Matthew Seiji Burns (Eliza) on Our Connection to Technolgy and the Allure of Interactive Fiction
Episode Description
Matthew Seiji Burns is a writer, director, composer, and game designer. With the help of Zachtronics game studio, he created Eliza a visual novel about an AI counseling program, the people who develop it, and the people who use it.
Prior to Eliza, Burns worked on a variety of games. He’s the creator of the interactive fiction projects Apology Simulator, The Writer Will Do Something, and The Arboretum. He’s also worked with Zachtronics to write and compose for titles such as EXAPunks, Opus Magnum, and more.
Burns has also worked as a producer at Treyarch, Bungie, and 343 Industries on titles such as Halo 3 & Halo ODST.
We talk with burns about our complicated, sometimes worrying, relationship to computers and why he's attracted to interactive novels.
Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp
Episode Notes
Check out Matthew's website here.
Learn more about Eliza here.
Try out this recreation of Eliza chatbot here.
Visit our website: Originstory.show
Follow us on Twitter @originstory_
Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us theoriginstorypod@gmail.com
Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch
Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper
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Phil 0:21
What's good everybody? Welcome to origin story, the podcast where we interview creators about where they came from to understand how they got here. I'm Phillip Russell, and I'm here with my co host, Ben Thorpe. Ben, have you ever considered getting therapy?
Ben 0:37
I have, quite often. Yeah.
Phil 0:41
What about AI therapy?
Ben 0:44
You know, I'm immediately out. I'm good on that.
Phil 0:48
Well, we talked to Matthew Seiji Burns, who is the creator of a visual novel called Eliza, which is all about AI counseling programs that were developed to help people with mental health in Seattle, Washington, you follow a character named Evelyn, who used to work at a tech startup developing this AI software called Eliza, and she has a secret. And she's trying to better understand something about the program when the game starts really interesting conversation.
Ben 1:25
Yeah, and I think what I one of the things that I really liked about it, and we get into it pretty early in the conversation, so I won't tread on it too much. But the game is kind of a sci fi futuristic spin on an Eliza chatbot that was created in the 1960s. And one of the things that I think has really stuck with me is I got kind of obsessed with the perspective of its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, who initially created this thing kind of as a almost as like, a way to lampoon, you know, the ability of robots to communicate with us, and then increasingly became kind of horrified by how much people began connecting with the Chatbot program. And, and in a lot of ways, I think has become kind of anti. I don't, is it too strong to say, anti tech? And I think I'm in a lot of ways, like, I've really come around to the school of Weizenbaum that this game has introduced me to.
Phil 2:24
Yeah, it's it was interesting. You know, because as I was playing the game, I wasn't aware of this, this old chat bot name, Eliza. So I came into the game thinking, wow, this is such an interesting concept. I don't know how Matthew would have came up with this. And then halfway through the game or something like that, I realized, like, oh, shit, this is based off of reality. And then, you know, as you're talking about kind of reading through these old interviews, and seeing just how true they ring today, was really fascinating. And I think that Matthew does a really good job, though, of showing a pretty even perspective on technology, and not necessarily beating us over the head with a narrative that's structured around technology bad. We need less of it.
Ben 3:13
Right? We're right. We're just like, I hate to, I think I always feel silly saying this as like, as someone who's like, oh, I work in journalism. And so I should be like, really on board with this even handed messaging. Like that's a good, you know, perspective to have. But I think pretty early on we I started kind of talking to you about feeling like it wasn't coming down strong enough. And like, again, I am someone who I think maybe has a I veer a little bit too far towards the like the Luddite perspective, where I'm like, maybe we should just destroy all of the robots. Anytime like Boston Dynamics puts out a video of those robots doing anything, I'm like, we should probably annihilate them like right now. And so I was having this reaction where I think like, you're right, he has this even handed perspective, you get a bunch of different kind of tech sector perspectives on technology, some people who are skeptical, some people who are like, they believe that it's going to create this utopian future. And then Elijah who like, I think, throughout the game, you're not really quite sure what her perspective is. And I find myself really grating with that. But I thought he had ultimately like a good like a really good answer for why his because ultimately, he kind of says like, the game does have a perspective, you just have to kind of wait for it ultimately, like the game is gonna have a vision for like the right, you know, version of viewing this stuff. But he didn't want to kind of front load that in a way that is like too in your face. And like, yeah, I can see I can see that.
Phil 4:47
Yeah, and I think given the fact that both of us are writers who primarily work within the written and Sonic forum, there is something to be said about what is the value of The interactive aspects and a visual novel are like why? Why visual novel is something that we talk a lot about in the interview. And I gotta say Matthew makes a good case for the value of, of the interactivity, no matter how big or small it is. And so I was really, I felt like my world opened up a bit more in terms of how I think about interactivity and what kinds of stories can only be told within this kind of medium. So I'm, I'm really excited for everybody to listen to this one. I think it's going to be good.
Ben 5:36
Yeah. Let's get to it. All right,
Phil 5:39
roll the clip.
Matthew Seiji Burns is a writer, director, composer and Game Designer with the help of Zack tronics game studio, he created Eliza, a visual novel about an AI counseling program that people the people who develop it and the people who use it prior to Eliza burns worked in a variety of games. He's the creator of the interactive fiction project. Apologies simulator, the writer will do something and Arboretum. He has also worked as Zack tronics to write and compose for titles such as exa punks, opus magnum and more. Burns has also worked as a producer for Treyarch, Bungie in 343 industries on titles such as Halo three, and Halo it is t. Thanks for joining us, Matthew.
