Think Like A Game Designer - Eric Lang — Designing for Payoff, Ritual Play, and Returning to Your Roots (#100)

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

About Eric LangEric Lang is one of the most influential designers in modern tabletop gaming, known for bold thematic systems and highly interactive play. Over his career, he has designed or co-designed titles including Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Ankh: Gods of Egypt, Chaos in the Old World, and numerous licensed and collectible card games. His work spans hobby and mass-market audiences alike, blending deep strategic frameworks with strong narrative identity. In this episode, Eric shares how he approaches conflict-driven design, why player psychology matters more than mechanics alone, and what it takes to build games that feel both competitive and emotionally resonant. If you’re interested in designing for tension, identity, and memorable table moments, this conversation offers a masterclass from one of the industry’s most distinctive voices. 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. Hello and welcome to the 100th episode of the Think Like a Game Designer podcast. It has been such an honor to talk to so many incredible guests. get to share all these insights with you and to build a community that has downloaded this show over a million times with tens of thousands of you listening every time we relaunch an episode. And it just means the world to me to be able to not only help this community grow and

help other people with their creative work, but also, frankly, just selfishly to help myself. I've learned so much from the guests. I've learned so much from conversations with fans when I meet up with you at different conventions. And we have done so much when it came to to think like a game designer master class, which drove directly from the principles from my book and from the lessons I learned from this podcast. And in addition to doing something very special for this episode, which is we actually have the very first live recorded episode.

I met with Eric Lang at his home in Malaysia. And so you'll be able to see this episode, not just listen to it if you're listening to this on your podcast player, but you'll also be able to see the video. If you go to the substack, justngariddesign.substack.com or justjustangorg.com will take you there. We're also going to be expanding our, YouTube channel so that you can now not only hear these incredible lessons, but see them and get to see

my lovely face as well as our guests in several different episodes. So it was really fun and creates a different dynamic for the conversation when you're in person, you're able to really feel that energy and vibe off of each other. Eric was one of our most popular guests in his first episode appearance, so I thought he was a perfect person to bring on for the 100th episode. But since I've mentioned the Think Like Game Designer Masterclass, some of you might have noticed we did not run one in 20. 2025. And that's because we were working on something very special. My team and I were trying to find a way to make this master class experience accessible to more people. And so in 2026, you will get to sign up for the Think Like a Game Designer Design Labs, which is a brand new program, which is two full game design courses that will take you from your very first idea all the way through publishing a finished game. And that can be through crowdfunding. That could be through working with a publisher. That can be through self publishing. All the tools are there. And it's going to be at the lowest price that we've ever offered and allow for a bigger community than has ever been done. So stay tuned.

We'll have more about that in future episodes, but it's something I'm very excited to bring to life in 2026 and to continue to expand the ways that I can help support you as in your creative life. Because as the podcast has grown, so has not only our game design focus in audience, but the broader creative fields. We've had incredible guests who have been creating comic books and novels and music and Grammy-nominated performers. And this has shown that the world of creativity is universal.

The principles that we are talking about here apply no matter what you're doing, whether you're starting a business, writing a novel, creating a game, anything that you want to do. And the principles of creativity, especially the ones that I've highlighted over and over again, where curiosity, getting obsessed, having the resilience to come over setbacks, and having empathy for your audience and the people and the testing and the feedback that you're going to get from the world, those core attributes, is so critical, especially in a world with crazy AI developments.

And we've talked about that and shown the ways that you can leverage AI in your field, as well as to protect yourself against some of the concerns around it. We are going to continue to evolve this show. And I cannot thank you enough for being a listener for supporting this. Please, if you want to support, this really does make a huge impact. If this show, if these lessons, if anything that we've talked about has had any impact on you, please just take two minutes and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. give me a like and say, you know, share something on Substack.

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And without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Eric Lang. Hello and welcome. I am here with Eric Lang for the 100th episode of Think Like a Game Designer. 100. That's right. And as you might notice, we are actually live in the same location. This is the first time we've ever done a live interview. So thanks for inviting me over here to do this, sir. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for doing your first live here in Malaysia.

Yeah. And so this is one of the exciting things. It's my first trip to Malaysia. This is a place where you live and enjoy. and we have a little bit of insight into Malaysia. What do we have here? This is iced teeteric. It is pulled the tea.

It's with condensed milk and frothed and then put on ice. Delicious. You can't taste it through this podcast. Not the healthiest, but I don't care. It's delicious. So one of the things that a lot of people ask me about, because I've been living a digital nomad life now for four years or so and traveling and being in a lot of different locations,

you know, what motivated you to come out here? What do you love about being in Malaysia? How does it influence your lifestyle, in particular, your creative work and you're working with a lot of people back home? Like, what brought you here and what's it like to be based out here? Well, I've been in love with Malaysia for 20 years, at least. And then my wife fell in love with it. So that pretty much cinched the deal. And this is where we live right now.

You're actually in our retirement house. So we're going to be, we're on the island of Penang and this with a little bit slower tropical island lifestyle. It's got my three favorite things, jungle, ocean. amazing food, the convenience of a city. The city of Georgetown is gorgeous. It's nice old colonial buildings, some new developments. The people are really friendly, and it's very, very multicultural, which as a resident of Toronto, I can't go to a monocultural places anymore.

I like places with lots of diversity, lots of street cats who you have met. Yes, that's true. We've gone around feeding the cats around here, which is one of your routines, which I absolutely love. Absolutely. And so like this is this for me is this is my native climate too. I love the tropics. Every single day it is 30 degrees centigrade. What is that in alchemical? Like 80s something. Yeah, it's like 82, 83, something like that. And high humidity. So I just feel better here. My wife feels better here when we spend we spend a slightly slower life here. I do a little bit less of the consulting administrative work, which of course leads me to me. time to wander, for my mind to wander. So I feel a lot more inspired and a lot more creative here. Yeah. So there's a couple threads on this, right? One absolutely I found this right. When we're in this time zone where a lot of the people I work with are more in sort of a U.S. space time zone,

they are mostly asleep while I'm awake and vice versa. So the beginning of my day and the end of my day I'll have meetings and coordination type things, but the middle of my day is free from distraction. What a blessing. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it is. So it allows me to do a lot more deep creative work. one of the great things about being here. We can do some deep dives on some fun projects and ideating and I've been able to work on writing and new projects and larger scale thinking. So definitely where you are relative to the other people you're working with

matters a ton. In principle, you could carp that space out on your own in a normal time zone, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. It doesn't. Well, because you need that actual, quote-unquote physical barrier, right? Because if somebody knows they could contact you,

even if you have a D&D and your Slack, right, they'll be like, well, you're all my time. I could come on. Like this is an emergency and everybody has a different threshold for what constitutes an emergency, right? Yeah. And it's like, it's one of the things I've kind of realized as I've gotten older. There's a, there's a lot of the lessons or the best practices that exist in, you know, how to do creative work, how to carve out, you know, deep work time. But doing that in reality, very, very hard.

And so if you can set up your environment to default to those things, it's so much easier and it's so much better. So living somewhere where you have a healthy lifestyle and you get up in the morning and you walk around and go feed the cats and you have a time zone when nobody else is there that you're able to do your work. And like those things just sort of will naturally allow you to, you know, fall into the best practices rather than have to like willpower your way through it, which is very difficult. That's right. That's right. Hard boundaries matter. And so there was another thread I want to pull on, which is you said, you know, this is your retirement home. And so the last episode that I did with you was five years ago. That's right.

It holds up, in my opinion, it holds up to this day as one of the most like, like counterintuitive insight dense episodes. Okay. That's me in a nutshell. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I think it's like it's a, there are so many things, you know, we've had plenty of great

conversations with plenty of great designers. A lot of times it's just like us agreeing and reinforcing the same sorts of things. And you and I disagree in fun ways and you've, you definitely taught me some things through that one. And I want to, one, pull on those, some of those threads here. But since then and now, you have retired and then unretired in a sense, right? You kind of tried you. And I want to talk a little bit about what that's like.

What made you pull away or feel like you needed to pull away and what kind of pulls you back? Because the difference of those five years can change a lot and what motivates you as a designer, why you're here doing what you're doing. So I love to dig into that a little bit. Oh, sure. So let's see. When we talked last, I was, I think I was just starting my gig, with exploding kittens.

