Valve’s Chet Faliszek has been a key virtual reality evangelist & developer relations liaison over the past couple of years for the HTC Vive, and I had a chance to sit down with him at GDC as they were showing off many of their launch titles. Chet talks about what convinced him to move his desk to start working on VR, some of the emerging new genres of VR games, some launch title highlights and some of his personal favorite VR experiences, as well as some stories of people discovering room-scale VR for the first time. There’s been a lot of growth and maturity in developing room-scale VR experiences over the past year, and Chet is continually humbled and surprised by what developers come up with. And with over 50 launch titles for the HTC Vive today, then there’s a wide range of different types of experiences to choose from.
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Here’s some of the launch titles that Chet mentions:
- The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed
- Vanishing Realms
- Space Pirate Trainer
- #SelfieTennis
- Audio Shield
- ModBox
- Brookhaven Experiment
- Tilt Brush
- Fantastic Contraption
- Job Simulator
- theBlu
- The Lab: Xortex
- Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine
- Budget Cuts
- Paranormal Activity
And you can look at some other mixed reality trailers that are located here on this SteamVR launch page.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.082] Chet Faliszek: My name's Jeff Elcik. I work at Valve and working on VR.
[00:00:16.774] Kent Bye: Great. So what's your background? Is it writing? And then how did you get into what you're doing in VR now?
[00:00:21.879] Chet Faliszek: So, you know, at Valve, I think everyone thinks it's a joke that we have our desks on wheels, but we really do. And we move around to different projects. And I was working on something else, and the VR team showed me the demo, the early Tag Room demo. This was back in, what, 2013? And it was a series of, like, 18 demos. And by the third demo, I was just like, OK, I'll move my desk down. You've got me. I went from, you know, not thinking this was real to just absolutely wanting to take people to these locations.
[00:00:49.784] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it sounds like you've been involved with this VR for a long time and what's it been like on this journey and evolution towards showing all the different people but also your own personal growth through this time?
[00:00:59.887] Chet Faliszek: Well, I mean, it's been fun watching the developers. So one of the things I love most about the VR community is everyone shares. A good example of that is Colin Northway, who came up with the idea of that mixed reality stuff. The minute he figured it out, he was giving out source code to everybody on how to do it, right? And it's that kind of spirit that we've been able to watch from the very beginning. So when we first did the last year at GDC, you know those guys we all had to kind of be quiet with right and that group formed really tight and everyone was really honest with each other they give each other really honest feedback which is often hard to get because often people just tell you oh it's great it's great but instead people really pushed each other to make something good And we wanted to carry that kind of attitude forward, and so we've kept trying to do that all along, and always try to put devs together, get them to talk together, have them come to our offices, sit with us, work with us, so we can learn as well, because we're all learning in this. And I think if you look at stuff we showed last year at GDC to this year, you can see that growth. as you're starting to see really full, deep games, you know, like Starseed the Gallery, right, where it's what you see out in 2D games now and that you'll see things like Vanishing Realms, which is, all of a sudden, it's so obvious in a way, but getting to play an RPG where you're actually swinging the sword and blocking shots and figuring strategy and tall guys have the advantage that you can go over the shield and short people have the advantage of the shield, like, it's just kind of seeing, like, oh my God, these are, like, how this would be in real life if there really were orcs and crazy things to fight, right? And just seeing that, I mean, if you take a look at a, have you played a space pirate trainer?
[00:02:34.495] Kent Bye: Oh yeah.
[00:02:34.855] Chet Faliszek: Yeah. Where people are running around like mad inside the space because they're confident in the chaperone system and they're confident in their movement inside of there. Same with selfie tennis comes from that, right? And so seeing this growth of games is just super exciting.
[00:02:47.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's the thing that I've noticed is that there seem to be like new aptitudes for playing these video games that involve more kinesthetic hand-eye coordination, moving your body around versus, you know, just statically sitting in the same spot and using this abstract transformation of buttons into the world. It's much more natural and intuitive and one that I feel like I don't identify as much as a gamer as much as, you know, more of this VR athlete, I guess so. I think it's sort of like introducing VR to a whole genre of people who necessarily weren't really into gaming before, and I don't know if you've seen that as well.
