I spoke with Navid Khonsari about the GDC Narrative Innovations Showcase Highlights at GDC 2017. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So I'm going to be going out to Venice Immersive in about a week, and there's an artist there named Naveed Kansari, who I have three entire interviews that I have not published yet. And he's going to be there again with his partner, Vasiliki Kansari, with a project called Lily. And I'm looking forward to checking it out and doing another interview. But before I do another interview with Naveed and Vasiliki, I wanted to publish these three interviews that have been in the vault and my backlog. And so It's going to be a three-part series going all the way back to GDC 2017. And oddly enough, the very first time I did this interview with Naveed, I did not hit the record button. So I get the in and it's like the worst feeling in the world when I look down on my recorder and I realized I didn't actually push the record button. So then we did the interview yet again. to talk about the GDC narrative innovation showcase that he was a part of talking about going from 1979 revolution, this kind of genre of Verite games, moving into VR with a kind of a Verite VR experiences with blindfold, as well as with hero, which was premiering at Sundance in 2018, which will be the second interview. And then the third interview will be around this kind of interactive murder mystery series. experience that they did that was sponsored by google and google daydream and then it came out in 2020 but i saw it on the festival circuit back in 2018 at the vancouver international film festival so it'll be a trilogy of interviews that will start to map out the trajectory from the narrative innovation showcase to blindfold to hero to fire escape and then when i go to venice immersive i'm going to be checking out their latest piece called lily so we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the voices of vr podcast So this interview with Naveed happened on Tuesday, February 28th, 2017 at GDC in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:12.751] Navid Khonsari: My name is Naveed Kansari. I'm one of the founders of Ink Stories, which is a studio based out of Brooklyn, New York. Over the past two or three years, we finished 1979 Revolution, which is an adventure game that's out today across iOS, Android, Steam, all of that, as well as the cinematic director on Resident Evil that just came out a few weeks ago and been heading up a VR project called Blindfold. in partnership with Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Campaign, the Iran Human Rights Campaign, I should add. And we really just wanted to jump into how do we bring narrative experiences to VR? And this was our first kind of challenge. So pretty excited about where we're going to be and the release of the game across Gear and Oculus in about six weeks.
[00:02:54.741] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it sounds like that you're pulling in a lot of the assets from your previous game, which is 1979 Revolution. Maybe you could tell me more about what you were trying to do in that game in terms of narrative and storytelling, but also kind of what genre that would be.
[00:03:07.333] Navid Khonsari: Sure. We refer to the genre as verite games, a verite genre very much taken from our good friends in the documentary world. And that's because what we did was we created a hybrid of a narrative experience in a real world in 1979 in Iran and wanted to kind of solidify the reality of that by making you an 18 year old photographer who has just come home and is trying to figure out what's going on on the streets and allowing you to get an understanding of the different kind of political factions but also the different personal choices that you have when You have a brother who's in the military. You have a cousin who wants to be out on the streets and tear it up. And your best friend comes from a lower class. How do you take on all of that and make choices and kind of navigate it and have it all based on real people, real experiences? So our approach in terms of research for that was to do over 40 plus interviews, partner up with photographers who were in Iran and grab their pictures. embed home movies into the experience that you can kind of discover, and really replicating the world of Iran at that time. We were able to take that research process and bring it into Blindfold, our VR experience, and particularly the interrogation scenes from the game, we reutilized a lot of the assets there. And the reason we wanted to do that was we really wanted to focus on the mechanics. How are we actually going to make branching work in a game? Sorry, in a VR experience where it might not necessarily work because in the 2D version, we've got this floating UI that allows you to make these choices. So how is that actually going to spill over into a world where you can look around in 360 and might not even pay attention to the person that's asking you questions? So we did use a lot of assets. We did an incredible amount of R&D. We came up with timers that were really kind of reflective of you not answering. And then so it triggers and it's like, how come you're not getting back to talk to me? If you don't talk, this other person will pay the repercussions. So the timing feedback was really, really, really great. And because you're interrogated, we used the gyroscope in most mobile phones and in the Oculus to nod yes and no. And then as you experience it with your yes and no answers, it actually goes off in two totally different branches. So we used some of the design elements, certainly animation elements from 79, but did have to recreate the actual experience to be specific to the medium.