You were still with SEMON, I believe, at the time. Oh, so it was still with SEMON. Okay, so it's even pre-oh, wow. So I've done a whole massive gig since then. Yeah. So, yeah, I was winding down at SEMON as at an executive position, which, that seems to be my pattern, like four years is, it's, and you've probably read this, right? Like, there's a pattern.

You stay at a place for either three or four years or you're there for life. And I've just felt like it was time to move on and get a little bit more creative. Then I got sucked into the Exploding Kittens world in a lot of the same capacity because we were on a similar wavelength. I wanted to get back to my roots and get back to making games the way I used to make games before I became a professional hobby game designer, more for broad audiences, more for my own short attention span, more games for my family wants to play, my nieces and nephews. and so I've worked with him for four years, burning just as hard, just as bright. And after that, I was like, oh, my God, my poor, poor body. Like, I was like, never again. I loved everything about that gig.

I wouldn't trade a second of it for the world. I loved the folks of Exploding Kittens, but never again. And then Hasbroke. Yeah. So this was like how you broke. So you, after Explan Kittens was when you said, I'm done. And then just when you thought you were out, they pulled you back in. And then Hasbro, like, came to me with a deal of lifetime where they, like, it's not quite the same,

but they were like, I'd love you to do similar to what you did with Exploding Kittens with us. But more focus on design, more focus on creative and mentoring our design teams. And, of course, unspoken also work with our executive teams. So again, I'm managing up and managing down. Yeah. So let's talk about this a little bit. because I have a lot less experience in the corporate world than you do. I had one job where I worked for other people and didn't take, so I quit and started my own thing, and that's been great.

But I think there's a lot of interesting lessons there. So they said, let's start, let's work backwards, right? So Hathrow said, do what you did for us for Exploing Kittins for us? What did you do for Exploding Kittins? Just for our listeners, we have both, you know, Elon has been on the episode on the podcast twice. Carly has been on the episode on the podcast recently. So we've gotten a lot of insights into the inner workings of exploding kittens.

So how would you describe your role and what your function was and all that? Sure. Well, okay. The intended role was for me to be an executive consultant and to be the voice for hobby and for game design and to be the expert with a broad game design litany to come in and introduce them to breast practices. What actually happened was I was the guy who helped them avoid a lot of best practices because what they were doing is amazing and they didn't need to be following hobby. So I ended up working with their dev team, doing a lot of work with their dev team, being the Alon whisperer. That was my own personal goal because Alon is an amazing, incredibly intelligent, inspiring designer to work with. But his communication is, he communicates in a unique way that a lot of other designers have trouble with. So my job was to like kind of decode Alon, figure out, like, become sort of a surrogate for, for like get what he likes, get what he doesn't,

not try to impose my own will on it, my own tastes, and incorporate some of that into how their dev team works and make sure that his creative voice is empowered as much as possible as they got more corporate. So let's, you know, working through and interpreting and making that transition from, you know, small, you know, founder led to more larger corporate org. I hear that.

And then the piece where you talked about breaking from the best practices, in fact, like finding areas where you're supposed to be the one that's like enforcing best practices. And in fact, you see your role as counter-retuitively preventing people from using best practices in a negative way. Can you give an example? Yeah, sure. So because I'm a hobby game designer primarily, right?

And Explan Kittens is not really in the hobby. They are primarily in mass market. Their games are first targeted towards Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, specialty mass, etc. Their audience is different. They, like hobby game publishers often assume a level of game literacy in their audience that is, that Explan Kids must, doesn't, and must not. And so the, so my job is to make sure that, you know, because they, they're curious, they listen to a lot of folks, to a lot of smart folks. So to make sure to safeguard against things like, like, you know, if they talk to a smart designer, it says, like, hey, your game has some problems. You have a first mover disadvantage problem.

Or, hey, you need more divergent strategies in this. Or, hey, you need more replayability. And that always ends up making their games more complicated or less intuitive or to or cannot meet their current audience where they are. And here's a thread. I know you're going to want to pull on or make their games more opaque. This is a term that I've been using a lot. A break meaning, like, when you play the game, the delta between the moves you make and how you win the game is really, really wide.

Right, like a lot of point-solid games, right? Like, I'm going to do a bunch of things and then we'll figure out who won at the end. Right. Right. We're Exploiting Kittance games like, no, no, no, you got to figure out, like, you've got to not only know how to play, but you know how to play well really quickly. Yeah, and I think that that's, yeah, it's a really important point that this, a lot of things that like core gamers quote unquote or sophisticated designers quote unquote

are looking for in a game and think are important actually work against some of the most important things especially for something that's like a mass market game but even just for games appealing games in general right that's right so yeah i think that's valuable to well right and one of the principal thing in the one of the principal differences between like i'm also i'm I'm sort of allergic between, like, a divide between mass market and hobby, but we can talk about that later. Yeah. But like, but principally right now, one of the differences that we commonly understand, at least I

understand, in hobby games, a big part of the joy is learning and decoding the game. For mass games, that is not remotely. You want to get as close to, you want to get as close to, you don't have to learn this as possible. It should feel as much like a game you already know how to play. And, and more importantly, a game. that you're not going to feel dumb while you're learning how to play. That innate curiosity about the game engine is not necessarily a feature. It's a bug for a lot of those games.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of view discovery is essential to the joy of games, but it's a different type of discovery. Right. It's not about like the rules or the nuances. It's about like the scenarios that can come up and the different emotional impacts that can happen. That's right. And especially for social party games, right?

Like I consider party games of skill, right? But the skill, of course, is all EQ basis, all social base. How well do I know people or how quickly can they get to know the folks I'm working with and leverage that knowledge? I consider that as skill. There's no room for mechanical exploration in between the rule set and that skill set for those kind of games. So that was deep diving a little bit. But my goal there was to make sure they basically don't listen to too many hobby game designers. Don't apply hobby game best practices to their games.

But also fundamentals of game design, like the very, very fundamentals, I was better versed in that than anybody on their team, including Alon. So I would help them sort of speed run through some of the really basics. Yeah. Okay. That's a great insight. And I think, you know, we've been friends for a long time. we've had design chats for, you know, just basically as long as from the first day we met.

Right. And so I've really enjoyed that. But one of the reasons I came out here in addition to coming to visit and enjoying at Penang was for us to do some design work together and work on a project together, which we're not going to reveal the details on this episode. Too bad. But I promise this audience will be some of the first to know when we do more. But it's been interesting because getting to work with you directly, I see a lot more of those principles in action, right? And by contrast, I see a little bit more of my own principles in action in that, like, I can't help myself but like think through the like sophisticated endgame, right? I can't help myself, but think about where the incentives pull on for someone who like is playing game five or game 10 or game 100.

And you have repeatedly pulled me back from that brink in our discussions, which I feel really interesting. And so this is part of that idea, right? Like this is like, no, look, let's not pre-solve those problems. let's make sure that this core is where it needs to be. And I found that like push and pull to be pretty interesting. I think both problems have to be solved. This is just a question of the order that they get solved or where the focus lies. Yeah.

Well, so one of the, like, I sort of pre-saw this a while ago, but it turned out to be well in practice. Like, because I know you're like you are a pro player, right? And so I figured this is one of the things I love about collaboration, right? like I generally have to be a jack of all trades with design this. We all do, right? But when I'm doing a co-lab, I can relax some parts. So I, so because I know you're so good at like developing for expertise,

I can be like, I can just relax that completely and devote 100% of my bandwidth to keeping the game pure or defending against development, which I do a lot. Yeah, no, and it's great. And I said, like just going through that. exercise, it's made me make a mental note of like, where else am I doing this too early or too often? Where else am I leaning too heavy into this before and like not allowing us to explore other interesting design space ahead of time? So it's been, it's been good at just going through the process is making me a better designer for seeing that in a way that wasn't as stark as it has been in other collapse that I've done. So, oh, interesting. It's been a, it's been, I mean, I know

I lead in that way, but it's, you know, I just, I posted an article about this recently, about like kind of the phases of design and like really important you know like when you're still trying to figure out where the fun is where the core tension is what you're trying to aim at you should not be worrying any iota about balance or numbers or anything like that right so irrelevant but there's a there's subtler nuances to that like even here in terms of like right even when you're building the structure of a game at the beginning right where it's just everything is open and it's like no no like we we both agreed quickly on like what's the emotional core of what we wanted right right that was kind of from the open the get

go, there's a vision, there's a picture, and there's like an emotional, like two or three key moments. Magic moments, right? Right, magic moments, right. Oh, that's great. Why don't we talk a little bit more about that? Because that was a phrasing that you use. Can I just put a caveat on one of your earlier points?

