Transcript for Embedded 341: Big Hugs to Everybody with Phoenix Perry.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White. Here with Christopher White. We're pleased to have Phoenix Perry back on the show to talk about art, education, and maybe ghost hunting again.

PP (00:19):

Ghost hunting.

CW (00:20):

Hey, Phoenix.

PP (00:20):

Hello.

CW (00:21):

Glad we didn't scare you off the first time.

PP (00:23):

I'm glad I didn't scare you off with my ghost hunting.

EW (00:27):

Could you tell us about yourself as though we met at a conference?

PP (00:34):

Hello. I'm Phoenix Perry. I make big, giant physical video games with lots of people generally for the public. I also work very hard to embed a teaching practice into that creative work, and see education as a bridge between creative work and learning. Beyond that, I have a project called Code Liberation, which basically just gives me an excuse to work with fantastic women, who are interested in learning how to make games and creative applications to tell their stories where I can and when I can, so that's the skinny about me.

EW (01:15):

Are you ready for a lightning round?

PP (01:18):

Definitely.

CW (01:20):

Favorite Ghostbuster?

PP (01:22):

Oh, man. Favorite Ghostbuster? I have a favorite ghost.

CW (01:27):

Favorite ghost?

PP (01:28):

Slimer.

EW (01:29):

Of course. That's my favorite Ghostbuster, too. Can you recommend a good smartphone game?

PP (01:40):

Bury Me, My Love, if you have not played it yet, is amazing. As is SelfCare. #selfcare.

CW (01:47):

Cake or pie?

PP (01:50):

Cake, always.

EW (01:52):

Exactly. What is pie in London?

PP (01:58):

It is not. What it is in the UK is weird. They put mushrooms and peas in their pies here, y'all. It is not all right, and they think sweet potatoes do not belong anywhere near pies unless they're savory, which I don't understand. My British friends won't eat my pumpkin pie even though it's amazing.

CW (02:19):

Biscuit or cookie?

PP (02:21):

Biscuit.

EW (02:24):

Favorite generative algorithm?

PP (02:27):

I like Markov chains.

CW (02:29):

If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach?

EW (02:33):

If-

PP (02:34):

Well-

CW (02:34):

Well, see... If you could teach a course that you aren't teaching... I don't know.

PP (02:38):

Sure. I mean, I've made a few courses during my day. One of them I made, I loved. I'm not going to mention it because I got harassed beyond all logic and had to leave the university. Not because I really felt like it was the right move, but because it was very clear to me in fighting a discrimination situation that I had faced, I just didn't feel like I would ever be able to progress within that department. If I had it to do all over again, I would really love to consider how to build a course around architecture, play, and smart environments, which I'm pushing my boss to let me do at UAL, and I'm begging, slowly, every day. I'm thinking around creative robotics and the environment, but that would be what I'd make, I think.

CW (03:29):

Cool.

EW (03:31):

UAL. You mentioned that. University of Art-

PP (03:35):

London.

EW (03:36):

... London.

PP (03:37):

Yeah. It's a conglomerate of universities, so it is... Basically, the British educational system went through a heavy revision in, I guess, the late nineties, mid nineties, and a lot of what were individual universities kind of got united into bigger schools, and UAL is one of them. It's Camberwell, Central Saint Martin, Chelsea College of Art, LCC... London College of Communications, LCC. Ton of others that I probably can not remember, so it's-

EW (04:11):

Well, I feel like there's one you should remember. The CCI.

PP (04:15):

We are not actually... We are an institute, not a college. We are... UAL's doing this really experimental thing where they're creating these multidisciplinary institutes. It's actually a really revolutionary approach, and it's why I joined UAL. CCI is this really beautiful... Or the Creative Computing Institute, this really beautiful marriage between computation and arts, and I thought, "Maybe for once in my life, I could be both these things at once and not have to fight an uphill battle in the snow either with humanities people or science people." I love it. It's the best job in academia I've ever had.

EW (04:58):

Is it teaching computer science to art people or teaching art to CS people?

PP (05:05):

Well, I got really lucky that I met the dean really early in the process. Basically, the CCI was an approved idea that UAL was building when I met the dean. His name is Ben Stopher, and he brought me on... I guess it's over two years ago now, and I helped craft the CCI, so I got to kind of control a lot of that. I wrote a huge part of our undergrad and masters' degrees in creative computing, and I really wrote them in a way that if you're a scientist coming, you can learn the arts side, and if you're an artist, you can learn the science side, so I get both, which is amazing and I'm so happy about.

EW (05:49):

You've been building a curriculum from scratch?

