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#1489: “Gorilla Tag” Design Philosophy & Embodied Gameplay Deep Dive with Kerestell Smith

October 6, 2024by kentbye

I interviewed Kerestell Smith, Chief Creative Officer at Another Axiom and original solo creator of Gorilla Tag, at Meta Connect 2024. Another Axiom announced in June that Gorilla Tag has surpassed $100 million in lifetime revenue. We talk about the journey into creating Gorilla Tag, the underlying design philosophy of emphasizing embodied gameplay and proprioceptive consistency, as well as what’s coming next in their follow-on title of Orion Drift. See more context in the rough transcript below.

Since this is the last episode in my series from Meta Connect 2024, then here’s a list of all 20+ interviews and 12+ hours of my coverage from this year:

Here’s the launch trailer for Gorilla Tag:

Here’s a developer snapshot preview of their next title of Orion Drift:

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So this is my last episode of my series from MetaConnect 2024, and it's with the Chief Creative Officer at Another Axiom and the original solo creator of Gorilla Tag, Kira Stel-Smith. So Karistel is someone who thinks very, very, very deeply around all the different design decisions that they made with Gorilla Tag from the embodiment and not having any abstractions, no menu. There's a lot of design constraints that are creating the magic of what Gorilla Tag even is. So he's originally coming from the Echo Arena community. He's actually like a two time world champion for Echo Arena. And we talk about all the different design philosophies and inspirations that were fed into Guerrilla Tag, which they've announced that has over $100 million in revenue. And also kind of defending the honor of virtual reality in the context of like, you know, there's all these memes around VR is isolating, but yet some of the most popular games within virtual reality have people that are connecting in a social dimension. And we also talked a little bit around Orion Drift, not to be confused with the Orion AR glasses that were announced the very first official day of MediConnect. But Orion Drift is their next generation and in some ways the spiritual successor of Echo Arena. So it's kind of like a rocket league or like soccer in space type of mechanic, but also having these instances with 200 people within them, whereas right now it's only like 10 people within Gorilla Tag. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Kerastel happened on Tuesday, September 24, 2024, in Palo Alto, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:56.316] Kerestell Smith: Hi, my name is Kerastel Smith, sometimes known as Lemming. I'm the chief creative officer at Another Axiom, and we make Gorilla Tag. And I'm also the original solo creator of the game.

[00:02:06.123] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.

[00:02:10.953] Kerestell Smith: My background is kind of interesting. I was actually in college, I did mechanical engineering. But when I graduated, which was around 2012, that's when the government sequesters were happening. So it was actually a pretty tough time for mechanical engineers to get jobs because, you know, lots of contracts with the government and stuff. So I ended up getting a software development job at a company called Workday. They do like HR financial stuff. and I was a front end app developer. So I was actually into VR just as an enthusiast, like I was super into it since like 2014. I ended up spending a lot of time with it and when Echo Arena came out, which was, that was like 2017 or something I think, I ended up competing in that game, and the team I was a part of won the first two World Championships for Echo Arena, which was really awesome. So my journey was really mostly just as an enthusiast. And then around 2019, I started getting the sense that you know, it felt like the industry was not moving forward in the ways that I hoped it would. Like, I was seeing a lot of games being made kind of like trying out different things, but I was seeing a lot of games kind of like reinventing the wheel a lot, right? Like, people were trying things that other people had already tried and either worked or not, but it was kind of like, you know, it didn't feel like people were building off of each other as much so you know if i thought i was so smart and you know i knew all these things what was good what wasn't i should put my money where my mouth was so that's when i started trying to build something of my own and that's really where gorilla tag came out of it was something where i thought that i had played enough vr games experiences whatever to really develop a sense of what I thought was really critical to get right for the medium. And I tried to crystallize those things into the scale of something that I could actually get done myself. So I spent about a year building the game and released it early 2021, and it's kind of just grown into an out-of-control monster ever since then.

[00:04:13.562] Kent Bye: Let's go back to Echo Arena because I believe I was at one of those like World Championships were happening like during Oculus Connect and what was challenging around that as a game was that what you're experiencing from the first person being inside of the game versus how do they translate that to a spectator who's just watching it and trying to trace what was happening and it was really like hard to follow what was happening but were you part of some of those games that were there during the Oculus Connect?

[00:04:38.234] Kerestell Smith: I was, I actually distinctly remember, I think it was Oculus Connect 5 where they told us we had to quiet down or they would shut the games off because we were yelling too loud during one of Carmack's talks. So yeah, it was, you know, it's really like, what I thought was so cool about Echo Arena is that it was the kind of thing that could really only exist in VR. Like it was this zero gravity game, but it was such a sport like, you know, passing the disc back and forth, like creating different plays. We had different call outs for different spots in the arena, like in the 3D space. And one of the interesting wrinkles is that I played upside down exclusively and my teammates played right side up. So we couldn't even say, you know, pass it to the left side because for them it would be a totally different side than me and how that's kind of an experience that you can't have in any other medium really. And it was really cool. To have that experience of competing and spending so much time with something, that's really a big part of how Gorilla Tag came about. It really wouldn't have existed without Echo Arena. The amount of time I spent in that game and the things that I connected with and the reasons why I found it really interesting and exciting. The process of building Gorilla Tag was a lot of that reflection and saying, how come this sports game that I initially wasn't interested in at all, because it was a sports game, and I don't really play sports games. I've never even actually played Rocket League, which is kind of the comparison that a lot of people use, because it was like this sports game. But Echo Arena was zero gravity, and I was super interested to try that out in VR. But it was really amazing how the flow of that game and the experience of playing it there was this sense that you weren't suspending your disbelief because it felt the way you imagined it would feel to be in zero gravity. And that was kind of really a huge part of what I've developed my sense of what I think is important in VR is We need to be building these worlds as worlds, right? We don't want to constantly ask the player to say, yeah, we know it's a game, so bear with us. We have to bring up this menu. We have to bring up this laser pointer thing to interact with certain things. You have to go through this loading screen, et cetera. It's not something that I think is a process that you could think about hard enough and figure out. You really had to play and experience and try things out. And that's why I felt like very encouraged by what I was doing with Gorilla Tag is because I didn't have to imagine all these different aspects. I was able to tie the different experiences of playing different games and like, oh yeah, I played this game and that was really interesting about it. Or I played this game and I thought that this would work, but it turns out that it didn't. So I'll hold back on that. And I think that was a very important process for VR specifically because there isn't really this list of rules that already exist, right? Like if you're gonna make a flat screen game and you're gonna make a platformer, people already kind of have this playbook of how you create that kind of game. Here are the things that work, here are the things that aren't, here are the things that you can experiment with, here are the things that are already figured out. And I think people have tried to apply that playbook to VR without understanding the reasons why those different decisions are made. Like, one thing that I think is really interesting in Gorilla Tag is there's no main menu, right? There's no menu screen at all. And that's not because, you know, it just didn't happen or whatever. It was a very deliberate decision to say, The game starts as soon as you load it up, and I want there to be as little time as possible spent with this abstract wrapper that's telling you, oh, you're playing a video game, don't forget, what you're doing is not real. I wanted to drop them in as soon as possible. And that seems like a very small detail, but I think it was really important to... keep that as the focus right because that also meant that we're trying to have as few loading screens as possible have as few transitional elements as possible make as few compromises towards building this as a video game compared to building it as a world and you know you can never succeed completely there are always compromises that you have to make but if you keep that really as like a focus, and then you have to compromise when you have to. But if you keep that as your north star, as something that you really focus on, then I think that makes it a lot easier to follow through on, because then you're not going to just fall back on something that you might have used in a different circumstance. And it can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes, right? Man, sometimes it really would be convenient to have a menu screen. But ultimately, I really think that the quality of the experience you get is completely different if you really focus on it.

