Think Like A Game Designer - Tim Hutchings — Thousand-Year-Old Vampire, Blending Fine Arts with Game Design, Crafting Emotional RPG Experiences, and Teaching Design Through Philosophy (#56)

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Tim Hutchings is a unique voice in the world of game design, known for his innovative approach that blends his rich background in fine arts with interactive storytelling. Hutchings' journey from the world of high art to game design is marked by his acclaimed creation, 'Thousand Year Old Vampire,' a solo-RPG game that exemplifies his talent for crafting deeply emotional and immersive experiences. As a professor of game design, Hutchings imparts both practical and theoretical wisdom, guiding his students through the exploration of games in innovative and thought-provoking ways. It was a joy to have him on the show to discuss the art and philosophy of game design. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Tim Hutchins. Tim is most known as the lead designer of a thousand-year-old vampire. This is a solo RPG. that is really as much an art piece as it is a game. It has an incredibly interesting mechanic that helps you feel this real sense of loss as your memory slowly decays over the long lifespan of a vampire.

We talk about this project and the design process behind it. We also talk about Tim's beginnings as an artist and how his art inspired his work as a game designer. What can be said through the artistic medium of design and agency relative to other art mediums. We talk about his process of teaching and how the philosophy behind game designs and the theory behind game design

and gaming in general can inform your designs. We bounce around a lot of really fascinating aspects of what makes games, games, what he tries to say with his games, how we think about design as an art form, how we think about the way that people create and the types of things that is how he makes such innovative, interesting, different games and how you might be able to do the same.

This was a really fun podcast for me to record. I only knew about Tim's work. I hadn't really gotten to dig into his background in animation and art and getting to see his teaching. And so this was a really great way to sort of unpack it all. And he even reveals a little spoiler at the end about how his career is changing. I'll leave that as a teaser, so you'll have to hear that. And I think we're going to be bringing him on even as a guest lecturer in a future session

of the Think Like a Game Designer Masterclass. until that next time, this is going to be a great introduction to Tim's work to some very practical concrete tips, as well as a lot of really interesting theoretical discussion about the backbone of what makes art and design possible. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So without any further ado, here is Tim Hutchins. Hello and welcome. I am here with Tim Hutchins. Tim, it is really exciting to get to talk to you. Thanks for taking the time. nice of you to ask me to be here. Thank you. Yeah. So, so, so there's, there's a lot of interesting

things I want to dig into. Of course, you know, the kind of design that you're, you're probably most well known for audience with you is a thousand year old vampire. And that is a fascinating thing. I want to unpack a lot. But as I was doing my research on you, I really, I didn't know this when I started to advise you on the podcast, but that you actually have a whole fine arts background, that you've done animation for Netflix. You've had a variety of art shows. So I'd love to just start there. How did you get into art?

How did that kind of, what was that process like? And then we'll get to this transition to game design over time. Cool. So yeah, I have a whole sad, failed, burned in the wreckage art life that really was the center of my whole being for a long time. I did the whole thing. I went to art school. decided like you know committed when I was 17 to a life of whatever it was and then um before before we

get into talk to me about what got you to there right because a lot of people there's a lot of resistance around you know being an artist or what is it that was your family artist was there something that some spark that showed up for you like what brought you into that it's so long ago I'm no longer certain I think I had some vague idea that I wanted to go into animation um but I was not a good. I couldn't draw well. And I had no actual experience with anything animated. But what happened was in art school, I started getting interested in art art.

I started saying, hey, performance art is really cool. There's all this stuff that was happening in the 60s and 70s and structuralist filmmaking and all this stuff. It got really into art theory, art, high art. And then I went to graduate school, a fancy school. I got a sculpture degree and went to New York City and had a New York City art life. You know, I'd go to places. I'd show my, I had, I guess, eight solo exhibitions in New York City at various places. And I'd sometimes go and show overseas.

And it was a good time. And the thing is, there's this transition that happened in New York City. I was in the right place at the right time. And my interest in games, I'd kind of take. camped down while I was in college. I just didn't have time. I was super focused on art. Everything.

Art. Everything is art, art, art all the time. And in New York, I started playing games again, tabletop, role-playing games, and board games. And I played Settler's Catan for the first time. I started playing story games with what was called NerdNYC. And NerdNYC was a Epidaya Ravishol, John Stapropolis, a lot of design.

that are important in the story game space were there figuring stuff out. And you had within the kind of range of New York City, you had the bakers, you had all these folks. And it was a magical time for me as an artist to see people doing really interesting work with the form of games and fundamentally questioning what games are, how they work as communication channels, how we can occupy them better. And I went through this terrible arc of realizing that games could do things that I wanted to do with art that I couldn't, that art couldn't manage. Okay.

Freighted. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of things to unpack here. Cool. And one of my beliefs and one of the things I really like to emphasize is how these principles of creativity are universal. The principles of design are universal. But the medium will dictate the nature of the messages that you can transmit.

And so this sounds very similar to what you're talking about here. So when you were doing, you're having this, I don't want to leave the art, Bohemian, New York art lifestyle yet because I just find it fascinating. I'd love to, you know, kind of paint me a little picture of, you know, what got you to those levels? Because it sounds like a pretty high level of success. You're having a variety of art shows. You're having your traveling around the world.

You know, what is it that got you to that space? What was the messages you were trying to transmit? How did you feel like how did you get yourself received? How did you what's it like to run your first art show? I just like to linger here a little bit before we transition over because I just think there's a lot of fascinating Nuggets time pack. So one of the things that happens, or at least for me, as I came to really dig in to contemporary art, is the realization that the levels of complexity about what you're seeing makes it incredibly difficult to absorb things in every level, right?

There's so much going on with an artwork. And I became absorbed in this sort of the idea of pushing the discourse, right? I'm going to make something it incrementally builds on all these other thoughts and pushes the bubble out just a tiny bit more. And there was so much art getting made. And so much art just being shown. There's so many galleries all over the place. And that was part of my deal is that my dissatisfaction with art

is that I couldn't make these big strides. The field was so full of stuff. And if you step too far, you step out of art and into other things. and you lose the ability to have that channel to contextualize what it is you're doing. The other part, and this is what I've kind of realized looking back, is that there's relationships between art and the gestalt idea of getting something all at once and tastemaking, right? Those three things interrelate, the inner leave in a really intuitive way, which is built on sophistication, right?

