Think Like A Game Designer - Tom Lehmann — From Economics to Game Mechanics, Crafting Strategic Choices, and The Nuances of Cooperative Play (#16)

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

Tom Lehmann is a former economist, programmer, and game publisher turned full-time game designer. He created Race for the Galaxy and has created expansions for games like Pandemic and St. Petersburg. Today, we discuss everything from economics, expansions, and game reward systems. There’s a lot of wisdom here, so grab a notebook! 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 Tom Lehman. Tom is an incredible designer of games including Race for the Galaxy, Rez Arcana, and expansions for pandemic. Tom's background in economics really shines through in this discussion, and we have some pretty excellent heated debates around a lot of really interesting topics, including how constraints can stimulate creativity, appreciating the differences between good decisions and good

outcomes, the difference between designing cooperative games versus competitive games, and how the subtleties of how you develop a scoring system can influence your player behavior. Honestly, this is one of the times where I've had a guest really challenged me directly on a lot of the issues that I hold dear. And I think that our debate and discussion helped to refine positions that I've held for a very long time. And I think I learned a lot from this episode. And I'm quite confident that you all will too. So Tom has a ton of things to teach us. And I look forward to hearing all of your reviews as you listen to my discussion with Tom Lehman. Hello and welcome. I am here with Tom Lumen. Tom, this is awesome. I'm looking forward to this conversation for a long time. It's great to have you here.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. So I just want to kick off the same way I do everything. I know this is a common question that a lot of designers get asked, but I always, we have a lot of aspiring designers out there. So I always like to kick off with the origin story. You've done a lot of amazing things in the game design world. But what got you started? What's your radioactive spider bite? that brought you in to this. Well, I grew up all around the world. My father was an economist for the agency for international development, which is a sub-agency of the U.S. State Department. So we didn't have very many games growing up. And so I started inventing my own, inventing variations on games and then full games myself.

And then I was fortunate enough to have a successful career in high tech. I was one of the first 50 people at Oracle. And so that gave me enough money to be foolish. And I decided I wanted to be a game designer and started first as a publisher and designer and then as a freelance designer. So I just want to tag on the one interesting thing. I was successful enough to be foolish is a really powerful lesson. I found when I first started as a game designer and I first started my company, I was super broke. And so I had to figure everything out and be really, really cost.

effective with everything. And then when I went and I had a big Kickstarter and raised a bunch of money and launched a project, I found I spent and wasted a lot of money in that world. And so there's this perverse power of broke that I think people underestimate when it comes to actually forcing you to really be precise in what you're doing. Right. I mean, I don't think I was foolish in that sense of throwing around the lots of money. I, you know, got quotes and, and, and, carefully did a lot of things, but I think I was foolish in the sense of taking a big risk. And when Magic the Gathering came out, suddenly our company, which had gotten to cash flow positive, suddenly stopped being cash flow positive because the stores weren't buying inventory,

they weren't reordering, and because they were all hoarding their money for Magic cards. And that's when I realized that, I have a problem here, and this is not a viable, you know, business. I certainly agree with you that, you know, doing things keeply, you know, being on a tight budget gets you to be more efficient in many ways. And, you know, it's like anything, if you constraints can sometimes stimulate creativity, right? you know, that sometimes you really constrain a project. You set yourself an artificial limitation, and then that forces you to be creative. And I think that's the nature of creativity. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

And I find that the other principle that I think applies across both for sort of businesses and games and creative things in general is that, you know, lowering the cost of you being able to test your. assumptions and to iterate and learn from that is always critical, right? Like, you want to get your prototypes to the table as cheaply and quickly as possible to learn what's going on. You want to get your business assumptions and your business initial MVP out there as quickly and cheaply as possible to figure out what's going on. And then as you become more certain in your assumptions, you can scale and spend more time and invest more in your prototype and art and business, etc.

Right. I mean, Matt Leacock has a saying about don't fall in love with your own prototype, you know, that you have to be willing to rip it up and therefore don't spend a lot of time on nice artwork or something that would get in the way of ripping it up. Right. Yeah. Another counterintuitive principle that is like actually having an ugly prototype, quote unquote, is better in a lot of ways in the early stages because you won't mind, you know, scratching something out and ripping up a card and replacing it with something else.

If it looks nice, then there's this unconscious resistance to, you know, updating it and refining it. And so actually investing less in your early prototypes will make them more useful rather than less. Yes, that brings us to an interesting thing where some publishers actually prefer that your prototype be very clean, but not have artwork. They want to see it as this sort of, you know, blank canvas that they get to paint on. And they feel that when you use lots of clip art and other things, that you're actually

getting in the way of them being able to think about all the possibilities for your game. Yeah, I have found that as well. I have, you know, I still have my own publishing company. And so a lot of times when we're building something for our own release, then, you know, of course, I'm thinking about art early on. But when I'm building something that I want to either pitch or partner with somebody else on, I've accidentally gone too far down that road before and had a bunch of arts and everything. And yeah, I realized that we had to backtrack and wasted some effort there. So it's another good lesson for people because I think the common perception is the opposite, that the prettier it is, the nicer everything is, the easier it is to sell.

And with sophisticated buyers, that's just not the case. The customer is a different story, obviously. No, I agree. So I'd like to shift topics a little bit. I'm fascinated about how people's diverse backgrounds can really come into play in how they design games and what it brings to the table. I've interviewed people who were neuroscientists and came to game design. James Ernest was a juggler before he came to game design.

And each one of these things really informs the way they think about things. Economics and systems design is, of course, a pretty close, you know, related to what we do as game designers. I'd love to talk for a little while about what you've learned from your past and how you've brought it to bear in game design and what lessons we can derive from that. Sure. So I'll break it down into two different areas here. From sort of economics and decision theory, I would say the main things are this notion of a time value of money, of opportunity costs, of risk, and appreciating the difference between a good decision and a good outcome. The last is more almost a life lesson rather than specific for game design. You know, we have these things where you make a good decision, right, and then you just get unlucky. And, you know, particularly in areas like, you know, a medical decision where you get all the advice and you research it, but then something goes horribly wrong. A lot of people, you know, at that point, they're like, I have to sue someone, right?

You know, I made good decisions. Why don't I have good outcomes? And the fact of the matter is there's a lot of luck, you know, both bad luck and good luck. And a good decision doesn't necessarily guarantee a good outcome except statistically. And bad decisions may not result in bad outcomes. You can get lucky. You know, as the saying goes, it's better to be lucky than to be smart. And so I think one of the values of games in general is that you can, it's

this whole decisions versus outcomes in a very safe way. And that, I actually think, is the true educational benefit of games. I agree completely. I think that as a species, the reason we play games is for that opportunity to explore decision space without real-world consequences or significant real-world consequences anyway. And it's a great... Right. Well, that's one reason.

