Think Like A Game Designer - Jason Morningstar — Designing Fiasco, Emotional Risks of Creative Projects, and a Culture of Learning and Play (#63)

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Jason Morningstar, a trailblazer in role-playing game design, chats with us about his journey from passionate gamer to the mastermind behind innovative and award-winning RPGs like Fiasco, Night Witches, and Desperation. His work on Fiasco (among the 40+ games he’s designed) is a testament to his ability to craft games that offer unique emotional experiences. Join us for an intriguing discussion about pushing the boundaries of RPGs, the interplay between game design and culture, and the art of making games that matter. Tune-in to get into the mind of a game designer who's been changing the rules of the game since the day he started.Want to support the podcast and get more design lessons?Paying subscribers enjoy an abundance of extra game design content and an exclusive newsletter with new lessons, archive access, videos, and more! By opting for a free or paid subscription, you can get the latest articles delivered to your inbox and support this podcast! 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

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SoulForgeFusion on Steam, and you'll be able to wishlist the game. And if you're listening to it after that, you could actually play the game. There'll be at least a demo available for free and tons more exciting things available to you. SoulForge Fusion is the world's first hybrid deck game, meaning if you're playing it on tabletop, every single one of your one-of-a-kind decks can be scanned into your online account and played online, or you can pick up decks digitally and have them available to play. Eventually, we're planning to add the functionality for you to print out your digital decks, so you can have everything be fully available.

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If you've heard of any of those games, you're going to love this game. So please go check it out. Go to Soulforce Fusion.com to find out more. In today's episode, I speak with Jason Morningstar. In addition to having one of the coolest names of any of the guests I've had on the podcast, Jason is an award-winning game designer

with over 40 published games. He has won the Diana Jones Award for his game fiasco, the indie RPG game award for his game Night Witches, and he has created custom games for high profile clients like Google, and we dig into all of that here. Jason has a lot of insight about building games that have a real perspective and create some different modes of play and different emotional experiences for role playing games specifically. We talk about how he got started, how he has built his company around the principle of not losing money and the idea of taking minimal financial risk. And we dig into how do you build

games and how do you build a company while taking that philosophy. We talk about the emotional risks of design and we talk about what it means to express yourself through games and learn through games. We talk about how the culture of play within an individual game community can influence the design of your game and how you can build to support certain cultures or encourage certain cultures and how times you want to back away and let the cultures define the rules for themselves. There's a lot of really fun deep dive we go into about the specific of Fiasco, which I was really interested in. We also talk about games as learning tools and how he was able to build games to teach,

consult for a nursing company and be able to help them to learn critical things in the moment and how games can really help drive useful, applicable knowledge in the moment. It was really fun conversation. I hadn't met Jason before, so I kind of learned a lot. We were able to really dig into a lot of fun areas of mutual interest. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. So without any further ado, here is Jason Morningstar. Hello and welcome.

I am here with Jason Morningstar. Jason, it's really exciting to have you on the podcast. Thanks for taking the time to come on. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you. Yeah. So it's funny. I'm in this like combinations phase with yours.

I love your work and yet I have not played your work. And so I'm going to put that up out front. I have I love, you know, it is a fiasco specifically something I use as an example. and we talk about, and I've kind of read through the rules and the things that I love about modern role playing game design. And I want to dig into it, but it's like I'm one of my crises of my life is I make games for living and so I don't have time to play a game. So role playing games is one of the things I don't have enough time for these days, even though yours is specifically designed to handle that problem. So that's my teaser for my own, both ignorance and excitement.

Well, thank you for being honest. Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't want to, I don't want to over represent things. That's where I do want to dig in because there's, there's, there's games I made for fun back in the day when I was just playing in college in ways I would play my role playing games that once I heard about fiasco, I was like, oh my God, you've done everything I wanted to see done. So, anyway, that's, that's one of my major areas of excitement. But I want to sort of zoom back to your origin story. I kind of always like to start by grounding, because I was reading a little bit about your background and sound like you started in information technology and doing some consulting along that side. And I'm curious how your path got you into game design and

into where you are now. Yeah. I feel like I've always been a game designer. I came from a family that valued play. My dad was a war gamer. So I got to see sort of through his eyes, playfulness in the 70s, really at the dawning of table top role playing, which he was not into, but he was into Panzer Blitz and, you know, that sort of game, Borodino. So, you know, it was normalized in my household. And because of that, I was always thinking playfully. I was always thinking about games or thinking about how to solve problems in game-like ways or express myself in playful ways.

And so, like, I've always been making games on one level or another. And I was immediately taken with tabletop role-playing. That was something that was exciting for me, interesting for me, right off the bat. And it was a very natural progression for me from just playing to playing and making. I think that particularly in role-playing, if you play, you're also a creator. You know, if you're inventing things for your home group, you're designing for them, right? Your home group is a designable surface and you're creating for them. You're a game designer.

And that sounds a little facile, but I really do believe that. So I was making stuff. I've been making stuff my whole life. And that naturally progressed into making stuff in a more serious way and then charging people money for it. Well, all right. We'll dig into those details. I do want to just underscore the point that you made, which is, you know, and it's true,

you know, we've had 50 some odd designers on this podcast, and the vast, vast majority of them got started with either starting with role-playing games and Dungeons and Dragons and their ilk, or things like Magic to Gathering and collectible card games. And both of those have that trait of you are building the experience within the box of the game rules, right? And so there's role-playing games as well as collectible games and those things like create. I think it's one of the best ways for people to get started or if you're interested in digital games, modding an existing game, right?

The ability to play within that box is a great way to sort of learn those skills. So I don't undersell that as a way to start learning the craft. So then you kind of just sort of hand-waved a little bit over the natural path from, I make games to I charge you money for games. I think a lot of people very interested in that cap because there's plenty of people listening that make games and play around and have this dream of charging money for their games or they've tried to charge money for games, and it hasn't quite worked out.

So maybe you can flesh that out a little bit more and how you got to kind of successfully charge you money for games. Yeah, well, I think there are a lot of paths toward that. And successfully charging money is a very bad goal to have, ultimately. I think game design is an applied art. And if you can't help yourself but do it, then, you know, that's a, It's an avenue of expression that you need to explore.

