VR, narrative design, and the future of technology

Ava: Hey, I'm Ava. This is lozenge.

This is a design podcast where I'll be chatting about the games industry, design craft, and literally everything and anything in between with industry guests and friends.

There's a lot of great design podcasts out there, but no one really talks that much about UX design in the games industry, beyond conferences that often cost a lot to attend.

There's also not a lot of podcasts that talk about the Gen Z experience within the games industry. You can't spell lozenge without Gen Z.

My guest this episode is Sarah Chen.

Sarah is currently pulling double duty as both a prestigious Rhodes Scholar PhD student at Oxford University, and as a designer and researcher at Studio Chyr.

She also happens to be one of my best friends.

Welcome Sarah, thank you for joining.

Sarah: Hi Ava, thanks for having me.

Ava: Before we get started on the topics, I'd like to ask a bit about you first. What does it really mean to be a designer and a researcher at an indie studio? What does your day to day really look like?

Sarah: That's a really interesting question. I think that my experience will probably be unlike anyone else's and will probably never exist again. So, I got started at Studio Chyr about a year ago, and I had come in, as you know Ava, with no traditional gaming experience. We both went to the same undergraduate college.

Ava: We did.

Sarah: That undergraduate college didn't really have any gaming. It had some media, but... So basically, I had no gaming experience, except for some narrative games that I designed on my own side.

And when I was looking into getting into the gaming industry, it was really a pipe dream for me, but Studio Chyr was looking for a creative researcher.

And so I actually spent the first couple of months at that job, maybe half a year, having basically what many people would describe as their dream jobs. I checked in on the state of the game. I gave creative opinions, but mainly my goal was looking at different sorts of media to see what we could pull, both mechanically and content wise.

So I played a lot of VR games for work, which was awesome. And now I'm starting to actually do design. So I'm working within Unity itself to do level design, which has also been an amazing experience.

What inspired you to make this podcast, Ava? I know you gave your introduction about the gap you think this podcast fills, but what was your inspiration?

Ava: Wow. Just like a Ph.D. intro.

So I think you reach an age where you can no longer fight the inner demons to create a podcast.

I think, okay, I think I'm in a really lucky position in the industry actually, where I have a lot of good friends, including you. Thank you for being my friend.

They have like really interesting positions in the industry and experiences, and I have conversations with, and I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that is discussed that the viewpoint isn't super duper represented in mainstream tech podcasting or gaming podcasting maybe.

And I think a lot of tech and games podcasts are by millennials, respectfully. I think there's a lot.

I think, I don't know, maybe Gen Z are aging into podcasts. I think there's going to be more Gen Z representation of viewpoints I think as probably the first, second generation?

I don't know if millennials count, but we grew up with so much tech and media, information constantly flooding our childhoods or whatever. Okay, maybe not childhoods, but teenage years and all of that, that we are very tech native in a way that older generations aren't. And then, I don't know, it's interesting to see the differences and hear about different experiences from person to person.

So yeah, that's why I started it. I think I'm curious to hear about what other people think also.

I'm so curious how you even found out about Studio Chyr, in the first place, given that, like you mentioned, our undergrad college isn't very tapped in to the games industry, per se. How did you hear about the opportunity?

Sarah: Work with Indies was a really helpful website. I'm also pretty sure I saw them on Twitter. And then I just applied, no connections, no anything.

I think they were really looking for, and what I think with a lot of indie studios as well, they were looking for a culture fit, someone that was really willing to learn rather than someone that was already trained. Obviously, if they found someone more experienced, I think they would have gone with that person, if they had been a good culture fit as well.

But I think at my studio in particular, they're very invested in getting young talent or people with potential, and then training them up from there.

Ava: People who pass the vibe check.

Sarah: Exactly.

Ava: I also have another question about that. So what did the application look like then for you, given that it's vibe-based recruiting, I guess?

Sarah: Oh my gosh, it was over a year ago now. I think I went through standard interview procedure. I interviewed with Will, who runs the studio, and Molly, who is our operations director.

I remember we had a work test that was paid, which was awesome. And I remember it was really fun. I'm not sure how much I can actually say about it, but I had to make basically a media collection presentation on this topic that was really well-suited for liberal arts majors.

It was like historical, half philosophical, but then incorporated a lot of visual arts into it. So I was looking for comparisons, and it was honestly the most fun work test I've ever done. But then again, I don't know if that's a fair comparison because I also was recruiting for consulting at the time in a variety of industries.

Ava: Yeah, tell me a bit about like, I guess it's a really different job application process, especially given that it's an indie studio versus like, really established consulting firms, right? So was there anything that surprised you? Like, did you have to write extra cover letters? Or did you have to like, spice up your resume or something?

Sarah: I definitely had to change my resume. I think because I was recruiting for what you'd consider more traditional industry roles, I had a resume that really looked at impacts.

And I would not say this is advice I would give for the games industry overall, but I think maybe if you're looking into more narrative or creative roles, my resume for my creative side looks entirely different. It's almost all on projects that were sponsored, but were pretty independently led by myself. It's all of my passion work.

And so what I tended to focus on there was way less like, you know, how much impact I made on the team because the team was me, or how much impact this had overall in any business process.

And it was more just, how do I approach things creatively? What does my research style look like? What does my, you know, communication style looks like when it comes to communicating in the arts, if that makes sense? Like I made a lot of Twine games, but I tried to change how I made the Twine games.

And then, I don't think I had to write any extra cover letters. I want to say I wrote, no, I don't think I wrote a cover letter. I think I wrote a paragraph about why I wanted to be hired in an email.

Ava: Did you apply for any other places? I mean, feel free to not share if you want, we can cut this.

Sarah: In gaming, I don't think I applied really to anything specific in industry. I think I sent out a couple of pipe dream narrative applications, but after having worked in industry, I knew I was underqualified then, but it really hit me exactly how underqualified I was and still am probably to do any sort of structured narrative role.

Ava: Boo. You gotta think of yourself, like, you gotta be kinder to yourself, man. Just to clarify, you applied with a portfolio already, right? Like you had Twine Games going on in the background. You had like a suitcase of projects that you brought with you to Studio Chyr.

