Think Like A Game Designer - Jordan Weisman — From Battletech to Shadowrun: The Power of Curiosity and Collaboration (#93)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Today's episode is a little different. I bring back one of my favorite guests, Jordan Weissman, who's been a friend and advisor for many years. He's a creator of incredible games like battle tech, shadow run, creating the company WizKids and countless more. And in this episode, I actually brought a pre-prepared set of questions that I started asking Jordan to help pull out some more insights, not only in how he collaborates, how he picks

Starting point is 00:00:43 projects, the nature of fear and creative work, but a ton of other things that he didn't share in his earlier episode with me. So this is just part one of that series of questions. And I wanted to put it out there because we're getting close to 100 episodes of the Think Like Game designer podcast and I realize there's so much gold and I'm so lucky to have such incredible relationships with these really legendary designers and industry leaders and I wanted to be able to bring back some more of those insights to you. So if this is something that you like, let me know. Message me on any of your favorite social channels and see if this is something you want more of. But I know I got a ton of value out of this as I do every time I talk to Jordan. So without any

Starting point is 00:01:18 further ado, here is Jordan Weissman. Jordan, what's something that you're passionate about outside of your career and what do you love about it? Wow, you know, that's actually a kind of hard question to answer. I mean, I guess because my career has always been, I have kind of a day job, which is the thing I'm making now, and then I have a night passion, which is the thing I want to make next. So they're both kind of part of the career, but one is a hobby because it's not a job yet, and the other is the job because it was what I came up with last.

Starting point is 00:02:05 and building now. And so that's kind of myopic. Can I get that? When I look past that, I guess it's, you know, trying to beg more patience for my partner in life, Dawn, to allow me to keep making this stuff and doing things with her, really whatever is as exciting and motivating for her is what I focus on. And then, you know, if there is, I guess actually during the

Starting point is 00:02:35 pandemic, I got back to a passion that I hadn't touched for 20-some odd years, which was model building and scratch building, you know, diomas and models and kits and figures. I used to, all for my child, I loved building this kind of stuff. And at FASA, the tabletop company, I would always build the big Gen Con displays myself because it was just, it was my therapy and a passion. But then, you know, kids and more kids and more kids. And then that kind of went away for a long time. And then the pandemic was like, shit, it got a lot of time.

Starting point is 00:03:14 I hope now. So I started to get back into it. And I do intend to focus more energy on that. What do you love about that kind of model building and creating? It's very, I guess it's very aligned with, you know, world building, fictional world building, you know, with the huge benefit of the fact that when you're done

Starting point is 00:03:39 at the night, something actually looks farther done than it did earlier in the day, which is often not the case when you're working on games. And so, yeah, to me, it's visual storytelling, you know, and I love building the things and putting little details that imply, you know, things about the world and the characters

Starting point is 00:04:00 and the story that's going on in the scene that I'm building. next question what is advice that you would give to someone that's just starting out in your industry well my career spans several different industries you know all beautified by kind of three legs of a table the way I visualize it one is socialization the second is storytelling and the third is mechanics and in my mind the mechanics always serve the other two legs. They're there to prop the table up, but the mechanics' job is to facilitate the socialization and the storytelling.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Now, in industries, that's expand from tabletop games to video games to theme parks, virtual reality, augmented reality, escape rooms, and other kinds of associated things, I think if I were to say what's the unifying element and all that for advice to somebody starting in any of those, think small. The biggest mistake I see aspiring designers is they want to design on a scale of the kind of things that they love playing, and they probably love playing giant things, right? We had huge, you know, incredibly beautiful, very high production value tabletop stuff that is just sprawling with with gorgeous assets and, you know, 100 page books with, you know, gorgeous art. Or they're playing, you know, a video game that took $200 million to make. Or they're going to Disney World and going, God, I want to make one of these. And I think the hard part is to how to think small enough to something that you can actually make.

Starting point is 00:05:50 And you can make it with your own resources or with, you know, very modest ability to bring in other people and hire them to help you with what you need. But the smaller you think, the more likely it is you are to complete and complete something is critical. We never learn from ideas. We only learn from execution. And so if you can narrow your scope, turn to things you can actually execute, then you'll learn. and to me that's critical. At every age you are, but even more so when you're just trying to get into the industry or any industry.