[00:09:34.522] Kent Bye: I think one of the unique things around what you've been able to do with Grill Attack is just the locomotion of how embodied it is. And it reminds me of the evolution of VR, the different platforms. When the Oculus Rift first came out, it launched with the Xbox controller. And then when Vive came out, they had a completely different approach with their wands, where they didn't really have a lot of the buttons. It was more of a trigger and more of things that you kind of swing around. But then once the touch controllers came out from Oculus, then that kind of in some ways became a bit of the industry standard to essentially port what was the Xbox controller onto these controllers. And I think, you know, there is a lot of abstractions that you can start to do this kind of like abstracted input, but it feels like you're in some ways going back to the days of what Valve kind of intuitively had with just the wands. There were buttons there for menus, but there wasn't the same type of buttons and abstractions you get with today's controllers. So it was like a real going back to the basics of trying to, in some ways, force people to use their body as the controller. And I feel like that is a key innovation that seems to really spread like wildfire across all these other apps and clones and everything else. Maybe you could take me back to this evolution of that core and body locomotion mechanic, because that seems to be a key part of the magic of what you've been able to create with Gorilla Tag.

[00:10:54.349] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, I think this is really a super interesting topic, and there are all sorts of aspects to this question I want to answer. So let me see if I can break up into all those pieces. One of the things that you touched on is the lack of abstractions, which is super interesting. Like, that's actually the reason why the gorillas in Gorilla Tag have three fingers. It's because you have the grip button, the index finger button, and the face buttons you press with your thumb. And I removed the pinky and the ring fingers because you don't have any direct control over those in the game. Those are the fingers that have to hold the controller in your hand. And the relationship I wanted the player to have with the controller is not, oh, what buttons do I press to make this gesture happen? It's if I curl my finger in real life, the player curls their finger in the game and you know there's all this hand tracking and all this other stuff that's come later that is interesting to think about that we haven't gotten to but fundamentally it's about trying to link what the ability you have in the world is to what the player can actually execute on and remove those abstractions so yeah there are fewer gestures that are possible to make but you don't need to think about oh how do i do you know, the horn symbol or how do I do, you know, hang ten or whatever. You have control over your three fingers and that's all you can do, but that makes it really simple. You don't have to think about how do I do a thumbs up? You know, what button combinations will make that happen? How do I pull in my pinky and my ring fingers as well as my index and middle? You just make the thumbs up and it happens. And that direct relationship makes it feel a lot more like you are in that world as opposed to interacting with the controller to command your avatar to do what you want it to do. And then when you talk about the movement and stuff, that's also like really key. The sense that I got from playing things like Echo Arena with the hand-based movement is that feeling of total freedom in the world. But freedom is not an absolute thing, right? Like, you can still move freely through the world if you have something like stick locomotion or teleport locomotion. But I don't think anybody would tell you that the feeling of moving through the world using those methods is the same as, say, the room scale, right? Where you walk from one end of the room to the other. There's a huge difference in the quality and the nature of those interactions. And one of the things that I really connected with with the hand-based movement is You know, this actually goes all the way back to motion controls on the Wii. Like, back then, I remember the hype around it being stuff like, oh man, you know, we're gonna have these lightsaber and sword fighting games, and it's gonna be like you're gonna be in the game. And then the first time you swing your arm, like it's a sword and in real life your arm moves and in the game the sword stops or gets hit on something, the illusion gets shattered instantly, right? All of a sudden it's like, oh, I'm just, it's just a waggled movement and my character swings the sword. And you get kind of a similar thing in VR. Like if you play anything where you go up to a table and there's something on the table, you want to pick it up, drop it down, works great. You reach through the table and your hand in real life goes through and your hand in game either also phases through or it does that weird thing where it kind of goes and it bounces around. But when you have the hand-based movement, where you put your hand through the table and you get pushed back. That completes the loop. It's no longer this sense of, oh, I'm just going to move my arms and something will happen in the environment. It's I push on the world and the world pushes back. There's such a powerful feeling of having a direct relationship with the space that you're in. It's the same way if you were going to walk across the room in real life. You push on the ground with your foot and you get propelled forward. You see a door, you grab the knob and you pull it and it follows your hand. But if you pull too hard, you're going to get pulled forward, right? And you're going to get knocked off balance. So that hand-based movement, what it does is it not only gives you this strong precision of the sixth degree of freedom tracked controller, but it gives you this direct relationship to the space that you're in. It places you in the world in a way no other locomotion system does. And now, not only do you have the freedom to move through that space, but you form a direct haptic relationship with that environment in the same way that you would in real life. And that, there's no other experience like it. And really in my mind, this is something that is so powerful and so unique to VR that I really believe that this is kind of like when people talk about how do we solve the locomotion problem in VR, right? Like people have talked about all sorts of different things like stick locomotion, teleport locomotion, room scale, you know, these treadmills, harnesses, all sorts of things. I think we have a solution and the solution is hand-based movement. And it's the kind of thing that feels a little weird because if I'm talking about walking on your hands, that's not how you do it in real life. But we also have to be kind of humble, right? We have to meet the technology where it exists and how we can actually use it. And we're just not going to be able to use our feet as control inputs the way we all kind of want it to work, right? Like, your feet have to ground you in real life. There's no way around that. But that doesn't mean that we have to walk in the game. just have a torso with no legs and walk on your hands. Like, come in, the water's fine, right? Like, when I talk about the way that I've engaged with VR and the kinds of things that