Search Engine - How do you make an addictive video game?

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

This episode will change how you look at games. We talk to Ben Brode, the designer behind Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, about how a creative person learns to make the things they love, and about the secret ideas hiding in games as simple as rock-papers-scissors. If you'd like to support the show, head to our newsletter. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. Each week we answer a question we have about the world, no question too big, no question too small. This week, how do you make an addictive video game? Like, addictive to me, personally. I will interrogate the person who made the addictive iPhone game that ruined my life. That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground.

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Good morning. I'm so excited to talk to you. I feel like I know you from watching a million videos where you explain meta-changes. But this is different. Very exciting. I'm going to read you the intro I wrote, and it's pretty short, and it'll give you a sense of where I'm coming into with this. Sounds great.

Okay. So in December 2015, I read this essay by a writer named Max Reed. It was called Milling Time. Are you familiar with this essay? No. Oh, interesting. Okay, so Max was describing this period of unemployment he found himself in. He'd had all these goals about what he wanted to do with the free time,

in between jobs. but then, as often happens, he did not use the time the way you planned. Instead, he found this video game called Harthstone. Max spent his entire unemployment in Harthstone. He described this game as incredibly addictive, incredibly time-sucking experience. He loved it, although it was also complicated.

The essay ends with Max getting a job. The unstated implication is that he maybe could have spent his time better that probably, now that he's rejoining the workforce, he will put the game away. Max publishes this little piece at the end of December 2015. I read the piece. And I think, Heartstone, addictive, time-sucking video game. I should install this immediately.

So I do on my phone, and I fall all the way down the hole. Like, I love this game. The matches are really fast. You can play a game in the time it takes to walk from my desk to the bathroom. Then I can sit in the bathroom and not come out while people start to wonder if maybe I'm seriously ill. I played Hardstone for a few years when I was stressed, when I was on a call, when I couldn't sleep when I woke up. And then I finally quit. It wasn't because I was sick of wasting

my time. It was because the guy who ran the game left. He was in charge of tweaking the game, keeping it fresh. And after he left, it was still good. It was just like subtly, perceptibly, a little bit different, just different enough that I felt like I could quit. So I did. And then, this past spring, a friend texted me. Did you hear the guy who quit Harthstone made a new game? This one's called Marvel Snap. Very similar. genre, but with Marvel characters. The games are a little different. They're a bit faster. The design choices are a little different.

But it was that same, like, blissful, time-wasting experience. I fell back down the hole. I have not gotten out. Wow. So I have other friends who play or have played. We text about it. We're always a little embarrassed about how much time we were spending on this. Some of these people make things I love.

Like, they write pieces or TV shows. The guy who writes a TV show said, yes, he would have a new project sooner if Marvel Snap had never existed. And so the first time lately, I began to wonder, who is the person who is stealing all of our time from us? And how do you make video games addictive in the first place? So can you tell me your name and what you do? Yeah, sure.

Hey, I'm Ben Brode. I'm the chief development officer at Second Dinner. I help make video games. And you are responsible with your team for creating Marvel Snap. That's correct, yeah. How often do you yourself play Marvel? snap. Every day.

And would you consider yourself addicted to the game that you have made? You know, I just, I don't love that word. I don't think I, no, I'm not addicted. I play it because I want to make sure I stay up to date with what's going on, and I enjoy it. Sorry, what you said is already interesting. Because addicted is a funny word that we have one word that we use both for like a relationship to heroin and potato chips and video games. Yeah, right.

What word would you use for, like, when you can't stop playing a game? Like, what do you say when you have that relationship to a game? That's a good... I don't know. I know that, like, what we call it on the other side as designers. What do you call it? We call it sticky. Sticky.

Yeah, this game's sticky. It's like, you know, you can't stop playing it. You want to keep playing. On the player side, I just say, man, I'm really loving this game. I can't stop playing it. And do you ever have, with any game, not just your own, but do you ever have the experience of, like, I want to stop playing it, or I should stop playing it,

or I should be doing something else, but this game is too sticky? I've had that with, like, you know, last night I was on TikTok for too long or whatever, you know what I mean? Yes. But when it ends, when the session ends, I'm like, you know, in hindsight, I would have preferred not to spend three hours on TikTok today.

But while I was doing it, I was enjoying myself. You know what I mean? If you're really not enjoying yourself in a game, it really can't be that sticky for you. You're not going to keep going back to the thing that you don't enjoy. You've got to have something you're enjoying that's keeping you coming back. I just want to step in here to say something that did not occur to me to say in this conversation with Ben, which is that for me, there's something different about the way Ben's games grab my brain

versus the way TikTok hijacks my brain. When I fall into a TikTok hole, the feeling I get from it, I wouldn't call it enjoyment. I wouldn't call it addiction exactly. All I know is that when I come out of the trance, I'm not thrilled I was in it, which is actually not how I feel about games. Do I wish I read more Russian novels with my free time? Sure. But when I'm finished playing a game, I don't feel tricked.