[00:03:18.958] Chet Faliszek: So, Nineth, isn't there this weird thing that you'll see is people who are used to previous motion controls where you still were using imprecise controls, abstracted of looking over at a TV to see what your avatar was doing, and thinking, oh, these motion controls are like, I'm really gonna want to just sit on the couch and not get up. until they play them. And then when you're in there and you're actually holding out a shield with one hand, blocking shots coming from one way while you're shooting the other way, and you're feeling like you're this action hero character, then all of a sudden you're like, oh yeah, this is what I want. And the fun thing about that is everyone can do it. You can just jump in and how you do things is how you do things. My favorite was watching one of our developers play Vanishing Realms. So a classic RPG, and not to give it away, but you light a fire and you give up offerings, right? So there's a fire to light, and he's sitting there staring at it. Well, there's got to be a switch somewhere. There needs to be some way to activate this fire. How do I activate this fire? You're holding a torch. Start the fire with the torch. Like, I was joking. It's like, how do you open a door? You open a door. And it's like seeing gamers who have all these preconceived notions of how you interact with the world, looking for those tropes that we've always had for all these years. and then throwing in somebody who doesn't play games, who just instantly gets it because it's just the one-to-one relationship to their body, to the space, to doing things how they expect them to work, right?
[00:04:39.668] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering from your perspective, since you've seen quite a lot of different experiences, if you can start to identify some of the emerging genres of VR games.
[00:04:49.542] Chet Faliszek: You know, so it's kind of weird right now. So right now, I think for launch, we're looking at over 50 games. We're adding more all the time. I mean, that's one of the fun things is devs can just say, hey, we're ready. We're going to go do this. We'll let them kind of dictate that. And we're starting to see things like Modbox come out of the woods where it's like, You're playing, you're creating, you're doing all of these things in this space and it kind of defies what a game is and what a building tool is, as it has this weird blurry mix. So you're seeing things like that, you're seeing things like Space Pirate Trainer is a great example of like these physical active games where you are totally in there and competing that way than the Brookhaven experiment, where it's horror, but horror in a whole new way, right? I mean, as a guy who was project lead on Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, we always wanted to put you in the middle of the zombies getting attacked, but we had to do things like In the Left 4 Dead series, if a zombie hits you from behind, it'll actually turn to move in front of you because players wouldn't turn. It was hard for them to understand where they're being hit from. I mean, there's a lot of things you had to do because you really weren't in the space. Were they gonna go, hey, you're surrounded by monsters in full 360? You're gonna look at one monster and go, you're far enough away, I'm gonna turn my back to you. And I'm gonna take care of this guy here. And, like, you just could never have done that before. And so, like, seeing people embracing that, and so we're seeing, you know, kind of classic genres of the horror, the shooter action stuff like that. And then, like, ModBox and Tilt Brush. Like, Tilt Brush has been around so long now, we almost forget, like, right? And then, I mean, Fantastic Contraption. Like, what is Fantastic Contraption? I guess that is a... I mean, originally it was a Flash game, and so it has some of the elements of that, but it's so much more now, right?
[00:06:27.571] Kent Bye: I kind of think of those as world-building, you know, tools where you're kind of building the world. So, that and Modbox, where you're kind of generating. And, I don't know, like, Tilt Brush seems like it's lowering the friction to your imagination and creativity, to be able to just, like, lower the barriers to just taking what you have in your mind and to be able to create it in this 3D space.
[00:06:46.033] Chet Faliszek: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, and it's really fun of, we were always thinking that, oh, we're gonna hit people that just don't wanna draw, right? So we've demoed that thousands and thousands of times. And instantly, the minute somebody does the motion where they do a big sweeping kind of turn of their hand, or they put it up over their head and they realize it's in full 3D, they're hooked. And they just wanna start playing, right? And it just instantly, there's something about being in that and among art, I think, that loosens them up to that. Or maybe it's just the headset's on and they can't see the people staring at them watching them draw.
[00:07:18.327] Kent Bye: So yeah, and one of the games I just played with part of the labs, Zortex, was to me it felt like using my skills both moving my hand around but also like my peripheral vision and being able to judge the distance and everything and just this beautiful, elegant way of moving my whole body around. It makes me think of like there may be a whole genre of VR games that are like designed to help you lose weight or to get in shape because I feel like I've had some anecdotal stories of some developers who they lost like 20 or 30 pounds a developer and just gamers who may not get their exercise in that VR could actually be a viable way to get your exercise and stay healthy and fit.