Sarah: Yes, I did quite a bit of projects in my undergraduate years that were funded by our humanities institution, which was lovely because they support the arts, but also lovely because I could say that these were actual, not jobs, but they were listed in my work experience rather than listed as personal passion projects, which I think was really helpful.

Ava: Yeah, agreed. Did you happen to do any personal passion projects in your spare time to just pad that portfolio?

Sarah: In my undergraduate? No. I want to say, I mean, not to blow my own horn, but I think I was pretty good about anytime I wanted to do something, finding institution that would be willing to sponsor me.

Ava: As you should.

Sarah: Which is how all my Twine projects came about. I basically just fit whatever game I wanted to design at that point to the lab project that the humanities institute was running.

Ava: I'm so curious about your journey with Twine, I guess, because I also did a project with Twine during undergrad ages ago, and I had fun with it, but I know the level of Twine you're at now is far beyond what I can get to. So how has your learning curve been? You have all these plugins, you have Inklet or whatever it's called, you have the advanced Twine spin-off software.

Sarah: I mean, I remember seeing your project, Ava, and I think we're pretty much at the same level. I really liked your project, especially all the fancy visual effects that you had going on.

I think the nice thing about Twine and Inkle is that they're community projects that have been very, very deliberately built to be intuitive and to basically try to remove as much startup cost to accessing creative content as possible, right? So their ideal, I think, for both of them is you open it up and you can just start writing, which I've found to be very, very true.

My main process for switching, so right now I'm working in Inkle on a project, and I'm stepping away from Twine for a bit because Twine has a really lovely visual interface where you can see all the nodes that you make and they're all connected with arrows.

But what I've found now that I'm working with a bigger project is it takes, because of Twine's pretty interface, if you want to actually edit stuff, it takes a little bit longer, especially if you want to be very experimental because you have to link together all your nodes.

So Inkle is a lot faster for that because that's literally, you just open it, you write, and then you have a bit of markdown language that explains where everything is supposed to be connected and where everything is supposed to go. The drawback of that is because there's no pretty interface, you have to keep everything in your head or you have to, what I do is I draw basically the twine version of the nodes separately.

And so, pros and cons to both, but I think they're both really, really good tools for thinking about interactive fiction and thinking about branching path fiction. And I love that you can just export it to the web, and it will do all the front end stuff for you. So you can just basically click and play your own game immediately.

Ava: Unlike any other game engine that's out there. Unreal, Unity, Godot, I don't know how you pronounce that, but you really just open it and it's just ready to go and you just start typing. I think it's so much more accessible than anything else, and also it's free. You don't really have to make an account or anything to just get it set up, right? So, yeah, I think it's a really underused, overlooked resource.

I'm also curious, like, why did you want to get into gaming in the first place?

Sarah: Doesn't everyone want to get into gaming? Isn't that everyone's dream?

Ava: So true.

Sarah: I know it's pretty standard, just you love video games. And I've seen a really strong connection with my friends between a love of reading and fiction and that translating into wanting to work in the creative industries. I think I've personally always been in love with science fiction and utopias and dystopias on the fiction side.

And so that translated into a love of video game universes, particularly video game, alternative video game universes where there's really cool weapons or where there's a really cool enemy or really cool society.

And then I think I had this click when I started working at Chyr Studio, where I realized that it is not as much of a reach dream as I thought it would be. And so because of that, I've now tried to center a lot of my life into working either directly or indirectly in the industry.

So my Ph.D. focus now is predominantly on games because of my experience in the games industry, which is crazy. I did not think that a Ph.D. advisor would go for that.

Ava: Yeah, I kind of wanted to ask about expectations versus reality of joining the games industry. Because I also thought like, games is kind of a weirdly untouchable industry, kind of like film and TV, because it's so hard to get into. But you really enjoy the effects and the entertainment that it produces.

I didn't really think it was a real thing until I actually got into it. Did you have any like, oh, I didn't think it was like this behind the scenes type moment in your experiences or?

Sarah: Oh my god.

Ava: Has everything gone to plan just as exactly as you expected?

Sarah: No, I think nothing has gone to plan, but in a really good way. Like learning Unity for one is something I've always wanted to do or learning Unreal, any game engine. Shout out to you for leading an Unreal tutorial.

Ava: A 30 minute Unreal tutorial.

Sarah: Back in the day, but being able to learn Unity, especially alongside people that are experienced in Unity, just like rapidly accelerated my learning curve.

I'm so much more impressed by people that self teach themselves how to design games, because there is so much knowledge that you just cannot find in Unity documentation or is hidden somewhere. So a lot of my Unity learning was, I think I watched a 10 hour tutorial. I learned how to make Flappy Bird.

Ava: Nice.

Sarah: And then after that, I basically just started playing around with ProBuilder and 3D. Our studio is developing a VR game. So you can imagine the challenges were very high for me at the very start.

But because I was in office most days and we have some really talented designers and engineers on the team, I spent, I don't know, like three weeks to a month just making mistakes, asking them what went wrong, them showing me that it was absolutely the most basic thing possible. And then I would have to write that down so I didn't forget it. And so I think because of all the behind the scenes design work that I've been doing now, I have this massive appreciation for games from a more designer point of view, even just purely technical point of view.

I remember I was recently playing The Witcher 3, and I stopped because I was like, wow, this, I can't even comprehend how good this looks because of all the work that they've put into it, right? Like you run through a forest in The Witcher, and it feels like there is a million different plants and trees and you actually like looking at the scenery and all the scenery is rendered properly. And it doesn't feel like anything is repeated even though I'm sure they've done some clever magic with shaders behind the screen. And you just think about the amount of work that that takes.

If I tried to replicate one screenshot of Witcher 3 by myself, I don't even know how long that would take me. And so I think I'm a lot more forgiving.

Ava: Yeah, but could a tech artist write a 90-page IR essay for their thesis? I don't know.

Sarah: I think anyone can write a 90-page IR essay for their thesis.

Ava: Yeah, no, environment artists, tech artists are like crazy. I think for me, one thing that I really appreciated, like didn't really understand, but like I think I understood it, but just didn't comprehend the scale of was just how many people are involved in making like a really high quality game.

Obviously, there's, you know, as a UX designer, I'm working with game designers, I'm working with producers, UI artists, but like there's also so many people on the other side, like environment designers, 3D modelers, riggers, animators, like cinematic directors, all of that.