I have certain art friends that I would go around with, and we would just instantly know something was like really good, or we'd just be bored by so many things. Like, this isn't doing anything, but why is this one good? Oh, it's doing something that's slightly new in this slightly new way, and it's saying something about everything that came before. Right. And that's a cool way to make stuff.

Yeah, well, I mean, that seems like from what I'm hearing is like, I mean, it seems like a very clear direct parallel to get game design and those things as well, right? I mean, we take the designs and things that came before. We want to push to something and bring something new to the table. If you're too new, then people can't relate to what's going on. And you're very unlikely to get traction. And if you're obviously, if you're too repetitive, people aren't going to be interested. And so there's this really, like, thin layer of like open space for you to,

build new things. And so that's seeing it feels like on both sides. So that's sort of both this, this, this, this edge of innovation, right? And it's a common mistake for new designers,

I think, to think that they want to be as innovative as possible. And that, that can actually push you in the wrong direction. And then there's, um, you talked about the gestalt, right,

of that, which I would, the ability to sort of understand and kind of grok what's going on, like get the, get the full picture in, uh, at once. And then I,

The other thing I thought I heard is tastemaking. Talk to me a little bit more about taste making and how that applies and what that means for how the industry and the design moves forward. It's the hardest thing for me to talk about. It's not something I really see other. It's not a term I picked up elsewhere. It's something I kind of feel like I figured out for myself. Although I'm sure someone somewhere, I'm sure like on Kitch is an essay that I'm sure talks about this. maybe where I've gotten some of these thoughts.

It's just the idea that we, why do I think something is good or bad? Does my intuitive reaction to something being good or bad align with people who are thinking sophisticated thoughts? I don't exactly know what the taste making part is, but I do know that like when I'm walking through spaces, I'm just yesing and knowing things. And it's not a deep inquiry, right?

It's like, oh, this is fucking funny. This is a punchline. That's not a joke. And I get it. And so again, it's like the joke moment, right? Yeah. It comes together. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So I'm just going to, I'm going to riff with you here a little bit because I find this stuff fascinating. So, you know, there's, there's elements of this where there's a, there's sort of core resonance with the nature of humanity, right? There are things like why we like art, why we play games, right? There are certain sounds of music and harmonics that are appealing to us. There are certain colors and combinations that are appealing to us. There are certain things within the game space that are we love to learn to throw a ball

around and pass it back and forth, right? Because we instinctually want to develop these skills of a hand-eye coordination or resource management or whatever. So I think there's some fundamentals that are anchored in our nature as humans. And then there are things that are anchored in our collective shared experience, right, that there's jokes are often funny. Not going to deconstruct the entirety of humor here, but a big part of why they're funny

is because there's a common realization of background knowledge that's shown that because I also have that knowledge, I get that this is absurd or this doesn't make sense. And now we have a shared connection of we have the same shared knowledge that brings that together. And then I'd say one more piece that I would throw into where I think would taste making would come from

is then there's, Because you use the word sophistication, there's a wanting to be at the kind of edge of this. I define my status, especially when you're really deep into something. You're a board game collector. You're an artist. You want to be liked and have similar visions with the other people who are at the top of the field and feel like you're amongst that group. And there are Includer, Excluder, in-group, out-group elements there where your tastes will

shift and certain people can move the needle one way or another because of their influence, then you will be influenced by them and then in turn influence others who are in your orbit. So I threw a lot out there, but like you kind of got my brain spinning of that. Those are the elements I see as kind of breaking down. When I hear a term tastemaking, how does that resonate with you? Or where do you think that lands? So I think there's the there's an important thing where we don't like, I don't like art. I respect it.

and I want to watch it. I want to see what cool things it does and how those excite me or confuse me. The thing that when I say tastemaking, I guess one of the things I'm thinking is like we know the whole body of everything that's happened before. What is happening that's outside of that, right? Is there a dialectic approach to the idea of making things

that are fundamentally new for which we have no vocabulary or thought? And then those things appear outside of our bubble of language. I experience it in various levels, and then I expand my bubble to get it. Who can expand my bubble in a way that doesn't pop it, right? It's not just totally something else. And that's it, right? It's like a very kind of decadent, like, I have been temporarily amused and or impressed or challenged by this.

My brain had a little skid, and now it's back on track, and I'm comfortable. comfortable. And that's like a lot of what the art stuff does for me, right? And that's terrible. It's decadent. It's awful. It's a form of quasi-intellectual entertainment. But also, it's a sort of discussion that can only happen through objects, through the context of art, through the idea of putting objects together or bodies together in different ways that continue. or quote or reference or in some way build on a dialogue that already existed. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating.

I don't know if it's fascinating. No, well, again, yeah, you've, you know, you've kind of mentioned it with some pejorative tones there, but I actually, this ceiling, another thing I talk about is in game design is that this idea that you're, you know, you're actually trying to create tension for your players, right? You're trying to create hard choices and these moments where, It's like, oh, wow, I really don't know what to do. And it feels a little bit unpleasant. And then when you resolve that tension and say, okay, now I've got a decision whether it works out or not, you've resolved it.

That's one of the feel good moments and one of the core aspects of what I try to do with my design. So I'm not sure it's a negative thing that I'm looking for art to challenge me and push me in a direction where I'm like, oh, wow, that's interesting. I like it. I don't know how I feel about it. Maybe I don't like it, but it's doing this thing. You know, like I think that's good. or even when I had Morgan Page on as a guest recently, is a grabbing out of a music producer.

And we talked a lot about this, all about music, all about this creation of tension and expectation and resolution of it. And the little unexpected next step of, you know, how the electronic music genre, which is his thing, like there's,

you know, sounds and music that if you tried to do this 30 years ago, people would just like lose their minds and couldn't handle it. But now because it's that pushing the edge of the bubble thing. So anyway, I'm mostly just trying to, push back now on this this this sort of self-progerative version of this reflection because I think it's a part of what what art and culture is at its core across all industries yeah um is that a

good thing do we is art doing good work um I again of course it's super important that uh one of my one of my fights with myself um is ideas around egalitarianism and making things that are more accessible or, you know, I don't know how to explain that. That's not a fight. I don't fight anything. I'm lazy. It's kind of lay there and in a wash in idleness. Yeah. Well, okay. All right, then you're giving me two different routes to go. I'll make one more comment on that and then I'll put down, I'll put two paths in front of you. You could choose which one you want to walk down and maybe we'll walk down both eventually. But, you know, one is, so the comment before we go down the paths is, look, you're making art, any art, any design you do, you've got to know who your target audience.

