Think Like A Game Designer - Geoff Engelstein — Game Design Wisdom, Educational Insights, and Industry Advocacy (#68)

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Jeff Engelstein joins us today to share his expansive journey in the gaming world. An award-winning tabletop game designer, Jeff has crafted acclaimed titles such as Space Cadets, The Fog of War, Pit Crew, and Super Skill Pinball. Beyond game design, Jeff is an adjunct professor at the NYU Game Center, where he imparts his deep knowledge of game mechanics and theory. He has contributed extensively to the Dice Tower podcast series on the math, science, and psychology of games and has hosted the Ludology podcast, diving into the intricacies of game design. With a degree in physics and electrical engineering from MIT and leadership roles at companies like Mars International, Mind Bullet Games, and Navar Engelstein Associates, Jeff brings a unique blend of analytical rigor and creative insight to his work. In this episode, Jeff discusses his origin story, the impact of psychology on gameplay, and the evolving tools and techniques that shape game design today. Tune in to uncover the depth of Jeff Engelstein’s expertise and his contributions to the games industry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Thank you for making this show possible through your pledges, podcast reviews, and enthusiasm on social media. Without your help, this show would not have been possible, and it's incredible how our community has grown. If you'd like to support the show and get access to more exclusive content from me and my guests, I recommend checking out Justin Garydesigns.com, where I've got weekly articles on game design and creativity,

along with show notes, lessons from the podcast, and more exclusive insights to help you with your creative projects. In today's episode, I speak with Jeff Engelstein. Jeff is an award-winning tabletop game designer and adjunct professor of game design at the end of NYU Game Center. His titles include space cadets, the fog of war, pit crew, and super skill pinball. Jeff has also contributed to the Dice Tower podcast series on the math science and psychology of games and hosted the Ludology podcast on game design. He has decades of experience, not just in games, but also has a degree in physics and electrical engineering from MIT, pretty impressive, and has had leadership positions at companies including Mars International

Mind Bullet Games and Navar Engelstein Associates. He is not only, a wealth of information on game design, but also on the industry in general. We talk a lot about his origin story. We talk about how he was able to program and design computer games in high school and quit his job at Burger King, which is a really fun story.

We talk about the tools today and how he would recommend people that want to learn to program or get started in game design could do so and how much easier it is today to do that. We talk about the impact of psychology and psychological experiments on players and how reframing some very basic features

of your game can transform, them from drawbacks into advantages. We talk about when the right time to use theory to your advantage and when the right time to break the rules to make your games better and to serve what really matters, which is the experience of your players. There's a lot of meat on the bones here. Jeff is a great teacher and a someone who honestly I thought I would have had on the podcast a long time before now, but I corrected that mistake finally. So I'm very proud and glad to present with you, Jeff Engelstein. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Jeff Engelstein. Jeff, it is great to finally have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

You know, it was funny. We were joking before we started recording about how, you know, we have kind of been in the same circles. You helped kind of get me, you know, connected when I was doing my talk at GDC. We've, I had elusory created the fact that I thought we'd already had this conversation. It turns out we'd never had. So it was a pretty, pretty funny psychological trick I played on myself. But I'm glad we're finally doing it. A little Mandela effect action there. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, I will have given some of your bio and kind of current work before we started here. And I definitely want to dig into some of the interesting things that you have done. But I actually don't know your origin stories. I usually like to try to start bringing all of the guests kind of down to earth a little bit and kind of talk about where you started, how you got into gaming. And then kind of will take the fun tangents along the way.

Sure. So I mean, I have always played games and, you know, with family and stuff like that, you know, all the basic mass market stuff. I was first exposed to to hobby games as such in the 70s. I had a story I've told before, but I will repeat it here. It was my first introduction to these types of games. I didn't even know they existed. And I was at summer camp where all good things happened. happen and we all grow as human beings. And, you know, a kid, I had the reputation as the smart kid at the bunk, which was, it really should have been like the kid is really terrible at sports and you never went on your team.

But I was, so I took that. And this kid from an older, an older kid came in and he just threw this game down on the bed. It was like, hey, I heard it smart. Let's play this tomorrow. And I open it up and read the rules. And it was a complete mystery to me. And I tried to figure it out overnight.

He came back the next day and I got absolutely destroyed. And then afterwards, he said, well, he said, I guess you're not that smart after all and took his game and left. I guess rather than turning me off from games, I took it as a challenge. It's like, wait a second, what is going on here? Turned out the game was Panzer Blitz. I realized years later when I finally saw the cover in a different context. For those who don't know, it was an old Avalon Hill war game about tank battles. but so that that kind of got me intrigued and I found out kind of where those games were

and was kind of off to the races. And then the next summer at Summer Camp I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons. Another kid just started talking my ear off about this game that he was playing with his friends. But the way he described it to me was strictly about the stories that they had encountered. Right. I mean, it was, he didn't mention mechanics or D20 or anything, you know, at all. It was just like, you know, this is what happened to us as if it was a movie or a novel or something like that. I was like, wow, I've never even heard, imagine that a game could do something like that or that you'd all play together as like, you know, that was obviously one of the first kind of cooperative games in a way.

And so that that kind of launched me into that. So that was probably when I was about, you know, 11, 12 years old back then. this was in the 70s. And then, you know, just started playing a lot of, you know, war games. It was a gold, you know, it's kind of a mini golden age, a silver age, I guess. So we're in the golden age now, you know, games like Cosmic Encounter and we got into heavily into diplomacy, which was from the 50s, but, you know, a lot of those types of games, the serious war games in college.

And then, you know, just kind of went from there when we had kids switched over to Eurogames. I had kids in the 90s. That was when the Eurogames were just starting to come into the U.S. We actually had to import them from Germany and have the little stuff. translated for us and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, it has been nearly universal of the people that I speak to on this podcast that they were either brought in and hooked by Dudges

of Dragons or Magic's the Gathering. It's like 90% plus rate of like, this is the thing that kind of like, wait a minute, what's possible here? And, and you know, my working hypothesis is that there's this, you know, the aspect to those games that gets you, you know, you have to sort of create and design games within the game, right? That there's an element of you're just like you're crafting the experience. It gives you a little bit more freedom and idea than compared to something like monopoly where you just follow the rules, do the things and pass through. And then you, you know, you, so I don't know if you, that theory.

