Choice Design With Zachtronics' Matthew Burns - GDC Podcast Ep. 2

this is GDC podcast that's a big pop [Laughter] [Music] hey everybody I'm Chris Kraft I'm here with Alyssa Mackel in hello oh yeah forgot to see what I do I am editor-in-chief of Gamasutra at least I try to be and this is the second episode of GDC podcast right yeah second episode I know that had it's got that fresh podcast take that with it's a fun thing about doing this monthly so far is it feels like it's been a week since we recorded this so I know it feels like we've been doing this for about 30 years now oh yeah season your podcasters over

here very seasoned there's been no editing at all in all these all of this is exactly how it happened so again we're here for GDC that stands for Game Developers Conference and we we kind of started this so that we could give people some insight into these fascinating people who make video games and kind of let people know how they make them I think that's a pretty that's a noble oh yeah yeah turns out they don't just will themselves under existence as hard-working teams of dedicated people behind all those many many many games that are coming out in quick succession this year it's it's true well not all of them will themselves into existence I think that will write actually willed himself in oh yeah well let's talk about oh we have to talk real quick about like what all right what are you playing right now I'm killing time as we're

recording this new Sims game pack comes out like three hours ago and it is killing me that I can't be playing it right now so it'll do that for the week you're that dedicated of a podcaster and you have waited this long to play games yeah it's installing like a and on my lunch I went to go start installing it so it's it pains me what do you what do you like so much about descent I mean it's a it's a great game but you're you're obsessed with it uh I am a micromanager and it gives me a way to productively micromanage without pissing any laughs without pissing anyone I know it's a one of those weird kind of like with a like circa valley and animal crossing where you have a bunch of like small little tasks to just kind of like focus on and get into routines and set up all this and there's like creative output in it it's just really relaxing and so none of your sims are pissed off no no they're all very happy and I hold them to very high standards in early do

you ever do the cool thing where you just kind of build them into a room and you know punish him like that they make it they make it harder in uh in these ones you can't just like delete the pool ladder anymore but yeah we treat our CentOS or our sins humanely in the year 2019 that's good and then I'm playing games - yeah there's math do you play any video games um dude do I game am i a gamer the gamer I'm a gamer I'm actually playing astral chain from platinum and it's a lot less Bayonetta and it's a lot more kind of more detective stuff than I thought there would be your your your the D you're basically demon police and there are these things called chimera that keep on coming through portals and infecting people and doing all this this weird stuff to people but it's a I'm

surprised how much of a mix of action and and detective work is in there yeah from the III I think trailer it looked like it'd be this really kind of like nish little game that not a lot of people would get into but a lot of people have been talking about that one yeah and also there is a toilet fairy in it oh is that the one that talks about your tweets yeah yeah that's well yeah that was my hilarious tweet joke like guy I contributed something to the toilet yeah I don't know it was as an item it wasn't it wasn't any yeah in any way the toilet fairy thanked me for blessing it video games are art they are heads speaking of video games the Game Developers Conference there is actually some stuff happening with it so we opened up the call for summits so if you have ideas for talks that involve AI

animation independent games game narrative math in game dev then you should submit a talk on the website you can find that information at GD Kampf calm there's also VR DC game career development you can submit your talks before midnight on September 30th at that website that's midnight before you turn into a pumpkin there's also more there's also a XR DC coming up in October that's 14th through 15th at Fort Mason festival pavilion and that's in San Francisco that has to do with all of the fancy visual computing stuff where virtual things are overlaid on reality a rxr vrm are various are as the XRS yeah

all the ARS all the ARS 2020 a GS submissions are now open as well those are due by midnight on September 30th students and non-students can submit games judged on excellence in visual art audio design narrative and best student game with a finalist in all of those categories and there is a program going where underrepresented under represented groups can apply for a fee waiver more details on that can be found at IG f comm slash submit - your - game alright this is where we start to tease the next guest here well not tease our next guest to tease what he does right yeah don't tease me a little background this person is a past that this is like gonna be one of my things on this podcast now huge hype right before we introduced the person all right all right our next guest is a past GDC speaker he's written for

