Think Like A Game Designer - Richard Bartle & Nigel Roberts — The Power of ‘What If,’ Building Communities, and Navigating Decentralization in Game Design (#73)

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Richard Bartle and Nigel Roberts join us on today’s episode, bringing decades of experience in gaming, technology, and community building. Richard is one of the co-creators of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), the precursor to today’s MMORPGs, and developed the famous Bartle Taxonomy, which categorizes player types. He’s also a renowned author and academic, with works like How to Be a God exploring virtual worlds.Nigel Roberts, one of Richard’s long-time collaborators, was involved in the development of MUD and has had a significant role in shaping the modern internet. He is a member of the ICANN Board of Directors and one of the founders of the .gg domain. Nigel also made history as the first person to win a lawsuit in the UK for unsolicited spam email. His legal and technical insights have been instrumental in building communities both online and in the gaming world.In this episode, Richard and Nigel share their journey from developing the earliest multiplayer games to navigating the challenges of decentralized systems, community regulation, and virtual economies. They also discuss the power of “what if” in game design, the hero’s journey, and how both players and designers can express freedom and identity through games. Enjoy! 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. Today we have a special double guest episode of Think Like a Game Designer, which invited back Richard Bartle, who was one of the creators of the first muds and multi-user dungeons and created Bartle's taxonomy. of players, which I've referenced all the times. You can listen to his original episode,

which is great and chock full of goodies. And we also brought one of his long-time collaborators, Nigel Roberts, who also worked on the original multi-user dungeon. He is also one of the founders of the dot gg web address and a member of the ICAN board of directors. We also get into some fun facts. He's actually the first person to successfully win a lawsuit against someone who sent unsolicited spam email in the UK.

and we dig into that story as well. He has a lot of great insights, both from a technical and legal perspective on gaming, on how internet communities work, and we really get into it in this episode. We dig deep into not just how communities are built and how game designers can foster great communities,

referencing Richard's book, How to Be a God, as well as Robert Highland's science fiction. We talk about the power and the magic of what if. How can you break from the understood norms of the industry in their case, specifically games that were all single player to say, what if we could have any multiplayer game and how you can encourage that in your own designs to make that next breakthrough. We talk about how you create a space for your teams and as managers,

how you create a space for people to ask that what if question. We talk about the power of the hero's journey and how it could apply to both your game designs and life. And we get into a pretty deep dive around how different communities can be formed, both from centralized command and regulation, whether you'd want to see maybe police officers regulating things like social media and game communities or whether it should be left to the industries and the companies themselves. We talk about the power of cryptocurrencies and decentralization and have some pretty

interesting debates about what the good, the bad, what does ownership mean, how does this actually help, where does value come from? And we really dive into how to say something as a designer. The real keys about what makes you a game designer, what differentiates games from other art forms, as well as how you can cultivate this. desire and cultivate the understanding of what it is that you really want to say. How do you express yourself as a designer? How do you create those experiences for your players? So it was a real great honor to get to have these two as guests, both bringing Richard back and having

Nigel here for the first time. They have a lot of great perspective over many, many years in the industry. And so without any further ado, here are Nigel Roberts and Richard Bartle. Hello and welcome. I am here with a special double episode. of Think Like a Game Designer with Nigel Roberts and Richard Bartle. Gentlemen, it's so wonderful to get to have you both here. Great to be here as before. I'm really pleased to be here for the first time. Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, you know, our audience will already be familiar with Richard because he's been on the podcast before. And you both are really kind of legends in not just the game industry, but the history of the Internet and how we think about, you know, connective networks. So I'm actually really excited to talk about both. So you were both kind of started working together. Am I correct that it was when you were kind of co-developing the first multi-user dungeons or kind of around that time period?

Is that right? Well, what you mean is we're old, right? Legends. I use the word legends. Well, it's better than being myths. Yeah. The person who started off mud, which was like the first virtual world precursor to today. MMOs was a mutual friend called Roy Trubshaw.

Nigel was in the same academic year as him. I was the year under, so Nigel knew him before. Roy started writing this program called Mud. We both got involved. Nigel was chairman of the Computing Society, which I joined. So, yeah, we've kept in touch ever since. It's a long friendship. It is.

I can actually give you a little. bit of a background as to how it all came about, which predates Richard's involvement by about 48 hours or something like that. So Richard reminded me a few weeks ago that how we met, which is that we were both apparently in a queue for tickets for a band at the university in Freshers Week, right? And we were just queuing up, and it was a long queue, because a very popular a band and we got talking and turned out we had a lot in common. But a couple of days previous, it might have been as much as a week. I managed to wangle myself a room on campus, which was kind of unusual for somebody in

their second year. I was a hacker even then, I guess. And so Roy and I were sitting together one day and we'd been playing. what you now know is Colossal Cave all the previous year. And we got all the way through it. We even got the last point, which if anybody on the podcast doesn't know what the last point is, you've got to take the magazines into the room that you can't get out of.

Very last. Right. So, and we, we, we have, we have the previous chair or treasurer. I forget what he was. A guy called Keith Routenbach came back for a visit, first weekend in our second year. He'd been the chair or the treasurer of the Computer Society before Roy and I got involved. And we'll be just kind of, you know, having a social visit. And we're talking about Advent, as we called it.

And I just turned to Roy and said, what if? I'll come back to the power of what if in a minute or the magic of what if. What if you could have more than one person in the dungeon at the same time. And Roy got this implementers look in his eye. He had this strange look in his eye. He turned around to me and said, you know what? I think I know how to do that.

Do it with a shareable high segment. Old technology, I guess. And he was off to the races. He was coding away in assembly language. And by the time I met Richard about a week later, Roy had a working prototype. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's, I mean, it's incredible. And we dug into some of the story. in the last podcast that I did, but I want to dig into this idea because you kind of flagged it about the magic of what if, because I know you've given a talk about this recently, and that power of like how you go from a zero to one innovation, right?

Which is something like what you did, where it's like, hey, what if this world was different? What if the thing that we all take for granted that video games are the single player experience and that we can all now collectively play together, which is, of course, transformed the entire world of gaming how do you approach that? How do you create space for those that want to do that next major innovation, that next zero to one? How does the magic of what if play out for you?

