Designing a Trance: Meditation and Game Design

[Music] Thank You Ryan and thank you all for coming this is a pretty important talk to me so I'm Robin or not I was the sound designer on antichamber and on the Stanley parable I love those sounds thank you well a few years ago I've kind of taken my life in a different path I've been designing this weird experience called sound self which I'll be talking to you more about later on in the talk but I found myself moving from you know spending time in with my indie game community which I love and also finding myself more and more deeply embedded in the consciousness hacking transformative technology neuroscience communities and the endeavor the exploration that's been really important to me over this last few years has been kind of a psycho notic endeavor it's been on the one hand looking at

neuroscience looking at the ways we can hack consciousness but on the other hand deepening into a meditation practice deepening into a less frequent psychedelic practice and seeing what I learn about about being from these explorations and how I can apply that stuff to game design a few years ago before his micro talk session richlum Martian said it's important for us to take inspiration from other games but it's even more valuable to take inspiration from outside of games the other arts the sciences and the natural world can all lead us towards new marvellous and beautiful types of game design what I'm hoping to give you in this talk is a window into what I've seen which is how these psychonaut practices meditation in particular can be rich fountains of inspiration for game design that I think radically changed what it's possible to do with the game so here's what we're going to talk about chapter one we're going to

approach the topic of meditation and sit in silence for a minute or so for those of you who don't have a meditation practice don't worry we can keep our game designer hats firmly on our head we're going to be approaching meditate as a game chapter two we're going to investigate a model of understanding meditation and other psychological experiences that has radically transformed my understanding of what we can do with game design and that's trance this is the bulk of the talk we'll be looking at trance and understanding it chapter three were going to be going into the design of sound self and seeing how we can take our understanding of trance or how I've taken my understanding of trance to design something radical and weird and chapter four we're just gonna wrap up with some conclusions and at the end here I've printed this is a pretty dense talk there's a lot of stuff I'm fitting into this thirty minutes so if you lose track or something don't worry about it I have some copies of a workbook up here

I have for anybody who wants to take what you're learning in this talk deeper and there will be a link at the end if you want to download that online but that's gonna take everything here and go away practically with it all right so without further ado chapter one in which we approach the topic of meditation and sit in silence for a minute or so so please let's all just close your eyes take a big breath in together and a full exhalation really enjoy your breath and push that last bit of breath out of your body again big breath in full breath out part of what we're doing here is oxygenating your brain now release control of your breath and just observe

it notice the sensation of breathing and when you notice your mind wandering and your mind will wander because that is what Minds do just bring it back to the breath let's just keep doing this for a few seconds more when your mind wanders bring it back to the breath so keep your eyes closed please and keep doing this for a little bit more while I talk what is it we are doing right now we're playing a game this is a game with rules bring your attention back to your breath what makes this game different from most of the games I think we talked about here is that playing this game interacts with our identity structures in some

pretty radical ways so please open your eyes that was just a simple mindfulness meditation identity structures so the self as we experience ourselves as we think of ourself I want you to see that you're doing this right now you can you can you create ourselves we create ourselves from our thought patterns the way we think of ourselves radically changes the actions we take what is possible the habit of identity superficially emerges from self reflectivity excuse me self reflectivity in our mind and a mindfulness meditation like what we just did helps us become aware of fluctuations in the mind like our identity and and disidentify with those fluctuations and when we stop identifying with mental fluctuations

especially identity there are some really exquisite states of consciousness available to us and I got drawn into this discipline of trance design just simply because I thought mystical experiences were really cool and I wanted to understand how our minds normally operating one way can access mystical experiences and I wanted to be able to make these experiences more available to me and available to other people so a mystical experience this is a great quote from Aldous Huxley speaking about an experience he had on mescaline visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood when the sensing was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero in Catholic men excuse me Catherine McLean's research on psilocybin she

found there were six characteristics that were very common in people's mystical experiences those are a sense of unity that is there's no me there's no you there's no world there just is this this one thing that is life a perception an intuitive sense that what we are experiencing is deeply true if you ever hear somebody saying they had an experience that felt real or than real this is what they're talking about a quality of sacredness especially for people approaching their practices or approaching their experience of mystery from a religious background a positive mood my favorite description I've heard of the positivity that comes in these experience comes from Jill Bolte Taylor and her TED talk which I think it's the most watched TED talk on ted.com still which is my stroke of insight she describes imagine dropping 40 years of