But if you can do almost anything else, you probably should. It's a difficult way to make a living. And there are other more lucrative avenues for many of the skills that it requires, but that it also teaches. So in my particular case, I got into it professionally through, contests really. So like my evolution as a gamer was an increasingly intense modification of the games that was playing. So I played a lot of GERPS and GERPS wasn't meeting my needs. And so that transition to playing Fudge, which is a game that both those very actively encourage you to

make it your own to use the building blocks to create the thing that is perfect for you. So just to pause for seconds. So GERPS I know is generic universal role playing system. And that was, you know, again, the very name implies it's really built to be like fit anything and shoehorned and customize it. I don't, I'm not as familiar with Fudge. What's that? Oh, sure. A freeform universal something game engine. Got it.

Same kind of deal. Fudge is, it's also very modular, but it's modular in a much more free form way. It's much looser. It's still a very traditional role-playing game. You have a game master and players. and that's sort of asynchronous or, I'm sorry, asymmetrical hierarchy. But it's just, it's a little more loosey-goosey and flexible than GERPS is, for example. So I paired GERPS down as far as I possibly could.

It was still not satisfied with it, switched to fudge. And eventually I was basically making my own game anyway. And at that point, I started to learn about other communities of practice, people who were really pushing the edges of what was possible at the time in the early 2000s. I got involved with some of those communities and started entering contests like Game Chef, which is, I guess still is going on. I haven't been paying attention lately, but I think Game Chef still exists. It's a tabletop role-playing challenge that happens yearly where they give you some ingredients,

and then you make games and there are winners and losers. So I did well. my first year participating in Game Chef, and some people that I respect, who were in the industry, played my game. They read it, they played it, and we're like, this is good, when are you publishing it?

And that was a revelation to me because I hadn't even considered that I could publish it. Even though I was well aware of the tools and the sort of democratization of the means of production for games at that point, there were I was you know sort of lurking at the forge which is a gaming sort of a gaming hub that was very much in the encouraging people to to be becoming independent

creators and we're sharing resources and sharing tools sharing reliable printers for example of finding ways to get games made physically and because of that I assume as somebody I respected was like, hey, when, when are you doing this? I was like, oh, yeah, I guess, I guess I should do that. And that's how it started. My first print run was 100 copies. Wow. That's awesome. I mean, you know, it's funny. It strikes me just how important that, that first, like, person that believes in you is. I, I had that similar story when I was, I was working on Ascension, and I was just kind of making it for me and for fun, right? I liked Dominion. I wanted to change it.

I wanted to make my own versions. I wanted to make my own things. I just was kind of playing it for fun of my friends. And it was a friend of mine that I also respected and had made and published games. Like, dude, make this. Like, this is a thing. I was like, really? Oh, wait.

I didn't even thought of that. And that just sort of put me down that path. So, you know, for those that are, you know, listening that already have success, you realize how powerful your word can be and inspiring people. And for those that haven't, you know, this, the barrier to making things is so small now. right as you learned when you're printing stuff i mean there's so many tools out there from you know the game crafters and drive-through cars and drive-through RPG and forge and others that are out there like it's so easy easier than it's ever been to print and make things and get them out there

of course the challenge is the getting them discovered and getting it to a place where you can actually you know have it be a sustainable thing and even though i agree that shouldn't be your primary goal there's plenty of better ways to make money than what we do uh it is certainly the dream and it's nice to be able to sustain your craft and sustain your art form. And so then tell me the story then of these first hundred copies. Yeah. So my first game was called the Shab Alhiri Roach. And it's a game that emerged from a contest whose ingredients were entomology, wine, and accuser.

So that year they said make games about things that use those ingredients. And I was in grad school at the time, and I was under a lot of stress. And I thought about it. And what emerged was a game that was sort of a dark comedy about academia. So that was my first game. It was very much an exploration of my own situation in life and my own sort of neuroses at the time. And it was a pretty fun game. and because the tools were available, but we didn't necessarily know we had the audience.

When I say we, I have a business partner and a dear friend, Steve Saghetti, who's been part of this the whole time. So he and I were like, yeah, let's print some copies of this and sell them. And we very conservatively, you know, used one of the printers that had been recommended in these forums we were hanging out at. and Alpha graphics is what it was at the time, a particular alpha graphics shop that all the indie designers were using. And we got the games printed, and we co-related them on a kitchen table, and we sold our print run in the first weekend.

So, you know, there was a demand, there was interest within our own sort of community of practice. We were all, you know, sharing the same dollar bill around. Hey man, that first dollar means a lot, dude. It is no joke. Especially being able to sell out your first run like that. You just don't know, right? You just put it on the table.

My first print run for my first game, I put 10,000 units on the table. That was terrifying. Yeah, that would be. Absolutely. That's a big bet. So we were very conservative and not really self-assured at that time. We didn't know if it was going to work and we didn't want to lose any money. In fact, that's written into our LLC.

Don't lose money. It's one of our... I should have thought of that when I started my business, or I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. Yeah, yeah. That's one of the rubrics we put all of our decisions through. Are we going to lose money or are we going to break even at least? Okay.

For sure. You've laid out of a lot of little avenues that I'm excited to explore down in terms of one. And I'll just, I'll signpost him here so you can pick the one you're most excited about, right? One is you're in grad school. you're super stressed and trying to be able to do game production as well as that. I want to talk about like, you know, how you manage that and how you're able to balance those things. A lot of people out there are stuck and feel like they don't have the time. I think that's interesting. You talked about how the specifics of your game explored your

specific situation in neuroses. And I find the idea of art as this expression of ourselves through our games and you being able to make the game that only you can make really interesting. I'd be happy to go down that rabbit hole. And then you talked about your business partner being there from day one, how that set up happened and the arrangements. And then this will, we'll, well, let's start there. And we'll talk about not losing money after that. So one of those three, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a channel that sounds most exciting to you, we can go down that road and maybe be able back to the others. Yeah, let's, let's talk about games as self-expression. I think that's an interesting,

interesting topic. Great. So, like, I think there are different ways of looking at making games, right? Some people think of it like painting, you know, that it's like fine art. It's an evolving fine art that really hasn't found its footing yet. It's only 50 years old. I don't really share that view. I think if it more as an applied art, I think that the real fine art is happening with the tools you provide. So at the table or in the room where it happens. That's my opinion. But in terms of applied art, you know, If you're going to lay the really well-turned table leg, that's a beautiful thing. It's an object you've created that's useful that other people are going to do something with, and that required skill and precision and craftsmanship.

