Robin Hunicke is the co-founder of Funomena, which recently released Luna. I had a chance to catch up with Hunicke at Oculus Connect 5 where she shared her insights into embodied game design, game design theory, experiential design, and some of the things that she’s working on next in terms of how to get a game to listen and better respond to player behaviors based upon a set of different player archetypes.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So on today's episode, I'm excited to have a deep dive chat into the theory of game design and experiential design with Robin Haneke. Robin both teaches game design at UC Santa Cruz, but she also is the co-founder of Phenomena, which is a game design studio which recently released their first VR game called Luna. And they're actually going to be at the Magic Leap conference this week showing their latest augmented reality iteration of that, which I should be able to check out within the next couple of days. But I wanted to feature Robin and her ideas and concepts of how to incorporate embodiment into the process of game design, both from what she learned from Luna, but also some of the next generation things that she's looking at in terms of how can you start to predict the different player archetypes and maybe have a little bit more of a dialogue of having a game being able to listen to a player and what that means to be able to have that interaction and how can these games be a deeper way to connect to each other and to be able to solve deeper problems that we have on the world today. So we'll be talking about all of that as well as different ethics around content within virtual reality and just being mindful for what type of experiences we put into our body. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Robin happened on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 at the Oculus Connect 5 conference in San Jose, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:42.418] Robin Hunicke: Well, my name is Robin Honecke, and I'm the co-founder of Phenomena, which is based in San Francisco. We're 28 people strong now. We're actually, yesterday was our six year anniversary, so we're six years old, which is kind of incredible to say out loud. And we've been making games for emerging platforms since we were founded. And our first commercial title release was called Luna, which was available on Oculus, Vive, Windows, MR, and is now actually going to be available on the PlayStation and PSVR this holiday season. So we're just getting ready to release that finally for the PlayStation.
[00:02:20.587] Kent Bye: Great. And I know you've done a number of different AR experiences as well, like the world. And what are some of the other projects that you've been working on?
[00:02:26.591] Robin Hunicke: Well, so we're just getting ready to show our next project at the LeapCon in Los Angeles. I've been working with Magic Leap and we've announced that we made an extension of the Luna franchise, kind of like a fairy tale version, a different story that we're going to be demoing there in just about 10 days. So really excited to be working on the Magic Leap. I think that augmented reality and like mixed reality, whatever you want to call it, whatever XR, whatever words you want to use, has a lot of potential to change the way that we think about computing and interfaces and the way that we interact with things day to day. So I'm really excited to be able to collaborate with them. They're a fantastic partner.
[00:03:08.172] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I'm curious to hear from you as you are teaching other people about game design, but also pragmatically implementing these theories by experimenting with yourself. You have this kind of theory and practice. You're bouncing back and forth. I feel like coming up with an holistic experiential design framework that is able to allow you to have some design framework to make trade-offs, design experiences for VR and AR, but also immersive theater, you kind of have like this universal human experience that's centered in that, but gaming also has some very specific perspectives on that as you're teaching game design. but there's also a lot of narrative and film and visual storytelling and now we have the body and we have these different dimensions of embodiment and different contemplative practices of presence and what does it mean to have your sensory motor contingencies hacked to be able to have your sense of embodied and emotional presence and your active presence and your mental and social presence. And so that's sort of the way that I think about it. I'm just curious from your perspective though, as someone who's teaching game design, how are you melding all these different design frameworks together to be able to create immersive media?
[00:04:11.613] Robin Hunicke: So the framework that I use for teaching games is the one that I learned actually I started teaching it here in San Jose in this hotel actually. So we're sitting in the Fairmont Lobby in San Jose which is where GDC used to happen and I started coming to GDC in 1999 and participating in teaching this game design workshop where we teach the MDA framework and in the room just over there was where we first started teaching the workshop. The MDA framework essentially says that there are mechanics, which are the fundamental ways in which we create rules for games. There are the dynamics, which are the things that happen when people interact with those rules. And then there are the aesthetic outcomes, which is the feelings and desirable emotional outcomes from gameplay. that exist in a person when they've played that game. And so, instead of designing games from the rules forward, towards the feeling, I encouraged my students and all my designers at Phenomena to work backwards from the desired emotional outcome. So, Journey is a really good example of a game that was designed from the outcome backwards. The goal was to create a sense of awe and wonder towards the unknown and a genuine connection with strangers online. And all of the mechanics and dynamics that are in the game exist because they serve that function. So it's a way of working from what you want back to the ingredients as opposed to putting a bunch of ingredients in the pot and then seeing what you get, which I think is more helpful because if you want to get to a specific feeling, you know you want to make a game about loss, or you want to make a game about letting go in the case of Luna, or you want to make a game about friendship in the case of Wattam, you can work backwards from those goals to the mechanics that are in the systems and that helps you, hopefully, helps you focus your development and scope the things you're working on so that they're always in line with your goals.
[00:06:06.923] Kent Bye: So, as you're looking in the realm of emotion, in some ways it's like centering the human experience as the primary center of the experience. And I know that Jelena Ruchitsky just did a talk on the hierarchy of being, where she put at the bottom the self, and then the world, or I would also say the context that is created by that world, and then on top of that you have the other people, the social dynamics, but at the core is the self, of the human experience, of the emotions, the phenomenology of what it means to be a human, but as you're interfacing with these technologies. So as you start with that as the center, and you're creating the world and the mechanics and the rules on top of being centered in the human experience, how do you do that translation between mechanics and something that is maybe quantitative into a qualitative feeling? What does that translation process look like?
[00:06:57.407] Robin Hunicke: So I think a lot of times what it looks like is you build a system into your game. So for example, there can be a system of pulleys in your game so that you can pull things from one place to another. And as you're engaging with the pulleys and putting buckets on the pulley system and moving things up and down multiple levels, you're starting to think about the world as a striated series of levels. You start to see the world as a series of steps. And you're like, OK, I've got this object to step two, and I need to get it to step three, but I need to move a pulley system over to get it, blah, blah, blah. And that's kind of how puzzles work, right? Like, you start to build a representation in your mind of what the level is like based on the affordances of the puzzle mechanics. And that's one way that you evaluate. You say, OK, well, I really want the person to have to think through several steps of operation in order to be able to do the right thing in the right order and solve the puzzle. And then when they solve the puzzle, they'll feel smart. The outcome of a puzzle game is that you feel clever when you solve a puzzle. And what gets in the way of feeling clever is feeling stupid. Feeling like you didn't get it, feeling like you're too slow, or it's not happening fast enough, or you must have missed something. Everyone's had that experience of playing like a pixel hunting game. adventure game where you know that you should have found a key, it's not in your inventory and you're at the door and you're just going back in your mind like, where was the key? Where did I miss it? Was it in the library? Was it in the kitchen? Do I need to go all the way back to the beginning and go to the main hallway? Those feelings are what gets in the way of feeling smart, right? So the way that you test for that is you give people a certain amount of uncertainty and a certain amount of stress or combinatoric evaluation that they have to do. Okay, I move this, this way, this, this way. Okay, there are only three ways I can move this, blah, blah, blah. You give them a landscape of choices and then if they can get to the right choice and feel clever in the right amount of time, then the puzzle is working. And this is really where game design experience comes in handy. I have a general sense of how long something should take before it gives you a sense of cleverness or accomplishment or just delight and joy. And I know that from watching people play my games and the things I've prototyped for 20 years. It's kind of like when a dish has enough salt in it or when the butter is the perfect temperature, it's melted but it's not separated. These are things you get an understanding of. I've heard chefs say that they cook by the sense of smell. They know when a dish is ready because it smells ready. They don't really use a timer anymore. They've been making the same Coq au vin or like, you know, the same filet mignon over and over and over and they know just how it's supposed to feel when you press into the center of the meat or just how it's supposed to smell when it comes out of the oven. And they can open the oven and take a whiff and say, oh, it's ready. And game design is exactly the same thing. It's a process of understanding how long should something take before a person gets a piece of information, a reward, a sense of feedback, a sense of progress. And that comes from effectively building systems and then watching people interact with those systems and seeing their face light up or their face fall. You know, it's really a practice-based endeavor.
