full interview_jenova chen_7.mp3
Jenova Chen [00:00:00] I'm Jenova Chen, I'm the co-founder and creative director of Bad Game Company.
Speaker 2 [00:00:16] So, we're reaching kind of a wide audience here, some people who've played games, some people who have not at all. So, could you start just sort of explaining game design? What is involved in designing?
Jenova Chen [00:00:30] I usually would say game design and game directing are two different things. I consider myself as a game director, not just a designer. So with the director's lens, it's much easier to look at cinema, as example, if you're shooting a film or in this case, shooting a television show. The director will have to think about the entire experience, right, where a designer will be focusing on a very particular track, you know, for example, cinematography. Is one of the major things for cinema, right? So it's gonna affect a lot of feelings and emotions and cinematography also involves jumping the camera around using spatial and temporal language to say something that traditional theater cannot do, right. So cinematography and editing to me is like what's defined in the cinema compared to theatrical play. But with games, you have camera, you had editing. So that's not setting a game to be different compared to cinema. What makes game different is the interactive design. So game designer is the cinematographer of interactive media. And they get to design the input and output, because if you watch a film passively, you have no input. The cinema just gives you everything. And it's a very passive, one-way relationship. But if you are a game designer, you would think about what is the input that people have, whether it's console game where you have almost 20 buttons on the screen with two joysticks. So you have many dimensions of input. And then you expect what type of output would the player, in this case the audience, would feel. And some of them makes you feel really, really... Heavy, you know, and some of them makes you feel very light, almost like you're weightless, right? And some of the interaction makes you a feel sad and some other interaction makes you feel happy. So to me, game designer is the, you know, if you see film and games as this multimedia orchestra, game designer is certainly the lead. Violinists, right, are the lead performer of an orchestra in the realm of interactive media.
Speaker 2 [00:02:58] You being the conductor.
Jenova Chen [00:03:00] And usually typically what happens, because it's such a new media, if you want to be a director, you have to learn how to play violin. You have to know how to be an cinematographer or a writer if you wanna direct a new type of film. So I would say every game director, if they're trying to push the envelope, they are definitely a designer. But not all the designers are the director type.
Speaker 2 [00:03:24] Can you talk a little bit briefly about your history, your games that you've made as a director and just kind of touch on that up to now?
Jenova Chen [00:03:37] It's interesting, when I was in school, when we were studying games at USC, the first game we made is called Dioding, which is a game a bunch of us students worked over a summer and then we sent this game to attend a festival and apply for competitions. In that game, my role was the lead artist. Everybody is kind of a designer because we're trying to make a game where two people would be playing side-by-side But they're seeing completely different worlds. It's like two parallel universes would lay on top of each other It's you and I are from different dimensions, and then we still have to collaborate So it's a very cool collaborative idea. Nobody has ever done that in that case everybody has opinions of how to pull this off. We all want to try something different. But my role is lead artist, so where I get to make all the visuals of the game. But yeah, I was definitely not a director, because it was kind of designed by committee, and we're trying something new. And then after that was successful, Thank you very much. The school was asking us to pitch for a game grant, called Game Innovation Grant. They want a game that is very different from what's on the mainstream market. And so when we were pitching this idea, I pitched this idea where you get to play with the clouds in the sky. So that idea, Wayne the Grant, that was the first time I get to have like a. You know, at the time, a designer, lead designer, had. But really, in that case, since I'm also doing all the art, I'm leading the design. So I'm pretty much the director. But during that time in the industry, there is no concept of game directing. It's really interesting, because, yeah, nobody ever thought that was a job. But in the cinema school, we were like, hey, there's definitely a difference between a cinematographer and a director, right? And so from that point on, I was just wondering, why isn't there a game director job title in the gaming industry? Back in early 2000, the people who were supposed to be wearing the director's hats are like executive producers at EA. Right? Or they will be called creative directors in Sony. There's no concept of game director. So I kind of made up this title, by the way.
Speaker 2 [00:06:23] I'm going to ask you when we're going again, you know, maybe touching, are we good? Yeah. Roll? Okay. You know, may be talking like, you flower journey in the sky, to talk about your sort of general approach to a game, and feel free to reference those as examples.
Jenova Chen [00:06:51] So, should we start? Sure, okay. It's rolling already? It's rollin'. When you start a new project, like a game, I think during the early 2000s, there were three types of innovations that drive these new types of games. The first is a mechanical innovation. So the most famous one would be Jonathan Blow's braid, right? So he figured out this new mechanics where you can rewind time, which historically nobody have ever tried this mechanics. And then he made this mechanics and he announced this in multiple conference. And then, you know, when he finished the game, he added the narrative on top, right. So it's like mechanic first and then visuals and stories come after. And the second type of innovation was visual style innovation. So at the time, while a lot of people was making games that's photorealistic, and people were pushing for making a game look like a painting and make them look like retro, like 8-bit. So when you see something like this, people would say, well, I've never seen a game ever like this. So I want to play this game. So it's mostly driven by the visual. And then they have a starway on top And mechanically, they usually don't have anything new, right? And then the third type of innovation is what I feel, what I learned from USC and film school, is you want to innovate the emotional experience. Majority of the games on the market is very heavily focused towards the young man's preferred emotions, like if you look at film, what men like from the young age, they like horror. Kids like to be scared. And then they like sports. Films because it's what they do at school and then they want action adventures which certainly for kids who's born in the summer this definitely gives them a lot of excitement and then as they get older when they start to contemplating about the society and their role with the world they think about sci-fi because it it's like visually sci-Fi is always very learning. But that's what men like, right? And then there's like, the middle section where both men and women like these things. And then there's the feminine side, right? Like only women like this things, right, I mean, a majority of women. And what I noticed while I was in the film school is that, yeah, for action sci-fi adventure, you got like a ton of AAA games that is already providing these feelings. If you think about the opposite emotions of an action game, the feeling of peacefulness, the feeling of relaxation, the feelings of being healed. Healing is like the opposite of destruction, right? So I was thinking that can we make a game that
Speaker 3 [00:10:12] It's okay, just close the door, it was fine, just pick it up as soon as it closes the door. I was thinking, can we have a view?