I mean, we also just want to have fun, and we like tinkering, right? Humans are tinkers among other things. Tinkers and storytellers. Yes. I just wanted to take on one thing related to that discussion, which is, so I think a lot of people in our audience will be aware of the sort of difference of, you know, being able to reason probabilistically and understanding that there is a difference

between a good decision and a good outcome. But in reality, it's very hard to do. do that consistently in an emotional basis, on a daily basis, and whether it's in your work or your regular life, do you have any sort of tools or tricks or habits that you developed that help you to be able to piece those things apart on a day-to-day basis? Or is it just you're just naturally very good at it? Or how do you think about that? Well, I think to some extent, it's temperament, right? That, you know, they have, you know, people are sometimes described as being, you know, having a very philosophical outlook or looking at something in a philosophical way.

And that's where they're stepping back and they're looking at that bigger picture sort of notion. And I think that a lot of that's temperament. I mean, you see that when we're playing games. You know, there's some people at the end of the game where they've, you know, made some poor decisions, but they're blaming the luck of the game. And, you know, I know some designers who feel that it's very important to have luck in the game so that when a player screws up, they have something to blame. Otherwise, they just go, this is a stupid game.

Yep, yep. People like to have something to relieve their ego concerns. It's a big factor. You know, so I think people vary. Some are better at having a sense of perspective, being able to step back and distinguish. the decisions and the outcome. And others, you know, have a much harder time with that. And I think that's really down the personality.

And, you know, personality is one of those things that's hard to change, but is changeable, but you have to sort of work at it. You have to develop habits. And, you know, if you want to become more philosophical, that often involves taking a breath and trying to see the bigger picture. Yeah, I think I often encourage people to try to, you know, cultivate that awareness of Brown when emotions are arising up, right? Because as a designer, our job is to create these emotions in our players, right? We want to create these experiences.

And for players, they're just sort of often just carried along in the experience. They don't think about it, you know, in a deep way. And when you're able to create that space and pause when a big emotional reaction or big emotional moment in a game or, you know, even in life is happening. And you can stop and observe yourself in that moment. That is key to sort of training your instinct, both as a designer so you know what, like, mechanics to use to create those experiences, as well as as a human being. So you can stop yourself when you would otherwise be carried off in whatever emotional decision you were going to make.

You can take a pause and analyze things a little deeper. Yeah, I agree with that with one sort of caveat, which is I don't think that we create the experience we as designers. I think it's more that we craft a situation where those experiences can arise, but that the experiences are created by the players. Our goal is to create a framework in which those experiences can arise. And in this way, I think that games are much more active participatory entertainment than passive consumer entertainment. you know, in a movie, the extent to which you can be manipulated by the director, by the photography, by the acting, and so on, is much, much higher than in a game because you're a much more passive

receiver. I mean, you'll think about the movie afterwards and so on, but you're receiving it, whereas in a game, you're an active participant. I think that changes. And so I really don't think of us designers as crafting emotional experiences, but rather creating a framework in which hopefully they can arise. That's very interesting. I see where you're getting at with that. I think that it may be more of a spectrum than a bright line. You know, all forms of art, in my opinion, are driving towards creating these emotional

impacts and insights in the audience. and the fact that games have this interactive element is a meaningful part of why games are different. But they are, I think, even when you use an example of movies, the difference of what is going on around you when you're watching the movie, your own background assumptions coming into it, all of the things that are there still impact what happens. You know, the movie director can't just, you know, crafted a motion for you right away. they have their own set of tools to use, and we have our own set of tools to use, right? When I can make a random negative impact happen to a player with a set of dice, it's going to have a different emotional force that I can predict reasonably well

to what's going to happen to that person as much as some character getting shot on screen. So I think it's a worthwhile distinction to kind of parse apart, but yeah, I view it more as a difference. of spectrum than a difference in kind? No, I agree. It is a spectrum. I mean, you know, there's the old saying about books is, you know, you reread a book, you know, 20 years later,

and you get a very different experience from it because you're a different person, right? The actual artifact, the book, has not changed, but the reader has. And suddenly you're getting things out of it and seeing things in the book that you didn't see before. So, you know, yes, we are all, you know, it is a spectrum.

I think more passive medium, there's more manipulation, and more active medium, there's less. But, you know, I agree that it ranges. Cool. So I wanted to circle back to your, you had two major categories of things you were bringing from your background. We talked about economics and decision theory, and let's talk about what the second one. Right.

And there I mentioned opportunity cost, which, you know, the thing that goes on, I mean, most strategic games are about decisions, right? And when you decide to do something, you're also often deciding not to do something else. And there is a cost there, and that cost is often not appreciated by some designers, right? They're only focusing on what the item that you choose to buy, say, is, and not so much on what you gave up by not buying something else. And I think that affects how you balance games. I think it affects how you do strategic paths in games, that thinking about opportunity cost is an important part of the game. and it's certainly something I've used a lot in my games. I mean, my game, raised for the galaxy,

where you have to, you know, your cards are opportunities, but you have to spend, you know, cards as money to put one of them into play. And you're giving up opportunities. And I force that, you know, very strongly, you know, I force the players very strongly to face that. And so opportunity cost, I think, is, you know, even among students of economic,

economics tends not to be very well understood, and I think it often gets overlooked in game design. So I would sort of flag that one. We'll talk about risk or the time value things in some other topics here, so I won't go into them here. Yeah, yeah. I think I want to dig into the opportunity cost things. One, my personal background, I came at games originally as a pro player, and so had to learn, you know, decision theory and, and, you know, playing magic and poker for, for lots of money on the line. Those lessons get drilled home real fast when you're losing thousands of dollars for mistakes.

But I actually think, you know, coming at it less from the balanced tactical standpoint and more from the emotional design impact standpoint, race for the galaxy is a really fascinating example to me because I, first, let me premise by saying, I absolutely love race for the galaxy. I've played it probably more digitally, more time spent on that digitally than any other game at this point.

And it's the reason why I decided to work with Templegate games for Shards of Infinity app, because I think they did such a great job of porting that and representing it there. Yeah, they're great people. The decisions are so hard. The decisions are so hard in that game. And the fact, the choice of making the discard from hand

to pay for costs is the main factor that ends up being there. Every single choice is a multi-layered branching tree of opportunity costs with imperfect information that creates this real agony of choice for the player turn after turn after turn. And I'm curious, you know, how you feel about sort of that decision. And it's something I tend to avoid using discard as cost for that reason. Even though I love the experience when I feel it, I think it ends up creating just enormous amounts of tension. Did you consider things for either relieving that tension? Is it something that you view as all upside in the design?

Just want to sort of dig in a little bit of your thinking around that specific choice. Well, I understand that it's not for everyone. I know people who say they can't play race because it's too angsty for them. That is, having to spend cards that you might want, that you might realize later, oh, if I'd only kept that card, just makes them feel too uncomfortable. I'll note that in New Frontiers, where you spend credits for things, you don't have that opportunity cost. So I don't feel that it's, you know, that's one of the differences between New Frontiers, the board game of Race for the Galaxy, versus the card game Race for the Galaxy. And so, you know, for the people for whom race is too angsty, that's the game I would point them to.

or roll for the galaxy. Those are both games that don't have that angst. But I understand that it's there. And I think the people who can embrace that angst find that, as you say, it adds a lot of tension, a lot of layers to the decision-making of race and of other games. the whole spending cards to buy things, to buy cards mechanism has not been taken up by very many designers. And I think they're sort of missing an interesting tool in the toolbox.