PP (05:52):

I've done five now if you can believe that. I've kind of become the curriculum builder. I'm good, apparently, at crafting these weird, interdisciplinary, hybrid programs.

EW (06:11):

Interdisciplinary, to me, as an engineer, who works on projects, means that it involves a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, me, and a higher level software engineer.

PP (06:22):

Oh, dear.

CW (06:23):

And marketing.

EW (06:24):

Occasionally, marketing. Product marketing. Every once in a while a customer.

PP (06:30):

Oh no. Interdisciplinary in academia usually means crossing bodies of knowledge, so for example, literature and computer science or art and design and computer science, right? It's entire bodies of knowledge, whereas mechanical engineering and electrical engineering are both still in the engineering department.

EW (06:54):

It took me four years to get through the engineering aspects I needed. If I had done art, too, which I did minor in-

PP (07:05):

Well done.

CW (07:06):

Is all a lie. The premise is false, but proceed.

EW (07:10):

It seems like... When I minored in art, it was in pottery and architecture. Not anything really to do with the computer classes I was taking, but you're joining them. Can you still get a regular programming job after a CCI degree?

PP (07:31):

Totally. Think about it. Let's talk about pottery. Let's go ahead, let's talk about how learning to paint and work with clay was radically improved... My skills in that space were radically improved by my soldering ability, so basically, the same skills and the same kinds of thinking that you use in any discipline in college are relatively the same, and what CS really teaches, is a way to think, right? It's not a bunch of algorithms. The algorithms are going to change relatively. They're somewhat stable now, but the languages I learned in college are completely not even taught anymore. They're not even on the table.

PP (08:19):

Every 10, 20 years, STEM... It moves so fast. It really tosses out huge bodies of knowledge. Particularly computer science, right? The most important thing you can learn from a CS education is computational thinking. It's how to break problems down into tiny pieces to kind of build a bigger system, and if that doesn't sound like understanding society, I'm not sure what else could, so really having that ability to look at society and think at a very practical level about what you can do to impact change and bring about cultural shifts. To me, that's extremely powerful, and I think that what you can learn from the humanities side, which is a much deeper, richer set of thinking around things like nonrepresentational ways of thinking, or material engagement.

PP (09:16):

These kinds of theories and approaches that exist in humanities, grounded theory, et cetera, et cetera... These teach a systemic holistic way of looking at problems, right? They teach you a much different kind of way of thinking. If you can then apply that kind of thinking back to CS, you get this really, really powerful balance where I think that you're going to be able to be the engineer that can speak to the design team. Can speak to the creative team. Can speak to the artists, or the artists, you can talk to your technology folks that you're working with, or know exactly what the material of the technology that you're working with is and what it's actual potential is versus, "Oh. I heard IOT is hot. Let's make a piece of art with IOT."

PP (10:06):

When you're building, and you know this as an engineer, you discover as you make things, right? It's a process, so I actually think... Not only did I put in a CS in this degree to make most of my undergrads cry, which happened this year unfortunately. It is a seriously skilled-up course. It's not for the faint of heart, but I also put a lot of theory into it, and it's not light theory either. It's not like half of either degree. It was like I came in and was like, "So here's the history of computer science and where it sits within humanities research, and here's all the problems." That was their first introduction to the topic.

PP (10:55):

It was interesting for them as freshmen, or first years, how to understand things like deconstruction. Their brains broke. It was really fun to teach it, and I don't know. I happen to think that we're moving into a time where engineering and computer science are not separable entities anymore.

EW (11:22):

It would be nice if they weren't. Yes. You said the history of CS, and probably the problematic parts, but one of the things about art is that there always was an important aspect to the history of art in order to understand where we are in art.

PP (11:40):

Absolutely.

EW (11:42):

But that isn't true of most engineering. Engineering is always forward looking. Looking back isn't as important as it is with art because the continuity... It doesn't matter. You build the future. You don't try to figure out why we moved from modern art to postmodern art.

PP (12:02):

I would argue that that puts you in a massive disadvantage because not understanding... I actually think that people like David Perez, who are anthropologists and have looked at computer science and the history of haptics, for example, really point to something that's endemic in CS, which is exactly what you just mentioned. It's forward thinking, right? It's never about the past, so if we've been doing the same thing and failing at it for 100 years, we might not realize it, which I think archeologies have touched, does a really good job at point out. There's just such a loss in CS because it's always claiming that it's going to change the world, right? This technology... Claiming you're going to change the world without understanding that these claims are continuously made in STEM... Continuously made in engineering and computer science. They just never are followed through on. We're losing something in our understanding.

