Embedded - 341: Big Hugs to Everybody

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) returns to speak with us about education and the importance of merging art and technology. Phoenix’s website is phoenixperry.com. The art installation crossing the virtual and the physical world was called Forest Day Dream. Phoenix is teaching a free online class: Create Expressive Video Games. Phoenix is the Master’s degree coordinator for University of the Arts London Creative Computing Institute. Diversity and accessibility are important, some resources: FeministInternet.org We Are Not Users: Dialogues, Diversity, and Design Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity by David Paris Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil Gone Home (Steam game) Her Story (Steam game) Bury me, my Love (Mobile game) #selfcare (Mobile game) Phoenix was previously on Embedded 204: Abuse Electricity

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, here with Christopher White. We're pleased to have Phoenix Perry back on the show to talk about art, education, and maybe ghost hunting again? Ghost hunting! Hey, Phoenix. Hello. Glad we didn't scare you off the first time.

I'm glad I didn't scare you off with my ghost hunting. Could you tell us about yourself as though we met at a conference? Hello, I'm Phoenix Ferry. I make big, giant physical video games with lots of people, generally for the public. I also work very hard to embed a teaching practice into that creative work and see education as a bridge between creative work and learning. Beyond that, I have a project called Code Liberation, which basically just gives me an excuse to work

with fantastic women who are interested in learning how to make games and creative applications to tell their stories where you know i can where i can and when i can so that's the the skinny about me are you ready for a lightning round definitely favorite ghostbuster oh man favorite ghostbuster i have a favorite ghost favorite ghost Favorite Ghostbuster. Oh, man. Favorite Ghostbuster. I have a favorite ghost. Favorite ghost. Slimer.

Of course. It's my favorite Ghostbuster, too. Can you recommend a good smartphone game? Bury My Love, if you've not played it yet, is amazing, as is self-care. Hashtag self-care. Cake or pie? Cake always. Exactly.

What is pie in London? It is not what it is in the UK. It's weird. They put mushrooms and peas in their pies here, y'all. It is not all right and they think sweet potatoes do not belong anywhere near pies unless they're savory which i don't understand my british friends won't eat my pumpkin pie even though it's a thing uh biscuit or cookie biscuit favorite generative algorithm i like markov chains uh if you could teach a college course what would you want to teach if well well see see see if you could teach a course that you aren't teaching i don't know sure i mean i've made a few courses during my day um one of

them i made i loved i'm not going to mention it because I got harassed beyond all logic and had to leave the university, not because I really felt like it was the right move, but because it was very clear to me that in fighting a discrimination situation that I had faced, I just didn't feel like I would ever be able to progress within that department. If I had it to do all over again, I would really love to consider how to build a course around architecture, play, and smart environments, which I'm pushing my boss to let me do at UAL. And I'm begging slowly every day something around creative robotics and environment but that would be what I'd make I think cool UAL you mentioned that University of Art London it is yeah it's a conglomerate of universities so it is basically

the British educational system went through like a heavy revision in the late, I guess, late 90s, mid 90s. And a lot of what were individual universities kind of got united into like bigger schools. And UAL is one of them. One of them. It's Camberwell, Central Saint Martin, Chelsea College of Art, LCC, London College of Communications, LCC. A ton of others that I probably cannot remember. So it's... Well, I feel like there's one you should remember, the CCI.

We are not actually, we are an institute, not a college. So it's a, we are, UAL is doing this really experimental thing where they're creating these multidisciplinary institutes. It's actually a really revolutionary approach, and it's why I joined UAL. And CCI is this really beautiful, or the Creative Computing Institute, this really beautiful marriage between computation and arts. And I thought maybe for once in my life, I could do both these things at once and not have to fight an uphill battle in the snow, either with humanities people or science people. So it's, I love it. It's the best job in academia I've ever had. Is it teaching computer science to art people or teaching art to CS people? Well, I got really lucky that I met the dean really early in the process. Basically, the CCI was an approved idea that UAL was building when I met the dean. His name is Ben Stouffer.