audiences. And it's okay to say, I'm making art for super sophisticated people that know everything about art and they're going to get it because I'm doing this clever thing. Only if you've, you know, 16th century Baroque sculptures, do you get, you know, are you going to get it? Or no, hey, I'm making something that's that anybody can get. You don't you know anything about art. This is like, you know, kind of mom and pop more accessible. And both, there's no less or worse thing. There's some people say, oh, well, unless you're making a Euro game, you know, Ameritrash games are are not worth it or unless you're making blah you know whatever right i don't i don't buy into any of that right all games are great all art is great if you have the right person right target and you serve

that target so anyway that's just my little soapbox but i'll give you the two i'll give you two paths to go down here um as you talked about this transition from game design from art to game design you said uh there are things that you could say that you wanted to say in game design that you couldn't say in art so one path is let's talk about what you could say and what you're trying to say. And the other path is from art style. What is it that you learned? You talked about being lazy and this will trigger this second path. What is it that you learned through your process of creating art to be able to successfully push through the resistance and the challenge of making art and be able to put things out consistently that maybe served you well as a game designer or could

serve our audience well. So you can pick out of those paths and if we're excited about it, we'll circle back and hit them bowl. Oh, those are good paths. I like this. I can't wait to see like where the adventure takes me next. I think that the things I couldn't say. I think that's the trickier one to answer, the less rewarding one. But one of the things that happens is the art the art world desperately wants novelty. And so you have these sorts of artists who go and they flip over rocks and they

say, what new bug is underneath here? I'm going to pick it up and show it to everyone and we're all going to laugh at it. I'm going to make some artwork about it. And that's something that happens with games a lot. You have artists who drag a bunch of game-related people into a space and say, ha-ha, look at these nerds. I'm doing something sophisticated about the idea that they're doing a performance while they play. I'm having deep art thought. No, there's so much bad shit that happens. And so one of the things, as I was like sophisticated art guy and game world guys, I kept saying, stay away from artists. Don't let them. come to your LARPs, don't do anything.

Most of them are evil. And I still stick by those words. And so one of the things I started doing is I started saying, hey, how can I as an artist make a world that crosses in a productive way? So like one of the things I did is I made in a, I forgot the name of the museum. I took two rooms in a museum and I filled them with a single gigantic sprawling, crafted terrain war game table and one solid surface. And I can't remember it was like 50 feet long, 48 feet long in the longest dimension. And this was a handful of things that I was really happy with mixed because I'm saying,

hey, look, gamers, you can come in and play with this. It is a gigantic, wonderful thing. So much space. You'll never get to play in a war game table this big again. And then on the other hand, I'm saying gamers play with systems. that are built for certain types of spaces, a four by eight foot table, four by six foot table is what Warhammer is designed for.

And I fundamentally break that system whenever, or I challenge that system if I say, hey, look, you have a 40 foot length of table, and then there's an elbow, two elbows you have to deal with. And so that, to me, as an artist, became an interesting place to play around games. Does that make sense? I'm not being mean, I'm not making fun of anybody, which was important for me,

although I'm still saying things about games that I think gamers get, which other people don't. And then finally, the thing that, again, I really loved as an artist is that without people using the table, it became this gigantic, sprawling landscape became something about, you know, like slab minimalism, right? It was activated and became something different when people were using it. So that was like a successful integration of art and art stuff. Now I just have, I just had a set one of my game books, an art game book, to like a museum show, the Dubuque Art Museum. And it wasn't interesting because the book is its own thing. It's supposed to live out in the world.

It doesn't need a museum. And so I'm like, oh, it's cool that I'm making these art book things that don't actually live in the art world. They don't need the art world. They're for mean people like me who play games. Yeah. So that's maybe path number one. Yeah. So one of the things that I heard there, which is sort of this, you're still bringing

some of this art ethos in that you're breaking the frame of expectations and pushing the boundaries and using that as part of your play space, right? This, this, this, you know, when you're designing games, you have to play in whatever the box that you're given, right? It's got to fit on a table. It's got to be played on a phone. It's got a whatever, right? And I'm a big believer that constraints read creativity.

Constraints are a powerful force. But when you sort of can reexamine those, especially very longstanding tropes and constraints, and then choose to consciously break those, intentionally break those as part of your art piece, your design, the emotions you're trying to evoke, that that's a kind of powerful thing that you were able to do with your games. That sound right?

powerful is a strong word. I don't think it was powerful. I think it was clever. I think it was useful. I had trouble saying powerful things with art. And I began to realize that I could say powerful things with games. And the way that games are used and inhabited and experienced by people is different than the way art is, right?

And because there's an investment in games when we play. play them. And there's so many reasons games operate differently. And I was in a, and that's how I kind of arc over into games. Okay. Great. Great. And I, um, yeah, there's, I want to dig into the powerful things you can say with games because I think many people restrict themselves to the fundamentals of basic power fantasies and, you know, strategic interactions. And you have broken that boundary on many occasions. So it may be jumping too far ahead, but I want to just put a pin in that. Um, if we want to take this other path about the processes. of producing art, and then we can circle into powerful things you started to say in games.

So the other path, go back to the save game point, is what did I learn about art that helps from art that helps translate into game usefulness? And I think there's a set of tools, which I hate the idea of intuitive things, but there's an intuition, which comes from art, which helps me see spaces around games better. but more importantly, there's just like fundamentally critical tools that art happily borrows from all these different fields and applies to the world it's in that games tend to not.

There's an art is an absorbing amoeba and games really don't do that. You don't have games with a bibliography of a list of references and a bibliography, right? Maybe, I mean, some you do, but not often enough. I had as my as I devolved into the despair of painting, I came to have a real interest in formal aspects of design, formal aspects of sculpture. And I really started to figure out how to analyze an artwork as a system, as a system of possibilities of choices. and then figure out where I could act within those to create new things.

That might be one of the best way to explain this. Hey, I am going to make this wooden thing. What if this side can be open, this side could be closed. What does it mean to have that? I figured out little channel, what are the other channels I can do? So that rolled over into game stuff really nicely. because so much of what happens in a game exchange within a standard game is not examined by the game designers or the players. It's something we settle into and we just get it, right?

We know how D&D works. So we're going to sit down and do D&D and we're not examining the way that we hand dice or talk to each other who has power. Yeah. Figuring out how that I could do that was really useful as a designer. Can you give me some specific example that comes in mind of how you would challenge that kind of core preconceived notion and what that turned into from a mechanic or, you know, design choice? One of the game I might aim at is a collection of improving exercises. And this is not the best example, but I'm going to do it anyways because I'm committed. I said the long title.