Starting point is 00:06:30 Great. Gold. So now let's flip to the other side of the equation. And what do you see is an important lesson that industry veterans need to learn? Or put another way, what advice do you think your older self might give to you? It's more than imagine an older self than me because I'm pretty old. But I think the lesson that you can, keep learning is, too. One, hubris, you know, just because you've been doing this for a long time, don't assume

Starting point is 00:06:56 you know anything because everything you've learned is wrong and you need to keep reltering it. And I've made some very expensive mistakes in that regard. And listen to young minds. I think, you know, if you look at a lot of the world, young minds are the people that have created, you know, really big intuitive leaps, right? have made big leaps in physics and science and technology and in storytelling and so on. And there's a reason for that, which is when you're young, you don't know what's not possible,

Starting point is 00:07:29 so you're not limited by it. And as you get older, you have a lot of scars for the things that didn't work. And they become self-limiting to you subconsciously. You just don't, you're like, oh, you just, you know, you critique your own ideas and you critique, other is because you can point to 50 times that didn't work. And that's true. It didn't work. But that's also not a reason to try it, not to try it the 51st in a different way. And that's a hard lesson to learn. It's hard to keep that naivete, the critical naivete necessary to be an innovator. Yeah, this is, I want to linger on this a little bit longer because I think it's such a,

Starting point is 00:08:13 it's a tricky point, right? There's the sense at which you've, you've gained experience and therefore can leverage that to your advantage. And there's a sense in which your experience closes doors to you in the, you know, and you kind of put you in a, on a certain path. Are there any practices or rituals or ways that you try to keep yourself with that beginner's mind or,

Starting point is 00:08:34 yeah, are there, how can one get the advantages of experience and minimize the disadvantages in the way that you're talking about? Is there anything that that would make that more concrete for people? Well, there's a, I think there's a handful of things.

Starting point is 00:08:48 One is, and it's very hard. This is the hardest possible thing. You just can't be afraid of going face first into the mud. There's an old Jerry Seinfeld jump where he says, you know, like, I forget what the percentage he made up is like, you know, 78% of people would rather be in the coffin than the one reading the eulogy, right? Because we're so afraid of public embarrassment, you can't innovate if you're afraid of public embarrassment. You just have to steal yourself that you're always going to look like. an idiot and and be ready to do that because otherwise you've just closed off all potential and i realized i always thought i mean i started life as a clam and i still am in many ways like i was a class

Starting point is 00:09:31 clown you know and and i think that is is uh is useful to be used to having people laugh and laugh at you and maybe occasionally laugh with you because you you you know kind of gives you some armor against that embarrassment of failure. But I always thought that the majority of people's reticence to innovate or to try new things was financial. And it wasn't until Wiz Kids, which was about, you know, 20 years into my career when I realized it wasn't, that it's emotional. And the example, what brought that to life for me is, you know, I had this idea for this

Starting point is 00:10:10 new kind of game format and this new kind of integrated representation. recordkeeping and kind of arc that characters can go through. So it was also this whole thing for a game called Mage Knight. And I showed it to people and, you know, people got excited and got on board and took significant risks in their career to come join us, right? I mean, they were leaving good paying jobs to come to a, you know, thinly, you know, thinly capitalized startup because they believed in the idea. So they were taking significant financial and personal risk.

Starting point is 00:10:44 We were lucky to be successful that game and the ones that followed, it built WizKids into a very successful company. And a couple years later, I had a new idea. By this point, we were the click-based company. Every game we had done was based on that first innovation. And I had a new idea that wasn't based on that. And all the same people who had taken personal financial risk were scared to death of this new idea, even though it would, like the written, it would not change our financial outcome at all

Starting point is 00:11:14 if we failed with this new idea. It wasn't that costly of a thing to experiment with, but they were all very scared of us releasing a product that wasn't a hit. And the kind of emotional hit that the toil that would take on the company and them as individuals as part of the company. And that's what really kind of opened my eyes to it, that that's the constraining factor. That's the thing that keeps us from innovating,

Starting point is 00:11:42 is that we're afraid of that failure in public. And it's also why large companies are usually not the invaders because their perceived cost of failure of a new idea is higher than when you're a startup. When you're a startup, everybody expects you to fail. And so when you fail, you know, you haven't let them down. And, you know, and the failure is small. No one notices it, right? When you're, you know, a big deal in a small pond like like Wiskins,

Starting point is 00:12:12 was at the time, any misstep we had was going to be the equivalent of front page news for everybody. And that was a very, all of a sudden became this very limiting thing in our team's mind. And luckily we were able to push through it. And most of the things we did continue to succeed, but not all of them, you know. But yeah, I think that's, so I think stealing yourself to that is really important. And I was being serious when I said, listen to young minds. question your assumptions, not only their naivete, right? And try to say, okay, when you have a new idea and you find yourself creating a list of reasons and won't work, right? Well, okay, what is the actual mapping of your previous experience to your current idea?

Starting point is 00:12:58 And at surface, they may seem to be very similar. But if you dive into it, often there are other factors like the marketplace, right? When I tried this idea 10 years ago, it was a very different marketplace than it is today. So is the failure still relevant, right? Or the success. I mean, one of the examples after Wisgids, so I was in a relatively unique position of having built two large successful companies in the tabletop games industry. And now I was launching a third. And I had the complete hubris to think that I understood what I was doing.