And he brought me on almost, I guess it's like over two years ago now, and I helped craft the CCI. So I got to kind of control a lot of that. So I wrote a huge part of her undergrad and master's degrees in creative computing. And I really wrote them in a way that if you're a scientist coming, you can learn the art side. And if you're an artist, you can learn the science side. So I get both, which is is amazing and i am so happy about you've been building a curriculum from scratch i i've done five now if you can believe that so i've kind of become the curriculum builder i'm good apparently at crafting these weird

multi-interdisciplinary hybrid programs. So interdisciplinary to me, as an engineer who works on projects, means that it involves a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, me, and a higher level software engineer. Oh, dear. And marketing.

Occasionally marketing, product marketing. Every once in a while, a customer. Oh, no. Interdisciplinary in academia usually means crossing bodies of knowledge. So, like, for example, literature and computer science or art and design in computer science, right? So, like, it's entire bodies of knowledge, whereas, like, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering are both still in the engineering department. Isn't that, I mean, it took me four years to get through the engineering aspects I needed.

If I had done art, too, which I did minor in. Well done. It's all a lie. The premise is false, but you're joining them. Can you, can you still get a computer science job, a regular programming job after a CCI degree? Totally. So like, think about it, right? Let's talk about pottery. Let's go ahead and let's talk about how learning to paint and work with clay was radically improved. Like my, my skills in that space were radically improved by like my soldering ability, right? So basically like the same skills and the same kinds of thinking that you use in any discipline in college are relatively the same. And what CS really teaches is a way to think, right?

It's not a bunch of algorithms. The algorithms are going to change relatively. They're somewhat stable now, but like the languages I learned in college are completely not even taught anymore. They're not even on the table. So like every 10, 20 years, STEM just like, you know, it moves so fast

that it really tosses out like huge bodies of knowledge, particularly computer science, right? So, the most important thing you can learn from a CS education is computational thinking. It's how to break problems down into tiny pieces to kind of build a bigger system. And if that doesn't sound like understanding society, I'm not sure what else could. So really having that ability to look at society and think at like a very practical level about what you can do to impact change and bring about cultural shifts, to me, that's extremely powerful. And I think that what you can learn from the humanities side, which is a much deeper, richer set of thinking around things like non-representationalist ways of thinking or material engagement, these kinds of theories and approaches that exist in humanities, grounded theory, et cetera, et cetera. These teach a systemic, holistic way of looking at problems,

right? So they teach you a much different kind of way of thinking. So like, if you can then apply that kind of thinking back to CS, you get this really, really powerful like balance where I think that you're going to be able to be the engineer that can speak to the design team, can speak to the creative team, can speak to the artists or the artists. You can talk to your technology folks that you're working with or know exactly what the material of the technology you're working with is and what its actual potential is versus like, oh, I heard IoT is hot. Let's make a piece of art with IOT. Like when you're building and you know, this is an engineer, you discover as you, you know,

make things right. Like it's a process. So I actually think not only will you be able to, not only did I put in a CS in this degree, it's like make most of my undergrads cry, which happened this year, fortunately. And I, you know, I, it is a seriously skilled up course. Like it is not, it's not for the faint of heart, but I also put a lot of theory into it. And it's not light theory either. It's not like you're getting like half of either degree. It's like, you know, I came in and was like, so here's the history of computer science and where it sits within humanities research and here are all the problems. That was their like first introduction to the topic. And I think, you know, it was interesting for them to, as freshmen or first years, have to understand things like, you know, deconstruction, like their brains broke, you know, it was, it was really fun

to teach it. And I don't know, I, I happen to think that, that we're moving into a time where like engineering and computer science are not separate, separable entities anymore. It would be nice if they weren't. Yes. You said the history of CS and probably the problematic parts. But one of the things about art was that there was always an important aspect to the history of art in order to understand where we are in art. Absolutely. But that isn't true of most engineering. Engineering is always forward looking. Looking back isn't as important as it is with art because the continuity, it doesn't matter.

You build the future. You don't try to figure out why we moved from modern art to postmodern art. I would argue that that puts you in a massive disadvantage because not understanding, like I actually think that people like David Parisi, who are anthropologists and have looked at like computer science and the history of haptics, for example, really point to something that is endemic in CS,

which is exactly what you just mentioned. It's forward thinking, right? It's never about the past. So if we've been doing the same like and there's just such a a loss in cs at like because it's always like claiming that it's going to change the world right this technology claiming you're going to change the world without understanding that these claims are continue continuously made in STEM, right? Continually made in engineering and computer science. And they never are followed through on. We are losing something in our understanding.

