Human Interact’s Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it’s a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a cinematic narrative with some story choices driven by language and voice. In the end, the vast adventure game was scoped down to a 12 to 15-minute sci-fi, arcade experience that uses your voice to interact with a repository of nearly two hours of pre-recorded video clips of Sergeant Sarah Pearson (played by Human Interact VP of Business development Sophie Wright) answering your questions. It’s a very unique combination that explores how you can do worldbuilding for an experience by just using your voice, and it sets the foundations for what it could be like to become a character within a cinematic, immersive experience.
Starship Commander: Arcade came out on September 10, 2020 after 4 years of working on it. From original idea to 2016, to prototype demo shown publicly at GDC 2017, to re-scoping it as a location-based entertainment, arcade experience, and then to it’s eventual release on Steam. Included in the purchae of this experience includes a very well-produced documentary called Passion at All Costs where Mejia documents his whole journey as an indie VR developer. It really captures the early days of VR, and will prove to be a valuable historical document of this time period that tells a larger story through the lens of Human Interact’s struggles and successes over the years.
There’s quite a bit of innovation and experimentation that’s contained in this experience, and I hope that folks will check it out. Despite the fact that AI voice services have been available for quite a while, then there haven’t been a lot of commercial VR releases that really explore and utilize the potential of using natural language processing technology to deepen your sense of social presence and immersion within a world.
So if you’re interested in the future of interactive narrative, then I’d encourage folks to listen to the first half of our podcast if you haven’t already decided to try out Starship Commander: Arcade. Go have the actual experience, check out the Passion at All Costs documentary, and then come back and listen to the last half of this podcast to get the full story. We are moving into a world where we become protagonists in our own interactive & immersive experiences, and there’s a lot of key insights that Mejia and Wright have figured out here.
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Music: Fatality
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 there's a very interesting experience that was released on September 10th, 2020. It's an experience I actually covered a couple of times before. It's called Starship Commander, and it's using artificial intelligence for you to be able to speak into the game. And so there's a couple of moments where you're getting a lot of context as to what's happening in this world, and you're able to ask a lot of different questions and explore different aspects of this narrative. and then issue commands to be able to have what ended up being a little bit more of an arcade experience but originally started out as a little bit more of an adventure game but just from the limited scope that they had to kind of boil it down because of limited funding and it actually went on the whole location-based entertainment scene for a while and then just released on Steam here for folks to get to try it out. So Starship Commander is by Alexander Mejia and Sophie Wright of Human Interact. And, you know, this is experience I've actually first heard about back in 2016 at VRLA, where I did an interview with Alexander. And then in 2017 at GDC, I had a chance to try out the early prototype and demo and do an interview with Sophie Wright, exploring the potential of where this could all go. They finally released it and also I think the thing that's worth noting is that they created a whole documentary called Passion at All Costs and really just documenting their own experience of like five years of this cinema of attractions phase of the early days of virtual reality. So it's actually quite a lot of interesting aspects of this story within itself. And the experience is available for folks to try out as well. And we're going to give a little bit more context as that story. And then at some point, if you want to listen to the podcast before experiencing it, then there's some spoilers that we'll get into in the second half or so. But I highly recommend folks go to try it out and just to get an experience of what's it like to be able to be able to talk to a virtual reality experience and. Yeah, I think a lot of the things that Alexander has in his mind for where this could all go in the future, I think this is a key part for a unique affordance of virtual reality. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Alexander happened on Sunday, September 13th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:26.330] Alexander Mejia: So hi everybody, I'm Alexander Mejia, I'm the Creative Director here at Human Interact. I've been working on a product called Starship Commander for over four years now, and our limited release of Starship Commander Arcade just launched on Steam this September. It's available worldwide, you can just go buy it and play it. And Starship Commander is a game that's about choices. It's a choose-your-own-adventure narrative. It's so hard to describe it. Like, I've been doing this pitch for years now, and I've never really settled on anything, because every time I describe it, people are like, oh, it's like this, or oh, it's like that. So really what I found is, depending on the type of audience you are, is where it really makes sense. So if you're a movie-going audience, I say, I'm going to make you the main character of your own movie. And you are going to make the choices because you are talking to the other characters in the story. And people go, ooh, what's that? And then you go on about, you know, it's a sci-fi adventure and there's a secret mission and all this stuff. If you're a gamer, like a console gamer, we say this is a cinematic narrative story that has choices that are driven not by dialogue wheels or clunky controls, but by your natural language and your voice. And they go, oh, wait, I'm going to be able to talk to it. And then you go down the route of what the game is about and how the controls and the gameplay works. If you're a theater or a D&D nerd, you know, it's like this list keeps going on and on in terms of how you describe this product to people. Because even though it's the exact same VR experience, the way that you describe it to different people always relies on something that they're familiar with that they can attach themselves to. And that attachment is really what is the thing that can drive you to the next step. Because at the end of the day, everybody's like, whoa, Starship Commander is this really unique thing. Nobody's doing it the way that they're doing it. I've never been able to have this type of an open conversation to say anything. And it's just really impressing a lot of people as they play it.
[00:04:33.312] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think I first met you at VRLA, it must have been 2016. And then you came up to me in the hallway, and we did an interview about Starship Commander. But that's before you had even announced it or talked about it publicly anywhere, it was still stealth mode. And so then I like sat on it for a long time. And then I think at GDC 2017, I had a chance to actually play it and then did another interview with Sophie that I've yet to publish. But now that this is launched, I hope to go back and now that it's out, publish it. And you know, in this release that you just did, you also released at the same time, a whole documentary, Passion at All Costs, which I think is actually a fascinating cross-section of the life of an indie VR developer over your whole life cycle, all the way back to the mobile VR game jam of 2015, which I also happened to participate in and become a finalist in and was a big reason why I decided to quit my job as well. But man, it's like we should be friends. But you, that documentary, the 52 minute documentary, it actually encompasses more of the totality of your story than I could even hope to cover here in this hour-long conversation we're going to have here. But maybe you could just contextualize those two things, because you have your Steam VR game that you just launched, Starship Commander, which you told me was anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes of playthrough time. And then this 52-minute documentary that I think gives a lot more broader context as to how this even came about.
[00:06:01.835] Alexander Mejia: Yeah, so inside every purchase, inside every package of Starship Commander Arcade, you know, so when you purchase the game, it comes with this 52-minute documentary, Passion at All Costs, just like you mentioned. It covers a slice of the VR industry from 2015, when I got started, basically the second rebirth of virtual reality, all the way to when we launched this in 2020. And those five years, oh my goodness, so much happened in that time. You have to understand that we went from having just like a development kit 2, so DK2 was available, and then it covers the commercial launch of VR, and then it covers some of the pain and growing pains that we all went through just trying to find funding to publish these things because I believe consumers really need to know that anybody making any sort of virtual reality software, they cannot put the same timelines and the same budgets that they do on a commercial game project or a commercial piece of web software or even something that's native in C++ that runs on a system. It's really important to think about The type of talent that it takes to create a compelling VR experience. You need game developer type people that know how to run things at the bare metal at milliseconds, getting problems and things done in milliseconds, which is an art form and a technical expertise in its own. And then you need storytelling people who know how to do things in a way beyond using the conventional things like editing, lens choices, any sort of standard cinematic language that you would use because a lot of that goes out the window. And then you need set designers and people and psychologists and people who understand how people work to get them through this funnel to go through a story because When you're in virtual reality, you are part of the story. That's the powerful part of virtual reality. I am part of the story. I can affect the world. And so you have to figure out a way to prevent the audience member from going off the rails and doing something that you didn't anticipate because then your scope just explodes exponentially if the player or the audience member can do anything. So I think it's critical just to take away that there's a lot of things going on when you make a virtual reality experience and people don't really think about it and nor they should, you know, right? Like it's kind of like the Pixar moment when you just, you sit back, you were just entertained, you watched the movie, you had an amazing time. And you didn't think about all the crazy technology and decisions and iteration that they went just to get to that point. And it takes a lot of time, effort, and money and expertise to get there. And virtual reality is just a whole new subset of that similar thought, right? Like you still go through the similar process of We've created a product or maybe it's a level or something, you run a bunch of people through it, you figure out the problems, and then you have this dynamic cast of people who have different varying sets of skills. Because there's no such thing as like, I'm the VR experience maker yet. Like those sets of skills are not taught in schools, and they definitely don't exist except for maybe in a handful of people in the world right now. So, you know, putting all those things together, Takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of money. And I think it's just really sad when we've got news and media basically saying like, oh, VR is dead. It didn't happen in a year. Oh, we didn't learn the cinematic language for VR, so it can't be done. Why do they keep putting in teleport mechanics? Why can't they just make everything a thumbstick, right? Like, there's a lot of things that we have to normalize around. and even the language that we have in terms of how do we even describe this experience. The fact that I, in 2020, still have a hard time telling you what this experience is and how to describe it means we got a long way to go.
