Partner at Kleiner Perkins, Kleiner Perkins
Sharing the Kleiner Perkins mindset on VR/AR, Gaming, and Metaverse
Bing Gordon was the COO at #ElectronicArts - launching Madden, Fifa, Sims.
He advised #jeffbezos for a period at #amazon -- sitting on Amazon's #boardofadvisors as a Board Observer.
He breaks down the early days of gaming, and shares how #virtualworlds evolved over 4 decades.
About Bing Gordon
Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, has continued to speak publicly about the evolution of the gaming industry, the metaverse, and investment strategy. In a June 2025 podcast appearance, he discussed his early career at EA, including writing the company's business plan in 1982 and raising $2 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. He stated that his metric for a board is "one valuable idea received by the management team per hour of a board meeting" and that "companies go astray when the boards don't ask hard questions." In a March 2024 keynote at the Game Developers Conference, Gordon argued that the game industry has historically been underestimated by investors, stating that "75% of the time investors could prove that the game business would always suck." He also described the metaverse as a "fundraising tool" similar to the "Information Super Highway" of the 1990s. In a January 2024 interview, he predicted that the law will eventually "start recognizing virtual worlds as physical real estate." Gordon has also emphasized the importance of founders as "learning machines" and noted that venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins seek "every now and then 100X return" over a seven- to ten-year period.
Transcript (70 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
We're diving into the metaverse with Bing Gordon. He's the genius behind EA Sports and adviser to Bezos. What's your opinion on VR? Do you have maybe a quick thought?
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Bing Gordon0:06
Let's see. So the primary use of VR headsets right now is a cheap home theater, and that's kind of Asia. And then there's the 'you are there' experience. Since the early days of EA, looking backwards, the first two years of every console cycle we would convince customers 'this time it's real.' My daughter, who is more your age, looks back at the games of the 80s and says, 'Oh my god, did you think this was good?' It was kind of like stick figures, not even Looney Tunes. But the first two years of every console cycle, 'this time it's real.'
We found that higher resolution graphics made a difference, and speed—60 frames a second visuals and kind of 20 millisecond visual response to button pushes. That was kind of the number one 'you are there'—response time to inputs. And then number two is surround sound. We found that surround sound and rapid response was actually more engaging than goggles. You go back to Jaron Lanier in the early first round of VR—the problem was nobody wanted to put on a headset that smelled like Jaron Lanier's hair. He had like cornrows that were washed like once a decade. Guy's brilliant, but nobody wanted to smell his hair.
However, the promise of VR is that you are there. So far, I think location-based VR works better than sit-down VR. With things like The Void—I'm on the board of a company called Dreamscape—and when you can walk a little bit, suddenly, and then we can touch stuff. You feel a heat lamp but you see a picture of a fire, you feel like you're close to a fire. When you get a little spray on your face, you feel like you're near a waterfall. It goes even so far as when you walk—The Void had a thing where you walked in a circle but it showed you straight in the headpiece, so you felt like you're going for a 200-yard walk.
The most compelling thing in The Void back then is they had six-foot or seven-foot high plywood walls with shitty carpet on it, but the visual display when you reach out and touch it is you're touching carved stone walls. You touch it and you'd feel stone. And then in Dreamscape, they had a thing where you walk up to the plate in the movie—it wasn't the natural, the movie, which baseball movie—and you hear the soundtrack from the movie and you feel like you're on home plate. So the 'you are there'—a long way of saying VR has a 'you are there.' When you're standing on top of a cliff and you look down a thousand feet, even though your brain knows you're on a flat floor, your body is telling you don't take that step. And as near as I can tell, that never goes away.
Whereas the 'you are there' of audio-visual flat screen presentation always gets pierced in about two years. It's kind of like if you think of The Wizard of Oz, that moment in the movie when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and Oz says, 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.' Well, from 1978 on, at the first kind of Pong and Atari VCS and Fairchild Channel F, all the way up to the current Xbox and PlayStation, you'd always pierce the veil in about two years. And so far, the good parts of VR seem unpierceable.
