The Metaverse with Meta VP of Content & Play Jason Rubin

Meta’s very own Jason Rubin sat down with David to talk about his long career (including creating now iconic franchises like Crash Bandicoot), how VR has evolved, and what he thinks the future of gaming will be as the metaverse grows. Plus, Lisa and David pick their favorite depictions of the metaverse and debate which one they think would be the most fun to live in.

For more information, follow @OtherGamingPod on Twitter and Instagram and join our Facebook Group at facebook.com/groups/thatothergamingpodcast.

Transcript

The Metaverse with Meta VP of Content & Play Jason Rubin

Meta’s very own Jason Rubin sat down with David to talk about his long career (including creating now iconic franchises like Crash Bandicoot), how VR has evolved, and what he thinks the future of gaming will be as the metaverse grows. Plus, Lisa and David pick their favorite depictions of the metaverse and debate which one they think would be the most fun to live in.

For more information, follow @OtherGamingPod on Twitter and Instagram and join our Facebook Group at facebook.com/groups/thatothergamingpodcast.

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David Jagneaux:

Hello, and welcome to That Other Gaming Podcast, where we take a behind-the-scenes look at virtual reality, online gaming, streaming, and more. I’m David, a tech comms manager at Meta, a full-time nerd, and a lifelong gamer that’s obsessed with the future of video games.

Lisa Brown-Jaloza:

And I’m Lisa, fellow nerd and, as he loves to remind people, David’s boss.

David:

Well, first, did I do a good job this week, Lisa? Do I still have a job? Am I okay?

Lisa:

So far so good, but you know.

David:

You can never be too sure. Yeah. What have you been playing this week?

Lisa:

I actually just got through playing Unpacking on the Switch. It was a lot of fun.

David:

I’ve heard good things about that one.

Lisa:

Yeah. It was a little relaxing. They market it as being this zen puzzle game, which I think is pretty true. The music is really good. And then the way that you uncover the narrative through the process of unpacking is really, really interesting. It reminds me of Florence. I don’t know if you played that.

David:

I love that game. I love Florence.

Lisa:

Yeah. So the bit in Florence where you have to make some tough decisions while in the process of packing or unpacking, it has a similar vibe to that, but they were able to stretch that out over a couple hours for the full game. So it’s really, really interesting what they’re doing.

David:

Correct me if I’m wrong. The premise in Unpacking is you are a woman moving in with her boyfriend, fiancé.

Lisa:

At the risk of spoilers—it’s kind of interesting—so the way that they did the onboarding process, I hesitate to call it a tutorial, because it really just feels like you’re thrown into the first level, but it’s manageable. It’s—your family has moved, and you’re getting your own room for the very first time. And then it progresses throughout your life over the years via the process of unpacking. But it’s really interesting. Depending on the space where you’re moving into and if there are other people involved, that will put constraints on what you can and can’t do in the game. Really great game. Definitely recommend checking it out. If you’re into narrative-driven games, especially narrative-driven games with a bit of nostalgia thrown in, since it starts off in 1997. How about you? What have you been playing?

David:

For me, still lots of Halo, but a new game that I decided to try out... Well, it’s not new. It’s new to me. It’s called Generation Zero. It’s kind of like if you were to take DayZ or H1Z1 kind of like a survival sandbox-y sort of game, but instead of zombies, it’s robots that have overtaken this city. Yeah, a very interesting game. And on the VR front, I’ve actually been kind of going back a little bit and I’ve been diving into some older Quest games, relative to a platform that’s only two years old, but Vader Immortal, I started playing that because I saw this really thoughtful Reddit post from someone that just got a Quest 2 and they were in tears after playing Vader Immortal because they’re huge, lifelong Star War fans, and they tried VR for the first time. So I went back and replayed Vader Immortal over the weekend and that was excellent—excellent game. It’s one of those things where it’s not even technically a game. It’s more of an experience. It’s almost like being inside your own Star Wars movie, so highly recommend Vader Immortal. It still holds up. It’s still amazing.

