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Real fake rooms: experiments in narrative design for virtual reality

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Real F ak e Rooms: Expe rime nts in N arrati v e Design f or V irtual Reality
Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz
Created from 2011 to 2019 by Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz .
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Real Fake Rooms: Experiments in Narrative Design for Virtual Reality
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS: MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE)
May 2019
Adam SulzdorfLiszkiewicz
Master of Fine Arts
Department of Media Study
State University of New York at Buffalo
Approved:
Tara McPherson, Co-Chair
Approved:
Richard Lemarchand, Co-Chair
Approved:
Holly Willis
Approved:
Peter Brinson
Approved:
Jeff Watson
Cont e nts
1 Prologue: What is a Dissertation? 1
I Theoretical Framework 9
2 Isaac Unbound: Play as Ontology 11
2.1 Monologue: “What is a game?” 11
2.2 Internal Dialogue: “How do you play?” 21
2.3 Metalogue: “What is an essay?” 23
3 Exploratory Modding: Play as Research 31
3.1 What is ’Practice-Based Research’? 31
3.2 What is ’Exploratory Modding’? 37
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 45
4 Real Fake Rooms: Virtual Semantics 57
4.1 When is a definition ‘real’ enough? 57
4.2 How does Virtual Reality relate to Actual Reality? 63
4.3 Why do you care about semantics, as an artist? 69
II Case Studies 75
5 Metalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constraints in M useum of the M icr ostar 77
5.1 How did M useum of the M icr ostar begin? 77
5.2 How did you find the core of the experience? 86
5.3 How did M icr ostar become a virtual museum? 95
6 Meat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades 101
6.1 How should we contextualize our worldbuilding? 102
6.2 How did M eat Grinder begin? 107
6.3 How did W urstW urld begin? 118
7 Metalogue: Cascading Coherence in Blast Doors 129
7.1 How did Blast D oors begin? 129
7.2 How are we going to use this controller? 135
7.3 We’re right in the middle of it, right? 143
8 Polygraph: The Dissertation Defense 149
v
Bibliography 155
About the Author 159
Figur es
2.1 Isaac crying (from The Binding of I saac ) 11
2.2 Poker chip 12
2.4 Rectangular poker chip 12
2.3 Phenomnomnomenology 13
2.5 Screenshot from The Binding of I saac 15
2.6 Dogs Playing Poker (remix) 17
2.7 Holy Grail in The Binding of I saac: Rebirth 19
2.8 Screenshot from introductory sequence in The Binding of I saac 23
2.9 Isaac and fly from The Binding of I saac 30
3.1 Cover image for (from NBA 2k16) 31
3.2 Target chamber interior at the National Ignition Facility 32
3.3 Photograph of Ice-T. 34
3.4 “Fountain” , by Marcel Duchamp (1917). 36
3.5 Examples of player-avatars in NBA 2k16 38
3.6 John Turturro and Kanye West as player-avatars in NBA 2k16 39
3.7 Scene from in-game machinima produced by NBA 2k16 40
3.9 ’Mars Blackmon’ player-avatar in NBA 2k16 41
3.8 Scene from in-game machinima produced by NBA 2k16 41
3.10 “X-Tina” player-avatar in NBA 2k16 42
3.11 Extreme example of player-avatar modding in NBA 2k16 43
3.12 Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz as player-avatar in NBA 2k16 45
3.13 Heidi Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz as player-avatar in NBA 2k16 45
3.14 Scrunch-faced player-avatar in NBA 2k16 45
3.16 Face scan attempt using Intel RealSense camera 46
3.15 Face scan for NBA 2k16 using Intel RealSense camera 46
3.17 Face scan for NBA 2k16 using Intel RealSense camera 47
3.18 Modded player-avatar in NBA 2k16 machinima 47
3.19 Elderly player-avatar in NBA 2k16 machinima 49
3.20 Triptych of player-avatar creation process 50
3.21 The Beetlejuice Taz 51
3.22 Commissioned avatar in NBA 2k16 53
3.23 Commissioned avatar in NBA 2k16 53
3.24 Commissioned avatar in NBA 2k16 54
vi
Figur es vii
3.25 Commissioned avatar in NBA 2k16 54
3.26 Thumbs-up during NBA 2k16 face scan 56
4.1 HTC Vive headset 57
4.2 Sinking of USS Maine. 59
4.3 Image from Rick and M orty 60
4.4 Circle and chiliagon. 62
4.5 Data visualization of carbon dioxide concentration 63
4.6 Screenshot of The Lieutenant J ohn Pike M emorial Br owser Extension 66
4.7 Mark Zuckerberg walking through auditorium of VR users 67
4.8 “The Hierarchy of Needs in Virtual Reality” 68
4.9 Controller mapping in H3VR 71
4.10 Example of “We Have To Go Deeper” meme 73
5.1 Portrait of Anton Hand 77
5.2 Portrait of Luke Noonan 77
5.3 Image from M useum of the M icr ostar 78
5.4 Early concept sketches for M useum of the M icr ostar 79
5.5 Work-in-progress image from M useum of the M icr ostar 81
5.6 Test scene for M useum of the M icr ostar 83
5.7 Modular kit testing for M useum of the M icr ostar 84
5.8 Props from M useum of the M icr ostar 85
5.9 Anthracite coal from M useum of the M icr ostar 86
5.10 Particle system development for M useum of the M icr ostar 86
5.11 Signs from M useum of the M icr ostar 87
5.12 UberFungus from M useum of the M icr ostar 89
5.13 Level layout from M useum of the M icr ostar 91
5.14 Gravitanium exhibit from M useum of the M icr ostar 93
5.15 Documentation of M useum of the M icr ostar exhibition at EMPAC 96
5.16 The Oculus Rift port of M useum of the M icr ostar 99
6.1 Portrait of Anton Hand 101
6.2 Aardvark expressing opinion about font 102
6.3 In-game menu for Cour ageous Cannonball Commander 103
6.4 Selection from banner image for Cour ageous Cannonball Commander 104
6.5 Screenshot from M eat Grinder 108
6.6 Selection of butters in W urstW urld 109
6.7 Final boss in W urstW urld 112
6.8 Horseshoe sign in W urstW urld 114
6.9 Trombone 117
6.10 Building prototypes in W urstW urld 119
6.11 Props for W urstW urld 120
6.12 Bandit bot in W urstW urld 120
6.13 Meathenge in W urstW urld 121
6.14 E-Slab in W urstW urld 122
6.15 Horseshoe tutorial in W urstW urld 123
6.16 ‘Amendment 35’ poster for H3VR 126
6.17 Door at the ending of W urstW urld 127
viii Contents
7.1 Portrait of Luke Noonan129
7.2 Hallway in PT (i.e. “Playable Teaser”) 130
7.3 Omnideck 6 (top-down view) 130
7.4 Maglite 4D 131
7.5 Goomba 132
7.6 Station Wagon in Blast Doors 133
7.7 VHS tape cover in Blast Doors 133
7.8 ColecoVision controller 134
7.9 AN/PRC-6 walkie-talkie 135
7.10 Blast Doors in-game controller136
7.11 HTC Vive controller 136
7.12 Thumbprint tracking on Blast Doors in-game controller 137
7.13 Controller thumbpad overlay in Blast Doors 139
7.14 Level layout in Blast Doors 140
7.15 Hallway in Blast Doors 142
7.16 Teleporter in Blast Doors 143
7.17 Radius XR logo 144
7.18 Omnideck at Radius XR location 145
7.19 Promotional photo of the Omnideck 148
8.1 Adam and Dissertation Committee Members, 31 July 2018 154
Prologue: What is a Dissertation?
1
This first chapter of my dissertation is called, “What Is a Dissertation?’’ This question is,
on many levels, the central question of this undertaking, this document, this collection of
documents, this object, this dissertation. So it seems like a good place to start.
What is a dissertation?
Let’s begin addressing this question by playing around with some colloquial usages of the
term ’dissertation’ . Google, the colloquial source du jour, defines ’dissertation’ as, “a long
essay on a particular subject, especially one written as a requirement for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree” . Wiktionary, another great source, defines it as, “a formal exposition
of a subject, especially a research paper that students write in order to complete the re-
quirements for a doctoral degree” . So dissertations are long, formal essays, focused on
one subject, and a requirement for the Ph.D. Again, breaking it down into components:
it’s long, it’s formal, it’s an essay or paper of some kind, it’s focused on one subject, it’s a
requirement for a Ph.D., and it has a single author who is a student.
Similarly, the monograph is long, is formal, is an essay / a paper / a writing focused on
one subject, it is a requirement (in this case for tenure usually, not for a Ph.D.), and it
has a single author, a professional as opposed to a student. In practice, dissertations and
monographs are two largely coextensive sets, with the caveat that one is usually more or
more “polished” than the other.
So a monograph: a scholarly book or a treatise on a single subject or a group of related
subjects, written usually by one person. A good example of this is Ellen Lupton’s ”Design
is Storytelling” , which I’ve been reading lately in preparation for the “Narrative Design and
Worldbuilding” class I’ll be teaching in the fall at Occidental College. Through this book,
a monograph, and many others [like it], I’ve learned a great deal. I believe monographs
have great value to humanists, scholars, artists, just people - but I find the traditional
monograph dissertation form to be poorly suited to my work.
Let’s revisit the definition again. A monograph is a scholarly book. I’m not a scholar. I’m
an artist, and I conduct research as and through art. So why should an artist’s dissertation
be scholarly? Further, a monograph is a scholarly book or a treatise on a single subject. Art,
especially mine, does not necessarily proceed in linear, predictable, singular directions.
In fact, art is notoriously capricious, as are many artists. So why should an artist’s disser-
tation focus on a single subject? And can it? Finally, a monograph is usually written by one
person. Many artists work in profoundly collaborative ways, myself included. I could not
make my art alone, nor could I have gained expertise about my art, and the relevant sub-
jects of this dissertation, without my collaborators. So why should artists’ dissertations
be written by only one person?
1
2 1 Pr ologue: What is a Dissertation?
For these and other reasons, I’m dissatisfied with the traditional monographic disserta-
tion form, and this document is an attempt, an experiment, in creating and using a non-
traditional dissertation form.
So, returning to our definition of monograph, you’d note that while it’s a scholarly book
or treatise on a single subject, there’s a proviso, a caveat in there, that it can be a single
subject or a group of related subjects, and that is usually written by one person - not al-
ways. Again, this is even in a colloquial definition of the word. Monographs are sometimes
written about groups of related subjects, by groups of related people, so we can modify
our understanding of monographs in that way.
Can a dissertation be written about several subjects, by several people, especially given
that cultural analog to the monographic form? So first let’s take the focus, the group of re-
lated subjects. If the artist’s work spans multiple disciplines, traditions, formats, subjects,
etc., can that artist’s dissertation span those subjects as well? My dissertation reflects my
practice, so it spans a group of related subjects. About authorship: if the student is also
a professional, and that profession is necessarily and profoundly collaborative, can the
student’s dissertation be collaborative as well? Can it involve other professionals? Again,
my dissertation reflects my practice; it was authored by a group of related professionals.
Narrative design as a discipline is a group of related subjects, and my work as a narrative
designer in virtual reality was created by a group of related people. Thus, my disserta-
tion on narrative design for virtual reality is designed to acknowledge and honor those
relationships. I wanted my dissertation to reflect my actual practice, which necessarily
involves many subjects and many people. So: its focus is a group of related subjects, its
authorship is a group of related professionals.
This part was settled. My dissertation will span several related subjects and will somehow
include the voices of my collaborators. But what about the rest of these attributes of a
dissertation, a monographic traditional dissertation? What about those attributes? Can
we play around with those as well, and should we? Let’s move quickly through each of the
remaining attributes and see if they make sense for this dissertation.
First: length. I suppose someone could write a one word or one letter dissertation, but
that would be impractical in this case. So my dissertation is as long as I felt it needed to be:
eight chapters, including this introduction. I have a more complicated view of the formal
qualities of a dissertation. For our purposes, I would differentiate between two usages of
the word ’formal’: one is ’form’ , and the second is ’formality’ .
With regard to form, this dissertation is designed to be largely traditional in its shape and
configuration. It has an introduction, designed to explain and embody the purposes of the
dissertation, and to foreshadow the subsequent chapters. It has a “Theoretical Frame-
work” section, designed to make explicit the ontological, methodological, and contextual
foundations of the research. Third, it has three case studies... which is about as tradi-
tional as you can get. Finally, it concludes with a chapter that discusses the results of
the research, and future directions for research. Again, this is all fairly traditional and
it’s structured this way for the purposes of legibility, shareability and utility. I want my
dissertation to be useful to people.
In contrast, this dissertation is decidedly informal in specific ways. The tone of the text
is looser in style; it’s less academic, and more conversational. It’s less serious, and more
playful, and the arguments are looser and less formal as well. Some of my arguments are
3
1: The Media Arts and Practice division of the
School of Cinematic Arts at the University of
Southern California.
2: Emphasis here is on the word tr aditional.
I don’t mean to suggest that all dissertations,
nor all monographs, are the same – and there
are certainly exceptions to every rule.
formal and driven by scholarly citations, while others are driven (as this introduction is)
by metalogical discussions of idiomatic, colloquial language.
These decisions were partly stylistic. I prefer playfully informal text, as a reader and as an
author. But this informality was also part of a much bigger and much more complicated
decision and set of questions. The big complicated question at this point: should I write a
dissertation?
Now, as a Media Arts and Practice
1
student, I’ve often been told: “You don’t have to write
a dissertation.” Many people in the Media Arts and Practice division [at USC], including
two of my committee members, worked hard to ensure that a written document was not
required of Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. students. Nevertheless, every Media Arts and
Practice Ph.D. student, to this point, has written and filed a dissertation document. The
results have been good, too. My colleagues have done good work.
The written essay is a well-designed solution to a difficult problem: namely, how to share
knowledge efficiently and effectively with other people. The word ”efficiently” is the one
that jumps out at me. Because as a scholar of play and games, and as a designer of games,
I believe pla y is inhe r e ntly inefficie nt .
The traditional monographic dissertation is designed to be efficient.
2
It is designed
around efficiency. This is a value which I do not share, and which runs directly counter
to my work. Efficiency comes at a cost. I value inefficiency because I value complica-
tion, confusion, inspiration, muddles, the unexpected, the shocking, the wondrous, and
the weird. I value inefficiency because I value play, so how should I produce a disserta-
tion that reflects my values? More specifically, how does one design a playfully inefficient
dissertation?
The honest answer: I have no idea.
For several years, I’ve struggled through a stressful, confusing, and inefficient process
of trying to find the right form for my dissertation. It was difficult to explain—let alone
justify—this process. I’ve long felt that the traditional dissertation format was a bad fit for
me, but I couldn’t figure out what to do instead, no matter how hard I worked. Often this
felt embarrassing. I felt the impulse to hide, and to apologize.
To reiterate: efficiency is a value. Play is inefficient. Sometimes play feels embarrassing.
Sometimes we feel like we have to hide our play, to apologize for it.
Slowly, I came to understand that my work was necessarily inefficient precisely because
it’s driven by play, and that this core aspect of my work felt embarrassing, like something
I should hide, or something for which I should apologize. In turn, this made me deeply
suspicious of my motivations as a dissertating student. If my process felt like something I
should hide, then what else was I hiding?
Let’s return to Wiktionary, and look at the definition they provide for the word ’research’ .
They define it as, “diligent inquiry or examination to seek or revise facts, principles, the-
ories, applications, etc.,” and as, “laborious or continued search after truth.” So, the artist
creates, and the researcher searches for truth. The artist researcher, then, searches for
truth in that which they create. As an artist researcher, my desire to hide and apologize
for my practice made me deeply suspicious of my ability to speak truthfully about it. At
some point I realized that m y r esear ch, i.e. m y sear ch aft e r truth, depe nded upon m y
ability and wil lin gness t o be honest. To speak truthfully.
4 1 Pr ologue: What is a Dissertation?
3: From IMA GINE DESIGN CREA TE: H ow De-
signers, Ar chitects, and Engineers ar e Chang-
ing Our W orld, (self-)published by Autodesk in
2011. Quote appears in an interview on p. 146.
This dissertation is a playfully self-aware experiment in honest research, and in speaking
truthfully.
Now, I may be willing to be honest, but how can I be reasonably certain that I’m able to be
honest? This is a wicked problem, akin to a paradox, and there is no test of faith for artist
researchers. I’ve had to accept this limitation. In my research design, I cannot assume that
I am being honest, nor can I demonstrate that honesty, but I can at least be honest about
that limitation. Further, I can be honest about other limitations which might embarrass
me, which I might want to hide.
So here’s an incomplete list: I’m a narrative designer, but I don’t know what that [phrase]
means. I’m also not well-read in narrative theory, and I don’t formally study design,
broadly speaking. Also, I’ve never written a novel, that feels important to say. I design
experiences for virtual reality, but I know very little about the history and technologies
of virtual reality. Further, I don’t play very much VR, because it tends to make me sick
(unless it’s on the HTC Vive). I did not set out to become a narrative designer, nor to write
a dissertation about narrative design. I did not intend to spend the past four years as an
artist working primarily in virtual reality. I did not prepare for this dissertation by con-
ducting an extensive review of the literature in the field, nor of comparable media and VR
experiences. In short, I had no idea what I was doing.
Nevertheless, I have helped produce several narrative VR experiences that have found
both commercial and critical success. To restate this, other people have decided, for one
reason or another, that my work as a narrative designer has been successful, and this work,
my work, was created through an inefficient and largely ignorant process of confusion,
muddles, and play.
I learned about narrative design for virtual reality dir ectly, by designing narratives for VR.
This is the essence of practice-based research. Similarly, I did not know four years ago that
my dissertation would be a practice based study of “narrative design for virtual reality” . I
discovered this dir ectly, through the process and practice of making my art. In principle,
practice-based r esear ch is thus a disco v e ry pr ocess dri v e n b y dir ect e xpe rie nce. The
artist creates something, and learns through that creation.
When it came time for me to share that knowledge which was obtained through direct
experience, I again had no idea what to do. How exactly do you share direct experience
with someone else? Again a wicked problem, a kind of paradox.
According to the designer Hugh Dubberly this problem pervades the field of design. This
is a quote:
Studio courses are mostly about socialization, sharing and creating tacit
knowledge through direct experience. Students learn by watching one an-
other. Teachers rarely espouse principles. Learning proceeds from specific
to specific, knowledge remains tacit.
3
For Dubberly, this problem continues throughout designers’ careers and persists across
the field of design. This is another quote:
Over the course of a career most designers learn to design better. But what
they learn is highly idiosyncratic, dependent on their unique context. The
knowledge designers gain usually retires with them. Rarely do designers
5
4: ibid, p. 146.
distill rules from experience, codify new methods, test and improve them,
and pass them on to others. Rarely do designers move from tacit to explicit.
4
Note the values at play in Dubberly’s quote. For Dubberly, designers should distill rules,
codify methods, test and improve those methods, and then share those methods. Design-
ers should or ought, according to Dubberly, make tacit knowledge more explicit.
Ironically, Dubberly also asserts that designers’ knowledge is gained through direct expe-
rience, is highly idiosyncratic, is dependent on the designers’ unique context, and is de-
pendent on socialization and specifics. Don’t these contradict Dubberly’s desire to move
from tacit to explicit knowledge? In other words, Dubberly tells us that basically all design
knowledge is necessarily tacit, and even tells us why it’s necessarily tacit, But he asserts
nonetheless that it should be made explicit, replicable, testable, etc.
Designers gain idiosyncratic knowledge through direct experience, unique contexts, so-
cialization, specifics. In other words, designers gain knowledge inefficiently, through play.
Dubberly’s desire to make design education more efficient is, to my mind, a simple state-
ment of values. Like many others, he thinks efficiency is good. Thus, he advocates for
efficiency in design education. But what if design education needs to be inefficient? And
what if design dissertations need to be inefficient as well?
As above, my idiosyncratic knowledge about narrative design for virtual reality was gained
through direct experience and unique contexts, socialization, and specifics. In other
words: inefficiently, through play. My desire to share my knowledge explicitly and truth-
fully, through replicable techniques and generalisable principles, in a word, as a disserta-
tion, is seemingly in direct conflict with the very nature of that knowledge. Simply put, I
cannot shar e m y kno w l edg e about narrati v e design f or virtual r eality, at least not in the
explicit, methodical way that is traditional to most dissertations. And, as above, I cannot
even share my knowledge with myself, because I’m unsure how to judge its character, its
accuracy, its truthfulness.
So, this dissertation begins from here, from this conundrum, and from the simple confes-
sion that I got stuck on this problem, and I never solved it. I don’t know how to design a
playfully inefficient dissertation. But I created a playfully inefficient dissertation nonethe-
less! That is, I can’t tell you how, or why, but I can tell you what I did. I gave up trying
to answer all of these wicked problems about how I should share my knowledge, and I
started looking at how I already do share what I know. “Don’t think,” said Wittgenstein,
“look!”
I found that, as a professional designer, I already share my knowledge regularly in three
different ways: the first, through my art; the second, through professional talks; and the
third, through conversations. It was assumed from the get-go that the first of these, my
art, would be shared as-is, as part of my dissertation. We might call this the first half of
practice based artistic research: the artist creates some art, which then stands as an object
of knowledge that can be studied and poked and prodded, etc. Second, the artist takes off
their “artist hat” and puts on their “researcher hat” . The researcher seeks truth via the
examination of facts, the derivation of principles, the construction of theories, and the
sharing and testing of those theories, at least traditionally. We might call this the second
half of practice based artistic research, wherein the artist researcher seeks to make their
tacit knowledge more explicit, by discovering shareable, testable principles in their artistic
objects.
6 1 Pr ologue: What is a Dissertation?
I assumed that any dissertation document I produced would follow in this model: it would
critically analyze my artistic output, through a scholarly interpretive approach, for all the
reasons I’ve already discussed. This is the point at which I became stuck. I can’t honestly
share my knowledge about narrative design and VR through traditional interpretation and
analysis.
I became unstuck when I began actually looking at how I share my knowledge. I regularly
give professional talks, I teach classes, and I chat with all sorts of people about my work
and my research. None of this makes me uncomfortable, and none of it makes me feel
dishonest. On the contrary, I feel like I can really speak my mind in those contexts. Fur-
ther, I don’t feel obligated to limit myself to a single subject nor a single line of reasoning.
Talks, lectures, and conversations allow me to follow tangents, get messy, and be playfully
inefficient. So it turns out I not only can share my knowledge honestly and playfully, but
in fact, I already do.
Of course, these forms of discourse feel very different from, say, traditional forms of aca-
demic writing and research. Talks are less formal, less focused, less rigorous, less valued.
I must admit here that I saw my talks as a lesser form of research. In fact, I had made an
error here, both in quality and in kind.
The first part of this, the quality part: academic talks have long been held in high regard.
All of Aristotle’s collected works, for example, are essentially lecture notes, and academic
presses regularly publish collections of lectures by a single author in a bound monographic
form. In fact, Wiktionary has a second entry for ’dissertation’: ”a lengthy lecture on a
subject.” Even colloquially, lectures and talks are valued as highly as formal written essays.
So my first error was devaluing my lectures and talks, and that’s on me.
As for my second error, one of kind: people tend to categorize academic talks separately
from professional and artistic talks. But is it so simple to distinguish between the two?
Can academic talks involve art, or be ’artistic’ in their form? Can artists talk about ’se-
rious things’ , research, interpretation, philosophy, science? I’m the same person when
I’m giving a talk or lecture as when I’m designing narratives for VR. They’re all part of my
practice, the same practice. So, my second error was separating my academic and artistic
output. There is no inherent necessary separation between the two. Nothing absolute,
nothing provable: it’s merely normative a value judgment.
When I begin looking at my lectures and talks as part of a holistic artistic research practice,
I began seeing them in a completely different light. I began seeing my lectures and talks as
artistic output. And once this happened, once I saw that my talks are output in the same
way that my art is output, I began to consider sharing my talks in the same way I share my
art, and including the talks in my dissertation.
Like artistic objects, lectures and talks can be considered primary sources, i.e. as evidence.
Shards of pottery from Pompeii, guild records from medieval Toulouse, T.S. Eliot’s cor-
respondence: all of these primary sources are used in analytic, formal research across a
number of humanistic scholarly disciplines. Following this, I began to see my lecture notes
and my slide decks as primary sources that could be used in humanistic research about
any number of things, including a dissertation about narrative design for virtual reality. If
I could neither share nor generalize my private tacit knowledge about my practice, at least
in a traditional manner, I could at least share my lectur es about my practice.
7
5: Like this!
6: In medical research, comparison groups
usually receive an alternate form of treatment
(unlike control groups, which generally re-
ceive a placebo), as a means of inferring the
effectiveness of some method. For more, see:
“The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Re-
search Methods” , Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan
Bryman, Tim Futing Liao, editors (2004).
I began looking through all of my lecture materials, and thinking about how they might
be incorporated into a non-traditional dissertation – and then something else occurred
to me. If it was legitimate for me to share my talks as primary sources in a program of
research, then wouldn’t it be equally legitimate to share conversations about my practice
as well?
My work as a narrative designer is profoundly collaborative. Further, interviews with
artists and designers are, like correspondence, valued as primary sources in programs
of research. Conversations between myself and my collaborators about the virtual reality
experiences we created together could not only serve as primary source material for other
people, and their research, but for me and my research as well. Like my talks and lectures,
these conversations could be used as windows onto how I think about my practice, and
to ho w I tal k about m y practice w he n I feel I can be honest. And they would include my
collaborators’ perspectives to boot.
This meant I could have my cake, and eat it too. I could conclude my dissertation with
an interpretive chapter – not one that discusses results in some objective, generalizable
manner, but one which presents results for me in a highly subjective and localized man-
ner. These talks and conversations could provide me [with] a view of my own thinking
at a distance. I could reflect on what I said, and what my collaborator said. I could even
add marginalia after the fact,
5
to cite or clarify or complicate some point from the lecture
or conversation. Surely, these talks and conversations would be an indirect, inefficient
means of sharing knowledge, but it would ironically be a more direct mode of sharing
knowledge as well. Without preconceived notions of what my dissertation documents
should be, or how I should write, I would be left with an honest representation of how
I actually think.
This line of reasoning ultimately led me to the structure of this dissertation. This disser-
tation document is comprised of four sections: first, the introduction, i.e., what you’re
reading right now; second, the “Theoretical Framework” section, which is comprised of
three lectures; third, the “Case Studies” section, which is comprised of three conversa-
tions; and finally, a concluding interpretive chapter, which contains results and directions
for future research.
Following this introduction, the “Theoretical Framework” section contains three chapters.
The first, “Isaac Unbound: Play as Ontology”; the second, “Exploratory Modding: Play as
Research”; and the third, “Real Fake Rooms: Virtual Semantics” . These chapters were all
presented at least once in an academic context. The presentations were then transcribed,
edited, and supplemented with marginalia and paratextual information, in an effort to
draw out themes relevant to the dissertation. (A good recording existed for Chapter 1, but
Chapters 2 and 3 were re-performed prior to transcription and editing.)
Each chapter [from the “Theoretical Framework” section] corresponds to a chapter in
a more traditional dissertation. The first, “Isaac Unbound: Play as Ontology” , lays out
the ontological underpinnings of my practice, holistically seen, and applies this onto-
logical commitment in an experiment in non-traditional writing. The second chapter,
“Exploratory Modding: Play as Research” , describes my methodological approach, and
demonstrates its effectiveness through the artistic equivalent of a ’comparison group’ .
6
The third, “Real Fake Rooms: Virtual Semantics” , provides context for my research, and
introduces my experimental work as a narrative designer in virtual reality, i.e. the pro-
8 1 Pr ologue: What is a Dissertation?
duction components of my dissertation. In total, these three chapters are surprisingly, to
me at least, traditional in their utility and function.
As with many dissertations, they are previously published research that has been repur-
posed and recontextualized for the dissertation. But what separates them from more tra-
ditional dissertation chapters is the way that they, first, engage the question of this intro-
duction: “What is a dissertation, on a metalogical level?” Second, they serve their tradi-
tional function only indirectly and inefficiently—especially with the first two chapters—
and they allow again for a kind of metalogical distance. And third, they retain their status
as primary sources. This allows my dissertation to serve the function of a dissertation,
while also playing with the form and function of “a dissertation” . It is purposefully in-
efficient and, while it is rhetorical, it is hopefully also revelatory of other adjacent and
associative ideas, facts, logics, and truths.
In the next section, three “case studies as conversations” are presented. There are three
production components [i.e. VR experiences] to my dissertation work, and each of the case
study chapters presents a corresponding conversation, as a lens through which one can
view a production component, and the production process as well. Thus, these conver-
sations are both views of case studies, and are case studies themselves – as experiments
in metalogical analysis, and as primary source material. Chapter 5 examines “convergent
thinking via constraints” in the RUST LTD. game, M useum of the M icr ostar. Chapter 6 is
not a metalogue, but a meat-a-logue, about our successful VR game, H ot Dogs, H orseshoes,
and H and Gr enades (and about cringe-worthy puns, apparently). Chapter 7 is a metalogue
about “cascading coherence” in our new VR game, Blast Doors.
After the theoretical foundation is laid, and the case studies are discussed, we arrive at
the conclusion. That document will be an edited transcription of my dissertation defense
[presentation], which will interpret and assess my dissertation and its various compo-
nents. In that defense, I will draw out conclusions from my previous chapters, related
to narrative design and virtual reality, and speculate about how they might be applied in
future research – specifically, in my upcoming research. Hopefully, this will reflect the
spirit of the dissertation, and attendees’ comments may or may not be included in this
transcript, depending on their comfort level.
In sum, my hope is that these eight chapters can each serve as primary source material
for my current and future research, as well as the research of other interested scholars,
practitioners, and dissertation enthusiasts. Regardless, I hope it serves to exemplify how
an inefficient, confusing, directionless practice can playfully produce a useful document. I
also hope this dissertation can be helpful to other designers and developers in the nascent
field of virtual reality, where it is common for practitioners to have non-traditional back-
grounds, and idiosyncratic knowledge gained from unique experience, direct knowledge,
and specific social interactions. And finally: I hope this document is a satisfactory disser-
tation. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, and I hope you enjoy it.
P art I
T heor etical Frame w or k

Figure 2.1 : Poor Isaac. Sorry, buddy.
8:
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Isaac Un-
bound: Play as Ontology” . Philosophy of
Computer Games Conference, Berlin, Ger-
many, 15 October 2015. The transcript has
here been edited for clarity; images, and foot-
notes to references, have also been added for
this reason.
9: In large part, I am presenting this tran-
scription (and the subsequent sections of this
chapter) flaws and all, as exemplars of my
commitment to this ontological practice.
10: “When Did You First Play the Binding
of Isaac?” , published 14 March 2013 on
Confessions of an Aca-F an: The Offical W eblog
of H enry J enkins: http://henryjenkins.
org/blog/2013/03/when- did- you-
first- play- the- binding- of- isaac.html
11: Given the central role played by Ludwig
Wittgenstein in this talk, I’d be remiss not
to mention the work of Karl Popper here,
and locate the conceptual origins (and values)
of falsifiability in his work; specifically, THE
LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959).
Isaac Unbound: Play as Ontology
2
Um, so my name’s Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz. The title of my talk is, “Isaac Unbound:
Play as Ontology.”
8
Can everyone hear me okay? Thanks for sticking around for the last
talk of the day, and of course predictably I’m sorry to say that my talk will run a little long.
I’ll probably take up thirty minutes giving this, so I apologize. And as an apology, I think I
can only say that I live in Los Angeles, so I have no concept of time. That’s what happens
if you live there for a while.
In fact, my living in a temporal dead zone means that the title of this talk has accidentally
become a kind of sad joke. [See Figure 2.1.] The second half of this talk was supposed to be
a performative presentation of a piece of what I might call mythopoetic scholarship, on the
popular computer game The Binding of Isaac, as an example of what a scholar might do if
they hold an ontological commitment to the practice of play as ontology.
9
Unfortunately,
as soon as I “unbound” Isaac, he wouldn’t stop talking, and he just went on and on, and I
couldn’t get him to stop... so I had to cut that portion of the talk in its entirety, because
this talk is already too long as it is.
The good news, though, is that you can find that portion of the talk online, and I will
provide the link to that essay
10
at the end of this presentation. In the meantime, let’s
begin playing with some ideas about play and ontology, and thanks in advance for playing
along.
2.1 M ono l ogue: “ W hat is a g ame ?”
Most game scholars, it seems, are sick and tired of playing along with discussions of ontol-
ogy, and with talks about how we define games. And yet, ontological problems continue to
plague the field of game studies, such as it is. In their attempts to understand the meaning
of computer games, scholars continue to define “the computer game” through competing
enumerations of formal properties—such as narrative, rules, aesthetics, computation—in
a counterproductive effort to provide consistency to their shared object of study. In this
talk, I will argue that such consistency is impossible, and that this fact is ironically the key
to unlocking not only a responsible scholarly approach to the study of computer games,
but also useful and I hope timely perspective on the acquisition of human knowledge.
Scholars who work to establish a consistent object of study are, in the humanist tradition of
scholarship, trying to generate knowledge that is shareable and that is testable. In other
words they hope to produce falsifiable knowledge.
11
But when scholars and academics
attempt to expand human knowledge through the production of falsifiable statements
and hypotheses, in relation to games, they are necessarily also making tactical maneu-
vers within a larger language game and socio-cultural context, which I think is something
11
12 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
12: Paul Martin, “Academic Game Interpreta-
tion: A Defence”: https://youtu.be/Kc-
MezMvuw4
13: Or perhaps meta-ontological?
14:
definition ( n.)
1. an explanation of the meaning of
a word, phrase, etc.
2. the act of defining, or making
something clear
Figure 2.2 : A stereotypical poker chip.
15:
po k e r chip ( n.)
a round, thin, red piece of clay that is used
in place of currency in the game Poker
Figure 2.4 : A rectangular poker chip.
that Paul Martin suggested [in an earlier talk].
12
It’s assumed that when a scholar creates a
falsifiable definition of computer games that they’re trying to forward human knowledge
in a principled way, in accordance with the rules and the procedures and the norms and
the betting values or what have you of a well established game. And at the heart of this
game lies a value proposition of sorts.
Scholars are taught that if they create falsifiable knowledge, or knowledge that can be
shared and tested by other scholars, that they’ll be making a positive contribution to a
playful massively-multiplayer endeavor. In short, to play well with other scholars in the
game of academia is to create falsifiable definitions... or so we’re told.
Ontology is in part the study of ontological commitments, of what we or others are com-
mitted to saying – about games, in the field of game studies. But more generally speaking,
ontology is the study of what there is, of what exists, and also of what can be said to exist,
and what can be said about that which we say exists. So what can or should we say about
games?
Pushing all of my chips to the center of the table, this talk will assert that scholars’ desire
to play well with one another, and to create falsifiable definitions of computer games, has
ironically left them blind to the simple and strange ontological
13
status of games. Simply
put, games are difficult to define as such because g ames ar e definitions and definitions
ar e g ames. Further, it’s also because play is the means by which humans and other animals
define things, and try to understand those things’ meaning. To illustrate these points, let’s
all channel our inner Wittgenstein and play a little language game – or rather, a game with
language. We’re going to construct our own definition of the word “definition” .
2.1.1 W hat is a definition ?
Now these are just two common definitions of the word “definition” ,
14
derived from two
commonly used online resources. Number one is from Merriam Webster online, and num-
ber two is from dictionary dot com. We’ll just use them as a starting point.
Note that in both definitions of the word “definition” , the act of explaining something or
making something more clear is a very important component. We all know this: defini-
tions are designed to be shared with other people, so they can better understand some-
thing, right? So for our definition of the word “definition” , we know at least that it’s an
attempt to share something. But what? What are we sharing? In these definitions we’re
attempting to share meaning – but specifically the meaning of a word or phrase. And we’re
trying to make that meaning of the word or phrase more clear... visually, I might say.
So let’s say we’re trying to share the meaning of the words “poker chip” .
15
Now this could be
confusing for a number of reasons. Perhaps the person has never played poker, or perhaps
you’re thinking of potato chips, or in Europe they might instead be thinking about what
Americans call “french fries” , I don’t know. So we try to explain what a poker chip is to this
person. We say, let’s say, it’s a round thin red piece of clay [see Figure 2.2], probably, that is
used in place of currency in the game Poker. It’s not a bad definition right? Unfortunately,
when we try to put our definition into practice, we find that it fails any and all tests of
falsifiability.
Poker chips don’t have to be red. Some of them are made of leather or other materials, and
not clay. Some of them have writing or symbols or numbers written on them; some poker
2.1 M onologue: “What is a game?” 13
16: For the sake of this talk, I’ve assumed
that definitions cannot be private – which is
a tricky, slippery slope. In retrospect, I think
it was an error to make this implication; I be-
lieve definitions, like games, could potentially
be private.
17: Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTI-
GATIONS (1953), §65-71
18: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, §66
chips are square or rectangular [see Figure 2.4]. But at least we know they’re a substitute
for currency in the game poker, right? Wrong. Some poker chips have no monetary value,
and instead act as a scorekeeping device, or a device for poker’s betting mechanic. Some
poker chips are apparently used to wish people a happy birthday. And some poker chips
are, of course, used for eating [see Figure 2.3].
Now ironically, this picture is an excellent example of how we take in meaning as humans:
we try things out, we touch, we smell, we taste things. We forget that babies are experts
in phenomenological analysis – or as I like to call it, “P he nomnomnome no l og y”, which
is the attempt to learn about the world by putting things in your mouth. I think this is a
good definition for my made-up word, but it doesn’t help us directly with our definition
of “definition” because phenomnomnomenology does not involve an attempt to share. It
is private.
16
So what do definitions attempt to share?
Well, I’d say meaning, of course, but what’s that? When we tried to share the meaning
of poker chip and make it more clear to one another, we found–as Wittgenstein did
17
–
that there were no formal properties shared across the group of all things we refer to as
“poker chip” , nor could we define the poker chip by and through its use. Instead we simply
ended up playing a language game. So is a definition simply an attempt to share a language
game, or to initiate one? As scholars know all too well, definitions of words are at the core
of many scholarly debates.
I don’t believe this is a productive place to land for us, primarily because it then begs too
many tricky questions: What’s a language game? What are its rules? How do we define
it? (Can I play?) And then we quickly encounter the problem of something like infinite
regress, or as the old woman might have said to Stephen Hawking, “Its definitions all the
way down.”
Instead, I’m reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous exhortation: “Don’t think, but look!”
18
Figure 2.3 : In this exemplar of phe-
nomnomnomenological analysis, this
toddler is chewing on a poker chip.
Image credit: Kate Rhodes. Source:
http://www.rhodeslog.com/2014/
05/five- of- my- favorite- blogs.html
14 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
19: Anna K. Nardo, THE LUDIC SELF IN
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH LITER-
ATURE (1991). See chapters 1 and 3 for ex-
cellent discussions about the ontological sta-
tuses of play and games – much of my argu-
ment here is prefigured, implicitly or explic-
itly, in her work.
That is, look at what we’ve been doing here today, and all day, we’ve been playing with one
another, with the meaning of words and phrases–are we talking about criticism, are we
talking about interpretation–we’ve been playing with one another and recognizing that,
in the end, definitions are just messy, confusing attempts to share precisely what we’ve
experienced. A playful experience.
So here we are: a definition is an attempt to share a playful experience, like the one we
just had with the word “poker chip” . I like our definition. Funnily enough, our definition
of the word “definition” also seems to me to be an excellent definition of the word “game” .
A game is an attempt to share a playful experience. So is a definition. In other words, the
word “game” and the word “definition” can be defined in precisely the same way.
We’ve discovered here that games are definitions, and definitions are games, and that it’s
through play that we define things, that we share meaning, that we determine what can
be said about things. In other words, pla y is an ont o l ogical practice.
This strange framing of games and play, as themselves ontological practices, drives the
work of numerous scholars: Witggenstein, Huizinga, Bateson, Derrida, Steinkuehler... a
woman named Anna Nardo,
19
whose work I encountered recently and who I’d never heard
talked about in game studies, ask me about her later, she’s brilliant... who each used games
as a lens through which they viewed the human acquisition of knowledge. Using this lens
of play as ontology, scholars of games can potentially see the maddening inconsistency,
instability, and subjectiveness surrounding their object of study in a new productive light.
Not as a bug in the academic system, nor a flaw in their scholarly designs, but as a feature
of computer game scholarship, as a condition of human knowledge, and perhaps most
importantly (at least to me) as a kind of ontological commitment.
2.1.2 Put tin g I deas int o P la y
In the first half of this talk, which is of course the only half of this talk, I will continue to
present the preceding arguments from this introduction in more general terms, and I’ll
engage the work of several early game scholars as a means of critically reframing the on-
tological foundations of computer game scholarship. And then in an effort to move from
broad generalizations to concrete analysis, the second half of this talk, which of course
will not appear in this talk at all, would have proceeded through a playful piece of nontra-
ditional scholarship: a mythopoetic reading or interpretation or whatever of the popular
computer game, “The Binding of Isaac” [see Figure 2.5].
Now this game is notoriously difficult to analyze, as it’s a messy mangle of intertextual
meanings and oblique cultural references. And it’s also very difficult to play, as an exem-
plar of the challenging rogue-like genre of computer game. But by accepting this messi-
ness and difficulty as the immutable condition of that game, “The Binding of Isaac” , and
eschewing traditional expectations of consistency and falsifiability in our analysis, my
hope was that we might begin to understand that the meaning of this game is found in
and through inconsistency and messiness. My interpretation of this game is that it’s a
game about a scared-shitless kid, who draws as a means of coping with things that are
beyond his understanding... and I think it took me about 100 hours of playing it to come
to that opinion. And I might totally be wrong. Anyway, in this way a playfully inconsistent
analysis of this game could perhaps model an alternative to traditional computer game
scholarship, and even offer a viable new ontological commitment to scholars who seek to
2.1 M onologue: “What is a game?” 15
Figure 2.5 : In this screenshot of the origi-
nal version of The Binding of I saac , the user-
controller character of Isaac is shooting his
tears vertically, presumably at one of the two
monsters above him. Screenshot taken by
User:Brightgalrs on Wikipedia.
20: I was thinking here specifically of Stuart
Hall’s talk, “Cultural Studies and its Theoret-
ical Legacies” , but also of the general temper-
ament of his work.
21: Bateson, Gregory. “A Theory of Play and
Fantasy” . STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND.
New York: Ballentine Books, 1972 (pp. 178-179)
22: ibid, p. 180.
better understand the meaning of computer games. But you’ll have to read the essay, and
make up your own minds.
For now, I’ll simply continue gesturing at play itself as a possible ontological foundation
for the study of computer games. I’m going to critically reframe several ideas and con-
cepts that I’ve gleaned from early scholars of games – “gleaned” , a word I like, it invokes
harvest and the repeated plowing of the same field, seems to me very appropriate here at
a conference like this, right? Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve had to continually re-sow
and re-plow the same field for quite some time, in order to reap any benefits. And fur-
ther, I’ve had to borrow tools from other disciplines and people, especially from the field
of cultural studies as of late, and fertilize my field with even more thinkers’ ideas. I haven’t
harvested it all yet, and my field is still too large and too disorderly to view well through
the lens of this bloated talk, but hopefully you’ll forgive my exuberance and just continue
to play along. Even though it’s late.
How we all doing? Everyone still okay? Thank you. You’re all amazing! Okay, so for now
I’ll just follow Stuart Hall’s lead, and put some ideas into play.
20
2.1. 3 P arado xical P la y
Beginning with the work of Gregory Bateson, I’ve come to understand play as an important
evolutionary step in animal cognition.
21
Now this is to say that play precedes (for Bateson)
language, logic, and human culture, and indeed logic and language require play and could
not be formulated without it. This is because play for Bateson involves animals signaling
signals as signals to one another, i.e. as signs that do not refer literally to or denote an
actual referent or object. This is his famous quote: “The playful nip denotes the bite,” says
Bateson, “but it does not know what would be denoted by the bite.”
22
16 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
23: ibid, pp. 180, 184.
24: To be more precise, it is “a negative state-
ment containing an implicit negative metas-
tatement”; to be even more precise, it is the
assertion of “a class of classes which are not
members of themselves” , see ibid, p. 186, for
these quotes in this footnote, and p. 180 for
context of original citation in essay.
25: ibid, 182
26: ibid, p. 193.
27: ibid, p. 180.
28: ibid, 189
29: ibid, 188
30: Among other things, I see this as one
of the implicit messages in Bateson’s meta-
logues, all of which take place between a fa-
ther and a daughter. Bateson is there teach-
ing a child to value and enjoy difficult, philo-
sophical thought via dialogue and a kind of
dialectic – a practice that is at least as old as
Plato.
Now these dogs are engaged in abstract thought – but more importantly it is paradoxi-
cal thought. It’s a paradox of communication, like the phrase, “This is not an academic
talk.” Bateson’s quote, and the dogs’ thought, is a paradox of self-reference similar to the
Cretean citizen Epimenides’ famous declaration, “All Cretans are liars.”
23
In Bateson’s
sentence, the word “denote” is used in two different ways, which are treated as synony-
mous, making this statement logically inadmissible.
24
In addition, Bateson’s sentence is
paradox on another level: the animals are communicating about something which does
not exist.
25
But despite this double paradox, animals play all the time and play success-
fully.
Now this simple but profound fact prompts Bateson to make what I think is a dazzling
observation, quoted here:
We believe that the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance
in all communication more complex than that of mood signals [like grunts]
and that, without these paradoxes, communication would be at an end. Life
would then be an endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with
rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor.
26
That’d be terrible. So it is not in spite of the double paradox of play, but because of it, that
animals are able to engage in more complex communicative acts. As Bateson says, the
logician Bertrand Russell would not have been able to formulate his logical ideals, such as
that of the “infinite regress” , were he not able to violate those ideals.
27
2.1.4 Framin g I deas as P la y
Bateson also deploys the concept of the frame, around this “dogs playing poker” [see Fig-
ure2.6] here, as a metaphor for describing how the cognitive process of play actually
works. Like the frame around this painting, the frame of play signals where one draws
the line between two categories or two logical types. Importantly, this frame is always
necessarily permeable, i.e. the frame is understood as play by play. Again I hear echoes of
Paul Martin’s talk in something like that. Bateson asserts that humans use actual frames,
in fact, because they like to externalize their psychological characteristics – and perhaps
most crucially for our game here, frames indicate in humans, quote, “a preference for
avoiding the paradoxes of abstraction” .
28
This is to say that, for Bateson, humans use
frames and logic to avoid paradoxical thinking, i.e. play.
I’ve gleaned from Bateson the idea that play is fundamental to logical, rational thought,
and that such thought would not exist and would stagnate without play... but that hu-
mans prefer to avoid playful thinking, to some extent, and that it can in fact make them
uncomfortable.
29
Further, Bateson has indicated that play precedes human culture. In
tandem, these concepts suggest to me: first, that play is not only critically important from
an evolutionary standpoint but also from an ontological standpoint, as human thought
stagnates without play – I’m thinking here about how people, when they get older, will
often talk about playing games and how important that is to them, that the moment you
stop playing games is the moment that you’re just, that you might as well just go to a
nursing home, right? Is this ringing true for everyone? Now second, Bateson’s work is
profoundly important to culture in that we must encourage people to play, and acclimate
them to that play in many situations, particularly if we value logical rational thought.
30
One only needs to imagine young students disinterestedness around modern art, or their
2.1 M onologue: “What is a game?” 17
Figure 2.6 : This is an unattributed remix
or reimagining of a painting, “A Waterloo”
(1906), from the original and well-known
“Dogs Playing Poker” series by Cassius Mar-
cellus Coolidge.
31: Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study
of the Play-Element in Culture. London:
Routledge, 1949 (p. 1)
32: ibid, 2
33: These appear throughout, but are intro-
duced in Homo Ludens directly on pp. 4-5.
34: ibid, 3
striking discomfort with and resistance to poetry, to understand the broader cultural im-
plications.
Poetry and art are places where deeply held ideas and ideals are played with, reconsidered,
and sometimes presented as mere frames. To value poetry and painting, then, is to value
a kind of playful thinking, and an ontological commitment that makes people uncomfort-
able, despite its deep cognitive embeddedness and profound evolutionary importance.
Now, as a lover of poetry and a stalwart defender of rational thought, Johan Huizinga’s
thinking aligns with Bateson’s in several significant ways. Like Bateson, Huizinga sees
play as preceding humans and human culture. “Play is older than culture,” he says in the
first line of HOMO LUDENS, “and animals did not wait for us to teach them their play-
ing.”
31
...I mean, unless it’s with a Playstation or something. In addition he also sees play
as significant, and as signification, as having a significant function. It’s no accident then
that, in HOMO LUDENS, Huizinga almost immediately criticizes previous studies of play,
in much the same way that I earlier criticized them: as always, quote, “beginning from the
assumption that play must serve something which is not play.”
32
Huizinga rejects this out-
right and, with Bateson, is steadfast in indicating the primary, irreducible, and significant
quality of play, as well as its capacity for resisting analysis in a myriad of ways.
Play is its own master, play is irrational, plays is freedom. These are the fundamental
tenets of Huizinga’s study, HOMO LUDENS.
33
Further more, play cannot be denied, and
this is a quote, “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth,
goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”
34
Wow. When read along-
side Bateson, we begin to see a portrait of play emerge in which play supersedes logic and
rational thought, and perhaps produces and directs rational thought. Further, Huizinga
indicates that this originary capacity of play is not limited to logic and rationality. He says,
18 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
35: ibid, 4
36: ibid, 4
37: ibid, 17. Note that Bateson refers to this
process, in part, in the transition from sig-
nificant acts that indicate, “This is play,” to
those that instead ask, “Is this play?” , and
more complicated things.
38: ibid, 17
39: ibid, 4
40: This is, in fact, the theme of Ch. 7, “Play
and Poetry” , as well as one of the main con-
clusions of the text. Huizinga sees poetry as
the place where playful and refined thinking
is being preserved, and wishes to continue to
preserve it in the face of the changes around
him, i.e. the rise of fascism. This is a strain
of modernist, Enlightenment thought that is
borne throughout HOMO LUDENS.
41: Hall, S. and T. Jefferson (Ed.). Resistance
through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-
war Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976 (p. 39).
Note that the actual quote is that ‘subordinate
classes live their subordination’ .
quote, “the great archetypical activities of human society are all permeated with play from
the start.”