Well, I think if you're a manager, which I've not been much in my life, I've tried to avoid management roles all my life. I've either been an implementer or an enabler or something like that. But if you're a manager out there and you're listening to this, what you just said is absolutely right. you've got to give people space. You've got to say there's no such thing as a stupid question. In fact, some of the best questions are the stupid questions. Because if you try and shut somebody down or whatever, because they don't understand something or they misunderstand something,

you're closing off that creativity. There is this spark, what I call the magic of what if. And it's only something I've been thinking about, you know, looking back on what I've done over the past. I'm not going to say how many years, but quite a lot. And it is, it is. You've got to be able to ask those questions of people, and then other people will come up,

and they will show you what you should be doing. Yeah, so I think that there's one, so I've done a lot of, I've done a lot of research into this. I've done some work with the Wharton School of Business, and we built games to help encourage this kind of space. And so the concept that you're referring to, I think is often referred to as creating psychological,

safety, creating a space where it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to not know. And in fact, to encourage a challenging of assumptions and breaking through the patterns that are kind of the norms of what's happening. One of the challenges that comes when you do that. I mean, I think it's absolutely a best practice. In our company, we do this once a quarter. We'll have just a pure assumptions challenging exercise. We'll take any one of our projects and just literally go through each assumption we have from the very fundamentals and see what happens when we challenge them. How do you balance that space creation, that what if creation, that exploration with, you know, the need to execute, right, with the need to kind of, you know, you can't be questioning

everything all the time or you go too slow and things don't move. How do you think about that process of going from, okay, let's make sure we're questioning and circling back to other times when's, hey, no, let's now, you know, move forward and stop going back. How do you balance that? And this is for either of you. I'll, I'll carry on with this for a second. I worked for the phone company for a while, that eight to ten years as a contractor at the research department near Epswich. And I worked in quite an important part,

but not what I did was so important. But the important part was kind of making sure that the software that was used to run the phone company didn't get introduced any bugs by any enthusiastic implementers. It was called Build Control. And I worked for a guy called Peter. And Richard and I were both, we're from slightly similar backgrounds and challenging convention, which I hate to use that word, but it's become a bit of a cliche now for our university.

It's become a strapped line. But challenging convention is something that we do. And so I work for this guy. and he asked me to go do something. It was probably just rebuilding an IBM PC or something. In those days, we had to put memory managers and stuff in to get Windows 3.1 running properly and so on. And I was trying to challenge his assumptions, say, look, we need to do it this way and it will run smoother and so on. And he just turned around to me and he used an expression that's a bit like RTFM.

you've probably never heard this expression outside what I'm about to say, but he was JFDI, which stands for Just Please Do It. So what you have to do, I think, to answer your question is to teach the people that to understand where, if you're a manager, where you're coming from, what you need doing. You can't challenge, you can't challenge, you know, whether or not you should buy half-fat milk or full-fat milk for the tea club or the tuck shop. It's, there, but you have to be unafraid to hold up, speak truth to power. Yeah, fascinating. I like the, the acronym modification there.

So the somewhat, I think, you know, when you kind of bring up this idea of, you know, what it's like to be in a phone company or when you're talking about sort of more trivial execution decisions versus important execution decisions, I think about how the creative process is different. I mean, in many ways it's the same and in some ways it's different depending upon both the type of thing you're making and the size of the team that you're working with, right? The bigger the team, there's more coordination that's required. And then maybe I'll create an opportunity for Richard to jump back in because you've written not just, you know, you've not just made, you know, major impacts into, you know, in computer games and, and digital production, but also writing nonfiction books and also. and also fiction books, how do you think about the creative process as so far as it is the same

or different between those different disciplines of, you know, sort of educating, entertaining, telling a story, how much of those overlap for you or how do you see those pulled apart? You want me to answer that? Yeah. Okay. Well, if you're a creative person, the problem isn't inspiration. The problem is which of the many ideas do I? I have is the one I'm going to do. And if you've given a boring task to do, which is pretty well what I have to do most of the time in my academic work, well, creativity is something that you just do because that makes it less boring. Doesn't slow it down, doesn't speed it up, just makes it more interesting. And the students tend to like it because it's not the same

as everybody else is boring stuff. Now, when it comes to industry, if you're consulting for somebody else, which is what I mainly do these days because I don't have a quarter of a billion dollars to make an MMO, last time I checked, with that, then you're still creating,

but you're creating within someone else's parameters. And in a games industry, it's always within someone else's parameters. It's always there are business requirements, there are financial requirements, there are deadlines, there are what can your team do? So even though you want to do something,

because ultimately it's all about expression. As a game designer, you're trying to say something to the players. Yeah. So game designers are always, well, they're trying to say something. They should be trying to say something. If they're not trying to say something, then why are they game designers?

It's like, why are you an author if you don't like writing? Why you're an actor if you don't like acting? And for game designing, well, you should be trying to say something. Otherwise, all you're doing is solving puzzles in puzzles of game design rather than some form of expression. So even though you're trying to say things, you do. get compromises that you have to make with the teams you're working with and the people who are paying your money and everything else, to which there are creative solutions, but they're not creative solutions that enable you to say things to the people you want to say them to, namely

the players. They enable you to say things to the people who are giving you instructions, as Nigel alluded to, but they don't let you say things speak to your play. So don't let you express yourself to the players if there are too many constraints. Can you disambiguous, make that a little bit more concrete for people, rather? It's like the, because I love this idea that we're always trying to say something, but can you give maybe some examples from your own work or work that you're very familiar with of what was trying to be said in that work? Okay, well, going back to mud, because Nigel's familiar with it,

what I was trying to say through that was it was to do with freedom. I wanted to say you have the freedom to be who you want to be. And so that's what the whole game was about. It was trying to give people the freedom to find out who they were. So it was an identity-solving thing. Because the real world didn't let you do it, but the virtual world we could let you do it. And that's what I was trying to say to the players.

Look, you can be yourself. You don't have to follow what the rest of the world is. telling you about you. The rest of the world sucks. This game, this world is for you to be the person you want to be. And if you don't know who that is, it's the way you find out. So that would be an example of expressing something. So that's about freedom. But there are other ways you can have freedom, not freedom, expression, sorry. There are other ways you can have expression. For example, you might want to build bridges between communities. You You might want to bring people together.

That would be a reason to create games. You might want to make people feel how other people feel. So you might create a world that's in a situation that's uncomfortable for many people because you're trying to express to them that this is what it's like living in some other country or even your own country in a different part of it. So there are ways, if you've got something to say, then a game design is a way of saying it, just as writing a book, writing a screenplay, choreographing a dance, writing songs, sculpting, artistry with paint.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I love that. And I agree with you that that's the kind of thing that all creative art forms, I feel Like you have to, you have something that you want to say. You have some feeling and emotion or a thing you want to impart to your audience, rather that be game designer art or writing. Nigel, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I was just going to jump in a little bit earlier because something Richard said was very,

very, very interesting and fundamental. I mean, anybody who in 10 years ago or more recently played second life will know about people adopting different identities, gender in particular. But what Richard did in providing the platform for people to do it, that was the first time we ever saw anybody adopt a female persona in a game. Well, of course, we knew everybody who was playing, so we kind of knew who they were, besides which, without being too politically incorrect,

just about everybody who had a modem in those days was male. So we kind of knew that. Although interestingly enough, I had a conversation with another mutual friend of ours who was in Richard Gio University. And we remarked really how back in the 1970s, late 1970s, there were about 35, 40% of females in our year doing computer science. And in the 80s, that kind of evaporated. We never knew why.

Going back to what Richard said, it is a kind of freedom. And as I say, I didn't actually realize until I read some of Richard's more recent writing, how much the influence of growing up in the political environment and the social environment that we both did, well, certainly affected me. I mean, I just thought I got on with my life. I followed the British equivalent to the American dream and so on. But in fact, when I suddenly realize how much of the upper classes still ran the country, I still got this enormous chip on my shoulder.

