When I wear my Oculus Quest 2 headset, I look ridiculous, and I don’t care. Picture it: a thick, retro-futuristic set of goggles you strap to your head while holding two joysticks in your hands. Anyone watching you play VR games sees you gesticulating wildly and moving around in inexplicable ways while you experience EDM playing or poker chips clattering on a poker table or toxic-waste barrels exploding.
I’ve long been an early adopter of new technologies. I like gadgets, but VR never spoke to me. Until Silicon Valley could promise me a Holodeck experience, I was not interested in the virtual. And then a cable network sent me a VR headset as part of a promotion for a new show. I set the headset up (it requires no computer or cords) and immediately became absolutely obsessed.
Turns out, it is a lot of fun to spend time in a virtual reality, especially when reality is … a terrifying mess. However ridiculous I look, when I don the headset, the world falls away. And the virtual world is surprisingly immersive. The interface is intuitive, and the apps are a lot of fun. There’s Walkabout Mini Golf, an adorable mini-golf game that is unexpectedly convincing. The 18-hole courses are whimsical, and I don’t understand how it all works, but it genuinely feels like I am on a mini-golf course. (The game is also more fun with an adult beverage, just like in real life.) Superhot VR is a weird first-person shooter where you shoot amorphous figures on different levels. You have to dodge bullets and various enemy onslaughts, and the longer you play, the more you feel like Sydney Bristow handling your business. If you’re still unmoved, there is table tennis and bowling and workout apps. You can watch movies on Netflix, listen to music, travel to exotic places, attend concerts.
One of the things Oculus doesn’t emphasize nearly enough is how much of a workout you can get from most of these games. In Beat Saber, you hold two lightsabers and have to destroy flying boxes coming at you—the beats of the music indicate not just when to slash but also how. There is swinging, ducking, sliding from side to side, all while trying to keep up with the increasingly frenetic pace as you advance through higher levels.
But my favorite game is PokerStars VR. I’ve been playing poker for more than 20 years now. I played online when internet gambling was still legal. I played with fake money in bars when the poker craze swept the nation and suddenly poker was everywhere. Before the pandemic, I played a few times a month at the Hollywood Park Casino, and when I travel, I am always looking for a good poker room.
When I found PokerStars VR, I was desperately missing the casino, the seedy energy, the hours hunched over the poker table, flipping up the corners of my cards, surrounded by overly talkative men who always, always underestimated me. In VR, you can only use play money, but people take the game seriously. Really seriously. As in real life, it’s mostly men playing, and they still underestimate women. They talk endlessly. When they lose to a hand they disapprove of, they rant and rave about how terrible you are at poker. Two hands later, they play that same hand and act like they are making a genius move. There are fun people and assholes, and very, very strange folks.
The technology isn’t perfect, but after a few minutes of acclimating to the virtual environment, I believe I am at the poker table. You can buy all kinds of silly virtual props to play with at the table—cigars and cigarettes, an alien in a tiny UFO, guns, swords, a can of hair spray, a birthday cake. There is a core group of players, so lots of people develop friendships, and they create poker leagues and servers on Discord. If you top the weekly leaderboard, you can earn rings. Players who have won a ring or three wear them, flexing not so subtly. As a very competitive person, I’m always trying to get to the top of the leaderboard. I have yet to succeed. I’m a good poker player, but I am undisciplined, which does not work in my favor. Every Sunday night, the leaderboard resets. I tell myself that this is the week I am going to go for it, play my best poker. The vow is almost as convincing as virtual reality.
