Think Like A Game Designer - Raph Koster — Game Design Insights: Iteration, Constraints, and Real-World Inspiration (#5)

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

Raph Koster has undoubtedly changed the world of gaming. He was the lead designer of the legendary Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies. In 2004, he wrote _A Theory of Fun for Game Design_ which highlights Edutainment as the driving force behind great games. He speaks all over the world on the subject of game design and I’m super excited to have him here with us to share his knowledge. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. My guest today is Raff Koster. Raph is a legend in the gaming industry, creating some of the first online games, including multi-user dungeons, Ultima Online, and and Star Wars galaxies. Raff also wrote the most accessible book on game design I've ever read, A Theory of Fun, as well as gives lectures regularly breaking down the grammar of game design in exquisite detail. I credit Raff with being one of the first and best theorists on game design, and I believe his work has laid the foundation for everything I and other modern game designers do.

It's clear from this episode, he still has a lot to teach us all, and he even walks you through his creation process live on the show. In this episode, we also cover how Raph got a special. started selling his own video games in a Ziploc bag as a teenager, what it was like to work on game design before any game design theory existed, how you can approach games from the experiential side or the mechanics side first. We learn the tools that Raff uses for capturing and developing ideas. We learn the value of working with restrictions and quickly prototyping and much, much more. As I mentioned, Raff is a legend and it was such an honor for me to become friends with him

and to be able to get to chat with him. And I'm so excited to share this with you. So I'll stop talking and we can get to the interview with Raff Koster. Okay, I am here with Raff Costa. Raf, it is great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, you know, it's actually, when I first started doing this podcast,

you were one of the first people that I was excited about getting an opportunity to talk to because sort of the whole point of the podcast is to demystify the process of game design and really think about, you know, deeply about what's going on, both in the industry and what it takes to sort of do this job well. And you were not only the first introduction point for me, your book of A Theory of Fun was an incredible, very accessible entry point into the industry and into understanding game design, as well as I've, you know, seen you lecture and speak on very detailed, nitty-gritty components of the architectures and components of design. and so it's a real honor to have you here. Yeah, I wish we could have done it sooner. I think the first time you asked me, I was sick. Couldn't make it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the beauty of this is, you know, these principles are timeless. So when we have these conversations is not as important as the opportunity to have them. So it's great. And I've always enjoyed our talks when we've been just kind of in person and casually discussing things. And so now getting to have a conversation and we get to share with the world is very exciting. Great. Let's do it.

All right. All right. So, you know, let's let's kick it off with just a little bit of background. You know, I, what kind of brought you into to the space as a, as a game designer? How did you kind of, you know, become immersed in it and, and sort of make this your career? Gosh, so I was born in the 70s. And I often say that being born in the early 70s is a great age to be a geek because it means that you got to kind of discover or find a whole bunch of things. just as they were happening. So that meant that, you know, we had a Sears Pong console in the home, right? We got to play D&D as it was becoming a thing, right? Got to go to the arcades when they were in their glory days, got to see each console generation happen from the beginning, right? So, yeah, all of those things were just in the air for me. And between the D&D and the arcades and all the rest, one key factor kind of changed everything for me, and that is that I was living outside of the United States.

I was living in South America because my mom worked for UNICEF when I was a kid. And so that meant that I would be home during the summers, and I'd play, you know, Kubert or Pengo in the arcades. And then I'd go back for the school year to live in Peru, and the arcade machines wouldn't be there. And I'd try explaining them to my classmates. And what I ended up doing was making board game versions of them that I would take in and we would take in and we would. play during breaks over lunch or during recess. How old were you in this process? Oh, gosh.

10, 11, 12, 13, that range in there. Awesome. So I still have a bunch of these, actually. And, you know, there's something amazing about engaging in the exercise of porting a video game to a board game. That, you know, now I think of that as an amazing. design exercise for learning how to do game design and for focusing on what really matters in a game in terms of developing mechanics and core loops. So it's kind of funny that I fell into it by accident.

Pretty soon I was making my own games. I acquired an 8-bit computer, thanks to the generosity of a great uncle, and learned how to program on the Atari 8-bits and started making games and attempting to sell them to my classmates, along with some friends when we were about 14. That is incredible. You got into this very, very early. That's fantastic. Yeah, you know, I'd heard the stories. I remember seeing, for the first time, a copy of a video game in a computer store.

Remember when there used to be computer stores? A lot of the listeners probably don't remember when there used to be computer stores. But you used to actually walk into specialist stores to look at 8-bit computers, to buy them. Commodores and Atari's and apples and the like. And I remember seeing a copy of like Ultima 1 and Akalabath and the early Ultima's there, one of them was hanging on a wall, right? It was something you could buy, and that was just weird. So, yeah, we actually sold one copy of one of our games and a Ziploc baggie to a

classmate when I was 14. It unfortunately did not then lead to the millions. that Richard Garriott got for selling his game in Ziblock Baggies. But it was kind of ironic that my first industry job in video games was working for Richard. Yeah, that's crazy. I love the initiative that you took at each stage of this to kind of just move forward in a field that was only just beginning and evolving. you know, I was a few years behind you in the track. And so there was a lot more groundwork laid when I started getting into it,

although I was sort of in the heyday. And there's a class of designers now from the Magic, the Gathering school, people who all kind of started in that world and kind of came in. So I felt like the era I grew up and had its own advantages, but really being able to be at the beginning of it. And the other thing that I find fascinating is sort of the kind of one-man gaming shop, which is much harder to do nowadays, whereas before you could come up with the idea and program the whole thing and get it out there.

And now it seems like it's much harder for a single designer to create their own games and launch things. Do you feel like that's a barrier for people nowadays? You know, it's actually a barrier that's fallen again. It was much harder for a very, very long time. You know, when I, I didn't think I would end up in games, right? I thought I was going to go do something else. And games just kind of kept sneaking up on me.

When I finally did start making games, video games professionally with Ultima Online, it was, of course, on a team. And the way the industry went for video games, projects got bigger and bigger. And it isn't just that they got bigger. and more complicated. It's also that even opening the door to get in got more complicated. Like, right?

You know, even the compiler, like, okay, so you're making game on Windows. You need to learn everything about the Windows 3-1 interface system and all this other crap, frankly, that was in the way. These days, with Unity and Unreal, and I could go down the list, there's so many, default and loom, GameMaker and so on, I actually think a lot of those things have gotten a lot easier to do.