[00:10:15.483] Kent Bye: Yeah, let's see. How would I describe it? I would describe it as in the future, we're going to want to become the character within an experience. And that right now, a stopgap for being able to do that is with live actors. And so you have live actors who are interacting with you. And so in immersive theater, they're able to explore what narrative looks like, but often what narrative looks like when you are a participant within the context of that experience. But most of the time, even within an immersive theater, it's not like live action role play where they even allow you to speak. A lot of times you're just this anonymous ghost that's interacting with this experience. And so when you start to look at something like live action role-playing, LARPing, where you actually have a character and a role, and you're the protagonist of this piece, then you have a lot more agency. The challenge is the more choices you give me to express my full agency as an exponential amount of work that you have to do as a narrative designer to be able to do that. And so by using artificial intelligence and Microsoft Cognitive Services on the backend to be able to enable me to do these speech commands at these different branching points, then you're able to bridge a little bit of that gap. It's not quite like having a live actor there to be able to express my full agency. But you look at the probability space of the different types of actions that you're going to be able to do within a very specific context within the story world that you've created, then you're bounded by the context you're given and the things that you might want to say. So it makes it feasible for you to actually create a program that allows the user to be able to express that level of agency. And I first saw this back in 2017, I think it's crazy. Like the technology existed and yet it's still at this point, there's nothing else that I've seen like it because it's number one, it's not an easy problem. But number two, as I watched through your piece, then it's so outside of what people expect that at so many different levels, it hasn't gotten the funding resource, the support from the press and the media. I mean, you could go down the list of how. the innovation that you're doing here is so outside of the box that people may not have a conceptual framework for how to make sense of it. You know, there's been this chicken and egg problem where these indie developers are putting a lot of things on the line to be able to push the medium forward. We don't understand enough about the medium to really judge what's compelling or not. And at the same time, in order to really put something into its full potential, then it needs the resources in order to get to that point. So if you're outside of that bounds of what has been funded already, if it's like a trope from 2d gaming that we understand and kind of the wave shooter is the thing that's probably the most thing that we understand what that is, but there's so many other. experiences that have probably been ideas, but just have never really gotten the support that they need to really take off and flourish into its full potential. And I see that this is an example that really, unfortunately kind of got caught up into the larger systemic issues of not having people really either understanding or funding it or putting backing it. You've been able to put together this arcade style experience. It's not the full experience that you dreamed of when you first began it, but For me, as I go through it, there's so many fascinating problems you're trying to solve and you're doing it in an innovative way and still has a coherent experience in that as you, you know, in the documentary, you taking it around to so many different festivals. Yeah. So I don't know, I'll just sort of hand it over to you and sort of have you clear some questions about all that.
[00:13:49.233] Alexander Mejia: So I think the one thing that you're coming around to here And it's something that I really wanted people to come to this conclusion was, there's a lot of bias in our industry. There's a lot of bias in terms of what is correct, what is good, what is going to be a good moneymaker, and what we're going to invest in. And like you said, the independent men and women and people out there, they're doing incredible work. And you may not even know that they're doing incredible work because they haven't had the resources to succeed on this. And when we looked at what we wanted to do here, we looked at the 90s, the early 90s and like the multimedia PC years where there was all kinds of crazy software just being built and shipped. because they were just, hey, let's see what happens here. We've got a new medium here. When the CD-ROM came around for the PC and the storage medium took off, it was like, oh man, all these limitations that we thought that we had are gone now. And there was a lot of amazing software that was built. There was a lot of really bad software that was built. But at the end of the day, it existed and it got out to people. And I feel like we went through a little bit of that in the VR industry, where people were giving out money to just, hey, you look like you got a cool idea, let's do that. Hey, you look like you got a cool idea, let's do that. And then that money shut up real quick, got real tight, real fast. And it's because the only people who have the purse strings to do such a thing and have the will to do it, they're losing a lot of money. They're losing a lot of money right now. And so, you know, after five or six years of doing this, somewhere, some business person sitting up top there just said, all right, it's time to collect. It's time to make money. And there's this bias in there of, all right, we know this works. We know this is pushing the market. And that's great. I saw this happen also in console gaming in the 90s, where they backed the same type of game, and they made the same type of thing, and they made this assumption that we're making toys for boys that are, you know, between ages 7 and 18. And it really shut out a lot of the industry, and it really slowed down the growth of the industry. You look at the video game industry now. It's this amazing, over $100 billion a year industry, and you've got games that are like these really hardcore first-person shooters. You've got games that they give the name walking simulator. I don't like using that, but when I use it, people know exactly what I'm talking about. You know, games that encourage exploration and storytelling. You know, you've got adventure games. that the media wanted to write. The adventure game is dead. The adventure game is dead. Because they were really popular in the 90s, and then first-person shooters got really big, and then all of a sudden adventure games are not making the money that they want to. There's a failure or two from a couple big adventure game companies, and now everybody's like, they're dead, they're dead, they're dead. And it took around 99 to, you know, about 2011, took about 12 years before They decided, oh, actually adventure games aren't dead when Telltale's Walking Dead comes out and just shatters all these records. And unfortunately, you know, it's a zombie game because that's what the market was like. Like, OK, we're going to make a zombie game. We're going to sell a lot of copies. But what they did in that experience brought adventure gaming back from the dead or actually I don't believe that it did it was never dead it was just a matter of they convinced the market and the business people up top that said oh there's a market and there's a viability for these and so when I saw what happened to The Walking Dead for me I was just like I want to make an adventure game And I never really got around to doing it because I ended up joining another company called Volition, where we were working on Saints Row and Red Faction. And those games are amazing, and I love them, and we did some really incredible stuff, and they taught me a lot about storytelling, especially when you don't know who the protagonist is going to be. They can be male, female, or anything in between. And so I learned a lot of writing techniques from that, and I think that set me up for writing for Starship. You know, the video game industry in general, especially like the AAA game business, has really been a boys club for a long time. And I have no problem playing those games because of who I am. But I know it was limiting to the industry, and it was not an every person's industry until indie games on Steam really started opening up, and you've got iOS games where people can make more casual games, or make games that are about story, or make games that are about action. The thing is, it's like this. Think in your mind, what does an average moviegoer look like? And we're all gonna come up with different answers, because movie industry targets everybody, and the movie industry is huge and makes a lot of money. What does the average video gamer look like? All right, we might get a little closer, but we've got a lot of different ideas in terms of what they look like. And so what does the average VR audience look like? And now we're starting to get more narrow. And so one of the things that is really important for me is to make sure that we don't tread the same path that the video game industry had to in terms of saying we're going to target this towards a young male audience and it's going to only create the certain types of games and young males out there. You should not feel afraid that other people are coming into this audience. It just means more content for more people. When there's more people out there, you know what? That first-person shooter is still going to sell 100 million units. There's still going to be a ton of people out there that want to play it. And all it means is that every single experience has the ability to reach more people. And that is really the crux of what we were trying to solve when we talk about it in Passion at all costs. this idea of how do we grow the VR industry. And for us at Human Interact, it was about making this experience that invited in new people.
