A Theory of Fun

[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the GameCraft podcast. I'm your host, Mitch Lasky. I'm Blake Rodins. And this is a podcast about the modern history of the video game business. Episode 6. The Theory of Fun. [MUSIC] So, Blake, what if the most successful games of the last decade haven't been the most fun games, but have been the games that migrated emotion out of the play experience and into the mechanics of progression? And I guess ultimately retention, engagement and retention. It feels like there's signals in the market that suggest that this approach has not only been dominant, but may have actually reached a tipping point. And maybe we're seeing a move back toward fun. So, you look at what's going on out there, live service launches, which had been really sort of like the dominant economic paradigm in terms of value creation. Those are play patterns that are very much reliant on progression. And those patterns seem to be collapsing pretty fast, right? There's been very few new successful live services launches recently. So, you have that going on. At the same time, you have a lot of smaller games, indie games, mobile games, with really strong moment to moment loops that are breaking out. Things like Balotro or lethal company or peak or repo or things like that. Yeah, I might even say the return of one time pricing and this closer to box good air of pay $10 or $20 for the game. Because I might argue it's more aligned and incentive aligned with actually fun rather than the traditional live service model, which is keep them engaged. They're only making their money back if they play for a year type of thing, whereas in this world, get it up front because you have to, it has to be fun for someone to play it. That's a really interesting point and I agree with that. I mean, really the problem in a nutshell is that a game like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which is 10 years old, barely any monetization scaffolding, still creates more pleasure, more joy in five minutes than a huge part of the large services market that, you know, that has been dominating the games industry creates in 50 hours. Yeah, I think it's really the craftsmanship and optimization of fun more than anything for Mario Kart, which is something that has kept Nintendo relevant through multiple industry changes that should have been threatening to them, which is they've just always focused on this fun aspect. I agree. And I think it's not nostalgia, right? It's not that people are playing Mario Kart because they remember it being pleasurable as children. They know people that have been introduced to games like that, freshly, who've never played them before of no association with them, but who just love the gameplay and it's just very, very joyful and pleasurable. So I think, look, if this contention is true that the biggest games of the last decade basically got better at engagement and worse at emotionally resonant core play experiences, I think it may require a new approach that recenters fun. So in the balance of this episode, I think we want to talk about first what we mean by fun and sort of how we think about fun, both as players and also as investors because it's a really important component of being a successful games investor, having taste and having a taste for fun. What is going to be fun? Because a lot of times you're seeing these products in very embryonic forms. And so what kinds of questions do we ask and what do we look for when we're trying to make that very, very difficult evaluation of is this wireframe or is this design document or whatever going to be fun when expressed in bits and images on the screen. So I think we can kick this off, I think by talking about how we talk about fun and it's a tricky one, right? It's fun is a very inherently subjective personal kind of a femoral concept. I like real time strategy games a lot more than you do apparently, right? Yeah, you love your age of empires. That's for sure. You actually play idle games, which I wouldn't even imagine. I do not feel safe. Yes, I do. I do. That's a good example. But beyond things like genre and play pattern, there I think there's some universal truths about what make games fun to play. And so look, I'm going to go into a little storytelling mode. I've been involved in the production and distribution during the period where I was really working mainly as an operator, but also working in kind of an executive producer role as an investor sitting on the board of directors of startup game companies. And that was really kind of my role. I did, I certainly never been a creative, but I have enabled a lot of design, right? You also were doing green lighting as for activation on third party publishing side. True. A lot of the lens that you've had is actually having judgment or taste on whether a game should make it true, not just simply the business side. Maybe I'd call it good pattern recognition in terms of what kinds of things worked in the market and what kinds of things didn't work in the market in designs. So the ability to sort of translate that, you know, what you're seeing in the very, very early stage into, oh, wait, this isn't potentially going to work or not going to work as it's ultimately expressed in the product. So if you're a game craft, completeist and or maybe a masochist, you can check out the four hour long interview I did with Soren Johnson on his designer notes podcast like Soren is doing a kind of archival project, if you will, talking to a bunch of really