The Press Box - Ep. 214: 'Achievement Oriented' on 'Final Fantasy XV' and VR's Past, Present, and Future

Episode Date: November 29, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk to their colleague Justin Charity about Square Enix's newly released role-playing game, 'Final Fantasy XV' (1:34). Then, they bring on Blake J. Harris, author of 'Console Wars' and the forthcoming 'The History of the Future,' to discuss the current state and mystifying future of virtual-reality hardware and software (19:50). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seat Geek, the presenting sponsor for my podcast, as well as the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling tickets for sports and music. With just two taps on your phone, you can instantly buy Seekkeek tickets to an event and you can enter that event just using your phone. No paper tickets. Drop your old ticket app. Use one that's built for 2016. Download the free Seatgeek app or go to Seekgeek.com. Oh, and welcome to Achievement.

oriented channel 33's gaming podcast my name is ben linberg and i'm a writer for the ringer dot com and on the other line i'd normally make a final fantasy reference here but i can't because he's never played a final fantasy game before it's jason concepcion well let me hold on i've played i've played final fantasy games before but i've just always found them bizarre which is a great leaping off point because final fantasy 15 is bizarre and we have just in charity here the ringer's just charity to help us kind of process Final Fantasy 15. Exactly.

Yeah, we need some help here because I've played a few Final Fantasy games, but I definitely don't consider myself a connoisseur. So we are using a special summon to bring in Justin Charity also of the ringer.

Video game history includes every Final Fantasy from the first one through 10-2. Justin, hello. Hey, how's it going, guys? It's good to talk to you. And I'd say, that as if you didn't just leave my apartment after a day long Final Fantasy Marathon. But still,

good to have you on. So I should say that later on in this episode, Jason and I are going to talk about virtual reality with Blake J. Harris, the author of Consul Wars and the forthcoming, The History of the Future, his book about VR. But first we're going to get into Final Fantasy. And next week, we're going to be talking about The Last Guardian. So this is the first of back-to-back episodes of this podcast featuring games that have been in development for a decade or so. And of course, Final Fantasy 15 started life as a spinoff to Final Fantasy 13 in 2006, which is a while ago. What were you guys doing in 2006? Actually, Justin, I know what you were doing because we were dorm mates in our freshman year of college in 2006. Jason, what were you up to in 2006?

Oh my God. I think I was working catering at that time, I believe. And now you have a video game podcast. So you've come a long way. Yeah, I was playing a lot of Halo, I believe, at that time. So you can imagine how much this game has changed in the decade that has been in development. And there have been changes in scale and story and the entire development team has turned over just about. And one would imagine that there might be a sort of disjointed nature to a game that comes out of that process. But I'll just, I'll start with you, Jason. I guess, you know, this world has an enchanted wall and demons that are gaining. in power and an early cutscene that looks like it's set in the sept of Baylor. So in some ways, you must have felt right at home.

On the other hand, you are fairly new to the series. So how bewildered were you by this game? As I understand it, this is a game. And I was playing for several hours last night. And in fact, I am playing right now. As I understand that this is a game about a young royal named Prince Noctus and his J-pop band. They're heading to a wedding and they break down in the desert. And then weird stuff happens.

It's pretty bewildering. From a purely mechanical level, it's fairly standard, right? You go on missions, you go on side missions. There's a fairly fluid combat system that's very new compared to what I've experienced in my cursory experiences with Final Fantasy in the past. But the story is crazy. Like, it's crazy. I don't even know how to explain it.

And the music is great. A lot of it is, imagine, like, an 80s sex scene with, like, candles blowing out and, like, the drapes kind of, like, blowing in the breeze. It's just so weird, man. It's weird. I mean, what do you think of it? Yeah, well, I agree that it's weird. I should say that we got our review codes only a day before the release date, which isn't nearly enough time to see everything this game has to offer, even if you literally play all day, which we did. But based on what we've seen, I would think this is a pretty good introduction to the series or a good place to start because like most Final Fantasy games, it's different from all the other Final Fantasy games.

But this time it feels especially different. So Justin, as the most experienced Final Fantasy player on this podcast, I mean, battle system wise and world wise and character wise, was this the most different from other Final Fantasy's Final Fantasy game you've played? Well, sure, but I say that with the qualification that, you know, I sort of hopped off of Final Fantasy around, like basically after X2 when they sort of entered the whole online phase, right? Right. So to me, I mean, a lot of the game feels very different from where I left off. It's funny, like, Jason described this story as Noctus and his J-pop band. I think it's probably, I find this story very hard, at least at this point, to explain. as far as we've gotten into it.

But I think a better way to maybe understand it and to sell it to people is, you know, Final Fantasy 15 is a game about male friendship. Yeah. And HBO has Girls and Insecure, and Square Enix has Final Fantasy 15. That's sort of how I've had to wrap my head around it. Because it does just seem like a game that it lets you do a lot.

It sort of gives you a lot to do almost in a sense of like a grand theft auto game where people sort of just interrupt you and give you like little side quest to go on. And it feels very different from a game like Final Fantasy 10, which I think that was the point at which Final Fantasy became so enraptured with like the cinematic abilities of like the later PlayStation consoles that it was so linear. And this is not linear at all. Right. At least for the first half of the game, which is what we've played, I've read that in the second half it sort of has a dramatic shift in tone and play style, which is kind of consistent. with the inconsistency of the game so far.

I mean, it feels cobbled together, which is not necessarily an insult. It's just a kind of amalgamation of different types of games. I mean, like the music will segue from Florence and the Machine singing Stand By Me to the Classic orchestral score. And then, you know, you'll go from your standard RPG fetch quest to these giant God of War style set pieces. So I have no idea what's coming next. at any point in this game, which is, I think, mostly a good thing. I just have no idea what's around the next corner in this world. Yeah, I mean, it's like you can fight monsters and then go camping and ask your friend to, like, make eggs.

