Think Like A Game Designer - Wright Bagwell — From Quake Mods to Game Streaming: Bridging Neuroscience and Game Design, Entrepreneurial Journeys, and Crafting Player-Centric Experiences (#12)

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Wright Bagwell started his career by designing mods for Quake. He is the CEO and co-founder of Outpost Games. He was the design director of the Farmville franchise at Zynga. Prior to that, he worked on Dead Space as a creative director at Visceral Games and was the lead designer at Electronic Arts. In case that wasn’t awesome enough, he also has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. So… Yeah, this guy is pretty amazing and has a lot to offer. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Wright Bagwell. Wright has an incredible career in the gaming industry. He's worked at Valve, EA, and even founded his own company.

He was a lead designer of Farmville 2. He's worked on countless really successful games, and he has a really interesting background. You know, not only did he just get his start in the industry working on Quake Moths, but he actually has a PhD in neuroscience. And you'll hear from this conversation that he takes that scientific approach to everything that he does, and it's a really fascinating lens on the craft of design. Building games is an applied science for him. And in similarly echoing the kind of messages we've heard from a lot of other designers, Wright thinks it's important. to test your assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible. In this podcast, we talk about a lot of the issues with designing, both with big teams

as well as with small teams. We talk about how to build games for an online streaming audience and the increasing importance of making sure that your games are not good just for the player, but for the viewers in the audience outside of the direct player. Wright's experience is really fascinating and comes at it from a very different angle from a lot of the guests that I've had on here. It's been having spent his entire life deep in the digital world working for some of the biggest companies out there, as well as taking that process and leap into entrepreneurship and

taking the design thinking outside of just the game itself and also into the industry, into the work, into the business of making games and making companies. And so I found it all very fascinating. He's got a lot of great insights. It's something that I really appreciated. I had never had a chance to speak with right before this interview. And so we connected on a lot of different levels. I know I learned a lot.

I'm sure that you guys will as well. So enough preamble. It's time to listen to right. Bagwell. Hello and welcome. I am here with Great Bagwell. Right. It is often to get to speak with you.

Hey, I'm glad to be here. So, you know, with a lot of these talks, I talk to people who I've known for years in the industry, and you're one of the few who I'm really just meeting for the first time. You come very highly recommended from other friends. And I'm excited to kind of explore both your career and thoughts on design kind of live as we're being recorded. All right. Well, let's get started. Yeah. So one of the things that I always start all of these interviews with is kind of your origin story. How did you get involved in games? And actually, you know, just for some of our listeners, I actually have already started listening to some. You actually put a lot of material already out there on design and videos on things like The Critical Path.

So I've heard some of this stuff, but I'd love to hear, you know, how things got started and how it's, influenced you today. Yeah, you know, it started when my dad brought home a TRS 80 model 3 back in the early 80s. And, you know, my dad got me hooked on games when I was a kid. He bought Pong, he bought Atari, and he brought this computer home, this Radio Shack computer. And he was really into text adventure games. And so he and I used to play them together as a kid. And one of the things that I really loved about those old computers was that you fired them up

and you got a prompt and you could just start programming right at the command line. And so I started teaching myself basic when I was a kid. And I remember as a kid, I thought, this is what I want to do. I want to build games. I want to design games. And then my dad brought home a Mac. And I remember turning it on and thinking, well, gee, this computer's no fun. There's no prompt where I can just sit here and program.

And I remember my dad explained to me that, you know, well, you need some, software and it's a little bit more complicated programming this thing. And so I kind of gave up on it for a while. And then fast forward to college, I got really hooked on Doom and Quake. And I was studying neuroscience. I was in graduate school and working in these laboratories. And I had a bunch of downtime in between experiments. And so I started learning how to build levels for and mod quake. And I was having fun doing that as a hobby. And then I made a few levels that got really popular. And I decided that, hey, I should try to give this a shot and see if I can go design games for a living. And so eventually started getting emails from some game companies that saw my

mods and my levels in Quake. And that was my foot in the door and got my first job at a place called Cave Dog in the late 90s. And so everything that I know about design and how to make games, I taught myself how to do or I learned on the job along the way. That's fantastic. There's a couple of things I want to pick apart from that story. One is just a common thread I hear from almost every designer that I talk to. And the same is true for the people that I hire and that I work with is that, you know, how do you become a game designer is you just start doing it?

You didn't have a job. You didn't have anybody telling you what to do or how to do it. You just started modding, you know, your favorite games and put. putting it out there and getting feedback and, you know, then started getting recognized from that. So, I mean, that's just sort of wonderful. And, you know, I just sort of want to underline that. And then I want to also dig in to the sort of non-game-related piece of this. PhD in neuroscience.

That sounds both fascinating and like a very big thing this walk away from. What got you into neuroscience and what was it about that that kind of attracted you? And maybe there's parallels to what you do today. Yeah, you know, I actually think there are a lot of parallels with game design. But what got me into it is, you know, I went through a pretty rebellious phase in high school and, you know, played a lot of guitar and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And, you know, I went to college not really knowing what I wanted to do. You're one of those neuroscience rebels. Well, you know.

Make that, mom. Well, I went off to college and, you know, dabbled on a bunch of things. I studied music for a little bit. I took some psychology courses, but then I took an intro to neuroscience course. And there was a professor on campus that was, he was notorious. It was a difficult class, but everybody really loved him as a teacher. And it was really just, it was the first time that I felt like this is, this is, is exactly what I want to study. I find this so fascinating. You know, what could be more fascinating

than learning how your brain works and, you know, how all these chemicals affect it, you know, how drugs work, you know, all these things that, you know, especially for somebody in that sort of late adolescent phase, sort of, you know, understanding how your brain works was, gosh, I couldn't get enough of it. And so I studied neuroscience and, you know, I had aspirations of going to medical school and getting my PhD and doing medical research and all these kinds of things. So I spent a lot of time in laboratories and published some papers. And, you know, I actually think it was a very, very good preparation for being in the games industry and being a designer.

And the reason I think that is because being trained as a scientist meant that I had to be able to formulate a hypothesis and clearly articulate an experiment that I was. wanted to do, why I was doing it, you know, do all the research and sort of figure out how it's going to conduct it. And for me, I think one of the things that that you'll find in the games industry, I'm sure you've seen, is that there are designers who kind of think more like artists. And then there are designers who, I think, operate more like traditional product designers. And I try really hard to make a distinction between those two when I need people interview people.

You know, the artist-type designers are the ones who say, hey, I have this cool idea in my head. I want to build, you know, dragons in space, you know, an RPG format. And it ends up sort of being an art piece that a team goes to make. It's really, really cool. My approach to design is really about problem-solving and understanding people in sort of what they need, what motivates them, what entertains them, and sort of work backwards from there and say, what is a product or what is a game that I can build that fulfills people's needs and wants?

