Think Like A Game Designer - Ben Robbins — World Building in Microscope, Gaming with Strangers and Writing Effective Rules (#64)

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

About Ben RobbinsBen Robbins joins us to share his experiences creating acclaimed RPGs like Microscope and In This World. Known for his innovative approach to role-playing, Ben's work on Microscope has revolutionized how players build and explore vast timelines without a game master. In this episode, we discuss the creative processes behind his designs and his philosophy of making games that deepen connections among players to the use of Artificial Intelligence in games and creativity. Grab a notebook, because you won’t want to miss the lessons Ben has to share. Tune in to discover how Ben Robbins has been redefining the landscape of RPGs since 2005, inspiring gamers to see the people across the table in a new light. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Thank you for making this show possible through your pledges, podcast reviews, and enthusiasm on social media. Without your help, this show would not have been possible, and it's incredible how our community has grown.

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In today's episode, I speak with Ben Robbins. Ben is an acclaimed game designer, best known for titles such as Microscope, Kingdom, and In This World. We start by a deep dive into Microscope, which is one of the most creative role-playing games that I have encountered, and I actually owe quite a bit of my creative success to playing microscope,

including hiring my very... creative director, George Rockwell, after our first game played together. Ben really brings a lot of great insights into this, including not only learning how to become a kind of solopreneur as a game designer, which he has done, how to run and create the story game Seattle meetup group where he took over from the previous owner and was able to kind of change it and morph it into something that really created a challenging but inclusive environment. And we talk about what that means and how you create that environment, not just with the social groups you create, but with the games and the rules and the components and every aspect. Ben brings a lot of really fascinating perspectives to the

conversation as well. One of his favorite quotes you'll hear throughout this podcast is where he talks about making your games, having your games make people fall in love with the people at the table a little more at the end and how we go about doing that. Ben has been releasing games since 2005 and he's used a lot of the skills he built along the way, including his self-admitted control. freak nature and detail-oriented nature to really create and push the boundaries of innovation with his games. And it's something that we have a lot of fun with. We talk about some crazy what-if scenarios and talk about AI and all kinds of fun things about how the creative process evolves and what the role of a game designer is in the world that's evolving as we get towards the end. So a lot of

great concrete things about the creative process, about becoming a professional game designer, about putting things out on your own and some really fun philosophical things about what our role is in the world. So I really love this conversation. It's the first time I got to talk with Ben. It will not be the last. So I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Without any further ado, here is Ben Robbins. Hello and welcome.

I am here with Ben Robbins. Ben, it is awesome to have you here. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. So I'm going to give a little bit of background, you know, from my perspective, before we'll kind of let you sort of tell your story. You know, I first, my, I first played microscope with, somebody who was now my creative director.

And it was during that experience where I was convinced that I wanted to work with him, George Rockwell, the process allowed us to be so creative and so immersive, so immediately. I just fell in love. This was a decade ago now, I think. And so I've been very eager to get to talk to you about this game in particular, but in general, your philosophy around building games that are about the creation of the world, the co-creation experience. And so I'll let you, at first, I guess maybe we can explain to people who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, what microscope is.

And then we can kind of zoom back and get your origin story and how we got to there. That's what I'm going to say first off, that's awesome. I love hearing about people when they play microscope, but particularly when they play a microscope and they really connect with somebody else. That kind of like, you know, no spoilage, but that's kind of the thing that really drives me with a lot of these games, is seeing people. surprise each other and just really have like a whole new bond they develop because they're like they're so impressed by the things the other person makes that they have this new kinship with them, which is fantastic. Microscope for anybody who's not familiar with it, which is probably a lot of people, honestly, it's a game that I describe as a fractal role-playing game. And the idea is that you

sit down together and you're going to make a history. You're going to make some kind of epic spam. of time, you know, it could be like we're going to tell about the rise and fall of an empire or some new invention that changes the world, something like that. But the key thing about it is that instead of just like making the story and going, you know, this happens and this happens and this happens is you start from the outside in and you can jump kind of anywhere you're interested in in the timeline. You can kind of go back and forth and you zoom in and zoom out. So the creative process really follows your desires rather than just being like lock step forward. And also, the other new thing about is that you, the parts of the story that

interest you is really what you focus on. So it kind of like lets you magnify the industry. And another thing is if you something happens, like something, you know, terrible tragedy happens. Like you blow up a city, this great city you've had. And you're like, well, oh, that's terrible. But because you're not locked into playing in order, you can be like, okay, well, let's go backwards in time. Let's play right before that happened. Let's play 100 years before that happened. And the thing is that that seems trivial at first, but the real freedom of that is that as a player, you never make a decision that locks out anything from the game. You can't remove something from the game.

If people still like that, the thing that you just destroyed, they can go back and so work with it. So it frees everybody up to kind of like make big things happen without feeling like they're going to ruin it for everybody else. And that's really the kind of the social point to it, is to give people the freedom to create bravely. Yeah, yeah, I want to give a little bit more context here, right? So a lot of people are familiar with, you know, traditional role playing games, right? Typically there's a game master and somebody that says, here's my world. You now make a character and play in the world, right? And you get to tell stories in the world that somebody else created. And microscope is this process of co-creating the world together. And that's really the whole game is that. So you have these, you know, as you mentioned,

this kind of beginning and end events. And then you can you can zoom in on specific timelines. You can zoom in on those specific events. You can roll play individual moments that you want to create happen. And it just created this. It's such a fun experience. I have used it as an exercise for working on my own worlds that we create for our games. It's actually, I think it's actually useful for people that want to do real, you know, creative work that they want to do things with or just to have fun. And so it's, it's this, it's this really interesting hybrid between a kind of game and a creativity tool that I, I found really powerful. So it's just, it's just such a, I've, I've, I've,

fascinated to know like how you came up with it, what brought you to that to that space. I highly encourage everybody to check it out. I mean, it's just like it's just a fascinating and thing that, you know, is a is just a different way to play. I'd never seen anything quite like it. Yeah. So it's such a weird. The thing is that it, when I was first working on it, um, in one hand, it seems like this kind of very bizarre, strange idea. I was like, oh my God, is this going to work? Is anybody going to be able to do this? Are people going to look at me like I have two heads if I try to, you know, do this process? And what was shocking to me was actually how easy it is. Like that people, you think like, oh, jumping back and forth and

like the timeline should be really confusing, but it's not. People embrace that very quickly, and they embrace the idea of like, oh, I don't know a lot yet, but I'm going to zoom in and figure out more. And I think part of that's because if you look at how we do anything in the real world, like how you learn any topic, that's how you learn it. You learn, you have an overview of something that you learn, and then you learn more details. You don't learn things like from front to back, you know, when you're a kid and they're teaching you about, you know, like the example I use like the Roman Empire.