Yeah. And then you kind of flip through photographs that your other friend took at the campfire and pick ones you like and maybe you go fishing. Like, this game is wild. It's an aggressively millennial game. There's randomly, like, foody elements to it. There's selfies. It's just an aggressively... Yeah, and with any giant RPG, there's that sort of period of disorientation when you first start out.

And there's a big map, and there are menus and skill trees and a million new names to know. And then you start getting into battles. And, you know, there's a shower of particle effects everywhere. and you can switch weapons and cast spells that work kind of like grenades in this game. And each of the supporting characters has special attacks. And you get dropped items. And I don't know whether to sell them or save them. And there's warping and blocking and parrying.

So there's so much to it. And I kind of felt, Justin, that I just sort of started to have a sense of what I was doing at the end of our first day playing this game. And really up until that point, I was kind of feeling my way and getting accustomed to the way that. this game works or the many ways that this game works? Yeah, it's weird because I'm used to, with Final Fantasy games, I'm used to being initially seduced by the story and the characters. And this is definitely an instance where when I finally let myself go and let the game sort of have me, it was more in the sense that like I felt like the game is difficult and I felt like I was finally getting a hold of the mechanics of it. And I feel like the mechanics and

the battle mechanics are sort of the more fascinating and engrossing on the other game. than the story or even this sort of central friendship at the heart of it. Yeah, I should say past Final Fantasy games that I've experienced, it's more of a hard turn-based structure where, you know, the enemy does something and then you get to choose to do something in response, and then you kind of have to wait for it to play out like Civ, for example. This is much more fluid. They've even configured the combat system completely.

It's much more on the fly. It's still a three button kind of structure with Dodge attack and something else. But it's very much in real time. How much of an adjustment was that for you coming from the other Final Fantasy games? You know, I don't, it's weird. I think that the pace of it is great. I think it's mostly difficult because it's not just that it's real time as opposed to turn base, but it's because the fact that you really have to master coordinated attacks among all of your people

at the same time in real time. And that's where it gets tricky and there's a lot of fingers tripping over fingers trying to coordinate like three different people's attacks while you're trying to coordinate potions and stuff like that. Again, it's super tricky, but because it feels so unfamiliar and honestly because it feels so much more lively than the mash button turn-based system

that I think, you know, after a point, Final Fantasy had different versions of that system. But like, it got old after a couple of days. decades. I will say that. Yeah, I think now that I'm acclimating to it, I'm going to like the battle system a lot. It's kind of kingdom heartsy, which makes sense because this game started out being made by the creator of the Kingdom Heart series or the original lead on the Kingdom Hearts series. But obviously, it's deeper than that. And any sort of transition seamlessly from the open world to the battle encounters, there's no kind of awkward transition sort of cutscene between one

and the next. So it's good. I like it a lot. And I think that as I progress in the game, I will probably come to appreciate it more than the typical turn-based system. But I agree with both of you that I am very disoriented by the story at this point. I mean, it's the basic good versus evil structure, but the narrative feels a little disjointed and maybe it'll come together over time. And maybe it would all become clearer if we watch the companion anime series and feature-length films that Squy Nix has produced. But yeah, I mean, the focus is on this core foursome. And as far as I know, you don't switch out anyone in your party throughout the entire game. It's just these four characters. So you really get to know them maybe even better than you like. So if you like them, then you'll

probably enjoy the game story, even though the sort of larger structure is, is a little confusing at times. I say J-pop band, because it really is like the, it's the perfect. The hair. It's the balance of characters. You know, there's the prince who's this kind of almost like a doughish character with like the rock hair. And then there's the muscular guy. And then there's the kind of very suave guy with the glasses. And then there's the other kind of like almost like rascal character.

I mean, it's this is, I can't get over how crazy this game. What is going on with the accents in this game? That's what Justin's right. Yeah. Can we talk? Okay, let's count the accents. Ignis, Ignis, who is the one with the glasses, the sort of suave glasses, smart guy.

He has a British accent. Yes. There's a random journalist in the game who has, like, a very stern. Dino, Dino. Dino. There's an Australian accent. They're weird, yeah, it's weird, too, because the accents are all specifically oriented toward playing up a type.

So, you know, there's the mechanic, Cindy, who has a, a very twanggy hillbilly accent. It was very Britney Spears, circa like 2000. Right. I was just going to say, Dino, I found his,

uh, his journalistic ethics to be quite suspect. For sure, for sure. What is he journalist during the day? Tueller by night. We all. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like this is one of those games where you can probably end up making a long list of things that don't work. But, because it's such an enormous game, there will be an even longer list of things that do work. I mean, you spend a lot of time in a car, which seems like it's going to be cooler than it is. It's this sort of sports car, and you drive from one place to the next in this open world. But then when you actually get in the car, you realize that it's kind of an on rails vehicle almost.

You can just press the accelerator and it will drive for you. So I've taken to fast traveling, even though you miss out on some dialogue on the. the way. But yeah, I mean, from what I understand, there are like stealth sections later and horror sections later. So it's just this mix of genres that I don't think we've really seen in a Final Fantasy game before or maybe any game of this type. And it's ambitious, that's for sure. How could, Justin, how connected is the lore to the wider Final Fantasy series? Well, you know, it's, it's weird because the story is so start and stop that there are moments where I feel like,

I mean, it's definitely an independent story. But the fact that, for instance, you're fighting these Magitech soldiers from this sort of evil empire, that's very much the story of Final Fantasy 6, right? And like the term Magic Tech is a big part of the evil force of Final Fantasy 6. But otherwise, it's sort of the stuff that, you know, the character names or the monster names that you see throughout the game, they're sort of just nominally intertwined with the general lore of Final Fantasy any more than they seem indebted to or connected to any other particular Final Fantasy game. How long did you play the game?

