S3E3 - Interactive Narrative: Kathryn Yu of No Proscenium

[Music] This episode of Reality Escape Pod is brought to you by Morty Virtual Escape Games and Patreon supporters like you. Welcome to Reality Escape Pod, your lifeline when you need to get away from the real world. I'm David Spira alongside my co-host PG Law. Together we're exploring a immersive gaming from all angles and we'll be joined by guests who really know their stuff. Today's guest is Catherine Yu. She's a game designer, co-founder of the immersive experience institute as well as executive editor of No Presenium where she covers immersive theater, VR, escape games and more. Welcome Catherine. Hello, so glad to be here. So glad to finally have you on. I know I feel like I talked to you all the time but never in this kind of official recorded capacity. I know usually there's no evidence of the conversation. Just by admitting that we are now in trouble. We go way back because you used to be a mainstay in the New York immersive scene before you moved out to LA and became one of those people. We got LA got Catherine now. Sorry, sorry. I mean we played many games together in strange and unusual places. I think the first one, maybe the first or second one we played. You, me, Lisa were all there David and someone got split up and I think maybe people got restrained or something. That was an interesting time in Queens. Oh yeah, I remember that. That was yeah. And I wasn't used to your process and so we're standing at at night on the sidewalk. There were not a lot of people around and Lisa whips out a spiral notebook and says, okay, everyone. What was your top moment and then what was like the most frustrating or favorite part? Yes. Is this the Spira method? The Spira process? I This is the patented Spira process. I've never heard of this. Well, PG, we haven't played a game yet. You two have not played a game together. Oh my goodness, because I've played games with PG, but not with you in the same room, David. I've played games with David and Lisa, but you weren't there, PG. So I feel like I know more than you do, maybe we only just met in person like three months ago. It's crazy. That is wild. Yeah. I know we barely get to hang out. We didn't get a chance to play any games because David was running a tour. So was PG is actually seven feet tall. So you discovered that right away, right? The thing that surprised him the most was how short I was. In my brain, PG was way taller. So yeah, what are we going to talk about today? We got a whole bunch of topics. We're going to dig into a whole bunch of things. I've known you for a long time now. I don't think I've ever actually asked you your immersive origin story. So let's start there. How did you get involved in this world? Well, like a lot of New Yorkers, I saw sleep no more in spring of 2011. And it's actually, yeah, I think it's coming up on some sort of anniversary milestone for that kind of stuff, especially because the show's been shut down and now they're reopening in February. So I saw a friend post a selfie with a very vague caption. They were in their mask and their date for the night was also in their mask and they were dressed to the ninth and it was just something to the effect of you have to go to this. I was like, okay, I don't know what this is. It looks pretty intriguing. So I went and immediately right after the show, I got into an argument with my husband because as some of you may know, they split you up. They don't like couples hanging out together. But this was so early on in the run. I don't even know if they had officially opened yet that, you know, this information wasn't necessarily out there or being highlighted in reviews. So I got dumped in the hospital floor, which I think is the fifth floor. And unrenotes to me, my husband was not allowed to follow me off the elevator. He was blocked by the character who is the elevator operator. And he thought that I had been like avoiding him or something and I was met at him because I was like, you ditched me. No, you ditched me. Oh, they did this to us on purpose. Wow, what an interesting experience. Hey, do you want to go again? Okay, let's go again. Let's find some friends who are willing to go. One of them was super into gaming and kind of became like a really great entry point into gaming for me. The other one was a little hesitant. I'm not a huge fan of jump scares or 100 houses. We tried to explain, you know, take it at your own pace. And if you don't feel comfortable, you can go back into the bar and know it's going to like grab you at sleep no more. And then when she went in, it took maybe five to 10 minutes and she absolutely loved it. A good number of us became obsessed with the show going back a couple of times, trading secrets. The first time I went, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a one-on-one private scene where you might get pulled into a temporary unlocked room and have a character do some acting like a private performance for you. It might be the only time that like those characters speak. And then you get thrown back out into the main group. And I just was like, oh, there's so many secrets to unlock. This is a really interesting world to explore. And then the friend that I went with wrote it up on his blog and actually started comparing it to a video game. So if you look in the punch drunk in cyclopedia under the entry for sleep no more as video game, my friend's blog is in there and apparently Felix Barrett saw it at some point. And so that's like a fun little piece of punch drunk history is, hey, that's the friend that I was like, hey, do you want to come to this with me? And he was so inspired to write it up comparing it to PC console games because he's a big PC console gamer. Also a big VR gamer. He was super