Lisa:

Very cool. So this episode, we’re looking at different visions of the metaverse, whether that’s through films, television shows, books, games—think Snow Crash, Ready Player One, The Matrix, Sword Art Online. David, what’s one of your favorites?

David:

One of the very first versions of the metaverse that I ever experienced as a kid growing up watching Toonami and anime and all that kind of stuff back in middle school and high school was .hack//Sign. That was kind of a precursor to Sword Art Online. It’s an anime about an MMO game. A lot of it takes place inside the game. It’s almost to the point where if you were to just watch a single episode, you might not even realize it’s about an MMO, whereas Sword Art Online’s kind of half and half. I grew up really appreciating and loving that one. I need to rewatch it. I haven’t in a while. Another awesome one that’s recent is Upload. It’s an Amazon Prime video sitcom. I think Season 2’s coming out soon. That one is very fascinating because it’s kind of hopeful in a way. It has a more optimistic view of the metaverse as opposed to a lot of fiction, I feel like, where it’s kind of whenever someone dies, they can choose whether or not they upload a copy of their consciousness to a computer where they can live out their days ageless in a computer-generated fantasy world. It’s so interesting. And they do a really good job of addressing a lot of the implications of a world like that. But what about you? What are some of your favorite ones?

Lisa:

I think Snow Crash is an easy go-to, just having coined the term, the metaverse, kind of easy to gravitate towards, but I would actually have to say Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

David:

I’ve never heard of that.

Lisa:

Really? It’s a science fiction novel, won the Hugo Award. It’s about this protagonist who’s recovering from Alzheimer’s in a near future where augmented reality has become ubiquitous. So people are able to access this overlay on the real world, instant access to information at your fingertips, so to speak, but without having to rely on a cell phone to access that information. So really interesting in the ways that it deals with technology and what it means for society, but also deals with a lot of familial issues and how they progress over time. There’s also an anthropomorphic rabbit, I believe, one of the avatars that you encounter along the way. So definitely a good read, highly recommend. Speaking of the metaverse, really excited about our guest this week. He’s a good get. It’s Jason Rubin, VP of Content and Play at Meta where he works directly with the Metaverse Product Group. He actually originally started at Oculus over seven years ago, and before that, was the co-founder of Naughty Dog and created now iconic franchises, Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter.

David:

I really appreciated his willingness to talk about his entire career, which I thought was really cool. So instead of just talking about the metaverse, we also talked about his time at Naughty Dog. We talked about why he got into game development. We talked about all sorts of things and it was a great, great chat. So hopefully you guys enjoy it.

Hello Jason, how are you doing? Why don’t you start by giving us a quick rundown of who you are for those that don’t know, and how you’re doing today?

Jason Rubin:

Hi, I’m Jason Rubin. I’m doing really well today. I am the VP of the Meta Content Team, which is the organization that has been building content and filling the platform since Gear VR, so very early on.

David:

My first VR headset was actually a Gear VR. I bought that back in 2015 for my Samsung phone. And things are very different now. You don’t have to slot your cell phone into the headset and clip it in and then realize you didn’t put it in well enough and it doesn’t start—you have to take it out and relaunch the app and restart—and so it’s very different now. VR’s come a long way.

Jason:

It was a great first device as was the Rift. They just both ended up breeding into the Quest, which I think is the right product.

David:

Absolutely. And Quest 2, it’s over a year old now. Time has gone by incredibly fast. And the Quest Platform is over two years old. It’s been a crazy stellar first year of life for that Quest 2. Did anything about this headset really come as a surprise to you? Has it just done better than you expected?