So virtual games allow you to explore that and adopt different genders, orientations. I'm not even going to go down the furry thing. Yeah, this is where people get to discover themselves and explore different aspects of their personality in representations. I mean, I'm a big believer that the kind of core reasons that we play games, you know, as a species is to be able to learn in a safe environment, right? We're able to explore and build, try different things out where the consequences are not the same as they are. It's not true. Yes, yes, exactly. And so I think that the ability to explore different personas and different identities and try things on. It's just like when small children try on,

they play pretend and play firemen and play house and play those things. They're able to learn how these roles fit in areas where they're not, you know, they're not real. There's no real consequences. And as adults, we need that too. It doesn't change that, you know, there's still plenty of aspects of us to explore and learn and grow as we as we evolve. And so I think there's, I want to kind of move the conversation in a direction because not only, you know, when we're talking about interconnected games, it's no longer just about pretending in a safe space. There's real connections that are made here. There's real things that get changed. And how we build the networks that connect people changes people's lives, right? Even the things like social

media now, they're in many ways gamified, right? How am I trying to, how do I get likes? How do I, you know, get engagement in the reinforcement systems? What types of information gets displayed to me? How does the algorithm display things, right? Whether that be in a game world, whether that be in a pseudo, real world connection, where I would argue that, you know, the social media connections are, you know, sort of this gamified mediated thing, whether it be through the internet. And I know, Nigel, you were very involved in a lot of the ICAN and kind of protocols built there. And in fact, in my research, is it true that you actually were the first person in the UK to win a lawsuit for unsolicited email, receiving unsolicited emails?

Is that, then I get that right? That's absolutely true. But that came out of left field. I wasn't expecting to bring that one up. Yeah. I did research before the show, and I had to bring that up. I'm really intrigued. But I'll let you tell that story a little bit, but I also want to make sure I want to frame it in the context of like,

literally how important those rules are, right? When are people allowed to contact you? What's the mediums through which they do so? How is that handled and how that's going to shape our, literally the future of society? So you can tell that story, but I want to also steer us in the broader direction. We'll come back to the story and I'll rely on you to bring it up at the appropriate point. But one of the things that started to emerge in the late 90s, so really the inflection point is Tim Bernersley and the World Wide Web, right?

So late night is the internet starts to become really important in everybody's lives. And by the early 2000s, it's kind of exploded. And then, and this is something I work with day to day, bad things happen on the internet. We know this. And what seems to have happened is the village has become the world. I mean, Marshall McLuhan used this expression, the global village back in the day. but every village one in 2000 had bad guys right they did things and in a village they were either ignored buried under the carpet or they were dealt with in not very um should we say with fairly efficiently and maybe extrajudicially right with the spreading of that village to the entire globe you have the creation of what I call intentional communities.

So give an example, I'm a radio ham or I was. I've been too busy to focus on it in recent years. You will find people making quite a decent thing out of running a forum just for those people. And then you get the dark web, people creating intentional communities of things we don't want them to create. like terrorism, child sexual abuse material, and so on. And that's the challenge that we have to deal with. And law enforcement and society in general is finding it, it's always playing catch-up. If you go back to the 1970s, which was sort of like the equivalent in the UK of the 1940s and 1950s in the US,

our government built a bunch of roads. They built motorways. and then bank robbers suddenly realize he'd get in a fast car, drive to the other side of the country, commit a bank robbery, and be back home in time, as we say, for tea. So law enforcement was just kind of based locally, a little policeman wandering around on bicycles. So they had to put them in cars and create what we call the flying squad. So this always happens, and society needs to catch up. Yeah, so I'll use this as another opportunity to bring Richard back in, because as I recall, So I'm going to frame this also a little bit broader as centralized solutions and sort of systemic or decentralized solutions to these problems, right?

We have worlds where most people are good, but there's always some bad actors. And we are trying to solve for a way to create a way for us to ideally optimize for the good and minimize the bad as we're bringing more and more people together. And I know your book, How to Be a God kind of talks about this, right? You get to make the best of all possible worlds when you're designing a virtual world. what are some principles that come to play to make that outcome more likely to be good or more likely to realize whether it be your vision and the thing you want to communicate or at least allowing people to express the best parts of themselves and create a safe space as possible? Yes, okay. So the first thing to point out is that in a game you might not want a safe. Sorry, it just said I'd reconnected.

So the first thing to point out is that in a game you might not want a safe space. because you need some edginess in games. If it's a player versus player game, then, yeah, of course you're going to want some conflict. And of course you're going to want some trash talking. And some people have got different thresholds to others. And if you've got a game for children, then that would be different for a game for adults who all know each other and are perfectly happy to use terms which they wouldn't in public. So there isn't just a binary, it's safe or it's not.

It's whether it's within your parameters of being safe for you. Now there are some levels at which society would want to step in and say this isn't safe for society. You might not mind sitting around planning how to print 3D print weapons or something, but the rest of us do. in which case society's laws and morals and ethics have to come in and take place but within a game context

all for designers being able to set the levels that they want or allow the players to set them now as for what happens when the players do not conform to these social laws well

there are a number of things you could do some of them haven't been tried. Some of them have been tried. Some of them are common. One common thing to do is just to ban the players for a short period. And if they keep coming back and misbehaving, increasing the ban until eventually you kick them out. Something else you could do is anybody who wants to play your game gets, has to give you their credit card. And if they misbehave, you charge their credit card. Now, no one's trying to try. that, but you can do that. A bad after tax. I love it. Yeah. Well, it costs money to service what someone's doing when they misbehaved. So yeah.

Another thing you can do is have, there's probably a better word for it now, but they certainly used to be called blacklists where, you see, it turns out that all the people who were sending emails to female celebrities telling them they're going to rape them and all this sort of stuff, it's actually pretty much the same bunch of people. The same person who writes to the MP saying that she's fat and they're going to kill her children and all sorts is the same person who writes to the other MP or to the celebrity or to the TV or radio news presenter. and if you identify those people, well, outside the internet,

you would, if someone's behaving like that, they go through a court process and then you lock them up. There's no reason why that couldn't happen on the internet, except that local governments don't run the internet. They abrogated that responsibility to the people who run the platforms. what perhaps should be happening is instead of Facebook having to pay the 10,000 people to go looking through their posts for misbehaviors, Facebook should be paying the police to do that. And we should be having thousands of police officers doing it who are independent and who can work across multiple platforms and who actually got warrants so they can do arrests and things if bad things are happening.