baggage what freedom a quality of the transcendence of time and space this is what Aldous Huxley was talking about in the last quote and finally a quality of ineffability ineffability means it's impossible to describe so when Aldous Huxley said when the sense 'm was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept this is what he's talking about because we communicate with each other with concepts and any experience that is not compressed into a concept necessarily cannot be shared through our normal modes of communication so if we can act these states of consciousness through drugs through prayer through meditation can we do that with a videogame and I don't think it'll be a surprise to anybody in this room that I think the answer is certainly yes but in order to

do so I find it incredibly helpful to understand trance because trance is the mechanism that will bring us there chapter 2 we use the wisdom Denis Weir's trance model to appreciate the multi-layered trances of a MOBA so what is a trance I think we intuitively know what it means to be entranced I wouldn't be surprised if everybody in this room is here because at some point probably in our childhood we were deeply entranced via video game for me I remember playing Sonic the Hedgehog on my Game Gear when I was a kid and just falling into the loops of playing the early levels again and again I was deeply entranced by Sonic but what actually is that that's happening I think all of us here are experts in creating trance more than anybody else in the world I think game designers know how to entrace people and I think it really behooves us to understand what it is we are doing so I find Dennis wears

trance model really simple easy to understand and practice upon Dennis we're says a trance is an a self-perpetuating mental loop so as soon as you have practiced something and like a game mechanic so thoroughly that you are doing it automatically you can be said to be entranced and transfer I that mechanic and the thing with trance is I'm thinking with simple trances like this is that they tend to dissolve rather quickly so in order to get a trance to hold us take us deeper we need not just a simple trance not just a self-perpetuating mental loop but a network of mutually reinforcing self-perpetuating mental loops and the more mutually reinforcing self-perpetuating mental loops we have the more complex the network is the deeper the trance the more stable the trance the further that trance can take us and complex trances like this naturally

emerge from the meeting of game mechanics with human psychology elegantly interconnected mechanics tend to give us access to elegantly interconnected trances so if this sounds a little bit like flow to you which is a concept we really understand I think pretty well in game design but we've pretty well internalized that's because flow is a type of trance but this pattern these autonomous mental loops also describe addiction habit meditation and hypnosis so this is the tool that I would I would like to to help you guys add to your toolbox so our typical sense of self as we as we saw it earlier that identity is itself just a habit of the narrative mind let's look at a moba I think MOBA is like leagues with League

of Legends and create these really tremendously complex trances they're fun to play so what that trans folk like and I'm gonna go through these pretty quickly you don't need to worry about like gathering exactly what's going on here but I just kind of want to demonstrate how complex a just a normal video games trance can get so I think in a MOBA our core trances were identifying with a team and working together to move forward to progress together and this is reinforced by our attention moving towards optimizing every decision moving towards an ideal optimal our relationship with our hero our relationship with a map and it gets more complex our optimization loops are reinforced by every resource and everything's a resource in this game health is a resource time is a resource even attention and resources a resource and every skirmish we have reinforces our relationship with our hero with our team with all of our resources so this is already becoming a pretty complex trance but every single one of these loops every single one of them is itself reinforced by a deeper trance a trance

of paying attention and this trance is a complex trance of our successes and failures our successes bring us into paying attention reward us for attention they feel so good and when we fail it hurts it punishes us for not paying attention there's time pressure so every moment I'm not paying attention is a moment ceded to the opposing team and there's this tension between what is known and what is unknown if so for not paying attention we're gonna miss things and and and not being able to use that information and all of this creates for a really powerful attention trends that I think you'd be right to label as a flow trance so like I said every single one of these loops and just just have a look at this and I think you'll see how how it happens every single one of these loops is reinforced by that deep and powerful complex trance and this trance and for games like this for games as complex as a MoMA MOBA become more

complex as we get to learn the game as we practice the game so I think a good MOBA is really activating us in our narrative mind we're thinking we're cooperating with other players we're planning and executing on our plans and and so I like to say that the game meets us in this particular layer of our being the game meets us in this case on our narrative mind but to understand what makes a MOBA like this so entrancing we need to go deeper than the narrative mind and just as our identity our sense of identity emerges as a trance from our reflector from habits of self reflectivity in our narrative mind so too does the narrative mind itself emerge emerge from the emotional body the mind labels emotions numbing them in a symbolic container so that we're not crippled by fear and the mind also helps us understand the causes and effects of our emotions so that we can move