Yeah. And that's why I started this phase of the discussion because I wrestle with it. Like my enjoyment of the experience that you created compared to my resistance to use that same design for that reason. I want to pick up on a thread that you dropped there, which is you're known for doing a lot of different expansion designs as well as taking the same design core, what I would perceive as the same design core of an engine game like Race for the Galaxy, and then re-envisioning it and presenting it in different medium. So whether that's for New Frontiers as a board game or role for the Galaxy.

or jump drive as an intro, that there's this process and thinking around taking something and either building an expansion for it and or translating it to a new medium that requires a real sense of the core of the design and how you think about that sort of stuff. And I've recently put a lot of thought into this and given sort of Ascension's 10 year anniversary and we announced doing a miniatures game version of it. And, you know, it's been a process of saying what is the heart of what we do and how do we translate it to another medium. And you may have more experience with this or at least better known experience with this than almost anybody I know. So how do you think about that kind of process? Well, I think expansions are very different than spin-offs or sequels and so on. So I think

those are two different beasts. And, you know, I would say let's talk about expansions separately and just concentrate here on the whole spin-off and sequel area. When we, we were designing Roll for the Galaxy and Jump Drive New Frontiers and so on. And I say we because Wei Hua Huang is the lead designer on Roll for the Galaxy. You know, one of the things I wanted is I wanted each game to feel both very distinctive and different from the other games, while still living in the same universe and also appropriate to its medium. So Roll is a dice game, And, you know, you have the dice allocation, you have dice pool, you know, which dice and which effects they have. You have dice as workers, dice as goods.

You know, we really pound home the sense of dice, right? It's not yachtsy in space with a race theme. It's, you know, a dice game where the dice permeate the entire design. And New Frontiers revels in being a board game, right? It's big and expansive. There's almost no hidden information. You see all your devs up front. You have these nice, you know, large, chunky plastic goods.

The big round world tiles, very distinctive empire mats. You know, all these things that go with it being a tabletop game. And then Jump Drive is, you know, this really quick, easy filler where the tension there is about doing more. versus paying more in addition to the race tension of spending cards to buy cards. And so as we did each of those games, you know, the big question in our mind was what made this distinctive and what made it more appropriate for its medium? And I think when you start looking at sequels, when you start looking at spin-off games,

that rather than thinking so much about, well, what is the core of the game, you can think more about, well, what is different about the target medium, or what new thing do I want to talk about in this sequel that wasn't in the base game? Concentrate on that, and then your universe from before, in terms of art assets, in terms of icons, in terms of branding, all those things, will more or less flow into the game naturally.

So I sort of feel in some ways you're asking a very good question, what is the heart of my game, except that I think the real question you should be asking is, what is distinctive about where I'm trying to take the game? Do you see what I'm saying? I do. I think that it's a great distinction, right? of course if you're, and so the way I represent this, and I think this is true, you know,

you've parsed out expansions versus, versus sequels. And maybe I conflate the two a little bit because a lot of my expansions are standalone, and so they have their own universe that they have to live in also. But I think that the paradox of sequels and expansions is fundamentally, people want same but different, right? They want the something about the original experience that makes them want to come back for more. But if you gave them the same experience that was too similar, then it's not interesting. And I don't, why did I spend my money on the new thing?

And you want something, you know, so you need that difference. You need that break that's going to make the new thing interesting, but there has to be a heart that brings it across. And I agree with you when you're shifting mediums. I think it's a great point that when you're shifting mediums, you need to say, okay, what is it unique about this medium? What's good about why do people play dice games? What can I do with dice? I can't do elsewhere. What's going to bring, you know, this category to, to the, to my design.

What is this category bringing to my design? But also to say something is role for the galaxy as opposed to, you know, a different dice game that is not related to race for the galaxy or what is it that that's connecting the two. And I think there are, you need that answers to both questions. What's unique here? What's the medium bringing? What's the new, the new expansion or, or sequel?

bringing, as well as what is the heart of the thing that I'm bringing across or the connection point. Does that, does that resonate with you? It does. Let's talk about the whole comfort versus variety thing, right? I mean, this is well proven on a scientific level with rats in a maze, right? Humans obviously are somewhat different. But with rats in the maze, if you test have shown that if you vary the maze too much, then you can stress out your rats. Whereas if you give them the same maze over and over,

you can bore your rats, right, where there's a little bit of anthropore. more than going on there, but it's related to behaviors that are observable. And so, but if you can, you know, hit that, you know, sort of balance, you know, where, okay, here's some variety and novelty that's interesting because you're used to the base game, but now here's some comfort food because you've had too much variety for a while, and now you just want something that's very comforting and familiar. And so any expansion or spin-off or so on has to strike that balance between comfort and variety novelty challenge.

And I'm a firm believer that the first expansion to a game should be sort of more of a comfort, more of the same. You know, they fell in love with your game for a reason, give them more of it with just enough twists and variety so that they feel, oh, a little bit of challenge. But then the second expansion, that should really have more of a twist to it. Because if you just gave them a second more of the same, while some players who really want the comfort food would be happy, a lot of them will start going, oh, it's just more of the same, right? So you are doing this type rope between these two things, and you should be conscious of that and be asking yourself, well, what are the things that give the comfort and what are the things that challenge and give variety? I love the discussion and completely agree about the comfort versus variety balance is another way to frame, I think, similar to what I was talking about. but I actually have not heard before the theory on, you know, which expansion should lean more in one way or the other. I find that I find that pretty interesting.

It sounds right to me. And I'm thinking back a lot through my own designs and what I sort of did naturally. But that the, that original, you know, your first expansion being more on the comfort side, your second expansion being more on the variety side, do you project it out beyond those two? Do you have a, do you have a rhythm that you think that adhered to? beyond that or is it after that it starts to get more nebulous? I think it's tricky and I think the person to probably ask that question too would be Donald Vakorino, right? Because he's done, you know, with Dominion, which, you know, was such a good

thing he could have so many expansions that he's had to think about expansions a lot more than I think, you know, most games do. But examples of comfort. versus variety, the first expansion to pandemic on the brink, right, is first, you know, a lot of comfort, oh, here are these new roles, here are these new events, but, you know, they're very familiar things, and that challenges for a little bit of variety, but challenges that weren't dramatically different, whereas the second expansion in the lab changes how you cure, right? That's a big change to the game. And you don't want that to be the first expansion, if that had been the first expansion, people would have been, you know, I already know how to cure, why are you changing

the game on me? But as the second expansion, that's like, oh, this is interesting, this is different, this really changes up the game. So, you know, I've done that now in a variety, in several different products. And I think, you know, that first, second punch works. What you do for the third one's a lot tougher. And my gut feeling is that if you go with the add some stuff and add some optional challenges, you can now be threading that needle between comfort and variety. And so like rivalry, the latest, was the second race expansion. And so we wanted some big twists, but we did that at the challenge level, because we recognized that there was still a audience that just wanted more tiles in the bag.