So that's perhaps in the future. We have seen similar things like if there's a sports stadium and misbehavior there, well, the sports stadium has to pay for the police to police the sports because they wouldn't be having to do it if the sports stadium wasn't there. Similar thing for social networks and you could argue a similar thing for games if they're above a particular size. fascinating well maybe this is a good opportunity to come back to Nigel's story on the uh being the enforcing arm of of unsolicited emails i know in the u.s there's some uh regulations coming in a place very soon about unsolicited text messages because i know i have been getting we have an election coming up and so i'm getting non-stop text messages which are very annoying uh for through SMS so i'm eager to see that gone but uh how uh you know both i you know i'm intrigued and

how much you think this is a good thing in terms of like using government as the arm to enforce, as Richard was implying maybe should be done for the broader internet more regularly. But there's another ethos here that I think a lot of people do enjoy that the internet has a level of freedom and, you know, extra government's capacity and, you know, that no government can really shut it down in the same way that, you know, it can with physical things and space that it has. So there's some trade-off here between how much freedom we want to allow in this global network versus how much we want to be enforcing some norms that, you know, let's face it, that people are going to be bad actors and we'll have used whatever tools are available to them.

Sure. Well, before I start on, you're keen to get to this story, and it's not as interesting as you think. All right. Well, we don't have to get into the details of his knowledge. I was just amused. I'm more interested in the principles. But what's interesting is the use of the words. word freedom, right? So that was the last thing you said. And the thing is, and I went over to

the dark side. I studied law after my computer science degree, but I did it about 20 years later. The difference between the way that the US and people in the US regard the word freedom and the way people in Europe, and by that I do very much include the United Kingdom, the British Isles, in Europe is slightly and subtly different. We're all talking about the age of reason. We're all talking about the Enlightenment. But the difference is that in Europe, we accept necessary and proportionate limitations on that freedom. We can't go out and buy a gun at, we call it Tesco, you call it Walmart.

In Texas, you can go buy it at Walmart, I think. So we have those limitations. And what's happened over the past 20 years in the development of, should we say law and rule-based, and so this is where it's directly on games now, and rule-based stuff, is that governments have realized that they cannot pay for police and prosecutors and the whole panoply of society,

the way it was done in the Victorian era, to keep the lower class. and the proletariat in order, which is basically what a lot of the mechanism of society was up until recently. And they've been designing the laws so that people can do what you might call self-help. So in consumer law, they don't say that the local government's trading standards department is going to grab your dodgy market trader and haul him into court. what they say is if dodgy market traded us something to you, you can

go haul him into court and you've got these weapons and they build these weapons. One of the weapons they built was the law I used on solicited mail. It was really designed originally for

spam phone calls, which were even a bigger problem in the US. And I had a friend of mine who was very much around And in the early days of the early 1970s, is the first job I went to, work for a chemical digital equipment corporation.

His name's John. And he's based in Boston. He used to, should we say, retaliate when he got his spam phone calls. You know, if you get a spam phone call and the guy's got an 800 number, well, you can imagine what kind of fun you can have with that. And this is back in the days

before the internet became a thing at home. There's a lot of great videos of this now, and there's even like whole soundboards and recordings you can use. Absolutely. Those robocalls that are very entertaining. My favorite is Stewie Griffin. Yeah. But so it was based on this principle. And I basically wrote to the people who sent me this spam email and said, look, this new law says you can't do it.

and I'm charging you for doing it. And they just ignored it because, you know, nobody'd ever done this kind of stuff. So I said, okay, fine. And we went to what you guys in the US would call small claims court. Here it's the county court and the way they do it is they divide it up into three slices and they decide what the value of the claim is. And then if it's below 10,000 pounds, which is actually quite a lot. But if it's below 10,000 pounds, it goes on to the small claims.

as we call it, and that then means you're not liable to have to pay the other guy's legal expenses, even if you lose. So I pushed it through. They ignored it again. So there's no great perimation showdown here. It was basically a default judgment. Then the fun really started, because that's when it was, so I got the judgment, but as you probably know, getting a judgment is only half the thing. You've actually got to get them to pay up. And there are whole TV shows in England. I don't know if it's the same in the US,

where they film bailiffs who go in and they take people's cars away, repo men and so on. So you have to then enforce. It didn't get to that stage. But what happened was, I wrote to them and said, look, I've got this judgment,

but the judge hasn't yet, assess damages. It's limited to 300 pounds because that's the claim I made, small claims track, because that was the cheapest, the cheapest it could have been for the court fees. Are you going to pay up? So they decided to pay up. So I got to check for 300 pounds, which I framed and photographed. And then the press got involved and it was kind of like, you know, we talk about the hero's journey in story and basically games a story. But the other thing that the press like is David and Goliath. So this was classic David and Goliath. It went what you would now call viral. I was interviewed on national television and so on. But really, behind it all,

it was just, you know, some guy from the north of England being awkward. And that's me. Well, I love, I love fighting the good fight here. And so I'm glad we got to, we got to hear that story. I was, I was entertaining. So one of the things that interests me, And I'm happy to come back to the hero's journey too, because I also find that to be a really important frame. One of the things that interests me now is sort of the new generation of game designs. And we've we've been experimenting with this too with our game Soul Forge Fusion of using sort of using blockchain and using the ability to have more financial incentives and without removing the need for a centralized authority, using kind of algorithms and and and and a public ledger to be able to encourage, incentivize and enforce the kinds of behaviors that you want.

And there's a promise here, not claiming that it's been delivered on yet, but there's a promise here that these systems can deliver that value that we want, which is a, you know, well-policed community that's enforcing the kinds of norms that we want, that's encouraging the kinds of behaviors that we want, without having to rely on the arm of the government or the inefficiency of bureaucracy or even a centralized game designer authority or, you know, social media CEO to tell us what's supposed to be happening. Do you either of you have thoughts on that system, either the promises or perils of a decentralized regulation system for multi-hiftly, but I think Richard is the guy who's going to

have most to say on this. Obviously, you're talking about smart contracts. So what you're talking about is the players and the implementers. designing a system whereby you have a set of rules, whatever they are. It could be some completely wacky world. And there are consequences and rewards if you either obey them or don't. The one point I wanted to make is what's really worth doing at this stage is to review some work that was done in the 1940s and 1950s.

By that, what I'm talking about is the science fiction of Robert Heinlein. Because there's an awful lot of stuff. I mean, you read some of the stuff he wrote. then, you kind of think, well, is that character really Elon Musk? You know, that, that's kind of the thing. And I've got a bunch of books behind me here, which I haven't opened in 20, 30 years. So you're probably reminding me to get some of them down and have a read through in the next few days. But Richard, it's down to you, really. Yeah, okay. So decentralization is fine until you don't want to be decentralized.

centralized. If you want to change the rules of your game and you can't because everything's smart contracts, that's a problem. If you want to, if the players take it one way that you don't like, it's hard to rein them in. It really depends on what your blockchain actually what value it carries. If it's a pointer to something that you control, then that makes it a lot easier for you to say, well, it doesn't point at what you thought it did. It points to something else now. But if you're doing that, then you've got a central, centralized system anyway. So what would be the point of it? If you're trying to give people freedom to do what they want with your game, it might be that what they want to do stops everyone else wanting to play it,

is something that we've seen a lot of in MMOs with real money trading where people leave games because there's just too much interference from people who are taking the gold farming kind of concept. Yeah. So I'd be interesting to find out what it is that you're doing. that requires blockchain. Yeah, so there's a couple of different aspects to it

that I would break down. One is, first of all, just agree with you that I don't believe that kind of core game design decisions should be decentralized generally. Like, I think there's a skill to game design, and that's part of what the whole premise of this podcast is about, and that if you give players what they say they want, a lot of times it will all fall apart very quickly.