intelligently towards the sources of positive emotions and away from the sources of negative emotions so the mova is not only meeting us in a narrative mind it's also strongly meeting us in our emotional body I think that flow trance I drew out is really an emotional body trance and activating people within the narrative mind and in the emotional body I think that something games do really well I think that's something we know how to do incredibly well so when a game like journey comes along they're building on a whole web of knowledge we already have but they're bringing something novel in they're bringing a novel trance into our emotional body these attachment loops that when they when they executed them were just so so powerful in journey and felt so new to so I want to go back and look at that game we played earlier when we closed our eyes the mindfulness meditation the core trance of this is focusing on our

breath it's supported by returning our attention to the breath when we notice that our attention is straight which requires the development of a quality of meta attention now this is not nearly as complex as a mobile which is I think why people get bored when they're learning meditation it doesn't hold on to us like a video game can but we're using they also a different kind of trance from a MOBA and we're gonna go into how so the words we're using here to describe these trances these are kind of attention words these are words describing a sort of deeper layer of our being then the words we're using to describe the trances in a MOBA which are much more action heavy action-oriented and this is a fantastically complex trance so if the mindfulness trance is using is operating on the domain of attention and what is it even is attention attention is the

highlighting and the feeding of certain aspects of our felt experience so even even thoughts you know the content of your thoughts is certainly something that occurs in our narrative mind that we experience as a narrative mind but you can you can feel the feeling of your thoughts and this feels this lays a sense just like heat is a sense just like smell is a sense just like the sound of my voice and that with thinking whether the the qualia of thinking actually kind of resembles for most of us anyway the the qualia of voice right it feels like a voice in our head which is kind of kind of interesting so what makes the meditation trance trance there's not only that it's occurring on this deeper layer of our experience but from this deeper layer of experience where the trance is embedded that trance in turn affects the narrative mind by helping us becoming aware of it and once we become aware of fluctuations in the narrative mind the trance in our lower state of being can now affect the emotional body and calm down there and

so on and this happens through play we have a nice pretty map here it's got those blue colors and everything it just looks really nice I think but this is just a map and and actually exploring this stuff is done through the play the play of for example the meditation game and I don't think meditation games are alone in doing this I think we've seen some video games that also do this effect of acting from one layer to dissolve trances on another layer so for example super hexagon is one of my my favorite examples of this when you're playing super hexagon it's trances are definitely not activating you in the narrative mind it's definitely not activating you in your emotional body it feels less like I'm playing super hexagon and more like super hexagon is playing me did anybody else have this experience with super hexagon right like there's something pretty crazy going on here it's it's acting on a very deep layer of ourselves and in doing so it's actually working to kind of fuzz out our narrative mind in a in a very different way the Stanley

parable is activating us in our narrative mind these are trances in the narrative mind it's a story we're thinking about it but it ties our mind in knots having an effect on our sensation of identity it's kind of I kind of think of those Stanley parable as being a little bit like a digital Zen Cohen so where our mechanics meet and stories where our mechanics and stories meet the player in this massively complex trance we call the self has a tremendous impact on the player's experience but not only the players experience who they are how our mechanics meet the player at any of these layers of self determines who the player is who they are practicing being and you can meet the player for example in the emotional body and have them practicing fear or you can meet them in the emotional body and have them practicing compassion if you meet them in the emotional body in such a way that it modifies existing trances or habits

in the other layers of their being then you can effectively reprogram the narrative mind or the higher layers of being so I'd rather actually I want to change my vocabulary here a little bit right now I've been saying higher layers of being lower layers of being that's kind of confusing just these lower layers of being I'm gonna start describing them as more subtle and these higher layers of being all describes more superficial they're no less real but they're more superficial so now's a really good moment I think for us to ask some questions about how we might use what we already know about trance here in our game designs Who am I asking my player to practice being in my game what structure of trances can continuously support that practice how is my game play setting up and reinforcing these autonomous loops and just as importantly how is my game play or the players existing habits interfering with the