[00:10:20.417] Kent Bye: Yeah, very iterative. And it reminds me of two different ways of how in the future of computing, there's going to be the approach that traditionally had, which is like writing computer code and having a very algorithmic approach of having a logic to it. And then there's the machine learning approach, which is to cultivate a set of data to create a neural network architecture and to feed that experience of data into the neural network architecture, but then that neural network architecture is able to make an inference or a decision and a judgment based upon their experience. And so it sounds like you've had this lived experience of being able to cultivate your own sense of intuition of knowing for how to translate these abstractions of doing these different actions and behaviors and how that translates into different emotions by watching their face and by just iterating many times over the last 20 years. You've cultivated your own sense of game design intuition for how to translate something that is these mechanical things into emotions.
[00:11:14.326] Robin Hunicke: Yes, and actually one of the things I'm really interested in for my next project is understanding how much can I program the computer to pay attention to what you're doing so that when you do certain things I give you the reward that you want. And so a lot of what I'm looking at right now in my next titles is What are people really doing? You know, how do people really play? And why are they playing? If you pick up a game like Journey and you want to spend time with it, it's not because you really want to get a sense of achievement and accomplishment. It's because you want to have a sense of mystery and you're curious about that space or maybe you just want to relax. You heard from a friend it's really chill. Like if you pick up Luna, You're not really interested in scoring lots of points because there's no points in the experience. It's really about the tactile quality of placing flowers and lily pads or growing trees or changing their color or petting a bird or a swan or a fox. These kinds of actions are, in and of themselves, they have a kind of quality that you want to engage with. A lot of games don't pay attention to what people really do. A lot of games are kind of, it's a little bit like they're on a date with you but they're looking at their phone. they're not really trying to understand what you want to be told or communicated with. Like, one of my favorite things of all time is the five love languages, which is, you know, quality time, like words of encouragement, acts of service, gifts, and physical touch are the five that they use. And if you take the quiz for the love languages, it's really interesting. A lot of people give what they want to get. So a lot of people love outwardly the way they want to be loved. I personally love to get gifts, so I give gifts. And I've had partners who are like, I love this beautiful thing you found for me in Tokyo, but I don't need it. I'd much rather we just chill and watch this football game, or play this video game together, or go to a dinner. They're much more interested in physical touch or some kind of connecting time and so I've learned over the years to love the way that people want to be loved and I think games kind of don't do that right now. A lot of games expect you to do what they're good at and I'm interested in solving that problem or at least engaging with that problem and looking at like what would be the best game for me that would pay attention to my needs and curate itself to me in my time, you know?
[00:13:45.447] Kent Bye: So how do you create a model for translating the abstractions of the human experience into a way that a game can listen to you?
[00:13:51.770] Robin Hunicke: I think there's really basic stuff. Like, if you are the kind of person that generally gravitates towards challenging gameplay, then I can give you challenges. And if you're the kind of person that gravitates towards just kind of walking simulator type gameplay, then I can just kind of make that feel rewarding for you. So there's just paying attention to what you do. But even more basic than that is just How often are you pressing the buttons? Are you the kind of person that when you're running between locations, you also jump? Like, I do that when I'm playing games. I just randomly jump. There's no reason to do it. I do it because I'm kind of a spaz. And, you know, when I'm, you know, running around in Wind Waker, I'm like hitting the button. Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. Like, some people do that and some people don't. Some people are very methodical and investigate every single blade of grass or every single cabinet or every single nook and cranny and other people just kind of breeze through and they're like, cool, got the rifle, now I'm going to do the main thing, got the guy, now I'm going to go get the reward, okay, open the tomb and I'm done, you know? And so, I think you can just kind of look at how many of the engagements that you've placed in a world are people really spending time on Even just basic stuff, like how long does it take someone to clear a level? How long does a person spend talking to the villagers versus looting the crypt? You're a game designer, you can pay attention to these things.
[00:15:21.945] Kent Bye: I know that there's different personality types and temperaments that people have, but also those get translated into different types of gameplay. Like if you are really into the active presence in an agency, maybe you want to be really competitive and compete against other people and you want to win and try to achieve as much as you can through going through all the different skill-based things that you have to do. If you're a puzzle solver, you want to sort of be a completionist and find all the things and, you know, just make sure that you've completed all the different tasks of finding all the hidden objects or whatnot. And then there's like emotional narrative where if you want to be engaged with your emotions in the story or the narrative and so you feel like you're much more into the receiving of listening and taking in the environment and the vibe and the ambience. Or if you're just kind of like someone who wants to cultivate this sense of embodied presence and maybe you'll do this like really repetitive spamming task but it has this meditative effect for you. So I don't know if you have a specific way of translating different player types into archetypes or temperaments and what those are.
[00:16:20.063] Robin Hunicke: Actually, I think that what you did was you broke, basically, down the Bartle categories, and I think that those are, they're universal, especially for immersive online worlds. Like, you see, basically, people are interested in storytelling, healing, tending, and conquering, right? Like, these tend to be the prototypes. And, like, it's not impossible to imagine games where you can move through those different behaviors and have different interactions with the system, just depending on how your day was. Like, you had a bad day at work, you want to come home and smash some shit. You know, and then later you're like, oh, you know, actually, I'm really kind of zoned out because I did a lot of mental tasks today. I'm just going to do some online knitting, you know, which is effectively like watering a bunch of plants or, you know, healing a bunch of bunnies or something like, and it should be fine to do that. and not feel constrained to a specific way of playing. I think a lot of games expect you to choose, like, are you a rogue or are you a tank? And then you have to be that person the whole time. And like, I wake up some days and I want to wear a tie. and chunky lace-up Doc Martens. And then other days I wake up and I want to wear like a fedora and a lace dress. And then other days I wake up and I want to wear jeans and a hoodie and some really sick Jordans. Like, I'm never the same day-to-day. And like, I don't know why games expect me to be the same day-to-day. Like, some games you go to them because it's a unique experience and you want to be in that world for a period of time. You know, like you play The Witness. You know, you just want to be like thinky. and be thinky and solve stuff and see this weird space and try to understand what it is, that's awesome. But it's a lot of work sometimes to maintain the persona of always being in charge and always conquering and always doing all this hardcore labor in, like, say, a World of Warcraft type game or even a LoL type game. Like, for me, that's just a lot. It's a lot for me to want to expend that much energy day on day and, like, play session on play session so I'm interested in the box of chocolates metaphor that like some days I want a caramel and some days I want something with a little bit of pepper, you know? I just like, some days I want a little earl grey, violet cream, and then other days I want, like, almonds. Like, I think that the idea that games are like these big chocolate cakes that you just have to keep eating the cake every day, it's the same cake, like, for me that wears me out, you know? And I understand that I'm not all players, but I definitely feel that, like, right now, bite-sized, bespoke content is really, it's just a really compelling idea to me.
