Department of Design

...Once you get what you want, you will just want either a greater amount of it, or you will want something else.

As for as their approach to new work, there’s one thing HUSH is adamantly against, and that’s brainstorming. “Brainstorming stinks,” says Schwarz. “You can’t just bring in a bunch of smart people, expect them to magically assemble, and come up with ideas.” Terwilliger agrees. “The loudest voice gets all the attention and the tendency is to go for lowest-hanging fruit, ideas that are widely accepted and safe. It’s not bad, but we like to challenge that stuff.” To illuminate their point, Schwarz recalled a lecture he attended last year. The professor asked the audience where and when they get their best work ideas. Some said before they go to bed or on their way to work. But not one person said a brainstorming session.

In terms of VR experiences, I really view VR as a compliment to current gaming technology. And I think that it’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as time moves forward, as people put it on. Because if you’ve never tried VR, if you’ve never put a headset on, you might be like I was before I put a headset on, and go, ‘Ah, you know, that’s okay, that looks like a thing that people might do sometimes; I don’t know if I want to.’ And then you put the headset on, and you experience it: you experience that immersion, you see what it can do, and you come out a convert. You know? You’re preaching the good word of VR after you put the VR headset on.

My advice is: don’t virtual reality design or work, because you’ll never want to do anything else after that. Mobile games—who cares about mobile games anymore? VR is the best thing ever for design or game play; it’s so amazing, the feeling, and it’s going forward so much that every week I’m like, okay, what are we [doing] next week? ...It’s getting better so fast that it’s the most interesting thing you could ever do. You can never be too early to start on this stuff.

In a traditional adventure game, objects are often uni-taskers: screwdrivers are for unscrewing and nothing else. Knives are for cutting and nothing else. It is a sort of “key and lock” mentality. But when the phenomenon of immersion takes over, and your body thinks the virtual world is real, a great deal more detail is expected. One puzzle in I Expect You To Die involves unscrewing a panel from the car’s console. We placed screwdrivers within sight, which we fully expected players to use for this purpose. However, we found many players tried to unscrew the panel using a pocketknife they found in a glovebox. Since they would use a knife this way in the real world, it seemed perfectly natural to try using it as a screwdriver. Initially, this simply failed, and it was a real immersion breaker. Allowing players to unscrew the panel with a knife would require us to radically change our puzzle structure, so ultimately we added a dialog line from our narrator: “I’ve seen you do many creative things with a knife, but I don’t think turning screws will be among them.” This is kind of a cop out, but at least it acknowledges the player’s attempt, and asks them to move on to something else. Other interactions we handled better: shooting the champagne bottle with the gun shatters it, and the broken glass can be used to cut things. Lighting the money on fire with the lighter causes it to burn. Players love using objects on other objects – if you can handle these interactions realistically, you will delight them. If you don’t, you’ll remind them this is “just a game”, and break their immersion. You are wiser to create a small game with rich object interactions than a big game with weak ones.

Madeline Ashby, a futurist with a degree in strategic foresight who has worked for organizations like Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, and Nesta, says that another big part of the gender imbalance has to do with optimism. “If you ask me, the one reason why futurism as a discipline is so white and male, is because white males have the ability to offer the most optimistic vision,” she says. They can get up on stage and tell us that the world will be okay, that technology will fix all our problems, that we’ll live forever. Mark Stevenson wrote a book called An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. TED speakers always seem to end their talk, no matter how dire, on an upward-facing note. Ashby says that any time she speaks in front of a crowd, and offers a grim view of the future, someone (almost always a man) invariably asks why she can’t be more positive. “Why is this so depressing, why is this so dystopian,” they ask. “Because when you talk about the future you don’t get rape threats, that’s why,” she says. “For a long time the future has belonged to people who have not had to struggle, and I think that will still be true. But as more and more systems collapse, currency, energy, the ability to get water, the ability to work, the future will increasingly belong to those who know how to hustle, and those people are not the people who are producing those purely optimistic futures.”

We have heroic efforts like the Internet Archive to preserve stuff, but that's like burning down houses and then cheering on the fire department when it comes to save what's left inside. It's no way to run a culture. We take better care of scrap paper than we do of the early Internet, because at least we look at scrap paper before we throw it away.

We're no longer designing interactive movies; we're imagineering playable theme parks.

Virtual Boy’s best traditional game, at least in the Nintendo style, bore ideas that have been revisited in recent years. Virtual Boy Wario Land is likely the best game the machine had to offer, a slow action game where the pudgy freak hunted for treasure while he explored dangerous forests and caves. Nintendo used the Virtual Boy’s depth effects wonderfully here. Wario trundled around from left to right just as he did in his Game Boy outings, but the field of view had multiple layers. Sometimes the path forward was hidden in the background of the stage and you’d have to find a specially marked place to hop back there. This is the exact same trick that spiced up modern descendants like Rayman Origins and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Did it really require the Virtual Boy’s 3-D to pull off? Hell no, but it was cool anyway. And that explains the Virtual Boy in totality. It was unnecessary—a machine that approached technology the public was hungry for but couldn’t come remotely close to delivering.

Conversations as mental habits