Think Like A Game Designer - Liz Spain — From Fashion to Fantasy: Crafting Emotive Gameplay, the Psychology Behind Game Mechanics, and Embracing Adaptability in Game Design (#8)

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Today I speak with Liz Spain from Lone Shark Games. Liz entered the game industry through the unusual path of fashion and costume design. Liz tells the remarkable story of designing, producing, and successfully Kickstarting her first game: Incredible Expeditions: Quest for Atlantis. She explains how she was able to raise money and awareness for her first game by attending events that worked thematically with her project's aesthetic. We also speak in-depth about the psychology of game design. Happy Gaming! 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

In today's episode, I speak with Liz Spain. Now, Liz and I have been working together on a top secret project for the last couple of years now, and we talk about it some in the episode. And so for those of you that are really interested, I will actually give details about that project at the end of the episode. So it'll give you a little teaser to hang out. But there's plenty of awesome things to hang out for and learn in this episode. Liz has tons of experience in game design and comes at it from a very different place than most of the other people that I've interviewed. She started off in organized live action and escape room game design.

Her first published credit is a steampunk live action role playing game. And she actually did her first board game all by herself, including art direction, graphics, production design, photography, manufacture sourcing, and running the Kickstarter, all without a huge presence in the gaming community. So it's really been fascinating to get to pick apart not only her experience with that and what she learned and how she accomplished all of that, but also her approach to game design that I've learned over the years is very different than mine and provides a really valuable insight into an aesthetics first style of design. She's very focused on visuals and her background in fashion design really shines through

and how she approaches games. So it was really fascinating for me. I've loved learning how Liz's mind works in our time working together and it was great to be able to get to do a deep dive here with her and hopefully you guys enjoy as much as I did my conversation with Liz Spain. Hello and welcome. I am here with Liz Spain. How you doing, Liz? I am fantastic. Great. I am super excited to talk with you. You and I have been working together on as the time of this recording, a top secret project. Mojaha. But I am, we, and so I've gotten to know a little bit about how you think from a design perspective in conversation, but not really gotten a chance to do just sort of a deep dive on design in general. So I'm really looking forward. to this. I'm excited. So one of the things I always do, most of the people that listen to this

podcast are sort of aspiring game designers and people who really want to sort of know more about the industry and the kind of people that make the games that they love. So I always try to start off with the origin story. What got you in the game design? How did you get to be here now? Oh, well, like most any game designer, I have a long history of just making games for myself and my friends and my family forever. So the question of what's the first game? you designed. I don't know. It might be a skip rope game. I, song I put together when I was six. I don't know. But really how I got into game design professionally and that world was through costume. I went to school for apparel design after I did cosplay so much that I decided I should

drop my chemistry major and switch to clothing and know how to do it properly. Side note. How did your parents feel about that? Oh, my mom loved it. Oh, good. I have the inverse story. I dropped out of law school to become a game designer and my mom cried. So I'm glad that you had to support it. She's come around. She's come around, but it took a little while.

I had quite the opposite. My mother was always the, she's a retired chaplain, but she was always the creative writer type. And my father was the chemist. So she was much chagrining that I went into chemistry. Gotcha. And very happy. She's like, oh, you're going to be an artist.

Okay, so that's awesome. So you found something you loved. You did a ton of cosplay. You're like, you know what? I should really know what I'm doing here. And so you went to school to do functionally, you know, faster in costume design. And then how did that, how did things proceed from there?

Yeah. So I moved out to Seattle about nine years ago. Oh, God, no, longer than that, 10 years ago. And I was finding jobs doing the freelance thing, styling photo shoots, making costumes for local theater and short film productions and that sort of thing. And I love board games. And there was a company out here called Flying Frog Games that they theme their games around sort of B movies, particularly B horror movies, a lot of them. And they use live actors and costumes for their games. And I saw them at a local board game store was hosting a night where they

were like signing promos and things like that. And I just approached them and say, hey, if you ever want any help with costumes, you know, here's my contact information. And their response was, oh, God, yes, please. You know, it's funny. This actually underscores a theme that I hear both from a lot of other designers and I try to tell to aspiring designers whenever I can that like, you know, wherever your passions are and wherever you can find ways to add value to other people,

that is how you get into the industry. Like never in a million years would I have thought, you know, fashion design and costume design would be your path into, you know, board game design. But clearly here you found that because you were instantly able to provide something that they need. And that opens the door to being able to find this other passion and kind of get into the industry. Oh, yeah. I started, yeah. So I started making costumes for them and modeling for them. And then playtesting.

And I was like, hey, wait, board games, the whole board game making process is very close to what I do to create. the elaborate immersive LARPs that I used to run, like mainly Steampunk-Gathulu-themed LARPs at conventions. I was like, what if I made my steampunk-cathulu LARPs into a board game and tried to publish it? And so that's what I did. That's awesome.