Matthew Seiji Burns 6:55
Thanks for Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Phil 6:59
Yeah, so you know, we brought you on, because we recently played through your visual novel, Eliza. And I think Ben and I have just been thinking all about these ideas around mental health and wellness, how that kind of intersects with the tech industry, especially right now, kind of after a year of COVID and locked down, and then kind of expanding into thinking about interactive fiction. So we're really excited to kind of talk about all those things.
Matthew Seiji Burns 7:28
Thanks. So my.
Phil 7:32
So yeah, we'll just jump right in and talk about Eliza. And I think to start us off, Could you walk us through a bit about kind of what inspired the project or what the Genesis was to kind of get you thinking about the themes of that game?
Matthew Seiji Burns 7:46
Yeah, so the the idea for Eliza came to me in a pretty specific instant, there was a time when I was working at the University of Washington, helping to to make games for a research lab. And as part of that, I got really involved in games for education and games for scientific discovery, and that kind of serious games side of things. And as a part of that, I went to a few different conferences, where people were showcasing game technology used for things like discovery of scientific things, or mental health or other other, you know, applications like that. And so I saw this very particular demo of a AI therapist, basically, not really AI, it's more and more, it was more of just like a, an avatar therapist. And it just really struck me this person talking to a therapist about their most, you know, innermost feelings. But at the same time, it was a computer, and it was doing all this computer vision on their face. And it was trying to do all this voice recognition on what they were saying. And so the juxtaposition of that kind of very raw humanity versus like, the kind of the an analytical approach of the computer has made me think, wow, there's, I really want to explore this more and and potentially write a story about it. And that was in 2014, I want to say 2015. And I kind of had this as this story that I was working on, mulling it over and turning it over and then working with Zack and Zack tronics. A few years later, I happened to tell him about the idea. And he got interested in it. And he said, you know, why don't we do this as a as a game. We have a we have a little studio, we have these, these resources. So we could, we could make it here. And so that's kind of how Eliza came to be.
Ben 9:48
So I think your game really got me got both of us, I think to look at the history of the the Eliza chatbot something that I kind of personally didn't know about. And I'm wondering if you could maybe talk about But how that chatbot program kind of is part of or that history of that chatbot program is a part of this visual novel.
Matthew Seiji Burns 10:10
So, Eliza, the visual novel, is is named after that original chatbot Eliza, which was invented in the 1960s, by a professor of computer science named Joseph Weizenbaum, at MIT, and it's pretty remarkable. Considering that it is from the 1960s, that it does a pretty good job of actually chatting with with you. And kind of making it seem like you're actually talking to someone, it's all a trick, it's all an illusion. And that was actually the whole point of it. If you haven't used Eliza, before, the original Eliza, what it does is it just kind of takes your input and sort of turns it around back at you. So it never really understands what you're saying. But it kind of like picks up that you're making a statement, and then it sort of rephrases What you said, in the form of a question. So if you say, I don't feel well, today, I would say, Why do you say you've don't feel well today, or something like that. And it just keeps doing that forever. And after a while, that kind of breaks down, right. But especially for the time, I think no one had any sense of what it's like to talk to a computer. So it actually fooled a lot of people. And it also made people think that like computers that you could talk to were just around the corner. You know, this was the 60s. So they were starting to say like, well, by the 70s will, we'll all be taught just talking to our computers. That didn't happen, obviously, until much, much later. And even today, computers still don't understand this, and can be very frustrating. But that was kind of the the effect of, of Eliza at the time. And because it turned things around. vies and bomb said it was like a psychotherapist, because that's kind of like a model of therapy, right is just can continue to get you to keep talking. It just turns things around at you. And so Elijah is not only viewed as like the first Chatbot. But it's also one of the very first inklings that we could use technology to address mental health. visor, Obama himself said it was just a parody. It was just a, you know, a toy, not to be taken seriously. But many other people did take it. So including real psychologists were like, Oh, we can use this right? And they were like, we're gonna we're gonna run with this. And there was some academic work toward developing serious bots for mental health, in the 70s. Even even Carl Sagan, in his kind of more predictive mode was talking about how we would all like sit in these little terminals and talk to our computer therapists in the future, things like that. So there's so much interesting going on with with the historical Eliza, it's, it's like human computer interaction. It's like what the future, you know, what will the future of that be? It's talking to computers that that fool us into thinking that they understand what we're doing. There's just so much going on there. It's such an interesting case study of like, you know, where things were at the time, and then where things went after that. So yeah, and looking at the history of, of computers and mental health, I couldn't, I couldn't not talk about Eliza. And then I had the idea that like, if a if a big company, a big tech company, developed something like that today, like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana, or Amazon's Alexa or whatever, they would give it a name. And then I thought, well, they would probably just give it the same name as the old program, just to like call back to it. Right. So the new program in the fiction of my story is also called Eliza.
Ben 14:01
I think so. Okay, so you talked a lot about vitamin balm, and one of the things so I was going back and reading some of the old interviews with him. And he got, I think, really skeptical, even though he was the person who kind of created this program. And again, I think you did mention, credited as a parody, but felt uncomfortable with the way people began to kind of forge relationships. I think, as he saw with that, that chatbot program, here's the quote, I had not realized that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking and quite normal people. I'm wondering, do you think that your game is about exploring the way that people develop relationships with computers?