And I date it back to Flash. Flash was kind of the moment when that single, you know, singular game author in video games kind of got resurrected. And I think that it's no accident that we got a giant indie movement and huge leaps forward in game content at that time. Yeah, I found a similar trend in the physical game space now, you know, where again, like the idea of sort of printing and getting graphic design done and getting a product out to market is sort of this daunting idea for a lot of people. It's actually shockingly easy now to do, you know, digital print on demand and to even be able to access, you know, real printing resources

and being able to create stuff with the tools that are available and the connectivity that's available now, it's really surprisingly easy. It's actually one of the things I try to tell people is that the barriers are not quite as bad as you think they are, even though it's daunting when you don't know what you don't know. Yeah, I was, you know, I'd been making my own prototypes using wood bits and paper and cardboard and whatnot.

And the day that the GameCrafter.com opened their doors, I started jumping up and down in excitement and immediately started putting all of my games into their POD system. And of course, now there's, I still use them on a regular basis, but of course there's many avenues now. Yeah, it's great to see that kind of thing open up the opportunities again. So this opens up a pretty good topic of conversation when you talk about your prototyping process and what that looks like.

What does your game design process look like more broadly? speaking, when you first start on a project, whether it's one that you're, you're kind of initiating on your own or one that you're doing for hire, sort of as part of another team. What does that look like? Can we break that down a little bit, you know, pick either path you want to start on? Yeah, it's actually, it does depend a lot on the individual circumstance. You know, I'll do the easy one first, which is if it's for someone else, usually there's some kind of a box that has, been defined for me, right? Be it a, usually actually, it's multiple boxes. There'll be sort of a technology box, a cost box, call it a resources box, right, of how much can you work with, right?

Often, in my case, in my career, huge amount of the time, there's been an IP box, right, where you have to work inside the constraints of an existing intellectual property, a setting or whatever. And yeah, there may be other kinds of boxes as well. You know, if you've already got a team, what are their strengths and weaknesses? If you've already got a technology platform, what can it do? And so when I'm in that situation, I start out by trying to analyze first what is it that this is actually about, right? Like I sit down with the IP and try to figure out what is it that makes this IP tick. If it's the technology, I try to figure out what is it that this tech does well? What is it that I can leverage? What are things that maybe are unexpected things that it might be able to do?

If it's the team, it's, you know, it's about figuring out what's the palette, right? What is it that I can work with? And that's kind of the first step from that side, because usually if you've got situation like that, you're answering to somebody who has pretty specific ideas. Of course, I prefer being in the opposite situation, which is just me. Who doesn't? But the interesting thing is that then I have to build my own box. And I usually find that to be one of the first steps is building a box for myself. I'm one of those people that believes that constraints breeds creativity.

So I look to impose constraints on myself. So they might be technology constraints, right? Actually, we mentioned the GameCrafter earlier. When they came out with triangular-shaped tiles, I said, fantastic, a new constraint. What can I go make out of triangles? Right. So I like using constraints that way as something to ideate with.

And sometimes those constraints might be computational, and sometimes they might be physical if it's a physical game. the principles for me for arriving at game system ideas really it doesn't make that big a difference whether I'm working digital or analog and often I'll move back and forth between the two not knowing where the eventual game will end up living interesting so so just to kind of restate it back so you'll you know when you're working on your own you'll try to in some ways sort of simulate the

the constraints that you would get when working for someone else or with a team by saying, all right, we're going to build around this constraint or this particular feature. But you'll, even within that constraint, you'll occasionally jump between digital and physical development for a project as you're sort of designing the idea. That's right. So when I start ideating, I usually start thinking from one of two ends, right? And I've found that designers in general tend to have a preferred end to start from. And we might call it the thematic end and the mechanical end, right?

If you are a thematic end person, then you tend to start thinking in terms of an experience, right? You tend to start thinking in terms of, oh, here's a world or here's a character and a story, or here's a feeling that I want to evoke, right? Here's an experience I want to give a player. It's an experiential first kind of lens, right? And then the other end is a mechanical first lens. And this one, instead of thinking about what is the experience like, it might be, okay, I'm starting with triangles. Therefore, I have either three vertices and edges or maybe at six connection points.

and I could add more, and what sort of topology does that mean I'm working with, and so on, right? And they're very different ways of working and very different ways of approaching the problem. I find that in my board game work, unquestionably, I find myself biased towards the mechanical end. It's very, very unusual for me to start from the other end

with the board games, actually. But in video games, it's pretty common that I start from the experiential end. And either way, my goal is establish something about what I know at one end, that end, and then use it to jump to the other end and try to draw some conclusions. So, for example, if I start from the experiential end and I know I want to make a game about, I don't know, throw out some random topic. on the experience ones

yeah a theme or swimming yeah sure so if we start with swimming I start thinking about okay so the experience of swimming for me first there's a whole bunch of different strokes there's the crazy fear of drowning that you have when you start to learn

there's the way in which rhythm is incredibly important to swimming breath management and I immediately go okay breath sounds like it might be a resource and it might be something that's consumed on a periodic basis, but there might also be some kind of overall exhaustion meter that goes down over time and starts capping your breath.

And then different strokes might then involve different expenditure of breath. So if I'm doing this now, if I say, great, I'm going to do a tabletop game of it, I'm now thinking mechanically, okay, so I can set up a board, some kind of race structure feels very natural for swimming. Maybe it's themed. Maybe sharks are chasing you. Maybe there's diving challenges or not, you know, whatever. And I'm going to play a game of resource management over time to get as many strokes as I need

by perhaps laying down cards playing tokens, right? So boom, I now have enough to go start building a prototype of that. If it were on the other side, a digital game, I'd probably lean me. more towards rhythm. It might be a bit of a timing game. I might still use the same concepts of managing resources of breath and endurance, of different strokes being different tradeoffs for expenditure of breath, endurance, distance, traversed. So basically, either way, what I want to do is establish these two ends almost of the, you know, the two anchors for my rope. And I want to move inwards. And I try to pay attention to both ends as I go, right?

That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully they meet in the middle, right? Hopefully what happens is if I've arrived at something with, you know, the abstract idea, if I had started with the idea of, huh, what if there's this deck of cards you can play and each one has costs in breath that I get back, cost in endurance that I don't? And each one, one lets me move forward by a certain amount. So that basically move cards, I might not end up with swimming from that, right? I might end up at something else, but it's a viable mathematical structure. Maybe that's my rules for moving cavalry in a supply chain or something. I don't know. But it's important to know, right, to get both ends, because then I can draw from both start

giving ideas, right, that feed into the core at the middle. And hopefully I end up with one connected chain that goes from one end to the other. So I absolutely love that entire process. And actually, the fact that you sort of illustrated it kind of live here is great. And I hope that people were listening and have already started prototyping their own swimming games. But let me dig in a little bit to real nitty-gritty stuff. So when you're going through this ideation process, Do you, are you sort of taking notes? Are you mind mapping? Are you just sort of writing down the one thing that you want? Is there a way that you sort of track this sort of thing? And, you know, you mentioned also similarly a process I'm familiar with, which is you'll sort of have a bunch of ideas and mechanics that you think are for one game. And then in reality, they turn out to be really useful somewhere else down the road. How do you manage that? Yeah, I found that I work best writing with a physical writing instrument.