EW (13:18):

I mean, some things have gotten better.

CW (13:21):

But they're not usually coming from people who are claiming to change the world, right? It's like Facebook's coming out and saying, "Well, we're going to allow information freedom, which is going to lead to a utopia," and "Oops, that didn't exactly work out that way."

PP (13:32):

No, and-

CW (13:34):

I've been at companies were it's like, "Oh. This network switch we're building is going to liberate repressed societies." It's a network switch.

PP (13:43):

Exactly, and not that technology has not radically transformed the planet, but it's been doing that since we were napping with stone, right? Understanding how humans learn and make meaning through that process is the fundamental root of both art and science. I really believe that we have to marry our thought in a way that's more holistic if we want to deal with things like the future of predictive policing, where people...

PP (14:20):

We just had a situation where they arrested a man, I think it was in Detroit, for a robbery when, literally, there was video footage of him on Instagram when they said that he robbed something, right? There was no evidence. It was just they had run... The city of Detroit is now running CCTV footage that it's getting in crimes against the entire database of photos it has, including DMV. What is that? Right? How is that legal? And they're arresting people based on these kinds of things. These are problems that humanities people are particularly well suited to be like, "Nope." Because it seems like CS people are so blind to the social implications that the technology they make has. Like the real implications. Not the pretend implications of, "This is going to liberate repressed people." "No. It's actually not. It's actually going to cause more problems." Right? We've got to change how we approach stuff. We can no longer barrel down it from one perspective or another.

EW (15:37):

One of the classes in your curriculum is computational ethics.

PP (15:42):

Yes. It's true. I definitely added as many books on computational ethics and the ethics of what we make as I could when I was working on the curriculum because this is a problematic space. Computation is not just... It is no longer just bound to some abstract postpositive space where we're looking at mathematics on paper, right? It's having ethical implications. Twitter doing something really minor to its UI can all of a sudden cause crazy problems in the world, and understanding ethically what you're making, and your responsibility in that... Why you, personally, are accountable for the technology you create... In my opinion, that should just be basic. They should give that to every engineer and computer day A.

EW (16:44):

If somebody's interested in learning more about this... Because that is kind of a hard responsibility. It's not just me who creates this, and when I'm creating it, I believe it is going to be used for it's intended purpose of unrepressing people.

CW (17:01):

Or being a smart watch.

EW (17:03):

Or being a smart watch. Not a nanny cam. How do I learn to start asking the right questions? Are there books you'd recommend?

PP (17:14):

There's so many books. The first thing I would recommend is if you're already working in computing or you're working in engineering, there are books like Algorithms of Math Destruction, which are great and fantastic. I know right.

EW (17:30):

It's a good title.

PP (17:32):

I think that I got the name of that.

CW (17:32):

You did.

PP (17:33):

I think I got the name of that right. There's books like... I'm just looking at my shelf right now. Brain, so many of my books are eBooks. Why do you have to ask this right now? I would just encourage you to just generally look at... There's another one that just came out on MIT Press. I think it's called We Are Not Users. There's an entire space in design research and computer science now where people are looking at ethics, and they're looking at how ethics could be used and thought about in computing. I don't know if I trust a word that falls out of Jack Dorsey's mouth, but he was on the Times this last week, and one of the things that I did appreciate was the way he was becoming more aware of the subtle changes that Twitter's UI... That they were making to Twitter's UI, and the implications those changes were having in culture.

PP (18:41):

I think that's an awakening that a lot of people in tech need to start having. Right? Because society... Twitter and Facebook are now starting to be held accountable for these choices they've made that they thought without any deeper... Without any game theorists involved. Without anyone who does psychological research. They're not including people who might be able to tell them ahead of time, "Hey. That thing you're making..." Right? "That thing you're making might cause problems, and here's why." If you're not bringing those people into the conversation, I'm not exactly sure how you can expect to catch that.

PP (19:23):

I would say, the first you can do is have conversations. Go to conferences. There's technical... Let me think. Oh my goodness. My brain is not pulling up the conference names, but I think that there're definitely design and user experience conferences. Every now and again talks pop up at CCC, which are really good on this topic, but they're not the norm. Oh, God. If I remember the name of the conference that I'm thinking of specifically about this, I'll send it you, but my brain is drawing a blank right now.

CW (19:57):

We'll put it in the notes.

