Not Your Father’s Data Center - Gaming and Education

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

On today’s episode, Raymond sits down with Erin Torbiak, General Manager at Addicting Games.Hailing from Alberta, Canada, Erin has had a long career as a developer and is now the general manager of the ever-popular Addicting Games website. The site is a directory of sorts full of quick, engaging games to pass the time, while Erin is also a Full-Stack Developer at TeachMe - a gamifying system to produce educational content for students.Raymond and Erin discuss the road the industry has taken and pay tribute to some of the great games that helped shape the industry where it is today, like Tetris. They look at the future of these gaming capabilities and where education sits in that pile.To learn more about Erin, head to her LinkedIn page here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-torbiak-56415869/ 

If you ask me to tell you what a key, where a key is on a keyboard, I can't tell you, but I can type all day long without looking. Yeah, it's very muscle memory. I don't understand how my fingers know where the L is, but if you ask me what row, what side of the keyboard L is on, I have no idea. Hello, hello. This is Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer, Compass Data Centers, the host of Not Your Father's Data Center. We are joined from the frozen north

out of the great Canadian province of Alberta. Erin, general manager of, I gotta get this right, Addicting Games, owned by Enthusiast Gaming, partnered or buyer of TeachMe, right? Did I get all that right erin teach me was the original startup okay i got it out of order okay teach me was the startup bought by addicting games we bought addicting games you bought addicting games yeah and then addicting games was bought by enthusiast gaming correct and you're the GM for Addicting Games. Yes. All right.

Got it. Excellent. Okay. From there, tell us what you guys do, but tell us what you do after you tell us who you are. Yeah. So, grew up here in Alberta. Started out way in the boonies, down in the prairies, living on a farm, being homeschooled. Did a lot of educational games while being homeschooled, like math blaster, number muncher, stuff like that.

Hold on, Erin. If someone tells you they're from the boonies and they grew up in Alberta, they really mean the boonies. Yeah. I mean, the boonies in Alberta is out there. Our neighbor was a dairy farm. Yeah, yeah, you're out there. Okay, all right. Yeah. Got it, got it.

But we didn't farm though. We only had two cows. Only two. Okay. So you're growing up in southern Alberta on the prairie, homeschooled. Go ahead. We got you. Moved into the city around grade two. My parents actually ran an educational toy store. They were really passionate about it. So I remember I'd go. That was basically my school from grade two to grade six. I'd go into the store, do my homework, play with the things. I don't know. Yeah. Adjusted to normal school, went to university in Lethbridge, transferred to University of Alberta halfway through because I got a job up here at Syncrude, a big oil company, and then finished. And that's

kind of how I started at Teach Me for a summer job writing math questions. It's supposed to be programming, but I ended up writing word problems for the math questions, like how many pizza cats are in the attic if two of them leave, stuff like that. So was this while you were at university? You were doing summer jobs in the university? Got it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Went back after I finished school and went along for the ride with my two bosses. So all those questions I got wrong in school where it was if a train is traveling 60 miles an hour and it's got 200 miles to get to Edmonton and it leaves an hour ago, how far away is it from Edmonton? That was you? At least on mathgames.com, yeah. Yeah, that was you. Up to grade six.

Okay, I just want to know who I had to blame because I got all those wrong. It's okay. As soon as we hit grade five, I have to pull out who I had to blame because I got all those wrong. Okay. It's okay. As soon as we hit like grade five, I have to pull up my calculator on the website anyways. Okay, good. All right. All right. So you're writing questions. You're doing that through school.

What's your degree in? Computer science. Computer science. All right. You graduated with a computer science degree and then what? Went back to teach me as a developer. Back then, we had just gone through Y Combinator as a company. So luckily I didn't have to go live in hacker houses in Redwood City because I was doing my last semester at school. So I came back on right after that.

So lots of funding and connections, lots of conferences, funding. And then my bosses, Bill Camusi and Reese Jones, had actually built up AddictingGames.com way back in the early aughts and sold it to Nickelodeon for a couple million bucks. And we reacquired it when Defy Gaming kind of went under. So now we went from a three-person educational startup to now a four times bigger recreational gaming company with employees in Los Angeles.

And that's its current iteration, Addicting Games. Yeah, Addicting Games. Yeah. So it was just a bigger company, more employees. So we kind of put TeachMe underneath that and started integrating educational and recreational together, which was, yeah, there's a lot of policies that needed to be made, a lot of things, managerial things. So I kind of ended up helping with that, just trying to pull things together, which was, yeah, there's a lot of policies that needed to be made, a lot of things, managerial things. So I kind of ended up helping with that, just trying to pull things together, keep things moving smoothly because the process of addicting games kind of going under was a little rough. So just getting the employees comfortable, getting the products moving again.