My attention doesn't feel abused. I feel pretty good. What do I get? What do any of us get from playing a game? I've played them my whole life. I did not realize until recently, I could not answer that question. But I hoped that by talking to Ben, maybe I'd get a better idea. So what is just your relationship to games?

Do you like playing games as much as you like designing games? Oh, it's changed over time. So I do believe that designing games is more fun than playing games. It is incredibly fun to design games. Yeah, building games is just the most fun thing that I do. And when was the first time, like, how old were you when you thought, like, oh, this is what I want to do with my life? Like, when did you know that? Oh, the first time.

So it's interesting. There's like, you know, as children, we often say ridiculous jobs. at different times in my life, I've said I wanted to be a professional clown, an astronaut, you know, stuff that like kids often say, I guess. But when I played Warcraft 2, I remember having the thought that I would love to be a level designer at Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment. If you never heard of it, I'll explain it a bit more later.

All you need to know for now is that when Ben was a kid, Blizzard was known as a pretty legendary video game company. They made a series of games called Warcraft. These were computer games since iPhone games did not yet exist. I can't prove the next sentence I'm going to say. Putting it in this episode may well ruin several days of the fact-checking team's life. Sorry, Sean, sorry, Santa. But here's a statement.

I believe the invention of the internet might mean that my generation of adults contains the most people who do jobs that did not exist when they were kids. Social media manager, viral TikTok personality, dropshipper, podcaster. By definition, not a single child in the 1980s wanted to be, any of those things when they grew up. Ben Brode, one of the most brilliant, successful designers of mobile video games. When he was a kid, the iPhone did not exist. When he was born, neither did the Game Boy. But weirdly, the desire to make little games people played when they were supposed to be doing something else, that desire still found a way to express itself. In the 1980s and 90s,

school kids often had to use Texas Instruments calculators, the Ti-82s and Ti-83s. These were graphing calculators, they had little pixel screens that were supposed to let you draw graphs and run rudimentary math computer programs. But kids, in my generation, used them to play very crudely programmed mobile games. I used to play one called Drug Wars, which for seventh graders would simulate the experience of being a drug kingpin by buying kilos at low prices and selling them at higher ones. Ben, as a kid, got interested in these calculator games. They were being traded by students from calculator to calculator using link cables, if you downloaded one of those games onto your calculator,

you could actually go into its source code and tweak it, which is what Ben liked to do. I started getting really into making games for the TI to Calculator. I started out just optimizing other games to make them faster and run more efficiently, and then eventually started designing my own games, and then I was on the water polo team in high school, and so I would travel to the schools and trade my games.

And I remember very distinctly the moment where I went to a school, I'd never been to before, and someone tried to trade me my own game back to me because it had spread throughout the region. Oh, wow. Because enough kids were playing it and enjoying it. That was like, you know, my first kind of foray into making games for other people. And what was the game that you made that they tried to trade back to you? So I made the most optimized version of Snake for the T82.

It ran fast than every other version of Snake. I called it Fast Snake. And that was the one that I think spread the fraud. I also made a bunch of, like, cheating apps. like, hey, if you need to answer to all these science questions, there's a bunch of menus and you can go look up the answers to stuff.

And for you, it was just, like, it felt powerful to solve a problem and then to solve a problem and to have other people find your solution useful? It was the act of creation. I wanted to build something. My dad was a software engineer,

and so I thought, oh, maybe I'll be a programmer, like my dad. So I went to UCI, University of California at Irvine, for computer science after high school. I got in, I like to say,

on a step dance scholarship, which is not like entirely true, but it's a little bit true. I performed a routine in the admissions office, and my generally low GPA and SAT scores were overshadowed by my, by my dance routine, and I ended up getting accepted to this school and only this school. How, how, how, what was the chain of events that led to you being in the admissions office and having the opportunity to dance for them? Yeah, okay. So I, I went to school in Culver City, like L.A. County.

And so Irvine is like not that far. And they had a program where prospective students could stay over one night at UCI with a freshman and attend classes and really get the feel of the school, decided if they would want to go there. And so I did that and I finished the program. It was really fun. I was waiting for my mom to pick me up and she picked me up right in front of the admin building. The admissions office is right there. I was just sitting at a bench waiting for my mom.

I looked over. I saw the admissions office and I was kind of curious because I really enjoyed it. I went in there. I said, hey, you know, I applied here. What are my chances to get in? And they said, well, what school did you apply to? I was like, oh, the computer science school. And they said, well, that's the hardest one to get into.

And I was like, well, my GPA wasn't that good. I had a 2.96. And they're like, oh, what was your SAT score? With that GPA, you need a 1490 to even be considered. I was like, well, not 1490. And I was like, how much does my essay matter at this point? And they were like, well, at this point, it matters a whole lot. I was like, well, you know, I was an Eagle Scout and I did this, and that.

And I was on the step dance team. And they were like, what's the step dance team? And I was like, oh, let me show you. And so I broke out into my step dance routine that I had been practicing on the team in my high school. And the whole office stopped working. And they all look up like, what is happening right now? And I went to go sit down. And while I was waiting for my mom, the person I performed for came up to me and said, hey, I'm really looking forward to reading your essay.