[00:05:24.790] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like in the process of talking to different people about artificial intelligence, you know, people like Andrew Stern and Fassad and Michael Mateus, that they have kind of like this highly dynamic emergent conversation almost where your individual local agency decisions may influence the overall outcome. And so there's this spectrum of authored stories versus emergent stories. And so it sounds like This is an authored experience, but you're trying to allow these different branches to happen. And so the challenge there, I think, is how you give the player that still feeling of that local agency, that their choices that they're making actually have an impact on the overall outcome of the story. So maybe you could talk a bit about how you're balancing that in VR.
[00:06:05.447] Navid Khonsari: Sure. I mean, I would challenge the concept that I think everything is authored. I think it's about how deep you can actually code to be able to convey the possibilities of choices. But in the end, it's not 100% free will. It's still being triggered off by verbs or nouns and so on. But at the same time, the sense of freedom and the liberty that a player feels when they can engage using their own voice and using their own vocabulary is so profound that if that's what it conveys is a feeling, who cares about how you actually get to that end result? So I think for us, this was a first step of giving you the ability to make choices that felt like your own. I don't think we'd matured technically to be able to bring audio to the VR experience. So we've done the next best thing and brought the yes and no kind of answers to that experience for you. So I think that the upside and the possibility is going to be massive. especially in VR, but also other experiences. And I think real world experiences is something I'm excited about. I'd love to be able to get rid of the text-based elements of like choices and really have you feel more and more a part of that, especially with the content that we're very much interested in making, which is about real people and real stories. The whole focus or at least one of the kind of benefits of the kind of games that we create is that you get to have an understanding for another group of people and it breaks down these ideas you have of who they might be because you actually get to be in their shoes for that one particular day. And that's such a powerful kind of experience. And then to be able to actually allow you to have a voice. in that experience that actually has the ability to get certain responses is just that much more powerful and just kind of pushes the whole concept of being in another person's shoes for a day that much more.
[00:07:52.352] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that the genre of verite gaming is perfectly fit for VR because VR is so much about transporting you to another place and another time. And so you can just really take people to that place. And some of the things that we're talking about in this narrative innovations showcase here at GDC was this concept of knowledge graphs and having a world that's really rich and exploring and having choices that you're making that you feel like you could kind of explore and learn about different dimensions of this, but maybe not in a fixed linear fashion, but maybe through these choices and decisions. And so as you're planning out these narrative games, how do you visualize it? How do you think of it? Is it just like a branches, or are there other kind of like a knowledge graph that you're really exploring?
[00:08:34.392] Navid Khonsari: You know, to be honest with you, it's very organic because it goes back to the research. When we're doing the research, when we're doing the interviews with the people, there's a common set of choices that come up from the people who we're interviewing as we ask them, like, what did you find difficult? How did you overcome that? What did you do here? What did you do there? What was it like, your relationship with your mother? What was the relationship like with your son? Once we're asking all these questions in the classic kind of documentary research approach that we have, Some of the answers start becoming very common responses and so that winds up creating elements of our branching and really kind of the key pivotal decisions and then from that, that's where we start then taking the liberties of adding more of the narrative choices that allow you to get to those pivotal moments. It's really a combination of what kind of floats to the top from the interviews that we have, understanding that these were the actual major points of reflection for these particular individuals during that trying time. And then for us to kind of come in and say, well, this is how we're going to build the branch or the narrative around it. and usually we'll go with the kind of a very much a tree kind of approach dig deep in the roots and then like the common areas that we have up are like these is where the roots come up out of the ground and we focus on not necessarily the roots but we focus on these particular trees for you know as an example is how we build our forest of narrative
[00:09:57.429] Kent Bye: So what were some of the unique things that you found in VR as you start to put some of these assets in and start to flesh out the mechanics? What have you found are some of the unique affordances that you're able to do that you may have not been able to do in 2D?