You've never heard of the Roman Empire before. They don't tell you the whole thing. They give you like a really simple description of it. And then a couple years later, you hear a little bit more and then more and then more. So this kind of like process of filling in knowledge in a non-sequential way and kind of bits and pieces is exactly how we do things all the time.

So it's bizarrely intuitive, even though it's very strange. So yeah. Yeah, and I think that there's, you know, one of the things I always say is, you know, restraints breed creativity, right? Constraints, sorry, constraints breed creativity. So that you basically, this idea that you put yourself within this sort of box, if I just said, hey, tell me a story. Right. That can be very intimidating and difficult, right?

But if it's like, okay, no, no, no, we're going to go between the beginning of the Roman Empire and the end of the Roman Empire and we're going to do like a specific, we know, a couple principles about how we're going to tell this is going to be a romance story. Right. Or whatever, you know, you're like, okay, well, cool. let's say, you know, this, the king meets this peasant girl. And now we have an event. Okay, now, well, what happens before that? He was, well, first he has, you know, his evil stepmother, whatever it is, right? Just you start to get ideas like spawning and then being able to kind of riff off of that with other people.

And the other thing I like about what you've done with myself is, you know, it structures it so that everybody kind of gets a turn. Yeah. And this is another real key thing because there's a lot of, when you're in a room for trying to do creative work, often there's the loud, really confident person. that will have their opinion heard and that opinion will override many of the other folks in the room. I'm trying to use charitable terms for this person. No, and the thing is, the thing is, I was that person, that I was often the one, I would have clear ideas,

I have these great things I wanted to say, and I felt like I would be, you know, I'd GMed games, I played a lot of D&D before that. I was always the GM. I was always the one making this stuff up. And you feel like you're kind of hog in the spotlight for creativity, even if you're really nice about it. Sometimes people, they want to hear your ideas.

Like, no, no, tell us this great story. But I felt kind of guilty about it. I felt like it wasn't as interesting as sharing with other people. And so the idea of making the turn structures are like, yeah, you, everybody, and not only turn structure, but if it's your turn, you have to go.

It's like you don't even really get to opt out and the idea that we will be patient and wait for you to come up with an idea. And then also the other thing you were talking about, which is essential to the same, the puzzle is that you're never making the whole thing by yourself. Any particular concept, you're only adding some building block that then someone else is going to build on.

So you're always getting this like no idea stands in isolation. So people who sit down and go like, I want to tell this whole story, they are sometimes frustrated because they have to actually share control. And so they can't predict what's going to happen. They can't control it. It's going to surprise them, which I think is the best part of it, that you're surprised by the things that people make. But so yeah, I think, I think it lets you off the hook because you don't have to tell

the whole story. And not only that, you can't. You have to react to what's happening from the other players. Yeah. And, you know, from a creative tool, so I created this kind of brainstorming and ideation tool called the Breakthrough Game with the Wharton School of Business that really applied. Like, we took their research on how groups work well together. And it's this exact same thing.

We force everybody to do individual ideation first so that you don't get overrun. run by other people, then there's a phase where people turn by turn will recombine others ideas together to form new ideas. And then only afterwards you then get the kind of group consensus building and stuff that lets you move forward to like something that you'll actually build and, you know, create for real outside the table. So I think your, your structure really did that. The human aspect, the thing that like, the really stubborn, starting for Bradstacks and

saying like, these are people sitting at a table and that you have to think in terms of the people are more important than the story and that the story that we're making today is just a vehicle for these people to kind of express themselves. So you want to make sure that the whole point of it is that the creation of the fiction is really a social interaction that's occurring. And it's because it's funny. And people are like, oh, I love that game. It was fantastic. Our history was awesome. And then they tell the history and everyone's like, well, that's not really that interesting. It's like, yeah, that's not the point.

The point is that the way we made it was interesting. thing. The way we, you know, it was interesting to us because we saw how our ideas ripped off of each other and said, oh my God, I never said that coming because he said this thing and I, you know, bounced off of it. But if you just didn't tell the story linearly, like, well, that's a normal story. Like, yeah, that's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, the meta-narrative is more interesting than the narrative itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that, so does that, is that sort of at the heart of your philosophy for where, you know, for games as this sort of tool or vehicle for social interaction? Or is it, it's what I like. It's what it's, it's really like, like the thing you described

the whole like when you sit down to play with people, my take on it is that if you leave the game and you like, you're a little bit more in love with the other people at the table. If you kind of like have a little crush on them, you're kind of like, oh, that was awesome. Like that person's kind of cool. That to me is a good game. If that doesn't happen, it's not a good game. I've played when I was doing a, I was running story game Seattle, we were doing a lot of community organization and a lot of like just random people coming out of the streets who'd never played these games before. And the best thing ever would be, you'd be at a convention or one of these or weekly events. And you'd see people sit down at the table together. And there's, you know, maybe four people.

And they're all total strangers. And you can see them. They all look, they come from different walks of life. And you're looking at them, looking at each other with skepticism. And they clearly do not like what they see. And you can tell they're kind of like, they're not sure what they're in for, but they don't have a lot of optimism. And then fast forward to three hours later, and those people are all best friends. And they're all like, they love the things they each of the creative. To me, that's the best part of the whole operation is this kind of like seeing people have better opinions about each other because they came together. Yeah. So Story Game, Seattle is a, you know, basically a meet up for people to get together and play, play these kinds of games.

Now, is this something you found it or you just ran for several years? It was a, there was a guy who was running it, but it was a different organization that had that name. And it was just like a week or like every month he'd run a game. That was all that was. And he basically was like, I'm too busy with school. I want someone else to take this over. And so I did, but I was immediately like, this is not how I want this to be at all. I'm going to change it.

So the name was the same, but it then became this totally different creature almost immediately. Because the way I did it was it's just anybody can show up, off the street and it's going to be we're going to pitch pickup games on the fly in the moment there and sit down and do one-shot games. We also did entirely GMless games, partially because I think that if you're total strangers that if you think if you never played a role-playing game before, right, and you sat down with people and he said, this one person is the game master, they're in control of what's happening, you'd be like, that's weird. That's actually kind of a weird social situation, right? That's not what a person would

expect. So I feel that like GMless games are a little bit more closer to a normal social interaction with people, right? It's like, yeah, we're going to talk. We're going to make enough up. So it followed that kind of model. And it was the other thing was the getting people to like teaching people to play the game so they could then turn around and immediately show other people how to play games. So it was like, hey, you've been here twice already. Guess what? You're a facilitator tonight. You're going to take these other three new people and show them how to play a game. So I think it was very empowering for a lot of the people there because they, they, you know, got to like become organizers themselves and play games.