There's certain amounts of tension and crafting that needs to come into design. But when it comes to how you empower the community, there are tools that blockchain allows that are, I think, easier. Not that they can't be done in centralized service systems, but they're a little easier to do with these decentralized systems. One is creating, I think players having control over a pool of resources that they get to then allocate towards different behaviors that grow the community. So for example, being able to run tournaments and encourage content creators and build like, you know, new kind of side projects and extra utility for the game, being able to reward that sort of stuff directly and let the community decide which of those things they want to reward. I think is pretty valuable. So and I'll just give an example of something that I've seen in the physical game space. So in Magic the Gathering is kind of what I grew up playing the sort of physical trading card game.

they a fan created format called commander was something that the centralized authority of of wizards of the coast of creators of magic were resisted for a very long time but eventually because they could just run do whatever they wanted with the physical stuff they were it became the most popular format and then became now the way most people play the game and finally it took a while for the centralized system to like correctly recognize and reward that that could have happened way faster and more efficiently if the system was in a in a digital space to be more decentralized in which things get rewarded and how things grow over time and to give people more of a sense of ownership of that direction of the social space,

not necessarily the design space. Well, when you say reward, what is the reward? Well, so there's rewards in the form of actual kind of cryptocurrency tokens and monetary reward as well as status rewards that you can, but primarily the fact that you can give both collectible objects and what tokens that are have real. monetary value. Well, do the tokens only have real monetary value if the players want to pay real money for them. They don't actually have any real. You couldn't sell them to a non-player.

And also they'd cease to have, well, actually, perhaps they wouldn't. Yeah, but Richard, that's exactly the same with the fiat currency, right? It's the only value that people think it has. It is, except that you've got to pay your taxes in fiat currency. So they do actually have. have a value. And the law can come along and take away your person if you don't. Basically, you're giving people stars like you were when you're at school. They've got a little star for doing something. Or McDonald's, you've got little stuff.

Yeah, they're little rewards, and they're nice to have and they show some things. The other thing, though, is that when you say the community, not all the players are going to get involved in this. In fact, it sounds if it's only going to be a very small number of players who will be doing all the stuff. So it's a bit like a modding community where a small group of people are working together to create utilities that are available for everybody in the game.

But most people aren't interested in that. But if you empower that small community and give them abilities to change the game, game, you've got to be able to rein them in if they make changes that you really don't want. Yeah. No, I think the modding community is a great analogy, right? That's a, it's a subset of people. And this is true in all forms of governance, right?

Like, I mean, it's true. Very few people are actually involved in, you know, even elections and everything else, right? It's a very, you know, that's a small subset of people that really care. And so a modding community is exactly that where, hey, they're going to create these new experiences for players and they invests their identity in it, they get some social rewards for doing so. But imagine if that mod and community, the number of players playing it,

you can reward them economically for that as well, and that players could put up bounties of this currency. And again, these currencies are exchangeable, so they're not just gold stars. They're gold stars that you can change into a cheeseburger or paying your taxes with some conversion. If you want it. Somebody has to want the conversion.

That's what we've seen hasn't happened. people don't want them because there's so much speculation going on. Well, I mean, there's trillions of dollars of value out there. So there is some people want them. Some people want these coins, these currents. Trillions of dollars have been spent on them, but whether you can recoup the trillions of dollars when you spend. Sure, sure, sure, sure. That's the thing.

I mean, it's got value while it's got value. Right. Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that it's a bad idea. I'm just querying whether it's something that you really want to bet the farm on. Sure, sure. Heading off here into economics, which is quite interesting. And again, this is something that maybe younger listeners won't be aware of.

But although I guess in some countries it's coming back, when Europe was divided into two between the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet bloc and NATO on one side and on the other, most of the communist countries had what were called soft currencies and they only had the value they had because the command economy said what those currencies were worth

and so if you wanted to go take a day trip across from West Berlin to East Berlin, you had to change so much and you only got three for one. So it's kind of the same thing here. Once the the barriers disappeared, those currencies basically became worthless

and I was I was there in Germany the day before it was before reunification it was in 1980 1989 1990 timeframe on the day where they merged the currencies and basically everything on the east we happened to be on the east at the time everything on the east shut down

because nobody wanted the money anymore because they knew that in three three days time, it was worthless. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, we've seen plenty of currencies either gets, you know, hyper devalued or, or disappear entirely when the, the government or environment changed. I think that when it comes to, when it comes to games specifically,

I think there's, there's upsides and downsides. I certainly think that there is, you know, games have used in-game economies and reward structures for, you know, a very long time. And in fact, how we build those systems makes a massive impact. Even outside of the fun of the game, the way that we choose to dole out rewards, even rewards that are kind of non-fungible or rewards that are just gold stars, as Richard put it, makes a big difference to people's feelings and emotional impacts and what they choose to, how they choose to behave.

Right. So for example, even just leaving aside, so in our game, Soulforce Fusion, we reward, you know, experience points for you and your deck of cards whenever you complete a game, regardless of whether you win or lose. But we found that a lot of people were forfeiting in their online games because when they felt they were losing because they got more points when they won and they just didn't want to play anymore. And so we stopped rewarding any experience points when you forfeit.

And that changed the behaviors dramatically, right? So now people like, okay, they'll finish the game so people can have the experience of completing a good game because we change the reward systems. So how we design those reward systems matters a ton. And there's a question of if it's, you know, gold stars or experience points is the rewards or if it's, let's just for fake of it. It's a currency that can be exchanged for real dollars or you're rewarding real dollars.

You know, as, again, I played competitive match tournaments for real dollars, you know, all the time growing up. That was how I kind of got into this industry. It changes the equation. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. When you have something at stake, it changes the emotional impact of the game. I don't know how you think about those kinds of tradeoffs. Well, I'm a poker player.

There you go. I know exactly what you mean. And... Yeah, it completely changes the dynamic of the game. I can't play poker for playing money. It just makes no sense whatsoever. Yes, yes, exactly. Poker is a really boring game without something on the line,

and it's an unbelievably deep and fascinating game with something on the line, especially with a lot on the line. Absolutely, correct, yeah. Yeah, well, with poker, it's got to hurt. If it doesn't hurt, if you were playing Elon Muskett poker and you are paying with the same kind of money you normally pay for poker, well, that's like fractions of a penny. to him. So yeah, it wouldn't hurt him, except for maybe his self-esteem.