PP (20:00):

Yeah. I will, but there's definitely groups of people... I think, particularly, if you look at some of the research, there's a really interesting project called Feminist Internet. There're actually two. One is women in the global south looking at the impacts that technology is having in their culture. Follow them. They have feministinternet.org, and they're absolutely worth paying attention to. Another one is Feminist Internet Project that's come out of CCI, which is kind of aligned in the same direction, which is also... It's the .com version, I think. It's worth looking at. One is a .com. One is a .org. The .org, I think, is much, much larger, and they've been around a lot longer. They've got the feminist principals of the internet, and they've been running conferences and stuff that look incredibly great.

PP (20:48):

But finding people, who are living and working in communities that maybe you're not part of, would be the first place, I think, to look for those kinds of conversations. Right? It's just bringing in other people, other perspectives, other points of view. If you're in an engineering room and everybody is from the exact same background, you're not going to see the problems that other people might point out is obvious, right?

CW (21:18):

It's really tough, right? Because when you start a company, or you found a startup, you need to build something, or you have an idea and you need to build it and you're in a big hurry and people are throwing money at you, or not throwing money at you, and that's a different problem, so you hire the team that you need, which is probably some engineers and you get far along and pretty soon you have something that's out there, and maybe it's a Facebook. Maybe it's Google. Whatever. And you built this cool thing. Now, billions of people are using it, and it's a completely different prospect than a small product, or, like you're saying. A tiny UI change has massive implications. Really feels like you have to have this kind of thing from the very beginning, but it's kind of hard for people to do that it seems like, or they don't want to or they don't think about it or there's no money for it.

PP (22:06):

Or they can't afford it. Yeah. I mean, all of these things. Right? It's very real. I know that those... I've worked in corporate for a long period of time before I came to academia. I can just imagine... I think that design agencies and advertising agencies have gotten a little more woke since I left in like 2012, I think, but I can't even imagine how hard I would've been laughed out of the room if I would've proposed that we brought someone in to look at these concerns. Just not a concern. They just do not care, and I think that... And it's not that they don't care because they're unthoughtful people or they're bad people. None of that's true. It's just market... The demands... Like you're saying, the demands of the market, this kind of capitalistic approach to product, product, product... It has a weight that stresses a lot of people out and puts a lot of strain on our society.

PP (23:07):

Technology hitting capitalism right now is starting to... It's starting to pull in really weird ways, and I think we're going to see if capitalism can survive democracy right now. If democracy and capitalism are starting to just hit each other and they're punching each other and you're seeing it with all of these technological tools getting used by foreign states or foreign governments to do things like tamper in elections or manipulate politics. It's literally, I think, one of the most fascinating times to be working in this space, right? I hope that the people that were creating at CCI will be able to be that engineer in the room that raises their hand and goes, "Hey. Wait a minute."

CW (23:58):

Yeah. That makes sense.

EW (24:00):

Back to, from the principles of the internet... Looking at the .org, I guess the question I can ask that Chris can't is, "Why do I care?" I mean, yes. I care, but does it all have to be about feminist, or... Can't I just be an engineer?

PP (24:28):

You can be. That is an absolutely valid way to move through the world. No one's going to stop you, certainly, but if you are in a part of the world where people are just doing that and you're paying the cost for it, right? You're going to start organizing and you're going to start bringing about change. I think that that is now a big part of society and I really do think that the days of us being able to just say, "I want a six figure job. I'm going to go work at Google." Might be... Your friends... It's ethical choices you're making. You're going to go build AI that can be used in extremely harmful ways. Are you okay with that? Are you okay optimizing YouTube's algorithm?

PP (25:19):

And if you, that's okay. That's an ethics choice you've made, and the world's full of people from every perspective, but I think there's about to be a pretty big backlash in the world from people who have really suffered as a result of those algorithms and engineering products. Really wreaking havoc in their environment, in their climate, on their bodies, and their societies.

EW (25:46):

What does this have to do with creativity?

PP (25:48):

Yeah. It's a good question. I think we're going to need some really deep, creative thinking to get ourselves out of this problem as a society, and I think the way you learn to think with creativity is not necessarily problem, solution, problem, solution, problem, solution, but it's a much slower kind of intuitive embodied knowledge of a terrain, right? You're able to make these really disparate cross connections, right? Between disciplines. Between ways of thinking. Between ways of living in the world, and I think the artists are going to begin build some of those... I hope artists are going to start building some of those common points where people can come together to facilitate either sharing experiences or having conversations around these kinds of topics.

EW (26:51):

Talking about art and changing subjects entirely. You have a new art installation. Forest Day Dream. Can you tell us about it?

