The Next Steps of Immersive Gaming

Have you spent any time at all playing virtual reality games? It's funny, when I was doing the research for this book, I spoke to a game designer, a brilliant guy at NYU. He's in the NYU Game Center named Bennett Foddy. And he teaches game design. He's designed a number of phenomenal games himself. And he told me something that I found fascinating and I took it on board. He said to me, I asked him about World of Warcraft and I said, you know, do you enjoy it? What do you think about it? And he said to me, I know that if I start playing that game, I either don't play it at all or I'm going to basically be giving up years of my life. And I don't have the time to do that. So I just have never even opened the game to play it. It's just not something I want to do. And that's that's how I have felt about most of those experiences. I did play one virtual reality game. It was with a haptic suit. So it basically fits over you. It was this Ghostbusters game. And I grew up watching Ghostbusters and loved it. So the ghosts fly through you and you can feel the suit compresses. And so it feels like they're actually kind of butting into you, which maybe doesn't make much sense because they're ghosts. But you fly around with one of the little Ghostbusters guns and you're in New York City and you're running around. This was a 10 minute experience. But if you had told me that I could give up the next 48 hours of my life, put on the suit, run around, no food, just just do this for 48 hours. It was so incredibly immersive and engaging and interesting. I would have done it. It was it was amazing. And it wasn't even like that's not even where we're going with this stuff. This was, you know, step one out of step 10 in terms of sophistication. This is the early days. It's only going to get more compelling. Are you aware of Sandbox? You've heard of the company Sandbox. Sandbox is it's a virtual reality game destination. So you go to this place and it's essentially a warehouse and inside of it, they have these arenas set up for games and a series of games that you play. And I play with my whole family. We put the haptic feedback suits on virtual reality helmets and you kill zombies. You fight off skeletons on a pirate ship. There's a bunch of games and it is wild. And you see it and you go, I see where this is going like this is right now. Pretty immersive, pretty immersive, really, really fun, very engaging, exciting to do. But you know, for a fact that it's just going to keep getting better and keep getting better. And right now it's insanely addictive. I get so pumped up to do it when we do like I'll go with my family like every couple of weeks or so. And we get so excited when we're on our way over there. Luckily, it's got a set time. It's a one hour experience. And when it's over, it's over. But my God, you know, you're you're in it. Like there's one of them where you're in a haunted house and you're fighting off zombies and they're just running at you like hundreds of them and you're gunning them down. It's so exciting when they get ahold of you, you feel their touch like in the haptic feedback. You see red in front of your face like you're getting torn apart. It's wild. And you know that this is essentially like doom, right? If you play doom today, it's the pixels are enormous. It's just like it looks clunky and squarish and blockish. And I mean, it's fun still, but it's so it's so crude in comparison to a modern game. You know, where the modern games have like there's a new unreal engine and we were playing a video of it the other day because it's so hard to believe that this is just a video game. And in this this video game, the lighting and the textures and the shadows are so exact. It's so incredible. And you just have this feeling of an editor inevitability like there's just going to come a time where you're going to be in this virtual reality thing and you're going to have a whole haptic feedback outfit from your fingers to your toes all over your face. And it's going to it's going to be better than real life. And that's what everyone's terrified of. Yeah. And I mean, it's it's hard to it's hard to avoid that right that that feeling that excitement that you have as you're about to play. Imagine if that were always available to you at any moment of the day. It'd be hard to resist it. Yeah, I I felt the same way about that. That very brief experience with Ghostbusters, that Ghostbusters game. It was just there was a level of excitement. And you know, you used to have to kind of suspend disbelief like you as you say, with Doom, you'd have the pixels and you'd be like, yeah, it's not quite real, but it's real enough. And then there was this point where everything just the processing speed, the sophistication of the development, the design, you could make it seem basically real and it's only going to become more so. And so you don't have to suspend disbelief at all. The minute you're in that experience, it's there. It's real. It may as well be real. What bothers me is people way smarter than me that aren't worried about it. You know, I had John Carmack on the podcast who I'm a gigantic fan of. You know, he's the guy who created Doom and Quake and engineered those engines. He's his take on phones was basically, well, people enjoy them and they make life better. And he just doesn't seem to be worried at all. And, you know, obviously he makes games and he's working with Oculus. He was at the time, at least working with Oculus, making all these games. And he he's also a very disciplined person. So he'll code for 16 hours a day, you know, and he's also he plays that there's the one game where you have the drumsticks and the things are coming at you and you're swinging at the air and knocking these things down. What is that game called? Do you know? I can't remember. I know the game. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. Beat Saber. Beat Saber. James is Beat Saber. But he does it at an insanely high level where he's basically getting this wild cardio workout in like like he's doing some sort of stick fighting martial art. He's like swinging his arms back and forth through the air and he actually gets a cardio workout. Like you can do that. And there's there is some benefits to like there's a boxing game that you can play on Oculus or no HTC Vive. I played it on. And when you play this boxing game, you're you're squaring off against an opponent. And when you get hit, your screen lights up like you got hit in sparring and you can maneuver around. So it's actually a workout. You actually move around this person coming at you and they turn with you to try to meet you. They know where you're standing and they they swing at you. And you can you can do certain things where it's actually beneficial. You can get some exercise. I've seen some of their engineering now with omni directional treadmills. So you have a harness around your waist. You're connected in position on this omni directional treadmill. So you can go any way you want. And you're running and you're shooting at things and running and you get this great workout while you're having fun. So it's not all doom and gloom. No, I totally agree. I think there's a temptation to to fall on one end of the spectrum or the other. And I don't think that makes sense as with most issues in life. You know, there's there's some nuance that's got to come in. So there are people who will just talk about screens are going to be the end of the world. And then there are people who will say there's absolutely no problem and everything we're doing is good for us and healthy and making the world better. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. And I think it also varies by by the person and what kind of experiences you're having. If you're someone who is sedentary, you weren't working out, you weren't moving. And suddenly you find this game that encourages you to to run and move around. That's got to have some beneficial effects. If you if you're someone who's unnaturally disciplined like John Carmack, then great. You know, you're able to say, I'm going to take the best from screens and I'm going to resist the worst. And I'm just going to move on with my life. But, you know, the data don't lie. And the data suggests that the amount of time we're spending in front of screens has gone up dramatically. And when you speak to people about it, they don't say I'm happy about that. They say, what what is going on? Where is all that time going? Yeah. So so that's that to me is the most compelling thing that we want to try to work out. How do we extract the best and leave behind the worst with with screens with any kind of technology, with any kind of shift in the world? You always want to try to do that across the population. Find the stuff that's damaging, weed it out and find the stuff that's useful and try to capitalize on it and emphasize that. I think that's what that's what this project is all about. It's it's about certainly not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and not not trying to run. It's about Guards Scorpivsoft. It's about what you've been traveling and going back IRI films like the two Ben of the rap hunt. You get your short versions, it's about texture Helen and paganism. And then that's what like it's 100% good for people to do a flat Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a good example. So there's the physical side of it. And then, of course, like the mental experience of being on screens can be very, very positive for us, too. You know, you're learning languages that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to learn. You're being exposed to people and experiences that you couldn't either experience because you live far away from them. I moved to the US in 2004 from Australia. And, you know, it's hard to believe. It's only 16 years ago, but this is before YouTube. This is the same year that Facebook came about. I couldn't really find a good enough internet connection to be able to speak with video to my family in Australia. And that only came a couple of years later. So that's a miracle that during this time of lockdown, when we're all so far apart from each other, we are able to actually communicate through these screens in a way that's basically seamless. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.