It's really insane, the amount of passion that goes into it. I think that's another thing that I really noticed between my gaming work experiences and my non-gaming work experiences. I think people really care about what they're making in games, which is like less common, I would say, in the tech industry in general. I don't know, what do you think?

Sarah: I think it definitely makes me have so much more respect for solo devs, because again, like you said, it takes so many people to make a good game, or even just like a game, period. And being able to solo dev that on your own, even if you're hiring people and bringing people in as contractors or to help you with your work, it's always a passion project.

I think gaming, I've never met anyone who works in gaming that is not incredibly passionate about video games, period. Anyone from people that work the producer side to the creatives. And so, yeah, I do think it is an industry of passion, which can be unfortunate because I think it leads to people being willing to like, accept a lot more restrictions or sacrifices in order to work in the industry of their dreams.

But it does, I mean, it does mean that the flops are a lot more heartbreaking, right? Because I think you just, even the games that we don't think of as successful, for any reason, whether that's commercially, narratively, whatever, right? There was so many people putting their heart and soul into that.

And oftentimes, I think you'll find that the failure point is not the people actually working on the game, who are often the people blamed. It's really unfortunate, actually.

Ava: But yeah, I think there's definitely something to be said about, like, given the amount of passion in the industry, it's like a double-edged sword, because for one, you get to work with a lot of people who really care about games in the same way that you care about games.

But again, caring that much also leads to burnout. It leads to lower pay across the industry, because, you know, people are willing to sacrifice that because of how passionate they are to work on something that they enjoy.

Question about that for you, actually. How have you managed burnout? Have you burned out of games yet? Given that you've played so much, I guess, as part of your research, and how do you kind of get over it if you have? Or have you gotten over it? I don't know.

Sarah: I don't think I've ever been burned out on games, period. I think the only burnout game wise I've experienced is when I play too much Teamfight Tactics and I'm hardstuck, which is what is currently happening. I've just been teetering and I can't break through the door.

Ava: To Plat?

Sarah: Okay, you know, I wasn't going to mention it on the podcast.

Ava: Okay.

Sarah: Where I'm hardstuck.

Ava: I'm sorry.

Sarah: It's okay. We're working on it. It's a work in progress this season. I just want to say, the only reason I'm hardstuck is because I don't use guides. I'm a pure flex player.

Ava: Oh my gosh, you're an internal, like, innate basics, fundamentals player.

Sarah: I really am.

Ava: You're not a stats player.

Sarah: I don't look at the stats.

Ava: Wow.

Sarah: I actually really support Riot's decision to... It's a hot take. I support Riot's decision to no longer release data on the TFT picks. But that's another topic entirely. It's because I think people should not be optimizing the game to win. I think we should be optimizing for fun. But anyway...

Ava: Easier said than done.

Sarah: Yeah.

Ava: Yeah.

Sarah: Especially when it comes to the... To gamble universes in TFT, which is definitely not a skill-based game. But I think the... I don't think I've burned out of the games industry overall, but I've had a really wonderful experience, and I will say a much lighter experience than I think most people have.

I am a PhD student, so my livelihood doesn't depend on the studio or the games industry overall. So I'm much more insulated than I think most people are. I will say that with three years when I graduate, we'll see how I'm feeling about that. I will say, and I do think that playing a lot of VR games in particular has given me a really good insight into what the industry currently looks like, both from a games perspective and from a pure hardware perspective.

I've recently been, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, because I'm really big into the new shiny tech toys. And so my new hill to die on when it comes to user experience. Getting people to actually play/engage with whatever product that you're doing is you need to make the startup costs as low as possible. If I have to, even opening Steam for me and finding the game that I want to click, is, you know, pushing it.

And so for VR specifically, I have to put on the headset, I have to check that everything is charged. I have to log in to my account if I have more than one user. Then I have to go to the game, I have to update the game if it's not already ready. And then I have to make sure the area is clear. And then I get to start in and play the game once I redraw my area square or choose that I'm stationary or non stationary. So it's a much, much higher startup cost than I think putting on an Xbox is or a PlayStation and just pressing play.

Like I think the Switch does this exceptionally well, especially when I'm hooking it up to the TV, because I will never get over the marvel of taking out the Switch console controllers and putting them in a handheld. Oh my gosh, what do you call it? Like the handheld player that you use.

Ava: Joy-Cons.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh, right. Because they slot in and then you can play with one hand and it feels really good. It feels like a controller. VR does not feel that good. The new tech thing that I'm on is a Quell. It's this like fitness game.

Ava: You're throwing out words I've never heard before.

Sarah: You have joy-cons and you have, I mean, you can talk about like, you know, the UX design of the hot tech topics, hot tech products, and I think that's a whole podcast episode in of itself.

But this is my new gripe, which I think they have potentially a really, really good product. But in order to play it every single time, I have to open the launcher. I have to take everything off of the charging dock first for it to register. I have to make sure that my USB is plugged into my computer. And then I have to start the launcher. Sorry, so I have to USB plug in the computer, start the launcher, take everything off for it to register, then strap myself in and then go back to the launcher when I'm strapped in to click play. And then from there, I have to click through, I think, two screens in order to actually play the game.

So it's about a three to four minute, if something screws up, startup cost for the way that they're designed, it's like 20 minute fitness game episodes. And so because of that, I'm so much less willing to play it because I know that I'm going to have to put in a lot of time to set it up.

So all to say is like, I am burnt out on the various app launchers, and I just, I want one click starts the game.

Ava: Totally understand. Damn, tell us how you really feel. Yeah, no. So Quell, I just did a quick Google for the viewers at home, which are non-existent currently. But I believe it's something that looks like a waist strap and then with controllers strapped to it. And it's kind of like it's giving Wii Fit a little bit.

Sarah: It is. It's very Wii Fit.

Ava: And you also do like punching and I imagine activity, immersion, synced stuff to whatever's going on in the TV.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with the launcher problem. I think it's a really universal, like all the way back when we had Battlenet, we had Steam, we have EA's Origin launcher, which I think they retired and they're just calling it EA now. You have Ubisoft's launcher, you have Riot Games' launcher.