PP (27:01):

Totally. I love Forest Day Dream. I think it is... We did it pre COVID, but I feel like its time and what it's saying is really relevant now. It is a project, which is a virtual environment that was created in Blender 3D, and it is a low poly video game world. Then, what we did is we took it and we physically constructed that world in real space. It's like a low poly forest. A low poly hut. Low poly clouds. We modeled all of that with physical materials, and then, we brought people into the physical space, which gives them a moment... When you see it, it very much looks like you just stepped into a video game. It looks like you just stepped into a virtual world, but you're seeing it in the physical... In a very physical embodied way, and the reactions that you had to that is already going to set you outside what you're expecting, and then what we did is we worked to build this ecology in a way that really began to throw into... Relieve some of the questions that we're dealing with climate change.

PP (28:21):

For the sound, we worked with the sound artist called Ben Kelly, who went to the Amazon, and he's been working with a local community in the Amazon to kind of help them basically stop their environment from becoming encroached upon and endangered, and he has been recording sounds in that environment and learning about that environment and the people who live in that culture, and he brought those sounds into Forest Day Dream, so the sounds themselves immediately... They hit. I've never made something that people spent hours in before. We had people spend hours inside Forest Day Dream. They didn't stay for five minutes. They didn't stay for 10 minutes. They didn't look at it and keep moving. They sat down and laid on the floor, which, for me, is exactly the kind of engagement that I'm looking for. A profoundly calming environment would be the way to put it. It triggers some part of your brain that is used to responding to being in nature.

PP (29:26):

It was a really interesting and amazing experience for me, as a creator, to make something that could make people reflect on the virtual worlds that we're gaining and the physical worlds we're losing all at once. It was the first time I ever made something that people didn't want to see leave a gallery. They didn't want to tear it down. They wanted to stay. We had to throw people out at the end of the day. I've never had that before, and we had people get upset that they had to leave, which... That's always what I'm hoping for as an artist.

EW (30:01):

But this is a big engineering project. I mean, this is big, physically, but it's also lights controlled and audio control, and putting it all together so that it's an experience in one place. What kind of engineering challenges do you see with that?

PP (30:19):

Oh my God. There were so many. It is... There are multiple games embedded in the space as well. There's like... You can either play it in an open ended way or there are literal games that you can run around and play. We built... The entire thing is controlled wirelessly. There are... If I count... At least 15 microcontrollers into the space. There is OSC controlling a DMX lighting... The virtual world exists, right? Everything is happening in there, but it's also causing changes in the physical space and they're networked together, right? That was its own problem with getting Unity to behave. It was a software and embedded engineering task that was really great because I spent an entire turn teaching students how to have the skills to build something like this at the master's degree level, right?

PP (31:16):

And then the next term, they had to directly employ those skills to make something like this. In this case, they definitely contributed to not only the creation of the work, the building of the work, some of the ideas in the project itself, and then they went on to build their own environments that were going to be in the physical world, but actually ended up being multiplayer participatory environments in the virtual world because of COVID-19. It was a process. So much code. So many microcontrollers. So many moments of just the fabricating it was a lot because if you look at it, you can see it's a whole bunch of wood, whole bunch of pipes, whole punch of paper, tons of acrylic-

EW (31:53):

So many LEDs.

PP (31:53):

So many LEDs. So many LEDs.

CW (32:08):

Some of the pieces are really cool tessellation problems, right? You had the clouds and the trees, I guess. Little things. A big, folded up dodecahedra.

PP (32:22):

Yep. That's what Adele Lynn brought to the project. Adele Lynn originally designed the clouds that hang in the sky, and then the CCI students collaborated, made some of their own clouds, which was fun. Adele just really... When we started talking about the project back in... I think it was 2014, 2015. She just brought this really great architectural understanding because Adele was working an architectural job at the time, and I could've never [fabbed 00:32:56] the way she did at that point in time. She taught me so much in terms of, "Here's a jigsaw, and now we're going to cut a thousand pipes to exactly the right lengths of a geodesic dome." It was just this level of dirty I had never been before.

PP (33:16):

Particularly as a software person, who normally puts one little microcontroller together maximum... My engineering projects have been small scale. Adele's like, "So now, we're going to build massive things." It was really fantastic to work with her, and just to have her in my life because she's a wonderful person, but... Yeah. The scale at which I started working before and after Adele, huge difference, and after Adele, I've made other very large projects I would've never been able to make had she not gotten me over this absolute blind terror of building things that were that big. Adele solved those problems.