A collection of improving exercises is on the surface It looks like a prospective drawing book from 1924 You flip through it has a whole bunch of drawing exercises And it's about a person drawing things like still lives on the beach It's a pretty anodyne seeming text I wanted to make a game That in that that that dealt with the idea of an untrustworthy narrator But actually have it be an untrustworthy

set of rules? What if the game designer is lying when they tell you the rules to the game? And this isn't something I'd seen done. And that's kind of what I started exploring with a collection of improving exercises. And so there's tricks in there, there's secrets in there, there's things you can uncover maybe, or different ways to experience the book, because the narrator isn't trustworthy, the person telling you what to do. And I think that's a really cool place to start. But that's not actually me talking about formalism, right? Formalism, like formally breaking something down. And so maybe a better example, because that's just me using like a literary theory thing, a better example of formalism is saying, hey, what is a game,

does games have endings, right? Well, what if we have a game that doesn't have an ending? And that becomes important. And so I have a terrible game called a tiny person. Have you seen this game? No. Horrifying game. You take a whole bunch of solo cups as many as you can get and put them on a table. And it was written for the 200-word RPG contest. And the idea is the players want to get the tiny person to come out from underneath one of the cups.

And so they're saying, hey, tiny person come out from under a cup. And the tiny person isn't really there, of course. They're just an imaginary game thing. So the people start lifting up the cups and trying to find the tiny person. and as they can't find the tiny person, the players have to start getting angrier and angrier. So they start swatting the cups off the table. They start, you know, they're angry, they're shouting,

and they do this. This happens over like five minutes, if that, until there's one cup left. And they know that there's a tiny person under that cup, that that person is under the cup. And they're furious at this point. They have to be mad at the tiny person. And then for the game to end,

and this is disgusting, someone has to smash the cup. and then you just leave it there. The rules say, never touch the cup, just leave it there. You can't look and see that the tiny person isn't there. And so this is a game that sort of spun out of the idea of saying, what if you make a game without an end? Okay, so the remnants of the game have to stay untouched forever, which, of course, is a useless site.

No one's going to do that, but it helped me kind of set the game up for this horrible, grotesque experience. it's a really terrible game. Well, I think so this, I think that there's a fascinating thing here. So this ties into a principle

that I talk about a lot that it's, you know, which is just sort of assumption challenging, right? Take the core of what you've done, of what's been done, of what you take for granted, make it explicit, and then what happens if you invert it,

right? And even the very same one that you just said, what if I make a game that doesn't end, right? Rob Davy, used a similar conceit to make legacy style games, right? These board games that like one game actually continues to influence the next one. So they don't actually end and that it became a whole new genre, right? And so these are some of the opportunities to make really revolutionary steps forward by just,

okay, this is the thing everybody takes for granted. What if it's not the case? And, you know, a lot of times that exploration won't go anywhere. But sometimes it will create those breakthroughs that are just super powerful. So I think it's a great poor idea. All right, I'm going to go because you've brought us here very directly because one of the things I wanted to talk about the most with you is the ability to create emotions and experiences that are much wider than what people typically assume from games. And I'm going to say, you know, as a designer, I've generally speaking fallen victim to the living in the box, right? I make games that you're you're leveling up your stuff and you're killing monsters and you're fulfilling these different character fantasies that are pretty, you know, pretty straightforward, right?

I think I make, I like to think I do good executions of these things, but, you know, I'm not making you cry. I'm not making you angrily smash a tiny person. And in, and eventually we'll use this to tailor into your, to your, your, thousand year vampire amongst others because there's this, this, you're able to evoke these feelings of, of wistfulness and long. and sorrow and heartache and challenge that just are not common in the space. So talk to me a little bit about how you think about these kinds of emotions, evoking these kinds of emotions, and how do you successfully bring them about when you're trying to build games that are saying more powerful things than most games say?

This is not what you want to hear. The answer is, I don't know. It's nice science. what I do is I make my games that slightly break things and slightly re-examine categories and do new formal things, things I haven't seen, or things I want to experiment with. And I make lots of these games for my friends and for little parties and we get together and then the games go away forever. And so everything I make is basically a gift for my friends.

Not everything, but many of the things I make are gifts for my friends. and sometimes they turn it into something really much more than what you expect. And so maybe just through a sheer weight of numbers, my dumb little art games occasionally come out as something that's real, that people actually find appealing. Now, that's the easy answer, that I just make lots of things and occasionally something lands. It's not a great.

That's why we have Candy Crush, right? That's not why we have games that let us be emotional because clearly I made lots of choices and I'm avoiding talking about it. There's an eye roll that I do whenever someone says this game is deeply emotional, right? I think, oh, fuck, I'm going to hate this. They're going to tell me, now it's time to cry. Now it's time to have a feel, roll versus weeping or something, right? I loathe the field of that field of games. So much of it is so bad and people are trying, right?

And maybe it lands with other folks, but just generally not with me. With a thousand-year-old vampire, I kept it incredibly loose. And I was trying, okay, this is where I'm saying the truthful thing. I was trying to make a two-person game where you're playing it alone, but the character you play has other ideas. The character you play doesn't want to do what you want to do. And that's a potent thing to do if you're alone, right? If you're playing this game alone, you're like, no, he's got to go do something else,

but you're doing this terrible thing. And now I have to justify it. And for me, that's a really, complicated, emotionally loaded space is the idea of being invested in someone, in this character, and then them doing something terrible, and I have to then protect them from it, or justify it, or take that on to myself in some way. And that kind of is autobiographical in some ways of taking care of other folks who don't have good, impulse control who make terrible decisions and who are awful.

So yeah, there's a lot that I just said. I should be quiet now and see which path you're going to give me next because I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to branch on here. I mean, I think that the first of all, actually, I'm going to ask you to just do a brief explanation of a thousand-year-old vampire. I'm familiar with the game, but our audience may not be. So give me a brief synopsis so that people will have more context when we dive into the next pieces.

Correct me if I'm wrong. My summary would be it's a game in which a solo game, table top role playing game, in which you take on the role of a vampire who lives for a thousand years and you track the course of their existence using prompts. You move through it semi-linearally through a series of prompts and react to them. And every time you react, you had a single little memory aligned to a memory. And at a certain point, your human brain that is a vampire brain can no longer hold more memories and you begin to forget things. And that's the most impactful part of the game is having to say, oh, I have to choose between forgetting my parents or all these important things that they're important because you've written them down.