And I kind of look at game design that way. And for me, it is a method of self-expression for sure. Like, my games are about things that I need to talk about, that I need to share with people, or that I need to express a feeling, that I need to express. Sometimes they come from a place of anger or confusion or just a sense that there's something that needs to be explored that people need to think about more. And I don't know that, I don't think that's the case for everybody, but that's kind of how I operate for sure. Yeah, yeah. I think honestly, I'll make the bold claim. I think it is the case for everybody,

but not everybody realizes it. And I'll push. Yeah, yeah. Because I've, I look back over my body of work and I'm able to, I didn't think of myself as like expressing internal things. I just want to make stuff that was cool, right? I want to make stuff that was fun.

And I, but when I look back, I see that there's a very specific play that I have in wrestling with this idea of uncertainty and crafting something from uncertainty that plays through the threat of my games for many years. And these ideas of, you know, the classic and game tropes that people are doing of, you know, sort of power fantasies and being able to find these ways of expressing themselves is very, very common. I think role-playing games

are the most overt when it comes to expressing yourself and having, you know, playing, literally playing a role, right? I think other games do the same. And I think that there's just, you cannot help but express those parts of yourself through your work. And I think there's times when you're working and playing within a very constrained box, like if I'm making a game for a licensed property, I'm making a Marvel game. Obviously, I'm trying to express the IP, but my personality will come through, whereas when I have more freedom and I'm building something that's my own world or my own systems, then it comes through even more.

And so I think that it's not always able to be seen forward-looking, but I think backward-looking what you're trying to say comes across. I did a podcast episode recently with Mark Otero, who did the Star Wars, Galaxies, you know, this multi-billion-dollar game, or I think, Galaxie. He's name. If I'm getting it wrong, I apologize. But, you know, these things were, and we dug into his history and his background and his sense of powerlessness growing up and was able to be found in role-playing games. And then that expressed through the way that he built games that were very much dialing into

this power fantasy and being able to. And everything he had radiated off of that. So I think it's a, I recognize I'm making a bolder claim. But I think it's a, it's a, it's a useful frame to look at one's art. that's a good way to look at it for sure so when you're trying to express yourself through your art it sounds like you're doing it in a much more explicit and forward-thinking way and i'm curious how where that comes from or is there a process through which you were able to fine-tune your your sensitivity let's say to what is going on in yourself or does it does it also kind of come up as or working, it's sort of you uncover it yourself as you do the work.

Yeah, I think that it can assert itself from different directions. So sometimes there's just a thing that I need to talk about. I made a game called Terps, which is about combat interpreters in Afghanistan. And I was upset at the fact that we were abandoning those people. This was before, this was a while ago. go. And I wanted to create some empathy around that situation and raise some awareness and talk about it. So it was an explicitly political game with an explicitly political point of view. So like in that case, I was like, I'm mad about this. I feel bad about it. I need to talk about

that. And the way I talk about it is through games. That's less usual for me, I think, than the other way, which is sort of self-discovery through play, finding the aboutness of the game as I develop it, starting with something that captures my imagination or that I'm interested in as a topic or as a theme or as a particular tension or feeling. And then over time I realized, oh, yeah, this is a game about feminism, right?

Or this is a game about whatever the topic is. It sort of emerges. And then I interrogate that myself. and it becomes a part of what's happening. Yeah, yeah, that you discover this kind of core theme and through line in the work. And then as you do the work, you refine your own understanding of it. And then once it becomes more conscious, you're able to reflect back and make sure that the theme is consistent throughout and build it. For sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And so that's two different ways of approaching that process. And I've done both. and I don't have a methodology for that. It just kind of happens. Yeah, yeah.

It's not, it's something. I love talking about this topic because for me, it wasn't, it certainly was not conscious for a very long time. And it's become more so, you know, as you, and I think this idea of art as not just self-expression, but self-discovery is a really powerful frame, right? This idea that as we create things, they are, we're expressing ourselves in the world inevitably and then we can kind of look at the things we're creating and realize oh wow i actually feel this way about something or i in in reality my what i thought was my thread is coming from this

place um and then that allows you to inform not just the work itself but your future work and your understanding of yourself and your interactions with the world like i find this idea of creating writing designing um putting things out there is is this one of the best ways to kind of uncover more parts of yourself in addition to adding something to the world and saying something in the world. Yeah, yeah, thanks for saying that. I agree with you. And also, by putting it out there, you're opening yourself up to other people's interpretations, other people's knowledge. You know, so like that's, and that creates dialogue and is a way to learn as well, for sure. Yeah. Okay. So I want to spend a lot of time in this,

space and specifically I love the the way that a lot of your designs have crafted different types of emotional experiences and narratives than is typical in role playing games or in the space. But I want to I want to just make sure for the audience's sake as well as my own, make sure to at least touch on the other signposts I put in here, right? This is working with a business partner, having a lot of work in grad school, and this idea of not losing money. I, you know, I talked about doing a 10,000 unit run for Ascension, which was a big bet, but I had a lot of validation points to that point. It wasn't like a total, I don't,

I don't encourage people to make that without a lot of signs along the way. But this idea of don't lose money, there's some amount of risk that comes in building these games and putting things out on your own. How do you apply this idea of don't lose money or how did you and your business partner think about this again? I'm just trying to, trying to ground it for people out there that are, you know, potentially ready to launch fast. Because I also agree, you know, you need to be very conservative. But what is this, how does this play out for you in practicality? So a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, there are platforms where the risk is pretty low, putting a game on itch or drive-through as a digital product.

There's not a lot of investment on the front end for that process, but also the potential discoverability issues. There's a lot of risks involved in just having your product noticed. but the creation and sharing of it on that level doesn't have a lot of risk. So that's a thing. If you want to print a bunch of books and store them, warehouse them in your basement, that's a whole different level of commitment. And that, you know, it does entail some risk. And even if you have those very positive indications that, you know,

the product is going to be well received or that you have a bunch of pre-orders or there's lots of ways that you could guess that you're not going to lose money and you could still potentially lose money. So what we have always done is we've been very conservative about how we sort of a portion money for our products. We're very frugal. We're, you know, we've grown slowly and deliberately. We don't take risks very much.

And that works for us. That's a choice that we've made. that's been successful within the bounds of our goals, right? And our goals are don't lose money, stay friends, and gradually make games that we love and that we, you know, believe in and, you know, gradually get bigger to the point of comfort, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

I think, you know, there's a couple things you said there. I want to underscore, you know, one is, and then I'll plus up one of them. One is this, you mentioned, you know, look, that's what works for you. And I think that's so important to just like try to be conscious up front. What does success look like for you? What does comfort level look like for you? And a lot of people that they're trying to model whatever it is. I remember, I mean, I made this mistake.