Starting point is 00:13:40 And I knew this marketplace because of my previous successes. So I didn't do my own work. I didn't go in like I had done the other two companies. When I started them, I spent a lot of time talking to retailers, talking to distributors, talking to players, spending time in stores and at cons and really just getting the current sense of the marketplace. I didn't do that the third time because I was stupid enough. to think I knew what I was doing. And I released a very good game design in a way that no one could care about.

Starting point is 00:14:13 It was very out of touch with the current marketplace, and it just flopped miserably. And it was purely based upon hubris of not having done, and hubris of assuming you're interested, you know, everything. And you never do. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of interesting. interesting counterintuitive truths there, right? This idea that like your more success makes you more susceptible to fear of failure. More success makes you more susceptible to being blind

Starting point is 00:14:44 to the realities of the situation. Whereas multiple people assume, well, okay, once I've achieved a level of success of the kind that you had, that now the problems are behind me. For many people, it's hard enough to just put their first game prototype in front of friends, right? That's a, that's a fear of failure that people have. And that doesn't change, no matter how successful you are, there's that fear of whatever the next thing is is there. And in many ways, it's amplified. So you've already sort of answered parts of this, but I'll get space for more types of answers. You know, what do you consider the most important skills to cultivate for your profession and how do you cultivate these skills?

Starting point is 00:15:19 We've talked a little bit about this, you know, overcoming fear and beginner's mind and listening to young minds. But what else would fall in that category? In this curiosity, you know, always being interested in what, others are doing and learning from what they're doing, being inspired by what they're doing. And that's, I find it very important to not just be in the field you're currently working in, but in all adjacent fields, right? So if I'm in tabletop games, I should be, and I'm always curious in what's happening in comics, what's happening in fiction, what's happening in fan fiction, what's happening in anything that touches on the gray space that happens inside your head,

Starting point is 00:16:01 right, that kind of infinite resolution renderer of what I always call in terms of what, you know, the painting pictures inside people's heads and then, you know, tabletop games do that and all these other genres do that, right? And so really being endlessly curious, I think is key. And for me, where I spend so much of my time in tech, that's often looking at and just reading articles about all sorts of strange tech. And because sometimes then, you know, these all just plant little kind of puzzle pieces in your head. And occasionally they go click and like, oh, wait a minute. You could put this with that and this with that and we end up with something.

Starting point is 00:16:39 And if you didn't have that kind of endless curiosity, you know, those puzzle pieces wouldn't be there to potentially get that point where they come together into something. So I think that's critical. I think also a process is important. My process is kind of backward. people are always like, think outside the box. And to me, like, what I do is I build a box when I'm trying to evaluate an idea. So, like, just go back to his kids to use that as an example. I had watched my kids save up all their money and go buy Warhammer.

Starting point is 00:17:24 And they couldn't make heads or tails out of Warhammer. They were like, you know, eight and ten. at the time. And the figures, which required super glue and, you know, find motor skills to paint and stuff. So, you know, the hobby side of it was unapproachable to them. And the game side was completely unapproachable to them. And it was a really eye-opening experience that to me that this industry had to been part of for 20 years was really very exclusionary. It was very hard to get new people to come into it because we had built these barriers of entry. And so I sat down and said, all right, I want to, what do I want to do about that?

Starting point is 00:18:03 I want to try to make a game that is figure-based because, you know, myself and my kids and many others, we love figural stuff, right? We love the table of the table of all of it, you know. So how do we make a figural game that's easy to get into and play? And I realized, okay, and that's where I started to build the box. It was like, okay, so I need ease of entry for the player, I need a place point for the player, what are the challenges from the retailer? Well, what are the challenges? Okay, well, traditional miniature game lines are very difficult on retailers, right? And as I went and interviewed

Starting point is 00:18:39 retailers, like, well, they have to have so many linear feet of these shelves and the individual turn per skew is so low. And so I wrote a list that these are all the challenges for the retailer. What are the challenges for the distributors, right? And what is the challenges in manufacturing? And so I kind of created a box of, you know, of all the problems I'm trying to solve for. And then just started going through ideas, you know, and was able to then use the box that I established as a way of vetting the potential solutions, you know, how applicable it was, right? Did it meet the retailers' concerns, then meet the distributors' concern, meet the players' concerns, wasn't manufacturable, and I could do it at the price range that was going to result

Starting point is 00:19:22 in. And so to me, designing that box, because you need a way to evaluate concepts, right? Because everything's cool, but everything cool doesn't actually make a product, right? So how do I evaluate not just cool, but doesn't meet the criteria necessary for, you know, to have a good chance of success. And to the earlier point about endless curiosity, at the time we were going through this, you know, kind of renaissance of action figures and these, you know, Todd McFarlane and others were producing these absolutely gorgeous figures, right? And I'm like, well, if that can be made, then I should be able to make plastic figures that are painted, you know, nice enough that I can put them right on the table and they will work for my fantasy of the game I'm trying to do as a player.