I have to strike something through and forget it. That's it. It's a mechanically simple game that has a tremendous punch to it. Yep. and beautifully executed as the kind of thing. Like I, I know you didn't set out to create a solo role-playing game. I tend to avoid this sort of stuff. Like, I make games that have solo modes for people that want them.

But to me, most of my game design is about playing with other people. And so this was, but you ended up there because the design kind of told you to go there. And so, yeah, just really, really recommended to people, fascinating, beautiful book. So now, okay, so now let's pick some paths to go to. on. You know, the one, there's a, you know, there's a, there's one I'm interested in, which you definitely do not have to go down that road, but there's this, there's this personal arc to it, right? You mentioned that, you know, you've, you've had to care for someone who's taking actions that are not, not necessarily good, or they don't necessarily have control over, and that that inspires this.

And I think there's a powerful part of, you know, coming from the art world, I think this is more clear, but I think it's true in games, too. We all have something deep, deep things within us that we try to express through our designs and through our work. And so you could speak more on how that has shown up for you and how. And I'm saying this not to kind of dwell on painful things, but I'm saying this because everybody listening out there has some personal pain, some personal weakness. I had Mark Otero on the podcast recently, and he designed the Star Wars, Star Wars galaxies, and a bunch of these, like, very successful games.

And we dug into it. And it was like his feelings of powerlessness as a child that he escaped into Dungeons and Dragons and into role playing as the way to give himself a space that he could control. And that those things informed his design work. And you could see seeds of it and everything he did since. Right. And I think there I want to I want to give people both normalize that we all have trauma. We all have hardship. And see how the seeds of that can turn into great and beautiful things over time.

So that's one seed I'm going to plant with you. do not feel like you have to, you know, fertilize that one. The next path that I'll give you is the, what we can say with games that we can't say in other forms, I believe has to be, has to generally speaking deal with agency. The fact that I as a player can and do invest my time and decisions into the space is what makes,

you know, if I'm watching, If I'm playing a game that's like got a cut scene where what makes you clearly want to cry, that's not emotions in games. That's a separate movie that's interspersed into my game. What makes games emotional and meaningful is that I, by investing my choices and my actions into something, now I'm able to create this payoff of in the case of, hey, I wrote down, you know, in your case you described, I wrote down these memories and they're gone.

And, you know, the ability to, you know, write down. There's a beautiful game called Kind Words that is out there where you write nice letters to people and you can put out questions and to pain points of your own and receive letters in return. It's just, it's, you know, the fact that I'm creating this space back and forth creates these emotions. So how you think about agency in terms of evoking emotion as the sort of unique to games art form is the other path. So two media topics.

I'll pause there. Well, I think a big thing with agency. is how much of it we give up whenever we agree to games. And especially whenever we've wandered into like the world of freeform LARP, American freeform LARPs, we are giving up so much agency and then playing in these spaces that become more intense, more engaging, more challenging because we've done that, right? We're going to make terrible decisions and be cruel to each other

because that's what we have to do to make the game operate. And we do this knowing, that everyone at the table, we all love each other, we're super, we want to make sure everyone has a great thing. We all have agreed to the experience. And that means I'm going to do it harder and meaner. And then, and so it's, again, like when your agency, there's a LARP. I can't remember it's a Nordic LARP in which people have to, people are just talking and they cannot express their frustration. They're not allowed to. And whenever they feel frustrated, they pick up a mug and they break it on the ground.

And that's the only way they can show they're frustrated. And the other characters don't see them break the mug. It's just simply a thing that you, the player, do to show your character's impact. In the game, Sign, by Thorny Games, every time you're trying to communicate using a sign language, you're making up. Your children who are teaching each other sign languages that you've talked yourselves. And whenever you get frustrated and can't make yourself, make your truths understood, you take a marker and you put a mark on your arm. Right.

And so there's all these ways that we really constrain things. And with that control of our agency, with that canning of the agency, it makes things so much punchier. Yeah. Does that help? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to riff on it. One, I'll clarify, just in case. people don't know, LARP, live action and role playing game. It's just the basics of role playing, but you are also kind of acting and moving around, and there's the physicality to it,

in addition to just the kind of, we're telling a story together. The things that I am very intrigued by when we, so games agency as art. Okay, yes. You know this? You're showing me. Yes, yes.

So you're, tell the audience, it's an audio podcast. So go ahead. Explain what you just showed me. Well, this is the trouble. I almost didn't go get it because I don't know how to say the author's last name. James, agency is art. And then it's C-Tai new or a new yen.

I don't know how to say it. It's backwards for you maybe. New yen, I believe, is the way to pronounce it. But I'm, I've actually one of my goals to have him as a guest on the podcast as well, because I think this book is really fascinating and fantastic. I do too.

And it doesn't quite make. it, which is so, which is why I'm so enraged at the book. I'm like, there's something missing, but I don't know what it is. And that's exciting, right? Because that's not a problem to solve. That's why we're here, right? I mean, that's what we geek out on these kinds of conversations because it's, it's, I do think, I agree, like there's things I would contest with, with the book, I think, but it's, it's moving us, it's moving the conversation in the right direction, right? This idea that, I don't know, maybe you want to try to summarize your takeaways from the book. No, I don't know. But I would say that, you know,

it's tying into this idea that we're talking about just for people that, you know, it's a little bit, um, yeah, a little bit academic in the way that it's structured. But if, you know,

the idea here is it's really exploring this, how playing with agency is the fundamentals of games as an art form. I think that there's a lot of parts of games as art forms, but this idea that this, where the way I put it is like this, there's this interaction between players and rules that is a space that is unique to games. That is a kind of, that's where,

the heart of the artistic form of games is. How that works, how that plays out, you know, very deep discussion. But what I would say is there's another aspect to this, which is that when with role playing games specifically and with the fact that your actions are constrained in this way, it gives people the freedom to be assholes. It gives people the freedom to be versions of themselves that they would be horrified to be in real life. and in fact is clearly a part of who we are in real life, right?

There are these aspects of our psyche that we spend, we're socialized to hide, right? Again, this power fantasy of dominating others is the most common in games, right? And it shows up in every basic competitive game that's out there. And the idea that I would try to crush you and destroy you so that I can have victory over you or that I could lie to you as part of that in a game like diplomacy, where I've actually lost real life friendships playing, playing diplomacy before

is is it's abhorrent to us but we all have it and so the ability to let that show and the ability to force you into these psychic states or action states of things that wouldn't you would normally hide I think is one of the powerful tools of games role playing in particular

but I think all games have this as an element yeah and just a nice thing when we play games we take on temporary values that are not a row right that's just one of the nice fundamental bits out of the book and that's such a cool way to put it. And if we have games where we want to be assholes, then we need to have rules about being assholes, right?

