Think Like A Game Designer - Jesse Schell — Mastering Game Design, Unveiling the Secrets of Fun, and Exploring the Gamification of Life (#3)

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

Jesse Schell wrote, The Art of Game Design, the number one book on the subject in the industry. He was a founding member of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and a former Disney Imagineer. He's also the founder of Schell Games, which has launched countless games including, I Expect You to Die and Domino World. Jesse is an amazing game designer and a fantastic teacher. 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. In today's podcast, I have a conversation with Jesse Schell. Shell was a Disney Imagineer, creating rides for Disney Quest, creating Tune Town Online,

and he was a founding member of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He founded Shell Games in 2002, which has launched countless games, including I Expect You to Die and Domino World. You could find these games and more at his website, shellgames.com. That's S-C-H-E-L-L-G-A-M-E-S.com. But outside of all this, what really got me interested in Jesse was his incredible book, The Art of Game Design, which is, in my opinion, the most useful book for someone that's aspiring as a game. designer, leaving aside of course my own book with the same name as this podcast. It really dives deep into all the different lenses that you can view game design from, whether that be from

the mechanics, from the rules, from the players, from the business, all of it, really a very comprehensive book. And I wanted to reach out to him because he taught me so much. And I was hoping that my conversation could teach you guys that as well. And really, Jesse did not disappoint. In this episode, we talk about how he got in the game design. We talk about what it was like to work as a Disney Imagineer, how he started and grew his own company. We talk about Jesse's thoughts on augmented reality and virtual reality games. We talk about what it's like to teach games both in class, in his studio, and through his book. And we even talk about how being a professional circus performer prepared Jesse for a life in game design.

And so much more. Jesse is really one of the people that I credit with giving me a ton of skills and learning a ton about design. And I learned a ton in this conversation, as I'm sure you will. so I'll let us get to my conversation with Jesse Shell. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jesse Shell. It is great to have you here. I'm very excited.

I've been looking forward to this talk for a while. Hey, great to be here. So one of the things I always try to get started with is, you know, most of the people listening to this are people who love games and want to get into the field of game design, but don't necessarily know how to get started. And so I like everybody to kind of tell their story about what brought you into the field. How did you get started? You know, kind of what got you going in the beginning?

Got it. Well, let's see. I've always been interested in games and making games ever since I was really little. I mean, I remember making up games, I don't know, being ages four and five and being pretty excited about that. The first digital games that I got involved making would have been in the early 80s. 80s. I was probably about 12 years old. And computers were starting to come into the home. And the idea of being able to make my own games was very exciting.

And of course, those computers were very maker forward, right? They all came with a programming language and urged you to learn how to use it and all that. So that was really how I started, sort of making simple games, hanging out at the department store, that kind of thing. And so, and I was hooked on it. I got really hooked on programming and stuck with it as a hobby for quite some time. And eventually went to school for computer science, but never really imagined I'd be able to make games professionally. And so the big step forward for me was after working at IBM and Bell Labs for a while,

there was an opportunity to work at the Disney virtual reality studio. And that was about 1995. That was when I really took my first step in making professional games. Yeah, that's pretty much a dream opportunity. It's something I grew up in Florida and would go to Disney all the time. And being able to work on those things, I think I actually played in many of the things that you worked on down there at the Disney Quest and some of their cool toys back then. And so that's a really exciting. So did you just, you found that job like a posting online?

Did you know somebody? What, how did that, how did you get into that? So I'd been working for Bell Labs. They sent me to grad school at Carnegie Mellon to learn about computer networking. I twisted that into a focus on virtual reality. And because that was kind of a new thing that was hot and I was really interested in it. So I was doing a lot of virtual reality work in grad school. and after graduating, my wife and I got married,

and she'd wanted to go to Disney World for our honeymoon, and I'd never had much interest in Disney World. I knew a lot about theme parks. I used to work at amusement parks and things, but I didn't really know anything about Disney parks. And in fact, I always had a kind of a negative impression. I'd see Disney parades and stuff on TV, and it all looked really corny,

and I just figured it was all just going to be sort of just low-quality stuff. And after visiting there, I came away with a completely different attitude. I'd never seen such high-quality experience design anywhere. And it just so happened that they had the Mark I version of Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride in kind of a beta state. And we happened to walk by one part of interventions at Epcot. And there was some Disney employee kind of like, hey, you want to try this virtual reality thing. Hey kid, you want to come over here? I know, and I'm thinking, what? Are you kidding?

And we go and check it out. And it's, you know, they started to give a talk about what virtual reality is. And then they pick a few volunteers and people get to try it and everybody else watches. And it was the highest quality VR I had ever seen. And you had already been specializing in VR at that time. And you just got picked kind of randomly down on the street in Disney. That's amazing. Yep.

Yep. I didn't know this thing was here. I had no idea. We were just walking around and just happened to see it. And we're like, wow, yeah, of course. Let's go check that out. That's awesome. That's awesome.

And so that made a huge impression. I immediately asked them like, do you guys have job openings or anything like that? And they were like, no, no, no, no, nothing like that. And so that was like, oh, well, too bad. But at the time, I was always reading, we used to have this thing called Usenet. She, how we did our news groups She needed back 25 years ago And that was how we'd get our online news

And there was a thing called side-up virtual worlds Which had all the news of what was going on And virtual reality land And I was always reading that Just to kind of keep up with the VR stuff Even though after graduating I wasn't doing VR anymore I was back at the phone company

Doing phone company stuff Making graphical maps and that kind of thing But then one day I see this posting for a position at Disney Imagineering to work in the VR studio, and they want someone who has worked on VR before, check. Somebody who knows how to program AI systems, which that was my specialty in undergrad, so check. Somebody who knew how to do sound design,

and I used to do college radio, so sure. And someone who knows how to put on a show. And I used to do, I was a professional circus professional, performer for a while. When I was in high school and college, I worked with a few different troops and toured around and worked in amusement parks, all that stuff. And so I could check all four of those boxes. So I applied. And a few weeks later, we were moving out to Los Angeles. And that was the beginning of me spending seven years at Disney. That is amazing. That is amazing. So it's actually, well, there's a couple of threads I want to

pull on from there. I'll start with the last one first, which is the, I had read online in your profile that you had done this circus performing and juggling and comedy and all of these different aspects to your life. And yeah, you know, I found that with a few, a few other people in game design, they, they sort of these polymaths that can, you know, work from a lot of different fields. Do you feel like that, you know, informed your love of design? Do you feel that there's a, was a cross skills, you know, obviously in this case, direct. for the job you got, but as far as in the craft of design itself,

how do you feel those things relate? Well, I think it goes the other way, actually. I think to be excited about game design and follow through on it, you have to have passion and confidence in a number of different fields, because that's what games are. Games pull together all these different media,

just necessarily. a board game. For a board game, you've got to be thinking about rules, which means you need to figure out how you're going to write them and express them and think logically. You've got to think about the graphics of the board. And you've got to, so visual layout and graphic design end up being something that's very important. You're going to touch the pieces in a board game. So you've got to think about the sculptural aspects, pieces that are too heavy or too lighter or are hard to pick up. And that's even just with a board game, with a digital game. Now you get into sound and animation and storytelling and music.