Matthew Seiji Burns 14:43
Part of it absolutely is I wanted to show different ways that people could engage with something like this. There's something interesting that goes on when you speak to something that you know is not enough. saralee understanding you buy some bomb himself was very, very skeptical of it and came out as kind of a sort of a an iconoclast, especially for the MIT of his era. In the 60s and 70s, you were supposed to be super pro technology and AI will be a solved problem and, and get all those great government contracts to, you know, Defense Department contracts to develop AI and things like that. So he, he did no favors to his career for being that way. But he was, he was very skeptical about it. And he ended up writing a book, later called computer power and human reason where he sort of argues that even if a future computer could do psychotherapy, it would still be morally wrong, that that psychotherapy is a human concern. It's about being human, and only other humans should be doing that for each other. But there's another, you know, there's another school of thought, which is that, like, people talk to things that don't understand them all the time, right? Like, I come home and talk to my cat. And I'm sure my cat doesn't necessarily completely understand what I'm saying. But like, you, you do talk to things and people and stuff, not necessarily always expecting full understanding. And sometimes that is nice. And sometimes that is therapeutic. And so the person who developed the program that I saw the demo of that, that inspired Eliza made that comparison, he's he's like, it's like talking to a pet that can be therapeutic, even though the pet doesn't necessarily understand what you're talking about. Exactly.
Phil 16:45
Yeah, I think you do a really good job and Eliza, the visual novel of exploring kind of the ways in which these different characters make sense of their roles in relation to the technology. And in some ways, I think, try to find the silver lining in it. So you know, about halfway through the game, there's a conversation with with Ray and Evelyn, and they're kind of talking about the inadequacies of Eliza, but ultimately, kind of come to the conclusion that maybe there is some benefit to just simply voicing your issues allowed to this thing, like kind of what you're talking about, that maybe he doesn't fully understand, but maybe kind of understands. And I'm wondering if, you know, if that that moment kind of speaks to this idea, or the allure of trying to find the good in these technologies, despite the fact that oftentimes, you know, these these startups or corporations tend to veer into maybe these problematic avenues?
Matthew Seiji Burns 17:52
Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to try to, to explore the ways that the technology could be used well, as well as the ways that it could be abused, and and used in the wrong way, it would have been easy for me, I think, to come out swinging and just say, this is all terrible and all and all wrong. But I don't actually think that I think it's, you know, technology itself is neutral. And it's it's more about how we use it, and how we design it and how we deploy it and what we want it to do. Those are the kinds of things that are that are most important that we think about, and that we're not thinking enough about. And so my approach was with Eliza, the story was definitely to try to explore the issue from a few different angles. Ray, who you mentioned, she's, she works for the big company. She's kind of a defender of the technology. She's a little bit starstruck by the by the high flying CEO,
Unknown Speaker 18:56
what am I doing, I wanted to make something that would help people, instead, I made something useless. You
Unknown Speaker 19:03
don't think she got some companionship out of Eliza. Sometimes that's really a help, especially for someone who might be feeling lonely,
Matthew Seiji Burns 19:10
and so on. And that's I wanted to include that perspective and a character like that even if I don't necessarily agree with it myself. Because there are as you probably know, there's there's a lot of people like that here in Seattle, people who are perfectly fine people and could even be your friend and then they go work for Google and you're just like, I you know, I guess you've made peace with with that yourself in some way. I don't want to, like moralistically be a scold and tell people what they should or shouldn't do. But it's it's interesting to kind of think about what is you know, what goes through people's minds when they when they are thinking of things like that, and are in find themselves in those situations. So, yeah, that The kind of the multiple perspectives thing was a was important to me from the start to, to showcase people kind of like thinking about it in different ways. And that's true for the therapy clients, too, right? Some people I think, do get a benefit out of it. The character, Maya, I think, is someone who seems to get a little bit of benefit out of it. And then others really bounce off it, and it doesn't help them at all. It's completely unsuited to them.
Ben 20:27
Yeah. So as someone who I think, like, I felt that you were doing a great job of staying neutral, and kind of not trying to tell the player how to think or how to feel about the technology. I was frustrated at times, and I'm wondering if you can talk about like, why was it important to offer this, you know, to allow the player to come to their own conclusions about the technology for themselves?
Matthew Seiji Burns 20:53
Yeah, that's an that's an interesting question, as well, because I think you weren't, you weren't the only one to react that way. I think that there was a, there's definitely a strain of like, you know, he doesn't he, he's not saying anything about it, because he's just kind of like saying, it could be this or it could be that. And I think that for one, I think it's when you when you come into a media where like the, it's sort of a foregone conclusion, I think it's easy to short circuit, your intellectual engagement, a little bit, and you just, you know, you go into it, knowing that a lot of a lot of cyber punk stuff today is kind of like that, right? Where it's like, you start playing and you know, like, the big corporation is bad immediately and all and it prevents you from having to think about it, you just kind of like know that that's true. And so part of why I suddenly start introducing these these perspectives, like Ray's perspective, for example, is I do want you to actually do the work and think about it. And not just let people off the hook and say, like, the big tech company is obviously evil. I could have done that, right. Like, it could have been established very easily right from the start. There could have been all these visual cues to the all this like cyberpunk, Dark City and neon lights, you know, you could, you can totally do stuff like that. And, but that's not really how it is in real life, right? Like, if you've ever visited a Google office, or an Amazon office, they're really nice. They make them look nice. The people who work there are very friendly, right? Mostly. It's, it's, I didn't want to make it like, Hey, this is this is confirming kind of what you already know. And to do that, I kind of have to do the work of like approaching it in this sort of maybe even naive seeming way of just actually exploring all those things. To people who say that I that I never take aside though, I would point to the to the endings of the game and say, I think the endings, if you if you play multiple endings, I think you'll kind of see where, where my actual, personal feelings about, you know, about this stuff kind of come out a little bit more. But you have to go through the rest of the game to get there.
