Most People Need the Cut: What Ashton Kutcher Gets About VR Most in the Valley Miss

Aston Kutcher, star of Jobs (above) and irrevocably, of Dude, Where's My Car, is also a well-respected tech industry investor, and he recently made this really sharp point about the problem VR faces:

“Everybody’s way too overhyped on VR,” he said. “You have to buy into this basic notion that people don’t want the cut ... Since the beginning of time, people sat around a campfire and told their stories. They cut the boring parts and moved through the interesting parts. That’s how you tell a story.”

“The minute you’re forced into a platform where you don’t get a cut, all of a sudden you get into this ambiguous short-form zone that has to be short to even engage an audience,” he added.

That's not a point that would have immediately occurred to me, but like most people in tech and definitely like most people in VR, I'm a hardcore gamer, and I'm in the mindset of that 3-4% of the world who don't necessarily want a cut.

"The cut" is a really good reference that only a narrative content creator like Kutcher could make. The Valley keeps thinking it's the platform that matters, and keeps missing that most consumers mostly care about narrative flow -- i.e. content not being boring. Only hardcore gamers want to explore long-form experiences without a cut, and even then, most of them get bored if there's no monsters in there to kill. And if most audiences are mostly only interested in short-form VR content, we're not talking about a mass market product about to replace TV or film any time soon. 

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Comments

[Iggy]

You make hard-core gamers sound a lot like serious readers.

Me? I'll stick to novels. Lovecraft has all the monsters I need, though usually they kill you.

[JohnC]

This is such a muddled statement.
“Everybody’s way too overhyped on VR,”
Agreed 100%
“You have to buy into this basic notion that people don’t want the cut"
Is he on another planet viewing the progress of VR differently to the rest of humanity ?
VR At the present time is all about the cut.
VR at this time consists only of meaningless short cut “experiences” that bore to death any intelligent being.
“Since the beginning of time, people sat around a campfire and told their stories. They cut the boring parts and moved through the interesting parts. That’s how you tell a story.”
Really?
How shallow, ignorant and unaware of the nature of the great epics of ancient times can you be.
How about all the classic Greek myths, Beowulf, the Viking Sagas or the Irish Tain, I guess he thinks they were long boring epics suffered by the listeners of these ancient times.
Not so, these people reveled in every minute detail about their heroes and what they did. As we still do to this day.The story teller was extremely important in ancient culture.
And this statement that “They cut the boring parts and moved through the interesting parts. That’s how you tell a story.” is about as ignorant a statement as you can make about story telling, ancient civilizations or modern fiction writers, and their audiences, as you can make.

[Pussycat Catnap]

He gets the 'cut' because he's an actor.

His whole career has been playing characters from one cut moment to the next - telling the story parts and not showing something like the 4-hours in traffic to get from the apartment in Paris to the Airport chase scene... or whatever...

(I think for him it was more like from the high school joke in the hall to the apartment basement around pizza... and not the long slog on a school bus in between.. but the same basic point...)

TOO MUCH immersion is not a good thing. You need just the right points.

Good VR will feel not like reality, but like dreams. All the choice bits, none of the filler.

[Sc]

Huh. And here I've been under the misapprehension that Kutcher was endowed with more intelligence than the drivel he just propagated.

We live and learn.