However, with better technology, there's less sickness as you take away the lagginess. So there's still the miracle, but the problem is the miracle doesn't work so well when you're sitting still. When we did Chuck Yeager's flight simulator—it was EA's first number one game in '86—and Chuck Yeager, we called it 'Chuck Yeager's Air Combat.' We wanted to convince players that they were learning to be a test pilot. And at one point he said, 'You call this a joystick? That's not what I call it.' He's pretty funny.
What he said is, in test piloting, when you go into like a flat spin or you have some kind of problem, you have to simultaneously do the cognition—the instruments help on that—but you got to go through a checklist really fast, but you got to feel your butt. He said, 'If you don't have a good butt, you can't be a test pilot.' And we kept trying to give that sense of a butt. You can see when that illusion is being created when people playing the game started doing this. So when we were playing Sega Genesis NHL hockey, there was one year we all got really sore thumbs because we were pressing the button to make the ice go faster—'come on, come on, come on'—and you're leaning in. We all got hockey thumb.
And then in Tiger Woods Golf one year we did motion sensing, and people would say, 'It's helping my swing,' because you can click the button, you can see Tiger do this and this, and you'd feel like, 'Yeah, I'm learning to keep my head down, I'm learning to do my hands.' And you see that—I'll lean around the corner in a shooting game even though there's nothing there to look through.
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Interviewer7:15
Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
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Bing Gordon7:19
But anyway, so the future of VR has got to be: how do you keep the butt in the experience? Get the butt in the experience. And we've now got with VR at least performance so people don't get nauseous, but you need to be untethered. And then you need to get this 'you are there' experience. There have been a couple good ones. The Blue from WeVR Labs was underwater scuba diving, but they did it wrong actually. There was a good 12-minute version of it at Dreamscape which was saving a baby whale. For somebody like me who doesn't like the experience of ears below 30 feet with a scuba tank, feeling weightless was pretty cool. It's a little more compelling feeling weightlessness in goggles than on a flat screen.
And there was an early thing I think it was from Facebook, and then it was a third party as well, where you had to kind of fly through space to fix a wrecked ship, and that was kind of cool. A spaceship, a space station, and you got little jets and all that, and that was kind of compelling. So VR delivers weightlessness. And certainly on The Void, when they did this Mayan Temple thing or Inca Temple thing, when you're walking across a plank across a hundred feet up in the air, you go over to a cliff and look over the edge—that's pretty compelling.
But for whatever reason, the VR developers haven't figured out how to overcome the limits of the hardware device. And the best—I think Gabe Newell, I used to think he was the best tech designer of all time because in Half-Life, he ended up feeling like the physics technology they had was pretty good. He made these kind of weird angular creatures and actually hid the limitations. It's kind of the way Pixar—every generation of Pixar movies had more lifelike characters, but when you saw A Bug's Life, you thought they were being real and you didn't stop and work backwards and realize the best their technology could do at the time was insect carapaces, skins, and eyes.
And so there's been no great tech designer yet for VR. And I got involved with Magic Leap and also saw Meta a little bit, and it's the same issue on AR. There hadn't been great tech design the way it did originally with making the Z-axis move quickly with Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein.
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Interviewer10:42
How much of that do you think is a hardware versus the actual content design problem? Because for example, have you played golf now on VR?
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Bing Gordon10:52
No. I played a lot of golf games all the way back and helped design a few of them. But now, if you take anything away from this conversation, go play Golf+ in a VR headset. It's unbelievable. They just put in Pebble Beach and they're working with PGA. But I can't really play it for more than maybe 45 minutes without having some...
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Interviewer11:18
And how do you do the swing? Is it click, click, click like Tiger Woods?
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Bing Gordon11:23
Full swing. And they have a grip attachment so you can actually attach a golf grip to the controller. Really cool.
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Interviewer11:31
And use sensors like the Nintendo Wii?