Well, I think that's, yeah. I mean, I think that that's true. And it lets you be kind of, you know, creative within the framework. Magic the Gathering kind of missed me. I was, I guess it was in the early 90s and that was when I just had just had kids. So I like totally mismatching in my time from my head up again. It was it was a really big. So I never got into it as much.

But yeah, I think that those kind of, you know, deck construction games and stuff like that will let you play with stuff. And so there's this interesting thing too. I just want to sort of cue in on and see if there's anything here. You know, you play this super complicated Avalon Hill game. You don't really fully understand the rules. You don't win. A lot of people, that's the point that they check out and they're done. Right.

It's like, all right, I don't get it. I'm gone. But you found that intriguing and kind of got you into it more in a sense. You wanted to learn more. Do you think that there's something there either in terms of your personality or in terms of a key trait of what gets people past those initial humps and brings people more corely into the, you know, to the to the gamer demographic, if you will? Yeah. I mean, I think for me, there, I mean, there certainly was. You know, it's weird because, you know, at this stage,

I don't feel like I'm a really competitive person in that same way. It's not like I play, you know, I feel like I've lost so many times at this point that it's, you know, kind of gotten burned out of me. But yeah, I mean, certainly in high school and college, you know, I was competitive, you know, I like to win, not at all costs, but I certainly played to win and wanted to do it. And so, you know, when presented with something where I lost, particularly when it seemed like something I should be able to do and I should be able to understand, you know, that kind of intrigued me. And I, you know, I think that, you know, it was the same kind of thing. I, you know, I majored in physics and electrical engineering college.

And my first exposure to that in some of the more advanced concepts was, you know, a little more challenging to me and required me to, you know, kind of apply myself and dig in and really get under the covers to understand what happened. So I think a lot of the stuff that I really love doesn't necessarily come as easy to me. You know, you've got to spend a little effort to get into it. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's one of the things I actually consider. I mean, and you, yeah, I mean, you did a physics degree from MIT.

It does not an easy thing to do in general, I think, right? So, so the, this love of hard work in a sense or this, I don't know if love is the right word, but this is this sort of willingness to kind of do the hard things or be intrigued by the hard problems. I feel like it's one of these superpowers, right? This kind of curiosity and obsession that kind of pair together, you know, regardless of what you're trying to do in life. You know, making games is hard.

Obviously, I'm sure the sort of theoretical physics and pre-physics is hard. I didn't make it that far. So I gave up earlier on that one. But you have to find something that, you know, you're passionate enough and curious enough about what this thing is and that you don't understand that you're willing to kind of go through this intrinsically uncomfortable process of figuring stuff out and not knowing and, you know, bashing your head against the wall for a while so you kind of are able to start getting, getting some understanding.

Yeah. And the head bashing is an important. part. I mean, I think my, I get a, you know, being self-aggrandizing, I don't know, whatever, but I mean, I think, you know, my, my, one of my superpowers is just that, you know, I just have like a hubris that to just do it, right? I mean, I think ultimately game design or, you know, I've written books to, you know, and stuff like that. It's, is the same general kind of thing. It's like, well, you know, writing a book is pretty big undertaking or, you know, hey, I'm I'm going to design a war game about whatever, right?

I mean, it's a pretty big thing. And you just have to have sort of a little bit of overconfidence, I guess, or a lack of self-awareness in terms of how, you know, you just have to go into it saying, oh, yeah, I can do this. And then when you get into it and then you realize, oh, I can't do this, you know, of kind of getting through that. But the way to get through that is just by trying to do it and failing and doing it again and doing it again.

you can, right? I mean, I've known people that I've talked to that, like, are very, they're theoretical game designers, you know, they have this game design they've wanted to do, and they think about it in their head, and they kind of mess around, or they, you know, they, they read about different mechanics, but, you know, but they never actually sit down and, like, build a quick prototype or do it. You know, I mean, there's just certain steps you've got to take, or, you know, the best way to write a book is just to sit down and start writing. Yep. No, I could not, could not agree more. And I try to emphasize that message. I mean, there's plenty of people, and I'm very grateful for those people that are listening to this podcast,

and listen to all of our episodes and 100 plus hours of stuff, and they have it picked up a piece of paper, a pencil, and start making a prototype of their own, right? And the difference of as much value as I think I'm providing and our guests are providing here, there is no substitute for the doing and the learning from doing. And so I think that some combination thereof, I wanted to get on this. One of the things I learned, sorry. So one of the things that was also kind of for me was so when I was in high school I designed a couple of computer games for the old Apple 2 computer which was not a picnic back then you know 16k baby you knew that's what that's how we really had to program and but you know I got them designed published you know

sold them they were they were sitting on some store shelves enabled me to quit my job at Burger King which I was very excited about and just you know the experience of going through that of of knowing all the steps to kind of, you know, just create something till it was done. It was really formative for me. And I think it was, you know, certainly helped later when I started getting into, you know, board game design and stuff like that. But it was also something I really wanted for my kids to experience. So, you know, when they expressed interest in designing games, you know,

or the first couple of games that I did that I had published, I did it with my kids. As I, you know, it was great to bring them along and show them, you know, for that process that it's, yeah, it's, there's a lot of fun. fun, but it's also a lot of hard work and perseverance, and it's going to take 10 times longer than you think. But I think that I hope that that's really, you know, help them down the road of, you know, developing that confidence that they can go ahead and do stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's so much to unpack here. And I echo the sentiment. It's funny. We're recording this. Like, I just got back last night, late last night from Pax East,

showing off our newest game, Soulford Fusion. But I had one of my favorite experiences at the show, had nothing to do with Sulfur Fusion. It was a father and son that came up to me and said, hey, you know, we've been reading your book and listening to the podcast. And now my son is making these games and he showed me the games and, you know,

they were able to bond and create that experience together. And kids game was actually pretty good. Like he was nine or, you know, maybe even younger. And it was like, this is like a really cool thing to see them bonding over it, to see them learning those skills.

And the father asked me that same question. Like, hey, how can I encourage him? Like he wasn't a game designer, you know, by trade and didn't have like, what do I do next?