I was like, you know, working down the path. And I wanted to be like, you know, Activision Blizzard. I want to be this giant company and like grow and we doubled in size every year. And it was like, turned out I ended up in a place where I hated. It was not even where I wanted to be, let alone the challenges it came with. It was just I wasn't doing the work I wanted to do. I wasn't, you know. And so I had to really step back and took me quite a bit of lost money to figure that out.

So I'm glad you got it earlier, but really understanding what does success look like? And especially as you're creating things, you know, the fact that you create something you're proud of and you're working with a friend and making something awesome, like that can be success on its own, whether it's financially successful or not in the long run. Obviously, if it is great, but if it's not, you make something you're proud of, you win, regardless of how it results, right? And so I think that's a really important part that that you've, you know, you've articulated. And then I think you're talking about not being comfortable taking financial risk and I and trying to minimize that trying to minimize that in general is always great.

I think it's like maximize emotional risk, minimize financial risk, right? Like it's so hard to put something out there emotionally, right? That is the thing. We talked earlier about this idea of expressing yourself through your work. And so in a sense, it feels like a part of you like your baby is like being out there. and then other people are going to criticize your baby and call it ugly. Yeah. Like, you know, it's, it's a very hard and pushing past that.

I don't know, you know, how you've, you've experienced that and how you, how you manage that kind of emotional challenge and risk when you put work out there. That's another great topic, actually. We should discuss it. Okay. And, yeah, like in my case, I don't, I just don't sweat it, right? I'm comfortable and competent. I'm comfortable with the work that I do.

I know where I'm at. And if people don't like it, that's fine with me. I'm not going to engage with that negativity. My games aren't for everybody. I understand that. And, you know, if it's not for you, good. I hope you find a game you like. And that's been very successful for me to just, you know,

encourage people to do things that they enjoy. I don't have any stake in what happens at your table. Like, I want you to be happy. And if you can be happy through my work, I'm overjoyed. And many people are, and that's so good. But, like, if you're not, you know, walk away. That's great. Find a game that's going to work for you.

There's no need to tear anybody down or, you know, tell people they're not playing right. Just let's all just get along. and that's that's sort of been my my approach to it well have you all so that's i mean if i could bottle up that mindset and export it to everybody listening into this audience i think we would just make the world an infinitely better place and more creative oh please please do but but how do i do that how did you start do you always like this were you just born like this your parents raised you like this like how did you get this because that's it's the right attitude i've 100% aligned with you but boy is it easier to say than do um from how do you get to this place was it success that got you

there or you just you from your very early stages you had no issue putting things out there and having them you know dealing with negative reactions yeah no i i i've never been overly concerned with other people's opinions uh and particularly with something like role playing games it's just it's a little absurd for that to become a you know a vicious cat fight uh over uh whether or not we roll high or roll low who cares? Like it's it's not important in the scheme of things. And I don't need to be invested in that. I will say that I spend some of my day crafting furious responses to people and then deleting them, which is, you know, that's a, that's a therapeutic response that seems to work for me. I'll get mad about something and I'll write a mean email and then I'll delete it instead of sending it. So like I have those impulses. We all do, right?

You want to defend your babies. You want to, you know, you want to, you know what's right. You know the right way to do things. And if someone else is wrong, you know, you want to correct them. But there's absolutely no percentage in that. So like delete it, write it, delete it. You'll feel better. That's what I do.

Yeah, that is actually great advice. I will do the same thing. And I will journal all of the mean things I want to say, but not say them to anybody else out there. Yep, it's let it go. Yep. Great. Okay.

Then let's, once we start getting into specifics of your role playing games, I think it's going to take up the remainder of the time. So I want to, I want to first, in my research, I found out you didn't doing, you know, consulting and designing experiential games for people like Google. And I don't know anything about what you've done there. And I'm really curious about how that came about and what it's like, because I've done work, you know, I've created facilitated events for Google and other companies as well. and I'm curious how your process worked and where this came about. Yeah. So in that particular case, it was more, I've only worked with them once and it was more experienced design than game design, although I guess I made some games as well.

What I usually do, and that's also a little bit of an outlier, my normal gig is talking about creating playful experiences within the context of teaching and learning. So, and that usually means going to, sometimes it's a company, usually it's a college or university and talking about the things that they're doing with their subject matter experts and thinking about how to present that in a playful way, in a game-like way. And I have certain rubrics that I use to talk about that with people who are experts in their fields by sort of getting them out of their comfort zone and then talking about games and play in a way that maybe they're not used to because I'm coming from an analog space. And often

in academia, if you talk about games, you're thinking about electronic games. You're thinking about computer games or simulation. And that's not the world that I live in and that's not the world that I'm introducing them to. My pitch usually involves index cards and sharp. which is sometimes surprising, but it's also very liberating because it's easy to iterate. It's very, you know, you can prototype rapidly. There's lots of advantages to have really low-tech analog solution to what might be a otherwise complicated problem. So I do that.

That's most of what I do. With Google, it was a little different, but the same underlying principles, I think. So let's talk about if you can, if there's any kind of specific example that you could help bring this to life because I'm very fascinated. And I'll just, I'll give you some time to think about it because I have, I'm also, I love teaching. I teach a, you know, game design course. I have people, I love this idea of being able to transmit knowledge in ways that are like

actually useful and impactful. And I think that's my theory is that why we play games in the first place is like the fact that it's a great way to learn, right? We're able to practice and, you know, have a kind of low stakes way to apply skills and apply different roles in our lives. And so I think it's like the very reason we play. in the first place at its core. And so it feels like a great intersection.

And so if you have an example that's come to mind, or we can just sort of pick apart some of the principles, whatever works for you. No, I've got a great example. This is actually one of my favorites and something that I did that was very successful and that I'm very proud of. I visited a nursing school,

and they had a very specific problem. The specific problem was that their pediatric oncology rotation for their nurses was having trouble with the students forgetting the basics. They would get to the pediatric oncology floor and would be so stressed by the surroundings that they would forget their orientation. And by orientation, I mean, they need to know the code for the Pixus machine. They need to know where to get supplies, where to get labs, all the really sort of routine stuff that a nursing student in that setting is just going to be asked to do. They need to know how to

handle it in that particular floor when a VIP visits, because VIPs love to meet the cancer babies. So they would get all this information, and then they would immediately forget it because it's a stressful environment. They're dealing with children in crisis, and it's just, it's a lot. And so I came in and suggested to the faculty that rather than orient them the way they had been, which was putting them in a room and spending an hour and saying, these are the 25 things you need to know. Okay, now you know them. Now you're going to go, which was a failure.