[00:20:02.179] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the mechanic of using your voice is also something that when you're immersed into a world, it becomes so much more compelling when you can say something and express your agency through the spoken word and be taken on an adventure. I haven't seen a lot of other 2d games that use voice. Maybe there was a one at indicate where you were singing and it was taking different ways that you were singing and using that as a mechanic, but just to actually use your natural language, spoken words, probably the closest I can think of is something like facade back in the day where, you know, you're typing out text. You're, you're, you're typing it out, but it's like some sort of like natural language. They're doing different things that were kind of cheating it, but, but doing a pretty effective way. But yeah, you're doing some sort of natural language input. That was a written text that you're typing out rather than spoken text. Spoken text is a whole other thing. Now, first, are there other proof of concepts that you're looking at? Things that you're inspired by or things that have, have tried to do this, which is make a game using your voice.
[00:21:06.712] Alexander Mejia: Yeah, so you can actually go onto our Twitch page and our Twitter if you're watching this recently in September of 2020. We actually played all the games that really inspired us. So we were inspired by... Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Lucas knew how to marry storytelling and cinematics together, right? And you have the classic point-and-click adventure game. Facade was a big one. The fact that, hey, you could have a natural language conversation, it was all text that you typed in, but still, the concept that you could do this already existed. Speech-to-text was really influenced us from what Google was doing in Chrome. Chrome, in like 2014, 2013, had a full speech-to-text system, and it turns out it was going through the cloud. Remember how you all got Google Voice for free, and we're translating voice calls into text messages and stuff? Well, you were training that system. You've been training that system for years now. So Google has this amazing system, and Microsoft also had one too. I don't know how they put it together so quickly, but we settled on theirs. And you take all these different pieces and then you say, look, all of the technologies to build this experience exist. It existed in 2016. And so it's like, it's 2020. This experience is finally releasing to people. And now we already have ideas in terms of like, man, look at all these technologies that exist now that will allow us to take this to the next level. But I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. And we've always had to do this. We have to prove to the industry, to consumers, to people who are not even in VR at all, this idea of you're going to be able to have this conversation with this virtual human. in a way that's scalable, meaning, you know, you can already do these experiences where you've got essentially like a dungeon master or guide or something and you schedule a time and you can do this immersive theater thing and they all have actors and they play. That's great. It's not scalable. It's great if you're privileged enough to have the time, money, resources to do that, but not everybody will be able to do that. And so, We always think about what's something that we can do now that's scalable, that's marketable, and that fits all these bills. Because, like, we could be the greatest creative minds in the world, but if we don't think of a way to get this to work business-wise, then we're dead in the water. And if we don't think about this from a business aspect, you know, it's like we've got to figure out, like, okay, look at what Telltale's Walking Dead did. There's a market for this. Look at what gamers like. Okay, that's what steered us towards science fiction. And the thing that kills me, because it's a double-edged sword, our statistics in terms of who is playing the game and who's talking about it is like 99% male and 1% female. And we know when we put this in trade shows and people watching this, the amount of females that like it is a lot more than 1%. And so I, it's just like, we have gone down this path to try to make something that's accessible to all. And yet when we look at the industry and we look at who's playing this, man, we did a really bad job in VR making sure that this thing wasn't, you know, cis white male. And that's a shame. And that's a shame because there are so many more stories out there that could be told. There's so many more experiences out there that are probably not being listened to or heard or given a voice or a platform because people are not, you know, they look at VR and they're like, maybe this is not for me. I don't want to pick up two guns and, you know, a sword and a gun and stab a zombie and shoot him or something. You know, it's like, there's got to be more to it than just that.
[00:25:03.593] Kent Bye: So let me, let me just speak about a little bit about my experience of this and what it's like to go through this experience, because I first saw this in 2017. And I remember seeing it at GDC, you were in the valve area and I was able to ask questions to, what's the commander's name?
[00:25:22.581] Alexander Mejia: Sergeant Sarah Pearson played by Sophie Wright. You were able to command her story.
[00:25:27.283] Kent Bye: And Sergeant Sarah Pearson, there's an opportunity to kind of ask a lot of questions. And that's how this experience starts as well. And I think that's a great way to really get grounded into this world. And it's kind of like an onboarding to like this world because you have no idea who you are. You have an opportunity to ask questions and you're kind of getting briefed by Sergeant Pearson. who's really getting you up to speed and she's very helpful. And it's also an opportunity to test your agency and imagine that this is probably the most amount of different types of ways that people can experiment because you're really kind of interrogating like how good is this? And there's a delight there when you ask a question and you get an answer that's actually addressing what you asked. For number one, it gives you this experience of being understood. And then that as a narrative designer, that you've created an environment that has provided me with a satisfactory answer. And that if I don't know exactly what to ask, then as you're going through this onboarding process, there's like little clues of things that you're dropping so that you can ask about that or ask about this. Or sometimes there's even suggestions that you can ask about, because sometimes you get into an experience where you could ask about whatever you want, but then, you know, there's some limit because you're not going to be able to ask about the philosophical orientation of the pain, you know, like you're not, You're not going to be able to get like that level of detail. So there's going to be some limit, but you still want to test it and interrogate it to make you feel like you are being heard and understood and feel present. And I remember the first time that I did it and I flew out, my depth of presence after that was so much deeper because it was like, ah, I'm in. There was something about the suspension of disbelief that you were able to cultivate through that process of being able to do that. So maybe you could just talk about that introductory scene because that's a key part of really introducing people into this world.