Oh, my God. I remember her name. It was like she had a little mainplate. And when they send you the application, it's signed by one of the admissions officers. It was her. She read my essay and accepted me into the school. So you danced your way into computer. I danced by way.

What a particular kind of confidence. That's really amazing. Yeah. So that is the improbable story of how one of America's best video game designers got into computer science school. The kind of goofy, improbable form of problem-solving that honestly you'd normally expect to see

in a 90s adventure video game. After a few ads, how Ben gets to the next step his career, designing a very strange, very unlikely to succeed video game. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients keep more of what they earn, Vanguard is here to help you with that. Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds.

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Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. So good, so good. Springstiles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now, and they're up to 60% off. Stock up and save on Rag and Bone,

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shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Welcome back to the show. So Ben Brod step dances his way into UC Irvine. And in the year 2000, he arrives on campus and quickly learns something unusual is happening there. There are these sort of on-campus incubators where people with ideas for businesses are trying to start them and they are having students work for them. The students aren't paid, but they get stock in the company if it succeeds. So students at UC Irvine are working at these like student newspaper style companies.

In his sophomore year, Ben decides to join one of these companies on campus, which when he joined it was dedicated to making a video game whose concept, I have to say, makes almost no sense at all. It's supposed to be a big online multiplayer game people would play on their cell phones, but crucially, this game was designed during the era where people's cell phones were still basically actual phones, like with number pads. This is before most people had any internet on their phone. So I don't know who the audience for this game was, but it was on those Nokia phones that had Snake.

Oh, I remember those phones, yeah. You could pay for like an internet subscription, but you couldn't go on like a web browser. This was so you could send an email or something. But you could connect to a web server and play a text-based game. Okay. So we were making this enormously ambitious game.

None of us had made a video game before. None of us had made a cell phone. phone app of any kind before or web app or anything like that. So we were like very underqualified to do this. And when I got in there, I was like, hey, guys, this is ridiculous. Let's do something easier first. And so we kind of pivoted away from this enormous project into just making a trivia game. And there was one guy who joined us. His name was Omar Gonzalez. He had started the game development club at UCI. He joined us. He was the only person who did any actual work at this company. I mean, everyone else was just like a poser. This guy was the real deal. He went in and he basically

built the whole app himself. At the time, I was working at a pizza place. And I negotiated the deal between these two companies where the person who won the trivia contest each night would get a free pizza delivered to their house. And we were like posting things all around that school, trying to get people to play this game. And Omar's girlfriend won every night. And she just got free pizza every night while we were running this promotion. Was he like slipping her the answers or was she just unusually good at trivia? We just didn't write enough trivia questions. So she got all then it was like, I just answer the questions

again and again. So we were going to start a new thing, but Omar left, and we were screwed because without Omar, there was nobody else who did any work. And he left and went to work for Blizzard.

He worked as a night crew game tester from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. Okay, so I promised before I'd explain what Blizzard software was, there's some alternate version of Earth where instead of being on search engine, Ben Brode is on fresh air,

because video games are huge. industry, they make more money than music and movies combined. And Ben Brod is one of the best game designers. Me explaining Blizzard Software, the place where you got to start, is a bit like explaining MGM Studios or Paramount or something, but I'm going to do it anyway because in this version of the world, a lot of people just don't care about video games, and I think that's fine. For a long stretch of time, maybe 1994 to 2005, Blizzard just made the best games. And actually more than that. Video games in the last 20 years were a place where new genres were being concocted all the time. Imagine movies before there was ever a thriller or a sci-fi epic. Blizzard wasn't

just making great games. They were often inventing or perfecting genres. When I was a kid, when Ben was a kid, the big Blizzard game was this series called Warcraft. The early Warcraft games were in a genre called Real Time Strategy. These games don't really exist in a big way anymore, but they were hypnotic. The way the game was a lot. games worked, you had a god's eye view of a map. And on that map, you could build little troops, archers, footmen, maybe some catapults. You trained your troops, you built a little base, you mind gold to pay for all of it. And somewhere else on the map, shrouded in a fog you could not see, your opponent, often a real person with a dial-up modem, was doing the same thing.

Building their base, training their troops, planning their attack on you. If you trained a bunch of archers and they had a bunch of flying griffins, you'd shoot them out of the sky and win. But if they had a bunch of heavy foot soldiers, they'd storm your base and you'd lose. Blizzard made Warcraft and Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. In the early 2000s, when Ben was in college, Blizzard was in its heyday. What he did not realize, and what, frankly, I find very strange

is that for some reason the Blizzard offices were on his college campus. And now, his friend was working there. Then couldn't believe it. I was like, hold up. Blizzard is here. It was literally on UCI campus. They had a building on campus. That's where Blizzard was.