[00:07:57.642] Chet Faliszek: Yeah, the thing is you don't even notice, like you play something like Audio Shield and you find out like you're rhythmically hitting the balls with your fists and you're kind of punching out and holding up your arms and you're doing all these actions. And then, you know, you're playing that, this is my mellow game I like to go home to sometimes, right? And so you're like 30 minutes, an hour in there and you're like, whoa, all right, that was good.
[00:08:18.258] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I noticed that one time you tweeted out that you were traveling, and this was the first day in a long, long time that you hadn't been doing VR. And I think that, for a lot of people, there hasn't been a lot of those games that they come back to again and again, but, you know, because you have sort of early access to a lot of these games. Maybe you could tell me a bit about what are some of those experiences that you find yourself going back to over and over again?
[00:08:39.433] Chet Faliszek: Well, so one of the things we did was making sure people on the team had these at home as well because we wanted to see, and not just on the team, but at Valve, you could, you have a kit, take it home and kind of see what the normal everyday use case would be. And so definitely you're seeing things like Space Pirate Trainer, Tilt Brush, Audio Shield, like those are those games that you just go back to again and again. And then the great thing is, as we're getting closer to launch, there's so much new stuff every day that you get to go experience. So, you know, we had the Star Wars experience that we were able to play for a while at home. And, you know, the first time you hold a lightsaber, I got to try it down at ILM, and the very first time I tried it, I just started giggling. Like, there's a step moment of, like, wow, this is the thing I've always wanted. So, you know, it's been, I think, a mix of going back to some of the games that are really replayable and then equally going through and exploring new games. Like, as soon as something new comes on, it's kind of like when we have something new release on Steam. You'll just see everybody kind of pile on and then start talking about it and like, oh, did you see this? Did you see that? Kind of thing.
[00:09:39.996] Kent Bye: What's one of your personal favorite memories of being in VR?
[00:09:43.913] Chet Faliszek: Well, so I still can remember when I saw the very first time in the old tag room, seeing the tall white spires going up. Bad programmer art. And I'm just like, can you just not move forward for a minute? I just want to hang out here. And it was just that first time I ever felt in virtual reality that I was truly at a place that I could explore and go down. And now, as we start playing stuff and seeing developers taking that even further, I don't want to give away anything from star seats. I'm not going to tell any of those experiences. It's really good. Yeah, I just, I think the first time I caught myself in Space Pirate Trainer doing dual wielding and doing where you're holding your arms totally apart and shooting two things at once, like, holy, like, this is the thing I've always watched. And again, it's always that, like, as a game developer, you're always doing this abstraction before, and you're always seeing it on the screen, and you're like, that's cool, and, like, there's that feel, right? Like, games always have a feel, and also now the feel is you. Right, I mean, I was talking about Vanishing Realms, which is an RPG. When you're swinging the sword, it's not, hey, the sword swings this way because you press the button, and it's always going to swing this way, and it becomes a timing thing. It's, the sword swings the way you swing the sword. And it just, like, I keep catching myself in these moments of that, of playing Budget Cuts, and the first time I ducked behind a door, or leaned because of a robot, and you're like, wait a minute, what'd I just do? I did that thing we always wanted to do, and I just did it.
[00:11:09.943] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's to me, you know, that's they refer to as the bat test of you know If you feel like you're actually in danger and you're reacting like that It's like really good sense of when you're actually present Your body gets sort of like tensed up in that way And when I was in the the lightsaber demo where we're just the Ionlex lab where you know These stormtroopers are shooting lasers at you and I'm like trying to with the lightsaber bounce it back It just like I felt in my body like holy shit Like I'm I'm in danger here. Like I could be shot by a laser by a stormtrooper and it was just exhilarating
[00:11:40.691] Chet Faliszek: Yeah, yeah, there is something about, you know, since you're standing, I think there's this feeling that you're exposed, that you're vulnerable, and your body, like, you can't help but have your body react to it. I still remember the first time in Ledger Cuts when one of the robots turned to me and pointed his weapon at me. I got mad. I was just like, first of all, I ducked, and then I kind of curled up, but it's just like, I was so mad, like, how dare you do that to me? And so of course he kills me, and so then I go back in and I'm like, oh, I'm killing all of you. Like, I am vengeful. You will feel my wrath. And I think that's a really fun thing that happens now, right? Where no matter what you think, you're going to do in it. I have to play games often in front of the devs who have made it in their offices, where you would think I would be able to abstract out and not lose myself in it. And I still just, I can't help react, right?
