Michael Block of Culture Shock Games talks about his interactive documentary VR game experience called We Are Chicago about gang violence in Chicago’s south side. It has a single ending to the story, but there are many different branching actions that are dependent upon your actions and choices throughout the experience.
Michael wanted to tell the story of the dangers and challenges of living amidst gangs and gang violence. They started collecting a wide range of interviews with members of dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, and hired a writer from the area to bring in some personal experiences and tie the story together. They wanted to create an experience where you can witness and empathize with the hardships of dealing with friends and family members who are involved in gangs.
Michael talks about the inspiration for creating this experience, some of the technical considerations, lessons learned for developing a 2D and immersive 3D version, and what he hopes to accomplish with the project.
Michael hopes to see a lot more of these types of interactive documentaries, especially once the technology improves to the point where it’s a lot easier to create a more narrative experience with fully motion tracked movements with tracked facial expressions. VR has the power to put you into someone else’s shoes, and this is a really interesting experience that explores the consequences of making tradeoffs and choices around gang violence in the south side of Chicago. You can learn more about this project on the We Are Chicago website.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.992] Michael Block: My name is Michael Block, and I'm with Culture Shock Games, and we're working on a project called We Are Chicago. And the general idea is it's a narrative-driven, choose-your-own-adventure-style game that takes place in Chicago in low-income communities. And it's based on true stories that we gathered while we were interviewing people at the beginning of the development of the project to kind of explore the social issues in those neighborhoods and to talk about some of the difficulties that people face growing up in these communities. What were some of the big messages that you're trying to get through this VR experience? Sure, so one of the big things is kind of this prevalence of gangs and the violence that follows with gang activity in a community and the kind of randomness of that threat. So a lot of times in the story there will be people that will be affected by people getting shot or people getting held up or people getting mugged and it's all very random in who it's targeting and whether or not it's even being targeted, right? So that's a big issue that kind of plagues these communities and that doesn't get discussed as much but then also on top of that kind of some of the backdrop of why are people joining gangs, right? A lot of people choose to join gangs because They don't have opportunities for employment that are actually realistically supporting them. And so they choose to join a gang because it provides them security, it provides them the opportunity to make some money, the opportunity to have a social network to protect them. And so we're talking about kind of the underlying social problems that lead to that through the game. And so, yeah, maybe talk a bit about the difference between, you know, creating this as a narrative cinematic experience versus turning it into a game. How is it a game? Right. So the game aspect is where these things happen, but you have to choose how to respond to them. And you have to choose whether you're going to place your sister in danger by hanging out with your friend who you know is gang affiliated or who has a brother who's gang affiliated and might be targeted because he looks like his brother or because he's, you know, around his brother or whatever. And so these kind of moral choices are making you think about the extra pressure and stress and difficulty in this particular neighborhood that you probably didn't have to deal with growing up personally.
[00:02:29.233] Kent Bye: Right. So how many different possible endings or outcomes are there in these branches then?
[00:02:33.916] Michael Block: So there's only one ending for the game, but there are multiple points during the whole story where the choices that you make impact events. So you might have a different event happen because you were nice to somebody as opposed to being very hostile towards them. So those like smaller events are really the things that you're able to change. The ending is kind of a commentary on a lot of things. And so it was kind of a thing that we kept as a static. And so maybe you could tell me a bit about the process of how you were gathering these stories that are included in this experience. Sure. So we did a lot of different things. So part of it was in-person one-on-one interviews with people where we kind of just talked to them about their daily experiences and things that happened to them in their lives and how that impacted their childhood growing up. And then also we went out and did interviews on the street with people as part of this thing called Community Action Day that was basically trying to figure out what are the common problems across a lot of neighborhoods and trying to find if people were aware of solutions that already worked and what things they saw that were helping in their communities. And so we got a lot of very varied information out of that interview process. And then we also brought in a writer who grew up in the neighborhood that we were focusing on to kind of bring his personal backstory to the game as well. And so you have a 2D version and also an immersive 3D version. So talk about the difference of creating each of those then. Yeah, so the VR version presents a lot of interesting problems from a development perspective because a lot of the things that we do with the 2D game is kind of controlling the camera, making sure that you're always looking in the direction that we want you to look. And that allows us to make more game because we can save time on developing that. But with the VR version, we have to kind of flesh everything out, right? Because you can look anywhere and you can see everything. And so that's presented some interesting difficulties that we're going to have to figure out before release. But I feel like it's a more immersive experience to be able to look around and to walk around and to feel like you're in that space. And hopefully that gives you a better sense of empathy and connection with the characters, which is the whole point of the game. And I'm curious, you know, how this project came about in terms of, like, how the team came together, the funding, and just, you know, how you were able to create this experience. Sure, yeah. It started myself and a couple other people were talking and we were just kind of thinking about like, hey, nobody really makes games about like real life experiences and like true stories, right? And it presented a