So it used to be that I carried around with me at all times an artist sketchbook, spiral-bound ones, typically not the tiny ones because I needed space. I actually have piles of these on my shelf. Usually they're the 11 by 14 size, right? It used to be that when I was doing things like UO or whatever, I would just carry these to every meeting. I would take my meeting notes in it. I would doodle in them. and I would ideate in them.

Today, I use an iPad Pro and a pencil, Apple Pencil. In the past, I've also used Windows tablets and styluses there. But, you know, the iPad's super lightweight, so it's easy for me to carry it everywhere, and the pencil is super precise. So I do it in there, and it will end up being a mix of sketches and written-out statements.

And when it is written-out statements, what I'm usually doing is I'll try sketching the mathematical relationships, usually as a simple graph or a drawing, and then I will try writing rules. And I will go write prose long-hand rules. Just start, and then I'll hit a point where I go, oh, shit, and then you'll find another doodle in the way. and often they just end up there and get abandoned.

You know, my notebooks have literally hundreds of snippets like that, ideas like that. And sometimes they're crazy short. I have one that is a game that feels like a kaleidoscope, that I have literally made half a dozen separate digital puzzle games out of. because each time I start trying to solve the problem and I start sketching, I latch onto a different thing. So, you know, it ends up that when I jump to the other end, the first time I tried it, I made a board game about symmetrical relationships with eight-way symmetry. And then later I ported that board game to digital, and the addition of a timer really changed it. and then later I wanted one that captured the sensation of the spinning.

So I made a game that was about, you know, basically a match three columns game kind of thing. Only you played it on a spinning board. And the spinning meant that it had to be digital, right? So that one went digital immediately. Yeah, there's probably, you know, there's like three or four more that I've built out of just that one high-level experience idea. because spinning versus symmetry lead to different math, right? They lead to different topology structures and so on. So the moving back and forth process will, you know, it can be really super generative.

And I'll often go back to these old ideas to pull out, you know, new stuff. So I've got quite a file of them. So I find the subject of note taking to be really fascinating. And in particular, yours involves a lot of doodling and a lot of, you know, the sort of, you have an artist, artistic background. And actually, even your book is one of the reasons I love The Theory of Fun is that it's got, you know, sketches and images on each, every other page to help illustrate concepts. How is that, you know, crafted your thinking and, and your process for ideating and

developing things? Well, I mean, I don't really have any good. insight into why it is that way or how it's shaped. It's just how it's always been for me. You know, my education, my training, my background, whatever, is somewhat eclectic, but one constant in it has been that I've studied the arts a lot. So I took studio art classes, even up through the college level. I did, I'm a musician. I play. multiple instruments and I took music theory and composition at the college level. Actually, the thing that I do that I never studied of all things is actually programming.

But I actually have a master of fine arts and creative writing. So I tend to draw on all of those things all the time. And so it's hard for me to envision, you know, what is it like to not be a jack of all trades, I guess? So I'm not sure how to describe. If I weren't working in all of those at the same time, I'm not sure how I would approach games. Excel is another one, right? Excel would be another tool that I use all the time.

Oh, my God. I couldn't do anything without Excel. I'm pretty much useless as a human. Yeah, so for me, part of the reason that I enjoy game design so much is actually because I get to use all the different muscles on one project. So, yeah, I don't. don't even know how to answer your question. Sure. Well, let me, let me take it from a different tack then because I think one of the

things I'm always fascinated by and try to pull out is those universal principles that apply to the creative process that are, you know, doesn't matter whether you're making games or poetry or art or, you know, a movie that there's things, I believe there's these common threads that or how you approach creative work. Totally. And so maybe you can speak a little bit to that since you have such a kind of polymath background. Yeah, I do actually consider the practice of all of those things.

I do see them as being very similar. And I do use kind of the same habits for all of them. I actually made a list of them once in a blog post, which I think was called practicing the creativity habit. But I'll try to remember what I see. said. First was, whatever the activity is, do it regularly,

make it a habit. So part of that is having the tools near you at all times. I don't think you've been over to my place, but the room that I work out of has about, oh crap, I guess, 20 musical instruments within five feet of me,

has a complete art studio within five feet of me, has a complete recording studio, has a game design reference shelf, not of games, but of those don't fit in the same room, but of books about games, about economics, about interface design, about other topics that are related to games. You know, all of this stuff is within easy reach.

And for board games, I have a prototype kit that has in it, you know, hundreds of dice, wooden bits of different shapes, probably 30 or 40 different decks of cards with different designs and different, you know, Uno decks and regular decks and canasta decks with inverted suits and whatever. So that's one of the things. Make it a habit. Second is have the tools close at hand at all times. Third is actually the bit about giving yourself constraints, right? And I actually try to do that as an exercise, like on a regular basis. If it is guitar, then I will say, great, I don't know jazz chords. I'm going to go find five jazz chords and learn them. And then I'm going to write a song using those jazz chords. And I'm just going to play the shit hour until I know how these chords work. And then I'll go find something else.

Oh, I don't know cumbia rhythms. I am now going to go do something with a cumbia rhythm until I figure that rhythm out. I am now going to, you know, I picked up this habit back in studying art, I think, where the art and poetry, actually, where poetry in particular, you know, there's all of these traditional poetic forms, right? sonnets and villainels and haiku and whatever. And doing the exercise, you know, they have handbooks of them, right? And a writing workshop, it was actually a student-run writing workshop, a bunch of us that really we wanted to take craft seriously. We got together on our own and kind of set ourselves the challenge of we're going to go through the book and write a poem using every single traditional form, one after the other.

Right? And it's kind of like the equivalent in game design would be saying, all right, I'm going to make a CCG, followed by a perfect information symmetrical strategy game, followed by a, right? Wow. And go through that exercise. And I haven't actually succeeded at it in the case of games, but I don't

I don't think that's a problem necessarily there's too many ones to try making one of everything and it isn't so much that you have to master them all it's more about like I am no good at making CCGs I can tell you that right now but you know it's about getting a tool onto your workbench

right understanding some more design patterns basically And I find that just cuts across all of the things that I work with, whether it's music composition or writing or draftsmanship or whatever, that is in common. That's an underlying principle for me. Yeah, and I think there's a lot to dissect there. So, you know, the practice of whatever habits and areas you want to be created in is, you know, I think it's a no-brainer that that, that, that whether it's 10,000 hours or just, you know, however many hours you can get in. If you don't keep doing it, you can't get good at it.