[00:19:04.787] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was basing a lot of those sort of qualities on the elements, which comes also like the Galen temperaments, but I'm curious to hear the sort of universal archetypes, how this other system, how that kind of has gotten translated into the games. I may have heard of those, but maybe you could expand on what each of those are and what those characteristics are.
[00:19:23.150] Robin Hunicke: So, you know, people generally break down the idea that if you look at a traditional RPG, right, like there's kind of the four major roles. One is a combat-based role, one is sort of a stealth or sneaking type role, one is a healing type role, and then one is effectively distance. combat, like magic, right? But when you look at the way that people play, like, for example, the way people play The Sims, you can break it down in a similar kind of quad, and in that case, it's people that want to break the system, people that want to game the system, people that want to cheat and just, like, explore, and people that really, really, really want to storytell. And, you know, I think many games that are very popular break down into multiple kinds of play patterns. Like, let's look at Fortnite, right? You know, it is effectively a game where you're shooting to be the last person standing. It's a King of the Hill shooter. But it also has building, and so therefore it has harvesting in it, and it also has dancing. and it has like other weird quests, it has like the purple lake, you know, like there are things you can put in a game like that that appeal to players that are not the mainline combat. And I think that we should really be taking cues from games like Fortnite because It's nicer to play together when there are soft loss conditions for certain people and when there are ways to participate that don't require you to be a specific person or a specific category. So I think it's not so much about like are these the correct categories or are there just four or whatever because I mean people could argue about that till the cows come home. But it's about, do I have to be the same person when I play this game every time? Or is there some flexibility? Is there a little bit of room for me to move around, you know? And I think that that's actually, it's a much kinder way to design because it means that the game flexes with your mood and it flexes with your interest in specific kinds of activities.
[00:21:22.892] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, it sounds like what I hear you saying is that there are these different ways of engaging and playing. Like a single game, you could do these different quests or kind of focus on different aspects of different experiences that you're trying to mediate or different emotions you're trying to cultivate. And that the challenge would be if you want to have the game listen, then is there a way to take this implicit behavior and then translate that into one of these player archetypes and then be able to adapt the game in a way that it's able to listen? The challenge, I would say, is that whenever you have something like AI that's taking your unconscious data and starting to train. I've noticed on Twitter, I guess I have a habit of looking at sports clips. And now all of a sudden, Twitter has decided that I'm a huge sports guy. And I'm not really, but I'm curious about stuff. But everything of the AI starts now all of a sudden, I'm sort of like the sports freak. But I actually am interested in other stuff. And I find myself not being able to mediate or give feedback into the system to be able to say, no, no, this is my unconscious behavior. But this is when I just want to see somebody make an amazing play. in a peak flow state, but I don't want to necessarily be bombarded with sports news all the time. And I find that that's the challenge with this sort of dynamic is that, like, okay, they're trying to, like, be smart about optimizing by what they're able to measure and optimize for engagement by clicks, by whatnot. there's no phenomenological input to say actually this is not working for me. How do you do that in the sense of a game where you have the same challenge if you're trying to mediate an emotion that's invisible to you, but yet you're still trying to take this implicit quantified data and translate that into a temperament?
[00:22:53.086] Robin Hunicke: I think this is actually the word that you use is feedback. You know, you say, you know, like, and I've had the same experience with Instagram. I look at Afropunk and a bunch of other stuff. My friend actually follows a bunch of body positivity stuff. And also she follows Afropunk on Instagram. So her Instagram thinks that she's like a heavyset, non-white girl, and she's actually quite thin white girl. And she's like, it's funny, like I keep getting these bra ads for like, you know, plus size bras. And she's like, I do not need a plus size bra. And yet Instagram has decided that that's who I am because of what I look at. She's like, it's just really interesting to me. It's the same thing, like body positivity for her is like, yeah, thin girls also count, right? Like she's looking at this stuff to make herself feel okay about being relatively thin. And it's a very different use case for the same content, right? But Instagram has decided that it's a certain kind of content and therefore a certain kind of user. With a game, the game can pay attention to you, but you can also give the game information by your actions, and the game can always give you extra choices, and then if you choose differently than expected, then take that into account. I think something like a Twitter or an Instagram feed or a Facebook feed that's curating you ads, there's not a lot of choices, like you said. There's not a lot of deliberate action. You're scrolling, you're clicking, you're scrolling, you're clicking. It's almost like a passive viewing experience for the most part. You're not in dialogue with the system. And with a game, you really can be. I think that the game can be, if it's built from scratch, to pay attention to you. It can pay attention to you in ways that are interesting and that's the challenge of the design that I want to build and that's why I want to build it. I'm really, really interested in the idea of building something and being open about it, having people participate in it, play it, see it as it's coming along. I've never done that before and I'm thinking about doing that with this title. I don't know if we will but I just feel that like A lot of bad algorithms exist trying to figure out people, but those are also algorithms that exist in systems with very little feedback and that have been designed in a vacuum without a lot of communication with the customer. So maybe you can solve this by A, engaging the customer more early and B, like you said, giving the player an opportunity to get feedback like, no actually I don't want this, like no I really prefer something else, like please show me something else, you know. That level of feedback is possible with a game in a way that it isn't possible with regular more linear media or more linear digital experiences.
[00:25:26.250] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I think about the MDA framework for games, for 2D games, you have the mechanics, which I think of the mental and social presence, the process of making a choice, the dynamics of actually the active presence of taking an action, the aesthetics or the emotions, the emotional presence of the feeling, And I feel like the virtual reality, augmented reality is putting the body into the equation in a new way where it's a sense of embodied presence. So you have the sensory experience of the body and all of the sensory motor contingencies, but the sense of what's it mean to have a body representation, an avatar, a sense of self. You are literally entering into the experience as a first person perspective. It's a phenomenological experience that's mediated through your senses. So I'm curious how the body gets integrated into this mechanics with dynamics as well as with the aesthetics and the emotion and how does the body fit into your framework now?