Wait, when you say you tried to publish it, you mean you self-publish it? You worked with the Flying Frog people? How did that go? Oh, I self-published. I did the whole Kickstarter started my own company from scratch, ground up,

did everything myself. And yeah, that was incredible expeditions quest for Atlantis. That is very impressive. So having never published a game before, you decided, I can do all of this. You went and created your own Kickstarter, launched your own campaign, got funded, produced the thing, did all the graphics and production, everything yourself, art direction, and game design, and source. Warehouse logistics, everything.

You must have learned a lot in that process. Well, I did, but I went in with some hubris thinking that since I had run a small clothing company, because I did freelance costuming and also ran the small clothing company. And I got clothing manufactured all the time out of Hong Kong and Southern China. And I thought, well, what's going to be the big difference with word game printing? I learned some things about that. It is different. It is very different.

Yes. Yes. So how did you? So you're, I have a whole. whole bunch of questions about this because I get this question a lot right. People who are new board game designers, they want to be able to publish their game. Kickstarter is very appealing, but there's a lot of challenges for it. I've learned this, you know, I've done well over a million dollars worth of Kickstarter stuff. I think you've been involved in that as well. What did you learn

from going through it this first time? What would you recommend to like new or aspiring designers who are thinking about going down this road? I would say everything is going to cost at least 40% more than your initial estimates, and it will take at least three times longer, at least. And, yeah, Kickstarter is a huge disadvantage. I recommend everybody think about it. It's going to cost three times more and take three times longer. Yes. Just to be safe, man, because it is amazing.

I've had this exact same experience. But beyond just the sort of production and cost side of things, which is we can certainly dig into more, but also, you know, how did you find your audience? How did you are you able to get so many people to back you and to connect? Because that's one of the other challenges is it's such a crowded marketplace out there. And without a background in game design, how did you get promoted? How did you get people to notice you and back you? Oh, oof.

I do not envy anyone trying to get started right now because it is so much bigger than five years ago when I did my Kickstarter. and yeah it was a lot market was a lot smaller then and so the standards for especially aesthetics in games were only just starting to come up due to Kickstarter so I was able to capture a big audience just by having beautiful art and what was looked like it was going to be a beautiful game with a strong you know steampunk aesthetic which hadn't been seen a lot in the market at that point right so yeah so I did the recommended I promoted around the board game sphere with ads and things and caught a lot of people's eyes that way.

So you did ads on board game sites like Port Game Geek or? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. I can't remember exactly which ones. But I know I did board game geek and a couple of other sites I did. And I also did a quick, an experimental run in Google ads as well. And did you find that to be successful or not really?

I've often found the paid marketing. paid advertising space to be, it's obviously, you know, hugely valuable and important, but also very easy to light a lot of money on fire very quickly. Oh, absolutely. Well, I think I found really, and not just in sort of the web advertising sphere, but in the real life, I found a lot of success, trying to drum up interest and inspiration in areas that are not traditionally board games. So I advertise on, for example, web comics that were steampunk-oriented.

their sites because I had a steampunk game. And so I caught people who, and I also went to conventions that were, again, steampunk oriented conventions and brought my game there and marketed my game to people who aren't the core board game market. Gotcha. So being able to find audiences that could connect with your theme or other ways to resonate with groups that wouldn't normally be, you know, sort of traditionally. marketed to as board games, as board games are, kickstaters are. So you might be able to get more

traction than that way. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I find, you know, when you sort of talk about the market being crowded and that's a common refrain I hear as well in the digital game space and the physical game space these days. But on the flip side, so what that you really need to do is find a way to distinguish yourself, right? Find a way that people are going to get noticed. What's unique about what you're doing. And so, you know, you may have been one of the first steampunk games on there. So that was, you know, a way you sort of differentiated yourself and could market yourself. And so nowadays, you know, I look and I've gotten a lot more enamored with the value of like unique components or a, you know, whether or a unique theme or any,

any little thing that you can find that can get you that hook. Obviously, if you have a, you know, big IP and stuff you can tie it to, that's, that's a common way. But for people who don't have like a, you know, a following already, those tools, I think, can be really helpful. Or you just need to, you know, actually spend the time and build the following before you go to Kickstarter, you know, be able to, whether that's as a designer or as a costume designer or as whatever other way you can kind of build your audience and get people to follow you. I feel like that's almost a requirement now to really be successful on Kickstarter. You know, you have to have that audience built in or you have to have a pretty amazing hook

to get people on board. Oh, absolutely. And I also think there's also a requirement for even though it is often considered secondary to the game design itself, but the aesthetics of your game, if you're going to run a Kickstarter campaign, they have to be drop dead gorgeous. So this is actually one of the things I did want to dig into because in my experience with working with you,

you feel are very much an aesthetics forward designer. And I have always been a kind of mechanics forward designer. And I wanted to just kind of dig into a little bit. like how do you think about this sort of thing and how do you have found that, you know, do you find that your style is common in the people that you work with? Do you find that it's, you know, kind of a jarring differences? Like what's that like for you? And how do you think about when you're approaching new projects?