I think the principle of keep it close by that to me, you know, speaks to that, reducing the friction to go and to practice and to do things because that's something I've noticed in myself, whenever it's especially a new challenge, there's always a lot of psychological friction behind moving forward on it. It's much that the brain wants to go to easier things and things that you know and things that are comfortable and forcing yourself to work within restrictions that are challenging and making it removing whatever barriers to entry you can to get yourself to do that feel like really powerful habits towards, you know, succeeding and pushing yourself towards these, these areas of growth. Yeah, definitely. And part of the reason to just have them all at

hand is also to mix and match, right? Like, if I just had the guitar in the room and I had to go someplace else to grab the mandolin, I'm a lot less likely to grab the mandolin. And the same is true, I think, for everything. I think the same is true for all of them. The other thing is that all of those different things are as effectively constraint sets too. Right. So one of the exercises that I often do with tabletop games is I mentioned I have this big pile of pieces. I will grab a set of random pieces. And then I'll say, okay, my challenge today

is to make a game out of this. Absolutely. I have the exact same thing. I do that with my teams too, where we'll just have days. We're like, all right, I'm bringing in a bunch of random stuff. And this group has to make a game with this pile of stuff and this group has to make a game with this pile of stuff and then we're going to crossplay them and it's a really, really fun mind stretching exercise. Yeah, exactly. It's, I think it's vital. It's different forms of practice. Like when you, oh, you know how they tell you when you're trying to work out? Hey, you got to work the different muscle groups and you've got to rotate through. I think it's like that, you know. Yeah, well, if I can ever make it out to the gym to work one muscle.

I got a ways to go. Okay, so we've got, you know, we were talking about your creative process and we talked about the sort of parameters and the defining the box and restrictions, then the ideation process and kind of brainstorming and note-taking

and then into prototyping. And we've talked a little bit about the process for prototyping. you have a lot of these extra tools around to love things like the game crafter and you also can of course program your own prototypes which is a fantastic tool that I'm

very jealous of. Every year for the last decade, I've been like, man, I really should teach myself how to program and just never did. Oh, dude, I'll teach you. I'll teach you.

All right, awesome. We'll work my way through that and teach me that and then I'll start learning some of those instruments you got lying around. So, So once you've kind of built your prototype, then what does your testing and refinement process look like?

Well, so these days for the prototype, first is I play against myself, and I do that a lot. You know, it's kind of that exercise of, okay, I'm going to sit on both sides of the table and play it myself. And I do that first, actually, before taking it to the next stage out. You know, this is also often the stage where

start thinking about modeling it if I haven't yet already. I'll try to model it and figure out, okay, how big is the possibility space of the system? So I might model it in Excel, run Monte Carlo simulation on it. Sometimes I have to write code and write a simple AI for it. Even if it's a tabletop game, I might do that. So for some of our audience, you may not know what a Monte Carlo simulation. Can you explain that briefly? Yeah.

So Monte Carlo, it's a very powerful tool, actually. It's basically where you create a model of the game, a simulation of the game. And rather than pushing it to playtest with real people, you basically put together simulated players. And you can do this in Excel. You can also do it in code. A lot just depends on how complex you want to get. And you then have the simulated players play the game. you know, 10,000 times, right? It's an automated process, so you can run it as many times as you

want, and you gather data on what you're doing. That sounds super abstract, so let me get really concrete with it. There was a trivia game that I consulted on, BuzzTime trivia, which you might have played at something like a Buffalo Wild Wings or something like that. And it's, the version that I worked on was one that you played on a tablet. And one of the things about a party game, or really any game, but particularly party games, is that you really don't want runaway winners. If people start feeling like, well, why should I bother participating anymore, then the vibe is completely lost, right? And that's a common game design problem.

So we knew that we wanted to have fairly tight matches running all the way through. And if the leader swaps often, who's winning seems to be in doubt and different people pull ahead and then fall behind, you end up with a very dramatic kind of game experience, right, over the course of it. So this was a trivia game. In Excel, I built a model where it showed I invented five arbitrary categories of question named A, B, C, D, and E. because it's just a model. We don't need to actually model the trivia. We just need to model the behaviors. We knew the game lasted, I forget what it is, 20 turns or whatever. So randomly generated what order and how many of ABC, D, and E questions came up,

and that gave us what the game landscape was going to be, like what the level they're playing through, then made a bunch of personas. and I think they were named Amanda, Billy, Carrie, you know, David, ABCD again, and put in percentage odds of knowing the answer in this category. So Amanda was the know-it-all and had 100% across the board. I think we had a, you know, a Zenobia that no nothing, right? zero across the board. And basically tried assembling these personas for all of the interesting combinations,

like somebody who knows half of everything, somebody who is an expert in one thing and knows nothing about others, somebody who's strong in two and weak in three, you know, whatever. And you build all of these mixes and combinations. And then even in those cases, you give them a percent chance of guessing or knowing, through just luck. So even zero doesn't mean you'll get all of them wrong. And all of this you do with random functions. And there's a setting in Excel where you can set the spreadsheet to recalculate

manually or not. So turn it to manual, fill in all of these things, and it won't recalculate stuff as you go. And then track basically who won each question. And I built a graph that sat along alongside this spreadsheet that showed a graph turn by turn of how many points each player had. And then you hit, I think it's F9 for Recalculate, and I can watch that graph change. And I can watch, oh, look, Amanda's always winning, but how much is she winning by? And I can run 10,000 iterations of it and adjust parameters in the game rules. And in this case, we had rules around there's always a gimmie. You can always say, I don't know the answer, but I want credit for it.

But you can only use that once in the match. There's a double down. I know this answer, and I'm positive. I want double credit for it. But you can do that once in the game. And then there were buying hints and things like that that you could do multiple times. So you had a currency that you spent in order to do these things. You can model that in the spreadsheet as well.

And so adjusting things like the cost for hints or the, you know, how many times you can use a double down and running it through those stock personas, we were able to tighten the matches so that all matches were tight. And even the person who knew nothing might sometimes win. But at least they didn't always lose, right? So the Znobeas of the world still have a chance. They still had a chance. And I just built that spreadsheet out and then manually hit F9 10,000 times until it looked like the numbers were working. Right. So that's the Monte Carlo method.

It's basically throwing random stuff through the machinery of your game system so many times that you see the patterns. Gotcha. So your start by doing Monte Carlo simulations or playing out a full game against yourself and kind of working on your own to refine it. I won't always do Monte Carlo. Just, you know, not all games are equally easy to model that way. So a simpler step that I'll often take is just calculate the size of the potential decision tree and see if it's big enough. Right. So basically, every point where there is a branching decision leads down someplace on a decision tree.