[00:26:16.832] Robin Hunicke: There's a lot of research about the way that certain body poses make you feel, right? So if you do a Fierro pose, like you put your hand in the air and you go, yeah, you feel positive feelings. And if you crunch your body down and like you bring your elbows into your center and you like crunch down, you go, oh, you feel like a very strong tension. The kinds of actions that football players do where they charge at one another, like with their heads down, like bulls, you know, makes you feel a certain kind of adrenaline feeling. and the actions that cheerleaders do when they throw their pom-poms up in the air or do cartwheels makes you feel a different kind of feeling and like those two feelings exist in a football game for a reason, right? You have the cheerleaders bringing everybody up and making everybody dance and clap in the stands and be excited and then you have the football players actually on the field fighting and like in this weird kind of aggressive and yet staged way having a battle with one another that people are cheering for right and those things play with each other and against each other in a way that is interesting for humans and so in the same way when you look at choreographed dance like I'm getting ready to go see Beyonce this weekend I'm super excited Like I love Beyonce's shows because I feel like she's really interested in the context of choreography and music and dance and the edges between social commentary and personal sort of narrative and representation and these more physical forms of expression whether it's people doing Dance all at once in the same kind of formation or whether it's people individually Showing off their skills or their moves. There's like ways in which dance embodies both the conversation between people and the idea of Universal forms or like an idea of aesthetic that is like complete and I really think that What's so great about? VR and embodied computing experiences is that you can actually have a person do repetitive motions, and like you said, in a way that's really meditative, or you can have them do them in a way that's extremely energized and very exercise-oriented or dance-oriented. You can have someone physically move their body from place to place as a way of sneaking around or discovering something, delicately moving something from point A to point B. You can do that now with a 6DOF headset that doesn't have wires, right? Like that's a really interesting idea. Like what if someone makes a hot potato game where you have to deliver like, you know, some small series of things from one side of the room to the other without breaking them. It's not that hard to imagine very physical, almost like summer camp kinds of experiences with the headset, so long as it's not tethered, right? And I think that there's a lot of things that we do physically in terms of theater, dance, play, even cocktail parties, you know, watching people interact with one another and the way that they move when someone interrupts a conversation or when they see someone that they want to talk to and they turn their body towards them. There's so much that we can learn from physical interactions in space that we can now put in our games because they're no longer just about touching the pads on some controller that's in your lap, you know?
[00:29:36.182] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I really think of Chinese philosophy as a way to kind of give this overarching metaphor for the yang and the yin, being that there's the outward expression of energy through the yang, which would be like more of the fire and the air, or the mechanics and the dynamics, and the receiving part of the yin, which is much more about the emotions and the body, where it's actually, you're centered in your experience and it's about your presence and your feeling and your emotions and your sense of being that you have. that we can look towards like Eastern philosophies and meditation and Buddhism and yoga, all these practices that are centering into the body and that as we start to add that into the young elements of gameplay, we start to find these different things where I see like something like Beat Saber as this kind of like perfect storm of being able to like have the emotional immersion that comes from the music, having your active ability of like slicing and chopping and then you're also like having to see the arrows and make choices and so you have to like be able to perceive and understand these things are coming at you so quickly but actually have to do the practice in your body. to actually respond as quickly as you need to, but that takes time, so you have to do it every day. So you have this contemplative practice that you're doing, but you have this kind of balance of the young and the young, and by the end of it, you feel like you're fully integrated and you have this full, rich sensory experience. But as you start to add these different domains, I see, like, there's these contemplative practices from meditation and yoga, all these dances and body movement, the storytelling in terms of how do you do character story and plot to engage the emotions, and then the aspects of how the mechanics and those making choices and taking action of the gameplay and how all those things kind of fit together. I mean, it's kind of like human life in a lot of ways, but we're turning it into a game. And, like, what's that look like?
[00:31:20.818] Robin Hunicke: You know, one of the things I'm really fascinated by is just the idea that even if you just go to the level of integrating physical behavior with gameplay, like in Luna, you know, you have to reach up to sort of solve these puzzles in the sky and then you look down into this terrarium and you're interacting with stuff in the terrarium and it's very delicate. And then at the last part of each level, we take you inside the terrarium and you look around, all around you is what you've created. and then you're at the same level as the characters and I was in my talk earlier today I was talking about this like this idea that like when you finally meet them you're on their level you've already experienced both this feeling of being a god and also this feeling of being extremely small it's critical to sort of creating a relationship with those characters that's equal. And like, even though that happens, I think, on a very low level and an unconscious level with most people, I do think that it happens. The physical embodiment really does give you the ability to change the way a person feels. And like, I'm not sure if we can do the things I want to do the way that I want to do them. But my goal in the projects I'm working on now is to really understand how the physicality of the medium is impacting those aesthetic outcomes. Because if you have a physical experience, and you are frustrated by some aspect of that physical experience, it's going to register in your body differently than if you're just kind of simulating the physical experience in your mind and then touching a game pad, you know. I think the experience of tripping and falling and hitting your chin is more impactful than the experience of watching someone, like a third-person character, fall and trip and hit themselves. And the experience of trying to, like, chop beets, you know, for example, or get out of the way of bullets in a simulation, you know, versus doing it with your thumbs, it's a different experience. There's something somatic and fundamental about that connection that is really interesting to me. And it's interesting to me not just because I think it's possible to do good with it, I think it's also possible to do bad with it. I think it's a scary place. Like, game design, when you're talking about it happening at the level of cameras that can see your face and read your microexpressions, or physical suits that, like, can sense your body motion, it's very possible to have precognitive understanding of the player. It's possible for us to know more about the player than the player understands about themselves. And I think that's a really interesting and very difficult amount of power for a game designer to have.
[00:34:06.300] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, and especially for someone like Facebook to have, because I think it does have like this, as the technology evolves, it does bring up these ethical questions that are actually like all technology is like a reflection of what our ethics are to be able to actually deal with that. And I think that's the challenge that we have to figure that out. But there is this dimension of this embodiment in this concept of embodied cognition. that I think that neuroscientists have been saying that, like, in some ways we think in metaphor, but we also think of embodied metaphors by, in order for us to really understand even concepts of forward and backwards, we have this sense of, like, moving forwards and moving, like, we have this embodied sense of what that means, and that as we have the immersive technologies, we're actually taking things that may have been abstracted before, and now we're actually putting it into our body, so we actually can just have a better memory of that, but it also changes our level of cognition as we start to do these levels of being able to connect abstractions and visualizations of concepts and ideas, but as they're connected to our embodiment and our movement, then we're able to understand, like, these abstractions and these concepts that were maybe beyond our ability to really sort of intuitively understand, but now we're able to do that, but put it into our body in the way that we just know it at an intuitive level.