[00:27:23.108] Alexander Mejia: So the intro scene that you're talking about, we worked on for years. And it shows. Because we knew nothing about how to build one of these experiences. And we became very good at building these experiences. And you're right. It is a section to test. But you also have to keep in mind that a lot of people have the expectation that it's just a dumb computer. It's just saying whatever. And it took us a while to figure out how do we turn those people around to make them believe, like, oh man, I can actually speak and say things. And Pearson has all these really weird responses when you talk to her. It's like, well, am I supposed to talk to this thing? Like, we got that a lot. And Pearson's like, yeah, I'm a person. I'm right here. We're talking. hi would you like to know something you know and then and then people break out of that like this idea because it's good and it's bad it's good because it gets people into this next era of storytelling it's bad because in 10 years people are going to look at this be like man people were so dumb you can always talk to these things But that experience and scene stuck around and we kept iterating on it for, I want to say, about two and a half years before we really felt confident in shipping it out to arcades. Because we knew that this was the first moment. If this portion of the game failed on you, that's it. The well's poisoned for another five to ten years. Good luck. Pack up your bags, go home. We're done. And so... you know, you said like, man, I just felt this amazing sense of agency, and it's like, man, I'm testing the walls of this, and I'm like, wow, this is pretty good. And part of it has to do with the fact that the technology is really good at understanding you. And that was like a moment that just clicked on for us, and we're like, oh my goodness, this is actually, this is really awesome. And then there's another moment, too, in terms of just figuring out and letting the player kind of describe something or answer a question, and then getting a smart and intelligent response from Pearson. And we're using all pre-recorded video right now. The responses are not generated by AI, because AI can't deliver to you a good performance. It can deliver to you something, but it's pretty monotone, and it's not great, and it doesn't get you immersed in there. So we did recorded responses. It was a cost saving measure for us because we're indie and it was Bank of Alexander Mejia funding this whole thing. You know, Bank of Alexander Mejia and Sophie Wright funding this whole thing. So we did the 2D video just as a cost saving measure. And it was way better than actually any other 3D models that we did, because we actually did do a test 3D model. And we're like, man, this is awful. It actually took you out of the story. Another thing, too, is we actually had some behavioral psychologists helping us in consultation. And the thing that you described in terms of, I felt so much more immersed when I had a conversation, that's actually like a real thing. That was like a real scientific thing. And Sophie can tell you a little bit more about that, but there's this concept of when we have this personal conversation and you're like, hey, how are you? What's going on? All right. All right. Now we're going to do a task. You feel that much more engaged and I feel like we passed that test, you know, when people said that. So all those things that really make up that experience and then we hit you with like the swelling music and the credits to make you feel like you're part of the story, you know, that's just like the icing and the cherry on top where people go like, yeah i'm ready to do this i'm ready to go more and so there's actually another open question segment where sergeant sarah pearson's like all right we're going into this mission what's up let's talk about it because a lot of people actually just at the very beginning were like yep let's go i want to shoot the guns come on come on come on come on because you know we were testing this with a lot of gamers and they just wanted us to go out and shoot things and we're like Slow down, man. Slow your roll. Because you're missing the good parts of why this experience is good the way that it is. And there's another section where you ask about the mission and what's going on. And you can be like, is this dangerous? Or why are we doing this on our own? Or hey, you never told me about the mission. What's going on again? You can say all of these things. Sergeant Sarah Pearson played by Sophie Wright. She did such a good job at doing this. And when we wrote all of these segments, like originally I was writing a lot of the lines. And in our first version, it kind of sucked, actually, when it was just me writing the lines, because it was great for the questions I wanted to ask. and for what I wanted to do, but it wasn't encompassing for what everybody else was going to do. And so Sophie started actually writing lines as well. And the character got a lot better because not only was she putting herself into it and really getting involved and invested in the character, but it really opened it up to another group of people that when they played this experience, they learned something. And then we wrote on a third writer. His name is David Coles, and he was a really, really great writer and brought on a completely separate experience from us because he grew up in a different region than us. I was an army brat. I grew up all over. Sophie grew up in the Midwest and Indiana and could really cover that. And he grew up on the East Coast. And he was just like, how big is the ship? And we're like, duh of course someone's gonna ask how big it is and sarah pearson's gonna know she's like rattling off text sheets and text specs of the stuff and it was just like that was like the very first thing that he asked and it's like we he's like he sumped the thing because we never wrote a line for that and so For us, it was really critical that anytime that you write for one of these characters or these experiences, you're not writing dialogue like, OK, there's what's going to happen and I'm really witty and here's my dialogue. Like, that's great. You can write that. And like 30 percent of players may never see it because they're not culturally like you. And so when we were when we were hiring people and trying to get people in here, we were really looking for cultural diversity. And it's like, to us, right now there's a lot of emphasis and focus on racial diversity right now in these industries. But I think in a lot of ways we were better served by cultural diversity because there are people from different regions all around the world that are going to be asking questions at our game. And we need to be able to have intelligence and insightful responses. And testing taught us a lot of things. Testing in different regions taught us a lot of things. But having a really culturally diverse group of people on the team, and we were just like, hey, I said this, and there wasn't an answer for that. And then the writers would say, OK, how would Sarah Pearson respond to this? So you still own the character. You still knew what that was. You could write what Sarah Pearson said. You could not write what the audience was going to say. And so you had to write your responses in such a way that they would cover it based off of, all right, people might be mean or might be angry or sad about this. And that's one thing I really, really wish that we could have really implemented, but we just didn't have the time to do was sentiment analysis. So, around the time that we launched in arcades, Microsoft unveiled something called Sentiment Analysis. And it could just basically, like, attach a number. So the way the language understanding system works is, you know, you have a pool of things that the player or the audience could be saying, and it's like, I've got a 98% assurance that they're asking me my age. and then we would play the line about the age. There was sentiment analysis where we could even get, say, I am 80% sure that the player is angry right now. And we could have come up with different responses for, what is your age, angry? What is your age, happy? What is your age, jokingly? Right? So we did not implement that because, again, it's another layer of scope that increases. It was also something that was in beta. We didn't know if it was necessarily going to ship or anything, but we are just scratching the surface of what these scalable NPCs and stories could do. And I talked to you about this in the last interview. You guys should listen to it out there if you haven't heard it. But I want to see a Westworld-like experience where you don't pick a movie or a game or an experience to go in there because you like that story that's in there. You pick a world to go into. And then you create the stories you want, whether it's a rom-com, whether it's an off-the-rails crazy shooter, whether it's just like a laid-back and chill Sunday afternoon and you're just having a bunch of fun. You should be able to tell all of these different stories and all of these different artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that are coming online all fit together in a way that I believe are shippable in probably the next five years. And the reason why I say that is because five years ago we said, hey, look, all of these technology pieces exist to ship. And today I see all of these technology pieces that allow you to synthesize a voice, synthesize a face, to create systems where these virtual humans walk around and they'll have a pattern, they go to work, they do these things. We did this stuff in Saints Row like years ago. You know, having the budget and the vision to put together all of these technologies in a meaningful way, I think that in five years somebody could ship something that would be like Westworld, where you could have your own story, right, that you tell. And it's not going to be the same as something that we would build that's very directed, but like, if you look at what we did in Saints Row, We had the sandbox section of the game where you could run around and just do whatever. We said, turn the map purple. You basically took over the city as you ran around and did deviant stuff. And then there was a controlled story that was told by a director and a group of writers, and you went through that story. And, you know, we had a pretty serious split between the people who only played in sandbox and the people who only played the story and did that. And there are different types of experiences for different types of audiences. And AAA games get it. They know that they've got to make, to make a mass market product, they've got to make this huge thing that appeals to a lot of people and appeals to a lot of different gameplay senses and how they like to play. And VR is really, really far away from that right now, unfortunately, because we really like to focus on one small audience and then just give them what they want and then put on blinders for anybody else that may be interested in this. And VR should be something that everybody is interested in because everybody likes it when you have a good dream. And VR is like the dream machine. I put it on your head and now you're experiencing someone else's dream.
[00:37:58.848] Kent Bye: Well, the Starship Commander game that's available, you had told me it's around 10 to 20 minutes, which is what I experienced when I went through it. It's probably around 15 minutes or so with all the questions. And then the documentary, The Passion at All Costs, I think is such a fascinating historical document for your perspective. And I think it covers so many other aspects of the VR industry that I don't hear a lot of people talk about, you know, a big one. being the, you know, how many of the indie game devs have to rely upon enterprise training and the enterprise medical, either advertising or enterprise gigs in order to really sustain themselves within the industry. And that it's really hard to just be an indie dev to really make a viable living without having like a day job or some other sources of income. And there was a whole arcade location-based entertainment that you also were part of, which as pretty much dried up more or less for around the world in terms of people wanting to put something on their face in the midst of a global pandemic. I'm sure there's clean box and other things like that that are able to mitigate some of those risks, but still, I think it's a higher risk thing to start to do in a certain context where there's a risk vector there that I think is significant enough that I think that's gonna be at least, even if it's 100% safe, there's gonna be a psychological impact on the location-based industry for a while. But this experience, it's not like a full 90 minute experience, but it's, for me, what's interesting is that you're still doing a lot of innovation and there's still quite a bit of latitude to play it again and again, because you had to take different questions from many people. And, you know, I know that I asked a question in 2017, I asked it again, which was, do you love me? I was asking such a. And she had an answer for me this time, which was, I don't know if she did last time, but there's, there's a lot of room for opportunity for people to play around and to see how far you've taken it. There's probably a lot more content there than a one-time playthrough. When I talked to Andrew Stern, he said that there was probably around like 2,500 or so dialogue pairs for facade, which was a 10 to 15 minute experience that. you expected people to play over and over and over and over again, because there's so many different variations. In this piece, there's a number of different branch points and decisions that you're making. Can you talk about, like, generally, like, how much content you had to create if you have, like, how many hours of, like, if you were to watch it straight through? And then a little bit more about the structure of this piece, because I made choices, but I don't know if I go play through it again, if there's other endings or other pathways that can go down.