Gamasutra and game developer magazine what writer and composer and a game dev at Zek tronics where he worked on such cool system e-type games like opus magnum EXA Punk's shen Jenna IO and also in a past life worked Triple A at Bungie Treyarch three four three industries they made some games some of those games were halo and of Call of Duty in cool including Call of Duty - big red one which I enjoy we're getting this by oh my god it's it's all on the Internet sir okay yeah III enjoy I like saying big red one as in big red one big red one yeah big red one and so if you oh he

also did the Great twine game the writer will do something that is about floundering development of a triple-a game and the latest latest game that come out is Eliza from Zack Tronics so if you'll join me in unveiling our guest Matthew Barnes hi Matthew hi hi well you have a long storied past in the game ministry I'm actually known of you for a while I feel like now I know you a bit after all that research that you've done after yeah after stalking me on the internet yeah yeah this is what Alyssa and I are getting really good at we are better at internet stalking than we are at podcasting which you know okay it'll hopefully that'll pay off someday now you started in the game industry it seems like you must have

started pretty early on in your life at like in your and your career can you talk about how it all started how I got started sure yeah I think it was 2002 2001 something like that so I guess that's coming up on like 18 years now started right out of school as a tester in the basement of Activision in Santa Monica the same building that they still are in right now but I was absolutely just a temp tester kind of kind of like starting on the lowest rung and eventually became a producer and I was a producer the entire time I was on Triple A and went through the various studios that you mentioned and various franchises that you mentioned and then I I tried to go indie once that didn't work out and I went back to triple-a and then I tried to go ad again and now I am here at sector onyx where I I do the writing and music which is more

interesting to me than the production stuff for right now because it's it's new and it's stuff I haven't done before so I guess that's the that's the short version of my journey through the game industry just taking notes here basically you crawled out of the basement of Activision that's how I heard it yes and in major ways so the test department at Activision is literally in the basement of the building like there's the core siddhis it's it's like metaphorical and it's it's kind of funny it's also a little bit you know like sad but like it's always been in the in the literal basement can you describe this basement was it dank damp it's you know there's no windows obviously and it's just sort of this large open space that is the underground floor of like a large officee building and there's fluorescent lights that buzz faintly and a break room with vending machines in it with

you know bags of dirt dedos that you can buy for a dollar 25 or whatever like so like what's that arcade machine of like puzzle bobble or something they play once you so once you got a taste of that you're like 15 years yeah I was like oh that's the life for me yeah awesome I can't wait to just keep like a slightly more upbeat metaphor they're like oh testers are the foundation of game development if you really want to like put that on a cat poster you could get there I think it's true I mean it's like it was a we're making fun of it but it is yes absolutely an important job and absolutely like not something that shouldn't be taken seriously like it should be taken very seriously yeah exactly I think I mean I would I I'm totally willing to go on the record and say that Activision probably could stand to treat their testers better both of them and now the triple-a though working

in that four years just to dig into that a little bit more was it anything near what you expected because I bet that there are listeners that are thinking you know there's still people out there despite the news of how hard it can be in this industry do you have a romanticized idea of it were you like that um I think so I think first like people who are going into triple-a now they definitely have a better sense of like crunch and and work-life balance issues and things like that like when I talk to students now a lot of them are familiar with the with the stories and reporting that has been done on that and that's a great credit to like the reporters who've been willing to like try to put these stories out there when I started there was less of that like less of like here's what to expect when you do triple-a so he didn't necessarily have like a specific notion of like this is what it was gonna be like it was more just like okay now I'm working on a big-budget game Call of Duty is like a big game seems important and I'll just

do what it takes to to get it done yeah so at that time the industry was just a little bit less established and there was just more kind of fly by the seat of your pants not that it's amazing now right but there's just like smaller smaller teams and like less less sort of developed processes and just like kind of like doing things and hoping that they hoping that they work so he didn't have this specific idea like it's going to be like this I just kind of went in hoping to be useful well you've had a lot of different you know jobs and games you said that your producer that was the you know QA and producer side is what you were focusing on now what kind of drew you more towards the focus on the writing and you're also a composer who writes music for these games you know what thank you yeah what are you towards

that well so I you know it's a like I joined games because I was interested in them creatively like I actually was it was a tester for three years and a producer for like ten years but the entire time I had been doing like my own writing on the side and my own music on the side because I think fundamentally I am a creative person and I always was but the thing about like working in in games on Triple A games I actually there was a point at which I could decide whether I wanted to be like a designer like I wanted if I wanted to follow like the design track on stuff like Call of Duty and to be super honest like the design problems that you have to solve on a game like Call of Duty we're not as interesting to me as like kind of like the logistical problems that you have to solve on like how to put the team together and how to do you like the voice recording and how to do that coordinate all the designers and and all the assets and stuff like that so I pursued the production track in