And I think that's definitely a real thing. And that problem is really aggravated when you bring it to the realm of hardware. Yeah, I don't think there's like any easy fixes to that right now. You could ask your user to download an app and be like, oh, the app will notify you if there are games that need updating or the game will auto-update if it's whatever.

But you can't go in and update the game without putting on the headset and charging the headset to put it on and connecting it to Wi-Fi or whatever. So kind of a difficult problem, but it's a super interesting one, I'll say that.

Sarah: I definitely think that VR has a long way to go before people want it that aren't already VR enthusiasts. I think that's the biggest barrier is, I was actually discussing this with my family very recently because my younger brother was saying, oh, like VR games haven't really hit that level of cool that. I think the terminology I've heard people use is pancake games, any game that is played on a flat screen. And for one, I think he's right.

But I think the other thing is, this is getting into a little bit of appreciation and elitism, but I really do believe that VR games are appreciated in a different way than pancake games, right? Because at least for me, VR games are all about embodiment and how well you can remove that barrier between your physical body and the virtual world. And some games do that really well and they make you feel really cool while doing it.

Superhot, I think, is an amazing example of the possibilities of VR. For people who haven't played Superhot, you are in this really beautifully designed, like, holy world. It's all white and red. It's really gorgeous. Basically, time moves when you move, and so you punch and you shoot, but you'll shoot, right? And then you'll move a bit to make the bullet move and hit them in the same way you can dodge bullets coming at you. So, it gives you that power of fantasy. It makes you feel like you're actually in a virtual world, and it does something special that you can only do in virtual reality and you can't do in the physical world.

And so a lot of other games that I think are trying to get to the point where we can fight in VR and we can cast magical spells and stuff, we're starting to get there, but very, very slowly. And I think this is one of the times where the hardware or the technical details are holding back creativity, right?

Because the headset itself is very heavy. You start to feel it, even if you're using the standalone headset or the PSVR2 that is lighter, but has that cord that hooks in.

Ava: Yeah.

Sarah: And then what you can actually render when you're playing a VR game, the level is just much, much lower. You have way less of a poly allowance, right? So you have to really reduce how detailed everything can look, which feels bad because you're looking at it really, really closely because you're in VR.

So, I'll also say, I hope that the big companies don't give up on it because I still believe it's a future, but I think it's, we're really in like the painful half-developed stage right now where we are going to need to put a lot of money and talent in.

Ava: I guess it's kind of weirdly contradictory because VR tries to make you feel immersed in your environment, but you can't move anywhere, really. You're kind of stuck to a 3×3 square meter area, or you can just sit in bed or in your chair or something. It kind of is a bit of an oxymoron, I think.

Sarah: I think some games handle this well. And I could just spiel on and on about VR.

But one of the things that I find that VR still needs to catch up on is game design in a physical space, because there are tricks that you can use to make people forget about the 3×3. But you have to design your game really deliberately in a way that you would not design a pancake game because you just move with the joy-cons and you don't have that physical limitation. And so again, some games are starting to do this and think about it in really creative ways, like Superhot that I mentioned.

There also is, let me see what the name of the game is called.

Ava: I'd love to, for me personally, I'd love to see a 3×3 game where your cage is the game or something like that, or you have to work maybe an escape room or something like that, where you're bound to that space in the game and in that world.

Sarah: Yeah, so really quick shout out, one of my favorite VR games that I've ever played is called Down the Rabbit Hole. And I think they use VR really well because they basically accept the limitation that you are stationary. And they say, okay, great, you are this giant and you are literally climbing down this rabbit hole because you're helping Alice and Alice and all of her companions are these tiny little guys that you observe around you sometimes in like a 360 motion. And so it allows you to embody your physical body and how actually big you are.

But it sets things in this like beautiful, tiny miniature scene that you can play around with occasionally by like tapping things or moving things around to help Alice. So I think they do it really well where it's very, very clever. It's a very fun game in and of itself. And it's a game that can only exist within VR. But what's your next topic?

Ava: My next topic is being Gen Z at work. And I want to talk about this because I think we're both relatively young still. Oh my god, I don't want to think about it. Probably still among the youngest at our respective workplaces. And I'm just curious, like, how have you experienced it? Like, how has it been for you?

Because for me, I think it's been a bit odd. I feel like it's such an interesting time to be in the games industry because I feel like a lot of Gen Z people are super tapped in to the culture, very online, very in the know about a lot of cultural things that are pretty important to the future of the gaming industry, especially now that Gen Z has more disposable income than ever. The biggest target market, right? So it makes sense that Gen Z people are joining the games industry in the workforce.

But my personal experience has been a lot of imposter syndrome, as usual, a lot of self-undermining, a lot of self-doubt where it's like, oh God, I feel super junior. I feel like I have ideas and opinions, but I feel like it doesn't really make sense for me to voice them out loud that much if I'm so junior. I'm still learning stuff, right?

Like people above me already know this, but I think where I work currently is a really great place because they do value that voice and they do value my input. So I don't know, how has it been for you?

Sarah: I definitely see where you're coming from. I think, I mean, obviously I work at an indie game studio, so it's going to be very different from working at a bigger company. And my studio has a pretty strong emphasis on like, a good idea can come from anyone, I will say. And this, sometimes being a junior can be a bit of a benefit.

So because I never learned Unity before, when I was learning Unity, I was learning Unity and all of our editor tools at the same time. And I sort of was like a testing guinea pig for any friction within our editor tools, any issues with our processes.

And I think that my being, basically not knowing the rules of how things should be, allowed me to point out a lot of like, hey, this seems like a really unnecessarily difficult process, or can we make an editor tool for this?

So we've managed to feed up internal processes on both like a technical and a sort of communication side at work a lot because we went through that really painful process of getting me... Really painful for me, because I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, which they would not have been able to do if they were onboarding maybe a more senior member that was really experienced in Unity and therefore knew all the hacks and the tricks and whatnot.

But yeah, no, I definitely get the feeling junior bit of it, especially in terms of comparison. Sometimes I look at the work that I'm producing and I look at the work that other people are producing, and I'm like, wow, their stuff is so much better. Why am I getting paid to do this? You know?

Ava: You got to be, you're there for a reason, Sarah.

Sarah: I mean, say that to yourself, dude.

