Transcript: A - Z of Tech Episode 24: V for Video games

Louise Taggart:

Hello, this is the A-Z of tech podcast series and you've joined me, Louise, for this episode, which is ‘V’ for video games. I am delighted to be joined in the studio for this discussion by two special guests. We have Jeremy Dalton, who is head of Metaverse Technologies here at PwC; and Tanya Laird, who most impressively is an inductee to the Women in Games Hall of Fame. Thank you both so much for joining us today for this episode. I do have to admit before we start, I am not actually a particularly big gamer. I wasn't allowed a console when I was growing up. I always think of things like Lemmings or Pac Man when we are talking about video games, but I am sure this episode is going to be a real education for me. Jeremy, if I might turn to you first with perhaps a fairly basic entry level question, what is a video game, how do you define video game?

Jeremy Dalton:

Tanya and I were having a really good discussion about this just now. It's an interesting definition, because at the end of the day, if you really draw back the definition of gaming, and what is defined as a game, you can go in so many directions, everybody in a way is a gamer of some sort. You have people who have played traditional video games, electronically on screens, you have got people who get involved in live action role playing, pretending to be different characters in a made-up world. Even from a corporate perspective, Tanya was bringing up examples around how different organisations are encouraging different behaviours by using elements of gamification. Whether you are a willing participant or not, I think it's fair to say everyone is a gamer of some sort.

Louise:

Are we all gamers, Tanya?

Tanya:

If we take a look at like the little red dots, a notification on your phone, that itself is a form of gamification to get you to execute a specific task, to open whatever the thing is, that’s gamification, that's driving you to a behaviour. There are so many different elements of that in our day to day lives that most people aren’t really thinking about, which actually makes everybody a gamer in some way or form.

Louise:

If we roll it back a little bit then, what is the history of video games, how have we got to where we are today?

Tanya:

When we talk about the origin of gaming, a lot of the origin of gaming really came from good old-fashioned pen and paper, D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) gaming. Their idea, for example, that we started out with IRC or In-Real chat, which was the very first origins of chatting on the internet. You would have a chat room, but then you could describe what that chat room would look like. A house with a chair and sofa, for example, and then you would have another chat room that somebody could go into, and you say, ‘now I'm in the hallway of that house,’ etc., and so forth. People would build in blocks, if you like, these rooms, and connect all these rooms in different ways to create an experience, and there you go, that was one of the first examples of very basic level gaming.

Jeremy:

That wasn’t the idea of IRC, right. It was a chatroom, but people used the constructs and the platform to create a gaming structure.

Tanya:

Indeed, and created things called MUDs (multi-user domains), for example, and that was really a collection of different text-based rooms that people could go and have a little experience. Then you have that changed from text-based experience into visual experience, where you have really basic 8-bit games, Commodore 64, Amstrads, and things like that. You're talking about very blocky games like Pac Man - arcade games.

Jeremy:

These are the ones you were playing, Louise.

Louise:

Absolutely, Pac Man was my particular favourite.

Tanya:

You have those basic game functions, that then evolved, and you have more and more sophisticated artistic rendering, but then you also have more and more sophisticated artificial intelligence behind this experience, user engines creating experiences that are both visual, but also have a bit more complexity behind them.

Jeremy:

It has got to a point right where these really rich visual 3D worlds are so realistic now that some people are having difficulty determining whether it was shot as a movie, or whether it was a completely computer-generated game environment.

Tanya:

Indeed, look at, for example, the Fast and Furious 7. Paul Walker when he died, they were left with a situation of, do we want to cut his character out from the movie or do we want to complete the movie with him in it. Well, the only way to do that is with digital enhancement and they used a lot of gaming engines in order to do that, the unreal engine to create those images. Gaming, it is used in many different sectors to create, as you say, lifelike experiences.

Jeremy:

We started off talking about video games, and now we're talking about movies, but it's all kind of intertwined at the end of the day, isn’t it?

Louise:

This is a perfect point to actually ask about that segue, that overlap between video games, the gaming industry, and the entertainment industries looks like. You've already touched on how that technology is crossing over. My perception from the outside is that perhaps that the gaming industry is seen as the poor relative of the film industry, is that fair to say?