really successful Indian mainstream game designers doing these very, very long podcasts where they go through their careers. So I'm unknown reason he decided to interview me as an enabler of design over my career and it's actually a very interesting podcast, but I it's phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough and look, I think it is doing it for hours long. So this is but but I look, I think doing this episode, which is almost long overdoing in a whole bunch of ways, just of, you know, we're forced seasons in and we're finally talking about the fun aspect. Because we're we've always taken the stance on the business side, but I think it's just so important to really cover like fun is, you know, we need the fun to even get to the business side of games. And this is a really interesting lens and look, I think listening to the designer notes podcast from from Mitch is another vantage point of how someone from investing or business lens thinks about fun. So but I'm excited for Mitch and Mitch to share his thoughts on how he thinks about fun. Yeah, I mean, look, I've learned a ton both from failure, which is a very teaches you very strong lessons and but also from working with some of the greatest game designers in the history of games, right? I mean, I've worked with Carmack and Romero with Peter Molenu with Brandon back in Mark Merrill at Riot with Genova Chen, like these are legendary designers. And I've also done a lot of study, right? I've also read pretty much every book on game design that's ever been written that's that's reasonably good. And I will say just as an aside and because it's important because we're going to be stealing some of his ideas in the course of talking about this in this episode. I cannot but unequivocally recommend high-end Sylvester's book designing games if you're into this kind of thing. It's a fantastic and very systematic articulation of a lot of the things that I've experienced working with some of the great designers that I've worked with in my career that I had a lot of like trouble articulating, but he does it in such a systematic way of like breaking it down to the cocktail to its individual elements of like why these things work and why they don't work. And I can't recommend it highly enough. Yeah, I would just also plus one that I think this topic of fun is so nuanced and like what makes a game great is so nuance and it can be quite difficult to actually articulate what makes a game special, but tiny did a phenomenal job. Look, I mean, it is 200 and something pages of just like real nitty gritty but also just complete clarity of what makes a game great. Yeah, I would say the first two chapters in particular are essential. Yes. And if you're working in the games business, even if you've been working in the games for a long time as I have, you will learn something from reading those first couple of chapters. So there's basically three elements to my theory of fun. The first is mechanics and that is really that fun games are not built top down. They're built bottom up and they're built bottom up the bricks and mortar of that bottom up building are mechanics. The mechanic is what generates the events of play and those events hopefully if the design is good create emotions fear anticipation joy accomplishment relief. The best games in gender emotions directly from the play mechanics themselves and not some narrative day new mall after the play has has finished. I mean, a classic example I was like to use is like the civilization thrown room where you know the idea is that like, okay, we've done all this work. We've done all this conquering. We've done all this economic expansion and our reward for all that is supposed to be this trip through this very highly decorated 3D model in the game throne room, where we're supposed to see feel really good about ourselves. Or in other adventure games, for example, playing through this difficult puzzle space, and then the reward is a cutscene. It just did such a diminishment of emotion in the way that I like to think about the nexus between emotion and play. Yes. The second concept is elegance. And this one really comes a lot from Tynon. Elegance is the idea of eliciting the greatest amount of emotional payoff from the fewest mechanics. This is a concept that Tynon addresses in the second chapter of the book that mechanics are not free. That every mechanic you add to your game requires a learning curve for the player. They have to remember how to do it. They have to act on it often under pressure, time pressure, or the pressure of violence from entities or other players. And each mechanic needs to be embedded into the play experience in an organic way, right? So that it can't be like you're asked to, even though I, again, bad game design, we've seen this happen again and again in games. But like, you know, you walk up to a door and you're, and then you have to play tic-tac-toe, or you have to do some other kind, you have to do something abstract in order to pick the lock and open the door. Well, no, what you really want is for that mechanic to be organic to the experience of walking up to a door in a medieval castle. And I think that's extraordinarily important again and something that gets lost on a lot of neophyte game designers who throw mechanics at you constantly throughout the game, expecting you to grok them individually one by one and get some pleasure out of the solutions. Again, very, very difficult to achieve. Yeah, I mean, I think chess is a good example of this. And you