PP (34:01):

There's a lot of group thinking. Robin Baumgarten, who made Line Wobbler, did all the LEDs, for example. Federico Sanchez worked on some of the game design. Ben Kelly was the sound artist, and literally 15 students. All of them geniuses and amazing. Then, Matt Jarvis, who helped design the... He's done just countless numbers of exhibitions in the past and worked for galleries... He designed the lighting. He lit the thing to just be so perfect. I've never had lighting that good. Super thankful to Matt for that.

PP (34:41):

It was a hive project. I could've never built that alone. There is absolutely no way, and I guess that's what I've learned building things that big. It can't just be one person. You might be a creative director in it, right? It might be a vision that you're building or working towards, but there's no way that you're solving all those problems yourself. There is absolutely no way.

EW (35:04):

That's another thing about learning the humanities side and the creative side is that when you start building larger projects, those skills become more important than actual technical skills.

PP (35:19):

Yeah. They really... They really do, and Adele and I have... The only way to say it is gloriously failed with Forest Day Dream multiple times before... It was another project called Night Games that Adele and I... We literally did not get right, I think, three times before we got it right. That iterative process, really learned from games and the creation of games where you build a thing, it doesn't work. You learn why because you speak to players. You take notes. You kind of build an HCI understanding, or Human Computer Interaction understanding, of what the design solutions could potentially be there. How you solve that.

PP (36:06):

I think we started... The first time Forest Day Dream showed was in a maze, and I think 2015. It was called Night Games, and Lord, it was trash. It was so bad. We screwed up so bad. I've never... There are ways to say ducked up, but we ducked up really. We ducked up in ways that I can't even... Now that I have more engineering knowledge behind me and I've built so many things... We literally used a different microcontroller for every piece in the project. Not even. They were not all the same. It was like Spark Core over here. Arduino over there. LilyPad... None of the same controllers, right? None of it we used WiFi. We used Bluetooth. We used radio. Madness. Sheer madness. It did not work. It worked some of the hours of the day. We'll put it that way. Badly.

PP (37:12):

It's really that spirit that you have... I was in design for years before coming to CCI, and just, "Ah. I screwed that up. Now let's understand why, and let's fix it. Let's make something new."

EW (37:27):

That seems like applying the engineering side.

PP (37:30):

Both. Yeah.

EW (37:31):

It's identifying, "Oh. If we want to make this easier to build, we need to settle on a microprocessor or two. A communication method or two, and standardize them."

PP (37:42):

Yeah. That's a lesson. That's a lesson, but I think my thinking now, having spent the first two years of my humanities degree, or my education as a computer science major, flipping to humanities, then having done an engineering degree, now having almost finished a computer science PhD... I don't even know where I... And then having worked as a designer and creative director, I don't even know where my thinking comes from anymore. It's like somewhere in both those spaces equally married and fluid between them.

EW (38:15):

Moving from physical games back to video games... Video games. That's the word people use. You have a class that's online. Could you tell us about that?

PP (38:27):

Yes. I'm super excited. One of the things that CCI has been doing is working with FutureLearn in this project called... To work on this project between the University of... I think it's Lancaster. Don't hold me to it. It's a couple other schools, but they've done this Institute of Coding, which is a really interesting project and Code Liberation made a class for it, but there's also other classes. If you're interested looking at the Institute of Coding on FutureLearn, there's just tons of classes in creative technologies that you can follow. The Code Liberation one is about creating video games, and it's particularly about creating expressive video games. I'm not here for people who want to learn how to make a AAA shooter. I'm just not. I don't have time for it. Life is too short.

PP (39:21):

There are 1,000 YouTube videos you can watch to get those skills, but there's not a lot of YouTube videos that you can watch to teach you how to think about games and how to make thoughtful, critical games about your own personal experience, so that's what this class is about, and it uses methodologies from humanities and coding methodologies, so there are a ton of programming units as well as comparative studies that you're asked to do between different games.

EW (39:57):

What is expressive mean here?

PP (40:01):

Expressive means you and your personal expression. Your story. Your way of seeing and being in the world.

EW (40:10):

Okay. Why would anybody else want to play a video game of being me? I'm not John Malkovich.

PP (40:20):

You're not John Malkovich, but you might have something really interesting to say. You might be a woman struggling with depression, and you might want to tell that story. You might be a refugee, and you might want to explain what your experience of going from Syria to Europe was like. By telling that story, you're going to find other people that connect to you and other voices that you can have conversations with. As well, I think, those are just great games to play.

CW (40:55):

You see a lot of... Many of these started coming out. First started seeing some of these sorts of things on Steam maybe five or 10 years ago with... I'm forgetting. A couple of them I played. Her Story, I think, was one, and-

PP (41:10):

Her Story. Yeah. That was a good one.