But in a game world, yes, we do have rewards, and a lot of the rewards are in-context rewards. So if you're playing an MMO, typically there'll be an in-game currency like gold pieces or something. And in theory, you can sell those. You're not supposed to be able to, but you can usually find a buyer for them. if you say, look, I'll give you 10,000 of these if you give me a pound or a dollar or whatever, then, yeah, sure, you can find buyer. So they can be converted into fiat currency, but they've only got value because in the MMO, that's what the MPCs take. Now, if you add the second currency, one that might be blockchain based,

then the NPCs accept that, or at least the cash shop accepts that, well, that does give you some other value for it, but it's only valuable because it's in the game. It's like shares in a company are only valuable, really, because of the dividends they pay or the expected dividends that they're going to pay, or the amount of money the company actually owns, the assets the company owns. So if you're buying something, if you've got some currency that's convertible within, the game, okay, well, I can see how that's valuable to players of that game. But it's only valuable while the game's there.

Once the game's finished, what blockchain gives you is, well, here's a currency that doesn't have any value in the game, but it's now, it's like a Roman pot. You know, you can't use it for drinking out of, but it's rare and they don't make them anymore. also, yeah, you've got a museum of... I think we all agree that there's a core entity that matters for purposes of how you would value these things, whether that be the U.S. government and the U.S. dollar or Soul Forge's digital currency in the Soul Forge game or any or companies likely future profits, right? So you mentioned stocks, which is a great example, right? Obviously, people don't just value stocks based on the dividends

that they pay now, but it's also your projections of what's going to happen in the future. And so people choose to value a thing based on what they're sometimes they value based on their emotional experiences of it or what happened in the news that day or whatever. Like, or, you know, there's a, there's a world of player, you know, human expectations, uh, in terms of how, how they value things. And it's some of that is the actual utility. Some of that is the projected utility. Some of that is the value of your identity and the personal network that you are part of it.

I value, you know, I, I, I have a belief in set of stories around the United States or the set of stories around Bitcoin or set of stories around the in game gold. in World of Warcraft that maybe decide how I'm going to value it and what's going to happen there. Nigel, what do you think about that? Yeah, sure. Well, there's another problem you've got that you might haven't have considered this in the wider world. So let's assume that you are really successful in creating this system of rewards and obligations

within game and that it expands beyond the confines of the game. I mean, we've seen the Linden Dollar is kind of tradable, right? you expand it become too successful and then what happens is the government wants its share and we have had there's a law going through parliament like this week it was announced about a week or so ago which is designed to give certainty to bitcoin holdings um i forget the name i think it's called the digital assets bill or something it's it's it's It's the new government, and it's probably a one-line thing that says Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is property.

I mean, because you have a problem, right? So, supposing somebody steals your Bitcoin, right? Is that theft? Well, at the moment, it might not be, because it has to be property. And if it's not property, then it can't be stolen. And therefore, you're acquitted. Well, and this is the thing. know, and we're getting into the weeds and some theory and philosophy here, which I,

I love. So hopefully you guys are enjoying this conversation as much as I have in our audience is. But like, you know, these things all need to be wrestled with, right? So when we talk about the value of the idea of intellectual property at all, right? That's required a lot of regulation and a lot of forethought about what does intellectual property mean. What does it mean you have the right to do? What don't you have the right to do? When do your rights expire? Why would we have those rights? There's a version of property rights that were worked out over thousands of years, hundreds of years. We have the version of intellectual property rights and information rights that we have on the internet,

and especially since the internet has formed of how am I allowed to communicate with you? What are the things I create belong to me? What are the protocols that we allow to communicate with each other? How can I be regulated or not regulated? And I think the idea that excited me about the entire kind of cryptocurrency space is that there's a more this idea of digital property, which I've seen games, many games did use to have an idea of digital property. So second life is one, the original version of Magic Online, you had your card you on, but now almost all of them have moved in the direction of you don't actually own anything, right?

It's all, we're licensing you the rights to use these things. You don't actually own everything. We have full control. And so it's moved into a more centralized control, less property rights model. And the same is true for your data when you use services like Google or Facebook or any of those things. And I like the idea that there's a, it's forcing our society to wrestle with a, no, actually, you should have rights to your digital life and your digital property and that there's something of value there. There's a lot of pitfalls. Don't get me wrong. And I'm happy, that's why I'm interested to explore them. But I think this idea of as we move our lives more entirely online, as the, our real relationships and our real connections and our real work all lives online,

is there a solution here that gives us more, more rights and more control as an individual than than what it seems like society is pushing towards. Well, the challenge is certainly there. I mean, you look around. Richard's got a ton of books. I've got books, right? I can give Richard a book. You can give me a book.

Can't? Maybe not. You know, you're licensing it on your device, whether it's all your devices or one device, and can you pass it on? Maybe. Problems libraries. Lending libraries are struggling with this right now.

There are some lawsuits going around right now. So, yeah, all I can say is the challenges are here. Yeah. The thing is that games have got a special case in that if the players actually owned the things that their character owns, or even if they owned their character, that would be a disaster for most MMOs. I mean, it would be really, really bad. it would mean that if anything that you did was destroyed

your sword wore out hey you've broken my sword that's worth money where's my compensation you broke it and you can't do anything it would be impossible to nerve characters you have made my warlock

worthless by increasing the or decreasing the value some spell. You can't. So virtual worlds are protected. Sure,

though I think that's a little bit of a specious argument. I mean, like, again, I'll use the case because my background

is in magic the gathering. And tradable, collectible cards are worth millions of dollars in some cases, mostly, you know,

lots of money. And the main, you know, the company that produce them can ban cards from tournaments. They can reprint

cards, they can pull cards out of print. And those all have massive impacts on the value of your things. And there's no legal lawsuits.

There's no problems with that. So you can still say, yes, you own your character, but we have the rights to change the rules within the game because that's the part that we control. But you own your character and your thing and you can take it with you whatever you want. I don't think that's realistically. So what does owning your character mean? What is your character? Right.

Your character doesn't have a, it only. Yeah, sorry. I want to clarify it, right? Again, ownership, as I mentioned, with intellectual property and ownership, there's a variety of different sub-rights that come with that. and we have to decide which ones matter. At a baseline, the ability to say I can, I can sell it, I can trade it, I can buy it, I can, you know, destroy it. And as if I want to, those are, those are ownership rights that are, you can't take it

from me without my permission. Those are, those would be a baseline set of ownership rights. What is the it that you're talking about? Sure. In this case, it would be a specific configuration of traits or a, you know, a digital representation of, you know, for example of Soulforge fusion, every deck is one of a kind, unique, right? So you have the rights to this particular deck. No one else has the rights to use that deck. It has its own specific cards in it. It has its own history and traits. And that's now,

and again, I can't destroy it because it's, it's those ones that are that are turned into, that are on a digital ledger. I can't get rid of it. Now, I have the ability to say in my game, when you connect it to the game, it can do, I can change how it's, how it engages with the game or what experience you're allowed to earn or which tournaments you're allowed to participate in or those kinds of things I can do, but you still have that specific configuration that no one else will ever have. But what you've got there is a configuration of pointers, and the pointers point to things, and the things they point to can change.