Like, how do I help him? And I had a similar response to what you said, which is, you know, look, obviously, you know, continue to encourage him and support him. And, you know, you could have him get in the practice of like pitching things and moving, getting, understanding that he's going to get rejected most of the time and trying a new thing. But regardless of whether he keeps interest and excitement in game design, these skills are so, such valuable skills. It doesn't matter what field you're in.

The ability to, you know, make a thing, put it out there, see if it works, see if it doesn't, learn from that and move forward again is just the feels like the key skill uh in terms of of what you could succeed at in life yeah that's a great story love that and and i think that the the value this is what i wanted to kind of circle back to and i want to talk more about the the game design in high school and quitting your job of burger king because this is there's i know there's more to unpack there but but before that i was going to make a note uh because i did i was working at a deli at a jewish deli and so we're making very very little as a bus boy when i start started playing magic and suddenly making money, playing magic for a living.

So I had a different narrative that got me out of that. So I'm sure we could share stories there. Before we get to that, I want to talk about this, this balance between hubris as a superpower, which I 100% agree, right? Again, game design, entrepreneurship, this, like, I need some form of irrational exuberance that I can do a thing that nobody else can do or that thousands of people try to do, or millions of people try to do and fail. I could do it, right?

But then you also need the humility and the ability to take in, and feedback and recognize and course correct in ways when you're not on the right path. And almost inevitably, early ideas are terrible or, you know, at the very least need massive refinement. How do you square that circle, right? How do you find or advise for either in yourself or the people that you advise to find that balance of that, you know, sort of can do, crush every obstacle in front of me and the, okay, wait, learn, pivot, you know, adjust as, as, as, as, you know,

as feedback and data comes in. I mean, for me, it was just the harsh reality of kind of truth and other people. You know, one of the first games, board games that I had done. So this was, you know, years, you know, maybe with like 2005, something like that. But, you know, I started getting into, you know, inside of, hey, I'm going to design a board game. Kids are a little older. Got some time. Let's do it.

Let's get into it. And I had this game that I was very excited about. and had designed it and I thought it was great. And I actually got a pitch meeting with Z-Man games of Slessinger lived in our local area here. And I went and, you know, I'd played it at some of that. I really know anything about, you know, pitching or playtesting or any of that kind of stuff. And I went out there and pitched it to him and played it with him and a few of other, you know, designers that he had with him.

And it was an absolute disaster. The game went off the rails. like, you know, immediately, you know, the whole thing was just so embarrassing and so terrible. And I went back and, you know, that game I never have taken off the shell after that. So I've considered going back and picking it up and maybe dusting it off and seeing what's there. But it just, it just left such a psychic scar. But again, I didn't stop designing games.

I was like, okay, you know, what I'm taking from this is that, yeah, I love this game and I think it's great. and but what I went into that playtest thinking was that oh yeah yeah I knew I knew and you know emotionally or you know I kind of knew that it wasn't totally baked right but I was absolutely sure 100% sure that when I put this on the table and played it with these other incredibly experienced designers that they would clearly see the genius that lay in this oh yes you know it's like it's a little rough around the edges but the core is really solid and And they did not see that. And it really wasn't a solid, you know, a solid course.

So for me, that was a real harder and lesson one that I took. So the next time I went and my first game actually was published by Z-Man finally. So I went back, you know, I had another design few years later. We played tested it to death, did the right things. And then that time when we pitched it, he said, yeah, yeah. He said, this is a real game. Let's make these tweaks, but let's do it. All right.

I'll ask a little bit of a loaded question then to dig at something else here, which is like, okay, well, you showed him this game. you should have this game and Ziband games this game. It was terrible. It went off the rails. Okay, this is a fail. You're emotionally scarred. But somehow you were able to come back and pitch him a game later that ends up getting published.

Like, why do you think that was? And what is it that transpired between point A and point B? I mean, I again, I guess there's just a love of games. I mean, I, you know, was something I wanted to do. I mean, I guess it goes back to, you know, that camp experience of me, you know, getting crushed in the game. And coming back and wanting to learn it and try again and see if I could do better. So, you know, I guess there's just certain personality traits in there.

But, you know, you need a thick skin if you want to be in this business. You're going to be, you know, stuff is going to be hard. And, you know, it happens all the time. I just showed a game just earlier this year to Martin Wallace. And he just was, he just ripped it to shreds. He was very unhappy with it. Some right. Some not so right.

But, you know, whatever, you know, but that's, you know, even it always is going to happen. So you just got to be prepared to dust yourself off and take what you can out of the experience and move forward. Yeah, one of the things I like to do is just sort of redefine what success looks like when you're pitching a game, right? I mean, obviously there's the dream version where you get the product landed and, you know, it becomes a huge runaway success that everyone's dancing on a pile of money. But really, what you're most often success is like, hey, I come across well as a person to the publisher. I am able to have a good conversation with them. on my middle, learn from that experience, and the door is open for me to come back, right? I think that's like a lot of people, you know, your first pitch is going to fail 90% plus

of the time. But if you show up as someone that people are interested in working with and people that's good to, you know, kind of, it can kind of personable and follows up, like that that's worth gold, right? Like, I know tons of people that have pitched games to me that I, you know, didn't pick up, but I keep in touch with and they have an open door. I think that's a very valuable thing for people to change their frame. a little bit and how hard that rejection hurts when you realize that winning is getting yourself

up there and getting yourself as many at baths as you can. Yeah, and that's, you know, I think that's true in life in general. You know, and anything that you do when you get rejected, you know, I never like to burn bridges. You always like to keep things with people. You know, my, my daughter works for indie game studios. So she's a developer for them and takes pitches and stuff like that is one of her primary jobs. And she's had designers that, you know, she's said, look, you know, It's a decent game, but it's kind of not for me, not for us. You know, that's not what we're looking for or here are some things, maybe want to tweak.