CW (41:11):

Going Home, maybe. Is it called Going Home?

PP (41:13):

Gone Home.

CW (41:14):

Gone Home. Thank you. I remember reading a lot of criticism from traditional gamers. The people who play the shooter things saying, "Oh. This is blah, blah, boring. This isn't what games are supposed to be," or whatever, and I found them really compelling the ones I played. I'm flummoxed by that criticism because we have... The entire cinema industry is devoted to this very thing, right? Telling people stories and going through narrative structures to express events and things. Not necessarily just a comedy or whatever, but there's lots of very critically acclaimed movies that people claim to like that are very difficult to watch, so it strikes me as very strange. That, "Oh. You can't do that in video games for some reason."

PP (41:58):

Yeah. It's interesting because the history of indie games is deep and old and it's been there all along, but I think what happened, particularly with games, is that a narrative began being crafted around the time that consoles were being sold to the whole market of who played them and why you would play them. That narrative is the narrative that eventually created the gamer identity, and that identity is very much locked to a very specific set of titles and a very specific way to play video games, and in that world, there are things which are good and there are things which are not good, and gamers have very strong opinions about that.

PP (42:40):

Then come along all these indies, who've never really gone away. They've been there since Atari days, but all of a sudden, the internet in conferences start bringing them together. Right? So they're no longer a cassette club in the UK in a Usenet in some weird backwater of the internet. They're at GDC. They're at these big, big AAA conferences. They're becoming a big part of the market, and mobile was the moment. Flash was cool. There were tons of amazing Flash games that got made, but mobile really changed things because all of a sudden now, you don't need to be licensed by a console to put out a title that reaches millions.

PP (43:32):

I think that casual games and indie games, really... They shocked the games market. The games market just was like, "What is this? You've got people like Zach Gage making games, which are making tons of money? How is this game a number one game? How is that happening?" They had spent so much money and time building a pipeline for their releases that all took a specific journey and arch. Particularly, if you look at the stories they were telling, they were telling stories almost as an aside. As a marketing gimmick. There was something... Very few of them were actually spending a huge amount of time... If you look at a four act structure from-

EW (44:21):

Drama?

PP (44:22):

... dramatology... My brain, but from drama, right? There are particular amounts of time that would get spent on each movement in that. Video games particularly focused on what would normally just be the conflict, right? They're not focused on the build up or the resolution so much. They're really focused on building conflict.

EW (44:47):

Cut scenes are boring.

PP (44:48):

Cut scenes are boring. People skip through dialogue. Right? Nobody wants that, and I think that had become a way of thinking in games, right? When these games that come along that are doing something really, really different, which is telling stories and acting like indie films. Let's just be honest. They're acting like indie cinema. Gamers are like, "What is this? And why is this? And why did I just get conned into buying this?" Because they were showing up in platforms and in places were they weren't expecting to see that kind of work if that makes sense.

EW (45:25):

It totally does. What about Animal Crossing? Does that count in your... I mean, that's not exactly expressive, but it's not a first person shooter unless you're doing it really wrong.

PP (45:39):

Are there guns in that? Can you even get a gun in animal crossing?

CW (45:42):

No.

EW (45:43):

The worst thing you can do is hit your villager with your net and they get mad.

PP (45:48):

This is good to know. I didn't know you could do that. I've got a really cranky villager. I'm going to do that. Anyway, I think that... No. No advocating for hitting villagers with nets. I think the Animal Crossing falls into... It's interesting because Nintendo, they've always made two things simultaneously, which baffle my brain. They have made the most rapey, most terrifying, most misogynistic video game ads you've ever seen. You're like, "What is this trash?" And simultaneously, they've made the most family friendly, innocent, wholesome content you've ever seen. I don't understand how both those things happen in the same company, but they do.

PP (46:39):

Nintendo has had a long history of making games, which have a very different pacing to them. Have a very different audience, and Animal Crossing is part of a series of games that just cash into a massive nostalgia chain, and as time was here and the Switch was the perfect platform for it, and-

EW (47:07):

And COVID helped, too.

PP (47:10):

COVID helped. Animal Crossing was set to be massive no matter what. It was going to be the indie games darling. There was no other way around it. Nostalgia alone would've carried it 80% of the way, right? But COVID really... Gamers being trapped in their houses alone with a Switch, games culture tips entire markets. If you want to know where something's going to happen first, just look at video games because they're trend tippers all the time. I was not surprised at all when I'm begging my niece to get Animal Crossing. I went, "Please. Get Animal Crossing, so we can play Animal Crossing." She went, "What's Animal Crossing?" A month later, she's got the most pimped out island I've ever seen. I can't keep up with a nine year old, or a 10 year old and a console.

