Think Like A Game Designer - Ben Seck—Treating Your Career Like a Game, Shifting from Cards to Mobile, and Being a Boss Who Actually Backs Their Team (#107)

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

About Ben SeckBen Seck is an absolute titan of global game development and competitive play whose career path is an masterclass in strategic execution. Ben and I go back nearly 30 years to our early days on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour circuit, where he won a Grand Prix in Cape Town and scored a legendary Pro Tour top eight. Unlike most of our old-school peers, Ben is still actively crushing tournaments competitively today. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the R&D trenches at Upper Deck Entertainment during the wild-west era of the Versus System card game, both eventually shifting from pure game design into brand and product management . While I left to bootstrap Stone Blade, Ben strategically expanded his toolkit by jumping into the digital free-to-play explosion at Zynga. Since then, he has served as a senior leader and executive at some of the biggest entertainment powerhouses on earth (including Walt Disney, King, and Scopely) and is currently the Head of New Games at Gram Games in London. He has managed teams of hundreds and launched massive digital projects played by tens of millions of users globally. In this episode, we break down how to treat your creative career like a game you intend to win, the massive structural differences between tabletop and digital monetization, and what real leadership looks like when you’re managing massive teams across corporate environments.If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* How to "Game" Your Career: To game your career, you have to be completely at peace with the fact that games are a commercial art form where understanding how to sell your product is a vital piece of the puzzle. Don't let yourself get stuck in a comfortable routine . Push your boundaries by chasing high-growth markets, and whenever you hit a gap in your knowledge, relentlessly ask questions and learn on someone else's dime. Ben and I took completely different paths (him in corporate mobile and me bootstrapping an indie studio) but we both used calculated risks to minimize dead draws and massively increase our surface area for positive luck. Ultimately, the true metric of success isn't a fancy corporate title; it's whether you effortlessly get out of bed because you're genuinely excited about the work you get to do.* The Lifespan and Cadence of Digital Complexity: A massive misconception in tabletop circles is that free-to-play mobile titles are inherently “simple” games. The reality is that digital titles don’t have less complexity; they just allocate their complexity points across a much longer timeline. Up front, your onboarding funnel is brutally tight, and if you don’t hook a casual player in the first two minutes, they delete the app forever. That said, once a user is plays regularly after a month or two, their tolerance for systemic depth sky-rockets. The secret is using universal themes and recognizable cultural tropes as an anchor so players get systems for free, allowing you to steadily layer in immense complexity over years without alienating your audience.* Culture Over Hierarchy: Leading teams at scale, whether it’s an intimate indie squad or a studio of 170 people, means abandoning rigid, top-down corporate hierarchies. Especially in a hybrid work environment, a leader’s primary job is to intentionally construct a culture that keeps people from hiding in their silos. You want to explicitly carve out unstructured whiteboarding spaces on Zoom or over office lunches to protect that organic, big-brain creative spark which calendars can kill. Your team needs to see through your consistent, daily actions that you will fiercely advocate for their interests and back them up when decisions are made behind closed doors. 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 speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective,

whether it's inside the gaming realm or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce. If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you. It is the brand new Think Like a Game Designer design lab.

It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers that includes over 60 lessons to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design discord

filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games. Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop pretending and start actually designing games with intention, check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. In today's episode, I speak with my good friend Ben Sack.

Ben and I have known each other for almost 30 years. Ben is an accomplished Magic the Gathering player, winning a Grand Prix in Cape Town, getting a Pro Tour top eight, multiple GP top eights. And he still, unlike many of the people I played with back of my day, is still playing competitively today. But in addition to that, Ben has had an incredible career in game design. We talk in this episode about our time together at Upper Deck Entertainment,

where he, like me, transitioned from being a game designer to a brand and product manager. And then we talk about where our paths diverged, where I quit to start Stoneblade Entertainment. He, a couple years later, quit to join Zinga and learned all about the process of making digital games. And we go into the differences between making tabletop games and digital games. He then went on to work at Walt Disney, as well as King and Scopely, and is now the head of new games at Graham Games in London. He has managed teams of dozens and sometimes even hundreds of people. He's launched projects that have been played by millions,

sometimes even tens of millions of players. And Ben's insightful attitude towards games, towards design, towards business, and towards life comes through in this episode. I always love chatting with Ben, and it's been amazing to finally get to share his insights with you. There's a lot of very actionable advice for you, whether you're just starting your career, whether you're managing people and trying to deal with a giant corporation or just trying to find your way in a very difficult environment, maybe at an indie studio.

We talk about all of that today. So without any further ado, here is Ben Sec. Hello and welcome. I am here with the Ben Sec. Ben, man, it's been a long time. I've been trying to get you on the podcast. Very excited to have you here. Yeah, I think you tried to organize it a few times and I stood you up as, like,

I want to do. You're out in London and the UK now working out there and you've moved around a lot in your career and I want to get into that because you've got a diverse career across the gaming industry with a lot of exposure to tons of different challenges, design styles, like mediums, like a lot of fascinating stuff. And just to tee up, because you're exactly the kind of person I love having on the podcast because you and I have known each other for almost 30 years, which shows how old we are. And from the moment that we met, we started deep diving on conversations about games, about design. And every single time we met, we just saw each other a couple weeks ago at the UK Games Expo, we do the exact same thing. And it'll sometimes veer into

philosophy and life and et cetera. But we always have these incredible conversations. And part of the point of this podcast is to be able to share those conversations and insights with people that are not just in the room at the time. So to tee this one up, you and I have. You and I have a lot of have pretty similar origins, at least at a high level, and then we diverge, right? And so I want to talk about, so we start off as pro magic players. You had a great magic career, supported yourself, traveled on the world. We ended up at Upper Deck Entertainment, started working on game design with the versus system card game, basically the Wild West over there, right? We had no idea what we were doing. Most nobody there knew what they were doing. And you also took a path, the same path that I did,

of moving from game design to brand management and taking on the business side of things. Is that that right as well, right? Because I think that happens. Yeah. I think the reason I did it is, again, similar to the reason you did it in that I think, at least in traditional paths, there is a ceiling or a perceived ceiling,

especially when you're in it, that your career can only be so successful just as a pure game designer. Now, I actually don't believe that as much. like in modern day, but I still do think that your best path is to have a reasonable or very strong understanding of the business aspect of, or the production aspect, or some other piece that's beyond like just making the game or coming up with the game. But I do think because the game industry has grown so much, there is like a higher ceiling that at least I perceive at the time for what a, let's call it,

tier one or tier F, whatever, tier system we want to use, like game designer. And I think maybe in hindsight, I actually might have not have put that way, but actually I'm glad I have. And at least for my perspective, I've enjoyed knowing every aspect of all types of games and all types of game industries.

Yeah, so there's two threads here that I find interesting. And this reminds me of a fun conversation we had that I'll tee you up for, which is, one, the value of understanding all the different sides of the business. I, of course, agree, right? I've been in every aspect of the business. I run my own damn company. I got to do everything, right? I would say to some extent, I have to know everything. And I think that makes me understanding production, understanding marketing, understanding how you connect to your audience, understanding, running a team, like all that stuff I think makes me a better game designer. Now, I don't have as much time to focus on the pure craft of design. So there is a cost,

absolutely. But I do think it improves your skill set more broadly. And so we could talk a little bit about that. And I'm happy to go down that thread. And I also think you also revealed something that I've noticed about you over the years, which is you're very strategic about your career, right? You're very much looking for the choices that you're making within the game industry are very much how can I advance and how can I, if you're gaming your career, you're gaming your career, basically. And part of that I think is how I grew up, my family is an immigrant family to Australia. I think there's generally a push in that direction. Let's call it strive because you want to make it worth the kind of blood, sweat and tears, your family did to move over.