Phil 23:19
Yeah, I wonder if another kind of conversation that Ben and I were having about the game was the role of interactivity in the narrative, and you know why that was important to it, and you're kind of touching upon. I love that, what you're getting at, like, I moved to Seattle, a little less than three years ago for creative writing MFA program at U DUB, so it was kind of ironic to see Harmon, you know, be there. But, you know, I, and now I work in tech, and write creatively on the side. And it's one of these things where, like you're getting at, I think a lot of people have to find ways to rationalize, in some ways, a bit of the, the compromises they're making in order to make a living. And one of the things I'm wondering, thinking about Evelyn as the protagonist, is, if you know, the ability to choose her responses at different points and kind of humor, these different perspectives, if that kind of helped you weave this narrative, as opposed to maybe if she was locked into this perspective, a certain perspective from the beginning.
Matthew Seiji Burns 24:33
Yeah, I think that is absolutely part of it. Evelyn, in some ways, is is so ambivalent because I, I myself, don't want to let let myself off the hook for Bing, bing, so great. As you mentioned in the intro, when I started in the games industry, I worked on big triple A games. When I was a When I was at Bungie I worked on Halo and I, I've also worked on on Call of Duty at the very beginning of my career. And I wanted to work on those games, because they were very big games. And I wanted to experience on like, kind of the highest budget games of their day. And like the biggest games around, like, I wanted to see how they were made and stuff like that. At the same time, working on Call of Duty is, you know, it's not like this completely, like, I don't, I don't necessarily feel amazing about going to work every day, working on a game like that I didn't. And at the same time, I did do the job, right. And I took the money. So stuff like that. It happened at the University of Washington to like some of the research grants that allowed me to have a salary to work on those on those research programs. Were from government sources, and not necessarily just, you know, the National Science Foundation, but also kind of kind of future military research about like, how do we use games to like, you know, teach? Well, it was they do a very good job of making it not seem military, they're just like, you know, how do we use games to teach people in uncertain situations? You know, they'll just say they have these like code words that they use. But the point is, is that like, you know, that, in my own career, I've been in these situations where I've worked on these kinds of things. And that's why I can't just, I couldn't just let Evelyn off the hook, as well, right? She's worked for the big tech company, she's made this thing that may or not, may or may not be beneficial for this guy, who may or may not have great motives for for the future, things like that. And it's something that I wanted to approach without kind of claiming any kind of moral superiority on my part, since that there's no, there's no way that I could and I'm also not really interested in doing that.
Ben 27:10
Do you feel comfortable maybe talking about how the work culture shifted between? Or was there a difference between working on these kind of big triple A games as opposed to working on something? Like Eliza?
Matthew Seiji Burns 27:23
Yeah, I mean, when I, when I worked in AAA, it was, that was like the first the first 10 years or so of my career. And that was a time when when the crunch stuff was not only bad, but like not even necessarily super well known as it is today. Today, if you talk to people who are interested in making games, like in school, or whatever, they've all heard the horror stories. And that's one of their number one concerns. And there's like, a lot of talk now about how to alleviate that kind of crunch culture, whether that's sincere or not, is kind of another question. But in the in the, like, the, the 2000s or so when I was when I was in AAA, like, that was just a matter of course, and it was like not even something you could really push back about, you know, in the same way that you can today. And so a lot of the stuff in the game about like burnout, and then those kinds of things also comes from, from my experience on on AAA and the crunch time and just feeling I don't know, just just feeling like, buried by, by work and the project and like this sort of inevitability of of, of doom, I guess that kind of happens on projects like that. Working on Eliza was actually was actually a really great one because Zack tronics is a very small studio and and Zack Barth, the the guy who runs it is not interested in pushing people past, you know, past their natural limit, like crunch time. He, he himself doesn't want to crunch and he would never, you know, make make other people do that. So it was much more healthy. I also kind of just, I was able to write the script for Eliza and then get it made. So there wasn't a lot of this back and forth. Stuff that sometimes happens on games that makes that extends the schedule out. Eliza is so straightforward in the way that it's designed. It's a very linear game. So there isn't a lot of like unforeseen consequences that sometimes happen in games where it's like you add a feature, and then that changes all this other stuff. And you have to extend the schedule for that reason. So it was a very smooth project from that standpoint.
Phil 29:50
Yeah, I think I want to get into some of those that kind of transition more but I guess I had one last question I wanted to ask about Eliza before we kind of brought in this Nope. A bit was, you know, I started playing the game. After I got off off the link. It was it was like almost like hilarious and kind of surreal to start. And then, you know, one of the opening sequences is you're on the link. And yeah, I assume that you literally recorded the sound or somehow got the sound, because I was like, this is deja vu. And it just had me thinking, there's so many parts in the game, like you mentioned, Magus books, who, where I used to go to all the time prior to the pandemic, and the game feels so intrinsically tied to Seattle, not just because of, you know, it's a, there's a tech boom here, and like Amazon, and Google and Microsoft, and things are here, but there's something else about it. That really stuck out to me just the attention to detail. And I'm, I'm curious, like, why was it important for you to set it here? And if you could talk a little bit about that?