And they get, like, really angry and agitated. Like, no, you know, it's that same, you know, you don't see the genius thing, right? When they argue with you is my favorite. It's like, you're not going to change my mind by arguing, you know, so, and so, you know, she's not going to look kindly on them if they come back, you know. That's a bridge that's kind of burned, you know. Right. Try to, you don't need to be a, yeah, you don't need to necessarily just be a, you know,

bend with every breeze that comes with every comment on your game. But, you know, you still want to be respectful and, you know, take, take what you can out of each and care. Yeah, just because a publisher or anybody gives you specific feedback doesn't mean that they're right. It doesn't mean you have to accept it. But, you know, you can receive it in a gracious way and show that you're open to. Often you are going to be wrong. And certainly in a world where you receive the same feedback multiple times from multiple parties, something there is wrong.

Now, you know, I say this quote all the time. So people on the podcast will know about my favorite Neil Gabon quote, right, it's for books, but applies here is, you know, when your readers tell you that something is wrong, they're almost always right. And when they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong, right? You know your game better than anybody. The skill of design is figuring out how to solve the problem. But your customer, the player is the one that finds the problems.

It's the, they're the results. It's a problem for them. It's a problem, regardless of how genius you think it is. If only they knew how to play it right or do whatever, you know. Yeah, for my class, when I teach my class, I have two slides that I introduce my section on playtesting about. One is your playtesters are always right or always listen to your playtesters. And the second slide is never listen to your playtesters.

Perfect. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So much of this is like, you know, understanding our conversation is bouncing around this, but like so much of skill in life is holding these contradictory truths at the same time, right? Being able to balance the two extremes of, okay, yeah, listen to your audience,

but really trust your gut, have an immense hubris and exuberance, but also be willing to cut bait and run when it's not right. And you've got to be able to adjust accordingly, right? There's a lot of this tension where, you know, it's easy to dole out advice, but really the skill comes and having that, you know, dialing in your intuition on where, which, which lens you should be viewing the world through and how to balance between those two poles. Yep. All right. I want to jump back.

We're going to talk about teaching. I want to leave a good chunk about teaching, both in class and podcasts and how you spread your message and your new, your new org also that you're working on for tabletop design, for the tabletop industry. But I want to, I cannot leave this high school story behind. Sure. I need to understand. Because again, these are the things like, this is the key to the,

the key to the origin stories, right? Like the, not everybody, lots of people talk about wanting to make games. Lots of people say they want to make games. Lots of people have great ideas for games, but not many, many people will actually end up getting through the process of programming a game. And especially you actually programming it, launching it, and making enough money to, to quit your day job or your side job, whatever. So talk me through a little bit about what that, how you got started, what, what your

project was, what, what lessons were learned there. Yeah, I was of a certain age that, you know, personal computers were just coming out when I was a kid. So, you know, the TRS 80 had just launched. I remember that was the first one that I saw in the wild in our local radio shack of lesson memory. That, you know, and it was that you could program it and actually, you know, got really into, computers of just like learning about them. I didn't actually get the opportunity to program at first, but, you know, I kind of ended up self-teaching myself at a program. I bought this book called the big book of basic computer games, which I still have to this day in my basement

when I was in like seventh grade or eight grade. So this was like 1977 or something like that, 78. And it was just listings of basic computer games and of language basic. And you could type them in to your computer. If you had a TRSA, you could just type them in or your Apple 2, and then save them on cassette tape, which is how he had to save those back in the day, and play them. You know, basic games like, you know, Hamarabi and Hunt the Wumpus, and there was a Star Trek game, was like the ultimate. That was the longest one you had to type in. And, you know, I literally kind of taught myself how to program just from reverse engineering that book, just from like reading through it. And there was no guides or

stuff like that that were easily accessible. And so that was kind of my first exposure to programming was computer games and getting and doing it that way. And so just gradually I learn more and more. I mean, ultimately end up learning assembly language, which is what you needed to do, to do anything real on computers in terms of video games. And then, you know, I was fortunate in that my parents bought me in Apple II. I actually wanted a cheaper.

I had this whole pitch plan with this cheaper computer that was only black and white. The pet, the Cometre Pet Computer was the one I read. I decided that I could convince my parents to get me. And then my father was like, well, you know, what about this Apple one that does color? I was like, well, it's twice a price, but sure. And so they got that for me. Good choice. Good job, parents.

It was a friend of mine and I that, you know, we kind of taught each other. We kind of self-learned assembly language and how to do the Apple and just reading by magazine and stuff like that and just you know just decided hey let's do a game and we did it i love working with other people generally that was the first instance of that i find that i'm much more productive when i work with another person because they keep me honest and i keep them honest and we kind of you know generally keep each other on the on the right track um and uh you know it was really the wild west there was a local here in new jersey in new jersey there was a local uh computer game store that was starting to get into publishing games.

And so we went in and, you know, partnered with them. And they, you know, they published it and sold it. And like I said, the timing was great. I was in high school. I just got in my driver's license. And I needed gas money for my car. So I signed up with the local burger can to get a job. And it was like a two-month wait to start or something.

It was crazy. They told me they had to wait to get the uniform in. That's why I couldn't start right away. And I started and I worked a day. And the day after my very first day of Burger King, I got the first royalty check in from the game, which was like $1,000 or something like that. And I was very unhappy with my first day of Burger King. It's not what I was hoping for in a position. But I went back a second day, and I worked, and it was just as bad again.

And I was like, I kind of said, you know, I just got this royalty, this game thing. This programming thing seems to be the way to go. It seems to be like a much better way to make money. than standing here working at Burger King. So I use that for my gas money, and it's kind of went off to the races from there. Awesome. I love it.

I love this story. So, you know, on the kind of side, you know, pretty big tangent then, you know, you learned a program and assembly language, you know, from a book on some of the earliest computers. Nowadays, there's, you know, many languages, far more sophisticated and easier to access. There's a billion different channels for how to learn. And there's also these, you know, kind of we feel like we're, it feels like we're on this cusp of a pretty big revolution and the way programming is going to be done for a lot of people and kind of some variations of natural language programming or co-paer programming with an AI and things like that. What do you recommend for people today that are kind of thinking about making games or building skill sets in this space? I am lucky that I kind of grew up when I grew up.

grew up, I think. If I was growing up today, there are such amazing tools that are available for zero cost. So, I mean, if you're interested in learning how to program and you're really into video games between, like, Unity and Godot and the Unreal Engine, I mean, if Unity was out when I was in high school, I never would have left the house. It would have been, it would have been a terrible, terrible situation. I wouldn't have gone out. I wouldn't have met people. And, you know, It's that the tools that are available that are just totally free are just unbelievable to me. So I think that, you know, if you're into video games or your kids are into video games, you know, that there's, you know, if you just down, like I say, Unity is a good one.