Starting point is 00:20:13 And so it was curiosity in another field, right, totally different. Action figures, okay, how can I take that technology and apply it to this industry and as part of my solution by? box, you know. And then the other part of that, just continuing that example for a second, education, right? Okay, so I think it can be done from action figures, but I don't know anything about action figures. How do I get educated about action figures to be able to go and do that, right? And so literally, I just went to start going to toy fairs and finding people, you know, looking at booths, looking at the quality of their work, and trying to find, the smallest company I could that had really high quality work because they would be much more approachable than a big company like Todd McFarland at the time. So I found a company that was producing gorgeous figures. It's very small. And I said, hey, how would you guys like to make X,000

Starting point is 00:21:15 dollars, right? Just for talent teaching me how you make those figures. Right. And it was a, you know, that was like, it was a small enough company. So it was an interesting interesting offer and that's what I did. I spent time with them. They took me through all of it. I traveled to China with them. We met with all different manufacturers. I learned how all the machines worked. I learned, you know, so on and so forth. So I came away from buying that education now with the information I needed to how to adapt that to the goal I had for how to make those figures. I have no idea if that answer the question you were looking for because it wandered all the hell over the place. No, no, it's great. It's great. I mean, the fundamentals of this stuff are so

Starting point is 00:21:55 important, you know, the constraints, breeding, creativity in the sense that you're really putting yourself in the box. I've kind of, I've classed these sort of, these core traits and come with the acronym for core. So it's like curiosity, obsession, resilience, and empathy. Right? This is the curiosity you've already described in great detail. The obsession is part of what's like getting really, really granular, staying very focused on exactly the problem you're trying to solve, learning everything about it being just obsessed with like this particular a problem. Resilience, you talked about earlier, right? They need to be willing to both face flat in the mud, get up, keep going, right? There's no substitute for that. And then empathy as a piece of not only knowing

Starting point is 00:22:36 how your product is serving the people you want to serve, but also the ability to kind of enroll others and, you know, bring them along for the journey that you're trying to do. And that kind of set of traits is something that's really powerful. And you kind of touched on a bunch of that stuff. And so it's great to illustrate it with very specific stories. I don't know. That specific formulation resonates with you, but I've been trying to kind of find. I think that's a great. I think that's a great synopsation of it. I totally great. I think empathy is really important. I approach that with different words, but I think to the same goal, which is that when I'm looking for team members, the key thing for me is respect. I'm looking for people who respect

Starting point is 00:23:16 themselves and we'll find the right work-life balance and, you know, the time for their families and so important in the long-term health of any of us. They respect their coworkers because we're in a collaborative art form. And if you can't, if you don't start from a position of respecting each other, then you're not truly collaborating. You're not listening. You're just trying to prove how smart you are, which is the other reason that for people who already respect themselves because they don't feel the need to keep proving it in every meeting, you know, and if you're trying to prove a smart char, you're definitely not listening to the others at the table to help build on their ideas. And then the last part of that, which is, I think,

Starting point is 00:23:58 what you touch on is you respect who you're making it for, respect your players. And because you can't make something great if you're looking down upon those you're making it for, right? Then it's about exploitation. There's a lot of companies who do very well through exploits. But that's not the kind of companies or products that I want to be involved in. And so, you know, I think respecting who you're making it for us is really, really key. Great. All right. So let's get to the areas where the industry or you have been dead wrong.

Starting point is 00:24:32 So what common advice do you hear about your industry that is dead? Anytime someone says, oh, that fill in the blank here is dead. they're wrong because nothing's ever dead right and the world just moves in cycles and things happen flow and it may be out of fashion right now it doesn't mean it's going to stay out of fashion right it actually probably means it's guaranteed to come back into fashion and it's just a matter of when so whatever whether that's game mechanics whether it's you know fictional IP whether it's monetization

Starting point is 00:25:08 methodologies nothing ever really goes away right I mean how many times did I hear vinyl is dead

Starting point is 00:25:19 well okay not really how many times I hear you know our tabletop RPGs are dead right they're just never coming back

Starting point is 00:25:27 it's like okay the strongest they've ever been right and so I think that's number one nothing ever does

Starting point is 00:25:34 It just means it's right for reinvention, not that it's not that it's gone. I would say, I'd say, one other kind of generalized advice of like. You can also take the next version of this if you want, which is what did you used to believe that you now see as dead wrong? Oh, God. So many things. Let's see, I treasure in-person collaboration. There's an energy of a bunch of people in a room with a whiteboard brainstorming that I find truly unique. And I probably, well, I think I've over-indexed in the past about saying that,

Starting point is 00:26:16 oh, you're not going to get really good creative work from distributed teams. And I've proven that wrong to myself now and seen others prove it wrong as well. It's not the same. It's not. but it can really work. And so I think that's something that's really changed so dramatically over the course of the years I've been in the business. You know, I mean, the old days when we started, you'd be writing letters and sending packages to people around the world. And, you know, collaborating with someone on the other side of the planet was truly difficult.