Jason:

It has. And at the same time, everybody could tell that the mobile portable, no cable, freedom, everything about that early mobile headset, the Gear VR was right. And they could also tell that having a strong library, having higher quality lenses, having higher quality build, not requiring you to use your phone, not being as awkward and clumsy, all of those things that the Rift brought were right. And I think when those two married together, consumers agree, and that is the right hardware. The fact that you can also plug it into your PC and a lot of people are plugging into their PC and enjoying really high-quality, high-end GPU games is also awesome.

David:

What games have you been playing in VR? Well, what are your current obsessions when it comes to VR time?

Jason:

Lately, I’ve been working my way through Resident Evil 4. The first time it came out, I played it and loved it and remember it, and this is by far the better way of playing it. Like SUPERHOT, it seemed like they made a 2D game that really needed to be in VR from the very beginning, and there have been a few of those that we stumbled upon. And actually the software is the unsung story. We could talk about how Quest is, resolution and it’s the right form factor and all the things we just talked about and all that is true, but if the software had stayed where it was in the first generation with Quest or the software had stayed in the Rift generation, I don’t think we’d be singing its praises. And I think consumers probably wouldn’t have been as attracted to it, but really we’ve got a real library of quality, very alternate ways of playing games that don’t show up anywhere else and experiences you don’t see elsewhere. And I think that’s driving a lot of the excitement with the hardware. Watching the Supernatural and the FitXR Facebook Groups and watching changed lives as people are losing significant amounts of weight, and they’re finding fitness that they never could find before. I think we’re finally now seeing the VR device start to take its real position as a, eventually a computing platform, as opposed to just an entertainment device. So the software really is a big part of the story.

David:

Yeah. That’s that classic adage that software sells hardware, and I think it’s really proven true with VR, especially even the market, I think is very different. I feel like gamers as a whole are more receptive to VR as a platform. How do you think the market has changed since 2016, since 2015? How are gamers different now? I’m curious to know how you think the market has shifted to allow for it to succeed.

Jason:

Yeah. VR and AR both are pretty big changes in the way that you think about things. I mean even the mobile phone being in your pocket, people were saying, I think it’s rude when people do that at dinner. How dare that whole table of people be looking at their phones? It was odd for people to think of compute all the time. AR is going to face that, and VR faces the, Do I really want to put something over my face and be completely in a different world for a little while? Which is both the promise, but also something that if you haven’t seen it, it takes a little bit of overcoming to do it for the first time. We started with the jokes and comedies on TV, would show people in VR and make fun of them, but it’s become more and more normal to think about people being in virtual reality. Virtual reality is now multiple years old. I’ve been at Facebook now seven years. 17-year-olds were 10, 10-year-olds were three when we launched some of those earlier products, and the world changes and people get older and they start to think of this stuff. And then it really just becomes a question of: is the price fair and is the content that I want on the platform? And if all of those things come true, it’s no longer a weird thing to think about going and buying VR because your friends have it. It’s no longer a joke on TV. It’s just kind of part of life.

David:

That’s a good point. The 10-year-olds today have grown up in a world where VR has always existed ever since they were three. So it’s... My son’s only four right now. For him, gaming, tech, VR, all that stuff is just a way of life and it’s just another part of life. And it’s crazy to just imagine how different their experiences are. It’s amazing how intuitive it is for them to grasp it. I think back to the first time my wife ever tried VR and obviously, she’s not a toddler by any means. She’s not a gamer either. And the first game she played was Job Simulator. And I remember that I didn’t have to tell her anything. I didn’t have to explain anything. I put her in PUBG and I have to spend 10 minutes explaining everything about the mechanics of buttons. You get rid of a lot of that limitation because the controller isn’t as much of an interface anymore when it’s your hands. The presence is so powerful.