I've played and the experiences that I've done, I've really tried to focus very hard on the feelings that I get from these different experiences. Because I think that VR, people imagine it to be this kind of intellectual experience, right? Virtual reality, you can do all these cool things, amazing things. But we have to pay very careful attention to the actual experience that we're having when we're doing these things, because that's the only thing that's really going to demonstrate what works and what doesn't. Like, I actually remember having a conversation with somebody where I argued very passionately that the climb, the original climbing game, would work better with a controller than with touch controllers, the hand-based movement. And my argument was, how is the game going to handle a situation where you reach for one handhold, and you reach for another one, and then you move your hands so they don't line up anymore? If you have just a regular controller, you can point at one and press a button, and point at the other one and press a button, and it'll tell you if you can reach both at the same time. It's just going to work better. And then you play the game for five seconds and you realize how dumb that is, right? Because the second you can grab something and pull yourself towards it, it's incredible, right? Like just that instant of feeling like you're in the world. And this is kind of how we have to apply building things for the rest of VR is paying very careful attention to how each individual really small thing feels. Like we're actually in Gorilla Tag, we're working on a new kind of like block construction feature We recently put out a preview for it, I think a month or two ago, and we're working towards a larger release. But while we were prototyping, you know, I was experimenting with putting these blocks together. And the first pass that we did was kind of like you line up the blocks and you connect the pin to the hole and you let go. And if it's close enough, you know, it snaps in and that works so you can put the pieces together and build it. But what I noticed is that if you had the piece slightly off and you let go, the piece would just drop and it wouldn't snap in. And then all of a sudden the feeling you have is no longer like excitement around building up these blocks. Now you kind of have like this fear that if it's misaligned and you let go, it won't work the way you want it to. And it almost becomes like... maybe this is a little bit of an extreme word, but it feels painful. It feels like you're being punished when it doesn't line up quite right. So you become scared of trying to put the pieces together because it's not going to feel right. So in order to kind of like iterate on that, we changed it to a system where When you have these two blocks and you line them up, you get that first little click, little tiny haptic vibration, just like with blocks in real life where you're lining them up. You know, you move the two pieces relative to each other and you get the pin and the hole to line up, but it's not snapped in yet, but you can feel that it's aligned. And then if you push in further, after you push in far enough, it clicks into place and the piece automatically clicks in and gets dropped out of your hand. So now you no longer have that feeling of misalignment, let go, piece dropping, not getting the success. You get that feeling of lining it up and then confirmation when you click it in. And now it just feels incredible and natural and you... Sometimes you click it into the wrong spot, just like how sometimes in real life if you click blocks together, you know, if you're not paying attention you might miss a block. But you never get that feeling of pain, that feeling of something went wrong or didn't end up how you expected it to be. And that transforms the experience from something that is very like intellectualized. Hey, I want to build these blocks together and I just have to make it work to something that just feels good to do the process of because we've removed the part that doesn't work the way you would expect it to. So that's kind of an in-depth example, but that moment to moment, that really like small scale feeling you get in your hands, in your body, in the whole experience, that is really critical to building things in VR compared to any other medium. because of how much of an investment you're asking the person to put in to try your experience, right? They have to put this headset on. They have to step into this entire other world. You're giving them a list of rules that they have to follow. And when you don't live up to that, It feels wrong. It feels gunky. It feels like the world is rejecting you. And those negative feelings are very powerful. And focusing on the positive feelings and removing those, not the possibility of feeling bad, right? Because you need people to feel the successes and the failures so that they're driven towards the successes. But paying attention to the parts that can be fixed, that can be improved, that can be iterated on, because that moment-to-moment is the entire thing for VR. The player never has this time where, you know, they alt-tab to a different screen and they, you know, look at something on Twitter while they're dead in the Counter-Strike round or something, right, and waiting for the next thing to start. They're always in it. They're always there. And at any time, they could take the headset off.

[00:21:37.438] Kent Bye: yeah I don't know where I started with this it was a deep dive into the embodiment and avoiding all abstractions it feels like you know to me it reminds me of like Mel Slater where he talks around like the plausibility illusion where presence can be like a house of cards where if you do something that breaks that sense of presence then you basically have a break in presence and it can be like a house of cards that collapses. It's kind of like when you're watching a movie and there's something that's implausible. Your suspension of disbelief is taken away. So I think there's a lot of consideration that you've taken in order to really build up all these subtle embodiment and not having those different breaks of presence or anything that's mismatching. And so trying to have a correspondence between everything that's happening both in the game but also the embodied experience so there's no proprioceptive disconnect between your body as it's moving around. It sounds like that you've certainly stumbled onto something here that is wildly successful. And I want to go back to the very early beginnings of Grill Attack, because I know that with Meta, they had a very distinct idea of what they wanted to have for what they thought was going to be successful in VR. And I think it was a certain amount of graphic fidelity, a certain user interaction. you know, then there was side quest and then app lab that came along. So it seems like gorilla tag is really like this story of being able to find these alternative modes of distribution that were allowing you to at least prove out some of these different ideas, all this deep thought around embodiment and locomotion that you were talking about. But yeah, to do it in a way that wasn't having the people who were curating and greenlighting different projects allowing you to exist or not. And so maybe you could take me back to the very early beginnings of where Gorilla Tag really began and having some of those very early successes of the different platforms of SideQuest or App Lab.