into PSVR before a lot of other people I knew were like into VR period. And so he was my VR surpa and hey, all right, so you've got to play station. If you're going to get PSVR like get this game, get that game. And that was the first time I tried Beat Saber was after he had recommended it a couple years after seeing sleep no more together. And I've been kind of obsessed with immersive theater and virtual reality. And then you start to add on some of the other stuff that is adjacent to it right. So there's escape rooms and alternate reality games and live action role playing and just like Los Angeles and London, New York has a lot of this stuff for at least it did in the before times. And so it's really easy to fill up my social calendar by seeing a show or two a week going to VR festivals seeing what's out there. And then at some point I must have met David and Lisa and then they introduced me to a lot of their escape room friends and creators. And yeah, I like to think of us as a bunch of niche interests that actually have a lot of overlapping roots. And so I find myself often talking about like, oh yeah, one of the reasons why I like this immersive theater piece is because it reminds me of this part of video games or another reason why I really like this VR game is because it reminds me of this part of escape rooms or when I'm attending a live performance in VR, if I'm a scientist, a character to me, it feels like lurping. So lots of interesting stuff happening along all of these lines. Yeah, I feel very much the same way. And one of the things that I appreciate about you and the perspective you bring is that you are so aware of all of these other mediums that are interrelated. And I feel like that's what I really want to explore with you today. Let's dig into game design. I think a lot of folks know you for your tireless work with no proscenium. But over the past few years, you've been working towards a master's of fine art and interactive media at the University of Southern California where you've been busy designing a lot of games. How's the program and the career change going? Like what's going on in your life right now? Wow. So that's a deep question. I am in the middle of working on my virtual reality thesis game, which is a narrative experience. It has some lightly puzzling elements. This is penra station, right? Yes. And part of what I am digging into not just in the making of the game itself, but also in my thesis paper is thinking about how we cast the audience. And I realize that there's a lot of commonality here in terms of when a video game kind of says, this is who you are. This is your role. This is what you're supposed to be doing. And the way that escape rooms and immersive theater and larp also convey like, oh, you're one of the scientists who's going to save the world. Oh, you're a bunch of prisoners and there's going to be a jailbreak. Or in terms of stuff that's more recent when you are playing Half-Life Alex, for example, and you are Alex and you can hear Alex's voice, to me, that sounds so interesting in terms of the way that people can connect with a character. And I've even heard of people feeling like when they take on the role of a different character in, say, a VR game, potentially changing their posture, their body language, the way that they react to things. So that's my like special interest right now. At some point later this year, I'll be able to spread the word about a new VR project that I worked on for TenderClose this past summer. And then in addition to that, just as part of my coursework and a fellowship that was looking up to receive, I've worked on first-person walking simulators as well as alternate reality games. I'm thinking of it in terms of of the fact that you're able to move around in VR, you have hands. One of the games that came up fairly recently tells from the Galaxy's Edge does this, where when you look down and you're like, "Oh, I'm wearing different clothing "and I have different hands than before. "Who am I? Am I me? "Am I someone else in VR? "Am I somewhere in between?" And I think that kind of stuff is what I'm still trying to think about and tease out because it affects a lot of these immersive experiences. So something like Club Drosselmeier, right? When the Spirors show up and they do some swing dancing, are they still the Spirors? Are they playing someone else? Is it a little bit ambiguous or murky? And I just love nerding out about this stuff and thinking about it. So I don't know if I quite have a hypothesis about what I just spoke about, but I do think that there's an area of inquiry that can tie a lot of these disparate threads together. I had gone to this seminar where they do this type of, I don't know, regression where they ask you to think about being your parents at your age and all the things that they were going through. This is to help heal your relationship with your parents. But one of the things they did is they take you through this thing where they make you imagine the house, you're in the kitchen. What do you smell? Your mom, your dad's in the kitchen, what are you smelling? And then this was the most striking thing is at some point, they have you throughout this whole thing. They ask you to picture your parents. Say you're your mom. If you think of your mom, there's a pose that you can always think of, you know, like a ticker. Some way they sit, maybe the way they tilt their head. And they ask you to assume that pose. If it's a standing pose, they ask you to stand. If it's sitting, they ask you to just assume this pose of your parents the entire time that they're walking you through this whole kind of regression. And I felt like it really worked. It really took me out of myself. And suddenly I'm looking at the world through the eyes of