And I think I've been a little bit more successful than the average game designer. I think having that training as a scientist means that I'm very comfortable looking at game design or design in general as applied science. science rather than art. So I think that's really interesting. I have a, you know, one of the theories I talk about a fair amount is that, you know, as a designer, your main goal and you always need to sort of keep in mind is you're trying to craft this experience for your players, or sometimes nowadays for an audience as well as players. But, and that that experience and is, it has to be at the heart of every decision that you make.

because if you're not focused on that, it's not, it doesn't matter the bells and whistles and everything else, always has to drive towards that. And the, uh, when you're building, not just a game, but entire,

you know, businesses and product lines and everything around it, um, it can get, it can get pretty easy to get lost in the weeds. And there's so many moving parts. Um, do you have tools,

um, that you use to try to keep that focus when you say, you know, you always start from this kind of end goal. Um, but as you're going through the process, Are there tools and tactics that you use to sort of make sure that you keep that emotional core as you go through your design? Yeah.

I had this process that I've used for a while, but it wasn't really obvious to me until recently when I read Simon Sinex book, Start with Why. And then I thought, aha, this is a great explanation of kind of how I approach this. Have you read the book? I have not read the book, although I've seen his TED talks and, you know, read synopsies online as well. Yeah. So his approach is to say, you know, for a company, but I think you can use this for an individual product as well, is to say, first of all, let's talk about why we exist. You know, why does this product or why does this company need to exist? Why are we here?

Come up with simple statement as to, you know, why are other people going to want to sort of jump in on this with us? Then he goes to the how, say, okay, how are we going to achieve this? How are we going to achieve this vision or solve this problem? But how are we going to address the why and then talk about what the product is? And I think it's a really good read because I think he describes really well as to the fact that a lot of teams and a lot of companies sort of go in the river. order. They say what they're going to build, how they're going to build it, and then why, which usually comes in the form of, hey, we're going to build a product, we're going to build a large team and try to build it as efficiently and as cheaply as possible. And why? Well,

so we can make a living, so we can make some money. But I really, really like that sort of reverse take that begins with, you know, what we believe in and what we think other people believe in and what we think people want. So starting with why, then going to how and then going to what. So I go through that process with the team and trying to make sure that we have a clear vision for what we're trying to do and how we're going to address it. What I typically do is I break down the vision for the product

into creative pillars. So for me, it's three to five statements about the product that we're trying to build that are, that I'm, I think our, something that I believe in so strongly that I'm going to put my foot down and say, this has to change. No matter what we learn or what we experience, this is not going to change. This is an assumption about the project, our product that's immutable. So I start with those. And then what I do is I start experimenting and saying, we have a vision, we think

there's a product that we can build that fulfills some need or some fantasy. Here are the pillars that define that product, the sort of characteristics or features of that product that I really believe in. And then what I do is I really, really believe in rapid prototyping and getting things out in front of people as fast as possible. And of course, this is something that I think everybody knows is really important. But I think as an industry, I still don't think we've really mastered this. Some people are better than others. But it's really important for me and for the teams I work on, I think for others to be unafraid to show unfinished work and to show unpolished work, to get feedback as fast as possible, and learn whether or not you're actually going out

out in solving the problems or fulfilling the needs that you think you're solving. So for me, it's about, you know, having that clear vision and knowing what you're not willing to change, but then gathering feedback as fast as possible so that you can learn whether or not you're right of whether or not this is a product that anyone wants or whether or not your assumptions are correct. And if they are, then what are the things that are working about fulfilling that? So this is wonderful. I wholeheartedly agree with every part of your statement. And in fact,

I even want to relate that back because the way I describe this to people is, it relates back to your own background because in many ways, you know, these assumptions are your hypotheses and that you want to test in the lab of, you know, player experience. And that, you know,

and when I talk to new designers, it's always about bringing their, being able to test your assumptions. as cheaply and quickly as possible. I mean, this is true for entrepreneurship as well, right? You build a business around these core assumptions and you're saying, okay, I think the world needs this and that people really want this. And you need to figure that out as fast as possible because you're, you know,

lighting money on fire until you're sure you're right. Yeah. Well, and the games industry is really good at lighting money on fire. That's for sure. My goodness, is it ever? Is it ever? Yeah. So yeah, my background was, you know, I've started and still mostly do tabletop game design.

And so it's trained me to have a much shorter and cheaper iteration cycle. And, you know, anything I can prototype up and test in pen and paper, even when I'm working on a digital game, I will do. And even, like, you know, act as the computer and talk through the game to people for certain phases to test things. You know, whatever I can do to get it iterated. because as smart as anybody thinks they are, you just don't know until you really get testing and get feedback. So I love every part of that sentiment. Another thing that you said that I wanted to dig into, you know, you talk about sort of fulfilling these needs that people have the psychological needs or fantasies. Do you have a specific way that you break those down or are there sort of most common ones you go for?

Are there things that you've driven for that are unusual or just sort of more standard ones? I know there's a lot of different taxonomies for this. I'm curious if you have a favorite or a way you think about them. Yeah, you know, I think the more time I've spent in this business, the more I've been focused on sort of being entrepreneurial and trying to build businesses. And I think that naturally sort of leads you into place where you're thinking more about knees as opposed to why. I think both are a valid place to start from. Some examples over time of what I've done is having worked on Dead Space, which is a game that I worked on electronic arts.

Dead Space has a reputation of being one of the scariest games of all time. So in this case, you might say having the crap scared out of you is not necessarily a need, but that was really kind of the vision for the game. In that case, it's, you know, hey, we want to build the scariest game of all time. We know that some people really, really love that feeling of being frightened and then overcoming that fear and sort of defeating the enemy, sort of defeating the fear. And so that's where the idea began from there. So we built a bunch of creative pillars for that and sort of what we thought would create a really frightening experience.

that would be enjoyable. After that, I worked on Farmville. And so for Farmville, you know, again, the idea there was we know that people like to do things together with their friends, to have a sense of accomplishment, that people really get a lot of satisfaction out of feeling like they're growing and nurturing things. And so I thought that was the power of a franchise like Farm Bill. I didn't invent Farm Bill. I came on after Farm Bill had already established itself as a big success, but I was brought on to go build Farm Bill too.

So for me, I sort of looked at the product and I looked at the people and I thought, you know, everybody's got a lot of opinions about what made Farm Bill successful. But I think there's a universal truth here. And that is that people love to grow and nurture things together with their friends and their community. And so for that one, what we did is we said, hey, we are going to build a game that is the fantasy. It fulfills the fantasy of the good life in the country, not the reality of rural life. And for my last project, the company that we started called Outpost Games, we were building a platform that what we wanted to do with the company was to make games as fun to watch. watch as they are to play. And so we built a platform that integrated audiences directly into games.