[00:23:24.284] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, it actually started in a Discord server that I made back when I was originally setting out to build the game. You know, funnily enough, it started as a gesture-based spellcasting game. That was the first idea I had for like, you know, what if instead of, you know, having some kind of input to cast a spell, there was some underlying system that the players had to figure out and engage with, and there were some rules about the world, and... it's very cool ideas that I wasn't able to execute on. So I was like, okay, you know, let me take a break from this, but I know I at least want some kind of movement system. And that's where the locomotion came in. It was thinking about echo arena and that hand-based movement. But one of the issues with that is this kind of like, you know, you had to grab the surface and throw yourself off and let go. So I was like, well, I don't want to constantly have to press this grab button and release it. And there are these little hitches that happen when you constantly grab and release. So I tried doing this walking thing. And that worked really well. And I was super excited about that. But I didn't have a gameplay loop around it. So I was like, OK, maybe it's some kind of like, you know, maybe a getting over it type thing where you're trying to climb something and the movement is very precise. But if you fall, you know, but that wasn't super exciting. So I kind of sat on the idea for a little bit. But then one day I was like, what if it was tag? And that's kind of where everything took off. I dropped in some of the photon networking and I got it set up. And the moment that you see someone running at you, and the only feeling you have is, I have to get away. It was incredible how much of a real, true experience that was, how much it really felt like playing tag on the playground. And that was the point where I knew there was something to the idea. So I shared the game in that state on Discord from the communities that I was a part of with Echo Arena, and there was this community of people who were trying out my game, and I was throwing out new builds every so often, and I was trying to flesh out certain gameplay things and refine the movement. I was trying out different things with like different maps and different tunings. I actually rewrote the entire movement system at one point. But it was just really cool to have this community of people who are interested in what was being built. And that is where I knew that there was something valuable about what I was making. It wasn't something where I was like, oh, you know, this is going to be some kind of runaway success or whatever. But it was something that I knew there was going to be a community of people who were going to want to play. So that's where I really determined like, okay, I'm going to see this thing through. I'm going to make the smallest version of this that I can so that I can actually get something out there. And so from the beginning of working on this to when it was first released was a little bit over a year. And it was in February 2021, I think, when I initially put it out on Steam and SideQuest. That was a little bit before App Lab was out. And it was really just word of mouth. Like there was nothing where it was like, you know, I was putting out advertising. I was trying to get people. And honestly, at the beginning, I didn't have any monetization in the game either. So there was no real possibility of being successful from that perspective. But it was just really cool to see the game take off from there. And then soon afterwards, I got it onto App Lab, which was really cool, because SideQuest was, you know, every time you wanted it to update, people had to go through and do all that stuff, which was kind of a pain. And so having it on App Lab was huge for the game early on, just to allow people to install it and get updates. Because I was trying to update as often as I could. I was still working at Workday at this point, so, you know, had my full-time job, and then I was working on this game in my spare time. And it really just kept growing. And it was all word of mouth, which I think was phenomenally cool, because it meant that there was something about it that people just wanted to pull other people into, right? Like, it was this community of people who are just really excited about what was being made and wanted to share it with other people and spread it from there. So to your point about like kind of the sense of what was going to be successful, like I really think VR is such a unique medium that people's ideas about what would work with it, like it's all informed by things like, you know, science fiction and Snow Crash and Ready Player One and the metaverse and all of these like... these very high-minded things, right? And it was so compelling to people because there's something about that that is very evocative, right? Like it's speaking to something. But I think that what a lot of people didn't quite connect with is how does that actually translate to how people want to use it in real life, right? And I think Gorilla Tag has really shown that that is not happening in the way that people expected it to. The things that people thought were the most important things aren't necessarily, right? Like it's not exactly about starting at this higher level of having this giant metaverse with all of these different worlds and cross interoperability and, you know, cross server things and all these things. It starts at a very small level. where what's important is the feeling like you are in an environment you have a direct relationship with. The hand-based movement allows you to directly interact and be interacted upon by this environment, building that world as a plausible alternate reality, a place that could exist. The rules are different, but there still are rules. And it feels like you are in an actual place. And then the social togetherness, where it feels like you are in this place with other people. That's really the core of it. The feeling is not, I'm in this crazy, out of this world experience that could never happen in real life. It is simply the experience of feeling like you're somewhere with other people. And everything gets built on top of that. And I think that as long as you're able to achieve those three things, that is kind of what creates the really strong foundation for the medium. Those are the things that allow you to create an experience that really hits the heights of VR. And then from there, then i think you can kind of build anything right and that's what i think is really exciting about gorilla tag it's not where things are now but it's like developing the understanding of what people are connecting with and how do we flesh those things out like there are so many compromises in the design of gorilla tag that had to be made just to kind of like be able to release it, right? Like, I don't feel bad about any of the compromises we made, but I know that they were compromises. Things like a limit of 10 people in a room. Things like if you cross these server thresholds, people disappear because they have to join these other servers because of those limits. You know, we can only have so many people because after a certain amount, the performance drops horribly, right? Those were necessary trade-offs to get the game released. But those are the things that can be improved and fleshed out. One of the things that we're working on for our next game, Orion Drift, is it's going to be a game set in outer space where the players are robots. You're on these really cool cylindrical stations where there's gravity on the outside and zero gravity on the inside. So we're doing a lot of cool stuff with it. But at its core, the swings that we're taking are... figuring out what works and what didn't about Gorilla Tag, focusing on continuing the strengths, but then also fixing the weaknesses. The biggest thing that we're trying to do is create these stations with 200 players concurrently, all at the same time. And the reason for that is because now we don't have to worry about those barriers between the areas, right? You don't have to worry if you leave this area with 10 other people that they're going to disappear. You take your group of players and you look at something off in the distance and you can all go together. You can see a game that other people are playing and just hop in and spectate. You can talk to people who are around you and decide to go off and play somewhere. And all of those barriers around needing to think about you know, these higher level abstractions to the game, right? Like, am I on the right server? Are these people on my friends lists? Like, do we have to quit out and load into a different map? All of those considerations go away and you just focus on the experience of being in this place with other people. Like we're at MetaConnect right now and a lot of these things that I'm thinking about kind of like mirror the experience of being at a conference. You're walking through the streets and you see someone that you recognize. You go to a talk and you sit in a room with a bunch of people and the talk happens and then afterwards you look over to your neighbor and you talk about what was interesting. Everybody starts shuffling out and you meet someone that you didn't recognize before. You're walking down the street and you see something cool that you want to check out and there's already a line of people there, so you just start up a conversation. All of those natural human experiences of communicating, interacting, forming relationships, those are experiences you could only have in real life. But with VR, we can create experiences that get you almost there. It's never going to replace in-person interaction, but it's the technology that can get you the closest to feeling like you are actually present with other people. To me, that's what's so exciting about VR and how I really feel like, you know, there's a lot of discussion about the state of the industry, where it's going, is it waxing, is it waning? The value I see in the technology is why I don't see any world where VR doesn't succeed. Because as a technology, it does something that no other technology does. It can make you feel like you are in a place with another person. And it's the only technology that can do that. That is such a powerful experience. And that's why I'm so passionate about VR. That's something that I would never have expected. Like, when I thought about VR, when I first got into it in 2014, for me it was, I want to be in these other worlds. I've always been an introvert, so when I play any of these competitive games, like Counter-Strike or Overwatch, I press ranked mode, and I never talk to anybody, and when the round's over, I quit and start a new one. When I first started playing Echo Arena, I had the exact same mindset. I'm going to grind ranked, I'm going to be the best, I'm going to get really good at the game, and that's where my participation was going to end. But the way that Echo Arena worked is in between rounds, you're just in the social lobby, and you're waiting for your next round to start, and you've got nothing to do but hang out with and talk to the other people around you. And through that experience, it induced me to interact with people in a way I otherwise wouldn't have. I formed friends, I created relationships, I started participating, I joined a team, and we became world champions. And I would never ever have done that in any other medium so I feel like if this is something that can take somebody who would otherwise not want to engage with other people not want to put themselves out there and create an environment that gives them this social nourishment that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten Like when I talk about paying careful attention to the medium and what you get out of these different things, I'm talking about myself, right? I'm looking at my life. I'm looking at my relationship with these things and trying to understand the impact it's had on me. And that's really what I see for the future. Like the ability to connect people across space, the ability to form communities and relationships that are unbounded by the limitations that we have on the real world. Those are the things that I think if as developers we focus on, like that's how we're going to move the industry forward. And I couldn't tell you what the timeline for that is going to be, but I do think it's inevitable.