And if you don't enjoy thinking about a whole bunch of different things and how they all fit together, you're going to hate game design because that's what it is. It's about doing all these different things and fitting them all together so that they are harmonious. And so I think it is people who lean toward a kind of a polymath approach that tend to enjoy game design the most. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, you're in the end, you're crafting this experience, and you have to be conscious of and at least somewhat proficient with all the different parts that touch on that experience. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the second thread I wanted to pull out of your background story here is, is, you know, virtual reality.

It's a, you know, was a big hot thing back when you were first getting started as this kind of new wave. It kind of died down in the public awareness and then it's risen back up again over the last couple of years. Yeah. How do you think about that space and the technology and why it sort of maybe didn't catch fire then and is it going to now? and how are you thinking about that these days? Yeah, I mean, the thing that always excited me about it, I mean, I've always loved, the thing I love about all games

are the way that we create a kind of an imaginary situation that you can really go into and do things in. And that's true, whether it's, you know, a sport or a board game or a video game. And virtual reality is special because it, it kind of tricks your brain into thinking that you're in a place that you're not. And that allows you to kind of have this sort of depth of immersion. And it allows you to fulfill parts of the game design experience

that we've never been able to fulfill before. We don't need you to pretend quite as hard because your body and your brain are believing the place that you're in a lot more easily. And that was a lot of what the original appeal of it was for me. Back in the 90s, the technology wasn't quite ready. It sort of worked, but all the tracking was magnetic, which was full of problems. The field of view wasn't very good. The number of pixels we could push and polys we could push was very limited.

So it just was really the technology just wasn't quite ready. A lot like how television was invented in 1890. and video phones were first demonstrated in 1950. Like, yep, those are good things, but they just weren't ready. Now it's a different story. Now, 20 plus years later, the technology is definitely ready, and it is just now teetering on the edge of affordability. And I think in the next couple of years,

we're going to start to see some truly mass adoption. I mean, already we have the number of high-end VR systems in homes is now in the millions. but we're going to see it in the tens of millions before much longer. Yeah, I've really enjoyed the challenge. So I've worked on two VR games so far. And, you know, my core background is tabletop games and trading card games. And we've moved into the digital gaming space and then now a few VR.

And it was a really fascinating because, you know, you've been wrestling with this sort of stuff for a long time. And for me, it was relatively recent. like understanding both the opportunities and the limitations of that space that I have, you know, when I'm working on a tabletop, I have a certain amount of space and physicality that comes to it and a socialization that comes with it. When I'm working in digital, I have the, you know, sort of a mobile device. I have, you know, the sort of speed and processing power, but a very small amount of space and not, the social is much harder. And I found VR made, you know, you had tons of space, but not all of it is as usable as you think. and social gets pretty close to real life.

You get a lot more out of it. But wrestling with those transitions was really fascinating for me. Yeah, it's very different. A lot of the old habits from making traditional video games don't translate very well into VR, because it's just a different medium. And we saw the same thing, really, when we went from people making PC and console games,

switching to mobile. Like everybody tried just porting across the old games that they were used to making. And those didn't work too well. And what worked instead were things that were better suited and better rooted in the medium. And we're seeing the same thing with VR. So if you could maybe give a few maybe counterintuitive lessons or thoughts that working in VR relative to other mediums that you've learned over the years? Yeah, sure.

I mean, I think some of the main things about VR is number one, I think, is the question of motion in the game, locomotion and exploration. The default activity in most video games is to explore a space. That's normally sort of the base of what you do. You run and jump or you run and shoot. and it's all about moving about a space and learning about that space. Motion is problematic in VR because since VR is trying to map your real motion

to virtual motion, we don't yet have the capability to have you actually run thousands of feet in the game without it being a problem. So people come up with artificial ways to move about VR worlds and those have a tendency to lead to motion sickness because of that physical virtual disconnect. And there are a lot of hacks that people try to kind of get around this, but it is that that's sort of a central difference. And generally,

we're finding that the wisest move is to be able to avoid that motion when you can for the key, key interactions. And so the way I often put it is you're better off moving away from exploration as your key, as your foundational activity. If you can move towards manipulation as your foundational activity, picking up objects and doing things with them, that's what VR is really, really good at. And when you can move to that as a foundational activity, you're in a much more stable place. this is a great transition to talking about a game that you've released. I expect you to die. And this is one of the things I often tell aspiring designers

that everything that you think is a constraint is actually an opportunity. And so you've taken this model of manipulation and being trapped in one place and turned it into a benefit in the cool part of the story. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, yeah, sure, right. So I expect you to die is a game that we made at Shell Game. that's basically being about getting trapped in a series of secret agent death traps and needing to MacGyver your way out of each one.

And so the entire game is designed to be played while seated. And the whole idea is you're in a series of different settings. At one point you're in a car, another point you're in a submarine of various places where you have an urgent situation that you have to get yourself out of by solving puzzles. And it's in a lot of ways you can kind of look at it like an escape room. We use a lot of escape room style design. But the whole idea is to really make you feel like you're in that place and to really make you feel clever when you solve the puzzles.

Right. I found that yeah one of it's been an advantage of doing kind of tabletop style games in virtual reality that you can you know the expectation is you're not moving anywhere you're working with the board and other people around a table and so that's been been very helpful as well as a paradigm and then you know trying to think about how we can then use what's cool about virtual reality and bring that to to the what would normally be a traditional tabletop experience Yeah, yeah. We spent a bit of time experimenting with tabletop experiences ourselves.

Anything that you've released or just kind of internal playing around? No, nothing we'd release because I guess what I learned is that I had, I think, the wrong end of the stick initially when I was thinking about that. I started, so one of the things that I think is really powerful about VR is the social aspect of it, the fact that you can sit, you can be near another person and you can really read their body language. And you feel this closeness to them that you don't get in other media. And so naturally, the idea of board games makes a lot of sense because there's some gameplay where you're with friends, you're kind of closely socializing, et cetera. And my initial vision was very much.

much that, wow, of course, people are going to want to play traditional board games in VR, because that way, you know, now I don't have to actually travel to see my friends. We can all just kind of, you know, put on our headset and bam, we're all together playing our favorite games. And so we put a lot of energy into this early on trying to solve all the hard problems because, man, it's hard problems, right? How do you, what's the right way to draw a card in VR? What's the right way to hold a bunch of cards in your hand?

How do you fan cards? How do you sort them? How do you? All that kind of stuff. And it was kind of like, if we can solve all those problems, like, we're going to have a thing that's going to make a lot of sense. And we could maybe be a platform and we could maybe have, you know, we could have hundreds of board games on it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we started building prototypes in that space and made this realization that, yeah, that's all cool in theory. but in practice, when people are in a VR world,

they really want some kind of superpowers. And so we started to see that, yeah, board games, I think, can work in VR, but they need to do things that board games in the real world can't do is the conclusion we started to come to. And so my initial thought of, oh, we'll build a simple platform, we'll just drop hundreds of known board games into it, and everyone will love it. We started to back away from that and realize that, no, if we're going to do this,

we need to do things that are very, very special, which means they're not going to be cheap to do. And so we ended up kind of, we're kind of taking a step back trying to figure that out. At least that's my take on it. Yeah, that's, I mean, we've tried sort of two different approaches. And one of the things, there was the game, Ascension, which is we released as a regular card game. and then as a mobile app and then in VR.

And, you know, it just sort of created the immersive world around you and simulated the social component of it. And it was sort of a more straightforward execution that was just sort of done really well by a company work with called Templegate Games. And then this other game, Labyrinth, which was sort of a more started off as a kind of turn-based tactical cardboard game.