And in theory, with any game, you can unroll the entire tree. But once you get above a certain size, the human brain can't handle it. And so just doing the simple math of how many possible board states are there, for example, can tell you a lot about whether or not a game is going to turn out to be trivial. So this is sort of to analyze, you know, the difference between a take, tacto or, you know, connect four or, you know, go that those permutations exponentially increase with each board state. That's right. That's right. Okay. So sometimes different mathematical models you'll apply. That makes sense if it's for that kind of game to say, yes, this is enough decision space or it's too much or not enough. and sometimes you'll simulate a game for yourself.

Sometimes you'll model a game and simulate it thousands of times via Monte Carlo method. Either way. These are kind of all. They're all simulation. Yeah. Yep, they're all different tools to simulate. And, you know, I like to call this sort of the in my cave phase of testing. It's like nobody gets to see what's going on here.

I'm still just kind of running through things on my own. Yep. And so then at some point, though, you've got to take your game. out of the cave. What triggers that for you and then what kind of process do you have for that? It's the point at which simulation isn't helping me, usually. I recently did a game working name as Pebbles that I couldn't model. I couldn't wrap my head around a way to model it. The possibility space exploded really fast. And so I needed to know more. about the game and how it actually worked with players.

So at this point, the board consisted of a piece of paper with the board drawn on it, which is five circles, and cards, which were just some cardboard cut out cards with pencil markings on them, right? Yeah. And yeah, what I do is I corner my kid. I still have one kid at home. I'll corner that kid and I'll say, all right,

you're going to try a game with me and usually there's a groan. Are you going to change the rules in the middle? And I go, yes. Yes, yes, I am. I get that all the time. And with that one, played and adjusted the rules and then said, okay, I want to try a different rule now.

Let's play the game again. And I'll just, I'll do that for, you know, until they get bored about a, usually five or six. And on that one actually roped in another friend of my kids who wasn't even local, set up the phone with a Skype and parked to the video hanging over the board so that they could play remotely. And then I watched what they did because I didn't have more people handy at the time. Once I have, you know, once it feels like I'm at that stage where I want other people,

I will start carrying it around in my pocket or whatever. I will basically become importunate and tell people, hey, so I happen to have a game in my pocket, want to play, and I'll put it on the table while we're having lunch. I've been a victim of this multiple times. It's great. Yeah, and I'll just say, hey, so I've got a new one. You want to try it?

And people usually can't say no. And yeah, we just start. If there are, ideally, there are more people, and I will say, oh, I already know how to play. How about the two of you play? Because I'd rather watch than actually play. And it's probably a bad habit, but in those early stages, when the game is,

I'm still tweaking rules, I actually, you know, the classic, playtest advice is stand there and don't say a damn thing. But in those early stages when it's still getting molded, I'll actually sometimes basically invite those early players into the process and tell them, well, I found this strategy, you know, or, well, you know, this really is a game about territory, not a game about points, you know, or whatever. I'll often kind of shape their expectations a little bit because I'm aiming for a particular kind of goal or experience at that stage. And if what I've got is way far off and they don't perceive it, then the feedback often won't be

relevant to where I'm trying to go, if that makes sense. So I'll often kind of set the stage and do what I call the tip. tissue testing, the blind testing, all the rest. I usually wait until the game is more fully formed before I do that. It's got to have an art treatment on it. It's got to have enough rules that people can look at a rule book, that kind of thing. But if it's still at the stage where I might change the rules on them in the middle of their match or forget a rule, oh shit, I forgot about that, you know, that kind of thing. I'll actually talk to them about the intent.

And it kind of brings them on a bit as a co-designer. Often I get back things like, oh, well, if the game's supposed to be about that, then why can I do this? Or if it's supposed to be about that, shouldn't I be able to do this? Right. And I find that super useful at that stage. often that stage happens with other game designers and

bluntly I find that that stage of development I usually get bad advice from game designers I get better advice from players I get the good advice from game designers comes once I feel like I've locked the rules more and I'm not actually changing them and it's in more of a solid form.

The funny thing about working with other game designers, unless you are really in sync, is often you'll have different intents in mind, and sometimes it can result in getting pulled in directions that weren't where you wanted to go. And I'm usually more interested in getting to a particular place with a game than I am in, oh, you know, this game would be a great bluffing,

game, right? I'm like, I don't care, it's not, I don't want a bluffing game. I'm not making a bluffing game. I see, I get what you're saying, you're right. I now have to cut all forms of bluffing, damn it. Right? Because I've got a particular artistic thing that I'm aiming at, right? Players don't tend to have that,

don't tend to give that kind of advice. Which is, you know, I guess that's the reason why I'd rather do that early, like, back and forth with them. And then I bring in my game designer friends at the next stage. And I absolutely do that a lot, actually. They are the step that comes before going to things like unpubbs or open play tests. Right.

Is I circulated among game designer friends. And, yeah, you know, I imagine many of the listeners have an idea what that's like. you know a lot of stuff gets torn to bits it's important to have people who will be brutally honest with you right um the first stage is very collaborative and you know because you're inviting people in to ideate that you don't get a lot of criticism and so you have to be the one who's self-critical and say no i'm aiming at this the next stage you tell your designer friends i'm aiming at this this is what the game's about go right and um and then let them tear it to pieces and see things you couldn't see and then the last stage would be after it's gone through that and um i've called and discarded

and taken the different pieces of advice then it is all right this is what it is uh that's when i'll go to you know, show it in an unpub or give the digital prototype to somebody or whatever. Right. Yeah.

In digital, the processes often have the idea, like I used to do this fairly regularly, have the idea on a Friday, sketch it, code it on Saturday,

and, you know, get people in my house to play it without art then. The next day, put on art and sound, hope that my kid has friends over and have them play it. And then on Monday, I would take it to the office and give it to professional game designers,

and they would be playing with it by Monday. Wow, that's a very fast iteration process there. That's great. It's about the length of game jam. It's a 48-hour game jam. Yeah. So I was doing game jams to myself before they were a thing, I guess. Ahead of the curve, ahead of the curve. No, I love it.

I love how you break it down into this level of detail. I also, you know, I'm just a big believer that the kind of the faster you can get through the iteration process, the better your games are going to be. It's just one of the most important values is being able to kind of be, you know, design, test, loop, you know, modify and go. And so it sounds like you have great processes for that on both. Yeah, one of the wrinkles for me is definitely that the, the process. Processes have evolved a lot for me because of all of the time I've spent working on concepts like formalizing a grammar for game system. And I found that that had a really profound impact on this process, interestingly, at the earliest stages.