triple-a because I thought I would like be able to learn more of like the kinds of things that I was interested in and see a lot of the different disciplines and like you know stand in on a mocap session and like make a big list of animations or or be in the recording studio with with you know participate in all of that kind of stuff as opposed to the kinds of again the kinds of design problems that you solve on in Call of Duty which are interesting but we're just less like what I wanted to pursue I thought when you went indie for the first time did you stick with kind of a production side of it or we're more in the like yeah no I that point then I was like oh I want to like it was it was tough so the first time I tried to go indie was like around 2011 or 12 so that was like when indie stuff was really really early on and it was like maybe this is a thing that can be done and I myself didn't necessarily have a great idea of exactly how it was going to work like you had to

sort of be entrepreneurial too at the same time and like pitch your game and there wasn't necessarily like a great pipeline for how to pitch the pitch stuff so I thought you know I have to be like some sort of business guy too and then also like be involved in like design and and like creative direct the game as well at the same time and it was a super super artsy game that I think wasn't the type of game that like a big publisher would pay a lot of money for especially back then I think maybe now there's more interest in this type of in in that type of game and there's more models for how that type of thing could work but at the time it was just it didn't quite come together but yeah it was it was always like trying to trying to be creative the twine games that I've made were made while I was not working at sector onyx and working at other jobs and I would you know go home and work on my twine games and that kind of thing you had mentioned that you you tried to

go indie first and you talked about what happened there because there was that period and then you had you then you went back to triple-a yeah I saved up some I had saved up a bunch of money and I was like I'm gonna do it I'm gonna pursue the indie dream and so in like 2011 or 12 something like that me and some friends that I had met we're like yeah we're gonna make a game and I said I had saved up money but it was like to pay my rent it wasn't like to pay my collaborators unfortunately so we were all kind of working like for free on this thing not a model that I would recommend especially today but that was like the only way that it could happen then and I would not do that again in the future I think it's important to to pay everyone for their contribution at this you know right now but so we worked on it and we we came we had like this sort of demo of of the game it was this musical shooter that we were calling plunk at the time after the named after

the physicist max max plunk and it was like it was kind of like inspired by like rez and Ted sea of music you Chi kind of games where it's like cool electronic music and and sound and stuff and and I was trying to get money to finish it and this was again this is a time when there weren't a ton of indie publishers I think like devolver was around at this time but many of the other ones weren't and so then I would like try to I was like try to pitch to like you know Konami or something right and it was just like I why would it doesn't make any sense and and so it was just it just didn't like it didn't happen like people were just not interested enough in the game it was like too artsy too out there not enough precedent for the type of game it was and to like the the deals that were out there for this type of thing were just like we're just kind of almost

condescending you know it would be like I would go to like a publisher and they would be like and I would be like hey I have this game and I need this amount of money to make it and then I and then I'll give the game to you and then they would come back with their counteroffer and then they would be like how about this we don't give you any money and you still give us the game and it would just be like okay that's not you know that's not like a real thing so eventually the money that I had saved up to like pay my rent was running out and I was like okay sorry I guess this didn't work so I had got another job in triple-a to kind of like continue it but I still felt like you know that that I had that had I had failed in some way because like I would I didn't finish the game that I was trying to make at that time yeah well I guess join the club right sure yeah absolutely yeah yeah I forget about those times and you said this was around 2000 eleven I think so yeah 10 11 or 12 something like that yeah so so to me you like again I'm pushing 40 now 2011 does

not seem like that long ago and it was such a different time where these this kind of rise you know of the mid-tier you know or the more boutique style publishers like devolver weren't really established as they are now or a lot of them around the idea of you and you know your little team pitching to the same company that publishes like Metal Gear Solid you know or better play games like that yeah I mean it's almost comical these days it really wasn't clear it really was a clear like mismatch and it was like hey I want to do this artsy thing and they were just like I don't know what to do with this I think now there's much more of like a framework that you can be like hey I am this type of game and they understand where you're coming from a little bit better it really was a different it was super different time and you're right it

wasn't that long ago yeah now SEC Tronics you joined Zack Tronics in 2016 is that right yeah so I had I had worked with Zack prior to that I'd done the music for infinifactory and written some stuff 40s 100 but in 2016 is when I joined basically full-time to do both the writing and music for electronics games so Shenzhen IO was the first Zack tronics game that I did both of the the writing and music for so this is this always struck me as an interesting pairing too because you are kind of shaping the future of Zack Tronics I as you know Matthew I interviewed Zack at GDC even like a couple years ago and we talked about the influence that you're having on it we near going into Zack tronic so if you don't know Zack Tronics does very