And I have a little bit also a kind of similar situation in terms of at least within, at least my family, but I think a lot of immigrant families, the perception of game design is basically non-examined. existent. They don't know what it is. And non-existent is as bad as a bad career. There's a lot of skepticism. There's a lot of kind of what the hell are you doing with your life. There's obviously the cliche of Asian families wanting kind of doctors, lawyers,

engineers or something like that. Yeah. Jewish families too man. I got to have the same boat, man. And I think part of that framing of what a career is and how do you prove yourself is still

is part of my blood. I think I naturally lean that way. I think if you're a competitive person, you want to make sure you do the best with the tools you have. But I do think that there's that part of it. But also I do think that most people aren't strategic enough about their career

because at least the way I see it, look, you create more value for yourself and people around you, but also it gives you more flexibility. and how you actually want to run most of your life. Obviously, there's a trade-off. There's a work-life balance people talk about it all the time. But success breeds at least options.

And I think that's something that people need to be considering when they're just doing any sorts of career. Now, I think with game design, I think there's actually some clear things that you need to kind of balance. And actually, it will get back to your first question in terms of, I think you need to, at least be reasonably a piece with that games are a commercial art. Okay. Some of your success metrics have to do with selling a lot of stuff. And if you're not considering that, that's fine. Look, power to you if you want to be an indie game design artist. I'll call them artists in the

kind of, let's call it the broader sense. Semi pejorative sense. But certainly I think there's a lot of people who are one. to be purists about what their artistic kind of expression is, that I think the majority of people shouldn't do that. I honestly believe that because it is not a sustainable lifestyle unless you are like independently wealthy or you just don't care about like how how you feed yourself from day to day. Or it's a side quest, right? If you just want to make this cool game that you can play with your friends and you want to have exactly the vision, the artistic vision you want, but that's not your career. There's nothing wrong with that, right? I really do believe and it's one of the things I tell

people in my course define what success means for you and be very clear about that because some people think they want the full career and the full thing but they actually don't but if you do want a career and you do want to make a living as a game designer then you absolutely you're 100% right you absolutely have to consider the commercial impact of your decisions you have to understand the intersection between the marketplace and your artistic vision and honestly later in your career you can make different trade-offs too you can do things that are more aligned with let's call it your core philosophy about game design. Like, I'm, I'd say to where I am considering that myself, I'm like saying, okay,

other options about like maybe doing something that's a bit more, let's call it, for me, that might have a little bit more of a ceiling in terms of at least the, let's call it, the likelihood of success, but actually still are able to satisfy what I want because I made, let's call it, more strategic moves early in my career. Yeah. So there's a couple things here. I'm going to ask you to talk about how people, because there's a lot of people here that are aspiring industry, people that want to get into the game industry, people that want to make a living in the industry. So I'm going to ask you to give your like strategy tips, pro player tips. But I will say that the high level version of this is very much the same as a strategy in a traditional game. Right. If you're playing match together, I could you really like you want to get your resource advantage advantage. You want to get your like overwhelming card advantage matters a ton, resource advantage matters a ton and then could capitalize in any number of different ways to actually win the game. Right. And so this is. This is. is a skill that we were trained on at the pro level from an early age. And it's true, right?

You don't, money isn't everything, but man, oh man, does money make things easier? Right? If you've got a lot of capital for it just as the ability to have some savings allows you to take more risks, the ability to have a steady income stream, be that from games or from something else, allows you to try more stuff. So there's definitely value in that even apart from the. Oh, I got into kind of a lot of the career post-opredek is actually very much that decision. I made an evaluation after five years at ApparDec that at the time, again, I was actually wrong about this, but I was also seeing a ceiling on, let's call it traditional tabletop gaming. I was like saying, okay, this industry is why I got into game design,

but I was seeing a lot of growth on like digital platforms, whether it'll be PC, mobile, etc. So I would say, okay, I'm looking for the bigger upside, the bigger industry, and what is a way that I can leverage what I know moving into something that has, let's call it, more opportunities, more skill sets, just more growth personally. Because I will also, once you've been making, especially for a company, like games for, let's call it, at least three or four years, you do feel like you get into almost too much. much of a rhythm, right? The problem with the rhythm is that it doesn't force you outside your boundaries or doesn't force you to push yourself. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to start applying for things beyond tabletop gaming. I applied for a place that a lot of people wouldn't have considered. In fact, I didn't consider it, except for a colleague of ours, Dave Humphreys,

who was now working at Wizard of the Coast, but was a game design manager at Upper Dick at the time. and look Dave's a extremely smart person and he's got a PhD he's like in biology or I can't remember exactly but like it's but then he was playing

these Facebook games that seemed incredibly stupid I wanted like incredible no skill I have no idea why he was playing them but then he was got we were talking about it one lunchtime as oh these games are huge

and they were on Facebook and this was a time with Facebook prior to it is just at the beginning of the social media boom. So we're talking about like 2010 range. Yeah, 2010. And so I think 2009 is when we talked about it. And I,

there was a company making the best or the biggest versions of those games which is called Zinger. Now Zinger is now quite well known for things like Farmville and things like that. But I was like, you know what? I'm going to trust my instinct. If this company is big, I'll apply to there.

Just see what happens, right? Because I also was interested in Silicon Valley as a concept. I definitely like the idea of being in a much more tech-focused company. And the only place that gave me at the time of day was Zinger. And actually, how I got the job was the recruiting manager, The person who was recruiting for the role was Henry Stern, and it was working at Zinger. Now, I don't know if people know who Henry Stern is, but like Henry Stern is a very story game designer, but he was actually a one of the first pro players that had converted to game design

from the pro scene in magic, worked for wizards and had actually like post-wisers had moved to the Bay Area to work at at Zinger. and he saw my name, we hadn't met each other, but he knew my name by reputation, just because he was part of the magic ecosystem. And he said, he had the belief that magic players make good game designers regardless of whether they're technical skills.

Like, I didn't have, I wasn't a programmer, I'd done some programming, but I wouldn't call myself a programmer. But he knew that's like, hey, the type of skills that you use in like playing magic, translate if you're able to refine them in the right way. And so he gave me the chance. The interview went really well. But I would say so much of my kind of the dominoes that kind of fell after in my career

are because I played competitive magic. And so you have to know that one of the words of wisdom is always be aware about the networks you're creating in whatever you do. I was able to create a network that was able to eventually lead to an opportunity because, one, a well-known person network, but also I was good to people in that network. So they were more likely to give me favors in that way. So I want to say it's like you don't know what bridges you are burning when you're being, let's call it, negative to somebody.

But you also don't know the bridges you might be creating if you're actually just being a good person in. general. Yeah, building a reputation. I love the Warren Buffett quote of reputation takes 20 years to build and five minutes to destroy. I may be botching it, but that's the gist of it. And it's a, there's no greater value than your ability to show up, be a good person, do what you say you're going to do, and demonstrate that over time. And then if you put yourself into a space where you surround yourself with smart people and as much as possible, those people are eventually going to succeed and do things and they will want you there because you've demonstrated that you're the kind of person that they want around. I want to dig into more about what you learned at Zinga. But first,

I, so my narrative took like a, this is, we've crossed over the period where my narrative takes a detour. I think I'm about two years ahead of you in this where I go, I become the brand manager, I launched the World of Warcraft Ministers game. And then I quit at the end of 2008, right as the recession hits to go start my own company and go do my own thing. Do you remember what you said to me at that time? I thought you were crazy. And I don't know the exact one. But I definitely never feel if I was like, I didn't know, like, I was not really aware of that many startups in the tabletop space. Right. This was like, and I would say that now they feel a bit more like, there's more of them.