Starting point is 00:26:52 And that has changed so dramatically over the time. I think I've been wrong many times about products when I see other people's products where I go, wow, I can't really believe that people are going to keep buying those. Things like, what's the name of the kind of blocky figures? There's a gazillion of them now. Oh, the Funko. Funko, that's exactly right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:20 So when Funko came out and like, oh, those are cute. That'll last like a handful of months. you know, and like a decade later, like people are still loving them, you know. And so, yeah, I've been wrong many times about product and flow and what people are interested in and how long they stick with things, both to the good and the bad. I mean, I can't believe it's 40 years later. People are still playing battle tech and more people are playing battle tech

Starting point is 00:27:43 than any time in the last 15 years. I would never have guessed that, right? You know, that can be wrong on both the good and the bad of it. I guess the generalized answer is absorb wisdom, but don't absorb edicts, right? Like, like people, whenever people saying something is, something is 100% definitive and will never change, that means they've stopped learning,

Starting point is 00:28:07 they've stopped being curious, they've stopped, you know, being open to where the world is going. I think there are times and seasons for things, and having a sense of that is really important. Like that example, I have Hurricane Legions where we launch,

Starting point is 00:28:23 the game and it was totally out of, I was just totally in the wrong season, right? I had not seen where collectible things were going and where we were at the time and, and so on. If I had launched that game, maybe five years later, I would have been a totally different story or five years earlier, but, you know, at that particular point, really bad idea. So, I don't know, not as definitive properly or succinct as you were looking for. No, no, you gave several distinct, very distinct answers there. And then, yeah, we're wrong on product all the time. If I do how to be right on that all the time, then my career would be a lot easier. But I think the other thing that this is totally, it may not be related at all,

Starting point is 00:29:04 but a mistake that I have made multiple times. And every time I tell ways off, I'm not going to make it again. And I'm better about not making it than I used to be, which is, this is a collaborative art form. It's all about teams. And super talented individuals who are toxic to a team are not worth their talent. They're not worth having part of it because the overall drag they will have on the team and the product is not compensated by their individual talent. And so many times, I mean, time every time, I've tried to say, oh, well, I just need this person, we'll get to this milestone and then I can correct for it. No, it's, you have to have had to learn that it is, it is all about the team.

Starting point is 00:29:56 It's all about creating that right energy inside the team. And if someone, regardless of how tall it that they are, is toxic to that positive energy and culture, you have to deal with it immediately. And so, yeah, that's true in every, every, every industry I've been part of, which is, which is all collaborative. It's true every time. That's gold. Yeah. No, I have, I have, I have, I have also taken a, a ton of very, very smart people and put them in a room together and made them all dumber because of it. It is a, it is a remarkable thing if you don't have the right people and the right culture to support

Starting point is 00:30:33 them, because it also pervades throughout, right? Like a single bad kind of agent that will can spread that culture and take otherwise, you know, positive, productive people and transfer them the other way. It's amazing how much that can corrode a system. So yeah, that's great, great insight. What books, articles, or learning resources have had the biggest impact on you and if there are any key takeaways that stuck with you that come to mind? I have read a number of business books over the years and I'd say I occasionally get some value out of them.

Starting point is 00:31:11 But I would say, you know, I mean, I think ones that come to mine that stuck with me are things like read Hastings book. I had some very interesting points, some very difficult concept of how that would scale. But I think in small organizations, I thought it's some really good points for very small organizations. I think Creativity Inc., which a lot of people point to is like this wonderful lesson. To me, my reading of it was, well, we have these five geniuses and whenever there's a problem, they saw it. And that's true. I mean, many, many organizations, but it's not a scalable solution. It's like, oh, go find five geniuses.

Starting point is 00:31:51 Okay, well, good. Now we're set. We have five geniuses. But I think that, to me, yeah, that was the lesson in that book. It wasn't like we built this organization that scales creativity. And it goes, it didn't in my mind. Later, after many years later, I think they started to have to. And I think things like their shorts program was actually the first.