systems based doohickey type of games where you add and subtract things from systems and you basically and some of you press go and then this the system just starts going and it might collapse in on itself or it might magically work and it just gives this amazing sense of progression like intellectual progression intrinsic reward is amazing with these games now bringing you on what was the goal with you I mean many of the Zack Tronics game is mechanically I mean they they come so with the exception of Eliza like the mechanics of the Zack Thomas games definitely continue to just come from Zack I don't really try to like make any like design contributions to stuff especially the more hardcore ones the ones where you just do assembly language programming like I don't really have anything to offer they're like from us from a design

standpoint but we do what what we do talk about especially early on in the design process is just kind of the overall story of the game and the world that the game takes place in and the the arc that we take players on as they do these tasks and that's something that's very important I think to us as a studio it's important to Zack he doesn't want to make games that are just about manipulating abstract symbols in a vacuum they have to connect back to the real world in some way and that's where I really get involved and I think that that's that's something we talked about from the very GetGo we don't design a game and then like put a skin on it like oh maybe this could take place in medieval times and then you just put medieval stuff on it it's really about designing the mechanics and the world and the story altogether all at once and hopefully by doing that they all like reflect on each other and and reinforce each other now the latest electronics

game Eliza is a game that just came out recently and it's quite a departure and that it is it's a visual novel it's not one of these super mechanics heavy games that Zac tronics has become known for right right can you talk about via what but how about this Alisa what are you thinking what we're both playing this game right now what are you thinking of Eliza was not emotionally ready to start it at like 10:00 p.m. yeah but I feel kind of bad because my preconception of Zack tronic games prior before this conversation and before doing a research and never leading up to this had been like these are puzzle games that are way too tough for me I had no idea of like the element of kind of world Curie world creation that went into that I just had compartmentalize the moyes puzzle games and I'm gonna go back and recheck some

of them no no that's okay I think I think like absolutely the most like memorable thing about them is is the fact that they are these like sort of programming programming puzzle games or engineering puzzle games where you literally have to like do engineering you literally have to like do an engineering job to like finish the level one of the descriptions I read for that was oh they're puzzle games for programmers and I like that it's so technical right yeah there's not technical stuff as well then you go to Eliza which is a visual novel which is a very nice Chandra on its own and entirely different from puzzle games altogether so how did the idea to be like here's a story I want to tell with these kind of mechanics about all of this and how did that kind of snap into visual novel for you guys yeah and and can you just give kind of our listeners just the the background of this the story of what Eliza don't have - sure yeah so Eliza is a visual novel it's kind of about this therapy app that

a large tech company based in Seattle has developed the way I pitch it to people often is saying like imagine imagine Amazon added a therapy function to to Amazon Alexa so like you would come home after a day at work and just be like Alexa I don't feel so good and Alexa would be like why don't you feel so good and then you could just like talk to your Amazon Alexa and it would like listen to you and creepily record you and upload all of your like deep thoughts - to Amazon and so it's it's a little bit like that although there's a there's a twist in that the AI responses provided to it are supposed to be read by real human beings called proxies and proxy work is may be analogous to like uber or lyft or door - or something like that where you as a proxy your job is to just kind of show up and like read these words that are provided to you at someone who is in for therapy so it's it's about these therapy

clients that come in it's about you being the proxy and not really having a choice about what you say to them and it's also about the people who make this technology and whether they're really helping or not and the choices that you make when you work in technology and the effect that you have on the world as an engineer so that's kind of in a nutshell what Eliza is all about there's a lot of other stuff too there's stuff about you know burnout and working in the in the tech industry there's stuff about all this other stuff there is there's so much stuff in it yes it touches on all this stuff like like AI bias you know talking about like you said burnout work-life balance this responsibility that people developing technology feel or don't feel about it what they're making what got you what got you thinking about all this did you just watch a bunch of black mayor or or I

mean like a lot of this stuff is very realistic that's one thing this is a believable war yes well I mean living in Seattle for for the past decade or so seeing the city transform pretty dramatically as Amazon has taken over more and more of it is one thread of that because I work in games many of the people that I'm you know professional colleagues with or friends work at companies like Microsoft or Amazon you know Microsoft has a big has Xbox right and amazon has Amazon game studios so there are plenty of Microsoft Amazon and has a big campus up here as well employees of these big tech companies in this area and people that I know I also you know I mentioned earlier I work on my own stories in my own time and when I