Well, when I'm approaching new projects, I try to think about really what is the emotional experience I want for people sitting at the table. And I know that's not a common design approach or designer approach. but I really try to take a wide view of the psychological processes and the sociology of at the table. And a lot of that is, I mean, humans at our core were monkeys and what do monkeys like to do? We like to look at things. We like bright colors. We like to touch things.

We like to manipulate things. And I think that is one of the most important things that a physical board game brings to a social experience that, digital games frequently don't. So I try to really think about how, what are the emotions and the feelings that I want people to have playing my game? And how do I complement those with aesthetic experiences, like of what are people manipulating? What are they looking at?

What are they staring at during the game? And how will that make them feel? Yeah. So one, I just want to underscore this sort of the emotional experience of the players at the table is the most important thing. I write about this a lot in my book as well, like that,

you know, people think that games are about sort of balance and rules and numbers. And it's like, well, those things are important, but they are all only there because they serve the emotional core of your game.

What is it that the feelings that you want to evoke in your player? So I'm 100% aligned with you on that as the most important thing. But so can you give some examples then as sort of like ways that purely speaking in terms of aesthetics and the way you would think about building, you can create different kinds of emotional experiences for people. So, you know,

you mentioned sort of generally where monkeys, we like bright colors and pretty things and fun stuff to move around. But like, what about different kinds of emotions or maybe even some examples from projects you've worked on or hypothetical projects? How do you use the tools of aesthetics to get a variety of emotional impact in your audience? Okay, sure. So I guess a really sort of easily read example if you look at the cards themselves is I worked on a game extensively in a game called Apocrypha. It's a modern horror version of the adventure card game. And the game takes place over 10 different chapters, and each chapter is kind of like a movie into itself. It has, it carries the main characters through a different part of a story. So if you think about it as like

seasons of a TV show, the different chapters take place in a completely different part of the country with completely different foes and are intended to evoke. different feelings and frustrations and excitements due to the mechanics. So two chapters I worked on. I worked on the deathless chapter, which is about our heroes who are monster hunters, going to the ice fields in the far north and working, like trying to investigate through this small oil drilling town that is being invaded by an army of the undead, all themed around

Arash Kigal from the epic of Gilgamesh as the goddess of the underworld. So I wanted that part of the game to feel stark and I wanted the characters, the players, the characters to feel like they're kind of exposed and weakened

when they're off their guard. So I have mechanics in that chapter that are all about that. that are all about kind of bleeding out to try to get an advantage in the moment moment and it coming back to sort of like frostbite weakening you over time and that's a decision you make. So for the art direction for that, I wanted the colors to be very, everything but red in that the artwork for those cards is drained away, is pulled away, and the contrast is very high. So you get these stark whites and these deep blacks and then splashes of violent red. And it just creates an emotion of being alone. The landscapes are frequently very, very wide in the horizon and with large planes of flat colors.

So you get this feeling of space and exposure. And to contrast that in the Fay chapter. So the Faye chapter is our heroes go to South Dakota during festival season and they run up against a Coachella-like music festival and a motorcycle rally. This sounds like a more fun place to be than the last place you described. Definitely. If I have to pick which place I got to go, I'm picking Coachella Motorcycle Fest over Wasteland of Doom. Yes, absolutely. And it's supposed to intended to be a very fun chapter.

with very silly mechanics, like balancing things on your head and spinning cards around like a tornado to figure out who's going to get hit by them. And it's like the silliest chapter in the game. And you're running up against into fairies, like fairy biker gangs, like headless horseman biker gangs, riding through the southwest at sunset and fairy tale characters starting fans. So the theme colors of that are just a lime green, this magenta, purple, bright blue. Everything's very electric. And the artwork is, I wanted everything to be in motion.

Whereas deathless, a lot of the pieces in there are very much still life and cold looking. In the Fay chapter, everything's in motion. They're literally sparkles in a lot of the paintings for that one because I wanted that feeling of brightness and lightness and action. Great. And so this is really fascinating for me. I am, you know, I've learned more, both from working with you and from working with some very talented creative directors on the Stoneblade team about the power of a lot of these, you know, visual choices and aesthetic choices in serving the emotional core of your game. Is this a skill that you picked up in art school?

Is this a skill that you sort of had intuitively? How has that, how have you learned sort of how to express this and how maybe could other people who, are interested in sort of leveraging this aspect of design, how can they get good at this? Well, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Like, you know, I was one of those kids who was talented with art and things, but with apparel design and also art classes I've taken there's just a lot of background. You can, even if you don't have a knack for it, you can absolutely learn aesthetics by rote. You can just like you can math or. physics, you can memorize ratios of things and how negative space works and line weight,

how those things affect people emotionally and color theory and all those kinds of things. Yeah, and I would also really highly encourage anyone to steal wholeheartedly, aesthetically from things you do like. So if there's comics or video games or things that has a visual aspect, that you personally really like, you can always bring that, hand that to an artist, show that to an artist and say, I like this, can you do something more like this? And you will often get results that are fantastic. Yes. I, you know, all creativity is theft. And I really, I find a lot of people worry so much about that. Like, if you are genuinely trying to build something,

you cannot help but express yourself through it. And that being, and everyone who starts and any design path that I'm aware of. And this is the same as true. Stephen King talks about this in this book on writing and a bright of others that you just can't help, but you mimic the people who you respect and the things you like. And that's how you get started and learn and your own voice and your own expression and your own sort of innovation and originality come through over time. And so, yeah, it's just getting people the, this is what resonates with me.