Yeah. So the caveat is like, like don't even, don't think about the expertise, like developing for expertise. I think that is a privilege that you and I can be afforded because we have the instinct. So like when I say I don't think about it, I don't think about it consciously. Like you and I've developed a lot of instincts for it. So like I do put numbers on stuff, but I don't put old bullshit numbers, right? Like I trust that I have a pretty good sense of how how basic balance works.

So I just go like, I'm going to put some stuff here. It's not going to be total crap, but it'll be fine for really young designers who haven't done the reps and that you may have to start doing that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like it's one of the things that come like experience as a designer. I'm still doing the same things and I'm still going through iterations and I'm still making terrible mistakes, but like the gaps in those like loops is smaller. Like I can make bigger leaps faster because, okay, I've done this a million times. I know like my instincts are trained for this kind of thing.

So that's like a lot of where experience comes in or even as you described your role with Explodent kittens. You're like, okay, well, I know all of these best practices so I can speed run us through them and or know when they don't apply here. Right. forward. Right. And it's always a judgment call. That's the thing, right? Like, it was why I'm almost allergic to the phrase best practices, because it's like, it's, I call it best judgments, but I don't want to get hooked on taxonomy. But like, like, when to apply best practices or not is still more an art than science from my point of view. Yeah, it's like, you know, like the, I forgot what, who did this quote, but you know, you got to sort

of know the rules to be able to break them is a certain sense. Like, in order to, sort of master an art form, understanding the rules that exist so that you can consciously break them in the scenarios where it makes sense, right, is a more skillful way to do it than somebody coming in new. And sometimes somebody don't come in new because they don't know the rules they'll just, you know, get lucky and like a lot. Yeah. Like a lot. He's explicitly about that. That's right. So, so, but I don't want to lose a thread. Magic moments. Magic moments. That's right. See, normally this is the other thing about the first live podcast. Normally I've got notes in front of me and I'm constantly tracking every thread, but I'm realizing in my first live podcast,

so we've got to keep it all here. We're ripping. Yeah, let's do it. All right, talk to you know, and you talked about best judgments versus best practices and not wanting to get two in the weeds on, you know, kind of taxonomy and which words we want to use. But I actually think the words is due, Matt, right? And this is why I want a key on magic moments because phrases that allow, especially an audience that's doing this to have that conversation and say, hey, what's the magic moment in this

game is, I think, relevant. So let's explain magic moment for people. Sure. And this is, again, this is a way I think of it, right? Very often, and when I think about a game and the game we have, right? And funnily enough, this is one of the reasons I called you in to work on this because I felt like you would pair really well with these magic moments. The game, I had this vision.

Actually, the idea came from a different designer of a good friend of mine, but he wasn't able to do anything with it. And I was like, I want this. This is an amazing idea. I want to make this game. Because immediately I had a sense in my head, if I was walking through a game convention or a public space and I was watching people play,

like there's the usual, like, what are they arguing about, what are they talking about? But what are the moments that make, what are these single moments that make this game stand out uniquely from other games? And I try to be as high fidelity with those moments as possible. There's a couple of ways to do that, right? My favorite of those magic moments is when somebody's interplay, what's going on in their head while they're playing,

actually becomes outer play through sheer excitement or adrenaline. Oh my God, you burn my dragon. Yeah. Right. Is a much different magic moment than, hmm, he'll burn my dragon if I don't do the following calculations, right? That's not a magic moment to me. The thing in the game that caused them to go,

you burn my dragon with your dwarf? I can't believe you did that. Right, right. Right. Yeah, those big, those sort of, you know, big moments in games is magic moments in games that get people that are going to tell stories about afterwards, that people are going to notice absolutely critical. And it kind of makes me think a little bit, because for a long time, I've, you know, the concept of table presence has been a big, has been a big thing, right? If I'm walking at a convention and I see people playing this game, is there something that's going to get my attention and make me want to learn more about the game or play the game, right? It's been absolutely critical for certainly as long as I've been in the end. The table poses is the box cover. Right, right. The box cover could be the board, could be cool figurines. It could be, you know, people that's screaming and laughing at the table, too,

that could have created a moment that people are going to come by and do that. But then things have evolved. And so since, yeah, again, it was five years ago since we did this last as a podcast, right? So there was a how good is this in streaming, right? Which has been, became a much bigger deal over that time period. And then now there's the sort of TikTokification of all of this stuff too, right? Oh, I'm so bored of that. We can talk about that later.

But yeah, I acknowledge it's importance. But I have a counter. Well, great. I have a contrarian opinion on that. No, you have a contrarian opinion? You heard it here first. I've been in the weeds on this stuff a lot longer than most designers, which is why I've already developed some.

Yeah. Well, so, yeah, this is stuff I want to dig into. Because we dig into it in the broader sense, right? Because I think that the idea of a magic moment as an internal thing that is like, holy crap. Like when I first like saw someone play like a shiven dragon and a royal assassin killed it or whatever. Like there's these things that happen in magic that's like this cool moments like oh, I imagine what's possible. Right. And I see the thing.

Right. So there's an internal magic moment for me that I like in this case, more literal magic moment. But like where it's like, okay, I'm hooked on this game now. I want to keep playing it. There's an external magic moment, which is something that's more as you described more visible and visual to the people that are not me having the experience. It's externalized in some way. And then there's a broader transmutable version of this. The thing is going to allow me to share it better with others.

And that could be word of mouth telling you the story. That could be like there's certain games like the mind comes to example, right? Where it's like, I can tell you about this game. It's like, oh my God, it's like a real time game where you just have to play out numbers in the right order and you just somehow do it. That's cool. And that gets your attention. So that's a version of sharing a magic moment, even though that game like didn't have a lot of replay value in my experience. right. It was like, was really, really cool.

That's part of it, in my opinion. Yeah. I'm obsessed with that game too. Yeah. And so, and then, and then again, to extend that to the, I can play it on a stream, right? I think the large part of why role-playing games became so popular over the last decade is because of streaming, right? It's fun to watch people do this kind of communal storytelling and acting, and that became a massive, massive growth of that. That's right. And then, you know, exploded kittens without short-form video is not exposed. kids, right? It was a huge part and, you know, just even talking about the process. Like, if they can't make a good short video for the project, the product doesn't get made.

That's a recent thing, by the way. They'll make it sound like it wasn't, but it's a recent, like last few years, last three or four years. Yeah. Well, and this is one of the things now that we've been doing this podcast for so long. We're at 100 episodes. I get to have guests back. So when I have it along the first time, didn't talk about that at all, right? As a part of it. When I had it on the second time, huge part of the process, which I was shocked that and dug it to quite a bit. So huge that they've, I feel like, and look, I love that, well, I love those guys. So, but I also, you know, we got to be honest, right? Intellectually honest here, like, it's so big a part of their process. This happens a lot as we

learn. Like, they retroactively retrofit that into like, it's always been that way. Right. But I guarantee you, Exploding Kittens, the card game would not have passed their initial test. Yeah. Yeah, that, that sounds right. And I think, so, so I want to dig into the, you know, to both the contrarian position on short form video. Is there another few? thing that we focus on because that ability to create magic moments at each scale, internal, external in the same location, shareable via word of mouth, shareable via video, shareable via short form video, and maybe who knows what else, how do you think about that landscape today?

I like to broaden it to, so, so, so somebody who says it doesn't like taxonomy, because I always make up my own stuff. Yeah, but like, we're like, where are the media hooks? That's what I think of it. That's broad enough, at least for me. Okay. Right. So if I say, where are the media hooks?

A lot of folks will kind of understand that to mean, how does this game inspire, like, gameplay that can be viewed on any kind of media, including just in the convention play space, right? The reason, so that media hooks, great. I don't think all games need it, of course. I think it is a good differentiator today. However, it's as soon as we get into the details, as soon as it's like, oh, how does this tick?

talkable, right? That's where I'm already bored of. I know that, because I've seen a full life, I've seen a full cycle of this infect the entire, like, just like Web 3, like, infect the entirety of mass market game space. And everybody's thinking exactly the same. And in my opinion, I don't think they're thinking deeply enough about it. Okay, what is thinking deeply enough about it look like? Well, in the sense that like, so, all right, like TikTokable moments, that's absolutely fine, It's like the first time we invented a Skinnerbox mechanics or obligation mechanics for Facebook games. Of course it's effective.

