Panel: Living the moment: Leveraging technology to create a more personalized gaming experience.

[Music] thank you [Music] we're gonna have a panel now about how technology is influencing game development and I want to invite on stage Anita diampo Ilya RMF Richard III and Tata Bryant for our panel please good afternoon my name is Annette and I'm going to host this panel today I'm part of the PG connects team we will discuss how technological advancements such as aivr and AR can be used to create more personalized and immersed gaming experiences we have bunch of experts who join us

today and I would like them to introduce themselves shortly to you now hi my name is Tara Bryant I'm the chief Revenue officer of optimove so it's really great to be here uh hi my name is Celia I'm one of the co-founders and imagine partner of the games fund early stage VC gaming fund hey my name is Richard Rouse I'm the studio creative director at Farbridge we're a pce console VR Etc Studio remote hi I'm Dan Paul of mass grade media we're a game and gamification Company and I'm the CEO thank you very much do we have more microphones my first question for you guys will be how have technological advancements such as AI VR and AR impacted the gaming industry in recent years we can start with Diane maybe thank you

yeah I'd say AR is probably the most significant right now just because you know AI is still making traction here but um just the experiences that you can have with AI are making a big difference in games because you're bringing you're bringing the virtual world into the real world and mixed reality so so in that case you know when you have an environment that a player is familiar with like their their room or something like that and you introduce those elements now all of a sudden that that experience becomes catered to them thank you oh yeah I I would agree yeah yeah um you know we've done we haven't done an AR project at Farbridge yet but we have done a bunch of VR projects so I can speak to that a bit it's a definitely a uh transformative experience for like the type of game you're making it's not just you know let's just take this game and put it in VR you really have to rethink the whole thing to adopt that or

the audience now I think in the early days of VR it was more just like I'm in VR and that's enough and then it was got to the point where there's conventions to what works in VR in games there's different segments to like the VR audience like people who will play for hours and hours and hours and people who really want a short thing that they get in and out of um and just sort of knowing what audience you're looking at and and tailoring your game to them you know and the advancement of the obviously with VR you're always dealing with sort of barriers to entry in terms of you know getting your Hardware to work that time because there's usually some some weirdness with it that's gotten a lot better recently with like the quest as an all-in device people definitely prefer that um uh and then just like you know figuring out again you know what other barriers there can be in terms of like getting it comfortable so people who might get nauseous in VR and there's been a lot of learnings about best practices to get it to feel like a thing so I feel like it's a real platform I don't think it's as big as as or it's a

real sort of media real segment of gaming but maybe not as big as other ones but there's definitely a dedicated audience there that loves it so I think it's probably the most mature of any of the three things in terms of of usage so thank you um I think we're still to figure out how we are AR blockchain AI will affect the mainstream gaming industry because yeah it delivers the unique experience and it kind of introduces to something that we never experienced before but uh what what it taught us you know the main thing is that there are hype cycles and even if people are getting excited about the particle technology at some point doesn't mean and even if that's a brilliant technology it doesn't mean that it would affect the mainstream game development industry so we so kind of hype waves for VR AR for blockchain web3 now experiencing the AI hype cycle and and it kind of taught us as investors to kind of cool down a little bit about

hype waves and be more uh more cautious about is it really something groundbreaking and that would change the core of the industry or just a new shiny toy that you know just temporary thing that's so on a metal level that's that was groundbreaking and you know uh reform the industry and how how investors and developers uh see to see the market but from practical perspective I don't think that actually that transformative for the industry okay Tara do you want to add something yeah sure so uh my company is not a developer or we don't create games but what we do is we've been using AI for over 10 years so for us it's uh we're excited that people are finally catching on so it helps us we don't have to explain what AI is and trust me it really does work it's right it's pretty accurate so we are the first customer-led marketing platform and what we do is we help you know retain monetize and customize the marketing to

your players and so Rai has been you know like I said we've been doing this for over a decade so for us we're really excited about it um the VR and the IR doesn't you know necessarily relate to us great thank you so we move to the next question my next question will be what are some benefits of using AI in game development and how can it be used to create more personalized gaming experience so I can start so recently we've been um kind of considering investment in one company and developing interactive story games and there will be in a deep discussion how generative AI how AI in general could affect the development and the production and the marketing of the interactive story games and we came up with a conclusion that the the benefit of AI could be in implementing ever changing and self-evolving content so the game itself would learn how you play it how the massive audience would play it and analyze which part of the game is exciting which part of the game is not