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Bing Gordon11:35
Yeah, it's standard controller because the Oculus doesn't have forward cameras, right? It has forward cameras, but the cameras probably can't read your hands. They do a little bit of some smart estimation for when you go behind your head. But overall, I play golf and it feels very good. And in the future, in 10 years, these cameras or these controllers will have cameras, so that'll be solved. But they do a really good job of estimating where your swing is. So now all you got to do is convince somebody that it's fun to put ski goggles on when you play golf. That's the issue.
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Interviewer12:13
Yeah, I think... yeah.
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Bing Gordon12:16
Well, this was an 'aha' for me with AR. And with AR, you have to believe when you go to the trouble of putting on goggles that your world gets better. And when you take them off, you go, 'Ah, it's back to normal.' And maybe the way some people feel with alcohol—it's, you know, I have some alcohol, suddenly I'm in a better world. And maybe pot's the same way. But you kind of need to feel like I'm now in a richer world when I put on the goggles. And I think VR is ultimately 'you are there,' and AR is not the experience that you are there because it's not an illusion—you can see stuff. It is your world gets better.
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Interviewer13:04
And you're on the board of Niantic, or just what's your relationship?
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Bing Gordon13:09
Just a helper. Just a helper. Yeah. I met Hanke—actually the guy who was head of marketing was a former EA guy named Mike Quigley. And I talked to Quigley, he left EA and he did a little payment startup that got bought by Google. And then within Google he went from that to Keyhole. And what Hanke had done—and Hanke kind of had done map stuff—and there's, I can't remember the name of the book, but his head of marketing wrote a book about Hanke's startup that turned into Keyhole, then got to Google Maps.
And about that same time—I'll go back—I got into the games business for virtual worlds. And in the '70s in college I did standup poetry, you know, before there were poetry slams. And I had one poem about a magic piece of glass that would sit on my table. It's kind of like a computer screen now, but in my mind it was just a clear piece of glass. But when I put my head close to it, I could travel through time and space. And I worked at Disneyland summers out of Cranbrook, and they let us do—we did Inter-Realm Sports in the park before it opened and then afterwards. And so I had this fantasy of what if the audio-animatronics came to life in the off hours. So that plus my poem, and after my poem came out the movie Westworld, the original.
And so early on I thought, 'Wouldn't this be great?' I called it an adult virtual Disneyland. And it would be compelling for grown-ups—grown-ups don't believe in the illusion of Disneyland except through their kids' eyes. I wanted it to be something that grown-ups believed in. And when I first heard about home computers, I went, 'Ah, this could deliver my magic piece of glass.' So now called the metaverse. I've been in—I don't know, you want to talk about the metaverse?
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Interviewer15:30
I'd love to hear about you as much as possible. If you want to sprinkle in the metaverse, yeah, that'd be awesome.
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Bing Gordon15:35
Okay. Well, so I got first—let's get meta about metaverse. And so the third iteration of the metaverse starts with Neal Stephenson because he named it. And he also thinks the current utilization of the word is kind of pretty phony. He has a crisper definition of what he meant. And I think the metaverse right now has started to be used as a fundraising tool, like the 'information superhighway' was used in the '90s. It was just—it sounded like something Al Gore used. And basically it was this brand name led by the phone companies who needed to raise money to fiber-optic the world.
And then EA—Electronic Arts—was the beneficiary of this brand at the time because there was about five years people thought games are the on-ramp to the information superhighway, which then bid EA stock up. And then people went, 'Oh, games aren't the—' the information superhighway is a joke, and stock went back down. So to get meta about meta, I think the kind of metaverse 1.0 is the human illusion, because human's illusion of time, of cause and effect, and even living real time is kind of all made up.
You can test it with all kinds of optic illusion tests when people are sure they see something and they don't. There's all kinds of psychology tests about eyewitnesses. And there's even one—I thought the name of the book was 'The Human Illusion'—but something I read in the '90s which is you can prove the time it takes the signal to get through your synapses from your nerves through your synapses to your brain, it has quite a delay in it. A lot of milliseconds delay. So even the illusion that we're living in real time is kind of an illusion. And there's an illusion of self. So that's kind of the level one metaverse is the human illusion—that we exist in real time, that time is directional, that even cause and effect and all kinds of other stuff.