Jenova Chen [00:10:22] Yeah, so can we innovate on how to make games feel different? Because in the industry, we have this old stigma back in the early 2000s. We say, why is there only men in the game industry? There's not enough women. And if you look at the people who bought the consoles and who bought Call of Duty, Madden, they're guys. You know, it's like... Unapologetically just men on console, right? And at the time we say, where are the women in the game industry? And, you know, in the early 2000s, they were playing casual games like Diner Dash or Plants vs. Zombies. And they're playing on a PC. And then the Facebook comes out, the social games came, and then finally they move from PC to social network. And today they're pulling on mobile, right? But historically the male and female gaming market is very, very separate. And so we were trying to make a game that feels differently, but still is a fun game to play on the console. That's kind of at the time what we were trying to do. And so when we made this game Flower, so I wanted to make a game that is healing, that is peaceful, that does not involve violence. And it should, you know, this is what I described to the Sony executive at the time they were laughing. It's like, I want to make a game makes you feel love. And yeah, that was kind of the wacky project. I think at the time, the executive was referencing the wackie project. But it's a student who's working on it. We're very low budget. So they let us do it because they're looking for innovations. And it's only recognized that gaming is going to eventually become a serious medium that will really be appreciated by adults rather than kids. So yeah, when I made flour, it was based on emotion. Well, I grew up in Shanghai, which is kind of like a concrete forest of buildings. And there's rarely any large sections of green. I'm not sure how it's looking like now, but when I grew up, it was always dirty. And I remember when it rains occasionally, the city will become more colorful. I would smell the mud and the leaves. And then the dust on the buildings will be cleaned up. And I would never notice the building in front of my house was actually orange and red. Most of the time, it's just dirt. And yeah, and that's the environment I grew up. And a lot of my friends who grew up in Shanghai, they all have asthma. I have asthma too. So I didn't notice that's odd thing, but now I'm about looking back, like most of my childhood friend has asthma, but the people elsewhere don't. So only until like a decade ago, there was this concept called PM2.5. Which is like how dangerous the air is dirty. And Shanghai was always very dirty back then, but we didn't understand that concept. My parents used to say, oh, those are just fog. That's the fog, but it's actually smog, basically. Yeah. Uh, growing up there, um...
Speaker 2 [00:14:14] I don't want to cut in, but I just want to kind of... There's a lot to get through, just make sure we kind of focus on the games that we're moving through here. We can talk about Shanghai more in terms of how it affects...
Jenova Chen [00:14:30] Yeah, I just finished setting it up, so now I can talk about the game, right? So the emotion I had with flowers, after I left Shanghai, I come to the United States and I'm studying at LA, right, and sometimes I would drive to San Francisco to attend GDC, but as I drive through the I-5, there was this period where you just drive through the endless agriculture basically, like grassland and farmland. And, uh... There was this little mound where people actually took the shot of the Windows 95 wallpaper, which you just see the grass going through this endless hill. And I was very blown away by the sight. Yeah, first I was like, isn't that the wallpaper? But also, I stopped my car and I get off. I was looking at this massive. Endless, you know, field of nature. And I've never seen it. Imagine someone who grew up in a desert, who go to the ocean for the first time. Yeah, I was overwhelmed by the sensation. I can smell the grass, right? And I can not capture the feeling because if I take a photo of the space, it's just a corner of this endless field surrounding me. I can take a panorama, but it does not capture this smell. I can't imagine if I have money, I can have a helicopter fly over the flower fields just to capture the vastness of it, but that would miss the close-up, the wetness, the smell I was there. And so I went home, I thought, well, how am I going to capture this feeling to share with my friends who grew up in Shanghai? And I thought well, you know, I'm an interactive designer. Why not using interaction. We give the player this opportunity to fly really close. You can look at the flower almost like a bee. Close up. You really feel the sensation and you can imagine the smell just seeing how wet the flower is. But then you can also fly through the entire field like a gust of wind. And that becomes this kind of initial emotion that I felt like I wanted to capture. And then the question is, how do you capture that with design? And you have to use exaggerations, right? Like just taking a photo of something, you will never capture how bright the sunset is. So you have you apply so much. Either using minimalism or using contrast to catch the feeling. And so ultimately, when you think about that game, it's just an artist trying to capture what he believed was the most authentic emotions. And looking back, I always felt like the flower as a game is very romantic. And not in a, like, oh, I'm going on a romantic date, but romanticism is about unapologetically truthful towards the feeling that you want it to express. And that's kind of the inception of flower. And it's also very, very personal, because if you grew up in California, to you it's just you know, grass, there's no feeling there, right? So it's only truthful for me. And we made this game to capture these, I guess, urban dwellers longing towards nature, but also wishing to have that nature to be part of the city. And that's basically Flower.
Speaker 2 [00:18:21] One of the things you're talking about is a wide array of people, not just in games, is sort of the creative process and kind of where you begin. Because everything, every process has many facets to it. And games certainly, you could start with a song in mind, you can start with the character. It seems like you start with feelings. And is that fair to say, you know, flower journey, sky, that there was a feeling you were going to end up in? Yeah.
Jenova Chen [00:18:51] Yeah, it's feeling driven. And I think that's why our games, our company's games tend to be usually associated more towards the artistic side. You know, like avant-garde is like a genre in film. And yeah, with Journey, we have this emotion that we want to capture. Is we want to, how do you say, capture the. Journey was made back in 2009. That's when there's a historical set up. Zynga just came out, and they dominated the game industry. And that was the year Zygga came to GDC and said, hey, we're indie, because they're a new startup company. You guys are indies. You should join us, because their recruiting. And they say, social game is the future. You know, either you join us or you die as a dinosaur.