know, which is, and Tyna talks about in the book, which is, you know, chess is this example of using the constraints and not trying to introduce too many mechanics and look, we've talked about chess as a forever game, but to say a beautiful example of like an elegant game design and like maybe the modern game designer today would be like, well, you can do so much more. You could change it and like, his point would be, you don't change it like they've perfected it. Try and put it into a different environment, doesn't make it better. Like keep it constrained. That's that's the elegance of it. Yeah, I mean, you have six pieces. So you have six mechanics basically, right? Each piece can move and capture in a particular way. You only have to learn six rules, right? You think about soccer is a similar kind of a, of a game, right? It's like the FIFA rules of the game can literally be written on a single page. Whereas you look at the NFL, for example, which is a great game and a great sport. But like it's ubiquity is limited by the fact that you need basically an encyclopedia to understand the rules of football. Like what is a catch is still something that is kind of oddly debated. Whereas in football, yeah, okay, maybe we get, we quibble about off sides and video review, but still there is a rule that they're hopefully trying to enforce. Yeah, it's funny to think about as, we have praised, I don't know, what's just say League of Legends as an example of this that is really great at balancing and doing patch notes. But in a weird way, that's the only hack to solving this elegance problem. Like when you have that many mechanics, you sort of need to patch things all the time. One, it's not like chess, this randomly introduces new rules or soccer is introduced new rules. That's the beauty of it, you know, a game that is, the counter-strike is actually probably the best example of this, which is most of the changes that counter-strike makes is to the map. They're not actually changing even gunbalancing or anything in the moment to moment gameplay anymore. - They're just true elegance, right? Because that means that you can take your learnings, you can take those mechanics and you can reposition them in a new environment and they are still valid and fun, right? That is probably the best way to express what we mean here by elegance. And it also encapsulates that idea of easy to learn difficult to master, which is the classic articulation of like, you know, but simple game design. Rewarding to play not in terms of the ultimate result or progress, but in the moment to moment, right? Yes. And then I think the third and in many ways, kind of the most important for me anyway of these is this idea of temporal layering. And this is the one that I've really been operating at independently as sort of my guiding light, my North Star, if you will, for most of my career in looking at games, which is most of the questions that I will ask game design when I'm in game designers, when I'm interrogating their designs are in and around this idea of temporal layering. So let me explain what I mean by this. Mechanics fire at different frequencies, right? There are second to second mechanics, there are minute to minute mechanics, there's encounter to encounter mechanics, session to session mechanics. They're not temporarily simultaneous usually, right? And the test that I like to apply is that what you have to do the most in the game needs to be fun first and foremost and emotionally engaging. And then once you've got that working and fun, you can progress to the next mechanic at the next temporal layer and then make sure that is fun. So it's for me focusing on that high frequency activity, what is the thing in the game that you have to do the most frequently and make sure that that is pleasurable, right? Yeah, it's such a good articulation in that it completely reframes how most people would even think about games. And I've obviously said in a bunch of pitches with you, and I've seen it firsthand. You always go through these questions. You even ask about like camera angle and what am I seeing? What's the scenery around me and those things? And so, and I think you often refer to it as like the Doom test. Yeah, and so I just-- The Doom test is gonna be fun to talk to that. Yeah, the Doom test is just a clever way or maybe not so clever, but a simple way of explaining what I mean by this, right? So when I ask people, I'll ask an audience, what do you do the most in Doom? And people will always say shoot, shoot things. But that's not actually not true. The thing that you do the most in Doom is move through a 3D environment of corridors, of hallways. And if that wasn't pleasurable, the whole rest of the game would suck, right? Because that is what you're experiencing constantly, second to second throughout the game. Then you see an enemy, you shoot it, and you get to jib the monster, and then you move on to the next temporal layer. You have to clear the level. You have to explore the maze to the point where you found all the enemies and you've killed them all. Then you can-- The next temporal layer is discovering the secrets or finding the keys. And then finally, you can progress to the next level, right? And that's what I mean. Those are-- it's like a spire graph of layered temporal events. And you have to design at the appropriate level of temporal specificity in order to make games fun, in my opinion. - Yeah, it's fun to think through just because I don't think most people, and certainly the people that most commonly