 Hi, I'm Winfried Gehrling and today we have here with us Mark Butler from the University of Potsdam from the Digital Games Research Center. So, welcome, Mark. Oh, thank you, Winfried. Let's speculate a little about the future of storytelling in games or maybe only about the future of games. I don't know, we will see. If you think of all the different types of games and all the possibilities in computer-generated worlds today, why are more or less all games in a mode of simulating 3D worlds in a 2D-representational way as we know it from our reception or maybe from the physical world or better from the mediation of this world, like in photography or film? Well, first off, thank you for the kind words, Winfried. And it's a wonderful question to start off on because, as you point out, games are still stuck in this mode of going for a type of realism that art strived for in its early stages. And games are a very young medium. They haven't started to discover all the possibilities that the historical avant-garde discovered in the 20th century. I mean, when you think of about cubism, daddism, surrealism, I mean, all of these different frontiers are still open for games. That moment they're trying to create photorealistic 3D geometrical spaces that work like the world we know most games. There are obviously very interesting experiments out there that jump between time structures that create non-Euclidean spaces. And these kind of approaches obviously open up completely new storytelling possibilities. And all I can say is, you know, the sky's the limit when it comes to games. We have not even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. And I think we're going to be seeing much more experimental games coming out. I mean, already we have Beyond Two Souls, which I was talking about, which jumps within the narrative structure of the game where you get episodic spotlights shown on different periods of time of the protagonist, and then you jump forward in time, you jump backwards in time. You have games like Alexander Bruce's Anti-Chamber, which creates a world which looks like a 3D world in a 2D space, but doesn't follow the laws of geometrical space. As we know it, you can walk around in a circle and end up in a different spot. And so that demands of the player to sort of dive into the impossible to make a progress in the game world. And there's all kinds of interesting stuff happening. And so we can just be very curious of what's going to come our way. So that's, like in Portal, what you described already. Is it another direction? Portal worked with this kind of idea. Echo Chrome worked with this kind of idea. It's a game that's, you know, sort of like an M.C. Escher painting. But Anti-Chamber goes much further along these lines because it's not just working with the spatial representation, but just also what can happen in this world. And the way that space bends and morphs and jumps, because as, you know, different theorists has pointed out, especially Mark Wolf, games have their very own kind of spatial structure, and they don't even have to adhere to the physical world as we know it. That's what I wanted to know because a lot of games refer to our known physical world. And so it seems like that it takes a long time that it changes. It's true. It has taken a long time. But then again, you also have to see that games were trying to establish themselves as a serious storytelling media that could compete with, you know, literature or then film, which is basically the main competitor as, you know, companies like Rockstar Games or David Cage, you know, see their work being presented. And so they were striving for, you know, just showing, yes, we can do realistic stories. But once that's been established, I think we're going to see all kinds of very, very interesting experiments going on. And so portal, ecochrome, anti-chamber are just scratching the surface, and they're pushing the boundaries as they do so. There's even more to be said, and we were talking about space. You mentioned time as well. And games also have the possibility that other media don't have, you know, when you have a film, you know, it's basically the pictures are going by 24 frames a second, and it's just moving forward continuously. And obviously the story can jump back and forth. But the person viewing the story cannot, you know, move the film around unless they're sitting at home on their watching it on their DVD player, and then they can jump back and forth. But that's not what you're supposed to be doing. When it comes to games, time becomes a spatial dimension. You can travel forward, you can travel backwards, you can slow it down like in Max Payne, you can speed it up. So obviously there's a lot that can be done there. And in general, the whole simulated physics of the game world, you know, the virtual physics is also another fascinating field to explore. Because we don't have to have games worlds with gravity as we know it. You know, we don't have to have, you know, objects that behave the way we expect them to behave. And as games move from showing us, you know, pre-rendered video animation of what happens in the game world to on the fly generation of realistically or, you know, surrealistically simulated game physics, then we're going to have worlds that will be able to offer us experiences that we can't have in our non-virtual life. Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate that answer. There are new platforms like the Xbox, which is recognizing up to six different persons in a single room with their movements and their so-called emotions, because they somehow measure how you move and it's then called emotions. It stores a lot of individual data. What will be the effect or will there appear more individualization on or in games like regional or personal styles of the same game? Well, as you said in the beginning, we can only speculate what this will bring. I think the possibility to have six people in front of the Kinect is not going to, you know, go very far because, I mean, the space that the Kinect can scan is limited. So, you know, if you have six people moving around, then obviously the movements that are going to be possible are going to be fairly limited. Maybe you could do a game like Rock Band, you know, in front of the Kinect without the, you know, plastic guitar and drum interfaces, but the question is, you know, what have you gained by doing so? Much more interesting, I find the idea that gaming systems will be able to scan and capture emotional reactions of the player because