I mean, some things have gotten better. But they're not usually coming from people who are claiming to change the world, right? It's like Facebook's coming out and saying, well, we're going to allow information freedom, which is going to lead to a utopia. And whoops, that didn't exactly work out that way. You know, I've been in companies where it's like, oh, this network switch we're building is going to liberate, you know, repressed societies. Like it's a network switch. Exactly. And that, not that technology has not radically transformed the planet, but it's been doing that since we were napping with like stone. Right?

And understanding how humans learn and make meaning through that process is the fundamental root of both art and science. And I really believe that we have to marry our thought in a way that's more holistic if we want to deal with things like the future of predictive policing, where people, we just had a situation where they arrested a man, I think it was in Detroit, for a robbery when literally there was video footage of him on Instagram when they said he robbed something, right? And he wasn't, there was no evidence. It was just they had run, the city of Detroit is now running CCTV footage that it's getting in crimes against the entire database of photos it has, including DMV. Which is, isn't just, what is that? Right?

Like, how is that legal? And they're arresting people based on these kinds of things. And these are problems that humanities people are particularly well-suited to be like, nope, because it seems like CS people are so blind to the social implications that the technology they make has, like the real implications, not the pretend implications of this is going to liberate, you know, repressed people. No, no, it's not. It's actually going to cause more problems, right? We've got to like change how we approach stuff. We can no longer like barrel down it from one perspective or another. One of the classes in your curriculum

is computational ethics. Yes, it's true. I definitely added as many books on computational ethics and the ethics of what we make as I could when I was working on the curriculum because this is a problematic space, right? Computation is not just, it is no longer just bound to some abstract post-positive space where we're looking at mathematics on paper right like it's it's having ethical implications like twitter doing something really minor to its ui can all of a sudden like cause crazy problems in the world. And understanding like ethically,

like what you're making and your responsibility in that, why you personally are accountable for the technology you create. In my opinion, that should just be basic. They should give that to every engineer in computer science day A. If somebody's interested in learning more about this, because that is kind of a hard responsibility. It's not just me who creates this. And when I'm creating it, I believe it is going to be used for its intended purpose of, of unrepressing people. Or being, you know, a smartwatch. Or being a smartwatch, not a nanny cam. How do I learn to start asking the right questions?

Are there books you'd recommend? Oh, there's so many books. The first thing I would recommend is if you're already working in computing or you're working in engineering, there are books like Algorithms of Math Destruction, which are great and fantastic. I know, right? I think that I've got the name of that. I think I have the name of that, right? There's books like, I'm just looking at my shelf right now, Brain. So many of my books are eBooks. Why do you have to ask this right now?

I would encourage you to just generally look at there's another one that just came out on MIT Press. I think it's called We Are Not Users. There's an entire space in design research and computer science now where people are looking at ethics and they're looking at how ethics could be used and thought about in computing and you know i don't know if i trust a word that falls out of jack dorsey's mouth but he was on the Times this last week. And one of the things that I did appreciate was the way he was becoming more aware of the subtle changes that Twitter's UI was,

you know, that they were making to Twitter's UI and the implications those changes were having in culture. And I think that's an awakening awakening like a lot of people in tech need to start having right because society like twitter and facebook are now starting to be held accountable for these choices they've made that they that they thought without any like deeper like without any game theorists involved without anyone who does like psychological research. Like they just, they're not including people who might be able to tell them ahead of time, hey, that thing you're making, right? That thing you're making might cause problems and here's why. And if you're not bringing those people into the conversation, I'm not exactly sure like how you can expect to catch that.

So I would say that the first thing that you could do is have conversations, go to conferences. There's a tactical, let me think. Oh my goodness, my brain is not pulling out the conference names like, but I think that they're definitely design and user experience conferences. Every now and again, talks pop up at CCC, which are really good on this topic, but they're not the norm. Oh God. If I remember the name of the conference that I'm thinking of,

that's specifically about this, I'll send it to you, but my brain is trying to point right now. Yeah, I will. But there's definitely groups of people. I think particularly if you look at some of the research that there's a really interesting project called Feminist Internet. There are actually two. One is women in the global south looking at the impacts that technology is having in their culture.