And we need them as laser in on assholes. And so that's when we have, you know, that's again, free-form larp does this kind of thing really well. We're going to have this experience where we do one thing and we have a couple of tiny rules about it. We have to remember, and we're going to all have a really intense experience for about an hour and a half.

I love that. Yeah. Well, and I zoom out on this, you know, to kind of societal level and to a philosophical level because I think it's like, what is society other than the interaction of people and rules, right? Like we have a government, we have systems of rules that are designed to structure our behavior either formally with a, you know, these are the laws that if you break them as consequences, or culturally, hey, these are the social norms that we are expected to follow.

you don't follow them, then there's going to be, you know, it's going to push you in different directions. Or systemically, where we're building these interactive systems. So that change your human, that change human behavior and make us feel differently. Like the difference, you know, simple examples to kind of just make this more concrete, right? The difference between the opting into your, having to opt into your company's 401k and healthcare plan versus having to opt out of those things. If you change that one systemic UIUX feature, it's a 30, percent difference or 40 percent difference is something huge in how many people participate in that plan versus not, right? Or, you know, donor, you know, whether you're going to donate your organs or how you're going to structure what makes the thing that's easiest for people changes the way people behave. And when I think about designing economies and designing societies and designing individual, down to the little granular things of how I run my company, I think about this like a game designer. I think these things, I think these same principles apply not just in the world of play pretend. It's, you know, everything in a sense, we're all playing pretend together. right? That's kind of how we create our constructs.

Well, it's all systems, right? And some systems we design to have disequilibrium in them, and we want to have a specific outcome. And those are games. And other systems we designed to have disequilibrium in order so we can have more money and we can take advantage of people. And that's, you know, capitalism and life. And hopefully at some point, you know, the real life ones reach a point of homeostasis is where everybody's happy, right? And then the other one, we have to have a winner. You know, it's funny, no people at home can't see this,

but as soon as you put me in front of a little Zoom screen type thing, I started doing hand gestures, right? Yeah. I try the space, because I teach. And I teach a lot over COVID and all the stuff with videos, videos. And so I've learned to play in this little box I'm in, like a Vanna White using my hands.

And to talk about systems today, and I teach, my university has been going through, economic flux to put it, budget flux, to put it mildly. And there is a big student protest today. And I watched them all go and gather in a parking lot. And the police had very carefully marked off or blocked all the exits. So it was a safe place for them to go and protest, right? And I think about like, you know, you can protest in the place where the people you're protesting say you're allowed to protest.

And that's a system. And that's a pernicious system. and it's easy in real life to buy into that. And I was super excited when everyone said, no, no, we're going to go March where we're not allowed. And they did it. And I watched them march away because I had to come to this interview. Yes.

Well, I appreciate you. Take a time out from, you know, fighting the man. I'm happy to be here because that's one of the tricky things is I am the man, right? Students, you know, they shouldn't let me sit there. Yeah. Soaking in all their youthful secrets. Well, yeah, okay, so this is a perfect transition to the kind of next media topic in general. I love having teachers and professors on the podcast because, you know, there's a lot of people who, when they're in the craft, they kind of intuitively do the thing and they've done it, but they don't really, I haven't spent that level of time articulating it.

And I found, I know this is true for me, as I've taught now, you know, several dozen designers directly, probably nearly 100 at this point, maybe more directly through my course. And of course, people that work at my company, I've had to refine my own thinking, right? You're how fuzzy you are, right? And your thinking is it becomes very clear when you try to explain that to somebody else. And so I'd love to dig into, you know, both how you got started in teaching and what you've learned about, not just design, but the process of helping to inspire others to follow on artistic path, whatever that is through that process.

That's, I know you've heard this a million times, so I won't dwell on this part. But when you teach something, you have to learn it more deeply yourself, right? You experience it deeply. You experience it differently because you have to learn words. You heard me use the word disequilibrium earlier. That's a teacher word. That's not a word I use in casual conversation. And so, yeah, I had to figure out, like, what is the actual pedagogy on games?

What is the vocabulary? What's all this stuff I don't fucking know? And so I'm using my boss's book, which Ethan Hamm, he has tabletop game design for video game designers, something like that. And it's a very straightforward list of, like, chapters that, hey, this is actions and events and all this stuff. And so I'm just kind of using that as a skeleton to teach on top of. And then I've been, you know, building it out since then. The reason I get to teach isn't because I'm a great teacher. It's because I have all sorts of weird, real world experience that the nexus of which is my department, right?

Because I used to do fancy animation. You mentioned all this stuff. And all of that circles around the idea of digital games, right? There's this halo around digital games, which I fit really well, even though I myself don't make digital games. although boy I have some I have some pitches in me that I wish I could lay on someone Simple games

I'll say that again louder for the people in the back Yeah Well okay wait hold on hold on Not only you know I have a company We make physical games and digital games There's I know a lot of listeners That are at major game studios across the spectrum We have you know

And so do you want to do a pitch right now Do you want to pitch some game ideas No, no, I don't. Okay, fair enough. Self-conscious. Okay, here's one. Quick, super quick game design. A probably VR game where you are tracked based,

your motion is tracked based on the controllers and your headset in which there's a person dancing across from you and they're moving, you have to imitate their dances. Once you get the rhythm, a stick appears in your hand and you hit them with it and you break their virtual bones and then they kind of rag doll into a new system until you and you have to imitate that and this is something I desperately want to see in the world. It's not a great thing to make. It's a pretty terrible idea, but it's such an enticing game loop, right? It is. That sounds traumatic. What? And this is something where it's like,

there's a reason I'm a solo game designer. I do everything myself because I'm unsufferable and I make things that are borderline evil sometimes, right? Yeah. And people like, oh, he's an art guy and he's really nice, so it can't actually be as awful as it seems. And I'm like, no, this is terrible. No one should play a tiny person. You know, Hitler

started as an art guy. Right, yeah. Painters, you should always be suspicious of painters. I have another one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I actually tried to pitch this one a company once. You have a pieces, players, multiplayer, couch game, little people moving around

a colored field. Everyone's a different color. And so when the actual pieces just move across colored certain areas of the board game, they disappear because they're the same color. There's another person trying to catch them. And that person, there can be various things where the board changes color. So then you watch everyone scurry to new hiding places. It's a really simple, straightforward couch game that I mocked up with a student and it was super fun. And I'm like, why this game, I don't want to make this game because again, I'm an awful person who doesn't work in teams, but I want to play this game. Did this make sense?

