While games dominate VR now, we will find many more uses for it, just as we did with PCs
Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Stern's column lands mid-debate over what virtual reality actually becomes: Wired had already argued in 2015 that VR doesn't need a killer app because tinkerers will experiment their way to its potential, while The Atlantic countered that augmented reality may ultimately find more applications than VR thanks to its real-world grounding. Stern bets on the PC analogy — games first, everything else later.
Six years of coverage since gives the thesis a partial scorecard: the pandemic drove real sales for Oculus and other headset makers but failed to make VR a mass-market social or collaborative experience, while by 2022 workplaces were using spatial audio and casual shared games like mini golf to foster remote socialization.
First-order effects
- Oculus and other headset makers got the sales surge Stern's PC analogy implied, but the pandemic coverage shows the buyers stayed gamers — the promised non-gaming audience hasn't materialized at scale.
- Workplace VR socialization is the first credible non-gaming use case to arrive on schedule, giving Stern's argument its strongest supporting evidence.
Second-order effects
- If work/social use grows from the 2022 baseline, VR competes directly with the AR camp's claim that see-through reality is where non-gaming applications belong, splitting developer attention between headsets.
- Non-gaming uses raise the stakes on the physical and psychological concerns WSJ has documented — headset injuries during gaming and unknown long-term psychological effects — since office users can't be assumed to accept gamer-grade physical risk.
Third-order effects
- The pattern so far tracks the slow half of the PC analogy: hardware sells on one dominant use while broader applications accumulate through experiments rather than a single breakthrough — meaning VR's fate hinges on whether tinkerers' niches ever consolidate into everyday tools.
- If they don't, VR risks settling into the structure AR skeptics predicted: a gaming peripheral ceding general-purpose computing to augmented reality.
The trend: Consumer VR is replaying the early-PC trajectory — gaming-led sales with general-purpose uses arriving slowly through experimentation — and whether it escapes the gaming niche will decide if it competes with AR for the next computing platform.