Follow them. They have feministinternet.org, and they're absolutely worth paying attention to. Another one is a feminist internet project that's come out of CCI, which is kind of aligned in the same direction, which is also, it's the.com version, I think. It's worth looking at. One is the.com, one is the.org. The.org, I think, is much, much larger, and they've been around a lot longer. They've got the feminist principles of the internet, and they've been running conferences and stuff that look incredibly, incredibly great. But finding people who are living and working in communities that maybe you're not part of would be the first place, I think, to look for those kinds of conversations, right? And just bringing in other people,

other perspectives, other points of view. If like you're in an engineering room and everybody is from the exact same background, you're not going to see the problems that other, you need to build something, right? You have an idea and you need to build it. And you're in a big hurry and people are throwing money at you or not throwing money at you. And that's a different problem. But, uh, and so you hire the team that you need, which is probably some engineers and you get far along and pretty soon you have something that's out there and maybe it's a Facebook, maybe it's Google, whatever. And you built this cool thing and now billions of people are using it. And that's a completely different prospect than a small product or, and like you're saying, a tiny UI change has massive implications. It really feels like you have to have this kind of thing from the very beginning, but it's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard for people to do that. It seems like,

or they don't want to, or they don't think about it, or there's no money for it. Or they can't afford it. Yeah, I mean, all of these things, right? So, like, it's very real. I know that those... I've worked in corporate for a long period of time before I came to academia, and I can just imagine, like, I think that design agencies and advertising agencies have gotten a little more woke since I left in, like, 2012, I think. But I can't even imagine how hard I would have been laughed out of the room if I would have proposed that we brought someone in to look at these concerns. Just not a concern, right? They just do not care. And I think that, you know, and it's not that they don't care because they're unthoughtful people or they're bad people. None of that's true. It's just the

market, the demands, like you're saying, the demands of the market, this kind of capitalistic approach to product, product, product. It has like a weight that stresses a lot of people out and puts a lot of strain on our society. And technology hitting capitalism right now is starting to, like, it's starting to pull in really weird ways. And I think we're going to see what capital, if capitalism can survive democracy right now, right? Like democracy and capitalism are starting to just hit each other and like they're punching each other and you're seeing it with, you know, all of these technological tools getting used by foreign states or foreign governments to do things like tamper in elections or manipulate politics. It's literally, I think, one of the most fascinating times to be working in this space, right?

And I hope that the people that we're creating at CCI will be able to be that engineer in the room that raises their hand and goes, hey, wait a minute. Yeah, that makes sense. Back to feminist principles of the internet, looking at the.org, I guess the question I can ask that Chris can't is, why do I care? I mean, yes, I care, but does it all have to be about or, or can't I just be an engineer? You can be that, that is an absolutely valid way to move through the world. No one's going to stop you certainly. Um, but if you are in a part of the world where people are just doing that and you're paying the cost for it, right? You're going to start organizing and you're going to start bringing about change. And I think that that is now a big part of society. And I really do think that the days of us being able to just say, I want a six-figure job,

I'm going to go work at Google, might be, you know, your friends, it's ethical choices you're making, right? You're going to go build AI that can be used in extremely harmful ways. Are you okay with that? You know, are you okay optimizing YouTube's algorithm? And if you are, that's okay. That's an ethics choice you've made and the world's full of people from every perspective. But I think there's about to be a pretty big backlash in the world from people who have really suffered as a result of those algorithms and engineering products really wreaking havoc in their environment, in their climate, on their bodies, in their societies. What does this have to do with creativity?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think we're going to need some really deep creative thinking to get ourselves out of this problem as a society. And I think the way you learn to think with creativity is not necessarily problem solution problem solution problem solution but it's a much slower kind of intuitive embodied knowledge of a terrain right and you're able to make these like really disparate cross connections between disciplines, between ways of thinking, between ways of living in the world. And I think the artists are going to begin to help build some of those. I hope artists are going to start building some of those common points where people can come together to facilitate either sharing experiences or having conversations around these kinds of topics. So talking about art, you have,