And in the VR version, you could actually like, zoom in to the character's point of view and like see the giant monster on top of you and and so it kind of created that cool little bit of magic even even though it wasn't necessarily functionally changing the game a lot it was creating that that that experience that kind of like whoa I can't believe that just happened which was was pretty cool cool yeah there's still still still puzzle pieces to fit out there it's definitely an interesting challenge yeah so I'd like to transition a bit from the virtual reality world to augmented reality, which I think I know from some of your talks is something you're also very excited about. And, you know, it feels like that's

a space where a lot of radical changes, not just to sort of games as we know them, but also to the way we do life is on the horizon. How are you thinking about that these days? Yeah, I mean, you talk to a lot of people at virtual reality, and they say, I don't know, I don't know if it really like that, but augmented reality, that's what I really want? And you probe that a little deeper about, well, what do you really want out of that? And people don't really know what they want out of that. They know they want it, but they don't know why they want it or what they want out of it exactly. You get vague things about, well, I could walk down the street and see restaurant reviews over the store, like, Really? That's a thing you'd really want?

So it's a fascinating space to explore because it has a lot of promise, but it's incredibly technically difficult, and nobody quite knows what it's really for. So, of course, right now we've got sort of two flavors of augmented reality. You've got your handheld phone-based stuff, and we're seeing AR Kid and AR Core on iOS and Android, respectively. kind of pushing that. And then you've got your head-mounted, your glasses-based AR. And so far for that, we mostly have HoloLens,

and we've heard a lot of promises from Magic Leap, and we'll see what they come out with. But the way I look at it is, I think we're going to see an AR platform that no one's thinking about right now. I think we're going to see VR headsets turn into AR headsets because the technical problem of overlaying a pair of glasses with visuals that really fill your field of view in a meaningful way is tricky business.

You've got HoloLens doing it one way. No one quite knows what Magic Leap is going to do. You've also got things like the Jedi challenges from Disney and Lenovo. And these are all different solutions, but none of them are like a lightweight form factor that people are ready to integrate into their daily life. I mean, you even look at stuff like Google Glass, which was super lightweight, super slick, and it wasn't good enough. or Snapchat's photo glasses.

And those haven't caught on at all either. So I guess the way I look at it is we're going to have VR headsets are going to get cheaper. They're going to get lighter. Vives already announced the Vive Focus at this point, which is a completely integrated headset that uses inside out tracking. So there's no wires, no cameras to set up. It's just all integrated. No computer to hook to.

It just all lives on board. And of course, it's going to have stereo cameras on it for tracking the space and the environment. But once you have stereo cameras, why not let the player look at them? And that will give you the ability to either be an AR headset or a VR headset. And I think we're going to see that's going to be one of the places we see the most AR development because it's going to be a powerful piece of hardware with a great field of view that is already set up to be a game system

and it's going to be a lot cheaper than the fancy sort of quantum wave guide systems like the HoloLens. Yeah, I think the interaction between the kind of physical world as it stands and the digital or game world is one that lots of people have tried over the years, and I've played around with in a variety of different ways as well, and it often falls short in the sense that, you know,

the goal is to be able to sort of, in some ways, get the best of both worlds, right? You want to get the upsides of that, you know, you can customize the digital space, and in the physical world, you have the automatics of the tactile interaction and, you know, all of the sort of common assumptions of the world that we have.

cutting aside from just the sort of glasses and kind of projection kind of model, have you played around much with toy or physical-based games that use that interact in the digital world or have some kind of augmentation from that space? Yeah, sure. I mean, we've been doing a number of things in the aerospace already. We have a game we created called Domino World that we originally put out on the tango, and then we have ported it to iOS and are soon. going to be taking it to Android for AR core.

And what it lets you do is it lets you set up, you know, you point your camera at surfaces in the world, tabletops and floors and things. And you can set up big rows and little paths of dominoes and set them up in all kinds of patterns and then knock them down. It's the same kind of thing you can do in the real world except it just takes forever in the real world. And you can do it quite quickly in the AR space. And we integrate all these toys with it, too.

Little toy airplanes and toy dinosaurs that march around and knock over your dominoes. And that's been really fun. And I think part of the key with the AR space is doing things that you can't do in other media and that use the space well. Yeah. Yeah, I've played around with that. The domino thing I've seen the videos for it. It seems super cool. It's just all the things I wish I could do in real life, but I'm too lazy or not precise enough to be.

make it happen. Yeah, yeah. And then you've got Disney with the Jedi Challenges thing. I don't have you had a chance to look at that yet, but... I've read about it and I haven't actually seen it, but it's the dream of what Luke does when he's practicing in the first movie. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's basically a system that allows you to have a lightsaber battle against you know, Darth Vader and all the bad guys in Star Wars except they're standing in your living room and you have a lightsaber battle with them. And we'll see, you know, we'll see how that does. And I think it's going to, it's going to, that's going to point the way for sort of future AR games.

Yeah, I feel like with these things, it's always, things start to catch fire when you get that perfect match between the sort of story and IP and the technology. Like, you know, Pokemon Go is a great example of this, right? Like the technology has been around forever that, that level of augmented reality. but it was that that sort of combination of the got to catch them all Pokemon are hiding everywhere with the technology that really made it come alive and go viral in a pretty crazy way yeah I think I think that's right I mean when you got the right technology and the right IP at the right time that's when things often catch Pokemon Go is a great example of that so I've any anything that gets me

feeling like I'm having a lightsaber battle I remember remember when I first saw the Wii controllers or even frankly, even when I first had the stupid, I played to the app on that first iPhone where it made your phone feel like it was a lightsaber. I got a lot, got a real kick out of that. Yeah, right, right. So I want to transition to another topic. You've worked in a lot of different environments. When you first started, you were programming and making things on your own as a kid and through into college. You then started working with Disney, which is how big was your team when you were working at Disney? And what was kind of the scope when you were there?

Oh, let's see. The team varied in size over time from probably about 15 up to about 35. Then from there, you transitioned to your own independent game studio. And you have, I think, was some over 100 people now? Is that correct? Yeah, we got about 110, 110, something like that. That is amazing. So, you know, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is what made you make that transition from Disney,

which many people would consider to be a dream job, to starting your own studio. Gotcha. Yeah, my wife and I, after we'd been in L.A. for about seven years, and I mean, working at Disney was, you know, absolutely phenomenal experience. We got to develop some of the attractions for Disney Quest. I became the lead designer on Tune Town Online, which was the first MMO for kids, and that was super fun. But after our daughter was born, we thought, you know, we might want to move back to the East Coast. And I was looking at different opportunities and possibilities, and one of them was to teach at Carnegie Mellon, where I'd gone to grad school. And there was an opportunity there at the Entertainment Technology Center, which,

didn't exist when I had gone to school. It was kind of a new thing that had been created by Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli. And I knew Randy Pausch pretty well because he'd done a sabbatical at Disney, and I worked with them a lot while he was doing that. So we'd stayed in touch quite a bit, and I'd learned a lot about this new entertainment technology center. And in fact, I'd hired people from it at Disney and thought it was, you know, I loved the quality of the students that were coming out of it. And Randy was always after me to, hey, he would say, and take a semester off and come and teach at Carnegie Mellon.