Godot is a good one that you can just go and download them 100% absolutely free. You can get things like Blender for doing 3D modeling. There are such phenomenal tools that are available. And there's tons, as you mentioned, of YouTube content on how to learn these tools and how to teach it. And I think, you know, you talk about motivation. It's like, okay, I want to make, you know, this type of computer game, this type of, I love this type of video game. And, you know, I have my own idea how to do it, right? Here's a toolkit that does a lot of the grunt work for you. It'll just, you know, it'll handle the navigation and the lighting and the, you know,

all of the stuff that we had to deal with on the lower level back in the day. It abstracts so much of that that it just, it just lets you do the fun parts and the creative parts. And But you have to do enough programming that it'll kind of get you into that and get you learning on how to do it. So, you know, there's a ton of fantastic resources out there that are just 100% free. Yeah. Yeah, no, we're not lacking for information these days. It's sort of just this ability of, you know, in fact, it's the opposite in many ways, right? The ability to block out all of the options and information I have just to focus on the one that I actually want to execute on.

And, you know, it's parsing it out, right? A lot of people think, you know, I want to be a game designer and there's, you know, different aspects of what it means to be a game designer. And the more skills that you have this, you know, the ability to build a good game and design a good game and have the rules and understand how the player reaction is going to be is its own skill set. I don't know how to program, but I, you know, work with programmers to help bring those visions to life.

But the more skills that you do have to bear to bring into the industry, the more powerful you are and the more valuable you are and the more you can get done yourself, whether that be from programming or creating content or whatever. And I think that one of the things that excites me is that with the set of tools that are coming online more and more every year, you know, more and more people will have that capacity to be able to create and build stuff, you know, either as solo teams or very small teams and, you know, Indies playing like they're there with the big boys.

It's a very fascinating time to be in the industry. Yeah, 100% agree. The power that people have at their fingertips is phenomenal. and, you know, I hope, I think that it will lead to a flourishing of creativity. I know some people are concerned that people will just start, you know, phoning it in and letting the system do all they're thinking for them. I don't think that's the case. But I think it's really going to allow for a flourishing of, you know, widen the tent. You know, it used to be if you wanted to draw, you know, you needed, there was a certain set of skills

you had and then computer tools, you know, then Illustrator came out and, you know, Photoshop came out and there was more tools and now there's like AI assistance and things like that. So I think just gradually it just brings more people into the tent with new ideas. Yeah. Yeah, I think I view the state of AI tools and tools today is like a kind of a U-shaped value curve. Like if you're bad at something, you're all, you're get a huge amount of value out of this because you're automatically mediocre at everything, right? There's just no thing you're not bad at anything anymore.

You're always mediocre. And if you're great at stuff, then you can use these tools to kind of move yourself forward much faster and be able to sort of accelerate yourself. If you're in the middle and you're just kind of mediocre, you've lost all competitive advantages. It doesn't do much of anything for you. So I think it's a very interesting time to have a few niche skills and to be able to level up pretty quickly on everything else.

So this is kind of sideways, lands us back into the other meaty topic. I want to make sure we have time for, which is, you know, kind of teaching in general and how you think about empowering. the next generation of designers. So you teach, I think it's an NYU. You have a you have your, your podcasts, a multiple podcasts that you've, you've, you've, you've, you've kind of hosted. And you have, uh, your tabletop game designers association that's coming up soon, like a whole variety of things that are aimed at this, this goal, at least at principle of helping this, helping other people to kind of accomplish what you've accomplished and, and to build this next generation. What, what motivates you

on this and then and how do you think about spreading this this knowledge and growing this community um i i really do enjoy you know uh seeing other people you know learn the skills and flourish and i you know although i have to say part of it for me is selfish that i just want to play new better games so and i don't have to design them all so um let's let's farm out the work um but you know i i think that It was interesting because I kind of came evasion of board games, then over to video games when they came out in the 80s and 90s and then kind of came back to board games. And a lot of the kind of critical analysis and stuff that you would see in the video game world surprised me that you didn't really see as much in the tabletop world.

And, you know, I think that there was more than I realized, again, because of my, you know, cubris and umbrella enthusiasm. But, you know, in 2010, 2011, we jumped in and said, hey, you know, I'd like to do a longer form podcast about game design to try to, you know, because the assumption was it's not just a review show or something like that, but these are games are things that can be studied and not just video games, but tabletop games. Yeah, they've been around for 5,000 years, but actually the level of critical analysis and breakdown and stuff is not, you know, still kind of in its infancy. And so, you know, we launched Ludology to start to analyze,

that and just just from that and I learned a tremendous amount from from interviewing people and talking to it and just you know spending an hour talking about role and move games what would work or whatever um that that led to some interesting places that you know it's it it for me and the feedback that we got was that there was a thirst for this kind of knowledge and that there was not this same kind of level of basics you know when I was majoring in physics you know there's a curriculum like you learn you learn this and then you learn Newtonian and you learn about forces you know there's there's a progression and there's a way that you do it you know with game design or if you study poetry or art you take art uh classes right that there's certain things about

perspective and color theory and stuff like that but there really wasn't the same kind of thing for board games if you're board game designer what do you study what do you do how do you get into it and so it's been interesting to you know kind of collectively as a community start to develop even a common language of how we can talk to each other as designers. And that was, you know, so when I started teaching, I wrestled with that of what do you teach, how do you teach it pedagogically? Pedagogically? I don't know.

Anyway, what do you want the students to take away from it? What do you want them to be able to do? One of the big things that I wanted them to just be exposed to a lot of different types of games and mechanics, just that kind of basic literacy of playing stuff. And just, you know, one of the strengths I have as a designer is, I think, is just I've played so many games over so many decades that if I run into a problem, it's easy for me to reach back and say, oh, this game did that over here. Let me, you know, pluck that out from there. Whereas a lot of my students would come to me and it's like, hey, we've got, you know, people are bidding and it's a tie. What do we do? I was like, well, here's eight different systems for tiebreakers. And so that ultimately led to my book, I do with Isaac Shalev,

building a box of tabletop game design, which is an encyclopedia of all of those types of mechanisms. So it's just about the mechanisms. And a big thing we wanted to do also was to help develop that kind of common language so that people could talk to each other in an industry. You know, I do a lot of electrical engineering computer science, and there's a lot of common terminology that people use in programming about object-oriented programming and stuff like that.