Matthew Seiji Burns 31:00
Sure. I think one was definitely because it's a it's, in some ways, it's a, it's kind of a personal story, right. And it's, and it's a story that I think, makes sense to set in Seattle, and because of all the sort of the things going on here, like you mentioned, and then also that many of the thoughts that I've been having about this stuff took place, you know, while I was here in Seattle. And so I think it's very true to the area to be talking about this kind of stuff. I also wanted to make a game in Seattle, that was set in Seattle, that was very accurate to the area and true to the area, a lot of games are especially bigger AAA games are very, I'm trying to think of the right word for this, but there's just like, not rooted in any particular place. A lot of times, a developer in you know, in one country will make a game set in another country. And there's this idea, you can kind of just set your game anywhere, no matter where your studio is, you do a little research and you look up like how things look, right? And then you just build it, and you just say, Hey, this is such and such a place. And so a big games company, like, like Ubisoft, is making games that are supposed to take place in the American Midwest or something like that. And it's developed in France and Bulgaria, and and, you know, they have all in China, right? They have these different outsourcing studios everywhere around the globe. And they just say, Oh, well, we're gonna pick a setting for it, and then we'll just do it. And so there's this kind of very, I guess, like, neoliberal supply chain kind of situation going on where like you can do as long as there's someone who can do 3d modeling, you know, they can, they can do it anywhere. And so that was kind of like, maybe a response to that, which is just like, this is a game set in Seattle. And it's and it's made in Seattle, and it's like, has a lot of stuff that you would only really understand if you've, you know, if you've been here and kind of lived here for a while, like, like, you'll get it if you if you if you saw it. That was kind of the thinking behind that. It paid
Phil 33:22
off. Surprising. Really, it was really surprising to play it live in here, especially because I know, you know, last year they had the last of us two, which took place a little bit. That's right, Seattle. Yeah. And I think in some ways kind of gets at the you what you're getting out of like, it certainly is representative of what it what it looks like. But outside of those aspects, it's not like it really matters too much narratively.
Matthew Seiji Burns 33:47
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so to answer your, your question, I did literally bring like a little sound recorder on the on the light rail. And I took a record of the announcement and, and the noise of the train.
Unknown Speaker 34:05
Next up Capitol Hill Station.
Ben 34:10
That maybe that maybe dovetails really nicely with. We had this question about like, why a visual novel? And like what, you know, what is added to the story by making it kind of interactive? I think you kind of heard heard Phil asked that before, but new, what is it what is added to a story like this, that, you know, it needs to be a interactive novels as opposed to a novel novel or a comic book? What do we get by having the kind of sounds and the interaction?
Matthew Seiji Burns 34:37
That's a very good question, especially because Eliza is quite linear. It as as like just an overall design. It takes you through its story and it doesn't necessarily allow you to just go your own way, in a lot of ways. I would say I think there are a few different things that the Visual Novel gets you that you don't get with like a literary novel, when like you said, the sound right is and the sound is tremendously important. The the ambient sound, the water splashing in the wind kind of at the just in that very opening menu
sitting, you know, you see, we see Evelyn sitting in West Seattle looking at downtown, and the wind is blowing over the water. And you can just kind of feel that wind blowing at her and it's very, very dark and blue, that kind of the way Seattle gets where it's just everything is just steel gray. And that I think like that kind of feeling is so great when you when you can get it with with the visual aspects and the sound aspect there. The visual level also lets you have these character portraits. It lets you have these actor performances.
Unknown Speaker 36:06
I had a dream this morning, but I can't remember what it was kind of vanished when the alarm went off. First time what's happened in a while I've been drifting away inside my own worlds for too long. It's time for me to wake up.
Matthew Seiji Burns 36:21
And I think as a kind of like a multimedia project, that those are super important. But then of course, like if you want those, why not make a film, right. And so the other the other side of that is the visual novel makes you click through to experience it. You can look at Evelyn's phone, use a couple of different apps look at emails, you can look around rooms a little bit. And again, it's all it's all linear, it's you're not really like choosing where the story will go necessarily, until the very end. But that kind of interactivity, I would argue is still important, even though it's not big choices or choices with consequences. Some people say like in order to make good interactive narrative, everything should have a big consequence. I don't think that's true, I think that like, sometimes even just like clicking to go to the next room, even though that's the only thing you can do, that's different than watching a movie where someone goes to the next room, right, there's just, there's just something qualitatively different about that. So even if the stakes are not high, even if it's not a big choice or anything, to the point that the idea that you advance the story, and you are kind of like clicking around to do it gives it gives it a different feeling. And gives a different quality.
Phil 37:48
Yeah, that like a perfect example that when I think about it is, you know, after each session, and Eliza, you have that moment where you're still in the room, after you've gotten your rating and and tip. And, you know, you can click up, click on the seat and you kind of or the theater that lamp or the the painting and you can get this interior moment of Evelyn, thinking, thinking about things right after this, this intense moment. And yeah, this the act of you know, clicking on those things, and getting these different interior moments almost kind of puts you into, into her into her psyche as a character. So I can definitely see why that would be alluring.
Matthew Seiji Burns 38:30
Yeah, yeah, totally. There's something about playing a game where you, you there's a there's a little bit more of like a you are the character, even when you kind of see her in third person. But the the, the therapy sequences in particular right there, like first person from her perspective, and she's looking right at the, the the other character, and I think because you have to click and you have to, like see them react, you really got a sense of just like you said, of being that character in a way that I think if you if you filmed a movie, even if even if it was square on on them in the in the film, you would still be like, Well, I'm just watching this movie, right? You wouldn't really feel like you're, you're the character in the same way.