and changing subjects entirely, you have a new art installation, Forest Daydream. Can you tell us about it? Yeah, totally. I love Forest Daydream. I think it is, we did it pre-COVID, but I feel like it's time and what it's saying is really relevant now. It is a project which is a virtual environment that was created in Blender 3D, and it is a low-poly video game world. Then what we did is we took it and we physically constructed that world in real space. It's like a low-poly forest, a low-poly hut, low-poly clouds. We modeled all of that with physical materials. And then we brought people into the physical space, which gives them a moment, like when you see it, it very much looks like you've just stepped into a video game, right? It looks like you've just stepped into a virtual world,

but you're seeing it in a very physical embodied way. And the reaction that you have to that is already going to kind of set you outside what you're expecting. And then what we did is we worked to build this ecology in a way that really began to throw into relief some of the questions that were dealing with climate change. For the sound, we worked with a sound artist called Ben Kelly, who went to the Amazon and he's been working with a local community in the Amazon to kind of help them basically stop their environment from becoming encroached upon and endangered. And he has been recording sounds

in that environment and learning about that environment and the people who live in that culture. And he brought those sounds into Forest Daydream. So, the sounds themselves immediately, they hit. Like, I've never made something that people spent hours in before. We had people spend hours inside Forest Daydream. They didn't stay for five minutes. They didn't stay for 10 minutes. They didn't look at it and keep moving. They sat down and laid in the floor, which for me is exactly the kind of engagement that I'm looking for. It profoundly calming environment would be the way to put it.

It triggers some part of your brain that is used to responding to being in nature. And it was a really interesting and amazing experience for me as a creator to make something that could make people reflect on the virtual worlds that we're gaining and the physical worlds we're losing all at once. And it was the first time I've ever made something that people didn't want to see leave a gallery. They didn't want to tear it down. They wanted to stay. We had to throw people out at the end of the day. You know, I've never had that before.

And we had people get upset they had to leave, which that's always what I'm hoping for as an artist, right? But this is a big engineering project. I mean, this is big physically, but it's also lights controlled and audio control and putting it all together so that it's an experience in one place. What kind of engineering challenges do you see with that? Oh my God, there were so many. There are multiple games embedded in the space as well. So there's like, you can either play it in like an open-ended way or there are like literal games that you can run around and play. And we built the entire thing is controlled wirelessly. There are, if I count at least 15 microcontrollers

networked into the space. There is OSC controlling a DMX lighting. So the virtual world exists, right? And everything is happening in there, but it's also causing changes in the physical space and they're networked together, right? And that was its own problem with getting Unity to behave. And it was a software and embedded engineering task that was really great because

like I spent an entire term teaching students how to have the skills to build something like this at the master's degree level. Right. And then the next term they had to directly employ those skills to make something like this. And in this case, they definitely contributed to not only the creation of the work, the building of the work, some of the ideas in the project itself. And then they went on to build their own environments that were going to be in the

physical world, but actually ended up being multiplayer participatory environments in the virtual world because of COVID-19. So it was a process, so much code, so many macro controllers, so many moments of just like the fabricating it, right, was a lot. Because if you look at it, you can see it's like a whole bunch of wood, a whole bunch of pipes, a whole bunch of paper, tons of acrylic. So many LEDs. So many LEDs. So many LEDs. Some of the pieces are really cool, like tessellation kind of problems too, right? So you have the clouds and the trees, I guess.

The little things are big folded up dodecahedra. Yep. Yep. That's what Adele Lynn brought to the project adele lynn originally designed the clouds that hang in the sky and then the cci students collaborated made some of their own clouds which was fun um and adele just really when we started talking about the project back and i think it was like 2015. She just brought this really great architectural understanding because Adele was working in an architectural job at the time. And I could have never fabbed the way she did at that point in time.

She taught me so much in terms of like, you know, here's a jigsaw and now we're going to cut a thousand pipes to exactly the right lengths of a geodesic dome. And it was just this like level of dirty I had never been before. As a, particularly as a software person who normally, you know, puts like one little microcontroller together maximum, you know, My engineering projects have been like small scale. Adele's like, so now we're going to build massive things. And it was really fantastic to work with her. And just to have her in my life, she's a wonderful person. But yeah, just the scale at which I started working before and after Adele, huge difference.