[00:40:29.433] Alexander Mejia: Yeah. So, all right. Spoiler alert, everybody. This is what's happening. If you don't want to know what's in the content, if you want to go play it, the game is retail $7.99. It's like $6.49 right now on sale for the first week. So go grab it if you don't want to be spoiled. But we did get this question because people are like, I want to know how much content's in here. You know, there's a lot of spreadsheeters on Steam. And it's really unfortunate because Steam is not a great place to be selling this product, but there's no other place to sell it. Because people are trying to figure out, like, if I pay a dollar, how many hours of gameplay am I going to get out of this? So the experience is unique. You will not get this anywhere. And that's what the Steam reviews say, right? Right. Like, that's not just me. That's the Steam reviewer saying, all right, you're not going to get this experience anywhere. The amount of content in it, like you said, takes about 10 to 20 minutes. If you rush through it and don't ask any questions and say, let's go, shut up, let's go, shut up, let's go, because you can interrupt the characters during non-essential dialogue, it takes you about 10 minutes, 11 minutes to run through it. You can spend about 20 minutes in it if you really want to dig in and say, oh, what are the bounds? What can I ask here? And figure out what's going on there. The amount of lines that play through a single playthrough are anywhere between 30 to 50 lines, depending on how many questions you ask. There are over 440 lines that Sgt. Sarah Pearson has. If you take all of the video clips and you line them up in Premiere, because I actually did this because somebody asked me on Steam, it's like, how much video am I getting for my $7.99? I said, Okay, well, Sergeant Sarah Pearson has an hour and 47 minutes plus and then some seconds of video that appears in the game. There's also the ship computer which has other dialogue. There's over 500 lines if you combine both of those because the ship computer also has some things to say and some other Easter eggs and things like that in there. The documentary Passion at All Costs is 52 minutes as well on top of that, which is something that you'll want to watch, especially if you listen to Kent By's stuff. This is something you will not want to miss. The extra content also on YouTube, which we don't necessarily count in there, but there's also probably another 15 minutes of content that we put together that were like cutting room floor stuff that happened for Passion at All Costs. So it talks more about the game and the experience and what we were inspired by, as well as we put on live streams every weekend for two hours. So there's actually a lot of content around Starship Commander. It's not necessarily the game content that, you know, the guy or the girl who's buying the game that says, hey, I want to be able to play this experience. But keep in mind, we wanted to make a movie length experience. and based off of the content that we did if there's 15 minutes and we've got you know about an hour and a half worth of footage and we want you to run through 90 minutes like imagine how much gameplay footage would have to be in there for us to fill out an entire experience and do the things that we wanted to do so these things are not inexpensive to make. They take resources and time. And fortunately for me, I was a video producer. I had been producing video since high school. I ran my own companies through college and stuff for doing video production. So I knew how to do this on the cheap and how to do this without spending a lot of resources. But at the end of the day, if you've got 9 or 10 hours of footage in there, that still takes Our shooting schedule that we were looking at, I think we were talking about having about seven weeks of back-to-back filming just to get this all filmed at the scope that we were looking at. So there's a lot of effort that would have went into Starship Commander proper. However, Starship Commander Arcade is what we were able to build on our budgets. And you mentioned about people getting jobs and everything. I actually had to take a job after I shipped Starship Commander Arcade, just because the arcades did not provide the payout that we were expecting. And the fact that the arcade model switched really quickly on us from like, we were thinking about charging like a per-ticket model, and it went to a per-minute model. And so we got really, really raked over the coals on that because people were playing the game for about 14 to 17 minutes on average. And we could only charge eight cents a minute because that was the model.
[00:44:46.467] Kent Bye: Wow. So the structure of the piece, can you speak a little bit more about if there's one ending multiple endings, because there's different choices that you're making, but I had, I only played through it once, uh, having gone through and like really stress tested it, but I'm just curious what you can say about the generalized structure that you have, like multiple endings, if it converges.
[00:45:06.935] Alexander Mejia: So inside the game, just so that we could make sure that we could show off the best experience, it's fairly linear, way more linear than we would have liked for it to be. And it was just really come down to budget and what you could do with the amount of time and production that we had. The open-ended areas are really about the dialogue. We really wanted to prove to people that there is gameplay and fun associated with having a real conversation with somebody in virtual reality. And just like you said, I felt way more immersed as soon as the ship took off and the game actually started, right? When you go through, you'll end up in the same sections. In fact, there was an area in the game where it's like, do you want to follow Pearson? If you say deny, it's like, it's just like, hey, you actually need to follow her. So we put you on rails here. And on the surface, that sounds really bad. But believe it or not, we did a lot of stress testing in Saints Row, and we had a lot of missions in there. And one of the most popular missions was one that was completely on rails. It was absolutely the same every time. And we really looked at that and said, if people are really replaying this over and over again, it was the most replayed mission in the game. And it was one where you got on a helicopter, and the helicopter flew itself around, and you shot at some guys, and there was some funny dialogue that happened during it. And, you know, we looked at that and said, like, look, if that's the most popular, most replayed thing, then that's what we're going to go for. And so this thing is fairly on Rails. The full experience definitely was not going to be as much on Rails, or you would run into some sections that were on Rails like this, and then you would have more open areas where you could have a section of the game that would open up and close based off of your performance and the decisions and whether your affinity with the characters were high or low, or if you knew about a certain piece of information that would let you go to the next area. So that was, again, the original plan, but in the arcade version, we really streamlined it down because One of the original versions of the game that we had actually had multiple choices and multiple endings and different ways to handle things. And we just found out that the arcade audience, it was just too much for them to handle. Like anytime we introduced a puzzle or a thing that they needed to negotiate their way out of, you know, being killed or something, it was just like, man, it was just too much for people. And we always had this design philosophy where we said, OK, this is an arcade experience. It's got to be like Hollywood. You just can only fail upwards and win.
[00:47:35.635] Kent Bye: I think when I saw the demo in 2017, there was a little bit more of a, let's use our voice to be diplomatic and negotiate to have a conversation. And, you know, cause when you play VR, you have a button and you have a certain amount of gameplay that you have with the abstraction of shooting things. And so I think the promise in the future is like you could start to explore completely new gameplay mechanics, which require you to have some conflict resolution skills or diplomacy skills, or to be able to communicate in a way to the level of eventually artificial general intelligence that would be able to fully understand the complexity of that. know, there's other issues of being comprehended with the natural language processing to the point where it is and the unboundedness that you would have with that type of thing. But those are all challenging AI problems that I see down the road. But I think that's the future. But I think probably where the tech is at and the budget and the constraints that it's probably difficult to explore too many novel gameplay type of experiences based upon where it's at and what you had the capacity to do. Because I think that's a huge potential. And I think I saw a little thread of that when I saw the previous demo in 2017, but I can see how it would go down this more arcade route where that context and that audience would want maybe a little bit different experience to end up in.