So I found that going through that exercise of formalizing, building up patterns, having this, large library of tools on the workbench or whatever, it means the ideas are more solid and I early exit out of ideas faster. And so to me, it's been of incredible value. It used to be for me, and I think the rule is 90% is crap, right? It's like one idea and 10 is actually going to be worthwhile. Right. And what I find myself doing now is scratching out more of the useless ideas when they're still at the three-sentence stage and cutting them that early. Because I can kind of use those formal tools, not in a process way, but I just kind of know, right? Like, I start messing around with a prototype and I'll go, yeah, wow, this is not going to

have an MP hard problem in it. Next, right? Like, I'll just move past it very quickly. So my hit rate for prototypes now that get to the stage of me actually like assembling something is way, way, way higher. I would say probably three quarters of them work first try now. Wow. And it's because I'm early exiting on them before actually getting to any kind of assembly stage, even the pieces stage. Fascinating.

Yeah, that's an incredibly high hit rate. I have found I am able to get through a lot of discard a lot of my bad ideas in my play test, play through in my head phase but I think my process is still a little more intuitive and less

formal logic than yours. But that's the thing. I am talking about intuition. It's just that I mean it's basically what is intuition? Intuition is basically pattern matching against experience right?

and in ways that we aren't really conscious of. This is an example out of one of the many cogsci books on my shelf. The firefighter intuitively knows, oh, that's going to collapse now. If you ask them why, they actually have real trouble telling you, right? And I think that the process of saying, I'm going to do formal analysis of lots of games, or I'm going to go out looking for, you know, N.P. Hard Problem categories or, you know, putting together just more of a pattern library and trying to internalize it and doing the exercise of building games around patterns just as practice results in its exercise for the intuition muscle, basically. So, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily be able to explain why I early exit out of a concept. I just intuitively go, yeah, this one's just not going to work next.

And the key is just doing it earlier. I still think that 90% of the ideas are shit. It's just that now I kill them before writing them down. I kill them when they are, you know, just some scribbles. Right, right. That's a great analysis of intuition. And so it's both that process that you talked about before of sort of providing yourself with challenges to build different kinds of games or work on different kinds of problems

that helps force and build up your catalog of intuition, as well as the kinds of things of you speak about a sort of formal study and kind of crafting, you know, a language and a grammar of design and all of that stuff just sort of gets, becomes the kind of background fuel that your intuition spawns from. Yeah. You know, I forgot another tool that I use a lot is well, the equivalent of reading, which funny enough is not necessarily playing lots of games. It's often just reading the manual for the game. Yeah.

Or sometimes buying the game and reading the manual. Sometimes just reading the manual. Board game geek is wonderful that way. But I also often draw inspiration not from other games. but from real world things that have systems in them. You used the example of swimming earlier. That's actually a very good example. I will do that with random things.

I will look at a random system in the world. My standard example, when I explain this, is my fish tank because it's an incredibly rich system ripe for detailed simulation. That has all kinds of crazy variables in it. But it could be anything, right? It could be how elections work. It could be, you know, compression algorithms. It could be how guitar strings resonate.

I don't know, whatever. There's mathematical systems with intricacy all around us all the time. And so if I start with a theme, great. I try to figure out what its system is. But sometimes when I don't start with a theme, I go, oh, what's a cool mathematical system? huh, the way that trees propagate nutrition through the trunk. Okay, that's a math system. That's got a topology to it.

That's got variables to it. It has currencies. It has strategies. Let's start there. So looking around for systems to draw inspiration from is also a key part of the practice for me. Yeah. And that harkens back a little bit to kind of almost where we started. that your first game design self-assigned game design task was porting a digital arcade game

system into a tabletop system. And while those were both, you know, one game form to another, sort of being able to distill things down to their essence and be able to communicate them through another medium is an incredibly powerful tool to sort of refine both your intuition and your skill sets on making new, well, creating new anything, really. Yeah, it might actually be the tool in the case of games. games, I think. Yeah. I think it's kind of at the heart of the discipline of game systems design.

So just having this conversation and listening to you, and you know, you and I've had several conversations over the years, I find the way that you think about games, the way you talk about them is really clear and insightful and also sort of very mechanical base, which me is, for me, I have a very similar intuition, so I love it. But what brought you into teaching, you know, both writing your books and you give the lectures on grammar of design? And for anybody that's listening that hasn't seen these, there's tons of them are posted online on your website and on a variety of other places that are just amazing. What made you do you make that transition into teaching and how do you feel like that's evolved over time? It's funny. I don't usually get it, hear it called teaching.

So that's a different lens on it for me. What would you call it? Yeah, I'm not sure. I've always thought of it as just kind of sharing. I mean, sharing lessons. So the thing is, most of the time, like my talks tend to be, they tend to fall in two categories, right? Sometimes I'm sharing things that are already known, right? And those are, you know, those will be cases where it's like,

like, okay, here's lessons, like I just gave one literally yesterday, on lessons from massively multiplayer games that are applicable to building social VR and social AR products.

And that was a case where I went back through and said, here's big things that people who are building online communities should know. And why do I give a talk like that? Because, frankly, people are going to get hurt if people don't know these things. So we need to tell them, please do this. We've learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

Please do this right. But an awful lot of them are the opposite. They are things where I was like, I'm going to engage in a research project for myself. The talk is an excuse to go do a research project. Oh, I'm speaking at GDC in the fall. What's something I'm currently intrigued by? Right. Ah, I'm currently intrigued by topic X.

And then it becomes an excuse for me to buy a bunch of books, watch a bunch of videos, and research and study a topic. Right. Sometimes that arises because I was already interested in it and was studying it anyway. That happened to me when I studied network. science and network theory, particularly social network theory. I got a talk out of that. Sometimes it's the other way around. They said, hey, so we need somebody to talk and everybody needs to, nobody's really talking about social mechanics. And I said, ooh, what a big, meaty topic. Could I actually list every social game mechanic there is? Like every mechanic that involves multiple people

in any kind of game ever and go back and figure out why they exist. And that meant reading a whole bunch of anthropology and sociology stuff. And I got a different talk out of that. So, yeah, it's often my research notes. But I think a lot of it is just it ties into the practice of being an autodidact, of always trying to learn something, right? always be out there looking for something else to add to what you do. You know, if I could just sit and take random courses and never have to write papers and take quizzes, I would.

And so this is my way of doing that instead, because I find that all of random bits of knowledge help me enormously in doing the things I enjoy doing. Yeah, I've found, you know, part of the reasons why I've done articles or this podcast or, or even teaching in, is that forcing, I find that forcing myself to present knowledge in a way that other people can understand it. Yes. It forces me to understand it in a much deeper level. Yes.