And after Adele, I've made other very large projects that I would have never been able to make had she not gotten me over this like absolute blind terror of building things that were that big. So yeah, Adele solved those problems. There's a lot of group thinking there. Robin Baumgarten, who made Line Wobbler, did all the LEDs, for example. Federico Fasce worked on some of the game design. You know, Ben Kelly was a sound artist and literally 15 students, all of them geniuses and amazing. And then Matt Jarvis, who helped design the, he's done just countless numbers of exhibitions in the past and worked for galleries. And he designed the lighting, like he lit the thing to just be so perfect.

It was, I've never had lighting that good. So super thankful to Matt for that. But yeah, it was a, it was a hive project. I could have never built that alone. There is absolutely no way. And I guess that's what I've learned building things that big that like it can't just be one person. You might be a creative director in it, right? It might be like a vision that you're building or working towards, but there's no way you're solving all those problems yourself. There is absolutely no way. And that's another thing about learning the humanity side and the creative side is that when you start building larger projects, those skills become more important than actual technical skills. Yeah. Yeah. They really, they really do. And like Adele and I have, the only way to say it, is gloriously failed with Forest Daydream multiple times before.

It was another project called Night Games. Adele and I, we literally did not get right, I think three times before we got it right. And that iterative process, really learn from games and the creation of games where you build a thing, it doesn't work. You learn why. Because you speak to players, you take notes, you kind of build like an HCI understanding or human-computer interaction understanding of what the design solutions could potentially be there like how you saw that like i think we started the first time forest daydream showed uh was in a maze and i think 2015 it was called night games and lord it was trash it was so bad like we screwed up so bad. I've never, you know, there, there are ways to say ducked up, but we ducked up royally. We ducked up in ways that like, I can't even like now that I have more engineering

knowledge behind me and I've built so many things I would, we literally used a different micro controller for every piece of the project. Not even. They were not all the same. It was like SparkCore over here, Arduino over there, LilyPad over there. Like, none of the same controllers, right? None of that we used Wi-Fi, we used Bluetooth, we used radio. Madness. Sheer madness. It did not work. It worked some of the hours of the day we'll put it that way badly so it's really that like you know spirit that you have like i was in design for years

before coming to cci and just like ah i screwed that. Now let's understand why. And let's fix it. Let's make something new. That seems like applying the engineering side. Both. It's identifying, oh, if we want to make this easier to build, we need to settle on a microprocessor or two, a communication method or two, and standardize them. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lesson. That's a lesson. That's a lesson.

But I think my thinking now, having spent the first two years of my humanities degree or my education as a computer science major, flipping to humanities, then having done an engineering degree, now having almost finished a computer science PhD,

I don't even know where I, and then having worked as a, you know, designer and creative director, I don't even know where I, and then having worked as a, you know, designer and creative director, I don't even know where my thinking comes from anymore. It's like somewhere in both those spaces, equally married and fluid between them. Moving from physical games back to video games. Video games, that's the word people use. You have a class that's online. Could you tell us about that? Yes, I'm super excited. One of the things that CCI has been doing is working with FutureLearn in this project called, to work on this like project between the University of, I think it's Lancaster, don't hold me to it. And it's a couple other schools, but they've done this Institute of

Coding, which is a really interesting project. And Code Liberation made a class for it. But there's also other classes. If you're interested looking at the Institute of Coding on FutureLearn, there are just tons of classes in creative technologies that you can follow. But the Code Liberation one is about creating video games. And it's particularly about creating expressive video games. And I'm not here for people who want to learn how to make a AAA shooter. I'm just not. I don't have time for it. Life is too short. There are a thousand YouTube videos you can watch to get those skills, but there are not a lot of YouTube videos that you can watch to teach you how to think about games and how to make thoughtful, critical games about your own personal experience. So that's what this class is about. And it uses methodologies from humanities and coding methodologies. So there are a ton of

programming units as well as comparative studies that you're asked to do between different games. What does expressive mean here? Expressive means you and your personal expression, your story, your way of seeing and being in the world. Okay. Why would anybody else want to play a video game of being me? I'm not John Malkovich. You're not John Malkovich, but you might have something really interesting to say. You might be a woman struggling with depression, and you might want to tell that story. You might be a refugee, and you might want to explain other people to connect to and other voices that you can have conversations with as well. I think those are just great games to play. started seeing some of these sorts of things on steam maybe five or ten years ago with uh i'm forgetting a couple of them i played but um her story i think was one and her story yeah it's a good one going home maybe or is it called going home gone gone home yeah um and i remember reading

