John Wise

Complacency breeds stagnation; it makes us wonder what to do instead of forcing us to do it.

Conflict throws us into action. We must run from or fight what is confronting us, but what we cannot do is stand still, for if we do, it will be at our own peril.

In the former situation, we will sit passively and entertain ourselves to death, while the latter forces us into a warlike stance.

When poised to go into battle, we scour our minds for solutions; what are the paths that lay before us?

This then begs the question, when given the relative ease of life in the 1st world, where do we find this conflict?

Most waste this resource in the mental masturbation of arguing with one’s self and then pulling in inconsequential nonsense to occupy a mind that requires daily gymnastics to remain plastic and ready for action. The problem herein is that the drivel many people allow in has no relevance to their own lives; it is fodder for complacency brought on by the inane.

So where do we find the kind of internal conflict that allows our creativity to build our own intellectual Trojan Horse that helps liberate us from complacency? We manifest it in desire and disappointment. When I was a young man, my conflict came from my inability to find the relationship I felt I needed. During that time, I was a voracious reader – didn’t have anyone to date, so what else was I to do? Those words I read stewed in my mind, and I continued reading to find answers, but there were none; there was just more conflict. With the fire of the mind blazing like a forest fire in its quest for knowledge and companionship, I started making stuff, digital stuff.

I was a child of the emergent personal computer revolution, just as words painted pictures in my mind; having the computer make pictures using its processing capability seemed a natural progression, and so I embarked on dabbling with digital arts in the mid-1980s. All of the reading, studying, and cultural exploration of my early 20s had produced a great curiosity; I had a million questions. It was here that I discovered, as so many others have over the course of their lives, that the mind abhors a vacuum devoid of answers, and given enough inputs, it will soon start to disgorge its contents by producing something that explains things to the curious mind. Soon, I was shooting videos and making record cover art with the wealth of knowledge I was refining.

And here begins the problem: success in one’s endeavors delivers like-minded others and validates the knowledge that produced the fruits of our labor by imbuing us with the currency of achievement: money. Time to get happy and lazy and the start of getting older.

But I don’t want to get old, nor do I want to be in teenage soul-ripping conflict either.

So how do we balance that yin and yang of two hemispheres of self and manage them so that they might remain a healthy self-governing police force of our cognitive maturity? We break the rules, our own rules. To make this simpler, we step out of our own habits.

I did not suggest we break laws; as a matter of fact, I would like to reiterate we break our rules. What are those rules? Maybe they were the knowledge that we should exercise and the realization that obesity is killing us, so we break out of routine and find a path to tackling our complacency with our diet and lack of running around. Or maybe we have been taking something for granted and have our reality shaken by a dramatic change in our situation that rattles our complacency and forces us to race against stagnation to fix ourselves.

In my case, I recently reignited my creative engine by dousing gasoline on a healthy bed of embers. While maybe nothing is easily pinpointed as being the sole flashpoint of having sparked that conflict, what helped me was a binge into guilt. I’ve not played games in a seriously long time; I’ve been too busy traveling and writing and maybe being complacent in that.

You see, I thought hours of mindless entertainment was a kind of complacency I couldn’t afford. Once something becomes normal and routine we tend to fall into a kind of mindless existence, so for me to fall into playing over 100 hours of a game at the exclusion of my “healthy” routine, I started falling into some extreme guilt. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was breaking my rules.

In a crescendo of regrets, I had to justify my losing face in playing the game to excess, and my mind started racing for answers. I had to find a path on this battlefield to conquer my conflict. What I had going for me was that I was in the process of creating a virtual environment, which might in itself be considered a game. I had recently attended Steam Dev Days and returned with a brain full of ideas regarding the valuable strategic lessons learned from Valve and their experiences in how gaming is evolving. I was inspired by the game I was lost in, too. Just as I’m cresting and about to cross this rubicon, my creative mind is rescued by my conflicting mind, and I find an important answer to a vexing monetization question regarding the VR environment I am working on.

A huge problem has been solved, but at what expense? The conflict alienated my relationships because for 12 hours a day I cast my normal to the side and appeared to be lost. I suppose I could have stayed in my new complacency, but fortunately for me, my brain enjoys a good round of gymnastics, even when thrown to the mat. I bounced up, feeling invigorated to tackle the hard issues of how to implement my genius. Oh yeah, did I tell you I like flirting with self-delusional ideas of grandeur, too?

