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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.11 - FEBRUARY 2001
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What's A Digital Media Futurist? HK: That's one thing we have been discussing in the magazine, is that gaming is becoming a much wider realm. People used to only think of twitch games, but actually a lot of games that are currently being sold are for kids, family titles. Are you saying that in this new world, that trend is going to continue even more? JVT: I do think so but the genre that I think holds the most promise is role playing games. HK: Shows like Friends and Cheers: folks watch them because they are a group of people they like. It's almost like spending time with them. You want to see what is going to happen next. JVT: That is something that is called terra social interaction and it's the tendency for people watching television to identify with characters as though they were real people and as though they were talking to them. HK: It seems like in these environments you get to know the other players, so you are having that same experience but instead of watching it, you are immersed in it. JVT: Yes, and besides that in many ways you may interact with both the character and the person. If you get to like a character, the two of you can go off-line, exchange email, meet and even get married. It is also possible to have friendships with a person's character that you would never know in regular life. You might not even like them but like that particular inclination of them. HK: Everybody out there is waiting for Star Trek's Holodeck to become a reality. Do you have any thoughts on this? JVT: Well, it's kind of interesting. Okay, we have the world. Let's just call that for now "reality." The three dimensional and four dimensional world of stuff. Now we have a network, it's the doubled world. It goes back to the Greeks with their myths. There's nothing original about this, as kind of a collective conscious and that is really what we've created on the Net. We keep making this a more and more real example or real copy of the world. It gets more and more detailed. If you can't find something on the Net, it's really frustrating. You have a sense that, 'It has to be there somewhere. I am just not able to find it.' Probably you are right. You don't have the right combination of search engines to get to it. The world, like our real world, has become bigger than anyone can know. That is what the Holodeck is. This is when the other world becomes as big as, maybe bigger, than the real world. Since the imagined world needs both that world and the resources of the real world to make it. Then it's probably bigger than the real world. I will take this a step further -- there will be no popular film that does not have an interactive extension. There will always be the desire to sit around the campfire and listen to a story, why would that change? But when you have people who are fully engaged interactively as well, they are going to want to recreate that experience whenever they want it. Plus, they are not going to want to watch the same movie twice, or three times or four times or even the sequel forever. They are going to want to be able to do things in that world, so if companies don't create that, then the users will. HK: For instance, The Phantom Menace: LucasArts came out with a pod racing flight simulator game. Would these types of elements now be integrated into the film? So that if you wanted to take a break from the film and pod race with all those characters you could and then you could rejoin watching the film? JVT: There's that kind of interactively, but I am thinking more along the idea of this sustained immersive environment. So there's going to be the Phantom Menace world that you can belong to. HK: And you can go in and investigate all the different planets and live in those areas... JVT: ...and reinvent those characters so that you can be someone's cousin. I think the next group of users is absolutely going to demand the ability to engage in an immersive environment that is responsive to them. They don't have to change the characters that they have invented, but those characters need to populate that world and some extension of those characters need to be able to respond to users in some way. HK: That is going to be a lot of work for a lot of people. JVT: It is. Although users do so much of it themselves, it is going to be a lot of work for a lot of people. I think that there will be big environments and small environments. HK: And some might continue on and on and on very strong, where some worlds might be popular for a little bit and then ebb as the movie becomes less popular. JVT: Exactly. I think too that people have not really, in the game world, capitalized at all on email, but they will. You are not necessarily going to have to go to a place. Elements of games will come to you, and they should. HK: How will that work? JVT: Well it depends on how broadband the deal is. The work space is already pretty broadband. Characters can interact among each other using email. If I were running a game, I would certainly be notifying people of things that were going on in the environment, if they wanted. If there is going to be an attack, you want to know so you can come and pick up your pitchfork. You could be emailed with graphics of your 'house' going up in flames. They could notify you on your cell phone. There is a lot of cross media engagement that could be occurring that is not that expensive to do and players could opt in and out. There's a source of private amusement that they might enjoy. You could really link this game into someone's life. You could send them Christmas greetings from the characters in the game, for example. And that's just off the top of my head. HK: What do you think the time frame on this is? JVT: As soon as people think of it and start doing it, it's ready to go. HK: And the sort of watching these immersive communities or fantasy communities on your television? JVT: There is a little bit of work here. In my opinion it's somewhere in a 15 to 20 year horizon. It's ten years at the soonest. There are some standards to work out. Basically what would have to happen is, you would have to have a communications gateway into your house and a communications center that allows you to port material to whatever device you want, where you want it.
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