Of course it's going to transmit games. But there are so many critical nuances there. So is this game TikTokable? To me is a dumbass question, right? The answer is sure. Like if I like wingspan is TikTokable because if you put Mandy Patinkin and his wife trying to learn how to play it, right? That's emergent. But that's still tick-tockable.

If you take that back to like a brain trust and go like, oh, how do we make a game that'll do that? Like, no, that's dumb. Well, yeah, I think so even with the exploding kittens process as they described it, it wasn't like we start with what's the TikTok moment. How do we TikTok this? It's the, they start with what's a really cool game, but there is a filter that says if it's not TikTokable, if we can't figure out how to get this short, this short form video feed, then we won't make it. I hope that they're still there.

I have to be careful here because I'm still very close with them and I don't want to share tradecraft. But I can tell you without naming names, I never want to name names, but I've talked to a lot of folks in this space. It does absolutely start with TikTok. And in fact, the ideation sessions are universal. And I want to spread this because I want to stop this as fast as possible. Like every publisher is always like, all right, let's scour TikTok. Let's look at all the memes that are on TikTok. Cool.

Let's make a game for that. Oh, yeah, that's way worse. me. That's where we are right now. So I'll make this prediction today is December 18th, 2026. By this time next year, but we'll go to the year. Sorry, 25. By this time next year, I think 80% of what you see on the mass market shelf is going to be bad because that's what buyers are asking for. That's what all public. And they're all going to look exactly the same because the same people and the same disciplines are doing that. It's gross. And sorry, gross is a bad word. It's just, it's predictable and boring and I feel like it's ossified already yeah so it's it's it's an it's an

interesting space right because this this gets into the broader questions of like where's our industry headed where's society headed right because this is oh my god just for games across the board yeah and i i i want to say look i'm an optimist by heart so i'm gonna i'm gonna give the optimistic case uh that is like i think you know as more and more uh the discovery channels and even on even on things like short form video stuff like TikTok and YouTube, like the algorithms are getting better and better at serving you the things that you want to see. I think there will be space for the niche, more of the niche products to survive and find their audiences.

They're not going to be on a shelf in a mass market store. That's right. In fact, even I had a previous podcast with Jamie Walenski, the target whisperer. And even she says, like, look at this stage, like don't bother selling to a mass market sell to the consumer. And then if enough consumer sales are happening, you've got enough, then the mass market will follow.

Like, don't waste your time. So I think there is a version of this that is like, you know, make the stuff that you love, that serves the audience you want to serve, and the type of content that will be created around that will find its way to the people that you need to find. I agree. I mean, yeah, it's the indie revolution all over again, right?

And oh my God, as a creative, as an artist, I'm like, yes, right? There's another side of this, though. I still believe in like, well, we can dig us deeper here as you like, but there's a part of me that like I don't want to lose the broad cultural touchstones, right? Like as entertainment because more fragmented, bespoke and specific and targeted, I do, I think we have benefited as a culture from these, like, you know, everybody knows monopoly, everybody knows Yatzi. Right.

Right. From having this shared common universal language. I still want to, like, there's a part of me that wants to make indie games for the five people that, like, want exactly what I want. Yeah. Absolutely. But there's a bigger part of me, like, there's a bigger part of me, still wants to make classic broad appeal games that have a chance of enriching the social fabric. Yeah, so let's talk about that, because I think that's the more interesting subject because that's hard. And, you know, we've talked about a little bit over the course of the last couple days.

Like, what do you think is the DNA of that project right now? Like what makes a game a modern classic or a potential for a new modern classic? Ooh. I mean, I purposely try not to think too scientifically about this because I do believe it's art. What's the chakra of a modern classic? I do, like, I believe it is a little bit more noetic, it's a little bit more artful. And I do think, like, it is like, I like the idea of games that feel like found games, right? So even though you're learning something new, your first thought is like, oh, this has always existed, kind of, right?

Right. Not that I already knew it. There's a key and nuanced distinction there, right? Not that games that you already knew how to play, that's where mass market's going. But instead, like, games that feel like, oh, I just hadn't heard of this. Cool. And I think that it's basic and primordial. So for example, so right now there's a movement in mass where every buyer,

everybody's going, I want the next Uno. And the thoughtless way of thinking about it is like, I just want a game that sells like Uno sells. Sure. Of course. Who doesn't? But what ends up happening in the second order, like still not thoughtful enough, is like, I want to make a game that's like Uno.

and always inevitably like it's Uno plus this, Uno variant this, right? Which always requires some kind of knowledge of Uno, right? Or something that's more complicated. To my mind, it's like the DNA of Uno is that it's crazy AIDS, yes. But it feels like even if you haven't heard of Crazy Eighths, you kind of know how to play it. If you're all your cards, it's sticky.

You explain it once, you never forget. A game like that that is, as sticky and no more complicated. So it doesn't have to be anything like Uno. The next Uno is going to be something that it's probably not even a card game. But it is something that leverages part of the social fabric we already understand, some playfulness we already understand. And by the way, I'm not going to decode that on a podcast because I'm going to design that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's obviously I don't expect it to give away the whole store here, But I do think it's like, you know, on a theoretical level, it's interesting to talk about it. Whatever, I'll give away some of my tricks on this, right? So I think, you know, a lot of the, one of the things I like to do is I like go through like old, old games. I like just go through games that are like, you know, just old card games that don't even have a publisher or IP or go go through old games that have been, you know, that are, we would now consider to be, you know, quaint and not modernize and have a bunch of problems. Sure. There's something that makes the maternal.

There's something that makes people get hooked on that. and then try to understand that core tension, and then just try to, you know, turn the lens around and find different ways to represent, like, that core tension. What does that look like if you shifted mediums? What does that look like if you created, even just creating arbitrary restrictions? Like, you said, like, all right, it's Uno, but it's with dice.

Right. Wow, fascinating. Okay, what does that look like? Sure. I can start spiraling down that road. That's a very game designer way of thinking about it, right? Like, which is good, right? I try to put an anthropological lens on it.

Like, I seek out play. So I'm not even, I've gone beyond games. So like, I often go to, I love traveling and I love kind of like walking by schools, right? And just like seeing like, what are kids doing when you leave them alone? Yeah. How do you make a game about six, seven? I guarantee you every single publisher in this industry right now will be producing one next year. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, not that. But like, but, but sure, I mean, that's an idea. But like, so I try not to do anything that's trend, I look, try to look beyond that. Like what is deep and cultural, they're playing and not even thinking about it. Yeah. Right.

And I think about the emotions that they're hitting. Is there something that can hit sort of those emotions or twist those emotions in a new way? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the cash money value of what we do is, right, the emotional impact and the experiences that people have, right? So how do you evoke those when you talk about what's the DNA of a game like Uno or I don't mean like mechanics of emptying a hand and color matching or whatever. It's that like that tension around like, you know, the excitement around finding a match,

the tension around getting close to running through and the simplicity with which I can see it immediately. And they like, oh, no, you know, I got penalized and skipped and whatever, like some, you know, possible crazy moments. And the fact that there are three or four meaningful decisions in the entire game is what makes it a great game. Rather, like, it's a ritual with like maybe not even three or four. one or two really meaningful decisions, that it feels like a tradition.

It opens up enough bandwidth for us to just socialize and engage with each other over the table. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. So I had some other friends that came and visited me. I was in Thailand before coming here. And they are like, they play all those kinds of games, like phase 10 and, you know, Uno and all these other card and they are sort of number variants where like there's not a lot of decisions that matter.

They're all very obvious decisions. Right. But it's so much fun for them because exactly that. that creates a social lubricant and a ritual, as you put it, I think. It's an underappreciative. And all of those, it's all underpinning, right? Like, it's all underpinning for the decisions that matter, right? It's like, I mean, casinos figured that out a long time ago, right?

You just, you need something meditative, contemplative, ritualistic. Yeah. And so one of the things I've been doing a lot with a lot of mass market games, Even with hobby games, I'll often do the opposite of what best practices are nowadays and just go like, oh my God, how can I lower the decision weight here? That's taking way, this is way too intense, taking way too much brain power. We talk about this a lot, right? All I care about is bandwidth management. Like how much bandwidth do I have left to give a shit about who's at the table?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I call this complexity points, right? So like how much of this and my spending in these various ways, if I have to spend a lot of my mantle, energy and complexity handling a certain mechanic. I don't get to engage with what my opponent's doing. I don't get to just like relax in the moment. So all those things. And so the way I tend to think about is based on who my audience is and what my target

is, that tells me what my pool of complexity points is. Right. Like if I'm playing a, you know, crunchy hobby game, there's a lot more of those points to spend because the audience is prepared for that. Right. Whereas if I'm trying to, you know, hit a wider audience, then those numbers shrink really rapidly. Do you think about a similar sort of way?