PP (48:07):

It is really interesting to see how quickly that tipping went. It usually takes a bit longer, and it happened instantaneously with Animal Crossing. All of a sudden, you had SNL making entire skits about Animal Crossing. That was a moment, right?

EW (48:25):

Yeah. Our local aquarium loves Animal Crossing and does Twitch sessions with entomologists so they can talk about bugs in the museum. It's just ridiculous.

PP (48:35):

I think what happened is a bunch of video games... When Animal Crossing came out, it was conference season, and it was conference season for all the video game companies, right? So all the video gamers were primed. The conference circuit, generally, for indies goes, "All right. IndieCade. GDC. E3." It just goes bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Now play this. Amazing Berlin. There's the Nordic Games conference, too. And they all line up, so if you're a games person, basically, from December to beginning of May, you do nothing but sweat bullets, right? That's your hot time of the year where you're on an airplane and living in hotel rooms.

PP (49:26):

What happened is Animal Crossing dropped in the middle of that and games conferences like, "Now. Play this." Just shifted to start happening in Animal Crossing. I think that that led to exactly what you're talking about.

EW (49:40):

I have one more question from a listener. Adam asked for ideas and techniques for navigating cultural differences in regards to technology. I bet that's a whole class, but do you have any advice?

PP (49:54):

That's not even... That's an entire-

EW (49:56):

Degree?

PP (49:57):

I would... Yeah. That really is. We have a degree starting at CCI in internet equalities. I would recommend taking it. That degree addresses exactly that, and I think that that's the field that people who do what's called EDI or diversity work within companies are beginning to try and get their heads around so they can start having those conversations in places like game studios or places like engineering companies. I would say that if it's just you and you're looking for a place to start, I would have conversations with people around you.

PP (50:35):

I would start looking at some of the bodies of research around... There's a new one that came out. I think it's called Radical Design. I'm trying to remember the name of the book, but start looking at some of the MIT Press books. Start looking at some of the books that are coming out that are doing that. There's podcasts that are about that. There's whole bodies of knowledge. I think jumping into some of that would be a way to pay attention to that space, and just reading articles by, or reading perspectives by people in different spaces. Because something that might seem really minor to you, might be radically toxic to somebody else, and we want to try and avoid doing harm, right?

EW (51:24):

Yeah.

PP (51:24):

It's a goal.

EW (51:25):

I think the book is called Critical Play.

PP (51:29):

That's a great book.

EW (51:31):

Critical Play: Radical Game Design.

PP (51:34):

Yeah. Is that Mary Flannigan's book, or Mary Flannigan's book? Let's see.

EW (51:38):

Yes, it is. Mary Flannigan.

PP (51:42):

Yeah. She's cool, and you should totally check her books out. Her books are... That book is very different. It starts to hit that, but that's not what that book is about. Starts having that conversation, but I feel like the conversation moved a bit since that book was released.

EW (52:00):

Okay.

PP (52:02):

Good book, though. Good book.

EW (52:03):

Well, if there are other books you'd like to put on the show notes, let me know. I know we kind of sprung some of these questions on you. In the meantime, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Phoenix?

PP (52:16):

Man. Thoughts I want to leave you with.

CW (52:19):

More thoughts.

PP (52:20):

More thoughts.

EW (52:21):

You're allowed to say no.

PP (52:24):

Really? Right now? I mean, be kind to yourself. Please be kind to yourself. This year has been the worst year.

CW (52:31):

How do you do that exactly? I'm not very good at it.

PP (52:35):

Yeah. No one is. That's the thing, and I was just telling someone else today that all COVID-19 has done has made us all busier. All more stressed out. We all need a vacation right now from ourselves. It is... A lot of people in the US right now are in real financial dire straits. Maybe bake yourself a cake. I don't know. Take a night. Go to... Find a community yoga class in a park. You can't do that right now. Find a community yoga class online. This is so bad. Anyway, the world is a dumpster fire right now. I would avoid social media for a day. Anything you can do just to try and take the stress off a bit. That's my final notes. Big hugs to everybody. High-five. We are not dead yet.

EW (53:31):

Our guest has been Phoenix Perry. Educator, artist, and engineer. Find her work at phoenixperry.com or on Twitter @PhoenixPerry.

CW (53:39):

Thanks, Phoenix.

PP (53:43):

Thanks.

EW (53:43):

Thank you, too, Christopher for producing and co-hosting, and thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Now, a quote to leave you from Audre Lorde. "When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

EW (54:07):

Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.