LAS VEGAS—For all the clichéd talk of the "magic of video games," we don't often think of the similarities between those games and the kind of magic tricks done on stage. But to kick off the annual DICE Summit Wednesday morning, magician Penn Jillette and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford (who are working together on a new virtual reality version of Desert Bus) came together to discuss exactly that—how video games can learn from the tricks stage magicians use to play with audience attention.

While many people think of misdirection as essentially pointing and saying "look over there" to fool someone, Jillette stressed that's not actually the case. Instead, misdirection is about studying and learning where people's attention naturally goes and becoming an expert at controlling that. "It's not misdirection; it's direction."

"We've been playing around in VR and traditional games, and one of the challenges is precisely the same as magic," Jillette said. "How to have someone make a totally free choice—put their attention where they want—and have us know where that is."

Jillette discussed the magic concept of "multiple outs," which gives the magician a number of ways to complete a trick even if they don't know which one will be used at the start. If an initial "card force" doesn't work, for instance, the magician can fall back to card control to push a certain card to the top of the deck. If that doesn't work, they can rely on an ordered "card index" in their pocket with ordered cards in pre-slotted envelopes. "If I don't know what the trick is when I start, there's no way you can figure out the trick when I end," Jillette said

Plenty of games already do something similar, with multiple paths that eventually coalesce to the same outcome and give the illusion of player control on a fully set path. But Pitchford said Gearbox has "invested an absurd amount" in cloud technologies that might be able to give even more outs to game designers. By simulating player responses away from the client machine, the cloud server could "change the plot while the plot is happening and change the outcomes in real-time." Pitchford didn't go into detail on this point, but the idea certainly sounds ambitious.

Pitchford said games should also take more advantage of a familiar trope of the "magician in trouble," where a trick that seems to be going wrong ends up working out in the end. There are a handful of games that have pulled off similar tricks by making players think the controller is unplugged or faking the deletion of a save file, for instance. Pitchford urged developers and platform holders to allow for more unexpected moments that "give us these strange feelings."

“Stop fucking beating up artists”

Throughout the talk, Jillette made a full-throated defense of the game industry against those who would blame it for all sorts of societal ills. He noted that the same reasoning used to "protect" children from violent games now was once used to prohibit Shakespeare from being performed in London during the Elizabethan era.

"It's the 21st century—stop fucking beating up artists," he said bluntly.

Jillette defended games, and indeed all art, as a way to "deal with horrific ideas in a place that's utterly safe." Where detractors see these kinds of fantasies as celebrations of death and pain, Jillette sees a celebration of youth, life, and health. This kind of safe play is a way of gaining the illusion of control over the worst parts of life.

"One of the things video games do is allow a playfulness of fear and aggression, to explore in that space and be comfortable without anyone getting hurt," he said. "Certain horrors in our world we can't defeat. Death is certain. Pain is certain. Suffering is certain. We can't fight that in the real world, and yet in art we can." Controlling fear of those certainties through any kind of art is "the strongest 'fuck you' to death and suffering we're able to give."

Jillette said he wasn't very immersed in the video game world until his friend Mike Nesmith, of Monkees fame, sat him down and showed him how games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft were now serving the old role of rock and roll. Nesmith saw this as a shared space where youth can gather and coalesce around art in ways previous generations can't fully understand. While rock and roll has been largely co-opted by "the powers that be," Jillette said, games are now serving the same purpose of generational revolution.

"If you liked rock and roll in 1971, you need to love video games right now," he said. "It is the same thing. It is where our culture is; it's what's important. That's why I'm sitting here. I want to be in the band now."