They recognized that that didn't work. So we made that into a series of playful experiences that were lightly competitive with the buy-in from the staff on the floor. So the students, rather than just getting an info dump, they were accomplishing these tasks in a, in a virtual way that had no stakes in a playful way, but they were emulating the things that they were actually doing in practice. So rather than being confronted with an actual VIP,

they had a task related to handling the arrival of a VIP, who was played by me and a couple of index cards. There were other tasks related to the things that they had to do. And all of this was put into the context of competition, between diads. So the nursing student paired off and then they competed

against each other to do the best. And they love that because if you go into medicine and you're going to be a little competitive so they wanted to achieve and it was fictive.

It didn't matter. We didn't care who won. What we cared about was retention. We wanted you to learn the code for the Pixus machine. We wanted you to learn where to get a bedpan. And it worked.

You know, that the amount of energy that went into reconfiguring that orientation was pretty low. All the information was, it became sort of, most of it was like a treasure hunt. There were index cards. The, you know, the staff on the floor would provide them with information. And it just, it was very, very low tech, low friction, low fidelity, and, you know, high stickiness. It just, it was a better way for them to learn the material. They enjoyed it,

and they got to compete with each other and had a good time. I love that. And I love that. And I love the, you know, the emphasis again on, on, you know, the low tech, very easy to build, very easy to iterate, you know, with a sharpies and index cards, you can like make a real impact in people's lives and design something that's really like useful. It doesn't have to be super fancy and pretty. And I think that that is a, it's a powerful frame that people forget, right? The number of times I see people that want to design things and they're thinking they've got to make like, Halo plus World of Warcraft as their first game. And I'm just like, wait, wait, wait, there's so much you can do with very, very little start there, work on

the craft, see what your goals are. Yeah, slow down a little. And also, like in that example, like every rotation they got to iterate, so the stuff that didn't work, we just threw those cards out and did new ones. You know, it was easy to refine. It was not a brittle process. Yeah. Shrinking your iteration costs, one of the most powerful things you can do to be make your game

better, right? Like, how much can I, how fast what I call the core design loop? Or how fast can I get through this loop of like, you know, IDA, brainstorm, prototype test? iterate, you know, move through the process. And so there's a really, yeah, that's a no more important thing if you're hoping to get better faster. I want to, I want to linger for a moment on this concept of competition because I've done a lot of game, gamification consulting, as they used to call it now.

I don't know what the word is out of favor. It is. It's a dirty word now. Yes, yes. And, well, and in part because of this, this. competition thing. I worked with the Wharton School of Business and we did a bunch of, we've done a bunch of games for corporations and things to make ideation better, to make team formation better. But the, what, what, when you drive in the competitive aspect,

for some people that works really well and for some that it doesn't. And you mentioned specifically, you know, people who are in the medical arena tend to be more competitive. And so that worked well for them. And have you had that experience elsewhere, right? When you start, you start throwing points and leaderboards and stuff, some people are like, yeah, I'm into it. And other people, it turns them off. It actually is net negative compared to where they were before. So how do you think about that in space? Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And my normal, my usual audience is the opposite, where that's definitely not going to fly.

And you just, you have to know or have a general sense of the people you're trying to reach and what's going to interest or motivate them. Something that I do quite often that is successful, that sort of the opposite of that is putting people in a situation where they have tasks to accomplish or goals. They're things that they want to get done in an environment that is inherently alien to them. And so one of the things that I will use with faculty, if I'm talking to college faculty, who are usually a little bit resistant, there's a little bit of friction, they're not necessarily receptive to what I'm trying to encourage from them.

and also there's subject matter experts in a variety of fields. So if I were to create a game or a playful experience around like anthropology, there's going to be an anthropology expert in my audience. And that's not what I want at all. And so I put them in a sewage treatment plant, which is an environment that is inherently interesting. Nobody knows much about it. And I'm reasonably sure that the people that are in my audience will know nothing about

it. And that works great because then they're learning something, which is sort of one of the takeaways. I'm putting them in the role of a student, you know, a learner. And it's also a foreign and uncertain environment for them because they don't know how it operates. We're not pretending to be academics. We're pretending to be wastewater engineers. And you're delivering the same material, but by sort of refactoring that, it's more successful. If I did the same thing and then they were trying to score points and beat each other and be the best sewage treatment plant, it probably would not work. But I put them in a collaborative environment, and that's an unusual collaborative environment,

and they usually dig it. Yeah, that's great. And so really tailoring it to your audience. And that's where I think, it's the biggest reason why I think gamification became the dirty word is because that's all people think, oh, can I give you points? Can I give you board? Can I give you things? And that's just like the least, like least creative and generally like least important part of what we're doing here. Like it's a piece of the puzzle, but not nearly as big as people think. And so, yeah, I think using games to facilitate learning, using play,

the mindset of play to facilitate learning is really actually, I think the most powerful thing, right? When people don't have that same like, I don't know, the sort of stress and tension that comes like In real life, we, by default, people, this ties back to our previous emotional risk things, right? People like very much want to be right. They very much want to assert their knowledge. They don't want to take risks. And in games, you take the opposite mentality, right? This idea of play.

Of course, I'm going to try different things. It's fine. If I lose, it's not what's important here. And so just finding the right artifacts and tools to shift someone from a mindset of being right and to a mindset of play does so much work. It's true. Something else I always look at is cheating as a benchmark of engagement. If I see people in those settings that are bending the rules or cheating, I love it.

I'm so happy because it means that they're engaged. They might not be engaged in the right way, but they're definitely with me in some way. I don't know if they're necessarily learning the right things, but I think cheating is great. a really good way to assess what's happening in the room. Wow. Cheating as a benchmark of engagement. I've not heard that one before, but I actually love it. That's a really interesting way to look at it.

They clearly care. They're clearly engaged. Okay. All right. I've used up about half of our time on various tangents I find interesting. I need to get into your role-playing games work and that craft more deeply. I'd like to start with Fiasco because it's the one I'm the most familiar with, even though I read it, I hadn't played it. I've read it and learned, I love it.