This is where I want to start. Go ahead and go down that road. And then you'll find your own unique path as you go along. So I echo that as well. So the next topic I wanted to get into, you've worked a lot on, you mentioned earlier, you know, sort of LARP and, you know, live event design. I know you've also worked on escape room design, I think some alternate reality games as well. What is that process like for you? And how does the, how do you view kind of event design, escape room design and board game design to be sort of.

of paralleled or different. Oh, I mean, there's a lot of, like, little elements that are carried through between, like, whether I'm sitting down to write a card game or I'm sitting down to write mechanics for LARP monster, monsters in a LARP, I'm at very similar spreadsheets. Like, yeah, I'm sitting there, crunching the numbers and probabilities and thinking about how frequently I want my players to encounter a certain thing and what the impact of that encounter is going to be. Same kind of process there. But the live event has this whole other layer of planning, like it's event planning where you're having to manage people and where they're going

to be and are they going to be warm and have water, where are they going to hang their coats kind of stuff when you're talking about like an escape room or a LARP. And also you have to consider the impact of multiple minds on things, which is very different frequently because in a board or a card game, you can easily limit the number of players you have easily. And so, all right, if I put a puzzle in this game, whether that puzzle is a simple arithmetic, like, how can we get to this number with this combination of cards puzzle? or if it's a more complex, multi-layered mystery word puzzle,

if you're at a board game, you can figure out how many brains you can have on a thing and roughly estimate how long it's going to, how difficult that is going to make it, and how much time that's going to make it. In contrast, if you're doing an augmented reality, like puzzle experience or a live event, you have a lot less prediction.

You still have to make those predictions. You're like if you're doing a Twitter puzzle, you're like, okay, we're going to have, we're expecting about 1,500 participants on this. And they're going to collaborate on Reddit and pass their answers around. So we'll have to like try to figure out how that's going to speed up or slow down the process of working through these puzzles. Yeah, the ratio of when your predictions are wrong is incredibly high. And you have to be ready at any moment to improvise tons of content. and different designers have different tricks for improvising that content. Ooh, let me hear some tricks.

Oh, sure. I mean, one of my favorite tricks is, this works especially well for mystery games. And if you're doing it, you never, ever, ever let your players know you're doing it. But one of my favorite tricks is what I might call to myself as the open-ended hook. So you introduce an element to the game that you haven't written the backstory for. You haven't created, figured out exactly how it's going to interact with the game, but you know it's going to be impactful. It's going to cause a splash.

And you give it elements that are interesting that people want to look into. So when your players are researching that mystery object or interacting with that mystery object, You create the background on the fly based on what they think it does. So I've used this. I've used this in some role playing games. I DM'd as well. Yes. I don't know.

Yes. Oh, that sounded good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's right. It is his evil twin. You're right. Oh, yes.

Absolutely, players. You are so wonderful and clever. This knife absolutely was created by this cult of psychic worshippers of a dark god. Absolutely. right that kind of thing yes you get to maintain the illusion of umipotence and omniscience when in fact you have no idea what's going on yes i actually think this is just a key life skill generally speaking you know the long time so you just have no idea what's happening and you know you just kind of roll with it and act like you know what you're doing uh you can get you can get away with a lot

yeah yeah i think my second favorite technique is it's a lot more uh it's a lot more work uh beforehand but it's also incredibly useful when you've been running a LARP that goes 24 hours and you're 24 hours a day and you're 30 hours into the LARP you haven't slept, you're cold and you're exhausted and can't think. It's important then to have things you don't have to think much about to pull out of your back pocket. So I will keep a small library of little plots that can be fit to multiple situations. and just kind of replace the names in them as are necessary kind of a thing.

Oh, that's smart. You're definitely having a backup plan. It's funny. I actually have something, I don't know, it's really analogous, but it made me think of this. You know, I have a catalog of like game mechanics and half-baked kind of little game segments that I've, you know, worked on forever over the years. And like, you can plug and play these into so many different designs. And so a lot of times when I'll be brought into consult on a project or something you, it's like, oh, well, have you tried this? How about this? And it just like these, you know, seem like a genius on the spot. And it's like, actually, you know, I worked there for like five years and it's just been sitting there. So no worries.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I like do, I take little things like that that are good for a live action game and I will literally write them on different pages of a small notebook. So that I can flip through and go, oh, okay, we need something to fill half an hour of time. Okay, let's send out a non-phersonable. player character that is a merchant that is going to start some sort of bidding game over, let's see, what's an important object people want right now, over this thing, and here's the mechanics of how the bidding game works. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, and then I'll just use this to also emphasize a point I try to reiterate a lot, which is write things down.