So let's say if you were, let's say you were in a game with Ninja and say ninja's got 100,000 people watching him, then in the game, when you're in a game with him, the game is telling you that now there are 100,000 people watching this game and everyone in the game becomes aware of that. And so what we were going after here was a need, or at least, to sort of powerful force that we're aware of in psychology, which is that when people know they're being watched, their behavior changes pretty radically. They suddenly start putting on a show. So this, what it did is it really made the game so a lot more fun to watch because I looked

at it from the perspective of the viewer. And I thought, if I can let everybody know they're being watched here, then they're all going to try to put on a show for the viewer. So I was trying to sort of play some psychological tricks to make some more interesting content to watch. And on the flip side, from the players' experience, this was beneficial because the audience could send them real-time feedback. And we know that real-time feedback has an incredibly powerful effect on people. If you do something and somebody immediately gives you praise, you're much more likely to want to keep doing that. So this platform that we built in this technology allowed us to create this sort of mutually beneficial system where the people who were watching games got much, much better content. When people who are playing got the satisfaction of knowing they're being watched and getting real-time feedback so they know when they were doing things that were interesting or entertaining.

And then they got some information about sort of what the audience has felt. so they could send applause, love, laughter, and all these kinds of things. So this was just a few examples of where we said, you know, hey, let's not just say, hey, people seem to really like games with scary things or games with cows or people seem to really like streaming. We tried to get down to the psychology and really understand what is something that players would really, really enjoy about this. And then we tested a bunch of versions of it to see which one actually.

fulfilled what we thought was a need there. So much to break down there. I, you know, the digging into the concept of sort of needs versus wants, I've often struggled with that when I, you know, work on games and, you know, almost all of the stuff are, almost all the things we trigger are wants at a certain level, right? When we're playing games that are, you know, not central to our lives. But they do emulate these core needs. Like, you know, You mentioned, you know, sort of growing and growing things and connecting, even the sort of adrenaline rush of being scared of this, this part that, you know, our biology, like, needs that to certain degrees.

We get joy out of that component and that excitement. And so when you make parallels to starting businesses where you're trying to fulfill needs and, you know, more the real world, do you find that you go through the same process, or is there some different component to it when you're thinking about things in terms of the broader business, or is it really just sort of all one and the same in your mind? Well, you know, I certainly can't claim to be a very successful entrepreneur as of yet. So, you know, I don't have a ton of history here. But thus far, it's been the same process.

Because I think that there's certainly businesses that you can learn. at and say, boy, this business is fulfilling a very obvious need. You know, if you're in biotech, you know, curing cancer, well, that's pretty obvious. Or if you're in financial tech saying, hey, I need a place to keep my money or grow my money or things like that. But I think for most startups and most businesses, you don't really have the luxury of doing something, you know, if it's really innovative, it's not always obvious right up front. So in that case, I would say, I admit that I sometimes use want and need interchangeably and not always very disciplined about that. But I think for an innovative business, what you want is to say, let's identify

a sort of powerful experience that people can have. And oftentimes that experience can then sort of work on a person's wants or needs. And so it may not be obvious from the start. So, you know, you could imagine something like, you know, I don't know, take Facebook, for example, you know, hey, people really like sharing pictures with friends. People really like to share what they're doing with their friends. It may not be such an obvious need right from the start, but if you kind of break that down, then you can say, oh, yeah, that is going after something that is universal amongst people.

which is, you know, we all want to connect with each other. But the way that they were connecting, I think that's the hard part is you've got to have a vision for some very specific way that you're going to bring this to life. And I think that's where sometimes, you know, you have to talk a little bit more about wants. You know, people want to post pictures or share what they're eating or things like that. And then that gets the universal truth, the need, which is to connect people. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of a path from one to the other.

and that you can kind of all of our wants derive from these, these sort of core needs, these core drives. So it's sort of all connected in that way. Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to pull from your last commentary is, you know, building a platform for integrating an audience into games. You know, this is something that, you know, has been a huge trend in the industry over the last several years,

that, you know, the sort of e-sports and streaming and kind of viewing games has become frankly even more popular than playing games these days. And it's kind of a little odd for, I think, people in our generation. But it's now, you know, I designed games for kids. And the YouTube streaming audience and people on Twitch is like always top of mind for what we're building. So I really, I'm impressed with the vision that you had for sort of trying to integrate those things. What did you learn throughout that process? because it's very challenging to nail that correctly.

Yeah, we learned a ton. Well, what I would say is I'm going to sort of bounce around the timeline for the company just because I think it's a little bit easier to digest. We were going at it for about four and a half years. So there were a lot of learnings. But what I'll start with is that we made this platform. It was called hero.tv. and as I said, you know, it integrated the spectators for anyone who was streaming into the game for the benefit of every player.

And then what we did is we built a game called SOS to showcase it. And so SOS was basically like a battle real game that sort of looked and felt like a reality TV show. So it was a bit like the Hunger Games in that respect. And what we found with SOS is that any player who got feedback from an audience. So the audience could click these buttons. It was a lot like Facebook Live, right? So you had different sort of emoticons that you could press. If the audience clicked eight times or more, the players who received that real-time feedback from an audience,

They had three times the engagement and retention of other players. And, you know, as you know, that's pretty insane. If you could triple the engagement and retention of your players, that's a really, really big deal. And this was really interesting because this doesn't, you know, again, it doesn't just apply to the people who were streaming. This actually had a benefit for anyone who would show up on screen and get feedback from an audience. So I wanted to say that first because I think that's the most exciting thing that we learned and that as a startup, you're building these products where you're making big bets. You don't really know if this stuff is going to work. What I mentioned earlier, I kind of think

of design as applied science. I took what I know about psychology from some texts, some papers, but also just from my personal experience. And I said, hey, I think this is going to have a really big impact on players. And it did. And I would say for anyone who's out building games right now, if you think your game is the kind of game that people are going to stream, I would think really, really hard about trying to get as many people to stream it as possible and to try to make sure that if you're in a game that's being streamed,

even if you're not a streamer, that you're aware of that. because that can have a really powerful psychological effect on players. It gives them a kind of intrinsic satisfaction that you don't get from, you know, just from points or coins or other sort of, you know, digital, you know, ethereal rewards. Sorry, do you want to ask questions? No, yeah. I mean, I'm really, you know, obviously that, I think that lesson is key. And I mean, I genuinely believe that people who get this right.

you know the people who are able to properly integrate this sort of viewing audience and player interaction and build this into something because the technology exists now for it to be you know be far more immersive than it ever has been before and that getting this right is you know the billion dollar question so it's just it's fascinating to me to hear and you know also sort of as a you know the entrepreneurial side of me wants to ask lots of questions about going through this arc because anytime you take a big swing like this and try to build something that's revolutionary, it's hugely draining and impactful and expensive and challenging. And I know that, you know, you went through all of that. So I kind of want to hear the whole arc, to be honest.

So I didn't want to interrupt because you have a lot of good stuff. But I, you know, this was, you know, yeah, I really would love to hear the whole story. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So I'll rewind back to the beginning. I was at Zinga with two old friends of mine who were engineers that I worked with the entire time I was at Zinga and basically the entire time I was at Electronic Arts. I had known these guys for at the time 14 years. And we worked really well together. I was a designer. They were engineers.

So we had nice complementary skill sets. And we decided we wanted to leave Zinga and take what we learned at EA, take what we learned at Zinga and go do something new. we wanted specifically to our first instincts were to say first of all at EA you may remember that in the mid 2000s EA had proclaimed that the PC was dead which kind of broke my heart because you know starting off as kind of a hacker and a quake moderate PC is still my favorite platform of choice And so, you know, some part of me was always like, no, a PC can't be dead. It's such a great platform.