And then once we kind of hit our stride and we're smooth sailing, we got acquired by Enthusiast Gaming for $35 million. All right. I know who to call when I need a loan. Got it. Okay. So Enthusiast Gaming's acquisition was when? 2021. Okay. So still fairly recent. Quarter to four. Yeah. All right. And you said you introduced the phrase recreational gaming so so i'm gonna for me well we're gonna get really deep into my gaming experience it goes from pong all the way up to miss pac-man i mean i've

got yeah i've got a very deep gaming background i mean you know pong was it when i was when i started that was all there was so yes again dating myself at my house we were the popular house because the pong game in most of my friends houses the the little dials that you move the paddles were on the console so you had to hunch over the console and everybody had to hunch by the console and turn the dials and we were late to the game and we actually had a cord that stuck out of our console and your dial was detached from the console so you could sit back on the couch and do it. And that was fancy. Like the first controller. That's right. It was a controller

and it was very complicated and had a dial on it. So even I could function with it. I could operate it. Yes. So I just want you to have, as we get into talking about gaming, I just want you to know I've got incredible street cred with that kind of experience. So you probably won't lose me at all in any of this. And then I graduated from there, of course, to Space Invaders and Asteroids. And then, of course, into the Pac-Man. You know, I mean, come on. And then my gaming stopped. And then I enter back into the world of gaming.

And somehow Super Mario and first-person shooters and the world is just taken over. So anyway, all of that. Tell me, though, between educational gaming and recreational gaming, kind of talk me through both sides. Talk me through what you guys do. Yeah, so Teach Me underneath, we have mathgames.com. That's kind of more like an interactive online textbook. We do Common Core curriculum in the States.

We have 20 to 30 other curriculums. Some provinces do their own thing. States, provinces. Got it. We do some other countries. We speak Canadian here. Postal codes, zip codes. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, we actually wrote a math games API. So game developers can make games with math as the central. So we have like a Southern game where you have to find the right bubble with the right

number for the equation above. Students can do their assignments by playing games. So our school districts, the customers for teachme.com? For the first three years, we actually didn't even have advertisements on the site. We added them and nobody got overly upset either. We've been really careful about partnering with companies that do KidSafe ads. And then we put up subscriptions

that were more for teachers, teacher priced, and we've just kind of gotten into doing districts and schools in the last few years. We actually signed the entire Providence of Nunavut last year. All right, okay. So Providence-wide, they're running Teach Me games? Yeah.

Got it, all right, all right. Yeah. So most of thewide, they're running Teach Me Games. Yep. Got it. All right. All right. Yeah. So most of the customers then are one-off teachers saying, hey, I want my kids exposed to this, or this is a good way for them to learn this. That's how most of the customer base was built? Yeah. And we also offer parent subscriptions as well for just kind of supplementary practice. And is that, did you grow up on the school side or the educational side? I guess that's a better way to say it, isn't it? Is that your background was the educational side or were

you both educational and recreational? I was doing both. Yeah. I was definitely playing like Pitfall and Oregon Trail at the same time as doing these educational games. And then, yeah, played games all through kind of childhood, played a lot of GTA 3 Unsupervised at a very young age. I don't know if that should have been allowed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if I log into some of these games where they do them in stadiums and stuff, what is your username, right? And what does your avatar look like?

Usually Torbodo. Okay. Avatars, they really vary across games these days. My PlayStation 1's a duck. Okay. Yeah. Torbodo. Torbodo. All right. Play off your last name. Got it. Okay. Avatars, they really vary across games these days. My PlayStation 1's a duck. Okay. Tor Bodo. All right. Play off your last name.

Got it. Okay. Got it. All right. All right. So the recreational side, how does that tie into enthusiast gaming? So under the Teach Me side, there's still TypeRacer.com, which was a very popular type racing game. Yep.

Type racing. And so you get in a room with five to 10 other people and you type the same sentence and you see who types it faster. So we acquired that back before AG and it hadn't had an update since, I don't know, 2007 maybe? It needed one. It needed one.