35
So, implicitly, play is presented here as a fundamental ontological practice.
One might go so far as to use Huizinga to revise the Cartesian, “Cogito ergo sum” , by in-
stead asserting: “I play, therefore I am” . As Huizinga states, you acknowledge mind in
acknowledging play.
36
Huizinga also sees play as evolving, as Bateson does, from a simple kind of play that’s
common to all animals, into a more complex play that only begins to emerge later in so-
ciety.
37
Then, he says, “what was wordless play assumes poetic form.”
38
Now, he’s inter-
ested in these forums, and the repetition and the rituals, and he sees in play an imaginative
and expressive capacity, which imbues life with meaning. And this is a quote: “In giving
expression to life, man creates a second poetic world alongside the world of nature.”
39
The generative, poetic potential of play is a theme throughout HOMO LUDENS... as is his
steadfast belief in the evolved forms of poetry and play... and that, in those forms, we find
the refinement of human thought. And Huizinga wants desperately to hold fast to those
refined forms, those poetic forms, precisely because he wants to protect rational, logical
thought.
40
2.1. 5 Frames and Boundaries
That Huizinga is revealed in HOMO LUDENS as a staunch defender of modern enlightment
thought may cast suspicion upon his definition of play, which is presented here, and in-
deed that definition also ironically fails to meet the standards of falsifiability. It’s strange.
But this in no way invalidates Huizinga’s work. Quite the contrary. For if we simply locate
and situate Huizinga’s thought within its historical context, and free ourselves from the
false prison of absolutist logic, we begin to see that Huizinga–like everyone else–simply
could not escape ideology. Not the ideology he used to resist domination, and speak out
against fascism. And not the Nazi hegemony that imprisoned him for three years at De
Steeg in the Netherlands, just a six hour drive west of here, where he was eventually mur-
dered in 1945. And he wrote substantial portions of HOMO LUDENS while he was interred
there. [NOTE: These facts are inaccurate. Huizinga was interred by Nazis from August to
October 1942, then lived in a colleague’s house in De Steeg until he died in February 1945,
just weeks before the end of the Nazi regime. Further, HOMO LUDENS was complete in
1938; Huizinga was revising it for translation until the time of his death. And finally: he
was not murdered.] And we cannot expect escape of him, in his work, nor can we expect
that of our contemporaries, nor of ourselves. As Stuart Hall says, or said, “We live our
subjugation not as theory, but as a concrete, lived experience.”
41
For Huizinga, the concrete was all too real, the play in the field too rigid in form, and
the ontological commitments of others too serious and too brutal to change. I live my
subordination to ideology as well, as we all do, but the comparatively privileged position
of my subordinating ideology offers, among many other privileges, the vantage points of
cultural studies and postmodernism.
This is to say that, alongside my intellectual interest in poetry and ontology, I’m also con-
stantly on the lookout [see Figure2.7] for that postmodern Unholy Grail: the impossible
circular self-contradicting paradoxical origin. The center that’s not a center, the myth
that both is and is not a myth. The new foundation for human knowledge, that is some-
how not new. With Bateson and especially with Huizinga, we begin to see the possibility
that play–the fundamental but paradoxical cognitive process in human practice, which
2.1 M onologue: “What is a game?” 19
Figure 2.7 : Isaac gaining the “Holy Grail” power-up item in The Binding of I saac: Rebirth .
42: I’m thinking here of Heidegger’s Poetry,
Language, and Thought which–as may be of
interest to those of us in a practice-based arts
research department–contains the worst po-
etry I have ever read in my life. Martin Hei-
degger might as well have been a Vogon.
43: Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of
Play. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001 (p. 8)
precedes and perhaps serves as the genesis of human culture–could be seen as an origin
for an impossible postmodern map that has, incredibly, always been ready at hand.
I find this inspiring, and I say so here to acknowledge part of my ideological frame, and
also to echo Huizinga’s abiding belief that play and poetry can be places of resistance and
freedom. This is not to say that play and poetry necessarily are places of resistance, nor of
any other particular value or goal. While Huizinga saw poetry as inherently playful, and as
a kind of last bastion of play in a world of institutions drained of their play, it nevertheless
remains the case that American poet Ezra Pound was a fascist. And Heidegger, who was
a terrible poet by the way, just horrible, Heidegger’s exploitation of poetry and poetic
thought must be read against his honored place as Hitler’s favorite philosopher.
42
So it
goes.
All of this is to say that I agree with Bryan Sutton-Smith: play is fundamentally ambiguous,
and the primary problem one faces in studying play is that the bulk of play theories are,
in fact, ideological rhetoric.
43
Sutton-Smith is hesitant to offer a definition of play, in THE
AMBIGUITY OF PLAY, in part due to the fundamental ambiguity inherent in play, but also
in part because of the omnipresence of these ideological rhetorics. His is a scientist’s
perspective, and his caution is that of a scientist. I’m going to read this full quote, which
is only partly here [on the presentation slides]:
In addition, I must caution that the search for a definition of play at this time
is a search only for metaphors that can act as a rhetoric for what might ul-
timately become adequate scientific processural accounts. While it is com-
mon to call such metaphors ’hypotheses’ , to dignify the undertaking as a sci-
20 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
44: ibid, 218
45:
I had grossly overprepared for this talk, in
part because I thought I’d have more time
– and, in larger part, because I was ner-
vous and excited. So I cut the talk short
here. The next section §2.2 contains the
portion of the talk that I cut. I’m includ-
ing it here for several reasons:
• It serves as a natural bridge to
the third section of this chap-
ter §2.3, “When Did You First
Play The Binding of I saac ?” , in
that it elaborates on the nature
and goals of mythopoetic schol-
arship;
• It exemplifies the techniques of
collage (and bricolage) that drive
this dissertation;
• It highlights the failures of the
talk, its imperfections and over-
reach, but reclaims and reha-
bilitates this writing as legiti-
mate knowledge production, as
primary source material (that is
normally hidden away or lost),
and as another polygraphic voice
in this dissertation.
Too, this subsecton (“Pausing the Game”)
is an example of how I’m often forced, as
a public intellectual, to improvise on the
source material I’ve created. The opening
to this chapter is another example of this.
Improvisation is at the core of what I do,
how I make, and the means through which
I express my ideas, beliefs, and commit-
ments. Thus, it would do my work a dis-
service to exclude such moments of im-
provisation from this dissertation.
entific one, the truth of the matter is that what I produce here is a metaphor-
ical melange representing the possibility of a truth yet to be discovered. A
cynic might say that most of social science is a play of metaphors aspiring
to be measurable processes. Since the scholars who create these metaphors
hope to take the next steps towards science, we cannot say that they are
merely poets or players, and their intentions absolve them from the charge
that this is only a language game.
44
So one need not be a scientist, or draw the same conclusions, to glean an incredible wealth
of fertile ideas from this paragraph. Sutton-Smith here asserts the value of metaphorical
melange as part of a knowledge-seeking practice, oriented toward truth yet to be discov-
ered. Further, he offers the intent behind the practice, one might call it an orientation, as
a means of validating that practice, i.e. the seeking of knowledge validates that seeking as
a kind of self-reflexive loop. And while he denigrates poetry and play here, I must forgive
him his own flourish of ideological rhetoric, for as a recovering social scientist myself, I am
well aware of the need to defend the ‘serious’ scientific underpinnings of social science,
especially when speaking to power. That this is something Smith is aware of, the poetic
playful aspects of his book, is all the fuel that my ontological commitment requires.
2.1.6 P ausin g the G ame
So I think I can move through some of this stuff, because I know that we’re short on time.
45
Here I would have talked a little bit about the metaphors of choice that seemed... the pre-
dominant metaphors of choice for so many postmodern thinkers are appropriated from
psychiatry, and I would’ve discussed therapy as a practice of practicing play, that sort
of emerges from thinking about Sutton-Smith and thinking about Bateson as well, right,
that the schizophrenic for example, for them, is someone who’s incapable of playing, and
also incapable of stopping playing, right? And that that connects in interesting ways to
Wittgenstein’s desire to stop doing philosophy when he wants to... I would’ve talked a
little bit about Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE…
And I really would’ve liked to talk about “The Binding of Isaac” – who here has played “The
Binding of Isaac”? One, two, three... That’s not enough. It’s a wonderful game. It puts a lot
of people off because of the grotesque imagery that you might see in it... and it can present
as a game that’s really, more than anything else, about a kind of remix of the Abrahamic
myth of the binding of Isaac. But the game is so much richer than that. And I hope you all
get the chance to play it, and maybe read what I had planned to talk about here, because I
really believe that there is a kind of alternative criticism or interpretive practice or what
have you, that awaits games scholars and that postmodern thinkers talked about for quite
some time, right, the mythopoetic, a practice of making myths, which understands itself
as a myth and a practice, which I would have talked about in another section.
But the title of the other section I would have read is called, “When Did You First Play ’The
Binding of Isaac’?” . Henry Jenkins was kind enough to publish it on his blog some time
back, so you can find it at that url. If you want to search it through Google, I’d recommend
putting quotes around it, otherwise it can sometimes be hard to find the direct link. And
I’d love to continue speaking with you all, if any of you like to stay after and chat with me. I
can stay as long as you like. But for now feel free to contact me through Twitter, or e-mail,
or smoke signals, whatever, we’ll continue playing this game, and thanks again for playing
2.2 I nternal Dialogue: “H ow do you play?” 21
46: I’m thinking here of Adorno’s essay,
“Perennial Fashion – Jazz” , which I would crit-
icize as being deeply, and ironically, classist.
And snobbish, at that.
47: Apologies, but I’m thinking here of too
many cultural studies folks to properly cite
this right now. Suffice to say that I re-
ceived this dual externalization/internaliza-
tion of ideology from various readings across
my reading lists, and it’s definitely there
in places as diverse as Stuart Hall’s essays,
Jamaica Kincaid’s A SMALL PLACE, Angela
Carter’s THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES
OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN, Judith Butler’s GEN-
DER TROUBLE, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg
Manifesto” , and basically any serious contri-
bution to postmodern thought that explicitly
troubles the internal/external divide in dis-
cussions of ideology.
48: I’m thinking specifically here of PHILO-
SOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS §133, but it’s
a holistic part of (and interpretation of)
Wittgenstein’s work that I take as commonly
shared.
49: STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, p. 190
50: ibid, 191
51:
This is perhaps the purest and most per-
sonal distillation of my lived practice,
holistically conceived. For play to become
an ontological commitment, it requires a
commitment to pr acticing play – in other
words, a commitment to ther apy.
52: ibid, 19-20
with me and ideas and for sticking around through this last long talk of the day. Cheers
everyone.
2.2 Int e rnal Dial ogue: “H o w do y ou pla y?”
[slide 32]
From Sutton-Smith, I have primarily extracted detailed confirmation that ideology is of-
ten mistaken for play. This is a powerful lens through which to re-read Huizinga, who
asserts that much of what is regarded as play in his present was in fact what he called
‘false play’ . Taken on its own, this aspect of Homo Ludens smacks of a contextual but deep
suspicion of popular culture, which troubles Huizinga’s work in much the same way as it
should trouble Adorno’s.
46
But through the social psychology of Sutton-Smith, we can in-
stead begin to see how ‘false play’ might be productively reframed as ‘ideological rhetoric’ ,
which is importantly both external and internal to the individual (as with all ideology).
47
And despite his caution, we can also enjoy Sutton-Smith’s invitation to accept his book as
metaphorical, and to live with the ambiguity of play, if only for a while.
[slide 33]
The metaphors of choice for so many postmodern thinkers are appropriated from the
languages of psychology and psychiatry. Wittgenstein, perhaps the first postmodernist,
sees philosophy and its questions not simply as language games, but ultimately as a kind
of therapy, as a practice of ameliorating the torment of nagging uncertainties.
48
Bateson
describes schizophrenia as “the patient’s failure to recognize the metaphoric nature of his
fantasies”
49
– in other words, as an inability to play.
[slide 34]
Therapy, then, is the practice of practicin g pla y,
50
i.e. trying to improve at play, and of
changing the game within which the patient is trapped.
51
In fact, Bateson’s philosophy
might also be seen as therapy, if we compare his description of schizophrenia treatment
to his description of his ‘metalogue’ form: “The point is that the purpose of these conver-
sations is to discover the ‘rules.’ It’s like life – a game whose purpose is to discover the
rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.”
52
In such juxtaposi-
tion, we might suddenly see Bateson’s work through a surprisingly dark glass.
[slide 35]
It would not surprise me if the relationship between play and therapy were undertheorized
(particularly among adults), but I am not trained as a psychologist nor as a psychiatrist,
and I am not particularly familiar with the literature of these fields. Further, I have my
misgivings about the metaphorical use of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses as a
conceptual frame. So, normally, I would remain silent. But in this case, I believe there
are two questions worth posing before I move on. First: if theorists like Frederic Jame-
son and Mark Roelofs are correct, and the postmodern condition is one best described
(metaphorically) as “schizophrenia” , then would it be fruitful to read their work against
Bateson’s framing of schizophrenia as an inability to play? In other words, perhaps play
is the center, the point of origin, we need in this postmodern moment? And second: if I
ask whether one needs to be trained as a therapist to practice therapy, is this question like
asking whether a person needs to be trained as a painter to practice painting, or trained
as a poet to practice poetry? What can, or should, we say about these things?
22 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
53: Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
WRITING AND DIFFERENCE. Trans. Alan
Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. (Note: my
current copy is numbered contiguously from
1-13, as a standalone document; I do not have
this book right now, and am not certain from
where my current copy originated. The quote
cited here is from p. 1 of my document.)
54: ibid, 2
55: The same could be said of the game Nu-
clear Thr one , for example, which might serve
as an interesting counterpoint in a more tra-
ditional comparative, interpretive analysis.
56: ibid, 2
57: ibid, 3
58: ibid, 3
59: ibid, 1
60: ibid, 5
61: ibid, 6
62: i.e. therapy.
[slide 36]
I do not feel qualified to answer these questions, but I do feel qualified to call myself a
“poet” , and it is the poet’s practice I wish to use in my research. In reflecting on this
desire, and on the above questions, I have lately been reckoning with Jacques Derrida’s
essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” , which appears
in his book WRITING AND DIFFERENCE. Derrida’s essay presents the “notion of a struc-
ture lacking any center” as the representative, unthinkable result of the postmodern rup-
ture.
53
[slide 37]
After the loss of any transcendental signifier around which to center discourse, Derrida
says, the “domain and the interplay of signification [is extended] ad infinitum,”
54
as struc-
ture itself becomes folded into the discourse. Consider this condition against a ”rogue-
like” videogame such as The Binding of I saac , a game which can be played indefinitely, with
neither a traditional beginning nor a definitive ending, and where the avatar (i.e. signi-
fier) of Isaac is constantly changing, replicating, mutating, dying, returning...
55
This is not
merely a problem of scope nor of ending, but also of the practice of critique, as without
the tools of transcendental metaphysics (and all that they imply), without the language
and position of metaphysics, we cannot critique metaphysics, because there is no sense in
it.
56
[slide 38]
In recognizing this lack of sense, Derrida makes an important move: he abandons the
signifier as a metaphysical concept entirely.
57
Because this concept is bound up in the
totalizing, ideological narrative(s) of hegemony, it is complicit in any critique of hegemony;
nevertheless, we cannot give this complicity up without giving up the critique as well.
58
This is the fundamental issue to which I have been alluding, the condition of critique (and
scholarship) which gives me so much anxiety. As Derrida says, “anxiety is invariably the
result of certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of
being as it were from the very beginning at stake it the game.”
59
In other words, the loss
of the transcendental ontological center and its referent leaves the critic, the scholar, and
the philosopher inexorably caught in the mangle of hegemony – and anxious as a lost,
confused child.
[slide 39]
In part, Derrida identifies this as a problem of str ategy, and following Levi-Strauss he opts
to embrace the strategic utility of empiricism. No longer does empirical research involve
nor lead toward “truth” as such; its value is instead in its efficacy, and its availability as
destructive tools that are ready-at-hand in the critics’ practice of resistance.
60
In place
of traditional philosophical critique, Derrida (following Levi-Strauss) substitutes brico-
lage, the process of using ready-at-hand materials and tools to make something.
61
For the
character of Isaac, this practice of making (of drawing pictures) is a way for him to try to
understand and cope with his world.
62
For Derrida, a bricoleur’s process of making is im-
portantly self-aware and self-reflexive, especially in that it sees itself as an act of making
that lacks any transcendental center, any guiding structure that is “true” or “foundational” .
The bricoleur is making myths, and is aware of this.
[NOTE: Point out Isaac’s shadow, thumb, and materials in the screenshot [see Figure 2.8].]
2.3 M etalogue: “What is an essay?” 23
Figure 2.8 : In this screenshot from the original
version of The Binding of I saac , we see a draw-
ing made by the Isaac character; he has drawn
himself sitting under a kind of spotlight, cre-
ated by the light from the room above him, af-
ter falling into his basement throgh a hidden
trap door in his bedroom. I would here call at-
tention to the shadow of Isaac’s body, cast over
the drawing; Isaac’s thumb, pressed down in
the bottom-left corner of the frame; and the
pencil next to the drawing. All of these fea-
tures suggest that Isaac is the artist here, i.e.
that Isaac is the narrative’s designer.
63: This is to say: mythopoeisis can be un-
derstood as therapy.
64: ibid, 7
65: ibid, 7
66:
Following this commitment, I am con-
cluding this chapter with an essay titled,
“When Did You First Play The Binding of
I saac? (Again?)” , which appeared on the
HASTAC website on 04 November 2014.
This essay was an attempt to “replay” my
original essay, to re-release it, in an effort
to call attention to the practical, ontologi-
cal, and scholarly necessities that dictated
its form and function.
67: Constance Steinkuehler, “The Mangle of
Play” . Games and Cultur e, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2006).
See p. 211.
[slide 40]
M ythopoeisis can be understood here as a practice of makin g m yths w hich unde rstands
itself as a m yth and a practice.
63
It deserves no referential privilege; there is no unity, nor
absolute source.
64
Instead, it represents an abandonment of the structure of (traditional)
philosophical discourse, and an embracing of a mythopoetic discourse, that has “the form
of that which it speaks.”
65
For Derrida, this move allows him and others to continue to use
philosophy, but in a different way, as just another tool that is ready-at-hand. And most
importantly, it allows for the re-entry of that which was lost to philosophy when it lost its
center, the aspect of philosophy without which critique and knowledge formation could
no longer proceed: the aspect of fr eepla y.
[slide 41]
Following this, I would like to offer a piece of mythopoetic scholarship on the videogame
The Binding of I saac as both an experiment in, and exemplar of, an ontological commitment
to playfully self-aware scholarship.
66
Part of this self-awareness is my recognition that
most everything in this essay could be (and probably is) wrong. The essay was originally
written in the Spring of 2013, and since then a completely new version of the game – called
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth – has been released to great public acclaim. So it goes with
games scholarship. As Constance Steinkuehler described it so well: “[B]y the time this
short essay is circulated, the practices I have described will have evolved and changed
and the descriptions I’ve given will no longer be accurate or complete” .
67
2. 3 M etal ogue: “ W hat is an essa y?”
Hi, HASTAC! My name is Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz; I’m a designer at RUST LTD., and a
Provost’s Fellow in the Media Arts and Practice PhD program at the University of South-
ern California. This is my fourth year as a HASTAC Scholar, so in lieu of a traditional
introductory post, I’d like to try something a little different.
24 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
68: Again: Steinkuehler, “The Mangle of
Play” , p. 211
69:
This phrase is an oblique reference to
§309 in: Wittgenstein, Ludwig. PHILO-
SOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. G. E. M.
Anscombe, trans. Oxford: Blackwell
(1998). Each italicized block of text in
this section (i.e. the essay that follows)
is a quotation from PHILOSOPHICAL IN-
VESTIGATIONS, hereafter abbreviated as
“PI” . Wittgenstein’s THE BIG TYPESCRIPT
(1929) is abbreviated as “BT” .
70: [PI §115]
71: PI §70
One of my all-time favorite videogames, The Binding of Isaac, has just this morning been
re-released. In fact, it’s been remade from the ground up, as an entirely “new” game,
called The Binding of I saac: Rebirth . With this in mind, I thought I’d reblog an essay of
mine, “When Did You First Play The Binding of I saac ?” , which originally appeared at Henry
Jenkins’s weblog, Confessions of an Aca-F an, in March 2013.
My hope is that reblogging this essay now will not only introduce you to my approach to
games criticism, but also to the instability that always surrounds such writing — because,
as of this morning, most everything in my essay could be (and probably is) wrong. As
Constance Steinkuehler described it so well, “[b]y the time this short essay is circulated,
the practices I have described will have evolved and changed and the descriptions I’ve
given will no longer be accurate or complete” .
68
So it goes. Games are messy mangles of practices, both cultural and subjective, always
contingent and always changing. Perhaps all games criticism can do is introduce and pre-
serve one perspective on some of those practices, like a photo of a fly in a jar, and of the
hand that held them. Hopefully, some of you will enjoy the photo (and the hand), and
maybe a few of you will “let the fly out of the jar,”
69
too. In any event, thanks for reading
— I’d love to hear your thoughts!
2. 3.1 “ W he n Did Y ou First P la y The Binding of I saac ?”
*
A pictur e held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language
seemed to r epeat it to us inexor ably.
70
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac sometime during the winter months of 2011.
This is to say that I watched one of its trailers, a short cinematic animation which explained
the videogame’s backstory. Which is to say I watched the introductory cinematic cut-
scene of The Binding of Isaac and mistook it as an advertisement. I have no memory of
this viewing; it is merely implied by other memories, and other images. Perhaps these
images are inaccurate?
*
N o, that is not what it means. And I should not accept any pictur e as exact, in this sense.
71
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac in late January or early February 2012. My
two best friends were visiting from Buffalo, NY, and both had become enamored with the
game. I remember glancing at their computer screens from time to time, while they sat
playing on my couch, each on their own laptop. The game looked interesting, by which
I mean I largely ignored it and focused on schoolwork. (My spring semester had already
started.) Then my friends showed me the opening cut-scene again. I remember feeling
stunned: someone had remixed Chapter 22 of Genesis as a videogame about child abuse,
evangelical Christianity, and schizophrenia. The game looked fantastic. I knew I had seen
the opening cut scene before, but had no memory of its content. But how could this be
true? How could I have seen the trailer but been entirely unaffected by it?
*
I n the sense in which ther e ar e pr ocesses (including mental pr ocesses) which ar e char acteristic
2.3 M etalogue: “What is an essay?” 25
72: PI §154
73: PI §66
74: PI §191
75: PI §125
of understanding, understanding is not a mental pr ocess. (A pain ’ s gr owing mor e and less; the
hearing of a tune or a sentence: these ar e mental pr ocesses.)
72
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 9:55 PM PST.
My wife and I went with some friends to a theater in North Hollywood, and caught the
premiere showing of Indie Game: The Movie. The film follows Edmund McMillen, the
designer and artist behind The Binding of Isaac, as he and his friend prepare to release
their game Super Meat Boy to the XBox platform. I cannot remember if the film mentions
or depicts The Binding of Isaac at all. But as I watched the film, I thought, “Oh yeah, The
Binding of Isaac!” I believe I bought the game soon thereafter. Thanks to my email, I am
certain of the date and time of the film.
*
What is common to them all? Don ’t say: “Ther e must be something common, or they would not
be called ’games ”’ , but look and see whether ther e is anything common to all. F or if you look
at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, r elationships, and a
whole series of them at that. T o r epeat: don ’t think, but look!
73
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 sometime
between 1 and 5 PM PST. I was attending a session of “CNTV 600: Medium Specificity,”
a graduate-level course taught by Prof. Henry Jenkins in the School of Cinematic Arts
at the University of Southern California. The theme for that class session was “Medium
Specificity in Game Studies,” and as a student who studies and designs videogames I was
asked to introduce a few notable contemporary games to the class. I began by screening
the opening cinematic from The Binding of Isaac. When the clip was finished, someone
asked me a question about what the game was like. I remember thinking: “How the hell
should I know?”
*
But have you a model for this? N o. I t is just that this expr ession suggests itself to us. As the
r esult of the cr ossing of differ ent pictur es.
74
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on two separate occasions between early October and
mid-November 2012. During that period of time, I was preparing three new videogames
for a gallery show at USC; I worked long hours most days. I hadn’t played a new videogame
in months, and I needed to try something new so I could write a short paper for CNTV 600:
Medium Specificity. Twice, I tried to take a break from design work, and I launched The
Binding of Isaac. I don’t recall what happened the first time, but the second time I fell
asleep on my keyboard during its opening cinematic.
*
The fundamental fact her e is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then
when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we ar e ther efor e as it
wer e entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand
(i.e. get a clear view of).
75
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. My gallery show had just ended,
26 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
76: PI §309
77: PI §290
78: BT, §300e
and it was time to take a short break from work. I remember sitting down at my desk–
it must have been Sunday, November 18th–and playing Team Fortress 2 for about ten or
twenty minutes. I have played over 800 hours of Team Fortress 2 over the course of the
past four years; it is a kind of habitual action, a comfortable pattern of thinking, like shoot-
ing baskets alone at a park. This is why my wife told me to stop, when she came into the
room. She said it was time for something new. So I launched The Binding of Isaac.
*
What is your aim in philosophy?-—T o shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
76
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on Sunday, November 18th, 2012. I was hooked almost
immediately.
*
What I do is not, of course, to identify my sensation by cri teria: but to r epeat an expr ession.
But this is not the end of the language-game: it is the beginning.
77
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on Monday, November 19th, 2012. I’d played the game
for hours the day before, but somehow it felt like I was playing a new game again. In part,
this is because of the freshness and volume of the game’s content, much of which cannot
be accessed until it is unlocked through successful gameplay. Different content appears
in different playthroughs, so you never know what you’ll encounter in a given level. More-
over, the game’s levels are procedurally-generated; they are created algorithmically, via
a set of instructions, rather than being pre-designed and static. This means that each
playthrough of The Binding of Isaac happens in a substantially new space, with unpre-
dictable configurations of content. This also means that there is no one version of the
game world. Instead, the game reveals itself as a kind of mindset one brings to bear on
arbitrary content in an unstable architectural configuration.
*
As is fr equently the case with work in ar chitectur e, work on philosophy is actually closer to
working on oneself. On one’ s own understanding. On the way one sees things. (And on what
one demands of them.)
78
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac throughout late November 2012. The game remained
surprisingly fresh, despite hours and hours of gameplay. Each time I played, I saw new
configurations of space and content. Too, I saw that space and content offer new configu-
rations of the game’s central character. The Binding of Isaac is a “roguelike,” a colloquial
term for a videogame featuring randomization in levels and content, as well as permanent
character death. This means that roguelikes usually afford opportunities for character
progression through a random distribution of power-ups and magical items. These items
traditionally increase (or decrease) the underlying statistics which govern your avatar’s
attributes, and thus its relationship to the surrounding level environments. The Binding
of Isaac takes this an unconventional step further: the items Isaac picks up also change
his physical appearance. Isaac is routinely changed by objects in strange and often pro-
found ways. His body grows, shrinks, and changes color and shape; his costumes change
him from Cain to Judas and back to Isaac again; sometimes he cross-dresses and becomes
Magdalene or Eve; other times he is deformed by reactions to pills; he sprouts wings, be-
comes a cyclops, or grows a tumor on his head. In these and other ways, The Binding of
2.3 M etalogue: “What is an essay?” 27
79: PI §563
80: PI §201
81: PI §499
Isaac becomes an ever-changing game defined in part through an unstable character, and
it follows that the meaning of the game becomes equally unstable.
*
Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its r ole in the game.
79
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. I can’t remember the exact date,
but it occurred when–for no apparent reason–I felt like watching the opening cinematic
again. To this point, I had always interpreted this introductory cut-scene quite literally:
Isaac’s mother was an evangelical Christian who one day started to hear God’s voice; this
voice instructed her to discipline Isaac for his sinful behaviors; eventually, the voice com-
manded her to kill Isaac, as a demonstration of her faith, and in true Abrahamic fashion
she picked up a kitchen knife; Isaac fled to his room, and then to the basement through
a trap door hidden beneath his bedroom’s carpet. This had long been my reading of the
opening cut-scene. But the longer I played the game, the more troublesome my interpre-
tation felt. When I watched the cut-scene, I noticed something new: Isaac’s thumb in the
bottom-left corner of the frame. And then I saw the shadow of Isaac’s head, looming over
his thumb. Suddenly, a cartoon fly buzzed through the frame. I was dumbfounded: how
had I never noticed these things before?
*
I t can be seen that ther e is a misunderstanding her e fr om the mer e fact that in the course of our
argument we give one interpr etation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a
moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it.
80
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. I still can’t remember the date,
but it was the day I realized that the game’s introductory cinematic was drawn by Isaac
himself. The opening cut-scene was the same story it had always been, but the author and
narrator had changed. And as I watched the introduction all the way through–perhaps
for the first time ever–I saw Isaac hang his drawing on the fourth wall, as an invisible
barrier separating him from me. It was then that I realized The Binding of Isaac is not a
remix of Chapter 22 of Genesis; neither is it about child abuse, evangelical Christians, nor
schizophrenia. In fact, it is not “about” anything. It is an habitual action, a commonplace
pattern of thinking. The Binding of Isaac is drawing.
*
But when one dr aws a boundary it may be for various kinds of r eason. I f I surr ound an ar ea
with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to pr event someone fr om getting in
or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the
boundary; or it may shew wher e the pr operty of one man ends and that of another begins; and
so on. So if I dr aw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am dr awing it for.
81
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in early December 2012. Already, I had logged more than
forty hours of gameplay. I had watched and listened to interviews with Edmund McMillen;
I had read reviews and interpretations of the game; I had talked extensively with the two
friends who had introduced me to Isaac. I had even played (and beaten) McMillen’s other
big game, Super Meat Boy. In short, I had been a diligent graduate student, preparing to
write a short seminar paper. My view remained that the game was best understood as
a habit of drawing, and when I situated that habit in relation to the game’s imagery and
28 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
82: PI §109
83: PI §123
cut-scenes (of which there are currently 14), that habit could be interpreted as a troubled
child’s means of escaping reality. It was an interesting reading of the game, and I’d even
found a blog post expressing a similar view, which McMillen himself described as “by far
the most mind blowingly accurate breakdown of the over-arching meaning behind the
Binding of Isaac’s ending” . Everything seemed to fit together. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet
purchased and installed the game’s expansion, The Wrath of the Lamb, which adds 80%
more content to the original game. McMillen has recently described the expansion as a
continuation of Isaac’s adventure, including “dream ideas” that didn’t appear in the origi-
nal game. I had turned into a serious fan of both Isaac and Isaac; how could I not complete
the adventure?
*
The pr oblems ar e solved, not by giving new information, but by arr anging what we have always
known.
82
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac throughout early to mid-December 2012. I installed The
Wrath of the Lamb expansion pack, consumed as much new content as possible, and dili-
gently worked toward some fuller understanding of the game. I found spare moments, in
breaks between work projects; I slept a little less. I played for twenty more hours, bring-
ing my total above sixty hours played. And after all that, I still wasn’t anywhere close to
unlocking the true, final ending of the game. I was exhausted and running low on time, so
one afternoon I decided to end the game right where it began. I gave up trying to win the
game myself, and instead I simply watched the game’s final ending on YouTube. My intent
was to finish playing The Binding of Isaac and start writing an interpretive essay about the
game. Instead, the game’s final cinematic cut-scene revealed an entirely different game,
and I had no idea how to play it.
*
A philosophical pr oblem has the form: “I don ’t know my way about ” .
83
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on an afternoon in mid-December 2012. I had just
watched the game’s final ending on YouTube, and in a flash it had changed my under-
standing of the entire game. I tried to regain perspective, and replayed the game in my
mind. The Binding of Isaac begins in Isaac’s bedroom, where the young boy is drawing
pictures and telling himself stories about his impending death at the hands of his crazed
mother. Isaac is constructing an adventure through his drawing practice, and that prac-
tice takes Isaac and you down through his home’s basement, down through caves and
into depths where he must fight and defeat his mother. When she is defeated, the player
unlocks a cut-scene (drawn by Isaac) showing Isaac’s victory over his mother. But this vic-
tory is short-lived, and Isaac must then continue “down” into his mother’s womb, where
he must defeat his mother’s heart. Once he has beaten both his mother and her heart ten
times–while inhabiting a number of biblical characters, each receiving their own unique
“ending” cinematic scenes–his mother’s heart is replaced by a giant fetus. Concurrently,
Isaac must travel down again into Sheol to fight the Devil, and then down (or up?) to a
cathedral where he fights himself, and after these battles even more “ending” cut-scenes
are unlocked. These scenes depict Isaac standing over his open toy chest, the chest in
which Isaac has found rewards in previous “endings” , but this time Isaac is rewarded with
perspective: he sees that he has been playing all of the characters in a fantasy world, and
in reality he has been in his bedroom the entire time. Reeling and conflicted, Isaac steps
2.3 M etalogue: “What is an essay?” 29
84: PI §539
85: PI §219
into his toy chest and closes it. This chest constitutes the final level of the game, and
once you beat the final level of The Binding of Isaac for the seventh time (at minimum),
you are rewarded with the game’s final “ending” . And this ending completely changed my
perspective on the game, as well as on my own perspective.
*
Thus I might supply the pictur e with the fancy that the smiler was smiling down on a child at
play, or again on the suffering of an enemy. This is in no way alter ed by the fact that I can also
take the at first sight gr acious situation and interpr et it differ ently by putting it into a wider
context.
84
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on an afternoon in mid-December 2012, while watching
the game’s final ending. In a game dominated by grotesque cartoon imagery, this cine-
matic is startling in its simplicity and plainness: it is a sequence of polaroids, found by
Isaac in the chest in this room. This sequence of snapshots depicts a loose retelling of im-
portant moments in Isaac’s life. The player is shown Isaac standing between his mother
and his now-absent father; this constitutes his father’s first appearance in the game, and
the entire trio is smiling in an outdoor setting. The next image shows Isaac’s mother with
what looks like a young girl, in the same outdoor scene, again introducing a new charac-
ter (a sister?) or a new perspective on old characters (mother and cross-dressing Isaac?)
who are, again, smiling. Next, a few particularly open-ended images: Isaac photograph-
ing himself, unhappy, with a shadowy figure behind him; Isaac’s parents, looking happy
together outdoors; Isaac alone outdoors, looking sad; Isaac leaning back against his chest,
head hung down, hands covering his face. And then, the sequence ends with two stark,
powerful, and totally ambiguous images. Next to last, an action shot of Isaac’s mother
brandishing a knife, with absolutely no context in the image. Finally, a view from behind
Isaac and his mother, as they watch what can only be the father walking down a road, and
off into the distance. The plainness of these images contrasts powerfully with the game’s
dark and disturbing comic-book aesthetic, lending an unprecedented feel of resolution to
the game. That said, the ambiguity of the final images completely upends that resolution:
At whom was the Mother brandishing a knife? Was she the monster we’ve seen depicted
throughout the game? Or could she be a misunderstood, exaggerated fabrication of her
son’s troubled mind? We are left with one strong clue: in the center of the final frame,
Isaac’s arm is extended toward his mother, and his hand rests on her back. This opens
up the game to an entirely different perspective, of a mother and son in a single-parent
household, where Isaac has been struggling to understand what has happened between
his parents, and who he and his mother have become as a result. Moreover, it presents
the possibility that The Binding of Isaac was a powerful re-imagining of the original Gen-
esis text all along: the Mother as heroic, knife-wielding defender of her son, who expels
Abraham from their home. Here at the end, I felt another beginning, another game waiting
to be played.
*
N o; my description only made sense if it was to be understood symbolically.—I should have
said: This is how it strikes me.
85
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac while I was writing this essay. The act of writing about
the game has, in retrospect, presented itself to me as a kind of unwriting, an unraveling
of the bindings of a videogame text. And I see my unwritten text as a parallel to Issac’s
30 2 I saac Unbound: Play as Ontology
86: PI, Part 2, i
87: PI §133
drawings: both are practices of composition oriented toward a kind of therapy. For Isaac,
drawing was a therapeutic practice of assuaging pain; for me, composing this essay was
means to break free from the hold of the game’s opening cinematic. For both of us, our
therapeutic practices helped us to expose fallacies in our thinking, and to better under-
stand our worlds and our places in them. Of course, Isaac is a conceptual container, a
drawing that draws. For whom was he doing therapy?
*
But don ’t you feel grief now? (“But ar en ’t you playing chess?”)
86
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac at 9:18 AM on Thursday, December 20th, 2012. That was
the moment I wrote this question: if videogames can promote a love of knowledge, are
videogames philosophy?
*
The r eal discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want
to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which
bring itself in question.
87
Figure 2.9 : This screenshot appears in the in-
tro sequence to The Binding of I saac . In it,
Isaac has finished drawing the game’s open-
ing sequence, and (presumably) designing the
narrative that follows, and setting it in mo-
tion. This image functions on a meta-level:
it implicates Isaac in the game’s depiction of
his mother, their relationship, and the core
assumptions and conflicts of the game, call-
ing the ’realness’ of the game’s narrative into
question, at its very outset. For me, this is
what it means to ’shew the fly the way out of
the fly-bottle’ , and it serves as an inspiration
and touchstone for my narrative design prac-
tice.
Figure 3.1 : The cover image for NBA 2k16, the
world’s most popular basketball simualation
in 2016 and 2017. The player depicted on the
cover is Steph Curry, of the Golden State War-
riors.
89:
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Impure Re-
search: Exploratory Modding in NBA 2k16.”
Invited talk delivered at the UCLA Participa-
tion Lab, University of California Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, CA, 07 Nov. 2016. The original
talk was not recorded, so I have re-recorded
and transcribed an extensively modified and
expanded version of the talk. Most of §3.1 is
entirely new, and was tailored to this disser-
tation document.
90: ’Machinima’ is described on Wikipedia
as, “the use of real-time computer graphics
engines to create a cinematic production” .
91: Mackh provided this definition during his
talk, “Research and Creative Practice” , 26 Feb
2016, at USC’s Mobile and Environmental Me-
dia Lab.
Exploratory Modding: Play as Research
3
In this autoethnographic talk,
89
I will present the results of several months’ worth of artis-
tic research, conducted through modifications or “mods” of the video game NBA 2K16 (see
Figure3.1. Exploratory modding offers a playfully impure model of practice-based re-
search that eschews clean methods and replicable procedures in favor of curiosity, messi-
ness and rule-breaking. My research was driven not by falsifiable hypotheses but by direc-
tionless experimentation, happenstance, and play. Through the creation of machinima,
90
digital photography, and artistic interventions, this research practice not only revealed
a wide variety of technological glitches, complicated player behaviors, and artistic affor-
dances, but also unexpected and surprising information about cheating, non-male gender
representation, and a community of players that could not distinguish between the two.
My hope is that these results, and the exploratory modding that produced them, can help
legitimate play as a practice-based research methodology.
3.1 W hat is ’Practice- Based Resear ch ’?
As an artist, I engage in what is sometimes called practice-based research. But what is
that? What does it mean to engage in research through an artistic practice? Let’s be-
gin answering that question by first answering another: What is research? Bruce Mackh
has done research on arts-based research programs across the country. “Surveying the
Landscape: Arts Integration at Universities” is the title of the book his research produced.
While authoring this book, Bruce interviewed 965 people and asked them how they de-
fine research. 962 said, in sum, “A purposeful investigation to create, discover, or learn
something new.”
91
(The remaining three said, “The Scientific Method,” and nothing else.)
Note here that research is creative in Mackh’s definition. It is also an exploration, and
in this way an artistic practice is a natural fit. But conventional research is also always
purposeful.
So, what are those purposes? What is the purpose of research? Based upon my experi-
ences working in academia, I would cluster the purposes of research into two broad cate-
gories. These categories are not meant to be thought of as “true” but rather as honest. They
reflect my gestalt impression of why academics conduct research. First, academics con-
duct research in order to increase human knowledge, and second, they conduct research
in order to apply that knowledge. We might think of that first purpose, of increasing hu-
man knowledge, as an attempt to expand what we know, and what we can imagine, as
human beings. As for the second, the desire to apply new knowledge, we can think of it
in terms of reproduction of that knowledge, and also tactical or strategic deployment of
that knowledge. In all honesty, some of these purposes feel and sound “pure” . The idea of
expanding what we know and what we can imagine sounds to my ears like a “pure” kind of
31
32 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
Figure 3.2 : This is a photograph of the inte-
rior of the ‘target chamber’ at the National Ig-
nition Facility [NIF]. The thing that looks like
an enormous brass pencil is the ’target posi-
tioner’ , which holds the target. The surround-
ing part, the part that looks like Cerebro from
the X -M en movie franchise, is a cluster of 192
lasers. (Credit: Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory)
92:
I’m being sincere here: it’s easy to imag-
ine engineers and scientists, at places like
the NIF, living out their childhood dreams
and fantasies on a daily basis. Most of the
engineers and scientists that I’ve known
self-selected into these professions, in
large part, because they really enjoy (and
often ’love’) playing around with lasers,
firing rockets, hiking up to the mouths of
volcanoes, and—in my instance—making
video games and VR experiences. This
self-selection, and this enjoyment, is part
and parcel with many subsequent parts
of my argument in this chapter, partic-
ularly my explication and use of Chom-
sky’s criticisms of liberal scholarship, and
its claims of objectivity. I must confess,
again sincerely, that I truly value games
and play. My research motivations are far
from pure and unbiased, and (if I’m being
honest) this necessarily calls in question
much of my research, including its on-
tological and methodological foundations,
as well as the specific things I choose to
study (and the specific things I choose ig-
nore, or simply don’t notice).
purpose, whereas the reproduction and deployment of new knowledge smacks of “impure
motivations” , of impurities. People can hold a mixture of these motivations, of course, but
it’s useful to think of them separately, because this is how we think of them culturally.
We’re trained to think of them this way.
3.1.1 P la yin g with a Gig antic Clust e r of 192 Lase rs as Resear ch
For example, one might frame the National Ignition Facility as a place for “pure research” .
Three and a half billion USD has been spent in creating a cluster of 192 lasers (see Fig-
ure3.2) at the Lawrence Livermore Research Facility in Livermore, California. Ostensi-
bly, the purpose of the National Ignition Facility or NIF is to induce nuclear fusion reac-
tions by heating and compressing hydrogen with the NIF’s 192 lasers. In other words, it
aims, no pun intended, to expand what we know about nuclear fusion by—and I mean this
seriously—building gigantic lasers and playing around with them.
This sounds like something a kid would propose. I mean this seriously, and I mean it in a
good way.
92
What we call “pure research” is intrinsically playful and almost childlike. It’s
about expanding our ability to imagine, and sharing knowledge for its own sake, and for
the pleasure of it, too. Pure research stands as a kind of ideal for what research should
be, almost in a Platonic sense of the word. Too, it implicitly requires protections to keep
the research and the research process as “pure” as possible. When children share knowl-
edge and expand their imaginations, they do so at places like sandboxes and playgrounds,
places designed to support their play holistically, to demarcate that play within a distinct
set of boundaries, and to protect that play and supervise it. One might describe a research
lab in much the same way. It supports, demarcates, protects, and supervises play. On the
other hand, impure research is tainted by extrinsic forces: competition, funding, poli-
tics, sexism, racism, classism, colonialism, etc.; anything that might influence or impede
the ability of researchers to playfully expand our imaginations and our knowledge of the
world. Impure research is not protected from these forces nor from those influences.
We can contrast our ideals with reality in this way: pure research is playful while im-
pure research is a game. This distinction is rhetorical of course, and this talk is far from
3.1 What is ’Pr actice-Based Resear ch ’? 33
93: I’m thinking here of all the myriad
caveats, qualifiers, citations, footnotes, and
other techniques and traditions used by aca-
demics to cleanse their own work of impuri-
ties, of flaws, of omissions, of “unauthorized”
and “illegitimate” things. This, in turn, re-
minds me of Peter Dennis Bathory’s book on
St. Augustine, POLITICAL THEORY AS PUB-
LIC CONFESSION.
94: Quotations taken from the ’About’ section
for the NIF’s website, available here: https:
//lasers.llnl.gov/about/
95: “Missions & Programs” . Lawrence Liver-
more National Laboratory. 13 February 2008.
96: Published by Open University Press, 01
October 2006.
97: Published by Stanford University Press.
The first edition was actually published in
1990, not 1988, I must confess.
pure, but it reflects the dichotomy I’ve experienced in numerous contexts both inside and
outside academia. Pure research is playful, and that purity and playfulness makes that
research better, or so we’re led to believe. And thus, our research practices must be di-
rected at expanding human knowledge and imagination for its own sake, not for its utility.
Furthermore, our research methodologies must explicitly account for all “impurities” in
our research. As acade mic r esear che rs, w e must not taint the purity of our r esear ch –
and when we inevitably do, we must confess.
93
Of course, research in practice looks very different from research in its monastic, idealized
abstraction. To revisit the National Ignition Facility: while the explicit goal of the facility
might be to increase human understanding, specifically of the processes underlying nu-
clear fusion, one can easily imagine a number of implicit purposes for this research, par-
ticularly within the contemporary American sociopolitical context. What purposes might
attach themselves to three and a half billion dollars in funding for the NIF? What might
the [expected] return on such an investment look like? And why might that investment
be made? Can we really imagine NIF’s research as pure, in spite of its playfulness? Fur-
ther, even the explicit goals of the NIF reflect the mixed purity of their research. The NIF
self-identifies two primary purposes for its research: first, “helping ensure the nation’s
security through stockpile stewardship,” and by “stockpile” here, they mean “stockpile of
nuclear weapons”; second, “blazing the path to a clean, safe, carbon-free energy future
through inertial fusion energy.”
94
So, their research has laudable environmental goals in mind, which might move us to-
ward a cleaner, pur er energy future. But it also has problematic military goals as well,
i.e. the maintenance of a profoundly impure stockpile of dangerous nuclear weapons, and
unavoidable nuclear waste. It bears noting here that the Lawrence Liverpool National Lab-
oratory, home of the National Ignition Facility, was founded in 1952 by the University of
California Berkeley as an expansion of their existing Radiation Laboratory. That labora-
tory describes itself as, “a premier research and development institution for science and
technology applied to national security.”
95
From its inception, the lab was deeply and in-
tentionally embedded inside the military-industrial complex, and its explosive growth fol-
lowing World War II. It was also designed to compete with the Los Alamos lab that housed
the Manhattan Project. On many levels, then, the Lawrence Liverpool National Labora-
tory, and its National Ignition Facility, are imbricated in layers of tactical maneuvers and
moves within a larger strategy, all of which is connected to Academia and the purposes of
academic research.
3.1.2 Ro l e- P la yin g the G ame of Acade mia
Academia is far from pure, and the playful research of well-meaning academics cannot
be disentangled from the game of Academia. This is the assertion at the core of Lisa Lu-
cas’s recent book, THE RESEARCH GAME IN ACADEMIC LIFE.
96
In it, she argues that
contemporary academic research is embedded within a context defined by globalization,
marketisation, and managerialism (this is on page 3), to say nothing of militarisation: all
forces which drive the accumulation of “research capital” , a term she borrows from Pierre
Bordeaux and his book HOMO ACADEMICUS from 1988.
97
Following this, Lucas argues
that contemporary academic research is designed to accumulate research capital, and to
demonstrate academics’ research prowess. She asserts that most academic researchers
are, at least in part, motivated by a desire for power and by the thrill of victory. This
34 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
Figure 3.3 : Depicted here is the rapper, ac-
tor, and alien-in-hiding, Ice-T, who originally
hails from the planet Alphabetrium (where he
was known as ’Water-T’).
98: And they would explicitly endorse the
tenure system, and the rules set forth by au-
thorities and institutions, such as universities
and their administrative apparatuses.
99: This first appeared as part of Chomsky’s
book, AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW
MANDARINS, Pantheon Books, 1968.
prompts her to ask, “Has research success within universities been turned into a compet-
itive sport?” (That’s page 2.)
I can’t help in a moment like this but imagine the rapper Ice-T, and what his response
might be to this critique: “Don’t hate the player,” he’d say, “hate the game.” In other words,
don’t hate the research; hate the research institution, or the tenure model, or corporate
sponsors, or the grant system, or the political context, or etc., etc... because even playful
academics are still caught up in the academic game.
What kind of game is it? Well, I like to think of academic research as a role-playing game,
and it’s the kind of game (like a role-playing game) that presents specific kinds of steps
that lead you towards success. First, you write grants. Then you get funding. Then you do
research. Then you publish. And then you repeat steps one through four. And then you
get tenure. And then you level up and repeat steps 1 through 4 again. It’s like grinding and
min-maxing a role-playing game, or playing “Professor: The Game” . Now, we can think
about those same steps in a completely different way, in a way that’s very familiar to role-
playing game enthusiasts. Instead of writing grants, we might be ’grinding’ . Instead of
getting funding, we might be ’collecting loot’ . Instead of doing research, we might again
be grinding. Instead of publishing, we might be collecting loot. And we do that over and
over again to beat the tenure level, to level up, and continue forward in our adventure.
In that way, “Professor: The Game” sounds a lot like a dungeon-crawler, like Skyrim, like
Diablo, like Dungeons of Dr eadmor e.
If academic researchers are playing a kind of game, one wonders what role they play within
that game, and what kind of agency they have in designing their role. Does the academic
want to, for example, collaborate when writing grants? What kind of collecting do they
want to do before getting funding, before structuring their research? What subjects do
they choose to study? When they publish, do they choose to share that information pub-
licly? If they do, I would imagine academia and its culture would describe that academic as
“lawful good” to use a description borrowed from Dungeons & Dr agons. A lawful good aca-
demic would [I suppose] collaborate, would collect, would study, would share, and would
repeat that collaborative, open, free research process to level up and get tenure.
98
In contrast, another academic might compete instead of collaborating. They might steal
instead of collecting; they might cheat instead of conducting a legitimate study. Instead of
sharing, they might hoard their information. And in those ways, a “chaotic evil” academic
might get tenure and level up and continue their adventure. This kind of agency, these
choices that academics have available to them, begs the question: How should academics
“play” research? Should they play as lawful good? Should they play as chaotic evil? Should
they play as neutral? And what do those choices mean? When choosing methods, research
methods, should academics employ the scientific method to expand human knowledge
and imagination? Can they employ the scientific method, in the context of academia, in a
manner that is lawful and good?