[00:35:26.075] Kent Bye: I want to dig into more of the social aspects here in a bit, but I want to go back to the journey from SideQuest to then App Lab, and then eventually getting onto the store. My impression was that there was kind of like a relegation of projects that were on the App Lab that you kind of had to like, hit a number of different metrics in order to get promoted into being into the the main quest store so what was that journey like for you and what did you have to like have monetization did you have to like prove that you know because you can have thousands or tens of thousands hundreds of thousands how many ever people that you were having but what was that journey like to go from side quest to that app lab and then eventually like it felt like You were in the App Lab for a long, long time, and it was almost like Meta wanted to pretend it didn't exist, or it was like it was having wild success in a way that was not necessarily being rewarded by getting promoted to the main store. At least that was my perception from the outside. But I'd love to hear a little bit from your own perspective of that journey of finally getting into the App Store, and what was it that finally convinced Meta to allow you to get onto that App Store?

[00:36:28.721] Kerestell Smith: know meta might be getting a little bit of bad rap i didn't want to be on the main store i was struggling enough with what was going on with app lab like to be in an environment where you had this kind of like absurdly popular successful game never intentionally create a live service game by yourself by the way it's it was rough You know, it took me a long time to feel secure enough in the team I had behind me in order to want to be on the main store in the first place. So that was, to me, really the biggest thing is that I needed to make sure my house was in order. So for a long time, I was perfectly happy to be on App Lab. Like, the game was already growing beyond the point where I could really handle it on my own. And it took me a while to get a team behind me that I could trust, that I had confidence in, and that I felt like we could be moving forward with. And then once that was in place, we had a path towards getting onto the main store. Like, to me, it was less about treating the store as, like, the destination where if you're on the store, you've made it, and more just about, like... the power of people sharing stuff with each other and the word of mouth and everything that was still available on app lab like i didn't feel like we had any limitations on the success we were able to achieve just by being on app lab being on the main store you know did expand our opportunities you know we got more visibility all these things it was certainly a big deal for us to be there But yeah, it was really a walk before you can run kind of experience for me. So I'm honestly really grateful for App Lab in the first place. Being on SideQuest was obviously really important at the very beginning, right? To start putting ourselves out there. Then soon afterwards, App Lab became available. Actually, the biggest turning point was for App Lab is that initially there weren't any in-app purchases allowed for things on App Lab. And that was actually the biggest sticking point because server costs started to go up and up and up and I wasn't able to sell anything on the most popular platform. So eventually, you know, once that was available, that was a big deal. So that was when kind of it transitioned from being something where I was like, boy, I hope the sales on Steam are able to cover the server costs from the Quest players to something that became a sustainable business. But yeah, I think it's been an interesting process because I think that Meta hasn't fully figured out what the industry is going to be like for VR as a platform, right? What stores work, what don't. I know that they're struggling right now with the process of removing App Lab and moving everything to the main store. That hasn't been a totally smooth process. My impression of things is that it's less of a intentionally making certain decisions and more of a growing pains scenario. Maybe that's only speaking from my own personal experience. But yeah, it feels like it's been a lot of growing pains. I'll put it like that. But I'm still happier than the alternative of not having had access to App Lab in the first place. To me, it was enough to be able to be successful. It wasn't all the tools that anybody would hope that they had access to, but it was certainly enough. Gorilla Tag wouldn't have been able to expand as fast as it did without App Lab. So yeah, I mean, I can't say the experience was perfect, but it was certainly sufficient to succeed with.

[00:39:53.496] Kent Bye: OK. Well, that's good to hear that it's kind of organically growing and almost supercharged growth in a lot of ways. I know that you've put out a number of different press releases just to kind of explain the different types of successes. What can you say in terms of either how many people are users or daily, monthly users or any other kind of metrics that you use in terms of revenue or anything else that you can share in terms of just to help me understand a little bit of the scope and scale of what we're dealing with with what's happening with Guerrilla Tag?