So we did a big redesign. We're really worried about like spooking the community because they're, I don't know, stenographers and keyboard nerds, but it went over really well. And then it started kind of getting picked up by- Wait, wait, wait. So the people who race are like court recorders and stuff like that? They race to reach each other? People that are professional typers? Yeah. So you'll see most people can only type, like 120 is pretty good a few people are like just starting to reach like the 200 word per minute level on oh my goodness but stenographer is going to hit like

300 so i remember when we acquired it i'd played it back in the day and i was like who are these people that are typing 300 it's not yeah yeah possible yeah it's because they use a lot of shortcuts and stuff ah they're stenographers doing shortcuts yeah yeah all right i'm dating myself mavis speaking i don't even know if you know who Mavis Beacon is. No, I grew up on Mavis Beacon. Okay. All right. All right. I'm not that old. I'm so happy not to be old. My parents really believed that typing would be important in my future. So I was doing it like we had a Pentium one and I was doing Mavis Beacon. Yeah. So here's the thing I can't understand, Erin. If you ask me to tell you what a key, where a key is on a keyboard, I can't tell you.

But I can type all day long without looking. Yeah, it's very muscle memory. I don't understand how my fingers know where the L is. But if you ask me what row, what side of the keyboard L is on, I have no idea. I couldn't begin to tell you. You could give me 10 guesses and I wouldn't get it right. But if you ask me to type the word lab rat, I'm fine to type the first letter. I just, I don't understand how that works. I think it's the same for like T9 for cell phones.

Like I feel the previous generation could probably tell you where each number is. But if you ask me what my passcode is, I'm like, I don't know, it's a shape. I couldn't tell you the numbers. I have to play it out. Yeah, yeah, you're just drawing the image, right? Yeah, it's just muscle memory.

Yeah, and the same way, and like numbers on the keyboard or just, I don't know. Yeah. I don't get it. I had 120 words a minute. I think my Mavis Beacon high was about 40. So it's a good thing that I don't type for a living. It's a little bit below average. Yeah. I'm below average. It's not the first time I've heard I was below average here. Just so you know, I'm used to it. I've gotten comfortable with it. All right. So, so we the educational part down. I got to how that works. I got what we're doing. I love the idea of type racing. I'm actually going to go home and Google that. That just sounds because I can go in and be below average. Talk to me about the recreational side. Yeah. So recreational side, we acquired Addicting Games and Shockwave.com. Shockwave.com is actually

a strange cohort. It's women in their 40s to 60s. A lot of reception. It's like daily jigsaws, daily word problems. And then Addicting Games is the younger crowd. It's like quick, easy games that you can play for, I don't know, 30 seconds, get a high score, go play another one. And then we also run iogames.space, which is the new web games. So we kind of went through like console games, web games were big for a bit, like addicting games. And then we went to apps, right? And I think kids got annoyed with apps

because you need permissions to download every single game, right? Yeah, you got to go ask mom and dad. Yeah, every time you need a download, yeah. Yeah, so we kind of are coming back to web games. And so IO games are just quick games that you can get in and play online with other people in your web browser. So they're still doing it.

They're still doing it on their phone, but they're doing it on a browser. On their. Yeah, a lot of them are still mobile friendly and then they'll make apps if you can get the apps and you can play with the same people. But yeah, it's kind of where gaming is going, which is cool that we've kind of gone full circle and what we were doing in the early aughts is coming back. It's all back around again. Yeah, yeah. That's a lot of how it goes. That's for sure. So I got to admit, I know our data centers run lots of big, crazy online gaming things. And you already talked about the consoles. And then we went to the consoles. And then recently last,

I know I'm not supposed to talk about dates, but last week it was Facebook came out with their new headset. I guess I want to say VR. Apple. Yeah, that's what it was. Apple, yeah. Competing with Facebook. That's right. And so are those, are there games in there? Are they in the headsets or are those just interfaces for the game? The team currently working on Apes.io, our latest game, actually did do some development on the VR

headsets back in the day, but they're not quite where we need them to be. And not a lot of kids have them, right? They're thousands of dollars. They're expensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What Addicting Games has really gone for is accessibility. So Apes.io, our latest first-person battle royale, you can run it on a Chromebook, which is what kids get in school, right? And that's the same approach that we were doing for math games. Like it should run on any device that a kid has access to.

So just really aiming for accessibility. They don't need massive graphics processors and cooling device. They don't need all that crazy stuff. Let's make it where anyone can run it is what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. I'm with you on our business. People talk a lot in the data center space.