And I would say, I don't know if you get how the business world works. I can't just like go away for four months and come back and have my desk still be there. But I'd said, what if I came and stayed longer? And so we tried that out. And I moved back to Pittsburgh and started teaching there. And it's gone well. I mean, I still teach there after, it's been 15 years, I moved, I initially started full time. I've switched now to halftime as the studio grew, but I created the studio kind of on the side,

partly because I, the teaching, like teaching is only nine months a year. There's nothing going on in the summer, but also out of a desire to kind of be in touch with the industry and to make some real, real things. And so initially we just started with four or five people. I knew some people who I'd love to work with. And I'd been doing independent design consulting. And that was going well. And people were saying, hey, we could throw you some projects if you wanted to pull a team together. And I thought that sounded good.

So I started doing that. And bit by bit, the studio has grown. So we've been a completely independent studio the whole time. We've never taken investment money. we we bootstrapped ourselves by doing a lot of partnership projects as well as creating our own stuff. So that's both fascinating. It was a conscious choice, I assume, to sort of not keep other money out of it and really try to grow, I guess, more slowly than you might otherwise?

I mean, the thing, I mean, I've always understood about other people's money, right? When you take other people's money, you're now, you've now got to meet. other people's goals. And usually people with money, their goal is they want to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. And what that usually means is focus all your energy on one thing, blow it up as big as you can, and sell it off and get out, right? And there are a lot of things about that that were not appealing to me. I don't necessarily like working on just one thing. That's that whole polymath thing we were talking about. The idea that just, hey, we're going to work on things the way we want to work on them when we want to work on them.

was very appealing. And further, like I would say for the, in the beginning, we didn't have some idea that it would make sense to go to venture capitalists and say, here's going to be the way you make your next, you know, you multiply your investment by 10 because we're going to blow up this big platform. We just wanted to make games. And so it really was very organic, I would say. And our growth has similarly been organic. We take on more people when there's enough work to sustain it. And we do it kind of carefully and cautiously because the thing that's horrible is to have to lay people off because you can't find the work in order to sustain them. And blessedly, in all this time, we haven't had to do that.

Well, I really am wishing that you and I had this conversation about five years ago because almost everything that mistakes that you've avoided are ones that I've made. you know it's a so it's a fascinating bit of insight that it's worth i just want to underscore that you know up front or at least have some idea what's important to you and bring people on that and work with people that who's interests are aligned with yours and that's not always going to be the case with investors or any kind of you know even other partners that you'd work with who who may have different visions yeah it's it's great it's great lessons for people getting started out there the idea of, hey, let's get big and let's go this traditional route is not always the right answer. Yeah, I mean, you just have to know what you're getting into.

I mean, I think there are times it totally makes sense and there are times that it makes less sense. So, you know, you talk about organic growth, but organic growth up to 110 people is pretty impressive. And, you know, one of the things I've found is that at each stage of growth, there's totally different challenges. is that that happened. You know, when I started with a team of four people, it was totally different than a team of 10, then a team of 30, than a team of, you know,

we didn't get much bigger than that. But, you know, how have you, what have you learned through that process? What challenges have come as you've grown in the organization or what systems have you put in place to kind of help make that effective as you've grown to keep the culture and keep the productivity and make it what you want?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, I occasionally talk to people who say, you know, secrets for engineering a good culture. And I often think that's really the wrong way to think of it. I don't think you can engineer a culture per se. I think a culture is a thing that grows. You can't engineer culture anymore than you can engineer a house plant. It's much more about tending and caring for your culture. So first, that means you have to figure out what your culture is. And usually that is sort of something that appears, right?

You start doing some work and you see the things that you like when you work with each other. And the good parts, you know, that's kind of the culture that you want to strive for. And when there's bad parts, you want to figure out, well, hey, is there anything we can do to get rid of these bad parts? Now, when you have less than 20 people, I find you don't have to think very hard about communication. because generally when you have less than 20 people, everybody in the studio, they're going to talk to each other at least once during the week. Each person will talk to one of the other 19 people

sometime during the week, some small conversation. Once you start to get above 20, that's not necessarily true anymore. You'll go a whole month and not even exchange two words with somebody else. So when you get even bigger than that, there's people. You're not even going to know who they are in the organization. And so once you start to get up to those sizes, if you're going to have meaningful information flow in the studio, you have to engineer it. You have to have the right meetings at the right cadence at the right time.

You have to kind of engineer all these ways that people can talk to each other. And two things that gave me a lot of hope in this regard. One of them was early on, it was funny, right, when we were about 20 people, was when we started working, we ended up working with Disney and Pixar on a certain project. And visiting Pixar was fascinating because I'd never visited their studio before. And their studio, I don't remember exactly, I want to say it has about a thousand people in it somewhere around there. but it doesn't feel like a thousand person studio. It feels quite small and intimate,

and it feels like everybody knows what's going on, and it's because they carefully engineer that through their design of space, through their design of meetings, and through the other rituals that they create. And so they're sort of seeing that, wow, they can create this intimate feeling in a good culture with a thousand people.

Then, like, surely we could do it as we move up beyond 20 and up to 30, we can find a way to do that. And I started going around talking to other game developers who I knew had had long-term successful studios and talking to them about the problem. And Ted Price, who runs Insomniac, was he had an excellent thing that was very inspiring and good advice, I thought.

He said, what gets you in trouble as you grow is ignoring the changes that happen when you grow. but if you're aware of the changes and paying attention to them and trying to solve the problems that arise, you'll be able to solve them. He says, I've never met anybody who was aware of the problems, looked for the problems, and could not solve them. The people get in trouble, the people who ignore the problems, pretend they're not there, and just grow without thinking.

That's when you get in big trouble. And that gave me a lot of confidence, too. And I found that is true. As we've watched and observed what the issues and the problems are, we've been able to build structures that have facilitated growth. We're kind of in a growth period right now, and I'm pretty sure the system that we have in place will work up until we get to about 150 people, or about 110 right now.

After that 150, we're aware that we're going to have to do some different things and change. but again, it's just you'll have to, we'll have, we'll take, we'll solve that problem when it's, when it's time. So there's multiple threads here as well. I really, I'm interested to dig into. When you say that as long as you're aware of the problems and put effort into fixing it, you should feel confident you can. Yeah. How do you, how do you, how do you, what systems, sort of meta systems, I guess, do you have in place for that. And actually it occurs to me that there's probably some pretty good parallels between

that and the way you observe game systems and how, you know, looking for problems there. I don't know if that's true. Yep. You put your finger right on. It's the same process. I honestly, I often think of the studio. See, and actually, this was a little bit of a crisis. I know that I faced as the studio got larger.

When it was small, I was kind of head of design. and game design was most of what I thought about. I thought a little bit about production and I thought a little bit about all the business things that we had to do. But the majority of my effort and attention was all about let's make sure our game designs are great. And as we got bigger, that didn't really make sense anymore. And things started to get chaotic.

People weren't getting the coaching they needed. And at some point, I sort of realized that like, the problem here is me. The problem is this is going to work. I need to put more of my attention into making sure people are getting the right coaching and the right feedback and less attention into making the games. And that didn't sound too great to me because I went into this because I wanted to spend time making games, not trying to optimize individuals. But meditating on this for a bit, at some point, I started to realize that, you know, you really can think of the studio as a game itself and the people who work at the studio as the players of that game. And I found that for me, thinking about it that way, changed everything because then I could bring everything I knew about great game design to bear.