during one job that that I had had like five or six years ago I said I want to say like 2014 I saw a demo of a real therapy application developed with funding from DARPA that was cameras on people's faces and there was like a 3d avatar that was talking at them like this like kind of old-school like Second Life looking 3d person and it would and it was like you know how are you doing and then the person be like oh I don't know and then all these like metrics would be like on their face like if they were blinking or smiling and you know all that kind of stuff and it was the the point of the system was to determine if people maybe had signs of PTSD or something like that and the reason why it was funded by DARPA which is part of the Defense Department was because maybe they were gonna like use it on soldiers who like came back from Afghanistan or whatever and then they would like sit them in

front of this like computer system and it would like scan their face while they talked to see if they were if they had PTSD or not so I saw that demo and it was just like really stuck with me right for for whatever reason it was just like the the idea of that you know you send some 20 year old kid into war and give them PTSD and then they come back and they have to talk to a robot about it like I really wanted to do something with that or like make a story about it so and this was before Black Mirror but like it just felt like really arresting and and so I was like thinking about like maybe I'll make this a toying game or something like that and so I had written a bunch of stuff about it and so one day Zak and I were talking I think this was after maybe maybe after opus magnum we were just talking about like future stuff that we could do I think that Zak feels that we can always make more puzzle gramming games like I feel like we

understand that that genre pretty well zach is basically the inventor of that genre but it's cool to try new things and do new things and so I told them about this idea that I'd had and then I was like kind of pitched him on this idea of doing it as a visual novel that takes a little bit of art and a little bit of programming time and stuff and he was like yeah let's do it let's make it let's make this as a Zack Tronics game and sort of put it through our process and so that allowed the art to happen and that allowed like the voice recording to happen and things like that so I totally jumped at the chance to be able to to do it that way did did Zack have any reservations whatsoever that it might not resonate with the typical Zack Tronics audience absolutely yeah we talked about that a lot there were a lot of like we had no idea if anyone would like this at all we had no idea if like Zack Tronics fans with like yell at

us and be mad and you know show up better at our homes or something like that right I made a visual novel yeah like we were concerned about that we were also concerned that like by by making a visual novel about like kind of just 30-somethings talking about their careers and stuff like that's not really typical visual novel um fair right and so like maybe maybe visual fans of visual novels won't like it and then also people who are not fans of visual novels won't play it anyway because it's a visual novel right so it's like maybe we're making a game for nobody then that that was a real fear while we were making it and then also yeah how would people who associate Zek Tronics with this very specific genre how would they feel about it as well I mean doesn't Grey's Anatomy about people talking about work in their 30s and 40s and people like that right sort of Grey's Anatomy of videogames is that you're gonna I don't know it's definitely like you know it's about like

adult things and I mean adult in the sense of like paying your mortgage adult not yeah yeah kind of yeah it's and Alyssa and I were talking about how and this isn't this is a this is a compliment to the am his it's it's depressing and it's but in in a way that I want games to make me feel something real and it you know I think that you know a lot of people will agree with me of that like that comes along not very often and when you're sitting there with the initial patient you're sitting there as the proxy and then you start to realize that you can only read out what the Eliza AI is telling you to say we're also get fired like right there it just it that takes away your agency it takes

away your your your propensity to help people it takes away any empathetic action that you could possibly take and that's what's interesting like and you've talked about this before at GDC about choice and how you handle choice and a lot of times it's not about the choices that are interesting it's about how they're presented so can you can you talk about that about designing for choice in a game that doesn't have much of it yeah so I mean I'll I'll just come out and say it that the way Eliza is designed is that you don't have a choice for a very long time I want to say the first two-thirds of the entire game are just completely linear and then it opens up towards the end and you do have a choice and that's a very very deliberate like design strategy that I'm using from a narrative design standpoint of using

using all of that time at the beginning to set up like a variant what I think is a very interesting and complex choice at the end so instead of bombarding you with small incremental choices throughout the duration of your play what you get is kind of a interesting situation and an interesting story and an interesting world hopefully and then you are presented with the you know with the chance to make a choice there's it's a lot more resonant that's my theory anyway it's the choice itself becomes a lot more resonating when you when you understand all of the factors around it instead of like you know you you just start the game and you're presented with a choice immediately with no context of like I don't I don't know what I'm choosing to do if I make these choices really it's like you're yeah that um that fills me with anxiety so like I'm there's six chapters in the game I'm on chapter 5 so it's you're getting there it's kind of like what you're describing is kind of like you know blowing up a party balloon and you know your your decision is like