So one of the things you can do when you introduce variety is go to that sort of challenge idea as a way of not going into the full-fledged twist, but allowing the people who want to do it to do those optional modules and allowing the people who still want mostly just comfort to just get the additional more of the same with a little bit of variety. Can you mind unpacking that a little bit what you mean by challenge there for people who aren't familiar with the work you've done? Sure. So this is something that Matt Leacock came up with for the structure of on the brink, the first pandemic expansion. So it gives you, you know, the petri dishes, which is bling, and gives you events which you just add to the game and it gives you roles that you can just add to the game.

And then it has two challenges, optional modes that you, that are completely, you can decide to play them or not, one of which the virulent strain will modify one of the diseases in the game to be a lot worse than the other diseases. And of the other one, the mutation, adds a fifth disease to the game. So these are changing the core experience, but they're optional. And so the package for a pandemic expansion is a certain amount of just add this stuff, and then several challenges that are optional. And I think that's a format that can be used in any expansion, but is particularly appropriate for third and beyond expansions, because then your customers will tend to be both some newer customers

who are still into more of the same and some older, you know, gated customers who are looking for more variety. And so the challenge format lets you, you know, walk that type rope. Did that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I want to use this as a platform to, well, we can take it a couple directions, but I'm going to connect it to one of my own designs and ask a couple questions.

So I recently worked on, and we released our second expansion to Shards of Infinity, which was called Shadow of Salvation. And it took what was a purely competitive deck building game and added some more cards and a new character and those elements to the. base game of fifth faction, but also introduced a PVE campaign, a cooperative campaign that you can go through a storybook and go on adventures and defeat bosses and whatnot, which was a, you know, somewhat of my attempt to try to hit, hit both sides like you were talking about, where if you just want to play the basic game, just add the stuff to the basic game and you'll enjoy that.

If you want to try something pretty radically different, here's an experience for you. what I took on in that process was building this entirely, you know, new game experience inside an engine that I already had. And that was a cooperative game, which I had not had a lot of experience working on prior to that. You know, you clearly have have a pension for designing some pretty exciting competitive game experiences. How do you compare that to the process of building cooperative games and building things like, you know, pandemic expansions and things where players are working together? towards a common goal. How do you approach those designs differently?

Well, let's see. First off, just a general comment. I believe Orleans did that with their second expansion, which was a cooperative expansion to the game. And they took a competitive game and then they added this cooperative thing. And I think that's a very interesting thing to do. Not all games can go that direction,

but I think it's certainly one of the things you can do in a second expansion, and I think it's well worth exploring. Similarly, you could think about some sort of campaign or possibly legacy module in a second expansion that changes up the experience a lot. To answer your question about cooperative versus competitive, I think this. Their risk is what really comes to the fore when you look at a cooperative game. You want to have, let's see, sorry. Matt talks about flow and rising tension relaxation a lot when he talks about pandemic, the design of pandemic, and how, you know, your, you're, you have an epidemic and oh my god you know how are we going to deal with this new problem

da da da da then the players start doing things they start experiencing some mastery they sort of relax but then the next epidemic comes the cards go back and you're back into this high tension and you know that alternating between high tension mastery relaxation i think is a very important part of a cooperative experience. And it's different than a competitive experience where, you know, your typical competitive experience, say in an engine building type game is, you know, you're increasing your mastery, but it's all about racing the other players increase mastery in what they're doing. And maybe depending on exactly how the interaction in the game goes, you know, doing something

to them or responding to their attempts to do something. to you, but then you have the end of the game approaching, and it's all about crossing the finish line first. And there's none of this sort of tension goes up, tension goes down, tension goes up, tension goes down. And so that's a very different experience between a cooperative game and a competitive game. And so, you know, that's one way that I think the two types of games are very different. And when you look at designing a cooperative module, you know, thinking in terms of, well, what will ratchet up to tension and what will give the players a sense of relaxation? Because the cooperative games that are just sort of unrelenting, you know, continuous tension,

where they're just beating on you over and over, people don't enjoy them, right? This whole process of tension goes up, tension goes down, I think is the key to making a cooperative game that people really enjoy. So I find that that sounds right to me. So there's, you know, functionally, you know, the game will sort of rise to moments of tension,

then lower to a level of relaxation that maybe is a higher baseline than at first and then a new higher plateau of tension and a new sort of higher plateau relaxation or less, you know, is that or you see it, you know, sort of an oscillating, raising curve kind of thing? Yes. And if you look at one of Matt's presentations, he actually has a diagram, a flow diagram, showing this sort of oscillating area where you're in the flow, but the tension is oscillating back and forth, but the game isn't too easy and boring,

and the game isn't too challenging and frustrating. And he's sort of, you know, in that sweet spot in the middle. And that's, I think, central to his approach to cooperative games. The other thing, which I think is more me and not Matt, is revolves around risk and to some extent the hive mind, you know, issue. I'm not, let's step back on the hive mind. The Hivebine thing is where you have a cooperative game, but all the information's visible or can be visible to the players if they show their hands to each other. And one of the dots against cooperative games is that at that point it's just a puzzle.

And, you know, why are you playing it as a group? Why isn't this just a solo experience? And, you know, I don't view it as a problem where it's made. Many people view this as some major flaw with cooperative games. Because first off, I think that it's really a subset of the unequal skill experience problem that exists in almost all games. Right. You know, your typical competitive game falls apart when you have a really experienced player and an utter newbie. Right.

Right. And most of us in that situation, you know, will treat it as a learning game or, you know, do things that are different than the normal competitive experience to make that work in a satisfactory way to all the players. And that, of course, bears in mind that, you know, players differ. You know, some players in a competitive game where they're in experience, they want you to beat them as hard as they can because that stimulates them to, you know, figuring. out counters and so on. And other players, you know, you do that and they just get incredibly frustrated and they give up on the game, right? And people learn different ways.

But, you know, all games have issues when one player is really experienced and another player is a total noob. And the fact that, you know, you're in this group solving things. And yeah, if one person really knows the game. and another one's a new, you're going to have to make some adjustments. But that's not a flaw for just cooperative games. That's a flaw for all games. And so, you know, the tendency to damn these cooperative games is just high puzzles,

you know, not interesting. You know, I think that that's not really understanding what's going on, which is that there's differential of experience. So that's sort of one comment. Another comment revolves around the idea of risk and multiple ways to lose and what will make a cooperative game in my mind work really well, even when it's the puzzle, is when you have lots of opportunities to be creative. Right? If, you know, sometimes, sure, in pandemic, it's sort of obvious, oh, yes, you have to move here and treat those cubes or else we're in big trouble. And, you know, all of us can see it and you just do that move. And it's very obvious. But when you have one-shot resources like the event cards, and it's a question of, well, do we spend this event now, which would make these things and these things easier? Or do we hold? on to it because after the next epidemic, we might really need it to save us from losing. And now you get a very hard decision because it involves a one-shot event. And I think that

adding some one-shot resources results in very interesting discussions. And when I see experienced players playing pandemic, you know, the really interesting discussions revolve around should we spend that event now? Should we do this one-time thing now or later? And that's where you start seeing the creativity and you start seeing that it isn't obvious what to do and often the plan that's suggested first is not the plan that they end up adopting.