And so I think what you say is true. I really do think it is a lot of the same techniques. business, you know, you look for the problems, you talk to people just like you do with play testing to sort of see what are they liking, what are they not liking, and you figure out what are the problems, you prioritize those problems, you come up with experiments to try and solve them, and then you make plans and you get it done. So we have a lot of things that we do in order to check on things. Let's see, where to begin. There's so many different ways. We have of kind of getting this feedback and figuring out what we should change.

One of them is, so with our management team, we make sure to have periodic off-site meetings because the temptation is always to spend all your time solving the current fire of the day, right? There's this problem or that problem or there's not enough staff on this or this project's fallen behind or whatever. And you end up spending a huge amount of time thinking about those things. but that's all you think about. You never get ahead of everything. So you have to schedule opportunities to talk about the bigger issues. And so part of it is we carve out time to kind of keep track of the bigger issues,

have meetings and conversations about, like, you know, the bigger issues. What, you know, what's the right way to give feedback? What should we have, what titles should we have at the studio? what are people happy about, not happy about, all those sorts of things. So one is just making time to think about that stuff. And then the other one really is, I think, just making lots of channels of feedback. We have a whole 360 feedback system where people can give feedback about what it's like to work with other people, because always a lot of the big concerns that people have are I'm having a problem with this person or that person.

And then we also have other systems. We have a system in a place called Office Vi. which sort of an suggestion box people can it's an anonymous suggestion box that people can send you know comments to management with about things they're concerned about and the best part is it's you can have an anonymous conversation through it so somebody can say hey i i wish we had more healthy snacks and i can write back hey anonymous that's a great suggestion we're looking into it um And I'll give you some feedback with what we find about whether we can afford more healthy snacks, that kind of thing. And simple things like that really make a big difference because I like what Ed Catmell from Pixar says. You've got problems you know about and you've got problems you don't know about. And actively looking for the problems you don't know about is a big key to keeping an organization healthy. Great.

So you have the multiple channels of feedback. Sounds like that's cool opportunities for anonymous feedback, opportunities for multiple levels of review for each individual person and ways to give them feedback as well as management. I assume what are sort of the more broad, are there any broad metrics that you use to measure your success over time or whether you're moving in the right direction or wrong direction? Well, I mean, the easy stuff is the financial stuff. Like, are we making money at what we do? So we look hard at that, try and make sure we don't, we're not losing money on projects at a minimum. And if we are, like why? What did we do wrong?

Where, how did we, how did that happen? And how can we stop that from happening? So we look at all the financial stuff, certainly. And then, of course, with individuals, you know, we try and give them, you know, individuals useful feedback and metrics. But beyond that stuff, a lot of it really is about gut feel, about does it feel like we're going the right directions in terms of what we're working on and how we're working on it. So some of it's quantitative, but a lot of it is very much subjective and qualitative.

Gotcha. That's great. So I want to shift to another aspect of your life and skills and how. they sort of circle around game design but aren't exactly game design. You, you know, you've sort of actually, you know, design games and focus on design. We've just talked about, you know, management and building a organization and how that is in many ways like a game design process and the tools for that. And the other thing that you've, you know, become incredibly successful and well known for is teaching and communicating ideas around game design. You left Disney, without an independent studio idea,

you left Disney to become a teacher as a sort of first step. What gave you the confidence that that was something you'd be good at and that made the desire to do that? And how does you review that transition? Oh, it's a great question. I'd always had a little bit of a teacher fantasy kind of thing,

just the whole idea of like, I've always liked explaining things to people. I often find, even when I was very young, when I'd learn a new thing or I'd figure out some new thing, I would find myself in my mind, like, here's how I would explain this to another person.

It was just always how I approach things, is how can I take this new information and make it clear to somebody else? So that had been a thing that always been on my mind. But really, what gave me the confidence was working with Randy Pausch, who some of your listeners may know him from the last lecture, which was a talk that he gave when he'd become ill with pancreatic cancer and became very popular and then turned into an inspirational book that has also been very popular. If anybody has not listening to this now has not watched that or listen to that, stop this podcast and go listen to that. It's amazing. And come back to this because this is also great. But that, yeah, that's incredible. He's an incredible human. Yeah. So, so Randy was, he, he was very encouraging to me that when he came to Disney, he was very much looking for how the heck is Disney making VR experiences that are so much better than the best of what's being done in the research world right now. And, To his surprise, he learned it wasn't about big brains and big computing that it was really about bringing artists and engineers together and to do things that they couldn't do separately, which is not a thing academia is traditionally good at.

In academia, different departments are separate, and everybody's very laser-focused on their own micro-discipline. But at Disney, there's a long, long history of art and engineering, kind of working closely hand-in-hand. I'd come from this kind of weird place where I'd been doing computer science, but also I had learned a lot as a circus performer. So we were always talking about the principles of entertainment and how they can be sort of translated into an interactive world. And he was really, he was a really, he was a lot of.

always interested in the approach that I had and the way that I thought about it. And he encouraged me to start doing lectures at conferences. He initially got me some ins at Sigraph. He would pitch talks at Sigraph where he and I would do co-talks together. And it was the first time I'd done any kind of real sort of academic public speaking. And those tended to go well. Some of them were went well and were fairly popular. And that gave me some some confidence. definitely. And then he'd really encourage me that he thought I could be able to teach at the school.

So, and I was interested in it, so I just kind of went for it. So when you teach game design, it's, you know, now there's more of an established field than it was when you were first getting started. You know, in many ways have to sort of build the curriculum at that time.

How have you thought about teaching game design specifically, what do you feel has been most effective? What do you feel that most maybe other areas were failing in approaching that process? Yeah, I mean, when I started, I guess I started 2002. Back then, I want to say there were about five books about digital game design, but I think that's it. And most of them were not very good at all. And so I had to make up a lot of it myself, but my instinct from the beginning was

that the right way to think about game design was not to be looking at the latest technological marvels and how they work, but much more to be thinking about what are the fundamentals and the basics of the way the human mind interacts with games, and how can you break that down? So my game design teaching approach was very much about having people build really simple games. card games and board games and party games and playground games and looking at the fundamentals of what makes them work because all those fundamentals of what makes those work are the same fundamentals that make the most popular high-end digital games work but you can just iterate faster and see the elements more clearly with working with more rudimentary games

yeah that's definitely the same advice i've i've given to all aspiring designers is start you know start with traditional tabletop card games those kinds of things just because the more you can go through that core design loop of ideating prototyping testing learning and going through that the better you're going to get faster uh and no matter where you want to end up i've found that to be true with with everybody that i've i've trained and i've worked with yeah that sounds right So you'd been teaching for about five, four, five years before you published the art of game design? Yeah, yeah, it's the art of game design came out 2008. And it was very much based on the class that I teach at Carnegie Mellon in game design.