[00:40:21.843] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, so the numbers that we've announced are that we've totaled lifetime $100 million plus in revenue. We've peaked at hitting over 1 million daily active users at one point and over 3 million monthly active users. And we shared these numbers because there have always been questions around like, how healthy is the industry? What does success look like? What is the addressable market? And it's always been bigger every single year. And the numbers are big enough that people can find success. And these aren't just numbers that are, like, good for VR. These are just good for any game, right? And I think that it was kind of after the Quest 2 was released was, from my perspective, the inflection point where it went from something that was a little bit more speculative, right? Like, back in the Rift days, it was really a, you know, hey, maybe if things work out, this can be a viable business. to once the quest 2 has been out it's like yeah the market is there there are people playing another number is that at one point our average daily session length was over an hour so these aren't just things where people were just checking things out and seeing how things were and then hopping back off this is like serious sustained play time that people are coming back to day after day And because things are just always growing year over year, like we shouldn't be talking about these things anymore in terms of like, you know, what is the industry going to be like in five or ten years? It's like, let's talk about what the industry is like right now. You can create a business now. You can have success now. We're past the stage of thinking about, OK, well, what if the headsets are lighter? What if the processing is better? What if there are more pixels? we've already got a baseline that works, that the market has responded to, and it is only going to get better from here, right? Like the cost is going to go down, the features are going to go up, but we don't need to wait for that future anymore. It's really now about delivering the software that the consumers are hungry for because people do respond to games that build what they want. There's a huge range of different types of successful titles. If you go to the Quest store and look at the most popular, there's a pretty wide range of different types of experiences. And especially recently, we've seen a few new things pop up there and rocket up really fast. This is a really great time to experiment with things figuring out what people are going to respond to and once you've found success doubling down on it i really think we're past this point of needing to say we're just got to try everything because we don't know what will work there's enough information up there about what people are interested in that you can start making some really informed decisions about what you want to build and what you think that people will respond to based on the data that's out there

[00:43:14.292] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just got back from Snap where they were announcing this Spectacles and that they had a lot of like skewering of virtual reality and they were saying it's an isolating medium. And I just had to like kind of chuckle to myself, just like the numbers that I was looking at was the peak concurrency for VRChat, the top that they have at least is like 109,400. And that's like well over half, according to Tupper, that are in VR. So anywhere from 50 to 60,000 at the same time in VR. But with Gorilla Tag having like, a million daily active users or three million monthly active users, do you have any peak concurrency numbers that you can share? Because I think there's still a meme out there that VR as a medium is isolating, and it just feels like people don't know what's happening with both the social VR apps or even just apps like Guerrilla Tag, just to get a sense of the scope and scale of how people are actually connecting to each other in a social context.

[00:44:05.580] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, the peak that we hit was about 99,000, and then our servers violently exploded. And I think we would have hit 100K, but we didn't quite. That was our peak all time. But yeah, to that point about the isolating experience, I really think that is... kind of an outdated criticism. Like I think that is something that probably applied a little bit more at the beginning of VR, right? Where we were seeing more things like, you know, people started off by building single player experiences because those are the things that you can have the most direct control over. There wasn't this wide market of people. So like you couldn't count on a multiplayer game having a healthy population. So the initial focus was on those single player experiences. But now we're really seeing that those social experiences are the things that people are connecting with. And that's kind of in direct contrast to the popular opinion people have about things. And I think, interestingly, that's why we're seeing a lot of younger players in VR. And it's not because VR is only for younger people, but younger people have fewer hang-ups about these things. They have fewer preconceived notions of what they think VR should be or could be. And they're totally happy to hang out and visit their friends in VR because it feels completely natural to them. And I really think that the social experience of VR is its most powerful aspect, right? Like I think that the way a lot of people think about VR and the downsides are like a lot of the common criticisms are things like, you know, it's bulky, it's uncomfortable. You have to make sure it's charged. You have to make sure there's enough space. And a lot of the comparisons they use is to playing a game on your console, sitting on your couch in your living room. And I think the misunderstanding there is that to me, the comparison is actually to coordinating with your friends to meet up at somebody's house or to go to a bar or to go to an event somewhere, right? You have to figure out like, okay, we have to match everybody's schedules. We have to figure out transportation. Like if you've got kids, you've got to figure out babysitting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. compared to putting on the headset and then feeling like you're in the same room as your friends. That is the comparison. It's a supplement to your experience with meeting and interacting with people in real life. Like we've got huge number of players who get a lot of their social experiences from playing VR, right? Like after school, you know, you see your friends at school, then you get home and you put on your headset and you play Gorilla Tag with your friends. that is a socially connecting experience, not an isolating one. And that is something that I think is going to be generational, not because VR appeals to kids, but because kids are more open to it. Like, I think the people who are playing VR as like, you know, 13, 14, 15 year olds, they're gonna still be playing VR in 20 or 30 years. The same way when we were kids, you know, a lot of our parents might not have fully understood why we were spending so much time with these video games, right? And we were just like, ah, you just don't understand. And we're actually seeing a lot of those similar things right now, right? Where the older generation, who would have a fantastic time playing VR if they were open to it, aren't quite understanding what the next generation really gets about it. So this is kind of another reason why I think that VR in general is going to be successful is because the next generation gets it and they're going to be playing VR all their lives. So we're kind of at the point where we're going to see the lowest adoption and it's really only going to go up from here.

[00:47:44.983] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear some of your comments on the types of emergent social dynamics that you've seen within Gorilla Tag. And how do you deal with moderation and making sure that there's not toxicity that's being propagated throughout these social VR contexts?

