The e-sport of Rocket League has given me as a viewer more profound meaning to the ubiquitous term "virtual reality," such that I am not sure that term applies. 

We start with a definition.  Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. So right away we have this ambiguity: VR can be "similar to" physical reality or "completely different." Wikipedia gives as examples of the former the on-earth simulators that prepare astronauts to what they will experience in space. Now, query within even that example: we are all familiar with weightlessness training, right? But that is real weightlessness! I at least wouldn't count that as virtual reality. This is the first Wikipedia example of "similar" VR:

That's an astronaut. He's on earth *eyeroll*. He's wearing goggles and has two controls in his hand and on the screen is an image. The astronaut is being virtually trained to fight a fire on a spacecraft aloft. Virtual reality, similar type. Wikipedia gives other subset definitions:

Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR.^[1]

I'm not looking those up. I get enough from common understanding of the adjectives. If I'm wrong I can be corrected. It seems to me that Rocket League clearly implicates "augmented" and "mixed." Physical reality is augmented in RL with flying, gravity defying cars. RL is also decidedly "mixed," that is, there is an actual, real human, usually a teenage one of those, manning the controls, just like in the astronaut-fire-extinguisher example. The following seems to me to be critical: the human's abilities are not augmented--he (invariably he) will win or lose based on the speed of his mind to read the play, on the speed of his hand-eye coordination, and those of his opponent. Cannot emphasize enough "opponent." The astronaut does not have a human opponent. Rocket League players do.

Speed is one of the key components to experiencing Rocket League as a viewer. Time is the other. I will tell you that I am almost fifty years removed from being a teenager. I have never played RL and could not, it would be impossible with any skill. I don't have the reflex speed; I don't have the speed of eye and of mind to even follow RL play sometimes. Time: Rocket League matches last a fixed five minutes. That's a blink of the eye compared to physical sports I have experienced as spectator, soccer, baseball, tackle football, hockey. The speed of play in RL is similar to fast-break plays in NBA basketball, which last 2-3 seconds.

Here's where Rocket League gets profound: We have all experienced the disorienting effects of speed+time. When railroads were invented some earlier "viewers" who had never experienced something as big as a train locomotive moving at that speed didn't get out of the way in time. They "experienced" it big time, and experienced nothing ever again! 

We're all familiar with the saying, "time seemed to stand still." You see a car ahead of you begin to lose control, more and more control, it veers or rocks and finally to your horror crashes. The whole thing took maybe five seconds, yet to the viewer it seemed to last forever. Witnesses to sudden, traumatic events invariably attenuate time. "How long was it from the time you first saw the robber pull the gun until he fled?" "Umm, a good minute, two minutes." It took maybe ten seconds. Lawyers will often time witnesses: "Close your eyes and visualize the robbery. When I say 'Now' the robber pulls the gun. Say 'Stop' when you see him flee." ...one thousand one, one thousand two...'Stop.' "Okay, that was five seconds." "Really?" Well, sort of. Because what is reality except what we experience through our senses? To the lady witnessing the robbery it took a good minute or two. Time is not experienced by looking at a watch. Time as recorded by a watch's second hand is an abstraction, it is not "real." 

One more example and then back to the main. Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah pioneered the cinematic (virtual) treatment of time and speed by slowing down dramatic scenes in his movies--using virtual reality to bring a scene into closer line with physical reality as human beings experience it. So there is in our experience a distortion that takes place with speed+time that, in my thinking, always distorts toward slowing.

Rocket League somehow does the opposite to the viewer. My son and I have watched hundreds of hours of Rocket League play together. We will miss goals (similar to hockey except that the object is a car-sized soccer ball not a small black disk). Almost every game (within FIVE MINUTES) we will forget who scored the last goal or the first. We will forget the series score. We will forget the sequence of wins and losses. "Who won the first game?" It's both of us (although my son misses far less in-game play), the 67 year-old father and the 33 year-old son. 

Speed+time in Rocket League works as a tape-recorder on erase. Once a game is over the tap-recorder erases it from you memory; the mind retains no virtual hard copy. Rocket League inverts the speed+time experience, making it seem faster than what the clock shows, and then erasing it.