The second illusion I'd call the fictive illusion. And this is—I think books are the MVP of the fictive illusion, the minimal viable product. Movies are as well, probably Greek drama was as well. When we use medium to transport people, but you transport kind of in the eyes and the mind, and it is kind of that 'you are there' when it works. But you're there inside a protagonist and inside a story.
And then I think Neal Stephenson, he meant the metaverse to be the place illusion—that you're actually in a different physical place. And so I would wish that we think about metaverse as the digitally created alternate place wonder. So that's 3D worlds. But by the way, if it's not digitally created, it's Disneyland, it's Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the coal mine—where in location-based VR you can do it, where you have this physical experience of being someplace else.
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Interviewer19:52
And is the difference between level two and level three that level two is not physical and immersive, whereas the third one is?
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Bing Gordon20:00
Yeah, yeah. You don't have the feeling you're physically in it. Level two—maybe that first iconic moment in movies where people in a theater saw just a train rushing toward them. But there you feel like you're in the middle of—in fictive, you're in the middle of an act. You identify, you empathize. But you don't have this feeling of physically being there. Whereas in these real place illusions, like Greenfield Village up in Detroit—Henry Ford just built this kind of 1915 walk the streets of America with horseless carriages.
And that is—it's really expensive to build. You could build the digital thing with zero maintenance cost—you don't have to go oil stuff and all that. But the real estate's free. But back in the days when the Museum of Science and Industry was building a coal mine, and probably today that'd cost a hundred million dollars to build. And you could do the same thing digitally, kind of in Unreal, probably in five people-years. And then the maintenance cost would be the cost to compute on AWS as opposed to the carrying cost of something like Museum of Science and Industry and keeping it up with maintenance and cleaning and power and all that. It's going to be kind of a 10x carrying cost.
So let's see, so metaverse in general. So if you think about the place metaverse, the level three, let's start with the benefits. And for me, the number one benefit of a virtual world—and this is pretty meta—is I wanted to live multiple lives. And kind of untrampled multi-lives. And I also wanted to live a random-access life as opposed to serial life. And by that I mean the way we live life is very much like an audio cassette. You can't really speed it up. One thing happens after another. And random access instead of an audio tape is a hard drive, and you can jump in at any point in time.
And so in games we have save and restore. So if you ever played Civilization, you go, 'Okay, I'm going to start at kind of 3,000 BC, and oh my God, the Visigoths just crushed me. Okay, by 1,000 BC I'm going to go back to 2,000 BC and do it differently.' And so I kind of love the fantasy. In my own life with kids, photos and videos are kind of a proxy for it, but I'd really like to go back for an hour to one daughter's fifth birthday. We kind of sit around the dinner table and remember it and pull out pictures or something like that. But I'd rather be there than look at the 10 photos at the time, or in this day and age on Instagram there'd probably be a thousand photos. But actually walking around it would be way more exciting.
And then the other thing about all these—or at least the fictive and the place metaverse—is you can experiment with identity. And I've come to believe that there's three ages of gamers. There's the pre-teenage, which is about physical mastery and agency. I first heard in a focus group in the '80s, 10-year-olds say, 'My teachers tell me what to do, my parents tell me what to do. In games I get to decide what to do.' And then watching kids, but especially boys, coming to grips with their changing bodies—that in games they can feel more coordinated. So for the pre-teens, when they're watching Marvel Cinematic Universe, 'Yeah, I'm The Rock.'
And then the teenage years are about identity exploration. And today's generation, with all kinds of fluidity, has much less friction in identity exploration than probably the British did in the 1800s or the Indians did in the 1900s with the caste system. But still, a 6'4" guy with a beard can shave a beard, but he's always going to be 6'4". Not in the metaverse.
In the late '90s, Lara Croft was the first game where boys would play a female avatar. And interestingly, about that time in EA Sports, the EA Sports designer said, 'Well, a player is just kind of a set of attributes.' And I tried to convince him that the EA Sports players would like to customize not just the stats but the way their characters look. They went, 'No, no, that's dolls are for girls.' I said, 'Haven't you heard of action figures?' And they go, 'No, that's different.' And we put in 'customize your avatar' in Tiger Woods Golf with Game Face, and sales went up by half.