And you don't see that in game design. Like, you know, we would describe something like there's a common pattern where each round, the person who goes first moves one space to the left, right, goes clockwise, the first player. It's a first player token or something like that. There was no name for that. Everyone just used to describe it as that, you know, each at the end of each round. passed the first player token to the left. So for designers, you know, it's not something we'd put in the rules, but we wanted to come up with a term. So in the book, we came up with this term, progressive turn order.

And if it goes the other way, it's a regressive turn order. So now that's been a term that's been picked up. You know, one other one was like input randomness and output randomness was a term that we developed to try to help explain certain things. So for me, the goal. was to try to professionalize game design, I guess, in a way, to help with that effort in helping to develop terminology and kind of core things that, you know, the designers could share and would form as a basis for things going forward. Yeah, that's great. I think there's value, you know, there's so much value in having common language and vocabulary

that you can kind of share and be able to talk through things at a higher level more quickly. the encyclopedia, as you put it, a kind of knowledge of things that you can pull from, the toolbox that you can pull out of when you need for your various problems you're solving throughout design. I think the other piece of it that occurs to me is this, you know, then there's the process knowledge itself, which I think is probably more where I focus a lot of my teaching on is this sort of like, you know, the kind of core, what I call the core design loop, right, like how you go through the process of ideating and framing and brainstorming and prototyping and like iterating, right?

Like that process of learning as you go and how you refine and how you kind of approach specific problems and the process of creativity. I feel like it's another big piece of the puzzle that people need to absorb and kind of get, get kind of into your bones, really, you know, like practice with in order to get good at the craft of design. Yeah, absolutely. I'm fortunate in the class that I teach that. So it's in a game design program.

So my class is a second year program, and they've already had introduction to game design for a year and before they take my class. So that kind of stuff is covered in there. So I'm focused more on specific board game stuff. And that's why I've kind of focused in on that. Nice. So then maybe talk to me a little bit about what you've got,

which I think by the time this podcast airs should be live, this tabletop game designers association. What is what is that and why should I care? Well, you get to be with all the cool kids. Nice. So this has been an idea that's kind of been bouncing around my head for a little while. I got a little frustrated just over the years from, you know, in the design world. I've never like self-published any of my stuff or had a public.

company, I've always licensed my games to other publishers. And I've worked with like five or six different publishers. And every single publisher that I've worked with, I've had some issue with royalties or something. There's been something that's happened at some point. And almost all of them were not, there was nothing malicious, right? It wasn't, you know, and, you know, with some phone calls and some prodding, I was able to get paid and get the royalties or get what needed to happen or things like that. But I shouldn't have to do that, right?

I mean, I've written four or five books and, you know, I've worked with book publishers and I've never had an issue with them. You know, they've got systems set up and they just go and it's like clockwork and you get paid and it's fine. I mean, I think the issue with tabletop game design in particular is that most these publishers are very, very small. A lot of them are just like one or two person operations. and unfortunately the designers are kind of the last person on the list of people that they need to pay to keep things going forward, right? They're going to pay for their booth at GenCon before they pay the designer. They're going to pay the printer who's making the games or the freight company or customs or whatever, or marketing or Kickstarter or whatever, right? The designer is always going to be the last person on their list of people to worry about.

And so because of that, you know, I think a lot of, designers have had issues with that. I've talked to a lot of designers and all of us have had problems at one time or another. And plus, it's one of these industries where a lot of people want to do it, right? Like designing video games or becoming a famous singer or whatever. And, you know, in a situation where you've got a lot of people that are trying to get into it, it's right for abuse and exploitation of people. You know, a lot of people, they're so excited to design their first game and there's, you know, they pitch it, they get over all. of the stuff we've been talking about and all the fear and the rejection and the anxiety,

and somebody finally puts a contract from and say, I want to publish your game. Nine times out of ten, where do I sign? You know, they're not looking at the details. They're not looking at what's going on. And then they get into, you know, they can get into a contract, which could be a problem for them. I was just recently, you know, talking to a very well-known game designer who's got a pretty well-known game, and they did not put in there an audit clause into the contract. So what an audit clause is is that, you know, you have the right, like once a year. If you want to, you can pay at

your own expense, you can pay an accountant to go in and audit the books and make sure that they're paying you for the actual number of games that they sold. And he didn't have that and he didn't get his, he didn't believe the royalty statements. But he had no recourse. He went to him and he was like, hey, you know, I want to come in and, you know, you have to prove to me. And they're like, We don't have to prove anything. This is what it is. You know, there's no clauses. You have that right.

And so he's kind of up the creek. So what we're hoping is with, we started the Tabletop Game Designer Association, which by the time this air should be live, we're just a couple weeks away from going live. And it's the three founders are myself, Elizabeth Hargrave, who did Wingspan and Senfulim. Yeah, she's been a guest on this podcast.

also for anybody that wants to check out. Elizabeth B. There you go. I've had Sen. I get on. You should have Sen. He's a good guy too. So Sen, who did Junkard and my management, a whole bunch of really cool games as well,

and some RPGs, Shang-Chi and stuff like that. And so we've been putting together this organization to kind of North American-centric, English-language-centric. There are other organizations and other parts of all that do this already. But to kind of put some help organize designers, not like a union, but just to give them the education, the tools. Here's what a contract should look like. We will help you review contracts.

If you're having an issue with a publisher, here's an organization that can step up and say, can contact them on your behalf and say, hey, the contract says this. You have to pay within this time frame. You haven't paid. If there's an issue, you know, if it doesn't get resolved, we can go public or we'll inform our membership and things like that.

