For anyone who has ever rage-quit Call of Duty and hurled their controller at the TV, you'll know gaming can sometimes be a dangerous pastime. When not pushing your heart to the limit while playing Alien: Isolation, it's taking your unhealthy obsession to the limit and falling out with friends over FIFA. Even board games like Monopoly have caused many a game night argument, but while things tend to cool down and everything goes back to normal, imagine a video game that can actually kill you.
Sounding like a dystopian episode of Black Mirror brought to life, defense contractor Palmer Luckey has created a virtual reality headset that could see you taking a dirt nap. The general idea is that if you die in the game, you die in real life. Good luck playing Elden Ring or any other FromSoftware game with this.
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Luckey is known as the modern father of VR, having created Oculus before selling it to Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook/Meta for a cool $2 billion in 2014.
Moving in a more macabre direction, Luckey has designed the NerveGear to honor the Sword Art Online anime.
Looking like a deadly Meta Quest Pro, the NerveGear has three explosive charges aimed at the player's forebrain. Like some sort of sadistic Saw trap, they'll activate if you die in-game. Explaining the idea in a blog post, Luckey wrote: "The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me.
"You instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.
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"Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”
In Sword Art Online, people who wear the NerveGear are trapped in a virtual world by a mad scientist and have to fight through a 100-floor dungeon to gain their freedom. In the anime, you're killed by microwave emitters, which Luckey says have been causing him a problem.
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Explaining why he's using explosive charges, he added: "I am a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this work, not without attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment."
He plans to keep 'tinkering' to add an anti-tamper mechanism that would make it impossible to remove or destroy the NerveGear. There are any number of failures that could cause it to malfunction which is why he says, "I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself."
As for the future of the NerveGear's future, he concluded: "At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last."
As you can imagine, the VR set isn't available commercially and is thankfully just a concept...for now. Despite Luckey's warnings that this won't be the last deadly VR headset, we can't imagine Nintendo releasing the NerveGear as a new peripheral for the Switch 2.