Starting point is 00:32:13 first time I started to see Pixar actually starting to expand the creative pool and discover talent from within the road rigs, you know, from my extremely removed perspective. I have no insights into the reality of there. So, you know, when I started in the business, the very first business, right, Sartifasa was literally my traveler group around the table and I had been drawing up all these deck plans for our use, people who had seen me play and said, oh, could we, could we buy those? Those would be cool. I'd love to run our game set out. So I was like, all right, maybe there's a business here. So I, you know, said to my table of players, I'm going to do this. I'd print these up and I, you know, anybody got 300 bucks and I want to

Starting point is 00:33:02 be my partner. So Ross Babcock was at the table and a good friend said, yeah, throwing 300 bucks. Now we were a partner for 20-some-odd years. And I love Ross. But that's not the right way to find a partner. What is the right way to find a partner? Should do more research on this. I mean, I think finding partners for business should have the same kind of process of finding a meat for life. You should talk a lot about the future. Talk a lot about work habits and what you want out of that and what you're trying to achieve.

Starting point is 00:33:39 and make sure that there's good long-term remindment on, you know, what is everybody put in and what do people expect to get out, you know? And as I tell a lot of students, you know, negotiate the pre-nup, right? What happens if we don't get along in a couple years and we need to split up? Think about that now so that we have a way to preserve some of the value that we've created in that period, you know, because otherwise you just end up in terrible. kind of brawls where you can just shred any of the value you've created. And so I think that that's really important. And I was going somewhere else with that story about what I forgot what it was, but the starting a fast...

Starting point is 00:34:24 Books Articles and Learning Resources was the initial prompt question. I don't know if that got us anything there. So yeah, thank you. So we printed these up and we started and I took them to game stores and tried to sell into the game stories in the Chicago area. And then I asked them where they bought most of their game materials from to learn about the distribution network and then try to solve them. But the key thing was, is that soon afterwards, Mark Miller, who was the creator of Traveler,

Starting point is 00:34:54 along with Frank, Chaddwell, saw them. And he really liked him. And he approached me and said, hey, do you want to do these under license as official traveler stuff? And I was very excited about that. And Mark became an early mentor to me. me. And I was extremely helpful. And his, not only is, you know, his understanding of the business, but more so his kindness and his openness. And, you know, I learned a lot more about how to behave

Starting point is 00:35:27 in business from his kindness and willingness to help others, which became, you know, something that I've tried to emulate myself. because I think, you know, I wouldn't be here without it and you want to try to play that forward. So I think he was, from a business sense, he was certainly that regard. And then the other key one for me is my father, who was always been a super mentor to me and who, after FASA was going pretty well. And we had, you know, a handful of employees. And we were looking, I realized I couldn't like run the business part and do the cruise. creative part, and I was recognizing even then that I was kind of sucky at the business part.

Starting point is 00:36:12 So I was like, went to my dad and said, hey, can you help me try to find a business manager to help run the business part of this so I can really focus on, you know, the product and the marketing and the community. And so we went and interviewed a bunch of people and realized that the scale we were, if we were going to get somebody if any experience, they were going to have to give them a fair chunk of equity in the company. And I love history and I read a lot of history. And what history teaches you is that business managers usually steal all your money and run away. And so I was nervous about that. And so I said, well, maybe he should offer the position to my dad, because if he did that, mom would yell at him. And that was kind of a security thing, you know.

Starting point is 00:36:53 And so, and I had an immense respect for him, obviously, and everything that he accomplished. So he did. He joined us. And without him, we never would have survived. I mean, he was a magician. in many ways of keeping us afloat with all the crazy ideas that I wanted to. And we worked together for 20-some-odd years in that regard. So he was, you know, the other, both, you know, my dad, Mort and Mark Miller were kind of the two best mentors for me. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the power of mentors can't be understated.

Starting point is 00:37:24 And I'll just say from personal experience that you've done a phenomenal job of paying that forward. You have been, I think you and Peter Auckuson are the two people that have had the biggest impact on me in terms of mentorship in this process, as well as demonstrating a kindness in business that I didn't think existed from the cliched versions of what, you know, the kind of shark-infested waters of executives should be. So my early experiences. And so it's really been wonderful. and part of why I do this kind of, you know, podcast and discussions is to share this forward to the next generation. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:38:06 And it goes back to Mark. Yeah. Okay. There's zero chance we're going to get through, I think, barely half of this list. But we'll go through and we'll just have to do a part two, I think. So switching from kind of key lessons and mentorship, what about systems, software, and tools that have had a big impact on your work? workflow. If there's anything that's adapted recently or that has, you know, kind of changed at any

Starting point is 00:38:31 point that's really made an impact in how you're able to coordinate and work with teams, especially nowadays distributed teams. Well, yeah, I think internally from a design process, I kind of make the box and find the solution thing has been kind of the internal tool that I use for design and for vetting ideas. In terms of software that helps, I find, I find Slack to be super, useful to kind of have a simulation of the office place and, you know, ongoing communication flow that's casual and fast. In my organizations, now we ban email for any internal communications. External communications, we use email for internal communications are 100% slack and no text, no email. It's like you should only have to go one place to find what your team is saying and

Starting point is 00:39:24 what's being shared. And I found early on, we were like all over the place and it was like, ah, and it's like, no, like, no, internally 100% slack. Externally, you use what tool you need to, but internally 100% slack. And that was true even when, like, the team was in one physical place. So I think that's what I go. You know, we moved to Google Docs and that platform well over a decade ago. And I continue to kind of be religious on it. I find it much easier to use and collaborate with people on documents and decks and spreadsheets and everything else is just really so much easier and more immediate.