my mother. And this is helping me understand what she's going through and seeing her as a person and not just, I don't know, my mother, but it was a weird thing. So like when you said this whole thing about putting yourself into another body, it reminded me of that. And how powerful, even standing a certain way, how powerful of a change it can make in your perception of the world. Yeah, definitely. And this is why a lot of people love live action roleplaying. They love immersive theater because you can try on different variations of yourself. And not necessarily have to commit to it, but it does start to create kind of a more interesting, self-aware reflective process in some folks. And it can be really rewarding. And there certainly are clinical uses for roleplay. It's not entirely the same thing as what we would consider large or many of the different variations of large. But there definitely is a medical realm for this. And there's also professional realms for roleplay of using it for training and all sorts of things. Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I think there's a lot of potential in immersive art and entertainment because you can literally imagine and build a new kind of world. So that opens the door to what kind of world do you want? What kind of self do you want to be? That kind of brings me to my next question, which is-- Wait, really? It really does. I am shocked, surprised, and delighted. You're working through right now a lot of different theory and practice of game design. But before that, and before you made this leap and decided to shift your career, you were working as a user experience designer, which is my vocation as well. What do you feel are the parallels between UX design and game design? Because you're at this point talking about constructing reality and doing it with intention. I'm curious where you think the overlaps and differences are. Oh my gosh. If you love people, if you're a humanist at heart, if you like understanding people, observing people, trying to figure out why they did something, why they didn't want to do something, but they thought what's going to happen. I'm constantly surprised whenever I try to play test something, or when someone gives me something of theirs, and I start play testing it. And let me tell you, I have really bad, very bad, hand-eye coordination, and I do not have a filter. So when you are giving me your game, I'm like, oh, what's this? What does that dot do? Is this supposed to be red? Is it clickable? Let me try again. I'm going to try again. Oh, I really want to click on that. Oh, OK. I guess I should be doing something. Let me open that-- oh, it doesn't open. Is there a key around it? Like that's how I tend to play games when I play this thing is I just give people my internal monologue. So I think, yeah, it's very similar. So someone has a problem with the navigation on a website, or they get stuck in an app, or they can't figure out how to check out their shopping cart. And then on the game design side, no one reads the rules. So you have to make them as simple as possible. If something isn't fun or interesting or dramatic right away, they might be confused. If you can't see a clear cause and effect between your actions in a game and what happens next, that's going to mean that it's not interesting to someone. So to me, there's a lot of parallels between a good user interface and good user experience, as well as what makes a game fun and interesting, as well as usable. Because you also have game UI and game UX. That's like a subset of that. I feel very much the same way. And when I do web design for my clients and app design, my underlying philosophy-- I use it as sort of like for grounding and for humility-- is that I don't believe that you can actually make a website a delightful experience. People talk about it, we're going to make a delightful experience. It's a freaking website. There are many like them. They all look sort of the same. It's small variations that add up to how pleasant it is to use. And so my goal is to not make something that's delightful, but I try to eliminate as much suck as I possibly can. And that's also sort of the way that I look at game design is that you have an infinite amount of options that you can put into anything. But a lot of them suck. A lot of them are really just miserable to be a part of. So can you shave off? Can you remove the stuff from it? It's more like carving than it is like building. That's the way that I think about this stuff. I have been delighted by websites, David. That's not true. Call Be's Curious Cook Off was an online web-based puzzle on and it was delightful. It's a website. It's a website. It's a website. It's a more task-oriented stuff. Yeah, I'm talking about the corporate stuff that I get hired to do. A Fortune 500 company is hiring you to go and rebuild their website. You're not making that website into a delight. You can make their task more pleasant along the way, though. Exactly. You can convey information effectively. You can make it so that the forms don't make you lose your mind when you put something in incorrectly or better yet. Design the forms in a way that it's really hard for them to put things in incorrectly and they don't even see the error state. There's a lot of nuance that can go into making something that's a pleasant experience. But I think that a lot of it is removing and zuring in on the stuff that isn't good. It isn't fun. Yeah. And for this scenario, what do people care about? They care about going about their day. They care about getting the thing done. They care about not spending too much money. Sometimes the best thing is to be forgettable in a way. Exactly. Having a website where a video starts playing immediately out the worst. OK. Yeah. It's