Ben 39:15
I think maybe this is a this is a good place for the sound question and I'm wondering if you can maybe talk about or like describe a scene or a moment that that maybe helps us understand your own relationship to technology and like how technology is like part of your own life? I don't know like, you know what, when you wake up in the morning, are you kind of checking your phone or you know, logging on to your computer? Or like what are the what are the things you do that kind of might show people the way that tech is kind of integrated into your life
Matthew Seiji Burns 39:48
you know, as I'll tie that in with with Seattle too, because Seattle is a city, you know, associated with with natural beauty, right? And the sound And then forests and things like that. And I, I love to walk around the water being near the water, listen to boats and things like that and walk around the city. When it was possible, I used to walk around the city a lot. But you know the sound of technology and of course, The Sound of game development is really being in a room with a lot of worrying, worrying fans and, and computers, right? If you are a triple A game developer, you might have a giant gaming PC and a couple dev kits and other things that all take a lot of cooling fans and so the server room and Eliza is one example of something where it just feels like a you know, there's just this rumbling this this worrying, constant, constant noise. And so, part of what I was doing in Eliza I think, is contrasting those, those two kinds of soundscapes one, one that the, the humming of computers, which I'm never far from, and then and then kind of the these like, nature sounds and the sounds of like being in the natural world.
Ben 41:19
Maybe a weird question, but do you feel more comfortable one place or the other? Or just different kinds of comfort in both of those places?
Matthew Seiji Burns 41:26
That's a good question. I don't know, I don't know that I feel comfortable around computers. Other than that, I'm just so used to it. So much as I don't really associate it with anything particularly good or bad. It's just like, it's just a constant. I think it's just been something that has been around for, I guess my whole life. So yeah. I don't know that I associate any particular you know, emotion to the computers themselves. Although, you know, to talk about the light rail again, somehow, transportation noises always, always really get me trains. The ferry if you've ever written the ferry, anything that's like, kind of, or even the bus, like just any kind of like mass transportation. thing always, always brings back memories of like being in that city. And that's part of why I really wanted the train at the super accurate light rail, Seattle light rail in the game.
Phil 42:34
Yeah, it's, there's something about the light rail, especially where I have to take it a lot. And I even remember the first time I took it, because I'm Ben and I are both from Michigan, where public transit, public transit isn't very good. And you know, once you get past just like how efficient the link is, there is something kind of pleasant about how it sounds and like, what the the day announcer woman kind of like a female voice kind of sounds like I totally I totally get
Matthew Seiji Burns 43:08
Yeah, trains pulling into stations and stuff like that is just a huge, it's a huge, like, nostalgia sort of thing. And if you're, if you're from a place with with a lot of traits, like like Japan, for example, right, like the it's such a part of the culture there because of just you remember those sounds from when you're when you're a kid, you know, and you associate them with with you end up associating them with your events in your life, things like that.
Phil 43:44
Yeah, where did where did you? Did you grow up at Seattle? Because you came to later in life or?
Matthew Seiji Burns 43:49
So I moved to Seattle? Let's see in about 13 years ago. I'm actually originally from Southern California. La and my mom is Japanese. So I did spend some time in Japan when I was growing up but not not really like a long time. Like I didn't really live there for any length of time.
Phil 44:17
Yeah, I was I was curious, kind of sticking into that realm of like childhood and and in relation to games. Do you? I'm interested in like how you got because a lot of a lot of your personal projects are interactive fiction. I'm interested like what kind of was your first exposure to the medium? I think when I think of myself it's like new grounds and little visual Flash games. So I'm wondering what it was for you.
Matthew Seiji Burns 44:44
Well, when I was a kid people's you know like my my friends. It was early enough people still have like Nintendo's and stuff. And like Apple twos, but I and people my age We'll say like, oh, it was the apple two that really got me into into games, but I actually wasn't super into those. I think maybe just because they didn't, they didn't seem that interesting to me at the time, like I was, I was maybe too young, but I also like, they just didn't look that interesting. And it actually was really the, the Macintosh later. With, with stuff like mist mist, I think was a really, really big one. Because it because it like actually looked like a place, you know, unlike a lot of other kind of like game stuff like Mario or whatever, whatever just didn't catch my eye so much, right. But like Mr. Like, really looks like a place, it's detailed. And there's, there's sound and music, and it's kind of got this very ambient sense around it. And somehow that's the, that's the kind of stuff that really, really caught my eye. And why I wanted to get into into games and interactive technology. And I think maybe that shows in my work too. Like, I'm less interested in, like, modeling combat, or like, you know, any of that kind of stuff, even though I play those types of games, myself for fun, like, make in terms of making a game, like I'm much more interested in that kind of like sense of place and a feeling and kind of giving us the kind of stuff that the kinds of effects that like literary fiction can Can, can have. Those are the kinds of effects I want to produce.
Ben 46:33
Yeah, that dovetails really nicely. So Phil, and I both played Eliza, but we also also both played your apology simulator. And I think maybe that's another game where it's like, I think it's it's trying to understand our relationship to text, but also kind of our relationship to kind of perspective, kind of where we're standing in relationship to the idea or the apology or the app. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about maybe what draws you back to kind of these themes.