[00:48:56.895] Alexander Mejia: Yeah, we definitely wanted the original concept for one of the scenes in the game that we did not ship was, hey, you're in a Kobayashi Maru. Now there's no way you're fighting your way out of this. So you got to negotiate your way out or you got to trick your way out of this. And so what we found was that a lot of players were just like, this sucks. I want to just like blow stuff up and be superhuman. And, and that was the thing that like, when, when I made console games, like, okay, I know, I know exactly what you want. And we built that. So when we talk about in the documentary, like, oh man, we can't find a funder. We can't find a publisher. We demoed this. It's going great. But people are like, Hey, maybe you should just turn this into an arcade thing. And that's when we scrapped that scene and we created a new scene that was like this off-the-rail sneaking mission that, you know, you find the water factory, but now everything goes sideways and you just got to blow up everything and run the hell out of there. And that, just like, We went from everybody who was like, OK, we're impressed with the tech, but we don't know what you're doing with this game to, OK, yeah, this thing is awesome now. Because it was a Saturday night, you know, like, let's grab some popcorn and high five everybody as we, like, walk out of this thing, you know? It's a really good feel-good experience, and it's a high-octane chase scene that you go through. And I love it. I love making scenes like that. But you're right, like, it is selling the technology short in terms of its potential.
[00:50:21.613] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, I think as you go through, watch The Passion at All Costs, and as I watch that, I totally understand how you ended up where you were, because the dream and the vision of what this could be, but When I think about the VR industry, I think of it, and then like these four pillars, there's the technology of what's possible. There's the artists and the creators that push the limits of that technology and still continue to do so, even with film, they're starting to tell stories that they've never told before with technology that's over 100 years now. And then there's the distribution platforms to get those experiences into the hands of the people. And then there's the audience and the people themselves that have to learn how to negotiate and experience these things that people are creating. And so there's this dialectic that it seems to be happening with, even if you create where this is all going to be in like, say 50 years, and you gave it to the audience today, they may look at it and they're like, they may need to have like all sorts of other skills and capacities for role playing embodying characters, you know, stuff that needs to be slowly cultivated over decades of time, and maybe multiple generations of people to the point where they're able to actually basically become the superpower D&D LARPer who is being thrown into the midst of this action film and being able to properly embody these different characters and what's it mean to take on these different roles, different characters. These are all skills and capacities that the audience will eventually have, but this feels like a bit of the training wheels of like, okay, what's the baby steps to be able to get them at least started down that path.
[00:51:53.591] Alexander Mejia: But Kent, I do wanna say this to you. There are people out there that are already ready for this and clamoring for this. And they've got the skills, they're ready to do this now. So, you know, I heard somebody on a popular VR podcast say like, hey, this is a niche thing. And I was like, you really think that this is a niche thing? Everybody has a conversation with someone else. It's like, maybe this product in terms of it being, you know, science fiction and kind of an action thing, but it's all dialogue. may seem niche to you now, but I'm looking forward into the future where VR is the next step from movies in terms of entertainment. When we talk about some sort of story, that VR is a storytelling medium, and here's what makes it awesome and powerful. One, you embody yourself or you embody someone else. Two, you have full agency. Three, you make decisions that affect everything that happened in the story, including even the characters' moods, right? And how you treat them. And when virtual reality is on everybody's desk and on everybody's head, because it's like the smartphone, it's like, well, you got a hundred bucks, put one on, man, you got one. And you can just experience these things. You're going to start seeing there's a big market for, all right, I'm just going to kick back on my couch, experience one of these things and be in another world.
[00:53:14.492] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, what were the big lessons that you took away from this in terms of making a story like this, writing a story like this, creating a story like this?
[00:53:24.121] Alexander Mejia: Well, there's a lot of lessons that we learned. Most of it was very technical in terms of how do we get a person to get compliance and go down a pathway and get them to do something. Finding the right balance between humor and seriousness, the first draft of the story was very, very dark. And you have to think, like, in 2016, you know, like, oh, I wanted a dark story. I wanted a gritty story. I wanted to feel, like, kind of bad, because, like, you know, for the most part in 2016, we were all pretty safe, you know? So I was like, okay, like, there's no line between government and military and corporation. It's all kind of just one big old conglomeration now. And we really backed off of that a lot towards the end together. In fact, like, the leader of the military was basically like the CEO of a company. And he was trying to vie for power by basically being like the global leader. So this Admiral Beckett character, which you can ask about in Starship Commander, because the lines about Admiral Beckett, like who's in charge and everything is still there. And he's like a war general. And he's kind of like this overlord of the New World Order. He's a general of peace. Peace is a company. In fact, in the story, we don't talk about this in the line because Pearson's like really bad at history. So we didn't have to write too many lines. But the idea was that the UN has this big scandal, and their name is sullied, and nobody wants to be a part of it anymore. And so a company purchases the UN, rebrands them as PEACE, and they're like, oh, we're this peacekeeping force, and they save this ship called the Traversal, which you can also ask about in the story, from the Ectheans, the bad guys. And so PEACE is like the good guy now, and everybody gives them power because it's like, oh, we want to be safe because PEACE is good. And so it was basically us looking at geopolitical events and saying, like, well, what would happen if all these crazy things? What if we were attacked by an alien race? What if it was this unifying moment? And it wasn't done by a government. It was actually done by a corporation that just bought a government entity and then made their own military. And so peace is like this space force that fights the war. in the story you're not actually at war but like Pearson's already like gung-ho like like a lot and I grew up in a military family right I talked to a lot of military folks so I got a lot of this inspiration from people it's like well we're not at war but we're ready to kick their ass as soon as they lift a finger you know it's like this idea of military people and military officers and people in the military are ready to do their job. They want to do their job. They're there because they believe in the cause and everything. And so you can actually go off and straight up just say, Sergeant Pearson, you're a racist. And she gives you this really kind of answer like, I'm not a racist. They're not people. And so this idea of she's already dehumanized the enemy, and it's easy for her to do that. And you get all of this story by saying that. But if you're just like, hey, let's have fun. Let's go through this. You never hear any of that stuff. You never know anything about that, and I am 100% okay with that. You know why? Because somebody might be like, oh, that's too political. You're saying some bad things about the United States, or you're saying some bad things about the military-industrial complex and stuff. But if you don't care about that, and you just want a good guy's good, bad guy's bad story, Like, you got it. And to me, that's what makes this medium so powerful and so interesting is the fact that you can explore these topics in a story if you want to, and if you don't want to explore those topics, and you want to turn your brain off and have a good time, you can still do the same thing. And there's going to be people out there, it's like, man, do you know when you like, you dig into like, this story is really deep. Like there's actually like some really good things that are happening inside of here and it's totally up to the player if they want to ignore it or if they want it to be part of their experience.
[00:57:19.173] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was part of my experience was to go through it once and then the stuff that you're saying here actually are good launch points to kind of dig into it more and to really interrogate it or. you know, reminds me of a general problem that happens at film festivals. As an example, you have this whole world, immersive world you've created, and you try to transition someone from the wide world into like a magic circle and start to onboard and get people ramped up as to what you're about to go into. And I feel like that opening scene is really that world building onboarding process that is really generalizable to so many other types of experiences that could use that type of technology to help you just get who are you, what's happening, and just allow you to kind of interrogate what this world is without having to read a bunch of stuff. Because it's always like, okay, how do you introduce this world? How do you introduce you to who you're going to be playing in this whole world? And that interaction and that conceit I think is a really powerful innovation. And I expect to see more people look at it and potentially adopt it more and more because it is a pretty powerful way to get you embodied into your character and into the world. But like you said, there's a lot of stuff about the backstory and other contexts that there's going to be different portals for people to do that. Whether that's through Instagram posts or web pages or wiki pages or whatever that ends up being where Maybe if people that are completionists and really want to like hear every last line that's in there, you know, they can do it. They can find different ways of coming up with those structure, those questions to kind of lead, lead you down. But there, I imagine there's going to be people like that, but also just generally that question of you've created this whole canon of this world and done all of this sophisticated world building and story, but that is completely invisible and you have to take a puzzle within itself to try to find it.