like this cool off topic. Would you like to join a mailing list? Exactly. Yeah, the thing is when people decide they're going to play a game, they want to be immersed. They're going to an immersive theater production. Now, you have different types of people who are showing up with different goals, but you can at least assume some amount of them actually want to be immersed in it. There are definitely some people who don't want to be there. They were dragged by their significant other. They were dragged there by their boss or their company. They got there by mistake. They thought it was something different. There are certainly mindsets where you have to take into account the people who don't want to be there. But when people are like filling out a form to return something to your company, they don't want to be there. No one wants to be filling out that form, but they're stuck doing it. If you are having to interact with your insurance company, nobody ever has wanted to interact with their insurance company ever. The couple times I've had to use our renters insurance, the people have been awesome, so that always helps. That's great. That's good design. And that means that they're doing something, they're taking a moment where they know you're filled with the dread. You know that you're calling up saying, gosh, I really hope they don't reject this claim right now. Because that's the thing that you're thinking about when you call up this company. Oh yeah, I had a movie of the buckets of water falling into our closet from the neighbor though. So a little easier for me. Yeah. I was like, look at this monsoon in my house. Can I have some money? And they're like, yes, here you go. Money please. Yes, exactly. [MUSIC PLAYING] We're taking a moment to thank our sponsor, Morty. Morty is a free app for discovering, planning, tracking, and reviewing your escape rooms and other immersive social outings. I believe in it so much that I have a stake in it as an advisor. PG, do you know what the worst part of being an escape room player is? Tell me, David. It is absolutely trying to figure out which game to play with your friends when everyone's played slightly different things in an area. I feel. Having to have multiple spreadsheets cross referencing all the different rooms that all of your different friends have already played That's the worst puzzle of them all trying to find a room that no one's played yet And so what I like is that Morty has a social feature to it You can have friends on the app and when you've played a game with that friend You can tag them and it'll show up as being played automatically on their Morty and so when you pull up a game It'll also show which of your friends have already played it and it's it makes planning your next outing so much easier You can learn more at Mortyapp.com/repod That's R-E-P-O-D to sign up and get a special badge for our listeners Link and details in the show notes Recently you created Medinawarr which is a free Twitter based choose your own adventure game that got you both an A in your class and Some media buzz including an interview and wired that was titled the genius behind the best metaverse Twitter thread Now I did not pitch myself as a genius. I was just a student looking to get a good grade. Okay, y'all It was brilliant Yeah, but you did a brilliant job and I'm curious. What is this game and what's the backstory here? One of my favorite professors Marine, McEw, Yeager, she's actually published as a science fiction author and Used to work on ARGs like I love bees Ah, so she knows our friend Delan Lee. Oh, yes, and she has stories about the times that she was wrong and he was right about things That's my experience with a long as well. Well, of course So she really wanted to instill in us the ability for a writer to adapt the first two homework assignments We're pretty straightforward. Hey write a game scene that has x requirement and then she immediately said okay Now that we've gotten that out of the way of the next two homework assignments You're gonna write about a VR environment with no dialogue no writing no words. Okay. Now you're gonna write Some VR scavenger hunt mechanics. Okay. Now I'm gonna force you to write for social media So it was really about the fact that we cannot predict the next form that hit games will take so you better be prepared to Write for whatever constraints whatever platform whatever affordances there are and so she really wonders to think about Okay, if you're writing for a first-person game or a console game that's a multiplayer FPS whatever what's fun in that format? What's cool in that format? And what do you not want to do in that format? All right, let's take that lens and move it to VR. What's fun? What's interesting and what is gonna make people just roll their eyes into the back of their heads and for social media We were thinking about how do you make something go viral? It's extremely difficult How do you hook someone if they see a tweet out of sequence which I found was so hard and Just really kind of broke my brain when I was thinking about it That's the puzzle of Twitter is so often you see someone retweet and you're like I don't know if I'm interested in this Yeah, what's the context? Tatl like yeah, and so for me when she gave us this assignment It was like here are the platforms you can choose from really think about your audience What's your hook? How are you going to introduce interactivity? Make sure that you don't spend it too many hours on it because you knew that this project could potentially take over our lives If we planned a big enough scope and then also that like iteration time So if you had a branching narrative that was something that you could do ahead of time If you wanted to introduce where people were voting or