The Quest 2 is panning out to be worthy purchase.

I've done the customary Beat Saber. It's fun and excellently designed, but not what I'm ultimately here for.

In the weekdays when I didn't plan to be hardcore, so I spent the time in 360-videos. I was in tight caves, roller coasters, diving skies, being thrown off tall buildings and walked through haunted houses.

I'm still in the midst of setting up Doom 3. But meantime the title Pavlov was highly promising. Everybody calls it Counter-Strike for VR.

Unlike any FPS I've ever done in PC, here I get to hold a gun for almost-real. The immersion is just something else.

Navigating in an FPS is interesting though. It's done from the directional stick of the controller. There's a sense of dissonance where the body moves but the legs are not. This is when I felt disoriented.

Once I got the hang of it I started the game on a simple level. And then I got what I was looking for.

It's an quiet empty hospital. A pistol is given, handful of bullets. A warning sound came up, seconds later zombies came rushing. There won't be enough bullets for them all, but you get to punch your way out of it.

Killing zombies isn't the point. It's about experiencing getting mauled by the mob.

It's easy to conclude that even compared to realistic high resolution 360 videos, games are scarier even in inferior graphic quality. The difference rest in agency.

A static video gives you zero control. There's no concept of win/lose and stake. At its best it's like a roller coaster.

A game lets you take action. Being put in a bad situation, it feels as if there's some way to influence the outcome and failure is a consequence of incompetence (perceived or by design).

So not only does one dies being attacked in a scary situation, it's also implicitly a personal failure to react accordingly. For a personality profile like mine that's a double whammy.

This is self-medicated exposure-therapy, I'm cautiously optimistic.