Really? And yeah, I obviously have an enormous fan of Blizzard games, like WorkRef 3, one of my all-time favorite games. I was playing it until 4 a.m. basically, every night anyway. I was like, hey, look, man, that sounds like the best job being the world. I would love to do that. I had just dropped out of school. Turns out of someone with my gym,

GPNST scores really shouldn't have been accepted. Dance is not enough. And I was working at this pizza place. And in Irvine, everything shuts down at 9 o'clock. But lunchtime for the night crew is 10 o'clock because they were 7 p.m. before him. And so there just didn't have many options. They ate at like Carl's Jr. every day. So my buddy Omar would call me and be like, hey, dude, is there any way to get pizza at 10 o'clock?

And I was like, listen, I'll shut down the restaurant. I'll take the last order out of here after I leave, and I'll bring it over to you guys at Blizzard. So I would deliver pizzas. I wasn't a pizza delivery guy, but I would deliver these pizzas to Blizzard to see the office and to meet the people there. And so like a bunch of times in a row, I would just come over and just meet the night crew. Then a spot opened up on the night crew and I applied for it. And because I'd like met them all through delivering pizzas, I got the job. And that was my first job in the games industry. And so wait, so night crew, is it basically like you're staying up all night playing video games and finding bugs and reporting them?

That's exactly right. One of the things I did on World Warcraft was I was one of the environment leads. I had to run into every wall of every building to make sure the collision worked correctly. That's not what people are doing when they're playing World Warcraft. They're having fun, achieving their goals. There's no goals. My character's not surviving past today's tests. It's just looking for seams on the ground, right?

You're like the building inspector for the fun theme park that you were playing in. Yeah, right. And would one like to design. But you're enjoying it because you're just closer to the thing you love than if you weren't in the building. Yeah. And just like the culture, you know, the category of people who were working the night crew was just great. And so what happens from there? Like, what's the next run on the ladder?

So they would often hire people into design positions from quality assurance. So I watched some of my friends move from QA to design roles. And one of my jobs in QA was testing the Mac version of the Warcraft 3 editor. So the thing about the original Warcraft games, the games had literal maps. Like, you're building your army, the guy over there is building his army, but you're on a map. Maybe one of the maps has a big river in the middle of it. Maybe another map is ringed by high impassable mountains. Playing on different maps was a way to keep the competition more interesting, and what was

cool about the Warcraft games is that they started to ship with their own map-making tools. So even a non-video game designer could make their own maps, upload them to the internet, and allow other people to try them out. Ben was working at Blizzard testing their games by night, but as a hobby on the side, he also started using their map designer to draw his own maps. And he found out he was really good at it. Ben's maps started to become popular on the internet.

Started really getting into it. I made a lot of War III maps. I made maps and posted them to websites that were so popular that I would be recognized when I queued up for a game in Warcraft 3, people would be like, oh, you're that guy. Really? I made a bunch of maps. Yeah, it was...

I was, like, well-known in the mapmaking community in War III. And then actually, Blizzard took notice and made one of my maps a official map of the week. And I got to watch them kind of, like, remake my map in a professional way with, like, professional sounds and stuff. And it was, it was pretty fun. Okay, so you're seeing some people get, like, the spaceship is taking them up to design. And you make these maps, they notice the maps. Is that, do they then move you up? No.

So I applied to be a designer on StarCraft 2. And I made a map. I did a bunch of work. I was very proud of my work to show off what I could do in the editor and things. And I remember a moment. And I believe this is the moment I truly became a game designer. I was in an interview with Rob Parto. He was the chief creative officer of Blizzard.

And he said, hey, are you playing any fun RTS games? He's like, oh, yeah, I'm playing Rise of Legends right now. It's really fun. I'm really enjoying it. And he goes, oh, what do you like about that game? And I was like, oh, I really like this. And I'm like, this unit's super cool. And I love that they do this.

And he goes, how would you make that game better? And I was like, I have no idea. I had never thought about that. That was not a thought I ever had while enjoying a video game was what would I do to improve on this incredibly great game? It just didn't cross my mind. And from that moment on, I stopped really enjoying video games the same way.

Like, I imagine movie directors, when they're watching a movie, aren't really losing themselves in the film. They're like analyzing like, oh, why did they do this shot? Oh, that's interesting. Maybe I would do that differently. They're just like they're in the craft of, the thing as opposed to just losing themselves in the thing. How would you make it better?

Anybody who makes creative work professionally started out as someone who enjoyed that sort of thing first. Directors were kids who watched movies. That question, how would you make it better? That's the first door, the hardest one, really, that you have to walk through, to go from enjoyer of to maker of. Ben couldn't answer that question, and so he didn't get the job he wanted, but he was smart enough to notice how important. important the question was, and how it mattered that he couldn't answer it. Instead of getting the job

he wanted, he got a promotion working at another part of the company that would not have sounded too fun to anyone but a video game obsessive. He was now working in promotion, meaning his job was to play the games, take screenshots of the gameplay, and save them for use by computer game magazines. So I took screenshots of World Warcraft, Bernie Crusade, I took screenshots of StarCraft Ghost, and basically every screenshot you've seen him, StarCraft Ghost, or Bernie Crusade in the magazine. was when I took. But so it's like you still want to be designing the theme park. You're no longer building an inspector.