Things like Kickstarter are allowed for a lot more kind of like bootstrapping in terms of making tabletop. at the time, it felt like it was just dominated by the kind of, one, it was dominated by licenses. That's what a big thing at the time. And the second thing, it was dominated by just the bigger publishers because, look, making tabletop games, especially back then, there's logistically very complex. There's a lot of stuff and a lot of different types of things that you need to get put into a single box. I saw the pain that you went through trying to make World of Warcraft Minutes.

there was so many kind of like decisions and concessions and like how do I make this thing viable for whatever the price point that you decided to go with and ultimately I think that was part of I want to say the failure of the product I don't mean it's like the product was a failure but like part of the reason why there was like it didn't get as big as it could be was it cost too much the way that you did it right and that wasn't your fault it was it was was a lot of what Upper Deck could do. You actually reduced the cost. I remember you did so many things that made concessions or like tradeoffs or just were creative

in certain ways. But ultimately, there just wasn't the right infrastructure within Upper Deck. And honestly, at the time, I think manufacturing overseas was just a little tougher at the time. And so there's a lot of kind of like friction there. I think now there's so much more fulfillment for manufacturing and this logistics. Oh, yeah. Everything's so much easier to create now that it ever was. That's for sure. The conversations we had at the time were like, you complain about what you couldn't do.

And that was really, I saw that struggle and I was like, why do you want to put all the burden onto yourself? Now, granted, I believe in your skill as a game maker. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was like, all the other stuff is, I'll call it, not your natural skill set, at least wasn't at the time. You had moved into product management of brand, man. Again, there's only like a year or so. It's really like you're betting in yourself, so I know how to do this. And I think it is very much a, I credit to your tenacity and your ability to learn things that it even worked at all.

But also, I think it helped that your first idea was very good. I think people obviously underrepresent how much luck is it. I say luck in terms of, look, if you do the first thing and it's the right thing, it makes it feel easier. Ascension being the first major thing that came out of your company, kind of changed how hard everything else was from that point. And maybe actually, maybe cause you some future stumbles, like, because of, let's call it, beginner's luck. Oh, yeah, I've never did anything that failed kind of feeling.

Definitely led me to some pretty catastrophic. You're still on the road. So I don't ever want to pretend like this was easy at any such of the imagination. Again, like, I bring this up because I think you're right on a lot of things. things, right? It is unbelievably hard. There's a certain degree of hubris, arrogance, whatever, to be able to pull this off. But I also, I was very strategic in a different way, right? I took different calculated risks. Like, I had learned enough during my time at Upper Deck and as you said, struggled with a unbelievably difficult project, like the most complicated, most paint operations,

most articulated pre-made, pre-painted miniatures ever done because Blizzard wanted its standards for the things. So I made one of the hardest possible things you could make. make on somebody else's time, learned a lot of things that way. And so I had enough of a skill set that I was convinced, and I had saved up, we talked about money giving you options. I had been pretty conservative with my finances. And I had saved up a year's worth of savings. And I had the freedom to try a thing. And I had a confidence that if it didn't work, which I judged a pretty high likelihood that what I was doing wasn't going to work. A year later, I could just go get another job. I'd go do exactly what you did. And I'm sure somebody would have hired me at Zinga or

whatever, it could have gotten back to Upper Deck, who knows. So it was a different kind of risk-taking and a different kind of strategy around the career. So I just highlighted here because I wanted for the audience, like there's not a right or wrong answer, but there are strategic ways to think about your career to mitigate risk and to maximize your exposure to luck, right? Because luck does matter a lot in all of these things, but you can, just like in a game of magic, you could top deck the right card, the wrong card, but you can strategically play a game so that you maximize the surface area for positive luck and minimize the number of dead draws available to you, right, or whatever, the number of things that could really burn you

in a way. So all of my business strategy now is very much. I just had this conversation with my team the other day. It's like the core design loop is the principle I invented for the, or codified, really. I didn't invent it. It's pretty common as a generally, but codified for designing things. And it's basically how you quickly and you can iterate to learn what you need to learn to design a product. And the same is true for business, right? It's like I'm trying to always like, what's the minimum risk and cost I can spend to learn the maximum of the thing that is the most important to figure out as fast as possible. And then the better I do that, the better I'm able to move forward in my business and my career and all the things. Yeah, I'll give a personal anecdote like a mirror to what you had.

So firstly, I want to plus one, the period of time that you said, hey, I learned on someone else's time. I think this is like knowing that every moment you can maximize just your personal kind of like develop an education about something. Like when I went to Zinga, I knew nothing about making games in the way that they want to make games, right? All my experience was physical tabletop. Let me tell you, the process is completely different at least at its kind of like machinery level, right? So I had to learn very fast. also I happened to be lucky so literally the second day I think I was in there they just gave me access to the database of all the play information all the play

actions and it says hey make a feature for Mafia Wars which is the first project I connected to and what I did was I just leaned along on what I knew in terms of like magic or TTCGs or collectible games and I just made essentially a collectible, let's call it deck building, like mechanic in this game. And I was lucky, again, I had beginners luck too, where it was actually one of the best and biggest features that they had done in kind of a while. Like it was made a million dollars on the first day. I was like, wow, this is like, you must be a god.

Amazing. And part of that is pure luck, but also leveraging the fact is, okay, on. What, I can't try and figure this out all by myself, right? I need to lean on a lot of stuff that I had learned previously. And so much about, and I went through many like TCGs and other games at Upper Deck. And I just learned what wasn't working in terms of you need to have a very accessible, wide funnel kind of idea in design to really make sure that you're getting the most amount of people.

and I knew the collectible kind of blind purchase for one of the better words like objects were really useful and I just, okay,

I took all that learning and made a feature out of that. The idea was I was able to like use Zingda's dime to test if there was applicable knowledge from what I used to do to what I was doing.

And it worked. And I think what I also learned was there is so many people involved in making digital games who are willing to teach you and tell you what they do and how they do it and their principles.

You need to be talking to everybody all the time when you feel you are at an information deficit. Talk to them, inquire, dig in until you feel like, okay, hold on, I can have a conversation with you about the thing you are doing.

I'm not being able to do it myself. but I can talk about it in enough detail that it doesn't feel that I'm judging it. And I think that's the thing. So many people may work in their own silos, whether it's like, I'm good at this, I'm only going to learn about this. But the thing is, you'll do the thing you do better if you know how the people around you are also contributing to your thing. And if you're not doing that, you're like saying, okay, my thing is just by itself,

I cannot leverage any other kind of either efficiency or create. from other pieces. And I think that's the wrong way. And actually, funnily enough, I think that Upper Deck, that's where we failed a lot. We did not, the R&D team, the people who were making the games, were by design or by structure, very siloed in the work they did.

And we made worse product because of it. I'm not saying, like, things we've made for our people, I think were good. but the problem is our people was big enough as a product like as an audience so you need to

no yeah no no question they brought in a bunch of pro players to make a Marvel comics Superman fighting Wolverine whatever game and we didn't do that as well as we needed to we did a game that was

really appealing to people like us and we did not understand our target audience we did not like consider the different markets and mechanisms that this thing was going to sell there's nothing more painful

than the time that we spent I think you did this as well, where you're at San Diego Comic-Con and you're trying to demo versus system to like a child that has this bright look in their eyes, like, oh boy, Batman. And then you started explaining, we put the resource row face down and then we get to

formation and you just watch like the sadness on their face. And there's like, can I just get my free t-shirt now, please? I learned a lot that way. Yeah. It's also because we have such a long period of like we've immersed ourselves in games since the year dot essentially like most of us were quite competitively. And I think we just don't naturally unless you force yourself to understand.

