Playing and Exploring

I’m a big kid. There’s no denying it. I love playing make believe and ridiculous games. Computer games especially. Now I’m a dad I just use the weekends for Lego, Minecraft and anything else that takes me back to my child-hood. Whether or not my son and daughter join me is of little consequence.

When I setup Territory Studio with Nick I knew that I’d be spending a lot of my time working and so I knew I would have to enjoy it and that meant working with people that worked in the business of fun. Films, Games, brand experiences and entertainment in general.

Learning from Games

Fortunately the first client we landed was Electronic Arts in LA who were after an opening cinematic for Medal of Honor. It was a great project to kick off our venture with as it combined my three passions; design, story-telling and games! From that point we continued to work with games clients and I’ve learnt a lot from them along the way. Not least the interesting hybrid of immersion and interaction with story-telling.

More and more I’m seeing an interest in taking the lessons learned from the computer games world and applying across industries. The obvious way we’re seeing this is with real-time technologies such as Unreal and Unity. In our films work we’re using real-time tech to deliver virtual production into LED volumes. Similarly for brand experiential activations real-time is being used for interactive installations, VR, AR, MR, haptic consoles and any other non-traditional canvas you can think of.

Hybrid creatives

However I think it’s the immersive characteristics and depth of interaction fidelity that I think is really interesting for other industries. A sense of discovery through exploring the unknown expansive digital worlds. I feel like there’s a real moment to bring the quality bar we see in games in terms of immersion and bring it over to the every day website and digital brand experience. Some of our first clients to realise this are in the automotive space, an industry already going through massive change due to electrification and even automated driving.

Here brands are looking ahead and recognising that the screen needs to do far more than the utility of speed and fuel. An opportunity is present to rethink the entire digital experience and the industry seems to be excited to really push the boundaries in new tech, new immersive content and really rich digital experiences. They’re looking at the work we’re doing in film and pushing beyond it in really exciting ways. Again game engines are allowing this, but I think also it’s the tradition of industrial designers applying there thinking to digital spaces that’s helping us elevate beyond the obvious and bringing moments of playfulness.

I spoke of my inspiration more recently in using real world architecture to inspire digital spaces. I can see that industrial designers have a similar sense of play and function and being influenced by other creative industries. When it comes to a digital experience they think beyond the classic ux of buttons and widgets. I would love to put some of these industrial design teams in a room with game designers to see what came out. In fact often my conversation with game ui designers are very similar to what we’re seeing in the automotive space. Sure there’s considerations of safety and being methodical, but the sense that an interface or HMI needs to be a balance of function, tactility, and a relationship to the outside world is what game designers are doing all the time when it works well. The interface is transparent at the right time, but functions and clearly visible at the right moments too.

We’re so Close

The visual sophistication in games is no longer reserved for the consoles and I can see a time coming soon where the notion of a website is challenged once again and perhaps replaced by something that resembles a gaming environment. We briefly touched on these ideas when working on Ready Player One with Spielberg, but I’m not convinced we need to wait for AR to be mainstream. I suspect there’s a few evolutions before that. I’m thinking of retail more and more, and I wonder if the gaming industry has a direction of travel that means shopping online is far closer to a physical experience than it currently is?