a lot about criticism from traditional gamers you know the people who play the shooters things saying oh this is blah blah boring this isn't what games are supposed to be or whatever. And I found them really compelling. The ones I played, I'm just, I'm flummoxed by that criticism because we have the entire cinema industry is devoted to this very thing, right? Telling people's stories and going through narrative structures to express, you know, events and things, not necessarily just a comedy or whatever, but there's lots of very critically acclaimed movies that people claim to like that are very difficult to watch. So it strikes me as very strange that, oh, you can't do that in video games for some reason. Yeah, it's interesting because the history of indie

games is deep and old, and it's been there all along. But I think what happened, particularly with games, is that a narrative began being crafted around the time that consoles were being sold to the home market of who played them and why you would play them. And that narrative is the narrative that eventually created the gamer identity. And that identity is very much locked to a very specific set of titles and a very specific way to play video games. And in that world, there are things which are good and there are things which are not good. And gamers have very strong opinions about that. And then come along all these indies who've never really gone away. They've been there since Atari days.

But all of a sudden, the internet and conferences start bringing them together, right? So they're no longer a cassette club in the UK and a Usenet in some weird backwater of the internet. They're at GDC. They're at these big, big triple A conferences. And they're becoming a big part of the market. And mobile really like, mobile was the moment. Flash was cool. And there was like tons of amazing Flash games that got made. But mobile really changed things. Because all of a sudden now you don't need to be licensed by a console to put out a title that reaches millions. And I think that casual games and,

you know, indie games really, they, they shocked the games market. The games market just was like, what is this? You've got people like Zach Gage making games, which are making tons of money.

How is that? How is this game a number one game? How is that happening? Like they, they had spent so much money and time building a pipeline for their, their releases that all took a specific journey and arc. And particularly like, if you look at the stories they were telling,

they were telling stories almost as an aside, as a marketing gimmick. Like, they were something that they, very few of them were actually, like, spending a huge amount of time. If you look at, like, a four-act structure from Dramatology, My brain. But from drama, right? There's like, particularly amount, there are particular amounts of time that would get spent on each movement in that. Video games particularly focused on like, what would normally just be the conflict, right? They're not focused on the buildup or the resolution so much. They're really focused on building conflict. Ah, cut scenes are boring. Cut scenes are boring.

People skip through dialogue, right? Nobody wants that. And I think that that had become a way of thinking in games, right? And when these games that come along that are doing something really, really different, which is telling stories and really acting like indie films, right? Let's just be honest. They're acting like indie cinema. Gamers are like, what is this? And why is this? And why did I just get conned into buying this?

Because they were showing up on platforms and in places where they weren't expecting to see that kind of work, if that makes sense it totally does um what about animal crossing does that count in your i mean that's not exactly expressive but it's not a first person shooter unless you're doing it really wrong are there guns in that can you even get a gun in animal crossing the worst thing you can do is hit your villagers with your net and they get mad. It's just good to know. I didn't know you could do that.

I've got a really cranky villager. I'm going to do that. But anyway, I think that no. No advocating for hitting villagers with nets. The Animal Crossing falls into, it is interesting because like Nintendo, they have always, always made two things simultaneously, which baffle my brain. They have made the most rapey, most terrifying, most misogynistic video game ads you've ever seen. Like, you're like, what is this trash? And simultaneously, they've made the most family friendly, like, innocent, wholesome content you've ever seen. And I don't understand how both those things happen at the same company. But they do. And Nintendo has had a long history of making games which have a very different pacing to them right have a very

different audience and animal crossing is part of a series of games that just cashed into a massive nostalgia chain and i think it's time has was was And the Switch was the perfect platform for it. And COVID helped too. COVID helped. Well, Animal Crossing was set to be massive no matter what. It was going to be the indie games darling. There was no other way around it. Nostalgia alone would have carried it 80% of the way, right? But COVID, really, gamers being trapped in their houses alone with a Switch, you know,

