You don’t need me to tell you that Half Life: Alyx is the greatest virtual reality game to release this year. It’s no contest. Nothing else exists in VR right now that matches Valve’s level, encounter, and interaction design, as well as story, production value, art direction, and lasts even half as long. I’m skeptical if anything will for at least another year or two, and even then, there’s plenty of workshop levels to play.

Inevitably, as we approach the end of this hallway-full-of-broken-glass of a year, the annual tsunami of best-of lists once again casts its shadow over Game…

It seemed odd to me, at first, that the most interesting use of ray-tracing I’d seen appeared in a videogame from twenty-three years ago.

Put simply — ray-tracing simulates the physical behavior of light by shooting rays out from the camera and bouncing them around the environment. Traditional videogame graphics have developed all sorts of tricks and hacks to imitate many of the same behaviors, but subtle differences — that someone like Digital Foundry would do a better job of explaining than I — still register consciously or subconsciously in our brains. Primitive reflections in certain surfaces, ambient global light…

Rule number one? No porn.

I’ve been curious for a while about the state of the art of emotional intimacy in virtual reality. How well can VR, right now, simulate the immediate feeling of being known by someone who’s present, right there, in front of you? “Presence” might sound familiar already - it describes the sensory effect of believable VR immersion. Under ideal settings, it flips some primal switch inside our lizard brains that causes us to believe, at least in some subconscious capacity, that we exist inside the world, and the structures our eyes see are physically there. What…