It's like, what if someone's just coming to games as an adult, right? What frame of reference do they have? I think that's the other thing. It's like when you're making games, understand that you have to understand all the frames of reference. And look, this is a common truism. I'm not saying anything that people don't realize. And I think there's quite a few books that talk about like lenses or,

like player types or whatever, right? That's fine. The thing is, can you imagine like playing the game without any context? And if you have trouble there, you have to rethink about that and say, okay, what are the context that

I am reaching? And is that big enough for what I want to do? Because I'm not saying you have to make a game for everybody all the time, but start big and go inwards rather than start small and go outwards. Interesting. Yeah. So I think how do you, there's two, there's actually a couple threads from what I want to pull on.

One is like when you're talking about finding that frame of reference, finding that lens for your audience, how do you identify who your targeted audience is? If you're not the target audience, how do you put yourself in their frame? How do you figure out what they want? What's the, how do you approach a problem like that? It obviously depends whether you're a small or a big company. I'm a head of studio for a company right now. And you're obviously, obviously have a lot of resources. So you can do a lot of customer research and everything like that. If you have all the tools, right, you wills your oyster.

But let's, yeah, I'm interested. I'm interested in both sizes. So tell me, what is your customer research like with at the head of a large studio? And what does it look like if you, or how would you approach it if you were more strapped for cash? Yeah, I'm going to start strapped first, just because it makes. Okay. I think what you need to do is figure out what other things, your potential, audience might want. And as in when I say what other things, what other, if they play

sports or if they collect beanie babies, whatever, I'm saying what do every comics, figure out what level of engagement they are with that thing and then look for things that mimic what you would might put into the game. So the idea is you need to find analogs in other things they do and say, okay, is this, if they understand like how

comics work and how the continuity for comics work, okay, now you can actually maybe presume there's a bit more complexity in their ability to draw strings together. So I think that makes sense. But if you think that they are, I interact with the media very simply, let's call it, and I don't need to go further

than a certain amount. This is why you could make a game that's more complex for Star Trek like Fisianados compared to Star Wars Buccia. If you imagine what's the other stuff that they would like is more likely that someone who's Star Trek

is a more kind of love, the techno babble, loves the detail, love the attention right? Like the how they've... Star Wars is just like it's about it's more about a motive storytelling, right? Space magic. Yeah, and the end of

the stuff, right? Or at least they didn't. Now they got me to clothing and stuff. Forget about it. Yeah, yeah. How the core emotion feels. And so you need to make a simpler game for a Star Wars fan. I'm talking maybe a few years ago. Sorry, you might get lynched by my audience after this, but we'll see. I'm not saying that there are worst games. I'm saying if you want to approach the Star Wars audience, you need a broader game. I think you should. I think you'd be smarter to do it.

I think you'd do it. Be more successful. And I think Star Trek, I think you actually can make a deeper game that potentially has more like detail and longevity in terms of like your skill level that the growth. Because they want different things and you can tell up by their media consumption. Yeah. How would you feel about the Lord of the Rings asking for a friend? I think World of the Rings is interesting because I think obviously it's changed over the time. I think, let's say prior to like you want to think about it. in terms of phases. Like,

before Peter Jackson made a movie, right? I think it's like, it's hardcore. Like, the own, like, the amount of people that actually read Lord of the Rings is a very small, very dedicated few. And then Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, he was able to open it up. Movies tend to do that.

And now, I think, where it sits now is all the tropes are very well known, about Middle Earth. A lot of the games I see with the Middle Earth theme often put the complexity

in something that's very narratively understandable. Okay, I have to run and but not get possessed by the ring or whatever you're going to call it, right? And then I have to get rid of the ring

and there's distraction elements. So if you include things like Aragon's role and things like that, okay, I need to distract them. And so you can like a very complex game, but because everyone knows the story or the narrative framework of the scene, you can put a little complexity there as long as it feels true to the story. So I think right now, the games that are coming up for Middle Earth or Lord of the Rings

are actually quite, have a pretty complex core at some places, but they're nearly always complex in how they execute the story like mechanics, and that's fine. You can do that because you can lean on them. It's like, oh, okay, that makes sense because it disappears when he puts on the ring. But it's like, why would you do this disappearing when you put on the ring mechanic at all? Because everyone knows how it works or that it exists or whatever. Like, you don't need to teach them that piece. So I think you need to kind of lean, how will they know the source material?

Yeah, I think that's, that goes into another. So there's, I've heard kind of two points here, which I think are both are both great. One is this, if you look to your target audience, you look at the other types. of media they consume, the other types of games they play, if they play games and the things they do. And then you could assess the sort of complexity and depth within those to help you target the complexity and depth of the product you want to make for them, or the game you want to make for them. And then the second point that you made is something I actually talked about in my book, which is there's a certain degree of which you can batch complexity by theme and make it feel not

complex. Right. So broad way to talk about this is if I tell you that you're a mage and the idea that you have low armor and a manna pool, you pretty much get that for free, right? You pretty much don't have to like that. I would expect these certain things to come in. And so understanding a manna pool and understanding that you're fragile and that you can cast some kind of way you spend manna to cast spells. Most people who have any exposure to modern culture of any kind from that those things are going to come in for free.

And similarly, of course, the idea that the ring is a central piece and that it's corrupting and that it's powerful and et cetera. Like we get that for free. when we make Ascension Lord of the Rings available on GamePound now. And I think that there's an interesting, I always feel in a certain game you get to your, I put this in a different way of say if you agree, right? I think for any given game, depending upon your target audience, you get a certain number of complexity points to spend, right?

There's a certain, like if I'm trying to make a Zinga game that anybody's got to play on their phone and figure it out in 30 seconds, very few points to spend, maybe more as they get deeper in. And then from there, when I'm trying to spend those points, a lot of, lot of times you can make these clever trade-offs where I'm going to use the story and the theme to make something that would otherwise seem complex feel totally natural and you almost get it for free and get you a more efficient way to allocate your complexity. Is that a reasonable? Yeah, it's totally right. And actually, dovetails is something I think is important and people

don't appreciate at least enough. Like theme of your game. Like, if you choose something that has let's call it your own lore and it has all these very specific stuff that you're creating. It will make the game high, right? Like, if it doesn't have very clear analogs to something that they understand, like you can still make some things like,

oh, let's call it, you make your own world and it's essentially an elemental world. It's like fire, water, here. Okay, cool. Now you have some framing there. But let's say you have these kind of factions and the factions are very deep and rich And you say, okay, this is what they do and this is how the mechanics work.

And it's like you're trying to do two things at once, trying to tell this story and teach your game. And I think sometimes, look, if your game is good enough that you can handle it, right? I'm not saying it's automatic failure. But like the more that you can do very clear, either with art or with names or anything you're using to give touch points that breed familiarity, it doesn't have to be bland. it just has to be clear, right?

You will make the game experience easier because some people are not going to engage with the game on the level that you maybe want them to because you want to, like, I see a lot of game makers, they want to create an IP as well as a game at the same time. I think that's really tough, right? And the other thing is, like, how do I remember things?