And the whole team said, 'Well, boys don't want to customize their avatar.' And I took one kid named Mike Olsen—who turned out to be a really great producer over the next decade—took him over to Maxis and saw all the power of avatar creation in The Sims. And he got true religion, went back and put it in. So what I've seen—I pay a lot of attention—this was father and daughters. But boys, by the time EverQuest came out right around the turn of the century, 48% of the female characters in EverQuest were played by boys.
And there was this transition from 'I'm never going to play a female avatar,' said the boys, to 'Huh, when I play a female avatar, people are more generous to me.' And then it was, 'Oh, when I play a female avatar, it's more fun to watch than a dude, so why wouldn't I play a female avatar?' To now, there's no negative connotation. It's just kind of practical. Sometimes it's fun to be a female barbarian, sometimes fun to be a male barbarian. And over 20 years, the emotional effect of gender identity in games has been dramatically reduced. I think even Republicans probably play female avatars in games, not just in real life. I can go ask one in the street in Naples, Florida—trust me, that'd be easy.
And last night I was listening to the Bankless podcast and they had Punk6529 on it, and he's using a voice disguiser. You have no idea what he looks like, or she—really don't know. And the whole hour-and-a-half podcast is done through a voice disguiser. And it's really interesting to think that that person's making a career out of this essentially Disney IP character they've created and have put into the real world with some sort of personality.
It's kind of in the future. So let's see, a couple of thoughts for you. So state-of-the-art of metaverse today—it's all going—what's the structure that pulls you in? So in my world, the number one structure that pulls you in is games. World of Warcraft is my favorite game of all time. Ready Player One is all built on a game. Fortnite is a game. So the rules of the game and the heat of the game pull you in, and the place is secondary. The place is something that you discover as a way to succeed in the game.
There's another kind of metaverse, which you talked about Chuck Yeager, but it's simulations as a structure—which is to learn the rules of the world. And what I found in simulations, with Madden Football and with SimCity and with The Sims, with flight simulators, that expert players, the first thing they do is come in and try to explore the bounds. In a flight simulator, you see, 'What if—can I go off the edge of the map? Can I check gravity?' In football, 'Can I screw up the AI? Is the turf different somehow? Is bunting on AstroTurf different than bunting on grass?'
So what we found in simulations is whatever it takes to win, we can convince people that's real. So with SimCity, to have a valuable city you had to master the water layer and the power layer, and people came away from that thinking, 'Well, this is how power works in cities.' And so there's something about—and maybe scientists say that because it's beautiful, it must be real. So Einstein, before he could prove it, it just felt beautiful, and so he thought therefore that it must be right. Well, in a simulation, instead, it's what it takes to succeed is what you end up believing is real.
And then I got involved with Linden Labs, a Second Life company. And Second Life and things like Sandbox VR and Decentraland—geography is the structure. And we did it in The Sims Online. We found once we put a world and you could pick where your land was, players imputed value to different locations even though there was no value. In SimCity, in Second Life at least, there's a little cost of going from place to place. But so the imputing value in the map—my sense is about 10% of gamers love maps, and a bunch of people don't. But a higher percent of gamers love maps than there are map collectors in the world.
When I grew up, the AAA would give you a marked map. And when we'd take road trips in the family, the navigator would sit in the car with the map and tell everybody where to go. So we kind of fell in love with maps. And then there's—I think you were doing it—but in the work-from-anywhere era, I work with a company now called SoWork that's trying to do office simulation. So work from anywhere but give you a sense of presence.
And so presence as a structure—it kind of is the underlying benefit of Zoom, that everybody's present. But this whole notion of using virtual reality even on a flat screen—it's surprisingly, especially for the digital generation of people under 30, there's something about having a cube, having some of your trophies in your cube, having spatial sound so when somebody walks up to you on the screen you hear them differently as if they're coming closer. There's something about this in-between presence that is creating value for people. And it might be that it's generational—that people who have grown up digital now think you can get a lot of the benefits of being physically together by being virtually together.