Instead, you know, the plan mutates. People say, well, we could do this, and you could then do this. And we could spend this event here. And then they start coming up with a, a new plan and that's where you feel that the hive mind is really, you know, contributing to the enjoyment of the game. Yeah.

So there's a couple things I want to pick a part here. So I think the idea of creating, you know, the hive mind as either, you know, a challenge or a feature is either a feature or a bug of the games is a matter of perspective. And there's two, two angles towards it. And the one I'll talk about first is the one that you tackled, which is, okay, how do we make the types of decisions that are available interesting and worthwhile so that the hive mind experience of people talking and collaborating is still interesting and fun. So you mentioned, you know, having one-shot resources, I think having the decisions be, have high levels of

uncertainty intrinsically is, is key there because you're going to, the more intrinsic uncertainty, the easier it is to sort of argue one way or another and you have to kind of, you know, make, make a decision that's fun to talk about and there's not a clear right answer, right? The more quickly the best player can get to the obvious right answer, the worst, the hive mind, what we call quarterbacking in our office is, is because it's just this one person just sort of takes over and the discussion ends. So I find that to be very. Right. I completely agree with that. You know, and I think the key thing there from the design point is that you want multiple ways to lose, right? You want different dimensions.

different axes of bad, because then you have to, you know, the tradeoffs between them, you know, become harder. So just to continue with pandemic for a moment, you know, you can win that game with seven outbreaks or zero outbreaks. You can win that game by, you know, quickly or slowly, you know, at the edge of running out of the deck. And the fact that you have multiple ways to lose, it's not obvious, you know, should we take that outbreak, Did we suffer that chance of several outbreaks? And we won't lose the game, but now we're a lot more fragile. And that's a hard thing. That's why I was mentioning that risk is so important in cooperative games,

because risk will drive those discussions. And it's helpful to remember, and this is getting back to the economics, is there is no prescriptive theory of risk. That is there is no generally accepted, oh, this is the rational. approach to risk, right? There is no single risk profile. That's something that people can differ on and which there is no guidance to say, oh, this is the right amount of risk to take versus this amount of risk. Right. That's actually, it's a deep philosophical point that, that, you know, we can say, you know, risk, you know, we can even exactly mathematically describe the risk, you know,

the risk-reward outcome, you know, tree, but that doesn't mean that there's a correct answer for someone who chooses to want to play it safe and emotionally doesn't want to be very risky, right? It's the kind of person that wants to quit their job and become a game designer or start a company is going to have a very different risk profile than somebody that wants to have a steady job somewhere and not go out, you know, not go out on a limb. There's not a right or wrong per se. You have to know what's right for you, and that's reflected here in these games. And I think that's a very interesting thing that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time thinking about.

Yeah, I agree. The other, I think, continuing on the idea of how do you make hive-minding fun, what do you make it interesting? I think that there's assigning ownership of different functions to different players can still be very meaningful. The idea of having not just one-shot resources, but my resource versus your resource, even if we're sort of collectively, you know, talking about and deciding what to do,

I think that ownership component can still make you feel more invested in what's going on. And even more than that, giving everybody an opportunity to do something awesome, right? Like I have this special thing that I get to do that makes me feel like I'm a part of what's going on, even if in reality all my decisions are getting dictated by the group or the quarterback, that being able to dole out functions and responsibilities and powers, to give you that moment of like, oh, look at me, this is really cool, I think can help make the feelings better in that space also. I agree on both of those fronts. I mean, in pandemic, it's the roles that give you each, you know, a special thing that you can do that no other player can do.

And, you know, that, that's that, that ownership, that chance to be a star, right? I saved us from losing the game by being able to get over here and deal with this problem. Orleans has the interesting thing in their co-op version, has the interesting thing where each player gets a private task that they have to fulfill. Right. So, you know, one player might have to, you know, send a whole bunch of their diss. Orleans a bag builder. to a particular location.

And, you know, that's their special tasks they have to do. And yes, obviously the hive discusses it and says, oh, because you have to do that, we have to let you collect this number of disks because otherwise you won't have enough to send. And you have to go do this, so you should be the one to do the more of the map in order to meet your special task.

But, you know, the special tasks, instead of being grouped tasks, because each player gets one special task, that's that ownership that you're talking about. That's great. Sort of the flip side of what I was alluding to of sort of personal powers versus personal quests, all those things that allow you to differentiate yourself from the hive mind in, you know, in function, even if not in thinking and decision making. So the other tack that I wanted to take on this was, you know, let's say, you know,

we said the hive mind's good, hive mind can be used in powerful ways, but also we, you know, for certain audiences or certain, uh, scenarios, the hive mind's bad and it,

or it has these drawbacks. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time, at least thinking about ways to mitigate the hive mind, uh, in, uh, the challenge of, of a hive mind in a multiplayer game,

uh, in a cooperative game. So, for example, um, games that are, uh, you can do this through,

uh, restrictive communication in a game like Hanabi where you're you actually are only able to communicate in very specific ways to try to collectively try to disoffic a goal and the communication itself becomes the core of the game or in a space alert where you know the the little recording goes you know and you can't talk during that time yes exactly or or time pressures in games like escape where you, you know, we're, you know, there's too little time for us to be able to fully reason out and have a hive mind chat. So we just got to go and move and do our best to assign resources and go forward as quickly as possible. Right.

Or there's, you know, hidden, various forms of hidden information, which are challenging because you can say people can't communicate what's in your hand, but it's kind of becomes this loose component. Are there other ideas or things that you can think of or have used or have experience with that can help if I want to make a cooperative experience that doesn't involve a quarterback or a hive mind or mitigates the amount that's available. Well, I think, you know, Shadow Run Crossfire is a cooperative game that I like quite a bit. And there they have the assist cards, which are cards that you can spend on your turn and they do a certain amount of things, or you can spend as an assist on someone else's turn and they

sometimes do similar and sometimes very different things. And so there you have the question of, well, should I spend this card as an assist or save it for my turn? And that's an interesting decision. And it leads to this, you know, very nice thing where you tell someone who's taking their turn, you know, if you need a blue,

you know, an extra blue and colorless, I can spend this assist for you. You know, So, you know, you're offering to help the other player. But if you don't need it, then I'll be able to use its normal property to do a level to take out this big five level on, you know, this obstacle over here. And so now you have this tradeoff, you know, which way is better? Is it better to help you on this turn or is it better to save it for my turn?