Well, so I've actually found a way to articulate this in a way. And this is, again, this is a little contrarian to, but I think I'm right. So I think I'm ahead of my time and we'll find out. Indeed we shall. Like, contrary to hobby designers, where I believe all games, including crunchy hobby games, the complexity is still a vice. And all these games are not based on, like, I know a lot of folks, like, ooh, the agony of decisions. stuff and that's cool.

I still think that's an illusion. Games are designed for payoff, not for input. Right? So what and so the best games in my opinion, the most enduring, the most classic games are the games that require the least amount of work, least amount of effort to get the payoff that that game is promising.

Uno does that so well. Yeah. Right? Your Uno payoff moment or your big reverse or your big plus four plus reverse is paid off, because the rest of the game, and the game is so broadly appealing, because anybody can get to that payoff.

Yeah. Anybody can. Yeah. So let me just, let me try to rephrase this in a different way then, because I don't think you're that contrarian here. I'm sorry to break your bubble, but I think what I would,

I've had a lot of very, very, we've had arguments. Yeah, all right. Well, so, no, yeah, we is the proverbial, the game designer, we. The community. Yeah.

So what I would say is, So of the principles of design that I hold most dear to my heart is elements. Like the ability to, and the way I define that is having, you know, the similar to the way you did, right, the minimal number of things, that's rules, components, you know, just, you know, complexity to get the maximum amount of impact. And that impact is to pay off in those emotional things, those magic moments. And so I don't necessarily view it. The way I would shift what I heard from you is I wouldn't say it's, you know, it's always a vice to

have that complexity, I would say that every piece of complexity, every piece of thing you add has to have a, you know, a disproportionately positive impact on the experience. And that's what makes it justified and good. Right. Like, so I don't know if that's similar to what you're saying or if it's different. Well, so I, so just to make sure we're demarcating, right? Like, like, I want to make sure, like, I'm including computational complexity. Right.

So, so like, there are a lot of extremely elegant games out there, like designer elegant games, right? Reiner Knitskya designs, most of them. Right? Like games were, and I still agree with that principle to a degree, right? What's the minimum number of rules I can get that get me the greatest amount of play space? That's great, right? But here's a great example I like to use. It's a counter example, and I'm going to use a specific game that I love.

Sorry, Reiner. It's a game he did called Loco when we did it with FFG. Botswana is another name for it. It's a simple game with numbers and colors. five different colors numbered 0 through 5 and a set of chips right on your turn you draw the deck pass between players you put the

five chips in the center on your turn you play one card into a pile in front of a chip you take any chip you want the game ends in some unsticky way and then when it does everybody's chips are worth the top card the value of the top

card to there extremely all again so deep so complex you get an insane amount of an amazing play space out of that. We sold that game as a better Uno. Intuitively, I was like, no, this is not a better Uno. It's a great game. I like it more than Uno.

And I couldn't, at the time, I couldn't put my finger on it, right? But, like, it's too opaque. It's way too opaque. You cannot teach a non-gamer. Like, you must teach the entire scoring system backward. You have to teach the payoff. A lot of Ryanner Canesea games are like that. I need to understand the scoring.

Once I do, it's amazing. It's really odd scoring. They're great games. Of course they're great games. But I don't think that game is going to be the next one. It's not even close. It's going to be Uno for gamers. Well, right? Or the game that a much, much smaller audience wishes Uno could be. But that has to be an audience that's already bought into.

I want maximum computational complexity from a small set of rules. I think even computational, complexity should be minimized as much as possible to get to the payoff. And I realize I'm excluding, like, I'm intentionally excluding the really, really complex games for which, you know, decoding the complexity is the joy. Like give an example of games that would be any, any Euro game that takes more than two hours. Got it. Right?

I've designed a bunch of those. I'm not saying they're bad in any way. I'm just saying they're niche. Yeah. that they have reached the audience they're going to reach. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, again, at all, and, you know, hopefully the audience has enjoyed this as much as I am

because I really like digging into the details here because, you know, this is, I think, at the frontier of what the art of game design is nowadays. Absolutely. And I think that the value of an agonizing choice or a computationally, so computationally complex decision, which I would interpret to say, means there's like, there are a lot of things I have to keep in my mind to be able to make the correct decision. I need to play out. Like a chess move would be a computationally complex decision.

Go is my favorite example. Go is the best. Right. Most elegant game of all time. Right. Most computational complexity, most deep game space for the least rules of anything that's ever existed. Right.

Right. Right. But it's not approachable at all. Right. Not approachable at all. So there's a version. So I agree with you. I don't think computational complexity is great for its own sake.

I think it's the, you know, creating the, you know, creating the, emotional experiences and joy in those different moments. And for some people that, for the right target audience, that calculating that and digging through that is really joyous and is something that they love. And that's an audience,

that's fine for them. It's not a cost in those worlds, but it is a cost in, you know, for most people that I want to be sitting around thinking about a thousand move pervutations. That's right. Well, so the quippy way of saying what I'm going to say, the quippy and largely true,

but kind of untrue is like, how do I get dopamine for the least amount of that person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think of games as dopamine dispensers, absolutely. And when I'm talking to my game design teams, and I'll say stuff like, oh, delayed dopamine or like, where's my dopamine? And I do understand that there is a school of thought. The principled opposition to my position here is, like some games,

the dopamine is in figuring it out, in spending, in decoding the engine. Yeah. Absolutely. what I'm maintaining is that is a tiny fragment. Even Spieldesiars winners, like still a tiny, tiny audience. We want to reach, if you want to make a perfect game like Hungry, hungry hippo, right, that is universally appealing to anybody,

right? That game has no delay dopamine. Yeah, yeah, right? Very clear, obvious what you're supposed to do from the moment you take it out of the box. Not only obviously what you're supposed to do, obviously why it's fun. Yeah. I could take that game to Harari, Zimbabwe,

with people who I've never spoke, shared a language with, put it there, and they'll know immediately. Right. And they'll, most, but the ones who are trying not to have fun, they'll get their dopamine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is a sort of interesting thing of like, you know, how many times are you going to play hungry, hungry hippos?

How often are you going to play that game, right? It's a game that has possibly the most, like, breadth of play possible, in terms of everybody can pick that up. I played it. I played it a month ago at a video arcade in a life-size form, which was hilarious. So fun. Right?

But did I want to play again right after? No, not at all. Did I want to, do I need to play it anytime soon? No. You didn't. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

I will play with my non-gamer friends and I want to play again and again and again. Sure. I'm not saying, no. So this is a really good thread here, right? There's a best practice inside our space, and including for designers like us, because I designed for addiction, right? Like, addiction.

Like, I want dopamine and addiction. Well, I want somebody to finish one of my game and want to play again right away. That's been best practice forever, right? I don't think that's for broad, like, I think that is a feature, but it is not like, and sometimes might work counter to broad appeal. Sure. Like, I think it's totally okay. Like, I want to play this once in a month.

Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And this is one of the things like, so, you know, the games that I release as, as Stoneblade, like the highest published games, like the U. could play this for a hundred years and still find stuff and still enjoy it is like part of the DNA of what we try to do. Yeah, infinite discovery.

Like that's our, that's our like, white whale. That's what we grew up on, right? It's what we love about the space and that, you know, it's in our DNA exactly. Right. I still love those games. Yeah, but it's not, but there's a price you pay, right? Like, you know, most of those games, you know, when I try to teach them to my mom, like, you know, she likes them because she's my mom, but she's not really, that really, you know.

And so I'll make other games like, you got to be kidding me and other like more lighter things so that I can have those experiences. And, you know, yeah, so it's an interesting, it's an interesting trade-off like where I think there's no, you know, the best design practices are the ones where you're going to get, like, you know, a five-ext return on one side of this equation for a small sacrifice on another, or, you know, or the magic moments where you just go all of them.