Ava: Oh my god.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, this sounds really cliche. And I don't know if this actually makes me feel better sometimes, but the nice thing about being so new to gaming overall is because the learning curve is so steep, I just see massive improvements in my own work from month to month.

So I remember because we push things to build, and then the whole team tests and tries it. I remember turning out things that I was like, wow, this is garbage.

I'm embarrassed that people are going to see this. And I hit a turning point a couple months in where I was like, okay, it's still bad, but it's not so bad that I want to delete all evidence of it. And then I think I'm at the point now where I build stuff that I personally actually like. I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. And then I look at other people's work and I feel bad about myself again.

Ava: No.

Sarah: So it's an eternal cycle of imposter syndrome. I think you just need to be productive in the moments where it doesn't hit you that bad or use it to fuel you. That's just probably like very toxic advice.

Ava: No, I think that's, it's fair and it's true. And it's a realistic thing that I think a lot of us deal with. I will say one thing that I have enjoyed about being kind of the only Gen Z person in the room is just being this like cultural add maybe.

I've added so many Slack emojis to our Slack workspaces at both gaming companies that I've worked at so far. I've really enjoyed that.

I will say, I'm curious about, how have you like, have you really buddied up with any senior designers or researchers at the studio? Have you sought mentorship within your studio? I think one of the things that I was really looking for in any kind of company is just like whether there's someone who's a bit older who can give me advice on maybe what they would have done when they were starting out in my position.

I understand your position is a bit different because you're literally learning whole game engines and whole processes and you're wearing multiple hats in an indie studio, right? So I feel like reaching out to those more senior people was one of the things that really helped me.

But I think, I don't know, it really depends on where you are at, right?

Sarah: Yeah, no, we love we love hatmaxxing at the studio. I think mentorship has come very naturally from the people around me to myself. Again, I think it because I am still learning the technical aspects of it. So people have been really, really wonderful in just actively giving me help, both when it comes to actual game design, and also when it just comes to like vibes, right? They'll be like, oh, by the way, the game industry is la, la, la, la, la. And then we'll chat about how the game industry is.

Going to GDC, I think, also helped a lot with that because I got to meet people outside of the work environment. And so we were able to talk more about the game's industry overall. For instance, like I have a much better idea of what it's like to actually be a narrative designer and the contract hustle culture that you need to adapt to if you want to break in, no matter how good of a designer you are, just because it feels like the industry is moving to sort of this contract style work, which can be very, very volatile and can be very, very, very shaky.

Rather than like traditional mentorship, and again, I don't know whether this is a my studio/indie studio culture versus big tech culture. It's more just like I am friends with the people at work and therefore we just chat rather than, you know, they are my supervisor or they are where I want to be in five, 10, 20 years and they're trying to help me get to that point.

Like this stuff does happen, but it is way less formalized than I would say, like, an official mentor or someone that is that you like only meet in that mentorship sense, right? Like you like get coffee with them and check in about how your career is going.

Ava: Yeah, I think I actually have both. We have an internal, more structured mentorship program where you get matched with someone and it changes every year, which is, I think, a pretty good thing. I also just have mentors outside of work, and I think like both are good. I think it's important to have both.

Cool.

Let's talk about the future of tech and gaming and a bit about your PhD work. Finally, we can get to it. In like two sentences or one sentence or however short you can get it to be. Can you summarize what your PhD topic is? No pressure, by the way.

Sarah: It's Joever. No, I'm only three months in. I can't say that yet. Okay. My PhD research focuses on how do we design custom games that we can use for academic research?

I think that's as basic as I could get it.

Ava: Are there any hypotheses you have? So far, are you basing it off of any academic games? Would the average gamer know of any academic games, would you say?

Sarah: I mean, I think the big one that blew up, and we're actually crazy lucky enough to have one of the leads on that project based in my Oxford department right now, he's a visiting fellow. But it is the autonomous car experiment that happened back, I believe, in 2016, I want to say, called The Moral Machine. You might have actually played it.

It really blew up, and it's basically where you have this little photo of a driverless car, or this little graphic, and it's going to hit one of two groups and you have to choose which one. For instance, like a grandma versus a dog, or like a bus of school children versus five contributing adults to society.

Ava: Question for you. I have two questions for you.

Sarah: Yes.

Ava: Would you hit the grandma or the dog?

Sarah: I think I tend to value human life, but I'm also not going to publicly state that I would cause any harm to dogs. So, I don't know.

I think a really easy answer out of that is that it's a false dichotomy, but unfortunately, it's actually not a false dichotomy because autonomous cars are a real thing, and we are going to have to make programs about how they should value lives.

Ava: I would simply brake the car.

Sarah: Sacrifice yourself?

Ava: No, I would brake before I hit them.

Sarah: Oh, that's not allowed in this game. We're all strapped to the trolley and we can't stop it. I do think that while it's important to know public opinion on this, which is what The Moral Machine does, it understands our sentiment.

I don't think that it should be shaping how we actually, you know, design autonomous vehicles. Yeah, I think that's the one that people would know of.

I think my project is pretty different in that I have, I've been told in academia, theory is a very, very strong word. You have to do a lot of research to make a theory a real thing.

So I have this hypothesis that you only care about your actions in games or you only act in games according to your own personal moral compass, if you know that your actions are going to influence the world. And so then you're going to try to make the world that you want to live in or that you want your character to live in. And I think that comes from that key point that I mentioned right there, which is if you care about how your actions influence the world.

So the world needs to have consequences, it needs to react to how you are acting, which sounds really, really simple. Until you realize that a lot of games don't really do this in a meaningful way.

Ava: Choices don't matter.

Sarah: Right, exactly. A puzzle game that only has one ending, you actually don't really care about how you're acting within the game. It's either solve the puzzle or don't. A lot of, I think, narrative games get hit on this when it comes to dialogue specifically, where it's like, oh, any dialogue option that you choose, you either can choose the rest of the dialogue options eventually, or it just doesn't really influence the ending of the game.

I'm trying to create a list of mechanics that we use in commercial gaming that make us feel like our choices matter, whether those are narrative or consequential mechanics, like a tracker that tracks how sad people are with you, and then try to find a way to develop a framework for how you as a researcher, not as a game designer, can design a narrative game that uses vignettes and that uses scenarios.