I heard you were at Ben's essentially for like 12 hours yesterday. Well, I was, we were trading off like doing work. I mean, this is all work, right? Yeah. Yeah. I got a few hours in of playtime while also writing another story. And yeah, it's weird. Like, I think Ben said this already, but I really got into the game around.

I want to say like the last couple of hours we were playing, which coincidentally were the most frustrating, like, we had to start over again hours. We were trapped in this ice cave, fighting these impossible battles where, you know, as much as we kept dying over and over again, I sort of appreciated how smooth and collaborative and just cool the battle system is compared to the old turn base system. And that's enough to keep me wanting to play the game for dozens more hours, I guess. Yeah, I think there's more planning to the battles or to the dungeons maybe than there has been in the past. And that not only do you have to stock up on all the usual potions and elixirs and Phoenix Downs before you leave, but you can't level up until you get to a haven, some sort of rest place where you spend the night. So that all happens at once kind of after you're out of the battle. and you have to plan because you mentioned cooking eggs, you have to have one member of your party sort of cook for you,

and that improves your stats. That messed me up early, by the way, because I was like, I tried to go to a mission and it was nighttime, and they're like, no, no, no, we have to go, we have to go rest. Yes, they're very big on getting there eight hours. And if you try to go somewhere at night, as Justin and I found out, you will run into unbeatable bad guys. So, bad idea.

But, yeah, I mean, I'm very intrigued by it all so far. It seems more ambitious than many of the recent Final Fantasies and sprawling. And I'm sure there will be a lot in it that people find frustrating, but probably also a lot that people find very memorable. Well, yeah, I do want to say that. Like, I think one thing, you know, in terms of how, I guess, strange the game is, is that I was actually thinking about this before we started playing. Is that, like, if you go back and think about Final Fantasy 7,

You spend tons of time in that game in, like, a casino and in Don Corneo's weird sex palace and that weird mission where Cloud is in drag. And, you know, to me, that's like one of the things I like about, I think, the better of Final Fantasy games is that, you know, there are these big, ambitious dramas that inexplicably have these weird slapstick elements to them. And, I mean, this definitely, this game definitely has that. So I'm happy. I'm happy, man.

Yeah, and I think this might change later in the game, but at least to the point we've played, there's kind of, even though like very serious and tragic events are occurring, like most of the time you're just sort of road tripping. Yeah. So, you know, like something terrible will happen. And then for the next few hours, you'll just have this lighthearted romp through the countryside and everyone bantering as if nothing happened. And so there's kind of an inconsistency there. But on the other hand, I like that it's more. lighthearted and doesn't seem to take itself too seriously yet. So I will take the kind of narrative shifts over just having an all-serious sort of final fantasy. Oh yeah, don't worry. There are chocobos.

They are chocobos. They are chocobos. I mean, I do enjoy the fact that it's like this world beset by magic demons and encroaching evil forces. But also like there's a lively shopping area by the by the waterfront with a restaurant. and people just kind of walking around talking to cats and stuff. Like they seem unconcerned about the 200 foot tall, like, giant birds of prey that are flying overhead. This game is wild. Yeah. All right.

So we're going to plan to spend a bunch more time playing this game. But Justin, thanks for partying up with us for this episode and for interpreting this weird world for our less familiar with Final Fantasy sensibility. Thanks for having me over. Yeah, thanks, Justin. You can all follow Justin on Twitter at Brother Nubsa and find his writing at The Ringer. And now we're going to take a very quick break, and we will be back with Blake J. Harris to talk about VR. All right, so we are joined now by Blake J. Harris. He is the author of Console Wars, Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation,

which both Jason and I have read and enjoyed and learned a lot from. He is currently working on a follow-up on virtual reality called The History of the Future. It will be out next fall. So we wanted to have him on to school us in the ways of VR. Hey, Blake. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. How's it going?

It's going well. Thanks for coming on. So before we get to VR, I'm kind of curious on your take, if any, on the current console wars. Like, is there enough for a sequel if you wanted to do a console wars too? Are the current console wars interested? Are they intriguing enough? Is Sony versus Microsoft versus Nintendo full of as much juicy behind the scenes jockeying for market share as Sega versus Nintendo 20 to 25 years ago was? Well, I mean, I guess the short answer is I don't know it because I haven't researched it.

So who might have really say? But to kind of look a little bit further, I would say it's not, it doesn't seem to be as interesting. I think that Sega or Nintendo was such an identity back in the day. for good reason, you know, it was very much like, you know, Nike and Reebok and Coke versus Pepsi. And I say that not just because of the marketing, but because they each stood for different things. They were very distinct brands. And nowadays, for understandable reasons, I think that, you know, Sony, the PS4 and Xbox One are very similar, you know, it's, and that has to do with lack of exclusivity and just the cost that it takes to make these games and these systems. Nintendo, you know,

I would say probably the most interesting story I'd expect would be with Nintendo and how they are, you know, quote, unquote, a distant third, but they're still doing the same thing. They're still putting out great games. And, you know, of course, I'm personally biased towards Sega Nintendo, since those are the people I know, that's the era I grew up in. But one thing that was really cool about that and what is part of what interested me in doing a virtual reality story now is that it was kind of like the Wild West era of gaming. There was a lot more of anything went and backroom dealings happening.

strange surprises and intrigue and for understandable reasons too because, you know, there was no industry, no formal industry at the time, there was no annual trade show. It was really a very interesting time in gaming. So I think that now that there's rules for lack of a better word, it's probably not going to be the same thing. But I'd love to read about it if someone else is going to write it. Yeah. And I want to ask about if we can take one more tangent question since you research Nintendo so thoroughly and you wrote about their operating practices and how they set up this almost monopolistic system with this fanatical attention to detail, how have their ways changed since then, to the extent that you know, without having reported the recent Nintendo years? I mean, there are still

people with Nintendo who were there during the time that you were writing about. They're still obviously doing the same franchise, the same series, the same stars. So to what extent have have they been forced to change? Well, you know, I think that I don't think, you know, very superpricially speaking, I don't think they've changed that much. I think the big difference is that their popularity has waned. And there's a lot of comparison. There's a lot of sense to make a comparison between Nintendo and between Apple.

