 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your host, Jeff Brick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Brick here. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The best name of any tech convention we go to and probably one of the highest energy tech conventions we go to out of the 70 that we're going to cover in 2015. We're really excited to be joined by our next guest, our first gaming centric guest that we've had on the show so far. Yeah, Brianna Wu, head of development for Giant Space Cat. Brianna, welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm super pumped to be here. Yeah, absolutely. So games are such a big part of technology, such a big part of the growth of technology and development, and you are right in the middle of it. We are, we are. You know, we've seen this explosion in women gamers in the last few years. So, you know, when I was growing up in 1989, women were only 3% of the gaming audience. In 2008, women were only 17% of the gaming audience. Today, the average gamer is a 35-year-old woman. So we are actually, women are 52% of gamers now. In 2015, there's this huge explosion. And one of the most exciting things about being here at Grace Hopper is all the women that are so pumped about working in games. So they want to come, like, change the world and make an entirely new set of games for everyone. So let's talk a little bit about the way that's changed, because back in the early day of games, right, it was all, you know, the games are so boy-centric or so boy-centric. You know, how do we, how do we have the girls have something to participate? Because on Christmas morning, when you brought home the Atari, right, there was no cartridge. There's one for Billy, but not for Susie to stick in the game. So have the games changed or have just women got more involved in the games? Or what's really changed to get that demographic? So what's frustrating is it's barely changed. You know, you brought out the Nintendo Entertainment System. So when I grew up in 1985, my parents brought home my Nintendo. And, you know, it's just Super Mario Brothers, right? It's got Super Mario Sisters. So in 1987, they had Super Mario 2 which had Princess Peach in it. And I was so excited because I could finally play as a woman. But then it was 20 years until a core Mario game would let you play as a woman again. So, you know, the truth is our industry is really failing at giving women role models. And, you know, it's turned around a bit in recent years. Like we see games like Tomb Raider, you know, they've radically changed Tomb Raider and Lara Croft. And, you know, nowadays she is, she's this really, really well fleshed out person that you can relate to. So it's changing. But, you know, the truth is the game industry doesn't really understand just how many women are lined up asking to, like, have ourselves represented in games. And what's, it's just fascinating to me, right? It's a big underserved market. And it seemed like before there was just attempts they couldn't get it right. Is it they can't get it right? Or there just aren't enough people trying to develop games, you know, for women? Or do they even need to be that different? What makes a game popular for a woman that maybe, not that wouldn't be for a guy, but what is it about the guys' games that's missing that a woman would rather have? Well, I mean, you say you're not really a super gamer. Like, you can look at games from the outside and you recognize that women aren't really represented the best in games, right? They just shoot them up and, you know, call a duty. Right, right. You know, I think it's multifactorial. You know, sometimes it's just giving women kind of a place to start to really develop that love of games. You know, when the Nintendo came out, you know, I grew up with, like, this six-button controller. But today that six-button controller has turned into a 15-button controller with dual joysticks. So you're really asking someone to really understand a very complicated device just to play a game. When the iPhone came out, it kind of gave women gamers a ground floor to start on and to learn how to be gamers. So, you know, what you have here is, you know, women don't typically like the same kind of games men do. Now, you know, they're men that like story-based romance adventures and they're women that like shoot-em-ups. But very generally speaking, there are differences in where psychological motivations are. And the truth is, we're just not having these games made. I think a really big problem is the press. You know, the games press, I did a talk at GHC today, and, you know, we covered the complete lack of women at several major gaming institutions. So you have men that are basically deciding what games have worked and what games get made. And when you don't have women in the equation, it's not really a surprise why the games kind of suck for us. Do you know what I mean? But, and then, and then you had the whole, like you said, the holding with iPhones and these little things, there's not a 15 button to joystick controller for these. So how is this kind of form factor and to kind of the duration of the games, right? It's, I asked him, I'm like, I don't, I don't get, I don't get like, well, right now I'm bored. Now I'm not bored. So, I mean, how has the mobile movement and the games and mobile changed the bigger