Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Carpenter.
Hi Craig, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I never had any idea I would become a business owner. I ended up earning my undergrad and then my Master’s of Science in Criminal Justice with an emphasis in cyber crimes and I got that Master’s literally days before a federal government sequester in which the job I was lined up to take was now under a hiring freeze and the tech guy I was going to eventually replace had to now stay on longer as his wife was laid off during that sequester. So that was just bad timing to graduate for someone about to work for the DEA and work on experience towards landing a job with the FBI in their cyber crimes division.
I ended up doing some none criminal justice related jobs and one day ended up quitting my job to come aboard my dad’s business that just had himself and my brother. Their business was growing and they needed someone tech savvy to help them with all that growth. One day, while my dad was on a business trip and work was slow at the home office, I was browsing some gaming news and saw that Meta (Facebook at the time) was going to start allowing for commercial use licensing of their Virtual Reality gear here in the US. This got me curious and I started to look into VR arcades from around the world and those already here in the US as I was a massive fan of VR and how immersive it was. The more I dug the sadder I got at some of the experiences offered by places. Even IMAX (the big camera guys) tried their hand at a VR arcade and the reviews I saw were brutal. Crappy VR headsets with resolutions and frame-rates lower than what I had in my house, boring games with no depth or complexity, weak computers that couldn’t push the visuals to a realistic and smooth play experience, and one of the more common issues, employees that had no clue what they were doing getting customers hooked in and then walking away and never helping them out. I felt so bad that this was going to be so many people’s first experience with VR, getting motion sick, getting bored, and getting confused.
So, I figured, “how hard could it be to start my own business?” I started to Google around for answers, how to start an LLC, how to pay employees, ADA compliance, materials to use for walls in a business, commercial license use for VR games, and so so so much more. I talked with local business folks and picked their brains for as much info as I could, but I was in a tricky situation, nobody had any experience with a VR arcade. They were so new and there were so many unknowns. When it came time for me to get liability insurance and make sure I’d be safe from someone getting hurt in here but also my VR gear getting damaged by players punching walls and falling over, I must have talked to almost 20 companies. So many of them turned me away right from the start because they just didn’t know what to expect.
After a lot of that technical stuff and a whole lot of planning, I was finally able to get my money that I had saved up and I went all in using only my personal funds, no bank loans needed. I did a lot of it on my own, like the building of all the PCs, the visual styling of the interior, setting up the internet infrastructure, and as much else as I could do to keep costs as low as I could.
The first big hurdle was down, getting up and running, but then there was the next big hurdle, COVID. My arcade had been opened for around a year now, I had just hired my first full-time employee, and then literally the next month, there were talks on the news about this COVID thing, and then the next month it was talks of it making its way to the USA, and then next month it was talks of the world basically shutting down. I was crushed. My landlord still kept charging me despite there being a clause in my lease about acts of God preventing me from caring on with business. Turns out, things like tornados and hurricanes are acts of God, but not a global pandemic that closes down most businesses, schools, and more. I didn’t think my arcade would survive months of paying my lease and new full-time employee with zero money coming in.
Thankfully, one of my most dedicated customers heard me venting about all this and not getting the PPP (Payroll Protection Plan) loan from the SBA and she mentioned to me that that’s literally her job position now at her bank. So I gave her a dollar to put into an account I had opened up with her and her bank and the next run of the PPP loans she gave me advice on how to properly fill these forms out, what info was needed exactly, how to find and quantify all that info, stuff that was way beyond my brain as someone who didn’t get a business degree. We ended up getting the 2nd and also the 3rd run of the PPP loans and I kept the arcade afloat.
I’ve now been open for almost seven and a half years, I’ve met some amazing people, I have been able to bring so much fun and joy to thousands of people’s lives and it has just been an amazing experience overall.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
HA! I should have seen this question just a few minutes ago, I would have saved all that COVID talk for here. Other than the COVID matters, it has been a very interesting road. I have learned a whole lot of what I should make sure is covered in my lease and things I will look for and question when looking for a location. Roof quality being a big one. For the first few years, the roof of my location had leaks almost anytime it rained for more than 10 mins. You probably know this already, but water and computers and electronics do not work well together. I pretty much developed a level of PTSD with rain, I used to love it but then anytime it stormed I would panic at what would happen to the arcade, the mopping I’d have to do, what would have been splashed onto for my VR gear, cleaning out the walls, and so much more.
On a more VR specific side, updates are not a fun thing to deal with. Whether they be Windows updates, VR software updates, or just game updates pushed out by the developers of the games I offer at my arcade, it was always a surprise to see what was now different and what was now broken. Maybe a Windows update released and two of the VR stations wouldn’t have any audio play through the headphones or the TV now. Maybe a game would be patched to fix an audio issue and the next time a player jumps into that game their hands are just stuck in the ground and don’t move. It’s always a surprise to see what technological hiccup comes up next.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I quickly learned that this job is a service job. Many arcades closed because they just hired high school kids that hooked up players to their VR gear and then walked away. Never helped them out with anything, and I saw some reviews say that after they asked for help so many times they just took off their own VR gear and walked out because they didn’t want to stand there confused for another 50 minutes. So at my arcade, I and my employees are very familiar with the games, what to do, where to go, how to change this setting, how to get into a multiplayer match with each other, as well as what games to suggest to players after we ask them a few questions. I’ve noticed that I’m very much a curator of different VR experiences and try to offer something for everyone while also having the classics that most players will enjoy when they arrive.
More recently, I have started to try and learn to program in Unreal Engine 5 so that I can begin to create my own VR gaming experiences that I can offer here at my arcade as well as license out for other arcades to use. I have over seven years of experience of directly seeing players of all kinds of backgrounds, male/female, young/old, gamer/non-gamer, etc… getting into these VR games and seeing what they like, what they dislike, what kinds of tutorials are easy for them to learn, what kinds of games to they like to play, and more. I want to put all of that experience of seeing it all directly in front of me, not just from a study or a report, to use.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Patience. VR is confusing, every game is different, and it can be a scary amount of information thrown at you when you jump into a game you’ve never played using gear you’ve never used. Players young and old can struggle using the controls or grasping a game mechanic and they can get frustrated quickly and then it will snowball from there. Also, when we’re helping players out, we don’t see what they see how they see it. We only see a small fraction of what they see on the TV screens and when we go to help guide their hand through a menu and such, we might have to do that from a direction that isn’t facing that TV. Little kids do not keep their head focused forward and in one direction, they look around constantly, and when they do that means the view we see on the TV is moving and looking away from that menu. So we’re always fighting against that when trying to help people. Also, we get swung at a lot. When someone gets into a boxing game and they accidentally hit their menu button, don’t know how to make it go away, and then we approach them to help them close it, the very second we close that menu they will go right straight back to punching and if our face is still there, we lose our teeth. It can be a lot of help players out and in ways that they grasp it so they can now help themselves out the rest of the time they’re here.
Pricing:
- 30 mins is $25
- 60 mins is $45
- 90 mins is $55
- 120 mins is $65
- Private parties start at around $325
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.digitalworldsvr.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dwvrarcade
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DigitalWorldsVR