Now you're just like the guy going around and taking pictures of people having fun. Yeah, I'm the photographer. I'm the theme park photographer. But what that department changed into was also the hub for all licensed products for Blizzard. And one of the first big new licenses we signed was the World of Warcraft trading card game. Trading card games. We've gotten to the part of the story where Ben is actually going to get on the path to making the games I want to talk to him about. Harthstone and Marvel Snap, these are trading card games.

I know this interview and this episode are in nerdy territory, nerdy even for search engine. And I just want to say if this is too nerdy for you, it's only going to get worse now. Because I need to explain the genre that is trading card games. So Magic the Gathering, that is an example of one. Pokemon is another. Trading card games are card games where you collect cards, use those cards to build decks, and then you play your deck against your opponents. The fun of a trading card game is that unlike a game like poker,

you actually decide which cards are in the deck that you're drawing from. Like, imagine getting to draw from a deck that was all aces or all kings. But in trading card games, every powerful card has a card that counters it. And you don't know. You have to guess which cards are in the deck that your opponent has brought to fight you with. There's this paradox in games, which is that the complicated ones tend to be rich. and more fun for a longer period of time, but they're also annoying to learn.

And convincing people to learn a complicated game is tough. It's like asking someone to do a bit of taxes before they can dance. It's why trading card games are less popular at American colleges than, say, beer pong. But at Blizzard, in the early 2000s, there's this idea that they should try to make a Warcraft-themed trading card game.

They already had a big and nerdy audience who liked that kind of thing. That game would come and go, but it would lead to Harthstone, an iPhone version of one of these games. Harthstone would be the first Ben Brode game I would become very stuck to, a trading card game that somehow taught you

how to play it very quickly. Instead of wasting a Friday night learning a game that might not be fun until Saturday, this was a version of a trading card game that once you downloaded it on your phone started making sense almost immediately. And Ben, even just testing this game, could tell it was a big deal.

Once I got on the team, I was learning a ton, and I could tell we were doing something that was going to be like an enormous detonation in the industry. Why could you tell? Because it was super fun. Right. And, like, we couldn't stop playing it. And as a huge fan of card games, I just felt this thing, which is like they're incredibly complicated. Most people are like, card games.

You know, like, this is for nerds. And I have tried to explain card games to people my whole life, including the Wow DCG. I was like an ambassador. I would go fly around to different conventions and teach people the game. And so I know how hard it is to learn these things. And Hardstone was not like that at all. People would pick it up immediately the first time they played it with no tutorial. They were like, okay, I get it.

And I was like, oh, oh, goodness. This is a thing. By the time I reached the height or perhaps the depth of my Hurststone habit in 2018, the game had reached 100 million players. It was very successful. But this would not be the last ultra-compelling game that Ben would help make. That year, 2018, he'd leave the company where he'd made Heartstone. and he'd form his own video game company,

where he would make a new game that, in my opinion, is the greatest iPhone time-waster designed by human beings. After the break, why games like this work, and the actual mechanics of how Ben came up with one. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.m.m.m. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I want someone who does not, play video games to be able to understand like how one thinks about games and game design.

So I want to just ask you about a couple games like anyone who's been a child in America is familiar with and how you think about those games being good or bad or what the values in them are. Oh, sure, yeah. Okay, so like rock paper scissors. Good game, bad game, interesting game. Like how do you think about the game rock paper scissors? Okay. So when I think about rock paper scissors, I think about like what the goal is.

What are you trying to achieve with a game like rock paper scissors? The first thing comes to mind is that the rugby scissors is not a game about strategy, really. it's a game about becoming victorious or losing as quick as possible. Usually you're playing rock-bearer scissors because you're trying to decide who's doing dishes, right, or where are we going for lunch? It's like you need a way to flip a coin without a coin. It's like one of the ways in which people play rock paper scissors, right? So achieving its goal, I think great.

It's a no equipment way of making a decision or to have the feeling of victory or defeat quickly, the fastest way you can get there that feels like you had some input into the decision making, right? It's like it wasn't just purely random, even though it was. It felt like you deserved to win or lose because you made a decision. So it's good at providing a random output that doesn't feel very random. Right. Is it a game with like a lot of staying power?

It's probably the most played game ever, like the number one game ever made in history. Rock Paper Scissors played by more people than anyone else. So like very successful from that perspective. I actually had to look this up later. when Ben says rock paper scissors might be the number one game in history, it actually goes back at least 400 years. The game was played in China during the Ming Dynasty.

I'm going to butcher this pronunciation, but it was called Shusiling. From China, it went to Japan where it was called San Sukumi Ken. There are versions where frog beats slug, but slug beat snake. There are versions where the fox beats the village head and the village head beats the hunter.

The hand gestures sometimes change, but the fundamental values of the game remain consistent. Rock paper scissors seems to show up in America in the early 1900s, where it's known as the Japanese game. In France, it was Chi Fuomi, although it's sometimes called Pierre Pipeet Sizzo, Kawibawi Bo in Korea. Ching Chang Cha in South Africa.