[00:47:59.079] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, it's super interesting because there are so many things about Gorilla Tag that were very intentional, but there are also a lot of things that were totally emergent. Like one thing that we see a lot is when you start Gorilla Tag, you start kind of in this empty cave and there's a little bit of signposting that can indicate where you're supposed to go. So you kind of start crawling, you figure out you can move, you start jumping a little bit. And when you get out of this cave, you go to the top of this cliff. And when you reach the top of the cliff, you're automatically put in a multiplayer room. And you look down and you see people playing tag underneath you. But they can also look up. And there is this cohort of people who just love waiting to see a new player appear. And then when they see that new player, they say, hey, come down and I'll show you how to play. So they'll show them, here's how you walk. Here's how you jump. Here's how you pinch climb. Here's how you run. Here's the computer. Here are the things that you can do here. Like that experience of like showing the game to other people, sharing in the experience of seeing somebody do something new for the first time. And because everything's placed in the world, you don't have to tell people something like, oh, you know, if you press the menu button and then go to this option, like you can do this thing. You take them, hey, here's the computer. OK, press this button. OK, now on this screen, press this. And this is how you change your gorilla's color. Or here's how you enter your name. There's this really cool process that people do of just social learning and education, all that stuff, which is really cool. Another thing is that at no point in the game do we ever explain how it works. So there's no rules list that says, hey, if you're playing infection mode, you tag people and da, da, da. It's something that people figure out with themselves or communicate to each other. And because it's so casual, you see this interesting dynamic where some rooms people are just kind of chilling out and talking to each other. And a game of infection is happening, but nobody's chasing each other. And then all of a sudden one person tags another and then everybody scatters and starts running and playing. So there's this natural ebb and flow in the room of like really high intensity gameplay to people chilling out and just talking to each other. And that also leads to people doing things like creating their own mini games and saying, okay, everybody stop what you're doing. We're going to play sharks and minnows. So if you're infected, you know, you start in the middle and everybody who's, who's a survivor lines up at this end of the room and then we're all going to run across from each other. So it's this really cool, like, Yeah, it's this really strange thing where the less rules you enforce on people through the mechanics of the game, the more freedom they have to play and experience however they want, and people really take to that freedom. So it becomes more of a framework that people have in order to play however they want or find the most interesting, as opposed to, oh, you know, the round is over, time to start a new one, that kind of thing. And this kind of also leads into like these social norms and like when you talk about moderation and stuff, there are these aspects of like how do people like socially agree to exist in these different environments? And how do people want to engage with each other in the most productive way? Like when we talk about toxicity and stuff, a lot of the time, Toxicity isn't exactly the right word because often it's just about making sure that there's less friction between the players, right? So like if you're in a room where you want to try really hard and like play as hard as possible, the people who just kind of want to play a little bit more chill and hang out and talk to each other, there's going to be some natural friction there, right? Because people want to engage in different ways. That's not necessarily toxic. It can lead to toxicity. But just because people want to play in different ways doesn't mean that it's inherently toxic. So that's something that we've tried to address in a few different ways. It's always an ongoing process, right? Especially when you're dealing with this new medium, you're trying to figure out new ways to engage with these different things. One thing we actually do is with our reporting system is that it's something that's actually more public than it is in most games. We've got a scoreboard and if somebody goes up to it, you can see that they're reporting somebody for something. So it creates this culture where it's not just that, oh, you know, if someone's being toxic, you report them. But people can see that other people are reporting somebody. So it encourages them to say, hey, maybe I should participate in the system too. Maybe I'll also report them. And it also leads to people seeing like, hey, that person's about to report me. Maybe I should like cool my jets a little bit, right? So no system is perfect. And we're always working on different ways to improve things. But I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work that we've done to create an environment that allows for people to engage in different ways and allows for these different ways of engaging in the game in a way we didn't expect. And that kind of like that experience of people showing the game to each other and exploring it and teaching each other is actually like a really interesting aspect. Like one thing we found is at one point we experimented more with kind of like talking about what the next patch will be. Like in a lot of games, I think that's a very traditional thing you do, right? You talk about what's gonna be in the next update, you talk about it in depth, you get people hyped for it, et cetera. What we found is that if we did that too much, people get annoyed because they feel like the game was spoiled. But they're not actually talking about just for them, because what we see when we put out a new update is a lot of people will jump in and check out all the new things. But then what they'll also do is they'll wait for people to come in and say, hey, have you seen this thing? Let me show it to you. And now they get to experience it again through this kind of like new set of eyes that they can show the game off to. So there's also this component of like sharing the experience with other people as well. And that's really not something that we would have emphasized as much if we didn't see how people were reacting to it. So it's always this ongoing process of trying to be humble about what we think people find interesting, or what we assume we already know about the game, because the players are going to surprise you about how they're actually engaging and reacting to these things. That's also kind of why we always think it's better to push out things sooner rather than later because it's so difficult to know how people are going to react to these things until it's in front of them. And being able to be responsive to that feedback is really important for us so that we can stay quick and make sure that we're not getting too set in our ways.

[00:54:27.079] Kent Bye: Great. Just got a couple more questions to wrap up here. I did want to ask one question around that I was talking with Jasmine from Impact Reality, VR with Jasmine. It's her YouTube channel. And she was saying that there's some really interesting collaborations that you're doing. And so there's this kind of like way that you're able to leverage the success that you've seen with Gorilla Tag and start to really help lift up other either experiences or other things that's happening in the broader ecosystem of VR. So yeah, I'd love to hear if you could say a few words on some of the different collaborations that you're working on.

[00:54:54.147] Kerestell Smith: Yeah, you know, this is also something that's kind of like some new territory for us. Like, we've done a few things with Hidden Path, with Witch Blood and Raccoon Lagoon. You know, I... It's such an interesting industry because there are so many things and influences and all kind of stuff that come around. Like Raccoon Lagoon is the direct inspiration for why the gorillas have no legs, by the way, right? Like it was so cool playing Raccoon Lagoon and having the experience of like, wow, they're doing something really interesting. Their characters are right next to the ground. Why are they doing that? How is that going to work? and then that's kind of raccoon lagoon is this kind of like animal crossingy like there are these little creatures that you have to gather resources for and it's really cute you should check it out if you haven't but at its core you know if you're chopping down a tree and you're cutting it into logs and you've got to pick up the logs If you have to bend over to reach the floor in real life, it's real big pain, and you have to crouch down over and over, and nobody really wants to do that. So a lot of games have kind of addressed that problem in different ways, like Half- Alyx is a great example of something where they have those remote control gloves that you can pick up things from the environment, all that kind of stuff. But in Raccoon Lagoon, all they do is put your torso next to the ground. And now the flow is not worrying about how do you interact with this system where you don't have legs, but you have to crouch. You're at the ground already, so you just pick it up. And I remember playing that for the first time, and I was worried that it would feel weird. But it felt completely natural. And it was this really cool thing where it's like, we were able to move so much faster with gorilla tag by paying attention to what other people had done and worked on and built and i really see the industry as being this cross collaboration between everybody that's building stuff so you know the collaboration between us and hidden path it's really something where we're trying to how do we all move forward together and we're trying to build up our ability to create these kinds of things with the resources that we have available to us and this cross collaboration was actually like really great they were able to build some systems for us to allow for that kind of like redemption of these different cosmetics and items in the game and stuff which we're planning on using for the future so yeah i think it's this really great thing where we can lift them up and they can lift us up and We're extremely grateful to them for the work that they've done in the industry that we've built off of. It's really cool to be able to work with people that you've really looked up to. I had a super fun time playing a lot of their games and stuff. Brass Tactics was another one. I remember I was playing a bunch with Dave Neubeld, our CTO. And that was, you know, kind of this RTS game and I was showing off this rush that I was doing in one of the maps and I was claiming that it was unbeatable and I played against him a few times and it seemed like it was. And then he was able to talk to the Hidden Path guys and he patched the map because that strategy was actually too strong on that map. And that was just me as a player. So yeah, it feels like it's coming full circle a little bit, which is really cool.