So we'll start there and we'll jump to other tasks as needed. Why don't we tee up the game a little bit for those that might not be familiar, and then we'll pick apart some of the design choices and the art there. Okay. Shall I give the elevator pitch for Fiasco? Yes, please. All right. So Fiasco is a game about dumb people getting in trouble.

It flips the script on most role-playing games because you're playing for failure. It emulates neo-noir fiction. So I was inspired by Cohen Brothers movies. If you've seen Fargo or Braising Arizona, that's the vibe that fiasco generally elicits. You're playing people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. They're going to make mistakes on a journey towards self-destruction. And the fun of the game is seeing why and how your characters make those bad choices. It's a GMless game.

So you all sort of have the same responsibilities in play. And it's for three to five players and takes two or three hours to play a complete game. Yeah. So this idea that there's no game master, there's nobody running the event, that it's a role-playing game experience where you're playing for failure, where it's built into a single experience that you're all co-creating. Those are all like pretty interesting. And if not, there are other games like it, but rare ways to build a role-playing game. And how do you build that structure in a way that A, gets players on board?

And I love this idea of like the jam-less situation where it's really, you've, just from your elevator pitch, right? one, it's clear that you've given this pitch a bunch and that I, if correct me if I'm wrong, but it's, you know, part of the process as you're building this game is that the elevator pitch is there and you're refining it as you go. And two, like that just giving that pitch gets people in the mindset to kind of be the way that you want them to be, right? Like that that that T up does a lot of work, it seems like, when people get into the game. Yeah, it's true.

But the game is going to help you get to that place, whether you want to or not. not. It's structured in such a way that by the time you begin playing, you have an unstable set of relationships that are poised for conflict and destruction. So even if you went into the game without that excited elevator pitch, you can't really help it. You're going to be playing interesting flawed people. They're going to get in trouble. It's built into the, it's engineered into the design of the game. How familiar you with the Amber Dyseless Role playing game system? I'm pretty familiar with that, yeah. Okay, yeah.

So that was the one that I first really got hooked. And I crafted experiences when I was in college that were very similar to what it feels like you've been going for with Fiasco. And that, like, I would hook everybody with these, like, backstory connections that were very complicated and then try to force them into like, you know, put them into, you know, give them a Mcuffin that they would be going after. But the reality was all about this conflict between the players and we would kind of larp it through. Because it was diceless, we didn't have. to sit at a table, we could just kind of roll with it. But it was still, I had to mediate or have, sometimes we'd have other people that would mediate as a kind of game master to resolve conflicts. How did you approach this? What made you decide not to have a game master in the first place?

And then how did you approach giving this facilitated storytelling to work in a way that doesn't require it? So I love being a game master. I think game masters are awesome. I think that's a fun roll and I love to do it. So my impulse is to spread that love around. Fiasco technically is a GM full game. Everybody has the same responsibility. There's no asymmetry to it. You're all responsible for making sure everybody else is having a great time and supporting their characters and their their character's bad decisions. So it's really sort of democratizing that role. Everybody's facilitating for everybody else.

And that's the way I like to play. I just think four people are smarter than one person. And if I can say, you know what? I don't know what the most amazing thing that could happen right now is, what do you think? I'm going to get three other answers that are better than what I had in mind to choose from. So it's a very natural way to think about credibility and authority at the table for me. I come out of a community that was in the early 2000s that were really playing around with these concepts.

And there are games that predate fiasco that I was influenced by, games like Polaris in a wicked age is another game that we're already making games. that thought about authority or thought about credibility differently or apportioned responsibility differently. And it's just a natural outgrowth of that. One of the things that I do as a designer when I'm making a new game is I really think about that early in the process. Like what's the best, what's the best relationship among the people at the table? Should there be asymmetry? Should there be a facilitator, should the facilitator have different responsibility than everybody else? These are all really good questions, and the game will tell you what the answer is as you build it. And sometimes it's really obvious, and sometimes it takes a little time to figure out.

But I don't reflexively ever just say, well, there's going to be a game master and a bunch of players, and the game master does these things, and the players are forbidden from doing them. because I think that is a fun mode of play, but it's only one of many. Yeah, yeah. This idea of democratizing authority is really interesting to me. I mean, as a traditional role-playing game, it's sort of like a dictatorship, right? There's a player say what they want to do and the game master decides, does this work, does this not? Or maybe there's some rules that dictate it.

And there's a variety of things there here in this idea where that's fully distributed and you're co-creating, it feels like in general that requires more of your player base, right? To be a good game master, you can you can kind of put rails on potentially for players who aren't as comfortable or there's more things going on. When everybody has that authority, does it find it requires a higher level of caliber of players? Or do you find that it's just about really building a rule set that's simple enough and that gives people the right incentives and anybody can do it? My impression is a fiasco is actually far more accessible than most RPG.

How do you think about that in terms of the authority and responsibility and opportunity on the player? Yeah, my experience is that it's a game that tends to work very well with people who are brand new to role playing. So if you've never played a role playing game before and someone presents you with fiasco, typically you know what to do because you know how to play pretend. And maybe you've seen the kind of fiction that it's emulating. So yeah, it's no trouble. there are people for whom it just doesn't work and that's that's okay it does ask you to flex certain muscles that are different from a normal normal from a traditional role-playing game

and if those muscles are ones that you don't use very much it's not going to be fun to flex them so yeah i think that you know i've heard of people or people have told me but yeah it didn't it didn't work for me. I found it difficult to make decisions spontaneously. It felt like improvisation and I don't like improvisation. And that's totally legit. I get it. Not the game for you. But for someone who doesn't have any expectations about how we're going to mediate this experience, it's pretty organic. It feels pretty natural. And usually they can do it. Yeah. So maybe walk walk through like a mediation, right? So I think thing X should happen. Another player thinks thing Y should happen. How do you resolve that in a situation where authorities democratize?

Well, there are lots of ways you can do it. The way that Fiasco does it is by not telling you how to do it. Fiasco very specifically never says who gets to say what, when. If your character is in the spotlight, you're going to make a couple of decisions about how the fiction is going to be controlled, you're going to decide whether you establish what happens or whether you're going to resolve what happens. And that's it. That's the rules. That's the rules in playing fiasco.