Flew up to Seattle, Washington, a few days ago to attend the Steam Dev Days event hosted by Valve. I was desperate to go as it appeared there was going to be an emphasis on Virtual Reality, so I reached out and requested an invite code, and much to my surprise, I was sent one. Being the over-enthusiastic zealot I am when I focus my attention on something I’m interested in, getting to listen in on Valve’s ideas of where VR is heading fits my needs to satisfy and even amplify my already off-the-chart curiosity. I visited the Convention Center the night before to find out just where I needed to be the next morning. I arrived Wednesday morning while they were finishing setting up the hall and our catered hot breakfast. I was trying to be polite when the guys who created Black Mesa for Counter-Strike strode in and sat where I “was” going to sit. We had about a two-hour wait before things got underway. As it turned out, I sat at the end of the center row; little did I know that this would work out PERFECTLY. Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, was the first speaker.

As Gabe finished speaking, I was not one of the lucky people who were able to ask him a question. Not a problem, I saw an opportunity. I got out of my seat, and as he made his way out of the hall through the seated crowd of 2000 attendees, I followed him. Once in the hallway, I asked my question. As we walked along and he answered, he asked if we could sit down a moment and continue. Wow, I’m kinda blown away by now. After a short while, he asked if I had the chance to see their implementation of VR, “Nope.” He got up and said, “Come on.” At the end of the hallway is the man behind the curtain, seriously. Gabe asks Atman Binstock, a Senior Engineer who’s been working on Valve’s VR project if he can get me in. There are a limited number of spots open to demo this prototype headset during these two days, and they are already reserved for the likes of people from Rockstar, Ubisoft, Intel, etc. Atman says he can offer me an abbreviated demo. I am indebted to Gabe, but I’m not even sure in my excitement if I offered him my profound thanks.

Now, I, too, am behind the curtain and in the magic room. The walls are covered with “Fiducial Markers” – they are what the camera on the headset I’ll put on will see so positional tracking is maintained. For the Oculus Rift demo at CES the week before in Las Vegas, the guys turned the concept around and covered the headset with markers where a camera on the wall kept track of the users’ head movements; that prototype system was called Crystal Cove.

This is Valve’s prototype VR headset I had the opportunity to put on. There are no words to describe the next series of events and impressions except to try and sincerely say that Virtual Reality is going to CHANGE EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING!!! Valve and Oculus call it “Presence” – when any idea that you are in something artificial fades away, and you are transported into this “other” place. I stood among cubes, simple cubes stretching off into the distance all around me. I could have been in Tron; it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I was standing in a giant cube with the Yahoo home page on the six sides of the cube; this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. You should know where this is going. Until amazement gave way to epiphany and a near-religious experience – I was in the universe of CDAK. This environment that buckled my knees and brought me to tears is a tiny 4k program that originated out of the demoscene. Back in the nascent days of the personal computer industry, “crackers” would create small demos that usually preceded a game they cracked – very common back when I owned a Commodore 64 and then my Amiga. My breath was taken away; I seriously had to gasp at how beautiful the universe was. At this moment, if there had been any uncertainty, I was convinced that VR was going to steamroll humanity. Exploring intricacy and beauty, which is impossible to realize in our physical world, is what’s going to make this ubiquitous. By this time, I don’t know what to say to Atman as I remove the headset; I’m stunned. Telling anyone what this was or how it felt will never compare to how the individual is going to find their worldview permanently altered from just one encounter with VR – assuming it isn’t going to be in an environment shooting people.

I emerge back into the real world. Gabe is gone. On the other side of the curtain, I’m introduced to Tom Forsyth, who now works with Oculus but has been with Valve. On his right in this photo is Atman Binstock, who does work with Valve. I’m tongue-tied. I want to ask a question, but my mind is reeling. I concede defeat in that my thoughts are not to easily be unscrambled, and I say bye, though I want to go back in, and I head back to the conference floor. I walk away with a smile that will have me looking like an idiot for the next three days.