So that's what we're hoping is to help designers, be less exploited, give them more tools to, you know, be able to negotiate decent contracts and understand what they're getting into and help them when things don't go according to plan. That sounds like a good value add. And this would be like a membership organization or something for designers to join? Yep. Yeah. There's two levels of membership. There's full members, which will have access to, you know, we, We have a lot of comprehensive information on the website about just resources for designers,

you know, videos, you know, free fonts, icons, are, you know, all kinds of different things. We've got tons and tons of links. We're putting together a publisher directory of like who's accepting submissions, how to submit, stuff like that. And a lot about contracts and annotated contracts and things like that. But you also, as a full member, you can get those services where we would review contracts for you and help you if you're having an issue with a publisher, things like that. And we've got associate members, which just have access to the website, which has all that information. And then there's also a bunch of free materials that are on there just for that any designer can go and look up. And that's at ttgda.org, Tabletop Game Designers Association.

great yeah it's funny so i've i've been on every side of this equation right i have my own publishing company i've licensed games i've worked for high i've done work for hire i've done you know kind have been been all around this industry and each piece of it brings its own unique challenges right i mean i generally recommend people go the licensing route when they're first getting started as a tabletop game design because it lets you just focus on the design right and less on the marketing and production and risk management and whole running a company things that takes up now most of my time, even though I think of myself as a game designer first, it's really a smaller, smaller segment of the work I do because of so much company to run. But yeah, licensing is not a

free pass either, I'm making sure you get it right. I mean, you know, things like an audit clause, you know, things like a kind of sunset clause and ways to get your game back if they don't publish or, you know, keep a game in print or things I always strongly push for for designers. to have and so having those resources around is super valuable. Okay, I think the idea of crossing between, I'll jump to different, sort of crossing between this sort of world of helping and teaching and the world of doing and creating, right? So I think we've kind of addressed this a little bit, but I love this, you know, the theory part

of design, which I, and I've had a lot of guests who are, you know, actually, you know, philosophers and people who just like, you know, really just sort of study the craft in that sense, you know, a lot of people can get lost on the connection between that and the real work of design. I think you did a good job of connected to things when it came to your book and saying, hey, look, these terminologies for all of these things may not matter in a given moment, but it really does help you to be better at both working with other people and collaborating on design as well as, you know, having, easier tools and things you could pull from. Are there other areas where you've seen either, you know, good or bad examples, right, where people have been either too caught up in theory or spending too much time in this, you know, the kind of more esoteric or where that connection between, you know, some of the what may seem like a more abstract lesson that ends up having real practical impact, either a story from your own experience or students or otherwise. I love kind of bridging this gap for people because I find I find the theory discussion fascinating and useful, but but often

people don't ground it as much as it needs to be. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I really learned about just from doing the Lodology podcast and the game tech segment, mainly for the Dice Tower, was the impact of psychology and psychological experiments on on players and you know how as designers some of the tools that we can use to you know manipulate the psychology of the players and a lot of that i find is it's very you know kind of abstracted i think um and it's sort of theoretical but you know everyone's a while i'm able to take you know something really kind of concrete out of the psychology playbook and say oh you know I can use it in my game over here. And it helps enhance what I did just because it points me in the right direction.

So just one example of that of the theoretical from the practical. In general, I'm a huge fan. I'm a little bit obsessed with this concept of loss aversion as a root of a lot of psychological phenomenon to the point where I wrote an entire book just about loss. version and its relation to game design. And it wasn't something that I even knew existed until I started doing, you know, these little game tech segments where I just report on people's research or find little fun facts. And just one thing led to another. It was like, you know, kind of uncovering an entire, you know, digging a whole giant dinosaur out of the ground, just one bone at a time.

And then all of a sudden you put it together. It's like, wait, there's like a unifying principle here, which is, you know, that people are much more afraid of losing something than they are excited about gaining the same thing. And that leads to so many different aspects. And, you know, just one little, and I knew it in the abstract, but then I was designing a game, one of my games, Pit Crew, which was about, you're a pit crew and you're trying to get your race car back out on the track as quickly as possible. And it's a real time game and you're trying to play as fast as you can. And the thing I wanted in the game is there's choices to be made between trying to get. everything absolutely perfect on the car. We're getting the car out as quickly as possible.

When you get the car out quickly, if you're the first one out, you can start rolling a die and moving your car on a track while the other people are still frantically trying to fix their car and get it back out. So there's a little bit of a tradeoff there. And the way it works is that you're just laying cards out on this thing. And if you make a mistake in the cards you lay out, which you can often do intentionally as a strategy, you get penalty points. And after everyone is done fixing their car, you go back at no longer on the clock and figure out how many penalty points each team has. And for every penalty point that you had, you moved backwards of space, your car backwards of space on the track. And simple, play tested it with, we're aiming it like a

family thing, played it with kids. Kids hated moving backwards. They did not want to move backwards at all. You know, they would play super carefully just so that they didn't make any mistakes and they went forward, which was not what I was going for. I wanted that to be, you know, even a reasonable strategy or just, you know, I want freewheeling and, oh, man, I only, I forgot to put a fourth lug nut on this tire. Well, you know, that's where it goes. And so I went back and, you know, one of the things that we looked at was this idea of framing of how do you present information to people and how do you, how do you do it? And what, what I changed it to was that instead of you moving backwards of space for each penalty point, all the other teams move forward

of space. Now, it's exactly the same thing mathematically. It's, it's, you know, there was no end, there was no finish line where you're trying to get across. So it didn't affect anything in the game. It was just strictly, and it was actually a little more complicated to do because you got to, other people got to remember and there's more cars that are moving. But when I just changed that rule, kids, they didn't care about, they didn't care about the penalties at all after that, right? If they didn't care that the other people moving forward, they care that they were moving backwards, but they didn't care that everybody else was moving forward. And that just totally unlocked the design of the game.

And just, you know, that was like the last little cherry that we put on top. But, you know, it just was so interesting that we were able to take this very theoretical concept and just do this little tweak of how we presented the information of kids and it just changed everything. Yeah. I love that example. And I'm going to potentially try to get you to give me one more of a different category because I love this space. But I'll buy you some time because my favorite example of that exact, that exact principle is World of Warcraft. they had after a certain amount of time when you played,

you're gaining XP, you're playing for a while. They wanted you to kind of log off and come back. And they gave you an exhaustion penalty, which cut your XP in half. And you had to log off the game, wait for a little while, come back.

