BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk returns to games to get kids off the couch

Above: Biba

Image Credit: Biba

GamesBeat: What got your attention with this project?

Zeschuk: I’ve been working with Matt for about 10 years as part of this company called Zeroes to Heroes, an online comic-book publisher. We were crowdsourced. We had an animation series. There was all this interesting technology. It was kind of an idea-generation company.

Biba was an idea that spun out of that. In the last few years we worked together with PlayPower to put it together. We’ve been waiting a long time to find these really good, really commercializable ideas that can get past that finish line of R&D into reality. I have kids. I can see the value in this – not just the activity for the kids, but also the parent engagement and interaction part of it.

We’re creating the company and building the product now. I’m not actually designing or making it, not in there writing code, but I’m helping the process. It’s kind of like the last five years at BioWare, an extension of that, but something a little smaller than Star Wars in scale.

GamesBeat: When you left BioWare, were you expecting this to become a bigger thing for you?

Zeschuk: We didn’t know. By that time we’d started it percolating. I’d go down to Vancouver for meetings and see a list of stuff and some of it would look interesting. But probably in the last year it’s started to happen, and in the last few months it’s really started to happen. The prototypes are there. We’re working with PlayPower on implementation plans. It’s accelerating.

If you asked me three months ago if I expected to be sitting here now, I’d probably have said no. But in the last couple months it’s seemed more and more like a good thing to do. It’s a good idea and a good thing to build, and I have fun people to work with.

GamesBeat: How did you become interested in this at PlayPower?

Lynne Vandeveer: We’ve been partnered with Zeroes to Heroes on this project for a couple of years. The reason PlayPower is interested in it is because we know, from a University of Michigan study and other studies, that kids are spending about half as much time outdoors as they did 20 years ago. As he mentioned, kids are getting upwards of seven hours of screen time a day. You’re probably well aware of obesity trends in children. We wanted to inspire kids and families to get outside and use playgrounds more. We’re trying to tap into behavior that kids are already used to, interacting with a screen as a way to play, and use that behavior to get them out on the playground getting some exercise.

Matt Toner: It makes for an interesting hybrid model. If we were a standard mobile game company making a tower defense game or whatever, it wouldn’t be very interesting for me. But the idea of this hybrid between a brick-and-mortar company that’s very successful and a very different idea of what games mean—How you substantiate fun using something physical outside? There’s nothing quite like this. Trying to align the two cultures and the two business models against an audience that’s looking for this kind of solution is a unique opportunity.

Bojin: The distribution is location-based. It makes itself known in two ways. When you have a Biba-enhanced playground, you’ll have a sign that explains what’s going on in the playground in some way, but you’ll also simply have kids playing. Kids will be watching other kids playing with phones and doing stuff with their parents, and they’ll want to play too. In our field tests we’ve seen this first-hand. We’ve had children coming up to us and trying to engage directly.

We’ve made the games very easy to join. If I’m playing with my kids at the park and another kid walks up, I can just say, “Hey, you can play.” It has this nice social virality with families who are at the park looking for ways to have fun with their kids. They’re not just sitting on the bench watching. They’re participating by being the referee or otherwise being included in play, which is what kids really want.

GamesBeat: What kind of play structures are going to work here? Do you have to build anything electronic into them?

Vandeveer: No, that’s the beauty of it. All that has to happen is that there needs to be a scannable code on the playground. We’re also developing an app that’s agnostic to the equipment, so the parent could just say, “There’s a slide here, a climber, and a swing.” Then the game can figure out a plan based on those pieces of equipment.

Toner: There are no physical points of friction. It’s very much like a QR code. You’ll walk up to the playground, and you’ll have a playground-agnostic app, so it works for anywhere down the street. If you have the app, you can play. But if you go to a PlayPower playground, there’ll be a sign at the front of the playground that looks like a little robot. You’ll scan it and it’s an augmented reality marker. It unlocks not just the gear in the playground, which is important, but what other kids are in the playground, what time of day it is, any special occasions — the first snowfall or whatever. Then it unlocks games that are perfect for that play session. If you come on a Sunday morning and then come back Sunday evening, you’ll get different games.

We’re using third-party information services as well as our own data sets ot unlock a small number of games. We’re targeting play sessions of about half an hour as optimal — five or six games about five or six minutes in duration. That seems to fit well with family play patterns. But it always feels fresh and different.

Vandeveer: We want it to work that way because there are 185,000 playgrounds in the United States alone. That’s a big installed base. We need it to work with the installed base, but going forward, playgrounds that leave the PlayPower factory will already be enabled. The new ones that go in the ground will be ready to go.

Above: Biba mobile activity app

Image Credit: Biba

GamesBeat: Can you just stick QR codes on the old ones?

Toner: It’s almost that simple. At the super low end there will just be a sticker, but our team on the industrial design side is looking at these clampable models made of a durable fiberglass that’s very cheap to make. You slap them on the equipment and you’re done. Part of our land-grab strategy might be, how many of these things can we get out there and how quickly? They’re easy to set up. Suddenly you can have points of presence very thick and very dense very fast.

Bojin: The other part that’s very cool is that we can start using stuff on the other side of the world here, VR and AR and things like that. Over time you could have your pad out. You’ve seen the Tangle Project stuff, with this positional technology? You could cover the playground with that and have characters running around. That stuff is all available to us later, but we want to get this out there and working and add stuff over time.

Toner: We’re thinking about wearables in the next year, fitness-based products for kids. They’re already out there in the market with an audience built in. It’s easy for us to extend our designs to incorporate them. We’re already starting to mess around with some tracking stuff. We think it can become a lifestyle solution for families that are digitally inclined, as opposed to a separate game that lives alone. It can be something that grows and evolves you, whether your kids are young or getting older, as you add new wearable devices.

GamesBeat: Are you feeling yourself pulled back into games in some way?

Zeschuk: I do fun projects. I do stuff I like. I don’t want to get quite as deep as I was before, because that was hard to –I felt kind of like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, you know? Stuff like this is fun and different. It’s good to be back and seeing everyone after so long, though, and this is something that I feel good working on.