I thought it would be a lot easier than it's turning out to be, which I think is how most people think going into their PhD. It's really hard. I cannot tell you, I didn't think it would be a breeze, but I think like emotionally in my heart, I thought I would be bing chilling because I'm like, oh, it's about video games. I know about video games.

No, it's incredibly difficult.

Ava: I remember my question from previously. Do you have anyone in the games industry, specifically in game design or narrative design, or even in academia within the gaming niche, I guess, or the psychiatrist niche that you really look up to?

Because I know one we have in common, and that's Celia Hodent. Shout out to Celia Hodent.

Sarah: Oh my goodness.

Ava: We're huge fans of your work. We want to be you when we grow up.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.

Ava: But yeah, Sarah, anyone else?

Sarah: This is kind of cheating because I'm currently taking a class with him. Greg Buchanan, who was the lead writer of No Man's Sky, he's got an absolutely stacked contribution to the world of gaming. I think he recently released his first novel as well. And he does this games interactive writing course.

And of course, I always respect people that, like Celia, make an effort to give back to the community or to help train the next generation.

Because I think that's something that if you want to talk about the future of the games industry, we are, I mean, I don't want to say we're gonna see a deficit of, because if industry positions keep on shrinking, like there will be more people than positions that need to be filled. But I do think that, unlike other industries where I think there's more formalized, passing down of knowledge, in the games industry in a particular, and I mean, I've watched you do this for years.

Like so much of it is self teaching. And just learning how to have good taste on your own and finding, you know, random things that people have posted online to learn on your own. And I think it's very rare that outside of a games undergraduate course, or maybe some sort of MFA that you're going to find formalized teaching that is accessible.

Ava: Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like it is kind of scary out there, especially for people going to specifically a game university, if you know what I mean, and getting a degree specifically in game design. I think it makes it really difficult because you've really put all of your cards on that one thing, and it's much more difficult to transfer out, I guess, than if you were taking an IR major or something like that, or media studies, I don't know.

Well, yeah, I don't know. I think it's difficult no matter what. I think the job market right now is a bit cooked.

Sarah: Yeah.

Ava: Yeah. Speaking of the future, our last topic is the future of tech and gaming and AI, which is the hot new buzzword that has been going around for the last year or so.

This is separate from games, but how does it feel going to university during an era in which AI is now super prevalent? Because I feel like we both graduated undergraduate without really having that kind of AI thing looming in the background. Has that changed your perception at all now that you live with it?

Sarah: I mean, I personally, and I know you share the sentiment, I'm very glad that we finished our undergraduate education before ChatGPT hit. I mean, when I was doing my master's degree, I think I want to say ChatGPT was out, was almost out right about that time, but it still wasn't, it definitely was not big. Like we were not using it.

And then now that I'm doing a PhD, everyone that I've encountered that is there wants to do their degree and wants to learn. We actually engage with LLMs more from an academic point of view.

Like I'm really interested in a lot of my work in the like, what sort of games are we designing focuses on our interactions with a variety of technology. And so one of the games that I'm currently working on is about friendship and betrayal with robots or with autonomous beings and whether or not, you know, we react differently as humans versus if a human betrays us in the same way.

And so I will say I do see. And I personally benefit from this as someone not super experienced with coding or with statistics or just with like any, you know, technical platform that I'm using that day.

I think that rather than searching through a lot of documentation, what I really like about integrating Claude within my work is I don't tell it to create me content at all. But if I'm having a technical issue, I will ask it to solve it for me. So when I was, you know, starting up Inkle, if I wanted to do something specific rather than going and reading and learning, I would just ask Claude to write me the code that I needed.

But yeah, I mean, for me personally, I don't know if these benefits, which are useful, are really worth the harms, the societal harms that are possible. Like I would definitely trade no longer having access to Claude for having Claude be a lot more restricted, a lot safer, or like ChatGPT or any LLM. And then of course, in academia, I'm sure you're aware, we've had several academic scandals of that really classic, you know, "I'm just an LLM" phrase being found in published journal articles, which means it's gone through several levels of review and no one's caught it.

And then it was published in an established journal, which I think is embarrassing on a whole as a discipline. So I don't know, like, I think that the world is really changing really rapidly.

But my personal philosophy, unfortunately, is, I think a little bit more cynical, which is like, creative destruction, right? Like, innovate or die.

So even if you choose, whether or not you choose to engage with it in all of the ways that you can, I do think it's important to be aware of the capabilities, because if you're not using it, someone else is. So you either need to figure out how to catch up on your own without being artificially, or you need to be aware of your own limitations and even better, right?

Like your strength, like what can you do better than someone that is using ChatGPT? And right now I think, you know, humanity is still winning. There are so many artists that I know that produce things that are much, much better than anything AI generated.

Ava: I feel like it's still kind of a bit of a false dichotomy to use your phrase. I think, I know, I think it's interesting because I think in games, at least and in any kind of creative work. Yeah, it takes away the autonomy, like the really boring automated tasks, like reading emails or summarizing three hour long meetings. Like that's helpful.

But like the tiny things, oh, you're being stuck on this code string or like anything like that. I feel like it's part of the experience, right?

Cause it's part of your own learning and you'll never know. You might run into a bug. Oh, that bug actually gave me this idea for a different feature or whatever. I think it's really kind of a part of that process. And I think I worry for the, I don't know, I worry for the future of tech and gaming because I feel like people will start seeing it as just like this universal band-aid fix to be applied when it's not really a band-aid at all, maybe. I don't know. I feel like it's just a, I don't know, it's difficult to say. And I'm curious what you think about it because you're at an intersection of gaming and academia.

You've been caught at the intersection of gaming and academia. And I'm curious what you think, especially with immersion, right? There's things like AI NPCs. There's like AI already in games. They have AI NPCs. They have other ideas of integrating AI to make it feel more immersive. And the environment responds to your actions and riffs off of your actions like a real person would, right? Curious what you think about that. Life becoming more personalized to you and that including gaming. I don't know. What do you think?

Sarah: I mean, I have two takes on this, which are like two core assumptions. I think that if you don't share these two cores, then like, you know, use AI as you will. But my first belief is that, and again, this is very personal, but as I've started engaging more with AI and AI generated things, I very much believe that art or any form of media is fundamentally about communication.