commenting or doing polls as to for example What your character should do next that means you the writer have to be posting all the time So what was your cadence would it be every 12 hours would it be every 24 hours and she encouraged us to make Fresh accounts that were not necessarily tied to existing accounts and to start measuring the amount of engagement that we got the number of followers that we got So I posted multiple times begging and pleading like please follow I'll get an a if I get enough followers please follow me It's like virtual panhandling basically and thanks to you guys I got some followers off of your followings and I knew that I Didn't want the experience to be too long. So if you actually read through the whole thing It's not that much of a time commitment and I tried to just make every single tweet as concise as possible and put in things that felt like Interesting and juicy and a little bit scandalous. So that's why I start off with a dead body. What's the basic premise here? So someone is killed the mayor and you are alone detective trying to figure out why and gets film noir, but I was thinking about old space and VR chat so became this like cyber space noir and I remember what was really cool about it was You would have a thread where the story is multiple threads and then suddenly Maybe you're introduced to a couple characters and then this is where the narrative starts branching because Nestled inside the thread you would have a tweet that said Click here if you want to talk to these girls that just walked in or click here if you want to Leave and pursue this other lead and so once you click now you're into another Twitter thread And I remember the whole time reading this it's like Russian dolls, but you worked backwards having to go The start of the story is basically the end of the tweet thread if that makes sense and just I could not imagine the Diagrams and the amount of work it took to build this thing from backwards to forwards Yeah, but that was that was several hours I have a question so do you consider this a game or a narrative? I started thinking about this when you started talking about sleep no more as a video game and I was like What defines the difference is a choose your own adventure? Is that a game or is that a book where are the boundaries? Very fuzzy very fuzzy. There's a big interactive fiction community They have a contest every year and I also have played a lot of twine games I've both made twine games for school and played a lot of twine games. What's a twine game? Oh, so it if you saw the template you'd probably recognize it It is an HTML in your browser branching narrative game where you can like click and there often be multiple choices and multiple endings so it's also a no code of required tool So it's really easy if you just want to write an interactive narrative to start using twine and get something up and running and because it generates HTML you can publish it really easily In fact if you go to itch.io and just say oh, I'm gonna publish my game. Oh, it's a twine game They will put it on their site and it will be runnable in that web browser from anywhere even on a phone So extremely powerful pretty lightweight super easy to learn tool if you're interested in interactive narrative Did I answer the question? I don't think I answered the question I guess I'm still like okay, would you call choose your own adventure a game? Yes, but it's not a satisfying game because most of the time you die I guess you could always like me skip ahead and you hold your finger in the book and you feel like that was a bad branch I'm gonna go back who's the right for I Think that part of the problem with choose your own adventure is that when you die it's not an ending It's just a conclusion. It's a like it just terminates. It's fairly arbitrary Why you die yet? You have no real agency because you'll have informed decisions to make and then you choose the wrong one and It just ends and it doesn't end in like an interesting and satisfying way it doesn't give you like The twilight zone or the black mirror ending that's oh wow It's twisted and really interesting and I see how that was the result of the decisions I made It's just like no you died What if they made a version that was like a combination of encyclopedia brown Which was like my favorite books to read as a kid and choose your adventure where there's clues, but they're hidden But there is a way to know the right path like each time where there's a little clue of your smart enough to figure it out That better. Yeah, that's definitely possible. There's lots of games where you might have choices A B and C at a specific point in time and it's clear that the game is trying to lead you down a path That's another thing especially when you start talking about getting immersed in a character when you can feel That the game wants you to walk a particular path and you start to become aware of that if you're playing an RPG and you're like You can rob this little old lady or you can help her cross the street and if you rob her You know there's gonna be terrible ramifications You could just feel the game just pulling you in a particular direction and you don't feel like you have agency I get that. I feel like lately with a lot of escape rooms We've been having designers kind of experiment with giving you a choice at the end of the game Okay, you found the bomb, but do you want to join the evil villain and like take over as the evil villain or do you want to save the world? I've seen this in quite a few games now and even then it feels like maybe you get a slightly different ending each time But I don't know that there's necessarily Real consequences are ending. I don't know, but I guess it feels a little bit like a choose run adventure like it's