So I get to decide whether I'm going to describe a scene and sort of paint it, let you know everybody who's there, what's happening, what the goals and objectives are. or I'm going to let you do that, you being the rest of the people playing collectively, but I get to decide how it resolves, how it turns out. Otherwise, if I painted the scene, you collectively are going to decide how it turns out. And that's often the more fun choice because the three of you, and this is where that democratization of authority happens, the three of you are going to collectively put my character in an uncomfortable or tragic or stupid situation,

and you're going to do that by discussing with each other and just picking the ideas that rise to the top by whatever method your culture of play uses. And that varies from table to table. You know, like that's part of the social contract. Yeah. It's different for every table and I don't want to presume that I know what's best for you, the best way for you to decide.

There are other games that do that are like, the person on your left will tell you what, happened or the person across from you is always your adversity in the GMless game. And that's fine too. I just, I didn't feel that was necessary. I think part of the secret sauce is that collective decision making. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a, it's a great. And it creates a fun environment. And so let's, let's linger for a little bit on this concept of the culture of play because I think this is a really important point. This idea that each play group, you know, we, we come into a game and there's a certain, you know, conceits that we make. We join, you know, the magic circle, right? We're all, but there are very different norms around

different playgroups. For example, you know, in anytime we, I think about cooperative games, one of the challenges we deal with is what we call, what we call quarterbacking, right, where one person is the dominant force and they will just make the decisions. And I have to imagine that that problem, if you call it a problem, comes up in fiasco as well. If there's one person who's very loud, they could, you know, kind of dominate the room potentially. But maybe that's okay. If people like that, that's fine. So this idea of like the culture and the norms of a group and how you think about creating space and creating play opportunities that work in a variety of cultures or potentially shifting the culture. Again, I think your your elevator pitch for fiasco dictates a certain,

vibe and cultural norm that's going to influence people, even without a rule that says you have to do it this way. Yeah, that's true. And I think that that's true for any role playing game, particularly your rules need to communicate procedures. They need to communicate aboutness. Like, this is why we're doing this and this is how we're doing it. But they also need to communicate a tone, right, to set a tone. So like, in Fiasco, can I use profanity? I don't know. Yeah, you can say whatever the fuck you want. Great. So in Fiasco, there's some introductory material and then the last bullet point before we start talking about the rules is one last fucking thing where I just established that this is a game that's

going to be a little raw, that we're going to be rude, and that it's going to be profane and black humor throughout. And if that's not your jam, you know, run, don't walk because it's just going to get dark and weird. So, you know, I'm setting that tone early on and managing those expectations. In terms of like cultural play, I really try to assume that I'm writing for people who are engaged, that want to play my game, that trust each other, and they love each other. And I'm not writing for people who are going to approach it adversarially. I'm not writing it for people who are there to have a bad time.

And, you know, if you're there to have a bad time, I can't fix you. Go see a therapist. Don't play my game. Right. It's like it's outside of my, it's outside of my purview. I can give you all the materials to have a great time and, you know, or a thoughtful time or a harrowing time or whatever the vibe is. But if you don't want that and if you're going to mess with that, then you're going to do it.

And I can't stop you. I don't come in the box with the game. You don't get to have me there to be like, oh, no, actually, you're doing it wrong. You know, if you want to do it wrong, you want to break it, congratulations. You broke my game. And you had a bad time. Good job. So, so like that's, from a design point of view, I have to think about the culture of play that I kind of want to see.

It's aspirational, more than realistic necessarily. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, so obviously most of my experiences with the tabletop card game and board game and that kind of experience. And very different space. Yeah, I have to think about the corner case players. I have to, like people are trying to break my game. They want to be the ones that, you know, find the corner case rules or find the broken cards or do the thing. So I have to play around in a sense the worst players, you know, quote unquote, right?

The players are going to push against the boundaries. Not the worst, by the way. I was one of them. So, you know, I'm not it. I get it. But this idea that I need to make sure that I create a box that makes it so that the player who's just there to have a good time will have a good time and other players can't ruin it or are minimizing their opportunities to ruin it. And that the best thing to do for players is the most fun thing to do. You, it sounds like, get the opportunity to not play that game, right?

To just say, look, I'm going to build a thing and the right people are going to gravitate to it and the wrong people should play something else. that I'm a little jealous from if I've heard that correctly. Yeah, that's, that's largely true. But I mean, I would argue that this is the same. The counter example in a card game would be like a guy shows up and he's got a fifth suit to play poker. Well,

that's, you know, you're breaking the game. That's not how poker is played. There are not five suits. So like, what are you doing? I think it's the same kind of analogy.

Like most people are at least, you know, they're going to try to play. it right. They're not they're not malicious. I'm not I'm not designing games for the guy who's going to bring the fifth suit to play poker. Yeah. And neither are you, you know, I want a coherent rule set that addresses those edge cases if they're necessary, but that, but I'm not going to stress about it. Yeah, I think, I think you're allowed to, you, I mean, role playing games in general, you want more fuzzy space for players to be within, because that's the, that's where the fun is

in a large sense. So, whereas I, I'm, you're allowed to, you're, you're, I mean, you're I generally want to curtail that a bit more in a traditional game. So I'm, it's one of these things like I kind of sort of hinted at this earlier. Like I used to play role playing games all the time. I love role playing games, passionate about them. But they have largely faded out of my life over the last however many years just from things happening. And I want to make a role playing game.

I want to build one again. I want to get it back into my life. And one of the things I wrestle with personally is this, something. within the space where it's like, you know, how much am I building a game for the people who need rails, right, who need those kinds of onboarding things and need a lot of structure versus the ones that don't. And it sounds like you just, you know, you just have to make that decision, much like, you know, any game you're trying to, which audience you're trying to serve. But, but how do you think about kind of onboarding people and teaching people these games in a way that is, is, gives you the most

opportunity in play? Because again, I think Fiasco from everyone I've talked to this play, it in the general sense I have, it is very successful in this space. How do you think about making this role playing games that are sort of accessible and give people that room to play and point them in the right direction? That's a really good question. I feel like this is an area where one of the things that I'm drawn to is providing constraints. I'm not really interested in an open-ended sandbox. Those kind of games can be fun. But if you look at it, my sort of history of design, I'm giving you really specific experiences most of the time. My games are about something.

They have a very strong point of view. They're constrained in character or in a moment or in, you know, the affordances of play. And I like that. That's what I want to play, so that's what I make. And one of the advantages of that is that it's easy to onboard somebody because you can say, like we're all going to play Soviet pilots and we're all going to be women and it's going to be 1941 and let's go. Like you can't be anything outside of that really narrow window.