You say you own this particular card, but what do you mean? What's the thing that you're owning? You're owning a pointer to some thing, and that thing can be changed. I could change it so that what you say it's a black lotus in Magic the Gathering, and it turns you turn it to land. Yeah. So that doesn't quite work that way because it's, again, these things are, the way we've done it, again, just we're getting in the weeds for my project.

But like we put all of those things not pointing to like our website, but pointing to a decentralized file storage system. So we can't change the fact that it's a black lotus. But what I could say is you're not allowed to play, like as Magic does, right? You can't play the black lotus in most terms. tournaments because it's too expensive and too rare, and so they don't let you play with it. So I could say you have your Black Lotus deck, but I won't let you play it in these tournaments because I want to protect the new players that didn't get access to the Black Lotus.

But you can play in these other tournaments. What you're actually saying is you can change the rules whenever you're like, if you're the God. Yes, that's right. Yeah, of course. And again, I am very much of the opinion, which I think I would guess that you both share, that you as a game designer and core creator, you still need to have control over your game system in order to make sure that it is, it is, you know, fun and, you know, the experience you want. I'm just wondering, what makes what you own a black lotus? What makes it that? Why is it a black

lotus? What makes it? Again, it has a certain, it has a certain art, it has certain text on the card. It has a certain traits, whatever those traits are. It has, and then the fact that I own it is. And so that's all true and I can't, and immutable in the blockchain as well. So all the traits, these are the values and everything. They're all the blockchain. These are what the points worth is. And that's, the whole thing is on the blockchain. Now, for a player character, okay, in an MMO, yeah, okay, we're maybe talking several megabytes there.

But what those things mean, it's all woven into the hierarchy. It's as if, yes, this player's got this value in a class system that goes all the way up of, you know, C++ class system. it's not that you've simply got data, binary data. That binary, that's not what your character is, because that is meaningless without the code to execute data. It has to have the context. Absolutely right.

Without the context, it doesn't have. I mean, again, it can be an artifact. It can be an art piece. It can be, you know, again, you know, if magic stopped existing and nobody played it ever, you might still care about a black lotus as a, you know, as you would, an ancient coin or whatever, piece of art, but it's, of course, dependent in the context of the game.

And I do think there's this interesting tension, which is, I think, what we're all kind of dancing around between the, what is the thing that is immutable, what is the thing that you own, what's the value of that, versus what is the thing that is mutable, that is controlled by the designer or the centralized system and how that works. And, you know, similarly to the... You said how you like philosophy. I think we're talking about Zinn and Badoitung here. Say that. Sorry, I'm not familiar with that term.

Well, the German expressions, but Zin and Bedoytung, it's the thing and the meaning of it. Okay. How do you label something and what does it really mean intrinsically? Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. And I think that, you know, to zoom back out maybe of that, you know, specifically with, with blockchain, but this idea of creating meaning is a big part of what the game space tries to do, right? We create an artificial world.

and we build artificial constraints for artificial goals that somehow magically people choose to really, really care about. I joke about this a lot. Why do I care about getting more points, getting a ball into a hoop or capturing a king or slaying a virtual dragon? Why do I care about those things at all? There's this magic circle that there's something about the way we craft the experience that makes people suddenly care and makes people bring.

value to this equation, again, regardless of whether it's, you know, permanent or ownable or whatever or a tabletop game, how do you think about how we create, you know, kind of how you create that sense of value and meaning, since that's really a lot of our jobs, right? We're trying to build that for players in a way that is, in many ways, defines their life and their friendships and real goals that can often be more meaningful than the job that they go to during the day. And, you know, how do you think about building value in that sense?

well in my field which is MMOs as I keep coming back to them yeah people play for different reasons

and people have got different things that they think are valuable so some people in your terms are trying to learn because as you said

games are often about learning and yeah explorer types they really they really want to learn things but achiever types

aren't so much wanting to learn because they've learnt quite a lot already. What they really want to do is to get a sense that what they've learned has meaning. Socializers, why are they playing? It's nothing to do with learning except learning about themselves and other people. But then if that's your definition of learning, well, everything that humans do is learning. So people will play games. for different reasons and the idea would be that you try to develop your game. If it's a single player or a small group game, you develop it for particular interests that

the players would have that they would want to experience. So if you make a game that's intensely competitive, that's going to attract a certain type of people. But if you create a word game, that's going to attract, you know, for single player, that's It's going to attract a different set of people for different reasons. It's an intellectual puzzle game. Overall, as you say, what makes things have meaning? Well, whatever people do has a meaning,

if they've got a freedom to do it and they chose to do it, then they're doing it for a reason. In MMOs, that reason is ultimately to find out who they are. But in other games, it could be for completely different purposes. and that's what is it you want to say to them because through the game, you're speaking to them and stroking the reason that they're playing

or defining it even. If I can just sort of add to that, I think what we're talking about is the creativity of the game designer. So if you're Taylor Swift or you're Adele or your, give a long list of any they all come to their music

with a different spin so you know or Amy Winehouse so more recent ones right so it's the same of the game designer I think you you can only go and tell the story and it's all story

capital S probably all capitals it's all story and you can only tell the story that you want to tell I'll give you a particular example. About a year ago, I had to review a number of games of all different kinds. And I went through them. And there were some that were supposed to be real popular. They were very shiny.

The graphics were utterly superb. And I gave up after about half an hour. Now, I've been really busy the last 40 years. I've not spent as much time as playing games as I did when I was at a year. university, which is one reason I didn't do too well at university first time around. Richard knows the quote. But there was another I came across, which was the remake of King's Quest. And I went through all of that from beginning to end.

It was the experience I had doing that 12 months ago was equivalent to when Roy and I sat down to play the original adventure, Colossal Cave. I was tempted to go and look at the remake of the Colossal Cave, and I thought, well, no, my own imagination is probably better, you know, left where it was. So it's the story the original designer wants to tell. Richard, what do you think? Well, some of the original designers do want to tell a story,

but there are better ways to tell a story than using a game. What games are, are their machines for generating stories? When you play a game, things happen. There's a record of events. Some of those events are important to you. They're the ones that stick in your memory. They're the ones that inform what you're going to do next. When you look at the causality of them, you get a plot.

If I do this and do this, then this should happen. Will it happen? Do I want to risk that happen? should I try something else? And ultimately, when you play a game and you look back on what you've done, there's a story because the game, through playing the game, has generated that story. If there isn't a story, then nothing interesting happened. And if nothing interested happened, why were you playing the game?

Even completely abstract games with no affection at all, like Tetris, have got a story. If you play a game of Tetris and you're speaking, telling them that, someone else about that game of Tetris, then you'll be saying, well, I mean, the usual thing, building up, it's building up, you're keeping a slot down the left of the 4-1, and it's not coming, and it's coming, and it's coming,

oh my God, make the top, and soon as this 4-1 comes, so it down when it goes, bam, another one, bam, bam, bam, oh my God. And what's the right? And the reason you're right, I say that is many, many years ago, I used to get the boat across from here,

where Richard and I are at the moment, from a town called Harwich to the Hook of Holland. And this was in the late 70s, early 80s, and they had a Pengo machine. Anybody remember Pengo? That was, I fed so much Dutch currency into that machine because it was all about these penguins, moving these ice blocks around and avoiding the snow bees.