So it's just kind of like a virus. It's just spreads. More and more and more people are learning how to both. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's interesting. And, you know, this is just another one of these principles I like to underline. Like, you know, I mean, you weren't a professional game designer at that time.

You weren't right. When you started this, you just kind of did it because you were passionate about it. That gave you a platform to then be able to try some of your games, presumably and learn more about how people interact with, right? And I just always like to kind of underscores because it's such a common theme among people who have, you know, gotten professional and done, you know, published games is that they just do this stuff for free and they build communities and they support communities. There's just no substitute for the power of that.

So I was just like, you know, I love pointing out those specifics. Yeah, you got to get at time. Yeah, you got have time hands on playing with people that that, that, in fact, a lot of the games I made, like I was already working on microscope at that point, but almost every game I made after that, including the final version of microscope, we're deeply informed by those experiences, by the constantly playing with new people,

constantly seeing how people play. Not even just playing my games, playing any games, just seeing those dynamics unfolding. And in fact, a lot of the games I made after that were kind of like, oh, I want something to play at our Thursday night meetups. So I'm making a game to serve

our purposes, right? Like, I'm a game that we can just play easily and quickly, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, I have found that has been the case for me too. Like my game design tendencies warp around what is, you know, who's around that I can play with, right? And they should. And they should. I mean, that's the purpose, right?

Like, you make the game because you want to play it. That's the best reason to make the game. So, yeah, absolutely. So I love your comment earlier, this, you know, if you fall in love with the people at the table a little more by the end, that's a good game. Like that, that really resonates with me. And we've already sort of talked a little bit about some of the principles. that encourage that, right, kind of giving people space to co-create and, you know, cultivating this kind of equality at the table, which your games do. Are there other things,

other principles or kind of strategies that you use to help help those people fall in love with your game, you know, through your games, not with your games, through your games, which is a really key distinction. I mean, I guess the other side of it is that, like when we just are in Seattle, one of the things, the beginning of every session, I would deal a little spiel. And be like, hey, welcome everybody. Here's what we're doing tonight. I try to explain the deal. And part of the spiel was to basically say, the game we're playing tonight doesn't exist

yet. Like, we don't know what's going to happen. It's entirely hinges on you. Every person at the table is a vital contributor. Your contribution isn't just desired. It is essential. If you don't contribute, this is not going to happen, right? which is like

kind of like welcoming but also a little threatening you know it's a little scary and I say you know and it can be a little bit scary I mean this what we're doing tonight is actually kind of challenging it's kind of a weird thing we're doing we're trying to make something creative together that's actually very difficult and I think by telling people that what we're doing is hard I know it's counterintuitive

some people say like oh it's game always just make it super easy and like well but also if you think you tell people they're doing something challenging, they're a little more forgiving, I think, of what happens. They recognize that it's a difficult task. If you tell them it's an easy task, then if it goes wrong, they're like, oh, what happened? So I think really making sure people understand

that what we're doing is difficult. Like even just trying to make something creative on your own is challenging to forget, like making something creative that satisfies the taste of four different people simultaneously. into something brand new that we just made up on the fly. It's kind of a bonkers task, really, if you think about it. And so I think that the setting the stakes helps a lot.

I think it puts people in the right mindset. You've got to go in there with a right mindset. You've got to have a right attitude. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that that gamer's mindset is actually one of the most important things. I'm actually working on a book right now that kind of is trying to take the idea of what is it that makes the game experience is great? And how could we apply that to make our lives better, right?

And all the things that we do. And part of that really is this gamer's mindset. And if you spoke about this idea of, you know, telling people that something is challenging and that's counterintuitive, well, you know, I would argue, and I've said, I've argued in another podcast like the whole point of a game is for there to be some challenge, right? Yeah.

What it means to be a game is that I'm taking on unnecessary challenges so that we have the possibility of overcoming them. This was a previous podcast. We have a teen when is, covers this that has not aired at the time we're talking, but we'll be aired by the time people are listening to this. And I think that that value of the way we approach challenge in a game context is very fulfilling and very rewarding,

even when we lose, even when we don't succeed. Because that's just part of what we built in our mindset. And now imagine you could take that mindset to the challenges that you face the day of day life, right? I mean, this is honestly, it's a lesson I need to remind myself of today as, you know, just going through a workday and dealing with all of these things.

Like, actually, no, these are opportunities we get to play and create together. And so I think you create this magic circle both with your games. And then it sounds like you did the exact thing in your kind of meetups. So I love that. Okay. And I think the other piece that I heard you say in the way that you presented it was it's not just about, hey, this is something that's challenging. But you have to take ownership of that challenge. Yeah.

You are responsible, right? to everybody that's in the room, that you have to take ownership of co-creating, I think really makes a big difference. It's not just like, hey, I'm here to be entertained. What do you got from? No, not at all. Exactly. That's the anathema. The sitting back and waiting is not, yeah, exactly, that kills the game. And the, the even darker side of that is the, you're not just responsible for contributing and being part of the creative process. You have the power to have a huge impact on the other people at the table for better or worse. If you are not thoughtful and you bring in terrible material, or I mean, like literally like questionable subject matter, right?

Triggered stuff, right? You're just not thoughtful. You have the potential to ruin everyone's night. Everybody does. We all have the power to ruin each other's night, which is when you get into things like, and we would talk every time, like safety mechanics, you know, like, you know, if there's things that bother you here so you can X them out. And the point, the interesting thing to me is that we talked about that every meetup, like every time, it was always like, here's the big warning. And this is the, we're not going to play tonight unless we all agree that this is how we're going to do things, right?

And it sounds very scary and very dramatic. And I say, hey, this is very scary and very dramatic. I tell them that because it is. But the family thing is that when you, I think by talking about it, by bringing that up at the beginning, it puts people in a, in a, in a, a thoughtful state of mind. So they do think about it. And you almost never see anybody having to like use a safety mechanic or X something out because they are already been primed to one, know that they can, that if there's something they are not comfortable with, they can stop it

at any time. So they're like, well, I'm in control. I don't have to, I don't have to feel like trapped. And simultaneously from the creative point of view, the people making things, they feel. think about what they're doing because like, oh, right, I got to remember that I'm not just like making up whatever I want. I'm saying something that's going to impact these other people at the table. So I think just like setting that right at the beginning, like, again, it's kind of scary, but it's a useful reminder that this can go very badly. Yeah, so I'm trying to think about how this applies more broadly, right? So your games are specifically very much like co-creating GM-less, like we're all doing this together. But,

Does this apply also to not just traditional role-playing games, but any other tabletop games? And how do you think about framing this kind of mindset in those contexts? Well, I mean, think about it. I think, okay, let's talk about classic D&D by comparison, right? So I was a GM for a long time, so I played a lot of D&D is great. But it's totally different. There's a lot of different social things occurring, right? If I'm a player sitting down at a table with the GM, the GM is kind of ultimately

in charge. And in a way, that lets me off the hook as a player. I'm not really responsible for what's happening at the table. They are. And if I, there's also, I think, and this sounds weird, but I think this is probably true, that you can kind of misbehave a little bit at a D&D game on the ground, with the assumption that like, oh, if I'm doing something inappropriate, the GM is supposed to stop me. The GM is supposed to say, okay, wait, time out or whatever. which I think socially might be a little more relaxing for people. It's like, oh, I can go to the game and just kind of play.