pitch us games, think through this aspect of it. You often tell the story of this like the shooter game or the World War I game, and I maybe his words just talking about that. But it is a little bit shocking of how many people don't nail this aspect of game design. - I would say that the majority of games that I've said no to, or that I've seen fail in the market, that I've watched from outside, have a mismatch between the constancy of activity and the pleasure of that activity. So yeah, the World War I thing is-- I was once pitched a game where the designers basically said they wanted to make a game about World War I, right? So, okay, I'm like, okay, what do you do in the game? They're like, well, it's World War I. You're in a trench and then somebody blows a whistle and you go up over the top and you run across this field of creators and you attempt to get into another trench and clear the trench. And I'm like, okay, what is the first five-minute experience like, right? What am I doing constantly in the game that is creating that feedback loop of pleasure? What is fun about being in a trench? What is fun about running across that field? What is the experience of danger that I'm experiencing? How am I reacting? If I can't see an enemy that's simply just filling my playing field with hot lead trying to kill me, none of those things seem particularly fun, right? They're not obstacles to overcome other than just surviving in a hostile environment. I don't have a lot of agency because I don't really understand what the threats are. Like in all of these ways, it's just bad design and it's bad design because it fails in that idea of the three things we've just articulated, mechanics, elegance and in particular, that idea of temporal layering. Yeah, I think the correct name I'm wrong, but on some level, the temporal layering question or this Doom test question is actually a lot of a test on taste and just like what are the things that you're going to protect and what is. the emotion that you're trying to protect. And that, yeah, I think a lot of these designers that you and I have seen past her games that have failed, maybe get fall into this. Oh, we're going to add too many mechanics or they're not thinking about it all again. And they're just like, I just want to build the game and maybe a game that they think is fun for themselves, but not at all thinking about the like real emotional side of this or the taste side of this. Yeah, I made a game. I'll give another example. I made a game, made a game. I funded and sort of executive produced a game a couple of years ago that was basically an extraction shooter. And it had a mechanic where you landed on an island and you had to gather a bunch of loot, solve a bunch of puzzles and problems and then make it to an extraction point where a helicopter would come in and take you out. And the innovation supposedly was that spectators were going to be able to affect gameplay by voting on like what items to drop in in a Hunger Games like way. Right? Nobody'd really done that before and it seemed like a pretty cool idea for multiplayer game and I gave it a shot. Anyway, every time I went in to look at a build, this one thing just would hit me in the face. And that was that what you had to do before you got to the first repository of loot is just kill hundreds of mindless zombies who basically stood in your way and it was so clearly in there just to slow you down and to be an impediment, but it provided no pleasure. It was just this burden that you had to kill all of these nearly inert but slightly hostile zombies before you could get to the good parts. And every time I gave the note, the executive producer note, this is boring. The moment to moment play of this game is boring and the game designer who's a very well-known, well-regarded game designer in his own right just kept ignoring me and saying no, you don't know what you're talking about and ultimately put the game out and everybody who played it said this is fucking boring. And it literally died on the vine and on launch. And there were other parts that were fun. The extraction mechanic was really fun. Some of the other mechanics were fun, but you never got to them because you just tapped out because it was so damn boring. It's, I mean, that game was basically, you know, Battle Royale and extraction shooters, you know, 15 years before that genre was ever created. It just so happened that they added a little too much, you know, to the Elgin's example of like that, too many mechanics, but the core was there. It's really fun to think about, I don't know, it does just use the temporal layering example in Fortnite, which is, you know, you're most of the time in Fortnite. You're actually just like hiding. You're just like walking away from this force that is closing in on you. And that is real, like, you know, I don't know, 98% of the time you're playing Fortnite, unless you're actively seeking out trying to shoot others, you are literally just playing a game of hide and seek. Which is fun, but that is fun. Yes, that is actually fun, right? And I think that's what's great about it, right? Is that they got that right. There's, you know, there's a scarcity of great hiding places. So it forces people to fight. I think the shrinking map, the kind of way that the map compresses over time, adds this idea of kind of the ticket, like a ticking clock or basically, I think of it as like a tug of war. We made, it's interesting. We made a multiplayer version of Tetris at Jamdat, which sounds absurd, right? On