You know, both are very controlling, not just with the media, but with their architecture and their everything, you know, it's part of a closed system. And the benefit to that, or historically the benefit has been that it's an incredible user experience. And I could say that, you know, I bought Nintendo games for, I don't know, 25 years, and I've never bought a game that wasn't fun or that felt like I got ripped off. And that's not true of anything else. But in exchange for that control, you give up some freedom to you're really beholden to Nintendo as a developer and as a consumer, it limits the types of games that come out. The one interesting thing with Nintendo, though, is that while they are a distant third in these

console wars, that it seems like they either by choice or by circumstance don't want to participate in, is that they have such an incredible roster of intellectual property that's unlike almost any other company out there except for, you know, Disney, Marvel, or any other companies part of that conglomerate. You know, and that's something that I think that Nintendo is starting to take advantage of in a good way and something that will hopefully propel their hardware plans in the future, whether it's with the Nintendo Switch or with something else. I mean, like there's just so much great properties there. I think an easy explanation might be that like, oh, the Mario movie sucked in 1993,

so they stopped, you know, exploiting those properties. But that's kind of crazy because that was 20 years ago and there's a lot of reasons why that movie was bad. But I'd love to see them, you know, launch five cartoons or live action shows on Netflix, create one idea that I always hoped that they would get to. And it's kind of part of an overall thing that we see with, you know, the NES Classic was released a couple weeks ago or kind of released because they kind of controlled the release.

Right. Yeah. And I think that that's something that Nintendo wouldn't have done five years ago or even a few years ago. I always got the sense that Nintendo nowadays took the perspective that, like, that's our past. We're going to focus on the future. We're not going to rely on past successes to guide our path forward.

But that's unfortunate in a way because a lot of people like us who grew up loving Nintendo or younger kids who discover it, you know, there's a lot to be said for that. And I do feel like they're now starting to realize that our demographic is something that they should reach and hopefully they'll start to do so with IPs. Blake, Ben and I, I think, would both readily admit to being neophytes to the world of virtual reality. One of my few experiences with the medium was in the back of a guy in Galard in Midtown with you on a Samsung rig. And obviously, the technology is starting to kind of penetrate into the marketplace.

What do you think is going to be the first kind of VR application that is really going to take hold? I think definitely gaming is going to be what helps it succeed in the early years, and we're already starting to see that. And a large part of what helped Oculus rise and really help create this cultural zeitgeistee resurgence of VR was their focus on gaming. And I guess what I kind of didn't really realize until I started working at the book or maybe just a little background for listeners, virtual reality has been something that's been talked about and used since the 1960s,

but it was only used among mostly academics at that point. And it was very, very costly, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Then in the 80s, it kind of gained prominence again. NASA was using it and doing telepresidents. Atari had a division. that was looking to do VR stuff before they crashed in 1983. And in the 90s, you know, VR was kind of hailed as the next big thing.

But that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. And, you know, I would say the largest to us consumers being that it sucked. So, yeah, I mean, like, it was cool, but not really. Like, the graphics were terrible. It didn't feel immersive. But it felt like the kind of thing that we've been reading about in science fiction or seeing in movies that it should be cool. And because it failed so spectacularly in the 90s in a consumer level, people just assumed

that it was like flying cars or jet packs. It was one of these things that we always talked about, but that was never really going to happen because that was ridiculous. And it still did continue to go on in research labs, and some companies would use it for visualization for building cars and stuff like that. So to say that VR died in the 90s is a bit of an oversimplification. But I would say that by the early 2000s, no one expected that it was going to be coming to consumers or at least any time soon. And then that all changed in 2012 when a 19-year-old kid named Palmer Lucky, who was living in a trailer outside of his parents' home in Long Beach, California, created a prototype called the Rift, the Oculus Rift, and that gained a lot of traction and media attention.

And then Oculus launched a Kickstarter campaign. They raised over $2 million. That was in August of 2012. And then in less than a year and a half, they sold the Facebook for over $2 billion. And that acquisition kind of helped propel this technological revolution forward. And so now we see, I think every big tech company is involved in some way with VR. And kind of like the two different types of, distribution or just the two different types of hardware systems, if you will, are kind of like

the mobile-based VR in which it leverages your phone and you kind of stick it into a viewer, which is what I showed you, Jason, at that wonderful guy in Galard. And, you know, those things cost like between $50 and $100. And there's the gear VR, which is made by Samsung and powered by Oculus. And then there's Google's releasing now Daydream. And you see they have some pretty cool commercials. And then there's also sort of like the premium version of virtual reality, which is the Oculus Rift, which is the HTC Vive, and which is the Sony PlayStation VR. And those run off of computers.

So in addition to the $6 to $800 peripheral device, you also need a powerful computer that's able to run it. And of course, over time, the costs of these VR headsets will go down. And also the costs of what you, the requirements you need for the computers will go down because they're, they, they, they, basically they want everyone to have this thing. That was a big part of why Oculus sold to Facebook was they wanted to carry out Facebook's mission of reaching billions of people and connecting them. So that's kind of like all the boring background stuff.

But in terms of the VR experience itself, it's unfortunate and it's definitely challenging to a writer because very much like the Matrix, it's something you have to experience for yourself. And that's kind of what I realized, I remember my editor saying early on that one of my challenges is going to be, how do you describe this thing that's kind of indescriable? It's like dancing about architecture.