Speaker 2 [00:19:51] For those that don't know, Zynga is a massive...
Jenova Chen [00:19:54] Yeah, social network came. And so a lot of. So a lot of-
Speaker 2 [00:19:57] Can you set that up?
Jenova Chen [00:19:58] Oh, yeah, so Zynga is this big social network game company. They make games on Facebook. And so a lot of us who treat game as artistic medium, who think of game as art, when we hear that, Uh, it was just not right. There was basically the entire audience was booing the guy who's from Zynga on stage. It was, I just remember this is the first time I was ever standing in this massive, you know, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people booing at somebody. So that left me a strong emotion. And I went home, I was thinking, well, if social is the future, I need to show the about how to emotionally create. A social connection, not just like, hey, here's a farm game, and you can see my farm look like this. Right? Like, it's very transactional, but I was hoping to show the world how we can use emotions to connect people, and that's what I think social is, is a human, a genuine human connection at an emotional level. And so, in order to capture that experience... We are really kind of deal with a lot of the stigma in the game industry because people always assumed kids play games for competitions and you know when you're on a basketball court when you just trying to win people tend to be a bit more direct and a bit more harsh if you are underperforming right and so a lot people say you know I would ever play online games with console players because they are all assholes. So we're working in this field where we're trying to show you that you can actually have an emotional connection with someone that makes you feel that you're not alone with the same asshole that they're talking about. And so I thought that was a very interesting challenge but that feels like the right type of game we need to make because I always feel like the societies always value things that is, how to say, like when you have too much of that, the other type thing is always more valuable. So when we make Journey, we did everything. We changed the law of how online games are supposed to be played. We hide people's names just so that they don't have purges based on their names. We disallow people to add each other as friends. Which is everything the Sony would tell you to do to make an online game. We did everything opposite so we can protect this emotion that is a genuine friendship and companionship. Yeah, and many people cried when their friend is suddenly gone, right? And it was the same people who on the other side playing in the sports game was seen as an asshole. They are here apologizing. For having to leave their friend behind. And that's kind of the type of innovation that we really like to push for, is that games can actually bring the full spectrum of human emotions. And we're still very, very left-handed today of this industry.
Speaker 2 [00:23:39] I had asked Tracy Fullerton about a game moment that meant something that was a core memory for her. It's exactly the moment you described. She was playing Jeremy and her friend fell off a ledge and it brought her to tears. I'm curious, you know, there's innovations that happen constantly on the continuum of games and yet people still play Mario. And I'm curious what, in your view, makes a game forever. Is it the gameplay, ultimately, the interactivity, or is it something else?
Jenova Chen [00:24:16] Well, emotional desire is this fundamental thing that human being has always craved. It's like if you see there's a romantic novel, if you go to your bookshop at Elport, right? There's always this novel and you'll be like, why would people still read that? And there's this novel called Twilight, and that becomes a movie that lots of teenagers go to watch. And then that movie was copied by a game company that they made a game that lots of teenagers would go to play. And these are all women. So for me, when I grew up, I played this shooting game called Counter-Strike. And if you really think about the fundamental emotional needs of Counter-strike, I remember the era before there was computers. What we do is we will, a bunch of boys, we'll make some mud castle or sand castle, and then we'll pick up some sticks, pretend we're soldiers. And I think for young men, there's always this... Fantasy for war simulation or sports simulation. I mean, sports is a war simulation. What is football? A bunch of guys are wearing soldier helmets and armor, and they're going for some competition. You don't kill people, but pretty much it's as close to real combat as you can say for American football. And if you look at the most popular franchise, Halo, That's basically a football guy with a helmet, you know, and a space marine gun, right? It's war simulation. I think that's something every man would want, right, even wolves and dogs, they would bite at each other just playing because that's preparing them for the future, a competitive world. And so when I was playing Counter-Strike, then look at what happened to Counter-strike. Counter-STrike then is replaced with World War II, Grease King. A bunch of World War II games came out, Medal of Honor and things. And then with modern warfare risk games, which is kind of beauty risk games. And occasionally, you have a futuristic risk game like Battlefield. And now we have the, I wouldn't know even how to say it. It's like League of Legends and Valorant. It's kind of like the. The hip-hop risking of the Counter-Strike. And certainly today we have a Counter-strike relaunch. It's the same war simulation game. Kids want to feel like they simulate to feel a soldier and warrior, but they don't want to go to the real war. And that desire would never go away. I'm sure 200 years later, there will still be war simulation. And today, one of the most popular games, life. MOBA game, right, just League of Legends, for example. It's a game about five people fights five people. And it's not about killing each other as much as you can, it's about winning the scores, right? So that is basically basketball. We play basketball all the time when we were younger, but the kids today, they don't play basketball anymore. They play League of Legend and they go to the stadium to watch teams who's really good at playing team sports to play. League of Legends, and it's already sports in the, how to say, the Asian Olympics.
Speaker 2 [00:27:57] So I'm taking this to mean that you don't make games that, in your view, are forever. Because it sounds like you're appealing to the basest emotions. That's what makes a game forever. But you are kind of also doing that. You're not making war games. You're making love games.
