Alice, Creator of Worlds
Alice grabs a wooden block with one hand and stacks it on top of another. This is not her first time. She just turned four years old, and in her growing portfolio are houses, towers, castles. One of her latest creations was a tower shaped like a T, with a placement of blocks on top as counterweights. Today, she’s attempting to build a tall bridge.
Handling wooden blocks is easy for her. Grabbing, aligning, stacking. She learned those skills before she had turned three. The hard part is figuring out how to balance everything. But her favorite thing is the final decorative touches, despite the risks involved. Towers crumbling after adding an extra ornamental block have never discouraged Alice from giving her creations that additional touch, and apparently even from letting go of her impossible dream of balancing a small ball on top of a pyramid block.
After a few collapses, her bridge is ready. Her father snaps a picture. Another one for the portfolio. (Did you think I was joking?)
16 years later, Alice presses her mouse to select a 3D geometry, and after an elaborate sequence of clicking and dragging while pressing different keys, she finally aligns the primitive on top of another. This is not her first video game. In the past four years she’s released a number of small indie games, sometimes exploring some aspect of the medium, sometimes exploring some aspect of her life.
For this new game, the idea came to her after looking at an old photo album her father had made, with pictures of her wooden block constructions from when she was tiny. The avatar is an adult Alice, running and jumping around and exploring a city made of real world scale reproductions of the wooden block constructions from her childhood.
She’s interested in the feeling of finding herself in those creations, and in how tiny Alice had unknowingly architected a world that her adult self would experience, and she thinks the idea is perfect for virtual reality. She just received an HMD, a combo of stereo goggles and headphones so good at delivering sensory input for the eyes and ears that it could almost fool her into thinking she was actually standing in another world.
She just finished reproducing a tall bridge, one of her favorites from the album. Alice contemplates her impeccably faithful reproduction, including the pyramids on top of the towers. A lightbulb goes on in her head. After a couple minutes of coordinating her fingers on the mouse and keyboard through a mental checklist of actions, one sphere rests on top of each pyramid. Young Alice’s dream came true. A trickle of new ideas comes into adult Alice. She wishes she could continue building this world, but feels drained from the effort it took to maneuver the interface.
Thanks to current software, Alice’s creativity is free from the laws of physics. She can clone things. She can shrink and scale things. She can make things float in the air. She can define her own rules. But to manipulate objects, she has to maneuver them with a mouse and keyboard. She feels constrained by this every day, like if her expression was tied to a ball and chain.
Alice sighs at this irony. Little Alice manipulated objects naturally but was limited by the physical reality. Adult Alice manipulates objects without limits but through tortuous maneuvers.
She clicks on the play button, and puts on her HMD. Her desk and computer are gone, and she is now standing on her tall bridge. The view is epic. She can see the lines of buildings on each side of the chasm, and a tower in the distance. Looking up, she can see the end of a column and the contour of a sphere in a cloud. She’s inside a world she started architecting before she could remember. And she continues to be blown away by the feeling of presence that virtual reality gives her. She knows the bridge isn’t real, but it feels like it’s there.
Yet something is painfully missing. The system doesn’t allow her to reach out and pick up things. In this world, she feels like she has eyes and ears but no hands. She can’t wait for virtual reality systems that will allow her to interact using her hands and body. The first systems with individual hand controllers should be coming out next year, those will be the real game changers. She moves that thought out of the way, and using the mouse and keyboard to walk, crosses the bridge to the other side of the chasm, while contemplating her creation in wonder. Did little Alice ever dream that one day she would stand on this bridge?
That night, Alice had a dream. She dreamt of a bridge. Not a bridge that she could walk on, but a system of interactions that crossed the chasm between two realities.
In her dream, she entered a room, all empty except for an object on the floor. She recognized her HMD. Now she was inside the wooden city. She realized something odd: she could lift up a block using the motion of her hands.
In her dream, she saw herself moving trees and rocks and mountains, and flying upwards to draw stars in the sky, and flying through space and scale to create solar systems and galaxies. She was doing this through the position and rotation of her hands. She was creating worlds in a way that felt natural and uncluttered. Her creativity was no longer constrained. She was finally free.
Thanks to Katherine Cheng, Adam Saltsman, Greg Rice, Lydia Choy, Drew Skillman and Anna Kipnis for reading drafts of this.
