2016 is shaping up to be the year of virtual reality. Sony recently built hype for PlayStation VR during Paris Games Week.
During a new interview with Digital Spy, Sony’s own Shuhei Yoshida talked about the new immersive experience that will come out of virtual reality headsets, leading him to believe there may be a change coming to the way the games are rated due to their first-person nature.
“The power of the medium is so much so that, in the future, the industry will probably come up with slightly different ratings so that we can communicate to consumers what kind of contents are inside,” he said. “It’s early days but it’s important, because we don’t want to handcuff the creativity of developers. But it’s a challenge for the future, as the media is so powerful, something could potentially cause trauma to people when they try that, because they’ve played something really awful.”
Yoshida detailed one example in particular.
“It’s pretty much giving you an experience with other people that you’d otherwise not have,” he said. “If you are lucky, you won’t have experienced getting a gun pointed at your head–it’s scary, right? But that can be created easily in VR. It is intense. In one of our demos, you get yourself stabbed, and it’s powerful.”