Matthew Seiji Burns 47:03
I think one of the themes that's common, I think, too, from with with Eliza and apology simulator is seeing things from from multiple perspectives, right? In apology simulator, you put together an apology, as the person apologizing, and then it kind of like, invites you to think of as the apology as the person who received the apology by changing the way that it's it's drawn and so forth. And I don't know, that's always been interesting to me how how different people can can see a similar thing and come to wildly different conclusions, right, that's, that's something that I've been interested to think about. And then the, like, the way people make the decisions that they do, right, when like when when they're apologizing, and how they kind of, like, try to be correct in their apology, even though there's no it's kind of obvious that they're not, things like that. I've always been interested in in that as well. And like the language, the language that people use, when they're kind of trying to obscure something or allied something and things like that. I guess it that all comes back to I think, my interest in in literature really like like, that's kind of where I draw a lot of I think it's articles from I want I want to represent something that's, that's very human, something that's a little bit uncertain, something that feels real. And something that you know, doesn't overpower your senses so much as it kind of like draws you in games or a lot of games are very, very good at completely overpowering your senses. And that's, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But like a book doesn't necessarily do that it it kind of pulls you inside of it. And that's something that I I want to try to do with with games.
Ben 49:09
Yeah, there's the other moment that kind of stood out in that game is apology simulator is the moment when you're choosing to accept or reject the apologies. I think there's like chirping birds in the background so like puts you in this like, kind of peaceful, contemplative place while you're reading what I think for at least the first couple were like pretty I think transparently bad apologies. Yes. And then you reject and I think there's like there's like a pretty or like, like hard sound when you do it. So it's it was another moment to where I think you're working sound into what's happening as well.
Matthew Seiji Burns 49:45
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love the ability to like add sound to stuff. It's that's always been a part of what I do as well. Right. The sound and music also being a big, big aspect of like, my creative work So, that's always that's always fun to be able to, to accentuate what you can do with with multiple, you know, things like that.
Phil 50:09
Yeah, well, I think, you know, whether it be apology simulator or Eliza or some of your other like interactive fiction projects, something I'm, I really appreciate about your projects are the emphasis on like interiority on the interior life. And I think that speaks a lot to like that love of literature and, and whatnot. Like before I hopped on the Call Ben and I were talking about there's a scene late late and Eliza with holiday I think her name was who's like an older woman doesn't really tech savvy. And you know, you gain access to her private her privacy data. And you can look through her phone and it, it was a moment for me where I where I felt like mechanically, I was it was like, euphoric. It was like this moment of, it reminded me of like collage and literature and kind of like found artifacts, and you get to sift through them and make your own conclusions. And, you know, this is all to say, I'm just curious, what kinds of literature and maybe other media are you kind of interested in or like, that you love? What do you keep on coming back to?
Matthew Seiji Burns 51:19
I guess I my my main thing is the is the novel, The the form of the novel has been something that I've always connected with quite a lot over my life. And I've, for many years, I've I've tried to write novels, as well, it's something that is always been in the sort of the background of everything else that I've been doing is being interested in this in this form. It's, I don't know, I don't, I don't have a degree in it. And I don't so I the you know, the amount of training that I have in it is entirely just from from working on writing in my day job, and then a workshop or two that I've done. But it's, I think in terms of just like, engaging with, with human experience, and like representing that in some way. I think it's really, it's something that really speaks to me. And so if there's anything that I can do that to like, sort of bring the kind of complexity and sense that you get from, from a really good novel, you by using the techniques of games and interactive technology, then that's what I'm going to try to do.
Ben 52:45
So I think I think we're starting to run out of questions for you. I'm wondering if there's something we haven't asked you about the game that you want to touch on? Or, you know, maybe you want to talk about some upcoming projects, or something that you're working on, that people should kind of keep an eye out for?
Matthew Seiji Burns 53:00
Oh, let's see. So there are some there are some games that I've been working on, which I think haven't been announced yet, unfortunately. But if, yeah, that they are going to come out to soon. Some of them are just more like, you know, more commercially minded games. So they're not necessarily these the more artsy ones, like, like Eliza, or apology simulator, but I'm also working on more games in that vein, as well. Something things that are a little bit less commercially viable, but more kind of, I think, on the side of like, trying to explore this kind of stuff. I guess I can, I can talk about that a little bit, too, which is that, like, games, like apology simulator are entirely like, you know, they're, they're entirely text based, right? It's just available for free on on the internet. It's not the type of thing that you can really do, as like you're living in games, right now. If you talk to publishers and things like that, they want to see the, you know, these very, very playable games, where people will spend hundreds of hours on them or, you know, they're procedural in some way. So you can theoretically, play them infinitely. And there's lots of progression, all kinds of things like that. And so from a business point of view, like making narrative games, especially making like very complex narrative games, that might be a little bit you know, they're they're not 100% Just like, satisfying right off the bat or they're not they don't they don't hue to like a kind of like a, an established genre, like a mystery or something like that. It's a little it's a hard sell for publishers, and it's entirely understandable. because they're just not, they just don't do like the numbers that other games do. So it can be tough to want to make games like that, but then have the you know, these, the interest not necessarily be as strong as they are for other types of games. And so that's something that's just, I don't know, I think I have had to kind of make peace with in some way, by continuing to work on the more more commercial games at the same time that I tried to do some of this stuff. I think a lot of people have to make that kind of trade off.
