Key Takeaways
I've had a lot of fun with virtual reality ever since I finally got my hands on a Meta Quest 3S headset, and have more than gotten my money's worth out of it. But in my time playing games in virtual reality, I've run into several significant pitfalls when it comes to my left-handedness, which can somewhat hinder the experience.
1 Controls Are Not Always Friendly
No matter what you may do to adjust to a game's reliance on right-handed control schemes, the fact is that most of them are still going to require some getting used to.
Some in-game items and weapons are still built with right-handedness in mind, making them slightly cumbersome to use properly if you're in the minority. A prime example is the first rifle you get in Resident Evil 4 which requires you to manually pull the bolt every time you fire, located on the left side of the gun.
This causes some annoyance at times as it means I either have to reach my hand around and pull the bolt on the opposite side awkwardly, or use the weapon in my non-dominant right hand instead. Every time I equip it I end up having to pull it out and move it to my right hand, which not only costs precious time, but also makes aiming less accurate.
I'd have much preferred a proper left-handed option in the game's control scheme to fix this for me.
2 Accessibility Features Are Not a Perfect Solution
VR offers a highly customizable way to play and often includes accessibility settings to let you use things in either hand. Whether it's a toggle in the options or the ability to switch manually between hands, it's nice to have, but it doesn't always solve things.
A lot of mechanics are simply not made with left-handedness in mind and are impossible to adjust even with settings meant to make it easier. Pulling switches and interacting with items in the environment is often relegated to the right hand, which would require you to put your items away before you can progress.
Accessibility features for lefties like myself are nice to see but often feel like an afterthought, as the games are simply not made with us in mind. Some, like No Man's Sky, don't even offer settings for lefties at all, forcing you to aim and fire your weapons or use items with your right hand. This makes the game a lot clunkier to play.
Analog controls using the VR set's joysticks are fairly common for a lot of games, which is great for accessibility, but some games have more complicated controls, requiring head and hand movements to navigate.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, a widely-praised VR exclusive, uses a movement mechanic that relies on the left control stick to move your character around the world. The problem is, there are no settings to switch which hand you navigate with. Since it defaults to the left, it can make aiming a weapon while moving feel awkward.
This once again leads to some imprecision in action sections, as it is much harder to properly aim and swing weapons with the right amount of force when they're in the "wrong" hand. It doesn't help that your sidearm is automatically stored on your right hip as well, making it somewhat cumbersome to equip and aim it in a timely manner.
This is the sort of thing that wouldn't be a problem with a few adjustments in software, but that I'm unlikely to see added in the future.
4 Even With Lefty Support, Immersion Issues Abound
Even if a game has perfect accessibility and minimal issues when it comes to playing with your left hand, it's still likely to have some quirks that can hurt your immersion. When it comes to protagonists in games, most of them are right-handed by default, which means cutscenes and scripted events might contradict the way a lefty has experienced the game.
In games with no lefty settings, you have to manually switch items between hands all the time to make things more accessible, which can also pull you out of the story. Instead of seamlessly grabbing items and using them as intended, you're left with an extra step that serves as a constant reminder that you're in a video game, not a dynamic virtual world.
Games with a focus on adventure and puzzle-solving will often have you performing actions with your right hand regardless of settings, which leads to inconsistencies between gameplay and the player character's canon hand dominance.
5 There Are So Few of Us
When doing a bit of research before writing this, I was only able to find a few threads making any mention of these issues, and many people simply write it off as a non-issue. Since left-handed folks make up just about 10% of the world's population and because the audience for VR games is already fairly small and limited to enthusiasts, we are rarely a priority for developers.
Creating settings that accommodate the use of both hands in complex VR titles, development-wise, requires the use of extra resources that most developers would rather avoid. Some considerations have started to pop up, but they are usually relegated to bigger-budget titles from AAA developers who have the money to implement them.
This is in stark contrast to the many options seen in "flat" non-VR experiences where the ability to modify control schemes is now commonplace.
At the end of the day, most lefties are simply expected to just get used to using the wrong hand in their VR games instead of hoping for more accessibility. While this hardly makes things unplayable, it does lead to some annoyances that can make what is supposed to be an immersive virtual world into a somewhat clunky, imprecise mess.
Despite this slightly dampened experience, I'm glad that the Meta Quest 3S finally sold me on VR.