trans structure I'm trying to help them cultivate a great example of this is if a player's existing habit of trying to control the world might interfere with a trance you're trying to give them of humility and surrender and there are so I've got a workbook up here for anybody who wants to go I think I mentioned this earlier but anybody who wants to go kind of deeper into this stuff please come up afterwards grab a workbook and I've got a lot more questions like this in there the upshot of all of this is that by understanding trance video game designers have a unique skillset and a unique opportunity to design trances that are as complex and powerful as a MOBA but operate on the pre personal level of meditation to alter player consciousness temporarily and create a permanent psychological impact in other words we can create digital psychedelics and I humbly offer the word oh no I'm not quite there yet in 1990 Terence Mckenna said I love this quote the drugs of the

future will be computers the computers of the future will be drugs and I think I think we're just beginning to taste how we can do that just beginning to and I humbly offer the word techno telex to describe these technological psychedelic experiences and the rest of my talk is going to concern itself with the creation of techno telex and specifically my techno Delic sound so chapter 3 recollections of the trance design of sound self so does everybody know this game most and maybe all video games provide a structure for the player to project their sense of self into my avatar is an extension is sort of a container for me to project my sense of agency into and in meanwhile part of the experience is defined as being not me as being the environment as being an enemy and and the funny thing is here like the trick that the game designers are pulling off without even realizing it is that the player is actually controlling

the whole thing if you jump it's not that they're you know Mario jumps up you're also pushing the world down there's this awesome trick that happens so naturally where the player projects their identity into your avatar so wherever we as game designers use our mechanics or or stories to draw a boundary we invite the players existing habits of separation to see themselves reflected in that boundary and I think there are really really really cool subversive ways to do this it's sort of like a glove like if our if you see a glove and and you intuitively know it hits fits on your hand and you try it on and you might try it on if you see something that looks like a ham you're less likely to try it on your hand but we can design gloves that fit your hand really neatly like Mario does or we can design gloves that fit your hand in kind of an awkward way and make you practice a slightly altered way of being and you could do that without going all the way into the sort of techno della craziness about describe so and sound so if I'm trying to do something entirely different I'm trying

to give a player that mystical experience trying to give a player that that sense beyond separation that sense beyond feeling myself and against a background of other Ness so if you're watching someone play sound so this really doesn't seem to be that much going on there they're chanting with their voice and breathing and they're observing the experience and that's it they just keep doing that and I'm going to go ahead and try to play you guys a video of somebody playing sound self that's all it is that's all they're doing and but what they're seeing is

this so it's entirely abstract and we do that so that there's no images no no symbols there that you could just hang experience and identity nothing you can decide as an avatar nothing you can decide is meaningful it's just absolutely right well mind giving me just a moment to pull up my stuff there we go oh no sorry guys here we go

thank you very patient oh no that's not what I wanted at all let's just get past these videos so it doesn't get confused here we go there we go and then die press this button that gives me this thing there we go okay thanks guys so like I said what I'm trying to do for players is give them a mystical experience which is an experience of the of the absence of art are typical trances on these these more superficial layers of our being but I notice when I sit to meditate if I sit in silence for a moment before I can feel anything anything beneath my ego anything beneath my my mental fluctuations I notice this pattern it's a a habit maybe habit you

can call it a habit of human and this habit of human is a very powerful trance and it's a powerful trance that as far as I can tell has three extremely powerful sub trances supporting it firstly a habit of looking out and and finding some things good and finding some things bad this is just anxiety a secondly a habit of time of imagining a future and a past like right now I'm sitting here and I'm worried about time because I don't wanna run out of time and I want to give you guys all the interesting stuff right and this is what that feels like and thirdly a habit of of sensing separation between most I think powerfully between self and other and if this looks familiar to you that's because this is exactly the same trance the moba was using to bring player attention into the experience so a game can take these really powerful trances that we have ongoing in our experience and redirect that energy into a focus on

gameplay but that's not really available to me because I'm trying to I'm trying to disarm those very trances so here's how here are some counter trances that we're using and sounds up to to try to dissolve these habits before the the habit of separating the habit of being anxious you just relax somebody if you just relax somebody they're gonna find themselves less anxious for the habit of seeing time by bringing the players attention into the present by witnessing the beauty of what's here we help them just not worry about time and the habit of seeing separation is trickier for that what we're trying to do in sound self is take the existing experience of identity the existing experience of self Ness and redirect that experience from being just in here to including

everything I hear and see in the game so here's what that looks like as sound selves trance and our voice mechanic really powerfully supports each of these three counter trances firstly by having the player practice a yogic quality of breathing by by having them chant and then breathe in they're slowing down their body which naturally calms down the physiology naturally makes people feel less anxious by having the player appreciate the present moment oh excuse me by having the player chant that voice is felt here in the present moment you know you feel it right here and as long as you're paying attention to your voice you're paying attention to what you're hearing you're here and finally we're doing this really weird thing in the sound software once you begin chanting there there are these sounds the the instruments of the game harmonized with your voice so this sense of identity that you already feel with your voice