I'd sort of had to build up a set of lectures about game design, and those became the beginnings of the book, I think, very much. Well, and I've recommended your book to many people and read through it myself and referred back to individual parts of it. it's really the most comprehensive overview of the craft that I've found. And somehow it manages, while being obviously a very big book covering a lot of material, to still be very relatable and kind of almost conversational in the way that it, that it approaches, doesn't read like a textbook, even though it serves as one in many cases. What was your process of writing that book? Like you created your lectures for class and then just sort of turn

those into the chapters of the book? Or was it, did you have to, you know, take a semester off and go work on it? How did that work? Well, it's, it's, it's funny. It sort of happened in stages and, and phases. Even when I was back at Disney, I was sort of working on this book. Back then, I had a different title for it. I called it Understanding Entertainment. I'd been very, there were two books that had been a big influence on me, actually three, I guess, that really led to Art of Game Design. One of them was Understanding Comics by Scott McLeod, which is this incredible book written in comic form all about the nature of how the comics medium actually works. And that impressed me a great deal. Similarly, there's a book, Magic and Showmanship by a magician named Henning Nelms.

It was written, I think, in the 1960s. And when I talk about interest curves in art of game design, I stole most of that right out of Henning Nelms. And I'd learned all that when I was working with a show troupe and a magician ran it, and he really insisted that anyone who wants to understand about making great shows needed to read this book. And the third one was a book called The Pattern Language

by Christopher Alexander, which is all about what are the patterns of architecture that make for a pleasing human experience. And so I boldly believed that I could write a book all about the nature of entertainment. And so I was taking a bit of the interest curve stuff from Nelms and kind of the approach of Alexander with his patterns. And I was really trying to break down like, Here are the ways that human minds get entertained.

And it was just sort of a personal project. I didn't really know where was going or how I was working out, but I'd always make notes on it. I just collected notes and notes and notes about how the human mind works with entertainment. And after I started teaching, a publisher approached me about the Panda 3D game engine, which was kind of a proto-unity engine that had come out of Disney. There was no unity engine back then, so we sort of invented it. We called it Panda 3D, and Disney made it open source,

And he'd approached me about, hey, what do you think about writing a book about programming in Panda 3D? And I kind of, I wasn't too into that, but I told him, let me tell you about this understanding entertainment project. And he wasn't too into that, but he said, you know, that sounds kind of in the realm of game design. And you could use a textbook on game design. What do you think about that? And I realized that, yeah, you know what? I mean, what I'm doing in my game design class anyway is applying all these understandings. entertainment patterns to game design.

And yeah, that's going to market. Who's going to want to buy a book, Understanding Entertainment? There's just two generals, too vague. So I said, yeah, okay, I think I could do that. And so that's kind of what kicked me off trying to do it. But it took some time. Like I, I mean, I think I started it in earnest in 2003, but it wasn't really ready to publish until 2008,

just because there's a lot in there. And I wanted to think hard and get it right. well i uh i certainly for one appreciate all of that a hard work uh really i feel it moved the craft forward in a way that uh it's pretty substantial and and lasting so no thanks a lot and you'd mentioned the conversational part of it i'd always part of what it always intimidated me about the idea of writing a textbook or something was i was never good at formal third person style nonfiction writing. I always felt much better just being one person relating to another person. And part of what really inspired me, I'd found these writings by this guy, Albert Hubbard,

who had written all these little biographies of people back in the 1890s and printed them himself. and they were gorgeously printed, and the writing is so personal, so just one person sitting down talking to another. I mean, one third of these things are biographies, but two thirds of it are the musings of the author just talking about what he thinks are important. And these just, they struck me with their personal style, and I thought, you know what, I like, I like this style, and I can, this is how I want to communicate, and I'm just going to go for it, even though a lot of people were telling me, you, couldn't do that. And the early reviews from the publisher were some of them, people were really displeased with this tone because it was so non-typical of a textbook. But I just kept realizing, like, look, this is the only way I know how to do it. So I'm just going to go all in on it. Well, I don't know how many of the audience of this question will help out, but I have been

working on a book of my own on on game design and much sort of shorter and more kind of step by step getting started than than than your book approach to it cool do you have advice for those of us who are interested in you know contributing and and putting something out there any any lessons you learned on on either the creation or the you know publishing and and a process that that you would share um well uh The publishing I don't know about, I mean, that's such a weird business. You know, the right way to publish books nowadays has changed so much. So, yeah, I don't know if I have too much to say on that.

Other than one thing, people were interested in writing books on these topics. One thing to check at is the ETC Press at Carnegie Mellon now, as run by Drew Davidson. and it's published dozens of different game development books, and as a very interesting model where digital downloads are all free, and then individual copies are kind of printed up on a one-by-one basis. So that's a little bit of a different model to check out, if that's something that's interesting to you. But in terms of actually getting your book done,

I think the key thing is that you do have to do it. and momentum is the most important thing with getting a book done. Momentum and deadlines are the two things that will get a book. I feel the exact same way about games. Deadlines are magic. Yeah, it's absolutely true. Momentum and deadlines, they are both magic. It's hard to have deadlines in the beginning when you don't know what you're doing.

And so that point you just want to get some momentum going. And one of my piece of advice is write 20 minutes every day. You're not going to get a lot done at that rate, 20 minutes a day, but you will be making progress. And a lot of times 20 minutes turns into 40 minutes turns into an hour and a half. And you start to get that momentum going. And then once you start to have enough, you know, getting some appropriate deadlines in place is the right thing. I'm actually working on a second book right now with Barbara Chamberlain. We're writing a book about educational game development.

And we're not going super fast right now, to be honest, because we have. haven't set big deadlines for ourselves. And it doesn't bother me too much because we're in a very exploratory space. And we do have some pretty good momentum. But pretty soon we're going to have to set some good deadlines for ourselves. Well, that provides a great transition. I'd love to ask about educational games. You know, everybody thinks of games as a sort of, you know, just there for fun and

enjoyment and, you know, maybe there's some social value in people getting together. but this idea that games as a teaching tool is actually pretty fundamental to why we play games as a species. And it seems like the process of using games in educational ways is not, it has kind of a bad connotation to it. There's some bad juju on it out there.

Can you help brush that away or explain it? Well, I mean, yeah, sure. It's not complicated. There's a lot of bad educational games out there, right? And everybody at some time or other has had a bad educational game foisted on them by a teacher or a parent or a grandparent or something. And because the problem is unlike normal, particularly educational games for children,

they don't work through the same marketing channel that normal games work through. Normal games are like, hey, look how fun this is. And if people think it looks fun, then they'll buy the game. Educational games are often in different realm. It's often the purchasing choice is made by parents who say, oh, look at the vitamins that are in this. And there's secondary consideration given to whether the games are fun or not. And then on top of that, of course, first of all, making a fun game at all is super hard. It's really, really, really hard.

And then you're going to say, I'm going to make a fun game and people who play it are going to come away from better people in some way. That just makes everything much harder. So the reason that most educational games are bad is because it's just super hard. And then secondly, you've got this marketing problem on top of that. But when it works well, it's amazing. And it works wonders, right? when you have games that have meaningful education and people are having fun doing them or really

enjoying what they're doing, it's a wonderful thing because people are enjoying what they're doing and they are improving themselves as they go. And it scares a lot of people away because it is so hard, but the rewards for when you get it right are just, you know, absolutely incredible. Well, you know, one that we've been very proud about is our happy atoms game, which is a sort of a physical digital thing. You get these magnetic pieces that snap together that are little atom models. And you snap them together to make molecules following certain rules. And when you've, when you snap them together, which then they're fun to just touch and play with and snap together. But of course, you have no idea what you

made. And at that point, you point your smartphone at it, and it does a visual analysis, and it'll tell you like, you know, oh, that's methane or that's sodium chloride or whatever it is. It can detect 17,000 different molecules. And then it gives you facts and things all about it, and it kind of gives you quests to go and do more. And when you see, like,

I mean, I've seen kids come out of it and say, like, that they're, they, They now want to be scientists after playing this game. And it's exciting to see that, not because it was something foisted on them, but because the game found a way to take what's actually fun about being a scientist and put it in the hands of young people. So, like, I get very excited about making great educational content.