kind of arbitrary I guess it changes the narrative a little bit but not enough that in a way it feels like it really made a difference in your win condition I don't know Yeah in screenwriting they talk about the events that happened and ideally it's a buccas event because I did this and then I did that and then we chose to do this. Oh, no, something is happening and now we have to make that bigger choice, but it was directly the result of our actions. And theoretically, technically, a USC games or at least my division interactive meeting game design is part of the school of cinematic arts. And so we do have some crossover between people who are formally trained as screenwriters who want to work on games or games students who are taking classes in the screenwriting school. Not everything in screenwriting applies to video games or other forms of gaming, but if you go back to the very kind of basic stuff that they teach, like this event happened and then this event happened and then this happened because I made a choice. I think that is speaking more to what you're talking about, P.G. where it feels like I made a difference and because of me, the outcome has shifted. Yeah. And the outcome is shifting because of your actions, not because of a forced choice or like a decision moment that was dropped on you and you're like, be good or be bad. There are a lot of ways to do it much more subtly and make it feel like it was born of your agency. And that's the great struggle, especially when you're talking about digital games is you do not want your project to take eight years to make, but you also don't want the player to feel too constrained. How many options do you present? What are those options mean? And then at a certain point, you often want your branches to coalesce to like reconverge somewhere. Yeah. And then in the escape room where, you know, the longest escape room is what three and a half hours. And that's an outlier game. Usually it's 60 minutes, 90 if you feel indeckinant. You don't have as many branches even if you want to go and round out your world thoroughly. The opportunity doesn't present itself the way that it does in a video game that could take 200 hours to complete. Right. Or if you look at something that is in between immersive theater and gaming, the live element means that the people running the show can react to the choices that you're making in a more organic fashion, whereas a lot of times stuff in a game is more preset. You know that you're going to trigger one of five endings or something like that. We'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Virtual Escape Games. Virtual Escape Games specializes in virtual team building adventures for teams anywhere around the globe 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In our regular careers, Lisa and I lead a whole bunch of teams. And one of the things that we like to do with those teams who are all over the world, play virtual escape games. If you are looking for something to do to bring a group of co-workers, family, friends together, especially if they are in disparate locations, playing an escape game online is a phenomenal way to do it. And Virtual Escape Games is a fantastic company to do it with. Their games are available around the clock, which means you don't have to constantly play the timezone game. Check out their games. Their themes are all super nostalgic and really funny. There is something for pretty much every decade in the last, I don't know, 50 years. They're all really humorous and safe for work. For non-hosted games, 1-6 players, you can get 20% off using the code R-E-A-20. And for your team building adventures, can also knock off 20% with the code TB20. All of this is available for you at virtualescapegames.com. These details are in the show notes. One of the things I love most about games and entertainment in general is leaning into the strengths and really working with a given medium, which was the point of the assignment that gave birth to Medeverse Noir, which is figuring out how to work with that medium and turn it into something that's special because of the medium, not in conflict with it or in spite of it. Well said. Thanks. So you mentioned Penrose Station, which is your master thesis game that you're working on with a team of people, set in VR. You're exploring some pretty heavy themes and complex emotions, including sadness, anger, helpfulness, remorse, understanding, and insight. What can you share about this project? And what do you feel are the risks and rewards of exploring emotions like this through games? Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love VR puzzle games like the room, VR, a dark matter, like red matter, like down the rabbit hole, like fisherman's tail. A lot of times I found that most of my attention was towards the puzzle mechanics themselves and not necessarily the narrative elements. And so when you put down some of these games when you're done, you don't necessarily go "Wow, what a great story," or "Wow, I fell in love with those characters." And similar to some of the challenges that, for example, Strange Bird immersive has talked about, how do you integrate puzzles in story? And so they're trying to integrate immersive theater and escape rooms. And I'm trying to integrate some fairly lightweight tasks. They're not very difficult puzzles, but I still wanted the story to feel like it had equal weight. So that is definitely one of the challenges. Sometimes it's oil and water. My writing professor said that interactivity works on narrative, like acid on metal. And yet we keep trying to get them to be friends. So that's part of it. Control your acid application to metal well enough you can etch beautifully in the metal. I mean, it's true though. Catherine, did you ever