with that vibration in your chest you now associate that quality of meanness to everything you're hearing if you're relaxed enough and then by creating a synesthetic relationship between everything you're hearing and everything you're seeing in on the screen or in the VR experience we extra further extend that sense of self that sense of identity do could to include the visuals so we have this synesthetic connection that draws us from our sense of self as felt as vibration in our chest through what we're hearing through what we're seeing so there's a lot more going on in sound self but I don't want to I don't want to go into all of that right now I just want to show you this to show you you know this is a trance that is as powerful as most video game trances and that gives it a kind of a leg up on on meditation transits because we can use the electronic medium to help sustain much more complex trances alright so how does

sound self fit into this well I think sound selves trances are occurring on this really deep layer of our being even below the distinguished senses because we are affecting the way we experience our distinguished senses in the synesthetic way so it sounds helps activating a trance on this beneath our distinguished senses beneath our sentence of sight and sound and so on and in our just raw uninterpreted sensation it is doing so in a way that numbs the narrative mind the quietens the narrative line with lots of weird techniques like we're strobing at them we're using binaural beats just loud sound so the player can't hear themselves think we're using that trance to change the way that the player usually experience the experiences they're distinguished senses and we're also doing something though I can't pretend to understand what we're also doing something in the emotional body because often I see people come out of sound self and this is a totally abstract experience and they're crying and that's baffling to me so I don't

know what we're doing exactly but we shake up something in the emotional body and it's worth pointing out all right the difference the big difference between sound self and and I think the big difference between what we can do with techno telex and meditation though is that sound self is is holding the trance in place it's not teaching you how to feel into these deep layers of your being it's just kind of numbing everything with brute force so that you're put there whereas a meditation practice gradually teaches you to guide yourself into experiencing our deeper layers of being so I think this makes sound self a lot more like a psychedelic than like a meditation practice and I think that's important distinction and there are many many many more layers of self that have been explored there are many more models but this is this is as far as I'm going and if we draw inspiration from

meditation techniques that activate us on these very deep layers then I think we can potentially make video game trances and techno Delic trances that activate us all those deep layers so does it work does sound self work from talking to people after playing it we often see people describe a sense of unity we often see people describe positive mood transcendence of time and space ineffability I almost never hear people describe an intuitive sense of deep truth or quality of sacredness well I think this is great you know I think this is really early technology and and it gives me a lot of hope that it's giving people even this much that it's giving people something even this close to AAA the kind of experience you might get on LSD and and I think with just a few more years of experiments a few more projects trying to do something like this we'll get more of a sense of the successes of failures what works what doesn't and we'll be able to activate this this experience of intuitive deep truth this this quality of sacredness so finally and thank you all for your

patience this has been a we've got a little over 30 minutes but I've got some conclusions first the game design is an extremely potent form for healing and self transcendence but unfortunately most healers are really shitty game designers and most game designers are not interested in healing if you want to use trance but you're not interested in tech no delicate assign like I am there are a couple of things you could do and and I go into a lot of stuff like that in this workbook but there's a few things you can do really easily just to give them a powerful experience and I think one of those things is bringing the players attention back to the present moment if your mechanics if you're if the trance you lay in the player draws them continuously back to the present moment you're doing a real kindness for them and if you find existing trances and either do label them subvert them or incite them in novel ways I think you're also doing something really awesome for them this is that that glove metaphor what we can

design is a direct extension of who we are so if you want to design new radical different things you have to become aware of the trances you're carrying with you because those transits are encoding themselves in your game designs already and I think to two easy ways just to like try on different transits you know try different meditation techniques try different stories these things all program us in different ways and expose us to new trances and there are plenty of meditation techniques that just help us become aware of the trances we've been carrying with us for our whole lives please come up here and take one of these workbooks if you're interested but if not on the next page I've got a little link for it and finally trance is a really really really really powerful form so please just be kind here are some resources for anybody who's interested in learning more about this stuff or finding a community of people who are using

technology to alter consciousness tomorrow night there's a consciousness hacking meetup group I'll be there I'd love to see you here thank you very much [Applause] you