And that, you know, around the time we left Zinga, what we saw was we saw the rise of Twitch. We saw the rise of League of Legends and e-sports. And we saw that the PC community had sort of, you know, came back from the dead. Not that it was ever really dead, but suddenly everyone was like, oh, hey, the PCs are really big deal. And you have games like Counter Strike that are still growing, and you have all these really hardcore communities around Minecraft that are incredibly retentive because of the really sort of deep social connections around these games and all the user-generated content that made people keep coming back to play and to watch.

So we said, hey, the PC is really interesting. Hardcore games are really interesting. You know, we had spent a lot of time making sort of mass market and casual games. And we saw things like Day Z. So I was playing Day Z at the time. And I thought, well, gee, this just warms my heart because this is an incredibly hardcore game. The most hardcore game perhaps I've ever seen. And it was blowing up.

It was selling like crazy. But more importantly, I saw that it was a lot of. was incredibly fun to watch that watching Daisy in some respects was like watching improv theater. People would go into this world and bump into random strangers and then have to kind of put on a show and to try to gain their trust or to threaten them or just to be silly to entertain people who are watching their videos or, you know, it was always very unpredictable. And so we put all that together and we said, hey, let's go build a company that is all of our making sure that we can let the skill and creativity of players shine.

And this is a really important point, I think, for us to talk about, because sometimes as designers, we're torn as to whether or not we should be the star of the show or whether not the player should be the star of the show. If you're building a game that is cinematic, that's telling a very specific story that has a specific beginning and middle and end, you know, it's oftentimes you fall into that situation where you're thinking

kind of like a filmmaker, you're the star of the show. And that was my experience building AAA games. We decided that we wanted to dedicate ourselves to building games that were specifically designed to sort of bring out performances, you know, bring out the skill and creativity and performances of players.

So that's where we begin. Okay. So you're at, this is all happening while you're at Zinga. You guys are, you know, sitting around the lunchroom or getting beers after work and you're having this conversation. You know, this would be something awesome to make. We should start our own company and go make this happen. Well, it was, it wasn't until we decided to, we knew that we wanted to do something together. We, we had talked about doing that for years. The truth is we ended up sort of agreeing that We were going to do that. And then we left Zinga and then we had this discussion and figured out what we wanted to do.

Gotcha. So you knew you wanted. So wait. And I just, I want to dig into the details because I find this stuff fascinating. And for a lot of people out there that are, you know, at a company and then thinking about jumping off on their own. Because I was working as a game designer at a company called Upper Deck and I quit to start my own thing, not having any idea what I was going to do exactly, just knowing I wanted to do

something on my own. And kind of it's taped up enough to kind of give that a shot. Is that, was it similar there where you're like, all right, we're the team, but we don't know what we're doing. We're just going to quit and give ourselves space to build it. Or I'd love to, more details on how that came about. Yeah. Well, we had sort of bounced the idea off of each other, you know, just kind of feeling each other out for a while. Like, hey, would you be interested in doing a startup?

And, you know, we all sort of said, yeah, but only if you are. And then, you know, we sort of built up that trust with each other saying, Hey, we've all sacked away some money. We're all at a point in our careers where we're ready to take a big risk. And we all believe in each other. We think we'd be great partners in this. So we began with just sort of feeling each other out and making sure that if we could do this, let's make sure that we're all in it together.

Because if I quit my job, I want to know that we're all going to be able to do this together. And we didn't have a specific idea for what we wanted to do, mostly for legal reasons. You know, oftentimes when you go to a big company, they say, hey, we own all of your ideas while you're here. Yes, we own everything you do. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, I understand why that is. I don't hold it against any company. And Zingo was a fantastic place to work. But, you know, we just said, hey, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it, right? And, you know, let's just be clean.

And we shook hands and said, let's all leave on this date and then figure out what we want to do. And so we all kind of resigned together and decided to take the plunge. All right. Very exciting. And so, you know, again, I just sort of underscoring some lessons here for people, you know, obviously you had a ton of experience, you know, in the industry generally and learned a lot through your time. at Zinga and EA and elsewhere. And you had a team of people that you were excited about working with,

that you had a built up trust and had a lot of experience working together. And decided, all right, we're committed. We're all in and quit. And now, all right, it's the day after. Maybe there's a celebrating. Maybe there's a hangover. Maybe not. And now, okay, now what do we do?

And that's when you started having this discussion and came upon this idea of like, Our focus is get the players being able to perform and to become stars and functionally be the center of crafting these viewable experiences is the vision for the company. Yeah. So we literally hit the ground running the next morning. We set up coffee tables and one of the other co-founder's house. And we just, and we ordered ourselves MacBook pros because we weren't really sure if we wanted to do mobile games or one. So we said, okay, well, that's a machine that we could build PC games, mobile games, you know, whatever.

And we just started hammering away at it. And our first instinct was, let's talk about cool games that we could build. And we talked about strategy games and physics games and, you know, all sorts of things. And then I think immediately, well, I say immediately, it was probably after. a day or two of discussion, I think we all said, whoa, whoa, let's stop because there's a trap that I think we were at risk of falling into that many companies do. And that is that you, you go to build a company and what you end up doing is you end up just building a product and sometimes you end up just chasing a trend. Like, hey, mobile's hot right now or VR sounds hot or RPGs are

really big right now or mobas or battle royale games or whatever and it's really really easy to go build a company around an idea that is just a trend and when you do that and you don't really establish who you are who you want to be then you know you run the risk of just dying as soon as the wind changes direction so we said wait a minute okay we're talking about games let's talk about the company that we want to build let's talk about who we want to be and um And I think that's when we realized that, you know, let's talk about our vision, our mission, and the culture that we want to have. And so that's when we started talking about bringing performances out of players,

making sure that, you know, we were bringing skill and creativity out of players, and that we decided that we ultimately wanted to be a platform company. I think all of us had felt like at this point in our careers, we wanted to tackle something even bigger than just a game. And so we said, we know how to make games. None of us have ever built a consumer or developer platform before, but we were up for that challenge and we wanted to build something big. But we knew that the best way to do it was to probably go build a game

that would allow us to test out our ideas. So, you know, if we had an idea for a technology or a certain way that people could interact with games as spectators or whatever, that we would need a game that was specifically designed to be able to test those ideas and we had to be able to own it. So we ended up designing this game and that informed us about what the technologies that we would need to build were and what kind of platform we could build from it. And so we spent three months building a prototype and we built it in the Cry Engine, which was really fun because if you've ever looked at the SDK, it comes to tons of assets and it's really beautiful and it's basically got a whole sort of FPS ready to go out of the box. So we built a prototype with that. And then we had to discuss whether or not we wanted to go down the publisher route or whether we wanted venture funding. And I think as first-time founders, we spent a lot of time trying to think about that and understand what the implications would be and talk to a lot of people to get a lot of advice. And we ended up talking to publishers and talking to DCs.