3.1. 3 Can Acade mics be La w ful Good?
Noam Chomsky argues that they cannot do so very easily, in his essay “Objectivity and
Liberal Scholarship” .
99
Chomsky’s argument in that book is that academics’ choices are
motivated, in large part, by the values and norms of the sociopolitical context that sur-
rounds them. For example, Chomsky would say academics don’t often study anarchism –
3.1 What is ’Pr actice-Based Resear ch ’? 35
100: I suppose I mean ’They’ here, i.e. some
gesture at a vague amorphous darkness we
general call ’Neo-Liberalism’ . Or I may have
simply used a pronoun with an unclear an-
tecedent. In either instance, I apologize, and
ask for Their mercy.
101: Published by University of Georgia Press
in 1995.
102: Originally published in the journal, En-
vir onmental Engineering Science, Vol. 34, Issue
01, Jan. 2017.
103: There They are, or is, again.
104: Originally published by the University of
Chicago Press in 1962.
105: Published by Harvard University Press in
2015.
specifically, they don’t study historical examples of successful anarchism, and when they
do study anarchism they focus on failed examples. For Chomsky, this drives an argument
that denies liberal scholarship can be objective. This is to say that scholarship conducted
in a liberal or neo-liberal context sacrifices its objectivity in favor of utility, in favor of how
they
100
hope to deploy their knowledge.
Another question we might ask about academics’ research relates to the tools they use.
Can we [as lawful good researchers] use tools to expand human knowledge and imagi-
nation? Frederick Ferre, in his book PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY,
101
is interested in
demarcating the limits of tools’ utility. Further, he calls into question the purity of those
tools. For example, Ferre talks about the telescope and the microscope as tools that we
generally consider value-neutral, that we might consider context-independent or even
pure. But Ferre would assert that those technologies not only relate to the sociopolitical
and historical context in which they were created, but that those tools were built in accor-
dance with the values and norms of a particular society at a particular point in time. For
Ferre, t oo ls r efl ect the v alues of the peopl e that made the m, and furthe rmor e, the y pe r -
petuat e the v alues of the peopl e that made the m. Tools like telescopes and microscopes
privilege vision and, by extension, human senses as a pure way of accessing information,
and as part of the scientific method. If it’s the case, that our tools are always impure, are
always tainted by values, by goals, by utilitarian ends; if those tools are always tainted from
the outset, then so is the scientific method.
How about rules? Do the rules of academia help researchers expand human knowledge
and imagination? Of late there has been an outpouring of research, across academic disci-
plines, that questions the rules governing academic research. One example [among many]
is a recent article by Mark Edwards and Siddartha Roy called, “Academic Research in
the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and
Hyper-Competition” .
102
For our purposes, I think the title of this paper speaks for itself.
Academics around the world are deeply concerned about the rules, the procedures, the
incentives offered by those entities who govern academic research, who enforce the rules,
who write the rules, and rewrite the rules.
103
Many academics believe that those rules
directly impede researchers’ ability to expand knowledge and imagination, particularly in
new directions. I’m thinking here of Thomas Kuhn’s STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REV-
OLUTIONS
104
and how, from Kuhn’s perspective, research gets bogged down, over and
over again, periodically, by this kind of rules-driven context and by incentives and expec-
tations that reinforce, for the researcher, a set of values and norms, a set of assumptions,
that necessarily shoves research into predetermined areas, down predetermined paths,
and toward pre-determined kinds of results.
If our methods are suspect, and our tools are suspect, and our rules are suspect, what
about the fields of play? Are they suited to lawful good academics’ attempts to expand hu-
man knowledge and imagination? I’d like here to refer to Nick Sousanis’s book UNFLAT-
TENING,
105
which was a hybrid dissertation, both a graphic novel and a work of critical
theory and cultural studies. Sousanis’s work took the field of graphic novels as an art form,
and leveraged it to talk about the field of academic research, thus opening the possibility
for meta-level critique, for a kind of self-aware playfulness. I see Sousanis’s book as an
interesting appropriation, a modding if you will, of the long-standing tradition of comics
and graphic novels. Sousanis deploys the techniques and received forms of graphic novels
to not only enhance the rhetoric in his work, but to reveal an entirely new and normally
inaccessible level of research, of questioning, and of concern. His book is the kind of thing
36 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
106: This concept first appears in Johan
Huizinga’s book, HOMO LUDENS. The (im-
plicit) interpretation of his concept is my own.
107: Again, this is something Mackh said dur-
ing his aforementioned talk at USC (I believe,
more specifically, during the question and
answer session that followed the talk).
Figure 3.4 : F ountain, the infamous “artwork”
by Marcel Duchamp that is, perhaps, singu-
larly responsible for reframing Art as a kind of
game. It’s worth noting, here and elsewhere,
that Duchamp eventually gave up the prac-
tice of making ’artworks’ , more or less, and
spent the bulk of his later years playing chess
(which he considered to be an artistic prac-
tice).
that inspires others to remix and modify existing works, tropes, mediums and art forms,
because it reveals through its remixing and modding the context in which that modding
takes place. It casts the original work, the original genre, in a completely new light and
invites readers and users to become playfully self-aware of their imbrication within that
context, and of the assumptions that they take for granted when entering and exiting that
context.
3.1.4 Impur e Resear ch
We all enter and exit strange contexts like this, all the time. We can enter and exit
Huizinga’s ’Magic Circle’
106
anytime we want, and we can draw a boundary around some
arbitrary space and call it a sandbox, call it a playground, call it a lab. These words have
meaning because of the play, in addition to the game that we are borrowing, remixing, and
modding in that instance. Academic researchers have to play the game to follow its rules,
to use its methods and tools, and stay within its boundaries if they hope to level up their
RPG character – whether they choose to play as lawfully good or chaotic evil, the game of
academia (the rules, the methods and tools, and boundaries) offers only a small set of pre-
determined pathways towards success, and those pathways have already been evaluated
and judged to be pure or impure by our culture. It’s [often] a frustrating thing for scien-
tists, academics, and traditional researchers to admit, but acade mic r esear ch is alw a y s
impur e.
What about artistic research? Practice-based arts research is a relatively new method-
ology, especially here in the United States, where it’s only been intentionally practiced
in an academic context for 10 or 20 years. Like many folks within this growing field of
practice-based arts research, Bruce Mackh’s advice to artist-researchers is as follows: “If
we want to engage in their game,” he says, “they make the rules.”
107
By this, Mackh meant
that artist-researchers still need to play the academic game and follow its rules, and use
its methods and tools, if they want to succeed within the academic game, if they want to
publish, if they want their research to be funded, and if they want to earn tenure.
I believe artist-researchers can play an entirely different game, because art is a fiel d de-
fined b y its inability t o define itself. Unlike other disciplines, it lacks any consistent meth-
ods, tools, and rules. And while Mackh might [correctly] assert that the academic game
offers ready-at-hand tools and methods and rules for artist-researchers to follow toward
success, this doesn’t mean that they’re the only methods and tools and rules available to
artist-researchers, nor that they should follow those rules toward success.
Academic researchers in general feel they have to play the game. Artists, in turn, have to
define the game, and artistic research is thus always impure, too, because it’s embedded
within academia – but the artist-researcher need not pretend otherwise.
Artistic research must be purposefully impure. Artists can, as they say, “game the sys-
tem” [as inFigure 3.4 ] because, in large part, the expectations surrounding artists are not
the same as the expectations surrounding academic researchers, scientists, and scholars.
Artists are understood as unpredictable, as people who follow inspiration toward inter-
esting ends. Artists are understood as disrupters, as rule breakers, as r ogues. Our culture
already understands artists as fundamentally strange and weird people who have their
own rules, who use inexplicable methods, and whose mastery of tools baffles most peo-
ple. Artist seem to be working magic half the time, so artists can, leverage this existing set
3.2 What is ’Explor atory M odding’? 37
108: See p.1 of the .pdf available on the artist’s
website, referenced in the next footnote.
109: Julian Oliver, “The Game is Not the
Medium” (2006). Available online at the
artist’s website: https://julianoliver.
com/output/papers/The- Game- is-
not- the- Medium_Oliver- 2006.pdf
110: Computers in Entertainment (CIE),
“Theoretical and Practical Computer
Applications in Entertainment” , Vol. 4 ,Issue
1, January 2006 (Article No. 7).
of cultural expectations, values, and norms around the idea of the artist, toward different
ends but also toward academic success, toward the expansion of human knowledge, and
toward the expansion of human imagination.
With this in mind, we can revisit the purposes of academic research through the artistic
lens, and ask: What is the purpose of artistic research? I believe artistic research should
question methods instead of simply using them, and should intentionally misuse tools
when the occasion suggests it. Artistic research should break rules as often as it follows
them. It should expand fields as often as it grows them in predictable ways.
Pure research is playful, we said before, and impure research is a game. I believe artist-
researchers can play with the game and be both pure and impure in their research. As an
example of this kind of playfully impure research, of playing with the game of academic
research, I’d like to talk about exploratory modding as a kind of practice-based arts re-
search.
3.2 W hat is ’Expl orat ory M oddin g’?
As we continue, I’d like to better define my term “exploratory modding” as a means of fur-
ther unpacking my general methodological approach as an artist-researcher. Given the
colloquial roots of the word “modding” , Wikipedia’s definition for the word is probably a
good starting point. Wikipedia defines modding as the act of modifying hardware, soft-
ware, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended
by the designer, or to achieve a bespoke specification. Why would you do this, you might
ask? Well, modding can have many uses. It can increase the performance of hardware
(as with overclocking), it can create an interesting tool and interesting output (like circuit
bending and the music it produces). Modding can change the functionality of hardware or
software (as with browser extensions) or it can supplement existing content (as new lev-
els or assets in games). Modding can also allow people to cheat, to break the rules, to do
things they’re not allowed to do. I’m thinking here of the “Game Genie” for the Nintendo
Entertainment System, or “Cheat Engine” , which is used in many contemporary modding
experiments on personal computers.
Modding can be used for artistic purposes as well. The artist Julian Oliver is known for
modding hardware and software to produce bespoke art objects which are often designed
to critique the original unmodified source material. In his essay “The Game is Not the
Medium” from 2006, Oliver says: “Whatever it is, game modification is an unusual techni-
cal practice. It is to learn how something is made enough to transform it into something
else, but is something that still references and needs its original.”
108
Following this, Oliver
asserts the importance of open source and accessible source code, to artistic modders as
well as the gaming community. He identifies modding as a locus of critique of both games
themselves and the cultures that surround them, and identifies modding as something
that’s dependent upon learning, experimentation, and exploration of hardware and soft-
ware.
109
Following this, one might define exploratory modding as, “the act of modifying hardware
and software in an effort to, and for the purpose of, acquiring new knowledge and stimu-
lating our imaginations” .
In the essay “Learning Through Game Modding”
110
Magy Seif El-Nasr and Brian K. Smith
38 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
111: See “The Game is Not the Medium” , p. 1.
assert that game modding can also be leveraged as a pedagogical practice, because the ex-
isting software is robust enough that it can be used to isolate specific, difficult, or founda-
tional concepts: artificial intelligence for example, or vector geometry. Modding certainly
does have value as a pedagogical technique. One need only think of the pervasive use of
M inecr aft in classrooms to illustrate this point. However, the research value of modding
extends far beyond classrooms, laboratories, and institutional contexts. While I certainly
agree with El-Nasr and Smith, I would add that moddin g practices need not be sanc -
tioned nor supe rvised in or de r t o pr oduce l egitimat e kno w l edg e, and that in fact such
supe rvision might hampe r l earnin g and constrain the e xpl oration pr ocess. The same is
often said of hacking, a practice that shares similar roots with modding.
111
The value of ex-
ploratory modding extends beyond the predetermined limits of pedagogy, social norms,
and sanctioned research. It is an artistic practice that breaks rules, redefines boundaries,
and often violates legal restrictions. Exploratory modding need not, and perhaps should
not, extend from preconceived research agendas.
I’ve learned firsthand that directionless, playful modding can grow organically from play-
ing a video game, and that this modding practice can in turn drive the production of un-
expected art and the acquisition of unexpected knowledge. To illustrate, the remainder of
this talk will present my exploration of NBA 2K16 as a case study in the utility and legiti-
macy of playful, directionless research.
3.2.1 Expl orat ory M oddin g in NBA 2k16
NBA 2K16 was, from Fall 2016 through Fall 2017, the world’s most popular basketball sim-
ulation video game. I began playing NBA 2K16 in the fall of 2016 – and I began, as most
players do, by creating a bespoke player avatar in the game’s “MyCareer” mode. In the
(a) (b)
Figure 3.5 : Examples of two player-avatars created for use in the MyCareer and online MyPark modes of NBA 2k16. These are fair approximations of the kinds of
representative avatars people use in these game modes, but they were selected here to contrast specific racial aspects of those representations. Many other kinds of
archetypal or stereotypical representations of race can be deployed in the creation of these player-avatars.
3.2 What is ’Explor atory M odding’? 39
112: Fraternal twin, that is.
113: Available online: cheatengine.org
MyCareer game mode, the user gets to design their own unique character and play that
character’s entire career as a high school, college, and professional basketball player. Al-
most immediately after I began playing, I also began fixating upon a particular aspect of
the MyCareer mode’s narrative design and it’s worldbuilding.
Looking at these two images side by side [see Figure 3.5aandFigure 3.5b ], you might notice
that there’s something odd about them. In NBA 2K16, you can play as a cis-gendered male
of any race but your parents and twin
112
sister are always black people from Harlem. Let
me say that again, you’re allowed to play as a cis gendered male of any race, but your twin
sister and your parents are always African-American people from Harlem.
The cinematic narrative that drives the MyCareer mode of NBA 2K16 was directed by Spike
Lee. When you play the MyCareer mode, your custom character is inserted into the ma-
chinima “film” , in real time, as the machinima’s main character. So is Spike Lee, by the
way; he makes an appearance in the game as well. You can play as an Asian male with a
black twin sister, you can play as a Caucasian male, as an African-American male, but you
can’t play as a gay male or a trans man. You can’t play as a woman. You can’t play as a
skinny person, and you can’t play as a fat person. You can’t play as someone taller than
7’3’’ , nor can you play as someone shorter than 5’7’’ . And that makes no sense.
This absurd incongruity in the game’s narrative design led me to begin experimenting
with similarly absurdist character creation. I started by using the approved in-engine
character creation tools to produce celebrity avatars, to produce people I thought might
appear in a Spike Lee film. So of course the first celebrity I tried to produce using the
in-game character creation tools was the actor John Turturro, because he’s in basically
every Spike Lee film. I also tried to produce Kanye West, because he’s Kanye West, and
why wouldn’t I? But using these tools produced unsatisfying results. John Turturro didn’t
look that much like John Turturro [see Figure3.6a ] and Kanye didn’t look like Kanye [see
Figure 3.6b ]. So, I decided I needed to find different tools and different rules. I downloaded
Cheat Engine,
113
a piece of software I referred to earlier in this talk and will continue to
reference as it played a large role in my practice, and I used Cheat Engine to start modding
NBA 2K16.
(a) (b)
Figure 3.6 : These are in-engine screenshots of my attempts to create NBA 2k16 player-avatars that resembled John Turturro and Kanye West. As you can see, these
attempts were... less than successful.
40 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
3.2.2 Surr eal M achinima
As I began my experimentation, I learned that you could modify the game to allow you
to play as one of the game’s other characters. By this, I mean one of the game’s already-
existing assets used to represent another character in the game. You could play, for ex-
ample, as the game’s representation of your father. You could play as your best friend
if you wanted to. As I began my experimentation, I learned you can modify the game to
allow you to play as any of the game’s other characters. The absurd limits of the game’s
narrative design inspired me to play as the main character’s twin sister. The game au-
tomatically inserts your player avatar into pre-built cinematic narrative sequences in the
MyCareer mode. This meant that my experimentation procedurally generated an unex-
pected artistic output: surreal machinima. This machinima was surreal in part because
it would juxtapose a gigantic version of the twin sister next to the normal character of
the twin sister in scenes where the twin sister would be talking to you, her twin brother.
My modding of the game and my choice to play as the twin sister thus created narrative
shorts where the twin sister seemed to be talking to herself. The twin sister would play
the role of coach, of “straight man” in a comedic scene, and also the role of the game’s
main character: a supposedly male, cis gendered athlete.
Figure 3.7 : By modding NBA 2k16 to allow you
to play as your own sister, the game’s engine
will produce real-time machinima scenes like
this one, where the sister-as-character stands
beside your sister-as-player-avatar, in a sur-
real juxtaposition. Note that the taller, player-
avatar ’sister’ is not wearing a shirt–and her
torso skin is a different color than the rest of
the skin on her body–because the asset for her
character was not designed to wear shirts, nor
to show its torso. Note too that her wrist is be-
ing procedurally deformed by the wrist band
I’ve forced the game to attempt to apply to her
character model’s wrist. It’s just so wonder-
fully strange.
I was immediately taken aback, not just by how interesting this machinima was, but but
by how self-aware it seemed to be. This weird, surreal machinima appeared to be, as
Julian Oliver suggests, critiquing the medium that I was modding. It was tipping its hat at
the game’s original narrative and at the modding’s original source. My choice to play the
game as the twin sister was in part motivated by my frustration with my inability to play
as a woman, to say nothing of a non gender-binary individual. I was only allowed as a user
to play as a male, and a cis gendered one at that, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to
find a way to break that rule. In so doing, I organically began to produce short machinima
films, that reflected my frustration with the seemingly arbitrary constraint on my player
avatar’s gender and its physical attributes.
3.2 What is ’Explor atory M odding’? 41
Figure 3.9 : An image of my ’Mars Blackmon’
player-avatar, striking a pose immediately
prior to the beginning of a game of 3-on-3
basketball in the online MyPark game mode.
Following this, I began to play as other in-game characters simply to see what kind of
machinima I might produce. One of my favorite other examples of the surreal machin-
ima generated by my exploratory modding are scenes I played as the team owner, i.e. the
person who owned the professional basketball team for which the main character plays.
As you might expect from someone like Spike Lee, this team owner character is an exag-
gerated archetype of what we would expect that team owner to be, to look like, and to act.
The team owner is a wealthy, privileged white guy. He was educated at MIT and he oc-
casionally uses basketball terms and street slang in ironic attempts to relate to the main
character. It’s all very-heavy handed, but it’s a useful perspective nonetheless. When I
began to watch the machinima I created by playing as the team owner I found a scene
where the team owner seemed to be, as with the twin sister, talking to himself. The team
owner was both the main character (again, a [black] cis gendered male from Harlem) and
the team owner played the role of the team owner: the rich white guy who went to MIT.
The juxtaposition of these two perspectives coming from identical avatars produced again
a kind of surreal self-aware effect on me, as a viewer.
Figure 3.8 : As with the above example, I was
able to mod NBA 2k16 to allow me to play as the
’team owner’ character. This produced ma-
chinima scenes where, for example, the owner
simultaneously played the roles of two con-
flicting, racialized archetypes.
3.2. 3 V e nturin g Online
Emboldened by the strangely poetic output of my initial exploratory modding, I began tak-
ing my modded player avatars into online multiplayer game servers. The first thing I did
was play as Spike Lee, a.k.a. Mars Blackmon. “Mars Blackmon” , if you don’t remember,
was the character that Spike Lee invented for his 1986 film, She’ s Gotta H ave I t, and re-
purposed in his iconic Michael Jordan commercials, and it was one of the first things that
put Spike Lee on the map as a major director. So, I modded the game to allow me to play
using the game asset for Spike Lee’s character. I made my character a center, so he was
an absurdly tall Spike Lee, and I named my character Mars Blackmon and ventured into
a multiplayer environment where other real people and their corresponding avatars were
playing pickup basketball. [See Figure3.9.] I found people to play with – and I think it is
important to point out, in order to illustrate the arc of this project, that this was the first
42 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
114: Specifically, I was entering the space of
the MyPark online game mode of NBA 2k16.
This was the less formal place and mode for
online competition, in contrast to the more
serious ’Pro Am’ mode, where teams of 5-on-5
played according to NBA rules.
Figure 3.10 : An in-game screenshot of X-Tina,
before a 2-on-2 game in MyPark.
time I’d ever gone beyond MyCareer as a player of the 2K franchise. I’ve been playing NBA
2K Games since 2K13 or 2K14, but 2K16 was the first time I ever ventured into the online
multiplayer format. I think I’d been too timid before. I didn’t think I was good enough
to compete online. So it’s interesting here that the primary reason I was brave enough to
enter the online space was because I saw what I was doing as an experiment.
That experiment afforded me a certain amount of critical distance, and it made me feel
safe. It made me feel like I could play a role as I entered this online space.
114
It might seem
strange to some folks that I didn’t feel that way already, since you’re playing in these on-
line spaces using a player avatar of your design. That avatar doesn’t need to look like you,
they just need to look like an athletic cis gendered male of a certain size. But for me there
was always something very personal about playing an online competitive sport. I think I
felt exposed, like my skills wouldn’t measure up and by extension I wouldn’t measure up.
I didn’t feel safe in the online space so it really helped me to have some playful frame-
work that would demarcate this expedition of sorts, this exploration of online multiplayer
basketball, because it helped make me feel secure enough to give it a try.
3.2.4 Adv e ntur es in M oddin g
I felt like not only was I decent enough to play online with other people, but my Spike Lee
character seemed to be pretty well received. I met a few people and began chatting with
them through the Steam application on my PC, in part because they thought my Spike Lee
avatar was funny. This warm reception from a few folks led me to start experimenting
more widely. I started next to play as a series of cheerleaders who appear in the game.
I asked my wife to name them. This is a picture of one of them named X-Tina (my wife
thought that was a funny name), and she was a 7’3’’ 330 pound center. [See Figure 3.10]
I played as the mother of the game’s main character for a while and changed my name to
“Your Mom” . I tried out a number of different female avatars, and a number of different
names, and all of them seemed pretty funny to me, pretty interesting, and the people I was
beginning to meet by playing online also thought it was pretty funny... but I encountered
a problem. I’d play with the same people, with people I was starting to develop a relation-
ship with, people who I liked, and who I thought played well. I’d play with those people,
but when I would show up on a server having changed my avatar those people wouldn’t
recognize me, especially because at that time I was also regularly changing the way my
name appeared on my Steam account. From that point forward I started to play under a
consistent name: G=L=I=T=C=H [i.e. ’Glitch’]. The spelling of that name was inspired by
the school of language poetry, and all of my subsequent modifications were made using
that consistent name.
The longer that I played, the more that I began to encounter other people who modded
their avatars. I found their modifications to be fascinating. There were people who mod-
ded themselves to be two feet tall, or ten feet tall. There were people whose bodies would
defy the laws of physics: people with 30 foot arms bent at violent angles, or people whose
arms seemed to disappear and who were nothing but heads and a pair of long legs.
There was one person who modified his character to have gigantic psychedelic wings [see
Figure3.11]. I have no idea how he did it. To give some context: anytime anyone walked
onto the game server onto the park in which these games were being played you could
3.2 What is ’Explor atory M odding’? 43
115: See my comments above, particularly
those related to Figure 3.7 .
see them walking around, even if you were in the middle of a game. If somebody weird-
looking wandered onto the server and you were in the middle of a game, you could still
see them standing on the sideline. When this person with gigantic wings walked onto the
server he would turn his body a certain way, and those wings would block out the rest of
the world. They would block out the sky, the court, and everything other than the people
you were playing with. Suddenly the game would be turned into what looked like a scene
from video art. It was incredible.
Figure 3.11 : This is a screenshot from a game
of 3-on-3 basketball in the MyPark game
mode, during which a modder’s player-avatar
walked past the game I was playing. The visual
experience was both beautiful and, to be hon-
est, hilariously frustrating. None of us could
see well enough to keep playing (and then the
game crashed, as often happened during cases
of extreme modding, like this one).
3.2. 5 M e n ar e fr om M ars, W ome n ar e Cheat e rs
As I became a better-known and more serious online player, I also became a better mod-
der. I learned how to mod my character so that, for example, one layer of clothing would
push through another layer of clothing in inconsistent ways, making it look like I had
ripped shirts on. This was a very common way to mold your character’s clothing and get
that clothing to glitch out in real time. It was something you could learn to do, if you just
read the online forums or asked somebody. I would also experiment with different kinds
of accessories or different articles of clothing that would act in glitchy, unexpected ways
on the avatars I was using. Importantly, when playing with a female avatar in NBA 2K16,
you’d find quickly that the clothing assets that were designed for people to put on their
player avatars were not designed to be put on the female characters’ game assets. Fe-
male avatars often were missing body parts, parts of their wrist, or their entire torso.
115
These character assets were created with a specific set of rules and constraints in mind,
and a specific set of needs from a development standpoint, and if those assets didn’t need
wrists—if those wrists weren’t going to be drawn—then why put them there? It’s just un-
necessary computational expense.
My character glitching became more sophisticated and, as I got better as a player and
as a modder, I not only encountered more modders and got better at identifying them as
modders – but I also encountered more cheaters, and I got better at identifying people who
44 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
116: Or at least, you thought you could tell.
See my comments below about the tensions
that emerged from this speculation.
117: Though, clearly, it’s not the same thing.
118:
This is precisely the kind of unexpected
research outcome that arises from a re-
search methodology driven by play. In
short, I never would have come to under-
stand this ’woman-as-cheater’ trope in
the online NBA2k16 community, were I not
engaged in a seemingly unrelated practice
of exploratory modding. It’s worth not-
ing that, in my subsequent reading and re-
search, I’ve never encountered an article,
blogpost, nor thread about this relation-
ship between gender representation and
perceived cheating in NBA 2k16. This talk
(and chapter) are likely the first dissem-
inations of that knowledge, though my
strange research practice and its strange
outcomes.
were cheating. For example, people who would show up on the server in pairs, looking like
and dressed like Steph Curry and shooting with a kind of accuracy that was impossible,
if you were playing by the rules, if you weren’t cheating. Some people would show up
dressed like mascots, and I learned later that this was something you could unlock as
you progressed, as your “reputation” grew and you leveled up online. The first mascots
I encountered were clearly cheaters, though, because they moved at twice the maximum
speed of every other player on the court.
It was often the case that players could tell by watching somebody that they were cheat-
ing. Identifying the signs of cheating and calling it out was a part of gameplay, and if you
played the game long enough you began to know what to look for and recognize illegal
modifications, even if that cheating was subtle. You could tell,
116
for example, if another
player was moving faster than they should be able to move, or if they were making shots
when the shot should have missed. Notably, those cheaters were using the same tools and
avatars that I used to modify my avatars, and modders were very often cheaters and vice
versa. One thing that really set me to thinking in this process was that every time I en-
countered someone playing as a female character (and this only happened rarely), every
time this person was clearly cheating. The people I was playing with and chatting with
would also quickly identify those individuals as cheaters.
I had begun pla yin g online as a w oman because I sa w it as a kind of int e rv e ntion int o the
space w he r e w ome n w e r e n ’t al l o w ed t o pla y. In general, female gamers or more broadly
gamers who aren’t cis gender men of a particular age range and demographic, people who
don’t belong in that culture, have a hard time entering it. They have a hard time enter-
ing “gamer culture” . This isn’t entirely dissimilar from my own discomfort with entering
online multiplayer competitions and competitive sports.
117
I didn’t feel like I was good
enough but I also didn’t feel like I belonged. I was approaching middle age. I’m too heavy
right now to play basketball very well and my knees can’t really take it. It feels strange
for me to enter into an online gaming space and interact with people who are, I assumed
going in, much younger than me. I found very quickly that while some people were my
age, in their 30s, they were almost entirely men. The demographic of NBA2K16 is very
male. I can only remember two or three instances in the months and months I played the
game where a woman spoke on a shared discord server, or where someone identified as a
woman in a group chat.
This led me to be deeply conflicted, even disappointed in the players and the community,
when the other female avatars showed up in these online spaces. These people who chose
to represent themselves as women were almost always clearly cheaters. The community of
players in these online spaces didn’t want cheaters to be there. They wanted people to be
playing by the same set of rules; they wanted fairness, they wanted accountability. When
someone showed up cheating there was very little that community could do to, for lack of
a better word, police that activity. Cheaters would be able to enter and exit games with
the same freedom as anybody else, and there were no anti-cheat oversights and entities
to assist players in regulating who had access to their space and who was allowed to play.
Oftentimes crowds of people, crowds of player avatars, would surround the avatars of a
cheater and use in-game animations to shame and troll the cheater, especially when it was
a really obvious case of cheating. In the culture of the online multiplayer courts, f e mal e-
r epr ese ntin g a v atars w e r e pr esumed t o be cheat e rs and w e r e de fact o ostracized and
sometimes harassed.
118
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 45
Figure 3.12 : This is what my first attempt, us-
ing my own face, looked like.
Figure 3.13 : In contrast, this is what Heidi’s
first attempt looked like. She is... much better
looking than me.
Figure 3.14 : My chinless player-avatar with
the scrunched-up, bearded face.
One of the problems the community faced was that, in online multiplayer formats, par-
ticularly the casual ones [in MyPark], there was no way for anyone to know for sure that
someone was cheating. When it was obvious, when someone was running at an impossible
speed, at a speed that exceeded the limits of the rules and was never seen in other con-
texts - that was one thing. A lot of the time, cheating was more subtle. You had to know
a lot about the game and what was going on under the hood. One would need to know a
lot about the rules that govern the game play to identify someone as a cheater: someone
whose shot was just a little too good, or who was just a little bit too fast. What this meant
was that the community would accuse each other of cheating on a r egular basis.
When someone’s shot was going in over and over again, even if their form looked good,
they’d be accused of cheating. When someone made a particularly good move and got
more space for a shot than other people expected, they might receive accusations of cheat-
ing. The only recourse that the community had was to accuse one another of cheating and
to shame one another – and at best, from an empowerment standpoint, to choose not to
play with somebody that they suspected was a cheater. As there was a strong correla-
tion between people who modded the game and people who cheated—and almost every-
one who played the PC version of NBA 2K16 and who modded or cheated used the same
tool, Cheat Engine—one might not be surprised to learn that many people thought I was
a cheater based solely on the fact that I was modding the appearance of my player avatar.
When I had a good game especially, people would accuse me of cheating and use my mod-
ded player avatar as evidence of that cheating.
In response to this, I decided to start modding using a different tool.
3. 3 Dude, w hat did y ou do t o y our face ?
I no longer wanted to be associated with Cheat Engine, and further as an artist I was begin-
ning to feel constrained by the Cheat Engine tool set. I began using a piece of technology
called the Intel RealSense camera. I borrowed it from the Worldbuilding Media Lab at USC,
and I began using it to change my avatar’s appearance. Built into NBA 2K16 was an option
to use the Intel RealSense camera to generate a face for your player based on your face in
real life. The idea was that people could use the camera to scan their face and then map
that scan of their face to the face of their player avatar. It sounds appealing, right? Instead
of having to make something from scratch that looked like you (only for it to fall short of a
realistic representation of your face), you could instead use a piece of technology that was
designed to create a realistic scan of your face and apply it to a three dimensional model.
The first time that I used the tool it generated a monstrous-looking face [see Figure 3.12].
The first time my wife used the tool she looked like a Kennedy; she looked like a hand-
some man [see Figure 3.13 ]. I think this contrast was fortuitous because it inspired me to
to push harder in the direction of monstrous, strange faces. I had taken on the moniker
G=L=I=T=C=H for a reason: I w ant ed in m y int e rv e ntion int o these online spaces t o cel-
ebrat e the act of moddin g, of doing unexpected and unauthorized things with the game’s
software.
I began making avatars like this one: the face all scrunched up, chin gone, and I had cov-
ered it with a weird beard and pulled the eyes apart as far as I possibly could [see Fig-
ure3.14]. At that point I didn’t know what I was doing, but I really liked the results that I
46 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
Figure 3.16 : In this screenshot, I am attempt-
ing to produce a useable and interesting face
scan through the use of props. The text be-
low my face reads, “Please completely fill the
window with your face.”
was getting and people that I knew liked them too. As I got more interested in this tech-
nology, I started to get more adventurous with the avatars I was making, and through this
process I started learning more about how the camera worked.
Figure 3.15 : In this screenshot, a two-dimensional image of my face is being applied to the framework underlying my three-dimensional player-avatar. The image of
my face was generated using an Intel RealSense camera, so this was an ’authorized’ means of modding one’s face in NBA 2k16.
You can see in this picture [ Figure3.15 ] I was wearing a set of swimming goggles and at-
tempting to bend my head or turn my head in such a way that I would get an interesting
scan. The result that I got looked to me vaguely birdlike, so I used the game’s tools to pull
the top of my head up, to increase the size of my eyes, to make my nose more beak-like,
and then I put weird hair on the top. This was a normal set of procedures I would use
to produce interesting results. I came through my experimentations to understand that
the use of objects like swimming goggles, or holding things in my mouth, had disappoint-
ingly little effect on the way that my avatar would ultimately look [see Figure3.16]. Some
techniques worked better than others. I found that covering up my face would sometimes
lead to disappointing results if all I was covering up was, for example, my beard. The Intel
RealSense camera had a hard time with beards and was not interested in representing the
beard itself, it was only interested in representing the face underneath.
This is because, as I came to understand later, of the way that the Intel RealSense camera
interacted with the 3D asset, the three dimensional head on which your face’s scan would
be placed. That head had points on it: the nose, the eyes, the mouth, where it expected
particular kinds of data to be located. When the Intel RealSense camera scanned your
face and converted it into data, some of that data would be [algorithmically] ’understood’
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 47
Figure 3.17 : I have intentionally deformed my
face here, and produced a successful scan, i.e.
one the software can use – hence the notifi-
cation, “Scan Quality: Great” .
as a mouth or as a nose or as eyes, and that data would be adjusted procedurally to fit the
structure of the three dimensional model. So you can see in any one of these scans [e.g.
Figure 3.15 ] that my face is being applied to the top of a point-cloud skeleton, to the top of
what could be described as a mannequin covered with a grid of points. When the scanned
data was applied to that grid of points, that grid and those points would adjust, according
to a certain set of procedures and algorithms, to assist in mapping your face’s scan in an
’accurate’ way to the three-dimensional model.
This meant that when I covered up my beard, I was actually doing the hardware and soft-
ware a favor. I was getting rid of that beard, which was confusing noise to the engine, and
replacing it with something it could at least understand as a mouth of sorts. But when
I covered up my entire face and deformed my mouth, as in this picture [ Figure3.17 ], it
would produce a similarly deformed face. This was the experiment that led me to really
start thinking and reading more deeply about how the hardware and software interacted
and what the Intel RealSense camera was actually doing under the hood.
This was the first time that I saw the texture of my player/avatar’s face deform in a totally
unexpected three-dimensional way. My skin looked like it had been folded, and my nose
looked like it had been not just smushed into my face but glitched-out. It might be hard to
see in the image, but there were seemingly random colors sticking out of my nose and the
sides of my mouth. I had done something with that scan experiment to break the under-
Figure 3.18 : Here I’ve brought my deformed player-avatar into the game’s procedurally generated machinima. Note that this is the same scene as above, when the
two sisters stand in juxtaposition: the game automatically inserts your current avatar into the main character’s place in all relevant machinima scenes.
48 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
119: I grew up in tract housing, and I still re-
member the day in ’Social Studies’ class, in
seventh grade, when I learned about ’tract
housing’ for the first time. As I looked at
aerial photographs in a textbook, my mind
was blown apart into little tiny bits. This ex-
plosive realization was only compounded by
the fact that I lived a short walk from the Buf-
falo airport – so the aerial photography was
a second view on an aesthetic I’d been sur-
rounded by my entire life, an aesthetic that
had, until that moment, been totally invisible
to me.
120: By ‘under-leveled’ , I mean that many of
the statistics that governed my player’s abil-
ities were not at the maximum achievable
level. Players improved their avatar’s abili-
ties through long sessions of in-game play,
i.e. through grinding, and I simply didn’t have
the time to grind that hard, and fully level up
my character. This was unusual among high-
level players.
lying rule set, or at least confound the underlying algorithms for this scanning process.
When I looked at the machinima that this produced, I was thrilled. It lent an entirely new
surrealist quality to the to the machinima and cast an absurdist sort of pall over the top
of the game’s narrative design.
3. 3.1 Encouragin g Results
I brought those characters online, particularly that character [in Figure3.18], and for the
first time I started to get responses from people that were not merely encouraging, but
were deeply surprised and even inspired. People wanted to know how I was doing what I
was doing. Many of them still assumed that I was a cheater, but they still wanted to know
how I was modding my character, because no one else on these servers looked anything
like me. Likely this had to do with two primary factors: the first being that few people
were inclined to do this in the first place, and the second being that few people had access
to an Intel RealSense camera. I can’t recall a single time that I saw another player avatar
that looked like it was a real face, and that looked like it had been using Intel’s RealSense
camera technology.
If you played NBA 2K16 long enough you began to see not unique faces, but the archetypal
faces that hid underneath those faces. NBA 2K16 player avatars generated by the default
engine were the aesthetic equivalent of tr act housing.
119
You could change the paint, you
could change the size of the windows, you could change how you dressed it up, you could
change the size of it, but still there were certain presets and certain limitations to each
player avatar. After a while, you just saw the same people over and over again. Had some-
one else been using an Intel RealSense camera, I probably would have noticed, because
their face would have looked wholly different from the other faces around them, even if
its difference had been [buried] in a pseudo-realistic aesthetic.
Just as more people encouraged me to push my modding further, more of the players I was
friendly with online were encouraging me to play in serious, competitive online games.
These games were called “Pro-Am” games, and in contrast to the more casual online mul-
tiplayer environment in MyPark (which was an outdoor park full of basketball courts), a
Pro-Am game is a 5-on-5 full-court game following NBA rules, where there were no other
in-game spectators, and where players’ stats were tracked and the results recorded. A
team’s win-loss record was compared to the win-loss record of other teams. Those teams
could design their courts and their uniforms, and teams often took their commitments to
each other and the game very seriously. And I would show up in these competitive Pro-Am
games looking like some sort of glitched-out monster.
Here, unlike in the casual online multiplayer environments, players could actually look at
each others’ stats and the the numbers governing those stats, both after the game and dur-
ing halftime. That is to say that teammates and opponents could check and see if someone
was cheating and actually know for sure. This was the moment when I learned that just
about e v e ry pe rson I kne w thr ough NBA 2k16 , e v e ry pe rson I pla y ed with r egular ly , had
concluded that I w as a cheat e r. A few people confessed to me that they accepted that I was
cheating a little bit, but they thought it was worth it because I was a nice guy, or because
I was pretty good, or fun to play with. When they got to look at my stats, and they found
out that I was actually ‘under-leveled’ ,
120
that I was definitely not cheating, a lot of them
were shocked.
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 49
As I became a more skilled player, and I participated in more Pro-Am games, my mods
got more sophisticated. I learned how to control what I was doing, and how to be more
intentional and more purposeful in my modding. For example, one day it occurred to me
that you couldn’t play as an elderly person in game. As with gender representation, this
inability to play as an elderly person seemed unnecessarily ageist to me. It’s an arbitrary
decision. If someone can play as a 7-foot-tall 300 pound super athlete, they can choose
to live that fantasy, why can’t they choose to be 80 years old while they’re doing it? So I
had learned enough about the technology to make my face look like the face of an elderly
gentleman [see Figure3.19] and I played for a while as an elderly guy with an incredible
number of tattoos all over his body. I had leveled up to the point where I no longer was
required by the game to wear a shirt while I played, so my chest just had the phrase “HEY
KIDS” tattooed across it in giant letters.
Figure 3.19 : In this machinima scene from NBA 2k16, my elderly player-avatar is driving around his old neighborhood with his best friend. I created this avatar using
the Intel RealSense camera; at this point, I had developed a sense of how to intentionally produce realistic characters, as well as glitched-out monstrosities.
My experiments got weirder as I got better at pushing in particular directions. I was never
sure of the results I would get, but I was more efficient at producing interesting results, and
I was getting a little better at predicting what those results would be. Here’s an example
[in Figure3.20] of how I revisited my earlier monstrous squished face, and decided to
squish it even further, and I produced this kind of slightly cyclopic character. Here, for
the first time, I saw some of the three dimensional assets pushing through my face. I had
glitched out the RealSense camera’s technology and the software-hardware interaction, I
had glitched that process out just enough that the rigged jaw that normally hid under the
50 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
121: I probably haven’t been clear enough in
this talk: I played and modded NBA 2k16 ex-
clusively on my PC, playing the PC version of
the game.
player’s skin began protruding and glitching through my face. That jaw needed to be there
so that the game could procedurally animate your face when you were talking in narrative
cut-scenes, so that you could chew gum, so that your face could move like a normal face -
it was rigged to do that. I was able to glitch out that functionality such that I would enter
these Pro-Am games not just with a monstrously deformed character, but with one where
the eyeball and jaw were jutting through the skin in terrifying ways.
Figure 3.20 : This triptych illustrates the process through which I created my player-avatars. First, I would scan my face using the Intel RealSense camera. Second,
the NBA 2k16 software would attempt to map my scan to my player-avatar’s 3D model. Third, I would use the in-game character editor to customize my avatar.
Through my play, through my personality in chat rooms, but also through my weird mod-
ding practice, my reputation grew and people got to know me. People would introduce
me to other players, and I had access to better and better Pro-Am games and spaces and
parks. Nevertheless, people still suspected me of cheating, even when someone would
vouch for me. I’d meet a new person, they’d see me and play with me, and immediately
think: “Here’s a person who’s cheating. He’s too good and he’s clearly using some sort of
modding tool. He must be a cheater.”
3. 3.2 T he Beetl ejuice T az
One of the most successful experiments that I made was something I called the Beetlejuice
Taz. So if you google ’The Taz’ and ’NBA 2K16’ , you’ll find [images of] a kind of deformed
face, a kind of glitched-out face, where the chin was drawn up so it covered the eyes a bit,
and it scrunched up the face so much that you could put hair or a beard on the top and
bottom, and basically not see the player’s eyes. It was probably called The Taz because
someone thought it resembled a Tasmanian Devil. This particular mod, ’The Taz’ became
well-known because it made the rounds on consoles as opposed to the PC.
It’s important to note that 20 million people were playing NBA 2K16 at its peak, and almost
all of them were playing on consoles. In fact, if 20 million people were playing on consoles,
in comparison about 200,000 people were playing on PC.
121
Now on PC you could mod
and cheat relatively easily, if you’re familiar with computers, using the tool Cheat Engine
and there was almost no oversight. As I said earlier, it was impossible to report someone
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 51
for cheating, and nothing would happen to someone if they cheated. It just happened.
On consoles it was completely different. There were no readily available tools to allow
you to mod your player, and those tools that were available were very difficult to use (as
I understand it). Further, the population of users who had access to the game through
consoles were a lot less likely to be computer savvy, were a lot less likely to be tinkerers. I’m
not speaking here in anything more than a gestural way, I’m expressing opinions, these are
suppositions. But generally speaking, the folks that I knew who were playing on consoles
were doing it in part because of the ease and accessibility of playing on a console. It just
worked. You just plug it in and it works, right? And further, there were a lot more people
playing on consoles so there were, as a result, a lot more really good people. In addition,
an online multiplayer game on console was heavily monitored for cheating. Modding and
cheating was harder to do, and it was much, much harder to get away with, so you very
rarely saw anyone on consoles who was modding, let alone cheating.
The Taz was one of the only mods that anyone ever saw on consoles. In part, this was
because a community of people, through sites like Reddit, showed each other how they
could share the file and upload it to their console’s hard drive via USB. As difficult as it
was to mod for the console version of NBA 2K16, I can only imagine that very few people
had the privilege of learning how to manipulate their modding tools the way that I learned
how to manipulate the Intel RealSense camera. So all of this is to say that The Taz stood
out as a kind of readily-identifiable and really hilarious mod, that made the rounds in
online multiplayer games on the PlayStation and Xbox. I made my own version of The Taz
in part because people had begun requesting that I modify my player to look a particular
way. Someone would say, “Hey why don’t you do this? Why don’t you make the top of your
head really pointy? Or why don’t you, say, stretch your face in this particular direction?”
And I would say, “Oh yeah, I know how to do that,” or “I’m not sure how to do that.” The
Taz was making its way around on Imgur and Reddit, it was making its way around social
media. So a few people said: “Why don’t you make a Taz?”
Figure 3.21 : The process through which I created The Beetlejuice Taz.
I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I started experimenting more and more and eventually
I hit on it. I had to violently shake my head left to right as fast as I could, while the camera
was trying to perform a scan [see Figure3.21]. It was just pure experimentation. I was
trying as many things as I could think of, and when I started to move my head back and
52 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
122: Unfortunately, I can no longer find these
posts. I suspect they were lost when I deleted
some old accounts.
forth horizontally I started to get a result approaching The Taz. Then I got a result that
grossly exceeded The Taz, where I watched as the texture of my face, which is pictured
here, and is clearly the result of me moving my head back and forth violently, you can see
multiple faces there like I’m Janus or something. I watched as, in real time, the engine
tried to apply this texture to the 3-D rig of points, to that 3-D graph, and I watched those
points pull upward in a group. I can’t begin to tell you why this happened in any robust
engineering way, but in the end this is what it produced. It had stretched my eyeballs
forward and up, and put my jaw above my eyeballs. Suddenly, it looked like I was some
character out of the movie Beetlejuice. So, I posted my results to Reddit and called it the
Beetlejuice Taz, and I posted to Imgur, and people immediately began sharing and talking
about it.
122
I started playing using this avatar in-game, and I would get just wonderful responses from
people who would talk to me about how shocked they were when I walked onto a server,
or how hilarious I looked, or they would say, “I like the little halo that’s floating above
your head,” and I would say, “Well that’s my teeth!” It was hilarious. It was things like
this that allowed me to have a special kind of interaction with people in this community
of serious online competitors. I was just as serious as them, but I was also doing really
weird strange things that made them laugh, that surprised them. It led to a lot of really
interesting conversations.
I played using the Beetlejuice Taz in both casual and serious contexts, and by this point
there were enough people that I played with that would vouch for me, that other people
who wouldn’t have given me the time of day before, who would assume that I was a cheater,
would at least play with me if not chat with me on discord or something.
3. 3. 3 Commissioned M oddin g, or M oddin g Commissions
My avatars and the work I was doing were polarizing. Some people loved them, and others
were vehement in their accusations that I cheated. Among the folks who really loved them,
a small few asked me to do commissions for them. I don’t work in the kinds of mediums
where people ask me to do commissions, the way that a painter is asked to paint some-
thing, so when people started asking me to make avatars for them I wasn’t sure what to
say, and I wasn’t sure how it would work. It was an excellent opportunity to expand my
practice, though, so we plunged forward.
The process that I used was this: I would ask the person to change the password on their
Steam account; these people actually trusted me enough to change the password and give
me access. In exchange I would usually trade some kind of personal information about
myself with them, so they would really know who I was. I told them I was doing this as
part of my Ph.D. research, I would tell them my real name, my website, etc. I would tell
them,“I’m going to make this. And then as soon as you’re happy, change your password
again. I want you to feel secure. Turn on two factor authentication.” This is a really strange
thing to do and I felt weird about it. But I did it. I would go into the person’s account and
I would use my Intel RealSense camera to produce interesting results in accordance with
the requests that they made. Then I would go back and forth with the people. I would
say, “How does this look? What do you think about this?” And they would say what they
wanted changed and that I would change it. It produced really interesting results, some
of which are are pictured here.
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 53
Figure 3.23 : Screenshots of NBA 2k16 player-avatars that I produced on commission.
54 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
Figure 3.25 : Screenshots of NBA 2k16 player-avatars that I produced on commission.
3.3 Dude, what did you do to your face? 55
Occasionally, I would play in an online competitive environment with somebody who was
using one of my commissions, and so two or even three of us would stand there looking
shockingly different from the other people around us. We would find, and they would
find, that immediately folks would accuse them of cheating. This is a theme I’ve returned
to again and again, in this talk, and this organically became a major theme of my research.
No matter what I said or did, some people would not accept that I didn’t cheat, and I
never manipulated my stats or modified the physics controlling my avatars in any way.
I could show them in Pro-Am games, and serious online games, my stats and send them
screenshots of my stats and nothing I could do would convince them otherwise. Altering
my appearance was all the proof they needed that I was a cheater.
3. 3.4 Concludin g Re mar ks: P la y as Resear ch
To sum up, I began this long talk jumping off of Bruce Mackh’s definition of research as a
purposeful investigation to create, discover, or learn something new. I asserted that the
purposes of m y artistic r esear ch w e r e t o question methods, t o misuse t oo ls, t o br eak
rul es, and t o e xpand fiel ds. Those were the purposes, the ideals I was chasing after, as I
modified my avatar and entered these online spaces.
In questioning methods, I found through the process that I had had no research agenda
and had used no replicable methods. I simply played around, I got inspired, I tried things,
and I had fun. This process of playing around led to not just interesting artistic results,
but to interesting research findings – particularly the relationship between cheating and
appearance.
Other purposes of my artistic research: I intended to misuse tools and break rules. I
misused tools to break aesthetic conventions and also the predetermined aesthetic limits
that were authorized by the software, by NBA 2K16, and I broke the designer’s rules about
what I was allowed to look like. In doing so, I inadvertently discovered that players who
modify their avatars’ appearance usually read as cheaters to other players.
I think in the context of NBA 2K16, but also in other contexts, this is a natural thing be-
cause you have to ask: How do our methods appear to people who are unfamiliar with
your research practices? What happens when we eschew method entirely? What happens
when we misuse tools? How will people read that? How will they know how to value the
knowledge that we capture, and the art that we create?
People want to know what the rules are that hide behind the objects of study. They want
to know what your incentives are, they want to know what your motivations are. In the
tradition of humanistic scholarship and academic research, principles like falsifiability
or replicable methodologies are in part designed to make the incentives and motivations
behind a research program more clear, and thus more easily evaluated and perhaps crit-
icized.
My rule breaking and misuse of tools, and my anti-methods, led me to learn things about
the software, the hardware, and the community of players (and culture of players) in NBA
2K16 to which I would not otherwise have had access. I learned that, in the absence of
robust anti-cheating tools, the NBA 2K16 community on PC became deeply suspicious of
anyone who looked “different” , including those who looked like women. My methods were
invisible to other players, my tools were suspect, and I broke rules and norms that I didn’t
56 3 Explor atory M odding: Play as Resear ch
even know existed, whether those be the expectations of community members, or their
ability to suss out whether or not I was cheating.