And I don't have to worry about the impact of my actions because there's this referee whose job it is is to stop me if I'm out of control, right? But any moment, any game, somebody could do something that would make everyone else want to quit in a heartbeat. Right. You know, back to when I was like 12 playing D&D, there was always that guy who was like, oh, my character is secretly an assassin. and then I killed the whole party when they slept and I took all their stuff. You know, there's always that there's always that kind of thing.

I hate that guy. I hate that guy. We all hate that guy. But that guy thinks he's being edgy. He thinks he's playing as an interesting character. You know, and you go like, well, now we want to quit this game. We're not just mad at your character. We're like, we don't want to deal with you, right?

This whole thing's falling apart. So, yeah, I think in any game where the players have volition, they can create situations that nobody wants to be in. Yeah. All right. I'm going to jump, I think, to the next topic here. I've noticed you've done a lot of crowdfunding for your games. I assume that this has come a lot from these communities that you've built and that has moved your audience forward. I think for these kinds, especially for the games like you make, which, you know, they're unique. They're not the certainly the kind of mass market expectations that you've done very well. for yourself as an are you you you do this all yourself yeah yeah this is yeah this is yeah this is i went full-time game design um and this is i i don't want to say this is all i do because that sounds wrong but this is my profession yes yeah um and so a lot of people dream of making that leap and a lot of people are terrified of making that leap yeah so i'd love to kind of get a little bit

more of your story about what that journey was like to the yeah no i can really do this this is my this is not just something I'm doing for fun. This is something I have a career out of. This is my profession. Yeah, I'm probably a bad example. I had a very strange career before that. I didn't, I didn't have like a nine to five job for the longest time. In fact, I think I'm not for a very, very long time. I had my own business before this where I was doing like computer support stuff, like computer consulting. It was very, it was very irregular because when you're a consultant, it's the regular. The point being that like my risk aversion was already extremely low that I wasn't I wasn't like oh I've got the security of a nine to five job. I never had the security of a nine to five

job. So switching it to game design was just a different form of unpredictability. So I think that's the biggest thing that as an individual if you are not comfortable having really no idea what's going to happen financially, it's going to be rough that maybe start off, start off, start. off as like a side gig, let it grow, you know, let it develop. I remember, I remember people saying things like, when I first started doing Kickstarter, they were like, you know, oh, I should do a Kickstarter, you know, make some money. I'm like, that's not how that works. You have to, like, you have to do all the work. Like, it's not free money. You have to do all this stuff, like to make the game, guys. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think most people have learned

that lesson since then. And I, I had to learn the lesson very painfully by successful Kickstarter that ended up costing me more than I earned. Exactly. Exactly. Did you calculate shipping costs correctly? Yeah, you're like, ooh, this is, this is awkward. Yes. But, you know, so there's a ton of, of insights there.

But I mean, so you, so just so I'm clear, you went from, you had a, you know, consulting kind of inconsistent or, you know, very interesting. And you did not have any income from games, but you said, I'm going to just go for it and jumped up, jumped across. You didn't build it up and co-create. It's more of an overlap. I did initially, starting in 2005, I was doing like supplements, like adventures and stuff for like more traditional games.

I was doing community mastermind stuff. And I was doing that, but like kind of feeling my way. Well, actually, this is important. I think this is an important lesson. Because I was doing, I was releasing things starting in early as early as 2005. I was developing the skills that you need to publish, to do business, to know how to like make a nice looking PDF, to know how to release things. All the stuff.

the skills, how to set up your website, all the stuff you need to be able to do. I didn't just start from scratch, like, here's my first big game. So by the time I released Microscope, I had already been doing game releases for like six years. So I had the skills, or I had worked up certain skills ahead of time. So I think that's a thing that you, game design is one thing, business is another. and they're totally unrelated skill sets. Yes. Underscore that for sure.

So for me, right, I went and I started doing game design as a job. Fortunately, I got hired it to do work on the versus system Marvel DC trading card game and worked for stuff at a company called Upper Deck. And then I transitioned into a product manager and brand manager role while I was there. So I got to learn how to do the business side of things while I was getting a paycheck. So it was very fortunate. And then was able to take all that knowledge together and say, okay, now I'm going to quit and try to start my own company and do my own thing.

So if you can learn on somebody else's dime, highly recommend. Or if you're going to try to go off on your own, still doing, you know, again, that's why I kind of dug in this, like having some period of time where you have some other source of income and you're able to practice the skills of producing things, not just designing great games. Or another way that you can kind of learn, you know, you don't have to be your own publisher. You can publish fine publishers and, you know, just. If you just want to be a game designer, that's also a great path. But, you know, so I guess actually, let me pause there. What means you want to be, you know, the one that did everything, right?

Because you could have potentially published your game with somebody else. I'm just a control freak. I just, I just, I hear you. I have that thing where like I look at, I look at every page and I'm like, the words have to be in exactly the right spot. Like I literally, it's like, Microsoft is a good example. Where the page breaks fall, if the page breaks were in the wrong spot and it's basically if it's split an idea so that if you're, okay, here's what. If you're a player at the table

and you're reading this thing and you say, okay, the instructions say do this. And you go, I'm doing this. If there's a page break and then the last bit of the instruction is on the next page, I know from sitting at the table someone's going to miss that because they're not going to turn the page. They're going to glance at this one page and they're going to miss part of the instruction

that might be critical. So it seems anal, but it's actually like, no, it's because I'm trying to protect the experience of play. And if I have a layout person and I'm trying to explain to them my insane desires to have things in exactly these right spots, it would just be no one wants that. No one would appreciate that. So it's probably better than I just do it myself. Yeah. Spare people.