Saachi pun in Chile. I can do this for days. Here's this one more. In Philippines, Bato Bato Bato Pick. Watching videos of this game, I get a very surprising little jolt of, there's no word for this, but the feeling of not aloneness

when you realize that there are some human activities that everyone, everywhere, does the same way with minor tweaks. Rock paper scissors demonstrates that simple games, like any sort of simple idea, will almost always spread the furthest, even if, let's be honest, rock paper scissors is free to play for a reason. It's not that much fun.

I wouldn't say that it's like the kind of game I want to spend like four hours a day dedicating my life to. There are people who do. It's very interesting. I played some professional rock paper scissors in my time. What is professional rock paper scissors? I went out to L.A.

There was this big tournament under a freeway overpass, and it was just like a party. There's DJs. There's like food. But I signed up for the amateur tournament. And they have refs. There's a big circle of people

all cheering and placing bats on who they think's going to win. And you start with a minute of taunting. And people use that. for all kinds of stuff, just like, you know, normal, just like, you suck, you know, you don't belong here. This is my town, you know, and some people try and get into the head of their opponent. Like, listen, man, I've only thrown rock my whole life. I've never not thrown rock.

You think I'm not going to throw rock today? I'm throwing rock all day. You think I'm not going to throw rock. Go ahead. But you're going to see rocks. You're going to see rocks on rocks on rocks. I never not throw up. And then their opponent's like, damn it, are they going to throw a rock?

I should throw paper. But what if they're going to throw scissors, right? Then they're just trying to get me to throw paper, you know, it creates some like mind games, right? That minute of taunting changes everything about rock paper scissors from a random game into a game of psychology. That's all it takes is that one mechanic tweaks the whole thing. One of the things I've noticed about anyone who becomes an expert in anything, movies, food, music, whatever, is their capacity to answer straightforwardly if you just ask them, if something's good or bad, seems to diminish. Is Imagine Dragons a great band?

I wouldn't say so. A music critic, though, would say, well, Imagine Dragons is a certain example of an early-odd stadium pop band with some surprising electropop influences. I really enjoy spending time with anyone who appreciates things in that sort of categorical way. I get a pleasure from hearing an expert explain

almost clinically why a thing meant to be fun is, in fact, for some people, fun. What about poker? Oh, my gosh. You've activated my trap card here. So most people do not understand the relationship between randomness and skill. What do you mean? So have you ever heard the term like this is a skill-based game or this is a luck-based game?

Yeah, people will sometimes insult. When they're saying they don't like something, they'll say that it's too luck-based, is what I've seen in my experience. Yes. If you say those words, you do not understand how luck and skill relate to each other. So people imagine a continuum, right? And on one end is a game that is 100% luck, like shoots and ladders, right? You just roll dice eventually someone wins.

And the other side, you've got a game like chess where there's like no luck. There's no random generator, just pure strategy, right? Yeah. And they imagine that every game exists on this continuum, right? So you could have more luck and less strategy or more strategy and less luck. But it is absolutely not the case. Luck and strategy are independent vectors. It's more like a graph where you could plot the amount of luck and stuff.

strategy. You can have games like Tick-Tac-Tow, which have no luck and almost no strategy, right? Like, mastering Tick-Tac-T-T-T-O is incredibly easy. You put an X in the middle. Yes, exactly, right? Like the heuristics to become the world's best Tick-Tac-Tot player, like I can teach a first grade or something, right? It's just like really easy to become the world's best Tick-Tac-to player. So, like, no strategy, no luck.

And then you take a game like poker, poker has enormous amounts of luck and enormous amounts of strategy. Right? It's not like you've sacrificed one. Like, in order to become the best poker player in the world, it doesn't require just, like, rolling high. You have to be, like, incredibly good at poker. And yet, it's undeniably an enormous amount of luck in poker.

Right. It's got full. This idea, which is that luck or randomness in a game, does not render skill obsolete. I'd never really consider that. People who play games often complain if they involve luck, particularly if they lose because of their opponent's luck. But Ben's saying, those people are wrong. And once he explained his thinking, I agreed with them.

It also made me understand a large part of what I love about games. I'm drawn to games because there's supposed to be these little worlds we build that are unlike life actually ordered. There are rules. There are points. You can actually tell when you've won or lost. Skill is rewarded. Cheating is punished.

That's the promise. If you pay attention, you notice that against our will, our games, over time, almost always begin to resemble real life. Games are often unfair. The best player does not always win. Randomness sneaks in. Even the outcome of the Super Bowl sometimes turns on a coin toss. All that mess used to annoy me, but through Ben's eyes, I see it differently. Luck in games and life creates situations that we can't foresee, and real skill is revealed in how we navigate the understanding. foreseeable. We can never control what happens. We can sometimes control how we respond to it. Although, Ben did extol the pleasures of one game that is actually completely without randomness,

another one of the most popular games that people play, one that comes from India in the 6th century. Chess has this phenomenon where they're opening moves, right? You should memorize a line of play to be best, right? You shouldn't just like randomly move your stuff. There's like universally recognize. These are good openers. This is how you respond to their opener if they open like this. Right. And so what you're doing to get to a certain level, there's a lot of memorization. Yeah. And that's not like problem solving skill. You're not executing strategy. You're just executing the memorized line of play. And at some point, you get to a point where you basically can't memorize infinite moves and it becomes interesting and that you're doing problem solving.