game team? It's like I said, it gives you a place to start. You know, what I think it's so telling is to use my iPhone, I just use my finger, right? Like, this is a controller that every human on the planet, you know, if you have hands, I guess, understands, right? But I think there's this misconception out there that women are only interested in Candy Crush. You know, women are only interested in like, Pebble. You know, I would ask anyone out there that's kind of saying, hey, women don't like hardcore games to ask themselves, what is the highest budget game we've ever made aimed at women? And the truth is you can't really think of a high budget game that's the equivalent of a call of duty. So, you know, we have a long way to go at making games for women. And what I'm excited about is our company is really going feet first into AR and VR. And, you know, we are going to be at the very forefront of the market, developing really cutting edge, holodeck level games for, you know, this augmented reality and virtual reality experience. So that's going to be crazy, right? This is going to be wild. Have you tried it yet? Can I ask? I tried a little bit. Actually a very interesting application with the company that does asset management and you wear the Oculus Rift and as you walk around the inventory yard of actually a power company and you look at a transformer, it tells you that transformer has an issue, then you can pull up the data, you know, you need to swap it out and main it. So a really interesting kind of internet of things application tied to visually looking at inventory. So I haven't really done it on the gaming side. Okay, so let me ask a question. You're walking around, did you feel nauseous? Because I bet a million dollars you felt nauseous after you took it off. Yeah, because you're not used to it, right? I mean, it's just like when you put glasses off of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually more complicated than that. So what we have is it's an interface problem, right? So you have the dudes in our industry who are really eager to make games that are you know, more run and gun shooters. So what we found scientifically is if you can design games where the character is sitting still rather than moving around a lot because what happens is your eyes are telling you that you're moving around, but your inner ear is telling you that you're standing still and that's what makes you feel nauseous. So this is a problem that we can solve. We just have to think about the way we're approaching it. Right, so beyond beyond the kind of the sexiness of the women in the game, whatever. Talk about some of the characteristics of the game between the storytelling component, the competition component, you know, kind of the psychology component to keep give people just enough, you know, the rewards just enough on a random basis so they keep playing. What elements of those are you really focused on and are some of those more important for male gamers versus female gamers? Oh God, that is such an insightful question. So they're basically six, I'm about to get a little academic care, but there are six different axes that we've kind of located that are what are psychological motivation for people to play games. So if you're a call of duty player, what is going to psychologically motivate you to play games is going to be you're going to like mastering a very complex system, which is one axi. And then the other axi is competition, dominating your friends, score-based things. Typically speaking, I'm not saying no women like this, but very generally speaking, women rank much higher on enjoying immersion. That's a motivation, immersion means story. It means feeling like you're part of a world. So like in Final Fantasy, there are a lot of women that really love Final Fantasy because this is beautiful world that you feel like you're part of. Another thing that really gives women psychological motivation is feeling agency within a story. The ability to change the world around them, the ability to make choices. So if you look at women, we tend to really, really like these two things, which is why I think the killer app that no one's really developed yet is like a romance novel in VR. Like, and this is the technology that we're developing. I'm so excited about this, but the APIs and frameworks that we are investing tons of money to figure out, like right now I'm looking you in the eye. And that tells you things on like a human level about what I'm feeling emotionally. Or if my voice is angry, that tells you things. Or if my voice is soft, that tells you things. So we are going to be developing technology that takes all these cues and changes the story based on that. And it's like really exciting. This is the holodeck, right? Yeah, yeah, because you've got so much horsepower, right? And you've got so much computing horsepower. Absolutely. Just a little bit, we're at a tech show. Talk a little bit about cloud, big data, some of those big trends, how those are impacting the way you're developing games today and what it's going to enable you to do in the future. Sure, I think for VR, one of the things that's very difficult is the consumer cost barrier for this, right? So for you not to get nauseous as you're doing it, I have to draw 60 frames a second in this eye and 60 frames a second in this eye. That's non-trivial, as we say in