Yeah. The control freak personality type is probably the main predictor of you trying to do things on your own. I'm guilty. It's partially that I know, I know the, the, decisions have an effect, that I've read game books where I'm like, where's the instruction? There's a whole paragraph here. I know somewhere in the middle there's a line telling me what to do, but I can't find it. And I'm so, I don't want to put out games like that. And so I'm always like, the amount of time I spend like honing and editing and editing and editing and editing and editing and

revising and like trying to push the text to be exactly as little as humanly possible to say what I want to say is a little bit bonkers. Again, control freak 100%. Yeah, well, it's, you know, At the end of the day, having a really dedicated focus on quality and detail matters a lot, right? And it shows through in the work. It sounds really nice when you say it. That sounds really positive. She'll stick with your answer. Your answer is better.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'll say like the book I have, I think I have it on my shelf back here. But the, you know, Microsoft, it's a small, very compact microscope, sorry, is a very, like, it's a very like a lot of, it packs a lot of punch for it in a very very. small package. It's very well, well, groomed and well, well established. But honestly, too long. I think it's too long now. See, now from 10 years later, like I just did in this world

and in this world, I was like, can I make this even shorter and shorter? I'm always making things smaller and smaller and smaller if I can, right? Okay. Well, that's a great, that's a great transition then, because I wanted to talk about it in this world also. So why don't you let people know about that project? Let's tee that up and then let's talk

about it because there's some other principles here that I I love, I feel like you're just generally servicing all of the best core creativity principles and turning them into games. So let's talk about it. So let's see. In this world, I just grab it in this world. In this world is like the idea of in this world is to basically take something in the real world that you're familiar with, like say cities or food or religion or weather. And then to create fictional worlds where things that you expect and are normal. are different. And it's basically a way to kind of like, one, brainstorm alternative societies and

cultures and worlds, but also to kind of like shake up your thinking and to think of things you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. So it's kind of serving two purposes. The world building is fun for the world building's sake, but it's also kind of a tool to kind of like jar your brain. And one of the things that is very important about the design and that took me a long time to kind of realize that I needed to do is that normally if you're playing a world building game you sit down, you make a world together, there you go. But in this, you actually are making several worlds, and they're all completely unrelated. So you're basically taking multiple runs at the same concept. You might have one world like, hey, let's talk about, you know, how religion works. And they're like,

great, we made that one world. And now we're going to stop, go back to those first principles we started with and make another world. And one's going to be completely separate and completely independent. And the reason for that is much like how in microscope, the moving around in time gives you this social steam valve so that you can create things without being worried about, you know, is this good enough? Within this world, it's literally that. You make a world, but you know as you're creating it that it is not the only thing you're doing during that session. So it gives you freedom. You're like, well, let's try this. You can kind of make something and like, let's see what it's like.

And if you're on the other side and you're like, I don't really like that idea, that's fine. You're kind of like, well, I don't really like this world, but this is only going to be one of the worlds we make. We're going to make more. So everybody is off the hook, both as the creator and as the other players, to just kind of go with it and being like, yeah, let's see what it's like. If we have squirrels having the reincarnated souls of, you know, priests and like there are Brutislava's and we pray to them, let's see what happens. Let's try it. What the heck? So it's very, it's very, it's super fun because it's super fun.

super fast. You get into things very, very quickly. And the way it spurs creative ideas, but without any of the pressure is, I love it. I love it. I love it. Very happy with it. Interesting. I'm noticing this theme here. This, this, well, you're playing with this idea of like creative pressure, right? Like it's just, they're like, okay, no, this is on you. You have to make a decision. You're responsible for this. But also, hey, no big deal. Everything's going to be Exactly, exactly. Because here's the thing. Like, I've played a lot of great people over the years who are shy or who are not confident of their creative ability, even if they're geniuses, right? And it tortures me because I'm like, come on, come on. I want to hear your ideas. I want to hear this stuff. And like, I tell this story of this friend of mine who I, when I first started playing microscope with him, he had always been kind of a quieter player, like a good player. But I'm a good player. but not really, you know, that stepping out. And then in microscope, suddenly, when he was forced to,

he was throwing out these ideas that he didn't think were great. And the rest of us were like, dude, you've been hiding this for us all this time. You have these great ideas. I felt like he's been robbing us all this time. So the idea of like, like, yeah, I want you to contribute. I want to hear what's in your head, you know. And yet simultaneously, I'm trying to make that as easy for you as possible.

Because it is uncomfortable to say to somebody, like, no, you have to go now. So the trick is like, how do you balance that? How do you draw out people's ideas, but not torture them too much? Just torture a little bit of torture. Well, it's funny because, you know, a lot of the most of the games that I make, right, there's much more constrained rules and boxes that people are in, right? There's a set of things you do.

There's, you know, it's, in fact, I think it is one of the main reasons why people play tabletop games and card games and board games. It facilitates social interaction for people who are uncomfortable. or, you know, there's a clear box that I'm playing in. And role-playing games are somewhere in between, generally, right? There's a, there is a box or a role that I'm inhabiting or something that I'm doing, but it's a little fuzzier. You know, it's a little bit harder.

And your game's arguably push it a little further out. It's like, okay, I could do anything. I can make a whole world. I don't know. But it's still like somewhere we're floating in between that space where I, you know, with my kinds of games with a card game or board game or tabletop game, I often have to work to get people to immerse themselves in the story more, right? To get them to feel like the ambiance of the game rather than just the mechanics of the game.

Right, right. Sell the metaphor. Yeah. Yeah. And so that becomes like how do like, you know, I just always find it interesting too. Like when I get into a game, there are certain triggers or cues that tell me, okay, this is a competitive game. I'm going to take seriously and care about winning. Or this is a silly game and I'm just going to kind of have fun with it.

I'm not going to worry about how ridiculous, you know, random it is. or this is an immersive story game. And so I'm going to get involved in the story in the world. And there's like a lot of these subtle cues, rather, that we can give people as designers to kind of nudge them into one direction or another. Or, you know, I was talking with the designer of Fiasco and like that process of like, how do you get people to be like,

no, no, this is a Quentin Tarantino movie. Like, yeah, this is crazy. Everything's going to be crazy. Yeah. And you'll get people into that space. Whereas if you would just set them down at the DAD table, they would never take those actions. And let me tell you.

Let's talk about fiasco. Now, hey, Jason. we're going to talk about fiasco. Because I think Fiasco does a bunch of very, you could say, oh, well, it says it on the front cover. It says like, oh, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a Coen Brothers movie. It says like, oh, you know, use your, what's it the, you know, treat your characters like stolen cars, whatever. But I don't think that, I mean, there's that, but I think it's actually doing something, some tricky mechanical things. Like, for example, you used it on to play D&D or even, in fact, a ton of story games, and you make your own character, right?

You say, I wish to be a wizard or I wish to be a middle-aged housewife. You pick your own character. Fiasco is one of the rare games in existence where you don't do that. Other people will actually hand you things and be like, the relationship between the two of you is that you've got a drug smuggling operation. Or the relationship between the two of you is that your brother and sister, right? So you as a player didn't come up with this person, right? You didn't make them. Other people kind of handed it to you. So you have this freedom to be like, yeah, this person's kind of disposable. I can just kind of run with it.