Starting point is 00:40:03 And it's why even like our adventure form game offering platform we're modeling on the collaboration, trying to model that collaboration into game making so that you have that's in kind of immediacy with your friends as you're making games. Let's see, what other tools? You know, back when I started, you had to build all your own. engines for anything. God, don't do that now. There are good game engines out there to make your software with, I think, try to religiously avoid, you know, not invented here because you'll run into that a lot. And it's just a way to spend a lot of money and frustration and not have as good features as your competition has. So as much as possible take off the shelf

Starting point is 00:40:46 items to help build your, and focus on your core innovation, not try to build everything yourself. Exactly. What's the value add you're trying to make, right? Where's the special sauce, right? That you're bringing to it and try to, you know, avoid developing anything else. And that even applies to like tabletop, right? I mean, if your special sauce is the setting, then why are you going to go out and create a whole new set of mechanics, right? Just take mechanics that people know and love and build your setting on top of that, right? You know, if what your major innovation is, is the mechanics, well, then that's a different animal, right? Or if there's something specific about your setting that can't be reflected elegantly in existing mechanics, well, then you need to make a new mechanic. But look, you know, kind of analyze that to find where, what's the truly special thing and work just on that? I'm trying to others in terms of software tools. Is there anything for you use for task, right? tracking and project management outside of the tools that you've already described?

Starting point is 00:41:55 Yeah, I mean, we've used Jira and ClickUp, and I guess those are the two most prominent ones we've used. Right now, you know, we were pretty, the last couple of companies were Jira focused. My current one is using ClickUp. You know, my team came forward and said we think this one works better for us, and it's a little easier for the artists to get their head around. It's like, well, man, it works great. No problem. Again, I tend to like tools to go bottom up.

Starting point is 00:42:25 I'd like my team to come forward with like these are the things that make us happy. It's like, we're great. Let's look at that rather than me try to enforce those stop down for the most part. But yeah, I think that's important. You know, task tracking is and understanding where you are in the process is critical. I think the concept of a scrum and agile. Yes, thank you. Yeah, Agile is really important, but like all religions, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Starting point is 00:42:57 But the idea of organizing your project in a way that allows you to keep trimming your project is really important because no project is ever going to get finished at the level that you anticipated in this and being understood where the most important parts are and that special sauce is key. Yeah. Yeah. And I find I'll link, I want to linger on this just for a minute here because it's a, this idea of like agile. One of my engineers said, we want to be more agile than agile, which is to say that there's value in some of these routines and rituals that force us to make short-term goals iterate and evaluate and consistently sort of check in and remove blockers. But that because the old school way of doing this was, you know, what's, been referred to as the waterfall method where you kind of build this whole thing and one leads to another and that's inevitably wrong and this fits closer to the to the way that design and development when you're building new complicated things actually works is that a reasonable conception of the idea or is there other nuances you'd want to absolutely um absolutely i mean i think waterfall means that you end up cutting things you shouldn't have because uh they you know because of your development order, right? And I think if you're doing kind of an agile approach, right,

Starting point is 00:44:21 the first thing you're doing is not, you're doing, you always tackle the hardest things first. Like, what's technically the hardest thing we're doing? What's creatively the biggest risk that we're doing, you know, and do those first. And because then, you know, one, if it fails, right, which it likely will, because, you know, that's the most likely results. for any experiment is it's going to fail. You want to fail as fast as you can't, right? And then pivot from that, right? Or abandon the project, right?

Starting point is 00:44:56 If the failure is so fundamental, then the right thing to do is abandon it, you know, and move on. So, yeah, you always want to take the most difficult things first, and then, you know, that gives you the ability to trim, right? Like, oh, these are the 10 features we really like we have in order. we only got eight done within whatever the period of time is great okay now in waterfall you would just keep working on the other two and you'd just be pushing things off the edge of the cliff later you know years down the road uh in agile you have to go and say okay if i'm gonna i should either cut

Starting point is 00:45:29 those two things or if i'm going to move them to the next phase then the next phase has to cut something right um so that you're you're not just endlessly pushing the weight farther and farther away from you yeah yeah all right i could like on this for a while, but I want to get through at least half of these questions before we run out of time. So can you share, and this is hard to do, but share it? Is there a favorite project that comes to mind and then lessons learned from that project? You've had tons of interesting projects throughout your career.