this offers the possibility of making player emotions a part of the game mechanics. And we've seen something happen just recently coming from the other direction, the motion capture of actors' faces that are used to animate the game characters have gotten so sophisticated that the emotions of the actors have become a part of the game mechanics like in LA Noir where you have to decide whether someone's lying to you or not, you're a detective, you're interrogating somebody, you have to decide if they're lying or not, and then press a button. That's part of the game mechanics on the side of the computer generated characters. Now, with the Xbox One, if it delivers on what it promises, we have the ability to have the computer react to the emotional responses of the players. Obviously, people are very different, so I don't know if it's possible to make a game where everyone cries at the same spot and that's the trigger to progress the story, but it definitely opens up some very interesting questions of what might be possible and so that's fascinating. We're definitely going to see a lot more individualization of the gaming content. The system sees what you like, it can react to that, it can change the parameters of the game, it knows where you are, and it can definitely tailor the experience to your personal likes and dislikes. With the introduction of Google Glass and other similar devices, a new quality of mixing realities arose. Is this a symptom for what Levmanovich proposed with the concept of expanded reality? Can we say there is a turn from virtual reality to real virtuality? That's a nice plan. I've actually used that myself in a somewhat different way because when people talk about virtual reality, oftentimes they act like it's not really real and doesn't have an impact on real life and obviously it has a major impact even as virtual reality. There we are already dealing with real virtuality, but the whole topic you addressed, the question of augmented reality I think was the first term to come up and then mixed reality I think is more appropriate. Julian Oliver talks about improved reality, but that's in reference to his art project, the advertiser where he's replacing billboard images with artworks. In general, yes, Google Glass obviously opens up a completely new dimension of gaming that has been there before, but obviously it's not a mass phenomenon. It's augmented reality gaming, something else. It's augmented reality gaming. The first experience were things like Pac-Man, where people are using mobile devices to play Pac-Man in New York City, things like that. If you have Google Glass at your disposal, basically you have a heads-up display in the everyday non-virtual world and you can overlay information, screen over everything and then you can play video games while walking around your city, going to work. Basically it's a further dissipation of the boundary separating work from play and it's inherent quality of the digital media I say per say and it's just continuing a development that has been ongoing for the last 40 years. We can at that point just start to imagine what it's going to feel like living in a computer game 24-7 because basically there are no limits on where the game could pop up in your day-to-day life. Again, that's pure speculation. There might be laws coming up that are going to try and regulate that. Who knows? There might be certain psychological problems people develop because they can't really differentiate between game world and not game world. People always worry about that. I don't think that's a real problem, but if you think about popular films like David Fincher's The Game, obviously you can get a bit paranoid if you're constantly confronted with these highly meaningful messages that are trying to involve you in the story where all you want to do is go to the corner and buy a cup of coffee. I'm very curious to see what's going to happen. Yeah, me too. How will games change while accessing the same game from different kinds of interfaces or platforms like we have recently seen with the development of Sony cross-play concept, which is only one of a lot I think because if you have different interfaces like the iPad or the iPhone or any other interface which is connected to the same game in the same status of the game, what will this change? Well, okay. First off, obviously it's a completely different experience. If I'm sitting in the subway playing a game, whatever, let's say Grand Theft Auto, I'm playing it in the subway. It's not as immersive as if I'm sitting at home in front of my big flat screen TV or even better Beamer with my surround sound stereo system. I can dive into that game in a completely different way than when I'm traveling outside. That's going to change the experience. I don't know how many players will want to do that. Some players will want to max out the time because that's a serious problem when coming to games. They're just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger and demanding more and more of our time, which is becoming a much more precious resource. There might be a lot who will want to do that on their way to work, way back from work, another dissipation of the boundary of the gaming sphere. But at the same time, I'm personally not too sure if these concepts are going to go that far, especially when we're talking about games that are meant to be played not only on the console but with a mobile device in addition. In addition, it's a nice gimmick. Like a second screen when playing a game in front of the computer or the TV. For example, Beyond Two Souls, which I've talked about a lot today, offers the player to have a second player use their mobile device, their smartphone to control the ghost form. The other worldly friend of the protagonist, Jody, in the game world. That offers some interesting possibilities. But basically, if I'm playing the game, I obviously want to control not only Jody but also I didn't. And sometimes I want to do it with a friend, but to be able to really experience the story and move through it, I'm going to play it in single player mode. And just like the Wii U really tries to build on this concept. And so far it's bombed. No one really wants to be looking at a touchscreen and playing a game up there. Somehow that doesn't appeal to many people. It doesn't appeal to me. But talking about interfaces that raises a completely different topic, which I personally find highly fascinating. It's the question of what do new gaming interfaces like the Kinect or like the PlayStation