Like, you forget rules as you play a game, right? And the less you forget rules, the better your game experience is generally going to be, like, that there's no worse game that one that forces you to refer to the rulebook multiple times during the game because your teaching mechanism or how you frame the rules is not intuitive without. And again, obviously, if you play, they're always going to be a little bit back and forth, but the longer, the shorter that is, the better you're going to be. Yeah, I think that's right. And as someone who made an original IP for my original game with

ascension, I absolutely leaned in on tropes that people would understand, right? I've got my nature faction. I've got my mechanical faction. I've got my like evil ninja kind of faction. I've got the monks and the things, right? So even though there's a deep original universe and original world that I'm very proud of, I was very intentional about leaning on tropes that anybody would recognize, but then just giving it a little twist. I think trying to be too original can really backfire. That's true in game mechanics. That's true in theme. That's true in everything. The innovation is not in and of itself a good. You pretty much want to as much as possible lean on the stuff that people know and then bring them like one, maybe two innovations that like

make the experience better and then or more more tailored to a specific audience. And that is going to be the easiest way for both for you to be able to sell your game and for the people to learn it and appreciate it. Most of the time you do an elevator pitch, it's oh, it's like A and B, with C twist, right? And that's about, you don't get much more than that usually to bring people in. And I'm curious to bring this back into the lessons from digital games, like how much, because when I think about how much complexity points I get to spend on like a typical hobby board game or trying to teach somebody a game at GenCon. And it's like light years more than ahead of what you get to do when you're working on a digital game or you're bringing somebody into a Facebook game,

whatever. Like how do you, like how do those principles apply or how do you think? think about building those kinds of projects to be able to onboard millions of people or tens of millions of people or hundreds of millions of people, whatever those numbers look like? I think it's a little bit different. And I'm going to take issue with one thing in how you framed it. I actually don't think we have less complexity points. I think we just have a much, let's call a longer time frame or bigger time frame to extend them. and like

initially look the change cost for a digital game is very low especially in the free play space because nearly all of them are free to download and so you need to if it doesn't catch someone in the first two to three minutes honestly less than that you'll just say okay I don't want to play this game

delete download something else so that's why you need a complexity to be extremely low you need the intuition to playing the game to be extremely high right you need the presentation of the genre and the story and all those kind of narrative elements to be very like engrossing or at least not alienating. So that's why you tend to see games like honestly gravitate the same stuff all the time.

It's unfortunate, honestly, in terms of the creativity in that aspect of the game. But like the thing is most people playing like mobile games or social games are using it as a, let's call it a. distraction from something else they're doing. Okay, so therefore, you know that you actually have them for a while, but you don't have your full attention because it's not meant to be something that they're really digging into. It's not like paying $60 for a console game where I have all the costs of all the

investments up front. If I don't like this game, it's 60 bucks that I've destroyed. So therefore, you need to reverse it. But these games are built in such a way that they need to. actually have the player play for months and years and longer, right? So the idea is that you actually need to change the mechanics as you over that timeline, they just need to be stretched over a much, much longer period of time. It's more things with TCDs, right? But so TTCs don't have a single kind of point of entry. It's actually one of the kind of costs of TTCs in terms

like you buy a booster and it's like, where am I in this game? It's like, can I play a game yet? No, can't. And you have to buy starters. The I bought this game, but I can't actually play this game is definitely the biggest problem. It's not a trading card game experience. But let's say you get into a trading card game.

Like, the complexity level is so much so that you can be playing dickhead slip. Right? Like it naturally builds up with the player. Maybe too far too slow or whatever. But like in general, the complexity is welcome to someone who's in franchise. Just like mobile games.

Once you get someone who's played for, say, one, two months, you can say the chance they are like they like your game is through therefore the chance that you can actually add more complexity and actually bring up some of what we'll call more traditional kind of like mechanics of difficulty becomes more tolerant right but you just have to be a little bit more like restrained in how much like how fast you overload them in fact yeah another thing is you can actually change the complexity level depending on how the player plays the game. There's no reason why the play experience has to be the same.

Like, it's one of the benefits of digital games is like you can, you know, create different cohorts of players based on how complex they play. They want the game because you can, there are other cues that might be correlative to their ability to understand complexity. And so what you do is you breadcrum some of that stuff. Oh, if they make this choice, I know that they've, they've, they understand so I can take them on a more difficult trip. And I think that's the thing with digital games that is a little harder, I think.

It's not impossible. I think there are games that to do this. But in general, like, the ability to have different experiences within the same game is much easier on a digital platform than it is in a physical platform. I think there's an idea I want to start in roughly the same spot. Like with board games, I know that's not completely always true, but I think in general, you'll see games that do that. And it's not as true on a digital

game. Yeah, it's very hard to do it in physical games. Even if you want to give like an easy mode, medium, hard mode, like the players don't know necessarily where to opt in and they, you know, make sure that you could. Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't even, yeah, I don't even, yeah, I don't even,

that's actually a great little tip. I do that the same thing. I don't do easy mode anymore. I do like normal, hard, ultra hard, like nightmare, whatever. So there's no, yeah, there's no talking down to someone because they're playing easy. I think that the,

but there's a few points I want to just pull I just want to tease them apart in what you said right one is and fair point right like complexity can scale over time and there's both one by default if I'm only like teaching you a few things at a time it doesn't feel complex right so you can make a very complex thing if I could just teach it to you over the course of weeks months whatever then it's great because I've already ingrained the knowledge from the previous stuff it's baseline so I basically you can keep you could spend almost an infinite number of points that way because people just want to say they've internalized the previous lesson. It's not complex for them anymore. Two, you scale it via investment, right? The hardest part about a game is like you, how much do I have to invest in upfront? How engaged am I? And then the more I've invested, the more I've connected to a thing, the more I'm willing to take on more burden, the more I'm willing to. So there's this kind of like attachment of, okay, I like the thing. I've already spent a bunch of time and money on the thing. It actually conversely means I'm willing to spend more time and money on the thing, which I think is an interesting, maybe slightly counterintuitive, but important point. And then, yeah, this idea of being

able to branch players into different buckets and then teach them the right things or move them on different paths, I am very jealous of that. That sounds amazing. Like I just have to, you have to make the best that I can. Even if I give multiple play modes, like it's just so hard to get people to play the one that's going to be actually best for them. And I feel as a tabletop game designer, I'm happy to give multiple play modes, but to a certain extent, it's just kind of lazy. It's like, You're just like hoping the players will figure out the right one for them. It's very tough. I think the biggest, like, thing that you're touching on is that the feedback loop for digital games is much better, as in you have more data.

If you're building the game right, your analytics for the game is, like, very clear about what's going on about player and player types. You can start, like, clustering or doing other sorts of, let's call it traditional data analysis kind of, like, tools. to allow you to understand, like, oh, players who play like this do have this kind of play pattern. They play like X sessions a day. They have Y interactions with this mechanic, whatever. So you can start like mixing and matching players. And then what you honestly, and this happens a lot. And I think a lot of audiences don't like it. But you can experiment with like you say, okay, I'm going to A, B, test this thing, right? I'm going to give this person this thing and this person this thing. what's their trajectory after that point.

It's not something you should be doing to high-core and franchise gamers because I think there's a perception of being manipulated. But I think when you're talking about a very broad-based low-stakes gains, like that amount of understanding of your player and be able to say, oh, you know, I have my intuition of A versus B, I think the outcome's going to be B, and then you actually get to see it on a, very large scale. These games are like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players. It's very

easy to get statistical significance of something very quickly. Usually we'd be able to get confidence level to at least one or two standard deviations in a week, right? And that's something you would need products and products, so many product cycles on a physical game to get that kind of feedback. And also you'd not really be able to do it on a physical game because it's hard to do it silently. I think people, People react differently with feedback loops on a physical game because they're answering a survey. So they know that they're being watched. Whereas what you do within the game action-wise when you don't realize you're being tracked.