You'll hear people talk a lot about edge computing. Oh, the use case for edge computing is we're going to have all of these augmented reality and virtual reality interactions with the world. And it's going to start with gaming. It's going to take over everything. And to your point, I just don't think that we're there from a bandwidth perspective, or we're there from the network, meaning bandwidth specifically,

or there from a processor standpoint, right? I just don't think we have ubiquity of the processing power to do the things that you need to do. Not that we're not going to get there, but we're not there yet. Yeah. Like even now, like your web browser runs pretty slow once in a while.

Like you barely surf the web at amazing speeds with a device that's a few years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you said, okay, we got these super accessible, play on any device, happy for everybody, what's next? A lot of it is just building these portal websites, new games, building the communities along those. And yeah, we're basically a game studio that does educational and recreational games,

integrating with Luminosity, the team under Enthusiast Gaming, doing some esports competitions with typing. Apes is competitive enough that it will hopefully get used in a tournament in the near future. And... Are tournaments, are there more than one game that gets played in tournaments? Do they have multiple disciplines, or are they just playing one game? Usually it's just one game. We were thinking of almost doing

kind of a company Olympics type thing, competing across games that we own. But yeah, lots of streamers will use kind of, I forget what they call them, but just like loader fillers. So they'll go do a few typing races while they wait to get into a lobby for Call of Duty or something that they're actually streaming. So a lot of the games we have kind of filled those little niches. I got you. It's a place to hang out in between some other interaction you're having online.

I got you. Yeah, because we have a lot of casual games and Apes is one of our more competitive ones, but Little Big Snake, it's a fancy slither very cute very fun to play i waste a lot of time on it a lot of people play that in between their loading times as well little big snake yeah all right i don't know it you gotta gotta coach me up on it what are we doing on little big snake did you ever play slither it's kind of like snake you eat orbs you try to like cut off bigger snakes and then eat their orbs. It's like that, but it's very pretty and has, I don't know, pets and stuff.

So coming to the future, we may see an enthusiast gaming decathlon or something. Eight or ten of your games all competing against people play all of them and how their scores add up. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, I think that'd be really neat. Enthusiast gaming decathlon. Yeah, I like it. I like it. All right.

Well, my friends in alberta doing gaming or you're in the oil business so you're kind of your two choices right and you've done both yeah oil business sucked i remember i didn't get a computer for the first two weeks they just gave me a book on sql and they're like read this like oh nice yeah thanks yeah yeah and then using like windows i always want to know about database queries. Thank you. Like I don't already. Yeah. And then Windows XP in like 2012 using Net 2.0, which was 10 years outdated and just reinventing the wheel and not being able to for security reasons and it was very slow moving. And my bosses at the end, they're like, I hope we haven't put you off of programming. Like maybe you should try like a startup or something more modern because we know you really didn't enjoy it here. You did what? You didn't like the manual and SQL? I can't understand that. Yeah, I know. How did they know? That's kind of interesting.

I know that I think about it. So, so we're sort of like you here in Texas about every other person works in the oil business here. Yeah. And it is a feast or famine business, right? Yeah. When business is good, they can't hire fast enough and life's uncontrollable. Business is terrible. Laying people off and it's awful. It's a very cyclical business.

Very market sensitive business. We compare Houston to Calgary and Austin to Edmonton. Yeah, yeah, okay. It's very similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, very good. Except that you guys are the cold versions of both of those cities. Yeah. For sure.

It makes you stronger. That's right, that's right. Hardier, hardier people, that's right, much hardier. Yeah, I bike commute all winter and it's great. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Nobody in Dallas bike commutes. Nobody. No, you can't. Yeah. It's funny. So we have people from our Canadian offices come here and they'll check into the hotels around the office and they're like, hey, I'm four tenths of a mile away. I'll just walk. And then they walk outside the hotel and they're like, there's no sidewalks. There'ss there's no way to walk it's like no you can walk down the freeway but that

you're gonna get killed yeah it's just we're just not set up for it i found it very annoying when i was in houston i was like you can't go anywhere like it says it's an hour walk even though it's only a few kilometers like you just yeah yeah there's no walk it yeah that's exactly right the concrete jungle all right give us your screen name one more time. Torboto. Torboto. So the next time I log into, what'd you call it? Apes? Apes.io, yeah. Apes.io, I can look for Torboto and get destroyed in whatever game I'm playing.