should I stop blowing into it or should I just like keep going it's like oh okay all of this is just building up to one big thing and I think so there's a completely fascinating design decision yeah I think it really allows you to do stuff that you couldn't do in any other way and so I was I did talk about this at GDC I think this is like an interesting approach to think about and it the game itself like it's not really very fantastical in a lot of ways like it's really just like modern-day kind of life there's nothing about it that's like made-up except for the therapy stuff and even then since the game came out everybody's been like emailing me like these apps they found on the app store that I like chatbot for for cognitive behavioral therapy or whatever like completely unbelievable it's totally yeah a thing now yeah I think like going into that very first so you start like the your character is a

first day as this proxy right when you play and they're going through and talking through their entire like okay so you have to go in this room and listen to this person and stick to the script it's very important that you stick to the script and that is hammered and I'm like oh here's the mechanic it's gonna be I have to sit here and right away I'm gonna have to decide if I'm going to stick to the script or if I'm gonna take a different option because that's a very visual novel II kind of binary choices like do I do a going down this road or do I do being go down the other path right but like right away you don't get that and I think that kind of yeah you get resigned to that same kind of anxiety that Chris was talking about but at the same time in other like outside of the eliza therapy office you have your text conversations or your face-to-face conversations where you can choose between two answers and the answers might not necessarily be different outside of tone the outcome will be the same and those two like the difference between those two kinds of decision and also the subtle differences

between the actual choices you make really do a lot to define the character you're playing as it feels like especially because of visual novels the ones I've played have been like anime nonsense because that's me in a past life but only a lot of times your protagonist becomes this empty vessel that you fill with your own personality right and the protagonist in Eliza has her own motivations her own goals and her own backstory that you uncover through these unique kind of narrative design choices I don't have a question I'm building up to here other than that it's very impressive how all of that was kind of drip fed to me by subverting what I expected of visual novels in a way yeah for sure I think that you know like any any like text book that you open about game design will say well basically will say like games are different because they're interactive right games are the games are different from other mediums because they present you with choices that's like the defining feature of games you hear any any pundit talking

about games will say this and so what's so powerful to me like in that is like actually denying someone a choice like that can be such a powerful like move because like it's a game you would think that you would want to give people a choice and so going going against that is like kind of a really interesting way to use the the tools that you have as a game designer right it's like it's like using silence as a composer or or blank space as a writer I don't know but you know the absence of the thing that makes the medium what it is I think can enhance the other parts of you know that you can enhance the choices that come later and it can and it can contrast with like you said the moments in her in her daily life in Evelyn that the main characters daily life where she does have a little bit of choice and then at work where she has absolutely none at all let's uh let's just sit here

dead air for five minutes to subvert the the notion of a podcast so when Sid Meyer says you know a game is a series of entering interesting choices or decisions you don't necessarily agree with that I think it's well to her admires good to be listening so you better be careful okay well then no I don't I don't I actually don't agree that a game is a series of interesting choices I think that what a game is is actually very difficult to define and once you know when you read game theory stuff like people are like oh Ludwig Wittgenstein picked the word game as an example of a word that's impossible to define and he had all these examples about like why how you can't define the word game it's worth worth reading

everyone has their own definition of game I think a lot of people think that visual novels are not games at all but I think that Eliza does have interesting choices in it or at least one interesting choice in it and so if Eliza is a series of one very interesting choice is it a game or not I don't know I'll let you decide as long as you buy it in plan well I know whatever you think it is like it's I think that what it's doing to me what it's how it's making me think about the topics at hand how it's making me think about the world around me I don't think that that could be done as effectively if it were a game that were you know as soon as I say this some like Indies gonna release an amazing game with lots of chalk like like that but like this this game I just it would yeah the fact that it takes

away the agency from me that really that that grabs me and it's compelled it's a deliberate yeah it's a deliberate choice like again like I said like you know at Zach products like we've made the we make these extremely mechanics heavy games right so it's not like beyond us to design a therapy game where like procedurally generated people come in who have like four or five conditions and you like have to like give them procedurally generated like prescriptions or like figure out what to say to make them feel better and then we've created this like weird like simulation II kind of model of like mental health which is like weird and not something I wanted to get into right because then you're making as soon as you start designing a system around that then you're then you're starting to make this procedural argument that like oh if someone is depressed they need this right like if someone has X problem then they need Y and if if you don't give

them that then they're bad and if you do give them that then they're better and it's like I didn't want to like every person in Eliza is just their own person if they're their own specific like case and that and the reason why that's true is because it's a completely linear and there's no choice and again that's a that's a deliberate decision modeling mental health just seems like such a such a minefield of like unintended like consequences and things arguments that I didn't want to make it's a deliberate decision that kind of makes a commentary on that way of thinking there's like one specific person in general where Chris and I both talked about it and we're like yeah she just came in to like have a chat and the AI is like well here's a pill for you right and like a lot of that is just kind of like you said through your computer kinda like oh my eyes like tears out of my head wait a minute you know you have you have to sit there and then you have to repeat what the AI says and it feels like you are making