Again, it sounds we're a big brother, but games are low stakes generally. So I don't feel as all that manipulative in that way. And honestly, I do know play is better now. And I don't use it like for evil. I think there's ways of doing it for evil and those ways of good. And I try to like instill in my designers and my product people that you, what you're trying to do is like trying to give them an experience that they want to come back for. That's the goal, right? Because that, all the good stuff trickles down from that, right?

If they like the game, if they engage, if they want to play more, you probably will make more money from them. So let's just keep that as the core principle. and if we want to do something a bit more, let's call it nefarious, let's gut check. Let's talk about it. Let's see if this is something that if we, let's say it got out, that we did this thing, would we get so much blowback that we'd have to really react to that? Then we probably shouldn't do it in the first place. It's probably now I think there's some things that people react to a little bit more than they should.

But I think overall, it's a generally good principles. If this was visible, would they really be annoyed? Yeah, my role for using Gabe design tricks is like, for me, I just have to put myself with the customer's shoes. Would I be okay with this as a customer? Would I feel like my time was well spent and I was being respected and treated well? Which may not be right because I'm not necessarily this sort of casual audience. But that's been my North Star for how much I'm willing to use whatever, quote-unquote,

manipulative mechanics. Just to look back to, I think, the initial thread that we were talking about, it's like how do I define like audiences as a big company? We talked about the little ones. And honestly, it's just a lot of market research. There is quite a lot of data out there about player types. So what we can do is we do fake ads that kind of, and we examine click-throughs.

We do lots of like gameplay examples. and check how people are reacting to them. Like, there's a lot of ways that you can do on the kind of performance marketing end and it's paid ads, right? Especially, obviously buying an ad that you're not doing a product for can be costly. So a lot of times you'll be looking at, let's call it, developing nation like audiences, where an ad buy a bit cheaper, things like that. But what you're trying to do is get the wisdom of the crowds in terms of,

oh, this is something that they're willing to, say, I intend to install. Now, it says, oh, thank you for it. It's like, the game's still in development. We'll tell you when it's ready to go. But like the idea, and that's a little bit of switch. I don't want to, but I think it's pretty. No, yeah, I don't think it's, yeah, that's, we did that with Soulforge Fusion, like, where we did test ads at different markets to see how our campaign would perform,

to see whether people would, whether it's worth it to do a higher ad spend in the US. Like we were making the game regardless. So it wasn't just like, do we make the game? But I think running tests on your marketing to see how easy it is to get users for your game, I think is pretty essential. It's just very high risk. And so being able to run those ads even before you've made the product does seem like it saved you a lot of potential costs and danger.

If nobody is interested in what you're selling, then you could figure that out before you build it. That does seem like a really valuable use of resources. No, absolutely. And actually, another thing that is available to a lot of people is like, what apps people have installed that click through. And also, I'm part of a bigger game company that has a lot of games. So we get to see what type of apps you have installed?

Do you have Spotify? Do you have Netflix, whatever, right? And we're able to get some high level information. A lot of stuff is like if aggregated, so you can't actually tell who this person is. But you're able to kind of see some trends there. And but the important kind of exercise. exercise I always do with my team is try and like actually personify these people like and I think this generally happens with a lot of consumer insight but like you say okay

is this a gamer or a soccer mom or like a 9 to 5 worker or whatever and it's okay cool imagine you know the person what's their lifestyle such that they will play your game right and so you'll see a lot with mobile games and character games. It's like you need, you say, okay, they're dropping the kids off at school and they're getting a coffee and they're waiting in line for a coffee. Okay, now they're they're next to do some work and they have lunch and they're scrolling or playing while they're eating their lunch and then they do blah, blah, blah, and they try to create. Let's call it a realistic kind of like cadence of when they might play the game. Then you've got to make sure your mechanics or your play cycles match that cadence or match a cadence of a potential player. or allow the player to play in a cadence

in a way that actually works. So if you don't have that, right, you can make these kind of, early on a lot of resource management games just had these kind of weird timers and timing and stuff like that. And the ones that failed were the ones that kind of made you wait an hour. Because an hour is a terrible amount of time because when you choose to do something

and then are willing to come back to the same thing in an hour, it doesn't fit any sort of lifestyle that anybody does. What you should do is things in three hours, six hours, things that feel like natural points, because like you have an interaction, breakfast time, whatever. And you say, oh, okay, lunchtime's going to be about four hours to three or four hours from now.

Make sure that the next thing is ready in three to four hours. And the next thing is like ready before bedtime. All that stuff is like it feels like it's obvious, but actually I don't think a lot of game makers go through that process. Is my game livable? as in can I live with it? Do I have a lifestyle that matches the game? If not, then it's going to feel like it's impinging on your lifestyle.

Now, that's okay for certain games because they're deep enough or good enough or sticky enough. But in general, you need to be... Can this lifestyle be sustainable? Because that is... Games are very obvious, as in like, you don't need to play a game. So it causes you to miss other stuff, they more likely to drop it. I think that's really important.

I think a lot of people trying to make like collectible card games or tournament games. One TCG is like really your whole life. Oh, yeah. That was the premise for Ascension, right? Like, Bill, it's like a game you could play in between rounds at a magic tournament. It takes less than 30 minutes to get a game play, go. Or you could, it's like a, and you could be a magic player or play TCG and play as many deck building games as you want because they, unlike a trading card game are much more finite. They're not as much to spend.

There's not as much time. They're just an easier. buy in to get at the same, kind of scratch a similar itch to what the players want from a trading card game. So there's no question that the understanding that market, how they're going to play the game, who you want to target, like, the length of the game. If you compare essentially to Dominion, like a lot of what I did was cut a lot of the chaff and a lot of the setup time and a lot of the stuff that slowed things down to make it more accessible. So I think that applies for physical games as well as digital games. How does this fit into your customer's life? What are they

doing is it a three-hour thing and they've got to have a weekly game night and this is replacing something else in their weekly game night? Is it a five-minute or two-minute experience they can do on their phone while they're waiting for the bus? Is it a something in between? I think all this stuff is really, really important. I'm curious about, I'm curious about things. I don't know you what your current office setup is, but you've had this, you talked about the process at Zinga where you didn't really know digital games at all. You brought your background from table Top Games and Magic Career, and you were very much, had conversations with everybody, absorbed as much information as you could about all different aspects of the business. And since then, you have

worked at pretty much every major mobile game studio, as far as I could tell. Scoply and King and Disney and now your current studio. And you absorbed presumably a lot of great information across the board and shared a lot of great information as you've grown in your career. One, I'm wondering how much the move to remote work hurts that process, right? For people that want to start today, you don't, it seems to me like it's a lot harder to get that kind of like natural absorption, that natural ability to just have those water cooler chats. Is that something that you've encountered?