It is about communicating an author's intent to the world. Even if you write it for yourself, right? Like you put it out into the world for some reason, and anyone can take whatever meaning that they want from it, whether or not that's the meaning that you intended.

But if you have AI generate that, then you completely take away that meaning, right? So to me right now, AI art or AI generated stuff is meaningless because there's no human on the other side that I'm getting any meaning from. It's just all fog and smoke and mirrors.

My other take is that I think a lot of us develop taste throughout our lives and that taste changes, right? What I liked when I was 16 is not what I like when I'm 24. And the more personalized that you make the world around you, the smaller and smaller your taste becomes because you're not exposed to different things. And this is really bad because it means that you can't develop objectively good taste if you believe that objective good taste is a real thing. But it also just means that you just don't develop taste, period. You develop whatever one thing that you liked and you just continue to like that. I've actually seen a lot of the...

I've seen a bit of criticism about the Spotify algorithm or other, you know, music algorithms where you start siloing yourself into a very particular type of music. I myself can say that I'm very guilty of this. The only music I listen to is indie sadboy music, period. But as an example, like I mean, I still think they're like low key indie sadboy, but this is a very hot take. I had was randomly on someone else's YouTube and Arctic Monkeys was playing. And I found out that I really like some of the Arctic Monkey stuff. And this is stuff that would never crop up in my own algorithm.

Ava: Yeah, they're so good.

Sarah: Right? And this opportunity, if you have this perfect, perfect personalization that only gives you what you want to hear. That being said, right, it's like if games become a form of just like a self echo chamber or like any form of media, then you completely, I think, lose the point of it.

I think that being mad at a game or disagreeing with a form of art is a way of appreciating art sometimes.

That being said, Skyrim recently had this mod where you can integrate AI, like not voice acted, but like voice chat AI with basically all the NPCs. It's really janky. Most of the time it doesn't work. But I was watching a YouTube play of it. And when it does work in that one phrase where they're actually responding to what you're saying, you're like, holy crap, like this is real.

They are semi-sentient. And then they go back to being like jangled garbage nonsense. They're doing this really funny thing right now where they'll respond to you in first person. And then for some reason, suddenly switch to like third person narration. They're like third person narrating.

Ava: As an LLM, I cannot give input on your current quest in Skyrim.

Sarah: It's so funny.

Ava: I think there was something similar a while back. There was this, I think a detective game. I think it was called Vaudeville.

Sarah: Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Ava: Yeah, it went really viral. I think this was like a year ago or something back when AI was still a bit janky. But a ton of streamers played it and tried to explicitly get it to believe that the streamer or the player was Batman and respond to them as Batman or something like that.

I think that is more of an interesting way of — the game itself is to get the AI to be an AI or recognize itself as an AI or whatever, or try to break its programming. I think that's such an interesting like, I forgot what the term is, but it's like when you make a game inside a game, like a meta game or emergent play or something like that.

I completely agree with you on those two things.

I think it's really difficult because again, can you truly create a game that integrates AI that doesn't just override the creator's original vision? Can you integrate an actual human being's living vision inside of an AI? I personally don't think so, and I'm kind of sceptical if AI will ever get there. But yeah, at the same time, again, taste is so important.

You define taste by knowing what you don't like, like what is not in your taste.

I think it's really difficult, especially now that AI is combining every single thing into this homogenous-looking. You know, when you ask for an AI-generated picture, you can generally expect to see what it looks like, and it's kind of taking all of these different influences and all these artists that it's being fed on and putting something out that looks very AI-generated most of the time. It's also, I don't know, I think it's difficult to say.

I think for me, the future of tech, I think has to be fundamentally very accessible to a lot of people and I think this is something that the industry hasn't caught up to that much yet. I think, instead of 3D holographic screens in your living room, I think a lot of people want the future to be like cyberpunk because cyberpunk is cool.

But have you seen that tweet? The inventor, the writer of the Torment Nexus says, do not invent the Torment Nexus and then someone invents the Torment Nexus, something like that. It's a bit like that where it's like, well, are you doing it? Are you doing it because it's a cool visual piece of art that's been created by some author before? Or are you just, are you doing it for the sake of doing it? Like what is the kind of appeal of this? How is it generally benefiting the user, right? The user experience. And yeah, I think it's a lot easier to say AI is the future than actually see how it's going to tangibly improve people's lives.

I think I'm always a bit skeptical when people are, oh, if you don't get with AI, you're going to be left behind. Well, I don't know, am I? Maybe, I don't know. If I listen to this like three years from now and I've been laid off by AI, then maybe not.

But like, I think in UX design and in game design, not so much, because it's so reliant on knowing human processes, like you're designing for humans, you're a human designing for other humans, right? You need to know the intricacies of all that. And I think no matter how big of a data set you put into an AI, it won't be able to really replicate all of that. Like you can't give AI taste the same way a human has taste maybe. But again, it's different, right?

Because some people who are not designers may think that AI does the same job, but ultimately you're missing out on a lot of return on investment and income from having that edge of understanding human tastes, understanding human preferences, human lives in general, rather than a prediction model, right?

I mean, for narrative design, there's already some pieces of media that use AI for narrative design. For game design, though, I don't think so. I don't think it's that easy. I don't know. I think...

You're going to teach an AI how to use Unity?

Sarah: I mean, I was actually just thinking about that, right? Because in my personal opinion, and not even in my personal experience, right? Like one of the biggest barriers for creating games has always been the technical aspects, right? It's not been the creative aspects. And there is so much about Unity and Unreal that you just need to sit down and learn.

And, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier in the podcast, it's hard to do that, especially if you're self-taught, slash it's hard to take the jump in risk and go invest four years in an undergraduate degree and doing that, right?

I don't even want to call it like AI. I can see automation. I can see technical improvements made on the usability of these tools, where we get to the point where it's like. If I want to build a 2D shooter and I can envision it in my head, it's much easier for me to get that exact thing on the screen, because right now, man, if you ask me to build a 2D shooter, it would probably take me for a crappy alpha version, minimum two years full time, just to learn everything that I need to learn, right? And that's probably underestimating it.