Yes. There's all these little itty-bitty ideas and half-bake things and partial stuff everywhere. it's useless if you don't write it down and forget about it. And if you write it down and you can look over those notes periodically, then all of a sudden, when you need that merchant to show up, you've got them prepared as opposed to trying to make it all up on the fly. So I find that to be really key to being creative in the moment is to remember and track your creative ideas from the past.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So you work on a lot of different kinds of projects. I know you still do costume design. you still do LARPing. You're obviously working on the cool, awesome board games, including the top secret one that I'm not going to tell people about yet.

And do you have a favorite? Do you have a favorite style of design, a favorite genre? Is there something you haven't worked on that you would love to work on? What motivates you these days? Oh, goodness. So I really love a lot of the things I work on

for my day job, which is cooperative, cooperative games. I just love that whole sphere of tabletop gaming because it's very challenging and it's kind of it's aiming for different things

than say a competitive board game often is. But really, so my favorite, I don't do it often because they are so much work and so intensive but my favorite thing to design for people, for humans anyway, are mystery games

is creating elaborate webs of clues that people can follow to track down to solve a mystery. They're really fun to create for me, and they get to go, get really dive into heavy story with those things and a style of narration that I like doing. Do you have a favorite mystery game either that you've worked on or just somebody else's design? Oh, my favorite mystery game that I've played is Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. I don't know that one. I think it was like two years ago. They re-released it in English, a new English printing, so you can get it again now. But it's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure-style mystery game where you get a little bit of narrative about what the mystery is.

And then you can pop all over to different part, quote-unquote, parts of, London to investigate the crime and get little bits of the story. And I think it's really fun because you can play it. We found out on a long car trip that you can even play it in the car as the driver, as long as you have a navigator in the passenger seat willing to read you out all the little story bits. That's a useful feature of a game. I have to try to tell people not to play my games in the car.

Ever since we released the Ascension app, I know there's been some dangerous situations out there. so don't. Don't play attention and drive, people. But maybe I can be sure. Don't play any of my games and drive. That's not good. So when it comes to cooperative games, this is actually a really good topic to dig into because my background is almost exclusively competitive games. I mean, I came from the most competitive of backgrounds as a pro player.

And then I started designing games where, you know, at least a good chunk of the audience is all about like showing that they're smarter than the other guy. And I've recently started working on more cooperative games. And the challenge of building those is so profound to me because what, you know, when I, when I'm trying to develop a competitive game, it's like, okay, what do I need? I need to make sure there's no one dominant strategy. I need to make sure that the different strategy, there's some reactions and an interplay between the players. I need to make sure that there's, you know, some that the play patterns themselves are encouraging and generating the emotions I want.

But with a cooperative game, like, how do you know when you're doing it right? Like, where does it, what's your metrics? What's your barometers for saying, yeah, this is, this is balanced, this is good, this isn't. What's your tolerance level on that? How do you think about that? So it's kind of interesting that you ask me about LARP design and things because I feel like designing a cooperative board game is similar in the same ways. And a lot of the same ways I have a lot of the same thought processes in which I try to think

about different types of player that might be sitting at the same. the table and what they want to get out of the game. And in a cooperative game, that range is broader. You'll want someone who, you'll want people who don't want to do anything that'll inhibit other players from acting. You'll want people who are just there to, for camaraderie. There'll be people there who get a lot of joy out of helping other people do things on other people's turns. And then you'll also have the same kind of players you have in competitive games, or you have players who want to find interesting combinations to play and players who want to play really powerful plays. And those desires will often be mixed in people, but they'll all be at the

table. And so my goal for a design is to try to predict. every want, every motivation that's going to be sitting at the table and check those beats off that I am offering something to that player. Interesting. Well, that to me sounds almost identical to what I try to do with really almost any kind of game, right?

You try to figure out what the player profiles and, you know, psychographic profiles are that you're interested in that are going to play and how does your game have elements that appeal to each one of those or, you know, obviously not every game appeals to every psychographic profile, but, you know, where are you saying, these are the ones I want to hit and the better your game is, the more you can hit or the, you know, the deeper you can provide that joy. So when you're, when you're thinking about things in terms of, let's say, balance specifically,

right? I know that, you know, a PVP game is, or sort of, you know, a competitive game is balanced when, you know, we can have people of similar skill level. They're going to go back and forth. There's the right level of, you know, randomness in the outcome, but otherwise it's, it's sort of you know, whatever degree you want skill to determine the outcome it does, and then the play experience is fun. In a cooperative game, you're all kind of working together towards the same goal. So what,

you know, do you have a sense of like how often should the players win in a cooperative game? What does it mean to win or not? You know, is there a metric that you try to use on that? Is it different for every game? Like what, what is the,

what does the end result look like there? I might get a little crunchy on things because I don't, I try not to think purely in per cooperative game in win-loss ratios. I mean, that's absolutely a metric. But what I try to really think about is this concept in behavioral psychology, in learning theory, called frustration tolerance. Won't go too far into it, but right now, because that's a whole hour talk. Don't be afraid.