And I think the assists in Shadow Run Crossfire is that general idea is something that could be used very effectively in a lot of co-op designs. And it leads to communication because, you know, the other player may not know that it's in your hand. And if you're playing face up, then they can see the assist. But that decision of where to spend it is still a real decision. Yes. And I think that's a fascinating one. probably my favorite, but that also has the most dramatic shift on the emotional core of a game is a betrayer mechanic of some kind, where the cooperative experience is there,

but either necessarily or probabilistically one of the players may not be trustworthy. And therefore, the high of mind communication system is intrinsically undermined in a way that is really interesting. I've tried to... Right. Yeah, I think that's a different beast. though, right? Trader games are very much like competitive games with common ways to lose, right? You know, they completely alter the dynamics of the game. Yes.

If you have a competitive game, but there's a common way to lose, you have to worry about the person who's behind throwing the game to the wolves, right? And traders are very much like that. You have to worry that, well, you're throwing the game to the trader. because you're being played by them. Yes. Well, I think it's, this is another one of those cases where maybe it's,

it's a spectrum of, you know, all right, there's, you know, cooperative, competitive game with like common way to lose. There's,

you know, the cooperative game with a, you know, with a potential betrayer to, there's a fully cooperative game. There, the, in my,

in my head as a game, I've, I've recently been working on with Mike Selenker as a, uh, sort of spiritual successor to betrayal at House on the Hill, but it has, has a, the game can be completely cooperative, but if one of the players chooses to put, push their corruption far enough, then they convert to a villain and then it suddenly becomes

not cooperative. And so it's this other space on the spectrum, which was incredibly difficult to design to be able to have that fully cooperative game experience. If you want it to be a fully cooperative game experience, or this competitive sort of betrayal mechanic. So it's, it's another one of these areas where I've been wrestling with this, this sort of exact space in a way that's got me. I've learned a lot.

I mean, in this going over to the dark side sort of idea that you have here, right? Is there a way to, you know, can a player, quote, go to the dark side but just be a victim, right? You know, and do it in a spirit of sacrifice for the whole table. Or, you know, they're actually being a traitor, right? Does the external sign that they've accumulated too many bad points or whatever lend itself to multiple interpretations? Yeah, absolutely. So the way, I'll just give us some brief overview of the game. So you have a corruption track of like zero to 10 or one to 10.

You are very encouraged throughout the game to, the game's called Hyde Society. So you're drinking the Jekyll and Hyde formula in an attempt to control the outbreaks of the Jekyll and Hyde formula gone wrong. And so you're constantly encouraged to, and you need to take on some corruption in order to defeat the villains that are showing up throughout the game and survive. And so you can always tell this story of like, don't worry, I'll take a little bit of corruption on. But I'm only here to help the group. I'm not going evil. And then as the track gets further and further, then of course, you know, you get more and more suspicious. And that creates the tension.

And then they secretly do something that they say, I'm going evil as opposed to I'm just becoming corrupt. Yeah, once you reach 10, if you reach the maximum of the tree, then you automatically convert to evil at the end of the round and everybody then has to convert against you. And everybody survives till the end of round three without turning evil, then there's a cooperative, you know, PVE villain to fight to win the game. I see. All right. So it's been, it's been fascinating. And I've had to wrestle with both sides of this where you end up with, you know, building, making sure the gameplay's experience is fun and everybody can play. it straight up versus it's fun and the people who want to be betrayers can be betrayers and you know there's ways to interact with that so um i love i mean i've actually played a lot of pandemic and you know other uh cooperative games of it's ilk to you know really dive in because i think those experiences are phenomenal uh and and i've been trying to correct for the problems i've seen in

in other betrayer games or even betrayal itself where the sort of wrong person gets forced into the betrayer role and it ends up corrupt you know the whole experience is ruined right if even more exacerbated than a different skill level of players in a either competitive game or a cooperative game, I feel like is this sort of betrayer game where the wrong betrayer, the whole thing just falls apart. Yeah. As to whether it's a spectrum or not, I think that depends on the audience. Some I've met players who say they only play cooperative games, right?

Because period. So for them, there is no spectrum. There's this huge bright line. And whereas, you know, I know other people for whom, you know, that that game would work entirely. And I think it's a very audience-specific question. From a design point of view, I agree, yeah, it's a spectrum. There's a variety of things you can do in there. Great.

So I want to transition to, I think what will probably end up being our last big, meaty discussion topic, which was the one that you had presented in our previous emails, which is this. you know, engine building, generally speaking, and how we think about victory points and the awarding of victory points in an engine building game, both early game VP tradeoff and balancing them, et cetera. And I love this topic in general. So I imagine we'll bounce around a bit. But if you'd like to sort of kick us off and you're thinking about this, having built quite a few very

successful engine building games. Right. So, I mean, the first thing, of course, you know, stepping back to the big picture is, you know, you know, why have victory points? You know, why not just have a goal, right? And certainly, to touch on our previous topic a little bit, I think goals are very appropriate in co-ops. Whereas in competitive games, goals can work, but often victory points are better. And why do you have victory points. And generally it's because you want to value different things in a game and have some common denominator among them. You know, American football is a good example where, you know, at the

core, the game involves, you know, kicking, running, and passing. And, you know, it's the victory points that tie those three things together, those three different parts of a football game together. And, you over the years, if you look at the evolution of the scoring systems in football, you can see on one hand, they've rebalanced things. They adopted the two-point conversion as opposed to, you know, and the trade-off between going for the one-point conversion, which is much safer, and the 2.1 where you're taking a risk. And, you know, that's a good example of the overall purpose of victory point. which is to balance different aspects of the game. Now, the moment you put in a victory point system, people start, gamers respond to them, right? You know, they immediately start. People do like points.

They do like points, but they will adapt their play to whatever scoring system you put in. So, you know, when you start valuing things with victory points, you have to be, you have to think about, well, what things do I really want to reward? I mean, we can think of point salad football, right? You know, where you get one veep if you get a first down, and maybe you also score a veep per 20-yard play that you do.

And, you know, if you start putting in these, you know, other types of veeps into, you know, victory points into the game, you're going to adjust in a big way how a football game evolves. And so as designers, you know, the moment you go to a victory point system, you have to think about, well, what is it that I'm actually trying to reward? And, you know, and not just sprinkle awards everywhere unless you're trying for a very tactical game. So, you know, the first thing when you look at victory points is, you know, thinking about what is the gameplay that I want to value. and what aspects of the game play am I not trying to value? And am I trying for a very tactical game versus a very strategic game?