Jenova Chen [00:28:15] Yeah, and the love games have been proven to be always needed by the society. You know, ever since poetry was first invented, you know, like Plato used to warn the danger of poetry because it's corrupting the youth. It makes them too emotional and doing stupid things, right? And when video games first came out, people obviously, it's corruption the youth, making people violent, you now? But, you know, in a couple of generations... What one of my friends has been saying, whatever your parents think is toxic and a waste of time, when you grow up, it will become national treasure. And I think it's very true to the Marvel comics. When you grow, it's probably seen as toxic waste of time, but now it's like American myth, right? When I grew up, there was these Chinese novels about swordsmen saving the world. Similar, I guess to Marvel comic and parents is always like, oh, that's so addictive. It's like really making you Suffer at your schools. It the terrible things but now it's like this is the most master Literary math math trees of the century and we got to have to preserve it, you know Yeah, anyway back back to games right so what we make I only have one goal because I love games so much that I've also studied so much about the history of film. I know game will be the predominant art in less than a decade. It will replace film as the most advanced form of art because it is literally film plus interactivity and social engineering and it's a bigger set of media collections that the cinema could ever have. But today, people still see game as the Looney Tunes. For kids, it's never going to be as respected. And growing up, I've seen a lot of my friends who loved playing games. And then they become adults. And they say, oh, I don't have time for games anymore. I have kids now. But at the same time, they're still watching sports. And they're going to orchestras. And they still enjoying other medium. I was like, why are adults stop playing games? I start to think about this because I don't want to see games being abandoned by the mainstream society. And one thing I realized is that if you don't make emotional content that is accessible to the adults, to like the female market, the people who never play games. You would lose them, and your medium will always just be a niche. And so the only way you can really legitimize a medium is you have to push forward, and you have to make content that will be emotionally accessible to people of all ages. And for people of old ages, they don't always just want to watch like a Marvel, not necessarily Marvel, but just like a war simulation film, right? Oscar, you know, and... In the film industry, besides action and adventure, the two major market, not even niche, is comedy and drama. How many games actually makes you feel a cocktail of emotions, which is like comedy, because you would never laugh if it's just scary. You would laugh if you think it's scary, but turns out to be a friend's birthday party, right? Like you have this twist of emotions to make you feel something. And drama is a roller-coaster ride of emotions that gives you a sense of rise and fall, and you can have a cathartic ending. And these are the two, I would say, emotional genre that is more fit for adults. And I think in the game industry, because most gamers were younger, so people are optimizing their emotional experience for younger men, that they haven't being pushed hard enough towards. You know, older people and both men and women and both parents and children together, right? You got games for kids, games for guys and games for, you know middle-aged women but you don't have emotion that is nuance enough to capture the whole crowd. And I think that is what the game industry needs the most to really legitimize this artistic form. You can see, you animation had their own share of being seen as kind of low-class, not art medium. Looney Tunes is a great way to show you how people would think what animation was. But after, I think, Disney produced Snow White and a couple of really hit movies, after they really win the Oscar, that people suddenly say, oh, you know, animation is art. You know, it may not be a real photo, a real film, but it's about humanity. The emotion is as relevant as... Any live action film and I think game industry needed that and that's why we are continually innovating the games because we feel we haven't covered the entire emotional spectrum of what people of all ages would actually appreciate, basically.
Speaker 2 [00:34:05] What was the first game you ever played that made you sort of stop in your track and say oh wow this is art?
Jenova Chen [00:34:17] Well, I would say like when I was young, I was not exposed to literary art as much as I wish I could because my parents think most of the novels the kids want to read was toxic and addictive so I don't get to read like great novels with great emotions. So my first exposure to game, to a strong emotion where I cried was through a game. Right, and it's looking back, the game doesn't really, you wouldn't consider that game as art. But the narrative and the dialogs was actually emotional and I had a strong sense of loss. It made me think about the way I live my life based on the characters in the game. I would wake up thinking about this game, think about choices this character made on his journey. Even months after I finished the game. And I think the process that allowed me to keep reflecting about my own way, my own value of life, because of the characters I see in this game, that's the moment I felt like this is art and this made my life better. It made me a better human being because it makes me think about how I live in this world. And that's the moment I was like, this is so cool. Like someone somewhere left these writings in this game that made my life better, right? And I just can't think about anything else I would want to do, but making cool things that will make other people life better. Right, that's like what I think art ultimate is. It connects with you, not through the artist director. He didn't talk to me, right, but he through the work of art. Said something to me that really changed my life. And I think that's the moment where I started wanting to make art. And I wasn't even thinking that it's a video game or something. It's really the story, it's the perspective of the value. How to say it's how you position life I guess it's the philosophy of the art that really pushed me and the game was just a novel RPG it's a Chinese RPG you would never heard of it because nobody played it outside China but whoever was writing the the the dialogs between the characters really managed to touch like whole generation like any Chinese kids would know they have cried for that story However, looking back, that was not a game that touched me. That was writing, like literary writing with some rudimentary pixel art that brings tears to my eyes. And I think today, I would call this game a cheater because it didn't touch me based on gameplay. Right? And it's more like cinematic reasons why it's impactful emotionally. But nevertheless, that was the moment I started to think that I have to be an artist. And for a very long time I wanted to just make movies and animations. But it was kind of an interesting era where School of Cinematic Arts at USC was pushing for interactive. Started telling and so You know then I start to try with games. Can I can I do that?
Speaker 2 [00:38:05] It sounds like you were touched by a game, but for reasons that weren't unique to games, and you were sort of... So after that point you never really... You've been searching and maybe trying to make that game where the gameplay itself...
Jenova Chen [00:38:21] No, yeah, I've been trying to tell a story, right? So imagine if you play Final Fantasy VII, that's like well, well, none, right. If you think about Final Fantasy seven, the moment most kids was losing it is when the main character, Iris, dies, right, so you've been with this character for so long, maybe eight, 10 hours of journey. And that person just dies, right? And a lot of people couldn't handle the emotion, right. And that's why that series had such a strong presence in a lot people's memory and nostalgia. But if you think about it, what is the gameplay of Final Fantasy? It's dice roll and hack and slash. It has nothing to do with the nuanced emotion. The emotion of that scene was done in CG. It's an animated series of her falling into the hands of Sephiroth. It's that. It's the feeling that we wanted to recreate. When I was younger, game was seen as drugs in China. So I would never think, I'm going to go make games, because it's seen as so low. If I would take a job to make games back then, my parents would kill me, basically. But it's only until I came to the United States while I was studying at the cinema school when the cinema schools sponsored us to go to GDC, a game developer conference, where I see people giving awards to developers for trying to push for artistic excellence. And that was the moment I was like, oh. I never thought a game developer would be respected, ever. And that's the moment I was like, maybe I could be a game devloper. I can tell stories in games. Before that, I was back, yeah, game is just drugs. It's bad for kids. Here's cinema that's respected on a stage, so I will go. Go tell a story in cinema, but it was like while I was studying at USC, I realized that actually there's more things I can do in games and I can still tell the stories. That will change people's lives.
