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

Greg Zeschuk, the retired cofounder of BioWare, spent a lot of time keeping kids and adults on the couch, playing video games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. But now he’s making amends for that with Biba, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup that he is helping to run.

Biba and playground equipment maker PlayPower are teaming up to create augmented reality mobile games that make kids engage in real-world activities, so they can get more exercise and outdoor play. Biba has created an app that gets kids to run around, and it works with a special code embedded in PlayPower’s upcoming playground equipment. With the app, kids can engage in an activity with a parent’s smartphone, while the parent holds the smartphone and acts as referee.

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The startup is the first game-related company for Zeschuk since he retired in 2012 from BioWare, which is now a part of Electronic Arts. At last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I caught up with Zeschuk, who is chairman of Biba; Biba president Matt Toner; Nis Borjin, chief product designer at Biba; and Lynne Vandeveer, chief marketing officer at PlayPower.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: From the video, I wasn’t sure how you were making these play structures fit into what you were doing.

Greg Zeschuk: The gist of it, the most fundamental thing of all — after our career of putting people on their butts for hundreds of hours playing games, I’m trying to pay back the world by making games that make kids go outside. We’re trying to create a system with mobile phones, which kids are playing with, to get them out there playing.

Nils Bojin: What we have here exemplifies the philosophy and long-term aims of what we’d like to do. We’re marrying PlayPower’s technology with the stuff that we’ve done in the game here. It has an accelerometer on it. What we’re doing right now is we have a smartphone app to get kids, ages three to nine, more active out on playgrounds. We’re using ready at hand technologies — just the phone — that don’t keep the device in the kid’s hands. Largely because we want the child to be safe and we want the device to be safe too.

The objective is to reorient kids from their current screen-based habits. Kids are spending seven or eight hours with a screen each day, and their activity is down drastically. Once they hit school years, about five and up, we’re looking at only seven percent of those kids getting the minimum recommended time of 60 minutes a day, which is pretty low.

When we install PlayPower, they can take their phone out, tag in to PlayPower, and it’ll immediately know what’s present in terms of playground equipment. All the different pieces of equipment will tag in as well, the ones that are interacting with the games on the platform. We’ll pair that with location-based services – weather, the time of year, what day it is, holidays, things like that. It’ll generate a list of games kids and parents can play based on those variables.

GamesBeat: What’s the premise of the narrative?

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Bojin: Biba’s premise is that these little robots have been crashing from space to earth over the last several decades. Playgrounds are the wreckage of their spaceships. When kids and parents visit playgrounds, kids are introduced to these marooned robots who are stranded there and encouraged to play with them and help them get back home.

We want to stimulate kids’ imaginations. They already have vibrant imaginations. They want to engage in active play. They’re inspired by the mobile games they play already to do that. We want to harness that for outdoor activities.

We have a game called Biba Racer that exemplifies that. The premise here is that the child is the car and they have to complete a lap around the race track. The parent’s holding the phone, always. The accelerometer can tell when the ignition should start and then he’s going to go and come back around. The embodied play aspect has him moving as the player character for the game, but the phone also embodies a tool or a thing, and the child comes back to interface with the phone.

Every time he comes back and tags in, well, he’s a car and he needs to be fixed. The car has to get refilled with fuel, reinflate the tires, change the wheels, tune up with the speed ratchet, things like that. They’re highly interactive, but also expected from a scenario where, “I am this thing and this is what I do.”

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In a series of games we present these premises for kids to latch on to and then embody and enact. The phone supports them with these very toy-like activities. We call it something like Simon Says meets Warioworld.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.