Julia Keren Detar

I was a game designer consult for this project and helped create the script and guidance for an interactive narrative game focusing on empathy training for a financial institution. I used Googles Draw.io tool for real time editing of flowcharts with the team and BranchTrack to transfer the flowchart into a playable prototype.

The training game was using Valve's VR system and I helped set up some guidelines and best practices for using VR in training. 

Lessons Learned

Know VR's Limitations

VR is a powerful tool but along with it comes some unique challenges. It is critically important to be aware of a few things especially when training people who have never used VR before.

• Use the environment to set and explain boundaries. In this project we used the cubical to limit movement and exploration.

• Make sure that real world objects are mapped to scale in VR. This helps minimize bumping into objects that aren't in VR space or dropping a controller on the ground because you thought it would be placed on a table that isn't there.

• You are you, similar to digital branching narratives, I don't need an avatar to represent me. But in VR having an avatar can be creepy. Those aren't my hands! Why do I see different feet!? Use iconographic representation or UI elements to replace what you are holding. Job Simulator did this well with their cartoon gloves representing your hands.

• Smooth out motion of gaze. Make sure that what a user sees correlates with the action they made with their head. This is key for minimizing motion sickness. If what I am seeing is different than what my inner ear sees, my body thinks that I've been poisoned or am drunk and reacts to correct the problem. Motion sickness is a real threat. When I was developing for an early release version of Oculus Rift, I got sick enough that I couldn't continue working and the experience made me avoid VR development for a long time. Unlike most digital experiences, a bad VR experience can do physical harm to a user.

• Think about the viewing distance of text. In VR you create systems with multiple depths and it is important to think about where a user will be reading those depths. For this project we kept all text located on a desk so that it would be the same size as reading off a paper, phone or laptop screen. 

• Keep the interactions simple: Here we have a standard interactive narrative with a max of 4 choices. The choices are clearly displayed and easy to access. 

• Make the menu make sense: We used standard desk items as menu items. The phone would start a call, the laptop would pull up relevant info and papers on the desk would act like papers. 

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Make the Most Common Mistakes the Core of the Experience

The goal for this training was fixing common misunderstandings people had about empathy. Because of the nature of the calls, employees tended to project common responses tied to sympathy instead and in doing so alienating customers. The narrative was designed so that each major decision branch would include 4 common responses to difficult conversations: empathy, sympathy, ignoring and assumption.

They weren't strictly formulaic, sympathy and assumption can overlap, and a good empathetic response can sometimes look like ignoring but they offered a good way to structure and reinforce common mistakes so that users could learn from them. 

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