Tanya:

Not at all, if anything, the games industry is significantly larger than the movie industry. It's only because of popular culture, perception, that gaming is for geeks and gaming is for behind closed doors, that people don't really understand that from a financial perspective, the games industry actually makes more money than the movie industry. I believe that Jeremy has the figures too.

Jeremy:

I have the perfect example. When I was doing research for my book, ‘Reality check,’ I found out that the highest grossing film in the last decade was Avengers Endgame. This was released in April of 2019, it made 305 million dollars globally in its first two days. By comparison, Grand Theft Auto 5, a video game that was released almost six years prior in September of 2013 made more than twice that, so 800 million dollars in half the time, a single day. The video gaming industry really towers above the movie industry and the music industry despite what perceptions people may have.

Louise:

Asking both of you, with your visibility of the gaming industry, why do you think that perception persists?

Tanya:

As I say, with the movie industry, it's all about the actors, the talent, and that profile of celebrity. You don't really get that within the games industry. You don't have a specific actor, for example, who will play the character in a game franchise consistently. You will have different voice actors and different physical actors, who will play at different aspects and elements, but you don't hang your hat on that talent. Whereas with the movie, you hang their hat on the celebrity power of the individual star.

Louise:

Touching on that financial aspect then of gaming and how much industry is worth, one aspect that I would very much like to ask you both about, is around that professionalisation of gaming. As I said, it isn't an industry I am hugely familiar with, but I've heard that there are, for example, football clubs in the UK that are hiring their own team of Esports professionals. How has that particular aspect come about?

Jeremy:

It's absolutely incredible how far this has come from the perceptions of video games back in perhaps the 90s, which was the basement dwellers, I suppose, who would just stay there and play their video games on their screens alone. Now, it's become more accepted, it has become more mainstream. As you were saying, we've got football teams that are actually hiring professional gamers to represent them in online tournaments. The prizes they're being given out are in the millions now and it is legitimate. I think it is legitimate, I don’t know what you think, Tanya, but it's legitimate to say that you can become a professional gamer now, the money is there if you want to do it.

Tanya:

It is a career, and actually universities, especially in the US, now have courses where you can graduate to become a professional gamer. Professional gaming isn't just about sitting behind a console and playing a game in front of an audience, it is a full-time profession. They will take these individuals, they will put them in a house where they will live, and they will train with these other people. They will have a full training programme, that includes physical activity and exercise as well. They are treated like professional athletes. They are expected to perform in the same ways that a professional athlete would. That's reflected in the way that these individual players enter an arena when they go to an Esports tournament event. ESL for example, you could easily be looking at an audience anywhere between 30,000 to 60,000 in the audience. You're talking arena events. These players, inside the arena, and that is literally like watching a boxing match or a football game, and seeing these players enter the fandom that they have is easily to any live event.

Jeremy:

This is a big business at the end of the day, because these players are actually adding value to the world through their highest level of performance on these video games. People as you were saying, Tanya, are coming to watch this in their droves and this is growing as a form of entertainment and sport. Traditional sports are actually trying to reinvent themselves as a result, because they are seeing a lot of loss of new people coming into traditional sports, because their attention is being taken by Esports, because they're just engaging the audiences in such a new and exciting way.

Tanya:

Well, it’s not necessarily even a new and exciting way, it's just that they have something, which traditional live events don't have, and that’s community. This again, this is the same reason why gaming is so much more successful than movies is, you create an audience, you create a community that sustains throughout the length of the franchise. With movies you generally have an individual audience for that movie, and that audience does not travel to another movie that's unrelated. The only time you ever get a continuation of that is when it's a fandom and it's a franchise like Star Wars for example, or Marvel, where you will have that loyalty, but with gaming you get that kind of loyalty every single time.

Louise:

Is that a trend that you're expecting to see continue, more of a crossover between different platforms, between video gaming and other types of entertainment that are seeking to capitalise on this trend?

Tanya:

Absolutely, because you're looking at industries that are beginning to have issues with, for example, live performance. You have something like COVID which comes along and suddenly you can't have a concert anymore, you can't have a live gig or live event, because the audience can’t physically be there. With Esports, it is not a necessity to have the event be live, because you can do this at home, digital platforms, that’s their natural habitat, it's their expectation that they will do this offline, so to speak.