play Aerole's Game the Present Quest? I did not. No. Oh my god. So this game scarred me for life. I talked about it before and it's not. It's magnificent. Aerole is a brilliant bastard. Yeah. So it's on the surface. It's an 8-bit escape room video game. Yeah. It looks casual and kind of lighthearted. But if I recall correctly, from the content warnings, it is not necessarily that the whole time. It is heavy. It is a very heavy experience. I would strongly recommend checking out Present Quest. I think it's still playable. I don't want to spoil it. What I will say is that when people were talking about, oh, it has content warnings that I was thinking, ah, whatever, nothing bothers me. I ignored it also to my detriment. And then my friend, Lindsay, who writes for the High Minus, one of my old friends, we go way back way before escape rooms and immersive. And she's pretty unflappable. And she played it and she sent me a text and she's like, I'm sitting here crying right now. I don't know if it was a good idea that I played this. And I was like, okay, now I have to go and figure out what, what did Aerole do? I was sobbing, David. I was so upset. Yeah. I played it and I was like, I was going through it and I was thinking, okay, I think I know where this is going. I did not know where it was going. And it punched me so hard in the fields. I actually like tear it up a little bit right now thinking about it. Just like remembering it, remembering how it felt. Yeah. It's been over a year. At the time, David knows I was very angry. I was, I was very upset that this game forced me to feel emotions I wasn't prepared for. But I'm still talking about it a year later. You know what I mean? And it's, we're still talking about it and thinking about it. And everyone else loved it. I hated it because I was not prepared for those feelings, but it's not like I hated the game. I hated the way it made me feel. Yeah. It provoked a strong reaction. Put another telemark under games as art. And one of my thesis advisors, it's like, why is it satisfying sometimes to play a game that makes you sad? It's to help you process your own feelings about stuff when you are inevitably sad again. Yeah. Or the forced people like me who normally would not sit and do a bunch of emotional work into this, but I like playing games. So if I can get there through these things, I think there's a lot of really interesting applications. Yeah. Definitely. And anyone who's interested in this topic should also check out games for change, which happens every summer. There's all sorts of different subject matter that is highlighted there. And a lot of it does have to do with difficult topics that are often not really approachable, especially in other mediums, but using games as a way to convey information and provoke emotion and hopefully corresponding action. Hey folks, I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about something that I've been working on with a bunch of people from the team over here for years. We've been wanting to host Recon, the reality escape convention in person in Boston for a very long time. And circumstances have halted that effort, but not this year. We're doing it. August 21st and 22nd of 2022 in Boston. Recon is happening. We are blending Escape Room Conference with the tours we've been producing for years to produce a proper Escape Room Convention. You'll meet people, you'll play games, you'll hear wonderful. talk. It's going to be a great time and I truly hope that you come and join us. Tickets for Recon are available now. You can learn more at realityescapecon.com details in the show notes. I'm going to have so much work to do after this episode because Catherine's giving us so many resources. It's great. I have links to all of the resources mentioned in the podcast in the show notes. So if you're a listener and you have not yet checked out the show notes, you can take a look because we link to most of the resources that are mentioned. PG puts a lot of effort into the show notes. You should go and check out the show notes. I keep trying to shepherd people there. I feel like I'm not wasting. I'm not screaming into the void here. So since we're talking to podcast fans right now, let's change gears a bit and talk no proscenium for a moment. The no proscenium podcast has a new format that I may really big fan of. Can you tell us about no pro 2.0 and just sell the listeners? Why they should be listening to you? We are trying to cover more and different types of immersive art and entertainment. So I would describe the new format as kind of more of a magazine. So you might have a beat check with a journalist for, hey, what have you been seeing at an Oculus conference or CES or what have you been observing on the festival circuit? And then we've got people who are actively working on projects that might be showing online or at conferences and festivals or in specific cities. We're also trying to highlight different immersive experiences. So each week our review crew, they're pick of the week and dig a little bit into what is it? How does it work? Where can you find it? What makes it special? I try to do a quick five minute segment about what's happening in the news and that could be in the XR space or theme parks or immersive theater or alternate reality games. So just trying to mix it up a little with more interviews, shorter interviews than there used to be with the bonus material being put out on the Patreon feed, but hopefully giving people a broader taste of what the stuff is all about. Whether or not it's immersive art installation or it is virtual or augmented reality or it's someone who's standing up a theater piece or who has written a book about a immersive experience design or immersive dance or whatnot. I really love the direction