Jason:

And that is by the way, the next frontier. As to your point, when we started, Rift was a joypad, and that was the best input at the time. And it turned out that Touch controllers were a much better input for VR. We certainly couldn’t be able to tell you where your hands were and what your hands were doing, but now slowly but surely, we’re starting to look at people’s hands and not require any controller at all. And to be sure, that won’t be right for every product. A lot of things are going to want to have something physical in your hands, and I think the Touch controllers are amazing. I can’t imagine playing Resident Evil by making a pew-pew gun with my hand and pointing it at people. The Touch controller really makes it work, but hands are really intuitive, and if we want to get to a lot of users, the best thing to do is to have them hold their hands up in front of their eyes, see their hands and say, "Oh, I get this."

David:

One of the first things I do in almost any VR game is I hold up my hands. I hold up the controllers. I get a sense of space and distance. And now you can actually do that. To me, that’s wild. I still can’t get over how well hand tracking works.

Jason:

Yeah. And it’s just getting started. The ML is going to get better. The sensors get better. The cameras get better. So ultimately, hands are going to be a huge part of our future.

David:

As we talk about the future here, we talk about the metaverse and hands and presence. We’re now known as Meta, which you know exactly what we’re about. Look at the company name, and that’s going to be built collaboratively by a number of companies over the years. And for you specifically, like you said, you’ve been here seven years and you’re just getting started. You seem like you’re in the trenches now more than ever. Why is this so important to you specifically?

Jason:

When I started making games, there was no internet and everything was very lonely, right? You put a disc in. You installed it on your computer temporarily. You played it. When you turned the power off, it went away. I loved games, but that wasn’t the future. And it was pretty clear pretty quickly that anytime you got two people sitting on a sofa together, things got better. All right? You think to the old Mario Karts and stuff like that. Your times playing games on a sofa next to somebody were better, but the sofa wasn’t a great medium for transporting games. The internet and online gaming made the sofa stretch out. It made the sofa stretch out and you lost the sitting next to somebody, and all you got was the screen. And so over time, I always had this concept that if we could be in games together, doing them together, but actually be there together, as opposed to the idea of playing against somebody that I can’t see, I can’t feel, I can’t hear, like in the being with somebody way, that would be the ultimate way for games to exist. And very early on, in Naughty Dog we’re debating whether or not to build something like World of Warcraft, to build Crash Bandicoot. Now I won with Crash Bandicoot. Business-wise, it was a good decision, but it wasn’t World of Warcraft, which was pretty damn awesome. It just didn’t let you get together. And I think what we’re on the verge of right now is that final state of gaming, where it is everything we love about gaming, but it’s also doing it with other people. And I’ve been on that journey for, God, it’s got to be 30-some-odd years now. Andy [Gavin] and I started it. We planned always to make a multiplayer game. We just never got there. But now at Meta, we’re going to land that. Meta has been on this journey for longer than I’ve been here. So it really needs to be clear that that’s my personal journey. That’s not the journey that the company is on. One of the first things that I did when I joined Oculus was interview both with the Oculus leadership at the time, which was Brendan and Nate and Palmer and that crew, but also because it was post-acquisition announcement by Facebook, I interviewed with the people at Facebook, now Meta, that were there at the time. And one of those people was Cory Ondrejka. And I remember very well that my conversation with Cory, who was one of the co-founders or at least the CTO of Second Life, was the longest interview I did before accepting the job. And what we talked about for, God, three and a half, four hours was basically the metaverse. I don’t know that we used that term, but we talked about... And Cory was basically responsible along with the other people there for Facebook’s vision of what all of that was going to be. And remember, this is before the Oculus acquisition actually closed.

David:

I love the metaphor of the couch. I think that’s a great way to visualize it because back whenever Xbox first came out and Xbox Live was taking off, and that was really, online gaming really came to the core gamer console player audience for the first time. And there was a lot of excitement about that for the same reasons. But like you said, it was just a voice, just a TV screen. And VR is so much more than that. I love it because I can go bowling. I can go golfing with my nephew back in Texas. I haven’t seen him in almost two years, but VR is different than playing a game just on a headset. It’s hard to describe. It’s impossible to really describe it. Going back to some of your background and your roots that you alluded to there about Naughty Dog and then after that at THQ, we’ve talked a lot about traditional gaming. We’ve talked about VR and the metaverse. What about other types of gaming? How do they fit into the future of the metaverse, the future of gaming in the metaverse? A lot of people conflate the terms VR and metaverse need to be the same thing, but the metaverse is so much more than just VR. How do you think that’s going to play out in the next five, 10-plus years?