Jeremy:

Lot of our listeners may scoff at the term Esports thinking that people sitting at a computer, playing video games, justifies the term sport, but it is absolutely a highly competitive environment and activity. It is, in my opinion, worthy of the name Esports, but if people are thinking there needs to be physical activity attached to it, well, if we think about the future of where this is going and the combination of virtual reality technology, then all of a sudden, we have a very exciting world, in which people will not only have to perform at the highest level in a video game, but they will actually have to perform physically as well, and that brings a new meaning to the term, the cyberathlete.

Tanya:

We already see examples of this with virtual reality Esports, and seeing the physicality of how they have to play that game in a virtual environment that they are physically running around, jumping about, ducking and diving. There is a physicality there that makes them just as much an athlete as another person. Again, if you really wanted to define this, and say, ‘is Esports really something that could be defined as a sport?’ Well, this is something that's going to be in the Olympic Games, and is now a recognised category.

Jeremy:

You're mentioning that Esports itself was being trialled at the Commonwealth Games as well. It's absolutely amazing to see how widespread it's becoming, and no doubt growth is going to continue.

Louise:

If we are thinking about that crossover, what does that look like when we are thinking about real world applications? How does some of this innovation and gaming technology cross over into real world examples? Jeremy from the business perspective, what have you seen?

Jeremy:

Apart from the gamification concepts that we’ve discussed that we know are mainstream and everywhere in the world right now. On a more fringe note, in the division that I work in, virtual reality and augmented reality, we saw part of the realm of metaverse technologies, there is some very exciting stuff that can be done with this tech. We are using it to allow people to collaborate remotely from different parts of the world. They can come together in a digital environment and feel like they are in the same place and workshop and solve problems, whiteboard, and so on. We are also using it from a training perspective, to help people develop soft skills and practice those in a very convenient and scalable way. There are also so many different opportunities to enhance the operations of business by providing a powerful way to create a remote assistance platform. That stuff that we are exploring right now in a myriad of ways, Tanya, you've seen a number of examples of how this technology is being used as well.

Tanya:

Absolutely, if you're talking about virtual reality and gamification technologies or game technologies that are being utilised, a great example of this is medical realities. If we take a look at how traditionally surgeons are trained, part of the training is to stand in the operating theatre in the back of the room by the wall, watching and talking to the surgeon as they are performing the operation. Now through 360 cameras being placed above the patient, and with the surgeon wearing virtual reality technology, they're able to transmit what's happening with that operation. All of the students, so instead of only maybe six people being able to fit into that operating theatre, suddenly you have an audience of maybe 300 students, who are able to get a front row view of what's happening and be able to speak to the surgeon in real time to ask questions, get clarification, to understand what's going on. It reinvents the way that training for surgeons is taking place.

Other applications as well, virtual reality has been around for an awfully long time. People think that it's quite a new thing in the last 5, maybe 10 years, but in fact it's been around for at least 20 to 30 years. It's been around so long that the ministry of defence and the defence industries have their own terminology for it, they call it synthetic worlds. In synthetic world training, they are utilising game technology as well as virtual reality technology to create, for example, the drone technology that we see nowadays, which is saving lives. It's allowing personnel to not go into the theatre of war and not put their lives at risk, being able to do things at remote distance with accurate technologies that are at the base of them, they’re using a game joystick really, using game controllers in order to do that.

Louise:

Now, if I might ask you about the flip side of the coin here. Jeremy, one of the things that you touched on briefly earlier was around that perception of gamers being basement dwellers. Maybe, there is a common perception as well that it's quite a male-dominated area. Tanya, I would love to get your opinion on whether that perception actually is the reality of gaming and what that looks like.

Tanya:

Well, the reality is, there have always been women in the games industry. They may not always have been overly prolific or perceived by others from the outside looking in, but there have always been women in the industry. In fact, if anything, the part of the problem was that people didn't want to see women in the industry. That's where we get issues like GamerGate, for example, and GamerGate wouldn't have even happened if it weren’t for the fact that there were women at very high levels within this industry. People like Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn, these women doing excellent things within the games industry, holding their own in senior level positions, running their own studios, running their own development companies. It was because people, when I say people, I mean, certain communities didn't want to see those women being successful in the industry that created GamerGate, which was essentially a movement to suppress women and feminism from being part of the games industry.