And that's true. And then I kind of realized, you know, there's no way to do it. The only way to describe it is to describe how other people react to it because that you can capture well. And if you see all these, you know, all the legends of the video game industry, the top game makers are so blown away that they want to put down what they're doing and create games for VR. Or you see, you know, Steven Spielberg being blown away by basically all these people whose opinions we respect. and whose work we respect. If they're believing it, we have to assume there's something to it. And so it's all just about, I encourage anybody to try it for themselves because unlike the VR the 90s, it is actually pretty cool. At worst, it's pretty great proof of concept. But I think that,

you know, what was your reaction? Like, what were you expecting when you tried it? And that's like the low grade first iteration. You know, I wasn't sure what to expect. Obviously, most of my experience comes from movies, books, Ready Player 1, that kind of thing. So it was cool. It was definitely cool. The ability to kind of like real time, turn your head and look at stuff. It didn't take too long before it became mildly disorientating. You know, you start to become aware of the fact that you are sitting in a normal space with goggles on your face

and probably look like a jackass because you're reaching out and trying to touch like a buffalo or something. something. It was really cool. Yeah, I think that the thing that kind of got me the first time I tried it, I would say that in another oversimplification, there's kind of two types of experiences. One is like a video game experience which uses computer graphics. You know, and if you've seen the games on Xbox 1 or PS4, the computer graphics are pretty close to realistic today, but of course, you can tell that they're from a computer, or it's more cinematic experiences. And the cinematic experiences, to me, reminded me of, have you guys, are you guys Harry Potter fans? Yes. So it reminded me of when Dumbledore put Harry into the Penn Seave and you're basically walking through someone else's memories in the sense that you can't, at least in this iteration, you can't affect change, but you feel 100% like you're immersed there and that you can move around in this environment.

The comparison that I always had in my head and really makes things exciting because if you think about the potential of what that means, what if you can start doing that in real time? What if you can just set up a camera, you know, if all three of us were actually physically together in person? we put a camera down, then an hour later we watch it and we can basically relive the experience. So that stuff's pretty cool and pretty exciting. And I guess getting back to your earlier question of like, how is VR going to progress and how is it going to take off? I think that one of the hardest challenges with any new technological device is getting people to create the software for it. Basically, everyone says that it's the content that sells these things, but it's not always worth investing in the content. if there's not a large install base or a chance that these things are going to be around for a while.

Basically, everyone's worried, is it going to be like the 90s all over again? And that's what's so cool about this time around is that between Facebook's investment and Google and Microsoft and all these big players, they're all kind of all in on this, or at least in enough to give this a 10-year shot. And we see that the content is coming pretty soon. And I think that one of the big game changers for people, and it kind of speaks to your experience, Jason, is, having presence of your hands in a virtual world really changes the game. And so, of course, you don't get that with the mobile experience, so you didn't get that at Guy and Gallard. And, yeah.

And, and you, yeah. And Galard is not a sponsor of this podcast, but. Yeah, Guy and Galard, locations everywhere. So, and that really is a game changer. That's why I think the HTC V has been so successful because it has room scale, which is pretty cool, but even more importantly, it lets you move your hands. And that's kind of, you know, an end. any movie about virtual reality or anything, one of the first things you do is you look down and you

see like, whoa, like, and you make a fist. So that really changes things. You know, one of the, outside of the Harry Potter feeling like moment for me, the other big one for me was trying Oculus touch for the first time and using Toy Box, which is an experience where you're in an environment with someone from a different room and, you know, conceivably it could be from someone in a different continent. And you guys are in the same physical space together and it feels, just like you're with another person. Because, you know, remember, you're wearing this thing on your head. So if someone moves their head a 16th of an inch, it could capture that. So it actually feels like there's lifelike movements. What you're seeing is not a photorealistic representation of the person yet

because of the uncanny valley. It would probably be very discomforting because it wouldn't be a perfect representation. But the avatar is real enough and the gestures and mannerisms feel real enough that you feel like you're with someone else. So, you know, I played ping pong. someone who is in a different room, and I'm excited to play ping-pong with my brother over in Colorado through virtual reality. So from presumably talking to lots of people who are trying to develop software for these devices, what have you heard about the challenges, not just technologically speaking, but conceptually speaking, figuring out what makes a good VR game? Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's, that is what reminds me so much of the Wild West era of the Sagan Nintendo, where there are no rules.

people are putting out best practices guides of here's things you should try, here's thing you should avoid. And then with new technology or just by doing things in a clever way, those rules get broken all the time. So I think that when it comes to video games, there's, of course, a learning curve because it's a totally different way of doing things. But at least it's somewhat similar because most video games are meant to be 3D immersive environments.

We're just blocked from that environment through the television screen or the computer screen. But where it's been much more of an interesting. observation for me as a writer and much more of a challenge for creators is the more cinematic experiences. And a lot of that has to do with you, with you're in this experience. Should you be a character in this experience? Are you just a, you know, some sort of warrior and a trench coat? What are you in this story? And also, I remember I wrote a script for a virtual reality short. And the first thing having a, you know, written screenplays before is I think of like zoom in or pan around. But that language doesn't make sense because everything around you is already around you.

