Whenever I explain what the Entertainment Technology Center is or what we do in my grad program, the most common response is usually “wow, that sounds really fun”. While people may not completely wrap their heads around the day-in-day-out work of our program or what weird things could possibly go into doing what we do, people can wrap their heads around fun.
Fun is universal.
And people that respond that way to me are not wrong. It is fun here. Fun is an integral part of what we try to do and built and is almost always a by-product of our creative process. Whether it is a game for social change or a transformational game or an educational experience, a sure-fire way to make sure it fails and does not get used is to forget the fun entirely. More fun, more engagement, more power - I think Albert Einstein may have said something kinda like that at some point, maybe.
Anyway, fun is good and we try to make good things so we try to make fun things. While it all seems like play-time at the ETC, if you show up between 11pm and midnight on a Monday night before something is due, you will not find very many people who would willingly admit they are having fun. Those are the points, while, yes, you are making a video game or, yes, are building an entire world that has never been thought of before, where you question your sanity and your definition of fun.
Our professors must have known we were starting to feel this way because the only topic of the latest round of everyone’s favorite graduate school pressure cooker (aka “Building Virtual Worlds” for those of you who are new around here) was fun. The catch, though, was that we only had one (1!) week to build our worlds instead of the usual two (kudos to the loyal readers who may have noticed that this post came a week earlier than it should have and realized that something even stranger than usual was happening).
With only a week to design and build a world based on fun, and without the aid of a mid-way design review and feedback, we were forced into a tight spot to begin with and only given one piece of advice: Keep it simple, stupid. Develop one interaction, one mechanism, one really fun thing and focus on making that as fun as possible. Sounds simple enough, but after rounds of story development and trying to layer in as much as possible, this proved to be a challenge. Like brevity, simplicity is a gift.
Just a few minutes into our first team meeting, we all had come to the conclusion that destruction was universally fun. As much fun as it is to build stuff, I don’t know anyone who would argue that destroying something to bits is not a completely satisfying experience. With that in mind, we iterated through different destruction scenarios that would fit a VR experience (utilizing an Oculus Rift with Leap Motion sensor) and eventually landed at a concept where a guest must use various household objects to destroy his or her little brother’s block towers after he stole their phone. Our goal was to build an experience that allows a guest to do all the things they wish they could have done to get revenge on their siblings - throwing bouncy balls, piloting remote control helicopters that drop water balloons and more.
I don’t want to call our group stupid, but by the end of the week, we were not model “keeping it simple” citizens. Our scope grew as we thought we had cooler and cooler ideas we could pull off and maybe we could have pulled them off in a two week span, but not this time. In the last six hours of development, we had to scrap some ideas and piece together what we had left. It’s not a perfect “world”, by any means, but….. it is pretty fun, if I do say so myself.
And that is what is going to stick with me from the infamous BVW Lightning Round: there is always time to make something fun. Our group rode the emotional roller coaster over the last twenty-four hours of our build and none of us knew where it would put us at 11:59 on Monday night. We did, though, trust the creative process we have in the past and our programmers and we were able to put something together that made whoever played it laugh and that’s really all we could have asked for. We made some great design decisions and some not-so-great ones and still ended up with an experience that ended with a smile.
A smile is a fairly commonplace thing and not your typical goal outcome of a project, but in some cases, it’s the best metric for how successful a project is. Especially in the ETC line of work, smiles are a stupidly simple way to measure how much of an impact a project can have and if we cannot accept that, then we are in the wrong place.