that exciting and leads to some drops in engagement and could automatically fix it and run ever run in ABC tests and Implement like a genetic genetic algorithm and that would be it would be something that was not possible before so before that some and always some game designers should proactively conduct a character test and decide what what should be done what should be changed in the game but evolution works the different ways kind of for Brute Force testing and I think that something like that could be done with AI technology and we'll find like organically we'll find the best way how to create the most engaging Story the most engaging gameplay the most converting tutorial for the game and stuff like that that's that's something that is was not seen before and that's possible now yeah I can sort of yeah it's very well said one of the things that we've done obviously we've been doing this for a long time and we've been working with Gamers for years

um is we you know you can give that insight and tell them you know Bob really enjoys like this part of the game this is where he's going to be the most engager he's most likely to you know to to buy more or to up to up stock his his deposit so it's definitely a way for us to um be able to it be more personalized versus you're just driving the campaign towards them like throw this at everybody and see what sticks using the AI and understands truly personalized and you're starting with each player each customer and when you start with them personally then it's it's very tailored towards them yeah yeah I think you know when I always think about using a new technology I guess I'm careful to think of like how is this going to make the experience better for the player and I think like some of the examples you gave are good there there's definitely like a thinking of like oh well now I can just write you know say if you're using chat GPT to just write quests or something like that anyone who's used it has seen that like well yeah I can write a quest but it's not really a great Quest it's time to be

honest you have to think like well wow I wrote this so quickly that's impressive but the player doesn't care that you wrote it quickly they just care if it's good or not right and they've got a lot of things to pick from and their time is very precious to them and they're willing to spend money to have a better experience so yeah it can be helpful to you in making stuff but you got to be careful in knowing that well to be better we're going to have to do better than everyone else who has this tool and that's where you know using the tool well or no using it just like as an early prototyping thing but then you replace it with like custom well-made work because players can tell that's why you know the people who are good at game development get paid more than the people who are less good at it and it's the same thing here you know you've got to figure out how are we going to get something players care about with this I think modifying difficulty I think being more responsive to what players do that's all great but at the end of the day the content's got to be super high quality yeah I'd say um you know all these all these different tools that they've made a lot of impact already and it's kind of slow but you know we've already seen

generative textures and all kinds of things in production and um and probably in the future it's it's not like these things are going to replace jobs but they're an assist right even if you write something in chat GPT right it's it's going to be it's going to be a base right you already now you've solved the problem now you can you know the the real programming can go in and say oh okay there's some good ideas here and I can put this in it's sort of more of a General survey right and and the same thing with artists or anything like that like it did in my last talk you know there's going to be better tools for you know for characters you know technical jobs like you know character rigging and those kind of things a lot of those things will be more automated I think in the future and nobody's going to really miss doing those kind of tasks that's interesting so it will change for VR VR and AR now so my question would be how can VR and AR be used to create more immersive gaming experiences and what are some of the challenges of incomparate incorporating this technology into game development do you

think let's move um so I think that one of the most impressive things about VR um it's that you totally immerse in the experience you kind of believe it you uh you don't you don't even know that you are inside the game and you perceive the what you ought to see as reality what what I think the downside of VR is is a dead end of headsets I don't believe in you know wearing headsets even the most beautiful ones like the thing that Apple would denounce soon I don't think that before we actually translate and transmit information directly to our Consciousness without any kind of media as eyes and stuff like that we would not achieve that truly you know seamless and popular vrar experience so we can uh at current stage we could understand how to create the beginnings for VR experiences how to navigate how to came up with the

controls how to get rid of motion sickness how to deal with that but um I think it should be in some radical different level to get really a thing so right now we can just learn some design blocks and understand how from from gameplay perspective from design perspective it could be done but it's not gonna not gonna be mainstream while we were in this weird stuff on our heads yeah I think it's important as you look at like different places people play games to just think of VR as another place people play games it's not a replacement for other places uh Jesse shell the game designer um talks about like you know the PC experience is like it's a personal experience because you're not really doing a collaborative you feel like you're playing a PC game it's sort of like your ear works bench tooling on the game and there's a lot of options a lot of ways to play it versus like playing a game on a console on a couch in the living room of your house where maybe there's other people there who might come and watch you or hang out or it's more of a shared experience it's