Move, which basically have kinesthetics, have dance, is their interaction paradigm. What kind of stories do they allow us to tell? And these interfaces underline the fact that games tell stories for the eyes, the ears, and the hands, or now the whole body. And that is an innate quality that only this medium has. And every new interface offers new interaction, but also new narrative possibilities. Because the best narration in games is the narration that doesn't sort of come as a side or something put on top. It's something that basically emerges from the interactive structure of the gaming system itself. Okay. So in your opinion, are there other major changes going on in gaming story-wise, which we didn't discuss, or which you didn't think about in your lecture? I don't know, just to think. Well, when you asked me to do this talk, you said you wanted to talk about your sort of sort of visionary stuff too, what's really far out there on the horizon. I don't want to go into neural uplinks or that kind of brain-computer interface, because that's obviously fascinating, but still very far off, not so far from what I think, but still fairly far off. Cup of tea. But when talking about really the visionary future for game-playing storytelling, I personally have this idea of game engines as story engines. For me, that means a game engine that creates a story on the fly, as opposed to, you know, spooling off a story that someone has written and set in scene, and that the player sort of basically retraces the path that the designer set for them. I think that in the future it will be possible for a game engine to generate a believable and consistent and compelling story from, you know, basic programming that is put into it that engages players on the level that stories do nowadays, and that that would basically be the deconstruction of the author, per se, you know, in the form of the game engine. It has a lot of prerequisites, you know, you would have to, you know, reach a stage where semantic webs have become a reality, where the computer program understands meaning so that I can leave, you know, prescripted dialogue structures, and basically I could say anything, and nowadays you don't have to type anything, you can actually speak with the computer, he understands me, and he reacts to that. That would be one prerequisite. Another prerequisite would be to have, well not so much a prerequisite, but another vision would be to have computer-controlled game characters that pass the Turing test, right, that really are so believable that I don't know if it's a computer playing or another human being. Another vision, and it's something that needs to be stressed, so we haven't reached it, is game characters that overcome the Uncanny Valley. We have this development of more and more realistic graphics and enactment of game characters, but they still seem eerily inhuman. You know, I'm waiting for the day that, you know, I can't differentiate between a game-controlled character and an actor, for example. The last point I want to make, and this is actually more close to the here and now than all the others I've made, is what I want to call user-generated story content. You know, we're seeing it in very many other fields. We've seen it beginning with games now, you know, Rockstar Games has a Rockstar Games social club, and you know, users can create their own little videos of their gameplay. They create mech, mech into mine, they can put them online, they're sharing it with each other. Obviously, this is something that's very interesting for players. At the same time, you also have, you know, emergent stories coming out of player interaction in these massively multiplayer online games. Like funerals. Funerals, or my favorite example is Eve Online. I mean, there you have players, you know, numerous players orchestrating the downfall of a very powerful player over the course of many months, you know, sort of luring her away from her powerful battleship so that they can, you know, get on board to just crash her entire empire. And this kind of development is more intriguing than anything any designer could come up with. So obviously, that's already going on. But what I mean when I talk about user-generated story content is that I see a future where designers open up the game engine, and this is something that they've done in other fields in the past, you know, and letting players mod the engine. But I'm giving users the tools they need to create their own story episodes and, you know, probably having some kind of editorial system in place to sort of filter out the bad content and get the really good content, and giving users a place to put that online so that within the story world of a game, you know, users can create their own episodes to let other players play them. I think there's a great future for that. And the whole move is away from these closed games that are, you know, basically in the, just on a DVD and have a beginning, middle and up to creating game worlds that are continuously expanding are very alive and are on the one hand being expanded through downloadable content created by the game companies, but then also downloadable content created by the players themselves. Or been played in the cloud, where you don't have to download anything at all. For example, yeah, yeah. That would be another development. It's true. Forgot about the cloud. Sorry. Sorry, Steve. Yeah, that leads me to the last really stupid question. But do you think cinema will die? No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Cinema does something completely different than games. And, you know, I think the whole rivalry between games and cinema, you know, is, you know, it's good to sort of get the creative juices flowing. But at the end, it misses the point because games are an interactive experience. You know, I need to be completely differently engaged with a game to partake in that experience. And cinema offers me something else. It offers me these audiovisual stories that are, you know, designed by, you know, in the best case, very talented directors and, you know, conveyed to me a story that I want to listen to. And I don't know, with me, it's a very clear decision in the evening. I have three hours time. What am I going to do? Some nights, I want to watch a movie. Some nights, I want to play a game. They definitely have a future of coexistence. So thanks a lot, Mark. My pleasure. Thanks a lot for being with us, Mark, and your rich input you gave. And thanks for you all being with us and see you next week, hopefully.