And some are seeing the 3D. And I saw this at USC in the early 2000s—they did an Arabic simulator based on Unreal Engine, so it was a 3D shooter engine. And they found that they could teach raw recruits—Army volunteers who they're going to send to the Middle East—they could teach Arabic in a simulation at zero marginal cost, twice as effectively as with a one-on-one Berlitz instructor. Believe it or not.
Because there, they had to go in and—what I remember at one point, they would not only talk but they'd pick physical gestures. And at one point, there's a woman in a town about the size of Palo Alto with a flat tire, and as a US Army person you're supposed to go up and show that you're there to help and kind of get help points, because ultimately you want to get to the town elders. So if you can get everybody to like you—and so there's all this hubbub because she's blocking an intersection and here comes a GI all dressed up, and you've got to convince them in body language you're there to help.
And the one I remember is then an elder comes in and goes, 'Are you CIA?' And you go, 'No.' And they take out a gun and shoot you. And what you have to do is 'No' with kind of an umpire safe sign, and that means 'really no.' And if you just go 'no' without doing the arms, it means 'I'm lying.' And so that's—they call that presence as a structure.
And then there's something about haptics as a way to—you've certainly seen it in location-based VR—it does help the 'you are there' illusion. And then I talked about the other structure, which is overlays. And that was the core idea behind both HoloLens and Magic Leap. But they got it wrong all along—it's part of because they thought they were consumer products that they'd be able to sell for $300 to $500, ended up being $3,000, and suddenly they had a whole different app they had to sell.
So that's a metaverse rep. It's really interesting what the future is. So we talk about the future. Clearly, I think the VR future is—all this stuff is battery life, so you need to be untethered. But still, you need to have safe walking around. So I think right now I'm pretty excited about location-based VR. The business model has been worked out, and you get haptics and cameras. Right now I've seen it in what Dreamscape did, but also what Amazon did with Just Walk Out stores—that the math of cameras is getting so good that the price of lenses can come way down.
So when The Void first came out, to cover like a 40-by-40-by-40-foot area with kind of VR resolution of plus or minus two or three in accuracy, there was $400,000 worth of cameras in the ceiling. And then I think now that could probably be done for $10,000. And in five years, be done for $200. And I think Amazon, in their stores, they took away all the physical sensors and just did it with cameras. And I suspect—in China apparently, all kinds of citizen scoring based just on cameras. So once you have multiple cameras so they can, as you talked about with the golf game, infer actual location and get the Z-axis highly accurate.
And that's kind of all math. I saw that all the way back with the stuff that Kleiner sold to Microsoft for their visual thing. They had PrimeSense and then bought some 3DV from Kleiner. And 3DV was math and PrimeSense was parallax. And math is scalable and parallax a little less so. So that's going to make a big difference.
A couple other interesting things. Future is wondering what ChatGPT does both for the fictive illusion but also the avatar illusion. And that avatar illusion may get created by a combination of large language models plus better renderers. And I learned early on that the problem with skin and the problem with marble and the problem with art in general—patina—is all that stuff has subsurface light scattering, which is hard to do with computers. The way computers do it is they give you a solid plane or facet and then they do particles and the particles lay on top. And in real life, in skin, the reflection comes at multiple layers, and nobody can do that in computers yet.
And then there's another thing in the future of the metaverse, broadly speaking: the law hasn't caught up yet. So I think we're going to see in my lifetime the law starting to recognize virtual worlds as physical real estate. And we're going to—so in the early 2000s in Pennsylvania, there was a citizen lawsuit against Linden Labs trying to hold Linden responsible, treated like, 'You've kicked me out of Second Life but I paid, and therefore there's no such thing as eminent domain and you're treating it like eminent domain and I'm going to sue you.' Well, they lost.
And then similarly, there's a bunch of digital platforms right now that are replacements for movie theaters, physical movie theaters. And then I think in the '50s there was a consent decree where movie studios were not allowed to own movie theaters, because the law recognized that there was kind of a physical monopoly as well as content. So they untied them. And at the time there was a thing—it was tying—where to get the hot movie for a movie theater you had to take a couple of shitty movies. And that kind of sin led to this consent decree for the movie business.