In the end, these results are similar in kind and quality to those produced by other research
methodologies. To my mind, this fact helps legitimate the practice of exploratory modding
as an exemplar of playful, practice-based research. Through my exploratory modding
of NBA 2K16, I came to understand that play is itself a research practice. Simply put,
play is research. And I came to understand that play is the methodological bedrock of
my practice-based artistic research. I believe this realization, and the self-awareness it
precipitated, is above all else the primary research finding of my exploratory modding.
Play is the basis of all of my research practices, and I am committed to exemplifying and
championing this methodology within the field of practice-based arts research.
Figure 3.26 : Believe it or not, this was the face scan that I used to produce my ’elderly man’ player-avatar. At the time, I just thought it was a funny thing to do. Humor
is a great teacher.
Figure 4.1 : Headset for the HTC Vive virtual
reality platform.
124:
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Virtual Se-
mantics.” Keynote delivered at the IEEE In-
ternational Conference on Semantic Com-
puting, The Hills Hotel, Laguna Hills, CA, 01
Feb. 2018. As in other chapters, the transcript
has here been edited, marked up, and supple-
mented.
Real Fake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
4
This talk is concerned with the semantic qualities of virtual reality, and by extension how
these strange qualities inform my work as a narrative designer for VR experiences.
124
I
might begin this talk by asking: what does the word ‘semantic’ mean? Of course, asking
this question would be deeply ironic. Semantics is the study of meaning. So essentially,
I’d begin this talk by asking: what does meaning mean?
Were this talk a game of chess, my question would be a... questionable first move. Never-
theless, this is the traditional opening gambit of academic talks, papers, and books. The
speaker or author begins by defining the terms they plan to use, in the hopes that their
audience will better understand what they mean when they use a particular word, like the
word ‘semantics’ . Again, semantics is the study of meaning. A specific study might focus
on the conceptual, linguistic, or logical aspects of meaning. But all of these approaches
depend upon explicit ‘definitions’ (whatever that word means) of words like ‘concept’ , ‘lan-
guage’ , ‘logic’ , and so on.
So how should we define all of these terms? And which approach should we use in our
study? Oftentimes, a talk like this one can get bogged down in justifying its definition of
a term, or its approach to defining that term, because now the question at hand is essen-
tially: what does it mean to study the meaning of the word meaning?
This is the kind of language game that can make an academic talk seem ridiculous to many
people. In fact, the entry for “semantics” at the popular website Wiktionary.org contains
a sentence that perfectly captures that ridiculousness: “The semantics of a single prepo-
sition is a dissertation in itself.” As someone writing a dissertation, that quote rings true
for me. It feels true, particularly given that I had to look up the word preposition to make
sure it meant what I thought it meant.
“Where did you look it up?” you might ask. What was my source? Was it a good source?
How do I know what a preposition is, and why shouldn’t I end a sentence with one? These
unanswered questions are starting to pile up, and my talk hasn’t even begun yet. Why
would anyone bother with a game like this? And what would motivate someone to play
along with me?
4.1 W he n is a definition ‘r eal’ e nough ?
I want to accurately define the term semantics here, so my audience knows what I mean,
but I also want to get past definitions and this pile of unanswered questions before my
audience stops caring. There’s an important tension here: on the one hand, we want to
know the real meaning of the word ‘semantics’ before we proceed, i.e. we want to know
57
58 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
125: This definition is a cribbed collage
from several widely-used online sources, e.g.
Google, Wiktionary, and Mirriam Webster.
126:
This is why I began each of the preced-
ing chapters with a language game: it
is an expression of my ontological and
methodological commitments to play, and
an honest reflection of how I subjectively
approach the construction of a theoreti-
cal framework. In part, it’s inspired by
the dialogic method used by Plato, and the
‘metalogue’ form used by Gregory Bateson
in his book, STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF
MIND. Too, I follow Dewey in approach-
ing philosophical situations via pragmatic
analysis: I take in data, use that data to
construct information, mull over that in-
formation, and come to practical deci-
sions. This pragmatic approach means
that I necessarily try to approach vari-
ous problems—in philosophy, in design,
and elsewhere—through the self-reflexive
playing of language games. (It likely goes
without saying that Wittgensetin, too, has
deeply influenced my approach. But I’ll
say it anyway, just in case.)
the truth; on the other hand, we want a definition that’s good enough for the purposes
at hand, so we don’t get bogged down in a ridiculous language game. How do we resolve
this tension? When is a definition good enough to use? Or, to be more precise, when is a
definition r eal enough to use?
Before this talk proceeds, I have a difficult choice to make. Will I ignore other things, and
focus on determining the real meaning of semantics? Or will I settle for a definition that
is virtually real, and move on to discussing other things like virtual reality and narrative
design?
I have a talk to give here. The slides are already made, and of course all of my questions are
essentially rhetorical. I made my decision before this game began. This is a talk about vir-
tual reality and narrative design, not about the definition of the word semantics. So clearly
I’m going to settle here for a definition of the word semantics that’s ‘good enough’ , that’s
virtually real, so I can move on to other things. My definition might be something like:
“semantics is the human study of meaning in language and logic,”
125
and that’s perfectly
fine for my purposes.
As an artist-theorist, I approach semantics largely through the colloquial usage of terms
and concepts, and I pla y with co l l oquialisms and idioms t o dra w out mor e complicat ed
cultural r elationships, to examine the games surrounding them, and to find inspiration
for both my theoretical and artistic work.
126
So, I often begin talks this way, with an ab-
stract discussion of language, because it’s a comparatively safe way to introduce and illus-
trate concrete tensions between concepts, such as the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ . In abstract,
this real-versus-virtual dichotomy presents as “merely academic” , as one might say – as
something of no pr actical consequence. One might say it’s “just semantics” , but semantic
discussions are always contextual and these contexts surround language games, like ours,
with very real and serious stakes. In our context, this abstract real-virtual dichotomy, and
our semantic play, serves as the foundation for a truly polarizing cultural conflict.
This conflict is best summed up by the juxtaposition of two simple words and the con-
founding colloquialism they produce: fak e ne w s.
4.1.1 Real F ak e N e w s
What is fake news? OK, let’s not get bogged down. We’ll just approach the question as
most any contemporary American might. We’ll Google it.
I’m looking at some Google search results right now, from the 29th of March, 2018. The top
stories, at the top of the Google search results, relate to “busting Russia’s fake news the
European Union way” , or Facebook beginning to fact check photos and videos. Those are
the stories that are bumped up by Google’s algorithms. The first entry underneath those
is a Wikipedia entry for the idea of fake news. That’s not surprising, given how widely used
Wikipedia has become. From Wikipedia, we might say that fake news is, “A type of yellow
journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes, spread
via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media.” Again, that’s a
description of ‘fake news’ from the Wikipedia website.
Now, the invocation of yellow journalism is telling here. The conflict between ‘real’ news
and ‘fake’ news is a longstanding conflict in the United States. I’m thinking here of the
4.1 When is a definition ‘r eal’ enough? 59
Figure 4.2 : The USS Maine exploded on Febru-
ary 15, 1898. Credit: public domain.
127: Wikipedia provides the following citation
for this: W. Joseph Campbell, Y ellow J ournal-
ism: Puncturing the M yths, Defining the Lega-
cies (2003) p. 72
128: Emily Erickson, “Spanish–American
War and the Press,” in Stephen L. Vaughn,
ed. (2007). ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN
JOURNALISM. Routledge. pp. 494–95. [Note:
It’s possible the historian’s last name is
actually spelled ’Erikson’ . In lieu of my
own certainty, I have used Wikipedia’s own
citation information.]
famous story about Hearst’s newspaper, and the Spanish-American War, about the im-
ages of the USS Maine being blown up by a torpedo or a bomb. As the story goes, William
Randolph Hearst told a war correspondent, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the
war.” If you return here to Wikipedia, and their entry on yellow journalism, you’ll find
that in their summation of the conflict between Pulitzer and Hearst and the causes of the
Spanish-American War, they acknowledge that—as well-known as this story has become,
of Hearst telling his correspondent to supply pictures so he could push forward the war ef-
forts in America—Wikipedia calls into question the veracity of that story, the truth behind
it, and the effect of Hearst’s yellow journalism on US involvement in the Spanish-American
Civil War.
The Wikipedia entry notes that the vast majority of Americans did not live in New York
City, where Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s papers were published, and it notes that the decision-
makers who did live there probably relied more on other newspapers. They note that
James Creelman, in his memoir, said that the artist Frederic Remington telegraphed
Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and there would be no war, and Creelman claims
Hearst responded: “Please remain, you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Impor-
tantly, Hearst denied the veracity of that story and no one has found any evidence of the
telegrams existing.
127
I like the quote they provide here, from historian Emily Erickson. The quote is, “Serious
historians have dismissed the telegram story as unlikely. The hubris contained in this
supposed telegram, however, does reflect the spirit of unabashed self promotion that was
a hallmark of the yellow press and of Hearst in particular.”
128
So on the one hand, even our
most famous stories about fake news turn out to sometimes be fake news. On the other
hand, as Emily Erickson implies, the story of Hearst influencing the U.S. entry into the
Spanish American War has a ring of truth to it. It feels true. It reflects the spirit of yellow
journalism.
60 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
This is a concrete example of the tension between the ‘real’ , on the one hand, and the
‘fake’ , or ‘virtual’ , or ‘good enough’ , on the other. What’s the nature of this core tension?
Is the tension between real events, like the destruction of the U.S. warship Maine, and
their virtual counterparts, like paintings, textual descriptions, conversations etc.? Or is
the real-virtual dichotomy more complicated than this? Again, what is fake news? What
makes some news real and other news fake? What makes some news feel real and other
news feel fake?
Again let’s return to colloquial usages and think about how the real-fake dichotomy crops
up in relation to other words. So commonly we contrast the words ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ . We
contrast the word ‘object’ , and the word ‘subject’ . ‘Natural’ and ‘artificial’ are often seen
as opposites. And there’s a dichotomy, a widely held one, between what we observe and
what we imagine. When we ask what makes some news real and other news fake, I wonder
if this is like the question: What makes some doors real and other doors fake?
4.1.2 Real F ak e Doors
I’m thinking here of the great sketch from the show Rick and M orty, Season 1 Episode
8, which is called “Ricksty Minutes” . There’s a great commercial in that episode [see Fig-
ure 4.3 ] where they’re watching intergalactic television from all possible universes. There’s
a commercial for a store that sells “real fake doors” . These doors are somehow both real
and fake, and the character in this commercial goes around demonstrating how all of these
doors, all of these things in his store that look like doors, do not in fact open. So they’re
Figure 4.3 : Screenshot of the ‘Real Fake Doors’ commercial from Rick and M orty, Season 1, Episode 8 (“Rixty Minutes”).
4.1 When is a definition ‘r eal’ enough? 61
real doors, but they’re fake as well. They don’t function the way you would expect. They
don’t lead anywhere. But they are still doors. But they’re not.
Think about this again in relation to the colloquialisms that we just talked about, the
generally-held sense we have of, for example, the difference between fact and fiction. It is
a fact, in that Rick and Morty episode, that those doors resemble doors or might be made
of the same materials as doors; they might be structurally similar to doors, they might
have hinges, they might have the potential for a certain kind of use... we might call those
things facts. And yet those doors end up being a kind of dodge. They don’t work the way
that you’d expect them to, they’re not affixed to walls properly. Some of them are stuck
on floors. Because they present in this factual way as doors, and then fail to meet our
expectations of how a door works, they become a strange kind of fictional fact.
It’s wrapped, this real fake door joke, in a larger fiction, in the meta-fictional universe of
Rick and M orty, which is an absurdist science fiction universe full of all sorts of seeming
contradictions and conceptual play. Again, think about the contrast between the ‘object’
of the door, and the ‘subject’ of the door. The object of a door has material qualities. We
might talk about its objective qualities: its weight, its size. But there’s a subjective quality
to it as well. What one person might call a door another person might not. One person
might look at a door that’s hanging on a rack and Home Depot and say, “That’s a door.”
Another person might very seriously look at that same door and say, “No it’s a big piece of
unpainted wood, and we’re going to hang it up somewhere and it’ll become a door.” That
may sound silly, but I’ve known craftsmen and carpenters who, after working their craft
for a long while, stopped seeing pieces of wood as anything more than pieces of wood. You
can repurpose all sorts of materials, in all sorts of interesting ways.
So, what is a person’s subjective approach to an object, and an objective situation? Again,
this is more complicated than we might immediately think. The same might be true of
how we talk about the ‘natural’ versus how we talk about the ‘artificial’ . What is natural?
Is there anything that we can call properly ‘natural’ or is this some sort of cultural conven-
tion, some sort of human conceit? What are the limits of artifice? Where does the natural
end and the artificial begin? Where do those ideas overlap?
4.1. 3 P ortmant eaus in the St orm
T he distance separatin g ‘r eal’ fr om ‘ fak e ’ has bee n shrinkin g. Fact and fiction become
smushed together in this example of a real fake door, and we might call that smushed-
together space a faction. The place and space between fact and fiction has become a polit-
ically contested space, so the word faction seems appropriate here. Of course, faction as
a noun can refer to a literary and cinematic genre in which real events are used as a basis
for a fictional narrative or dramatization – it is a blending of fact and fiction. I think that
narrative technique, and the use of the word faction, is wonderfully ironic in relation to
the common political usage of the word faction, which is a camp of folks with very spe-
cific interests, needs and goals, who are, in their grouping together, opposed to the ideas
and goals of some other groups, and they organize for political purposes and for political
power. We might also recognize here that history itself is, as my partner Heidi likes to say,
a fiction based upon fact.
Fact and fiction get mashed together in some sort of factional and fractional way, as the
space between fact and fiction becomes aesthetically contested and dramatized as it was
62 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
129: Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman,
NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Ugly
Duckling Presse, 2009 (p. 17). The relevant
section of the book is freely available online
at the publisher’s website: https://www.
uglyducklingpresse.org/wp- content/
uploads/2013/07/Notes_free.pdf
130: The concept of a ‘hyperobject’ is most
directly attributed to Timothy Morton, au-
thor of the book, HYPEROBJECTS: PHILOSO-
PHY AND ECOLOGY AFTER THE END OF THE
WORLD, Minnesota UP, 2013. It is used widely
among contemporary philosophers, particu-
larly those involved with the ‘object-oriented
ontology’ movement.
131: This thought experiemnt appears in
Descartes’s MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHI-
LOSOPHY, specifically “Mediatation VI: Con-
cerning the Existence of Material Things, and
the Real Distinction between Mind and Body” .
Figure 4.4 : In this illustrative image, a small
circle sits beside a much larger chiliagon.
Credit: Wikipedia.
in the real fake doors example from Rick and M orty. The idea of real fake doors is funny
because we’re playfully jumping back and forth between conflicting and contested seman-
tic meanings of words like real, fake, and doors. I’ll come back to semantics later when
I’m talking about my work.
Moving forward, let’s talk about the object-subject dichotomy from before. There’s a word
that’s made the rounds in specific literary and artistic circles that is a portmanteau of ob-
ject and subject and that word is sobject: subject plus object. I encountered that word in
the book NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS which was written by Vanessa Place and Robert
Fitterman, and in that book there’s a quote that I think perfectly encapsulates the spirit of
the sobject as a concept. “Narrativity,” they say, “like pleasure, is subjective in the pred-
icate and objective in the execution.”
129
So people, like characters, are both subjects and
objects who play roles and stories and who author their own stories. And the sobject rec-
ognizes this.
Doubling back, we might talk about a mixture of natural and artificial: two words that
again are seen in dichotomous opposition. We might mix them together into the aug-
mented, as we think about transhumanism, or cyborgs, or nonbinary ontologies, or con-
tact lenses, or marriage, or fertilizer, or ‘virtual reality’ . All of these are a kind of blending
of what would classically and colloquially be called natural, and what would be called ar-
tificial, into something we might call augmented or mixed or virtual reality.
Finally, the dichotomy between the observed and the imagined becomes troubled with
processes driven by ‘Big Data’ , or concepts like hyper objects. A hyperobject is a [semantic]
response to the question of what happens when ‘objects’ , whatever that means, are too big
and too complicated to be seen – and too big and too complicated to be imagined. They
become what many contemporary philosophers call hyperobjects.
130
4.1.4 T hought Expe rime nts
There’s an old example of this in the work of Descartes, who asks his readers to play along
with a thought experiment.
131
He asks the reader to first imagine a triangle, a three-sided
figure. The idea here is that a triangle is pretty easy to imagine. It has three sides; we’ve
seen them before. We’re used to thinking about them. Then, Descartes asks his readers
to imagine a chiliagon, which is a polygon with one thousand sides [see Figure 4.4]. There
are problems with trying to imagine a chiliagon. It’s too complex. So when one tries to
imagine a thousand sides at once, the vast majority of people in that situation will picture
a circle. The human mind isn’t equipped to envision a thousand-sided figure at once.
Now, there are exceptions to this. My collaborator Anton Hand insists that he can imagine
a chiliagon, largely because he’s looked at them for years as a 3D and 2D artist. There
are some questions here about the ‘natural’ ability of humans, let’s say, and the learned or
developed or enculturated [or augmented] abilities of humans. We can trouble Descartes’s
thought experiment that way.
Nevertheless, the spirit of this thought experiment rings true. It feels true. It’s virtually
true. It’s good enough. Because it illustrates that some objects, like a chiliagon, are too
complex for a person to imagine, and probably too complex for a person to recognize in
the “real world” . If I were looking around the room I’m in, and there happened to be a
chiliagon in it, I don’t know that I’d identify it as a chiliagon. I might just see a circle.
4.2 H ow does Virtual Reality r elate to Actual Reality? 63
Figure 4.5 : Data visualization of the monthly
mean carbon dioxide concentration in Mauna
Loa from 1958 to 2017. Credit: Wikipedia.
132: The bulk of this paragraph was cribbed
from a talk I gave at the 2018 Society for Cin-
ema and Media Studies Conference, as part
of a panel entitled, “VR Aesthetics 2: Forms
and Formats” . I served as a respondent on the
panel, so much of my talk was a synthesis of
the panel’s other three talks. In the case of
this paragraph, I am most directly indebted
to Liron Efrat and her excellent talk, “The Re-
turn of the Real: The Aesthetics of Conver-
gence in Augmented Reality” .
Contemporary philosophers who talk about hyperobjects often connect this concept to
contemporary issues like climate change. Climate change is a difficult thing, or object, to
imagine. It’s big, it’s complicated, it’s not something like a box or a book or a handbag
that we can easily grab, that we’re used to seeing, that we’ve talked about with other folks.
We might talk about climate change with other folks, but it’s a difficult thing to talk about.
What aspect of climate change are we talking about? What approach are we taking to
our subject? Are we going to talk about the concept of climate change, or the logics and
processes at work behind it, or are we going to talk about the semantics of climate change
and its use in political rhetoric?
Again, all of this circles back to the ball that got rolling at the beginning of this talk. It
circles back to semantics. If we want to know the meaning of climate change—not just as
a concept, but about its impact on our daily lives—we also have to reckon with ho w w e
judg e the r ealness of somethin g that cannot be pe r cei v ed. Folks working in Big Data, or
in the visualization of very large data sets, reckon with this question all the time. How do
we perceive the realness of something that can’t be perceived through the human senses,
nor through ‘normal’ means to which we are enculturated?
For example, take a visualization of an aspect of climate change: the monthly mean carbon
dioxide concentration in a specific place like Mauna Loa, in a specific date range like 1958 to
2017 [see Figure 4.5 ]. If we look at a line graph, and a scatter plot that’s creating that line, we
can perhaps [better] understand this data, particularly if we’ve been trained to understand
it, and if we’re used to looking at line graphs and scatter plots. We can understand this
data, but we cannot perceive the hyperobject of climate change itself. We can only reckon
with a visualization of very specific data collected and represented in very specific ways.
As we reckon with the dichotomy of real and virtual, it means we have to reckon with
imperceptible facts, immaterial objects, the artifice of nature, mediated observation, all
phrases that, like ”fake news” , seem paradoxical or oxymoronic or ridiculous. In the face
of these paradoxes, these ridiculous turns of phrase, how do we move forward? Especially
if we can’t perceive the way?
All perception is paradigmatic. Each of the dichotomies I presented earlier are paradig-
matic, and reflect paradigmatic ways of looking and understanding relationships: the fact
versus the fiction, the object versus the subject, the natural versus the artificial, the ob-
served versus the imagined. Something is considered ‘real’ when our lived experience of
it most closely aligns with the dominant model or paradigm of what is called reality, of
what is called a fact, of what is called an object, of what is called natural, of what is called
observed. These are loaded words. These are terms that are deeply embedded with and
in the dominant paradigm and model of reality.
132
4.2 H o w does V irtual Reality r elat e t o Actual Reality?
At this juncture it’s probably worthwhile to ask: how does ‘virtual’ reality relate to ‘actual’
reality? We have this idea of actual reality as being constituted of facts and objects, of
somehow being ‘natural’ as opposed to something constructed through human artifice,
and we understand the actual world through observation. So how does virtual reality re-
late to actual reality? Is it fictional as opposed to factual? Is it subjective? Is it artificial?
Is it imaginary?
64 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
133: I also discuss this in the “Paradoxical
Play” subsection in Ch. 2 (see §2.1.3.)
When we look at a widely-available resource like Merriam Webster, we find the follow-
ing definition: “Virtual Reality is an artificial environment which is experienced through
sensory stimuli, as sights and sounds, provided by a computer and in which one’s ac-
tions partially determine what happens in the environment.” This is a really interesting
definition for our purposes, because it actually sounds a lot, and reads a lot, like a good
definition for the word “reality” .
Like virtual reality, we could describe reality as an artificial environment. We could say
that it’s experienced through sensory stimuli, right? That it’s observable through our
senses. And we could say that reality is a place where one’s actions partially determine
what happens in the environment. So what’s so special about virtual reality? Is it that
it’s created by a computer? I don’t think so. (And this is setting aside completely the Elon
Musk perspective, that we might all be living in a simulation right now.) Virtual reality for
me isn’t special because it happens using a computer, or inside an artificial environment.
It’s special because users of virtual reality know it’s happening inside an artificial environ-
ment, made using a computer. In other words, peopl e usin g VR kno w it’ s ‘ virtual’. They
know it ‘isn’t real’ . They think of it as virtual, or only ‘virtually’ real.
How do we know that virtual reality isn’t real? I like in moments like this to turn this
question toward Gregory Bateson’s work and ask: how do dogs know when bites aren’t
real? Bateson’s famous quote about this is, “the playful nip denotes the bite, but it does
not denote what would be denoted by the bite.” So, playful nips refer to virtual bites, to
bites that do not exist. There’s no actual bite. There’s only the idea of a bite. But for the
dogs, the idea of the bite still denotes meaning, and it’s still part of their lived experience.
It’s a part of their reality even though it’s only virtual, we might say. This is a kind of
paradox. There’s no bite. There’s only the idea of a bite, but it still denotes meaning.
133
4.2.1 Real F ak e Rooms
So how can dogs and other animals, like humans, reconcile paradoxes like this between
real things, like bites, and virtual things, like ideas of bites that are denoted and connoted
through mixed things like a nip? For Bateson, animals need play to break outside para-
doxes of thought. Virtual Reality is itself a paradox of thought. To experience virtual reality
is necessarily to inhabit a real space and a fake space at the same time. Room-scale virtual
reality takes place in a real room and a fake room that are somehow coextensive. By this, I
mean that the real room and the fake room are conceptually separate, but extend over the
same space and time. The user is in both the real room and the fake room simultaneously.
They’re also in neither room, because each phrase—“real room” or “fake room”—implies a
separateness that does not exist.
Viewed this way, virtual r eality is a r eal fake r oom.
How can a room be both real and fake at the same time? And how can a person understand
a room as both real and fake? I would argue that virtual reality is an invitation to play, and
to be self-aware that you are playing. A person can understand a room is both real and fake
through a self-aware kind of play, and virtual reality is an invitation to think that way, to
think across multiple, seemingly contradictory semantic levels. Through this, play allows
animals of all kinds to resolve paradoxes, to understand controversies, to solve seemingly
impossible problems, and to imagine change.
4.2 H ow does Virtual Reality r elate to Actual Reality? 65
134:
This is a direct and honest expression of
one of my core beliefs, and it impacts both
my ‘artistic’ and my ‘theoretical’ work.
In the latter case, I try to use seman-
tic wordplay and language games to in-
vite, motivate, and help my audience think
playfully about serious topics and difficult
concepts. And it helps me, too: it’s some-
thing I enjoy, and it provokes my imagina-
tion.
135: The relevant entry at the website
K now Y our M eme is useful for context:
https://knowyourmeme.com/
memes/casually- pepper- spray-
everything- cop
Play lets us imagine things like climate change, when we’re incapable of perceiving climate
change. Play allows us to imagine economic change, through art, let’s say. I’m thinking
here of Banksy’s work. Play allows us to imagine political change and to use symbols that
can inspire playful thinking about a political context. A good example of this might be the
Guy Fawkes mask that appeared regularly during and in the Occupy movements in 2011.
Following these examples of the Guy Fawkes mask or Banksy’s work, we might say: pla y ful
art helps peopl e imagine chan g e.
134
If perception is always paradigmatic, and all paradigms are ideological, then playful art
can help us engage paradigms and ideology in a playfully self-aware way. We can see a
paradigm as a ‘real fake room’ . We can see ideology as a real fake door. We can see that
facts and fictions are not so distinct as they initially appear. We can see that objects and
subjects are smushed together, that the natural and the artificial are not easily separated,
and that imagined data is just as important as observed data.
Something is considered real when it most closely aligns with the hegemonic paradigm
of reality that predominates a specific sociopolitical and historical context. This is to say
that there are many realities, but some of them are winning. (And some of them are...
orange.)
4.2.2 Real F ak e W indo w s
Now, I’m a humorist and a narrative designer who works in virtual reality. Let’s talk about
the first part of that: I’m a humorist. When I want to talk about the hegemonic qualities of
reality, and the way that we think about reality, I believe humor can help people playfully
jump between ‘realities’ and gain critical distance from their and other models of reality.
Humor can help us think critically about a ridiculous idea like fake news, and take that
concept seriously as we move forward. In my work, I try to leverage humor to invite people
to playfully engage semantic meaning.
An example of this would be my 2012 work, The Lieutenant J ohn Pike M emorial Br owser
Extension, which, when installed, causes Lieutenant John Pike to occasionally walk out into
your browser window [see Figure 4.6] and pepper spray you in the face, thus blacking out
the screen and making you incapable of seeing the content in your browser’s window.
Browser windows are not real windows in the hegemonic sense of reality, but browser
windows are real windows in that they allow us to see a world. At the time I made that
browser extension with my collaborator Lucas Miller, many people were seeing the world
in part through the meme of the “[Casually] Pepper Spray Everything Cop” .
135
Lieutenant
John Pike was the police officer who used illegally-obtained military-grade pepper spray
on peaceful protesters at the University of California Davis. After he did this, it inspired a
meme where people would insert an image of Lieutenant Pike pepper spraying something
into every kind of context they could think of. It was a beautiful example of folk art that
drives a kind of mimetic thinking and a kind of cultural play. This play, I think, helped
people see that their vision of reality was something worth playing with. I wanted users
to see their browser windows as constructs, as well as windows onto a perspective on the
world.
Browser windows are thus both real and fake, somehow, in the way that doors can be both
real and fake and rooms can be both real and fake. Fake rooms, fake windows, can show
us worlds that are virtually real.
66 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
Figure 4.6 : A screenshot of The Lieutenant
J ohn Pike M emorial Br owser Extension at work.
4.2. 3 V irtual Se mantics
I’ve been dancing around the word ‘virtual’ without engaging it directly. So let’s talk about
that. Virtual reality is almost real. It is nearly real. It is practically real – and as before, its
reality is determined in relation to some other reality.
If virtual reality is ‘almost’ real, then it is implicitly aspir ational. VR is supposed to be mor e
real, and closer to some specific reality. When we see images of people using virtual reality
headsets, we often see images that reflect a specific kind of reality, a specific context or way
in which that virtual reality device is supposed to be used. Again, this is aspirational.
In relation to those aspirations, let’s ask a tricky question, a speculative one: Why did
Facebook buy Oculus? And, what made Oculus worth 2 billion dollars to Facebook?
There are images all over the Internet, like this one [see Figure4.7], of Mark Zuckerberg
walking through halls full of middle-aged white men, all of whom have these futuristic,
ridiculous-looking ski mask things stuck on the front of their faces. They’re all taking
this experience very seriously, and Zuckerberg has a big smile on his face. When I think
about these folks, sitting in this auditorium, all together but experiencing virtual reality in
an isolated way, through their own individual headsets, it reminds me that VR headsets,
like browser windows, allow us to see a world, a reality, and that these headsets provide a
window that, like a browser window, is both real and fake. Accordingly, it allows us to see
a world that is both real and fake. It is a virtual world. It is virtually real.
4.2 H ow does Virtual Reality r elate to Actual Reality? 67
Figure 4.7 : Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Face-
book, is here walking down the aisle of an au-
ditorium full of (white male) people wearing
Oculus headsets. Image originally appeared
on Facebook, and is now widely used as one
of the most famous VR-related images – and
the foundation of numerous memes.
136: Michael said this during his talk, “De-
veloping the Spatial Paradigm of Virtual Re-
ality” , as part of our aforementioned panel at
the 2018 Society for Cinema and Media Stud-
ies conference.
What kind of world does Facebook want us to see? What kind of reality do they want to
create? Maybe a better question would be: what kind of reality would Facebook prefer?
My friend Michael LaRocco says, “Both the materials and practices of virtual reality cur-
rently serve and aspire toward a Platonic ideal.”
136
By this I think Michael means that these
platforms, at the heart of contemporary virtual reality, seem to aspire toward an ideal of
reality that reflects an objective, factual conception of reality. Further, that this concep-
tion is deeply aspirational in the way that Platonic forms are, and values an ideal of reality
‘above’ what we might call “actual reality” .
Still, why invest two billion dollars in a Platonic ideal? And what is that ideal? Well, I
would break it down this way: Facebook’s Platonic ideal of virtual reality is driven in part
by a kind of realism. Their user manuals, their relationships with developers, their best
practices manual (which Mike LaRocco studies): all of these things reflect the desire for
virtual reality environments and experiences to be realistic. What I mean by ‘realistic’ is
something approximate to most people’s experience of paradigmatic reality. Facebook
wants virtual reality environments and experiences to look and feel like the experiences
people have when they’re not in virtual reality. In those experiences they want to meet
users’ needs in the same way that those needs are met elsewhere.
4.2.4 T he Inne r Ear M edium
Facebook also wants virtual reality to be immersive. They want VR experiences to be invit-
ing, to be comfortable, and to never violate the user’s expectations of realism, or worse, to
make them sick. If we imagine this in relation to Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” , the virtual
reality hierarchy of needs [see Figure 4.8] rests on a foundation of comfort, and asks: “Can
the user experience the simulation without becoming nauseous or disoriented?” This is,
for a company like Facebook, the fundament of their ‘virtual reality’ . Every other thing—
the interpretability, or the usefulness, or the pleasure of virtual reality—is secondary to
68 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
the user’s comfort in that space. So the Oculus user has to feel immersed in the space,
and that space must feel realistic in an embodied, holistic, somatic way.
Figure 4.8 : This image playfully applies
Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”
to contemporary VR technologies. Source:
“The Hierarchy of Needs in Virtual Reality
Development” , by Beau Cronin. Published
to Medium on 18 Jan. 2015. Available online:
https://medium.com/@beaucronin/
the- hierarchy- of- needs- in- virtual-
reality- development- 4333a4833acc
Stuff like this prompts myself and my colleagues at RUST LTD. to observe that virtual
r eality is not primarily a visual medium, it is an inne r ear medium. This is a way of look-
ing at virtual reality that’s grown not just from our own work, but from our interactions
with other VR developers. If we think about virtual reality as an inner ear medium, it be-
comes easier to imagine making a ‘realistic’ immersive environment in a practical way,
because the user’s balance becomes incredibly important and the developer can be self-
aware about the user’s ability to maintain their balance, to maintain a holistic sense of
where they are in a space. Developers can also share techniques that help people to un-
derstand themselves in virtual reality as being in something like actual reality. A simple
technique that we often use in out-of-home experiences is pointing a fan at the user’s
face. The experience of wind, of a breeze hitting your skin, tends to help people (for lack
of a better phrase) gain their sea legs. It helps them to feel balanced, to not feel nauseous,
to be more present in this virtual reality.
Facebook wants techniques that help users to be comfortable and immersed in an en-
vironment that feels realistic, and that is consistently realistic. Consistency is important
here. VR experiences have to use the same interaction paradigms so users can become
enculturated to VR more easily. When developers map interactions to buttons on an Ocu-
lus controller, they need to map those interactions in accordance with the paradigms set
forth by Oculus and Facebook, by the platform’s creator and maintainer. Users need to be
enculturated to the use of a new controller – and to deviate from an interaction paradigm
is to undercut that enculturation process, and the consistency of an immersive realistic
experience.
4.3 Why do you car e about semantics, as an artist? 69
137:
Earlier in this chapter, I asserted that
the distance separating ‘real’ from ‘fake’
has been shrinking. In that context,
I meant that many people (specifically
many Americans) are beginning to adopt
a worldview that is more self-aware and
accepting of conceptual ‘gray areas’ . In
other words, people in certain subcul-
tures are becoming enculturated to a fac-
tional, sobjective, augmented, hyperob-
jective ‘reality’ where things are less ab-
solute, and less distinct.
In contrast, I believe Facebook wants the
real and the fake to converge so they can
colonize and monetize this convergence,
this coextensive space, this ‘gray area’
where (it seems) more and more people
will be spending more and more time.
And if Facebook can encourage the growth
of its own subcultures, it can in turn lever-
age the shrinking distance between the
real and the fake in service of a new kind
of measurement, a new way of reckon-
ing, a dark underbelly of the gray area –
this is the kind of subculture, for example,
that would ironically deploy the term ‘fake
news’ as a tactical maneuver in a high-
stakes language game.
I say all this here to prefigure some po-
tential confusion that might arise from my
assertions about this ‘shrinking space be-
tween the real and the virtual’ . In part, I
could’ve been more precise in how I spoke
about this convergence, and about how I
perceive the strange spatial and temporal
semantics of VR – and at the same time,
I have to admit that I didn’t fully under-
stand what I was saying until I re-read
this transcript, and reconsidered my ap-
proach. So this attempt at clarification,
via this margin notes, arises from my re-
visiting one of my talks as a primary sour ce.
138: Anton Hand talks about this in Ch. 6,
where he speculates that Facebook is mov-
ing away from data mining the gaze, and to-
ward data mining the user’s surrounding ‘real
world’ context. In other conversations, he
and I have discussed how Facebook’s forth-
coming ‘Santa Cruz’ headset is “turning its
cameras outward” for precisely these rea-
sons.
139: SeeChapter 5for an extensive conversa-
tion about M useum of the M icr ostar.
4.2. 5 Real F ak e Cultur e
Culture is, to my mind, the most important part of Facebook’s Platonic ideal of virtual
reality, of the ideal that they’re aspiring to reach. For Facebook, VR needs to offer spaces
for family and friends to build real culture together, which can directly connect VR to
their real lives. They want the space between the real and the virtual to shrink.
137
They
want to shrink this through consistency of interaction paradigms. They want to shrink it
through a kind of immersion that is inviting and comfortable, and that is consistent in its
use of realistic techniques and tropes. Through this, F aceboo k is culti v atin g a subcultur e
of use rs t o w ant VR t o be ‘r ealistic ’, to internalize this Platonic ideal and this particular
aspirational idea of virtual reality. This new subculture of VR users wants to immerse
itself in a realistic fake culture.
If VR spaces are designed to be realistic, then people will [presumably] approach those
spaces with realist expectations. In turn, this will prompt the user to look at ‘virtual’ ob-
jects in ‘natural’ ways, and to perceive and accept those objects as ‘facts’ . All of which is
necessary for Facebook to data mine your gaze.
Now, to this point, Facebook’s attempts to data-mine users’ gaze have been underwhelm-
ing. So where Facebook is going in the future is a little hard to predict. It will depend
upon the direction they take their platforms, and the direction other platforms take.
138
They may want to grab hold of a subculture and continue to direct its development. But
Virtual Reality is becoming many things for many people, and mixed reality, XR, or aug-
mented reality, AR, is still troubling the creation of any monolithic kind, any Platonic ideal,
of virtual reality.
Nevertheless, I would assert that Facebook was willing to pay two billion dollars to acquire
Oculus because Facebook wanted to data mine our gaze. The most popular platform, the
best practices, and the dominant virtual culture could soon be controlled by one company:
Facebook. It may shake out that way. This company primarily makes money through ad-
vertising. Facebook wants to define, standardize, produce, control, and profit from what
you see. Thus, the perceptual paradigm of virtual reality could become virtually indistin-
guishable from specific commodity forms and ideological aspirations.
4. 3 W h y do y ou car e about se mantics, as an artist?
So, to circle back: to control the culture of VR, Facebook and other platform holders and
companies like them, want to shrink the distance between the real and the virtual.
As a narrative designer, my work calls attention to this distance and leverages it for
comedic, cultural, and political purposes. For example: Museum of the Microstar, which
I produced with my collaborators at RUST LTD. in 2013, is a tech demo that satirizes tech
demos.
139
It takes place in a museum devoted to the technological progression that led
to the Earth’s destruction. It’s a satire – and satir e w or ks acr oss man y se mantic l e v els,
and asks use rs t o pla y ful ly jump betw ee n those l e v els. M useum of the M ocr ostar spanned
multiple semantic contexts. It was a technology demonstration that was created for and
submitted to a competition. It was a gallery installation, and it was also the third com-
mercial project to be released for the Oculus Rift (its original DK1, their first ‘development
kit’). So again, M icr ostar was a satire that attempted to jump playfully between different
semantic levels, and asked users to jump along with it.
70 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
140:
In this context, “the same kind of mind-
set” refers to our desire, as designers, to
encourage people to jump playfully be-
tween levels of semantic meaning. This
may have been lost due to the preced-
ing section discussing Cour ageous Can-
nonball Commander, which did not appear
in the original talk, nor in its subsequent
transcription – it was written ( gasp!) and
added after the fact, to better contextu-
alize and leverage my earlier discussion
of Facebook and Oculus in sections 4.2.3
through 4.2.5.
The same was true of RUST LTD.’s game, Cour ageous Cannonball Commander, which was
created in the summer of 2013 as part of an invite-only, month long VR game jam for In-
dieCade. When we were invited by Oculus to participate in the game jam, we decided to
make a satirical game that we light-heartedly refered to as a ‘first person shooter’ – be-
cause the game involved you firing yourself out of a cannon in virtual reality. Of course,
this made the vast majority of users very nauseous, and this was our intent as designers:
we thought it would be an interesting intervention, into an invite-only industry event, to
exhibit a game that made users uncomfortable, and encouraged a weird kind of physical
comedy.
Ours was the only game that the judges decided wasn’t ‘suitable’ for inclusion in the ex-
hibition at IndieCade. This not only disappointed our team, but confused us as well – we
were told that all invited entries would be exhibited, so long as they were completed and
submitted by the deadline (and our game was). Too, our game was comparable in ‘quality’
to the other exhibited games, and via M useum of the M icr ostar we were one of the better-
known design teams invited to participate. It caught us by surprise, then, that we were
being excluded from the event. In retrospect, I’ve come to believe that this exclusion was
an early expression of Oculus’s commitment to their ideal of ‘realism’ , of controlled and
consistent and comfortable virtual experiences.
It bears noting here that, as the game’s narrative designer, I built a world where the ‘game’
of Cour ageous Cannonball Commander—as in the part where you fired yourself out of a
cannon in first person—took place inside the computer of an office worker, who was sitting
in a cubicle pretending to work while actually playing games. Everyone in this world had
a cannonball for a head – including your co-workers, who would occasionally walk past
your cubicle, prompting your computer screen to switch from your game’s menu to an
Excel spreadsheet.
In a weird, precient accident of narrative design, I embedded the cannonball ‘game’ inside
a par ody of F acebook, called ‘Faceboom’ . This is to say that you began playing Cour ageous
Cannonball Commander by first loading into an office cubicle in virtual reality, where you
would then access the ‘game’ menu through a fictional, diagetic menu in a browser win-
dow, on a platform that was satirizing Facebook.
And all of this occurred almost a year before Facebook purchased Oculus. We had no
idea this was coming. As an explanation, I can only gesture at the speculative structural
analysis required by any decent satire – I was guessing at the future of VR technologies,
and the contexts in which one might use those technologies, so Facebook was a natural fit,
especially given that Cour agous Cannonball Commander was inspired by browser-based
games like Kitten Cannon and N anaca Cr ash, which are the kinds of games people play at
work while pretending to do their ‘actual’ jobs.
I would have really liked to include Cour ageous Cannonball Commander as part of this dis-
sertation – it was the second time I worked as a narrative designer on a virtual reality
project, and I’m proud of the work RUST LTD. made (alongside our collaborators for the
competition: Jeremy Gibson Bond, Marc Destefano, and Josh Ols). Unfortunately, the ex-
clusion of our game from the IndieCade event precipitated an unexpected loss of data and
documentation. The game no longer runs on any VR platforms, and indeed we can no
longer locate the game files. We have a few screenshots from the game, and nothing more.
In this way, our exclusion from the exhibition functionally resulted in a kind of indirect
censorship, of a game that satirized not only a new medium but a weirdly accurate vision
of the future of that medium.
We’ve brought the same kind of mindset,
140
i.e. our desire to encourage and leverage se-
mantic play, to the development of our game H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades,
which we’ve been working on since 2016. We’ve been fortunate to see Hot Dogs, or ‘H3VR’
as it’s often called, become one of the best-selling games on the Steam platform, and for
the HTC Vive virtual reality headset.
H3VR is a commercial success driven by se mantic debat es. As developers, we understood
4.3 Why do you car e about semantics, as an artist? 71
going in that the HTC Vive controller is a new interface, and we understood our platform
holder’s desire for developers like us to follow a consistent interaction paradigm, to map
in-game interactions to buttons on the Vive controller in a manner consistent with their
best practices and with the rest of the development community. Specifically, there’s a
button on the controller, right at the the top of the front... it’s right above the big touchpad.
That button is supposed to be reserved for the applications menu. This is to say that when
users pressed this button, the one right above their touchpad, it should always take them
to their their application’s menu, to the menu of the application they’re currently using.
Figure 4.9 : In this image, I have goofily marked
up one of HTC Vive’s ‘best practices’ images
(related to controller mapping for the Vive) to
illustrate the ‘incorrect’ mapping we chose for
H3VR. I believe I used MS Paint to create that
big, red, and very professional-looking ‘X’ .
We had a lot of debates internally at RUST LTD. about whether or not we should follow
this paradigm. On the one hand, we want our users to understand how to use their con-
troller. We want them to become enculturated to that controller, so that they don’t have
to keep thinking about it, so they don’t get confused. But there are only so many buttons
on the controller, and we had need for a button that would trigger locomotion. We were
already using the touchpad for a number of things; we were using the trigger and the grip
for a number of things, and the button beneath the touchpad the system menu button
is definitely reserved for the system menu. There’s really no wiggle room there. So the
only button we had left was the application menu button. After a great deal of debate, we
decided to diverge from the best practices for the Vive controller and try to enculturate
our users to a different interaction paradigm. So we use the application menu button for
in-game locomotion. This means that H3VR is driven by semantic debates related to its
interface.
It’s also driven by se mantic pr ecision. It’s a game that’s about sport shooting – and it’s
chock-full of guns, melee weapons, toys, and props. So on the one hand, our user base
enters this sport shooting simulation expecting to use guns that are extremely precise,
weirdly realistic in their performances and in their behaviors. You have to know how to
use a gun to use a virtual gun in H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades.
72 4 Real F ake Rooms: Virtual Semantics
141: I talk about this at length with Luke Noo-
nan, my primary collaborator on the project,
in Ch. 7 of this dissertation. (See Chapter 7.)
In contrast to that precision, H3VR is also driven by a kind of se mantic ambiguity. A great
example of this is the game mode W urstW urld that is embedded in H ot Dogs, H orseshoes,
and H and Gr enades. H3VR contains 22 or 23 levels at this point, and some of those levels
are so large that they are basically games in and of themselves. W urstW urld takes at least
two and a half or three hours for a user to finish. W urstW urld is self-contained as an en-
vironment in all respects. It is a parody, and an obvious one at that, of the media property
W estworld, and it takes place in an abandoned roadside attraction and theme park some-
where in the Midwest. This weird, run-down theme park is populated by robotic sausages
who ask you to solve puzzles and play horseshoes and fight animatronic bandits.
In accomplishing those simple tasks, a narrative is revealed through a variety of tech-
niques, whether it be embedded in the design of the environment or in the signage that’s
displayed around you, or whether it be recordings that the user can find scattered through
the environment – where a character, voice-acted by me actually, talks to another admin-
istrative character, who is not present, about the administrator’s decisions in creating the
park. Those decisions are patently absurd, and this employee, who’s recorded on data
disks that are waiting to be found, this employee is often baffled by the decisions the ad-
ministrator is making. Nevertheless, he follows along, because that’s his job.
This contrast, this absurdity, is at the core of W urstW urld, and of H3VR in general. W urst-
W urld, like many aspects of H3VR, is a parody of a variety of hegemonic perceptual
paradigms, whether it be our culture’s view on guns in general, or the way that guns and
gunplay are portrayed in the vast majority of AAA contemporary videogames. And in the
case of W urstW urld, it’s also a direct parody of an existing media property, and par ody ,
lik e satir e, w or ks acr oss man y se mantic l e v els and asks use rs t o pla y ful ly jump betw ee n
those l e v els. Again, semantic play is at the core of my practice as a narrative designer.
This is also true of the new game I’ve been developing with RUST LTD.: Blast Doors, which
is being designed exclusively for the Omnideck, a large omni-directional treadmill made
by the company Omnifinity. Blast Doors is designed to be a magical realist experience,
where the user is stuck and sequestered by blast doors in a section of an underground
facility, that presents to the user as either a scientific research facility or perhaps a military
facility. The user only has so much information, and has to figure out why they’re trapped
in this space, and how they can escape.
While this game follows in the footsteps of escape rooms and out-of-home experiences,
it is explicitly and intentionally a magical realist experience. Magical realism depends for
its impact upon a kind of contrast between realism, as such, and magic. M agical r ealism
thus also w or ks acr oss man y se mantic l e v els, and is an in vitation f or use rs t o pla y ful ly
jump betw ee n those l e v els in a self -a w ar e w a y. As part of that invitation, we designed an
object in-game that is analogous to the Vive controller, the object that the user holds for
the entire game. We designed it to look very similar to the Vive controller so that the user’s
reality (actual reality, their ‘meatspace’) would bleed into the virtual space of Blast Doors.
Similarly, there are teleporters that the user discovers in the Blast Doors environment
and those teleporters are designed to look like the Omnideck, like the omni-directional
treadmill that the user will be walking on when they play the game.
141
This is a kind of shrinking of space, of a space separating the real from the virtual. But it’s
also an attempt to intervene in that space that separates the real and the virtual, in much
the same way that magical realism as an artistic movement tried to do this.
4.3 Why do you car e about semantics, as an artist? 73
I think this is critically important. I think intervening in this space and calling attention
to the separateness, and yet the strange [and seeminly contradictory] mixture of the real
and the virtual, I think this is critically important when so much of virtual reality and in-
teractive media reflects a hegemonic idea of what counts as realistic. Further, there’s a lot
of baggage that comes with that, specifically in America where the military entertainment
complex (as Henry Lowood and Tim Lenoir would call it) is the primary funding source
for the production of new technologies and new experiences. Things like virtual reality,
for example.
There are values that come along for the ride, and we have to continually ask ourselves as
developers: Why does a new platform work the way that it does? Why are we being asked
to enculturate our users in specific ways, to follow specific kinds of interaction paradigms?
What’s the long play here? What game is the platform holder playing? What is their strat-
egy? And what kind of tactics are available to us as artists, to leverage a platform and use
it in a different way that is perhaps antithetical to the aspirations of the platform’s holder,
and its funder, and the hegemony that would have you use it in a particular way?
In the work that I’m producing now, I’m attempting to continue engaging users in this
space between the real and the virtual, and to respect how much bleed there is between
these two spaces. I’m attempting to invite users to play with seemingly contradictory
meanings, and to enjoy that the virtual and the real are not so different after all.
The space between the virtual and the real is a space for play, for imagining change, and
for revising and renewing our cultures. These are my aspirations. These are my goals, and
this is the ideal toward which my work aspires.
Figure 4.10 : An example of the meme, “We Have To Go Deeper” , inspired by the movie I nception (which contains the scene depicted here).

P art II
Case Studies

143:
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam, with Anton
Hand and Luke Noonan. “Postmortem:
Museum of the Microstar” . UNITE: Unity3D
Developers Conference, Vancouver, BC,
Canada, 30 August 2013. This chapter is
an edited transcription of the talk. My
co-presenters were Anton Hand and Luke
Noonan from RUST LTD.
Figure 5.1 : Portrait of Anton Hand, created by
Lucas Miller.
Figure 5.2 : Portrait of Luke Noonan, created
by Lucas Miller.
144: ”The GPU as General Processing Unit:
DX11 in Unity” , available here: https://
youtu.be/I1uZnPAkInI
145: “DirectX” is a proprietary set of appli-
cation programming interfaces (i.e. API’s) de-
signed by Microsoft for their platforms. It is
one of the two most commonly used API’s in
3D game development (alongside OpenGL).
146: “Alloy”: http://alloy.rustltd.com/
Metalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constraints in
M useum of the M icr ostar
5
A NTO N: Welcome to the post-mortem for M useum of the M icr ostar, our project from back
right at the beginning of this year [2013].
143
So, what are we going to be covering here?
Basically this is going to be a fairly loose or messy talk. We’re going to be jumping back
and forth, talking about the incredibly rapid development process that this project was,
and the way that we tried to balance various sorts of design constraints, not sleep, fix
things, not sleep more, etc. So the team here is myself, Adam, and Luke, and one of our
collaborators, who wasn’t able to make it here today, Lucas.