I actually don't know how remote your job is or how much time you spend in the office these days. My team is hybrid. So we have an office that we go to. We're all located, like let's call it, relatively a first with an hour or so of, of the office and we go in, we have two official work days in the office. I tend to be there three and a half, let's call it as in,

when I say three and a half is more like three or four, not three and a half days. Yeah. But also, so I think it does. I'm not saying it's not surmountable and maybe the benefits outweigh the costs of that. I do think the loss of the water cooler

or the loss of just being able to duct your head over the monitoring over here a conversation and kind of like either just listen what they're talking about or to add some context there. I think that is something that you lose a lot. Now, I think there are ways to mitigate. As I would say, the most important person to mitigate this is the leader of the team. Okay, so they need to be able to create a culture that is inviting enough that people want to be in the same space all the time. Okay. So yes, you're like when you do two days, but actually in reality, I see a lot of people three days, not because I force them to. I say, hey, if you have stuff or you want to work from home or you want to focus to something,

please work from home. These two days are there only for coordination reasons and for socialization. Right. So it's, hey, we want to hang out, you know, talk over lunch, or we have some crucial decision making or crucial reviews or something out there. But you don't want to have a workplace where you're trying to avoid the workplace. I think that is a bad idea. And I think that is something, are you able to do things like brainstorming or like other kind of, let's call it,

free-form thinking? You have to give room for that too. So we actually have brainstorming Zoom meetings and we do use tools like, sorry, I forgot, I had a brand. Like mirror like whiteboarding tools. Muro. Yeah.

Very much one that we use a lot. And you need to be able to have those tools and use those tools to basically facilitate that. But also make sure that they aren't very guided. I think that's the other thing. Like you tend to have meetings in a remote situation almost for a reason. You're there to do something and have an output or an outcome. You need to have these meetings.

that, again, are optional, but allow for a little bit organic, like thinking, because if you don't, you lose that kind of, let's call it spark that you often get, just change someone. So often I will have these meetings like, hey, this meeting here, like, if no one turns up for 10 minutes, we'll cancel it, whatever, it's who cares. If you make it interesting, if you make it engaging, if you listen as much as you, say this is a way to like bridge that gap because I do think there's a lot of value look office costs are expensive I think especially if you're a small operation or whatever so there is a lot

of value so if you need to okay not have that totally fine but be aware that one culture is important so you need to have your leaders like setting the tone and two you have to have more unstructured kind of like interactions because you tend to like only do things that are on your calendar like in kind of a work like I know you haven't been in a corporate situation for a while but that like always default to oh I have a meeting for this that's why I'm attending rather than that's just like how we're feeling here or what's what are you liking what you disliking or oh we're trying to think of a new mechanic that's trying to like generally solve this problem those things need to be more unstructured to feel that you're not losing that kind of,

I've called it big brain thinking. Yeah. No, I could not agree more. And I actually think about this a ton. Like how do you think, how do you set the culture? How do you create a environment where people feel free to free form, share ideas and try weird things and create space to be their weird selves?

And then how do you make sure that gets absorbed by default to the new people that come in, right, especially my team's not that big. We're whatever, 12 to 15 people depending upon the project in the time of the year or whatever. So I could still know everybody individually and interact with them individually. But as we scale, that point of, we're right at that edge in my experience of that 15 to 20 range where it's, okay, now there will be people who I don't interact with at all throughout the course of a day. And I need to make sure that the culture is strong enough and the rituals are strong enough in everybody that exists to be able to cross that boundary without losing the thread or getting.

I think that culture is the key to growth. Again, speaking as a small indie guy, not as, I actually have no idea. How big is your company team nowadays? My studio is about kind of 170. The team I work with on kind of like a regular basis is like 25. Yeah. But I would say that I'm responsible for about 80 of those 150 in terms of like either membership or some sort of guidance.

So what else have you learned about how to lead to? teams at scale like that. You obviously creating that space to set the culture, creating some opportunities for people to learn from each other. You've talked about setting up ideas for how they can understand their audience and personify things. What else is, would you say you've learned about leadership at scale? I think you have to not be perceived as the other. I think this is something that maybe I feel a little more kind of passionate and more natural to my style. I don't, I try to not have kind of a hierarchical interaction with anybody. Yes, I have experience.

Yes, I have seniority of someone. But like, one, you've got to say, hey, I have an open door policy. We can talk about anything, whatever. Also, they have to believe that you will advocate for them at anything. If they say, this is my problem. Or I'm having a problem dealing with this personal thing or whatever, right? you should say, okay, how do I, what's your perspective on it, how can I advocate for you for the most kind of like positive outcome? If they can trust you about advocacy, that's super important because you will get people putting more effort and just having more appreciation about like your position.

And it will strengthen when you actually have something to say that's important. Okay, so again, another kind of cliche is the servant leadership. But I think servant leadership is like, tries to invert it a little too much. I'm not trying to say, I will do everything for you. But I says, I will back you, right? If you come to me with your problems and you make clear what the issue is and is this an issue that is like something that I can structurally help with, right? because they know that they don't always have a seat at the table when some of these decisions get made.

Right. But if they know that I will bring them up or I will like collate and make sure that they don't feel that they are like lost, especially in a corporate setting, which is very common, right? I tell them, hey, every time if you tell me, this is a problem. I will bring it up even if I agree with it or not. I'll say they think and I think their concerns are valid. I think there's a way of, and also very real with them about what's an outcome that could be happening. It is one you'll get heard.

I cannot say that they will change something, but what I will get is a resolution in terms of what the company or myself or whatever, whoever's making it the decision so you understand the context of why it can or cannot be done. Now, if you're overpromised, then you're going to get yourself in trouble too, right? But you can say, hey, you know what? You got heard. They don't agree.

I understand or I don't understand why they don't agree. But be sure that they know that someone said this, whether you actually want your name said or not said or whatever. Like that kind of thing is like, so important for the rank and file contributors who actually are doing the work. They're doing the work. They're making sure that things happen, that things get built, that things get made exactly how you're doing to do it. Because generally the leader is about setting that vision, setting with that North Star that we're doing. And then, but they also, it's a two-way street. The whole point is that they're going to have some struggles or some problems or some issues

that they want to see a dress because, look, we're all very interior people. We all want different things, and they have to know that it's not going to be just like a nice word. And that's it. And I says, hey, what would you want me to do? This is what I think I should do. This is what I think the outcome is likely to be. But if you want me to push, I'll push. Or if you want me to park it and come back to it later, that's fine too.

the idea is that they get a hearing, at least at my level, and if it warrants something, I will advocate for them all the way, especially if their problems are justified or their issue is very clear, or honestly, if the leadership has done the thing the wrong way, which happens a ton. Let me tell you, I think leaders, there's a lot of failing upwards. I think this is actually 50-50 in terms of corporate life. Right? I think it's that bad.

Is that big a thing? As a leader, I'm confident I never make mistakes or do anything wrong. So go on. No, but the thing is, I think you get this little bit of personal echo chambery. Like, I've been successful. And sometimes you get there via attrition or sometimes you just leaked the correct mood. Yeah. So to speak.

Yeah, whatever. Or even if you made good. decisions in the past. That does not mean that your future decisions are going to be any good either, right? Jordan Weissman's been a mentor of mine for many years. He's been on the podcast a couple times and he's, I consider him a genius and he's done an incredible work, but he's said those times, I am wrong all the time. I try to bring young minds in to help keep me fresh and help me question my assumptions. And it's something I've always tried to remember because just because you're either successful, whether you were lucky or good, doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that your future success

as a shirt. Yeah. And also you've got to make sure that there isn't, like, even the people who happen to be a bit quieter are seen. I think that you often have, look, the game industry runs the entire gamut of personality types. But I would say there's quite a lot of people who are like natural introverts. Yeah.