engineering. So we've found that cloud computing solutions are helpful for calculating light mouse, which is something very expensive. To me, what is really imperative is, engineering is all about trade-offs and choices. So what we are concentrating on at our studio isn't running gun gameplay, it's not killing things, it's not shooting robots. We are spending all of our development costs on conversation, on people, and really concentrating on that experience because you can't do everything, right? Like engineering's about choices. And there's a lot of nuance, right? So there's probably a lot of serious horsepower that's required to drive the nuance that you see there. Well, it's a really interesting question. They've done studies, so our industry tends to love photorealism and love really complex static meshes and love really complex characters. Interesting thing though, that's not what the consumer likes. So if you're in VR, what we've actually found is consumers and particularly women respond much better to a lower polycount, kind of cartoonish, think sailor moon kind of environment. So the irony is, if you can get away from this idea that games need to be call of duty, you know, it's less expensive to develop and it's more immersive, so yeah. Well, let me see that in regular movies, right? Of course, right. I mean, huge production movies, if there's no story, if there's no plot line, if it doesn't hold together, it's just exploding. I can watch that on Mythbusters all day long, right? They blow stuff up. So where does it go next as you get into this VR, you get into these immersive experience? Does it become less of a game, more of an experience, more I'm going to go places and see things and do things? Well, I think for VR and AR, I think if you are an investor, I think the majority of the money there is not going to be in the game industry. I have friends that are working on real estate solutions for AR, you were talking about a power plan example, it's easy to imagine that working with something like Google Glass or HoloLens, it's going to be part of how we interface with computers in the future. I am waiting for Apple and Microsoft to figure out how you do, you know, OS 10, how you do the file browser in VR, that's a very interesting computing problem. I think the problem we've really got to figure out is interface, you know, I don't know if Oculus, which is over there, they had a demo this year, Oculus Connect that blew me away. So they figured out the controller, which is a haptic glow. So you put it on and their controller will represent your hands in front of you. So if I move these fingers, I see them like springing in real life and I can pick up virtual blocks and move them and put them around. So I think where it goes from here is we've got to figure out the interface. That's really the big problem. Yeah, we have touch screens for years that wasn't until Apple figured out pinch to zoom and multi-touch and all these touch-based gestures. The interface, it really took off. So I think if you are, you know, a front-end designer or an interface designer, we need our best and brightest being thrown at this problem. Yeah, so let me shift gears a little bit. Please, please, please. How can we use gaming and the draw, the connection, the pull, right? Our kids are on them all the time to drive other types of behaviors. For instance, you know, the whole theme here is getting girls involved in computer science earlier. What's the game that you can write that they don't know it, but they're actually getting exposed to and starting to learn to love the problem-solving that feels like a game, but it's actually introducing them to computer science? That is a great question. Yeah, for us, you know, I was telling you a bit before we started about game working and how terrible that's been this year. And you know, if your listeners don't know, viewers don't know, you know, I've basically been the target of a hatred for most of 2014. So what I spend a lot of time thinking about is the internet, like, you know, it takes empathy from us, right? Like we're all angry at each other on Twitter and on Facebook. It's anonymous, right? It's easy to do and it's anonymous. I think the anonymity has been oversubscribed, but it's certainly aggressive towards each other, right? So what we find, we're asking ourselves is how can we develop games where empathy is a building block for that? You know, like so many of the games they reward you for shooting and killing, how do we build a game that's fun but also rewards you for relating to people in a positive way? So, you know, that is why we're developing the frameworks that we want to do. I think it's so telling that when Captain Janeway on Star Trek, when she wants to blow off some steam, she doesn't go to the holodeck and kill more bored. She goes and talks to Leonardo da Vinci and interacts with them and learns things about herself. So to me, I think, you know, the iPhone makes this very natural because we're touching something. This is a human interaction that makes sense to us. To me, the next frontier is emotional interaction. So to interact with games in a way that makes sense, to look at them, to talk to them, to have your voice reflect what you're feeling and have those systems give you feedback. So at what point is it no longer a game? Yeah. Never a game means. And it just becomes