Here's a great example for Exploding Kittens. One of the first games that I brought into Exploding Kittens through Inventual relations was actually by Ken Gruel, It's one of my most favorite design partners called Mantis. They called it Mantis at the end of it. And it was a card game. It was a pretty simple card game that we intentionally developed so much of the skill curve out of it. So that game plateaus after like three or four games.

You're as good as you're going to get. And that is one of the reasons why it's so successful. Like you can, after game one, a gamer like you and me is like, oh, I know how to be good at this. immediately. And that is, you know, like for hobby gamers, like,

all right, well, I've learned what I've learned, I've consumed to this product, right? I think, sure, for the highly engaged hobby gamer,

that's fine. But for the broad player, they like, oh my God, I figured how to play this. And now they've, now it's a ritual immediately. It becomes a tradition

more than an infinitely discoverable game. I have intentionally taken the skill curve out of games to fit that audience. Not always, but if Mantis was a little deeper and a little more opaque and a little bit more discoverable, there was no way to do that without costing too much approachability or to get that game like the way I see it play all the time. Ah, it's a nice relaxing tradition. Yeah.

And the dopamine does not wear off. All right. So there's a way to interpret what you just said that challenge is one of my core beliefs about games. So I'm going to see if that's true here and explore it further. I believe that like games as an art form primarily the the joy of it like that is this discovery right there's this learning curve that happens when you play games like why why do we as a species play games right why is this the thing we spend so much of our energy on why does every mammal play right and the and the reason it's as you know raff coster sort of first highlighted this to me in the theory of fun book is like actually we do it to learn right this is like it's one of the best mechanisms we have to learning and that when you you reach a point where there's nothing left to learn in a game, it gets boring and you don't want to play it anymore. So tick-tac-toe is a classic example, right? When you're a kid, tick-tac-toe is really fun. Eventually, you learn the cool trick where you can set it up so your

two moves your opponent can't escape from, and then eventually you learn how to make it a tie every time and it's not fun anymore. Right. And so I'm going to disagree with Mr. Koster fundamentally, right? I think it's a way. Absolutely. It's a way and it's a significant way. But infinite discovery is not always a good goal. Tic-Tac-T-T-O, I understand. So Tick-T-T-T-T-O is a solved game. That's different, right? It's a solved game.

It presents you with perfect information. You are going to get it. Mantis is not a solved game, but it is a game that you're not going to get better at because the fact that it's a random deck of cards provides the infinite variability. So it's variety. So maybe this is just a broader term.

I feel like I'm discovering new situations and I'm unsure of what's happening next, more so than, like, I'm necessarily getting better at doing this. So I think, and I'm going to, mad props to you, Richard Garfield. I don't think, I think I'm going to agree with Richard from 30 years ago and disagree with Richard today. I think he had it right 30 years ago.

Okay. He talked about ritual gaming back then. And I was like, oh my God, dude, you were so far ahead of your time because I'm with him now. Where, like, game like Mantis, you play it as a ritual. It's a tradition now. The goal here is the game itself. I'm not going to learn anything new after a game.

of Mantis. I figured out how to do it well, but it's still enjoy the process of eating it. It's like eating comfort food. Yeah. Right. I'm not bored of my favorite comfort meal. I still enjoy it. Right. Play is, and so Mr. Costa is, I think he's, what was that, what was that fun expression? He's, he's, what he says is, it sounds, it, um, reasonably untrue. where it's not even remotely universal. I think it's absolutely. It's a reason.

But there's a huge vein to be tapped of games that can become rituals as quickly as possible. And I think they're just as useful to the social fabric. I think I'm inclined to agree with you. And I think this idea, you know, I do think that a lot of games, especially tabletop games, but the same is true for digital games. Well, they're ways for you to,

you know, socialize or just like relax and just like kind of take, take things, you know, take your brain off, you know, offline a little bit. Sudoku. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or like even, you know, with the popularity of the Ascension app, like I see people playing it and we've seen the, I've seen the metrics of people playing it. And it's insane.

They're just like, but it's like this casual thing that they can just kind of scroll cards. I still play Ascension, corset only. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a meditation. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's a very different mode. And I don't think I've really thought about it in this way prior to this conversation. So I like that framing. Are there things that make something more likely, or how would you describe things that make something more likely to become a ritual game? Or what leads to that as a media? I think honestly, right now, it is a, I think it's an advantage. This is a thought that I'm having that's a little contrary to our current space.

saw. Like, I'm, I don't know. Like, I think right now we're finding it by accident a lot. I'm doing it intentionally from time to time. And I couldn't tell you, I couldn't build a rubric for it. But I can see, like, if I see a game like Mantis, there's something about me that will go, like, oh, I can, I want to play this, but I don't want to get better at it. This feels like something I just want to do as a group meditation. Yeah.

Rollin rights are a pretty good example of that. I like the, a lot of those parallel play. Not the complicated ones, but the like Ganschen Clever or, oh my God, I said it like an Englishman does, but Ganschen Clever, that's how you say in German. There you go. Right. Or do you remember Take It Easy from what, I want to say Abacus, but I think I'm wrong. So take it easy is a game from the late 90s. It's a precursor to all the rolling rights.

It's just a bingo type game. But it was rolling right before rolling rights. And the point of that game was take it easy. It's not stressful at all. You just play it and you enjoy it. And I remember, when we played it back then, I was like, I love this. I don't know why I love this. This is nothing like anything I would design.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, it's, my guess is that there is some aspect of the level of variance that exists within a very simple space. That's right. That's part of it. I do think variance is probably important, right? I think a perfect information game that plays out the same. Of course, that's solved. So I think that we can probably discount that like Tic-Tac-Tow, right?

Even though people will still play it. Well, I mean, like chess and go, people will play virtually with their friends and family and as a thing that they just kind of fall into these patterns and play. It can cross that threshold too. I just think that they're not super approachable. No, the skill gap problem is the big deal, right? That's right. Like having a game that has a low,

skill cap or or or even a low influence on the outcome beyond a low skill cap right right there may be like a small narrow curve of improvement or whatever right but um that allows a lot of different people to be able to play the game everybody feel like they're in it and can just enjoy the experience of having to think too hard that's right like that's right um now now i'm going to argue against myself for one second well not argue against myself but there is a parallel argument here to be made that. So chess has been made a huge resurgence, right? Thanks to Discord and lead chess and like online cultural communities that have actually made the skill gap, like a communal skill gap, the communal discovery journey, you get to enjoy it with other people. You get to watch

streamers play and chess has become a game that is now watched more often than it is played. Very similar to the way that poker did after like Chris Moneymaker won his first belt and WSOP, went huge, right? Right. So there's, I think there is, the counter to what I was saying, there are, like, there's room for both, but there's room for games with infinite discovery and very opaque discovery. If you can build a culture around it, God, if you want to put the effort into engineering

that, good luck. Yeah. I don't think you can. I just don't think you can. Well, how do you build culture at scale is something that, you know. I think you have to surrender to luck. Well, yeah. I mean, it's something that, you know, companies like Apple of Nike,

and others like try to do and like as part of their like branding it's not it's a it's a massive undertaking and if you can get it right it's you know that's worth billions or trillions or whatever so yeah i think you got to stumble into it a lot of times but one of the reasons i like to have these conversations to dissect you know there are elements that give you a better you know if you're going to throw throw spaghetti at the wall you're more likely to stick in a certain direction than others and there's like interesting to see what things matter which things don't like that's right like i'm a musician right so i'm going to fall back on music theory a lot, right?

Music theory is, in my opinion, way better understood than game theory at this point. Still, right? Like, you, even, like, I'm, like, I'm not a deep theoretician in music. I understand enough music theory to be dangerous, and I stopped after a while because I felt like it was eroding me a little bit.

But, like, you know, you understand major equals happy, minor equals sad. And even then, like, there's nuances, right? Right. Right. Like, Phrygian mode is dark. Mixolydian is generally a little bouncy and happy. Like, like, I understand that stuff, but, um, so there are ways to dissect that.

I think we, if we started talking about game theory a little bit more like music theory, a little bit more, I think we might advance a little bit bit, like the conversation might advance a little bit faster. Because right now when we think about, we talk about mechanics and mechanics are more like riffs in music rather than like, rather than scales or modes or, right, or pieces of a song. What, what, yeah, I'd love this. I'm going to ask you to kind of give some of the examples of what that might look like, what scales might look like in games.