Starting point is 00:45:58 There's something that jumps to mind as a top one and a takeaway from it. Well, I'm going to steal from Flankroyd right on this one. We just toured Tellyhast with my family. I'm there for Thanksgiving. And he was asked, you know, what? that's the favorite, what's your favorite project, right? What's the one that you think on most favorably? And his answer is always what I've always said, which is whatever I'm working on now, right? Because that's always the favorite one. Your passion, it's where your passion's all wrapped up in it. There are certainly ones that I look back on that had important aspects,

Starting point is 00:46:36 you know, kind of emotional aspects in my life. And also creation stories, which are, which I enjoy that have become internally mythologized, you know, I mean, the creation of the creation stories, right, how we got made. And some of those are fun. I mean, in that camp, you know, like Shadow Run is it falls into that camp where I was working on a cyberpunk game, and then Mike Ponsmith published Cyberpunk. And I was like, shit, it's good, because Mike only does good work. And it was good. And I'm like, OK, I don't want to be the second cyberpunk game after a really good one.

Starting point is 00:47:17 So what do I want to do? And so it put me into a spin of like, OK, how do I approach cyberpunk in a different way, that doesn't go head to head with what Mike had done. And that led me eventually to Shadow Run. And part of that was I was like, OK, again, I said it my box, I want to try to find something different. What I want to find what I'm going to do it?

Starting point is 00:47:42 well, what if cyberpunk and fantasy met in a really interesting way? Okay, that's interesting. How do we get to that in a way that doesn't just feel stupid? And then I started looking at different aspects. My father was a huge fan of Mesoamerican cultures, and so I was raised with a lot of that, a lot of great books around the house on Mesoamerican cultures. And so I was aware of the Mayan calendar

Starting point is 00:48:11 and the concept of the long count, and then it clicked for me. It's like, well, what if the long count was about the happen flow of magic to the world? And so put that all together. And one of the guys was working with at the time received a phone call like three in the morning for me, as I just blurted the story out to it. It's like, another one I think that as more of an emotional component, actually, his crimson skies. I was at a place in my life where I was,

Starting point is 00:48:42 I was at my own company, but I wasn't happy at my own company. I'd kind of positioned myself in a marginal, marginal place. And my wife and who is often my creative partner on many of our companies, but she wasn't at this company. She kind of just one day read me at the Rydak

Starting point is 00:48:59 and said, look it, that's not what I signed up for. I signed up for a guy who may get home at midnight, but he's happy and he's passionate. and you're getting home at like eight o'clock and you're miserable and depressed. So here are your options. You either get home at like 5.30, like everybody else was miserable and depressed in their job and you help put the kids asleep and go back to doing something you love and you get home. And I realize, okay, that's, I do need to move past that.

Starting point is 00:49:33 And part of that for me was making something new. I had spent the last, you know, I'd made Battletech and Shadow Running for years. All I was making was Battletech and Shadow Running in very different forms. And so I was like, you know, I want to get back to make a new world. And that's what Crimson's Guys became. But I collaborated on that with Dave McCoy and Vic Bonilla and a couple others. And it was really rejuvenating to me to remember I was good at that and enjoyed doing it so much. and it inspired me to go to the board of the company and say that I'm going to leave.

Starting point is 00:50:11 I'm not enjoying this experience and I'm not being productive the way I want to be. And the board said, okay, well, we're sorry to hear that, but if you're going to leave, then we're going to sell the company. Okay, that's fine. And that's actually how we ended up getting acquired by Microsoft is that. And Microsoft then said, well, we want to buy the company, but only if Jordan comes with it. And I realized that that was really exciting to me, the idea of coming, you know, I never worked for anybody else. So it was like to be my first boss after 20 some odd years.

Starting point is 00:50:45 And, you know, going from a situation of startups where you are always resource poor to like going to Microsoft was like you got kind of unlimited resources. So, you know, and it was a whole new city and it was a whole new everything. And so it was like a very rejuvenating experience. And it came from my from Dawn saying, this is bullshit. fix it, you know. Awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, okay. Well, there's infinite more I'd like to do, but I think

Starting point is 00:51:12 we are pretty much out of time for today. So we'll close it there and we'll continue with a more fun deep dive again in the near future. I would love to. Yeah, sorry I ran so long, but happy to do another session. Thank you so much

Starting point is 00:51:28 for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step

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Think Like A Game Designer - Jordan Weisman — From Battletech to Shadowrun: The Power of Curiosity and Collaboration (#93)

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