And so a lot of people don't have the time to do that, right? Like solo-deving or even hobby-deving, you know, 5 to 9ing is a huge sacrifice and a huge ask. So I think that's where I see, again, like I don't even think it needs to be AI. I just think that's where I see any sort of technology improving the accessibility to game design itself, which is removing, reducing the technical barrier.

I agree with you in that the, any content creation, any ideation, I think needs to be human led. Not even, even if we take out the whole like, oh, you're designing for humans by humans part, like I don't want to play a game that is made by AI and ideated by AI because then what am I actually playing? Like a dopamine generator?

Ava: You know what? Doesn't sound too bad.

Sarah: I mean, it's sort of just like, like intentional, right? Like are you engaging with intentions when you're engaging with any form of media? Like even let's take Balatro, right? Like I personally, I mean, I played Balatro. I liked Balatro. I was not severely addicted to Balatro.

Ava: Wow.

Sarah: Yeah, I know. I'm simply stronger. I'm built different.

Ava: You're not like the other gamers.

Sarah: Even Balatro for me personally is not my game of the year. Like because it was made by the solo dev, I think I appreciate it outside of what it truly is, which is like a literal dopamine generator. Because I'm like, wow, like look at all this work that goes in. Look at how this dev designed certain art pieces within the game. I really appreciate the fire thing that Balatro does.

Ava: The music is so good.

Sarah: Exactly. And all of these things are intentionally designed and so you have something to give your appreciation to. Sorry, I'm back on my like anti-AI idea spiel. But I don't know, like I think this is, so there's a really, really interesting short story that I read when AI started breaking.

And it's a short story about this woman who enters into a writing contest. And I think she loses the first time, and it's like all of her own writing. And so she starts using AI to enhance her writing more and more and more. And she gets denied, not on the quality of writing, but on the fact that she uses AI. And then there's some really interesting, like, philosophical-

Ava: Ship of Theseus moment.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Like justification for the use of AI in creative work and AI being the thing that like pulls out what is hidden within her, right? Like, it has her reach her maximum creative potential is what she argues. And then the whole thing is like a meta-commentary on the use of AI.

It is really important to find that stopping point for me personally, when I'm trying to write my games. I did this because I wanted to feel a little bit of self-doubt. I was trying to write the scenario, and so I went to Claude and I was like, hey, gave it the scenario. I was like, write this in the style of, you know, like really cynical, high sci-fi, sardonic, but still clever, something like that, right? And what it put out was better than what I had written.

Ava: Noo!

Sarah: Which like was really unfortunate. And I think I have pretty good taste in writing and in judgment of writing. And so that definitely felt bad. And I was like, you know, it's okay. I think I can catch up as a creative writer.

But the interesting thing is when I went in and had it re-generate in the same style of writing, like different scenarios, still centered around the same style. It just started because it was all of this like future tech stuff, right?

And so the first one was innovative, I think because it was new. And then all the rest followed the exact same like story framework. I would say it was like short, like 300, 500-word pieces. So I tried to get it to change its story framework and it didn't. So I can say that while the actual writing, like the words on the screen, it was better at using descriptions. It was better at sentence formatting. But the actual content itself was incredibly predictable from like vignette to vignette.

And again, like all of it didn't mean anything because it was an AI creating critical commentary on future tech in society. And I was like, this is just, I don't know, like it's good if I were to give this to you as a Black Mirror episode, I think you would really like it.

But for me, it didn't have any meaning.

Ava: It's not bringing anything new, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Ava: Yeah. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it is that like, it might have better structuring, but the content itself is meaningless because you can't create meaning.

But you can train off of 6 million people who have really good writing, learn how to write like them.

And I think this goes back to that quote that we were talking about ages ago, by Ira Glass who talks about the gap between your taste and your ability. And I think AI really helps bridge that gap in the fact that it can churn out something that it shows you where the gap is. But then the problem is people don't want to bridge that gap because AI does it for you, I guess. So it's kind of a scary future to think about for me personally, but I think there's a lot of interesting other future things to come.

Sarah: Sometimes you do just have to do the work. I think, I mean, my personal thing for using any LLM to edit your own work, which I think it's fair, but I think you need to learn how to write first.

So you need to be an expert in whatever you're in, in order to be able to judge the AI creation, that thing, and whether or not it's appropriate and valid and correct.

And I think that's what a lot of, that like taste versus training gap is coming from, is you can make something really, really good, but because you don't have the taste to judge it, because you haven't put in the time, the sweat and the work, you're not gonna know whether that's actually really, really good.

So I think it's a whole, like, you know, a lot of teachers say, or a lot of writers, even a lot of editors will be like, yeah, we can immediately tell what's AI work and what's not. Whereas they've done studies and like your average person often cannot tell what's AI generated and what is. And it's just that like you, you need to have some sort of knowledge about your field.

So I do think, you know, if we're talking about taste, what I hope in the future is that we start adapting this sense of human taste, hopefully before AI catches up and is able to perfectly replicate that.

Ava: I don't know if I'm pessimistic or optimistic, maybe optimistic, but I feel like it won't be able to get there. I just, it's so much easier said than done to encapsulate like the entirety of the human experience, or maybe it isn't, I don't know. We'll see in like three years.

Sarah: I mean, poetry?

Ava: Yeah, but it's like-

Sarah: Have you seen AI poetry?

Ava: I know it sounds good because it's generated on really good poets, right? It's like trained off of them.

Sarah: Yeah.

Ava: I don't know, it's not super duper impressive to me yet. Maybe we'll see AI, Ava and Sarah, and they'll take our jobs, and they'll just become our clones or something like that.

Sarah: Dude, AI, Ava and Sarah would respectfully self-destruct.

Ava: AI, Ava and Sarah create a new podcast called something worse than lozenge, or something better than lozenge probably.

Sarah: What's the, oh my god, what's the term you use for fixing a bug?

Ava: Troubleshooting.

Sarah: Because a lozenge fixes you because you're sick. And so if you have a virus, like a, a technical virus, and then you push a fix, yeah, that'll be their podcast.

Ava: I feel like we've yapped for a while. Thank you for your time. Thanks for joining.

Sarah: Thank you. See you later.

Ava: Thank you for listening! This was the first episode of Lozenge.