more open it's a little less you know it's not a console it usually just works less options so that's a different experience then the VR is sort of like I think he called it the reading Nook it's like when you read a book you're just reading the book by yourself you're really in it you're completely immersed in that world and VR is almost more like that because you're just completely absorbed in that and it's it's not better or worse than the other ones it's just another place and yeah more people watch TV than read books probably so it was like to your point that I think VR is maybe it's a certain segment but the people who love it you know really love it and and um yeah I think as each of these things come along and people have been doing this a while see these hype Cycles like you were talking about about this platform it's going to change everything everything's going to be this like it's it's never everything it's going to be this it's always like what choices do players have yeah I'd say you know the the interesting thing about VR is that VR is actually not new at all what's new is the commercialization of the devices when I did my first VR game with Disney

um a long time ago which I don't want to admit how long ago but Disney Quest no relation to the request device but um but then you needed it you know you needed a workstation the size of a refrigerator now you can fit it in your phone so what's really Innovative is just the the use or you know the availability instead of a theme park ride now everybody can you know have this device and use it I agree that the future of it is probably not in the headsets it's going to be in something else some way of projecting this environment around you without wearing a headset but but for now this is what we're using and so what's cool about you know any of these things is like okay yeah mobiles is Mobile's the biggest marketplace right but but if you're in a smaller Marketplace you can be seen so if you're if you're making games for VR right maybe there's not a lot of headset that's out there compared to phones but there's there's definitely a dedicated base there and you have it you have the ability to kind of hone in and focus on what's going to make a great VR game because it's not like just taking

another game and turning it to VR thank you so how do play expectations and preferences impact the use of the technology in game development and how can developers ensure that they are meeting these expectations I don't know I'm not sure that I got a question can you can you rephrase it rephrase you can use chat GPT okay so you can go with yeah you you made me like not understand my questions in a moment like a little something I think like each platform does bring like I think you were talking about like expectations of what players have for different technology and again in VR because it is more mature than you might think you know it has been around a while and the new cycle of VR hype has been around a while as something matures like that it does come with more expectations like if you pick up a first person shooter on a

console you expect the sticks to work a certain way and if they don't it just feels broken and and maybe there's some options to change it but mostly those conventions are established so as the same thing with you know whatever the technology is like how does a roguelike work or something like that's a sort of a generative game in a way there's expectations of what a roguelike is and what players like and then what they don't and like more mature it is the more you know that becomes sort of solidified and then in these newer technology spaces you're often thrashing around for a while trying to figure out well what about this technology could turn into a cool game what's this thing and if you like thrash around in the dark then that's great for you and if and some people don't they like working in more established mediums so it's really up to developers choice of of what's more important to you okay anybody wants to add something okay I'm not sure Okay so I will ask another question how do

technology and advancements impact the job market in the game industry and what skills are needed to work with these Technologies what skills you need to have to start working with this Technologies uh yeah I can start so um the rise of AI definitely raised some questions about what the current Specialists will be you know needed in in game development like artists concept artists writers localization mentors QA managers and I think that everything that could be automated will be automated and what cannot be automated it's a kind of human talent and creativity has been mentioned before if you pay close attention to the content that had been generated by generative AIS like chat GPT or mid Journey or stable Fusion it's kind of impressive on a technological level but when you don't know if it's uh if if it's a generated by Ai and just judge it as any other

media any other content it's not that cool it's just um it tastes tasteless it's mediocre and it's just nothing exciting about it besides the very technology the way how it was produced and there is a joke like AI doesn't have a child her drama so that's why it's the content is not that creative not that interesting so I think that ability to create to ask right questions like prompt engineering that's that's a key skill and then some ability to create cool stories create something that is exciting for other human beings that is something that's Irreplaceable by AI but everything else will be automated so yeah some many people will lose jobs but AI will create many other jobs like but they will be completely different and if people who are currently in this areas that I just mentioned are not paying attention to AI