[00:35:19.687] Robin Hunicke: Yes, and I think that one of the best applications for embodiment is learning. I gave a talk in Nordic Game, and then I just most recently gave it at Guerrilla, about the end of high-fidelity development, or what I've been calling post-fidelity development, especially with embodied technologies and spatial computing and the idea of being able to be in the spaces where things exist and have metadata that you can position and move around in a space and stuff like that. Inherent to this idea is the idea that there's an intelligence that goes beyond fidelity, You don't need to render everything perfectly and make it look real so much as it needs to feel real. And feeling real is very different than looking real. Like, Journey doesn't look like any place anywhere, really, but it feels real. Like, when you're moving through the space with your character and you see the sand swirling around their feet, even though it's a very, very low bandwidth connection between you and the controller and the game, It feels real and I think that we're experts at making things feel real as game designers. And so the real question is, is how much abstraction is possible? Like how basic can a game look if it's in a headset or if it's enabled through a body controller, if it feels real? then that's good enough. And then the questions I think that like Kibibo and some other artists in the space are asking is, what does feeling real mean if it looks totally different? Like, how can something feel real but look completely alien? How can something feel interpersonal? or intimate or like it's paying attention to you if it doesn't have a face but it's like this bizarre physical blob with feathers on it you know like are there ways for us to create the feeling of real without the representation of real I think that's a really interesting area and the more I look at immersive technologies, whether it's VR, AR, or some combination of these things, the more I realize that there's a lot of pretending to be real and a lot of faking reality that we do right now that we can just let go of. If we really embrace the idea that these places have their own affordances, their own styles, and their own languages, and then once you let go of them, well, where are you? You know, there's a really interesting book, I think we've talked about it before, called Lady of Mazes, which is about a future in which people really have existed for a long time with a lot of virtual information, virtual friends, virtual world experiences. And one of the tests in that book that they give people is a drop test where they delete the ground from below the person and see if they try to hang on. Because people have stopped really caring about falling. You know, they've eliminated the fear of falling from humanity by constantly keeping them in these safe controlled corridors where nanomatter is constantly saving them. It's interesting to think about that. We have a lot of affordances in the world and a lot of data in the world that we take for granted. How many of them can we remove and then what is the effect of removing them? You know, philosophically, what is our What do humans really need to be grounded? How much time could you spend in an augmented space before you took your glasses off and looked at the real world and were like, this doesn't seem real? It's kind of the inception question, I guess. If you're dreaming and you're in a dream that's in a dream, will you ever be able to wake up? And I think about that stuff all the time. I really do. I mean, I know it's a little bit heavy, but it's also important to consider, as a designer in this space, in 25 years, will we be looking back at these choices that we're making now and going, oh, if only someone had thought ahead. It's a really compelling and, I think, sometimes terrifying time.
[00:39:14.829] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've been diving deep into these questions on the podcast in episode 698 that just launched, talking to a philosopher who's looking at the quantum mechanical level. And quantum mechanics has a formalism that has the math, but the philosophy for what the math even means is an open question. There's so many interpretations, but one of the interpretations is Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, and then Ravelli's got to a point where he's basically like, ah, I'm gonna let the philosophers kind of figure out what this means. Well, this philosopher, Bernard Ocastro, picked it up and said, well, maybe it actually means that there's a platonic ideal realm, that there's a universal mind, and that as we have our experience, we kind of have this collapse of the quantum wave function with our untangled minds that our perception actually creates the world. So we actually have this dynamic process of a living participatory universe. As we're perceiving the world, we're actually co-creating the world, which means that from an idealist perspective, as we go into a virtual reality, that means now we're experiencing reality that is a constructed reality of somebody else's consciousness that is mediating our consciousness into some sort of experience that we want to have. Now, this could be a remedial factor where if we want to really dial in and work on these different issues, we can go into the projected consciousness of somebody else to be able to actually mediate that. What I would say to that is that there's always going to be something magical that is in your relationship to the concrete reality that is not being mediated by someone else's consciousness. So from that, you're going to have some sort of limitation of that that's never going to be as full or robust as having something that's not mediated. So that would be my response to that.
[00:40:45.894] Robin Hunicke: It's funny because I do also really think a lot about physics, metaphysics, and the metaphysical questions of what is our reality. I've been reading James Ladyman's work. He wrote a book called Everything Must Go, which is about where we sit in the quantum continuum and the idea that like everyday dry goods level where we live we think of everything is like these bags of stuff and things are moving around but then if you go a level up or a level down like it just no longer really helps to think about things that way and so the idea of a unified theory or being able to encapsulate what reality is in a single mind is just kind of like it's a silly idea. It's like, well, nice try, but really, you can only experience the level that you're at with the equipment that you have, and our equipment is a very specific kind of equipment. I do believe that games mediate people's realities and that our behaviors towards one another create our reality in the sense that, you know, someone asked me earlier in an interview today, like, how did I feel about the state of gaming culture. And I was like, well, I feel the same way about that as I feel about the state of culture, which is that every angry tweet and every frustrated piece of feedback on a call line and every I didn't leave you a tip interaction at a restaurant, those all happen because people are unhappy. You know, fundamentally, those people are unhappy. And the only way to fix the world is to fix yourself. You know, the only way to fix the world and make it more peaceful is to make yourself more peaceful and to make yourself more aware. And I think that the longer I work in creating experiences that try to create feelings in others, the more I'm forced to admit that my thinking creates my feelings. And my thinking comes from responses, automated responses in many cases, to what I perceive. But that my perception is not reality. It's real for me, but it's not true for everyone. It is so important, I think, for us right now to understand that we are co-creating in many ways just through our everyday actions. If you drive a vehicle that uses gas, which I do, then you're co-creating a reality, you know. There are many things that we do day to day that are choices, like it's whether or not you smile at the person that's pouring you coffee or you say thank you when someone opens the door for you. Each of these actions, in some small way, is creating a larger reality for everyone. I've said this before, but every moment in life you have the opportunity to choose which of the two liquids you pour on the flame. One is water and the other is kerosene. And you sometimes can't tell which is which. They look the same. So in the moment, when we're acting or when we're designing and we're thinking about what we want to be building as a future, whether that's a creative title or just your everyday behavior, you are and have a lot of agency. And I think that this is really, I just think it's very critical for designers right now to be thinking about what the things they create make and the realities that they make. for everyone. You know, a lot of people are talking about, like, well, VR, the market size of VR, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's hardcore, it's not hardcore, whatever. Like, these are all just guesses, you know? In the end, the technology allows you to take images and sounds and lay them over your reality, whether it's complete and a total blanket or incomplete in the sense that it's piecemeal and it's interspersed with the reality that you see right now. And that is an interesting thing in and of itself. That is the crux of why I work on it because I feel like it's very powerful and very interesting to have the ability to modify one's perception at that level moment to moment. I just think it's, it amazes me often that people don't understand how powerful it truly is.