Basically, the big challenge is how do you guide the viewer because they can look any place in 360-degree environment? How do you get them to look at what you want them to look at or should you? Or what kind of stories can you tell when you're not actually sure where someone's looking? So that's kind of like the interesting challenge. And I guess it's really more about creating like a world. It's more about like universe building and creating an universe building and creating an, environment, like an open-world environment that people will want to participate in. And you could have, you know, in that respect, even if it's cinematic, it's a lot more like an open-world video game,

like a Grand Theft Auto, where, you know, there's missions and things that can guide you, but at the same time, you can just screw around and do it every one and explore. So these are the kinds of challenges that people are facing. It's a difficult challenge because it's so foreign to us. You know, it's not like a movie. It's not like a play. It's not, you know, it's kind of people make comparison to novels, but still at the same time, you have so much more autonomy as the writer to kind of direct experiences. So I think one of the big things to making that leap from early adopters to a mainstream audience is leveraging IPs again. Hopefully Nintendo will be involved. But that's where it's really great to see the Lucas film. People are looking to do stuff

with mixed reality and virtual reality with the Star Wars universe. And lots of other big companies are looking to bring familiar characters to this unfamiliar space. And in the end, I think that is what will make it familiar. In the near term and in the long term, there's kind of like this dichotomy between augmented reality, which it would be like if you were wearing glasses and it overlaid graphics over looking at the actual world or Pokemon Go for people who need an easy reference or virtual reality, which is the fully immersive thing. In the new term and the short term, which of those is going to emerge as like the dominant medium? Or are they simply going to be two different ways of engaging with content? That's a really good question. And something that a lot of

investors in the space are asking themselves on developers too. And, you know, I think that the answer is that at some point down the line they'll converge and that really AR and VR can be the same thing if you have a way to basically block out the real world and put people into a virtual world. But, you know, I was thinking about this in terms of, Ben, what was the name of the article that you wrote earlier today? Unsubscribing from gaming's constantly connected future. Yeah, but it was basically about some concern or at least a personal inclination towards not being in a game or in an experienced 24-7 from the moment you wake up. And so, you know, I guess I can't tell whether it's personal bias or whether there's a logic to it. Like,

that's kind of why I prefer virtual reality. You're choosing to get into the. experience and get out. And of course, with augmented reality, when you're wearing glasses, you know, you can take the glasses off. But I think the insinuation to why it's going to be so popular is that you're going to be basically wearing these things all the time. And it could just be because, you know, I'm 34 and I, you know, don't want a perpetual state of being in these experiences. But that's partly why I feel a preference towards VR. Though in the end, really, you know, as part of Facebook's 10-year plan, it is a pair of glasses that lets you toggle between both. And that'll be really interesting if that comes to pass.

One of the interesting things about augmented reality that I didn't really think about it first is that in addition to it being like people make the reference to it being like Terminator Vision where it's like you look at someone and it gives you all the information about them. God, I can't wait for Terminator Vision, Blake. I can't tell you. Well, I can't wait until see which people you hunt down. But like what's kind of cool and what I didn't really think about is in addition to hunting down John Connor, You can also use it to, if you're in a small apartment and you don't have the money or even the space to buy a 70-inch television, you can buy a non-physical 70-inch television that to you feels like a real television that could be plastered on your wall.

And that's the kind of stuff that is very interesting in the future. You know, basically if a television in your apartment wasn't a $1,000, $2,000 physical piece of equipment, but it's a $1 or a $2.00 app, this television app is better than the other one. And that also extends to kind of like a laptop too. You know, why do we need these things to be physical when you can actually just kind of create almost like a hologram in front of you that reacts to your typing on this holographic keyboard and stuff like that? That's the stuff that blows my mind and makes me scared and makes me excited at the same time. And do you get the sense that anyone at least in the consumer space is making money on VR yet? Obviously, there are these three kind of main products that are out already and a lot. of people are waiting for the price to come down, for the technology to be refined a bit. So

is it all just sort of staking your claim to the market share and continuing to develop the technology and hoping that the investment pays off long term? Or is it already profitable for anyone, do you think? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that for the hardware makers, the ones who are trying to create this ecosystem, it's nothing about a loss, you know, not an unexpected one, but it really is just a long-term investment. And, you know, so, So for a developer, there is money to be made. I don't think anyone has, like, created the Angry Birds or the candy crush of VR or AR yet. So it's really only a matter of time.

And that's the kind of thing where, you know, you could do it for, with game engines nowadays, anybody could become a developer. That doesn't make them a good developer. But, you know, you could do these things for cost and companies are going to explode. So I think in the software space, that's where you'll see the kind of like overnight sensation things. But the hardware makers, and that's partly what I find so admirable about the people that I'm speaking with in the story, is that they know they're taking a loss. I mean, even if you consider Xbox or when Microsoft decided to launch a video game console, I believe, and this is, I don't have the data, but I believe it took 10 years for them to even

turn that from a loss into start making money because of all the money that went into the research and that. So imagine that, but for a technology that has been proven to fail before and also doesn't have like a stable of developers or content makers. So it's a long-term investment, and that's really what was so. important about Facebook's acquisition of Oculus, not just that those guys made a lot of money or that Oculus was going to be able to really take this thing all the way to the finish line, but that made other companies like Google and Sony even more so and Microsoft take notice

and realize that if they don't participate, they're going to be left out. And that's good for us as consumers because that just means they're going to be putting more money into this. And I know that that is like as gaudy as the $2 billion is that, Facebook paid for Oculus, even more impressive to me is that they've spent, they must have spent at least more of that thus far and just developing technology and paying developers to create content. So they are doing everything in their power to make this happen. And it's exciting times ahead. Is any of that content particularly interesting to you? There's a number of movie studios

that have released some VR series. There's some games. There's a lot of games. But any, any one of those that in particular kind of captures the experience better than others? I think, you know, there's plenty of great games that I love. Lucky's Tale feels like the modern day Mario Sonic kind of like platform, a mascot character adventure, edge of nowhere on the Rift is great. Res Infinite on PSVR is great, job simulator on Vive, and now PSVR is great. And that was Conan O'Brien played job simulator the other day.