And that's one set of issues, just the moment you start saying, my game's going to use victory points. So maybe there's deeper things to this, but fundamentally, the idea of reward the thing, the behavior you want to see is at the core of this, right? You want to be, make sure that you are, if you want to see people thinking very tactically and short term, give direct rewards for tactical and short term things. If you want to see people, you know, engaging with certain kinds of card play, make sure that you get victory points for those kinds of card play or whatever the specific thing is,

right? It's at a base level that it sounds like that that's a core motivating factor here. That is. But, you know, if you don't want those things, if you want strategy to be, you know, what's really going on, then you have to not reward certain things, right? And you have to be careful to sort of think, what is the strategic elements that I'm trying to bring out in the game? Because if you're careless with how you put the VEPS,

you may destroy the strategic nature of your game. Right. So that's one issue. Then you get to the issue that I think, we all know from engine building games, which is, you know, early on, you don't go for victory points, right? You grow your engine, then you run it for victory points at the end of the game. And this general tendency means that, you know,

I've seen lots of games where there's something you can, you know, say that there's three phases to the game, and there's something that you can do in phase one that's worth a lot of victory points. And often that's a trap, right? You know, if you buy that thing, you just fall too far behind in the building your engine category, and you're like, why did the designer put that thing in there? You know, it's just a trap, and, you know, it's like, it's, you know, it really doesn't belong in the game. So you want to, you know, it's just a trap. So you want to, you know, it's just a trap. So you want to find some way as designer. If you want options to go for victory points early, you then have to go, well, how do we make going for victory points worthwhile?

And this factors into two different things. One thing it factors into is how you balance items within the game. And I've seen videos by other game designers, who I will not name, where they try to explain balance to, you know, how you balance a game to an aspiring game designer. And they sort of say, well, you know, you have this ratio between a victory point and money and other things. And you, you know, make all these things, reduce them all to this. And then you can evaluate and you want everything to be the same. And I'm just like, that's completely wrong.

I completely disagree with that's how. you should balance a game on like so many different levels. First of, I've had multiple designers who've come and either started working for me or that I've who will try to, you know, show me a spreadsheet breakdown of, this is it, this is the ratio. This is how many points each thing is worth. This is how much this is worth. So I'm like, if that were true, then their game is not interesting. There's no, there is no scenario where that simple of a breakdown is the right.

Right. And so the first thing that it's missing is sort of the time value of things. When you look at this very static, I want to evaluate everything, assign a point value to every item. The fact of the matter is that you don't buy all the items at the same time in the game. And fundamentally, the balance of things will shift over the course of the game to use Race for the Galaxy. as an example, you know, at the beginning of the game, a card is worth a lot more than a victory point. And at the end of the game, a victory point is worth a lot more than a card, because a card at the end of the game is just a tiebreaker. And a victory point, well, now you're not tied. And, you know, so over the course of the game, that's sort of rough one victory point equals one card, which might be true about in the late midgame. But, But initially it starts one way and is shifting the entire time as you're playing the game. And so if you try to say, well, you know, this card is worth X victory points and why this

and costs this and oh my God, it's overpriced or underpriced or whatever, you're sort of, you know, trying to fix things that are fundamentally varying due to the time value of things in the course of the game. And that's where I think a lot of the sort of spreadsheet analysis look at each individual item and try to come up with a formula, you know, just misses the picture, is that they're not including the time value of non-VP purchases. So how do you do this, you know, as a designer? Well, if you have a formula, one way to, you know, and you're sort of teching a bunch of different items against your formula, you might come up with a formula for the end of the game or near the end of the game, and then you might back off and put in a time value to reduce the value of victory points. and in my upcoming customizable dice game, dice realms, that's what I did for that game.

Right. I came up with a formula for here's in the late game. You're still spending money to do things. You're still doing things. But in the late game, here's a rough formula that I could use to double tech all the different, you know, 75 different faces that are in that game. But then I said, well,

Victory points early on are worth different amounts. And so let's apply, and this had to do with the rate of growth in that game, two-thirds of their value. So say I had something that was beforehand, you know, valued at three victory points and two coins. You know, say that was one face. Then because of the two-thirds, I said, well, that's really, you know, valued. You know, less and this thing should become, say, three VEPs and three coins. And, you know, if you're going to use a formula, you better put some time value for vitry points or you're fundamentally going to have bad results. And that's sort of one of the first things when you look at, you know, vitri points from a design point and you want to go the spreadsheet formula route. You better be putting some time value. or you're not going to get the right results. And you're still in that world where, let's say, you know, I've got this spreadsheet formula and I now have a ratio to discount for value over time,

you're still going to end up having to put your stake in the ground somewhere on that spectrum and say, okay, I'm going to balance it for, you know, midgame value versus end game value versus early game value. And maybe the right answer is that you want to take a variety of cards and balance them at different points in the spectrum. But either way, you're going to end up with some cards or strategies that are still a trap, right? You're still going to end up in the world where, you know, taking things early, you know, VP points super early is going to be either terrible or those specific VP cards are going to be too good late in game, potentially. Do you have other solutions for how you approach those kinds of problems?

Yes, that brings me to the second part of this approach. Right. But, you know, if you're going to do this sort of formula approach, I would recommend in the late game because then you can say, okay, you know, a veep is a veep and time is running out, so building my engine is not so important. And that's a good time to establish a formula. And then you can say, okay, now that I have that rough formula for the late game, then I can simply put a value, to depreciate the VEPs and then make adjustments based on that. But the overall point of, well, then aren't the VEPs still a trap? And that comes to, I think the tool in the toolbox for that,

has to be a VP pool. Okay? If you have a fits number of VPs in a pool that when it's depleted, triggers the end of the game, and it's one of several different ways the end of the game can be triggered. then, and you also have some additional VEPS that you add to the pool once you breached it and say, okay, this is the final turn. So everyone still gets all the beeps.

Now taking VEPS early on is having another effect besides just generating victory points. You're depleting that pool. You are threatening the end of the game. So the player who is still building their big engine and cranking it might not be able to cranking. it as many times before the game ends because you've been slowly but steadily chipping away at that VP pool. And that suddenly makes going for VPs much, much early in their game, much more viable. I could agree more.

I use the exact same tool in Ascension as well. I think it's a critical resource. I think I'll just throw out a couple of other concepts that I've leaned on that I think are valuable for this kind of thing. One is the idea of a VP engine versus a resource engine. As you use in Race for the Galaxy, you write, there are some cards that allow you to sort of quickly process and generate victory points over time

as opposed to generating the sort of more purchase and scale resource, which maybe is just a different thing in kind, but it's another way to make early, if VP-focused, if VP-focused effects and cards, also have an ongoing generation component and then pulling them earlier can have adjusted impact, I think is valuable.

And the other thing that I found success using is creating some variable alternate resource options to give at least a probabilistic way for the VP player to kind of get some spikes of resources to not totally fall out of the running. So for example, in Ascension, the monster, the killing monsters is the kind of VP equivalent thing and we put a lot of rewards on monsters that sometimes if the right one comes up,

you can scale your resources and still get to participate in that side of the game. So just some other tools that I found can help to give people a reason to not go resource building first and then transition to points, which is the common approach. Right. And I agree with both of those things. Another possibility is a tech tree approach where the resource, I'm sorry, the VP path also gives discounts towards certain things. That's an approach I used in my game, Phoenicia, where the city center, which is a keep VP item in the midgame, gives you discounts on public works, which is a big VP thing, which in turn gives you another discount on the city wall.