So it's like, I love that the mechanics, they don't say that. They don't say that's why they're doing it. But the mechanics put you in the mindset of treating this as a character who is not precious to you, which is genius. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So that's the kind of goal that I really like to sort of dig up in terms of like, okay, where, when you know, you know the mood you want to create, you know the experience you want to create for a player, right?

That's always the kind of payoff at the end of the day, right? What can you make them feel and how you can you, you connect them. And then it's, okay, what are the different tools at my disposal? Can be what are I right in the box? What colors do I use, right? Right. Exactly. It matters, right? Like everything. And, and and all the way down, it's like, okay, if this mechanic means I'm going to have more control, then I'm going to feel more constrained by it. If it means there's things where I have less control, then I'll feel more open. And what does that look like? I think it's just, it's just fascinating, you know,

as you apply it to any different kind of genre. And I think, I think that gets into something back to the whole like, you know, hey, being a game designer, one of the, one of the real skills, like the necessary skills is the can you put your brain in the brain of somebody else playing this game? Can you fully project yourself to the experience of a different person and what they know and what they don't know? And to be like, at this point, they don't know this part of the rules. At this point, they're having this experience. And if you can't do that, if you can't put yourself in their shoes and the shoes of a lot of different people, it's misery, right?

It's much, much harder to make games because you're just like guessing. And I know a lot of people who are like great people who are very like ardent designers, but you can tell that they're not doing that yet. Like, no, no, you got to, you got to like visualize that experience, not just that one experience, but the experience of many different kinds of people who will be in that seat. Yeah, I mean, I would argue it's the most important skill of a game designer is that empathy, right, that ability to understand how the decisions you make as a designer will impact the experiences of your players or whoever's your audience, right?

Yeah, it's not just like, what will the chits do, what will the mechanics do? It's the what will the people feel or will they be thinking looking at your mechanics, right? Yeah. Yeah, and I think that, you know, you touched on this earlier, but just to sort of reinforce the lesson, like there's nothing more important than just watching people play games to develop that intuition. Right. So even for, you know, that's where running different game groups and bringing people together of different walks of life and seeing them and seeing how they react is so important. Or for people that are just playing at home with their friends, maybe you don't have a big game group yet. Like when you're in a game and you're thinking like a game designer, you're not just immersed and losing yourself, right? It's like you're losing yourself. Right. It's like you're losing yourself. Right. It's like you're losing yourself. Right. It's like, you're losing yourself. Like, why did I get so excited right now? Why did it get so mad over here? Right. And then you're, you're paying attention to what is it. You're like, wait a bit. And then you can sort of. That's an easy starting point. Okay, what triggered that for me? And then look for other people.

Look for their reactions. Look to see when they get confused or check out of the table or really get lean in. Those starting to look for those cues and connecting them to the elements of the game that bring it together is like the best foundation thing that anybody can do, regardless of what phase you are. And you know, you want to be a professional designer. You just want to get better at this and know more about it. Like that seems like kind of square one to me. And I also think I think that the gaming of strangers is such a big thing that I think so many people, so many groups probably just play with like that we have the same gaming group we play with the same

game group we have this dynamic and we're used to it and even if we play a bunch of different games it's still the same people but to actually sit down with people you don't know over and over and over again different people different over and over again wildly educational right your ability to very quickly suss out what they're about what they're thinking is is a whole incredibly valuable scale. Yeah, yeah. Or another twist on that is the, you know, demoing games to people, right? Having to teach them games. Oh, my goodness gracious. I mean, I have, I have run through and taught, you know, thousands and thousands of games over the, you know, my career and watching that, knowing those elements where people get stuck, we will people get lost, where people don't follow

you, where you could, you know, so when it comes to like games I've been demoing for 14 years, like Ascension, I'm like, I've got my script down. I know exactly, but here's the thing. I know exactly what you're coming in. I know exactly what you're hooked. Look at that script. Look at that script in your head. And then go back and look at the book and be like, does the book say that script? That's the question. So the advice I give to my fellow game designers that they hate. And it's the when you've been working on a project for a while, you've been churning on, you've been going on and on. I'm like, take the rules you've got, close that folder,

put them in a drawer, put them away. Take out a blank sheet of paper, you know, open a new text document, right? Write the rules from memory from scratch, front to back. right just write the whole thing in one sitting or whatever right and i guarantee you if you've been playing this game a bunch and you've been demoing all this stuff the what you write down will be so much better than what's in the rulebook because you have just like you said you've got your pattern you've got your perfect you know exactly you want to say every little thing and it's and it's like the best version of the game ever but because you've got this text document that you've probably been editing for 10 million times it's got all this cruft and got all this stuff

stuff that's left over from like version one. But with a blank slate, you suddenly, like, you'll have the best version of it. It's, yeah, I agree completely. Yeah, this is great. So it's actually, I'm in the middle of doing this in a really interesting way right now. So we just, as of recording this, we just released our kind of closed beta for Soulforge Fusion to our backers. And this is a hybrid deck game.

So it is a digital version of the same physical game. And we have a tutorial in that, in that version that's notorious. It's so difficult to build a good tutorial rule set. I have more tools than I do with a rulebook because I can kind of give you steps and make you do a thing. Right. You can walk them through it. It's like it's infinite refinement.

It's infinite little details. It's like, and I'm, you know, I'm trying to get the thing that you do to feel obvious to you without having to tell you to do it. It is like, it is,

there's an infinite rabbit hole of time that you could spend on this. And I think that's, that's one of the biggest problem. Like, I mean, the skill of writing rule books or building tutorials or teaching, it's like, It could be an entire kind of course and domain of expertise in itself.

It's the weirdest form of teaching because you think of like a classroom, you teach things, but you might teach someone something, but you don't then immediately make them execute it, right? Teaching games is like, I'm teaching you this. And now two seconds for now, you have to be able to do it.

Like, you are now the EMT, right? I just told you EMT skills. Now you do the thing. Do the thing. I just told you do the thing. It's a very strange.

it's pretty unique. It's a pretty unique teaching thing. But in just the, I mean, the other side, the overload problem, like, well, if I tell you everything, I told you too much, right? And now you drop, it's all falling out of your head again. I'm back to square one, right? Like, less is more. But how much less and how much more, right?

Right, exactly. How do I titrate this information to you? So you get it when you need it, not too early, not too late. And it's, obviously, you have to hit a wide. swath of audience because some people are going to need, you know, some people want to know everything before they start. Some people, they're going to get, they're going to check out if you give more than a page of instruction before you move, you know, and that there's, it's, it is such a difficult and interesting art. And then, and then the, the get a face reality, they're not going to

read your book. Like, you write these instructions and you pick every last paragraph and every sentence is perfectly refined. And this one word is slightly different. And they're skimming it because of course they are, because they're sitting at a table and they're trying to play a game quickly. they're not reading it like a Bible. And so then you got to go, okay, how do I make the rules so that even if you're playing it wrong, the rules will show you you're playing it wrong and get you back on track? Like, how do I make the game auto correct if you do it wrong? You know what I mean?