[00:59:05.624] Alexander Mejia: You know, I'm glad that you raised that, and I want to tell you one really fun point. When it was called Starship Commander, people said, I want to hear the story, I want to be told the story, this story, there's no story there. Because they totally just ran through it guns blazing, said let's go, I want to kill things, let's go, I want to kill things. They're like, you told me there's a story here, there's no story. And what was funny is we started coming up with this idea for a scene talking about first contact and this war and doing this thing where you're like disembodied from yourself. And it's just like, man, this is a ton of work. And two, it totally bypasses this great onboarding section we did. And when we started calling it Starship Commander Arcade, all of a sudden people were like, oh, man, the story is great. Like, that's the thing. It's like, we have to be really careful about the expectations that we set with this product. Because like I said, it's the first one and I don't want to be the guy that's like, hey man, he's set back talkable NPCs for five years.
[01:00:06.139] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, what's next? What's next for Starship Commander? I know you just launched and what's sort of the next step to move forward and get it out there?
[01:00:14.585] Alexander Mejia: So the next step for Human Interact is to take the feedback from what everybody is saying about the product. We just launched it on Steam, so a lot of gamers are playing it, and it's a lot of PC gamers with high-end hardware. And so we've always brought this to conventions, film festivals, you know, pop conventions. There was WonderCon, South by Southwest, and Future Storytelling, all these other places. And they bring in a very more casual, you know, not as hardcore audience. And so we know we do really well with them. We're going to find out how well we do with a hardcore PC gaming audience. And I'm going to say hardcore because if you've got a $2,000 PC, you like playing PC games. You like playing games a little bit more than most people do. Even if you have a $1,000 PC, you probably like playing games a little bit more than most people do. So once we learn what to do from there, that's really going to inform what our next steps are. I personally would love to take smaller projects on, because I've been working on this for five years, and do something a little bit smaller, more manageable, personally. But it's really going to come down to what happens. You never know what the opportunities are going to be around the corner. You never know what sort of geopolitical event is going to change and shape and change everything that we do and say and live in this country or even in the world. And so, you know, asking me what's going to happen next, I've been around long enough and I'm now wise enough to say I have ideas and plans in my head, but I'd rather not say them out loud right now because I have a feeling that I'd say something now and then I'd look back at it three months from now and just laugh at it. Things are changing that fast these days.
[01:02:01.966] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely feel that. Well, finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling in the mix of AI might be and what it might be able to enable?
[01:02:16.037] Alexander Mejia: I have always wanted to be able to explore topics that have been taboo for movies because somebody is offended by even the mere mention of the subject. And so I think we've already got the technology to do something like that already because you are allowed to explore the story. You are the director. You are the one that can say, this is good, bad, or I don't know, maybe you tell me. And so I think that some sort of experience like we've got, but maybe over spirituality or maybe over how we even deal with each other as human beings and how we relate to people that have completely different opinions from us and completely disagree with us on a level where they're maybe violent towards the ideas that you have. you know, being able to walk in and being able to explore that and understand more of other people. Because I think the problem that we have in society today is that we don't do a very good job of understanding each other. And I just spent the last five years trying to understand what people were saying, you know, just so we could respond to it. And to me, it's given me a new appreciation of really listening to people of understanding what's on their minds and understanding their wants and desires and figuring out how to play to that or how to be in a space that is acceptable for those people. And so, yeah, we picked a softball pitch. We made a science fiction story where you go off, you shoot some bad guys. You never even see who the bad guys are. You just get told that they're really bad the whole time. I hope that at some point we are able to finish Starship Commander the way that we expected, which is a movie-length experience, multiple endings, multiple choices to do, multiple characters that you can talk to and ally with or be enemies with. But that experience probably is going to cost about a million dollars to make. So if you're a publisher out there and you're like, man, that sounds interesting, come talk to me. But until then, unfortunately, I'll have to take on small projects because I took another job. So I've got way limited time now. I can't dedicate full time to this anymore. It's not that I've quit or that I've given up, but it's just I have to be realistic with what I can actually do in this space and the kind of innovation. And it's really sad to me because There are a lot of people that we used to go to SVVR or we'd go to Oculus Connect or, you know, go to VRLA when it was still happening. And you would run into all these people like, Oh, what are you doing? Oh, what are you doing? And there was this incredible amount of innovation that was happening. And now I'm just, I'm having a hard time seeing it anymore because we went, I think we went to commercialization too fast.
[01:05:09.296] Kent Bye: Hmm. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:05:17.701] Alexander Mejia: Stay in there. Keep in the fight. Keep in the fight. It's going to happen. You know, we're in the trough of disillusionment right now. It seems really dark. It seems like times are bad. It will not be this way forever. And there are people out there every day that are entering into this medium and saying like, oh, what can I do? And for the younger folks out there that are just entering this medium, Don't be afraid to look back. A lot of really cool stuff was already done.
[01:05:48.892] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Alexander, I wanted to thank you for taking this epic five plus year journey to finally release the Starship Commander Arcade and, you know, for people to be able to experience it and try it out. I highly recommend people test it out and really interrogate those open-ended scenes and really see how much of the story you can discover. And yeah, also the passion at all costs. I mean, that really well-produced, I mean, you obviously have any award-winning producer and, you know, I've got the filmmaking background. And just to see your perspective over that time period of all the different aspects of the shifts in the industry, I think it's a great cross-section of your lens and your perspective of so many different aspects of how the industry has been unfolding. So it's definitely a very valuable historical document that's for me worth the price alone, but you've got on top of it, this whole other experience that you can play around with and get inspired by. Cause I do think that there's an element of this is the first iteration that people will see this and be like, their mind will start to open up and like, Oh, well, no, this is possible. This is possible. Yep. And I think that there's not a lot of other experiences out there that I've seen that are like this. So definitely check it out. And, um, yeah, this blend between live actors and eventually doing stuff like this, like you've done in this experience. Prerecorded because you can actually do quite a lot with prerecorded as well, as long as you get the 5%, the 95th percentile of what the most likely probabilistic answers and questions might be and be able to handle that. But I think, you know, as you have been working on this, it's so long, you know, at least when I went through it, you know, it's hard to, to find those cases where there's not an answer. So, but yeah, just congratulations on the launch and thanks for sitting down and to be able to unpack it a little bit more here on the Voices of VR. So thank you.
[01:07:29.566] Alexander Mejia: All right. Thanks, Kent. And I do want to say one more thing. I am so, so invested in history preservation, especially in software. So much of it got thrown away, especially for the IBM PC years in the 80s. And I see there was a lot of it during the Oculus Share days, that some of this stuff is not easily accessible anymore. And so for me, I felt it was really critical not just to release this product and make sure that people knew about it, but to also capture this moment in time. And so I actually learned very deep on that the only people that are going to capture history is you. When you capture all of these photos, when you capture all this video, and then putting it together in a meaningful way, like, we spent about eight months putting that documentary together. And it was the labor of love, but it was also, I felt, a necessity because I don't think anybody has really captured the indie VR scene kind of like we did, and we had so much media to describe it, and I saved every video, every picture, every screenshot of everything that we did, because a lot of this stuff that we're doing with AI is server-based. And it may not be around or playable. And those videos may be the only documentation that we'll have of potentially like the first versions of the game. Like they don't run anymore. I can't boot up the version of the game from 2017 and play it. All I have are videos of it.
[01:09:01.011] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Just the the API that you're currently integrated with. People should play it now because we don't know how long that is going to be supported and.
[01:09:10.383] Alexander Mejia: Come on, give Microsoft some credit. They'll keep it alive for at least 10 years. Microsoft Microsoft's the good guy, man Microsoft. I know I'm just saying.
[01:09:19.435] Kent Bye: You know just even with unity builds and everything else that you know, there's things that change We never know what's going to happen like 10 years is a lifetime in technology. So um, but the point is just play it now because like you said the diversion from two to three years ago, you can't play so Yeah. Plus, you know, you were paying those server costs. Yeah.
