Game design is about tapping into human needs. We didn’t always explicitly acknowledge (or necessarily realize) this, but games work because they reflect and amplify our natural human tendencies. As we’ve learned more about what motivates people, we’ve continued to refine our craft and we’ve gotten better and better at making games. One need only look past survivorship bias at the games that haven’t survived the test of time to see how far we’ve come.
Unlike the last 40 years spent crafting experiences around drawing players into their screens, in virtual reality (VR) we literally, in many senses, drop the player into the middle of our games and ask their brains to trust us. When done well, the result is presence, the artificial supplanting of “for-realsies” reality with the one we have artfully constructed for our players. In other words, they think they are now there and not here.
I was excited to give my first GDC talk this past month at the 2015 Independent Games Summit (IGS). I’ll admit to being a little nervous–not so much about speaking, per se, but about speaking at GDC and that I take a non-standard approach to game development. As one friend so helpfully pointed out, “You’ll be fine! It’s only your reputation on the line!”. Yet despite my trepidation the talk went great, and I was delighted to hear that it ranked among the top 10% across all the GDC Summits, and was in the top four of the IGS. Hooray!
I was born in the mid-‘70s, back when it was uphill both ways to the rumpus room, and video games were limited to two pixels (I may be exaggerating slightly). And yet my earliest memories of video games are of magnificent creations that transported me to lands unimaginable. Video games took me places (yes, even E.T.). I loved (and love) being outside and exploring the real world, but video games brought a wonderful counterpoint to that exploration—a chance to be in spaces that couldn’t exist. To be things I never would.
[Re-blogged from Gamasutra]
VR is demanding we re-investigate from the ground up all things we have been assuming about UI/UX, and that we look deeper into cognitive science to address questions about how we perceive our environments and what fidelity even means in VR. We’re moving the requirements of the systems we design out into a far more literal space in a way that breaks basically everything, while amping up the requirements for how we convince our brains to operate in that space.
Today marked the completion of the Masters of Digital Media 2014 cohort’s academic year. This is the point at which they leave us after a year of intense coursework and projects to complete their degrees through their internships. We always hold a little “ungraduation” ceremony to celebrate the last time we have the cohort all together in one place until the official graduation next spring. Asked to say a few words, I put together a little something which I thought I'd share.
With the recent advances in virtual reality (VR), more and more people are casually using the term “immersion” to refer to all things that take place in VR, even when they refer to fundamentally different experiences. Below is an attempt to clear up some of this confusion.
I’m troubled.
At the recent women’s computer-science conference, WECode, sponsors Goldman Sachs donated swag in the form of nail files and vanity mirrors, while Google provided gender-tagged socks.
I’m troubled because the event and the swag remind me that we’re not there yet, and that the societal biases that govern us day to day remain strong and insidious.