You're right. You can tell a story. And that story had me feeding these quarters into that machine. Right. The games where you get to tell a story that you, the player, are the hero of the story, right? You get to actually be the agent in the, in creation. The game designer can direct the story because people aren't necessarily good

at creating their own stories. So if you give them exciting or interesting events, the interesting decisions, that's what game play is, charting your way through the different tensions that form the game. So you can do that. The game system will always give you a story, but you can layer on top of that your own fiction, your own story to give meaning to things.

And some games are completely ruined when you change the fiction. I remember visiting some friends who were making a game years ago. And it was a sheep dog game. And you were controlling sheep with your sheep dog. And the publisher said, that's good, but who's interested in sheep,og? Make it polar bears doing penguins, herding penguins.

Polar bears and penguins live on opposite side of the... It doesn't matter. This was a Hollywood producer, right? It was, I think it was a Japanese company, but the person was British. So they made this game, and of course it was a complete flop, whereas the charming original one, which was exactly the same game just with different pictures, would probably not have been a floppy. It would have been a hit in my home county of Lancash,

and I suspect Yorkshire as well. Yeah, probably would have been. But penguins herding, being herded by polar bears wasn't quite as cute as farmer with a corn, cob, pipe herds, and a sheep dog herding. Yeah, well, each aspect of the game matters to craft the experience, right? The story, the visuals, the not just the mechanics and the mathematics of it, and the context within which it is presented to you. All of those things matter, right? If I'm playing in a tournament and there's money on the line or there's, I'm playing casually at home,

or it's being introduced around the family dinner table. Like every one of those things impacts how players will experience your game. And so that's important to understand the broader context of the things you have control over and the things you don't. Without gameplay, you've got no game. That's the key. Everything else can change. but if it's got no graphics yeah well you can have a game with sound you can have a game with text but if it's got no gameplay

then then it's not a game it's something else so that's the core of it that's the only thing that games have that nothing else has gameplay and that's where the art must be carried the art of game design

is the art of expressing things procedurally through gameplay you can express things through the look, you can express things through the social interactions, you can express them in many other ways, but if it doesn't have gameplay, then you can express that probably better in a different medium.

If it's got gameplay, that's the only thing you've got, and that's why games designers need to speak through the gameplay, rather than a lot of these self-conscious art games where, oh, the triangles mean this and the circles mean that, and the birds represent your soaring ambition. Oh, right, yeah. Gameplay. What does that mean?

All right. So I know there's so many things I could keep this conversation going forever, but I want to be respectful of time. So now we're getting into some core things of as advice to current new game designers, people who are breaking into the industry, this, you know, obviously focusing on the gameplay, the core of play itself is one of them. maybe some parting words of wisdom to those that are trying to follow in your footsteps or craft new

experiences and into the next generation. I'll start with Nigel, since Richard, you just got to give us a good one. And if you come up with another one before we close, I'll come back to you. Well, look, Richard, Richard knows my thinking on this. Although it's had some criticism in recent years, I would say if you've not studied the hero's journey and the monomith, go read it up. Everybody's watched Star Wars, right? So, classic example. But there's so many, Lord of the Rings,

there's so many examples out there. Don't take it too seriously, but you can't go far wrong if you tell a story in those terms. So that's my quick cheat. Yep, yep. And I recommend Joseph Campbell specifically. The Power of Myth was the book form of that interview was the one that resonated with me the most. But anything of his is great to get you an introduction to that story.

And I'll give a little aside before I come back to Richard to close it off, which for me, I started studying the hero's journey as part of my game designer journey, my game designer skill set. I wanted to be able to tell better stories and allow people to tell better stories in my games. And after reading those books, I actually realized that it was so impactful to my day-to-day life, that we want to create these narratives and go through these arcs in our life. And that being able to view your life through that story and be able to tell a powerful story about your life was real game changing for me. So I would echo your advice and say not just for being better being a game designer, but being better. And just as a PS to that, to be in a position where you can look back over 50, 60 years and say,

say, yeah, I did that. That's a good place to be. Yes. Well, I look forward to that. Not quite there yet, but it also, I mean, it puts things into context. Sorry, just to give another thing, because I do, I'm passionate about this topic, is like that the, it really, the struggles and the challenges that you face gain meaning through that retroactive storytelling that you can say that are the things that I went through that let me accomplish and become who I am, allow you to be grateful for even the, the struggles and, you know, quote-unquote failures that happen. In fact, is key to a good hero's journey. There's no good hero's journey that's like, I started off great, everything went great,

ended great, cool. All right, Richard, you want to close us off with any final words of wisdom here? Well, I could rant about the, well, not so much rant, about the heroes journey, which does apply when people play virtual worlds. That's what they're doing. They're following. They're going to another world of magic and mystery and intrigue, and following it through.

And I'd also say, if you are going to study the hero's journey, study Campbell's 17-step version, don't go for the 12 steps, or the eight-steps, or the even five-step versions. And if you read Campbell, it's borderline impenetrable. So don't expect an easy read. Anyway, as a final advice for game designers, I would say,

make sure that game design is your medium. make sure that you've got something that you want to express through a game. If you know what you're trying to say, all the decisions that you need to make will just fall out. I want this to be about my case, freedom. Is that what this is giving me? No, off it goes. Or no, how can I make it? But if you don't have any artistic spine,

if you don't have something that says this is all about, out the corruptus that people in power always gain. Or if you don't say this is about the way that poor people hang together or whatever the chips you have on your shoulder, if you don't have anything to say, you're not going to say anything. And if you want to be a game designer, the game design has to be what you want to say.

That has to be your medium. So just that's great. I just, I want one addendum question that comes from that. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, wow, wait, I don't know what I have to say. What do I have to say? I want to be a game designer, but I don't know what I have to say. Is there a way to them they can discover that? Like how do you go about that process of knowing what you want to say?

Well, why do you want to be a game designer? Ever since I was a small child, I've always wanted to play in games. Yeah, but ever since you were a small child, you've lived in houses. You don't want to be an architecture, a construction worker. Everything is you're a small child, you used to eat food, but you don't want to be a baker or a chef. what is it about games that you want to be? I want to have other people have a blast. Okay, why do you want other people to have a blast?

Because it's going to make you feel good or then feel good. Yeah, yeah. Just keep asking yourself, what is it? And if you make games, why am I making this game? I mean, you've got to just make games if you don't. Right. And most of the ones you make, you're not going to finish. They're not even going to be coded.

they're going to be written pieces of paper or in the word files or whatever. But if you don't design games, you don't know, you're not going to find your reason for designing games. Another way of it is, what do you want to change about the world? What irritates you? What gets you angry even? What if? Oh, love it.

Perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, gentlemen. This is an amazing podcast. Richard, it's great to have you back. Nigel's great to have you here for the first time. this has been really fantastic. So thank you both. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference

and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer.

In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.