Jason:

I think a lot of things are going on at the same time. Put VR and the metaverse aside. The difference between the types of games that are out there and the places that people are playing those games is coming crashing down as it should. The idea that the console plays one kind of game and the mobile device plays another type of game is becoming less and less relevant. Fortnite’s a good example of that. Something of the quality of Genshin Impact playing on your mobile phone—still to this day, I can’t imagine Genshin Impact graphics existing when I was first making games, let alone what we see on high-end PCs. But the fact that’s happening in my hand, in a mobile phone is truly insane and incredibly impressive. Cloud gaming could bring that crash down even faster because now the chipset isn’t restricting you and you can write a game once. And so perhaps your Xbox game is just shipping straight to mobile phone. You’ve already heard that from Microsoft. And at that point, the whole differentiation between types of games becomes one giant spectrum. I don’t think any of them are going away or any of them are going to win or any of that. I just think that people will find the games that they want and they’ll enjoy them. So throw into that VR and the metaverse, and I think that just extends. When it comes to VR right now, the things in our store tend to be premium price. They tend to charge you upfront. The reason for that is really simple: There aren’t enough people yet in VR to get the top of the funnel to be large enough that over time, the small percentage of people that pay in free-to-play games justify the development cost. There’s nothing else devious going on there, but as time progresses and we get more hardware units in people’s hands, inevitably, some people will decide that the best thing for their way of building things is to simply go free-to-play. And some consumers will either like that or not like that. And if they like it, it’ll perpetuate itself. The metaverse then is just another layer on top of that, which is letting people do things together, perhaps instantiated as avatars, and why that would cause any one type of game to rise to the top or I don’t know that it will. I do think that people will tend to move towards social gaming over time, just because it’ll be empowered by the technology and they’ll like playing with people, the sofa idea. You’ll see more and more people spending time on things that are lighter games, perhaps more social simply because the social becomes an important part of what they’re doing. You’re already seeing that with Fortnite. There are a lot of people that want to play Fortnite and Death Match against each other. There are other people that just want to go build stuff together, and really they’re getting together as if they were sitting in a living room or in a bar talking to each other. And that’s really the more important thing than the actual game itself.

David:

I like the way you described that as layers of a spectrum of the metaverse and how all those things coalesce together and combine together to create this overarching experience. For a lot of people that haven’t tried VR or haven’t tried AR or haven’t had first-hand exposure to that sort of technology yet, they might be most familiar with pop culture representations of it from movies like The Matrix and Ready Player One, all those kind of things, the fantastical kind of sci-fi vision of the metaverse. Do you think that is accurate at all? Are we going to have treadmills in our mobile home trailer stacked on top of each other, like in Ready Player One with full haptic suits?

Jason:

Yeah. I don’t know that it’s easy at this point to make those predictions. So there are two things that are really easy to do. One is to dismiss it entirely out of hand and laugh. And you can certainly say something like a bunch of kids with VR headsets running down the street with police cars passing them is a bad idea, because... I was watching the movie Ready Player One, I’m like, they’re going to get run over. That is just not how you use VR.

David:

I remember that scene.