And if everyone's on board for that, first of all, that's a filter, right? Because there are people who are like, ah, no, I actually don't want to do that. So if you get a table full of people who are like, hell, yes, let's be those people, then you've already got some enthusiastic, you know, buy-in for the situation. You've already got trust because everyone's going to be there for the same kind of experience. So, like, I feel like by creating those constraints, aesthetic constraints, fictional constraints, whatever, focusing, focusing in the game, that you're halfway there to getting people engaged and playing very quickly. Yeah.

The concept of filters, I think, is really powerful, right? This like not making sure that it's clear who the game is not for. And that gives you a much better space to play in up front. Yeah, you absolutely don't want to surprise somebody. You know, no one wants to find out they're playing a different game than what they were told. Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay, we're running into time and I want to hear about your new projects. I want to hear about things you've done recently. And, you know, this podcast will probably air about two months after we're recording. So, you know, with that context, what, what, what stuff are you excited about right now? What are you working on right now? What's, what's,

what's going on in your life? So, so we recently released a game called Desperation, which I'm extraordinarily proud of. It won the Indicade analog game award for 2023. And it's just a cool, cool concept. The, the way that the game works is super interesting. And I'm, I'm, I'm really anxious to explore the design space further. I learned about apophonia, which is like our brain's pattern-matching abilities gone awry. So like we're pattern-matching animals. Our brains are always looking for patterns.

And apophonia is finding them where they don't exist. And it explains a lot of very satisfying moments in, particularly in gaming, where two things happen and it feels like magic. it feels like if the perfect card was drawn, it feels like the perfect die was rolled, when in fact, you're just, your brain is playing a trick on you.

And what I thought was, what if I made a game that just leaned as hard as possible into that? What if I made a game that relied on pattern matching in a way that made everything feel spooky, made everything feel like it was the right choice? And what emerged from that is a game where, that kind of subverts some of the normal things you assume in tabletop role playing.

So normally you have agency over who gets to say what and when. In desperation, you don't get to decide what gets said, but you do get to decide who says it. And that's such an interesting change. So what happens is you create a set of relationships. You create a tactile map on the table with like a village or a ship or whatever the game is about. There are two sets right now. One of them takes place during a blizzard in Nola, Kansas in 1888. And the other one is a shipwreck in the Gulf of Alaska in the same time period.

And so if you're playing the shipwreck one, which is called the Isabel, you learn about the crew and you learn about the passengers on this ship. you're going to learn about the ship and then the ship sinks. And as you're playing the game, it's, it's, it's, you're drawing cards, it's a card, sort of a deck of cards that are, that are gradually revealed. And there's some variability there, but you're, you're revealing these cards that have words on them. And those words are being spoken by somebody who is within the context. But the game doesn't tell you who.

So one of the cards might be like, I hate that guy. that guy is always stealing my my my food and I'm going to get even with him that's a very basic example but but it doesn't tell you who's hating who but in the moment because you've already established these relationships everyone at the table will be like oh yeah that's Lestenkoff and it'll feel perfectly magical in the moment and the premise of the game is that you're in a very bad situation and people are starting to die. And so in the Isabel, it's a shipwreck survival kind of situation. In the other one, which is called Dead House, it's a blizzard that you can't escape.

And so, like, characters are, the pool of characters is diminishing, but there's still people saying stuff. And it gets so interesting because even as that pool of potential speakers diminishes, you still know. Every time a new card comes, you know exactly who's talking. And it's so interesting and fun. That's desperation. That's my most recent published game. I am, what am I working on now? So the next game that we're going to publish sort of in a physical format is called Genia's Wonder Tales. And Genia's Wonder Tales comes out of my interest in Slavic and Baltic mythology and folklore. So it's designed to help you tell stories that could have been pulled from the Eastern European folk tradition.

So you might fall in love with the bear. You might go and have to negotiate with the king of the snakes. And they're very tightly constrained little stories with lots of variability about how they get told. But it relies on some of that same technology I was just talking about. And I'm really excited to get those out in the world. They've been people just all the playtests. I've played tested it with hardened gamers and with people who are brand new. And everybody seems to really enjoy it.

So I think it's going to be well received. Okay. Let's, I mean, I love the, you know, the narrative constraints you put in in the kind of worlds you're evoking are just are just phenomenal. Each one's so different. and it's just like makes me want to play right away. I think since you brought up this idea of playtesting and the games that are not yet released,

maybe it's worth talking a little bit about your playtest process, right? What does that look like? How do you know when a game is done? You know, a lot of people, I think, struggle with those pieces and how does that work for you now? Yeah, since the pandemic, it's been difficult. I'm not getting out very much. I used to playtest the hell out of my games at conventions

at events, you know, I would be consistently just hammering them at events that I attended. Haven't attended any events since 2019, have to be a little careful. So the playtesting has been more virtual, and I've been relying on others to blind test things with local groups and then give me feedback. I still have a weekly face-to-face group that, that I use for that purpose as well. So it's a, yeah, it's a big, it's actually kind of a bottleneck right now. I counted, I have 20 games that are pretty much ready to go, but that need to get played.

So if any of your listeners want to play some not quite baked Jason Morningstar games, have them get in touch. I'm happy to share. Okay. Well, then that's a great thing to do, right? So this is something that, you know, for people out there that want to work, on these kinds of games, there's no better way than starting to playtest and see the games as they're being made and start getting in touch. So how would people get in touch with you? How do they find your

games? How do they become part of your now ever-growing playtest group? Yeah, maybe I've made a terrible mistake. So my company is Bullypupit Games. You can find us at Bullypupitgames.com. You can also reach me directly through there. On social media, I'm at J.M. Star on Blue Sky and mastodon. We have a discord. Bullipulpit has a discord, which is by far the best way to get in touch with me. I'm very active there. I'm sharing all my design stuff there. That's where I coordinate playtesting. We have a Patreon. I release a game every month to our patrons. And so if you're interested in what that looks like or how that is achieved, become a patron. We would love to see you there. That's where you find me. Great. I love it. Awesome. Well,

Thanks so much for taking the time here. I really enjoyed this conversation and digging in. And thanks for your contributions to the space. I think really pushing at the boundaries and growing what's possible in games and really thinking a lot about the different kinds of representations and experiences people can have. And really saying something meaningful is something I'm really trying to encourage more in the world and do more myself.

And so you've really inspired me here. So thanks so much. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. That's very kind of you. And I enjoyed this. Thanks for having me on. 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. 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 something.