Yeah. Without a doubt. I'm a little rusty on shooters these days. I haven't played since like early Fortnite days. We played a lot and my partner was actually top ranked in Canada for a little rusty on shooters these days i haven't played since like early fortnight days we played a lot and my partner was actually top ranked in canada for a little while and then the kids just uh i don't know we couldn't keep up yeah yeah the kids take it over you mentioned oregon trail i played that but that's been years i cannot remember how long i played oregon trail but that was you consider it an educational game to some degree i would say yeah

yeah because it helps you understand the history and the in the process and all of that for sure Would you consider it an educational game? To some degree, I would say. Yeah, yeah. Because it helps you understand the history and the process and all of that, for sure. Like resource management? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I see it on lists every once in a while. I'm like, Oregon Trail? I'm like, yeah, I guess I learned some things from it.

Yeah, I guess I learned something. Yeah, yeah. There's actually a pretty neat remake on, I think, Apple Arcade a little while ago. So I replayed it last year. What I'm interested in seeing, and I guess my generation were sort of the first video games were a central part of our lives, right? Arcades were a thing. And I'm interested to see how they're remarketing

those brands back to us, right? I mean, I already mentioned, you know, Pac-Man or whatever, but you see, you get these, I saw somebody the other day, they had a console that was about twice the size of their iPhone, and it had 250 games on the little handheld. And, but they were all, forgive the term, classic games. They were, you know, Pac-Man and Asteroids

and all these games. I guess they just had figured out some way to give you sufficient interface on the little handheld device to play all of them. I actually got my nephew some for Christmas because I was like, that's rad. And it's not a phone, so it's a little different, but yeah, like I still play a lot of Tetris.

There's a version on the Switch where you like compete against each other. Okay, greatest game ever. There's more rows, yeah. Yeah, greatest game ever. Tetris will live forever. Yeah, it's the greatest game ever. What I love about Tetris is it just keeps going, right?

You don't have to stop. So that's one of my all-time favorites. You had to watch the movie, yes? Come on. No, I actually haven't. You're in the business and you haven't watched the movie, the Tetris movie? I'm behind on my video game movies. Yeah, I think it's on Apple Plus.

Okay, I have that. But it's the history of the Russian guy who wrote it. Oh, right. And how it became a commercial business and then how it got you know you hear the it tells you the background story of how the business how the game got out of russia yeah because he didn't get credit for it for a long time right that's yeah you got it yeah don't give away okay listeners blame erin if she's to give you spoiler alert yeah spoiler alert hold on uh get online and blame Torbo something.

What is it? Torbatron? Torboto. Torboto. Yeah, that wasn't me that gave away the end. Yeah, no, that's right. He didn't get credit. Because it was still very much closed off communist Russia when he wrote the game. And he did a deal with some dude in England. And then that guy lied and cheated about it. And then they did a deal with a guy in the United States.

And then he did a deal with Japan. This was right when Nintendo was becoming a thing. And so it tells you the whole story. And it ends happily. So it's not too bad a spoiler alert.

You've got to go watch it. Well, our next episode with you will be reviewing Tetris the Movie. I'll also watch the new Mario one. I promised my nephews I'd take them to that.

Yeah, I haven't gotten that one. The new Mario movie. And what's the next one that's coming out? There's another video game. Yeah, there is one. The Pac-Man one was terrible. Can we just say that? It was awful. Oh, I didn't see that one either. Yeah, you skip it. It was horrible. It was a couple years ago. It was awful. Don't waste your time. Not even worth it. Okay. It was awful. Don't watch it. Oh, I think they're doing a Zelda one, aren't they? They're doing a Zelda one. And Tron. That's another one. Tron. Awful. Oh, yeah. Should have never been made into a movie.on was terrible i remember being okay that was way back in high school though yeah that was this what goes way back that's for sure yeah tron the movie was awful i'm just gonna fall down on the side of we shouldn't make movies about video games yeah

most of them don't have enough content that's the moral of our podcast today if we've got to come up with a signature line that's it don't turn your video game That's the moral of our podcast today. If we've got to come up with a signature line, that's it. Don't turn your video game into a movie. To be fair, I feel very strongly about that, so I'm not even upset. Yeah, yeah, excellent. Well, Erin, it's been fun chatting. We'll just say this, that video games are certainly, because people, if I get asked, they were a part of my life from the beginning.

They're great, whether they're teaching kids stuff or just providing entertainment. They're a huge part of our lives. They certainly part of the digital infrastructure, which is all about what we do for a living. And we're grateful to get to laugh about them and chat with you about them and meet somebody behind the scenes who makes these things possible. And we're so grateful you joined us. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.