[01:09:38.409] Alexander Mejia: Well, I'll tell you this. We will do whatever we can to make sure that the game can stay up. So my goal is to make sure that this thing is playable for, I want to say at least five years, but my goal is to make sure that it's playable for a decade. And then at that point, what we'll probably end up doing is migrating to local speech to text when that actually gets good enough. And then that way the game can always be playable and Who knows, maybe we get to a point where we just release the source code and the project for it out there. Because I am all about, like I said, preserving things and making sure that people can point back to something and say, here's what it is. And id Software did that with Doom and Quake. And that was a huge inspiration on me, because the fact that they left those things in such a way that you can go back through source code, put it together, compile it, make sure that it works, and say, hey, this is what software was like back then. And so, you know, for me at some point, this product, I would love to put out there like that. I just got to figure out how that's going to work. And like I said, that's a problem for five years from now. It seems like an eternity, but it took us five years to get this thing out the door. And it's like, you know, what's the next five years. So here we go.
[01:10:49.500] Kent Bye: Yeah. I just saw doom running on a pregnancy test.
[01:10:53.802] Alexander Mejia: Oh yeah. Foon's great. Yeah. Foon's like down the street for me. But yeah, so... Starship Commander Arcade running on a pregnancy test in 2037. The cyberpunk dystopian future we live in is awesome.
[01:11:10.897] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks again. Thank you. So that was Alexander Mejia. He's the creative director of Human Interact. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, just this concept of entering into a magic circle and learning about a world that you're about to step into. This is a challenge that I think a lot of VR experiences have faced, especially when you go into like a film festival circuit where you have a whole installation, you are going into a physical installation that's trying to give you some sort of metaphoric priming before you actually step into the experience. I think the interesting thing here is that you're in this briefing context where you're getting information about this world and it's a little bit unstructured and open-ended for you to really explore the different aspects of the narrative. When you actually go through the experience, you know, you can just spend 10 to 11 minutes to kind of just rush through the experience. If you want to ask a lot of different questions and explore different aspects of this narrative, then there's a lot of this world building that they've done just through the writing and recording these little interactions when you ask Sergeant Pearson to answer some of your questions, then they are listening to what you're saying, the Microsoft Cognitive Services, and interpreting that. There's intention that's extrapolated, and then it's selecting different clips to be able to play in response to that. when it works it just does a really great job of just making you feel like you're in this world and this is a real world that actually exists and I felt more committed to the world when I first experienced this back in 2017 and to a certain degree when I did it again this time but I think you know there's something unique about being in a world for the first time. And what I would say is that this sort of world building is an interesting problem Like how would you really introduce yourself to a culture and to a place where you've never been before as well as like who are you? What's your character? so it's almost like you've been waking up from a slumber and you just sort of have complete amnesia and you have no idea who you are and you have to and have basic things explained to you. And so just having someone to be able to talk to and get a little bit more of that context does a great job of being able to do that. Now, there are different parts of just the way that the dialogue is structured, where there'll be a term that you don't understand. So then they'll mention the alien race of the Echineans, and you're like, okay, who are the Echineans? And So there's different ways that they kind of lead you. And there's other ways that you just have to figure out what are the things that people want to know about where you're at and the dynamic of having these different aspects of pushing the technology forward, you know, being able to create an experience like this, just turning out to people and then training the audience for how to even interact with this. Like, what are the things that the audiences most likely want to do? And I think it's that process of putting stuff out there and immersive theater has the advantage of being able to interact with people live and they're, maybe able to get that feedback in real time, but this is a little bit more of an iterative process where they have to put it out there, listen to what people are wanting, and then kind of record that. And then they did that for a number of years until they finally refined it to the point where they went out to the VR arcade. And it was fascinating to hear Alexander say that people were complaining about that there was no story at the very beginning before they had turned into the whole arcade experience, which is much more about you going and blowing up these different ships there at the end. And so people were perfectly fine with the story when there was like this whole action component. So, you know, really trying to cultivate an audience that is interested in this and how to actually like do that. Alexander says that the people that like this stuff, as if they're already there, they're prime, they have all the skills they need to be able to do it. And there's this like larger subtext of this conversation, which is that this type of experience is a new type of experience that can be difficult to really put a name to and for people to understand, okay, this is exactly what I expect when I go into this type of first person shooter, wave shooter, adventure game, horror, survival game, walking simulator. I mean, all of these terms that we have for games describe the essence of an experience. And this is kind of a mashup of different types of experiences that are unique to VR in some ways, and doesn't have a name to be able to put onto it, which creates an additional challenge of pushing the envelope forward, but then having to describe what it is and to have people experience it. So there's this moment when Alexander talks about the early days of VR where we've gone to all these different gatherings and Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference to VRLA There's a dialogue where these creators and makers were creating experimentation and having these opportunities to just show it to people and that created this unique context where It didn't have to be like a certain commercial bar. You could just be experimenting and that type of conversation in those gatherings would actually help facilitate all sorts of different experimentation and innovation. And we're kind of moving into this commercialization phase, as Alexandra says, that it's putting into more constraints in terms of what works and what doesn't work. And that type of experimentation becomes more risky as you move on. So hopefully there'll be things like Oculus Share. I know that there's going to be unlisted apps that Oculus is going to be returning to, but also just as general culture of people that are interested in those types of avant-garde experimentations and to be able to look at all those. Alexander is really into software preservation and also just knows that there's a lot of stuff that's already been released and out there that people have already been pushing forward, but just hasn't maybe gotten the attention, thousands of different experiences that are out there. And so it's worth going back and just looking at what's already there to see what people have been doing and doing this archival, digging in through these different experiences. So hopefully we'll have a little bit more of that as we move forward and get more people interested in this time period as well. And the documentary passion of all costs was just really professionally produced, really well done, highly, highly recommend it. If you're interested into the voices of VR podcast and this kind of history of the evolution of VR, especially through the lens of like, what's it like to be an indie VR dev during this time period. This is a really amazing cross-section I think represents a lot of different people's experiences as well. So highly recommend going to check that out as well. Cause passion all costs. There's a lot of passion that's been driving a lot of these experimentations within VR. and there hasn't been a lot of money or funding or resources. And so it's just been people making do with what they have available. So just to hear that story and to see what they were able to create, I think it's just worth to support independent creators like this and to see the cultural artifact that they're really documenting the work that they've done. but also just to experiment with their experience that they've created as well. And to see what kind of insights that may give you, because this is like a very unique affordance to be able to speak and to have something that's a recording that comes back. But when it aligns, it just makes you have this deep sense of feeling like you're part of this culture and you're in this world much more so than if you don't have those different types of social interactions. There's just something about that social presence that you're able to recreate virtually that helps you just get really present into this experience. And the final point is just that there is a lot of different content that is there. The total amount of footage was around two hours or so with for about 15 minutes. And so a shooting ratio around eight to one or so, but there's lots of different things to explore. And, you know, after you go through it once or twice, then you may need to have a little bit more context to be able to know, okay, you should ask about this Admiral and ask about the ship size and different. Contacts and world-building stuff that may not be intuitive But there's just a lot of things that are in there and also different Easter eggs as well But also just think about different people liking to have different playing styles And so he's talking about how triple-a games and once they get to a certain size then you know they have to fulfill a lot of the needs of a broad range of different types of temperaments and play styles and That's similarly here, like just thinking about as you create your world, then what are the different lenses that people want to be able to dive into the history or dive into the logistics or dive into the relational dynamics of these different races. So lots of different things like that, that are embedded into this experience. And so just thinking about how, as you create experiences like this, then what are those different lenses that you're going to take to be able to really do this deep dive into this whole world that you've created. So that's all 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, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself 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.