A D A M: ...Do you want me to talk about that? We’ve been working together for about 4 years
at this point. We started off as I think a “media art collective” might be the way to talk about
it. We just sort of jumped in on each other’s projects. Our work has always spanned a wide
range of media, whether it be conceptual art or mobile applications, conceptual poetry,
sometimes we do social justice activist stuff, but increasingly we’ve done a lot more in
games and specifically immersive 3D environments.
L UKE: On this particular project we had two primary collaborators. We’ll talk about how
we arrived at that, they were our buddy Josh [Ols], who is a wonderful shader programmer,
and Arthur [Brussee], who is giving a talk
144
right here, next slot, you should all come to
it, who is the author of “TC Particles” , and so both of those were some wonderful tech and
both leveraged a lot of the stuff that this contest was really aimed at, and so it seemed a
really natural opportunity to work with these people. We found that in a small team setting,
you’re left with either sleep even less than you already do, get bigger, or find people to work
with, and so far the finding people to work with is much better than not sleeping.
5.1 H o w did M useum of the M icr ostar begin ?
A NTO N: Exactly what was this produced for originally? Back on the 13th or 15th of De-
cember, Unity announced the DirectX 11 competition as Unity 4 had just added that fea-
ture set.
145
And basically the contest was very open, you have one month to make anything
whatsoever in DirectX 11. It could be a game, could be a demo, could be a tool, what have
you, and as I had just began collaborating with Arthur three weeks before, maybe a little
more, it seemed the perfect opportunity. And around that time, a set of physical shaders
that we’d been developing for about a year and a half were finally coming into reaching
feature complete. It provided a great opportunity to basically see, like, all right, now that
this works, can we make this more ridiculous [see Figure 5.3 ] and add an even wider feature
set?
L UKE: So we had this physical shader system.
146
The really interesting thing about it is
that it is primarily data driven, which is really important for a project like this one, because
77
78 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
Figure 5.3 : This is an in-game screenshot from M useum of the M icr ostar. More specifically, it is a screenshot taken from the top of the elevator that you, as the player,
reach at the end of the museum experience.
147:
Another way of expressing this: a well-
developed metafictional universe can
make the arbitration process feel more
justified and efficacious, particularly with
respect to relatively small decisions. It’s
as if there’s an ’external arbiter’ of sorts,
through which the quality of the decision
can be judged.
it allowed us to produce content way quicker than we would have been [able to] otherwise.
Basically you don’t have to paint nearly as much, and that’s a really time consuming pro-
cess. We had the schedule measured out to hours not days, it was really tight, so anything
we could do to pull that off. And with a lot of these… we’ve all worked on projects, it’s
really easy to let things sprawl, saying “Oh, we’ve made a lot of good progress today!” no,
having a nice trial by fire where you have to get things done by the end of the week is a
good way to get a lot of bugs taken care of, it’s a good shake down for eventual release.
So, in our work with Arthur, and with every collaboration, we really wanted to make sure
that everyone was getting good things out of it, and so in our design we wanted to come
up with a product that would really allow us to feature that particle set and also to provide
a pathological case, like, “We’re going to push this as hard as we can push this right now!”
Even M icr ostar is using a slightly, like... well, development continued. I think the day
after it was released they found a big bug and there was a 30% increase in performance
afterwards, and it was like, “Great! That’s about a million particles that we missed.”
A D A M: Oh yeah, and one of the nice things is that we’ve come in with a metafictional
universe, that we have been developing for at least a year or two now at this point, wherein
there is sort of a multi-Galactic corporation. It’s the only corporation that’s left, called
H edr on, which is a really weird subtle joke that nobody seems to notice... a hedron is one
side, that’s it, it’s just the one side, you know, one corporation.. maybe it’s not that funny.
So yeah, we’ve been developing that for some time, and it really helps because one of the
nice things about having a consistent coherent metafictional universe is that it helps y ou
t o mak e decisions that othe rwise f eel v e ry ar bitrary.
147
I’ll probably talk about that a little
more later.
5.1 H ow did M useum of the M icr ostar begin? 79
148: He really was.
149: This is likely because I told him that, if
he didn’t write his thesis paper, I was going
to break his knuckles.
5.1.1 Hidin g as Constraint
A NTO N: So just an amusing aside just to help paint the picture of the situation… Adam
wasn’t involved in probably the first five or six days of the production of this, because I
was hiding from him.
148
I was about to enter the last semester of my MFA program which
meant that the Christmas break was supposed to be being spent on writing a paper I did
not want to write.
A D A M: He was under strict instructions to not do anything until he had started to write
his thesis paper, so of course he did something completely different.
A NTO N: So the contest was announced and I started hiding from him. He would log into
Skype, and I would log out because I was afraid he was going to break my knuckles...
149
and the idea was to get as far ahead as quickly as possible with this project, so that he just
had no choice at that point.
L UKE: And it worked!
A D A M: Worked perfectly.
A NTO N: So I wanted to put this up here [see Figure 5.4 ], because even the prettiest things
can begin as an absolutely hideous Photoshop sketch.
A D A M: This is a RUST tradition by the way, there’s always an early, ugly-as-hell Photoshop
sketch the beginning of every project.
A NTO N: But just to give you an idea of where I was starting with this, I had a vision of a
space that I wanted to create, that was a centerpiece to the particles, that was... because it
was one contiguous space, there are all of these level management things [in the Unity IDE
and engine] that I wouldn’t have to worry about at all, and also I wanted to make sure–sort
Figure 5.4 : This pair of early conceptual sketches for M useum of the M icr ostar reflects the beginnings of a vague structural and aesthetic vision that carried through
the remainder of the project.
80 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
150: None of us had, really. From the begin-
ning, RUST LTD. has been a ’Unity shop’ , i.e.
we’ve used the Unity3D IDE for all of our 3D
development, and never used the Unreal En-
gine, or some bespoke alternative, in creat-
ing games and other 3D experiences. This was
the exciting thing about Unity adding DX11 to
their engine: many people would now have
access to its affordances, for the first time.
151: It’s worth keeping in mind, here, that we
were an up-and-coming design studio, at this
point, and we wanted to show (and place!)
well in the Unity competition.
152: SLI stands for ’Scalable Link Interface’ , a
means of connecting multiple graphics pro-
cessing units and enabling them to function
in concert, augment each others’ capabilities,
etc.
of falling in the spirit of “this demo should be a pathological case of these Technologies”–
no clever ways of occluding things, no turning off of certain content at some moment,
I wanted to be able to have most of the environment in view at one time [see Figure5.3 ]
from certain angles to prove that this could hold up and not utterly die from a performance
standpoint.
5.1.2 A P I as Constraint
A NTO N: Cool, so entering into this there were a list of technical design questions that I
had for myself, that related to how was I going to spend my time building certain sorts of
content. I’d never done anything for DX11 prior.
150
I had seen endless amounts of demo
videos online... we’ve all seen them, “Look at this bumpy bark, look at this bumpy rock!” ,
you know, occasionally a bumpy character. But I didn’t quite know what the most efficient
way to author that content was. And I had no idea how well it was going to perform.
Which meant that constructing the environment, starting with a massive surface that was
entirely tessellated (i.e. surrounding it in rock), was a really fast way to get a handle on that,
to figure out what sort of distances would work, and based upon how that would perform,
that would inform how much more of that [texture] I could put throughout the entire en-
vironment. And what were some other interesting and unique ways to use DX11?
You know, I make the joke about bumpy rock and bumpy trees because, it seems to me,
often times when we’re seeing tessellation demoed and showed, it’s the same three or four
pieces of environment content. Because this doesn’t work well on hard surfaces, it doesn’t
work well on anything rectilinear, and so it was an open question to me how could I do
something that was actually fresh.
151
So in general: what was our performance target? I’m sure any of you who downloaded
either the Oculus [version of M icr ostar], or the regular version of this, to play around,
noticed that it’s... it’s a little merciless to your graphics card. But it was an open question
of whether we were going to create something that required two 480s and an SLI,
152
or
something like that, or whether we wanted to sort of target the sort of high mid-range,
and this was a question that seriously probably didn’t get answered until two days before
we released.
5.1. 3 Design Pr obes ( and Light Pr obes )
A NTO N: It was nebulous and scary the whole time. I would add one thing and all of a
sudden performance would drop, and so – constant anxiety. And then, most importantly
from a production standpoint, now that I had the sort of industrial complex and the sort
of star-slash-fusion reactor in the center, what content could I rapidly design from the
beginning, iterate on, and deploy? [ snaps fingers] Once again, broken down into, “this will
take how many hours?” because I was splitting my time between doing technical manage-
ment, problem solving, modeling assets, texturing, etc., so content production only got to
take up a small fraction of my time.
Here, just a couple early pictures... I believe this [ Figure 5.5 ] was taken day two, just to give
you an idea where this started.
5.1 H ow did M useum of the M icr ostar begin? 81
Figure 5.5 : This is a screenshot of M useum of the M icr ostar at Day Two of its development cycle. Even in this very early work-in-progress screenshot, you can see
the vision from the concept sketches being realized. Already we had decided that the microstar would sit in the center of an underground space, with some kind of
structure beneath it that would, somehow, interface and interact with it.
153: When Anton finally stopped hiding from
me, we talked on the phone about the work
he’d been doing, and he said something to
this effect: “I’m envisioning a big space, un-
derground, where there’s this... ball of fire...
thing, floating in the center of the space, and
there are these... robot arms... above and be-
low the ball of fire... so yeah, figure something
out!” And then he hung up. Such is the glam-
orous life of a narrative designer.
154: For us, it’s almost always through open-
ended conversations: we get in a muddle, and
we play around with ideas.
155:
Many goals are dictated by circumstance:
as below, you may want to win a competi-
tion, or satisfy a particular audience, and
it’s relatively easy to make these kinds of
goals explicit, early in the process. But
other goals can be trickier to pin down.
How do you want your audience to feel?
What do you want your game to mean? As
a narrative designer, I’ve found that a co-
herent metafictional universe (or simply
a good backstory) can be tremendously
helpful in answering these tricky ques-
tions, and adding those answers to the
team’s set of goals, at a similarly early
place in the development process.
A D A M: So we moved into this moment where Anton emerges from this really important
ideation process that allowed him to, via what I think people in the practice based arts
research field might call “design probes” , when you test things out hands-on and see what
things we are capable of, what we aren’t, what kinds of questions remain, what you’re
really passionate about. I don’t think we can talk too lightly about that; I think for all of
us at this point in a project it’s really important to make sure that you’re passionate about
whatever you’re doing, make sure it’s worth following through.
And so to lead into one of the principles that we try to follow as we design a space: the
great thing about Anton’s contacting me at this point in the process was that the constraint
process was already started for me.
153
He came in and I knew that there were going to be
certain things that needed to be in that space. I knew that there were certain things that
were going to work and certain things that weren’t. Generally speaking, when we are
working on a process together we have a really interesting give and take, where from a
narrative design perspective, I’ll say, “Well, we could do this!” and there’s usually some
subset of responses that might happen, from, “No, that’s not going to work for this tech-
nical reason,” or, “No that doesn’t seem right for this conceptual reason,” or, “That’s not
funny enough!” or, “We did that last time!” or, “Yeah that’s fantastic!” or, “I have no idea,
I have no idea how I feel about that.”
But there’s a process through which you start narrowing in. It’s an old hat truism that
constraints are your friend, but a lot of times the question is: how do you come to those
constraints?
154
Part of it is what we talked about, part of it is the next thing we are going
to talk about: goals.
If y ou can e nume rat e y our g oals as ear ly as possib l e, the y can help t o mak e decisions
f or y ou.
155
We had a number of goals in this process, not least of which was the DX11
competition, but we also needed to make sure Anton didn’t fail out of grad school. This was
a non-negligible consideration, which meant (in all honesty) you have to realistically in the
82 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
156: In retrospect, I should’ve softened this
statement. Academics’ concerns and values
are not entirely separate.
157:
One might say that, among their duties,
narrative designers are responsible for a
kind of quality assur ance. It is generally
my job to ensure that any new addition (of
any kind) to a project doesn’t break that
project’s aesthetic, conceptual, or narra-
tive coherence.
158:
This was an enormously important take-
away for me. Through the narrative de-
sign work I did on M icr ostar, I came to
believe that the most efficient way to de-
sign a used environment–i.e. a fictional
environment that looked and felt like it
had been used by people–was to find al-
ready existing spaces that reflected my in-
tended use-case, and then replicate the
core structure of that space. In short, I
try to generalize the form (and logic) of
a ’real-world’ space, and apply that form
to the space I’m designing, and the world
that I’m building. This is an incredibly
useful technique for 3D immersive envi-
ronments, especially in the case of virtual
reality, because users can enter your fic-
tional environment with an intuitive sense
of the space, of its use and its function and
its logic. Narrative designers can lever-
age this familiarity, with a kind of space, if
they choose a familiar spacial or architec-
tural form early in the process – and it’s
critical that this choice happen early in the
design process, so that its logic and coher-
ence can ’cascade’ through the remainder
of the design process. (For more on this,
seeChapter 7.)
159: We were giving this talk in a large hall,
at a conference center in downtown Vancou-
ver, with probably a thousand seated audi-
ence members facing us.
160: I was looking for these “stations” be-
cause we wanted to demonstrate specific
things that could be done with DirectX 11 –
we wanted judges and developers to be able
to identify, at a glance, which particular fea-
ture of DX11 was being ’shown off’ at a loca-
tion in our tech demo’s space. And I needed
to leverage this goal and account for it in my
narrative design.
moment ask, “Who’s going to be judging this project?” And of course, there’s always going
to be an audience, but it wasn’t just the judges at Unity, and it wasn’t just the community [of
users] that we were interested in satisfying, it was academics, which is an entirely different
audience. Academics have a completely different set of concerns, a completely different
set of values, so we needed to keep those things in mind.
156
We needed to make sure that
we were showing off as many of the properties of DX11 as possible, we need to make sure
that it was scoped properly, we needed to make sure nobody had a heart attack in trying
to finish the project. So those things helped us.
5.1.4 Co he r e nce as Constraint
A D A M: This one is one in particular that Anton has been pushing me lately to push about,
so I guess I’ll push, which is: especially as it relates to tech demos, but certainly as it relates
to a number of games, co he r e nce, conceptual coherence, seems to be a little too low on
the list of priorities for a lot of projects. I don’t mean that in a crappy way, what I mean is
that, when people get busy, when everyone’s wearing multiple hats on a project, there are
ample opportunities to loosen up the standard by which you measure the coherence of a
space.
157
What I mean by this, is that if we look at the room around us right now–literally, look
around–this is a really thoughtfully designed room. But it wasn’t designed in a day, it
wasn’t designed in a month, in fact it wasn ’t just designed by the designers, it was also mod-
ified afterward through its use.
This is a really difficult thing to replicate in a fictional designed space. We really have to
reckon with that, that a lot of spaces don’t completely cohere until they’ve been used and
changed for a while. So this is something that I think at RUST we take really seriously, that
this is an iterative process and that, especially from the perspective of narrative design or
writing, we don’t follow the traditional writerly and narrative designerly role, which is to
sort of go off in your own space and come back with something really complete. What we
really want, and what really helps us establish coherence, is fl e xibility.
Oftentimes, in a project where I’m working on the narrative design and writing, it’s my
job to come in very quickly with numerous options, as many options as I can, for coherent
spaces, for things that makes sense, things that are entertaining. In this case, to be con-
crete about it, if we were to build a space around a giant particle system–namely something
that looked like a star–and we knew it was going to be underground for some reason, and
there would probably be some sort of industrial platforms around it, so people could walk
around, what I immediately started looking for were design f orms with r ecei v ed cultural
kno w l edg e alr eady e mbedded ar ound the m.
158
So this room for example, is a great examplar of that.
159
We all know what this room is for,
or the things this room is for, just walking into it. And so we know what to do with that
space as users. I started looking for spaces like that. The ones that I hit on, that made it
to the end, that didn’t immediately get rejected because they stunk, were a museum or a
church. Those are spaces that you can move through, understand not just what you do
in it but why things are laid out the way that they are, why there’s space between things.
Specifically, I was looking for stations, some sort of space that could have embedded sta-
tions within it.
160
Maybe this is the recovering Catholic in all of us, that we were all like,
5.1 H ow did M useum of the M icr ostar begin? 83
Figure 5.6 : Screenshot of a test scene for the
asset kit used in M useum of the M icr ostar.
“Yeah! “Stations of the Cross”! That’s an embedded narrative!” Then we threw that out
for bunch of different reasons.
But the museum stuck, because it allowed us to meet as many of the goals as possible, and
keep things very coherent, but also allowed people to approach the space in very different
ways. Some people would be looking at it aesthetically, some people would be interested
in the narrative, we also wanted to keep that space as flexible as possible so people could
approach it in different ways. And I think that leads into a bunch of discussions about
modularity in the tile set, because as much as things needed to be set in stone very quickly,
we also knew based on past experience that some things were going to have to change over
the course of the project.
5.1. 5 M odularity as Constraint
A NTO N: And so shortly before this contest had begun, I’d been beginning to build a mod-
ular asset kit for sci-fi industrial interiors that was designed to truly test the shader set.
You’ll notice that most of these assets have very flat solid colors [see Figure5.6 . It was
designed to strip back the texture painting as much as possible, and let the shader sing
visually and see what it could do with both baked and dynamic light.
As we began this, and I realized it was going to need some sort of industrial components,
I looked at the set and asked myself: how quickly could I repurpose and extend this to
another form? As you can see here, this is all built for an interior, whereas with M icr ostar
even though you’re in an interior, you’re in a cave. Most of those platforms are built more
like exterior constructs. They’re walkways, they’re platforms.
A D A M: It’s a large space, right?
A NTO N: So I basically started taking the components that I made before and building
platforms out of them [see Figure5.7 ] to see how quickly... I mean, when you’re building
a big space like that you have, I don’t know, two days, three days to figure out, “How am I
84 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
161: This holds true for all aspects of the de-
sign, including the narrative and worldbuild-
ing. This is why quality assurance is so im-
portant.
162: This sort of mindset is a very practical
and effective way to generate sensible con-
straints and goals... especially in the case of a
small, independent development team work-
ing on a short timeline with no budget!
going to fill this with enough content that it doesn’t look empty?” Having a kit and using
kit logic is really, really valuable.
Figure 5.7 : In this image, platforms have been
built using part of the modular asset kit used
in M useum of the M icr ostar. The logic of the
kit, of how its pieces fit together, is apparent
in these test platforms.
These are five of them but I think I built something around 14 or 15 unique platforms over
the course of it. All I had at that point were very generic industrial components, and
as Adam was developing this notion of a museum, something that was a little more... I
don’t know, I guess you could say commercial-slash-residential than when I was originally
planning, it quickly became: “What is the minimum number of assets that I can add to this
set to make it convincing again that sort off extends its kit logic?” and so those were things
like planters, small stairs, signage, an ATM [see Figure5.8 ]... guardrails. Unusually short
guardrails.
So, along those lines, as Adam had developed the reason to have these stations around,
I was realizing that beyond that sort of bumpy cave wall I really wanted to do something
more with shader technology and learn how to produce content for it. So I started. This
was the first example of it [see Figure 5.9], this is a piece of anthracite coal, and also ended
up just being a really great use case for the physical shaders because this is using the actual
reflectivity value of coal. Basically I just started planning out and iterating with the guys
on what could possibly go in those stations.
And then also along those lines, running parallel to all of this, was Arthur down there
working as hard as we were every day, with my endless set of feature requests for this
particle system. He had this longer plan of things he might like to do, and I was like, “Can
we just take that and just have that all happen in two weeks?” So these [see Figure5.10]
were some of the earliest screenshots from getting turbulence working, which in my mind
just artistically is the most incredible thing to use with a particle system because it adds
so much visual complexity.
But obviously the one complication of this is you grow a system rapidly and what you’ve
done is you’ve tripled or quadrupled all of the possible points of failure.
161
So it was around
this time that we realized a couple things worked a little glitchier than one would have
liked. Instantiation of new particle systems didn’t quite work, there were some draw order
issues, and so we designed around this, we designed very, very defensively. Like, “Ok, what
percentage of this feature set works a hundred percent that we know will continue to work
a hundred percent two weeks from now?” And we showcased that.
162
5.1 H ow did M useum of the M icr ostar begin? 85
Figure 5.8 : These props were built using the modular asset kit for M useum of the M icr ostar. They were inspired by the design discussions we were having, early in the
process, and in turn they inspired many concrete decisions i made as a narrative designer, e.g. an ATM that was malfunctioning due to nanites having escaped from
their exhibit.
163:
Luke’s absolutely correct – that ’aggres-
sively defensive’ design mindset must be
applied to all aspects of development, in-
cluding the narrative design, if the project
is to remain flexible. And as much as I
might try to prefigure problems and de-
sign toward coherence, as a narrative de-
signer, there’s still a point at which g estalt
meanin g eithe r e me rg es or it doesn ’t.
What I mean is this: all of this coher-
ence has to serve something, some larger
meaning, some narrative or diagetic core
that allows the project to exceed mere
coherence and become something one
might call ’art’ . This is the heart of Luke’s
point here, and I agree completely.
5.1.6 Agr essi v e Def e nsi v e Design
L UKE: So this defensive design principle extended not just to the particle systems but to
the entire project. There were moments that the flexibility of the tileset was actually a
really aggressive defensive... [ laughs, pauses] “aggressive defensive” ...
A D A M: How American. What a great idea.
L UKE: (laughing) An aggressively defensive move, in that what we were trying to do there
was buy ourselves as much space [as possible], in case we needed to change things down
the road. One of the things about doing this kind of development... the name of the game
here is cheating as much as you can, in a lot of ways. You’re like, “All right, how can we
get more particles out of this existing system than we could before? What hacks can we
do?” All of this is done in the name of making up for other stuff. W he n y ou ’r e doin g
narrati v e design, and it came t og ethe r pr et ty quick ly on this pr oject, the r e ’ s no rushin g
it. Y ou eithe r ha v e the ideas or y ou don ’t.
163
You have to design defensively, so by building
around this, and by keeping that in mind we allowed ourselves much flexibility later in the
process.
As we designed M useum of the M icr ostar we were looking at the development of the system,
we were looking at the shader tech, we were looking at the way tessellation works because
we hadn’t done that before. At various points we were trying to make mental notes and to
keep track of stuff, because if it breaks, if we can’t keep this working, if we can’t fix this
bug, what are the things that we can change this to allow for that? If we can’t get all of the
stations we want to have, will this layout still work with four less? With three less? Do we
86 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
Figure 5.9 : Screenshot of the ’Anthracite Coal’
exhibit in M useum of the M icr ostar. This was
the first exhibit we designed for the museum.
Figure 5.10 : Screenshot of the in-progress
particle system for M useum of the M icr ostar.
This system was developed in conjunction
with Arthur Brussee’s ’TC Particles’ system.
arrange them differently? If x, y, or z breaks, what are we going to do to change it? I think
that allowed a lot less stress later in the process, relatively speaking.
A D A M: Relatively speaking.
A NTO N: Adam do you want to talk about…...?
A D A M: Specifically is there anything you want me to talk about?
A NTO N: Just more along the lines of constructing a more concrete history.
5.2 H o w did y ou find the cor e of the e xpe rie nce ?
A D A M: Yeah, so at this point, I guess what I might say to lead into this following what
Luke was saying is there’s this continued process of arbitration that’s happening to this,
which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, but the thing is, I think a lot of people coming into
design, design fields in general, think arbitrary means it doesn’t matter, that it is random.
It’s actually the opposite. The fact that there are people making these decisions means that
you have a great deal of responsibility, and that those decisions matter, especially when
5.2 H ow did you find the cor e of the experience? 87
164:
In retrospect, this reads like I’m asserting
something equivalent to that well-known
apocryphal quote, usually attributed to
Michelangelo Buonarroti: “The sculptor
finds the sculpture within the marble, by
chiseling away all of the superfluous ma-
terial.” It’s not a bad analogy... if we as-
sume that the sculptor also created the
marble. (And maybe the chisel.) Narra-
tive design, for me, is about first building a
coherent world, setting, and space for the
experience, and then finding the experi-
ence’s core meaning through subtractive
editing.
the system has to work, on any number of levels, right, not just conceptually, it has to run,
and it has to run on as many computers as possible.
So in this case there was a moment, and this is the moment I think that we usually look
for in a project, to start throwing things out, right? Just kill as many babies as possible,
because y ou w ant t o find that cor e.
164
You always go into the project like this thinking
you’re going to be able to accomplish more than you actually are, and you just have to, you
just have to do that. It’s something you have to get comfortable with.
So, I don’t know, were there any more concrete things that happened right there at the
beginning? Can you remember anything that got tossed at that moment?
L UKE: Well, I think that was when we had done enough development that we felt really
good about the museum narrative, we felt like we had gotten that right. So at that point,
Adam and I started looking at how real world museums are designed, thinking about those
museums we had been to, looking at all their floor plans, that sort of stuff. There’s lots
of great things that buys us, so to say, “Oh, it is a guided experience, here is how layouts
to good guided experiences work.” We were able to get into the nitty gritty details with
enough time to be like, “Anton, we’re going to need signs.” [See Figure 5.11.] Or something,
I don’t know if we had signs before.
Figure 5.11 : Signs at the entrance to the museum area of M useum of the M icr ostar. They reflect the layout and narrative arc of the museum, as well as its metafiction,
and came in part out of the research Luke and I did around museums, their floor plans, etc. All signs in M icr ostar were created by Lucas Miller.
A D A M: And you know what’s really funny, before you continue, is that what is also going
88 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
165: Luke did all the foley work involved in
the game’s sound design. When he created
the sound effects for the ’UberFungus’ , he
did so by smushing wet pasta around in a
saucepan. It was... effective. And by “effec-
tive” , I mean “super gross” .
on under the hood at that moment–and it’s a really good thing that we took that time to go
do that research–is we couldn’t figure out how to deliver the narrative. Like, functionally.
Do we have text on the screen? Is there is it audio only? Is the audio locative, is it only
loud enough to hear when you’re standing next to it, or does it follow you? And why? And
what are the implications of those things? And we couldn’t answer that in week three so
that happened later.
A NTO N: And the last sort of thing on this point, which is that we also were really realizing
at this time, because we’d been developing this fictional universe, and because of the role
that museums play for society, that this was a great way for us to tell everyone about our
world, to lay out a concrete history, especially for rhetorical reasons considering the con-
tent of the piece, from how we got from here, to this sort of dystopic future (albeit with a
whole bunch of misremembered, tumorous wrinkles in it).
5.2.1 T ech De mo as Cor e Expe rie nce
A NTO N: Obviously even more [ gesturing to scr een] another pass on this. It was around this
time after I had made the first couple really realist shapes: the coal, the methane, the oil,
that we had the far future to fill out which allowed us to get a lot more ridiculous with
things. But it was also, I was really questioning at that moment whether DX11 tessellation
was something that was just limited towards making things look more representational or
more high fidelity or if there were some unused and unexplored tool possibilities present
because obviously when you have a higher poly mesh of anything, certain types of anima-
tion become more complex to implement or they become simply more data-heavy.
Blend shapes is a perfect example of this. If you’ve got a million polygon fungus [see Fig-
ure5.12], and you have a bunch of blend shapes in your scene, you’re going to have this
massive, massive mesh. But because tessellated objects are represented by a black and
white texture, you all of a sudden have multiple layers if you set up your shader a certain
way to be able to have a very complex smooth surface animating in a really beautiful way.
And so in the case of this fungus if you haven’t seen it, the top of it sort of oscillates in
and out and the stem sort of crawls up disgustingly. Yeah, this is the grossest thing in the
game.
A D A M: The sound of wet pasta.
165
L UKE: Yeah. And so this was a nice moment of lots of like, a nice tight iterative loop, that
we sort of developed as we’re working on this one, because we were getting through the
script, and as we’re thinking about how we’re delivering this narrative, the layout, these
example spaces, there was a lot of back and forth. Often, Anton would Skype with me,
because I think I was out of town at that point. We were mostly distributed through most
of this process.
A D A M: Oh yeah, this was the week my computer died.
A NTO N: Yes.
L UKE: So Adam didn’t get to see anything.
A D A M: Not in week three.
5.2 H ow did you find the cor e of the experience? 89
Figure 5.12 : Screenshot of the ’UberFungus’
exhibit in M useum of the M icr ostar. This ex-
hibit demarcated a conceptual transition from
’realistic’ exhibits to more speculative and
ridiculous ones.
166:
Luke’s hitting on something important
here: narrative design is about much
more than writing, especially when you’re
dealing with an interactive format. Differ-
ent audiences, in different contexts, with
different capabilities and interests, etc.,
all of these complicate any attempt to con-
vey (let alone control) a coherent narra-
tive.
167: Except for my dissertation committee, of
course. But they’re exceptional human beings
with impeccable taste. Many graduate stu-
dents are... less fortunate.
168: This flythrough can be viewed online:
https://youtu.be/- 63AjgnaAAQ
L UKE: And so he would be like... “look at this, look at this crazy thing, what would it be
like if...?” and we were like, “well, what might be...?” So then I would come up with some
sketches and then later on, later on Adam would make them funny or make sense.
A D A M: Hop on my wife’s laptop.
L UKE: So those fed into each other in a really nice way.
5.2.2 F ly -thr ough as Cor e Expe rie nce
L UKE: Yeah so the fly-through mode. I don’t know when exactly we first had this idea,
but that was a really interesting calculative moment. So as we’ve been developing, we’ve
found that a lot of our narrative work as a group is, if anything, perhaps a little too subtle in
some cases. This is supposed to be a tech demo on top of everything else that it is. And so
we knew that this context space was difficult.
166
If you think judges have a short attention
span, wait ‘till you have academics who don’t care. They won’t give you any attention at
all.
167
And so we wanted to make sure that we are able to communicate everything that
was happening in this demo to even non-technical users. So we had this question of: how
are we going to deliver that? And so on one hand we asked, do we have written materials
that go with it? How exactly are we going to deliver that? We landed on this narrative
fly-through.
168
And so the fly through is drawing on the existing “tech demo” technology approach. We
didn’t want to make clear that we have all these other narrative goals, so we decided to just
bifurcate. We had two entire game modes, and you could switch into either one. We also
wanted it to be non-interactive, or it was less important for it to be interactive. In part
because, especially dealing with older academics, and other people with less experience
using this kind of technology, if you were requiring the user to navigate through the space
you can’t depend on them really navigating through it thoroughly. And also we knew there
were going to be users who were going to go be like, “Really?! Yeaaahhh!” and just jump
off the platform, and that’s going to happen. So we need to allow for that.
90 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
169: For example: if you know that many
users will want to jump off an incredibly high
platform in your game, then you can leverage
in any number of ways. In M icr ostar, I lever-
aged it by auto-teleporting the player back
to the beginning of the game, and informing
them that Hedron had saved their life via tele-
portation (and that, of course, they had au-
tomatically deducted the appropriate amount
of money from the player’s bank account, to
pay for this life-saving procedure).
170:
This is, perhaps surprisingly, directly
analogous to the practice of narrative de-
sign for games and virtual reality. The
narrative has to work simultaneously on
so many levels, and is dependant upon so
many different layers of technology, that
as the game grows it becomes hyperboli-
cally more difficult to track the ’steps’ in
the narrative design. There are just too
many moving parts, and if you miss one
of them–if you don’t keep an eye on ev-
ery bit of it–the narrative’s coherence just
falls apart. This difficulty is then com-
poounded further by the rapid, unpre-
dictable changes happening to the game,
at any given point in the development
process. You end up just holding the nar-
rative together with glue and duct tape.
A D A M: And leverage it too. Right?
169
L UKE: Yeah. And we design for somebody who just says, “I wanted to see this cool DirectX
11 technology. Tell me about it. I want to hear about that.” So what we ended up doing was
this fly-through mode, and this was convenient for us, because besides doing this other
stuff I also own a record label and small recording studio, so we already had all that. I
was like, “Well I have the the microphones over there, like, let’s let’s just record this.” So
we ended up doing that. While I was in town we recorded the entire narrative, the fly-
through narrative, and then from there we built the camera pathing system which was an
interesting exercise.
“iTween” is a wonderful wonderful library. I got a lot of use out of it. I really love the
project. We’ve hit the limit at this point of what it can comfortably do due to its weird
internal data structure issues. We had a really... I mean I got it working. At first I was
excited I could just do splines, and I thought it worked wonderfully and then I handed it
off to Anton.
A NTO N: And I immediately duplicate one of the splines, move some points around, click
off it and it reverts back to the first one. And this actually was one of the more stressful
days of the project where you have a system that looks like it’s going to work up to a certain
amount, you plan for it, and all of the sudden there’s this huge wrinkle.
Now there are resources on the asset store. There are like five awesome looking camera
systems right on the asset store right now. Because you have a limited amount of time
you ask yourself: “Do I have the mental bandwidth and time to learn one of them quickly
enough to still get all these camera paths laid today or do I do the alternative?” We found
that we could barely get it to work as long as I did this arcane set of steps with each spline
like duplicating the spline, adding a point, removing a point, dragging it into a new prefab,
and saving. And if I did exactly that it wouldn’t break. If I missed a single step it would
break.
170
And so we ran the calculus and I was just like, “Okay, more coffee, don’t mess
this up.” And so you oftentimes have those tradeoffs of arcane... you know any 3D artist
knows this one, arcane workflow, or you know, do I risk something new?
5.2. 3 Con v e rsations as Constraints
L UKE: And I think it’s really important that you’re not afraid to take the moment and
actually have a conversation, because we found ourselves... I had gone half a week putting
together this scripting system because we take tool development pretty seriously. As you
see with the shader stuff, with a particle system, we really value what that can bring to the
table. So I had sunk a bunch of this valuable development time into the system. It would
have been really tempting to just not have the conversation, be like, “All right, we already
invested, we have to do this,” but that we actually took the time and said, “Is this really
going to be the best option? Or should we just go another route?” And it’s the good time
after bad problem. This didn’t work, so we’re going to sink more time into it. Thinking
like that it can be a problem. Something I would encourage everyone to do is take those
moments to breathe, get a glass of water, and actually make a clear-headed decision so
you’re not committed to either a design idea or a technical decision that you should be
reevaluating. The decision might be to stay the course like we did, or maybe to jump
ship.
A D A M: Or something. Yeah.
5.2 H ow did you find the cor e of the experience? 91
So this is interesting. I guess this would have been the week where I came out of my
dead computer and we started... well, before I talk about the narrative, pacing, editing
and delivery, I also want to talk a little bit about the level design.
A NTO N: Yes.
A D A M: Do we have a slide?
A NTO N: I have, that’s the next one. [See Figure 5.13 ]
Figure 5.13 : An overhead, annotated view of the level layout in M useum of the M icr ostar.
A D A M: Oh, okay good. So at this point, now that things have gotten this concrete, we have
to start refining things to the point that it lasts the length of time that we want it to last,
and that there is a kind of consistency across the tone, of not just the script and the audio
components of it, but also the signs and stuff. We start to get to a point of no return and we
have to actually get things recorded. So we took the same sort of modular approach and
the same ethos of “let’s kill some things!” permeated everything, including the writing,
including our design of the space.
92 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
171:
Quality control is so difficult at this point
in the process, largely because of the sunk
cost (and the team’s exhaustion), but it’s
the point at which all of the finalized plans
need to be fully implemented – and this
means tearing apart temporary, place-
holder assets, structures, designs, etc. My
experience as a narrative designer sug-
gests that final level layout only really
happens at the very end of the beta stage
of development – this is the point at which
all of the systems are in place, all of the as-
sets are complete, the entire narrative is
finished and the core of the game has re-
vealed itself, so it’s actually the first mo-
ment in the process where the team is ca-
pable of efficiently realizing the best lay-
out for the game’s level. At this point, the
team has developed the ability to intuit
what works and what doesn’t in the level’s
layout, and (again, in my experience) you
have no choice but to wait for this intuitive
sense to organically develop.
172: This paragraph is a concrete example of
the assertions I made above. This level lay-
out emerged organically, very late in the pro-
cess, when I was able to step back and take the
whole project in – not an idea of the project,
not some plan nor design, but the actual re-
alized project in its entirety. I had to let
the gestalt effect of the game wash over me,
and I soaked it up for a while and thought
about it before deciding what worked and
what needed to be changed or removed.
5.2.4 Ex ecutin g the Conceptual Cor e
A D A M: This was an interesting day, because we had planned for this, but then, like Luke
was alluding to, you get to these moments late in the process where you have a lot of sunk
time into something and you very much want to just stop. Your overwhelming desire is
to just stop working on as many things as possible. That’s a decent impulse in a lot of
different ways.
But it’s a terrible impulse and a lot of ways, too. Anton and I, very early in the project,
when we were talking about constructing the modular tile set, talked about this stage in
the process. This specific day, I think it was actually on the schedule to rip apart the
level, only when we started to do that, Anton didn’t want to rip apart the level because he
had sunk so much time into designing the space.
171
There was an interesting conversation
because Anton did the right thing. We talked through and saw that the space was arbitrary
in a bad way that there was a way in which...
A NTO N: Because the initial space had been constructed around a much less concrete idea,
which is a sort of general industrial sort of layout, I had been following in many ways the
sort of design layout logic of something like Half-Life 2, where you have a lot of verticality,
you’ve got a lot of twisting pads to find interesting nooks. While that looked interesting, it
was certainly not a museum. And it was very confusing to walk through, it wasn’t linear,
it didn’t have a narrative flow through its topology.
5.2. 5 N arrati v e T opo l og y
A D A M: And you’re moving very slowly through the environment. There’s really not much
in the way of jumping, you don’t shoot any enemies or anything. And we should remember,
too, that it was explicitly a test space. I’ve seen a lot of projects where test space has
become final level design especially if you’re on such an abbreviated time scale.
So there was this frantic day where we went through and re-laid out the entire level
and made really deliberate decisions. It took hours determining where objects should
be placed. One thing that we eventually hit on that’s worth noting is that, as you move
through the museum and you come out of the initial sort of lock-you-in, explain-the-
world-to-you teleportation room, you come out very low and you get that great view of
the microstar. Only it’s a reveal, it’s a natural reveal, that you suddenly look to your left
and there it is. It’s not directly in front of you. It’s very subtle, but you’re a little farther
away at the bottom than you are at the top. You come up very slowly and get closer and
get higher as you go, until you’re on the same level as the microstar. This is the kind of
e mbedded suspe nse that you’ll find in a space like a museum.
172
L UKE: This is an interesting project for us, because the writing of it in its various forms
was spread out across the entire team in a really profound way. While Adam and I were
doing a lot of the actual writing, the script and narrative copy, our collaborator Lucas
did all the signage. I didn’t see any of that before it came in, and it cohered pretty well.
The actual design space, from detail work up through the macro level layout, was also a
narrative delivery vehicle to fit into that space.
For us, it was also convenient that we’d already had an existing metafiction. We had
Hedron, the company that we were working on and developing. What would Hedron do
in this situation? Well, the bathrooms would be closed and broken. OK, well. We’d make
5.2 H ow did you find the cor e of the experience? 93
Figure 5.14 : The ’Gravitanium’ exhibit in M useum of the M icr ostar is a concrete example of narrative design via independent, convergent thinking, from a team working
in ’profound parallel’ . Each team member had made or seen some part of this exhibit, prior to its full realization, but none of us had seen the entire exhibit until the
individual parts were finally assembled – and all of us were taken aback by how coherent and effective it was.
173:
In my experience working with the RUST
LTD., narrative design is often a dis-
tributed practice, realized in parallel by
all members of the team. The challenge,
then, is keeping all of the team members’
vision of the narrative in alignment (and
up to date). Part of this challenge can be
addressed via explicit procedural means,
e.g. regular stand-up meetings, but in the
end the t eam me mbe rs must oft e n arri v e
at t he same conclusions thr ough inde-
pe nde nt, con v e rg e nt thinkin g. The best
ideas are arrived at separately by multiple
team members – those are the guaranteed
winners, in my experience.
174: These can be seen, if you look closely at
the floor, in Figure 5.14.
those sorts of decisions as it went. For us, that al l o w ed us t o w or k in pr of ound paral l el.
173
We could just come back in and the pieces fit pretty well together. But it also was inter-
esting just how distributed it was. For example the gravitanium, I didn’t see until it was
in the space. That’s wonderful. [See Figure 5.14.]
A D A M: Or The H’s on the floor, you always talk about that, right?
L UKE: Yeah so we gave a presentation at USC, and one of the audience members men-
tioned, “Oh, well look at the H’s on the floor,
174
that’s really cool,” and in my head I’m
thinking, “Oh those were an accident!” That’s what I’m thinking to myself, those words.
A D A M: Except no, Anton and I sat down and had a conversation about it.
L UKE: And Adam was like no, we sat down and had a conversation about it. Lucas was
there too. And I was busy doing something else. That hour.
5.2.6 P lannin g t o F ail, not F ailin g t o P lan
A NTO N: So obviously we managed to finish it in time. Interestingly enough, we had one
last sort of wrinkle, which was that with a contest like this (and you’ll see this, this was
the same thing with the VR jam that just happened) is that with these sorts of contests,
you have to FTP upload your build and sometimes your project file. And if it doesn’t get
there on time, tough luck. We had an 18 gig project file for this, and I think the build the
unzipped is another 1.1 gigs.
So we had to budget enough time for that FTP upload, from cranky internet in upstate
New York to start, fail, start, fail again, start, and then hopefully complete. We actually
lost an entire day in our budgeting just to make sure, after all of this effort, that we didn’t
94 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
175: The same could be said of the narrative
design and writing in M icr ostar, particularly
the satirical and comedic aspects.
176: Several press releases miscredited spe-
cific members of the development team. The
accurate credits are:
Anton Hand: Game Direction, 3D Art, Visual
Effects
Adam Liszkiewicz: Narrative Design, Writing
Lucas Miller: Graphic Design, Writing
Luke Noonan: Development, Sound Design,
Writing, Narration
Joshua Ols: Shader Development
Arthur Brusee: Particle System Development
screw it up in that step. And that’s the defensive thinking. I think I might have jumped off
of a bridge in Troy if that had happened to us.
L UKE: And so this is really one of the things that I think that we’ve come to find through
this project and others, that a lot of the detail work goes a long way. So in this case we
made sure that we were going to have enough time to actually come out a little bit early
to make sure the menus came together. I had a couple of days of fiddling while they were
busy keeping other stuff moving. What do you think of these? Do we like this here? Does
this makes sense? Can we get to this one here? What controls do we need? How is it going
to work?
I was also the audio engineer writing the audio system for it too, and it was tied in. But that
kind of detail and polish isn’t all that hard from a technical perspective. We’re wrangling
tessellated geometry, UI stuff isn’t that difficult, flat UI stuff at that, but it lends so much
to the experience.
Ideally with a lot of this detail stuff and a lot of this polish you want it to disappear.
175
I
don’t want anyone to comment on how nice the menus were. I want them to see all the
gorgeous eye candy that we put together first and foremost, I don’t want anyone to be like,
“Oh, you have a camera system.” I want them to be paying attention to the content that
we’re delivering. So much of the polish process is to make sure that we’re eliminating
those distractions, by and large.
From there, there was just the logistics of submitting it, making sure we had all the entry
information done correctly. Despite our poor efforts and Unity’s best efforts, there were
some minor screw-ups with the crediting.
176
If we had any time to think about it, we would
have been more explicit and communicated. And you know, in the end it all worked out
fine. It wasn’t a huge problem. As we’re going through this process there’s a lot of detail
work to take care of, and I think that we did an OK job of budgeting that into this process.
The FTP worked the first time; we didn’t have to go through the 3, 20 gig uploads, but we
had that buffer budgeted, too.
I think if had we had to go through it again we would budget even more time to make sure
that our paperwork stuff was there. For instance, the tech specs. This one we found when
releasing it, too. We were like, “We’ll just put the minimum specs up there.” Well, if you
only release the minimum specs, people will think they are recommendations. We need
to do a recommended and a minimum, so the people take the minimum seriously and you
know poor Anton here is getting an email, Will this work on my...
A NTO N: Intel 945 GM. No.
L UKE: And we feel bad, we wish it did, but it doesn’t. And that was a little communication
detail. Again, if we had more time we would have thought about it more, but.. So I can’t
underestimate just how important all that detail work is.
A D A M: And how much you want to just go to sleep.
L UKE: Yeah I’m like, I don’t care about this. I haven’t slept in days.
A NTO N: But there’s building it and then there’s actually releasing it properly which just,
yeah on those lines.
5.3 H ow did M icr ostar become a virtual museum? 95
177:
It bears noting that M icr ostar was the third
project ever released for the original Ocu-
lus Rift DK1 (i.e. Development Kit 1), af-
ter a small tech demo of a medieval town,
and Valve’s massively popular game, T eam
F ortr ess 2. This means that one might ac-
curately describe M useum of the M icr ostar
as the first narrative-driven project avail-
able on modern, commerical Virtual Re-
ality platforms – and we had no idea this
might happen beforehand. The explosive
success of the Oculus Rift platform caught
everyone by surprise, including us, and
w e simply t oo k adv antag e of our r elati v e
e xpe rie nce with the medium t o port, t est,
and r el ease our g ame as quick ly as w e
coul d. In this way, M icr ostar became our
first successful foray into narrative design
for VR, driven by experimentation, hap-
penstance, and a little luck.
178: The amount of feedback we received
from this community of early adopters was
both invaluable and unexpectedly volumi-
nous; it indirectly prepared us for the public-
facing development we would undertake in
H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, & H and Gr enades, as
well as the behind-the-scenes experimenta-
tion we would share with other developers of
new Virtual Reality hardware.
179: For us, this was our first step toward
full-scale development for contemporary VR
platforms.
5. 3 H o w did M icr ostar become a virtual museum ?
A NTO N: So then following the contest, there are just two things within our sort of little
epilogue which really sort of fit with the philosophy of our group in general, which is if
you make something, if you really invest in it for a long time, make sure that you’re then
extracting the maximum amount of value out of it. That doesn’t just mean getting it out to
users, but using it to learn other sorts of things for yourself and for your group.
So this piece has been ported to two other formats, the first one being the Oculus Rift.
177
I was lucky enough to be part of the first batch that got sent out, and so I spent basically
three sleepless days immediately after receiving it putting this out. I apologize to anyone
who’s played it; the control schema isn’t great. It kind of crashes sometimes. But we got it
out really quickly which was both a really great way of getting a lot of exposure with a really
energized, awesome early-adopter community,
178
and also just like really shaking out the
platform, seeing what sort of technical hurdles might exist, taking a fully mature thing
that itself was a maze of technical difficulties and slamming it into this new format.
Then, in addition to that I had to do my MFA exhibition. So, especially because I have
background doing VR, and my advisor [Ben Chang] had a background doing VR, and be-
cause this works, you know, this was the perfect piece for a maximalist exhibition form.
We converted it over to three screen KVR so that’s running at 5076 by 1080 [see Figure 5.15 .
In many ways it was sort of like final, “Wow, we did a great job optimizing this,” because
this did manage to run off of one machine and one video card. I think it was running off
of a 580.
L UKE: This provides us some wonderful value, because when you work on these new plat-
forms, what you’re interested in is what questions are there for this platform? Why is this
different from from other stuff? And so in this case we could take this existing project to
be like, we need a new camera set up, which way should we do it? And to not worry. We
already have a good test bed. And then we could answer those important questions, those
interesting questions, in my mind at least, and still have a really great test platform.
It’s in part just not being precious about it, being able to say, “Well, this might not look
great on this platform, we’re going to see how it looks.” But also like you said, I don’t
know about you, but part of the reason I like working in this field is you get to do new stuff
all the time.
179
So there’s this really strong instinct to be like, listen, I don’t want to do
anything with particles, I don’t want to do narration... you just want to put it away. Like
let it be. Let it go away. But you know that’s where we really try hard to make sure we’re
not succumbing to those instincts, we’re making sure we were pushing harder.
A D A M: And one of the really nice things about this, about releasing on multiple platforms
and in multiple contexts, is that we’ve got to interface with so many different commu-
nities of people, different age groups, different backgrounds. You talk about especially
the early adopter Oculus folks are likely to have powerful computers, are likely to have a
long standing passionate relationship with VR, right? But in a cave exhibition like this it
means–and we were lucky enough to show this at EMPAC which is just such a wonderful
space–so many different people came in, especially in the context of GameFest, a lot of
young kids were coming in. Anton was talking at the time about how he came to VR pretty
young, too, and had that great sort of like, “Oh my god!” moment, looking at old CAVE
systems, and to see kids feel that way in relation to your stuff, it makes it all worth it. This
makes it all worth it too.
96 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
Figure 5.15 : In this photograph, Anton is sitting in front of the three screen KVR exhibition of M useum of the M icr ostar at GameFest 2013, at Rensselear Polytechnic
University’s EMPAC.
L UKE: We could ramble on for a while, probably, but we want to make sure that we have
an opportunity for questions and answers and stuff.
A NTO N: There is a microphone stand right there if you do want to ask a question because
we won’t be able to hear you otherwise...
A D A M: Nobody else will either.
5. 3.1 A udie nce Q & A
AUD IEN CE MEMB ER 1: So you guys had a very small time frame with which to build this
project. And it’s clear that it is really important for you guys every so often to make very
coherent and correct decisions in a very small amount of time. Did you guys work in the
same space? Was it easy to communicate?
A D A M: This is fun. Thanks for the softball. That’s a great question, we love to talk about
that. Because all of us were like...
A NTO N: So he (ADAM) was in Los Angeles. I was in Troy, New York. He (LUKE) was on
various couches between Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Troy.
A D A M: Luke has many couches.
A NTO N: Lucas was in Buffalo, our shader guy was in Indiana, and he’s (ARTHUR) in the
Netherlands.
5.3 H ow did M icr ostar become a virtual museum? 97
A D A M: Somewhere in that weird Scandinavia part of the world.
L UKE: So yeah over a dozen time zones made a difference there, too, which made for an
interesting... I mean, yeah, I am still terminally jetlagged off that project. Like, I still don’t
know what time it is.
A D A M: What’s really interesting by the way, and this is part of a larger.... like it’s always-
this is obvious - but it’s always better, or easier, to work with people that you know really
well and that you’ve worked with before. This also wasn’t the first time that we had exe-
cuted a contest entry project on a limited time frame where we weren’t living in the same
time zone. We did that two years ago for the Kongregate Unity contest.
A NTO N: That was actually the first game we had made as a group.
A D A M: Yeah that’s right. Or no, the second.
A NTO N: You know, in only three weeks.
A D A M: Hourglass was the first.
A NTO N: Yes, the second.