an immersive experience in whatever you're choosing to do. Right. I don't know. I don't think it matters, right? Right. Yeah, it matters. So the other just fascinating thing about game, again, I'm not a big gamer, looking at it from the outside is spectating and gaming as a spectator sport and these stadiums that are filled with tens of thousands of people watching other people play games. Right. What is that all about? Well, it's, you know, it's a, are you a sports fan? Are you a sports fan? Yeah, absolutely. It's exactly the same thing. Like, you know, there is a game called Peckle, okay? Peckle is a $20 game where you basically shoot a ball and you watch it bounce around and you try to beat the other player. This is a $20 casual game. My husband and I have taken this game and perverted it into a blood sport because that's how much of it we have played. I've probably played three or 4,000 hours of Peckle in the last five years. When you're watching someone do anything at a high level skill, whether that's hit a baseball, you know, play in a fighting game, play Peckle, it's exciting. Like, it's a spectator sport. Like, I think humans just enjoy watching people do things well. At a high level. And if I could say this, you know, one of the reasons I think I've never really been able to get into sports is because, you know, with respect, women can't play football. Women can't play baseball. You know, the thing that makes games so beautiful is this is a place where women can get in there and compete just like men can. So I think it's a really, it brings us all together. It's kind of like, that's why people like golf, right? Because you can watch golf and if you've got the money and the time, you can actually go play the same hole that the pros played. Well, you can't do that in football. You can't go run around and get beat up on a professional football game. That's interesting. So let's flip kind of to the negative side of things for people that don't get it. And you just said you spent lots and lots of hours on this game. Sure. What do you say to people to say, ah, like kids are wasting so much time on this game. Is it okay? Is there benefits? Is it just because we've become so kind of wealthy as a society that we can afford the time? Or is it just purely a time substitution for what we used to do with watching TV or doing some of these other things? Yeah, I am not a parent, you know? And I often wonder how I would handle having a child that was as addicted to video games as I am. What's very funny to me is all the time I spent as a child, like playing Final Fantasy Tactics instead of going to class. You know, given my profession these days, that was a good call. Yeah, worked out all right. But that's not what most people should do. I think it's really hard. You know, I think it can be a waste of time. And you know, I would love to sit here today and tell you that the science shows that playing games has no effect on children, but it doesn't show that. So what happens scientifically is if your children play a lot of online games, scientifically, it slows their empathy development, meaning they have a harder time relating to people, thinking about them, talking to them. And sadly, it's also gonna stunt their social skills. That doesn't mean you don't develop them later, but it does have those negative consequences. So I think that's something I would encourage parents to think about. Yeah, well, it's just interesting, right? Because they've got the device. So whether they're playing game, they're on Snapchat, they're on Instagram, they're listening to music, they're watching YouTube videos, what's interesting is it's all on the same device. And in fact, homework and sports teams, schedules and this and that. Right. So you look at down the road five years from now, what are we gonna be talking about from gaming? So I think it's really interesting if you look historically at any kind of competing technology, the mainframe era of technology, Grace Hopper's era, basically, that lasted about 20 years. The PCH lasted about 20 years. And we are about to cross the line into eight years of this. I don't think we're gonna be tapping on the class forever. So my eye is more towards the future. I think what is gonna happen slowly is I think VR and AR are gonna be an interstitial step to us getting to neural interface, which is we're doing a lot of advanced things on that. So I think what's gonna happen is Oculus is gonna come out and Microsoft HoloLens is gonna come out. It's gonna segment the market somewhat. It's not gonna dominate it, we're gonna have games and programs and flat screen for a long time. But I think you're gonna see people continue to pull out of the real world and spend more time in VR and AR. And I think that's kind of scary, but there's no stopping it. Yeah, yeah, because why do you need fingers and eyes if you can just go straight in, right? Move the middleman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Well, thank you very much, Brianna, for stopping by. Our first gaming representative here at the conference at Grace Hopper. I hope I'm not the last. Absolutely, I'm sure you won't be. So great to see you. And again, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff Frick. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 in Houston, Texas. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.