that no pro is going. If you haven't listened to it recently, strongly recommend check it out. Catherine and Noah and the gang are doing a killer job. And special shout out to all of our volunteer staff just trying to keep a bunch of different voices on the podcast too. It's been really nice to highlight some of our writers who you might only read in print on the website, but yeah, getting their voice on the podcast has been super cool. So it's not just me and Noah all the time. I have one more important question for you. It's actually the most important question. It's the reason that you're on the show. Can you help me understand the magic of the chili crisp? Oh, okay. So it is a condiment. The most famous one, which you can find at many Asian grocery stores is called La Ga Ma. And it is sweet and it is spicy and it's got beans on there and it is good on almost every kind of food. Some people put it on ice cream. Other people put it on oatmeal or hummus pizza. Yeah. And that's the classic. That's like the OG. Some people call it old lady sauce. Other people call it old man sauce because the portrait of the creator is the little ambiguous. The legend is that she was selling noodles and her noodle stall got so popular because of her amazing sauce and they realized this then they decided to produce and package and mass market the sauce. Now fast forward a couple of years. Everyone loves La Ga Ma, but there's some other people putting their own spin on chili crisp. And so you might get ones that are more garlicy or that are less spicy or that are more about like a roasted chili pepper kind of flavor. So I personally have several in my cupboard. I've divided them up via application. Some are meant more as a cooking ingredient. Others are meant more as a condiment or a topping. All delicious. So if you like sweet spicy or crunchy spicy, highly recommend David, when I saw this question in the list, I thought you made chili crisp like a potato chip. And I was like, I was like, oh, chili crisp oil. My favorite sauce for dumplings is soy sauce, vinegar, and chili crisp and sesame oil. And so if you want to make a delicious dipping sauce for your dumplings, there you go. Catherine, what comes next for you? Well, I really hope to finish my thesis game later on this year. And fingers crossed be able to find a distribution avenue for it. It might be self published on the Oculus App Store or something like that. I'm really hoping to get into the app lab so that I can get it out to people. And then hopefully finding a full-time job here in Los Angeles or remote in the area of immersive art and entertainment while still continuing to fulfill my duties as a co-founder of the immersive experience institute and the executive editor of No Persinium. Catherine, where can people find you on social media? So I am at Catherine U on Twitter, apologies if I post anything ridiculous. Oftentimes it might be food or cocktail or meme related. And then you can find No Persinium as @No Persinium on Twitter, no underscore, prosinium on Instagram. And our website is No Persinium.com. We've also launched our search listings portal. So that is everything immersive.com. And you can find curated favorites from the No Persinium staff as well as things like a curated list of VR chat worlds. You can search by location or genre or type of experience that you'd like to see. So check that out as well. And I'll have all that in the show notes. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. It is always a pleasure and if you had a good time listening, Catherine's going to be sticking around. We're going to be chatting about all sorts of stuff in the bonus episode. Probably talk about sometimes that game made us feel some big emotions. Oh dear. Is that a threat or a promise, David? Can't it be both? Why not both? The reality escape pod is produced by Lisa Spira edited by Steve Ewing of Stand Inside Media and brought to you by rumuscapeartist.com. Your home for well researched, rational, and reasonably humorous escape room and immersive gaming content and events. I'd like to take a minute to talk to you all from the heart. PG and I put a lot into making all of these episodes. As do the team that is off microphone, my wife Lisa, Steve, our editor put a ton into producing this podcast. All of this is made possible because of the support from our Patreon community. That financial support allows us to invest in the production value of what we're making and allows us to inch our way towards making this into a proper career. It's hard to monetize content these days and our Patreon community really does allow us to do that and we're really trying to grow. So we put out extra bonus episodes for our patrons. We have a spoilers club for higher level backers. We've got a discord chat and we're always adding new things to the mix for our patrons. So if you love what we're doing, please consider supporting us. It means more than you could ever imagine. And you'll get a whole bunch of extra content too. Thank you again to all our patrons. If you aren't one, I hope you become one. Okay, I guess my escape room glory ish when they did the expanded version of the nest. I went pretty early on in 2019 and I remember thinking that their in-world hint system was very clever. The phone rings with the lawyer whenever you're stuck and we got through the experience and it was so moving and touching and just so well crafted and I said, "Oh, did I break something?" Like what? Like the phone only rang that one time with the character introducing himself and they're like, "Oh, you you guys didn't need any hints." Like you're the first people who haven't needed any hints. And I was like, "Oh, okay. Score." But also, can I go back inside because I really want to like look at that stuff again.