tools a developments they most likely will lose their jobs do you agree or disagree oh no um I think I think it reminds me of a little bit is like back back in the olden times you know all games were written in Assembly Language and then they're like we're gonna have this amazing thing it's going to be called C and then anyone can program and and then it was like because assembly was like you know little codes and numbers made very unreadable and then C was like amazingly readable compared to assembly now anyone come from oh wait no that's okay now we're going to have JavaScript anyone can program oh wait no not we're going to have visual scripting now anyone can it's like each time it's like well yes this does open it up to a different type of things lets you solve different problems but it's still a skill to use it right so the biggest skill you can have on your you know as you're looking is people looking for work is the ability to like stay on top of these things want to adapt to new things not you don't want to be the assembly programmer refusing to learn C because you think it's dumb right but

you know you also don't want to think that c is going to make your job trivial because it's it's still not it's still going to be hard um yeah I I think yeah it ideally you know the the way to do it like it if the I don't know that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs because of AI I mean I know it's gonna probably just make a lot of jobs easier um and I agree if it if you don't know how to use those tools you don't start using them you might might lose your job but um but ideally if you know if the tools can you know make make it easier for to collaborate with with engineers and with artists and with writers um that you know that's the key if the if the AI makes it easier to do those things then um then you're gonna have more successful games and you're gonna have you know you're gonna have games that are you know more creative because if you if you can collaborate more um and it doesn't matter whether you make them fast or slow right as long as you have that ability to collaborate then you're going to have a better you're

going to have a better game right between all the different uh specialties okay thank you so how can technology be used to create more more diverse and inclusive gaming experiences for for the players right yeah I think that's an interesting one I mean you know there was a talk at GDC about this too about you know just how how these algorithms sort of generate towards this sort of generic um the the generic is you know sort of um the the white male but um you know it'd be interesting to see who implements that right and who's going to implement the tools that say okay well this isn't inclusive enough right the past tools were like okay well we this is the the data we have and so you have to kind of gather data from different audiences right and so the the the data that we were gathering was from a very simple you know it was a very basic demographic so as player bases increase and as we you know as we look into other um types of players to to kind of gather

data from I think that will that will help do that um and a lot of it is up to the developers too the developers have to kind of look at what they're creating and what the audience is and saying hey hey we don't just have one audience you know there's there's plenty of other people in the audience so and with with games you know you have the ability you can recast the main character anytime you want you can't do that with a movie you can't watch a movie and say Hey you know that guy doesn't represent me let's just swap them out you can't do that but you definitely can with a game because that game in the game that main player represents you in a way yeah and I think I think you know with with the AI models it's all about the data you're training it on so if you're you know training it only on you know literature from Europe or something like that that you know that sort of the output you're going to get and I think as people keep working on different data sets to train it with they're gonna make it you know or they're going to make one that is specifically says it's biased in this way or it's from this cultural heritage or this other cultural Health to Heritage and then you as the Creator

will pick the one you want to use or you'll want to pick the one that's truly Global and I think there'll be options for that except in Florida that'll be illegal airpoint do you want to add something to that um yeah I think uh currently um culture kind of biased because it's created by uh limited exclusive group of people and uh theoretically uh using AI should be more unbiased but the thing is that AI currently is already biased and produced uh content that is based on cultural landscape that we currently have so it's kind of replicated you know our current culture and but it could be you know really changed so if someone has such a mission you could change the data set you know and educate the network educate tools to be less biased but it requires some effort to do that intentionally but I really like the uh think about the recasting in some movies right for instance the recent debate

about their Little Mermaid been played by uh by black actress that was kind of first sparked some some discussion and it could be not a discussion uh later on because uh you can have whatever characters you want in movie and you can adapt movie for every audience and someone would like them look that way someone like them different way and you can adapt and personalize content and um yeah I think that that's totally possible not just in games but in movies in in text format in music and anywhere great thank you very much so before I ask next question do we have any questions from the audience okay so my last questions will be what predictions do you have for the future of gaming technology and how do you see the see it evolving in coming years what