[00:44:49.609] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of the Aristotle's like final causation, like what is the final intention of what you're creating and it feels like that as a creator, as you're creating any of these experiences, they are trying to guide somebody's experience towards this alignment towards your intention with if you're trying to create this sense of connection and awe and wonder like in Journey, then you can have people who want to have that experience, have their consciousness mediated through that because they actually want to be aligned with this connection to this deeper sense of awe and wonder. And I do see that as we create these mediated experiences, we're going to have to have a little bit better ways of discerning what the deeper intention is of these different experiences of what is the deeper meaning of like, is it trying to actually connect us in these deeper ways? Or is it a hidden agenda that's trying to exploit us or take advantage of us in some ways? And I think that's what we see so much of in our culture today. We have this nihilistic skepticism about people just trying to be out for us, but we do have the potential for people to act from their hearts with the deepest intentions to actually connect us in deeper ways.
[00:45:51.540] Robin Hunicke: It's really true, you know, it's funny I was, so I've been traveling a lot, I've been on the road pitching a game and so that means I'm on planes a lot and I have watched a lot of films recently and I've been going back through some of my favorite like sci-fi classics and then also like watching, like I watched Interstellar and Inception and then Contact recently, Arrival's another one. I've been watching those kinds of movies and then every once in a while I'll pick up another movie and like I recently watched the movie Molly's Game and in a way I expected it to be this story about this brave woman who kind of was like an iconoclast and she's like bucking the system and getting her way running this poker game. And then I watched it, and about two-thirds of the way through the film, there's a moment in the film where she's losing her shit, basically. Like, things are not going great. She's riding high, but it's starting to unravel. It's kind of like the myth that, like, you know, people that, like, try to get around the system or try to, like, get their way, have their cake and eat it too, eventually it all falls apart, right? So she's in a situation like that. And there's a really intense, violent scene where she gets beaten up very badly by a mafia guy. And after that, all the tensions in the film resolve. And I thought about that for a long time after I watched it. I am a feminist and I like the idea of women being smart and getting their bills paid however they need to and that kind of thing. And just whatever you're doing, do it for yourself and love yourself and move forward. I was really really taken back by the amount of physical violence that was shown in this film towards this woman and there was an aspect of the film where a lot of what you're thinking about is that she's incredibly beautiful and she's incredibly attractive and she's made herself attractive in order to get these guys to come play this poker game and at the same time she's totally unavailable because of course you can't mess with the person that runs the game And so she's this, like, unapproachable, gorgeous princess for the majority of the film. And then she gets her ass handed to her by this mafia guy. And then suddenly the rest of the film plays out. And, like, all this tension that's been building up the whole time, they're constantly kind of parading her around in front of you in these gorgeous outfits. And she looks, I mean, she's flawless. She's super, super pretty. And it just really, really struck me after I watched it that, like, it was really not a film about her at all. Like, she wasn't powerful. She was never... empowered. It's actually a film about daddy issues and like there's a lot of like mostly the film is about men and I really kind of didn't like it. Like I felt angry after I watched it that like this film had been kind of marketed to me as like this strong woman's story when really what it was was this girl who's really lost kind of getting taken advantage of and eventually really beaten down by a patriarchal society and I really I thought about it for a long time afterwards. I'm not really sure if I'm glad that I put that film in my head. It's a film, so you can just kind of put it aside because it's just a film. I spent an hour and a half with it or whatever, but what if it was a VR experience? What if I had watched that happen from inside a headset? I'd seen her beaten like that in the same room as me. How much is appropriate? When will we say no? Those kinds of things are really interesting to me right now. I curate what goes into my head pretty aggressively. I don't really watch that much television or film. I'm very sensitive to violence and especially violence against women. It's incredibly triggering to me as a woman and as a woman who's experienced sexual violence, I find it really threatening. So I don't like it when suddenly I'm watching a movie and a lady's getting punched in the face by a grown man. Like, I find it really distressing. And there's no... On the film, it's like, rated R, there's some violence, but it doesn't say gendered violence. It doesn't say a woman beaten by a man. And this is kind of the question I've been starting to ask myself. It's like, well, what are those labels supposed to be? And how do we curate into our own heads the things that we want to see that will be positive? and that will create positive experiences. Or if we do experience something like this, how does it become something that's a teachable moment or has value beyond the idea that women just shouldn't step up because they get beat down? I really, really, really wanted to I wanted to interrogate the person that had written the screenplay for that film after I watched it. I wanted to talk to the actress. Like, I had this very intense... I had a lot of questions, like, what is this really about? Like, why did you do this? Like, what's your view of the character? How do you feel about this kind of thing? And that's just one movie, you know? Like, I think with VR, there's just... there are so many more potential bugaboos there, you know? And it's a... It's an interesting conversation and I'm curious to see how it plays out as the medium becomes more popular.
[00:51:05.837] Kent Bye: To me it sounds like a case of somebody who probably has a lot of trauma and unconscious shadow projection to be able to sort of unconsciously create these narratives without really realizing what it's about and that, yeah, there's a certain amount of each individual creator's responsibility to sort of figure out what those unconscious blind spots and shadow projections may be and how that may be just propagating these cycles of violence in these different ways. There's a deeper conversation, I think, that's happening in every dimension of our society right now, which is looking at the deeper ethical implications of what is it that we're doing and how is it that we have this deeper truth and reconciliation to be able to speak the truth and be authentic and be able to actually heal from these deeper traumas, but not doing it in a way that's completely unconscious, in a way that is, in a projected way, that is actually potentially triggering other people. And I do think that there is this deeper ethic that will have to be figured out to be able to figure out, first of all, what those triggers are, And then secondly, how to navigate them in a way that's sensitive to people who may have experienced these things that, especially in these immersive environments, it's kind of a different game that it's different than having it abstracted in a 2D environment, but that when we're talking about these different traumas, having this level of trauma awareness, I think is a general question of like this education, but also like the taxonomy of trauma that can allow us to be a little bit more sensitive to empathizing with many different perspectives. And I think the big other part of it is being able to really empathize from those different experiences, even if you didn't go through it, to put yourself into the shoes of somebody who may have experienced that and what they might feel like if they're watching it.
[00:52:34.310] Robin Hunicke: Well, and it's like, you know, if you watch the new Han Solo flick, I watched that as well when I was on planes. And I was thinking about it like, you know, the Star Wars universe for the long time had the one girl in it. And In this particular film, there's a love interest and she's female and they spend a lot of time together, but there are not a lot of other women in the movie. A lot of the women in the movie show up and then they die and they go away. Women don't have conversations in the movie about anything other than the dudes they're with, really. It doesn't pass the Bechdel test. Most films don't. And what is the equivalent of the Bechdel test for VR? What is the equivalent of the emotional test that you would put something through to decide whether or not it's worth putting in your head. Like, I really do believe that it's important to curate what you put in your eyes, you know, and in your mind. Like, it's very important to spend time thinking about, like, why am I ingesting this? Like, there are many things that I don't watch and that I don't engage with because I don't want them in my mind. Like, I want to keep my mind open and free of certain kinds of triggered information, but also just, like, I'm a positive person and I like to think positively at the same time. You know, I'm in the nail salon in Santa Fe the other day. I'm getting my nails done and all over CNN is this stuff about Kavanaugh. Like, you know what? It's really triggering for me. It's extremely triggering for me to watch people on the news talking about a woman who says she was assaulted and saying, well, maybe she's lying. Like, that's a really, really triggering thing for me to read. It's a triggering thing for me to experience. My Twitter feed has been all full of it today. There are some ways where you just can't curate it away. You can't curate away the issues that we saw that led to Black Lives Matter. You can't curate away the sort of economic and socioeconomic problems that lead to people, you know, being out of work in San Francisco and living on the sidewalk. There's a lot in my life that I can't curate away. And so it's really important, I think, to sort of ask yourself, what are we building? Why are we building it? And like, what is the goal? Like, what is the, what is the world we want to live in and how do the things that we make make that world more possible? I'm all for fantasies and like, feeling like a hero and all that stuff, that's great. But like, is that really what we need to move forward as a species? Like, maybe what we need is a lot of good games about collaborating to solve problems together. Maybe if we built a bunch of those, then suddenly we would be educating the new people that we're bringing onto this planet on how to save it. Like, I mean, I'm not saying that's the only thing that we should be doing, but that's certainly the kind of thing that I want to be doing, because I do care about what I make.