One of like the greatest chess players of all time, Bobby Fisher, suggested to change the chess rules. Basically you randomize the back row of units when you play chess. Interesting. And then it changes everything. You can no longer memorize an opening move. It goes straight to the problem solving. That's the fun part of chess. I've always avoided chess because I just felt like the amount of hours I'd have to spend memorizing.

It's like I'd have to learn a language before I visit the country versus other games where it feels like. Yeah, right. Like, I'm learning poker. I'm bad at it. I played recently with a friend and he afterwards offered to buy me a poker strategy book because I played so poorly. And I did okay. I went home with most of my money, but he was like, I could tell, by the way, you're playing, you don't understand the game.

Like, read this big green book. But there was something about, like, okay, what I like about randomness is both, it creates new situations and also the reward for skill is like at least slightly muted. Like, over time, skill will win, but you will have luck some of the time and that will keep you in the game while you're acquiring skill. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people really don't understand that you can have high luck and high skill. Poker is the game that says, no, you just.

certainly can. Card games, collectible card games, are closer to the poker quadrant of that graph than anywhere else. They have a lot of luck, right? Like a shuffle a deck and then draw random cards, right? Every game is different for that reason. But you also have to play the cards you're dealt correctly. I'm in a new situation. What do I do here? No one's ever been in the situation before. I have to figure out what the best move is given a situation no one's ever been in before. Hearing Ben describe all this, help me understand why I find the latest game he's made Marvel Snap, so not addictive. Sticky, hypnotic, playable. The way the game works, you build yourself a small deck of cards, and then you play six quick rounds with your deck against an opponent.

You can play your card at one of three spots on a board, and you're trying to get the most points at two out of three of those spots. The game is simple. Cards have power. You play cards at locations trying to get the highest power you can. If you have more power than your opponent at two out of three locations, you win. In a lot of ways, it's like rock, paper, scissors. You know what I mean? Like, where are you going to play your card. Oh, he went left, but I went right. Oh, you know, he's got more power there than I do, right? It's a little bit like rock paper scissors. It's also a little bit like poker. The game board selects random rules each time, so you're thrown into unpredictable situations and forced to improvise. And it's a little bit like chess. You get better over time as you learn to recognize common

strategies from your opponents. One opening move might suggest they'll probably follow up with that other one. Games take about five minutes. The other little innovation, that weirdly makes the game very sticky, is that at any time you can make a bet, not for money, but for points, on the outcome of the game. If you've ever played backgammon and used the doubling cube

that die with numbers printed on it, it's the same idea. You have the ability to bet and bluff on the outcome of the round as you're playing it. The most fun moments in Marvel Snap involve recognizing how your opponent thinks they're about to destroy you,

lulling them into betting too many points on the game, and then out maneuvering them. The worst moments are when they do it to you. Many times a day, I pull out my phone and engage in a test of wits, a battle against some other person, somewhere on Earth. I try to bluff my way through a short round with some bored Uber driver waiting for a fare or a new mom with a kid in one arm, her phone in the other.

I am, at best, mediocre at Marvel Snap. The game has millions and millions of players, and sometimes I just marvel at the vast assortment of people all across Earth who have outsmarted me. I know how it feels to play the game, but I wanted to see if I could understand a little bit what it was like to create it. What does it look like to design a game like Marvel Snap from scratch?

Like, what's the beginning? What's the brainstorming? Like, what's the process? It's horrifying. So, you know, when you're employed by a company, they own what you create. And so we didn't want to, like, come up with a game idea while we worked for Blizzard.

Technically, Blizzard would own any game ideas we created while there. So when we left, we had no ideas. And that's like really freaky. You know, like, will we have good ideas when we started working on this thing? I don't know. So the first day, we didn't know our computers yet. We just, like, sat on the couch and just kind of started talking about what games we liked, what kind of stamp we might make the different genres,

what our values were when it came to games. And one of the things that Hamilton said was I've always wanted to feel what it would be like to use the backgammoned doubling cube with a strategy game. And I was like, oh, we could test that right now. So I loaded up Harstone. And every turn of the game was like, if you could double the stakes right now, would you do that? If your opponent doubled the stakes right now, would you bail out of the game? And immediately we could tell, hey, this is actually really fun.

This is all the fun of Harstone, plus betting and bluffing mechanics, which are incredibly deep, right? Like, poker has never required an expansion to remain strategically deep for decades. It's because these mechanics are so hard to master. They're so interesting. Yeah. And with that initial burst of inspiration from Hamilton, we said, okay, we can make an even simpler card game where the strategic load is being carried by this doubling mechanic.