Now, I have to focus on the other reason I’m here in Seattle: learning from Valve. When Gabe Newell gave his introductory talk, he said he was only going to focus on two things: the most important two things Valve sees for the future are Open Platforms and Virtual Reality. With that in mind, the people here to talk with us are spilling their corporate guts about what’s working and how things have changed. They point out the economic benefits of in-game trade and commerce, of how they can no longer make all the content, and the user wants an active role in creating UGC – User Generated Content. Two examples are how they were surprised when users made more than 20,000 skins that were being traded in Counter-Strike, but that didn’t prepare them for what happened in Portal. Users created more than 318,000 maps, a feat Valve would never have been able to do on their own. We hear over and over about openness, that we must evolve and learn, and that economic connectivity between developers and gamers is strategically absolutely important. After some amazing talks about the success of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Portal, and Dota2, it was time for me to attend the afternoon sessions. Talks about Music in Games, Collaborative Coworking, and Steam’s Early Access program were the sessions I chose; I would have liked to attend all the sessions, though.

At the end of the sessions was a get-together in the main hall with DJ and drinks. There was also the matter of a giveaway that was part of our swag bag. At the start of the conference, attendees were handed a bag of goodies and a t-shirt. In that bag was a prototype Steam Controller, a notebook, a pen, some stickers, and, of course, the really cool Steam Dev Days canvas bag it all came in. But we were also given a card that was to be turned in this evening. Before I collected my free gift, I ran into Alexis Khouri and Jeremie Noguer of Allegorithmic. I had just met these two guys the month before in Los Angeles when their CEO was over from France to make the official announcement of their new software called Substance Painter. They told me of something totally cool coming to Substance Designer 4.1, but I can’t say anything yet except that it’s going to be really cool.

Btw the card we were given earlier in the day to be traded at the evening social event was this i4770-based Gigabyte-built Steam Box called Brix Pro. While I was happy to hear about this and receive my very own, nothing was overshadowing my experience in Valve’s VR room. If it hadn’t been for all the great content of the sessions and how open Valve was with how content is being sold, I could have easily gone home at around 10:30 on this first day. You can be sure, though, that this mini powerhouse of a computer had me giddy as a kid this swag bag didn’t disappoint.

The next day, we heard talks in the main room about ARG – Alternative Reality Games. What I was waiting for, though, were the afternoon sessions, as there was a big focus on VR. There was so much interest that the room this was supposed to be held in was expanded to handle 700 participants. Michael Abrash gave a great talk about how close we are to commercial virtual reality. Instead of me describing it, you should just go to his slide show and read about it yourself – click here.

We also listened to Joe Ludwig, who talked about VR and Steam; check out his presentation – click here.

Palmer Luckey was here with his crew from Oculus, including CEO Brendan Iribe, co-founder Nate Mitchell, and Tom Forsyth. Palmer was coming off a successful couple of weeks that saw the company raise $75 million with Andreessen Horowitz and demonstrate the Crystal Cove at CES in Vegas. Palmer leaped on stage and dove into an hour of material that was compressed into a 30-minute presentation.

After the individual talks, the guys sat down to answer questions from the audience. From left to right are Joe Ludwig of Valve, Devin Reimer of Owlchemy, Palmer Luckey of Oculus, and Michael Abrash from Valve. The conversation lasted about an hour, after which we broke for a catered dinner in the main room, along with more music and drink.

As I was leaving I ran into Palmer, not the first time, that was at Siggraph just this past July. I said hello and took the blurryest selfie ever, hence the small black-and-white version I’m posting. Over the two days here, I was able to see that an older generation and decades of digital advancements had given the opportunity to a young 20-year-old guy to change the world. The people who will make the content that drives that advancement are twenty and thirty-somethings who are harnessing complexity and are still able to learn new tricks and hopefully bend with an entertainment industry that is about to go through the greatest contortions it has ever faced. Get ready, world; you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Like the days and years ahead, there are things that cannot be seen until they present themselves. There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, behind the curtain, and within the mind when magic is being manifested. We are aware that this is the year when a new reality is going to unfold, a place familiar yet different; it is popularly known as Virtual Reality. With this reinterpretation of our brave new world, the doors of perception will surely be knocked from their hinges. This new food of the gods is being built using the very electrons that manifest and alter our reality; we are the engineers of tomorrow and a billion futures. Happy New Year, world.