So that enables the city wall, this big item at the end of the game, to potentially be bought with a much smaller engine. And that's an approach that can also work, is to attach discounts to the VP items. Great. I love it. This is a lot of really great actionable things in parsing this stuff apart. So I want to transition into into a few closing questions. Just being conscious of your time here. There's one thing I always try to ask. Most people, especially anybody who's really listened to our conversation to this point,

and people listen to this podcast are people who really want to have a career and game design in the gaming industry. And how would you advise someone that's just getting started today to approach trying to become, you know, as successful as you are or become a part of this industry? Well, there's a lot of different things you could say, but one of the observations is that if beginning writers often start by copying other writers style, maybe by writing fan fiction as a learning tool and so on.

And, you know, that's not a bad approach in games. If you're just, you know, this is at the really beginning level, which is, you know, do a fan expansion for a game you like. You know, it forces you to reverse engineer and truly understand a given design. It forces you to consider balance issues within an already existing framework, and it gives you skill just to, you know, in how to make prototypes and test them and revise them and gather feedback and so on. And, you know, among the games I reverse engineered as a teenager, and during my 20s were Flying Circus, the old SPI, Real War I, bi-playing game,

Magic Realm, where I created a bunch more characters, and Towsman, where I also did that. And, you know, that experience of reverse engineering a game is, you know, if you're unsure of how to get started, if you're starting to, you know, maybe do a house rule for a game here and something else, and you don't have a, a burning idea for your own game, but you're sort of thinking, I'd like to sort of explore this. The whole reverse engineer, do a fan expansion approach is, you know, a good place to start.

So that's a piece for the very beginning designer. During development, once you have a prototype that sort of, you know, basically works in your local play group, I would strongly recommend going to to conventions and trying to get players who you don't know to play it. All right? Because that helps you hone your games pitch before you ever approach publishers or prepare a Kickstarter. It allows you to get lots of different feedback and allows you to truly judge the market

potential of your game, you know, just how excited are people about it. And, you know, that is an important step in becoming a better, developer of games. And, you know, to leave the comfort of your friends or family or your local gaming group and just go out there and do those cold pitches in the open gaming area and getting some people who you don't know to actually try your game. Another sort of point as you've developed games, when you're gathering feedback from players, remember. that it's your testers job to point out issues, but it's your job to solve them.

They can suggest ideas, and you get some very opinionated testers sometimes, and you should thank them and write down the ideas, but, you know, a game design is a very interconnected beast. You know, fits in one area, often throws

things off somewhere else, and it's your job to monitor and improve the entire game. So concentrate on the issues they're raising not necessarily the solutions that they're suggesting. And that I find is a common error with many newer designers is they, you know, the game starts changing continuously as they show it to different groups

because they take suggested solutions to issues, you know, sort of too much at heart. And, you know, it's your job to solve things. It's their job to point out issues. Yes, I could not agree more. One of my favorite quotes from Neil Gaiman, who's one of my favorite authors, Sandman, American Gods, a bunch of other things. He says, when your reader tells you that there's something wrong, they're almost always right.

When they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. Yep. And it's a similar principle. Enough of your players, or especially players you don't know, are reporting a challenge. You as a designer have to solve it. the types of things they're going to suggest are almost never good. But that's okay. And that's, that's the difference of the art and the craft of design. But too often, I think the mistake is not necessarily that people will overly take the suggestions of players, but that they'll reject

the premise that there's a problem at all. And being aware that your baby and your precious design is always able to be improved. And you have to be able to listen objectively to those things I think is really critical. So I just want to underscore it's a great point. Right. And that's part of why I say take it to conventions. You know, do cold pitches to people you don't know because that experience, you know, and if you can't get feedback from people you don't know and respond to it, well, you know, I hate to be blunt, but you may never become a good designer. Yep. Being able to have that it's really that's it's a core not just the sort of mechanics of being able to like test the game and pitch it but then the sort of almost going back to our previous thing of being that emotional awareness for yourself of you know when you're resisting those sorts of things being able to take in feedback and be objective about your own work right uh is just the most important skill uh for improving in any creative field but particularly with game design yes i mean sometimes you know when you feel a sense of resentment in yourself it may mean that oh

the issue they're bringing up is fundamentally that they want a different game than the game I'm doing. And sometimes you have to stick to your guns about, no, no, this is a game about this and not a game about that. So, you know, you do have to pay attention somewhat to your resistance, but you also don't want to just, you know, be an artist and, you know, say, I know better than everyone else, right? You know, like all these things, there's a balance among them. And then, you know, at a different level, if you go the route of picking games to publishers as opposed to the Kickstarter or start your own company things, you know, when you pitch games to publishers, present, you know, multiple prototypes, because then they think of you as a designer. But concentrate on the one that you feel most passionate about. because your passion will leak through and that will often get them to consider a game more strongly.

And so, you know, don't be scared of your passion. You know, be passionate about, you know, what you are passionate about. Yeah, I mean, after all, why get into being a game designer if you're not really passionate about what you're making? It seems like you could be an accountant or something at that point. That's right. But I see some designers when they pitch the publishers. They're all worried about market considerations and, you know, the latest trend or this or that.

And they start apologizing for a game that they perceive as not fitting the market. And, you know, but it's still a game that they're actually passionate about. And, you know, that's not the right attitude. You know, the game publisher will think about market considerations all on their own, just fine. It's your job to be as passionate and as best an advocate for your designs as possible when you're presenting to publishers. Absolutely. I think this actually provides a good transition into my last question, which, you know, I think just as a final comment here, I think the idea of chasing market trends is generally a mistake. You want to be aware of what's

going on out there. You want to be able to use that to inform your designs. But if you're not following something that you're passionate about, you're not excited about, then you're going to end up not making as good a product, not selling it as well, and oftentimes not even being able to do the hard work of iteration that's required to try to just, you know, copy something or chase a trend that you think is out there. That being said, what trends out there or things that are going on are exciting to you? What about the, either it can be your own projects, it can be some new games you found, it could be some new technologies. What's most exciting to you? nowadays as you're looking around the world of design?

Well, you know, I think I'm really excited to see all the new themes, more diversity, more attempts to embed narration and play amidst evolving stories, more playing with real-time or apps that can manage hidden information and player scaling automatically. I love the amount of experimentation that's going on. We're living in this exciting time where almost too many titles are being produced, but that means it's one of those situations where let a thousand flowers blossom. And so that excites me. There are games that I want to do that have featured topics or themes,

that I don't think I could get through a mostly conservative European sort of publisher, Maylu that now in this time of, you know, experimentation, you know, that I'm hoping I can get some publishers to take a look at. And so that to me is what is most exciting. That's awesome. Well, I have really loved your games for many, many years. It's been awesome to be able to have this deep dive conversation and go through this with you. I'm hoping we'll have an opportunity to do it again. But Tom, I just don't think you.

Yes, there are things that we didn't cover that was on our outline. So, you know, we can obviously both talk a lot about this stuff. Yeah, yeah. I love deep diving into this. It's obvious that you do too. So we'll have a lot more to cover in round two. But until then. Thank you for having me.

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