This is a deep, this is a deep dive kind of podcast. So, you know, we learning about the psychological deep dives and the relevant parts is I think our audience will be very interested in. So don't be afraid. Okay, sure. Then I'll get a little crunchy. So the sort of the central parts of our brain, the very old, old parts of our brain that evolved early, we'll call it the lizard brain, is responsible for centers of emotion, for producing the hormones and connecting the neurons that the parts that are very essential to how we think. And so they are in the middle of the brain

and they connect out. The more cognitive parts of the brain, the ones responsible, like the prefrontal cortex, that are responsible for complex logic and reasoning and long-term memory and those kinds of things are way out at the edges of the brain.

And so what this means is that generally speaking, we experience things emotionally, and then that radiates out to how we think about things. Now, there's ways you can manipulate it so that when you think about things, and this is the sort of central tenet of cognitive behavioral therapy, is that if you use that thinking part of your brain, the sort of, yeah, logical part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain to connect back to the emotional part of your brain enough, you can manage.

manipulate how those emotional connections work and you can change them over time and you can change negative experiences into positive ones or at least neutral. Can you give an example to kind of help help bring this, make this a little more concrete for people? Oh, sure. Okay, so my turn gets skipped. And my lizard brain might tell me that immediately that this sucks. I wanted my turn. I've been sitting here waiting for my turn, planning my turn, and now it's been skipped. So that emotion, that's just sort of frustration will radiate out to these thoughts of this sucks, this game sucks, why does it have a mechanic that skips turns, or it'll go to blaming the person, the player, other player who skipped your turn and thinking about those things.

And it'll communicate back and forth. Yeah, I hate that guy. Yeah, I hate that guy. It's making me skip my turn. Right? So, but it's really important to understand it's just essential. That's kind of groundwork working from. especially really complex games.

The learning that we're dealing with is in the thinky part of the brain. However, dopamine. And a lot of people think of it or know of it or may have heard of it as a reward chemical that your brain gives out when you get something good.

And that's not accurate. As a game designer, it's like for me, this was kind of a revelation. It was like, oh, this is why this works so well. dopamine levels, what they do is the brain releases dopamine, and the dopamine increases the neurons' ability to, like chemically, changes the neurons' ability to be more efficient at making new connections. So dopamine is very, very, very, very important to be able to learn. And it may be about learning about good experiences and things, but it's really important to have dopamine

levels in your brain that are rising to be able to learn better. Now, dopamine peaks when you are the most frustrated, learning something, when you anticipate a reward coming. So that's when, so when somebody says, hey, do this thing, you're going to get a cookie, the dopamine levels in your brain peak right before you get that cookie. When you know you're going to get that cookie, you have done the thing, you've got that cookie. So what that's related to in learning theory and dog training, which I also do, is if you can push your player, human or canine, to a point of frustration that's high for them, but they don't break, the end result is when they get that reward, they will be the most satisfied they could possibly be. So when I try to think about game design and especially with cooperative games, I try to think of shifting mechanics and things to produce enough frustration that people feel challenged.

And what they know that that reward on the other end is going to be worth it. So you treat your players like dogs is what you're trying to tell me. Absolutely. I don't tell them that at the table, but I absolutely do. I have found that many, many, many of the core scientific principles behind canine ethology and training I use in game design. And it works really well. So I will, I actually will underscore some of the stuff because I think it's important. Not only, I actually take it even further. I literally try to train myself like a dog.

I find that like the, you know, as you just. described at the thinky part of the brain is very limited in effectiveness. Like when you want to get up early in the morning to go to the gym or you want to go work on a difficult project, like, thinky part of the brain is often like, meh, nope, going back to bed. And you need to find ways to train that sort of mammalian lizard part of your brain to like auto respond. Like, nope, getting up.

I always put my shoes on every time when I hear the alarm. I always go do this thing. I clear distractions. I set up so that every time I'm in this zone, I always do. habitual response A, to get me to move forward. So I actually, I find that to be abundantly true in my, in my day-to-day life, as well as in the design process. As funny as it sounds when you first start telling it to people.

Yeah, but absolutely. I've done talks at a few different conferences for game designers on, yeah, one of my most popular talks is just utilizing the reinforcement and punishment quadrants of theory of behavioral psychology and applying it to game design. So like the quick summary of that is that you can either reinforce behaviors or you can punish behaviors, which in scientific context is when you punish a behavior, you want that behavior to occur less. And so you could do things, you can add things to an experience to encourage behavior, or you can take away things to encourage behavior or you can add things to discourage behavior or you can remove things

to discourage behavior. So let's give some examples please so we can, you know, make it make sure we're not losing people. All right. So if we're playing a board game and I want you as a player to go explore something, to go flip over a card and do a thing, the easiest way I can do. that to make it a positive experience and encourage that behavior is that if you flip over that card, you get a cookie.