do you think um so my view is that we will be overflowed with the content because uh it become more and more approachable and doable for it on wait okay not uneducated by it not you know hardly trained people to create content you know all the Christian tools become super Democratic so anyone can create content anyone can write a text and will be at least readable text anyone would be able to create a movie or a game but in most cases it would be complete thresh so it would be unenjoyable so the major change for future Generations is discover discoverability and curation of content so I think that that's one of the topics one of the sectors in in technology and development that should be paid attention to so how can we actually find you know diamonds in pile of trash oh um it's fine

well think about it we'll come back um I think that point is great there was a science fiction magazine that closed down their submissions recently for a time because they were just flooded by you know generative examples that had that sort of end of the problem is when it's good enough that you start reading it and think wow that's kind of boring so far but maybe it gets good later and but oh no it never gets good um and if you just and that's fine they would get you know the interesting thing is we were already flooded with content right there are already people you know flooding submissions of Science Fiction magazines or flooding steam or flooding with ever whatever with games that aren't super good it's just our ability as players to look at and go oh that doesn't look good I'm not going to try it versus oh that does look pretty good I gotta watch it longer to know maybe I'll maybe it'll take me a real long time to find out there's just kind of nothing here um and that's that's sort of some of the the Peril of it um you know I think the the there's there's obviously sort of we

haven't talked about like the legal problems with some of the generative models I think that'll probably get solved by large corporations that get data sets that they've secured the rights to properly and will have to pay them giant licensing fees to use their stuff um so that that'll probably get fixed in the not too distant future um so I guess that's that's a something of a prediction and I do think these things will help game development but I don't think it's gonna mean you know not it used to take 200 people to make Assassin's Creed now it takes five like that's that's not happening anytime soon the 200 people will still be there they'll just be doing different things uh yeah I'd have to agree um I'd say like you know the old rule used to be like what is it like 15 85 percent of everything is crap and then there's like 15 that's good but but when you start generating things right then when you start Auto generating things or when you have a platform where everybody can do something or you know there's a lot of submissions right then that that number the number skewed it down to like one or maybe a half a percent so so the real

problem is going to be like how do you find better you know how you're going to find it is it is it going to be based on data that you know people watch this they found it but how do those people even find quality content if there's so much stuff so I think you know content moderation platforms might might see a rise in it you might see um you know you might see more of a a way to Democrat democratize what content you see in some sort of a platform where you could sort of uh cater it to your needs and you know you're sort of rejecting a lot of things that uh you don't want to see um but yeah again that's going to be a lot it's going to be a lot harder to get through to the users um and to impress them because you know because we you already use so many uh algorithms for marketing to people and you know using these things we we have a lot of you'll see a lot of games that are advertised you see the game wow that ad looks so cool download the game it's nothing like that and and I think that's really sort of what's ruined a lot of the markets like the the you know the

mobile market and things like that I sort of feel like I've cheated because we've been using AI for so long so I have like a little bit better of a prediction I think so I agree I don't think it's gonna really affect um like the number of jobs it's just maybe what you do or where you spend the priority of your time um we've seen that a lot so we sell a lot to marketing companies and what we're trying to explain to them is you know think of a traditional marketing company 10 years ago they would decide what campaign they were going to create what what the content of it was going to be what it was going to say um and who it was going to go to and it's sort of like you've been to three buckets right and so their entire customer base or player base to go to these three buckets and now what what we're finding is we didn't take anyone's job with our AI tool in marketing but what they're able to do is now they're able to be more strategic so we were able to you know create all of these hyper segmentations not three segmentations not two or five or 25 now we have hundreds and thousands of segmentations and you can start with

something and it goes It's So personalized that now people want what we're finding is people want to give their information because before we just get spammed all the time but now or by people like oh I know that if I give my information and not fake information real information I'm going to get things that are very relevant to me that I actually want to see and so that's what we're seeing a lot with AI and then the the the teams that used to do a lot of this more manually they are able to be far more strategic really get into really use the AI to their best benefit I think we're going to see the same thing in gaming we're you know now they're gonna have more time to be more creative right this is you know this is the the space of creativity and being able to live in these other worlds and think of these other things that that they can bring the table where their time before was consumed with more manual tasks okay thank you very much I think it will be all for today if we don't have any questions from audience okay thank you very much thank you for joining us

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