The VR game that can change the world

Much as porn changes the entertainment industry, or war changes the medical industry, virtual reality has the possibility to change what we know about everything from travel to gaming. But it will be one game that will move us from the tipping point into a new world. That one game would be a VR MMORPG called Re-Que.

Re-Que is a project we are working at Sanctuary Game Studios. It’s set on Earth, roughly 10,000 years after human civilization wiped itself out. Foreseeing the future, the Founder of the Renewal project started sending people out in space in cryogenic tubes, with orders to come back when the world is inhabitable again. With things like a built in database of educational videos, players can learn about the world around them and fill in gaps for mutations that were not discovered yet.

The reason why Re-Que will change the world is how it gamifies education in games using VR tech. With the premise that you have just woken from cyrosleep in-game, players are taught everything from how to start fires to being able to tell what food is poisonous or not. This technology is tied to the developers at Sanctuary Game Studios, were we are working on apps that can read encyclopedia entries from different languages and automatically create a visual entry for players.

Another cool thing that can be seen in Re-Que is that combat is based on traditional martial arts. In order to proceed to the next mastery stage, you need to practice the motions repeatedly. Using the patented bracelet technology that comes along with the game, players can practice outside of playing the game. This would still count to completing the achievement and mastery level inside the game.

This of course is not without its consequences, with a rise of people taking martial art classes in order to try to skip ahead before playing the game. The press release for Sanctuary Game Studios mentioned how you can take your existing knowledge and bring it in-game. This means that a person in Norway can teach the skills they know from the real world to someone playing in Australia, and the Australian would learn the skills in-game…or that a 8th Dan Taekwondo fighter could open up his own training hall to earn money from his virtual students.

You won’t see the game coming out any time soon, but this is an example of virtual reality games can affect how we can approach education.