Speaker 2 [00:40:41] You know, since you brought it up, can you tell us a little bit about the Game Innovation Lab? We went to film there, saw some incredible students and projects. They're very fond of you there. Can you talk about that place and the place of posture? Or even better, how do you learn such a multidisciplinary art form? How do you even teach that to somebody?
Jenova Chen [00:41:06] Yeah, the three years at the cinema school was definitely one of the highlights in my life, because the school.
Speaker 2 [00:41:17] Sorry, were you in the game innovation lab? Yes. Can you just say that live so we can...
Jenova Chen [00:41:22] Yeah, so it was the. Yeah, so OK. The first year of the program, there was no games. It's called Interactive Media. And there was only six students in the entire school. And I was the only student who was interested in making games. And then a year later, EA made a donation. Electronic Arts made a donation to the school. And then gaming became a real pursuit as one of the track that you can under interactive media. And so we started making games and the grants, right? We made lots of games. At the time, there was no Innovation Labs. And then after our game died in and then Cloud win a lot of awards and bring a lot of attention to the school, the school decided to have this lab and have an official grant to keep pushing for students to try to make innovative games. And so the Game Innovation Lab started on the third year. While I was still in school. So I was like first year to get to use this lab. But what's important is every summer break, every winter break, we're not walking elsewhere, like just walking the library to make a living. We are making games, and we're paid at minimum wages by the school trying to make the difference. The kids who go to the game innovation labs, all people wanted to make a difference of this medium. And I think there's so much romanticism back then that our professors, like Tracy and Mark Bolas, they would say, you spend all this money and all these years wasted in this program. You have to think about yourself as the subject expert when you graduate, how you're going to push the boundary. And make a difference for this medium. Otherwise, you wasted your three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition, you know? Like, and that was leaving me a very strong impression because I was like, yeah, I put my parents' lifesaving in this. Like, if I just go get a job after I graduate, what are these money for, right? And I think there's a strong sense of mission that the school in building to us to change the industry.
Speaker 2 [00:43:56] How do you learn such a multidisciplinary art form, when you're sitting there in that seat? Were you more of a dreamer? You had these sort of feelings and ideas you wanted to impart, and not very good at coding, or were you good at, you know? Yes. So.
Jenova Chen [00:44:13] Yes, so I think the what happened is I had I've been coding since I was seven years old and I didn't like coding I like playing games but I went to computer science for undergrad when USC recruited me I also had a minor in art so I was doing animations and and I went like the number one. Animation in Shanghai where I grew up. So I was telling my dad, I'm like, you know, I have talent in art. I should go to pursuing art, right? But my dad is like, art makes no money. You're going to be a beggar on the street. You got, you better focus on your computer science. But when I applied for USC, I applied for animation because I want to go to work at Pixar. The school said, Hey, you have all this engineering background. Why don't you go to this new program, right? Interactive media is like both technology and art. The school was saying, we think you have a better time there. I was pretty disappointed initially. I was like, oh, are you thinking that my animation was not good? Maybe you're kicking me out. But it ended up to be the best choice that could have happened. And to work on this new medium that requires technology, but the school also teaches us how to look at things with a critical eye. And I think before I go to USC, I made three games in my college as a hobby. But what we do is just copy whatever is popular on the market. Oh, this is such a great game. Let's make the game look like that. But it's when I started to learn how to, critical studies at film school is like a discipline. And we have to like analyze, we have write reports about every film we watch and debate about it. At the time, I thought, what a pointless class that is. But I think that really changed my perspective how to look at games in the lens of a mature art form. And you can just compare to the games and compare to films. You look and you can see so much similarities. Like the first 40 years of history, how film has developed from just capturing the train coming to the station. Become like two citizens king, this history repeats in game industry. And I think if I didn't go to the film school I would never be able to look at games with the perspective I have today. I'd probably just go work for a game company and then be done with whatever genre like the company is doing. I think the school studying the new media and the traditional media together gave me this vision of how game would eventually become cinema one day. And you can see the history just going. It's perfectly lining up. And it just makes you feel excited to jump in and be part of it, the movement, basically.
Speaker 2 [00:47:32] I just wanted to go back to one thought about your approach to games, you know, if you're a musician, you make a song, it's fixed, somebody can go remix it, but as far as the audience is concerned, the song is a song and you listen to it, you receive it, You make a game. Innately you have to build that space, big or small, for the player to participate in the art you're making. And we've talked to some other people, and it's interesting, some people like to kind of put it on rails, this is what you're going to experience. You seem to have a different approach in terms of giving a bit more leeway, but I'm curious to your thought, how you make art where ultimately it's finished by people you'll never meet.