Why do you call it a, what makes it a couch game? Because one person is trying to catch all the other people. Okay. So maybe it's not a couch game. It could be an online game or a multi-person game or a clever, you know, I don't, I want And so you're free form, your free form running around and the other people are invisible when they're on a matching color space. Color space has changed periodically. So as the chaser, I could come and move towards a color that I think somebody's hiding in or I'm just watching, I'm trying to pay attention and watch them as they go.

And they could see me when I'm coming closer because we're on a shared screen of something. Before I go over and I hit a button and everything changes. And I get to say, ah, watch that blue guy run from that formerly blue space to this new one, which is a long strip. I know he's somewhere along there. And probably there's a goal that the, like, you know, everyone, they want to move all the way across the board, the people who are hiding. I would, yeah, so it's really interesting. I could imagine a world where you did this as a almost a, among us style type thing where you had the different colors that not, it's not just one person versus many. It's that each color team is trying to get certain other people captured and protect themselves.

And so now you, now you can create some really interesting like, okay, there's a variety of switches around the board. where you can change the colors for somebody else and try to get, so you're both hiding and helping the hunter in various ways, I think would make it a little bit more kind of fun, interactive, engaging. And there was a whole bunch of games that were like this, where you had invisible people. And then once you struck,

you gave away your position, right? Combat had invisible tanks. And that was an irredgiously fun version of combat. One of the early Unreals had nightlife. levels, I think. So you had flares and your guns flashes, right? Yeah. So funny, funny, funny, old story of mine. I don't think I've, I've told. So what actually got me into magic in the first place, it got me into gaming in the first place. I used to play in a laser tag league. I used to play this laser tag with teams and competitive and in between games they'd play magic.

One of my favorite versions of this was a version of laser tag where they would turn all of the lights off in the room. So you could not see anything at all. You would be moving through the space. And you could shoot people, but obviously once you shoot, your laser is super visible. And so it was a like sort of real life version of one of these games where you had to be very conscious, like every shot had to count. And as soon as you made a shot, you had to move because everybody was coming for you. That's so good. Super fun.

Scoot. Now, the number of times we would run into each other because it was too dark, it made it a little bit harder in real life, but it was entertaining. Cool. Okay, cool. Well, so this is, this is fun. I mean, I love, you know, kind of not just, you know, and thanks for step up and up and doing some of the pitches because I love working through design stuff live and seeing the different ways that other designers' brains work.

So this game that we're working on kind of now is that you have much more traditional style, which is a fascinating jump from the beat your dance instructor variation. But again, I like it. I like the work that you do because it's it's provocative. It gets me to, I really. think that to make games more appreciated as an art form, they have to be pushing the boundaries, not necessarily just for the sake of it, as your, you know, disdained art colleagues did. But because it matters, because there's emotional experiences that we can have.

Some of them are unpleasant that you want to be able to experience and to be able to explore more parts of the human condition. There's a game, I hadn't actually played it, but I downloaded it and I'd seen it played the, like, I think it's called before your eyes. It's, it's this fascinating thing which it's controlled by your blinking. And you're like your timeline, you know, as you, every time you blink, like the time evolves and your, you know, your kids grow up and there's these things that move forward and to kind of give you this visceral feeling that that time is slipping by. A fascinating way to use controls and semi-agency to play with your emotions.

It's such a great concept. I can't play it very well because I have glasses. and it's such a good, such a neat game and it's well done, right? There's so many games that are like excellent sketches. But this is, that's just such a good game. Well, it's super hard. And then,

you know, this can tie in because your university space is in, is in digital games specifically. And, you know, it's one of the things whenever I try to teach game design, you know, most of my games are tabletop, but I do,

I do quite a variety of digital games. We even have a hybrid game now, lives in both zones. But it's so expensive and hard to do digital games, right, at high quality. It just requires, generally speaking, teams of people and huge art budgets and the iteration costs are much higher. And so how do you think about working in that space? I don't have you done, you haven't done any digital games yourself, have you?

No, I don't do that. Okay. So now you're teaching people that want to work. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. The thing is, like, I watch my students. One of the things I watch my students do. is they spent, they want to make a finished game with a lot of, one of the magic things with Bradley is that we did the math,

and I think students are going to make seven finished enough games before they can graduate minimum, and most of them make, I think, 14. We have them make lots and lots and lots of games, unlike a lot of places. But the students are desperate to get the game done, and so they don't focus on game design, they focus on finishing a game. And so the games the students make here suffer from that lack of time to figure out the play.

And because the more you develop the game, the harder it is to adjust the play, right? And that's such a maddening thing. And so I can't imagine working on a real game, right, on a professionally produced game where the stakes are even higher. Yeah. Well, and I've had plenty of, you know, AAA guests, you know, digital studio guests on the podcast that make some of the, you know, games that make billions, right? And they all say the same thing, which is like, you know, you need to keep your iteration cost as low as possible until you find the fun, right? So you're, you know, you want to have a team of two or four people at most to get that initial iteration work done, not a hundred, you know, whatever that you would have or more on a on a on the final polish parts. And it's not just it's not just that you're wasting time and money on the thing, but it actually creates this emotional resistance to iteration.

The more you, the prettier your prototype is. and this is true for tabletop designers too, the less you want to change it. You're like, there's a visceral, oh, but it looks so good. As opposed to when I have my ugly prototypes and I can just cross something off and change it or make a quick change to a stick figure on a character,

how the physics work on a character, as opposed to my beautifully articulated, you know, full-on hero. It's just better. It's better on every level. And so, yeah, I try to beat that into my students as much as possible as it sounds like, so do you. I have a weird success story. what I teach here is I teach

game design one, which is like making board games and stuff, and a role playing game, like the obvious things, but also I teach a game history class and a game theory class, game philosophy, critical studies for games. And I had my students say, oh yeah, we actually took

like this idea of diagetic game material, right? Like diagetic information in games, meaning the game world tells you information as opposed to like numbers on the screen or whatever. And they had had a big fight about a health bar or something. And they realized, like, well, diogenically, we don't need it because we've put in these other

things that show the health bar of the character. And they removed it. And it's so hard to get students to remove things. They've implemented, even simple things. So, like, doing that and through a theory class was really, I felt super accomplished. Like, I should have had a little pop-up. Achievement. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it. Okay. Well, let's, you know, we only have so much. much time left, so we can't get too meaty. But I love, I love the esoteric here and game theory, not classic game theory, but you know, kind of game. Explain, explain a little bit more what you mean by, when you say the word game theory compared to the traditional terms, and then maybe another couple examples like the dietic information that people may not think about as these kinds of core principles of what we work with. So game theory, of course, isn't what

Game studies is the better thing. Or we call them theory classes because that's the term we use in the university for classes of support vocational classes. But yeah, so game theory, of course, is a study of odds and best actions within a system. And game studies, game design, there's this other world, which I don't exactly know what the best word is, because game philosophy sounds stupid. concepts that surround and support our understanding of games.