Yeah, I find that space really fascinating. I think there's a couple of key points. The one that you've already hit on is this idea of being able to sort of bring the fun and the lesson and doing both those things well, incredibly challenging, but that there's big rewards when you get there. And the other thing is there's I think certain types of lessons that are uniquely well taught via games. So for example, I worked on a project with the Wharton School,

business called the startup game, which was basically a role-playing game for the students, everybody would play and take on the roles of founders and venture capitalists and talent, and you would sort of have to make your deals and kind of set up your company and then it would get scored. And then classes can be taught on those principles of what, you know, makes you more or less likely to be successful and the types of considerations you have. And that forcing you to wrestle with the choices in an uncertain environment is exactly what you have to do as an entrepreneur and that's very hard to teach from you know a book and i find that there's space there that is pretty interesting to play with um that games are not just more fun or

you know to learn from but actually uniquely capable of teaching from no i think i think that makes sense there are a lot of kinds of learning that work better as learning by doing and games are kind of doing so for um are there other games that you recommend or that you think have hit this really well other than uh than the Happy Adams one that you made, that others out there that you look at as kind of like, yes, this did it right? Oh,

boy, there are a lot of really fascinating ones out there. You know, my co-author on the book, Barbara Chamberlain, she runs his Learning Games Lab down in New Mexico. And a lot of their games are just little underrated gems. There's one I really like,

Night of the Living Debt, which is all about, you know, helping teenagers understand, well, what does it mean to have a credit card? And what does it mean to accumulate debt? And what are the consequences of that? And it does it by kind of translating it into this sort of world of zombies where your debt takes the form of zombies that kind of come back to get you. And so it's funny because you play this game about trying to deal with all the zombies in the world.

And it really, it's just an analog for like, how to properly do the right kind of debt. It's fascinating. Some of the games that I like the most are ones that are not explicitly trying to be. They don't present themselves necessarily as educational games. I think Papers Please is a great example of this. It's trying to sort of present you with a viewpoint and the complexities of the, you know, the the circumstances of immigration,

but it presents itself just as a kind of an interesting indie game. And there's, I don't know, there are dozens and dozens, but they really are kind of hidden out in the world. And for people that are interested in that space, obviously you're writing a book, so I'm sure a lot of your lessons are sort of either being formulated or presented. Do you have kind of tips for now? this is maybe somebody who is, has some experience in game design and wants to move into the educational game field.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the, there's two different ways to look at that. One of them is the question of doing that as a business, because it's a tricky business. It's not a business at all like the normal game development space because the markets just aren't there, really. If you have the idea that you're going to make this great game and just sell it into schools, there just is no market. it like that. There is no standard way that schools and teachers buy video games. So that doesn't really exist. So what you have to do is you end up often trying to go in through the normal entertainment channels with your education game. And that doesn't, it just, there's a lot of challenges with that. You have an advantage when you're talking about games for preschoolers, because parents will often spend money on games that they think are going to help their kids prepare for school. But outside of that space, it can be really tough.

So the main thing is you have to have a clever hook. You've got to have a different way of doing things that's going to get people's attention and actually work. Either through just a different business model or a different approach. Like when we did Happy Adams, we give that app away for free, but we partnered with a toy company to make the physical toy. And then the revenues come in off of selling the toy. We're doing another one, a chemistry-related one right now. It's actually a VR game that the kind of working title is Superchem right now. And it's a chemistry laboratory.

And we'd love to just make money by selling it into high schools. But we know that there's just not going to be a revenue source that's really going to work. even though there's a lot of demand and a lot of interest, the amount of money that would come in wouldn't offset the development. So what we're doing at the same time is making it into an entertainment game that where you, it's an adventure game on a space station, and you end up solving all the problems on the space station by doing real chemistry. You have to make acids to melt obstacles,

and you have to create illumination to get through dark areas and you have to make a battery. And it all ends up being real chemistry from chemistry lab, but in an adventure game context. We were very inspired by the game Curbel Space Program, if you've seen that, which is kind of a rocketry game, very popular with science teachers, but it sold 2 million units on Steam,

and they got bought by Take 2, in fact. And so here is the thing. it's ostensibly entertainment, but has a lot of great educational elements of it as well. I think that's one of the best approaches to take right now, obviously very challenging, but it's definitely an approach that I encourage. Yeah, that sounds fascinating. And we're running a little bit late on time, so I want to ask, I guess, this question more briefly, but take it from the other side of a educator who wants to,

use games to help their kids and to help their teaching process. Is there a way that they can approach sort of bringing these things into the classroom or bringing this into their thinking about how they can move forward with it? Oh, yeah, I would say for an educator who wants to kind of bring games into the classroom, there's some great books out there. The one I'm thinking about here, it's called Game of Fire Your Classroom. Matt Farber, this is just such a weird coincidence. He and I had talked several times as he was putting this book together all about bringing game techniques into your classroom and writing this gamify your classroom book.

And the weird part is I, it wasn't until I actually got a copy of the book and looked at his little mini bio and realized that he is a geography teacher who teaches at the same junior high that I went to in the same classroom that I took geography class in. So that was just a weird coincidence. but his advice, and I think it's the right advice, is bringing digital games in the classroom can make sense when you find the right games, but often the stuff that works best in the classroom are the things that are more hands-on, more social, finding ways to bring board and card game approaches

into the classroom often work best. I've got a team of students at Carnegie Mellon right now. They're working on kind of a thing that's sort of best of both worlds. they have a system that uses simple Google Cardboard type VR, but it's networked. So it allows like 20 students to, in a networked way, go into a VR world together and they've designed these hands-on activities very similar to what Matt Farber describes in his book, but kind of adapting it into the VR space.

So I think for teachers, don't be afraid to keep it simple, look at best practices that other people are doing, and be ready and willing to experiment. Oh, there's so many things I want to talk about. So I guess the last topic that's too big for the time we have left that we'll just touch on is you mentioned gamification as sort of gamifying the education process, gamifying the classroom, gamification sort of rose as a buzzword

maybe five, six years ago, and faded a bit since then and how sort of gamifying businesses and life and all these different components. Is that something you still feel is a fruitful area? It was overhyped. Is it something that, you know, we see it in little bits here and there around our life? How do you think about sort of gamifying life more broadly? Yeah, it's funny.

I mean, I think there was a lot of hype when people thought, oh, this will be easy. Games are simple, right? It's easy to make a fun game. And so why not just take those same game techniques and just slap them on top of the ordinary things we do every day, and this will be an easy thing to do. And it turns out that, like, no, it's not easy to do. Because making good gameplay designs and mechanics, just like making good design of any kind, is actually quite hard. And I'd get pulled in on consultations all the time. Companies who say, hey, yeah, we just want to lay down a simple game design layer over what we're doing,

just show us how to do that. And I'd say, okay, well, the way you start is, let's dissect what you're already doing. Like, let's talk about the fundamental reasons you're doing it, your fundamental methods, and let's rethink which of those are flawed, and let's change out the bad ones, and let's build motivational structures that people are going to really want to do into this new restructuring of what you're doing. And they'd be like, whoa, whoa, what are you, I don't, we don't want to change anything. We just want to put this kind of layer on here. I thought you were just going to give some points and achievements and we'd move on, right? Yeah, that's, that's all, that's what we want to do. Just, yeah, just let's stick some points on it.