Jenova Chen [00:48:21] Yeah it's very nuanced right like in art it's art because the artist has rearranged and removed something to express a particular feeling and to me like even though we say yeah interactivity you can do things any way you want you can experience any possibilities that just means nothing. So to be art, it has to be a linear experience because your brain can only record things linearly and you can only tell your experience narratively to your friend in a linear format. So I believe in linear. On the other hand, if you put someone on a rollercoaster ride and you lock their head, they can't look around, right? And then they're basically watching cinema, right. So the agency of the person being able to look around and realize they're in a danger and they can cling onto the handle and make themselves feel safe, but really not. And they have to fight their muscle with their neck as the rollercoast goes. That physical interaction is what we, the game designer, have. We're still going to take you on a roller coaster ride, but we'll give you the additional agency that helps you to experience that even stronger. You know, I always tell my friends, it's like, when you're directing a game, you're not directing a cinema where every single frame was meticulously composed. You're directing ballet. You're the choreographer, because your audience is actually dancing. So their body has to move this way in order to feel the most intense emotion, right? And so when you design a dance... You're not just making it for the audience in the theater to see, but imagine what's going through that dancer. And she's going to have to make these movements. She has to jump the highest she needs. She has spin. She has maybe pick up a gun in a video game. And how do you use these movements to make that person to feel like the most intense experience? And I always talk to people about like... You know, when you look at Joseph Campbell's work, right, like the hero's journey. Cinema has its limitations. You have to emotionally be able to relate to somebody, saving the cat, just so you care about this person. Even Frank Underwood, an asshole, still has to do things to make the audience care for him. Then when this character goes through the journey, you feel for him, when he's in danger, you feel, ah, no, he can't die. I like this character. And when he triumphs, then you feel like... Oh, that was so good, as if I, someone in my family has achieved something great, right? But you are only experiencing it from the third person's perspective, right. It's like watching F1, like a Formula One racer winning the race. It never feels the same if you are the racer yourself. And so when we made Journey, I always said like, You know, in a video game, you are yourself. You don't need that compassion towards a fictional character, just so you care about the experience. You are already there. You know? You don't need to like one character and his friends to feel the loss of his friend. You already have a friend on the stage, right? And then losing that friend is gonna be more impactful than any cinema you could feel because... One layer removed you know and that is the beauty of games is you don't need compassion you can directly drive the most raw emotion to a player because they are there you know and that to me is the building of this medium and I think a lot of the industry is still attempting to shoot a cinema Hollywood film you know like to feel something it's just like when people first know how to shoot cinema, they just shoot ballet, they just do boxing, they just should opera, right? And they're not using what is native to that medium to drive the emotion to the next level.
Speaker 2 [00:53:05] Was there a particular challenge? Can you think of one example of any game you've worked on where you had a dream or a feeling you wanted, an experience you wanted the player to have, but there was a technical challenge? Okay, one more. You can think about that.
Speaker 4 [00:53:23] Yeah
Speaker 2 [00:53:39] I really love your metaphorical style. These guys are going to love that you talked about roller coasters.
Speaker 3 [00:53:44] I've got a follow-up. We have a story book. Interesting. Feel the thoughts behind me. I'm getting that. How about we work together?
Speaker 4 [00:54:10] I've got a couple of things that I want you to jump in. This is great. Yeah, really wonderful.
Speaker 2 [00:54:27] All good? Okay. So we're talking about a particular technical challenge that you had to address as you were trying to achieve an artistic moment for a player.
Jenova Chen [00:54:42] Yeah, so, you know, to continue what we were saying, right, sometimes to let the player to feel something more like if they experience it themselves, it's very difficult. With Journey, for example, we want player to feel they have a bond, they have formed a bond with a real human being, right? You cannot tell a story with an NPC. In cinema, you would probably have a fictional character that becomes your buddy, Lord of the Rings, for example. You have Sam and Frodo. Sam is this loyal friend who's always be there helping you. And then when Sam was endangered, if you are Frodo, what would you do? Right? But in a video game with less than two hours. And we want to achieve the same feeling between a real person, the local player, and a real personal with remote player, and we wanted them to be Sam and Frodo, it's very challenging. Because a lot of the times, you don't have full control of what Sam can do. What if Sam comes over and starting to do a weird dance and leave you behind, and you would never like and care for Sam? So our biggest challenge is to deal with. How much agency we want to give to the other player. Without completely turning him into just a kind of fake character. Because the feeling of you caring about a fake character with a real human being is completely different. And so most of the battle we have is to control the input and output of this remote player. So initially, people come up to say, hey, what's up? Right? And then if they say something like, what else? I'm finished my bong, right? So you will immediately start to get upset about this person. You're building a false image of this person, that's why we had to take out the chat initially. Because we don't want people to judge somebody just based on their first greeting. And then we realized we have to take people's name out of the game. Because... The PlayStation player has wacky names, like, I kill Hitler, right? And you see that, you're like, must be a kid, right, and you just can't really start to trust this person, you know? And so we have to hide the names, right. We are already breaking two basic laws that the PlayStation network forces us to adopt. You have to show people's names, you have to allow people to add each other, you have to allowed chat. Like we're breaking all these rules. Because they're instantaneously remove the trust. You couldn't have formed with someone. And to some extent, it's almost like lost in translation. When people can't talk and when they just look at each other and when together witness something together, especially if something that they witnessed was so powerful, then they form a bond. Just like, you know... Soldiers went to the battle the guys in the same trench come back to say I did they are deeply bond sometimes better than real blood right and so So we're dealing with that And then initially our characters in journey have hands and so you can pick things up You can you can push another person up onto a wall which they could not climb Themselves so we created these things to allow player to help each other Because we believe if they help each other more, it will form an emotional bond. But what happened is, they like to push each other into the pit, into the danger where they get them killed. And then they were laughing at them. And so that, to me, is the biggest challenge when we make interactive experience between multiple players, is that initially, I was pretty depressed. Because I was like, not only is the tester doing these kind of... Funny, but very earful, mean actions, our developer is also doing that to each other. So I was like, don't you guys know we're making a game about people helping each other in the most difficult journey and forming a bond? Why are you guys doing this to me? I can see my coworker is kind of glimpsing off the screen to look at me if I'm getting frustrated. They were getting joy out of it. And so, yeah, I was quite depressed at the time, thinking maybe men are born mean and evil. And then one day, I run into a childhood psychologist. I told her about this frustration I have towards mankind. And she said, oh, you know, you are not really, And the problem is actually very simple because you're dealing with babies and babies don't know what is good, what is bad because we haven't defined the morality and the values of the society to them. They were just fresh new and they're trying to get a sense of the world. They're trying push the buttons and touching the fire to see where the boundary of the world is. And so if you allow them to push you under the cliff... And you would die with a big cry, it's very satisfying. It's a huge amount of feedback from that tiny little input. So if they can push you to kill you, which you get 10 times more feedback, versus they can't push you help you to climb, which is you only get one time the feedback, they will always do the 10 times feedback. That's what babies do. So at that point, I start to realize, yeah, maybe I should take the moral value out of it and re-educate babies first. Give them the right feedback, teach them what is the good moral and then control the feedback of the bad morals and then they end up just being nice to each other. And that's kind of what we did with Journey is we had to remove a lot of feedback from bad morals. People can steal from each other initially, we have to remove the possibility for stealing, killing each other, we had remove that. And that has always been the biggest challenge for our designs. It's humanity, it's battling, then the human nature is to me the most difficult thing.