[00:12:29.746] Kent Bye: Do you have any personal favorite stories of other people, what you've seen people do in VR, or the experiences that other people had?
[00:12:35.891] Chet Faliszek: The paranormal activity guys are really good at getting people to rip the headset off and throw it, so those are kind of funny. There's games that are going to be very, very scary that people are going to be like, I don't want to go down that route. But equally, I think watching somebody in Tilt Brush realize that while they don't think of themselves in an artist that they're making something that they are actually happy about like that's always been fun and we've done that so often that you get to see such a wide variety of people and I think it's just watching those physical reactions we had somebody the other day playing Zortex So you moved your hand around, right? Well, they decided that their hand had to stay fixed to their body, and they moved their body around. And so they were just, eventually she was on the ground shooting up, and just losing herself in it, and just having a great time, right? But it's just like, you've never been in this position before, so you don't know what to do, and you just start doing what you think you should do.
[00:13:27.488] Kent Bye: I'm curious, you know, I've done a lot of different interviews about narrative and storytelling and, you know, this cross-section between interactivity and agency versus giving someone an immersive experience and maintaining a presence while at the same time trying to tell them a story. What have you seen as some of the most innovative advancements in terms of storytelling in VR so far?
[00:13:47.770] Chet Faliszek: Well, so first, I mean, I come from the realm of I'm not a big fan, to begin with, of, like, cutscenes and stopping for that. I like a story that kind of organically stretches through the narrative. You know, like, if you want to see something like The Vanishing Realms, which does it as in, like, that kind of RPG way of you advancing through that world, or Starseed does a really beautiful job, I think, of kind of more the traditional game feel, but yet they pull it off. You know, I think a lot of the oddness of, oh, VR has a problem with storytelling comes from we're seeing a lot of movie people enter the space as well as game people. And game people are used to having this problem of, how do you get someone to look somewhere? How do you get somebody to go to the place you want? And you learn all these little cues where you kind of lose that authoritarian voice that movies have that they can say, you're looking at this, you're going to go over here. But, you know, we're already seeing a large group of those guys start to learn the language and learn the vocabulary of working in the mix that VR is of between games and that kind of narrative. So there's a bunch of stuff that is not announced yet and coming on board. But, you know, I think we're going to start seeing more and more of the kind of experiences where, since it's you in there and it's not this character avatar you're watching on the screen, that we're gonna see more of that kind of storytelling. So it's kind of like with Love for Dead, we never wanted you to be like, after a session going, hey, remember when Bill saved Zoe? It was always, remember when I saved you, right? And so I think we're seeing more and more of that here because that's what this lends itself to so strikingly well. You know, I think the times we see outside of that is some of the stuff like Nani's doing with that, peeking in on some very hard to deal with subjects and how those affect you in VR is way different. So, you know, there's a kind of a wide variety of narrative. I think I've loosely answered that in a very off-kiltered way. I apologize.
[00:15:38.522] Kent Bye: No, that's fine. You know, I think that there's an element there of having interactivity and having NPCs that have, like, realistic body language and behavior, and I think that's going to be a big part of, like, maintaining that presence, as well as storytelling, and start to see something perhaps more along the lines of Facade, where it's, like, a more interactive dynamic. where it may be a shorter experience of two to five minutes but you have a lot of different variations and so I think it's still very early days for VR but that for me I think is the real sweet spot of having a sense of embodied presence and then having a sense of agency and being able to interact and not just kind of artificially change the story in different ways that don't have any meaning but really engage in a way that can completely change the outcome. So I don't know if you've seen anything like that yet.
[00:16:22.028] Chet Faliszek: I've seen a bunch of interesting experiments down that way and ideas and definitely I think when people talk about it there's a lot of talk around that. I mean some of that is just very hard to do and hard to do well because I mean people have tried to do that in games now as well and it's always the I think the struggle is you can make it different every time but it's hard for people to understand that it was different every time and so then they're not sure if they really had agency or if they just answered the questions right and that's just kind of a thing that plagues game narrative in general that way.
[00:16:50.631] Kent Bye: You know, I know you've done some talks on VR game design and you also are releasing The Lab, which is a series of different experiences. Do you see The Lab as sort of like Valve's way of communicating to the wider development community of here's some best practices and mechanics that seem to work pretty well?