And given that we wanted to take a big risk and we wanted to shoot for the moon, we knew that if we talked to publishers that our hands would be tied in many respects and they would want to be fairly concerned. about what we were going to do. We ended up talking to VCs, and we met Mitch Lasky at Benchmark, and he saw what we were pitching. I got about halfway through my pitch. It was way too long. And he just said, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop.

Your pitch is too long, but I've been looking for what you're pitching, and I love it. And the whole thesis and vision around making games as fun to watch as they are to play. play by bringing performances out of people, I'm in. And things kind of went from there. We had a couple more meetings and suddenly we were a venture back to company. So how long did it take from when you decided, okay, we're going to start. So you simultaneously were having meetings with venture capital

as well as with publishers. How long from when you started that process, you had a prototype that you were reasonably happy with? You had a vision. You said, okay, we need some money. I'm going to go down this road. How long did that process take until you got funded? Let's see. Well, um, approximately is okay. I just, you know, yeah, I would say, um, from the time that we finished the prototype, it was, it was probably three or four months. Okay. That's, that's a pretty decent, uh, from, uh, most, most, uh, rates. That's a pretty standard. I like it. Yeah. And then, and then, uh, You know, one of the things that I found, because I've done funding in a variety of ways, I've worked with publishers, I've gotten VC back, I've done crowdfunding, and I've learned some

lessons the hard way that if you don't align your incentives and your goals with those of the people, of the people you're getting money from, you're going to be, you're going to have a bad time. Yeah. And that really is something that you underscored there. You know, if your goal is, you know, we're going to go, we're going to 100x or zero. You know, we're going for the big swing VC. That's what they're all about as opposed to a publisher where they, you know, they want to make a profit on their games. And that's not risk too much.

Yeah. I'm curious, did you ever consider crowdfunding? We did. I think we talked about it, but we didn't take it too seriously. You know, despite some of the big success stories. And I'm trying to think, you know, we started the company in 2000. So we began our hunt for funding in the summer of 2014. And I don't remember if things like Star Citizen had already seen their success on Kickstarter.

And I don't remember exactly why we didn't go after it. But my gut is telling me that we probably discussed it and realized that none of us were really great artists. or marketing people. And I think we thought we're better at sort of describing, you know, we're better at building software than we are and going out and trying to make trailers or all these other things that it felt like you needed for a Kickstarter campaign.

You know, and in hindsight, you know, we ended up building a really, really cool demo that we showed to publishers and investors. And, you know, we probably could have just, you know, screen capped it and gone on Kickstarter. I don't know I have a great answer for you why we didn't do that. But I think it was mostly because we wanted to build relationships with people who could help us. You know, as first time entrepreneurs, you know, we needed some people who had to bend down

this path before and could help us out. Sure. No, that makes sense. And, you know, there's no, I don't think there's a single right answer to any of these. You know, I just, it's, I always am curious, not only sort of how people make these decisions for their own businesses and then the ramifications over time because they really do matter and as I've mentioned, I've learned that lesson the hard way by going down the wrong path sometimes and it sounds like you pick the right mechanism.

So you're getting now you get funding and it was a pretty significant amount of funding. I think it was, I read 18 million, something like that. Is that right? Well, our first round was 6.2 million. Oh, is that all? We ended up doing a couple rounds. We did $6.2 million. So what is that I just want to tell,

I want to break down to this story. You know, like you signed paperwork. Now you have $6.2 million. Maybe it's in tranches or whatever. But what is that, what's that day like for you? I mean,

you know, your first time entrepreneur, you've just gotten, you know, significant funding for your idea that previously it's you and your friends just kind of working in your living room on the coffee table. And now, now you're funded.

Now you're going. Like, what was that experience like? You know, it was obviously a really great experience. But, you know, I would say that the three of us as co-founders, I would describe us all as sort of, you know, sober types. You know, we've been in the games industry for a while. And, you know, having worked on a games that had a lot of big budgets,

we knew that that was actually not a lot of money. So while we were happy and we felt like, you know, it was great that we got money and it was great to see the people believed in our vision, I think what we were most happy about is that we had the person who I think is probably, you know, the best investor in gaming, a person who has a really incredible reputation, Mitch Lasky. So we were, I think we were just relieved that we did a deal with somebody that we felt like would really be a great asset for us. So it wasn't, you know, champagne, it wasn't partying. It was like, okay, well, now we just have a lot more work to do. You know, we have to go hire people. And I think that was really hard. Because I think most people probably have this fantasy, as we did to some degree,

that you're going to get this money and you're just going to sit down and you're going to make something awesome. But in reality, you get the money. We couldn't build anything because suddenly we became full-time recruiters. We were talking to lawyers. We're trying to find an office. We're trying to recruit people. We're trying to figure out what game engine to use. We're trying to figure out, I mean, just, oh, my gosh,

there's all this stuff that you need to do. And it was a little bit of a bummer that after we had created what we thought was a really, really awesome demo, it's like our progress kind of halted for a little while. So it was fun, but, you know, it was... It was mostly kind of a realization that, well, things are real and this is going to be hard. Yeah, no, it's always, you know, it's one thing when you make money, you know, from selling a game and you're like, oh, great, we're making this money. But it's another thing when you're like, this money exists and you need to spend it.

Like, you need to build a thing that makes more money, you know, relatively quickly. Like, it is actually an obligation, not a, not a boon in many ways. And so I understand that, that pressure. And also, you know, just sort of underscore the other component that like kind of what got you, what got you to where you are is not necessarily the skill set that you need from that moment forward. Right now you're not the one building, or at least not at that, you know, your most important task is not building and, you know, programming, but building a team and setting the vision and setting the company culture. and building around that side.

And you know, you've led some pretty large teams before. Did you feel that those skills were kind of paralleled, or was it, you know, just new now that you're, you know, really the final buck stops here kind of role? Well, you know, one of the other co-founders was the original CEO. But obviously, as co-founders, you know, we were all working really closely together. I think we all felt like we equally shared the burden of, you know,

leading and running and managing the company. I thought that my experience leading products in the past, it was very useful early on, you know, when you're small, when your management problems are pretty minor. Everyone's morale is super high. Everyone thinks that, you know, we're going to go build a billion-dollar company or we're going to rule the world. Everybody does. You know, everything is pretty rosy.

And I think that, you know, for sort of the first phase, everything looked pretty darn good and we were having a lot of fun. What I wasn't prepared for, eventually I decided to swap with one of the other co-founders. And he wanted to get back into an engineering role. And, you know, I was really good. sort of leading the vision for what the company was doing in terms of what the products are that we were building and going out and selling them to investors and things like that. So it felt natural for me just to have been in a CEO role. But what I wasn't prepared for was the fact that, you know,

my biggest strength is in directing products and creating the vision and shepherding them throughout the process of experimenting, trying to find out what's sort of the right version of that product we should build is and getting the details right around execution and making sure that people understand all the nuances around what we're trying to build and why. As soon as I stepped into the CEO role, I realized, you know, it's the first time you do any job, especially a big job like that, you're pretty terrible at it. So suddenly it's, you know, I'm thinking about finances and suddenly I'm thinking about legal issues and suddenly I'm spending, you know, so much time trying to fundraise.