But like, you know, I think we were talking about this earlier in the week that, you know, games are such a new art form in terms of like real focus and real. I mean, you know, music theory and music, you know, like been around forever. Studied for, you know, at the very least hundreds of years in detail. And that, you know, and game theory and game, you know, game design and game craft is like maybe 50 years of like real. like work that's been done. Of serious work by serious people. Of serious work. Like, obviously games been around forever, but like real like the modern like intellectual work and theoretical work and scholastic work of round games is, is pretty recent. It's young enough that a dumbass

like me can add to the lit and the games, right? That's what this whole podcast is about. We get more of us dumbasses together to all these problems. Right. Until our AI overlords take care of it for us. We'll be fine. So, so I actually use music theory. a lot when I'm talking about games. And I've, unfortunately, that it's a problem. But, like, I have caught myself, like, slipping back into my music. Like, when I'm playing a game, I'm like, oh, God, nope, two staccato. Right.

Like, so when people talk about, like, I like a game to feel smooth, to me, that's legato. Right. Like, I'll stop here for a sec. So staccato and legato are two music principles that are, I use a lot in games. A staccato beat is something that starts and stops at regular or irregular intervals. You can hear the stops. You can hear the start. Like staccato, right?

Ligato. So, like, when you play, I'm a guitarist. So, like, if I'm playing a staccato solo, like staccato, right? It's legato. You don't hear, you let the, you let the fret hand flow across the, you do a lot more hammer-ons, a lot more.

One melody carries over into the next. It feels fluid, right? And they're both, they're not, what we have right now in game, games, like staccato and legato are tools that you use as musicians and they're value neutral. I think in games, we haven't caught up to that yet because when we think of games that are sticado, we're like, nope, oh, it's not smooth. Right.

Like we chase legato all the time. Yeah. Right. I'm like, but sticado has value too. Right. Yeah. So one of the things I also love and one of the reasons I've had on this podcast, we've had guests from all different kinds of spectrums. 100%.

Morgan Page from music and Stephen Pressfield from writing and people from all over because the creative process is universal and there are lessons to be learned from each of these different art forms that can be carried over. I saw a really interesting interview with Louis C.K., the comedian that, you know, he's a fucking genius. He's a genius. I mean, genius. And like he was talking about how his most recent tour, he has like been experimenting with different colors on the palette, meaning like he will like intentionally make his audience angry. He will intentionally push and leave like these more awkward spaces because then when he can take that,

you know, that color in the palette and then you use it to paint a different kind of payoff down the road and of course bring them back to a laugh and whatever the core of what they're doing. But like that there's this whole other range of things that he was afraid to even try for the first 40 years of his career or whatever 30 years of his career because it wasn't the thing to do. It's like, hey, I got to get a laugh every five seconds or whatever it is.

So I think there's a similar thing going on here. So as a huge fan of stand-up comedy, an art form that I think is very close. I'm actually going to disagree with Louis on this one, right? I think he's always done that. What he's done is with age and wisdom, he's finally started to add a vocabulary to that. I followed his career for a long time, and I understand all the stuff. I get that. So I'm going to remove social value out of this.

Yeah, yeah. Just as an artist in art form. The dude's a freaking genius. You cannot deny that, right? And the, the, so like he is, he's done, like those, these new tricks he's talking about. He's done that. You look at his old standups. He does that.

What he's doing is he's doing a very, very skillful, a skillful way of saying, like, art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Right. Love that. And that, which is a, like, which is why punching up and punching down is a thing, right? Like, and like, I don't like punching up, punching down either because that's not nuanced. enough. Right. Disturb the comfortable.

Comfort the disturbed. There's like people like me who are kind of affluent and like a little comfortable. I like stuff that punches me in the face. Right. Right. But like somebody who like somebody who is not comfortable, somebody's in a bad place.

They're not going to react well to being punched in the face. Yeah. They want to be happy. They want to be comforted, right? So his audience generally tends to, tends toward folks that are a little bit more comedic, comedy literate, a little bit more affluent, a little bit more like a a little more comfortable.

So he can tell, like, he will do jokes. I do this, too, by the way. Like, for my core audience, like, when I do blood rage, when I did onk, like I do, I disturb the comfortable as much as possible, right? You're going to play a two-player game that has player elimination. Screw you, right? Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, I think it's really.

Like, who are you challenging? Like, that's a cool goalposts that you should move as often as possible. Tell me if this resonates for you, a thing that is universal, I think across all the three disciplines we've talked about. So comedy, music, and games. And again, maybe it's across the board. Is it like so much of the art is all about how am I creating tension and how am I releasing that tension, right?

And so like this is true in music as you have a sort of build up to a chorus or a drop or whatever. This is true clearly in comedy as you're, you know, trying to get people ready. In the Louis K example, he's making people very uncomfortable. And it's like, how is he talking about this? Where is he going with this? And then brings us back with a punchline. and certainly true in games,

do you think that that's a, how universal do you think that is in terms of what it is that we're, of the paint colors we're playing with, is that a primary? I think it's, I think it's a very scientifically dissectional way of looking at. That's fine.

I think it's a good way of looking at, but it's an incomplete picture. Yeah. But I mean, like, so like in parallel, so in parallel to that, I would ask, who are you comforting, who are you disturbing?

Right. And that's, again, even that's incomplete, but I would never, I would not, I want to, I would marry that as much as possible as another way to think about that. So for example, right,

like there are games like Cards Against Humanity, which like, I'm not a fan of, but, but I recognize, I mean, I'm going to recognize apples to apples as the game that, that, that, the actual mechanical innovation there. Well, so I think it's a dynamic innovation, right? There's nothing genius about the mechanics of apples to

apples, but there's, but the dynamics that they found unbelievable they have advanced party game design in a way that no other game has. Now, as somebody who doesn't like cards against humanity who has publicly called out stuff,

they absolutely have advanced, they've advanced the field in a couple of ways, right? Number one, they are comforting folks who are creatively challenged, right, who are socially challenged. I want to be, like, we all feel like we,

We all have a need to be transgressive. We all do. We all do. But we all like to challenge each other. We all want to push. We all want to test boundaries, but not almost have the skill to do that, right? You and I are probably among the most, like, without being like, like, like, bragy. I think you and I are probably among the top 1% eloquent speakers for game design, right?

I'm not going to challenge a young game designer to come up speak. Like, they could be as smart as us, but they're not going to have to. have the eloquence that we do. If I made something like cards against humanity for them for game design, they're like, oh, I can feel, I can get the dopamine from telling a funny joke, take ownership for that, and none of the effort. Right. Right.

Sure. Like, it's not high art. Who cares, right? Like, it's not for me. I don't like it. I, acknowledging all the problematic stuff, like the idea of something that allows for transgression in a safe space. I think has value.

It does that, it does transgression better than apples to apples did, which is why it surpassed it. Yeah. Well, I think, like this, this ties into another,

I think another aspect of games where, you know, I like that we're sort of surveying a variety of the different things like what games do, right? Right. There's the games as like a, you know,

discovery learning tool. There's games as ritual. There's games as this sort of mode of self-expression, which is, I think, a broader way to say what, what you just said with apples to Apple, or with the cards against humanity

because I think that's what role-playing games are. I can be a warrior or be a villain or whatever in this role that's safe because it's okay. I'm within the boundaries of this character and not a monster in real life. I think it's a big part of why we, again, even kids' role play as whatever,

a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. YouTube streamer most of the time now, I would imagine, that's a part of what we get out of play. I think here. Yeah, performative expression is like something, yeah, RPGs, because they, because they, they're demanding, right?

Without the, without the demanding part of, like, like, that's why the games like D&D, that demands so much of you pay it off, right? And the simple one shots, oh, they're fine and they're fine, but they don't, that they may not resonate as long because the, like, we still tell D&D stories. Right, right? Even though we may not play it today.

Right. I'm sorry, there was something smart I was going to say, and I forgot it. Damn it. That's all right. That's all right. These things happen. I think when we've talked about, I want to bring it, because we can't talk about the stuff forever, but I can't let the podcast go on forever.

So I want to talk one, you know, sort of bring it back. And if this triggers your thought, then cool, where we are, you know, the many things that games bring to the table and the many ways we can optimize for the experiences we want to create. So again, we went through a few of these things. And then I think one of the ones we haven't talked about is a phrase that you used earlier that I wanted, you know, before we started recording that I really wanted to bring back, which is ludon narrative.

Oh, sure. This idea that the story behind the game and how it interacts with the game, the story of the world that's there. And so maybe we'll just like we can, unless this primed a previous thing you wanted to say. Oh, sure. That's actually not the definition. Okay. So the definition of ludon narrative is the story. that is told through the act of play.