There's tons of things and I guarantee every person listening to this has this happening right now, as do I still, that there's stuff that you think you understand. And then when you actually have to try to explain it, you realize, oh, actually I missed this gap. this gap and that's where I need to dig in and really kind of connect those things. And so I find that process really fascinating. Absolutely.

And going and finding people who see the problem from angles that you don't and explaining things to them, super, super valuable. I've spent some time now a lot of folks over in academia these days grew up with games. They study computer science, but they, want to do computer science related to games. And so there's this whole field now that does things like procedural generation of game systems. And they're doing things.

Yeah, no. And there's amazing stuff happening. And, you know, it was sort of weird for them, you know, some of these folks reach out and said, hey, some of the things that you've done on game grammar are important to what we've done. They were building blocks and helping build this field. So I get invited to some of these conferences now. Yeah.

But, oh my God, I'm surrounded by computer scientists who know way more math than I do. And it's incredibly invigorating. It's so exciting, right? Because it's like a completely new lens on the same stuff. Like I get to see old problems with fresh eyes, right? it's awesome and it just sparks new stuff all the time and it also ends up making you feel like shit I thought I understood what I do and I really don't yeah right there's there's more it's always more there's always more yeah the both the the blessing and the curse of life there's always more to learn

yeah one thing you know you mentioned the mechanical bent I do think that's a fair thing you know, I'm not, and it might be because my background in the other things, right? Like, I put out a book of poems and, you know, one would think, well, why didn't you do a game that had the poetry in it? And it just wasn't my first instinct. It might be I go, now, if I'm going to write something, I'm going to write something. If I'm going to do a music thing, I'm going to do a music thing. And when I look at a game, I'm going to go, I'm going to do a game system thing. And so one of the challenges, I've actually been setting myself the challenge lately of starting from the experiential end, because it feels like I have a bias or a tendency.

And so I've been trying to push myself in the other direction. And I credit a lot of that to watching things that have been happening in the indie scene where it feels like there's such an experiential tilt to, indie video game design in the last few years, and they are pulling off narrative and artistic statements that are really expanding what games can do. And can you give some examples that are that are exciting you right now and what's happening in that space? Oh, gosh. It's been multiple years. Yeah, there's been multiple years now, but everything from to the moon to dysphoria to depression quest to more mass market would be something like limbo or inside. What Remains of Edith Finch, the walking simulator movement, whether the name's pejorative or not,

I don't have a better label for it, but things like Gone Home. But yeah, there's just so much interesting stuff happening in that realm. And it made me feel like, wow, you know, maybe the statements I have in my games aren't good enough, right? I mean, that's part of measuring yourself up against other people's work. And even if I might say, well, but my game systems are better, I want to be able to do it all. Right? So, yeah, so I've been trying to give myself that challenge more because it does feel like I fall back on mechanical solutions rather than experiential ones pretty often. So there's another component.

So the idea of building sound systems and great player experiences and fun games as well as ones that have statements or messages or are different artistic approaches and outputs than the more traditionally understood method is all fascinating to me. And there's another topic I really wanted to cover with you, which is the idea of games as. as an agent for social change and social good. Actually, you and I first started working together over a project like that, which I don't know actually where it ended up. Yeah, it hasn't materialized, unfortunately. Yeah, but I found that to be, you know, it's a fascinating space that we can do. You know, games can make a change in the world, not just, you know,

through sort of the classic idea of an educational game, but ones that sort of change people's behaviors and perceptions and, and some that actually do real physical good work in the world. And I guess I kind of wanted to get a little bit of your take on that space and where that's evolved over the years and where you see it going. Yeah. I mean, it's been an active area for a bunch of people for a very long time, of course. I mean, heck, Oregon Trail, right?

But I think part of why a lot of that stuff probably resonates for me and why talk about it, even though it's not my primary emphasis, this is probably because when I really got into doing games professionally, it was via massively multiplayer games, you know, online societies, really. And there, the fact that you have that kind of power and that kind of impact is basically inescapable. Like, there's no way for you not to be aware of it. And particularly back when I started, which was in text muds, right?

when it was a relatively small team and you got to know all of the players because it was a relatively small group of people playing as well. Right. And it basically meant you can't be unaware of the fact that you do impact people's lives. You can change their behavior. You shape their behavior in very all-encompassing ways in the case of a virtual world. You have like, I mean, you control the vertical and you control the horizontal, as Rod Serling would say. You have an enormous amount of power over everything they experience. And it's hard not to be aware of that when you're in that field. And so I think I carry that awareness with me over to thinking about games in general,

even though perhaps a quick game of Stratigo or Connect 4 maybe doesn't shape people quite as powerfully, I try not to lose sight of the fact that games are in a lot of ways. They're forms of learning. They're a tool for learning and training, and that means that you're rewiring brains in a whole bunch of ways. I think the changes over the years have been that, you know, the whole chocolate-covered broccoli concept, which is, oh, we'll just wrap something that seems like fun around an,

an actual academic task and it became pretty clear that didn't work well at all right I think we've come to understand that games teach in particular ways

that make them well suited for teaching particular kinds of things and not well suited for teaching other things that games yes motivate players but they motivate them best

through intrinsic motivation where players choose to learn things and choose to take on tasks because of something that they want to do. And the game is just kind of there to give them the objective rather than the hurdles. So the best example I can think of an educational game would be you don't make a game to teach people math. You make the game where players have their own thing that they want to do, it just turns out that learning that kind of math is the best solution. And because they're motivated to solve the problem,

they will hit on the math as a solution and learn it because they want to. And I think that's been a realization that educational game design has come to over the years. As far as games to change more things, right? I think there's social structures are systems too, right? And so there's a lot of things that games can do in order to help you learn to see and think about social structures, how people interact, how the economy works, how politics works, all of these big topics, how everything in everyday life works. But I think there's still obviously plenty of stuff out there that is more narrative in nature or more polemical or basically advocating. a point of view. And game systems can do that too.

You know, SimCity was famously criticized for painting too rosy a picture of public transit and the tradeoffs with it, right? So, yeah, you can bias your game systems to carry these kinds of lessons, and you need to be aware of the fact that your game systems are basically teaching lessons whether you mean them to or not. And when you put a game out there, you are putting some lessons out there. So it's a good idea to think about what those are, whether you meant to say them, basically. Yeah, no, I've had, I've had a variety of experiences in this space, both kind of designing,

I designed a role-playing game for the Wharton School of Business on entrepreneurship simulation, which was really fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And it's now being used in business schools all around the world. And it was just a really cool thing to create and be a part of. And I've also like seen different versions, whether it's the Sims teaching you that promotions and more friends are the key to a happy life. There's a great game called Cash Flow.