You know, 6.2 million wasn't a lot. So, you know, we went back into fundraising mode, not too long after our first round, just a year later. And then,

you know, and then you're doing a lot to recruit. You're doing a lot thinking about how am I building the culture and managing the office. And so, you know, suddenly I felt like,

well, boy, I'm doing a really crappy job as CEO being, you know, the first time I'm doing it. And I'm also doing a pretty crappy job. Sorry to interrupt.

How big was your team when that went around this time when you took over a CEO? You know, I think it was probably about 25 people at that point. Okay. Yeah. And did you have, because I have also been through this arc and I had a lot of actually challenges as a CEO. When my company started growing to around 25, 30 people, I really hit a point where I was not at all doing a good job. that there's this number. When you're below 20 people,

you pretty much can, like, know what everybody's doing, and you can, like, talk to everybody every day, pretty much, you know? Yeah. And if you start getting above that number, all of a sudden, like, you need better systems and communication and company culture isn't something that just default, you know, it felt like before that it could kind of exude from you. And after that, it's like, no, that's not going to work.

You need, you know, tools to get you there. Did you find that kind of similar breakpoint? Or did you have specific things that you, you, you, learn that you're like, all right, these are some maybe two or three key things that helps you to get through that next growth phase? Oh, boy. Yeah. You know, there's a lot to impact there. I realized I was not doing a great job. You know, as you said, one of the things that I was thinking a lot about was the company culture and talking to my other co-founders. we realized that we knew exactly what the culture was that we wanted to have and eventually we

realized that well the more people you hire the harder it is to maintain that you know culture really kind of stems from you know not only sort of how you manage and direct the company but of course who you hire and who you bring into the company so you know hiring and firing is is really kind of the most effective way to build culture and so I think I naively thought that, you know, getting up and talking to the company about the culture that we wanted to build, while not always sort of setting the best example for the culture, and while not always doing the best job of sort of removing people who didn't fit the culture fast enough, you know, having people stay around too long who didn't quite fit,

and then people sort of getting confused about what kind of behavior we expected from people and how we wanted people to work. So I did not do a good job of that. And at the same time, I think my board of directors expected me because they invested in the vision and the products that we were selling early on. It kind of expected me to be the chief product officer, design officer, the visionary, and responsible for the execution for the product. when meanwhile I'm sort of up against the ropes figuring out, you know, how to run a company. You know, there's, you're just hit with every hour a dozen different things, you know.

And so I definitely felt like I suffered from a little bit of paralysis. You know, there's a certain point at which you're just like, I just can't process any more information. Right. Yeah. So, all right. So you're going through this. and learning trial by fire and having to handle all these problems

as you're growing. And the product is, you know, you're sort of maintaining fundraising mode. You're having to deal with keeping things going. And then the product's proceeding. And I think at some point along the way they started making a documentary about you. Is that right?

Yeah. There was a company that, some friends of ours that got in touch that they were doing a documentary around Dead Space. And, you know, Dead Space has a pretty big cult following. There are a lot of people out there who are still kicking, screaming for more Dead Space titles. And they got in touch with us, you know, a bunch of us at Outposts because a lot of us came from the Dead Space team. And so they came in and they did a documentary because, you know, they realized,

hey, well, we got in touch with you about Dead Space, but it turns out there's some other interesting things going on here, and we'd love to talk to you about that. And what was that process? Like, are they like following you around with cameras, like, while you're going through all this, like, process? Are they, like, what is, you know, I'm curious. I've never had a documentary crew. Well, it's hard enough to get the job done, let alone while people are filming you. Yeah, you know, it was pretty minor. They came in, I think they were around the office for, it was, I want to say, like, two days, and they interviewed a bunch of people. So I think that, you know, after you take away all the time, it took for them to set up lights and choose good spots around the office to shoot.

You know, it was probably only, you know, eight hours worth of footage or so that they collected in total. So I think I'd probably spend maybe one or two hours with them talking about the company. And it wasn't very disruptive. It wasn't like we had a reality TV show crew in the office all the time. All right. So we're going through and now, you know, obviously things at some point start taking a turn and don't quite working the way you would hope. Can you mind talking a little bit about where, how this goes down and where the arc kind of turns for you guys? Yeah, well, I'd say things got really, really hard once we started gearing up to launch.

And, you know, there's a lot of things that went wrong here. So I'll try to sort of make sure I'm giving you the Cliff Notes version because I can talk for hours. But I think the first thing is that we made a couple of. classic startup mistake of trying to build something that was scalable before we knew how badly people wanted the product. We were building a stadium for 50,000 people before we knew if anyone would like to come watch baseball. So as we started ramping up, we had alphas and we had beta tests of SOS and we tested some of the tech and the technology and the platform that we were building. And we got really, really positive feedback. You know, we had players and we had streamers

saying, oh, my God, this is going to be huge. This is going to be amazing. But, you know, there's this classic, you know, startup mistake of relying a little bit too heavily on anecdotal feedback, instead of saying, hey, what are your engagement and retention numbers actually look like? And do you have enough data for it to be statistically significant, you know? And I think in the end, what we had were people who really loved what we were building. And so we spent all this time building, you know, making sure that we were protected against people cheating and that the back end would scale really, really well. And, you know, all this work because we're like, gee, we really don't want to be caught launching a game that melts down because there's so much demand for it. We can't keep up with it.

So we put all this time into it before, I think we really, really knew how badly people wanted it and what the retention would look like. So we launched the game, and there were lots and lots of problems with the game itself. One of them was that, in hindsight, this was sort of an obvious problem. And we did anticipate this and have solutions for it, but we didn't realize how bad it would We built a game where your voice was the core game mechanic. So what we realize is that if we're going to build games that are really fun to watch, the most kind of fun, universal, timeless form of entertainment is character drama.

So the game that we built was kind of like a battle royale game, but the teams are all formed ad hoc. So you would start, you had to wander around in the game, meet people, and then you would go up and you would raise your hand like a high five. And then if people high fived you back, you would form a team, you would team up. Sometimes they would backstab you. There was lots of intrigue, lots of treachery. And it was incredibly fun to watch.

But what we realized is that the game, your mic was always on, and you could talk to anybody that you met. And so shortly after we launched the game, there were a lot of internet trolls that realized that we had just built the ultimate internet troll game. Yeah, yeah. This is, we have a, we call the penis principle in our office. Any mechanic you make, how quickly can it get to somebody talking about writing, showing anything that's really inappropriate. And we, yeah, we spend way too much time worrying about this sort of thing.