[00:58:06.656] Kent Bye: Nice. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?

[00:58:15.058] Kerestell Smith: This is a big question. You know, I think we're at the point where it's still, to me, it's uncertain where things are going to end up. Like, I've always said I'm not a very imaginative person. Like, I can't picture something that I feel like I haven't seen myself. You know, with Gorilla Tag, I didn't sit in a room and hold my fingers to my temples and think really hard about, oh, this is going to be the best game ever, right? It was a, hey, this was something from this game I really liked. This was something from that game I really liked. And in terms of the future of VR, I don't know how things will end up. But what I do know is that I see where things are now, and I see how the things that exist today that could be pushed forward. Like with Orion Drift, we are pushing forward the things in Gorilla Tag that aren't quite working. But there are going to be things about that game that don't work too, right? what are the hurdles around having a space with 200 people in it is 200 people too much is it too little right like what are the communities that are going to be enabled by this kind of thing what are the hardships those communities are going to face what are the aspects that are important to have ownership of in those communities what are the things that we need to build to enable the kinds of experiences that they want to have What I'm really excited about is that I see the work that needs to get done. Like, I don't feel like we're lost in the wilderness waiting for something to happen. I feel like we're at a point right now where we can see what people are responding to, see what's important to people, see what is valuable to people, and see the things that we're doing that meet those needs and the things that don't. And I'm really excited because we've got so much stuff to build that will make those experiences better. What we're doing with Orion Drift is going to push things forward in the manner we think is going to be valuable to people. What's the next project going to look like? We've already got some ideas for the kinds of things that we're not going to be able to do in Orion Drift, right? Like, what are the things that people are going to want to build these communities from the ground up instead of a station that we build for them? It's really cool to see the near term and how we're going to be pushing things forward and what things are interesting and what things are compelling. So to me, the future is going to be building off of the successes of today, seeing the kinds of communities, seeing the kinds of experiences that are very powerful right now, and seeing how those things can be fleshed out and made even better. So to me, the future of VR is if I had to put my prognosticator hat on, I'm guessing it is going to be these more large scale worlds. It's going to be something where it's not one metaverse that encompasses everything everybody could want to do, but it's going to be these individual spaces, these individual worlds that are built Maybe some is space and zero-g, maybe some is fantasy and, you know, maybe some is high fantasy, maybe some is like hard sci-fi, you know. I think it's going to be about creating worlds, alternate realities, plausible alternate realities, large-scale spaces with large communities of people and different people are going to find those different spaces that really speak to them. And I don't think it's going to be one metaverse, but I think the concept of a metaverse is going to be all these different worlds for different people at different times. And I think right now we're starting to see the kinds of worlds that are just going to get bigger and going to be built out more and more. And I think it's really exciting. And I'm really hoping that we get to a point where I don't have to make video games anymore and I can just spend all my time playing them. I really can't wait until I can go back to just being an enthusiast again, right? Like, it was a whole lot less work. It was a lot more fun.

[01:02:17.018] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else that's left unsaid or any final thoughts you'd like to share to the broader immersive community?

[01:02:24.548] Kerestell Smith: I think VR is the coolest technology in the world. And after having been a part of the industry now for a little while, I'm convinced that the social value that it gives people, the human connections that you can form, the relationships and the feeling of togetherness that it gives you, that no other technology can. I think it's the most exciting technology that's been released in I don't know how long. And I think that the kinds of experiences it can enable are going to be so powerful that the success of VR is, in my mind, inevitable and i'm just really excited to be a part of the industry at a point where i feel like we can accelerate things and i'm really excited not only by what we're building but by the possibilities of what i see other people building as well you know it's this really cool community where there's so much to learn from there's so much out there that people have tried out experimented with like put out there and the learnings that are available it can accelerate what we're building so much so i'm really hoping that people keep building people keep learning from each other and yeah i just can't wait to keep seeing what people are building

[01:03:48.740] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Kirstel, thank you so much for joining me here today on the podcast. It's very clear that you're a very deep thinker about how you're designing and creating all these different things. And as I was talking to some folks, sometimes it's difficult to predict what is going to hit these inflection points and be the killer app for some people that is going to want to get them to come into a VR headset or to keep them coming back. But it sounds like you've been able to find a lot of those core affordances and experiences from your own experiences, starting with Echo Arena. a real close attention to the proprioceptive resonance and and having everything aligned with what's happening in the world of what people are experiencing so yeah very close consideration but also you've been able to capture all these different magical components of the medium to create something that really has legs and uh yeah just really exciting to to hear a little bit more about your own journey and story and just all the different ways that you're thinking about the medium so yeah very deeply insightful and very much looking forward to where you take it all in the future so thanks again for joining me here on the podcast so

[01:04:48.554] Kerestell Smith: Thanks so much for talking with me. I just love talking about this stuff. At the end of the day, I still really just consider myself an enthusiast, and I'm just so excited about things, and I always love talking about it. So thanks for the time.

[01:05:01.206] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the voices of VR podcast. And I would like to invite you to join me on my Patreon. I've been doing the voices of VR for over 10 years, and it's always been a little bit more of like a weird art project. I think of myself as like a knowledge artist. So I'm much more of an artist than a business person. But at the end of the day, I need to make this more of a sustainable venture. Just five or $10 a month would make a really big difference. I'm trying to reach $2,000 a month or $3,000 a month right now. I'm at $1,000 a month, which means that's my primary income. And I just need to get it to a sustainable level just to even continue this oral history art project that I've been doing for the last decade. And if you find value in it, then please do consider joining me on the Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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#1489: “Gorilla Tag” Design Philosophy & Embodied Gameplay Deep Dive with Kerestell Smith