A D A M: So yeah, I mean having that kind of experience when you’re getting going as a game
developer, you think a lot about the stuff that’s in front of you. But I think the longtail stuff
is really getting fascinating at this point. After you’ve done ten projects together you start
saying, actually this weird process of even being on a stage and improvisationally giving a
talk it is so much more comfortable as you go.
L UKE: We developed some best practices where you get to know everyone else’s schedule,
knowing, all right is it 7:00 in the morning there? They’re not going to be awake, I’m going
to work on something else. And so you structure your time. One thing we didn’t mention,
but the rendering process...
A NTO N: Oh yeah, as this project grew, we had a metronome for this project, which is that
level started out taking about five hours to bake on a Hexacore CPU, and by the end of
it I think the final bake we did was a 19 hour texture bake, which meant that any time I
made a structural change or needed to see how new lights impacted the scene, I couldn’t
render at low settings because that wasn’t giving me useful enough or accurate results, so
I would have to do it when I went to bed and hope that it was done by the time that I woke
up. I had to essentially cluster all of these different sort of production and modification
activities.
L UKE: So like I said, we scheduled it down to the hour in many cases. But also there are
subtler things about keeping track in your head about who you talk to about stuff, and
when you’re doing software development in general, game development in particular, you
kind of have to have the whole project in your head. Good software practices, other stuff
can help, but when it comes down to it you have to know where everything is. That requires
either it’s a one person team and you’ve got it in your head, that’s fine, or you need lots of
rigorous communication.
I would often be on a call with one person and we talked through for two or three hours,
and then whoever else would wake up and we’d move over there, and you’d have to catch
them up, and then talk and iterate through. I’m the sort of person that I think well by
talking, so that was really useful for me, but we had to really be conscious about that
and make sure we weren’t overlooking anyone. Because there was a few moments when
98 5 M etalogue: Convergent Thinking via Constr aints in M useum of the M icr ostar
someone was like, “Oh, well I was thinking about this!” and everyone else was like, “We
cut that feature two days ago, where were you?”
A D A M: Well, you have to be ready for that. One thing I really have been wanting to say,
especially in contexts like this where we’re really generally looking for technical or socio-
technical solutions to problems; we want scalable methods, we want design principles
that can help, and those things are all really useful... but the thing that we don’t often
hear talked about in this context is that really what’s happening is improvisation. It’s a
big gigantic mess, right? And you have to be able to trust the people around you to make
really intelligent decisions when they’re going on no sleep and you’re making things up as
you go and every project is different.
We’ve been improvising together for a while now and Anton has a background as a VJ,
Luke’s been a gigging musician for years, I’ve been a gigging musician for years. That
kind of training helps at least as much as scalable methodologies and design principles.
It’s really important to be able to recover from weird, unexpected things, to make changes
in a moment, and to know how to anticipate other people’s needs and stuff like that.
So do we have any other questions? Because I know we’re getting short on time, we don’t
miss anything. Hey!
AUD IEN CE MEMB ER 2: Maybe I missed this but how did you all meet up?
A D A M: That’s a great question. We’re all from Buffalo, New York, which is an interesting
place to be from. I always say it’s a great place to be from if you want to really love living in
L.A., because L.A. has all the bad things that Buffalo has, but with a whole bunch of really
great other things on top of it.
L UKE: Jobs and perfect weather.
A D A M: So we were lucky enough to all meet at the State University of New York at Buffalo,
where we all took classes and we all taught, and we’ve just been friends for years. Yeah.
L UKE: Then, collaboratively we also met Arthur through the forum...
A NTO N: Yeah through the Unity forums. And I met our shader guy Josh Ols in Second Life
in 2005. Hey, you laugh but it’s why I know how to texture bake so well.
AUD IEN CE MEMB ER 2: So maybe one of you three or maybe someone else knows of a
place, excuse me for this strange analogy, that’s like a Match.com for people who want to
collaborate on unpaid projects particularly for Unity.
A D A M: That’s a great question I see a lot of stuff on Reddit forums where people are trying
to meet up and get their skill sets to overlap.
L UKE: That’s actually a really interesting question. I remember an interview with Rage
Against The Machine, actually, the interviewer asked, “Well, how do you guys work to-
gether, when you have such aggressive politics? How does that work for you?” And they
were like, “The politics are the only thing we agree on. You should see the van.”
I think one of our strengths is we’re all really good friends on top of that. And “don’t go
into business with your friends” - there’s reasons why that could be a bad idea. But, for
us it gives us the patience that we need. We’re really compatible. Similar threshold for
work, and the sort of products that we’re interested in are really compatible. So I think
it’s an interesting challenge. I mean, I’ve seen some wonderful collaborations come out of
5.3 H ow did M icr ostar become a virtual museum? 99
the Unity forums and other forums, places like Reddit, but when it comes down to it you
really have to cast around
I would encourage you, if you find a group of people that you like working with, it’s worth
really being aggressive in holding on to them towards that end because for us, it’s our...
A D A M & A NTO N: Awww.
L UKE: But you know while our skills happen to be sort of complimentary, it’s often that we
work together and the non-technical stuff pretty well too. I don’t know if that answered
your question at all. But.
AUD IEN CE MEMB ER 2: Well, so at this point really it seems to be by chance that people
meet each other. I mean you know, networking like we’re doing at this conference, but
there is no website yet you know that has...
A D A M: Not really, no. But the practical answer I guess then would be long sustained ef-
fort. Long enough in terms of meeting people and developing skills and stuff like that and
getting used to producing certain things. It takes a long time and it takes long enough
that you forget how it happened. You don’t really have a great explanation for why you do
anything anymore. But I think you’re right, I think you’re identifying something here that
would be really useful to have. Thanks.
Figure 5.16 : An in-headset view of M useum of the M icr ostar on the Oculus Rift DK1.

181: This chapter is an edited transcription
of a conversation I had with Anton Hand in
Summer 2018, about narrative design and
worldbuilding in our game, H ot Dogs, H orse-
shoes, and H and Gr enades. I was nervous
that the conversation wasn’t being prop-
erly recorded by our computers, so I kept
triple-checking to make sure that Audacity
(the open-source sound recording and mix-
ing software) was working, that the levels
were good, etc., etc.
Figure 6.1 : Portrait of Anton Hand, created by
Lucas Miller.
Meat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
6
A D A M: So I have hit record,
181
and I’m not going to think about this Audacity crap any-
more.
A NTO N: I’m going to actually drag this down here, so you can’t even see it.
A D A M: I can see... I can see the gain stuff going up and down though. Look at that.
A NTO N: There we go.
A D A M: Nice.
A NTO N: Perfect.
A D A M: How are you doing?
A NTO N: Getting along.
A D A M: It’s a nice balmy day here in Southern California.
A NTO N: I know, my father checked in with me via text earlier to ask me if I had, in fact,
set on fire yet.
A D A M: Had you?
A NTO N: No. Central Air is wonderful.
A D A M: Oh man, it’s so rough not having air conditioning once you become acclimated to
it. I couldn’t sleep last night.
A NTO N: Dude, I slept down here, actually, just because there’s about a 10 degree tem-
perature gradient at any given moment between here and upstairs, just because of the air
volume and the fact that the thermostat is upstairs.
A D A M: Oh, gotcha.
A NTO N: So it’s always a bit cooler down here.
A D A M: What’s that thing over there, is that a humidifier?
A NTO N: Yep.
A D A M: Ok.
A NTO N: It’s one of the things that’s really necessary. I have this thing where in the past
like, two-three days I’ve woken up, I sat down at my computer, and after the first couple
of minutes I realized that my eyes weren’t adjusting to how bright it was, and they were
burning and hurting, and I had dry eyes for the first time in my life.
101
102 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
182: His name was Hugh Dubberly, and the
interview appears on pp. 146-147 of the book.
183: I talk about this at length in “Prologue:
What is a Dissertation?” , i.e. the introduction
to this dissertation.
184: For reference: https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/John_Carmack
Figure 6.2 : Aardvark assuming T-Pose to as-
sert font dominance. For the record, I made
this image, the font in the image is indeed
Helvetica Neue Bold, and I have complicated
feelings about that. Also, good information
about the T-Pose, COME AT ME BRO, and An-
gry Aardvark memes can be found at Know
Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.
com/
A D A M: You’ve never had dry eyes before? Did it freak you out?
A NTO N: Never. Yeah, I was panicking because I’ve never used eyedrops. I can’t really put
them into my eyes. I found a technique where what I do is I hold like this, and I’m able to
drip it right on to here, and then let it fall into my eye.
A D A M: Heidi can’t do it either. She closes her eyes, puts a bunch of eye drops on top of
her closed eyelid, and just opens her eyelid really quickly.
A NTO N: That’s brilliant. I am going to use that technique from now on.
6.1 H o w shoul d w e cont e xtualize our w or l dbuil din g ?
A D A M: Oh man. So speaking of techniques (that’s a nice awkward transition), I wanted
to sit down and talk with you because, in large part, I was reading a book that Adobe put
out. I think it’s called IMAGINE CREATE DESIGN or something, and they were interview-
ing some guy, I don’t know his name,
182
and he talked about how designers don’t know
how to learn. Specifically, his assertion was that designers don’t know how to replicate
and share and codify their methodologies. He said something along the lines of: ‘over the
course of their careers, designers learn how to become better designers, but that knowl-
edge remains tacit. When a designer retires, their knowledge retires along with them.
They never take that tacit knowledge and make it explicit.’
183
On the one hand, I think that rang true for me as a designer, because I don’t know how
to share what I know with anyone, let alone myself. At the same time, I fundamentally -
at the very least I’m suspicious of - but I fundamentally reject at this point the idea that
design methodologies can be applied to every situation, and I reject the idea that one can
formalize a replicable methodology for design.
A NTO N: Oh yeah, that sort of like, superset of designer removed from context, like,
[grandiose tone] “Oh, because I’m a designer....” All that, as far as I’m concerned, is the
warped world view of your John Carmack
184
and others at the top of engineering. We’ve
just basically got powerful egoists akin to him in the field of design, and so of course they
have a disciplinary outlook similar to engineers who feel like, “I’m very good at my one or
two problem domains of design and have risen to the top, so clearly what I know and how
I know how to do it is applicable to everything.”
A D A M: That’s right.
A NTO N: It’s a power play. It’s a T-pose to assert dominance. [See Figure 6.2]
A D A M: God now I’m thinking of that aardvark “COME AT ME BRO” meme. I feel that way
about Helvetica. Helvetica is the “come at me, bro” aardvark of fonts.
A NTO N: Typefaces.
A D A M: Fine. (laughs) Clips! Say ‘magazine’ . I know you want to say ‘magazine’ right
now.
A NTO N: Actually, I’m not a pedant about that one. I’ve heard it so many times that I yell
at people who pendant about that.
6.1 H ow should we contextualize our worldbuilding? 10 3
Figure 6.3 : This is the in-game menu for RUST LTD.’s now lost VR game, Cour ageous Cannonball Commander. Note that the users first had to enter a meta-fictional
world space, where they accessed and launched the ‘actual’ game from their office computer at work, before they could fire themselves out of a cannon. Too, this
‘game within a game’ was embedded on a website called ‘Faceboom’ , a parody of the popular website Facebook – which later purchased Oculus, some time after we
made our satirical game. I talk at length about this, and other aspects of Cour ageous Cannonball Commander, in Chapter 4.
185: Insert obligatory polish v. Polish joke
here. Anton and I are fellow Polacks.
186: See above.
187: “FacebOculus” is a popular portmanteau
of Facebook and Oculus.
A D A M: Yeah, I’ve gotten used to all the pedants in the field of design asserting that their
eccentric approach to aesthetics and their preferences, their socio-cultural preferences,
are somehow objectively true.
6.1.1 F acebOculus
A NTO N: Yeah, totally, I get you. I get a tremendous amount of side-eye and just straight
like, Squinty Straight Eye, from almost every other VR designer I’ve met.
A D A M: Why?
A NTO N: Because I’m anti-polish.
185
Because I care about systemic expressivity, and little
fun details that you stumble across and are surprised by, hundreds of thousands of times
more than consistency and accessibility and um, yeah just everything really. Because the
real world is not constructed that way, and to create virtual reality in a polish-first way,
186
in my opinion, is creating an intentionally unreal space in very particular ways.
A D A M: It’s that intent that, for me, is so insidious.
A NTO N: It’s the Steve Jobs-ification of reality.
A D A M: Yeah absolutely. Or the FacebOculus-ification of reality, right?
187
This idea that
Facebook and other platform-holders are shoving down devs’ throats, that spaces need to
be not just realistic in some non-specific ahistorical way, but that it needs to have a con-
sistency, and a kind of parseable depth. They do this so that people can look at something
in a pseudo-three-dimensional space, and perceive it with depth similarly to the way that
they perceive depth in real life. Such that, and I really believe this, such that Facebook
104 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.4 : Depicted here is the courageous-
looking ‘Commander’ character from RUST
LTD.’s now lost VR game, Cour ageous Can-
nonball Commander.
188: As Anton was saying this, I was imagin-
ing the Eye of Sauron.
189: The Oculus-related subreddit.
can advertise and track the gaze more effectively in three-dimensional space. That’s their
long play, right?
A NTO N: I think their initial long play was probably gaze-related. The reality is that, from
what I’ve seen from people who actually have done eye-tracking work, gaze doesn’t actu-
ally present you with that significantly more novel and interesting information compared
to other interactive behavior. My feeling with Facebook is it’s significantly more about
having cameras pointed outward.
A D A M: Well, before we move to the cameras pointed outward thing, I think we’re talk-
ing about the same thing but just at two different moments. I think that a few years ago,
when we made Cour ageous Cannonball Commander, Oculus (and this was before they were
bought by Facebook) was still wedded as a company to growing a culture of inner ear-
centric development, with the goal to never make anyone nauseous. It was, I think, pre-
figuring Facebook’s desire for consistent objects that could be looked at in a simulated
three-dimensional environment. I think that Facebook acquired Oculus primarily be-
cause they wanted to track the gaze. If that’s since fallen short, then that’s another issue.
I think you’re probably right about that.
A NTO N: And I think it’s also interesting, the way in which you can look at the current
things that they’re stumbling over, in terms of their own design work, to see their my-
opia.
188
Right? There was a huge post on r/Oculus
189
a couple days back, that was this
one user’s two- or three-page long takedown of the new, what’s called Rift Core 2.0. It’s
their next version of the environment you load into initially, how you buy games, how you
organize your space, how you launch apps. And it’s basically skeuomorphism run amok.
Such that mundane actions are like 7-step things, because they’re an attempt to emulate
the way that action works in physical space.
A D A M: So you’re saying for the user it’s a 7-step process.
A NTO N: Yeah, it’s stupid. If you’re like, “I want to change how I’d look!” Before, you would
simply click over, a panel would open, you would see yourself right there regardless of
where you were, you would click options and you were done. Now, you have to drag a
user-customizing widget out of some panel into the world, navigate over to it, “Oh shoot,
I overshot, I have to turn around, get back, OK now I’m finally in front of it, I’m looking
at myself, now I can modify how I look!” And then save that, sort of thing. It’s a sort of
over-physicalization of abstracted things
6.1.2 V irtual Enculturation
A D A M: Do you think users will eventually become enculturated to stuff like that? Or do
you think that it’s going to run up against some sort of proprioceptive wall, where users
are going to be incapable of acclimating themselves to it?
A NTO N: I think a lot of it will probably have to do with enculturation and if it’s worth
it, if the carrot that’s dangled is worth it. Because they ripped that idea off of Rec Room.
In Rec Room you’ve got this ‘my home space’ thing you can walk over to, and you can try
on different things. The difference is in context. When I’m in Rec Room, even though Rec
Room is a platform, I still have explicitly launched a game. It’s in its own universe, it has its
own playful logic; that playfulness - of like, ‘isn’t it fun to stand in front of a mirror and go
N nna yy ahhh into it’ and things like that is embedded in the language of the whole thing. I
6.1 H ow should we contextualize our worldbuilding? 105
190: https://sine.space/
191: i.e. H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and
Gr enades, also known as “H3VR” .
don’t want Windows to work like that. And so, Rift Core 2.0 wants to try to simultaneously
be both. Essentially, I think there are so many ventures in this space, they’re trying to
do the, like, “Step One, Step Two, Step Seven” jumps. Everyone wants to have enough of
certain sorts of physicalized base functionality, that a layperson might expect a metaverse
to contain, because they all want to be “that thing” .
A D A M: Yeah.
A NTO N: I still find this funny in regards to virtual worlds stuff because... Linden Labs is
trying to do their next big thing, I think it’s Sansar. The company that Philip Rosedale is in
charge of now is doing High Fidelity, and they’re all making these horrible stupid mistakes
and they have no user concurrency, while quietly over to the side Adam Frisbee’s company,
with Rowan [Freeman], SineSpace,
190
is slowly but surely succeeding incredibly. They’ve
got great user concurrency, because they approached it from the perspective of, “Actually,
the most important thing is tools.” They built their thing on top of Unity, so they have
all of Unity’s tools and cross-platform capability, and then all of these rich custom tools
they’ve built on top of it, because it’s about content that will get people in the spaces and
keep them, it’s always content.
It’s why our game succeeds, continually. It’s capital “C” content, a large variety of it, and a
constant stream of it. If you don’t have great tools, then you can’t have a constant stream,
a low friction stream, of content. High Fidelity and Sansar: they are tools, they can bring
in certain types of content, but they’re essentially trying to play 10 years of catch-up with
Unity. They’re never going to be able to. And I’m not surprised, because Linden Labs,
because of Philip Rosedale, had a “not built here” syndrome, and he’s clearly carried that
over to High Fidelity as well. So now we have two major virtual world companies infected
by the “not built here” logic.
A D A M: It’s interesting because the tension that I’m hearing emerge here is between the
need for tools, and the platform holders—the tools’ creators—wishing to enculturate peo-
ple in a particular way. Right? The missed steps from one, to two, to seven, that you’re
talking about, to me sound a lot like enculturation steps. You need the tools, and I think
that what’s interesting to me, as we’re trying through this conversation to discover our
own tacit knowledge, share it with one another, and see how that builds towards some
more explicit understanding for ourselves and for other people, is trying to imagine how
our game found and built a consistent metaverse. From a narrative design perspective,
I think H ot Dogs
191
is almost weirdly consistent. I often gesture at things like us knowing
each other really well, or having worked together for a really long time. I think that rings
true in relation to tacit knowledge, I think that we share a lot of that.
A NTO N: It’s also that you me and Luke come from a... and granted this is wide as an
umbrella, come from an installation art background. We’ve got very specific shared artistic
discipline backgrounds, that have very different relationships to space and content and
pacing and orientation of things than games do. Yeah.
A D A M: And we all come from an improvisational background, right? Luke was a musician,
I was a musician, you were a VJ. I think we’re all really comfortable with improvisation,
I think we’ve gotten used to giving talks, I think we’ve gotten used to designing by the
seat of our pants, I think all of that relies really heavily on tacit knowledge, and on being
comfortable with an anti-method methodology, an anti-pattern that is largely about dis-
covery, and about directionless play. I think that’s the methodology that has carried us
through. Almost - I want to say nevertheless, or in spite of, I don’t know why I want to
106 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
192: pun (n.) – a joke exploiting the different
possible meanings of a word or the fact that
there are words that sound alike but have dif-
ferent meanings.
193: Anton is here referring to the group of
fans who communicate directly with us on the
Discord platform.
194: i.e. The annual Game Developers’ Con-
ference in San Francisco. We exhibited H ot
Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades at Valve’s
booth during GDC 2018.
say that right now, but - we have this consistent metaverse, this consistent metafiction or
aesthetic.....
A NTO N: MEAT-a-verse?
192
A D A M: Ugh, I hate you.
6.1. 3 Tr eatin g P eopl e Lik e M eat
A D A M: I don’t have a cup to cheers you with right now but yeah... fist bump. So our
meat-verse, meat-a-verse, is weirdly consistent given that we approach things in such a
haphazard, happenstance, playful kind of way. I thought we could begin our specific focus
on the narrative design aspects of H ot Dogs and push this conversation toward that a little,
by talking about those steps that we took from the get-go that lead toward such a consis-
tency across all of these levels, the majority of which are not explicitly narrative. They’re
implicitly narrative, there’s a narrative and there’s an aesthetic that’s shared across the
whole game that binds it all together, but a lot of the levels are are not explicitly concerned
with narrative and I don’t think a user would read them as narrative.
A NTO N: Yep, I agree. And I think if anything, part of what’s been enjoyable over this
period of time, especially interacting with the Discord,
193
is when someone suddenly has
a like, “But wait, what if it is all one universe?” realization moment, and they start putting
pieces together, and they invariably lead to: “Wait, am I a giant sausage? Where are all the
humans?”
A D A M: Yup.
A NTO N: And it goes from there. And so... I remember having a conversation with one of
the press folk we talked to when we had that Valve booth.
A D A M: You mean at GDC?
194
A NTO N: Yeah, at GDC, and he had asked a question about the idea of doing a more nar-
rative campaign. And I talked about how it’s a distributed narrative that is consistently
present across scenes, and laid down for him a bunch of the overlying thematics and was
like, “In case you weren’t paying attention, this is clearly a post-apocalyptic space. These
are destroyed and abandoned things. There’s no other people here. And it’s suffused with
guns and gun culture. Draw your own conclusions from that.” And in the end he just had
this wide-eyed like, “Oh, I see what you did there,” moment with it. But it’s one of those
types of things that of course the VR press guy wouldn’t have noticed because they play
every game for like 20 minutes tops.
A D A M: Yeah, it’s such a big ask to say, “Hey, play our game for 50 to 100 hours, and you’ll
start soaking up the idea that everyone in this game is made of meat, and that on some
meta-level the commentary that we’re making via the game is that games like this treat
people like meat.” Right? Like disposable, grindable, serveable commodities. I think that
it seeps in, and I’ve seen it too, I’ve seen on forums when....
A NTO N: And shooter games’ portrayal of soldiers in warfare is one that doesn’t map to
actual warfare whatsoever, and maps to warfare in such a way that I’m always surprised,
honestly, that people who are in the armed forces don’t take more issue, generally speak-
ing, with the portrayal of what they do in games, because it portrays them as throwaway.
It portrays them as ego-driven.
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 107
195: M eat Grinder is an explicitly horror-
themed narrative game mode inside H ot Dogs,
H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades. We released
it as the Halloween game update in 2016. It
takes approximately 20-30 minutes to finish
the game mode, i.e. to win, but it is very dif-
ficult to finish. It is a rogue-like that is de-
signed to be difficult, and to be played for sev-
eral hours total. You can watch the original
release trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.
be/NxrOGeYTOGA
196: Another game mode in H3VR.
A D A M: Yeah, your death is largely meaningless. Even in a small-scale tactical encounter
between six people fighting six people, your death is an inconvenience, at worst. It’s like
playing... M inecr aft is weirdly similar to this. You die in M inecr aft, and at worst, after
you’ve had a couple of days to get set up, at worst, it’s an inconvenience. You drop some
resources on the ground, or nowadays maybe you lose some experience, it’s not a big deal,
you’re not dead. The game is not over, the data is not lost. I think gaming culture largely
rejects that option. They’ve been enculturated, gamers, to assume that their death can
only be a minor inconvenience at worst.
A NTO N: I think that’s no clearer than the way in which the roguelike and rogue-lite genres
have mutated to be games that pretend to have permadeath.
A D A M: Yeah.
A NTO N: When all of the important stuff exists outside the player’s life-death loop, in the
form of various forms of persistence and the transformation of the game, it just shifts the
way that the linearization of the campaign occurs.
6.2 H o w did M eat Grinder begin ?
A D A M: This reminds me of the kind of conversations that we had when we were designing
and conceiving of M eat Grinder.
195
Do you remember those? Is there anything in particular
that jumps out at you from your memories?
A NTO N: A lot of the stuff that we did wrestle with was that there wasn’t anything perma-
deathy yet in VR; that sort of thing. There were some worries about the big ask of like, “I’m
going to struggle in something terrifying and hard and confusing for twenty-five minutes
and then die, suddenly, have nothing. No score, no unlocked anything. Just dead. And a
narrator will laugh at me during the seven seconds it’s fading out, and I’m dying, and then
I’m going to wake back up, and he’s going to be real irritated that he has to deal with the
next person.”
A D A M: It’s funny. So I went into this part of the conversation thinking, “I wonder how
Anton will talk about the roguelike aspects of M eat Grinder?” And immediately when
you said what you just said, I thought about how—over the course of designing these VR
experiences—we’ve learned that most people, most of the time, only want to play and only
can play a VR experience for about 15 to 20 minutes, and then they need a break. You build
up a tolerance for it.
A NTO N: Yeah, at first. Our power users now are all doing competitive T ake and H old
196
runs with each other on the Discord, I don’t know if you’ve seen.
A D A M: Yeah.
A NTO N: There is like, there’s one where it’s maximum number of points, and one of them’s
maximum number of time, and they’re all over an hour and a half long.
A D A M: Absolutely. You have to build up to that, the way that you have to build up to doing
100 pushups or something, right? And it’s interesting that on the one hand, we have that
kind of extreme. I think we might be the game where people will play it for the longest
contiguous periods of time. (Anton is shaking his head, for those of you who can’t see
this! In a yes way!) At the same time, I think when we were making M eat Grinder, and we
108 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.5 : An in-game screenshot of M eat Grinder, the horror-themed narrative game mode for H ot D ogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades.
were wrestling with what it meant to design a roguelike for a virtual reality experience, I
think....
A NTO N: We were worried about making it longer than 30 minutes.
A D A M: Yeah.
A NTO N: Because then no one would finish.
A D A M: Exactly. Yeah.
A NTO N: Because at that time nothing in the medium required you doing something that
long, that you couldn’t save your progress.
A D A M: Yeah that’s right.
A NTO N: I still don’t have scene serialisation, there’s still no way to save your progress in
any of the modes unless it’s a persistence-based unlock type thing, and that’s always going
to be the case.
A D A M: As a result, I think that the kind of distributed narrative approach that we’ve taken
serves us really well in M eat Grinder, that so much of the narrative is world-built, for lack
of a better word, into the environment – through its posters, through its design, not just
through the narration, not just through the monologue that you’re hearing, but through
the consistent, overarching goals that are architected into that space, the physical space
[seeFigure 6.5 ].
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 109
197: You can listen to the opening narration
of M eat Grinder starting at the 10 min. mark
in this update video: https://youtu.be/
2Gw4NtHesy8?t=10m5s
198: i.e. Marc Destefano, Professor at Rens-
selaer Polytechnic University, who voice-acts
the character of The Narrator in the H3VR
game modes M eat Grinder and W urstW urld.
199: I voice-act a character in the W urst-
W urld game mode, who is not given a name
in-game. He has a squeaky voice.
200: i.e. The character Morty from the TV
show Rick and M orty.
201: You can watch this scene from a fan
playthrough of W urstW urld, wherein you
can hear me talking about ‘delicious but-
ters’: https://youtu.be/T31lENrj9rs?
t=6m38s
6.2.1 M eat-a - narrati v e, M eat-a - fiction
It was a designed space in the meta-narrative, in the meta-fiction. Somebody designed it
for specific purposes. People were there. There are remnants of people there. And there’s
a history there, that’s mostly lost but remains through the objects and the ways in which
they were used and positioned. I think as a narrative designer it was thus pretty easy for
me to leverage that, when I was doing the writing for the voiceover, for the monologue,
because it was easy for me to imagine living in that space and assuming the mindset of the
the narrator. Narrator’s not doing him justice... the nutbag, the psychopath?
197
A NTO N: It’s funny, everyone just refers to him as The Narrator, because he hasn’t been
given any other sort of name.
A D A M: Yeah. Well that’s cool.
A NTO N: And they want more of him. So.
A D A M: Oh, okay.
A NTO N: As actually a separate thing I need to do with you, I’m in the process of designing
the real tutorial for the game.
A D A M: Uh-oh, ok...
A NTO N: Some of it’s going to be my voice, basically I’m going to be giving specific instruc-
tions, like about handgun usage, but then the wrapper narration in the given sequences
should definitely be Marc.
198
A D A M: Oh That’s going to be fun.
A NTO N: And then probably some hidden audio logs of your Squeaky Guy character.
199
A D A M: Oh gee. I don’t think I mean for it to sound like Morty
200
[as much as] as it does,
but it definitely does.
A NTO N: You’re a little lispy and fatter-faced with it, which is good... (doing squeaky voice)
“These delicious butters!” [See Figure6.6.] But yeah. Folks love stuff like that,
201
and it’s
important, I’m glad that he exists as an antagonist in the place, because if there’s one thing
that I love doing with my power users it’s torturing them. So, being able to wrap that pain
Figure 6.6 : This table of delicious butters is
hidden at the top of The Butter Churner, a
big building in W urstW urld that very much re-
sembles its name. Players can sample sev-
eral exotic flavors, including kangaroo and ar-
madillo (pictured here) – and if the player
samples them all, they are ‘rewarded’ .
110 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
and difficulty... The thing is, when a VR game is hard, it’s hard in a completely different
way than a screenal game.
A D A M: How so?
A NTO N: For a game like H3VR at least, the difficulty is coming from the fact that you
are exceeding the player’s cognitive load threshold, and so they are suddenly losing total
control of their entire body, they’re losing their capability to coordinate, perceive, and
keep track of things. It’s the same level of overwhelmed as being part of a stampede of
people.
6.2.2 V irtual ly O v e r coo k ed
A NTO N: When you’re getting overwhelmed and frustrated with a game, you have a single
object in your hand, the controller, which is why we have this entire meme of throwing a
controller. It’s like, I’m done, I’m out. In VR, when something is horrible and overwhelm-
ing, you’re trapped in it as it’s occurring. The last thing you can do is just allow your hands
to go down at your sides and just die.
A D A M: Or rip the headset off your face.
A NTO N: Yeah right.
A D A M: That’s the other thing I see people do, I think that’s the equivalent, the closest you
get, to throwing your controller. Throwing your controller is about being frustrated with
your impotence, or your failure, or with the game failing you, feeling like you’re getting
bullshitted. Ripping the headset off is about feeling that claustrophobia, feeling trapped,
like needing to get out of this virtual space and back into the real world. Sometimes that
happens simply because of nausea, but I think a lot of the time it happens because of the
stuff you were talking about, people feel like they’re getting stampeded, their lizard brain
is getting hit too hard.
A NTO N: Which is incidentally, if you look at the way that soldiers are trained (I just
watched a documentary the other night about the French Foreign Legion and about how
they induct people in the first stages of training), so much of early training with infantry
rifleman is like: you’re going to crawl through this thing, and then look for a target, maybe
not even shoot it, over and over again. But we’re going to literally sensorially bombard you
while you’re doing this. You’re going to run ten kilometers first, so you’re already winded,
exhausted, and you can’t get enough glucose to your brain to make high-level decisions,
and then we’re going to do things like have you crawl through a mud tunnel, and then try
to find something, while there are two burning car tires that stink and are hot. Because
it’s all about exceeding a wide sensory threshold and maintaining body coordination and
the ability to make decisions based on discernment.
A D A M: How do you think that affects people’s relationship to that narrative, in something
like M eat Grinder, where they’re either sneaking around terrified of what’s going to be
around the corner, or they’re in the middle of that kind of sensory bombardment?
A NTO N: I think what’s productive about it, why it ends up working as real horror, and
why it’s enjoyable, is that it ends up pseudo-replicating the one thing we can’t replicate
about a horror experience or a combat experience, which is you dying, or you’re feeling
genuine mortal fear that, “I’m going to be hurt.” That feeling of being overwhelmed and
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 111
202: HE MEANT ‘FIGURATIVELY’ .
that feeling of having to engage in precise actions while a threat is occurring replicates the
feebleness of the body, and the imprecision and the fact that you can mess things up in a
way that I think most pancake games don’t even come close to.
A D A M: And by “pancake games” , you mean two-dimensional or flat-screen non-VR
games. I love that turn of phrase. Yeah, I just can’t put my finger personally on why the
narration, to say nothing of the narrative design of the space, is still parseable for the
player in the midst of going into lizard-brain mode. People still really love the narration
and the space of M eat Grinder, and yet my assumption would be, going into it, would be
that a narrative would be overridden and drowned out by that sensory overload. And that
doesn’t seem to be the case.
A NTO N: Well actually, I would say that the funny thing about the narrator as an antagonist
in M eat Grinder is that his presence is deeply comforting.
A D A M: OK.
A NTO N: If you play meat grinder with the narrator turned off, which you can do, you are
ALONE. Which means that it is a way bleaker experience, next to nothing is explicable
about it, you can’t keep track, you get no positive reinforcement when you’re doing well,
you have no idea how much time is left, and literally the only other animate things in the
environment are trying to kill you. Whereas, having him there, even as an antagonist that
is insulting you and saying weird sexual things to you while you pick up guns, is this like –
“At least someone knows I’m here.” And in a horror context, that’s deeply comforting.
6.2. 3 T he M eat of the N arrati v e
A D A M: It’s weird, there were two things I was intentionally trying to do, that I remember,
with the narrator in M eat Grinder. First, I wanted to make the narrator functional; there
had to be some way that we could tell the person how much time was left, what their mo-
tivations were, and so on. Following that, the second thing I wanted to do was motivate
the player to combat the narrator. I wanted to give them some enemy that was consis-
tent, that was larger than the one-on-one fights they were having with a Meat-Bot, or the
struggles they were having navigating the environment. There had to be some sense of an
arc to it, some reason why they were trying to get to the end, something to motivate them
to get through all 20 or 30 minutes of play. I was concerned about those things.
The way that you described people’s relationship with it, that you’ve observed and that
you’ve heard from people, tells me that there’s a third thing we did and it makes me feel
really bad that we did it, which is we gave people Stockholm Syndrome. Right? There’s
only one person in the space with you, and that perhaps—not despite their abuse but per-
haps because of their abuse—you develop a fondness for them, and people have developed
a fondness for The Narrator. Like you said, they want more of The Narrator. I have hon-
estly been a little surprised by that, because the way that I wrote that guy and the situations
we put people in, around that narration, are pretty antagonistic. They’re pretty mean.
A NTO N: At the same time though, the tenor of him was changed at the end of W urstW urld.
Aside from the fact that you’re literally spending your entire time in an environment that
is an avatar of his failure as a business person, as a whatever, there’s this grand buildup to
the final boss, and it falls forward and falls apart. We castrate the antagonist, literally in
front of the player.
202
112 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.7 : SPOILER ALERT: This is the final
boss in W urstW urld. It’s a meat-robot that’s
roughly the size of a building.
203: I first came across this joke in Drew
Carey’s book, Dirty J okes and Beer: Stories of
the Unr efined.
204: You can watch this, um, climactic mo-
ment at the 4:50 mark of this fan-made
playthrough of the W urstW urld ending (or,
you can watch the entire six minutes, and
get the whole story): https://youtu.be/
seZ4YLnEROE?t=4m50s
205:
The moment Anton said all this, it imme-
diately rang true for me. And it’s a strange
sensation: I wrote and designed this situ-
ation, but I can’t say that I explicitly and
fully understood my intentions. But An-
ton’s captured it, he understands it, and
through him I’m able to better understand
my own goals, my own intent as a nar-
rative designer. I’m really fortunate that
Anton can parse what I’m doing, and what
I’ve done, and mirror it back at me.
206: The full Edson quote: “Possibly a good
psychological physic, which goes: just get
something on the page, you have nothing to
lose except your life, which you’re going to
lose anyway. So get with it, enjoy this special
moment that brings you to the writing table.
Relax into the writing and enjoy the creative
bowel movement, remembering all is lost
anyway.” (From “An Interview with Russell
Edson” , available online: http://www.
webdelsol.com/Double_Room/
issue_four/Russell_Edson.html)
207: I couldn’t agree more with this state-
ment. This is my experience as well.
208: This is a return to the theme of tacit vs.
explicit knowledge.
A D A M: I remember how much you and I would talk about that castration. The like, “What
we’re going to do is reveal the gigantic meat of the narrator. His massive sausage...”
A NTO N: “...that itself has two giant mini-gun dicks in its hands.” [See Figure 6.7.]
A D A M: Exactly! It’s like all those old dick jokes that, like, “My dick’s so big, my dick has
a dick, and even my dick’s dick is bigger than your dick.”
203
Right? Except the minute
that it’s revealed, the minute that he unzips his fly, and the giant boss that is his sausage
comes out, it just falls over.
204
He is revealed, in that moment, as being completely and
irrevocably impotent, right? And he may not even be there, is the other thing. It’s not clear
that The Narrator exists anymore. Is he more than a recording? Is this more than some set
of triggered events? We don’t know. Well, they don’t know, right? The user base doesn’t
know. So yeah, I think that... I don’t know what I think. This is one of those moments
where, in reflecting upon this, I see that I think I have a sense of what I have done, but I
don’t have a holistic sense of it. There are so many parts of this that are missing for me as
a narrative designer.
A NTO N: And this might be a little too lit-analysis, this might be a little too “Eyes of Dr.
Eckleberg” , but I think the fact that this is an explicitly single player game that is lonely,
this is a very lonely game regardless of what part of it that you’re in, and that’s why people
always ask for multiplayer at the end of the day, that w e ’v e cr eat ed an antag onist w ho is
cl ear ly just as l onely , w ho is laughin g al on g t o his o wn t e rrib l e jo k es, because the r e ’ s no
one else t o laugh al on g t o the m, playing with his little toys, his brilliant little thing that
he’s assembled and now puts into play. He’s the perfect mirror of the player.
205
A D A M: I’m reminded here of when I started to tell you guys that writing on a RUST project,
for me, is like writing as part of a comedy writing team. That, if I’m not getting immediate
feedback from you guys, from the room, about what works and what doesn’t, I don’t know
how to do it. And I’m reminded of that in this moment, because you get my writing. You
understand what I’m trying to do as a writer almost viscerally. You don’t need to think
about it. It’s not something that needs to be right at the tip of your consciousness, or
something, you get it on some deep fundamental level. Such that, as a writer, when I’m
writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m writing. It’s coming out. That’s the experience of
writing for me. You know that.
6.2.4 H o w T he Sausag e Gets M ade
I’ve always been inspired by the way that Russell Edson talks about writing as the creative
bowel movement.
206
For me, I chew on a lot of things, I go for walks, I think, I think, I
think. And then suddenly, something just comes out of me. When I talk about it this way, I
think part of me feels bad about showing people how the sausage gets made, as a writer.
A NTO N: Because they expect this massive architective plan, largely because la y peopl e
alw a y s o v e r -ascribe infrastructur e t o ideation
207
when it’s a discipline that they don’t
have experience with.
A D A M: Yeah, and my experience as a writer is: I’ve been doing this for almost my entire
life, and I have no idea what I’m doing. When I say that, I mean I have no conscious, explicit
idea of what I’m doing, and I don’t have any idea about how to generalize what it is that
I’m doing, nor how to teach it.
208
It makes, for example, the writing of a dissertation about
narrative design for virtual reality ironically really, really difficult for me, because I don’t
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 11 3
209: For context: https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Hero's_journey#Summary
210:
In short: I believe the user-as-hero mon-
omyth has become so pervasive, in con-
temporary videogames, that it has as-
cended to the status of meta-fictional
context for ‘Gamer’ culture at large – par-
ticularly the aggressive, male-dominated,
fungal subculture that propagated the
dank, disgusting mold that was Gamer-
gate.
211: Or when the game becomes the char-
acter. By which I mean, Russian literature
has definitely shaped my approach to narra-
tive design, and this is borne out through the
meta-narrative of H3VR.
know what it means to be a narrative designer in the way that I know what it means to
listen to a bird [ bir d chirps in backgr ound ]... in the way that I know what it means to code,
right?
Object oriented programming is something that’s designed to be taught in the same way
that a guitar is designed to be taught. It is so easy to learn how to play the guitar, to a
certain point. What makes the guitar historically significant is that it is designed to be easy
to play – and by “to play” , I mean to generate specific chords at a specific time. You just hold
your hand in a particular formation, that is based on a simple mathematical relationship
between notes, and you just strum. Becoming a virtuoso guitarist is incredibly difficult,
it would take a lifetime to get there, but you don’t need to become a virtuoso on a guitar.
Which is to say, that’s not what made it historically significant. What made it historically
significant is that it takes you a couple of days to be able to sound good sitting around a
campfire and telling a story, which is what the troubadour tradition is all about.
I think the equivalent of that in video games is “The Hero’s Journey” .
209
I’m sick and tired
of Joseph Campbell and “The Hero’s Journey” . It’s easy, right? It’s so easy to understand
and replicate, and people keep doing it over and over again in our industry. Largely, I
think, because the vast majority of them are not trained as writers. I don’t know what that
training would even look like, but they have... they have such a shallow understanding
of writing, and such discomfort with anything that isn’t “The Hero’s Journey” that they
avoid it, and they structure their production process and their teams to ignore the vast
majority of world literature from the past 100 to 150 years minimum. It’s all Shakespeare
and Joseph Campbell, and that’s all people talk about, and by people I mean white men
of a specific age, which is the vast majority of people who seem to be writing in Triple-A
environments... it drives me nuts.
210
A NTO N: That’s why something like The Witcher III is given the level of accolade it is, by
doing this narrow sidestep. It’s still “The Hero’s Journey” , it’s just you’re actually playing
a side character of that hero’s journey for a hundred hours, and then finally in the DLC at
the end you get your own little like, “D’aww, Geralt gets his story, for him!” And it’s twee.
It’s literally, you know, “It’s off to the land of Toussant!” Which is this fusion of medieval
Arthurian France and a little bit of Italy. And he’s like the unwashed mutant in the perfect
colorful land of Toussant.
A D A M: He’s the Barbarian! I mean, we’re talking about The Witcher III , we’re talking about
something that’s acutely aware of Eastern European fiction, which is bleak, and which is
not about the individual. This is not the flâneur, the individual walking through a space
and telling you what they see, their individuality and their perspective not only connecting
you to the characters around them, but doing it in a unique way. The French do this.
This is what Existentialism is all about, so I’m not surprised that he ends up in France.
But what makes Russian literature so great is the moments when the town becomes the
character.
211
A NTO N: The Witcher III , all of its side quests, over and over and over again, are morality
plays that are about you becoming an instrument of the will of a small town, a village, an
individual in a conflict, and coming to precipice points of: do you give them exactly what
they asked for? Do you give them what they wanted, but not necessarily what they asked
for? Or, do you take an individual expression of your own morality (if that’s even possible
in the context)?
114 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.8 : Image from a sign in W urstW urld
(made by Lucas Miller of RUST LTD.). As is
implied here, mostly fans of H3VR found the
horseshoe mini-games in W urstW urld to be
very difficult and, often, frustrating – and I
was honestly very surprised by this. Anton
and I return to this topic later in the conver-
sation.
212:
To my mind, this isn’t specifically about
gender per se, but about self-described
‘outsiders’—people who would say things
like, “I don’t really play video games”—
who are not part of the ‘heroic’ , mono-
mythic, hegemonic Gamer culture – and
who, in turn, have not been encultur ated to
approach all games in specific ways, with
specific techniques and expectations and
desires.
213: i.e. The State University of New York at
Buffalo, where Anton went to college, I did my
MFA, and we both taught courses.
A D A M: That’s so weird that you would frame it that way, because in imagining answering
the question: “How do you make a distributed narrative for VR like H ot Dogs, where the
central character in H ot Dogs is the game itself?” I would say the meta-character of the
entire collection of games, and The Narrator, is about as close as you get to that. You were
saying those side quests in The Witcher III are about the designers and authors deciding:
do you give the user what they want? And in relation to that, what do you give them? If
there was anything that was consistent across the set of discussions we’ve had, related to
what kind of narrative and narrative design work and worldbuilding we’re going to do in a
specific place, it had to do with the fans. What do the fans want? When we started making
M eat Grinder, the fans wanted horror. They were asking for it, Halloween was coming up,
and we kind of gave it to them. W urstW orld was similar, wasn’t it? Similarly, the user base
was asking for stuff, and in relation to that we said, okay, on this side quest... even though
W urstW orld is a massive game, right? It’s two hours minimum to finish it.
A NTO N: Yeah about two and a half was the fastest play-through. From someone who just
apparently had played tons of VR games, so the horseshoes were a slight speed bump for
them. And of course it was a woman.
A D A M: Really?
A NTO N: Yeah, who beat it first that night.
A D A M: No kidding. Why do you say ‘of course’? Like, why would a woman be able to beat
it faster than somebody else?
A NTO N: And once again, maybe this is just too gender normative, but I imagine a woman
who is a super fan of the game, enough to be great at it, would hit a space like W urstW orld,
and be like, “Ooh! More stuff on the periphery, more variation...”
212
A D A M: I see.
A NTO N: And would get into it more [ snaps fingers] off the bat, whereas, as we’ve talked
about quite a lot, some of the puzzle and horseshoe aspects have been “A thing I have to
do” for a large amount of the male-dominated player base of the game.
A D A M: So just to say that back to you, you’re distinguishing between cultures that tend to
correlate strongly with genders. Right.
A NTO N: Yes.
A D A M: Whether those are binary separations like man and woman, or just man versus
anyone who is not a particular kind of “man” . I think it’s closer to the latter. This is closer
to the “Gamergate versus The World” thing. There’s this underbelly to male-dominated
gaming culture, where your immediate desires need to be satisfied in a linear, efficient
way. You need to be satisfied. Right? I don’t think that “non-gamers” , I don’t know what
that means but people who don’t identify as “typical gamers” , approach those kinds of
spaces completely differently.
6.2. 5 Self -Sel ection and Stagnation
A NTO N: I always think back to when I was doing my VR rail-shooter back at UB.
213
A D A M: What year was that?
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 11 5
214: “In 1956, Harvard denied Kuhn tenure
because the tenure committee felt his book on
the Copernican revolution was too popular in
its approach and analysis.” From the website,
‘The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/kuhn- ts/
A NTO N: 2005. When I had that first group of people come into play it, it was my Maya
class that I brought over to play it. The dudes all played it and they took a very “I’m holdin’
a gun!” kind of stance, and played like a shooter. And this tiny little Japanese girl, she
was like like four-foot-six, maybe, really mousy, and [speaking softly] talked about this
loud, picked the controller up and literally held it underhand, the way you would cradle
something that was fragile, and proceeded to wreck the game. Just like, bump bup bup
bup bup. A target was there, she pointed exactly at it, and just BAP BAP BAP BAP BAP BAP
CH-Ch, Bap bap bap bap bap bap, Ch-ch. As we all stood there, like: “What are we even
watching?” And then at that moment I sort of interpreted that she didn’t, and she didn’t
really play games, she didn’t have all of this enculturation getting in the way of her mental
representation of what she had to do, which was point a laser pointer at something and
click a button.
A D A M: Yeah, I feel that way about narrative design in general. I feel as though the vast
majority of people who are approaching it are self-selecting into the role, which generally
means that they love games, that they’ve thought about doing this for a long time, and that
enculturation process, their immersion in those cultures, I think blinds them to specific
atypical productive avenues toward interesting output.
Have you read Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”? I’m going to do a
really terrible job paraphrasing here, but Kuhn was I think a physicist at Harvard. He was
at some Ivy, where he was doing physics and being brilliant and didn’t get tenure.
214
That’s
what makes me think he was at an Ivy is he didn’t get tenure, because they never tenure
anyone at Ivys. So he went somewhere else, I think he went to Berkeley, but he wrote a
book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and it was a landmark publication
in large part because he talked about the periodic aspects to science as a discipline, as a
culture, and as an approach.
Prior to Kuhn, generally people thought that science was trending towards some better
understanding of the world, and that this trend was largely linear-ish and consistent.
Kuhn turned that upside down. What Kuhn said was essentially that science is deeply
cultural, and when you’re part of the culture of science the process of choosing what to
research, your approach to researching it, and the way that you interpret results is about
a self-selective set of biases that generally means that scientists find what they’re looking
for, and scientists become the equivalent of numerologists. They, by design, not inten-
tionally either, it’s just they have blinders on because they’re enculturated. They use the
same tools, they study the same things, and they expect a specific subset of possible re-
sults.
What this means is that, over periods of time, there are these plateaus where science just
doesn’t really progress anywhere. The revolutions happen when someone somewhere else
does something really weird, it can be because of happenstance, it can be an accident,
it can be that they have a radically different approach, or are coming at things from a
radically different culture. Again, I’m doing my best to paraphrase it, I haven’t read this
book recently.
But it’s to say that I think the same ho l ds true acr oss v arious aspects of g amin g cultur e,
whether it’s development, design more generally, or in my case narrative design and world
building. I think people think that “The Hero’s Journey” , for example, is a really great way
to tell a story in a game because that’s what they keep doing, because that’s what they
116 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
215: i.e. Edmund McMillen, the designer and
artist for The B inding of I saac .
216: The integrated development environ-
ment for developing digital games.
already think and they’ve already been taught, because all the games that they’ve played
and are familiar with as mainstream gamers use “The Hero’s Journey” .
One of the reasons why The Binding of I saac has been such a touchstone for me, over and
over again, is that The Binding of I saac does not follow a traditional “Hero’s Journey” . It’s
got striking similarities. I think that people will experience the same kind of catharsis,
and the same kind of investment in the main character. But it’s for completely different
reasons. The Binding of I saac is an epic poem. It’s a... it’s a meditation, for the user, I
think as well as McMillen,
215
on a scared-shitless kid who copes with his surroundings by
drawing. That’s it, that’s the core of the game and it took me hundreds of hours to come to
that belief. I believe that’s what makes the game richly autobiographical, and what makes
the game such a great window into a kid’s experience of the world. The game is drawn
by the main character, Isaac. It’s kid’s interpretation of the world. It’s mytho-poetic, he’s
creating his own myth, and he’s using it like a bricoleur, like a collage artist, he’s using
fragments of the little bits of culture that he’s soaked up. He’s soaked up Catholicism and
somehow the magical realist aspects of it.
A NTO N: And the scatological nature being a kid.
A D A M: Exactly. He’s also picked up stuff from other video games, and he’s picked up
stuff from Reddit. I can imagine a contemporary kid having the same kind of story in
their head, about their relationship with a parent, especially in a stressful single-parent
household where the dad has left, and there was some violence, and they had some sibling,
or Isaac had non-traditional atypical gender expressivity and he got beaten for it. It’s not
clear to me whether or not Isaac’s character had a sibling in that game. What’s clear to me
is that he is confused about gender and gender representation. He cross-dresses. And a
lot of kids do that, for no reason other than just playing and exploring, but it seems he was
maybe punished for it. He has some sense of religion, but he borrows from it in the way
a kid would, they just grab shit and they smash it together with other shit. It’s the mythic
quality of it, the poetic quality of it, and the way in which, richly, you just keep drawing
over and over and over again. It’s not about resolving some story. It’s about coping with a
situation.