I like cookies. Yes. And in the office, we use get a cookie as a shorthand parlance for give the player some reward that they find of value. We have exactly the same terminology, by the way. It must be a universalizable thing. I don't know where maybe my psychology background. We talked about the same thing.

But it, yeah, just the idea of like giving. reward the behavior you want to encourage. You know, it's pretty straightforward when you think about it, right? If you wanted your players to do certain things, reward those things. And, you know, it's, you know, just sort of to give a concrete example from my own experience. So one of the things in when I was first designing Ascension and you bought cards, the cards didn't replace until the end of your turn. And that meant that the next player was the one who got access to all the new cards.

And that by which. often would lead players who, if you were thinking strategically, would discourage you from buying anything because if the cards on the board were just mediocre, you didn't want to risk making a great card for your opponent to be available. And so we changed it to, no, the cards show up right away. And so you get that not only the access strategically, but there's a visceral like, who, what am I going to get kind of experience? So you get that emotional cookie right away. And it was just a much more fun experience right away, you know, instantly. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that is an example of adding a thing to their environment. So it's a positive to encourage behavior. So it's a

reinforcement. It's a positive reinforcement. And positive reinforcement is an excellent way to foster like emotionally higher level mammals, whether canine or human, when there's positive reinforcement introduced, they produce more oxytocin in their brain. They produce more dopamine in their brain and they learn faster and they develop stronger connections with social connections with the people around them and the abstract notion of the game itself. So if you want happy, fuzzy, warm feelings, you use a lot of positive reinforcement. Okay. And then talk to me about negative reinforcement. What does that do? The easiest way to think of negative reinforcement, if you do the behavior I want you to do, the bad thing will go away. So if we're

we're looking at the, go back to the example of, I want this player to explore this deck and flip a card over. That's the behavior I want to reinforce. And if I'm using negative reinforcement, I will have some overlying condition for if you do not do that, you will lose a cookie, for example. I see. So yeah, you take a damage every turn that you're in the same room.

If you don't go to a new room, if you go to a new room, you don't take any damage or something like that. Yes, exactly. If you don't fight the monsters, the monsters will start hurt. hurting you. Yeah. Yeah, that's a negative reinforcement. Makes sense. And then how to, and then when you're thinking about whether to use negative reinforcements versus positive reinforcements, you said positive reinforcements give me, you know, warm and fuzzies and make me like the game more and

the people around me more and everything's wonderful. What about negative reinforcements? And negative reinforcements can be very stressful. It's that sort of, whether mild or great, they sort of come with this haze of intimidation in the environment, with, which, depending on the kind of game you want to create, maybe exactly what you're looking for. So the difference of, hey, do this thing, get a cookie, or do this thing, or I'm going to punch you in the face. Exactly.

Exactly. It's a different emotional response, as we say. Yeah, no, I can imagine a different emotional response to those requests. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then one of the ones that I've tried to really, really, really pay attention to is because it is so powerful is negative punishment. So negative punishment can be easily thought of as you take something away from a player to discourage a behavior.

So that can be stealing, is frequently stealing something from a player. And that is the fastest path to resentment that you will ever find in game design. So if you really, really want your players to hate a situation or an NPC or something like that, if you want them to be frustrated and resentful in a powerful way quickly, take something from them. It can be completely mechanically dumb that you're taking something. It can be valueless. but if you, we are, humans are such possessive creatures that if you take something from us, our emotional reaction is powerful, is strong.

So it is a, it is a big lever to pull and you should always know when you're pulling it. Yeah, I'm trying to remember the name of the psychological principle. I talked about this, but basically, you know, we tend to overvalue the things in our possession dramatically. Like if we, it's, if I tell you, you know, how much would you pay me for these concert tickets? you'd give me a certain number, but if I said, hey, here's these concert tickets, how much would I have to pay you to get those back from you? The number is always dramatically higher. Yes. Same tickets, same scenario, but the fact that it's mine, I now care a lot more about it.

I don't want to lose the thing that I already have. Yes. And so that is a really powerful principle to be able to work into your games sparing. And I would encourage anyone who wants to like dig more into this. One of my favorite books on the subject is the title of it is Nudge. Yeah, I've heard about that one. I haven't actually, I think I read a synopsis of it because I figured, eh, it can just nudge me in the right direction I got this.