lot of interesting like game design challenges essentially to us. And so we were kind of talking it through, and we came upon, because we live in Chicago, we came upon the subject of the South Side of Chicago, and as we were talking to people more, we really decided, like, this is a story that has to be told, and we live in Chicago, and we don't know it, right? So people outside of Chicago definitely don't know this story, right? And so we decided it was important to tell, and important to tell as a game because of that interactivity, so you're making these choices, you're understanding why people are making those choices. but then the kind of funding and all of that was by chance more than anything. My previous work independently turned out to be very successful and it's basically funded this entire project, which has given us this great freedom to kind of make the game the way that we want to make it and to make sure that it's not somebody's marketing piece, right? That it's actually about the narrative, it's actually about this story, it's about trying to increase empathy And we're helping some non-profit groups that are working in Chicago. We're sharing our proceeds with them and we're featuring them in the game and in the environments. They're physically present in the environment. But all of that is done in addition to the narrative, not like driving the narrative, right? Which is what we wanted to make from the beginning. What would you hope to be kind of like the best possible outcome for an experience like this? So the hope from our side is that people understand more about these communities, they can empathize more with people who they may not have direct exposure to. And hopefully that filters down into their kind of thought process and decision making because a lot of the things, you know, we get seemingly unrelated random stories like things in Chicago that happened. There were school closings and things like that. People were saying, oh, it's no big deal. Like it's a school closing. But they're not saying you don't get to go to school. They're just saying you go to some other school. But to understand the context in this neighborhood of like, hey, if you have to go to a different school, you're crossing new gang territory. You're putting your life in danger. by having to go further to get to school, right? So it's not so much a matter of, you know, oh, well, they're still being provided an education. It's fine. It's a matter of, in that context, it's actually more dangerous for a person to have to go to a different school, right? And so to be able to understand those intricacies and nuances of that community and to understand those challenges is really important and something that I think everybody who's voting should have an understanding of. And so if we can do that in some way to try to like plant a little seed of like, hey, maybe you should think about this other demographic of people that you might not be thinking about intuitively, you know, like naturally. That's the goal, I think. Yeah. And so you have character performances in this experience. And I'm curious about some of the technology that you had to do in order to bring these characters and humans into your experience. Yeah, so we ended up doing a motion capture shoot. We did two days worth of motion capture shoot for the full body animations. And we've basically had one animator working full time for over a year now on the facial animations alone. And that process has been incredibly time-consuming but also incredibly rewarding. When you see the characters making facial expressions that relate to what is happening in the dialogue, I think it makes it much more impactful and it increases that empathy and that understanding of that character. And I'm really glad that we took the time to do it because even though it was a lot of time and money and effort, I think it's really paying off in the final delivery. And so were you using face shift technologies? And I'm curious if you record the dialogue first and then try to add in the facial animations and expressions after the fact, or if you try to do it at the same time with something like a face shift? Yeah, so we're doing it as a separate process. So we did a audio via recording session and then separately we're using face effects as the software that we're using. So that does kind of like an automated pass to kind of get the lip sync generally right. And then our animator goes back through and fixes everything up and adds in emotions and expressions and that sort of thing. So it's a post process step. However, there is a scene in the game where somebody is presenting poetry and for that one we did a mocap session for that specific events, and then also did a video recording of their like facial expressions during the presentation, so that we could turn that into the final face effects. And there's some UI elements in here in terms of having the dialogue, and I'm curious about some of the iterations that you did in terms of like making it feel right to have kind of dialogue bubbles within a VR experience. Yeah, so one thing that we originally tried to do before we even did a VR version of the game was we had the UI actually present in the world so it wasn't a flat 2D UI and so when you see the like interact boxes that's how the dialogue was presented it was presented in the world and that experience felt really great but unfortunately it took an incredibly long amount of time to like make it work for every camera angle and for every you know setup that we had and so We ended up having to drop it But it's something that I would really like to bring back for the VR version because it's it makes the game Feel less gamey and feel more like everything's in the world and you're just experiencing this thing in the world. Yeah So yeah, what type of experiences do you want to have in virtual reality then? This is, to me, the really interesting stuff, is kind of putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and trying to understand someone else better through their lived experiences. I don't know how long it's going to take before we get there, but I'm really excited for it to get there because I think it's the most interesting, interactive thing that I can think of to do.
[00:10:39.150] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:10:47.920] Michael Block: Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, I think, I hope that it gets to the point where people can create their own experiences on a much easier level so that they can kind of share their lives with other people, right? And I think there's lots of really fun and interesting projects that I've seen as far as like, you know, nonlinear stories or like telling stories inside of stories and things like that. So I'm excited to see what all those are. But yeah, I don't even have the foggiest idea what it's going to be. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thanks.
[00:11:22.131] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.