6.2.6 Instrume ntal Kno w l edg e
I think that’s what made it so perfect for the roguelike [genre]. It’s not about winning.
It’s about coping. And drawing is that for a lot of people. I think it’s... it’s the same way
with guitar. I think that when I talk about guitar, the way that I did earlier, it insults the
guitarists I know, because the people I know who play guitar well are people for whom
playing guitar relates strongly to some, if not coping mechanism, some long-standing re-
lationship with the instrument, and that instrument’s relationship with their life, with
their environment. Did they play guitar because nobody liked them at school? Did they
play guitar because they emulated and loved and respected specific musicians? Did they
play guitar as a form of escape? Did they play guitar for any number of other reasons...
There was some purpose behind it. And the points that I’m making are separate from
that, it’s to say that guitar exists, it was designed, and it beat other instruments histori-
cally. It rose above other similar instruments because it was portable, and it was easy to
learn. That’s it. Instruments before the guitar were confusing as hell, in the same way that
“instruments” before Unity
216
were confusing as hell.
6.2 H ow did M eat Grinder begin? 117
Figure 6.9 : The tenor trombone. What a goofy
instrument. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
A NTO N: My mother played mandolin.
A D A M: Oh my god. Really.
A NTO N: She played mandolin, and I played a violin and a viola.
A D A M: Oh that’s right you did, I forgot.
A NTO N: I know wholeheartedly. What a pissy instrument.
A D A M: Yeah, dude... I really regret picking trombone as my primary instrument. I picked
it, I told you why, right?
A NTO N: Why? ‘Cause You could make fart noises with it?
A D A M: Oh you know me so well. I think I was in the second grade, third grade, whatever
grade it is that in public school they parade the older kids out in front of you and say,
“Hey, we need some of you to play instruments because otherwise we won’t have a band.
We have these instruments lying around. Here’s what they sound like. Pick one.” And
the kid who played trombone came out and did the glissando slide thing, and he just goes
[ makes tr ombone glissando noise] and I go, “Bwahahahahah!” The trombone cracked me up,
so I chose that.
I don’t think that was the wise decision in the long-term, from a expressivity standpoint.
I think, though, that I opted into a culture that was perfect for me, because trombonists
are goofballs and dark comedians. We exist, in an ensemble setting, in a visual dead zone
for the conductors, so we can get away with anything. And we exist in a sonic dead zone.
You can’t hear trombones. They’re at the wrong range. You can’t get away with anything
if you play flutes or piccolos, because you’re sitting up front and you’re really high. The
notes you make rise above everything. You can’t get away with anything as a percussionist
because you have to keep the beat, and if you screw up the whole band just dies on the
table. You can’t get away with anything if you’re a French horn player, because if you do
anything wrong as a French horn player your instrument immediately sounds like a dying
animal, so you have to be perfect. Trombones are just right in the middle of everything and
they get lost, and no one expects anything of their big goofy aardvark of an instrument,
and you could just hide and goof off and you observe everything that’s happening around
you. Trombonists tend to have core aspects of their personality resemble one another by
the time they get out of high school. I really deeply believe this.
A NTO N: Whereas I picked the violin for all the wrong reasons, too.
A D A M: Yeah?
A NTO N: Oh yeah. I picked it, I think, even if just subconsciously, as an aspirational class
thing, being a poor kid. It was something that serious adults of a higher tier would do. It
wasn’t until years later that I even realized it. I plateaued with my ability because I didn’t
really practice, because I didn’t need to practice anything as a kid. And so, for me the level
that I was playing at, which was still pretty great, was basically like, “OK, that’s how well
Anton can wing this” , for the most part.
A D A M: How much time did you spend winging it, though? Like how many hours a day did
you play? Not practice, just play.
A NTO N: Oh I didn’t even play every day.
A D A M: OK.
118 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
217:
This is a big takeaway for me, and one of
the emergent themes of this entire con-
versation. Anton and I are best friends,
we’ve been best friends for almost a
decade, we know each other really well,
and we’re very comfortable chatting free-
form with one another (as is probably ap-
parent here). The thing is, it’s very easy
for me to forget how weird this is, having
a best friend who is also one of your pri-
mary artistic collaborators – couple this
with the fact that we’re a couple of really
weird dudes, and there’s a baseline wier d-
ness to all of our interactions that is hard
for me to track. It’s something I take for
granted: I approach narrative design, and
design in general, in a fundamentally and
profoundly atypical way. Given the popu-
larity of H3VR, this means our weirdness
has gone weirdly mainstream. Weird.
A NTO N: I would get my like (because my mom would yell at me otherwise) maybe an hour
a week.
A D A M: But did you play in orchestras or anything, in school?
A NTO N: Not in school because I was homeschooled.
A D A M: Once you got into school, you didn’t play anymore?
A NTO N: I did most of my violin playing when I was homeschooled. I would occasionally
do like the Suzuki events. There was a thing once a week, or once every other week, I
think, that I would go and show up and play in a group and things like that.
A D A M: How interesting. Because since I was public schooled, I didn’t practice either, but
I think that I kept getting better and better in large part because I winged it for longer and
longer periods of time, for larger portions of my day. By the time I graduated high school
and moved into college, I was in I don’t know how many bands, every band they could
put me in, I was in. I was in regional bands, traveling bands, I gigged semi-professionally.
Whether it was like, I played for money in nursing homes, I played for money in the drink-
ing halls, at the American Legion. I would do jazz, I did that more in college. I did a lot of
small ensemble jazz gigging in addition to playing in every band. So I almost was a music
major based on credits alone. I considered doing it just on a whim, so I did all of the stuff
you had to do to round out the major, like learn piano, and do the performance classes,
the specific solo performance classes. That was probably the first time I started practicing
in a methodical way. And I got even better even quicker, and the whole time I disliked my
instrument. I never enjoyed playing trombone.
A NTO N: Whereas I stopped because of conflicting hobbies. When you play violin and viola
you need very short nails. And you callus up the tips of your fingers, and you lose a whole
bunch of their sensitivity. I was doing a whole bunch of precise visual arts, where I needed
sensitivity on the tips of my fingers and long nails. They kept fighting each other.
A D A M: I wonder if the playing of the violin still in an indirect way improved your facility
with fine motor movements with your hands.
A NTO N: Oh absolutely, and gave me a baseline sense of rhythm.
A D A M: Exactly. I think that’s where I was coming from saying we approach the design of
videogames holistically, and the narrative design aspects of that holistic design come from
a totally oddball direction in comparison to other game designers and VR aficionados. We
ar e atypical designe rs w ho ar e ha vin g mainstr eam success.
217
I think that’s what makes
us interesting, and what makes me want to find ways to record, both literally and the other
kind, our attempts to generalize and make explicit what we’ve learned, how we’ve learned
it, and how we approach the design of spaces.
6. 3 H o w did W urstW urld begin ?
A D A M: When we started talking about W urstW orld, you already had something in mind.
You were already watching Westworld at the time of course.
A NTO N: I was watching “Westworld” [i.e. the contemporary TV show on HBO], but where
it had sort of stemmed from, for me, was from a request that had been made over and
over again, which was to have the equivalent of a carnival shooting gallery. It had been
6.3 H ow did W urstW urld begin? 119
Figure 6.10 : A collection of the building asset
prototypes for W urstW urld. At this point, we
were just starting to get a clear sense of the
(large) size and scope of the game mode.
requested over and over again. So where that ideation process started for me, was asking,
well what if the shooting gallery is just the size of a town? Yeah. And then...
A D A M: I remember we talked about that, like where is it going to be located?
A NTO N: And then I blocked it out. Salmonboxed it, if you remember, because that was
just the color that the default material was at the time.
A D A M: So not “sandboxed” but “salmonboxed” .
A NTO N: Yeah I’m just not going to riff on that. We’re just going to move forward.
A D A M: That was just for posterity, I wanted to make sure the recording got it right.
Salmon.
A NTO N: And in laying up the initial size, you were kind of like, “Holy shit, it’s a really big
space, Anton, are you going to be able to fill that with stuff?” And I was like, “Well, I got
three weeks, so, maybe!” And, in a big way, I would say that a lot of the design of the verbs
of that space stemmed from needing to fill the space with something. [See Figure 6.10 and
Figure 6.11.]
A D A M: Which happens a lot for us, right? How are we going to fill this space with some-
thing that’s interesting, and that makes sense. What role would you say I played at that
point in the process?
6. 3.1 M eaty Spaces
A NTO N: I think one of the things that we had talked about early on, was the idea of hav-
ing a parallel activity driven space, that sort of notion that there were several different
categories of things that you could do in the space, and if you got bored with one you
could jump over to the other one for a little bit of time. Despite the fact that this was a
space that could have some hazards in it, in the form of combat, it presented a friendly
120 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.11 : Props designed for use in W urst-
W urld, on display in the ‘Indoor Shooting
Range’ game area. These were made during
the ‘We Need More Stuff Like Yesterday’ phase
of development.
self-directed pace and was designed so that the player should be able to escape out of that
threat immediately.
We came up with the badge idea fairly early, as being that sort of like, “Naah, I don’t want
to do this! Oh god! I don’t want! I’m not enjoying things shooting at me!” It also came
from when I was showing Marc [Destefano] the original [prototype], because he doesn’t
really enjoy the tenseness of the gunplay. It’s too stressful for him. He was very early on
in the camp of, “Oh, there are going to be bots that shoot you [see Figure 6.13], I hope I can
avoid them completely, or get out of that at any moment if I want to.” I recognized that as
a really important design pillar of this space, and it fit perfectly well with the fact that it
very quickly evolved into an attraction.
Figure 6.12 : One of the bandit-bots in W urst-
W urld. Players can choose to put on a ‘sheriff’s
badge’ while in W urstW urld, and while they are
wearing the badge, bandits will spawn and at-
tack them. As Anton mentioned, players can
also choose not to wear the badge, and no en-
emies of any kind will spawn anywhere in the
level.
A D A M: Yeah. How did that happen?
6.3 H ow did W urstW urld begin? 121
218: i.e. The International Association of
Amusement Parks and Attractions.
219:
See §5.1.4 for more on this approach to
narrative design.
220: The aforementioned Squeaky Guy char-
acter, for whom I am the voice actor.
A NTO N: There were still some... some stuff about the other work that we’ve done as a
group, and IAAPA...
218
during that period of time the stuff for those people down in Tor-
rance, I can’t even...
A D A M: MediaMation.
A NTO N: We are still wrapping some stuff up on that. So I think we were thinking in
terms of attractions and amusement parks, just extending from the fact that almost every
space in H3VR stems first from the fact that like, step one you’re in a place, step two, - X.
Whereas, that isn’t the way that games function, typically.
Figure 6.13 : Perhaps the meatiest space in all
of H3VR: the ‘Meathenge’ attraction in W urst-
W urld.
A D A M: Yeah. So to say that back to you, we had a few things on our minds. We had a
couple of weeks to make something that was going to be related to carnivalesque shooting
and a carnivalesque atmosphere, we were thinking about amusement parks, there was a
big space and we wanted something to tie it all together. I think this is sounding a little
to my mind like when we were in M useum of the M icr ostar saying, “We have a space of this
size, and certain things need to be accomplished. What’s a good analog to the space that
people understand? Ok, amusement park.”
219
I know you wanted to add a lot of western-themed guns into the game, you kept getting
that response, too. I wonder if that’s what made us connect to “Westworld” . I remember
the W urstW orld name showing up and it felt like that was the moment where everything
congealed, and this metafiction opened up around us.
A NTO N: I think looking back to the way we tend to approach these things this way: when
you take the things that you do typically in games, and you render them into a space that is
taking as its first axiom, “this is actually a place” , most of those actions become ridiculous,
to some extent. I think we just naturally leaned into that ridiculousness, by creating the
secondary character
220
whose purpose is to comment on, “Why the fuck is all of this stuff
here? Why is this all here? Why are we building this? This is dangerous, and when it’s
not dangerous it’s stupid.” [See Figure6.14.] So we lean on that a lot. It’s still not typ-
ical commentary, because it ends up making the space.... it legitimizes the surreality of
the space, because one of the pr ope rties of our time is that w e ’r e surr ounded b y bar ely
122 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.14 : This is an ‘E-Slab’ , the W urstW urld
equivalent of an iPad. Players can find data
discs, sprinkled throughout the level, which
they can pick up and insert into their E-Slab.
This triggers recordings of narration—voice
acted by me, as the Squeaky Guy character—
that are relevant to the location where the
disc was found. In part, these recordings are
designed to address Anton’s questions here:
What’s going on in this W urstW urld place?
How am I, the user, supposed to make sense
of this strange place, my goals, and the story?
And why is this so... absurd?
221: Anton and I share this view of contem-
porary America and the surrounding geopo-
litical context. This view lies at the core of our
work.
e xplicab l e thin g s that ar e the pr oduct of massi v e infrastructur es makin g ar bitrary de-
cisions unde r ine rtia that pr oduces bizarr e r esults.
221
And so we just follow that logic
forward another 30 or 40 years. If there is one design methodology that I think is worth
doing, it’s consistent constraint.
A D A M: Yeah.
6. 3.2 Abse nce as Int e r face
A NTO N: And it’s partially because I suck as a UI designer. I’ve always had a hatred of UI
across games, for as long as we’ve been making games. We try time and time again to
accomplish all the things that games need to accomplish, in terms of instructing the user
and giving them ways to track their actions, without UI.
A D A M: Yeah we share that, I think, in part because over time we’ve come to augment each
other’s hatred of UI. But for me the Venn diagram overlap is: I have a profound hatred of
unnecessary things in games, and in design in general. You know me, I alw a y s sa y , “ Y ou
alw a y s w ant t o so lv e pr ob l e ms as a designe r b y subtractin g thin g s. You solve problems
through subtraction, never through addition. Unless It’s utterly unavoidable.” If you can
remove UI, all the better. Most UI elements I think are lazy design, or they’re expected
through enculturation. Even if they’re efficient, even if they’re useful. I also hate how so
many games ignore their own diegesis, have inconsistent diegesis, are flippant in making
arbitrary decisions and in the act of arbitration. So I remember wanting a character who
could help locate the player in space and in time, to help the player understand what verbs
were available to them, to contrast their own motivations against.
A NTO N: And also, this I remember us talking about, big time, that we had a player base
that was not in any way enculturated to the logics of an adventure game or a puzzle game.
And so, in the exact same way that in the narr ative the structure that exists in the level is
there because The Narrator is desperately hoping to get someone with enough functioning
6.3 H ow did W urstW urld begin? 12 3
Figure 6.15 : The first horseshoe station in W urstW urld, where users learn how (and why and where) to throw horseshoes. This is a screenshot of a fan-made video
that’s appropriately titled, “HORSESHOE CHAMP!!!” The video is available here: https://youtu.be/zcwmbkEF- _w?t=3m16s
synapses through his beautiful creation, to be a worthy opponent, that in so doing we were
desperately hoping that [players could] figure out what they had to do.
A D A M: This is the heartbreaking irony of the expressive subset of our community’s hatred
of horseshoe throwing. Because that’s my favorite thing to do in H ot Dogs. I loved it. I was
so looking forward to designing a whole game mode around it, and people just hated it.
It’s so frustrating for people in our community to try to throw horseshoes like that. That
was a learning moment for me. I think it’s ironic because of that design motivation that we
shared here, that we wanted to make sure we could motivate our players to move through
what was a divergent space for them, compared to other levels [see Figure 6.15]. It wasn’t
a static, “You stand in one place and you shoot at a target.” We were asking them to enter
Skyrim. I remember saying that early on, that this feels like I’m walking around a town in
Skyrim. This is huge. I can’t believe we’ve made something this big. And so we needed so
much work to tie everything together.
A NTO N: And frankly put, the things that didn’t work about the horseshoes were two com-
pletely separate blindspots, one of which is that we were creating a sport and didn’t really
realize or acknowledge that we were creating a sport, which the rest of the game is not a
sport.
A D A M: Well, this is the irony of that: it is a sport. You were the first one to identify that.
124 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
That is a game about sport shooting. H3VR is sport shooting. It’s just that there’s no over-
lap functionally between people who love sport shooting and people who love horseshoes.
It’s that we were designing that one sport, and then suddenly shoved another sport into
it. I think that’s what it was.
A NTO N: It isn’t just that, because the issue is that sport shooting is a sport that has a
massive catalog of tools that you can utilize to compensate for how bad you are at the
sport. If you can’t hit flying pots off of irons, you can put a reflex sight on the gun and it
becomes 50 times easier.
A D A M: I see this as a “both and” .
A NTO N: Which is why, I think it’s no surprise, that to deal with the fact that they couldn’t
throw well, our user base used the exact same logics that you would use in the case of
firearms: I need more tools to help me fulfill this physical task I’m incapable of doing.
A D A M: So they turned off gravity...
A NTO N: They turned off gravity, or they turned it down to make make it a longer throw,
or they turned it just off, and then used guns to fire the horseshoes at rings.
A D A M: I think it’s a “both and” . As designers we said: we’re going to put another kind of
sport into this sport game. And we missed exactly what you’re talking about. There’s no
compensation for horseshoes. You throw it. And that’s that.
A NTO N: If you suck at it, you suck at it.
A D A M: That’s right. That was a real learning moment for us.
6. 3. 3 K eepin g Track of E v e rythin g
A NTO N: And then the second one was the fact that the Oculus Rift doesn’t have a func-
tional tracking system, and so reports controller velocity terribly. Not just terribly, incon-
sistently, thus interfering with the one way that you can get better at it, which is learning to
make a consistent gesture. Because the problem with that tracking system, in the way that
it’s interpreted, is you can make literally the exact same gesture in the exact same input,
and because of where it falls in some tracking filtering frequency, you’ll get a completely
different controller velocity.
A D A M: I feel like that happens sometimes with the Vive.
A NTO N: It does.
A D A M: Yeah?
A NTO N: Yeah. It’s just less inconsistent, but it still actually is, and they’re still trying to
fix it.
A D A M: OK.
A NTO N: There’s a Steam input beta. It’s still broken. They’re trying to fix it. It’s a way
harder problem than you would think.
A D A M: It’s so interesting thinking back on this conversation about how the impetus, in
conversations like this, is to attempt to make explicit our approach and our knowledge
about narrative design, and what ends up happening on a meta-level is that we get into
6.3 H ow did W urstW urld begin? 12 5
222:
This is precisely why I’ve chosen to have
my ‘case study’ chapters serve as case
studies themselves – they are experimen-
tal exemplars of how metalogical com-
munication can expose tacit knowledge. I
would not normally record a conversation
like this one, nor would I transcribe it and
share it publicly. It makes me feel ex-
posed. I don’t want people in academia to
have access to this side of my personal-
ity, this way that I express myself in pri-
vate with one of my closest friends and
colleagues. This is to say: some kno w l-
edg e r e mains tacit because it is hidde n,
guar ded, e mbarrassin g, confusin g, d iffi -
cult t o shar e, and pot e ntial ly dan g e r ous
t o the ho l de r of that kno w l edg e.
What risks am I taking by speaking this
way, and sharing that speech in this for-
mat? How might it impact, for exam-
ple, my committee’s view of my disser-
tation? Or my university’s, for that mat-
ter? And what of the rest of my profes-
sional career? This is not simply a mat-
ter of delivery and style – it is also a mat-
ter of the v alue of tacit kno w l edg e as pri -
v at ely hel d capital. My approach to nar-
rative design, my colleague’s and my com-
panies atypical methods and techniques,
have been gained directly through years of
hard work, and our livelihoods under late
capital depend, in part, on the knowledge
capital (i.e. ‘intellectual property’) that we
have developed, that we hold, that re-
mains tacit.
I often say this, behind closed doors: al l
methodo l ogies ar e simply someone ’ s at-
t e mpt at sel lin g y ou somethin g. This dis-
sertation is no different.
a muddle, and we start talking about stuff that is adjacent to it. Or that suddenly moves
unexpectedly into it, and we find these great moments emerge and we find something
that’s relevant to the conversation.
The thing is, my primary motivation in capturing these kinds of conversations, and this
relates to things we’ve talked about before naturally in this conversation, is that when
you’re using the rhetorical linear form of, let’s say, an essay, you are self-selecting into a
modality of self-reflection and self-expression that, similar to what Thomas Kuhn talked
about, prefigures the results that you’re going to attain. They are going to be within a
certain range. That’s the point. You create falsifiable hypotheses so that they’re shareable
and testable. This is driven by an assumption that it is a g ood thin g t o shar e and t est stuff ,
that it can be shared, that it can be tested, and numerous other kinds of more complicated
assumptions that are difficult for us to access because we’re so deeply enculturated into
this kind of humanistic endeavor. It’s to say that, when you write a traditional dissertation,
you’re trying to get at something that’s true. You’re trying to get that knowledge that is
true. You want verifiable results, you want replicable methods. And by that measure this
kind of communication, this kind of expression, misses the mark. Because we can’t easily,
even in real time, talk about what it is that we do and how it is that we arrive at places.
222
But I don’t want truth. That’s not what I aim at as a scholar and as a humanist. I w ant
honesty . And that’s an entirely different thing. They overlap sometimes. But what I want
here is an honest attempt by us. That’s what I wanted going into this conversation, was an
honest attempt to recount the narrative design of H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades,
and it’s specific levels, M eat Grinder and W urstW orld.
6. 3.4 An H onest At t e mpt
A NTO N: I think that, to riff off of that and a bit of a prior point, in the same way that
you were talking about “The Hero’s Journey” , and the way in which people are prefiguring
what the structure is going to be from the get-go in this very narrow way, I think that
one of the highest-level impulses that defines our practice, in regards to this game, is
we deviate in a similar sort of way, writ large, about the whole piece. Almost everyone
setting out to make a VR thing is coming in with all of these structural assumptions about
a completely different thing. They’re all like, “We’re sitting down, and we’re making a
video game. Capital V, capital G, Video Game. That is composed of certain things and
the person stepping into it is X, and in the end what a menu is, is X, and the separation
between diegetic and non diegetic things is X.” We largely wholesale reject that.
A D A M: Yeah.
A NTO N: And I think it’s important to explicate that into the microphone, because it un-
derlies every narrative authoring decision that’s made from the get-go. Especially given
that H3 started as a pure sandbox. The way that I described it for the longest time is,
“It’s like having another couple of rooms in your house, except those rooms are outdoors
sometimes.” First and foremost it’s always been about going to a place that’s composed
of something, and that in a big way the very first in-universe peek at something, that I
think we were all joking about on a group Skype call, was the “Amendment 35” poster [see
Figure6.16]. That was the first moment that H3 all of a sudden was situated in time, in
a definite place, and situated in a bizarre future alt-history, and so many things grew off
from that.
126 6 M eat-a-logue: H ot Dogs, H orseshoes, and H and Gr enades
Figure 6.16 : The ‘Amendment 35’ promotional
poster for H3VR. The amendment’s text on
the poster reads: “No person shall be found
with fewer than thirteen times their own body
weight of federally provisioned munitions.”
223: This research institute is affiliated with
the University of Southern California. More
information can be found online: http://ict.
usc.edu/
224: Or salmon-er?
In a big way the impulse to create that was, in part, our like emotional and ethical relation-
ship to the gun culture that suffuses the game. Thinking that there’s going to be a bunch
of people who turn around and look at that poster and be like, “I wish I had that much
ammo!” And that’s as far as they would think about that. There have been people in the
Discord who have calculated based on their body weight how much they would be legally
required to keep. And if they’re keeping it in five-five-six versus keeping it nine millime-
ter, versus keeping it and seven-six-two by thirty-nine millimeter, how many rounds of
ammo that would be.
A D A M: Yeah it’s, I mean it’s such a contemporary colloquialism, but we operate on such
a ‘meta-level’ , we are so meta as storytellers and as designers, and I think this kind of
conversation is a perfect distillation of that approach. That I would say, if you want to
understand our approach to game design, if you want to understand RUST’s approach
and my approach to narrative design, you have to wrestle with the meta-level story and
narrative and world of this conversation. I think this conversation fails to resemble “The
Hero’s Journey” in any way, but it’s only a failure if you assume that’s what we were trying
to do in the first place.
At the end, this is a st ory lik e an ythin g else. This conversation has its own arc, and it
has its own peaks and valleys and you know climactic moments, and burps and farts and
poop jokes, but fundamentally the results that we arrive at, the end points that we arrive
at in our conversations, as well as our games, are deeply atypical. It is the result of a
messy, improvisational process that is perhaps impossible for us to track and break apart
and codify. I don’t know that we’re ever going to be able, as designers, to make our tacit
knowledge of what we’re doing explicit.
I also don’t know that it’s a goal toward which we should aspire. I don’t know that it’s a
good thing for us to make this knowledge explicit. I’m thinking for example here about
folks at the Institute for Creative Technologies,
223
and how the military entertainment
complex is so interested in narrative and narrative design. They throw money at it, and
it shows up in games or experiences that, for example, are designed to help traumatized
soldiers returning from battle deal with their post traumatic stress. And it’s a laudable
goal.
Also, I’m deeply suspicious of government and military funding. I always want to know,
what are people looking for, what are their goals in funding something as strange, it would
seem, as narrative design? What are their ends? I really think their ends are control.
They want, through narrative, in a way that’s not dissimilar from propaganda, but isn’t
just about propaganda, they want to find ways to control a user base. They want to encul-
turate you, they want to manipulate you. And again, we don’t have to imagine that they’re
insidious, it can simply be for practical, logistical reasons, or it can be because, in the ex-
ample of a soldier returning from home, they want to help them heal. We don’t have to
imagine that they’re pure evil, it’s greyer than that.
224
It’s just, I don’t want anything to do
with that. So I don’t know how I feel about the idea of making our process more explicit.
We’re doing it here on a meta-level. I think that’s great. I just I think it’s valuable to speak
into the microphone that we’re intentionally doing it in an atypical way for the same sorts
of reasons.
A NTO N: I don’t know that I would know how to do it in any other way.
A D A M: No, I don’t either.
6.3 H ow did W urstW urld begin? 127
A NTO N: It’s the same sort of thing when folks ask me repeatedly in the community like,
“Do you have a road map I can see?” And I’m like, “No because it’s changing... Yeah! Oh,
wait, it just changed again. I just I farted and it changed.”
A D A M: This game would suck if it had a roadmap.
A NTO N: Absolutely. The whole thing is like... This has been a two, like a two and a half
year game jam meets a jam session.
A D A M: We’ve become the Phish of game design. Oh God.
A NTO N: Oh yeah, this is like a two-and-a-half year guitar solo.
A D A M: Can we at least be Pink Floyd?
A NTO N: Sure.
A D A M: I don’t want to be Phish. Well that’s as good a place to end as any.
A NTO N: Indeed.
A D A M: Neat. How do you end a jam band session?
A NTO N: You just... peter out.
Figure 6.17 : The door at the end of the W urstW urld level. “It’s been quite a long game already,” says the door. “Are you sure you want to keep going? Is this door really
meant for you?”

226: Italicized text in this chapter was
orginally spoken by Luke Noonan, my
co-designer on Blast Doors, depicted in
Figure 7.1
Figure 7.1 : Portrait of Luke Noonan, created by
Lucas Miller.
227: Blast Doors is a magical realist narrative
experience for Virtual Reality. It will be pub-
lished by Radius XR in 2019.
228: “PT” here refers to “Playable Teaser” , a
videogame co-designed for the PlayStation 4
by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. It
was released in August 2014; since May 2015,
it is no longer downloadable.
229: The Omnideck: http://omnifinity.
se/#omnideck
Metalogue: Cascading Coherence in Blast Doors
7
Hey, buddy.
226
H ey ther e, So we’r e live.
Hoooo...
W e’r e live in my har d drive, not live in the world we’r e in.
Well either way I’m glad something’s listening.
Something’ s always listening. (laughs)
7 .1 H o w did Blast Doors begin ?
So what do you think is a good place to start with the r ecollection? I feel like a discussion of
audience is pr obably important.
My thinking was that we would just start at the inception of the project and move through
early ideas about what Blast Doors
227
would be, through to ideas about what the Blast Doors
controller would look like, because those are the two big markers on the road. So why
don’t we start with where Blast Doors began. Do you remember how and when we started
talking about the project?
Y eah, I r emember the early iter ations of the pr oject wer e thinking about and r eferring to other
pr operties, for example PT
228
was an important early r efer ent for Blast Doors.
For sure.
That ’ s true fr om a genr e standpoint and also as an aesthetic structur e. I r emember the early
conversations cir cling PT as a design touchstone. Because we wer e designing for a har dwar e
platform, a lot of what I was thinking about was how we lever age this new platform,
229
wher e
you can walk in any dir ection but not run.
(laughs)
What ’ s the right genr e to take advantage of that platform?
I remember this from the beginning, saying, “Ok, we need to leverage a genre where the
user is walking at a reasonable pace, doing interesting things.” I remember thinking (and
this is partly why PT was such a touchstone for us) that we’d have limited development time
and limited assets to use, so we wanted to make sure that the space was self-contained and
we could get as much use out of that space as possible. I think the idea of an underground
lab or military facility or whatever it actually is, and then the idea of “blast doors” by
129
1 30 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
Figure 7.2 : This is the hallway in PT, specifically the first section of the hallway that the player encounters. Gameplay requires that the user walk through this section
of hallway, and round the corner at the end of it, over and over again. Much of the suspense in PT is driven by the simple tension created by a walk down a hallway,
toward a corner at its end. Photo is a screengrab by Dennis Scimeca for The Daily Dot.
Figure 7.3 : This is a top-down view of the Om-
nideck 6, an Omnidirectional treadmill re-
leased by Omnifinity in 2014. Blast Doors was
designed exclusively for the current version
of the Omnideck.
230: http://h3vr.com
extension came directly out of this conversation around how we might re-skin the general
layout of PT, and how we might learn from that layout: the dramatic turns around a corner,
the objects in a hallway [see Figure7.2]. I don’t remember when this was all happening,
though, do you remember?
The timeline was kind of jumbled. One of the early discussions was about what verbs we wer e
inter ested in exploring. W e had one big one, which was walking, because that i s the obvious
use of the Omnideck [ see Figur e 7 .3 ], but then beyond that ther e was a question of how much
do we want to just for egr ound that. Remember, we cycled thr ough a couple of options wher e we
consider ed having no contr ollers, just walking. Also at one point I was pushing pr etty har d (and
I still kind of like the idea) for having just one contr oller. I like it for some aesthetic r easons,
and also in a very ner dy game design way.
Both of those options closed a bunch of design doors, and so context eventually played a r ole in
making our decisions to keep or discar d ideas. F or instance, we had to ask what our playtime
looked like. That was a big question early on. So, too, was the fact we wer e going to design this
for a nominal ar cade or public demo context. W e r ecognized that the pr oblem with a game like,
for example, H otdogs, H orseshoes & H and Gr enades
230
is that in all of those public and time-
limited contexts learning the contr ols is just r eally har d – they ’r e r eally detailed and difficult.
So I think a lot of what we wer e exploring was the subtr active. Like, can we just not have that?
Can we push in r esponse to that, go the other dir ection, simplify, and not have a thousand
differ ent contr ol permutations for everything?
7 .1 H ow did Blast Doors begin? 1 31
Figure 7.4 : The Maglite 4D flashlight is widely
associated with law enforcement officers, in
part because it is large enough to be used ef-
fectively as a weapon.
231: This is part of an ongoing, sprawling
conversation among the principal members
of RUST LTD., and implicit in this conversa-
tion (for us) is that a flashlight and a gun are
absolutely not the same, in terms of the di-
agetic, aesthetic, cultural, and of course vio-
lent properties of the objects. In this context,
we’re talking about how there are very few ef-
fective objects that you can give a user in a 3D
game or virtual environment – players want
and need objects that empower them to act
upon the virtual environment, and they need
to intuitively understand that object’s affor-
dances. When it comes to the use of guns in
games, this creates a serious tension between
pragmatic design goals and diagetic/cultural
values.
232: For an independent design studio, as-
sets of all kinds will usefully direct (and
also constrain) a narrative designer’s process.
More directly: the job of a narrative designer
is to use the assets at hand to generate verbs
and constraints, the logics of which drive the
creation of a coherent world.
233: “Perfect realism” here means something
akin to “a consistent aesthetics” , or coherence
more generally.
7 .1.1 T he Int e r estin g T hin g About a F lashlight
This is viscerally reminding me of the conversations we had around the flashlight. I had
forgotten how much our design process was distilled down to not just a flashlight but a
maglite [see Figure7.4]. We were looking for something that would have the appropriate
weight, the appropriate size, something that would, as a flashlight does, allow you to see
the environment, because we knew we wanted it to be dark. (I don’t remember why, so
we can circle back to that.) Also it has a minimal amount of controls: it has a button on it
for you to press and turn the flashlight on and off. We knew that pointing the object and
using it as a flashlight was really important, we wanted the user to be able to look around
at specific things and I think that by extension we wanted some things to be visible, other
things to not be visible so that we might surprise the user or scare the user. We wanted
something with weight in case we wanted the user to be able to whack something, or crack
something over the head, or even knock something off a shelf or push a button with the
flat end, the non-lit end of the flashlight.
One of the inter esting things about a flashlight is the way that the flashlight has a similar V enn
diagr am of affor dances as the affor dances of a gun in virtual spaces. That is to say that a gun
and a flashlight have a crucial similarity in that overlap space: they both let you affect (in
whatever way you ar e affecting it) the envir onment which is outside your immediate r each.
231
This is r eally convenient, and is why first person shooters work so well as a genr e, because you
can affect a big part of your envir onment without r eally moving ar ound a ton.
That’s right. We knew from the get-go that we didn’t want a gun, we wanted something
that would have a similar set of affordances, so in part the functionality was retained in
transitioning from let’s say something like a gun in Hotdogs to something like a flashlight
in Blast Doors. So functionality was really important, minimal use case and minimal on-
boarding was important, also diegesis was important from the get-go. As part of those
conversations I remember pushing really hard for us to make a controller that made sense
for the environment and made sense for the genre we were aiming for, which was part
magical realist, part horror and part walky-talky, and we wanted that object to make sense
in the diegesis of the experience. Why didn’t we want hands, do you remember?
W ell the other aspect of scoping this pr oject was the abbr eviated timeline given your schedule
and the delivery timeline, so I think the hands wer e largely not an option because of time and
labor needs. W e wer e using the same asset set as the one in H3VR which is wonderful and
designed to light bake r eally well and you have all these wonderful r ealist things, r ealist visual
aesthetic assets in ther e, so to get r ealist hands that matched that aesthetic was going to be very
difficult.
232
Yeah that’s right.
W e knew anything less than perfect r ealism
233
was going to feel incongruous ther e, which is also
why we steer ed away fr om... I feel like water came up in our design discussion. I know ther e’ s
often a moment in these design sessions when someone says something like “Oh, we can do this
awesome thing with water!” and everyone else immediately says, “ N o, ther e’ s no water!”
Nooooo! No water! (laughs)
N o, ther e’ s no water unless you do it cartoony. So I think this was a similar decision. I know
myself, and I suspect also Lucas was cir cling into the conversation ar ound that time, and that
1 32 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
234: To elaborate, the central techniques of
Magic Realism depend for their effectiveness
upon a realist and realistic aesthetic founda-
tion – the world must feel the part of a ’re-
alistic’ world, which in part means it must be
logically consistent, and roughly analogous to
the user or reader’s embodied, lived experi-
ence. Magic realism is thus driven by con-
trast between the underlying coherence of a
world, and a set of incoherent or incongruent
objects, actions, and events within that world.
I’m thinking here of Angela Carter’s The I n-
fernal Desir e M achines of Doctor H offman , and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One H undr ed Y ears
of Solitude, which contains the great exem-
plar of a gigantic wooden sea-faring ship ma-
rooned inexplicably in the middle of a dense
forest.
Figure 7.5 : The “goomba” character, from
Nintendo’s M ario Br os. games, is a good ex-
ample of the magic realist techniques embed-
ded at the core of mainstream video game
culture.
235: This is to say we were self-aware, early
in the process, of how contemporary sci-fi
aesthetics and conventions might undercut
the r ealist side of our magic realist equation,
i.e the user’s expectations of a ’realistic’ sci-fi
environment might undermine the ’realism’
of a sci-fi narrative set in the past.
constr aint is something we wer e both particularly sensitive to. What it would take fr om a time-
limited contr ol standpoint to get the Blast Doors envir onment feeling good is an achievable goal,
but if we added the wr ong elements we might not be able to get it to look like it had the same
visual textur es and feel as the r est of the envir onment did. And in keeping with the diegetic
side, ther e’ s...
That’s right, because in magical realism it is critically important that the realist side of that
equation is thought through and executed with care and precision. In order to have a real
contrast and achieve that magical effect, you really need the majority of the environment
to look and feel and work in a “realistic” way.
234
7 .1.2 M agic Realism in V irtual Reality
W e’ve done a bunch of pr ojects that use these themes, in fact some parts of this pr oject go back
eight pr ojects ago. As we cir cled ar ound it I think one of the inter esting r evelations especially
as it r elates to these non-diegetic materials and insight, is that people ar e r eally used to weir d
nonsense stuff happening in video games. Think of M ario: you’r e jumping on turtles to kill
them and you eat mushr ooms [ or jump on mushr ooms to kill them, as with Figur e 7 .5 ]. The
canon of the genr e is not surr eal but is almost psychedelic, out ther e, and that is the standar d.
I think that shows how in this genr e as much as any that these aesthetic, these magical r ealist
tr opes, might be applied if ther e’ s envir onmental consistency.
I experienced this viscer ally once in Blast Doors. I t was actually in a scene later on wher e the
user is in the welcome center the first time (we implemented this in the earlier pr ototypes years
ago), and ther e was this moment in development when we wer e baking a r eflection pr ogr am.
Developers use that to gener ate the r eflections on objects, but the way it is r epr esented in the
space is a mathematically perfectly smooth chr ome spher e. I r emember at one point, not even
in VR, just looking at it on scr een in the envir onment as Anton was working on it, and that
r eflective spher e r eally weir ded me out, because of the r oom it was in, the wooden counter and
shitty carpet of that space had cr ossed the uncanny valley of r ealism and seventies ar chitec-
tur e, so I believed in its r ealness as a space. The spher e then, just floating in mid-air in this
mundane place had a deep feeling of like, “Oh, that shouldn ’t happen ther e …” Y ou don ’t see
floating spher es every day. That r eally hammer ed home to me the power of that particularly
r ealist aesthetic we wer e driving at could engender that and how tightly we had to stick to those
aesthetic laws.
Absolutely, and I remember too that when we were working on this idea of using a flash-
light in the space, this minimalist diegetic skinned controller, and decided that it wasn’t
working for a couple of reasons I’ll circle back to. A lot of our design thinking and a lot of
the work that I was doing when I was trying to re-imagine what this controller could be
was driven by that late seventies aesthetic, it was driven by revisiting that welcome center
from... when did we make, that, two years ago? And then re-purposing that and thinking,
“What kind of place is this? Why do the walls look the way that they look? What kind of
objects appear in that space?” Given that we were working toward magical realist goals,
but we were also working in a science fiction environment, I think that takes a special kind
of care because sci-fi nowadays is predominantly future-oriented, forward-looking, uses
imaginary or at least fantastical tech, and we were trying to locate fantastical tech in the
past.
235
Not in the steampunk, Victorian way, not in a way that had a preexisting genre
with an established set of conventions, we were kind of looking to establish our own set
of conventions there. And I think that the design thinking revolved around that.
7 .1 H ow did Blast Doors begin? 13 3
Figure 7.6 : S p oiler alert! At the center of the Blast Doors environment, there’s a room the player cannot access – not even visually, as the doors and windows are
all sealed, save for one partially open window. When the player rounds the third hallway corner in the environment, they get the chance to look inside the ’Chekov’s
Gun’ of the sealed, central room, and they see that a mid-70’s station wagon is floating (and vibrating) in mid-air. Photo is a screengrab from within the Unity3D
integrated development environment.
Figure 7.7 : This VHS tape can be found in
the Blast Doors environment, and taps (or at-
tempts to tap) into the metanarrative sur-
rounding the experience.
W e wer e making the same kind of gestur e but we didn ’t have the giant body of r efer ence material
– it was a kind of steampunk or diesel punk or, yeah, you name your weir dly-titled fantasy
genr e ther e. A lot of those fantasy genr es ar e asking, “What if the tech of this time period wer e
crystallized and then we got to magic fantasy sci-fi? What ar e the affor dances of that, what
might that look like?” W e wer e doing a very similar thing except that part of that er a was kind
of the disappointment of the whole thing.
7 .1. 3 Cir clin g Back t o the Contr o l l e r
Cir cling back to the contr oller itself, we tried to pull a bunch of that 70’ s tech into the Blast Doors
aesthetic at various points. Ther e’ s the car [ see Figur e 7 .6 ] and VHS tapes on it [ see Figur e 7 .7 ],
and that clunky you know, VCR, that cr appy looking monitor which Lucas just did a wonderful
job of making it look like it was pr oducing a r eally shitty video on that scr een, which is actually
r eally har d to do. But that was the point and we needed to push it home aesthetically. A lot of our
design work as we attempted to captur e that time period was also capturing the disappointment
of American consumerism in the seventies. Ther e was definitely a, “Sci-fi! the futur e is going
to be gr eat!” feeling to that er a, after the sixties had died and Reaganomic nationalism hadn ’t
yet taken hold...I’m just thinking thr ough all the various r efer ents that we started dr edging up
1 34 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
236: “Onboarding” here refers to the pro-
cess of familiarizing a new user with the con-
troller, platform, rules, and world of Blast
Doors (among other things). Narrative de-
signers rely heavily upon well-established
cultural conventions when creating narra-
tives in interactive environments, because
the onboarding process for the story becomes
an order of magnitude more difficult when
the user is unfamiliar with the controller, or
with the platform more generally. I often
liken this to teaching someone to juggle, at
the same time you’re teaching them to ride a
unicycle. ’Virtual Reality’ is a new, inconsis-
tent, and rapidly changing medium–and the
same could be said for its hardware, inter-
faces, platforms, etc.–which necessitates, in
my experience, an almost ruthless and fanati-
cal commitment to what I playfully call, “Min-
imum Viable Coherence” .
Figure 7.8 : The controller for the ColecoVi-
sion, a videogame console release in 1982 for
use in homes.
for what the contr oller should look like fr om like a physical standpoint.
What I remember is that it took two or three days and we left the discussion at the end of
one day feeling like the flashlight, the maglite, was going to be the way to go. We started
thinking about how to use that flashlight first in a way that it was intended, right, “Look at
it lighting stuff up!” and then having the user exploit its use in a way that it wasn’t intended
which was essentially to bang it against buttons to enter in codes.
I remember distinctly feeling really dissatisfied by this, so when I went back to the drawing
board with that as a narrative designer my process was informed by, one, the functionality
that I wanted to retain from that flashlight idea but, two, the addition of functionality that
wasn’t there yet, the ability to enter a code in a way that made sense to the user that wasn’t
going to require a crazy amount of onboarding.
236
That need led me to continually revisit
everything that we’d been talking about, the aesthetics we had chosen, the genre we had
chosen, the asset pack that we were using... And in the end I am pretty sure I wouldn’t
have had this breakthrough were there not a ColecoVision sitting in our office, because
I remember picking up the controller for the ColecoVision (see Figure7.8) and thinking:
what if this were a flashlight? I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went after
that when I returned to you guys with this idea, but I just remember feeling like suddenly
this had been the breakthrough I was waiting for.
I r emember in the lead-up to that br eakthr ough we had asked what the other verbs, what other
kind of affor dances these contr ollers give fr om a player’ s perspective? I f the contr oller is a
flashlight it ’ s not as though ther e ar e a lot of other things you can do, you know, we need to hit
buttons and activate these puzzles in this space...
So you can walk, you can look, you can light something up, and those are the scope so
far...
I n theory you can whack something with it, you can... W e hadn ’t implemented that but that ’ s
a pr etty str aightforwar d thing to do, and I think you had some good ideas about the things we
could whack, but nothing that quite worked out in my mind for whatever r eason. W e had also
talked about having a flashlight in one hand and a r adio in the other.
Right...
This cir cles back ar ound to wher e we wer e with the setting, and the challenge we had with this
historically andr ogynous envir onment which was designed explicitly to be that way because it
was originally designed for use in other contexts. F or example, the way you pour concr ete for
military-style bunkers didn ’t change much fr om the fifties thr ough now and it will pr obably be
the same at least a decade fr om now in the futur e. That gave us leeway to answer the question
of time period. W e asked whether we should push the envir onment into the futur e and just
imply that it hadn ’t been updated since the seventies and was sixty years old.... or we could
have it actually be in the seventies... which is a weir d distinction, like, is this in the futur e with
seventies stuff or in the seventies with futur e stuff?
(Laughs)
Those ar en ’t all that differ ent, it turns out, but they ar e differ ent. So the inter esting thing was
as we wer e trying to figur e out what the walkie-talkie should look like, because we wer e figuring
out how we should deliver this inter action with this other char acter in the story, and at one
point we pulled up this gorgeous model of this big honking ex-Soviet...
That thing was so cool. [See Figure 7.9.]
7 .2 H ow ar e we going to use this contr oller? 13 5
Figure 7.9 : It turns out that the ’ex-
Soviet’ walkie-talkie Luke mentioned
was actually the AN/PRC-6, used by the
U.S. military from roughly the Korean
Conflict through the Vietnam War. We
thought it was Soviet technology because
the 3D model we found on Turbosquid
had Russian writing on the handle:
https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-
models/u- s- talkie- prc- 6- 3d- model-
1232461
237: Ihis kind of design decision cascades
through the rest of the design process, so
it’s crucial that the narrative designer take
time to reflect and sort through their feel-
ings. I was inspired by the ColecoVision con-
troller and by the AN/PRC-6, but each object
had different affordances and would shape
in-game interaction in profoundly different
ways. So which would work better for Blast
Doors? That’s the kind of question that takes
time (and good, long conversations) to an-
swer.
And yeah it wasn ’t super expensive but it was enough that we wer e like, ar e we sur e we want
this befor e we pull the trigger to pur chase it? I think that that gave us a nice pr ompt to be like,
“ All right, let ’ s think about how we ar e going to use this contr oller!” ...and it still didn ’t give us
a good button pr ess! I think I made the argument that you can hit the antenna but it ’ s kind of
ridiculous...
Yeah.
7 .2 H o w ar e w e g oin g t o use this contr o l l e r?
I r emember you working on the idea and being li ke, “Just work it into the narr ative that they
cut off your hands!” and it became a physical comedy thing... we wer e looking at a lot of ideas
about how we could addr ess that, I think none of those ideas r eally r esonated, it ’ s not like they
couldn ’t have worked. I think that having this electr onic object r efer ent that ’ s slightly mor e
complicated might have helped pr ecipitate this multi-tool, injectable plastic multi-tool that we
ended up with. That was also about the time Lucas modeled the contr ollers. First ther e was
some discussion of what those tools wer e, and I came back the next day and Lucas had modeled
them, and so I don ’t r emember how exactly the design happened.
I gave him the reference photography.. I’m trying to remember exactly how it went. I
was there for part of it while he was working through it, because you know after those
conversations... we were really thinking more explicitly about diegesis at that point, where
we were thinking not just in terms of maglite but this weird walkie-talkie phone thing, and
thinking, one: does it solve any of the functional limitations we have? So far not really it’s
not a great solution, and, two: are you even going to be able to hear well out of that thing?
The thing we were looking at was less a radio and more of a phone, and it just felt so much
like we were doing all this heavy lifting that we didn’t need to do and that there had to be
simpler solutions.
237
When I had the inspiration to think about the controller like a ColecoVision flashlight I
remember talking to you guys about it and pitching the idea and everyone being really
happy with it and then following up with Lucas in some form or fashion, providing some
reference images or showing him some stuff in real time and I remember watching him
cut part of it off. That’s the only thing that stuck in my memory. He sent me images during
the process or I was standing looking over his shoulder or something like that but he had
already done most of it, because really it’s a ColecoVision wheel, and it’s the Vive’s handle,
and I – oh, that’s what it was, I kept saying, “Guys, if we just take a Vive controller and
we cut off the doughnut at the end you’ve already got a flashlight. Then, if we use the
thumb wheel like a, if we make it look like a ColecoVision we can use the thumb wheel to
somehow enter codes,” and everything moved on from there so I remember him chopping
the doughnut off of the doughnut stick of the Vive controller and just already being like,
“Ooh, yes! That looks great!” [See Figure 7.10]
7 .2.1 Contradict ory Contr o l l e rs
I think for me that’s the moment when it crossed over into the sublime, that this controller
felt immediately right to me in a way that nothing had before. Especially for the genre,
to see the Vive controller itself suddenly become a diegetic object but also re-purposed
1 36 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
Figure 7.10 : This is how the controller in Blast Doors looks in-game: like an HTC Vive controller, with the ’doughnut’ at the end cut off and replaced with a flashlight
lens. Note that the thumbpad resembles a ColecoVision controller’s joystick.
Figure 7.11 : This is a photo of the HTC Vive
controller, contemporaneous with the design
of the controller in Blast Doors. It is included
here for the sake of comparison.
and to have part of it removed without feeling like it in any way would change the way the
person thought about the actual material object they were holding. For me that was kind
of mind-blowing, because in Blast Doors at the end of the day the controller both is a Vive
Controller [see Figure 7.11] and is this weird ColecoVision flashlight – it’s somehow both at
the same time, when you’re in the VR experience. And that kind of self-awareness about
this object’s dual existence or almost contradictory existence was for me what felt so right
about it. And it was only confirmed when we finally got to use it in the space.
Y eah and I think that was what was part of what I think is compelling to me. I t ’ s inter esting to
try to articulate. I t ’ s a very particular aesthetic sense that I don ’t know that people who a r en ’t
game designers would even key in on. Ther e’ s a certain dir ectness in the fact that the thing you
wer e holding corr elated so closely to the physical object, and that meant that we didn ’t need to
do any explaining as to... like, even if the trigger didn ’t do anything, in either of those cases,
that they wouldn ’t get confused or disoriented or disconnected fr om the space… I t r eminds me
of my wife’ s standar d complaint of all VR, m ost VR experiences: “I can ’t see my feet!”