They have a subscription model. They want you to like play longer time over time, not necessarily just play for 24 hours of stretch, you know, for multiple good reasons. Anyway, people hated it. They were livid. The playoffs were mad.

It was like, how dare you? Your money grabbing. scumbags, you're evil, you're the devil, all these things. And then they were like, all right, no problem. And they changed it. So that instead of getting an exhaustion penalty, you got a rest bonus of 100% extra XP for the first X hours you play after you log in. And then all of a sudden, oh, this is the coolest thing of all time. Oh, my God, you guys are awesome. This is such a nice thing to do. It helps us. Same mechanics, same math, nothing changed,

just the way you presented it. And it went from you're the devil to you're the best. I just amazing. It's really, really powerful how you frame stuff. Really makes a big difference. And the fun part as a designer is, you know, is there's not a right way or wrong way to do it, right? You don't always necessarily want to present things positively, right? Sometimes you want it to be negative, right?

So, you know, when I did my, I did the expanse game based on the TV show. And, you know, in that one, you could spend, you could spend victory points to, to do special things or something. Sometimes you could actually spend your victory points to try to save cards or other things. And I looked at switching that one around also and it was around the same time of the pit crew design. And so I was like,

maybe I use that trick here. I just have everybody to go up at victory point. But in the end, I wanted it to hurt, right? I wanted it to people to really agonize over whether they were going to give up that victory point. So I kept it that way. So, you know, all these techniques, you know, there's no, you know, there's no good or bad, right? Sometimes you want your players to

agonize over something and sometimes you just want them to, you know, feel happy and move on with their lives. Yeah, yeah. Knowing that, you know, player experiences the metric that matters, right? You have to decide and the skill comes from just what is the, what is the experience you want to create? And all the kind of rules of thumb and like general principles of design, you know, understanding those rules and why they're there gives you the freedom to break them intelligently, right? Like so we have a game we actually have a target exclusive game that's coming out. You got to be kitten, family, bluffing, you know, kind of card game with adorable animals on it. And this one, I do things.

I would never do in like a more traditional hobby game. Like we have as you lose the game, you lose cards and thus it becomes more likely they're going to lose. Players get eliminated while other people are still playing. Like, but I want that feeling of like ridiculous, like helplessness and like random, you know, rare, rare incredible comebacks because it's like so painful. as you start losing. And like you want to build those experiences that are like light and fun and you're not going to take it as seriously by just kind of making things super unfair and high variance and putting some putting some real consequences in it. And so I think it's just a good,

it's a good lesson and probably a good thing to kind of as we start to move towards wrapping up to a really great way to tie in. Like how do you, you know, cross that gap between theory and practice? And one of the answers I hear from what you're saying, is like, you know, sometimes it's knowing the theory to let you know when to break the rules, right? Know when to take the things that are the sort of common practices and know that you can intelligently say, hey, here's where I want to flip the script and that's going to have power on its own. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's plenty like that. I mean, you know, player elimination. It's like, oh, you know, never do player elimination. Well, there's certain cases where player elimination works

really well, you know, or, you know, or roll and move, you know, no one wants to play a role and move. Well, I can point to 12 different role in those games that are fantastic. But, but, the, you know, but you got to do it the right way and know what you're doing. So, you know, that's the experience. And that's where it comes with, you know, playing lots of games or testing your game and seeing what is. And most importantly, which you talked about, which I, which I love when you're talking about the kitten game is, is the vision of what you want it to be like, right? If, you know, people always ask like, oh, do you start with mechanic or do you start with the theme? It's like, I try to start with an experience, right? That's what I always say. It's like,

I want an emotion. I want to, you know, what's the story that the players are going to tell when they're done. And that is kind of my load star. That's the thing that keeps me going through all the mistakes and the missteps and the bad feedback from play testers because maybe they don't want to play the game that you want to design. So that's fine. You know, just do something else. But it's important to have that vision to the level where I always write down when I start any new project. I spend a couple minutes at the beginning for whatever. Something got me excited about the idea. So I'd write down one or two paragraphs describing why I'm excited about the idea. And then a year later, when I'm in the weeds and flailing, then I can go back

to that. It usually puts me back on track. And that idea, when you write that down, because this is a great concrete practice, is that idea is generally written in the form of the stories that your players will tell or the experience they're going to have, that they're going to be, you know, how do you write that idea? Yeah, I don't worry about the mechanics at all. It's about like, you know, you're, you know, I just random one from another game, but like, you know, you're, you're, you're trapped in them all with zombies are attacking you and you got to vote, you know, you're, you're, you're dashing from store to store, you know, just so, so those kind of emotional verbs and action verbs and things like that. I don't worry about how it's going to go. But, you know, but I will put it in there, like, you know, this is for, you know, it's, it's for heavy gamers or this is like going to be a super light game or I want it to last like 30 minutes or whatever. A couple of. A couple. those things, but I don't get into the leads at all on the mechanics. It's just about the emotional experience, kind of the narrative of what the players are trying to do. Yeah, sort of what is the core of this experience and who is this experience for in many ways? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just wrote one just

the other day. So I was talking about potentially doing a conversion of a video game into a board game, and so play the video game. And so the vision statement that I presented them with is this is an economic game, but it's about the economics of abundance. You can always buy anything you want to buy. There's other issues down the road, but it's not like you're tightening up the input faucet of resources. So that's going to guide the whole design. It's about the economics of abundant resources and what that means.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Awesome. Okay. Well, this is a great place to wrap it up. I think it's been a pleasure to actually finally get to have you on the podcast. It's lived up to my imagined memory hype.

of what I thought we already had. So we could check that box. Preview or whatever. Yeah. Yes. And I look forward to getting to actually do this in person, either when you come out and visit my neighborhood or to show soon. This has been a ton of fun.

You already mentioned where people could find the tabletop game designer association. Are there other areas you want to direct people to find you, your stuff, your podcasts, any things that would be awesome that people could discover now that they've discovered you on my podcast. I mean, the easiest place to find me, so is on, I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter or whatever it's called now, at G. Engelstein is G-E-N-G-E-L-S-T-E-I-N.

And from there, you can reach most of my various things. Awesome. All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to 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 Design. 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 soul.