And for whatever reason, elected officials in the '50s understood physical real estate, and elected officials in the 2020s don't seem to even understand email, let alone digital real estate. So I kind of think that as this digital generation grows up with metaverse as kind of a second reality, that the law is going to follow 20 years behind.
And then the ultimate of AR is basically something that looks like Oakley cycling glasses with all the power and all the compute embedded in an earpiece. And right now you got to do a cable down to a battery pack, and the Magic Leap is kind of pretty horsey. Nobody would wear that in public if they ever wanted to get lucky. But when I was a kid, people felt that wearing glasses was kind of four-eyes, and if you wore glasses it was an invitation to get beat up. And then later on people started wearing glasses just to look more legit, without even lenses in it.
And then over time, I think going from one pair of glasses—now glasses is a fashion accessory. And now glasses with tasks. So if you think about glasses, I have reading glasses and driving glasses. People have sunglasses to reduce glare. They certainly have fishing glasses, polarized to see through. You got motorcycle helmets and all kinds of windshield glasses. And I think far side, there's going to be a time in the future where we just take for granted you have your 'you are there' glasses and your 'make the world a better place' glasses. And they're going to be different because the technology is so different. And also the masking and power requirements are pretty good.
So I think we're going to look up and AR and VR glasses are just going to be new kinds of sunglass equivalents coming in at all kinds of prices. And sooner or later, we can imagine people with brains connected to electronics and eyes with physical implants. I think that's already starting to happen as well. And as weird as that sounds, I don't think it's a whole lot different than getting a knee replacement or a heart stent. So just various levels of human augmentation, and over time humans will adapt to it.
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Interviewer44:18
Last question here: do you think that those levels one, two, and three are linear, or do you think that's circular and three goes back to one over time?
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Bing Gordon44:31
Let's see, are they linear in history? I think they are. Because the first one is this sense of self. I think our history—we recognize that's true in human history. There's a linear history that the human illusion, sense of self, probably went all the way back to first human. And then stories, with storytelling around the fire, pulling people in. And before there was digital, for me there was Disneyland and Greenfield Village before there was World of Warcraft and The Sims Online. So I do think this is an arrow of time.
And then the sense of self and the human illusion—I think once you start experimenting with identity and place, the more meta you get in the metaverse, it does have some kind of recursive understanding of the other two. And I found teaching kids lit club in seventh and eighth grade that the best way to teach literature was to abstract the story and explore it in different media. And there's this older generation sense that the book has value in itself. And for kids who are kind of transmedia, it's, 'No, no—imagine Journey to the Center of the Earth as a movie, imagine it as a game, imagine it as art in a museum.'
And how do you do the characters differently? It turns out—I even had one kid do this with D-Day—and it turns out the protagonist, the characters you follow in D-Day, is different in Medal of Honor and different in Stephen Ambrose and different in the Tom Hanks movie. And then you start realizing, oh, it's just a choice. Once you have a story, it's three acts or five acts, are the characters there, a lot of characters, are there individual characters, is it one character on a journey. And there's different habits in different formats, but in the end you've got kind of the core story.
I don't know, so when you get meta about stories, you end up with Joseph Campbell. And you end up with exploring the same story in transmedia. I found it with seventh and eighth graders back then—when I asked them, 'What did you remember from the book that you read last night?' they'd look at me blankly. And then I'd say, 'Which page would you start the movie on? Which actor would you cast as this character? And what music would play under this page?' And at one point I realized that kids realized they could remember soundtracks or movies they had seen five years ago in particular scenes. And my daughter was playing back the 'Shagadelic' theme song last night—she remembered that, and she can't remember something she read last night.
I
Interviewer48:07
That's so funny. I need to jump. Awesome story. Thanks for sharing your story from magic glass to having all this knowledge—you could definitely do a dissertation on it. I appreciate that. Yeah, let me know what you're up to, gonna be something cool pretty soon.
B
Bing Gordon48:23
Oh, good.