PSA: It Is Extremely Difficult to Drink Beer While Wearing a Virtual Reality Headset

My evenings and early mornings are often spent glued to my screen, drink at my side and controller of choice in my hands. It is second nature for my mouse hand to become my beer drinking hand whenever a game gives me a quick moment. I don't even have to look--or, I used to think I didn't have to look.

I am here to tell you that it is not easy to drink a beer you cannot see. Being immersed in virtual reality blinds you to actual reality and that is not great for getting having a responsible drink or two while unwinding w/ a VR game. It is absolutely balls for drinking a civilized amount of alcohol during a night of virtual reality gaming.

I figured I would need to show a bit of restraint out of fear of nausea but what I did not expect was for the physical act of drinking beer to become challenging in its own right. You will see videos of people punching TVs and tripping over chairs while wired into their VR sets. What you don't see is the far more tragic scene of a gamer blindly fumbling for a bottle on a desktop only to have their hand helplessly clank off the bottle's side because they've forgotten to put the controller down. It's a horrible situation, more blind and fumbly than you can imagine.

To make matters worse, you are pretty much stuck drinking beer straight out of the bottle. You need to nudge the headset up and out of the way in order to tilt a glass or can up an appropriate amount and that is more immersion breaking than a bad inventory system. It's terrible and we, as gamers, deserve better. I put in order online, waited for the box to arrive, plugged everything in and installed the software. Am I not entitled to at least an easy way to easily drink a glass of beer?

For now, I am finding myself considering putting a long piece of tubing into a growler and taping the other end to the back of my hand such that I always have beer at the ready. It is a stop-gap solution at best but a person can get desperate in times like these. There is a lot of potential for integration of beer into virtual reality but for now the situation absolutely stinks.

And don't get me started on what a pain in the ass it is to go to the bathroom.