Got it, yes. And so the, but this came up in the context of the broader narratives that get tied to games and how those things come together. Right. So let's talk about the difference between Ludo narrative and a regular narrative. Sure. So Magic the Gathering was the example that we were talking about, right? So the Ludo narrative of Magic the Gathering, right, is like through play, I am putting down

land. I'm summoning mana from those lands to put creatures down. and my creatures are going to attack you. You stopped my creature. Right. You either stop me or don't. If you don't, my creature is going to hurt you.

You take 20 points damage, you're dead. I did describe some mechanics in there, but that was a narrative. It was a narrative with the beginning, a middle and end, tension, release. It follows Sidfield's script writing structure. Exactly. But it's emergent.

It is player-driven 100%. The narrative of magic gathering is, there are planes walkers that travel from domain to domain. And it explains why, throughout, without the act of play, it explains, it rationalizes all of this in a greater, in a greater metaphorical or the A word. Analogous context. Yeah.

And so I think like this is something that's, I think about a lot because I love telling stories and I like building worlds for my games. and the story that I tell as a player of the game and how that fits with a story that could be told in other medium, right? So it's making no secret. It's our Ascension's 15-year anniversary.

There's the feeling of playing the deck-building game and I'm recruiting heroes and I'm defeating monsters and I feel like I get stronger and earn honor and I go through this arc of like, you know, we're all, and what was meant to be like, we're actually all doing on the same team, killing monsters,

but one of us is the most glorious at the end versus the narrative of what here's the world and here's characters that, like, we've been looking and doing comic books and, you know, other and short-form animations and things with that IP. And it's like, okay, well, you can't tell that same story in the same way. You have to tell a different kind of story that fits into the narrative of that world.

Have you, I don't know if you've been involved with IP that's been trying to make that jump one way or another and any of the things you worked on? Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest one is actually one of my least successful games for S-Mond called Chaos Ball, which is, I think, the first Kickstarter I did with them, I actually designed the IP first.

I'm still very proud. I'm so proud of that. I think the game, I could do a whole podcast about that game. Like I have 10 years of reflection on that game, and I actually want to bring it back in a completely different form because I think its failure was on me 100%. So you want to give like a quick synopsuit?

Sure. Chaos ball was a Euro blood ball. Okay. Okay. That's how the market sees it. It wasn't my intent, but Euro was my DNA. I make games the way I make games. So it was actually Kevin Wilson put it better.

He said, this feels like cosmic encounter, Blood Bowl, which is, okay, cool. And so I, and the game is more of a blood sport than a sport. I invented a new sport to be played with fantastic characters and ringers that you can play over seasons that has the promise of Blood Bowl, right? You get your fun seasonal play. It was supposed to hit all those notes, but where Blood Bowl was about like deterministic outcomes, a lot of output randomness, a lot of like, let's think a little bit as much we can,

but then a bunch of wild stuff's going to happen and it's going to feel really unfair, right? I designed all that out of it. I did the thing where like I made magic better by taking out all the things that were essential, right? Yes. But I designed the IP first. So I actually designed this world where this world where the sport of Chaos Ball was actually the primary engine through which political and social conflicts were resolved.

So starting with that as a core, I was like that just like that set my mind off. I made this huge awesome world. So every team was actually a subculture was like the way white wolf. if you used to do it, psychographically grafted from a subculture, right? The demons were like your inner goth, right? Like that kind of thing. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time on that, and that informed the gameplay to make sure that they felt like. So when you pick the favorite team, you might pick it for the ascetics, but I'm like, I'm psychographically mapping you, right? Right. I think there's an intentionality behind that that I want to chase again,

and I actually want to chase it in the chaos ball context, but I think I have to completely I have to divorce it from trying to be blood bowl. Yeah. So, okay, so there's a lot to unpack there. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, that's all right. I'm just going to get a little bit. So let's just talk about, what do you mean when you say psychographically? Oh, so, right. So like, so psychographic profiles, the best way to put it, I don't want to get to

psychobabble here, but like the, like, if you think about a magic context, right, Timmy, Johnny, Spike, and those other three things that don't matter. But the way that the player's motivation for playing games, what do they want out of a game? Right. Right. And it's a profile, not a player type, right? What aspect of you are you trying to play? Are you trying to engage?

Are you trying to performatively express yourself? Are you trying to test yourself? Yeah. Or are you trying or are you going for maximum dopamine? Yeah. Right. So when I was profiling, I was profiling by culture. So each of the, so each of the different factions or teams in your world was a different

psychographic profile. and cultural profile? Well, I use psychographic profiling to map them onto a culture, right? So, right? So like the ninjas, right? The ninjas was a little fuzzy. I shouldn't have used that example. But like they're the pajama ninjas, right?

They're the, they're the 10-year-old in you that still wants to play, like that still wants to wrestle with your friends, right? So they're and the way they feel, right, they'll be playing the game. and if you match with, in gameplay, if you match, your card matches them, you assassinate them. Yeah. Right. So you get a lot of, like I was aiming for,

what I was aiming for was, you play the game, but like you have these involuntary, like, when you play an issue, like, right? You get that feeling, yeah. It leans you that way. So then let's bring this back to the broader question because you brought this up in the context of creating an IP in a story that is going to cross medium, right?

You're going to have the feeling of play, which is the sort of ludo narrative, When I'm in the game, there's a story that I can tell through my agency and the experience. And then there's a broader story, which you apparently were trying to see him on to turn into some other kind of media. We would have if the game was successful. Right. Fair enough. And I cheated, right, because I use sport as a thing.

So play and IP naturally fit together because I'm a game designer. And I like to get the efficiency when possible. I'm not the, like, I'm no Steven, like Spielberg, right? I think I can create IP. I think I have a pretty good sense of what makes stuff great, but you can't just give me a blank slate, and I'll make the next, like, Yu-Gi-O or Pokemon, right? Yeah, and that's sort of the context of this broader,

because it's like it's really fun. And, you know, we've both worked on a lot of trading card games and a lot of these, like, broader things. And the IP that attaches to that, you know, Pokemon is, you know, certainly the best example of this in that space. I think you might, I think argue might be the best example of any recent IP.

My hot take is that Pokemon is the most important IP of our generation, including Star Wars. Sorry, guys. Cancel me now. Don't worry, I also broke out in an argument with him about this the last time. So I'm not going to dive into that here. But to get to reinforce it, right, as a, you know, they got to catch them all, like, mechanic for it. And the idea that this is my cute pet friend. And also this warrior that I can, like, geek out about his stats and abilities and try to level him up and make him, like, add all that in. all that being part of the narrative was really genius and really is a reason why it's so

I think they stumbled into some of that. I think I think the myth making they stumbled into a little bit but like because it was got to catch them all they're trying to teach you how to buy a Pokemon. Look that's very effective. I actually discount that from Pokemon as an IP as the worth of the IP. I think the my pet as my best friend that we all want to secretly compare right like we all want a hot or not all of our friends like our pets just like we do all of our friends That is so universally compelling. Even the Pokemon folks on my butt be like, dude's reading too much into this book, but like, sorry, I think I'm right.

I think, like, I think Pokemon will endure past almost any IP that we do today, even when Star Wars gets over-dicted. Cancel me now. Well, I think Star Wars is a Disney just signed an IP licensing deal to open AI that they can use their characters for AI and user-generated content. So if you thought it was oversaturated before. And I still think there's some great Star Wars.

Like, look, I grew up on this stuff, right? So I don't want to diss Star Wars, but I also think episode date was the best one. Damn it, why am I saying you this? Oh, man. Oh, no. You know, that's going to be a great place to wrap this up. You can send your hate mail to Eric at Eric Langdon.

Eric at I don't understand starwars.com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, honestly, Eric, this has been so much fun. I'm so grateful to have our now many years of friendship to get to be here and collaborating on something together to be able to see your home and explore this other side of your life here and go feed cats together. Yeah. As well as share a deep dive at the frontier of what's interesting about design and hopefully help others to surpass us with the fun games that we get to play in the future. That's right. You guys are just as smart as us.

I hopefully give you some of the building blocks to get. That's right. So then until next time, and hopefully we'll be back here doing this again for episode 200 someday. Absolutely. Thanks, Justin. That was awesome. All right. That's it for episode 100.

Ciao. 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 platform, 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 so.