Jeremy:

On the flip side, as well, it's not only the women in the industry that are misperceived, but also the women who are the end users, the gamers themselves, there's a misunderstanding that it's all men playing video games at the same time isn’t it?

Tanya:

Exactly, when in fact, at least 51% of the audience is female, and depending on which console you use, that percentage goes up. In fact, there are more mobile gamers that are women than men.

Jeremy:

I was just going to say actually, even from many of us have probably played Pokemon Go at some point or another, but even for those people playing Pokemon Go, who visited a business while playing the game, because they could be tracked, and 84% of those were women, the vast majority of Pokemon Go players are women.

Tanya:

Same with Candy Crush Saga, for example, or any of those type of mobile phone games, the average commuter is somebody who's playing the game on the way to work.

Louise:

That's definitely me, I definitely fall in that category. Some of the other factors that have fed into to these difficulties that women are facing, one that comes to mind is around that anonymity that's afforded amongst or received more broadly, social media and online activity, but particularly within gaming, is that an issue?

Tanya:

Whenever you have anonymity as a shield, there is always going to be an issue. We see that in gaming with women players getting abused from male players when they're on an audio feed and they can be heard, and with female characters being targeted. Unfortunately, we see that even in virtual reality, where female users are targeted by other users, and that's why certain companies created ways for players to not be able to invade the personal space of another player. If they were doing things that were considered as offensive or rude, that they could be blocked and not seen essentially by others, but the only reason they had to create those safety protocols was because of the abuse that was happening. That abuse happens, because there is a cloak of anonymity that happens when you're online in much the same way as with social media. You have these people who want to be abusive, troll-type behaviour towards others, they don't like social justice warriors or whatever the thing is that they don't like.

Jeremy:

In a way these software safeguards, they empower people, because they give them the ability, that perhaps they wouldn't have in the real world, to be able to block someone, move them away, get rid of them. It can be quite a powerful tool, using these or communicating and collaborating in these video game environments.

Louise:

Gaming, certainly part of that wider discussion around online safety and digital harms, but if we think about the future of the gaming industry in video games, what's driving the direction of the industry at the moment? Jeremy, you've already touched on Metaverse, for example, what do you see happening in the industry in the next three or four years?

Jeremy:

The concept of the Metaverse is a really interesting one, and to be honest, the idea of a Metaverse is not yet here, but the underlying idea of creating an environment in which people at a 3D world in which you can explore, interact, be represented by a digital avatar, that concept has been around for ages and it goes back a long way. The reason why it's becoming really popular now is because we're starting to see integrations with other technologies as well. Convergence of blockchain tech and within blockchain NFTs that can be sold in those environments. It starts to get really exciting when you get these very rich worlds, who actually have their own parallel economies at the same time as well. I'm very excited to see that grow and build.

Tanya:

In terms of economies, we've been seeing meta economies for a long time, Second Life, for example. Even when you look at things like Minecraft, there are real life economies related to these things, where a bit of code is worth a lot of money to certain people. When we look at how that can be evolved in the future, we are going to see more and more opportunities to integrate across multiple platforms, multiple technologies into more of a unified experience in a unified identity. When we find that unified identity, which Metaverse may be the first beginnings of something, I hate to say it, but something that everybody is using. If we can begin to unify that experience and that identity, then we begin to look at an economy that has much more value and can be much more influential in the real world.

Louise:

Just before we wrap up, Tanya and Jeremy, do you have any recommendations for further reading that our listeners could do if they want to find out a bit more on this topic?

Jeremy:

Absolutely. I'm not one to blow my own trumpet, but if you have an interest in virtual reality as a gaming technology and how it can influence business, then do check out ‘Reality Check’, how immersive technologies can transform your business and if anyone wants to get in touch with me personally, my website with all my social media details is www.jeremydaltonxr.com.

Tanya:

Brilliant, thank you. I will just say thank you both so much for joining me on this podcast today. We've covered a huge amount of ground, but I think my takeaway is that I am a gamer, that has been decided. Listeners, thank you for joining us for this episode. Don't forget to like and subscribe as we hurtle towards the end of the alphabet, and you can join us for our next episode, which will be ‘W’ for Web3.