Jason:

What the hell are they thinking? It may make good film. It makes very, very bad life decisions. So let’s not do that. So it’s easy to dismiss that future. I think that’s too easy. It’s also easy to go too far and say, we’re all going to be living in these float tanks and do... I don’t know that that’s going to happen either, but there’s somewhere in the middle where this really does make sense and people start spending more and more time in these virtual worlds with each other. I’ll give you an example. I work out and I run on a treadmill. I just wouldn’t work out in VR, but there’s an entire audience of people that don’t like treadmills and don’t like weights and don’t do those things that it’s really connecting with. And some of those people live in apartments and don’t have a lot of space. On a given day, you don’t have time to go walk outside, or it’s snowing or whatever. You just don’t have the ability to do it. The replacement may be a VR headset. And again, if you show somebody from the outside of an apartment, you have a video of a movie of somebody sitting in their apartment without anyone else around and they’re waving their arms around and squatting and doing all these things in a headset, "Ah, that’s never going to happen" would probably be your reaction. But the reality is a growing number of people are not only doing it, they’re benefiting significantly from having done it. So again, I’m not a float in the water bubble suit kind of person, and I think sometimes we go too far with what we’re trying to recreate, but I don’t want to predict what we won’t do, because if someone lands something that makes sense, people will do it. If humanity finds a reason to do it, as long as people are happy, I think it’s great. And it’s safe. Be safe.

David:

Safety first, boys and girls, for sure.

Jason:

Yeah, exactly.

David:

Before we wrap things up, what can you tell us about the future for Meta and for Quest and what does 2022 look like for gaming in your eyes? Is there anything you can allude to or tease? Obviously, there’s not going to be any huge announcements here or anything like that, but what are you excited about?

Jason:

I think the biggest announcement is that GTA is in the works for Quest in the future. And Mark announced that at Connect. I am wildly excited that is happening.

David:

It’s San Andreas only?

Jason:

That’s correct. San Andreas coming out, but like Resident Evil 4, it’s one of those games that I remember playing most of the way through. I don’t remember precisely how far I got, but I do know that I played a significant amount of it back in the day. And I think like Resident Evil 4, the ability to step into it is going to be insane. I’m not giving you a launch date. I’m just making sure that everybody knows that is coming out. ’22 is going to see increasing quality games, a lot of them. One thing that’s happening now, which is very important, people will hear me talking about developer money and things like, "Why are you so greedy? Why do you care?" The more money developers make, the more developers will spend making product. The more they spend making product, the happier consumers are playing those products because they’re deeper, they have better graphics, they can spend more time tweaking them. And that makes happier consumers than try more things, trying more things. This cycle makes better and better content, which makes people happier, developers happier. And that makes me happy and makes my team happy that makes Meta happier. That is the perfect situation. And I think what you’re seeing now is there are enough people in VR that the ecosystem is really churning along, which I can tell you after kickstarting the industry from the beginning, this is the part that I want to be here for. At the end of the day, it benefits gamers.

David:

Thank you very much for your time, Jason. I really appreciate it. I hope you had a fun chat, and I hope people enjoy listening to you talk about the metaverse and talk about the future of gaming and all that’s coming down the hatch for Quest and Quest players and Meta enthusiasts out there. And I’m super excited. I can’t wait.

Jason:

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

David:

That was an awesome conversation. I really enjoyed talking to Jason. He’s a great guy, seems very down to earth and easy to talk to. I really loved hearing about how whenever they were at Naughty Dog originally, that he secretly always wanted to work on a multiplayer project. I never knew that because Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot are both very notoriously single-player action game franchises. So that was fascinating to me. I had no idea.

Lisa:

Yeah. I could listen to him talk for hours. He has such a good way with words and with metaphors in particular.

David:

He does, he does, especially. Yeah. Okay. Now it’s time for Jaloza versus Jagneaux where we each get one minute to make our case on a chosen topic and try to convince you to believe what we’re saying.

Lisa:

For this episode, we’ll debate which futuristic vision of the metaverse would be more fun to live in: Ready Player One or The Matrix.

David:

Fun being the operative word there, right?

Lisa:

Yes.