[00:55:11.523] Kent Bye: Yeah, and that's a big reason why I'm doing this podcast and this work is because I feel like VR's medium is actually this highly leveraged point for shifting us into these completely new paradigms and to see the change that are happening that we're kind of ready for the change and the new technologies are kind of symbolically reflecting this new capacities that we're trying to cultivate in ourselves to grow into this new stage of being as a collective society. But that's a nice turn of the hope, which is that I do think that technology has the potential. So I'm just curious from your own perspective, what are either some of the biggest problems that you're trying to solve or open questions that you're trying to answer?
[00:55:45.944] Robin Hunicke: One of the things I'm really interested in working on in this next project is the idea of collaborative versus hierarchical systems. Phenomena is a pretty collaborative place. We don't really have a lot of hierarchy. There's a few people that obviously manage the teams and run the studio, that kind of stuff, like our GM Jason and stuff. But for the most part, really try to think of everyone as an equal and having an equal voice in a lot of the systems that we build. And I think if you look at a lot of online games in particular, there's a lot of games that are like The metaphor is, like Eve is a good example, you know, you get a lot of money and you become the boss of a lot of other players and you tell the players what to do. and then eventually they're all working for you in your giant guild. That's a recreation of a hierarchical capitalistic system that we didn't need to recreate. You don't need to have guild systems in online games. You don't need to pledge fealty or have a boss. These are things that worked a long time ago because there were no other options. They're very old ways of interacting and they're old ways of organizing labor and they're not necessarily very interesting to me. If you think about the philosophy of spiral dynamics, or integrated dynamics, which basically, the philosophy says there are different ways of thinking that are available to cultures and civilizations at different times in their development, and like, might makes right, or everybody follows the same god, or everything is about money, or everybody has a say. These are all different ways of thinking about things, and the integrated philosophy is that each of those things has a relevance at specific times for specific purposes, but no one way is right. I'm really interested in games and game systems, especially for online play, that ask those kinds of questions and really turn this idea of hierarchical rule or command and conquer on their head and instead replace them with like, I don't know, like matriarchal or polyamorous or like, you know, rando Relationships between people just like there is no such thing as a permanent connection all connections timeout in five minutes You know like what are the ways in which we can perturb these relationships? Concepts of leaderboards who's winning all these things like they're all very very linear and they're very hierarchical and they're very old and like I'm just really interested in looking at those things from a very different perspective and Even just the idea of winning and losing you know the binary idea that like there's a win condition and a loss condition like what if there's Grades of win and you know grades of loss or there is no such thing as a loss So therefore there's never a win like journey is a perfect example of a game that you can't lose The only way to lose it is to stop playing I guess and that just means you paused it so like what's the space that we can explore that's about those kinds of trade-offs. I'm really, really interested in this stuff because philosophically, like, I make games to explore future potentials and, like, the ways in which people can interact and, you know, and I do it to understand why we are the way we are and how we tell the stories we tell and how we act the way we act. Like, I'm interested in people and that's why I make games. So, I'm really interested in the systems that we create for our players and the ways that they interact with one another to create that reality in that space.
[00:59:02.103] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just actually did an interview with Ken Wilber, who integrated a lot of this episode number 594, talking about, and he used Don Beck's, well, Claire Graves, and then Don Beck and Chris Cohen's Spiral Dynamics, and sort of, that's something I've looked at as well, and it's one of these invisible stages of moral development, of these worldviews, or center of gravity of our values, and it's something that's invisible, we don't really fully understand yet, but we kind of get an intuitive sense that there is this progression of going from the egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric. And I feel like there's people that are growing into that sort of world-centric ethic of trying to live into these deeper values of bringing about this deeper change. And that Ken Wilber talks about the whole-archy, or there's something that's a whole on that is not necessarily... I mean, there are hierarchies that we do need some aspects of hierarchies, but some of these non-hierarchical ways of being that are able to maybe perhaps blockchain technologies to be able to do these more distributed voting, and what is it, governance systems that come from something that's maybe a little bit more participatory or consensus-based. But as you were talking about the competition, I think of going back to Chinese philosophy, the yang and the yin, because there is this yang archetypal journey that I think is very linear and having a zero-sum game and a single winner. And there's a lot of things that are based upon that. But what is this, what does a yin archetypal journey look like? We can look to maybe Joseph Campbell to see like the hero's journey is very young, you know, people would then argue like okay Well, is there a hero wins journey? What is the feminine aspect of that? I feel like there's different aspects of both in Chinese and Japanese culture different dimensions of looking at the collective What does it mean for you to be? connected to the whole, so being able to see how you're interrelated to everything. And so it's more relational to see how you as an individual are related to a larger cosmic order in some way. And it's not about you as an individual. Individuation is an important aspect of the development of the modern man, which we've had since the 500 years of the Enlightenment. But it feels like we're going back into this, well, how do things actually add up into the collective and creating this collective consciousness? And how do you as an individual fit into that collective? And I think that to me is sort of the early phases of this, I'm calling it the Yin archetypal journey, but I feel like it's the journey that is this embodiment through the emotions and it's like this connectivity, but it's also something that from a narrative perspective, we don't necessarily know how to identify it, we don't know to name it, which means that the people who have maybe been experimenting it have maybe been in a way of not being able to be understood or categorized. And so I imagine we're going to be going through and discovering all these things of what this archetypal journey even looks like.