games culture tips entire markets. If you want to know where something's going to happen first, just look at video games because they're trend tippers all the time. And I was not surprised at all when, you know, I'm begging my niece to get Animal Crossing. I'm like, please get Animal Crossing. And she's like, what's Animal Crossing? You know, a month later, she's got the most pimped out island I've ever seen, you know, and I, I can't, I can't keep up with a, uh, a nine-year-old or a 10-year-old in a console um so it is really interesting to see how quickly i think that tipping went it usually takes a bit longer and it happened

instantaneously with animal crossing and all of a sudden you had like snl making entire skits about animal crossing that was a moment right Yeah, our local aquarium loves Animal Crossing and does Twitch sessions with entomologists so they can talk about bugs in the museum. It's just ridiculous. Well, I think what happened is a bunch of video games. So, when Animal Crossing came out, it was conference season. and it was conference season for all the video game companies right so all the video gamers were primed like the conference circuit generally for indies goes all right indicate gdc e3 right it just goes bam bam bam bam now play this amazing berlin like there's the nordic games um conference happens too and they

all like line up so like if you're a games person basically from december to like end of beginning of may you do nothing but sweat bullets right it's that's your like hot time of the year where you're like on an airplane and living in hotel rooms. And what happened is Animal Crossing dropped in the middle of that. And games conferences like Now Play This just shifted to start happening in Animal Crossing. And I think that like led to exactly what you're talking about. I have one more question from a listener. Adam asked for ideas and techniques for navigating cultural differences in regards to technology. I bet that's a whole class, but do you have any advice? That's not even, that is, that's an entire degree. Yeah, that really is. We have a degree starting at CCI in internet equalities, I would recommend taking it.

That degree addresses exactly that. And I think that that's the field that people who do what's called EDI or, you know, diversity work within companies are beginning to like try and get their heads around. So they can start having those conversations in places like game studios or places like engineering companies. I would say that if it's just you and you're looking for a place to start, I would have conversations with people around you and I would start looking at some of the bodies of research around. There's a new one that came out. I think it's called Radical Design. I'm it's called radical design. I'm trying to remember the name of the book, but like start looking at some of the MIT press books, start looking at some of the books that are coming out that are doing that. There's

podcasts that are about that. Uh, there's whole bodies of knowledge. And I think that jumping into some of that would be a way to pay attention to that space and just reading articles by or reading perspectives by people in different spaces because something that might seem really minor to you might be radically toxic to somebody else right um and we want to try and avoid doing harm right yeah it Yeah. That's a goal. That's a goal. I think the book is called Critical Play. Oh, that's a great book.

Critical Play, Radical Game Design? Yeah. Is that Marie Flanagan's book or Mary Flanagan's book? Let's see. Yes, it is. Mary Flanagan. Yeah. Yeah, she's cool.

And you should totally check her books out her books are like uh that's it's very that book is very different it starts to hit that but that's not what that book is about um starts having that conversation but i feel like the conversation has moved a bit since that book was released okay good book though good Well, if there are other books you'd like to put on the show notes, let me know. I know we kind of sprung some of these questions on you. In the meantime, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Phoenix? Man, thoughts I want to leave you with. More thoughts. More thoughts. You're allowed to say no. Really? Right now? I mean, be kind to yourself. Please be kind to yourself. This year has been the worst year. How do you do that exactly? I'm not very good at it.

Yeah, no one is. That's the thing. And I was just telling someone else today that all COVID-19 has done has made us all busier, all more stressed out. And like, we all need a vacation right now from ourselves. It is. And I, a lot of people are in the U S right now, I think in real financial dire straits, like maybe bake yourself a cake. Like, I don't know, like take a night, like go to find a community yoga class in a park. You can't do that right now. Or find a community yoga class online. This is so bad. Anyway, the world is a dumpster fire right now. So I would avoid social media for a day.

You know, anything you can do just to try and take the stress off a bit. Like, that's my final notes. Big hugs to everybody. High five. We are not dead yet our guest has been phoenix perry educator artist and engineer find her work at phoenixperry.com or on twitter at phoenix perry thanks phoenix thanks thank Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting, and thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm.

Now, a quote to leave you with from Audre Lorde. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.