David:

All right, I’ll go first. I’m going to be defending The Matrix. All right. So I mean, Neo, right? Neo’s awesome. Keanu Reeves, he carries that franchise. He’s such an incredibly cool character. And I think if you watch the first movie especially, it makes a really good case for how fun it would be to live inside of the Matrix, particularly if you are self-aware of being inside the Matrix. If you’re like Neo, if you’re like Morpheus, Morpheus and all the people in that movie learning kung fu, being able to jump across skyscrapers, dodging bullets, I mean, it’s just such a cool, cool, cool, cool world. And the other cool thing about it is it’s fully immersive, right? You’re not just wearing a headset. You are jacking in with a wire into your brain, and it is the most believable type of metaverse because all the people in there, the vast majority don’t even know it’s fake. So it would be fully immersive. It would be so fun. So cool. And I think it’d be super neat.

Lisa:

Okay. So naturally I’m going to have to go with Ready Player One. First a novel, then a film. So it gets points right off the bat there for me. Despite the fact that you access the OASIS through hardware, you are virtually unlimited in what you’re able to do once you’re there. So as far as leaping over tall buildings, being able to fly, you have that plus the benefit of any number of planets devoted to increasingly bizarre and obscure elements of pop culture from the 1980s, and as an ’80s kid, that kind of scratches the sweet spot when it comes to nostalgia. So definitely got some points there for me. And if you expand it to Ready Player Two, an entire planet devoted to Prince, pretty outstanding, I would say. And I’m running out of time. 

All right, well now you know what we think. So it’s your turn to tell us what you think. Head over to our Facebook Group and Twitter @OtherGamingPod, and vote on whether you think it would be more fun to live in the Matrix or the world of Ready Player One. And let us know what you think about the show on Twitter @OtherGamingPod.

David:

Last episode, we debated which game had the bigger impact on modern gaming, either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64. You all weighed in and voted… for Super Mario 64. That’s right. I won this time. That’s the game I defended. I have redemption. Lisa, you’re wrong. You got outvoted. How does it feel?

Lisa:

Feels pretty bad, but cue Bob Marley “Redemption Song”.

David:

Before we go, I want to drop a quick live streaming hot tip from my fellow content creators out there. Doing things beyond just talking about the game you’re playing is also a great way to keep your audience super active. Give them things that they can do other than just send messages to you. But one example would be a wheel spin that you can institute in your stream. You can just Google free wheel spinners and stuff like that. You can customize the colors and put whatever different options you want inside the wheel, like Wheel of Fortune style. Something that I like to do is whenever someone donates over a certain amount, I spin the wheel. I bring it up on screen so everyone can see that I’m not cheating, and whatever it lands on, I have to do. So for example, maybe I have to drop and do pushups or one that people used to love always getting is making me play the game for five minutes without my glasses. Yeah, my vision is very, very bad. So yeah, that’s a good way to keep people more engaged. And I want to quickly shout out a content creator that I’m a big fan of. Her name is Sachi. She’s a Facebook Gaming partner. She plays lot of wholesome games like Animal Crossing. She’s very funny. Her streams are really long. They’re six-plus hours sometimes. And she has good vibes, good vibes only.

Lisa:

Oh, my kids love Animal Crossing. I’ll have to check her out. Thanks so much for joining us on That Other Gaming Podcast from Meta. Remember, we’d love to connect with you on our Facebook Group and you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @OtherGamingPod.

David:

The show is produced by LWC. Cedric Wilson is our lead producer and composed our theme music. Kojin Tashiro also contributed music. Jen Chien is executive editor. That Other Gaming Podcast is executive produced by Steve Gray and Juleyka Lantigua. Art by BJ Prema.

Lisa:

We’ll see you next time.

CITATION:

Jagneaux, David and Jaloza, Lisa Brown. “The Metaverse with Meta VP of Content & Play Jason Rubin.” That Other Gaming Podcast. Meta, LWC, January 6, 2022. 

Produced by LWC.