So we say, hey, let's do a section on diagetic material in games, and we go in and we look at that. Because my bosses kind of said, well, we just like what you do. So you just show them what you tell the students

what you care about. And so one of the things we start with is I start them on Michel Foucault, this French philosopher and anarchist. And I'm like, hey, let's look at this idea of heterotopias, which are these certain sorts of architectural spaces. And it seems like it's totally on the left field. But then we start looking and saying, well, like hospitals and museums and all these things that Foucault writes about in this theory show up in games. And now what things does Foucault write about that don't show up in games?

It can we make games about those. So it's sort of this ridiculous performance of pseudo-intellectuality in a way that helps. them think more about games and more consciously about the fact that you can think about games. Yeah. Do you bring? Yeah, that's great. So, again, I was a philosophy major at school. I love, yeah, I, this is my, this is my jam.

Like, I love this stuff. You know, I'm a huge Wittgenstein fan, and he, like, uses games as the core of, like, deconstructing everything that we do, right? Like, the fact that you can't really define the word game, even. And that all of the things we do are playing language games of building around. structures around how we're able to communicate and how we construct meaning in the world and all the things that we think we can make meaningful statements around, but we're really diluting ourselves and we're just spouting nonsense all the time. I'm sorry, I'm dropping a lot of stuff for

the audience that I'm not going to have time to unpack given the time that we have, but I wanted to just kind of balance it in because I do think that there's, you know, in a sense, right, this is, you know, naval gazing. This is like very highfalutin, you know, things, but I really do believe that the time spent unpacking a lot of these concepts can have very real practical implications in your lives, right? This Wittgenstein, who studies the philosophy of language, helped me to realize, like, really at the core of like that, you know, my identity as a person is a construct, that these things are not things that I used to hold so tightly, and now I can let go of more, and it makes my day-to-day life better. And it applies in, you know, the work that I do when I

think about how I construct the language that we're using within a real game and how play are going to understand that and how I communicate it. These things are very deep topics that are worthy of, you know, a lifetime of study. I fall on the Ferdinandes Susser side of things. So everything you just said, nah. Yeah. We view games as syntagmatic constructs of signs. But the thing is we just do a week on this.

We pick out a thing and we just run through it so fast. We do Mark Aulj. say, hey, what's the hypermodern space? Let's figure this out. And that's sort of like level design stuff. And then halfway through, we flip back to kind of those like fundamental game concepts that are useful. Well, it's great. I mean, obviously, yeah, you know, you have new students.

You can only go so far that are interested in making digital games. It's only so far you could spend on Foucault before you're going to lose them. But I think that like, well, I just, you know, I'm glad we kind of ended it here in a sense because I do think that like it's just another one of these fields. It's like it's why I still do this podcast. It's why I still love making games after you know 20 some odd years of doing it is because there's always more to unpack. There's always more interesting things to learn. And like we really are, you know, kind of to tie it back into the very beginning of our conversations, we really are expanding this bubble of knowledge and possibility around what this art form is, around what

experiences are possible, around how we're able to talk about and think about those experiences. And it's clear that you've been doing, you know, a huge part of adding that, adding to that conversation. I think the design seeing your work is what drew me to you and wanting me to have this conversation with you, learning more now about your background and the way that you teach these principles shows that you're on the ground level of actually, you know, helping the next generation to do this. And so, and now hopefully, you know, you're going to be able to have an impact on a lot more people through this conversation. So I, for better or for worse, but I appreciate you taking the time. time and doing this. Where can people go to learn more about you or play your games or maybe potentially argue with you about the contentious things you've said? Oh, a thousand year old vampire

dot com is where most of my stuff lives. I also have an itch page, which I kind of need to tie those two together, at least one to the other. But yeah, that's it. Do you periodically delete things off your thousand year old vampire page? What do you mean? Well, it's part of the theme of the book is the things you can't save. Oh, I don't delete things, and I should, and I think you're right. But what I had to draw, and this is the serious thing, right? It's like, I'm really interested in metatextual experiments and nonsense. But I'm having to draw a really careful line on a very conscious line.

I'm like, yes, you'll have this bizarre metatextual experience, but this is exactly what you're getting, and this is the business, and you're going to give me money, and I'm going to give you this thing. And I really am being careful about that. Yeah, yeah, there's this so as when you, whenever you push outside the, the magic circle, right, which is the kind of the, the industry jargon term for like, I'm agreeing to the rules of the game and I'm agreeing to play.

Then it gets dicey, right? Like we've had, you know, Jordan Weissman on the podcast and we had a variety of other people who've built these, Elon Lee and others who built these alternate, you know, alternate reality games and these things where it's like, okay, the game now pervades your day to day life. And you might get a phone call at some point. and the Joker is calling you

and that means you have to go and do this weird thing or whatever, these different things that you can do and I think that stuff is fun, but you really need opt-in. You're by default playing a game if you come to my web store that maybe you won't get the product that we told you is a little rough. But again, even, you know, Exploding Kittens

did this as their their in-store event or sorry, at conventions, they would do like a, you know, kind of random get stuff box, you know, and part of the fun is like, maybe I'll get a game of exploding kittens. Maybe I'll get a cantaloupe and you don't know. And like it creates a crowd and creates the whole experience. So playing with Store as game is totally on the table. But you, I think there's, there's something really important about the opt-in to give you permission to be weird and do stuff.

Or, you know, I go to, I go to Bernie Man every year or, you know, those style of events that are intentionally, you know, disruptive and, and, you know, can be even. aggressive in some people's art styles at times, but you know, you know what you're getting into when you go there. And so that kind of helps. Again, thanks so much. I love this conversation. And I look forward to having you as I think our next conversation is part of my next, I think that games on our class is a great, great way to take it. Thank you so much. Have a good day. 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 with 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.