Yeah, you know, so we knew that this would happen to some degree, but we had some moderation systems that we built to try to address it. We believed that the presence of an audience would discourage people from doing some of this. So we thought, hey, a lot of bad behavior on the Internet comes from this feeling of anonymity. So if everybody sort of thinks they're being watched in the game, we won't get rid of it, but, you know, we'll sort of mitigate it. And in truth, you know, for a person who really likes trolling other people, having an audience is sort of, you know, pouring gas on it. So what we had were a bunch of streamers, notably some female streamers who really loved our game. But it was,

when we launched it, it was still at a small scale. So trolls could watch the streamers. So trolls could watch the streamers play the game, get into the matchmaking queue at the same time and have a pretty good chance that they would end up in the same game as that streamer. And then the game would, you know, basically, they could stream snipe and go find that person and start shouting obscenities at these women who played our game. And so we had moderators who were watching this stuff, getting reports, and then banning people for doing that. And one of the really challenging things about our game was that it was designed to feel like a reality TV show. So we wanted character drama.

We wanted people to sort of take this, or to think about the game as a chance to be a part of a cast of characters. And we expected that some people would sort of play the villain and some people would play the hero and there would be all sorts of people in between. And, you know, some of this, I think, was straight up trolling where these people would come into our game, they would harass the women, and they would get all of our followers after they got banned to go onto Reddit and to other public forums and say, hey, outpost games is, you know, they're a bunch of social justice warriors. They're just banning people

for being mean to women. And, you dumped yourself right into the heart of the worst parts of gaming in the community that. That's unfortunate. this. Yeah, I mean, really, we were, we were, you know, we fell right into this. And so, and now what was hard about that is, you know, we were building a game where we knew going in that moderating a game like this is hard because one of the interview questions that I always ask, you know, moderators and community managers came in, and I said, you know, how were you going to tell the difference between somebody who is playing a villain and somebody who's just a real asshole, you know, because there's some people who were really good at playing the villain,

and everybody would sort of go along with it. And, you know, even if you were sort of the victim of their, say, backstabbing or treachery in the game, you could be like, hey, well, that person was still pretty entertaining. Like, that was really fun. That was really interesting to watch or to be a part of. And, you know, I think we all understood where to draw the line there. It's, I think, it's pretty obvious to most reasonable people what's harassment and what's sort of, you know, done and good fun. But, of course, you know, you can't win when you've got, you know, an army of trolls coming after you who are, you know, just being horrible people. and then making up a lot of stories. And in some cases, deliberately forging conversations

with our community managers saying, look, here's a Photoshop transcript where they're saying all these horrible things to us and doing all these really corrupt things. And so it was just this war with the trolls. And then the hardest part there was that Twitch changed their terms of service to say anything that appears on your stream, you're accountable for. So if a troll walks up to you in SOS and starts shouting really, really horrible obscenities,

you can be responsible. So a bunch of streamers said, hey, we love this game. We absolutely love it. But we can't risk our careers as streamers playing it. So we'll come back once you guys fix all this stuff. Good luck. Yeah, yeah. And so now that was sort of how things shook out when we launched the game.

The other thing that was really hard is because we built a game where voice was the core mechanic, we had this real struggle thinking about how do we divide up the territories? We had a small player base so we couldn't afford to fragment it and chop it up by language. So we started getting Portuguese speakers, you know, some other non-English speakers in the game. And they weren't happy because they couldn't always communicate. And then we launched a game in China. We needed it available in China. And then, of course, you know, you have this sort of ongoing rivalry, East versus West,

that was playing out in a lot of other games at the time. That started showing up in SOS, which, you know, was even more frustrating for players. they felt like there's even, you know, other types of trolling going on with people shouting them sending these number languages and everything. Wow. So eventually we decided that, you know, hey, we always wanted to be a platform company. And we built this really great piece of technology. We built this destination called hero.tv that is a place you can go to watch any stream

and interact with the game in real time. So we had this ability to send real time feedback. But it also had all these other features for you to vote on things that are happening in the game. And so it was this really sort of rich audience interactivity platform. And we said, we've got to go raise another round because SOS is not selling very well. And we're burning a lot of cash. We need to raise money now. And as you know, this is, this was our third round of funding you're going after.

And, you know, when you're at this, you know, when you're doing a. Series C, that's a growth round. You're expected to be able to show that you have product market fit, that you have a product that people want, that you're making money and you have users. And if you can do that, people will throw really, really large sums of money at you. You know, at that point, they're just like, here, here's $50, $100 million. You know, here's some gas to throw in the fire. Keep this thing going. And meanwhile, our numbers were plummeting. They were going to zero because SOS was it was failing really badly.

And as a consequence, no one was really using our platform because there was no other reason to use the platform other than to interact with SOS. So at this time, were you trying to work with other companies to sort of adopt the platform? Or was that you were sort of waiting on it being completed or you weren't getting traction there? Like what other steps were you taking

to try to salvage the platform side or show a use case that could function? Yeah, so we did. I went out and I, you know, sort of put on my business development hat and my sales hat and I started talking to people about using our tech. But it wasn't ready for other developers to use. So we spent a couple of months packaging it up for other developers and getting the APIs documented and building a portal where people could go administer their accounts and everything. And we sort of talking to other developers, and this is where I think things really started to unravel. One of the things that I would tell anybody who's doing a startup is that you're not going to have a lot of resources. So you're going to have to pick one thing that you're going to be really good at. And what we had was a game studio and a platform technology company. So we were really two startups.

as if one startup wasn't hard enough, especially for a lot of first-time entrepreneurs, I was really trying to lead and manage two different startups. And these startups, each one had a very different culture, right? So game team is going to have a lot of artists on it. There's much more sort of an artistic, creative culture on a game. game team that you've always got a shepherd and make sure you're making it clear sort of how this game is supposed to succeed and what its strategic role is for the company. And on the other hand, we had this platform team that was almost all engineers plus a couple of designers. And so

they were very technical. And so now what you have is not just sort of two companies are trying to run, but the makeup of each team is very different. The culture on each team is very different. And so we were just trying to do too much. And I would say to anybody who's going to do a startup, you know, do not do that. Do do one thing. One startup hard enough. Do not do two at the same time. Good advice. Good advice. Make one product and even better yet, build one feature at a time, you know, and get it right, test it before you move on to the next thing. Yes. The minimum viable product is a common phrase for this. I also love Seth Godin's terms about

the minimum viable audience too like you know try to make the thing as small as possible that you can succeed at do a great job at that and then and only then do grow to things that are bigger. Yeah. Very hard, very good advice, very hard to follow. I find almost

everybody, even forget just tangentially a little bit out of entrepreneurship back into just pure game design. The number one problem I see with new game designers is they're always trying to do too much. Like everybody wants to Halo plus World of Warcraft, but more than that, you know? And it's like, wait, stop.

Yeah. It's a real problem in the games industry, I think. Game designers, you know, they have that problem that you describe. And what's worse is that games that fail, oftentimes I've been guilty of it myself at times. but I've sort of been trying to beat it out of myself, is to say, oh, okay, we built this big thing. It's not working.

What it needs is just a little bit more time. Like we just need to put a little bit more spit polish. You know, it needs more systems, more content, more rewards. You know, it's so easy to tell yourself that it just needs more time when you don't really have great fit. And it's, there's this. I would have saved myself. millions of dollars if I'd learn this lesson for sooner.