And then we can make a card game that literally anybody could try and pick up immediately in love. So do you pay attention to the community of people playing? Do you read the subreddit? Do you watch the videos? Do you watch people enjoy the amusement park you've built? Of course. Yeah, it's one of the most fun parts of it, man.

It's like, you know, just seeing what people think. Honestly, development takes a long time. It was four and a half years of working on Marvel Snap, and motivation comes and goes, right? You know, there's moments where you're like, there's a moment where you're like, it's hard to get going this morning, you know? And after shipping the game, it is so motivating.

You have so many people who are loving it and talking about all the time. But the thing that's more motivating than people loving the game is people being rude to me. Really? Yes. I realize this is very strange, but I found it to be incredibly motivated. when someone would tell me I suck and that the game sucks.

Why? Because I have the power to make them happy. And my ego desires making them happy. I want to make everyone happy. I want to make everyone love the game. I want to make everyone love me. And so when someone's like, this sucks and you should feel bad, I'm like, okay, I can go to work tomorrow and improve things.

I can make things better. And then that person will be like, oh, you know, you were right all along or, you know, You were, this game's actually better than I thought or whatever it is, right? And will you pay, if there's like some random person on like Reddit who points out a flaw in the game that does feel real and you fix it, will you then go back and see if the person has changed their tune? Like, are you paying? No, no, no. Okay, good, good, good, good. Good.

And do you ever see someone enjoying the game enough that you're like, perhaps this is too sticky for you? Like, do you ever see a fan where you're like you're playing too much? Uh, no. I mean, look, we have like, street. who play full time every day. You know what I mean? People will engage with your game at all different levels, right? It's probably one of those normal distributions or whatever.

We're just like most people are paying an average amount. There's people on both sides who are lightly engaged, heavily engaged. It's like anything. People will engage the amount they want to engage. And we build a game that can be whatever it is to you that you would like it to be. Yeah, and I don't mean to be like, I love your game, I love your game. I love your game. Do you feel bad that you're a purveyor of moral corruption or whatever?

It's strange. like I also try to make something like sticky. Like when we put out podcast episodes, I can look at the data and see like where someone stopped listening. And if I don't get people very, very close to the end, most people, I fix it next time. You know what I mean? But it's hard with what you do because the upper bound on how much someone can enjoy it is like,

like no one's ever like, I got to listen to that podcast episode seven times in a row. Yes, right. Yeah. You're not spending 20 hours a day, not getting sleep, not filling your obligations to do this thing instead. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't, you know, Honestly, I haven't heard, like, stories about that kind of, like, unhealthy engagement with Marvel Snap, right? Like, people are playing it because they love it. And that's great. We're not, like, putting out fires or solving world hunger, but we're creating something that's fun and people really enjoy and that, like, adds to the texture of life. And those are things that, like, make me feel good as a creative person and someone who's putting stuff into the world. And, like, it inspires our whole team. We have 80 people at the studio now who are working on, you know, Marvel Snap and things.

and it's just like, you know, we're all very motivated by the people who love it and dedicate their time to it. Yeah, it's nice. I mean, I think when you meet the people who make the things that you get a lot of pleasure from, you want them to be happy. It's so fun just hearing how much thought goes into like a simple pleasure, basically. Oh, yeah. I mean, it is the best job working on video games.

Whether it's art, engineering, quality assurance, production, it's just like you create this thing, and then, if you're lucky, a bunch of people enjoying it. We look back fondly on games that we really, really loved, and it's really, really satisfying to be part of that for people. That was my conversation with Ben Brod. Can I say it's a funny part of this job that I call brilliant people and ask them, how did you learn to be brilliant? Because the really blunt, honest answer is that they can give you some tips, but a lot of this is mysterious, talent and skill that people build up over years. Ben was making highly addictive. games on a graphing calculator before he even knew he wanted to make mobile games.

It's just in his fingers. I don't know. It feels like a not very satisfying answer to the question that got us here. If you wanted to, how would you, how would I make an addictive video game? Here are the notes from this conversation. Here's what I'll take away. One, when you're consuming the thing you want to learn how to make, you have to learn to ask yourself, how could this be better?

Two, you need to identify the values. of the games you're enjoying. What is rock paper scissors for? What are these games trying to do? And how are they designed to do them better than anything else like that? Three, the deepest, most satisfying games are the ones that resemble life.

They combine luck and skill, and they can never quite be mastered. That is what I learned this week from Ben Brod. Ben, thank you for talking about this. It's been a pleasure. This has been really, really fun. Not every chat I do gets this deep into the crafting of game design.

So it's been, it's really fun. Ben Brode. His company is called Second Dinner. His game is called Marvel Snap. I've warned a lot of people not to download it. Many have ignored me. Hey, business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver.

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Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJVote, truthy Permananey and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fat-checking this week by Sinta Taylor. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Vizarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Porello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Downley, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Moira Curran, Josephina-Fner-F. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. You can follow

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