Interview: Noah Falstein on VR & Neurogaming

In your work with VR and Neuroscience, what have you uncovered about the way our brains react and behave during a gaming experience?

That's a huge subject, of course literally every aspect of a game interacts with our brains, usually in more than one way.  Perhaps one of the most basic and important ways is Flow, something popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  He didn't set out to describe a game experience exactly (although playing Tennis was one of his first examples, back before video games were mainstream) but Flow is central to almost all game experiences.  The summary is that when a game is not challenging enough we become bored, and when it is too challenging, we become frustrated.  If you have a good game, there is a space between those two extremes where the player can enter into a "Flow State", where one becomes totally absorbed and loses oneself in the game.  Gradually the game needs to become more challenging (or the player gets bored) but not so quickly that the player becomes frustrated, and this is called the "Flow Channel".  Understanding how to set up a video game to keep a player's interest is a fundamental role of a game designer.

Your work on LucasArts game titles were somewhat ahead of their time in terms of storytelling and in game flexibility. How do you see new technology enhancing the immersive capabilities of gaming?

In many ways - one of the most exciting is the use of VR to do moviemaking where you feel as if you are part of the action, really physically present with the actors (or animated characters) in a movie.  Google's Spotlight Stories (particularly the EMMY award-winning Pearl) convinced me this is a very important deal, and it ties into my understanding of neuroscience and games in that VR seems to engage the amygdala, a very old, central part of the brain that deals with fear, anger, and arousal - the key to a lot of "fight or flight" reactions, as well as many other strong emotional reactions.  With VR, we have the opportunity to make interactive stories that really engage people's emotions - not just the typical ones in video games, but also empathy and even romance, that have often not been part of games.

VR, although clearly a bold new technology, is still at its nascent stage. At what point do you believe it can cross over into mainstream use, beyond being just another peripheral gaming element? 

I think it is likely to do so in several ways.  One is in enterprise applications, where it is used for training or instruction for workers - the military has been doing this for years.  Another is in interactive movies as I mentioned before. I think in the next few years we'll see a whole new industry in VR movies (probably just 180 degrees, where you sit in a chair or on a couch and turn your head, not 360 degree standing/turning experiences).  And also in medical treatment, where VR has already been used to treat PTSD and phobias of many types.

You make a distinction between traditional videogames and ‘Serious Games’. Could you explain the key differences, and what role you see ‘Serious Games’ playing in the future?

Serious Games is just a label for games that have a purpose beyond entertainment.  Other terms include Impact Games, Applied Gaming, Gamification, and more specific areas like Games for Health or Games for Change.  There are companies that are applying to the US Food and Drug Administration to get games approved on the same level as pharmaceuticals, so that a doctor can prescribe a game to treat a specific illness or condition, like ADHD or Depression.  It's very exciting to see that we could reach that level, where a game is potentially as helpful as a drug but with limited or no side effects.

 

You’ve worked on some key movie-to-game titles in the past. What is the secret in making an effective transition from one entertainment medium to another?

In general, I think the trick is to find the essence of the character - or franchise or brand - and think about how to express it in a way that most effectively meshes with what games do well.  That's a bit vague because it's more of an art than a science.  But I do know that you can fail when you just try to take a concept or brand from one medium into another and just copy the original medium, instead of doing what works well in the new medium.  Think about the movies that have been made from books - sometimes it works well when the story embraces moviemaking, other times it's pretty terrible, when they just try to film everything that was in the book without thinking about what works better (or worse) in a film.  Games are like that - in fact it's rare that a good movie is made based on a game or vice versa, but it can be done.