Yeah. Well, and it's so hard because, you know, we always look at the success cases to take lessons from. And so, you know, you can look at Fortnite and you can look at now Apex. And now suddenly I'm hearing a lot of people say, oh, well, that's kind of how you succeed. But you can't. I mean, Epic is a company that's been around for 25 years. they had piles and piles of money and resources. And by the way,

Fortnite was built on the back of a game that was in development for five years. That, by the way, the original version of Fortnite was a total failure. But it's so easy to look at Fortnite and say, oh, well, the way you create a great game and build a great business is you build this super polished game with tons of content where everything, they got everything right. And now you have apex that just came out of nowhere. And it's like, I don't think I've ever seen a more perfectly executed online game. And I'm just hearing people online and friends say, like, well, that's what we've got to do.

We've just got to, like, we just have to hit that bar, you know. And we can do it. I bet you we can do it on a small budget. And I'm like, no, you can't. You cannot do that. Yeah. It's very tough because, you know, there's a lot of conflicting, there's a lot of conflicting lessons and advice out there, right?

There's a problem of a survivorship bias, right? Like the people who succeed are they, you know, they put it all in, they put it all in the line, they got all the way through and they kept going when it looked like they were going to die. And to some extent, that's true. But there's also a giant ocean of people who did that and then left it all in the line and it's gone. And so there's this very challenging balance of like, you know, believing in what you're doing and trying to do as good a job as possible, but also just being realistic about

what's, what can be done and staying focused on those small things that you know you can execute, as opposed to this sort of giant, you know, long-term vision that you can only get there, you know, one step at a time. If you don't have that, you know, $100 million and six-year timeline kind of cushion than a lot of these other companies do. Yeah. And, Again, I think it comes back to making sure that your hypothesis driven. So instead of saying, let's build a super amazing, I don't know, RPG, shooter, car trading game, whatever it is that you think would be cool to build. You know, if you approach it from the sense of, or from the standpoint of saying, hey, let's see if we can get, I don't know, let's see if we can get people to do something. together online, then suddenly you'll realize that, well, you don't need a lot of spit polish and

a lot of scope. If that's the problem you're trying to solve, you'll suddenly find that, hey, you can probably do that in a couple of weeks. You can probably test it anyways. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's great advice. So, you know, one of the other things I sort of want to underscore, you know, and this is something that, you know, we all face in varying degrees. And, you know, we have a lot of failures in our, in our past and that design as a principle is as a process rather is is all about failing over and over again right you you have hypotheses you test them they don't work you modify them you try another one still doesn't work try another one like oh okay that's closer all right now i got something and you kind of move through and it's true in business it's true in game design so you know i really appreciate

you sharing you know this whole story arc and i know obviously we could go on for for a long time but i want to be uh respectful of your time so now you you know you've taken these lessons some Do you know what's next for you? What's, uh, is there, is there, is there, is there a path that you got clear or you just kind of keeping your eyes open? What, where are you at today? You know, uh, there are a bunch of things that I'm thinking about. Um, you know, first of all, I love games.

I'm a gamer. I love making games. Um, but I, I also find that I want more bigger, more interesting challenges, um, as I grow older. And so I've been wanting to take my career in a direction where I think of myself more as a product designer rather than simply as a game designer. And so I'm exploring a bunch of things that aren't necessarily games, but things that can benefit from a game design kind of mindset. And when I look around the world, I think, well, there are very few products that I can imagine that don't benefit from feeling, more playful and more engaging and more rewarding and that offer the chance for you to accomplish things together with friends in a way that is that is you know again you know fun playful engaging

everywhere I look I see that whether it's you know health and fitness apps or whether it's productivity or whether it's you know apps that help people build startups you know certainly one of the things that you learn from building a startup is that there's a a lot of BS that you have to do. And there are infinite possibilities for tools and products that can sort of get rid of the busy work people so that you can focus on the bigger problems. So, you know, having experienced the pain of all that busy word, there are a lot of products have been thinking about building that could help other people, you know, stay focused on

bigger picture. All that said, I still really, really love games. And there are a couple of things that interest me right now. The first is interactive fiction. Despite all the focus that I've had in the last few years on online games and performance, I'm also finding that when I do choose to play games that I call consumable games, content that I want to consume rather than be performant in, I'm finding more and more, and I'm finding amongst my friends,

that people are wanting sort of smaller bite-sized experiences. So things like Gone Home, Firewatch, Edith Finch, Stanley Parable, all these things that I hesitate to call them games. These are experiences, you know, stories, that these are really, really compelling to me now. You know, I have a family and I'm getting older. I don't have 80 hours to go finish Red Dead Redemption. So I like these games or these experiences that are, you know, two, three, four hours long.

And given that we see the traditional media industry really struggling, I think we all know that there's going to be a convergence of sort of traditional media and games. And I really start to see it coming together with things like what Annapurna has been doing in the games that they have invested in. So I'm really, really interested in kind of short format or sort of, you know, short interactive fiction pieces. You know, I've been thinking, what does interactive Black Mirror look like? Can you build 30-minute little experiences that are interactive,

that are really compelling, that are memorable and make really interesting social commentary? Didn't Black Mirror already make interactive Black Mirror? Yeah, they did with Bandersnatch, but I mean more, I mean more immersive, you know, full 3D worlds. Yeah, no. I think I think Bandersnatch was really just sort of, you know, I hesitate to call it a game. Yeah, yeah. Or I hesitate to call it immersive. Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty fascinating experience in playing with that space.

It's clearly, yeah, more, more driven movie and a commentary on, a commentary on a lot of these interactive games rather than an interactive game itself. But I found it pretty fascinating. And I can absolutely see kind of in the direction where you're headed that that is going to become more and more interesting design space as we get more immersive, both technologies and virtual worlds as well as, you know, the common way we consume media is more on devices where interaction is very easy. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the other thing I've been thinking about a lot is a continuation of what we were doing at Outpost, and that is what do games look like when you really, really start to consider the viewer as a core part of the game, as a core part of the design. And so, you know, I regret in hindsight building such a complicated game to test this idea at Outpost, and I've been thinking a lot more about things like GameShame. and sort of traditional examples, games that are just incredibly fun to watch and sort of thinking

about what are those, what's the next generation of those games look like? How do they work on streaming sites? How do you get spectators more heavily engaged and directly participating in them? That's a space that I find really, really interesting as well. Fascinating. So for those out there that want to follow your new projects when they're ready and learn more about you online. What's the best way for people to reach you or follow your work? You can hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Right Bagwell. And you can always find me on LinkedIn as well. But yeah,

Twitter's probably the best place. Anything that I'm up to next, I'll start to post on there. Great. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I found this stuff fascinating. I have this suspicion like we're going to have a lot more opportunity to dig into things in the future as we share a lot of interest and the overlap of the mindset that brings you to be as successful as you've been in design as well as now and not just for games but for products and bringing that into businesses and now seeing you you almost can't help yourself but now want to design products to help people design products better I really am eager to follow what you're up to next so thank you again for being a part of this well thank you it's been really really fun 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. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Design. 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 are sold.