Netflix’s TV adaptation of the novel The three-body problem makes some significant changes to the source material. Characters in Cixin Liu’s original book are reimagined and split into others. Threads from later books in Liu’s trilogy, known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past, are brought forward in the story. And thankfully, the virtual reality video game being played in 3 Body problem is noticeably different from how it is described in the book version.
The game, known as Three-body in Liu’s text serves the same purpose as in the TV series: it is a recruitment tool for the world’s smartest and most curious scientists. In the Netflix show, the device on which Three-body is played is a sleek, almost magical machine. The players on the TV show are both excited and alarmed at how advanced the VR headset is.
“This isn’t normal,” says John Bradley’s character Jack Rooney after trying out the game (and being virtually decapitated by Sea Shimooka’s Sophon). “Do you understand how far this goes beyond the current state of the art? I mean, we’re talking 50 years? 150?”
Liu’s description of the Three-body VR experience is much more business than what we see in the show. In his book, he describes the game as running on a “panoramic viewing helmet” and, oddly enough, running on a web browser. The thrill of playing the game in Liu’s version was powered not by the chrome helmet’s direct neural interface, but by a full suit that was described as widely available commercially.
Here’s how Liu, clearly optimistic about VR technology at the time, describes this suit:
The V-suit was a very popular piece of equipment among gamers, consisting of a panoramic viewing helmet and a haptic feedback suit. The suit allowed the player to experience the sensations of the game: being hit by a fist, being stabbed by a knife, being burned by flames, and so on. It was also able to induce feelings of extreme heat and cold, and even simulate the feeling of being exposed to a snowstorm.
The TV show has no such suit. Not only would having it be at odds with storytelling – imagine having to watch characters dress and undress before entering the virtual world – but the fact that the chrome headset can do so much to simulate multiple senses, shows how alien It feels.
Image: Netflix
The three-body problem was written years before the commercial revolution that brought VR technology to the masses. It wasn’t until the creation of the Oculus Rift in 2011 that mainstream affordable VR headsets began to sense real, promising, industry-changing potential. More than ten years later, the harsh reality of virtual reality is starting to emerge. This has obvious limitations and simply cannot provide the level of immersion that Liu promised in writing. That’s why Netflix’s VR headset 3 Body problem is presented as an impossible device, so much so that characters sternly warn “We don’t have this technology” to the people playing it.
The TV series presents the Three-body game world as almost perfectly photorealistic, although the VR scenarios seem somewhat creepy. That’s a way to dismiss any immersion that comes from depicting, say, 30 million Chinese soldiers acting as a giant human CPU, and that looks even remotely off. It was suggested that Liu’s version of the game would also be photorealistic and immersive, so the show’s producers went to great lengths to create a vast, believable world for the players to experience.
But Three-body isn’t much of one game; it’s just a separate location for characters to solve astrophysical problems – to advance the plot against the backdrop of a historical fantasy world. It’s an artifact from a period when people who play video games were hopeful about the future of VR and its possibilities. (Although it pretty accurately reflects the wow factor of experiencing the technology: dazzling at first, but with rapidly diminishing returns. There’s a lot of flash, but not a lot of substance in these segments of the TV series.)
Image: Netflix
The more intriguing mystery is who is behind the technology that makes this happen Three-body possible. That is why the players of the series play. Naturally curious, they strive to solve a problem already solved by the Trisolarans (also known as San-Ti) and learn more about its creators. The alien forces are not only looking for smart people to explain an unsolvable physics problem, they are also looking for scientifically curious, likable people. And what better way to lure them in than with fantastic technology and one of the most fun ways to solve problems: video games.
Plus, in a show full of hard-to-believe scientific phenomena (e.g., photon-sized supercomputers, blinking stars, countdowns projected onto retinas), a next-generation virtual reality game co-created by alien game developers is one of the easiest disbelief to suspend.