[01:01:38.056] Robin Hunicke: Yeah, actually, so there's a concept that Pema Chodron has talked about called the Big Squeeze. And the idea is that sometimes you participate in a system and you really want the system to be a certain way. You have ideals about it or expectations and then it doesn't work that way and you have to live within that system anyway. And she tells a story about being at a center basically where she's alternately either asked to be kind of up on the dais and teaching down We're sitting on the floor and looking up and at some point she gets really confused. She says it's really painful for me I never know what to expect like I don't know whether I'm supposed to be big or small and Her mentor says you need to learn to be big and small at the same time and I think that in many ways what we're trying to learn right now is how to be individual and have our lives and you know, our Instagram stories or whatever, at the same time that we're also connected completely and complicitly to every single person on the planet. Like, there is really so much suffering that happens and there's so much that goes on on a daily basis that it's very difficult to feel anything but privileged most of the time for me. But at the same time, I also can't always take on the weight of every single thing that's happening, right? If you did, you would just never get out of bed. It would just be woe is me. And this is the struggle of a connected, conscious planet, is that you cannot deny the pain of others, and yet you can't take it on. You have to be big and small at the same time. And games can translate your reality. They can give you experiences that are new and fresh. But they can't take away your experiences prior to that moment. and they can't substitute themselves in for other experiences. They're part of the universe of experiences, but they're only one part. And I think it's really critical. in any practice to ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing and how what you're doing affects others. And it's also really critical as a player to be engaged and asking, like, what do I want? You know, like, what is the world that I want to see and how do I want to spend my money? How do I want to invest my time? How do I want to engage with this content? And who do I want to reward for having made these efforts? You know, so it's a really interesting time. to be a human on the planet Earth right now. My students always teach me so much. I really, really enjoy speaking with them about these issues. And the more I work with young people, the more I realize that it really is, in many ways, it's up to them. It's not really even up to me anymore. Yeah, maybe I've got two or three more games in me. But I'm reaching the point where I am less and less relevant. to the future of the planet, and they are more and more relevant. And so, I don't know, it's a really interesting time to be doing this because it has the potential to have such an impact, and at the same time, it has so little potential, you know? Like, it's so important and it's so unimportant at the same time. And so, I don't know, I'm just really grateful that you are doing the work that you're doing and exploring these things, because I think there aren't a lot of critical voices out there in this space, and they're needed. So, thank you.
[01:04:45.257] Kent Bye: And just to wrap things up here, I'm just curious to hear your perspective on what you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, augmented reality, and what it might be able to enable.
[01:04:55.986] Robin Hunicke: I think the ultimate potential is that it can give people the sense of having things without having things. I think that there's a really great way of supplementing our need for things and our need for experiences with the imagery of those things in the same way that films and books can give you access to the emotional interior of characters that you will never meet. I think that virtual experiences can give you access to physical places and emotional experiences that you couldn't possibly have had due to your scale or the planet that you were born on and the way that you breathe air, all those things. I think it's very possible to expand beyond many, many of our physical limitations in those experiences. And that's really powerful. Whether we decide to build a universe of jump scare experiences and shooters, or whether we do the other thing, that's a whole different discussion. But I think that the potential is there.
[01:05:50.092] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR community?
[01:05:54.255] Robin Hunicke: Nope. Just that if you're out there and you're inspired by listening to something like this, you should seriously consider making something of your own. Because it's really not that hard these days. The barrier is very low, and the potential is very high.
[01:06:06.918] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for sitting down and having this deep dive into the future of immersive media. So thank you.
[01:06:12.983] Robin Hunicke: Thank you.
[01:06:14.036] Kent Bye: So that was Robin Haneke. She's the co-founder of Phenomena. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, I really appreciated hearing Robin talk about her game design framework that she uses, which is essentially looking at the mechanics, looking at the dynamics, as well as looking at the aesthetics. The way that I sort of break those down is the mechanics are the rules and the mental and social presence of all the different dimensions that you're trying to constrain. and have people actually kind of stimulate their mind in different ways. You have the dynamics, which is, you know, after you make that choice, you have to actually take action and engage and have different behaviors within that context. And then the aesthetics is the different emotions that you get from a game design experience. And that what Robin is advocating for her students to do is to start with the emotion and then to have everything else work backwards from that. So what type of emotion are you trying to get? And then build everything else that's around that. That really kind of goes back to what the, Yelena Rochesky and Isabel Tues's Hierarchy of Being presentation, which is really starting with the phenomenological direct experience of really centering things in the human-centered design. What is the experience? What is the emotion that you're trying to go after? Then you build a world and a context around that that has different interactions and gameplay dynamics, and then potentially having social interactions that are on top of that. really what is new with this whole equation is adding the body into this dimension. And so there's different ways that your body can evoke different emotions. There's also ways that Robin was really playing with this context of like small and large scales. So you play this God mode where you're looking at things at this small scale and then you create this world and then you have a process of creating the different dynamics of that world and then you are embodied within that world. And so you have this sense of environmental presence that you are a part of helping create. but you're able to do it at a scale that you're actually at the same scale of. And when I did the demo of this back at PAX a couple of years ago, it was a super profound experience. And I'm looking forward to seeing what their latest iteration is of how they're translating some of these same concepts and doing this within an augmented reality context with the Magic Leap. So the other big thing is that there's no universal translation for how do you translate these game design mechanics and the different dynamics of behavior into specific emotions. Really, from what Robin says, she's been doing this for 20 years and that she does these different experiments. She has her own sort of intuition about what it feels like for her. And then it's just a lot of user testing to see how that plays out. And so it's not something that's an exact science. It's just you have to iterate and try different things out and then see how people react. And then as you get more and more people react, then you start to able to really hone in and dial in into that process. cultivating that experience and that intuition, which I think is why I think there's very difficult to have a singular game design book or idea or framework and just, you know, put it out there and expect that it's going to work. It's something that I think is constantly evolving and growing and that it's a process of an embodied practice of actually seeing what works. But, you know, I guess it's an open question as to whether or not there are these universal principles that are able to help you make that translation. And I think that the interesting thing about virtuality is that it's bringing in all these different disciplines, whether it's embodied dance or meditation, contemplative practices, architecture, design of objects and user centered design and human centered design and website design and game design all these things are kind of fusing together into what Robin would call the mechanics dynamics and the emotions and with embodiment and what I would call the Social mental presence the active presence the emotional presence and the embodied in environmental presence. I And that the overall VR ecosystem needs more critical theory and more voices thinking about the long-term implications of a lot of these different things. And that Robin has been thinking about some of these deeper philosophical implications, what are her design responsibilities and all of this, and the different ethics around content and what type of either awareness that we need to have around trauma and what things could be triggering for people. Because as you're asking people to go into these different scenes, if you have these different scenes of violence and you're not really thinking about it, You could be putting people in a situation where it's really quite triggering and there has to be this process by which individual creators can cultivate that trust but if there's a larger either ratings or ways to become a little bit more trauma aware of Some of the things that we may have experienced in a 2d screen is a lot different context when you're actually embodied there within that virtuality context and so there's this whole other dimension of being mindful about what type of experiences that you're putting into your body but also into your brain as you're having these different VR experiences and It's kind of an open question for how to exactly navigate that but that's some of the questions that Robin is bringing up here in this interview So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends. I think this is a great interview to spread out to anybody who may be a game designer or looking at the theory of game design and may not be in virtual reality just yet and starting to see what the game design hooks are into what the potentials are for these new immersive mediums of both virtual and augmented reality. And this is a listeners-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