Absolutely. But yeah, it summarizes a lot of those little sort of cognitive bias things that humans have that will affect decision making. And it's super useful in game design. Yeah, I think the author that got a Nobel Prize, I believe, as an economist. and there's a lot of the components that you as a game designer absolutely need to be thinking about directly, right? You are always trying to nudge your behaviors, the behavior of your players to, of their own free will, do the thing that's going to actually create the emotional experience you're looking for. So one of the things I also, I always ask my guess, is, you know, what kind of advice would you give to people who are just looking to get started in the industry now and how can they get?

you know, if people really want to become a game designer professionally or be involved in the gaming industry, you know, what would you tell them? And then, you know, also specifically, you know, you're the first female game designer I've been able to have on my podcast and hopefully the first of many. And I, you know, if there are women out there, I think that there's this sort of stereotype that women, you know, aren't game designers or this field isn't for them. And I would love to hear your advice for the women in the audience who would love to become a professional. part of this and how they can, you know, what your experiences have been. Oh, absolutely. I think game design is really interesting in that almost everyone I know in the industry who's a game designer

didn't go to school for it and got there just by doing it. Just like in your spare time making games. And it's the kind of thing where the first hundred games you make are going to suck. Like when you're learning go, they say the first hundred games you play, you're going to be terrible, and then you figure it out. And it's kind of the same way for game design is you'll start designing games and you won't know what you're doing. But if you keep at it and keep at it and are open to change and development, far too often I see designers who are very protective of their precious babies. And that can be really challenging to get a job in the game design industry because if you are very protective of your design, it's going to be hard to work with a collaborative team.

100% agree on all fronts. Yes. Except that your design is bad and that your first designs are all going to suck. My first designs of new games still suck. Even every time you do a new project, it's going to suck. And you just got to embrace the suck. Yes. And get an, iterate because and iterate and show it to people and ideally work with other, you know, smart and talented people, but literally just show it to everyone you can to be able to get that feedback and iterate. You know, I've had plenty of people who are like, oh my God, I have the best idea for a game, but I can't show it to you unless you sign this NDA and do all these things. And I'm like, nope, you're never going to make that game. I'm sure of it.

Yeah. Nope. Yep. Yeah, I just have to, if you could accept the fact that the idea that no ideas are too, are too precious to lose or share with somebody else, then you'll go far. But it's absolutely an industry where you can, I mean, I got hired as a full-time game designer working on a whole bunch of different games because I made, designed, published my own game, and that caught a guy who owns a company's eye. Yeah, you can just do it. So if you have a game idea, prototype it out. It doesn't have to be perfect. yet it just has to be prototypable,

just at a stage where you can make a chunk of it and play a chunk of it and keep going. Awesome. Well, we are at the end of our time. I thank you so much for doing this, Liz. This has been, you know, we've had plenty of chats, but this has been really awesome to get to do this deep dive. And then, you know, we're going to transition from this

talking more about our new still secret project. So this is a lot more fun ahead. And to our audience, I promise you, I will let you all in on this very soon. when this podcast releases. Awesome. Thank you so much, Justin. Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Now, as promised, I'm going to talk about that top secret project that we kept teasing all episode. So this is one I've been working on for a long time and actually started out when Mike Selinker and I had a conversation at a convention nearly three years ago at this point,

where we talked about how much we loved his original design for betrayal at House on the Hill. and I helped work on one of the expansion, Widows Peak End Games. And we talked about the things we loved about the game and the problems we had with it. And so we decided to work together to make a spiritual successor to betrayal at House on the Hill,

and it is called Hide Society. The premise of the game is that the Jekyllynne-Fourn formula has gotten loose, and we as a group of intrepid adventurers are there to help stop all of the chaos that's ensued. Now, of course, in the process of stopping that chaos, We're going to need to, you know, drink some of the formula ourselves to make sure that we are strong enough to prevent all the harm. But, of course, we are strong enough to resist the evils of the formula and the corruption that comes with it because, you know, we're heroes.

We would never turn on each other. Well, as you can probably tell from my tone of voice, a big part of the game is this concept of everybody being cooperative and trying to stop the threats that are there. But this great risk that we could all, one of us could turn and then become the villain ourselves. And that's basically the premise of the game. There's a series of rounds that are played and different strategies for each character to enact so that you can avoid being overrun by monsters and all kinds of crazy events. And then at some point, either the players will collaboratively work together to discover what the end game scenario is and learn how to beat it. Or if one of you becomes too corrupt before that happens, well, then you become the villain and the other players have to turn against you to try to stop you from taking over and becoming the mastermind behind it all. So it's been a really exciting project to work on and it's just taken us a very long time and we're still not ready to put it out there.

In fact, this podcast is the first time I've ever talked publicly about the project because it's very hard to not just balance around a cooperative game, but also a cooperative game that can turn competitive depending upon the play group with a lot of different scenarios and a lot of variety. So it's been a very exciting project and we are going to be doing some more announcements about it very soon. but you as my faithful podcast listeners got a first inside scoop. So stay tuned. I'll definitely be giving more information about this as Will Mike. And it was a pleasure to work with him. He was my very first podcast guest. And so it's exciting and I'm sure we'll be able to talk more about it soon.

And if you want to find me at a convention, I'll give you even more insight into what's going on. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you.

I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested,

you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com, or wherever fine books are sold.