But I think the one that really is, that kind of blows you away. And also kind of gives you a sense of what to expect from this thing is the Google Earth experience. Google, you know, as we all have probably played with with the Google Street View, you know, Google has mapped out the planet. We've all stocked. We've all stocked people through Google Street View. So in other words, imagine that not only are you looking at your ex-girlfriends or potential girlfriends' house on Google Street View, but now you can physically be there in a physical environment where you can look up, down, left and right, and you're in a physical space. You can also then say, all right, I'm not going to be a creepy stalker anymore. And I

I'm going to go fly to the Grand Canyon or I'm going to go to the Taj Mahal. Basically, this thing that Google's created is incredible because it's, you know, it shows like not only just the coolness factor, but now you can start to see how this could be used for education. How in history class, you're not just going to be talking about the Roman Empire, but you can actually go there and you can interact with people maybe. Basically, it just feels it feels like proof of concept for the next step. Would you recommend waiting at this point if anyone is listening? and wondering whether to take the plunge on something for Christmas,

would you just suggest waiting for lower prices, better technology, and just in the meantime, wandering into a Manhattan coffee and sandwich cafe? I won't say which one, and hoping that someone is using it, and they can just try it until they get nauseated or bored and then wait for the better solution to come along? Well, that's a really good question,

Because I think that, again, like the Oculus Rift costs $600, the HTC5 costs $800 and the PSVR, I think, is 400. But for the Rift and the Vive, you need to have a computer. So you're looking at least $1,000 all in. And if you're not a hardcore gamer, that's probably a big investment. And one that you probably aren't going to, your family's not going to make for Christmas time. Though, you know, if you have a PlayStation, there's already a huge install base, I would say it's definitely worth the $400, even though it's not a, is not as strong of an experience as the others, not unsurprisingly. But what I would recommend is definitely to try it, just to see it because it's cool,

or to really look at the mobile experiences. If you have a Samsung phone, the gear VR either it used to come for free or it's at least, it's less than $100 and the Google Daydream stuff is going to be priced at less than $100. And, you know, we all, or most people have smartphones. So I think spending less than $100 to get something that can unlock this different world and will at least show you what's to come. And it's not just like the mobile VR is like, oh, I get it, cool. I'm never going to use it. I think there's a lot of great experiences.

And to your point earlier, like, you know, companies are investing in this for like promotional experiences for the Olympics. They had experiences where you can be there. They do a lot of like the MBA now has a deal with Next VR. I believe, where they broadcast one game every week and you are sitting there on the sideline, it's all not only is all really cool, but it's just, it's something that I enjoy having a part of my everyday life, and I think most people will too. Let's turn for a moment to the dark side, Blake, because no discussion of emerging technology post the millennium is complete without wondering how this could adversely affect us.

I was in Marin about two weeks ago, and I had this game developer was telling me that he had tried VR porn. And I think his quote was, I'm not sure the human race will survive this. And there's privacy concerns. Oculus's terms of service are quite draconian, saying essentially that anything, any content that you broadcast using their pipes is owned by them, essentially forever recently or semi-recently there was an article in Frontiers of Science that talked about the need for a code of ethical conduct best practices using VR because of the way the human mind reacts to it, of not really knowing where the body is, essentially stuff like that. What do you see as some of like the issues that are going to pop up as this

technology progresses into our lives? I love that question. That's a great question. And I always love going to the dark side. Well, and it's interesting, too, because yesterday I was interviewing the director, Brett Leonard, who directed Lonmore Man, which was like from 92 or 93. One of the great weird sex scenes ever produced for film. I urge anyone to go to YouTube and watch the Lawnmore Man sex scene. Yeah. So, and that was pretty much the first mainstream pop cultural introduction of virtual reality and also of Pierce Brasson, I believe. And then also he did Virtuosity, which was the Denzel Washington and Russell. Russell Crow movie where Russell Crow is originally, I believe, an artificially intelligent.

Yeah, isn't he like, he's like an amalgam of like 76 serial killers. Right. So he's not a real person. He's an artificially intelligent being based on data from all these people. And then at some point he escapes into the real world. But I mentioned that, well, for a lot of reasons. But one being that I think artificial intelligence is going to play a big part in this, especially in the perceived dark side, as well as others will argue.

and I can make the argument as well, that that's what's amazing. But, you know, VR porn, in addition to feeling like you're there, you know, hanging out with these people, you could also form a long-lasting relationship with these people because they could be artificially intelligent. And the AI has already progressed pretty far that at least you can have conversations and have like what feels like a human interaction. What might not feel human is the persistence of that relationship, like, you know, in the way that we learn things about each other.

and there's backstories and stuff to discover. But I think that that could change too. And so, of course, you get the concern of what people have always been concerned about with new technologies of kids in basement spending too much time on the internet or watching TV or whatever. So that is a real concern to anything that could be popular. But there's also the psychological component. Imagine a version of that movie, Her. Yeah, the Spike Jones movie with Scarlett Johansson voicing the AI.

Yeah, basically, like the Siri-like, like, At first, I was like, oh, that's so weird. Who would have a relationship with the phone? But when the phone gets to know you and actually provides you that emotional comfort and it knows things about you that no one else does, either because it has access to big data or because you've talked to it in intimate ways, you know, that is a relationship that feels, that is actually a real relationship. And so when you can take that to the next level and actually have what appears to be like

a physical presence or, you know, whether it's computer graphics related, it'll be really interesting to see. And, you know, so that's the dark side, especially if you go down the porn and girlfriend path and anything else. But there's also a lot of great aspects to that as well. There's, you know, for teaching purposes and also in, I guess we could call it like gray area for military simulations, you can test out different scenarios and actually have people that you're on your team or that you're attacking or that you're trying to train be artificially intelligent. So I don't know. I guess I guess the biggest concern, that I would have at this point is the one you mentioned about the privacy or just the fact that it is all big companies that I listed that are building this infrastructure and this ecosystem. And we often think the worst of big companies and there are reasons that we do. But I wonder if what I'm kind of curious about is if that is a generational question to some extent because I hate giving away my private information.