Yeah, mine too, actually, Heidi’s the same.
I t ’ s inter esting that that ’ s a moment that you have this disconnect fr om your physical envir on-
ment to the virtual envir onment, when you r ealize those spaces ar e differ ent. F or me the design
clicked when I r ealized that even if we decided that none of the buttons should do anything, if
that came down the design pipeline, the fact that those buttons wer e ther e and they matched up
with the r eal world, and you wer e like, “yeah, I pulled the trigger and nothing happens ” , that
would be the kind of thing that a toy commer cial toy fr om that period would have done, like,
“we’ll put all these extr a buttons on it and only the or ange one over ther e does anything because
7 .2 H ow ar e we going to use this contr oller? 1 37
238: Luke’s distance estimate may be off
here–my casual research suggests stere-
oscopy works to at least 65 meters, perhaps
as far as 200 meters or more–but the prin-
cipal he’s expressing is fundamentally cor-
rect, given that stereoscopy depends upon
eye convergence, i.e. the brain’s ability to
determine how crossed your eyes are when
looking at an object. Our experience de-
signing for VR suggests that stereoscopy (and
depth perception in general) is functionally
shallower in contemporary VR experiences
than in ’real life’ . Researchers continue to
study this phenomenon across VR hardware
and platforms, e.g. “Stereo vision and acu-
ity tests within a virtual reality set-up” , by
Dankert T, Heil D, Pfeiffer T (2013).
239: For a quick encapsulation of this, see
“Game Feel: The Secret Ingredient” , by Steve
Swink, published 23 Nov 2007 to the website
Gamasutra.
Figure 7.12 : The user’s thumb-press is tracked
and displayed as a blue glowing thumbprint
on the controller in Blast Doors. This design
decision was driven, in part, by our desire to
leverage the pleasure and efficacy of looking
at an object at close range in virtual reality.
we didn ’t have the budget to foot this!” That r eally felt like it was staying totally true to the
physical r eality of the object tha t you wer e holding and it looked r eally good, too.
Oh it looks so good.
The visual experience is one of the things that I’ve found r eally striking and compelling about
H3VR. So, you’ve got lots of ways to per ceive depth thr ough vision and one of them is ster e-
oscopy, so that is the fact that your two eyes see differ ent things. That only works fr om about
six inches in fr ont of your face to ten or twelve feet. P ast that your eyes see basically the same
thing and you just use other cues for depth.
238
7 .2.2 Micr o- int e ractions in V irtual Reality
As it happens the distance that you hold a gun in H3VR is like right in that sweet spot. W e
found just by chance in that case it r eally sold that phenomenological experience of ster eoscopy
because all the objects that ar e detailed ar e positioned geometrically to take advantage of that
r elative to your face. With the Blast Doors contr oller you have an object that is doing the same
thing, that you ar e holding it at that same distance... at arm ’ s length. Further, it ’ s an inter active
object. That is r eally important for me and I’m curious to get your r ead on it. I feel that an
inter active object at close r ange is a sour ce of pleasur e in terms of the... I mean, pleasur e might
not be the right wor d, but a sour ce of a compelling aesthetic experience on a short time loop.
Players ar e going to pick it up and put it in fr ont of their face and look at it, and say, “Ooh,
this moves and this happens and this moves and this happens,” and they ar e going to notice
that and it ’ s the thing they have the most agency over, and so if we can get that object to r ewar d
explor ation and curiosity a micr o-scale, then that would help pr ompt explor ation and curiosity
on a macr o scale. I’ve forgotten which game design writer talks about those differ ent scales of
engagement but what I’m trying to articulate is similar to that.
I think it’s Steve Swink and like “Game Feel” stuff. The proprioceptive lengths of time it
takes for someone to perceive something...
239
Y eah, so the gener al idea coming out of cognitive science and neur ology that says that you’ve
got differ ent parts of your br ain har dwar e oper ating at differ ent scales pr obably due to evo-
lutionary pr essur es, and if you look at gr eat, super-engaging game design of various, acr oss
wide genr es ther e, they tend to oper ate on one loop-length or another. Which is to say, you can
taxonomically categorize these games based on the various lengths of their engagement loops.
One might have a r eally short length five second loop, you’r e getting good feedback ther e, ther e’ s
a two minute one, ther e’ s an hour one, I forget what the longer ones wer e...
Yeah, it’s like ten seconds, sixty seconds, 180 seconds, something like that...
Y eah, so in this case I think this is something like in some r ough hand-wavy way part of what
immediately jumped out about that solution is that you wer e getting... we wer e giving the user
something aesthetically compelling thing to do at that micr o time scale.
Like you can click the flashlight on and off, that’s a thing to do that’s immediately inter-
esting, and then you can enter a code into the space, the thumb controller space and that’s
something at the minute mark or something that becomes more interesting...
And the way Lucas did that actually your thumb print shows up all the time so you’r e always
getting that feedback.[seeFigure 7.12]
1 38 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
240:
I would describe the controller in Blast
Doors as o xymor onic. It is an interface,
i.e. a shared boundary and a point of in-
teraction, and it separates ’actual’ objects
from ’virtual’ objects, but it is also itself an
object – in fact, it is two objects, one in
’actual reality’ and one in ’virtual reality’ .
Somehow, the controller is the interaction
point between actual and virtual objects,
while remaining both an actual object and
a virtual object. In other words, the con-
troller in Blast Doors is self-contradictory
but still meaningful. And, as with the in-
tentional use of the oxymoron as a poetic
device, its self-contradiction undergirds
the magical realist qualities of the Blast
Doors experience. For me, the controller
in Blast Doors exemplifies a new kind of
poetic technique available to designers of
virtual reality experiences.
Yeah, I think that’s important. So having that kind of feedback, having something that
looked beautiful and was pleasurable to look at and pleasurable to use, something that
fit the diegesis, something that looked the part of a piece of technology that precedes us
and yet exceeds what our current technology can do, all of that stuff was really important.
I think that was part of our intent as a group as we thought about how this controller
that we’re holding might fit into the diegesis and by extension how the Omnideck might
eventually fit into that diegesis.
7 .2. 3 Int e r face P oetics
I think what surprised me was the way in which this controller encouraged me to think
playfully about the entire experience. It’s to say that I think this is connected somehow to
this one second, ten second, sixty second, these loci of attention and interest, because by
the time I was interacting with the code input on that thumb wheel and I started to try to
solve puzzles using it, just the act of looking at the controller that was so realistic and that
was allowing me to do these fantastical things kept returning me to a playful head-space.
I couldn’t quite get into the VR world completely and yet I was mostly in it.
I don’t know how to say what I’m saying other than to say we were talking about these
boundaries between things, the realistic and the unrealistic, or the beautiful and the ugly,
the interesting and the uninteresting, what made that controller really interesting to me
was that it was continuously interesting and interesting on multiple levels. The fact that
it was both real and felt real, and was magical and was unreal and yet right there in front
of my face and I was using it all the time suddenly kept me grounded in a magical real-
ist mindset. As a subject, that’s what made that controller so compelling to me, is that
the int e r face itsel f became a kind of poetic de vice,
240
it became a thing in retrospect I
think I understand now, it became a thing to which we might apply existing techniques
for storytelling and narrative design.
I didn’t understand at the time it was being designed, I don’t think. I only understood
when I was standing in the space using it, and feeling like I was suddenly exactly in the
mindset I wanted to promote in the player.
I had a similar experience, actually r elatively later in the pr ocess. Ther e was a bunch of stuff I
r ealized we had designed that r einfor ced and affor ded a sense of magical r ealism. F or instance
we wer e playing ar ound with the exact light that the Blast Doors contr oller thr ew. N ow her e’ s
this weir d oblong r ectangular object and this is the light, and so you wer e then thr owing a flash
that was a r ectangle.... and again that ’ s no mor e difficult than a perfectly r ound, as a designer
we just put a differ ent cookie on it, it isn ’t anything cr azy technically, but it is an uncommon
thing to turn on a flashlight, and r ecognize “Oh, why is that all wide?” and look at the thing
you ar e contr olling and see, “Oh, I guess that ’ s like a weir d squashed r ectangle thing, I guess
that ’ s the light it would bake.” And then ther e was the next one that r eally struck me, is you
have these terminals and you go up ther e and part of this puzzle that you’r e doing is you need
to figur e out not just what the passwor d was but what language the passwor d was in...
That’s right.
Like what kind of symbology was in ther e. And so ther e was this moment wher e you, using the
contr oller, pick this up and go to one of the contr ol panels you’r e inter acting with. Y ou see a
whole new set of symbols on ther e, and I r emember sitting down and having the discussion as
7 .2 H ow ar e we going to use this contr oller? 1 39
Figure 7.13 : Some symbols on the controller
overlay in Blast Doors. When the user ap-
proaches an access panel next to a door,
several symbols appear on the controller’s
thumbpad. These symbols are hidden at var-
ious places in the game’s environment; some
are difficult to find, others are more obvious,
but all are embedded in puzzles.
241: This was a major takeaway for me, par-
ticularly after reading this conversation once
it was transcribed – small, concrete decisions
can drive the construction of a coherent nar-
rative and a robust meta-fictional world.
we started getting that fr amework for the puzzles in place design-wise, about how much ar e we
asking for, and how complicated the input system [ might] be.
7 .2.4 Contr o l l e rs as Clues
What I r eally liked specifically was that having those differ ent symbols [ see Figur e 7 .1 3 ] made
things easier fr om just a sheer mathematical puzzle standpoint. I mportantly it also r esponded
to the r eality that ther e would be some players all about the explor ation so they ’ll explor e every-
thing befor e they try and solve a new puzzle, wher eas other people as soon as they see a puzzle
they ’r e going to try and solve it. I n either of those cases the first thing they hit isn ’t going to give
them enough information. So, it ’ s when they get the second thing they will get the appr opriate
information ther e, no matter when or which dir ection they come fr om, so if they come acr oss
the door first or the panel they ’r e going to r ecognize car d suits, or the other symbolic systems. I n
those cases they ’r e going to be primed to know they need a passwor d that ’ s car d suits. I t pr ompts
them to look for that set of symbols, and when they continue thr ough the envir onment they ’ll be
mor e likely to see the car ds as a clue.
I f they go the other dir ection and just blow past the door, instead exploring the wider envir on-
ment, and then they come back to the door, they might see those car d symbols and say, “Oh, I
r emember wher e I saw those, let me go back ther e…” So half of that whole inter action, which
is a r eal cor e loop of that later experience, happens thr ough the contr oller. I t made me r ealize
that it ’ s the display on the contr oller that pr ovides you a crucial component to how the puzzles
work and you’r e always carrying it with you. I t is always going to be in the right spot at the
right time. I t had a wonderful elegance to it.
This is another thing that I think I would forget, either forget it completely or forget to
think about it, because I’m so used to doing it as a narrative designer. You’ve heard me
say this like a million times, that bein g a narrati v e designe r is lik e bein g M acG yv e r, that
you have to solve these problems with whatever’s at hand and if you use only whatever’s
at hand and you think in relation to what’s at hand you can solve the problems.
7 .2. 5 Ready at H and
This is to say that if you think in terms of problems and affordances when you’re trying
to locally within some narrative over-world, some meta narrative or world-built place,
you’re able I think more efficiently as a narrative designer to solve problems in a way
that cascades in a positive way that’s like... cascading coherence. Cascading coherence
emanates from something like this controller.
241
The controller just makes sense. If it
works in the right way, then you can follow its logic and extend its logic throughout the
rest of the experience.
I think that was the strength and weakness of the most recent prototyping and design
work that we did that we’re now taking some time away from and we’re revisiting and
improving on. We had gotten so focused on the sequence of puzzles and the coherence
and the user’s ability to negotiate and navigate that space, that we lost sight of some of
the stuff that was there in PT and some of the stuff that was there in the discussions that
inspired this concept. I think that now that we’ve talked about the experience evolving
and becoming a little less linear, a little less railroady. The idea of escape rooms at one
point became suddenly the genre that we were hanging our hats on, right, in the middle
140 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
Figure 7.14 : An overhead view of the level lay-
out in Blast Doors, captured in-engine (i.e.
in Unity3D) while still incomplete and in de-
velopment. I designed the level to be tra-
versed multiple times – and to repeat in un-
expected ways, when the user moves through
a blast door. This was directly inspired by PT,
and persisted through numerous iterative re-
designs of the space.
242: This is a nice, simple example of how co-
herence can cascade through a project.
of that process, and I think that constrained our thinking in an unproductive way because
they are often very linear experiences. Even though there are multiple ways to escape an
escape room it’s still a physical place and it follows Euclidean laws of how space works,
or Cartesian law, whatever. We had forgotten I think, you and I, that we wanted to use
that same space over and over again [see my level design in Figure7.14] , and when we
returned to that we realized that there were ways to solve problems that the controller
itself and that cascading coherence had caused. For me this emanated out of how many
of the techniques that we started to apply after that controller came directly out of escape
room genres and things like, I don’t know, Myst or something.
At that time I think that the other the important mechanics that emerged fr om that the contr oller
specifically wer e one they made the dark space a little mor e navigable, but they also meant that
you had to be much mor e active and intentional as a player in your explor ation of the space.
That’s true.
So that was a nice thing that slowed down the player in a good way. I t means that the player
can ’t just scan a r oom at a glance, they need to actually point the flashlight at it and move
ar ound. Also the glow in the dark clues r eally take advantage of the contr oller-as-flashlight.
242
I forget who or wher e that started, wher e that thr ead started, if that was you or Lucas who
initially came up with that idea, but once that was implemented I can r emember...
I’m confused about what you’re... oh...
The glowing...
7 .2 H ow ar e we going to use this contr oller? 14 1
243: In another good example of cascad-
ing coherence, the team’s free-flowing de-
sign conversations somehow led toward the
idea of using glow-in-the-dark paint to hide
clues in plain sight. We might retroactively
trace the path from the controller design,
to the embedding of symbols on the con-
troller’s thumbpad, to the need for glowing
symbols (for legibility), to paint that glows in
the dark–and the painter-character it nec-
essarily implies–but this might obscure how
an organic, directionless brainstorm led to a
concrete, coherent idea. So it is that ’mud-
dles’ , as Gregory Bateson termed them, are
central to my process as a narrative designer.
244: Luke was being pithy here, but it was
sincere – and our desire to avoid the all-too-
common trope of human-centered violence,
in our work, is always an explicit part of our
process. This is something, for example, that
we’ve revisited (and to which we’ve recom-
mitted) over and over again in producing H ot
Dogs, H orseshoes, & H and Gr enades.
245: It bears noting here that, as independent
and self-funded designers, we must always
think about the feasability of a design deci-
sion as we’re assessing it. In fact, at this point
it’s such a deep-seated constraint in our de-
sign process that we seem to naturally prefig-
ure costs, financial or otherwise, in even our
most free-floating design discussions. Again:
being a narrative designer is like being Mac-
Gyver. You have to use what’s actually ready
at hand.
7 .2.6 T he G l o win g ( or Sp otlightin g a M uddl e )
Oh, yeah, that was um, so you’re asking like where the design of the code input came
from?
Or just the idea that, I mean, because it...
Or that it would be glow in the dark?
Y eah, that we could expose something thr ough this glow in the dark paint
243
flows kind of nat-
ur ally once you’ve got a flashlig ht in a dark space...
Yeah....
I t might show something! And it turns out....
It’s funny you should say that because I remember the glowing aspect of the controller
that was definitely from me. The glow in the dark paint I have no idea where that came
from. That could come from any one of us.
I think that grew up from the muddle. I don’t know why I keep using this phrase but that
part of that cascading coherence was like, oh, if we can do this and then we can do this,
and if we can do that, then we can do that. I love that [the glow in the dark paint], it’s one
of my favorite things and it might have been Lucas’s idea originally.
Y eah, and I think because that was, like you said, something that falls natur ally. I mean you’ve
got to be able to think about it, it ’ s not like it was obvious fr om the beginning.
Oh for sure..
But once we had it, it was like, “Of course that ’ s a thing you activate in your envir onment with
a flashlight!” What makes guns compelling at least in part is you can change something way
“ over ther e” and her e’ s a case wher e you can do that with a flashlight. And it doesn ’t involve
mur der. Awesome.
244
F or me part of it was just the juiciness of how Lucas implemented that particular mechanic,
how compelling that felt. I t was a lot of fun, again on like the short time loop scale. I imagine
being in the player’ s mind and them thinking, “OK, I found wher e the clue is!” “OK, I’m going
to put my flashlight on it!” “W oah, I am going to take my flashlight off,” and “W oah, it ’ s glow
in the dark, which is exactly like glow in the dark stickers and stuff!” “I t went out again, so I’m
going to put my flashlight on it and...” , and you can pr oduce minutes of triple-A video game
experience. N ormally that ’ s a million dollars worth of work to get another minutes ’ worth of
entertainment value. Which is to say that the glow in the dark paint r eally helped r einfor ce
that explor ation theme because it ’ s a good case wher e we can r ewar d the sort of player that does
that thor ough explor ation.
245
7 .2. 7 V irtual D ar kness
At one point we wer e talking about adding mor e Easter eggs, maybe even a glow in the dark
Easter egg, just mor e stuff that you discover thr ough that mechanism, for example, maybe not
necessarily a clue, just an explor ation we want players to be inter ested in doing and a way to
r ewar d them for that explor ation. So I do think it ’ s inter esting to cir cle back that ther e. W e
did run into some awkwar d aspects of the dark space, too, in the design pr ocess, like actually
142 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
Figure 7.15 : This promotional image for Blast Doors exemplifies the kind of dark spaces we ask players to navigate, and the controlled ways in which they are illuminated.
246: One of my pet theories: the running
lights helped because people darkness af-
fects players’ depth perception in VR. But this
smacks of correlation, not causation.
247: As above, the ’disorienting’ aspect of this
suggests the players’ inability to orient them-
selves in a dark virtual environment.
248: This is to say that ’realism’ , in games and
other media alike, isn’t about a strict corre-
spondence with ’actual reality’ . Rather, it’s
about correspondence with users’ sense of the
’real’ and the actual. This is a double-edged
sword – while we can use magic realist tech-
niques to play with this sense of the ’real’ ,
virtual reality impacts users’ senses in unex-
pected ways.
doing a r eally dark space [ as in Figur e 7 .1 5 ] - that is difficult fr om a lighting, computer gr aphics
perspective.
I remember when we added runner lights to the floor and we were like, “Oh this is so
much better!”
So... just staring into an all black envir onment in VR is weir dly uncomfortable, it turns out.
W e have some pet theories as to why, but the running lights helped.
246
Befor e we even got to the new contr oller, when we wer e still playing ar ound with the idea of it
being a flashlight, and wer e playing with hitting the button with the flashlight mechanic, one
of the pr oblems with that was that if you got your flashlight and you hit the button with it
you had to stick the end that makes light into the panel. So, it suddenly got dark, like, pr etty
pr ecipitously. One half second to the next half second the envir onment went fr om bright, like
the thing you’r e staring at is super bright, to total black... and then bright again. Then, if you’r e
hitting these panel buttons using the butt of it then you’r e shining the flashlight in your face.
Because it was your cor e light sour ce it was very d isorienting.
247
Ther e wer e ways ar ound that,
like we could have just put lights on at all the panels, but then we had to r evisit it a couple times.
Ther e wer e some parts of the game wher e we had r ealistic r eflections that we used on some of
the materials, but we also had a r ealistic brightness out of the flashlight, and when you do that
you just get a lot of glar e. I n most of those cases that just wasn ’t pleasur able, or r eal, or made
things di fficult, even if that bright glar e might have been truer-to-life.
248
W e don ’t let ourselves
get constr ained by hyperr ealism in that way.
7 .3 W e’r e right in the middle of it, right? 14 3
249: At the time of this conversation, we were
revisiting the narrative design of Blast Doors
after a few weeks’ break from the project
(which we took to gain some critical distance).
7 . 3 W e ’r e right in the middl e of it, right?
Anyway, we had to think a lot about the ergonomics and in-game use of that tool. When we
turned it into a multi-tool it became this data entry device, an inter action gizmo, and a flash-
light, and it took time to ensur e those functions wer en ’t inter acting poorly. I n the end, I think
that we did a r eally good job, I think we found good balance. Ar e ther e other downsides that I’m
forgetting ther e, or did I just block those out?
Well, you know for me the primary impetus for having this conversation was for both of
us, for our memories to get jogged and then gain some momentum as we talked about
the process of designing and developing Blast Doors and how its led us, I think, to and
through a breakthrough that was driven by interface design, specifically. I think it’s really
interesting because we’ve been talking for what, maybe 40 or 50 minutes at this point and I
think we’re finally at a place where we can talk about the last thing I wanted to talk about,
which was how this is impacting the way that we think about the Omnideck again, and
how we’re thinking about the Omnideck as a diegetic object now, again.
249
M m-hmm.
This started after we designed the controller I remember saying in an off-hand, this is
obvious way - “Hey, we’re going to have a teleporter in this room, make it look like the
Omnideck! [See Figure 7.16] That’s how it should look, just plain and simple it should look
Figure 7.16 : The teleporter that appears in Blast Doors directly references the Omnideck, on which the user walking as they move through the game level. In this way,
the Omnideck becomes an oxymoronic, diagetic object in the same way as the controller. One might see this as another example of cascading coherence in the design
process.
144 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
Figure 7.17 : The logo for Radius XR, designed
by Luke Noonan.
just like the Omnideck.” And I think it was you that was like, “Yeah yeah, we’re definitely
doing that!” You know, it was this obvious thing to do.
7 . 3.1 T hinkin g T hr ough Contr o l l e rs
Now in retrospect it seems like an obvious thing to do to push the overarching narrative
of the game and the meaning of the game around this central teleportation technology, to
say that in a similar way the Omnideck is not just becoming a diegetic object, and, how
am I going to say this, playing a role in that space, right? It has character. Just like the
controller you’re holding in your hand it almost IS a character on some level.
But it helps us I think to think more clearly and more coherently about what the players’
goals are and what the story at work here is. What kind of facility are you in? We’ve always
known it had something to do with teleportation. But to come at that again here later
in the process as we’re rethinking some design decisions and doing some rewriting and
doing some new layout, to see that we’re again thinking through a controller, thinking
through an interface, and seeing as we’re talking about it how it reinvigorates the project,
reinvigorates the design process, as we think about how to take what we have and finish
it, you know?
Y eah, the start of that came befor e we even started talking about Blast Doors actually, because
I’ d built the Radius logo, I’ d got that into 3 -d space ther e...
Yeah that was brilliant. [See Figure 7.17 .]
And in that pr ocess I’ d been trying to be r eally explicit at various points about evoking the
thinking about the tr ansition into and out of these virtual envir onments. So having this as a
gener al r ole on the other demos on other pr ojects that I’ve done, I’ve tried in a bunch of cases
to give the user their starting space and have it r esemble wher e they wer e in physical space.
Ther e’ s a little pr oduct that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: the office in the gar age at my old
place had a pr etty simple ar chitectur al structur e, and I was like all right, what I should do is
model this, this space, perhaps in a stylistic fashion, but it had pr etty iconic colors (the floor
was pink) and then make a like r oller coaster ride of an experience wher e a magic door opens,
a str ange thing happens, at some point the walls explode and they fall off or whatever, and then
loop back at the end of that experience, back in the starting gar age, the walls coming back into
place, and you take the headset back off again... all in the hope of pr ovoking the experience in
the user, to get them to think, “well, ther e was a door ther e befor e...” and see if you could get a
player, a player that comes out of that experience to be like, “Y eahhh... ther e used to be a door
ther e... I’m just going to try to pr ess on this concr ete wall to see if ther e is r eally a door ther e
like ther e was in the virtual space.” And conflate those spaces in their minds.
Mm-hhmm.
With the Omnideck you’ve got this visually evocative, r eally inter esting piece of har dwar e to
move on and inter act with, but it ’ s a r eally dynamic one. I ts scale is part of its gestalt effect [ see
Figur e 7 .18 ], so I’ve been trying to then echo that in the virtual space to give the player some
context continuity. I t has been my intent in those cases to let the user slide into these spaces
mor e gently, and so ther e had been those thr eads of similarity between the design space and the
r eal Omnideck.
7 .3 W e’r e right in the middle of it, right? 14 5
Figure 7.18 : An image of an Omnideck being
installed at a Radius XR location, with a level
resting on it for scale.
250:
When we were recording this conversa-
tion, we were redesigning the narrative
of Blast Doors – and I was about to fi-
nally have access to the Omnideck for the
first time. Thus, the remainder of this
interview is an interesting case study in
how two co-designers talk through prob-
lems, get in a muddle, and arrive at a point
where they can kick around new ideas for
an ongoing project.
7 . 3.2 V irtual ly Similar Int e r faces
As I was modeling what turned into the teleporter, which has the sixteen sections of the Om-
nideck and is at the appr opriate scale or pr etty close at least, I found myself trying to apply the
same interr ogative pr ocess that we did with the contr oller to that design space. Asking, “W ell
what would be the like, kind of shitty seventies version of this thing?” I f in meatspace we’ve got
the like “2018 aluminum r oller,” you know, “J ony I ve piece of har dwar e,” the r eal thing is ther e
– what ’ s the cr appy 1978 version that is the analog to the Blast Doors contr oller? I don ’t know,
I t ’ s a mixed bag, I don ’t know that I captur ed that quite as well as I wanted to.
I don’t know, I really love it! This was the place I kind of wanted to get to and maybe end
on in this conversation. The kind of thinking that you’ve already done in relation to what it
means to implement the Omnideck as a diegetic object is the same kind of thinking we’re
going to have to continue through as we make some other decisions. Because we’re right
in the middle of it, right?
250
We’re right in the middle of trying to transition from an
actual alpha to an actual beta, and finishing up the... I mean the footprint is pretty much
complete, right?
But there are some features and some diegetic decisions that need to be revisited. That
loading screen is one example now that we’ve decided that this is a less linear experience,
now that we’ve decided that there is a little bit more backstory accessible to the player,
now that we’ve changed our mental model of how the narration will take place. I think
it’s worthwhile to revisit what that loading area looks like and I think we can talk about
the affordances of that loading area that you did, which I think is really great in abstract.
More concretely as it relates to this particular project, I think it could perhaps be skinned
to more specifically suit Blast Doors, to say that when you put on the HMD and you have
the controllers in your hand, that the loading screen itself becomes a little more explicitly
and usefully diegetic.
146 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
251:
This is fascinating to me: Luke and I are in
a muddle here, we’re brainstorming and
ideating and reflecting, but at this mo-
ment in the conversation I’m acknowl-
edging that there’s been a third character
in the conversation, an entity that persists
across conversations. The interface itself
is a participant in our muddle. And in ret-
rospect, I think this might be the climac-
tic arc in the narrative of this conversa-
tion, because the int e r face-as-charact e r
is he r e bein g r e v eal ed as something that
speaks, something to which we as design-
ers can listen, something that helps direct
our design conversations and keep them
coherent.
252: As a narrative designer, I can’t help but
wonder here: if a controller can be ’difficult’ ,
and a controller can be a character, and a
character can be ’difficult’ , can a controller be
a ’difficult’ character?
253: Again: I’m enjoying that, here, the char-
acter of this controller seems to be demanding
loyalty from us...
We’ve kicked this idea around before, doing something else with the loading screen. And
I think it’s interesting because the only response you’ve ever given, which is I think a very
good one is the, “Well, we want to make sure it’s standardized from Radius project to
Radius project.” And I don’t disagree with that at all, so it makes me wonder: well, what
would happen if you start in that standardized Radius loading screen, and it loads you into
essentially a secondary loading screen? Anyway it’s just to say that this is a moment in this
conversation when we could continue to go on tangents, and continue to essentially apply
this same kind of open-ended design thinking ,to solve more problems in a way that’s
driven by thoughtful consideration of the interface.
251
It’s so natural, it’s so obviously the next thing we would do, if we weren’t recording this,
if this was the kind of thing that was just for posterity or was some snapshot into the
process. For me that’s the big takeaway here, after doing this work for Blast Doors; one,
I can’t believe how important the controller has been to me as a narrative designer, and
how we can trace that thread through so clearly; and two, it’s weird how surprising it is to
me that with the Omnideck making its way to North America, that this would suddenly be
happening all over again around a second interface. As we try to finish the game in July,
I can only imagine that there’ll be some similar stuff happening where I’ll finally get the
chance to walk on the Omnideck, and have that sublime, surreal experience, that magical
feeling of moving through this space and not being able to see my feet, but being able to
understand, in the space, what my feet are doing, to think about them in a way that is both
realistic and magical.
I think along those lines, and this r elates back to the contr oller too, ther e’ s this: in the same
way that those affor dances happen they also natur ally lay in some constr aints. Some of those
ar e ergonomic constr aints, a human wrist can only twist so far in any dir ection for example.
Ther e ar e also constr aints about communicating with the player, r eally complicated pr ocesses,
the H3VR pr oblems that we’ve run into, hotkeys, multi-button triggers, it ’ s difficult, but ther e’ s
also like, I feel like kind of almost like an art school snobbishness to the... or design school
snobbishness maybe... to maintaining that difficulty.
252
I don ’t know they ’r e all kind of inter-
changeable maybe...
Yeah.
I notice this for the Omnideck, and I’m curious if you encounter the pr ocess with the contr ollers,
but ther e’ s the teleportation question, too. I’ve addr essed it as I’ve been doing other work on
that pla tform, asking myself, how do I design for this when the whole cor e of the Omnidec k is a
locomotion platform? I f I put in teleportation into the design it seems like a str ange decision,
since isn ’t the whole idea that we don ’t need to teleport? Like, isn ’t that what makes this platform
[the Omnideck] particularly compelling? And it turns out that ther e’ s a balance point. I actually
feel r eally good about the teleportation stuff that we have in Blast Doors , so far, with the new
thr eads we ar e thinking about which involve a little mor e mechanical teleportation. I feel good
about those too, because of the way they work. But if we went too overboar d with teleportation
it might seem like avoiding the str ength of the har dwar e. And like, one of the side pr ojects that
we’r e working on is all about the weir dness of teleportation, so...
Mm-hmmm.
That isn ’t an Omnideck pr oject, and that feels good, I’m like, “OK, gr eat! This is a w eir d affor-
dance.” I was just curious if ther e wer e ideas that would definitely work, but felt like they would
betr ay the spirit of our ColecoVision r emote contr ol interface? I was curious if that interface
demanded similar loyalty.
253
7 .3 W e’r e right in the middle of it, right? 14 7
254:
Insofar as the controller is a character,
this is akin to a director replacing an actor.
But the interface is also a shared bound-
ary, so the directory would also need to
replace... the stage? The venue? And
what of the controller’s dual nature, as a
character in both actual and virtual re-
ality? Would the director need to swap
out the audience, too? What is the cor-
rect set of analogies here? As a nar-
rative designer, my job is in large part
about tracking changes in a complex, dy-
namic system, and then helping to pre-
figure and solve the problems that those
changes cause. (See below.)
255:
The narrative designer, in my experience,
is the person who has to (1) come up with
this kind of question in the first place, (2)
champion the question to his collabora-
tors, and (3) offer as many answers to the
question as possible, so the team can as-
sess them and choose the best one. I can
think of no better description of a nar-
rative designers role, especially in rela-
tion to virtual reality – and I wouldn’t have
been able to formulate this description
without this conversation, without listen-
ing to the recording, without editing the
transcription, nor without typesetting it
in L
A
T
E
X. I say this simply to highlight how
this conversation was a designed conver-
sation from the get-go, and the process of
re-designing it as a narr ative has taught
me a great deal about my practice, about
being a narrative designer.
7 . 3. 3 V irtual ly Diff e r e nt Int e r faces
It’s so interesting you’d be asking that question because as you were talking I kept thinking
about how profound the porting of this project to another platform might end up being. It’s
to say that, even with something that you’re holding in your hand, the fact that it becomes
not just a diegetic object but an object that exists simultaneously in the actual and the
virtual space, it’s both material and immaterial, its diegetic and non diegetic, that Vive
controller and its design has driven the rest of the game’s design in palpable ways, in
ways that we can talk about and recount. To then later in the process swap in something
else... I don’t know, I don’t know what the ripple will be.
254
I think about like an MXR
controller...
Or an Oculus... the touch contr oller which is way differ ent.
Yeah exactly, and I mean the [Microsoft] MXR one at least is kind of like a doughnut stick,
but if that doughnut were massive, right, though... I was trying to think of a good joke there
but it’s just a huge damn doughnut. Whereas there’s the Oculus touch controller, there’s
the Daydream controller, that’s just a little teeny thing that looks like an ipod shuffle....
Then the knuckles ones...
The knuckles one are coming. To say nothing of the gloves that are coming in the future.
Which is to say here we are making this project, and here we are saying, “OK it’s successful
and we want to share it on a few platforms,” ho w ar e w e g oin g t o track those chan g es as
designe rs, w he n the narrati v e design of the e xpe rie nce w as dri v e n fr om its inception, in
some pot e ntial ly ine x orab l e w a y s, b y int e r face design ?
Following that, and here’s the real concern I was thinking about while you were talking,
was like how are we going to handle this with the Omnideck and non-Omnideck versions,
because we do know that’s definitely something we’re doing – one you’re walking around
in the space, the other you’re holding a teleportation device in your hand, and this is going
to be an experience that’s all about teleportation and the technology that allows for tele-
portation to happen... which I think allows us to usefully connect to the metanarrative of
virtual reality. Like, how?
255
I guess we won’t know until we are doing it more together in
person when you’re here in a couple weeks. I mean how is that going to track across these
two versions of the game and will we actually have to change the story when you change
the interface? God I hope not, that’s a lot of fucking work!
I do think that does affirm the design cascade that you wer e talking about... that can cascade
in a bunch of differ ent ways .
That’s what ends up in retrospect making this project great... and we’re not even done
here! But looking backward is what makes it look like such a weird experiment, an exper-
iment prompted by the affordances and constraints of a specific interface, the Omnideck,
to which we had limited and inconsistent access. You had a little, Lucas and I had none.
Through the design of it, we then found our big breakthrough in the other interface, the
Vive controller which was going to be consistent, and something that we all shared at the
time, shared access to, had some familiarity with, and now we’re returning back to the
original interface that gave us affordances and constraints. On the one hand it seems to
be solving a lot of problems that our thinking is back at it, on the other hand, Oh man am
I scared about the kinds of problems that might crop up. It’s an interesting place to end
the conversation I think...
148 7 M etalogue: Cascading Coher ence in Blast Doors
W e’ve got our work cut out for us on that fr ont!
I think after an hour or more of talking we should probably do the smart thing and turn
off the recording, make sure that everything got recorded, and then talk about what the
transcription process is going to look like, too. Should we hang up the call and call back
once you’ve tested it?
Y eah.
All right, Sounds good.
Later, man.
Figure 7.19 : The Omnideck: the “2018 aluminum roller” , as Luke called it. Eat your heart out, Jony Ive.
Polygraph: The Dissertation Defense
8
Following the logics and spirit of my dissertation, this concluding chapter is an edited
and typeset transcription of my dissertation defense presentation, which was delivered
on Tuesday, 31 July 2018, at the downtown Los Angeles offices of XR, Inc.
This defense presentation summarized the results and findings of my research, through
discussions of each chapter of the preceding document. It also reflected on the exper-
imental ‘polygraphic’ structure of my dissertation, as itself a kind of metalogical result.
Finally, it suggested several directions (and questions) for my upcoming research and pro-
duction, and speculated about how my dissertation might inform the direction of those
projects.
As requested by my committee members, I circulated drafts of my defense presentation,
as well as my artistic portfolio, prior to my defense date. This provided the committee
additional context for my summative dissertation defense. Unfortunately (and perhaps
ironically), a great deal of the context and content from my defense was unable to be re-
produced and transcribed, due to the poor quality of the audio recordings that were cap-
tured during the “Question and Answer” period that followed my presentation. Over an
hour of discussion was lost.
For some time, I wrestled with the question of whether or not I should attempt to replicate
this discussion somehow. Should I supplement my defense presentation transcription
with an additional transcribed presentation? Should I take things one step further, and
write something akin to a more traditional concluding chapter? This was more than a
theoretical question for me – it was a deeply personal one. I’ve chosen here to create
an experimental, anti-traditional dissertation because I believe it better expresses, as a
gestalt, the complicated and contradictory and often internally inconsistent nature of my
critical and creative practices.
Polygraphs are apparatuses for producing copies, and sometimes such apparatuses break
down. Polygraphs are lie detection machines, which turn out to be unreliable measures of
truth. Polygraphs are collections of voices, of authors, brought together in a single work,
assuming neither consistency nor coherence. And polygraphs are groups of letters that
come together, as individuals, to represent an indivisible unit of sound, a musical manip-
ulation of mammalian mandibles. This dissertation is my attempt at producing something
befitting a discomfiting word lke polygr aph.
So, ultimately, I decided to allow the following incomplete transcript of my dissertation
defense to have the final word in this odd dissertation of mine. I felt this decision best
reflects the melifluous chorus of meanings that comprise the chord that one hears when
one speaks the word polygr aph. The transcript’s incompleteness would undercut its accu-
racy, but be presented nonetheless in an inherently flawed attempt at a kind of honesty.
14 9
1 50 8 P olygr aph: The Dissertation Defense
257:
In my defense (no pun intended), I can
only offer the words of two great Ameri-
can poets, Walt Whitman and Val Kilmer,
in a kind of absurdist Cartesian mash-
up: I contain multitudes, thus my hypocrisy
knows no bounds.
258: See:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polygraph
It would be a self-defeating gesture, an exercise in existentialist experimentation, a nickel
thrown into the void...
And it was that kind of thinking that led me to nervously write this preamble, right at the
last possible moment, and add [virtually] the only piece of actually written pr ose in this
entire document, thus indelibly defacing the edifice of my dissertation project.
257
This is not to say that the edifice was ever real in the first place.
8.0.1 Real F ak e Results: An Incompl et e Transcript
Welcome to Chapter 8 of my dissertation.
First I want to thank the committee members who are here, and the committee members
who aren’t. (aside) Hi Holly! And I wanted to thank the people on my Quals committee
as well. I couldn’t have done this without you. Thank you so much for the mentorship,
feedback, and support. I don’t know how to say how much I’ve benefited from your ex-
pertise. I feel really lucky. That’s not enough: I feel guilty, actually, to have found people
like you.
I also want to thank my family, my RUST LTD. collaborators, people like Cord and Haalen
who have helped along the way, and all of the other Unicorns who aren’t here from IMAP.
I couldn’t have done it without them, either.
I mean that really seriously, too. That’s part of the core foundational set of assumptions
for my dissertation, that without the various values and traditions that other people that I
have been working with for a long time have provided, this dissertation would not exist. I
don’t have original ideas, that’s a fallacy. It’s just not true. So, I didn’t want my dissertation
to be a part of a tradition that either implicitly or explicitly uplifts this idea that everything
I’m saying here is original.
So, the way that I always kept saying this is: I’m not writing a monograph, I’m writing a
polygr aph.
And I think that I latch onto that word, aside from the fact that I like puns, because of
its inherent multiplicity. There are a lot of voices that appear in this book. And like every
other chapter, I thought we’d start by talking a little about the word polygraph. But I won’t
dwell on this too long.
At Wiktionary.com, there are four definitions [of polygraph].
258
The first is the one that
you’d expect, right, it’s the lie detector. The second one is... actually it’s a little bit closer to
a copier. That’s out of date. There is an archaic one that is just wonderful, it’s a collection
of different works often by different authors, I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, how
great is that?!’’ And then, finally, linguistically it is a group of letters that represents a sin-
gle phoneme, so just that simple difference between like, thumb and dumb, or something,
is the difference between one phoneme and another.
So, in summation, all of those things together I think really reflect the set of intentions I
brought to bear, especially given that I wanted my dissertation to try to honestly reflect
the polyvocality of this, the intense years-long collaborations and friendships that have
driven the work that you’re going to see later, and somehow bring it into some bounded,
singular, expressive unit. Which is ridiculous, it’s just too many things! And further, I’ve
1 51
been instructed by co-chair Tara McPherson to give a 10-15 minute presentation. So, I
thought I’d follow in a tried-and-true iMAP tradition and deliver a Pecha Kucha.
So this [slide] is me giving not exactly a Pecha Kucha, but something close to it, at an event
called “E-Lit under the Stars’’ at the old IML building. Mark Marino put it together. Here
I showed off some of the early work I was doing, I think made it in various forms into this
dissertation. Here for example is the “Lieutenant Pike Memorial Browser’’ extension. And
Luke was there! So in this nice circular sense. I thought he should be the one to keep the
time. Traditionally Pecha Kuchas are 20 slides of 20 seconds each. I am going to get myself
something to drink. I’m getting that dry mouth. I am sufficiently nervous and defensive.
Luke is going to be the one steering the ship from here on out. We’ll go twenty seconds
per slide.
[LUKE]: Ready?
I guess!
[LUKE]: Alright, here we go.
Yeah right, here we go, you’re right.
Right, so here we are. “Real Fake Results” – or, “me attempting to cram in an entire disser-
tation into a few minutes” . But that is what the dissertation felt like through and through,
was trying to capture too many things and fit them all into this too-small space.
The process was, as I think you all know, deeply inefficient. I’m a triple-checker and I
had a lot of different ideas about where this dissertation was heading when I arrived. It
took me a long time to start seeing this as a feature and not a bug, and to commit to that
wholesale; there’s a lot of this running through the dissertation, that to commit to play is
to commit to a kind of inefficiency and an ongoing attempt to revise your understanding
of whatever it is you are doing and what values you hold.
It’s also a methodological commitment, because, as so many of us [in the Academy] are
trying to find ways of talking about, academia has a set of rules that are becoming more
and more solidified, and relate more and more directly to a specific group of people’s
values and norms, and more importantly what they’d like to achieve.
Artists, I think, need to work against that. And often inherently new art is about defining
things, it is about breaking rules, misusing tools, glitches, trying to figure out to find out
what works and what doesn’t. And that means it is also a semantic commitment: trying to
figure out what something means in a different context to a group of people, and how to
invite people to jump between those different semantic layers. That’s the common thread
throughout my work. And that’s the approach I take as a narrative designer.
This is a screenshot of Cour ageous Cannonball Commander where you are accessing the
game’s official menu through a platform called “Faceboom’’ [a parody of Facebook]. More
about that later. That was a satirical piece, so was M useum of the M icr ostar. Satire functions
semantically - well, it works, if you’re willing, as the reader, or viewer, to jump between
different layers of meaning, and in that space, in that jumping, satire does its work.
Parody does the same thing. This is a shot from W urstW urld, which you’ll get to see later –
it’s a parody of W estworld, and it really encapsulates the core argument of H otdogs, H orse-
shoes, and H and Gr enades, which is, as with games like that, shooting games, treating peo-
ple like meat. That’s honestly the dark truth of it.
1 52 8 P olygr aph: The Dissertation Defense
Magical realism, too, you’ll get a sneak peek at Blast Doors, relies upon the tension between
hard realism and some magical component that you don’t expect to be there, like that
Buick floating in the middle of the room. Again, that’s about semantic layers coming into
conflict and the person having to wrestle with that.
We see this a lot in memes like the Pike meme [i.e. “Pepper Spray Everything Cop’’] that I
repurposed for this browser extension. I really believe this at my core, and it is at the core
of my practice, that semantic play helps people to imagine change. It can do this because
it asks us to play around with meaning itself, and that’s a necessary condition for this kind
of thinking.
We can also leverage tacit knowledge and help make that knowledge more explicit, like
when you see this image of a room full of white men with Oculus Rift prototype headsets
strapped onto their faces and Zuckerberg grinning like an evil villain walking down the
aisle. This image is revelatory. This image taught [and showed something to] a lot of
people.
So this is a similar image that our collaborator Lucas Miller made for H otdogs, H or-
shoes, and H and Gr enades, for a fake [U.S. Constitutional] Amendment that requires that
no person be found with fewer than thirteen times their own body weight in federally-
provisioned ammunition. This is a dig at the types of people who often play our game.
This is a screen shot from a machinima, which you can watch later, that I titled “MBA
2K16” . To create this machinima, I took the team owner character’s art asset and modded
the game so that your character looks like the team owner character, so in this machinima
the owner is talking to himself the entire time. It’s this weird Lynchian thing.
This is what it looked like when I started to figure out how to really glitch out a face scan
for 2K16 by shaking my head violently back and forth. That’s the section that talks about
the Beetlejuice Taz, in Chapter Three. All of these things are revelatory things for me.
In conversations like this one–and I’m thinking specifically about discussions related to
narrative design, and in conversations that I’ve had with many of you individually–there
is a lot of tacit knowledge that is shared. It is private, it is hard to talk about and difficult
to share (and often only happens in the context of a relationship) but it comes out and it
seeps through, and in part this is why I wanted to present conversations as primary source
documents on some level, to reach some level of refinement. Because for me there were
a number of findings that emerged through that curation process.
I found that the best ideas are often arrived at often via constraints. Constraint can lead to
a kind of convergent thinking across the team that can help a narrative designer remain
consistent. The ideation process for me, and in practice, is not a method. We often look
back and reflect upon a series of events and narrativize it and say,“This is how I achieved
this’’ , but it is hard to generalize from that.
Following that, design decisions are often quite arbitrary via the ideation process. If you
own up to that, your process can account for how arbitrary those decisions are, and when
you continue to make decisions in the future you can allow those decisions to work well
with one another, with previous choices. Essentially you can creating a cascade of coher-
ence based on the decisions made before, if you just reference the stuff that you’ve done
at an earlier stage in the process rather than some external method or referent.
15 3
259: Oliver, Julian. “The Game is Not the
Medium” . Self-published, 2006.
This seems to lead to weird, revelatory acts whether it’s via remixing or simple experi-
mentation – you start to find, especially at a metalogical level, that certain truths emerge.
Again, with satire, parody, the work that I did in NBA 2K16, it’s not just about playing
with the narrative design; it’s like Julian Oliver says, you also see the original work and its
surrounding context through that remix, which is part of the metanarrative.
259
I’m clearly being too long-winded, so there are some other things, like – always solve
design problems through subtraction and not addition. It was nice to see that end up
in my dissertation because I say it a lot. And for me perhaps one of the most concrete
and useful pieces of knowledge that I found [through my dissertation research] relates to
interface, so I’ll come back to that, but essentially it is the paradoxical nature of VR.
So this is it, I’m out of slides.
The slide that I am going to end with is one that for me is very much about the spirit
of honesty I wanted to bring to this, which is that I see the continued lived practice of
play as one that is about practicing play, and trying to reckon with the constraints around
you: the rules, the material conditions of your life. For Wittgenstein, and for Gregory
Bateson, that’s a therapeutic act. To continually revisit the assumptions and decisions
that we’re making is to in part cope, and that’s part of that story that I hope made it into
this dissertation.
Again, thank you. That’s as fast as I can go!
1 54 8 P olygr aph: The Dissertation Defense
Figure 8.1 : An amazing dissertation committee, and their very relieved and tired and grateful student, immediately following the dissertation defense. The group is
standing on an Omnideck at the offices of RadiusXR in downtown Los Angeles.
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About the Author
Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz is the Chief Executive Officer of the award-winning design
studio, RUST LTD., creators of the best-selling virtual reality game, H ot Dogs, H orseshoes
& H and Gr enades. He has designed and consulted for clients such as Dave and Buster’s,
the Independent Television Service, Nokia, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, and Toy-
ota. He is also the author of a full-length collection of digital poetry and games, AFEELD,
which was published by the Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia
Tech in 2017. Adam is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Culture at
Occidental College, where he serves as Director of the Playwork Lab.
1 59
160 About the Author
In Chapter 3
In §2.1
In Chapter 5
In §4.1
In §2.3
Ackno w l edg e me nts
Portions of this dissertation have been previously published or presented elsewhere. Talks
were transcribed and edited by Adam and Heidi Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz; where recordings of
the original presentation did not exist, the presentation was first recreated and recorded
by Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz before transcription and editing began.
Ѱ Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Impure Research: Exploratory Modding in NBA 2k16.” Invited
talk delivered at the UCLA Participation Lab, University of California Los Angeles, Los Ange-
les, CA, 07 Nov. 2016.
Ѱ Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Isaac Unbound: Play as Ontology” . Philosophy of Computer
Games Conference, Berlin, Germany, 15 October 2015.
Ѱ Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam, with Anton Hand and Luke Noonan. “Postmortem: Museum of
the Microstar” . UNITE: Unity3D Developers Conference, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 30 August
2013.
Ѱ Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “Virtual Semantics.” Keynote delivered at the IEEE Interna-
tional Conference on Semantic Computing, The Hills Hotel, Laguna Hills, CA, 01 Feb. 2018.
Ѱ Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam. “When Did You First Play The Binding of I saac? (Again?)” . HAS-
TAC, 04 November 2014. Web.
Design and typesetting was done in L
A
T
E
X by Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, after forking the
project files used by Ken Arroyo Ohori in his dissertation, “Higher-dimensional modelling
of geographic information” .
Cover design was done in GIMP (i.e. GNU Image Manipulation Program) by Adam Sulzdorf-
Liszkiewicz, using a photo released into the public domain by Albert Jankowski.
T hank Y ou ( an incompl et e list )
To my dissertation committee members, who were my patient teachers and mentors: Tara
McPherson, Richard Lemarchand, Holly Willis, Peter Brinson, and Jeff Watson.
To my fellow unicorns in Media Arts and Practice at USC, who taught me how to give more
as an artist and a person.
To my colleagues and students at USC and UCLA, who taught me how to teach.
To my collaborators and best friends at RUST LTD.: Anton Hand, Lucas Miller, and Luke
Noonan.
To my parents, Marilyn and Patrick, who taught me how to play. (And thanks for proof-
reading the final draft, Daddy-O!)
To my partner, Heidi Sulzdorf, who taught me how to love – both caritas and cupiditas,my
brilliant beebee.
And to everyone else who has been a part of this dissertation: thank y ou.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Adam (author)

Core Title Real fake rooms: experiments in narrative design for virtual reality

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Publication Date 02/14/2021

Defense Date 07/31/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag arts research,Games,narrative design,OAI-PMH Harvest,ontology,play,polygraph,video games,videogames,virtual reality

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemarchand, Richard (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Brinson, Peter (committee member), Watson, Jeff (committee member), Willis, Holly (committee member)

Creator Email adam@rustltd.com,liszkiew@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-121836

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