So it's like, because they're not, no one reads your book front to back. That would be, nobody does that. Yeah. They're glancing at it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So there's, there's, you know, rulebooks have like, they have several purposes that you need to serve at once, right? They like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing. I need to learn and get started.

There's the like, hey, I need to reference this and find something that I actually need right through the process. And then there's this sort of like I can just, this actually makes me want to play. Right, right. You got to get them excited. Exactly. I have to actually be excited through this process. Because if it just, if I check out while I'm written the rolls, then you've lost, you know, you've lost them already. Right. Right. So it's like I need to keep doing. engaged. I need to get you the information you need and I need to be have information readily available to you whenever you need it. Right. I have to inspire you to be excited by this game at the same time. Right. Yes. Yeah. So a lot of work, a lot of work. And I,

why are we in this business? This is a terrible business. You know, we should. This got to be easy things. How was that computer consulting thing you were doing? That sounds easy. Real estate. That's where the money is. It's going to crypto. Yeah. Oh my goodness. No kids. This is a, anyone, listen to this. That was a joke. Do not get into crypto. Do not get into crypto. I'm not advising getting into crypto. This is not financial advice. It's a result. As a general rule, you're not getting into game design because you're trying to get rich. It's a bad strategy by default. It's because you're so passionate about this that really doing anything else just seems like it would be

dull and I uh and there's and there's the thing too like I you know I mean getting getting serious for the moment right like so you know uh you look around like for the last whatever 10 years the world's been crazy whatever how long how long is the world been crazy I forget it's been a while right you know just and you're like what am I doing to help the world what am I like I should be a doctor and like no I'm making games and then I go wait that's how I'm supposed to be helping the world I'm supposed to be making these games that I guess like help people think better, I don't know, like enlighten people's lives or give them some tool to, I don't know, have a better view of the world around them. I mean, I guess, you know, it's not thoracic surgery,

but. Yeah, I mean, I take, I take, I take this question very seriously. I don't, you know, I think we should be here to, you know, make the world a better place for our existing, right? It's not the only reason to be here, but I think it's an important part of the puzzle, right? You want to contribute. And I think that absolutely, like, you know, again, I think you, you, you said it beautifully early on in our conversation, right? You fall in love with the people at the table a little more at the end, right? You are connecting people. That's one of the jobs that we do. And helping people to be more creative and live more creative and fulfilling lives. That's like my main mission right now. I mean, that's what I'm here for. That's why this podcast exists.

Right. The people that are listening are because they want something out of their lives. And I went through the, you know, listeners the podcast, probably heard the story plenty of times. But, you know, I went through the wrong path for a while. I was, I went down to law school. I was miserable. I was kind of going down this playing in this box. And it took me a lot of pain and suffering to figure out how to break out of it. And now I want to make that path a little easier for everybody else. And so, yeah, you're right. I'm not performing open heart surgery or, you know, fighting a war or whatever.

But I do think that this matters. And, you know, at the end of the day, if our lives are going to be crazy, if the world is going to be crazy, it's going to be because people are intrinsically, they're not happy on their own. They're not feeling fulfilled. They're not feeling heard. They're not feeling connected. Right. We have the real challenges of our society now where there's, you know, suicide rates are increasing and there's depression rates.

And, you know, it's not a lack of of resources in the world. There's actually quite a bit of that. It's really a lack of, it's the mindsets that we're talking about. It's a brain problem. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing that's exactly right. I think this the thing I always think is the, I, my games never tell people what to think. I have no ideology baked into my game. I have very strong ideologies. Let me tell you. I can rant all day about things I think are right or wrong. But I very actively do not put this in my game because I have a firm belief that if you give people tools to examine things and you put them in a room with other people, the majority that will comes out is going to be good.

Like people will become better people. Even if they're examining any issues, they'll still think better. The result will be good. They will not turn into worse people who have terrible ideas. I think. I could be wrong. I might be back of the wrong horse on that one, but I'm pretty confident that is true. Yeah, yeah, my experience aligns with that.

And it's one of the, it's one of the hardest things right now, right? The different sides, it doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum. Generally speaking, you think the other side is crazy and completely at lunatic. Why would you ever talk to those people? They're Satan, right? Exactly. And that's not healthy, right? This is not, I don't, you know, everybody, you know, at its core, we all want the same things, right?

We all want to belong. We all want to contribute. We all want to, like, feel like we have a place in the world. We all want, you know, to kind of have some kind of legacy or connection. Like, these things are just intrinsic. And you may think you're going to get it in a different way than I do. And that's okay. We can work through that.

But appreciating that common humanity and being able to connect is so important. And I do think games are a huge part of that. And, you know, since we're in the crazy philosophical part of our conversation. We jump straight to that part. Yeah. I don't know. I would go so far as to say it may be that games are the most important part. of this because when we get into a world where suddenly, you know,

AI is going to be doing everything better than we are. Right? We're going to need to be able to what, how do we, how do we, how do we find challenge? How do we like, you know, connect? It's like, well, no, it really is going to be games and creating artificial constraints for ourselves because the world itself is not going to be the thing that you're going to be struggling against, you know, even in the utopic version of AI where, you know, resources are plentiful.

AI is taking care of all of our problems. We still need some way to find meaning and connection. And I think actually our. ability to play games with each other and connect and create and do those things, it's still going to feel valuable, even if it's, you know, like your games for, you know, microscope and the other games, like, you're creating worlds, not because they're going to be the next Lord of the Rings or because you're going to do anything with it. In fact, I've played, I've created hundreds of those worlds that I've just thrown away at the end. That's not what's

important. It's the act of creation that's important. And I think we need to, to develop that skill and learn that that's important. And we're in trouble. No, you're right. The process that That's exactly right. Within this world, when I was making this world, I was like, I had these doubts beforehand. I was like, oh, is making multiple worlds okay and just throwing them away, making them very quickly during the way? And it had that exact thing. I was like, no, the experience, the thing that you take away, the thoughts you have is the important part. The world is irrelevant.