In introvert, being an introvert doesn't mean that you have nothing to say. It means, oh, absolutely. Right. And often you're just choosing the right time or you're just keeping eternal. And you don't want force them to be uncomfortable. But I think as a leader, you say, hey, I know you don't always speak up and that's fine. You can please. But when you do have something to say and you don't feel you hurt, let me know. And then we can either make sure that I'll just say, hey, I believe this is the right thing or people have said this or whatever. I can be like, yeah. I think that ability. Yeah, that ability to make people feel heard and to show that you really care, right? And that your interests are your interests. You care. It's not just about, obviously, you run a business.

They have to achieve certain goals of the business and that has to be a priority. But you have to, as a leader, show them through words and actions that you genuinely care about the people on your team. And they will feel that. And it will be represented in a lot of different ways. And then if they feel that they will work harder for you and they will, that, that, that relationship will strain will survive the inevitable strains when business is hard or there's miscommunications or you don't hit your metrics or whatever that having built a relationship and

a deep well of trust because you have shown them again and again that you care and that you're not just there to exploit them or whatever is going to that that pays dividends over time. Yeah. And one other thing which I think is important. I think there's often, it's called a guidance for leaders, celebrate your wins or even celebrate for losses. You have this kind of Tuesday. Make sure you celebrate. I think you should just celebrate in general. You don't need a reason.

And part of it is we're making games. It needs to be fun. We need to celebrate each other just working together. And I think there's too much like outcome celebration stuff. Right? Not enough. Are we having fun doing this? Because when we say fun, I don't mean like we have to be laughing at all times. But

I've always judged my own person kind of desire like how well I'm doing in terms of my career is do I effortlessly go to work as then do I wake up at the morning and get like very excited by what I'm going to do or not every day can be like this but I would say if you have long

let's say a month long oh man work sucks right? I think it's just really easy it's just one not work very hard but two also just not giving you best work and so I think like this general tone of like celebration and enjoyment of each other's company

regard like I think one of the things that really kept the upper deck crew together in some really crappy times is that we celebrated together like arbitrarily right that was a great group man we were it was the best it was the best we had the best times like we had such a great group of smart fun like interstate cool right the work yeah agreed the work environment wasn't very good right i don't i don't think anyone looks like truly what looks at that kind of let's call it the corporate job structure as this was oh we we literally had a bond villain running the company it was like he's just like evil and incompetent and like now that's all public and court records and everything else so we it was a toxic environment but within it

we had such an incredible group of people i look on it with so much fondness and i remember how shit it was. Sorry, I don't know. It was a really tough work environment and it was all to complain about and we complained about it. But let me tell you, we celebrated and I don't let me just party. I think we just had a lot of

like whenever we went to lunch together, it was fun. Right? Whenever we hung out on weekends, it was fun. Like it was always about like making sure that the bonds were. Now I'm not thinking everyone needs to be friends. But I think there's too much of mandated fun. And I'm not saying that. I'm saying that create the environment that always is a celebration,

that always feels like it's enjoyable to interact with them. Even if the actual numbers, metrics, business isn't doing well. And then you'll be able to write out some of the inevitable storms coming up. Yeah, and this all ties together in how you build culture. So every week we have an all hands where everybody does a, here's what I'm most excited about. Here's something I'm blocked on or concerned about. And here's a shout out to somebody for something awesome, like that they did or something

that I was excited. So there's always celebrations. I'm always forcing people to bring. I really do want people to bring forward problems for communal discussion. And it's worth spending that time to be calling out what other people are doing and celebrating each other for living to the values of the company. Because, again, when you have different divisions, which is, of course, even more true for you.

but it's true for me too. Or if people will be working on the Gundam project, other people work on Lord of the Rings, other people work on things, they don't necessarily interact or the engineers don't interact with the game designers or whatever, being able to have them see each other

and celebrate each other and understand what's going on really makes a big difference. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to, we're running short on time, but I'm curious because you hinted at this earlier when we were talking about your career path.

And so I want to open the door for this. You've been so successful, you've traveled and lived around the world in these different companies. You manage big teams. you've launched and been part of projects that touched hundreds of millions of people over the course of your career. But you seem to indicate that there's something more you're yearning for, maybe something smaller, maybe something more true to your own thing.

So if I could just wave a magic wand and say, okay, look, let's leave the money aside, leave the team size aside, just like you've got a project or something you'd be excited to do. What comes to mind for you? I think it is a merging of a lot of my passions as in, look, I've played magic since the beginning. I think unlike a lot of the people who have played, I haven't stopped. I've played every set competitively in some fashion. Now, I'm going to say, it's not always like the highest level, but like certainly I've cared about every set. So I want to be able to build a, but I think I understand the environment of both digital and TCGs better than most.

And I think, but also I don't know, I don't love, let's call it the general predatory nature of TCGs. And I say predatory is in general the gacha booster pack but understand why I would never say that magic should go away from that that's crazy. It doesn't make any sense. But I do think there are digital equivalence and then last time that we saw each other

face of faith we talked about this kind of trend towards things like rogue likes. Right? And for those unfamiliar rogue likes essentially have you have some sort of you play a session and essentially most of your progress doesn't carry from session's decision. Because then you maybe understand the system better, but usually you start from scratch again.

I think there is a happier middle ground between kind of progression systems and road likes. Now, there are games that do it. I'm not saying this is a, but I do think there's like TCGs in general. I would love for this kind of like mostly roadlights. like, but with certain collectible elements piece of a game. I think that's really, really. Yes. There is like peanut butter and chocolate there.

And I think that's a kind of product that I would want to make. Because I see it. I don't know exactly what it is. I have some inklings. I don't know how to all the design. But I think that if you get it there, I think that's something that you could actually make it really strong. Oh, my God. I should have started this conversation way earlier in the podcast.

I botched it. I definitely, I will go. I'll deep dive on this with you because I think I have very similar thoughts. I have a lot of different ideas and stuff I want to build in the space. I think as we talked about when we were in person, I think this kind of rogue-like space that's really opened up over the last, God, I don't even know how long it's been six years, seven years. That's been really blown up.

I'd say Slavis Spire was the first TTCG deck builder one. So let's call Slatospire one. I think that's like me. I've actually been 10 years again now, maybe longer actually. 10 years ago. Yeah, so that spawning the genre and other offshoots like Balatro and other rogue-like things to take things we know. There's a lot of space here.

We're going to have to save this one for a part too, but I do think that's exciting and want to be a part of your process for building this thing because I think it'd be really fun to work together on a project like that. We'll leave the audience hanging on that, unfortunately, but we will follow up because I think there's a lot to be to unpack there. If people want to follow you, website. Yeah, if people want to follow you, find your stuff, anything public you want to

promote for purposes of follow your magic career, next tournaments, whatever you want to promote here. Is there anything that you want to direct people to? Look, I have a very much less presence that I used to, but I post on X occasionally or Twitter as I only say X. I don't know why I think. Yeah, that's the name. It's totally funny to say X. I do have account of it. I found the like specifically for games I think it hasn't been as good blue sky. I think for other stuff it's better but I think if you find me at

TBS dash on X I'm happy to interact with you there if you can find me also on LinkedIn if there's any kind of advice or even just interactions if you hook me there say you have me on the podcast I'm happy to one have a chat but also it's always good to extend my network

and talk to interesting people. Great. I recommend anybody take him up on this offer because he is both an interesting person to talk to and a good human being. And so thank you, Ben, for being my friend for so long and for all of the amazing chats over the years and finally getting to share this chat with my audience.

Okay, thanks a lot, Justin. Game design is a craft. And like any craft, it gets better with structure, feedback, and repetition. You're able to learn better when you're surrounded by liking, minded people who support each other and lift each other up. The Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab is designed to give you all of that.

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