Speaker 2 [01:01:32] Fascinating answer. I really, I never considered that idea. I just wanted to ask one more question. I'm going to open to these guys that have some thoughts. But, you know, creativity is like a capital letter theme of this show, and so I'm just curious, this is what you just talked about is a great example, you know, when you, when you have to... Get creative, solve a problem. Are you are you putting on a engineer hat, a coder hat and then switching in saying oh but the art has to be this way? Is it all kind of mixed in together? What what's the sort of nature of your...
Jenova Chen [01:02:15] A couple of the creativity traps we always fall into, like the writer's block, is first you have the blank canvas problem. You have tons of money, tons of time, and you can hire tons of talent. What do you do then? And then any idea you have seems like is that really the best I can have? You have this weird selection paralysis. It's like, when everything is possible, you can't actually make a move and be confident that's the good choice. So we often run into that problem. And then we will have to add constraints. Like, OK, it has to be shipped by this day at a time constraint. It has to on this platform. It cannot have this feature. And we start to add lots of constraints, constraints as friends for creativity. And so internally we have this rule that, you know, how do you know you have a good design is when you can name at least three, sometimes four reasons why this is the only way you can do it, right? And if you still have kind of like, oh yeah, this could be white or black or, you know, that guy could be 3,000 polygons or versus 1,000. That means you're not actually thinking hard enough. You didn't give me the best answers. So we have to fight against the blank canvas problem. And the second issue is, which typically happens in AAA studio, which is in order to be creative, you have to relax. If your game is shipping this Christmas, you only have three weeks, everybody's crunching every single day, you can't really think creatively, right, because creativity comes when you actually feel a little bit bored. And people having epiphanies when they are just showering.
Speaker 2 [01:04:09] You have nothing else to do.
Jenova Chen [01:04:11] So I'm going to think about something, right? And then you think about creative solutions. But if people are constantly on a high stress deadline, they will never be able to think outside the box. And we often say that you're just doing the busy work because you're lazy, because you now actually think through how to solve the problem. You're just do the most challenging work repetitively. That's a lot of people tend to do that if you stop thinking creatively. So the challenge for us is how can we create an environment where people have that luxury to actually be a bit bored. Like typically in large companies, people want to just stack you with tasks. And we have to fight against that while a lot of projects is behind schedule. How do we give people still the freedom and not be stressed out?
Speaker 2 [01:05:03] Very well said. I think these guys probably have a couple of questions.
Speaker 3 [01:05:07] Yeah, we'll take that one and then we can go ahead. OK. So. One of our themes is about how technology inspires creativity in art. Things are developed, I mean cinema as you know, medicine came up, you know one of the founders, he just used it to record stuff. He didn't actually, he didn't think it was going to be all that useful, he kind of lost interest. And then the creative people came in and said, oh we can tell stories, we can do this and we can't do that. Okay. So, for you, how much is... Innovation, what are you trying to win as an artist? What are you trying to innovate? Are you trying to have the latest and greatest? Are you trying to take advantage of technical innovations? Because listening to you talk it sounds like while that's important it's not the most important thing.
Jenova Chen [01:06:00] Yeah, I think, you know, I called myself and I always treat the technologist in our company as the most important talent because for me I think about the most strong emotional experience, the strongest storytelling you can do is to leave something in that person's memory for life and that's what I consider as the more important thing. You know, at USC, we have this saying from the cinema school. They say, a great movie is a good story well told. Good story is good writing. Well told is good directing. And all the different medium would work together to make it deliver and touch people. But I always think that's not enough, because I've seen many movies that had both, but was not successful. And so I added the third thing on top of that. That's my own rule, which is. It has to come with a spectacle. The spectacle can be the first time you see a dinosaur in a movie, right? If Jurassic Park was just about a bunch of ostrich, it would not be as successful, you know? But it's not necessarily just a CGI. It could be something like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, first time in a move as a couple, right. That's also a spectacle, right, it's a. You know, people want to see a spectacle. And to me, I feel like technology is one of the things that enables magic, because why do we go to see magic shows, right? Because we like to have a sense of wonder. We want to have sense of awe and a feeling that I don't fully understand something, but it's wonderful, right, because the modern society, it's so lack of that, in a strange way. Thank you. You know, everybody can search for anything, they would know all the answers, right, on Google and Internet. And everything becomes so readily available. So it's actually really hard to create a sense of wonder these days, but technology allows us to do that. I know the magicians will go out of ways to invent new technology just so they can pull off some trick that people wouldn't understand, right? And I do have that feeling, you know, because when I look into the history of my memory I remember the first time I played a real time strategy game that was Dune. Afterwards, I played many amazing strategy games, but it doesn't stay in my memory. I only remember the first time something strong happens. And so even if we don't rely on technology, we just keep making great art. Artists have to make some breakthroughs on the story, like this is the first time someone will ever tell a story this way, right? Then you will have that memory, like the sixth sense. Right, after the six amps, anyone else pulling that trick, it doesn't quite work anymore, right? And so for me... Like Technology allows us to potentially tell a story that will be forever remembered. And if the technology is well serving this story that was never possible in the past, and you would never be satisfied because once you do it once, like other people copies, then this no longer would bring that sense of wonder. So you always have to stay one step ahead. Yeah, that's like my personal bias.