And so I think it still happens all the time. You look at Duolingo, right? Most people don't call that a game. They just call it an app. Yes. But it's completely a system all about using game-style techniques to kind of keep up your momentum with your language learning. And it's just quietly acknowledged that, yes, of course,

this is the best practice for how to do a language app. And we see it, you know, in simple things like web page design all the time. I mean, so I guess what I'd say is it hasn't gone away. It just wasn't as easy as people thought. And at the same time, it's quietly creeping into everything that we do. And so it's there. It's just silently taking over. Yep.

I use DeLingo specifically a lot as an example. And even simple little things like my car has a little efficiency meter that shows how efficient I'm driving and saving gas and it fills up or slows down. It's such a trivial little mechanic, but it makes it more fun for me to be like, oh, look at me. I'm being super efficient now. So it doesn't take a lot to really influence behavior. But it's fascinating. My favorite one of those is the Mini Cooper convertible. It has a little fun meter on it.

and it's like a fun meter like what is that and what they do is it's just this little percentage needle that charts it's on the car persistently over time and it uh it charts the percentage of the time that you have the top down i hadn't heard of that that's awesome and it has no real purpose other than just to kind of give you a little poke about hey yeah you know you did buy a convertible didn't you why don't you put the top down a little more that's amazing i actually have a convertible and it's totally true over the years. You just, you don't put it down as much as you used to. When you first get it, it's down no matter what. I don't care if it's raining. I still got the top down. Five, six years later, you're like, yeah, you know, it's there. I remember. That's great.

Now, maybe you need a fun meter. Yeah, I do need a fun meter. You're right. I can really work on that. Okay. So this has been an amazing talk and I really, I hope we get an opportunity to speak again because there's a lot of deep topics we didn't get into. But I want to go through. There's a few questions I ask all of my guests. I want to hit hit those before we we close so you mentioned several great books to read outside of your own which of course I recommend strongly the art of game design book of lenses you mentioned understanding comics magic and showmanship pattern language are there other books that you know top two or three that come to mind of things that you would recommend for aspiring game designers and that as with the other examples they don't have to be

game design books just things that you think are valuable The one I'm digging into now is thinker toys. The author has gone right out of my brain right now, but this was a book recommended to me by the designer of Color Switch. And he came to me with quite a story about, because Color Switch has been incredibly successful, right, over 100 million downloads, et cetera. And his story was absolutely amazing.

He had background as an artist and as a combat medic and all kinds of things. And he decided he was going to go into games, even though I didn't know how to program. and he read, he said, I read two books. I read Thinker Toys and I read Art of Game Design. And he said, when I put what I learned together from this, I understood how to make games. And he just started making games.

And he made 40 games in a row that all failed. And then he made Color Switch and hit it really big. And he gives a lot of credit to Art of Game Design, which is great, but also to this book Thinker Toys, which I've only just started to dig into. and it seems to have a lot of great advice about just how to break down problems and move forward on them. So that's a book I've been pretty excited about lately. Great. I'm going to pick that one up. I hadn't heard of that. That sounds fascinating. Then what games are you most excited about right now? What games are you playing or games are you sort of most interested in following that are coming out soon?

What's got your attention? Yeah, boy. Lately we've been so busy, I've been had a hard time just keeping up with the games coming out of my studio. But I've been looking a lot at a lot of the VR stuff that's coming out because that's just, that fascinates me so much. I think Lone Echo is a fantastic achievement in the VR space, just in terms of what you could do with sort of a larger budget VR game and having character. characters that you get a little a little more up close and and personal with. Low echo. Cool. Yeah, yeah. I know that's that one's that one's pretty good. That's kind of setting some bars for the rest of us to to live up to as we as we as we move forward in that space.

But boy, there's just so much stuff going on that when I, a lot of times when I'm when I'm sort of done for the day, the last thing I want to do is go. and check out more cutting-edge games. I've been lately retreating a lot into old games. I've been getting really into old Atari games and trying to complete my Atari collection there. So that's been, I've been going a little retro. So are you using an emulator? You actually have a retro machine.

Oh, no, I have a retro machine. I don't like emulators. The sound usually isn't right. Sometimes the timings aren't right. And I just like the old hardware anyway. So I mostly go for that. And it's fascinating to learn. I mean, again, just in terms of breaking things down,

it's a simple game mechanics. I always, I find some obscure Atari game. And I always think, oh, this is just another space shooter. I'm not going to learn anything from this. And then I fire it up. And I'm like, oh, my God. Like, who would have thought that a game mechanic like this was even ever a good idea? And it opens up doors in new ways to look at things that I haven't seen before.

And that's what I like partly about the old game. Same thing for a lot of simple mobile games is the mechanics are just laid bare. They're very simple. They're not hidden in layers and layers of story. You're just staring at this kind of weird mechanic, and it gives you a lot to think about. Yeah, I love the sort of minimalist approach

and that, you know, I've always been a big believer that, you know, restrictions breed creativity, and those old games had to work under so many restrictions and so little space and so little graphics, and so, you know, all of it, and so the things that came out of it were really incredible. Yeah, no, it's, it's true. It makes you, it definitely makes you invent things. So the next question, what advice would you give for somebody that's starting out today?

Now, you mentioned the, you know, obviously playing games a lot and, you know, testing and designing them and iterating on them. Is there other sort of tips for somebody that's just starting out? They don't know how to program. They don't know how to do anything, but they love games. They really want to get into this industry. Well, there's so many approaches that you can take. Certainly playing games and thinking about games a lot is very important. If you're looking to be a designer, the thing I always advise people to do is start a blog.

Start writing about what works and doesn't work in the games that you look at and play, because it forces you to break it down in writing, in structured thought, to sort of analyze how, what's working. But then ultimately, you just got to start making some games. games, whether they be card games and board games, which you could start immediately. But if you're going to go for digital games, either you learn some simple coding or you get with a partner, or you start to use some of the tools that are out there. You look at things like Game Salad is one that's out there.

It's a pretty easy one. Game Maker is still around. But there's a lot of other tools you can use out there if you're not ready to start coding. But however you do it, just start doing stuff. And it's the way I look at it. It's a lot like people say, oh, I want to learn music. What do I do? Well, you could go to music school and you could read a book about music,

but probably you should just pick up an instrument and start trying to make noises with it and see what happens. Because ultimately, if you're going to get good at something, you just have to do it. Great. Well, I think we're about out of time. If people want to hear more from you, find out more about you, play your games, read your stuff. Where should they go look? How can they find out more? The easiest thing is just go to jessyshell.com.

You can also drop in at shellgames.com and find out more about what our studio is doing. But lots of information there and contact information, I'm always happy to take emails from people. I'll always glad to help out if I can. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you for your book, for all your work in the field and all the awesome games you've been making. It's really, it's been a huge contribution. And it's something that I'm hoping to be a part of here.

And it's meant a lot that you've taken the time. So thanks so much for being here. All right. Thanks a lot, Justin. It was great talking today. 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. listening to reviews and shares make huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or sleep.

Thank you.