Ben 55:42
Yeah, heck, it's a very familiar calculation. Right. Got to do one thing for the art one thing for keeping the lights on.
Matthew Seiji Burns 55:49
Absolutely. Right. Yeah, that's true of any of any, you know, whether that's writing or music or whatever you do. Right.
Ben 55:56
Well, I guess just thank you so much for taking time out of your afternoon. evening to talk to us.
Matthew Seiji Burns 56:02
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I feel like I could I could talk for at least another hour. If we have the time.
Ben 56:09
Yeah, it was great. I mean, like, I'm just so grateful to just like, I got, I got like, very aggressively passionate about both the history of the Eliza chatbot and Weizenbaum, I was reading, got me reading interviews with Weizenbaum. And so it was just like, what it was such a, I think, a contemplative game and got me really thinking about these things. And so it's awesome for that alone. Thank you.
Matthew Seiji Burns 56:36
That's great to hear. That's I couldn't ask for anything. More than that. That's, that's great. Yeah, Weizenbaum was a fascinating thinker and character. And like I said, he was like one of the only people especially in his in his group at MIT saying, Hey, we should, we should think about this, maybe this is wrong. And you know, and everyone else, Marvin Minsky being like, kind of the poster child for the opposite, was like, we're going to we're going to AI will be a solved problem by like, 1978, or whatever. Like, he was like, saying all this crazy stuff. And it's because the government kept giving him money. This was during the Cold War. And it was just like, you know, a lot of the technologies that we have, I'm just rambling. Now, a lot of the technologies that we have were like, originally developed in the kind of in this Cold War atmosphere. So like, every, like speech recognition for, like the very first stab at speech recognition, where like the military saying, oh, we need soldiers to be able to talk to airplanes. And then here, MIT professors figure this out. And so a lot of the stuff we have now, kind of like, derives from from that world. And so if you find out how much it's like, wow, this was this is really all this is kind of all from the military. So like, it's, it's very interesting for advice on bone to point that
Ben 57:58
out. Yeah, I'm very much a convert of the Church of Weizenbaum. He was saying some stuff that I was just like, wow, like, first of all wild that he was saying this is early, early as he was but yeah, it was just very interesting. Yeah, yeah. I
Phil 58:13
mean, the interview could have been written like today. Yeah. Literally the one we're looking at.
Matthew Seiji Burns 58:17
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben 58:18
Yeah, he has that one quote about I think he's says that like computers, he believes computers are like an inherently conservative force, which is just like Damn.
Matthew Seiji Burns 58:29
Right. It's, it's, it's really bracing to think about today and just be like, Wow, that he said that in like, the 70s or whatever. And it's just like, Yep, that's true. And I think like people at the time, were weren't really ready to hear that, right. Like, for a long time, people were like, oh, computers will democratize things and the internet is going to set us free. Right? Like, like, Well, maybe not.
Ben 58:59
All right, we won't keep you but thank you again. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Matthew Seiji Burns 59:03
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is a great, great conversation.
Phil 59:31
We want to thank Matthew saves you burns for coming through on the show, and giving us such an interesting conversation regarding interactive fiction, visual novels, and, and technology. You can find him on Twitter at Matthew Seiji or at his website Matthew Seiji burns.com.
Ben 59:53
Yeah, I you know, listening back to the end of the interview, I was kind of gassing him up a ton and just being like, Wow, I'm so great. For your game and like, you know, wow, I really enjoy playing it. But like, I genuinely like think that was a good conversation and like a great game that like actually did, you know make me think about these things in a deeper way. And yeah, I'm so so grateful that he came on and was willing to talk to us.
Phil 1:00:18
Yeah. And I'm happy to see like this kind of medium expand and the ways that it is I think there's been such a renaissance in some ways in terms of public perception of visual novels and what what interactive fiction can be. And I think as, as somebody who is interested in maybe someday, doing some kind of interactive story, Matthew had a lot of valuable things to say in regards to showcasing different perspectives when it comes to a narrative and still having a point of view within.
Ben 1:00:56
So Phil, we're just transitioning to only covering interactive games from now on.
Phil 1:01:02
That's the podcast maybe All right, let's go thanks to Matthew Seiji burns, for stopping by on the show. And given us such a great conversation. You can find his work at Matthew Seiji burns.com. And on Twitter at Matthew CG. Where can they find you, Ben.
Ben 1:01:22
You can find me at sad underscore, radio underscore lad.
Phil 1:01:27
And you can find me at 3d Cisco on Twitter. And you can find this show at origin story underscore or our website origin story dot show. Thanks to melody Hirsch, for the awesome cover art. And thanks to Ryan Hopper for providing the awesome intro and outro music that you hear on the show.
Ben 1:01:51
If you have any kind of questions, concerns, ideas, I think, Phil we're starting to get to the point where we're thinking about like, you know, what, what is the audience interested in hearing from or kind of who would you be interested in us interviewing? kind of reach out to us? Let us know. Maybe also tell us about your favorite sandwich?
Phil 1:02:10
Exactly. Yeah, we really want to hear what you all have to say. And if you have any suggestions, concerns, ideas, or if you want us to, you know, maybe answer some questions and the pre in the pre show, then, you know, hit us up at the origin story. pod@gmail.com
Ben 1:02:27
Salami, no salami, tomato, no tomato where Yeah,
Phil 1:02:31
Ben, you're a vegetarian.
Ben 1:02:32
That's not true. It is basically true. Sad to say,
Phil 1:02:37
secret's out. catch you all next time. Bye.