[00:10:08.738] Navid Khonsari: Well, I mean, I think whenever you're playing a 2D kind of experience, you get to see that character. Or if you're playing as a first person experience, you get to see your hands in it. It still feels like you're playing something on a screen. When you're in virtual reality, you're in the screen. and bringing real world stories to it has even a greater sense of gravity to it. And then actually giving you choice just goes, you know, just a domino effect of impact that the experience can kind of have compared to the traditional 2D games. So that's one element that is what gravitated us towards VR because of the possibility of the impact and And also, you know, the mystery and trying to figure out what's kind of going on. So that was kind of key for us to take this kind of content to VR. Saying that, the other challenges that we do have, though, is in a traditional 2D game, you have the ability to be a little bit more subtle with your exposition. In VR, you don't have that because if you don't give the person background and you throw them right into that world, they can make some pretty random choices without knowing what the repercussions are. And that's fine, but we're not seeing a lot of replayability in these experiences. So you want to make sure you give them the knowledge that they need so they can actually enjoy the experience to the fullest. So exposition was a challenge and we've been able to kind of solve that to a certain degree with memory triggers that comes off through audio. And I think, you know, compared to traditional games that you just kind of buy it, you've got enough background and you know how the engagement goes with the 2D screen. When it comes to VR, something that we should really be focusing on also is like how we get people into the experience and out of the experience, you know? It can't just be about the headset. If you can kind of hold their hand into the experience or give them, like kind of warm them up and then warm them out, for lack of a better term, out of the experience, that's very, very, very kind of powerful and needed, you know? And I think the other difference is that we've been kind of brainwashed and thinking that games are about winning. And VR is about experience. It's not about winning. And I think once we start distinguishing that and have people who are at the forefront of creating, they're going to wind up really pushing it to that next level. Because it's not about, you can do the shooters and I love the shooters. I love that John, I mean, I'll do that John Wick VR experience. till the cows come home. And I enjoy that experience because that's what I'm getting. But I also think that there's so much more for us to be able to kind of grow into and just experience it for experience sake. And so what do you want to experience in VR then? What do I want to experience in VR? I want to experience what it's like to be a civilian in Syria when a barrel bomb gets dropped. I want to experience what it's like to live on an island where I have to fend for myself. and be alone in total isolation, kind of like Tom Hanks' movie. I can't remember. I want to talk to a volleyball. I want to be in a loving family and feel that maybe my brother, who's autistic, is trying to connect with me. But I also want to really kind of experience the world and have choices in that world and see what the repercussions of those choices might be. These are just some kind of experiences that I kind of pulled out randomly, but there's also so much stuff that we could do. Remake a whole bunch of Alfred Hitchcock experiences in VR and really allow you to feel that sense of isolation while you're trying to discover, explore, or solve a mystery. All of these things are open, but we need that narrative force from creators to see the potential of that. And we've got the bigger challenges that we've also got another argument that's kind of taking place on top that's not even content related is the battle of hardware and the battle of hardware penetration. So I'm going to leave that to those guys. I'm going to try to focus on the content and getting it out there. And hopefully there'll be some common symmetry that allow this medium to really kind of become not only mainstream in terms of what people want, but also have experiences that draw the hardware to becoming mainstream.
[00:14:06.624] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:14:13.203] Navid Khonsari: Well, I mean, I think virtual reality has a couple of functions. One function is that it's opening up people to the possibilities beyond what they've had as traditional screens. So I see it as a great step up towards augmented reality, which is something that's very exciting. I also see virtual reality, aside from in terms of interactive experiences that we're talking about, that's kind of more on the entertainment or empathy kind of element of it. I think you're going to see a huge uptick in training in terms of doctors, in terms of helicopter pilots. I think... those elements of allowing people to initially experience it. I think I've seen some impressive stuff being done by Skip Rizzo out of the USC School of Creative on PTSD. That's the stuff that's exciting and interesting and revolutionary that can actually have a real impact on us as people and do good at the same time. And we can draw so much from that. So I think The potential is there for it to be an incredible tool for education, entertainment, medicine. And I think a lot of people believe this as well. So it's not, you know, I'm not the only one drinking the Kool-Aid, but I think that we need to start distinguishing content for profit, content for good, and content for actual impact and content for education. These need to be seen as different sectors, but still recognize they're using the same tool to have impact.
[00:15:33.197] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