Speaker 3 [01:09:49] Great, thank you. No, that was my question. That was your question. All right, so this is just, I'm simply curious. I can go down to the county museum and I can see a painting that was painted 400 years ago, pretty much kind of the way the artist intended. I can go to a theater or I can watch train coming to the station, the Lumiere's, I can watch it as a game. I can't necessarily go back and play even your Chinese RPG game. I can play something 20 years ago that I'm on the right platform, whatever. We design games where you have to load an ancient version of the game in order for people to play it still. So what does that say about your art? Because you just talked about how in 10 years this was going to be the center of the 21st century, which I agree with, but... Isn't there, there seems to be, are you worried about the ephemeral nature of some of the art
Jenova Chen [01:10:47] Yeah, it's a very hot topic, because some of our art was permanently collected by the museums. And the technologist from those museums was talking about how difficult it is to preserve these. But they were trying to do that. All games have been preserved by some museums. But who's going to go to dig out that old console and put it on a dusty CRT monitor and play that in the future? Right, like even today I would not watch. Citizen Kane in its original format. It's readapted, digitized today. A lot of these are re-recorded onto a new platform. So with Journey, for example, and Flower, they were launched on PlayStation 3. And then they were ported to PlayStation Portable. Then they ported it to PlayStation 4. Now PlayStation 5 is backwards compatible. You can still play Journey on We port it to the Steam library, so it works on the... The PC field, right? So I do feel like the similar things might actually happen to game industry in the future. It's like if you want to play the old game, you would be basically playing a simulation of the cloud version and deliver it to whatever platform you have in the feature. But it would never be the same compared to originally playing on the original device. And I think that is true for cinema as well as to sum up the songs, right. The music performance. Today, you have to hire a new orchestra just to perform, you know, Canon D, for example, right, and who is really interpreting this. And if you look at the games, when initially we have Counter-Strike, today we have counter-strike zero, is it called? Yeah, I forgot the name. Goal, yeah, it's basically the same game remastered. And I do feel like the true classics will be remastered again and again in the future and That's that's how I see it But I agree with you that the exact tactile experience to have the PlayStation 3 controller on a 720 T monitor that time has gone right and So yeah, I think the truly classics will remaster again and You know, I'm sure the 8-bit Mario will always be a thing that people would just experience, right? And in a strange way, you would say like, Mario from the first iteration till now, it's basically their way trying to make it still contemporary, but the game is very much a running and jumping game.
Speaker 3 [01:13:33] And it's dark.
Jenova Chen [01:13:34] No, I wouldn't say Mario is art, unfortunately, no. I think art has to be a singular voice, like an art-tour's voice, and the message has to be something that you can relate to. We were trying to make our game relatable, and I think Flower and Journey would still It'd still be relevant today if people played, but... Yeah, I would say, like, flow, for example, in our game. And even for sky, to some extent, not everything is art. Because to me, as a fine art student, there's a difference between commercial art and fine art. Commercial art is the art that listens to the audience and make changes to please the audience. While fine art, it's only listen to the creators and it would not care if people would want to buy it or not, right? And I think as our game gets more, the company gets bigger and our game become more commercialized, the percentage of art will become smaller just because the medium and the industry we're currently in. Um, but it doesn't stop us from doing like artistic pieces. Like we're currently working on a real world installation and that would probably be more art.
Speaker 3 [01:15:07] One more one more question is that you reference roller coasters. Do you like coasters?
Jenova Chen [01:15:13] I enjoyed every single ride in Disneyland, but I probably would vomit for like Six Flags.
Speaker 3 [01:15:21] But just tell us, because we are doing a story about a very big deal, a game designer, in Europe, and what's wonderful, forget about the vomiting, because maybe you're too old, I don't go on them, but what happens to you, why do you do it, what does it make you feel when you ride on a roller coaster?
Jenova Chen [01:15:43] Well, to me a roller coaster is a narrative storytelling, a classic roller coaster, is a storytelling of this React. And you know, we human beings, we are like the frogs. If you boil the water, if the roller coaster just keeps going up, you will fall asleep. But we are very sensitive to drastic changes. So if somebody suddenly steps on the brake, just a tiny bit, they will wake up from I was like, whoa, what happened? Did we hit something, right? And so roller coaster ride and cinema is all trying to do the same thing. They wanna hit the highest change of speed, change of anticipation. So if you go, I mean, most people remember when the roller coaster is falling because that's scary, that's intense, right. But before it falls, they spend a long ass time building up the anticipation. Like the longer the anticipation, the more memorable the hit will be. So it's really about just playing with the highs and lows of this experience. And you want to really blow people's expectation beyond what they think they're going to have for them to be blown away and leaving the roller coaster ride feeling like, whoa, what did I just experience? That's kind of like how you make a great story telling as well. And to me, Rollercoaster Ride is just... Kind of storytelling through cinema, because that's visual, but also the kinesthetics, because they calculate exactly how much pressure is on your neck, on your back, on you hands. They know how you're going to exert force, and that becomes a part of the instrument. Yeah, you know, weird way roller coaster is kind of an interactive medium, you know, it's just a...
Speaker 3 [01:17:39] What else for you?
Jenova Chen [01:17:41] The three acts, well, typically you want the final act to be super intense, right, high intensity. So in order to create that drastic change, the second act has to be Super Low, right? But if you don't have a first act that's relatively high, you wouldn't feel the low. And that's why at least for someone to remember something, you need to have at least three beats. So for example, I would just do this on the camera for you. So if I just move my hand, It's pretty boring, you're gonna fall asleep, it's very mesmerizing, I'm just going flat, right? So if I'm doing this, right, low to high, it's kind of getting your attention, but very quickly you kind of get used to it. So if do normal, low, and high, it's almost like heartbeat, right. Right, then I'd really get your attention just on the camera, you know, it's like the three act is such a simple thing that. But that's how our memory works. For a dancer, just make dancing moves. You want to have this react, basically.