It's actually a board game. There's a digital version you can play for free online. I forget the name of the guy that does the rich dad, poor dad book. And the whole thing is like, you know, you're sort of moving around the board sort of going through life and your goal is to create enough automated income to have to escape the rat race kind of thing.

Right. Yeah. And it teaches very deep lessons in a way that people wouldn't necessarily get some sort of reading a book or being told, hey, save money. Yeah, I think for me, one of the big values that games can bring is we talked about finding real world systems and abstracting them or boiling them out to their essence.

That isn't actually a very common skill. and games in some ways playing a game kind of teaches people how to do that in general but i think the the whole idea like the game you just mentioned of finding real world systems modeling them and letting people experience them in a game context and really come to understand them it's it's a chance for people to iterate on those systems in a way that they don't get to in the real world like you only get to do your lifetime earnings one Whereas if you can play a game that has that system in it many times, I think there's underlying lessons you take away. And I think that's true for all kinds of things.

Like political engagement is a system. There should be a way to make a game that lets people experiment with means of political engagement and figure out, oh, this is a better way to do this. Right. And I think that's true across the board. but we do start, you know, tipping over into our, you know, our sister field of simulation when we go down that route. I am, I'm loving this talk. I want to be respectful of your time. So I'll move into some quicker closing questions. What things do you recommend for people who are listening to this and anyone who's gotten to this stage is clearly very interested in game design and people who are, you know, aspiring game designers who want to kind of get started and breaking any industry.

industry, what advice would you give to somebody like that? Well, the first is go make games, obviously. But I'm sure everybody's sick of hearing that piece of advice. But I think it's valid. You know, make lots and lots and lots of games. You know, get your practicing going, right? The second thing I would advise for people who want to be game designers in particular, become intellectually curious.

I don't know any, you know, really good game designer. who aren't, right? Be a voracious reader. Be somebody who is willing to move readily across different fields. Who's, you know, kind of omnivorous about curiosity. All the best game designers I know are like that.

Gosh, those two things can take you pretty far. Those are great. Yeah, those are great. Those are great piece of advice. And you've given tons of advice along these lines throughout the course of just this talk as well as the countless things you've put out there. Let me dig in a little bit to the, on the book side.

Obviously, I recommend anyone that's aspiring to be game designer, read a theory of fun. But I want to, what other things do you recommend that people read? And I'm also very interested in a few highlights of things that people wouldn't normally think of that aren't just a game design book, quote unquote, that you think would be really valuable. Yeah, so on the game design side,

for people who want to get into that mode of, practicing and start practicing game system design. Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton is the book that I always recommend. Jesse Shell's Art of Game Design is probably the best large-scale overview of game design we have, but it isn't structured so much as a course, right? Whereas Game Design Workshop is. If you're super interested in systems, in particular, characteristics of games by Garfield, yes, that Garfield,

Elias and Gutera is excellent. and advanced game mechanics by Joris Dorman's and Ernest Adams, which is about internal game economies. If you're in video games, haptics and controls is super important. I would suggest Steve Swink's game feel, which is all about that interface between the player and the game system. I could get more specific on games, books around narrative, for example. I like Lee Sheldon's book. If you're doing something with online communities and virtual worlds, you want Richard Bartle's designing virtual worlds. Books outside of games, Understanding Comics by Scott McLeod, is one of the first ones I'd recommend.

I would also recommend 100 principles of design, which is a phenomenal book about basically core principles that carry across architecture, graphic design, you name it. A field of design, it's in there. The Edward Tufti books on presenting information, they're kind of pricey. There is four of them, and I think they're like 50 bucks each, but they are insanely valuable books. Each one is about, for example, title of one is the visual display of quantitative information. And it is an entire book of gorgeous visual examples of ways to display numeric information. And so he's got one about numbers, one about other, kinds of data. What about you get the idea? They're phenomenal and a really a wonderful must-have.

It's a good idea to have some books on, you know, other kinds of things, other fields, be it economics or history, mythology, right? All of those things are incredibly valuable sources, and there's far too many things there for me to recommend easily. Yeah, I mean, it really does. that's plenty for people to chew on I'm sure of that I've actually yeah at some point I've tweeted or posted pictures of just my reference shelf

and you know it's it's large right and that's just the game design shelf if you go over to like I have a it's a 20 inch wide eight foot tall shelf that holds nothing but

art books and mythology books. And, you know, I have in there all of the Disney manuals that they use for training, illusion of life, drawn to life, bottoms one and two, all of the art books for studio jibbri movies, collections of pulp art from the 20s and the 30s and the 40s, you know, art history books, that kind of thing. Because, again, you know, all of these things just go in the pot, right?

Right. Right. Yeah. The, what I was, I'd say, always be exploring, the phrase I use you. And you just, you, there's no, there's no limit to the amount of gristle for the mill that you should be accumulating to fund, to fuel your creative process. Oh, another core design book, design of everyday things by Don Norman, found foundational book on design in general. Oh, yeah. I think it's important to appreciate that game design is in a way a subset of a larger discipline just called design. And you have disciplinary cousins who work in designing household objects, buildings, right, and other things, right? It's super valuable and kind of liberating to realize, oh, yeah, this is part of a much bigger field. Games is a specialty.

Right. Yeah, the game design is a craft relatively young. Design is a craft in Sizzla. It's from the dawn of time. Exactly. Awesome. That's a great list and it was reminding me as I need to come over some time and see all of the amazing stuff you've got over there. Okay, so in closing, I just want to give people an opportunity that want to learn more from you or, you know, interact with you and see your work.

Where can they find you on the interwebs or elsewhere? Yeah. So if you go to raffcoaster.com, R-A-P-H-K-O-S-T-E-R-C-E-R-K-E-R-T-E-R-C-E-R. My blog there has been running since about 1998 and has probably a million words on games on that site. And that's a good pointer. There's huge archives there. I'm on Twitter at Raf Koster. There is a YouTube channel that I have gathered anything on YouTube that is a talk of mine or whatever is on that YouTube channel.

So you can look for Raf Koster on there as well. Many of the talks are on the blog. Lots of them aren't on YouTube, but I do have pointers to videos or audio recordings and the like. You can find me on Amazon if you want to find Theory of Fun, which was my game design book. Or please, buy my book of poetry. It's called Sunday Poems.

You can even find my album of music on all the usual streaming services. So, yeah, buy that too. Why not? All right. There we go. Lots of opportunities to support amazing creative work. This is great.

Thank you so much for taking the time, Raff. I hope we get to do this again sometime soon. You have a few of those books on that list. I have not yet read, so I'm going to dig into those. I'm sure I'll have a bunch more questions and topics of conversation after that. Yeah, come on over. We can play games. Absolutely.

Thanks so much. Sure thing. 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.