things worse that you're contributing to something bad mm-hm and then you get into all of this stuff like you know what am i it you start thinking what am i involved in what am i doing you know the to this world what's my impact on this world is like these little things that you do is that making it better is that helping people right and that's kind of the ultimate like question that the game asks right which is what are you how are you contributing to the world and how do you feel good about what you're doing yeah well yeah no no don't wrap it up I'm gonna go check I want a one more question I want to ask before I know we're running short of time but it's like it's half a credit to the voice acting and half a credit to their writing that like all of those characters and all those situations in like the eliza therapy sessions all seem human and not like people really I think

it's easy when you're dealing with mental health mental health topics and trauma and anxieties and stuff like that to write characters that are just just those traits I'm like so far all the people I've encountered feel like they have rounded out lives and that everything seems like amazingly human in actuality and I guess I wonder if you can talk a little bit about writing human characters or the voice acting process of coaching into getting this really genuine feeling in each of those very personal intimate moments yeah totally I mean I could talk about both of those things for a really long time but I'll say in terms of I'll start with the voice acting like when the voice actors came in I we just talked about how I told them that I that I was interested in getting very naturalistic performances and not you know stage II performances and not to worry about like where the where one line begins and where one line ends oftentimes in game

scripts the lines have to be very separate and and actors who know how to act for games know to like pause between lines because they're going to be cut up into there into the dialogue stuff and I said well if it feels natural to like just run into the next sentence just do that and I'll I'll fix it on my end so that both like one line becomes two lines or or two lines become one line and stuff like that and sentences that I had written that we're like weirdly stilted or whatever like we kind of fixed in the in in the recording booth as we went just to find that like really natural delivery and that really natural performance and a lot of that you know they was the actors responding to me like trusting them to with the material like I didn't try to say say it this way or come at it this exact way it was like more like providing a space to let them find a place to take it so that's like though kind of the voice acting part and again I could talk about that for a really long time the other thing was I

did some you know when I was doing my research before or during writing this I spoke to some some people some mental health professionals interviewed them I also drew on my own experience going to therapy and and sort of like what I would I know from my friends as well who have experienced similar things and I think it was important to me to like show that people you don't you don't talk about your deepest problem like the first thing when you walk into your therapists office right you don't just like immediately bring up the the thing that's like lurking underneath everything at all you don't just like you know you're not like the it's not like your therapist is like how are you and you're like oh my parents disowned me like you that's like lurking in the background and sometimes it takes like multiple sessions to even get anywhere near there a lot of people don't talk like they don't even feel comfortable talking about the real issue and so like showing that people don't necessarily just like

do that was also very important to me that there's always like something you know the real issue is kind of lurking in the background a lot of the time and and if if the therapy clients feel more human for that reason I think it's that it's that part of that approach you know in the writing to get their last question before we let you go is there any happy ending in this relationship between humans and technology like in the real world like in the real world yeah you know I think I I think that that it is possible I'm not sure if it is probable but I think that it is possible because I believe that technology itself on its own is neutral right and it's really just how we use it like technology on its own is not good or bad it's it's how its applied and if we are careful and think about how we apply technology then we can we can

benefit from it and of course we're all being very careful and we're doing a great job of it so far yeah right nothing to worry about I feel like everything's going smoothly I don't know about you guys I think everything's going great yeah on that note we all love technology we also all love Eliza and thank you so much to Matthew for joining us and best of luck with the game thank you thank you for having me [Music] all right Matthews out of the room now that's heavy stuff right I can't I just want to swoop back to my my my notes that started off with visual novels what a

genre yeah yeah yeah I want to swoop back into the fetal position no it's it's such a good game and hopefully it doesn't you know turn people off who might be listening to this that it is there's some profound stuff in there right yeah yeah the last thing we want to do is get guests on the show and then discourage people from playing their games but I think the one thing that I tried to get at it when we were all chatting but the one nice thing about Eliza is it feels like it deals a lot of heavy topics but it gives them the weight that they deserve and the amount of thought they deserve and the entire the entire game is about kind of like the same questions that you're asking as you're playing it so in that note the writing is very I just I have like the word meaningful written like a million times throughout my notes here because everything is it's it's everything just feels meaningful and it feels very cared about yeah absolutely