The creative process is not the output of the creative process. It's the thing you wind up thinking about a week later. When you're still dwelling on an idea and you're like, hmm, I'm kind of haunted by this. And the interesting part too is that four people sit down at the table, we make all these worlds together, each of us walks away with a different experience. We all walk away thinking about different things. And that's great

too. Like, we don't all have to like the same parts of the story or be fascinated by the same way or or have our thoughts provoked in the same way. But the AI thing, it's suddenly dawned on me. I was like, wait a second. AI, I realize, it was literally the

anti-game, right? Like, it is the exact direct opposite of game. We make the things. We do the creative part ourselves and the AI is the no, it does the creative part for you. It removes you from the equation

and just provides you with answers. So it's like, it is our worst enemy. It is, the battle line is drawn. Gamers versus AI, that's my take on it. I'm serious. This is our arch enemy. This is the worst possible

thing. possible. Interesting. Interesting. I don't know if I'm quite as pessimistic, but I see where you're going with this, right? I mean, so what I would really like, hey, I want to do a creative thing. I outsource it. I ask someone. I mentioned, let me put you an example. Say you're playing, you're playing a game. Playing a Z&D. And every time it's your turn to make a decision for your character or to say something, you turn to someone else and you say, what should I say or do? And that person tells you what your character would say or do. And you go, awesome. And then you turn to GM and say that's what my character says just the thing that this guy told me but that guy is an

AI right that's literally what the AI creative process is is to say hmm do this for me and it runs out and does it if you if you called someone on the phone and had them do this for you you would never like when i see people talk about like the thing that they made with AI they sometimes do have like kind of a creative possessiveness to it like i made this thing with the eyes like no no you you outsource that someone else made that the AI made that if that had been a human making that for you you would never think that. You'd be like someone else made that. Well, yeah.

So have you, have you done, played with this stuff at all? Have you played with like, I literally am in games with people and we're like, we're playing games and they're like, hey, I'm going to make a thing with a pancake with eyes.

And they're throwing in the chat. And I'm like, stop doing that. Stop making pancakes with eyes. I have not touched it directly, but people have mocked me endlessly. They've said the, hey, ask AI to make a game in the form of Ben Robbins.

and it spewed out a bunch of stuff that seems sensible for the first like three paragraphs and then suddenly it stopped seeming so sensible. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's the question of like, what is AI today versus what does the future look like? And I think there's a AI today is actually not that different from what you are doing at the table with other people because it is as a collaboration tool, right, is the same way I might in a game of microscope choose to say, okay, I'm going to start here. In fact, I bet I haven't tried this, but I bet you could play a good game of microscope with

AI. Something would happen. Yeah. Something would definitely happen. Where you, you know, this idea that, and again, this is some of the work I've done with Wharton and I've seen some of their things. Like, you know, AI as part of the tool at the table of one of the people that's generating ideas, you will come up with better ideas collectively. AI doesn't give you by itself is not going to come up with anything super original, but with constraints and working with a person. Right now, it does, it does provide some value. And I think it can be another one of those things that helps people who are not as comfortable being creative to give them like a springboard to kind of do stuff. I think that's where it's best case scenario.

But it's not in the worst case scenario is where it replaces the human and it's you no longer feel the need to use your own creativity or participate in the creative process. Then I agree with you that your your nightmare scenario is much more real. Prompts versus output. I mean, if you say like give me random prompts, that's the funny thing. You see people prompting the AI, but rarely talking about the idea of the. AI prompting them, which is really the more interesting case, right? The like AI provoking me to make things rather than me provoking the AI to make things.

Yeah, having the AI take on a role. I like to think of like treat AI like a very earnest intern. Like somebody who really wants to help you, not necessarily that smart, but it's somebody that you can have in the room to just kind of talk through really, you know, really helpful. I found that to be a useful little side tool. I don't know where it's headed, but I do think it's as a technology, exists today, it's like not good enough to actually replace people who are really good at their jobs, but it is good enough to like help goose you along. Or if you're, if you're, so I look at it like a,

it's kind of an inverted, like a U shape curve. If you're terrible at something, AI is really, really useful to get you to like mediocre. And if you're great at something, it can be a nice useful tool that kind of just like kind of move, help you move a little bit faster. But if you're just kind of mediocre at something, it's the worst thing for you. Like for people who are mediocre, the AI is just a replacement. And so it's a very interesting space. I have got the big wrenches out. I'm going to go smash the machines. I've gone full.

Yeah, yeah. Fight the power. Fight the power. It's gone full of the. So speaking of the power of the machine, I realize we're running a little low on time. And so if people want to use their machines to find more things from you and to be able to give you money virtually over these machine tools,

how would they go about doing that to pick up games? Which I do again. I highly recommend microscope specifically. I know I'm going to pick up in this world because I discovered it as I was doing research for this this conversation so where can people go to get your cool things and play your cool games with or without a what do you think uh uh really aren't isn't all intelligence in some ways artificial when you really think about it i mean none of us sometimes got intel i mean really you think about it like you know uh i don't that's really

true uh the laneage.com uh is the the website which has been there since the dawn of time you can always find me there my social my social media presences are always lacking but i have a long running blog that's been going on for so oh okay 19 years now so wow late yeah started started chiseling the blog in stone tablets and now it is yeah that's been a while um so i do i'm i'm if you if you want to keep up with the kind of things i'm doing go to laymaidj.com and then from there the there's stuff from the blog there and you can actually do like an email list subscription to get all the latest posts or rssss and stuff like that and i'm always posting something moderately inane or or actually that's not true i take that back i don't do that what i do

is i post probably less than a lot of people do because i i tend to only post something if i think it's actually quite interesting i'm i'm very averse to wasting people's time with um you know just filler yes yes that's good and hopefully uh people find that same thing be true for this very conversation where we yeah yeah wrap around nice Oh, man. No, I think this has been more fun than I expected to be honest as we jump to a variety of different fun topics. I never, I never know. Okay, we think of it this way, right?

This interview is much like a game, right? The fascinating thing, the thing I think one of the big hurdles for the kind of games that I make, for example, is that you don't know what's going to happen going into it. If I say to you, hey, let's stand to play microscope. Neither of us know what the subject is. We have no idea what the topic is. That's very daunting, right? It's like a leap of faith to sit down and play and have something happened. This interview is the same way.

We had no idea what we're going to talk about. And here we are. See? Turned out well. That's right. That's right. As you know, yeah, most people are known about it. You know, I give that preface to every guest at the beginning.

Like there is no, there's no agenda. There's no specific thing. Like we just go where the conversation naturally goes and try to, you know, try to add some value to the audience, but mostly just entertain ourselves and find things that I'm here to learn. And I'm here, I'm excited about. And then you're excited about. And then boom, here we are having a fun chat for over an hour here. So I want to thank you for that time.

And for all of your contributions to the crafts, to connecting people together, it's great. It's not often that I get sort of genuinely surprised by a game. And Microscope did that for me. I'm sure it will from any of our audience after listening to this. So thanks so much, man. Thank you.

It's been very fun talking to you. It's been a great time. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights

to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.