I hate that my news feed and Twitter trends are tariff. targeted to me, especially as someone whose my stated goal is always to write for a general audience. I often say I want to write for my grandma. So if I want to write for my grandma or a woman in Nebraska, it doesn't help me if I'm seeing only things that I already like. But at the same time, these services are being given to us for the most part for free. So we have little say about changing that. And also, I don't know that I'm in the majority opinion with that. I think that people younger than me seem to have no problem and seem to appreciate that things are tailored to them. So privacy, I don't know how much people younger than us care about it. And I'd be

curious to know, I'm not saying that they don't care. But it seems like they care less. And it seems like that old, like, you know, if I don't have anything to hide, what do I care? I promise you, I'm not hiding stuff. But I just like the idea of at least the illusion of privacy. So last question to end on a non-porn note. We're all terrible at predicting the future, of course, and people have been wrong about VR in many ways before. But is there a past, you can foresee in which VR does not become kind of the dominant mode of gaming. And is there a path for traditional games, 2D screen games, to still exist? Still be prominent, still be dominant even?

Or do you think it's inevitable that VR will eventually be kind of the standard way that we game? Really good question also. I think that I don't think it's going to be like a total conversion to VR. and part of that is because of what Jason was asking about earlier with AR. I think that one thing that's nice about gaming now or even watching TV now as opposed to an immersive VR world is how passive it is. I always keep the TV on when I'm writing. I don't want to be fully into the television experience or the gaming experience.

Sometimes I kind of just want to be like something I'm halfway doing. And I think that AR can provide those ways of doing it where you're doing other things at once and it's not like you're feeling like you're fully your most in this world and need to give it all your attention. So I think that that is something that would continue us down a path of also creating platformer games like Mario and other stuff like that. And also, you know, in a, in the virtual world, you can still have experiences that we're used to. One of my favorite experiences for the Gear VR mobile one is that you can watch a movie in a movie theater. So, you know, again, it's kind of like having the TV in your room. I have a relatively

small apartment, but I put this on and all of a sudden I'm in a movie theater and feel like I'm watching a movie. And so that is, you know, it's not a 3D movie experience. It's just a regular movie in there. But because I'm taking advantage of some of the things that virtual reality can offer, that makes it kind of cool. All right. Well, I don't envy you the reporting process on this book. It must have been a little easier to report console wars, given that everything you were writing that was, you know, two decades old and people were probably willing to reveal things. And you knew how the story ended and now, I mean, you're finishing the draft and you must just be dreading the news every day, going to totally upset everything that you've written. It must be

changing all the time. So, good luck with that. Yeah. It is. I mean, it's awful. Mostly not having like an ending, but at the same time, I've now come to love it because as cool as it was to go into writing console wars and know beginning, middle, and end, and basically just once I got a sense of who the characters were, what the scope was, to be able to target things, and there's tangents that come up. You kind of have a sense of it. What I realize is that when you look back on something 20 years ago, you remember things in very finite terms, like, oh, that was a good thing that happened, or that was a bad thing that happened. And so I actually get to see talking to these people every day, every week. It's like the ups and downs of something that they're expecting or that something

that's happening. You know, like one small example is like when the Oculus Rift came out, there was a lot of blowback from some early fans that the titles were exclusive, meaning that they had paid money to the developers to make the game or paid them money after making the game so that the title would only be released on their system for a certain amount of time. To PC gamers, this was not a very good thing. I always think anytime you put money into creating content, it's a good thing. But anyway, but I feel like that now that other companies are doing it, especially Sony and now HDC is doing it, I feel like that's the kind of thing that if we talked about this 20 years later,

no one would really remember that that was a big deal. But it's it, but it is a big deal, and it's worth reporting because it tells you a lot about how this is first trying to appeal to the PC gaming crowd and what makes it different than consoles and kind of just the way that the media works sometimes is an echo chamber and how, you know, just a lot of different things. So it's been definitely much more difficult

to report something as that's happening. And, but it is kind of addictive and fun in a way as well. All right. Well, people should go find console words, It's in every format. It's in every place you can buy books. And look forward to the history of the future, which will be out next fall. And we look forward to you finishing the draft because you have promised to let us play with all your VR gear when you do.

So good luck with the rest of it. And everyone can also follow Blake on Twitter at Blake J. Harris, NYC. Blake, thanks. Good talking to you. See you, guys, galar, sometime in the future. Take care, guys. All right. So that will do it for today.

Yeah. I would just like to implore anyone out there with any kind of juice to help me and Ben get a VR rig. Anybody out there that's looking at, you know, it's an expanding medium that needs to get people into it. You know, we would love to be able to experience the new realms of the senses. This is my way of shamelessly begging for a piece of gear. Yeah. For the ringer to be fair. This is not for personal game.

No, no, no, no, no. It's this for the ringer. Yes. And for our listeners. All right. So, by the way, the first game we ever talked about on a Channel 33 podcast, No Man Sky, just got the update that was promised for a few months. Are you going back for more? I am going to go back. I feel an obligation to see how it's changed. There's a base building mode now. Yes. They've kind of tweaked the distribution of wildlife on a planet, some other things.

The team has been absolutely incommunicado since the game dropped. I feel like they've been working on this, you know, round the clock. So I feel like I'm going to give them another chance. Yeah. Interesting strategy. Say nothing at all. Radio silence for three months, then release a giant update instead of releasing it in smaller parts or saying something at some point.

Okay. Anyway, they've added item stacking, Jason. Oh, my God. Thank you. You can store multiple versions of the same item in the same inventory slot. That enough, I think. is reason for me to go back in at least once this crush of holiday games is behind us. So next week we'll be talking about another of those games, The Last Guardian,

and hopefully we'll also be talking some Westworld. So we'll be back in a week. Good talking to you as always. Thanks, everyone.