and you know a lot of sci-fi which you know this this is it's very near future sci-fi I think is really kind of there there's kind of one point of view and it's technology sucks and we're all doomed and this isn't like that there are characters who really believe in this kind of AI based therapy there's a there's a character that really believes that this is going to help people and that's the reason that they're in it so you have the you you have a spectrum of people who think of Eliza the AI in all these different ways you have the extreme who is this character Nora who used to work on the project and then she left to lead the life of a musician in an

artist and then she becomes one of the harshest critics of it whereas you have the you know the the big CEOs of these tech companies who are all about it and then you have the people in the middle who are somewhere you know somewhere in between yeah if you break it down to like its most basic parts there are like these very clear like against for chaotic in the middle kind of like these very clear sides but in the actual implementation of it it's really like human and believable and just really good it's a really good game good yeah and it reminds me of and people will see this or people have seen it if they played the game it reminded me of when I was in college a little bit and I was telemarketing and it's like stick to the script and then you have your your boss yes I was a telemarketer I was one of those awful people it was college they

needed the money which is probably what a lot of these proxies in Eliza thought it was College and you did the money so I became a proxy for machine learning robot thing but yeah stick to the script you have no agency and by the way your boss is listening in on you make sure that you're doing that you're doing the job right uh I think like my one big like high-level takeaway from this conversation is just the kind of benefit of not sticking to your brand I guess in a way because this like this in a million years every well like three weeks ago when this was announced every single headline was like sacked Ronix is making a visual novel like no one could believe cuz it's such a out there game for based on like the past library that they put out before but like they didn't and they went for it and it just it resonates in such a great way where like sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone and everyone should make a visual novel what I'm getting at and I've seen I've seen some of the user

reviews you know pray for me I went into the steam user review section brave well yeah I was just looking at it and there are Zack Tronics fans of the previous games who really liked this one so you know there there might be more overlap than you think it's interesting how like kind of the theme of they went from puzzle games for programmers to kind of like a game about like big like the programming like morality question is there and there's always this kind of like underlying beat that's just very interesting to see when they deviate from genre so it's just a very cool outcome when when I talked to Zach at GDC he was very much like I mean they have they released a huge instruction manual for I think it's 40 is and it it's actually like an engineering math manual it's like meant to be like an actual electronics like engineering

manual and so you know you got that not everything in math you did work on that as well but you do have this this reputation like even Zach was like if you don't if you don't understand our games you know I don't care and you know that they're they're they're crowded GDC we're just like yeah yeah cuz it does it does give you kind of a special thing like I understand this like this is a game for me for my brain and then you come out with this that you know kind of that that questions a lot of things that programming lays the foundation for yeah that's cool yeah I think like all of my in the conversation notes are just like things I wanted to dig in on more because there's just so much so much cool surrounding how this came to be yeah it touches on so many different things now we're not talking spoilers here so yeah keep listening but it talks about it it touches on things like as a

society in today's world we're coding yes it's important you know stem is very important and all that but at the same time we are devaluing the arts for example you know we are so creating intelligence with one skill set no I'm saying which is you know coding that's a smart thing to do and then you know if you don't know how to code you just you know write write books you know one of those in our society is valued over the other now there's a Nora I'm so bad with names that applies to game characters as well but Nora the programmer turned just a cool DJ yeah and like her there's a conversation early on it's all early on despoilers that kind of like equates certain things in her programming life to using those

same skills its artistic expression as a musician and like just a lot of really cool kind of little conversation starters in there to make really make you think yeah she's like an electronic musician she's using all of this stuff you know her music is about input and output I I meant to mention it when Matthew was gonna call but uh what column ah that song was really good and I wanted to mention it but that's it's the music's really great too and there's a lot of like subtle things to it and I should have said that when he was on the call but yeah well math Matthew is too good at too many things this podcast isn't long enough all of his talents so the the game is great it's Eliza I think that's it so yeah we should we should wind her down here right yeah we're actually on iTunes and Google Play which I don't think anybody

uses so shout out to people who use Google Play for podcasts and and also Spotify and we're actually getting some some followers off of our first one which is good Spotify podcast stuff has apparently gotten a lot better just in the past couple months not just because the GC podcast is now on the platform but like I said it was us we pushed kicked it off but yeah yeah yeah it was us are you people who wanted to do a new podcast ride the wave the GDC podcast so we're gonna go now I'm Chris graft I'm Alisa McAloon thanks for listening don't forget to subscribe or on Spotify follow and if you love us rate us we'd really appreciate that have a good one see you next time [Music]