[00:17:06.667] Chet Faliszek: I think it's a mix of what we've learned and actually people joke that and what we found were failures. It's a mix of as we would try things and experiment along the way. I mean, you have to remember we can go back. Our first controller was a headset. we had to put something tracked in the space that we wanted to have you have agency in the world. And so we actually just took another headset and had that because you could track that. And then we would try tracking other objects and we tried moving on there. And so we've tried so much stuff through the years of what will work and not work in this space that these are kind of a good example of things that we found work really well. Like the longbow has been in for a really long time of example of, that was actually a, we joked the controller test is, pull back the bow and arrow, I know you can't see this on the radio, but what's tracking my hand that's behind my head? If I hold this other hand in front of my face, am I occluding my head? How do we get around that? How do we make sure our tracking works for that? You know, and so a lot of it's come just from that, and then, you know, we decide, like, this is fun. We did a lot of, kind of went back and did the game design experiments and trying to look for the fun and seeing what worked well.
[00:18:15.095] Kent Bye: So what do you want to experience in VR then? I want to experience in VR?
[00:18:18.456] Chet Faliszek: I want to cry. No, I'm starting to see the beginning of those experiences where, I guess even last year it was already there, where I was just losing myself in it. I remember last year before GDC, a stressful time, a lot of stuff going on, and I put on Dovetail's fishing game. And I found myself fishing for like an hour and a half. just mellow out casting reeling back in and like there's just so many things like that that I find myself kind of losing myself and it's very meditative that way and so I like to see those kind of things coming up there's even some more stuff coming out that it's along that way I mean same with like audio surf where I do that and so it's just getting to see those and getting to see where everyone's taking all of this so many of the developers are helping each other learning from each other looking to see what everyone else is doing and influencing them going out that like what we see this year it's hard to predict what we'll see next year because it's going to build on this year and so what people find works like right this minute we showed space pirate trainer all the devs asked for codes to share with it and start playing it and dirk's just been you know swamped with those requests because it's just like oh my god like you nailed this thing i saw screenshots of your game i wasn't excited about it but the minute i played it or minute i heard people talking about it like that was the game and so I keep being surprised by stuff coming down from developers. And so I just look forward more to that. Every time we give someone a kit, I always joke. And I'm like, make something cool. Just make something cool. I just want to see what you do. And so they are. And it's just getting to see all of that.
[00:19:53.772] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:20:00.517] Chet Faliszek: I don't think that would make it like there's one thing. And I think that's the one thing that isn't true of virtual reality. You know, it's kind of like, so we're looking at our launch and we're trying to look at the realm of kind of what's out there that'll be part of the launch. So one of the things is there's right now with steam page stores and like ready to go there's about 50 titles I'll have over 50 at launch and it's not like we think people are gonna start at number one and play through 50 different pieces of content But instead, it's such a variety because everybody attaches to something different, and they fall in love with something different, right? So when we would make the demo loop last year for GDC, when we had to make very small three-minute pieces all put together, you'd always have somebody who'd be like, oh my god, this is the best thing ever, the blue. Why are we showing anything else? Just show them the blue. You don't need to show them anything else. Oh my god, just show them JobSim. Everyone had their own thing that was special for them. And so when we look at the content coming out and we look at how people consume it, it's making sure that there's this wide variety because something hits somebody differently. And it ends up, for whatever reason in VR, it's very opinionated of like, this is my thing. I just want to play Elite Dangerous. This is all I'm going to play. from here on out, or I'm going to play this, or I'm going to keep playing Space Pirate Trainer, or those type of games. So since it's so personal that way, it's hard to say this is the ultimate use of it. We're seeing it equally outside of games, inside of experiences, inside of enterprise uses, where we're seeing it in designing of automobiles, or we're seeing it in other weird cases that never would have thought. We demo for everybody and they'll come and be like, this is going to be a waste of time. I don't know how you're going to possibly use VR. And then they come back out of it and they're like, here's my pitch. And you're like, oh my God, that's a great idea. And so, you know, I think that's one of the things of saying like, what's the one ultimate use of virtual reality is an impossible answer because I think it's so versatile. And it solves so many problems that the computer has always had, and that is it removes abstraction, and it puts you one-to-one in a world where you have precise controls. Once you have that, what can you do? And it ends up you can do a lot.
[00:22:14.156] Kent Bye: Great. Thank you so much, Chet, for joining me today. All right. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