the face of it. But it was like two-player Tetris. And so you could play it over the internet. And what what would happen was that as you cleared blocks, it would push them to the other players or whatever. But there was a really high possibility of stalemate. So what we did was we had like this idea that like it was almost like you were, you had this sort of tug of war at the bottom. And as the game progressed over and we timed it out to like two and a half minutes or something, the gap would widen so that the margin of victory that you needed in order to achieve victory in the early game was it was it was large. But as the game progressed, it was small until it got to be 51 49. And then and then we so we could we could essentially end the game to and avoid stalemate. But it added this level of tension like to this to what is already a pretty tense experience of playing Tetris at a high level. It was really fun actually. Wow. That's that's it's there's something around all of that which is in Fortnite or Battle Royale, I think of it almost as like Jenga. Like if you've ever played that game of like you know, pull one brick and it's just increasing tension. And it sounds like in in this Tetris example is very similar. Just like every moment it just gets higher and higher and then you know, eventually it peaks and someone wins or loses. But you can't hide forever. Yeah. If you if you keep hiding, ultimately the maps going to shrink around you, right? I mean, you have to ultimately engage engage at some level. And the game forces that resolution. And that's what's so brilliant about that play pattern. So let's move on and talk about the problem with progression based pleasure. Because I think that's the counter example that we really want to throw up here, which is that yeah, we've been talking a lot about the moment to moment about the the base level fun and why that is so vital and so important to creating great games that monetize really, really well. And I think again, the thesis being that perhaps and and I think there's evidence to that to suggest that this is true that the games industry over invested in progression based pleasure and under invested in this moment to moment pleasure that we've been discussing. And so this is something you use. Yeah, I'm very passionate about. I'll let you I'll let you carry the ball on this one. Yeah, I mean, one one one overarching theory of this is just that these games that we would look at as the on some level, maybe even the forever games that you and I would reference, but largely in the pursuit of trying to be a forever game, most of the games of the past 15 years have basically taken all of the best practices of what you and I would view as forever games, which are battle passes and you know, live ops and events and building all these micro currencies and prestigious all of all the things that that you and I would think of as these progression, a really long term, attentive pieces of these games almost almost metagame aspects right in some in a way, right? Almost elder game things have been pushed that used to just be the realm of the super user have kind of been recontextualized as like as like part of the core experience. Yes, yes. And and almost as they like, we need to design that on day zero, when I would actually argue it's something like a right that you have to earn rather than just say like, oh, we can we can just do this on day zero. And that's how we're going to have to think through all this. We we were talking before we even started recording, which is, you know, League of Legends, for example, which is and a lot of ways took this this like what is a fun game of Warcraft remod and Dota and wrapped a lot of these meta games around it, but they they earned the right to do that because the game itself was fun. And I think a lot of the current market and and really the clearest piece of evidence for this is I mean, look at look at the steam database, you know, or steam DB stats for you know, last year, there was 19 live service games and 11 of those had already lost 90% of those by by January of 2026 90% of their users and you know, I'd call it four more were down 80%. So really the only game and I looked back to the data like the only game of 2025, those live service game that shine through was our creators and we will talk about our creators a little bit further in this, but Battlefield 6 is the other version and I'm Battlefield 6 today, you know, where now in May is dead relative to the peak and these are not small bets and like we're talking about out of Super Vive, you know, which is a very talented team with X-Ri team, you know, they'd raise almost 90 million dollars and we're talking about fire break and split split gate and you know inzo like, like, which is net ease like we had some really big games. Yeah, Concord, Concord and all of these for some reason stumbled and I don't think it's accidental. I think it's sort of a the human nature of looking at the successful games that are or the four ever games and almost taking what what do they do we should go and build us into our game on day zero, but I think almost missing the point of like these games need to be fun and maybe again taking the lens of the investor, which is you almost don't want to take too much risk when you're when you're building a new game or building a new genre or building a live services game where you also would prefer they'd go after a proven category like even arc rateers, arc rateers went after extraction shooter genre, you know, which is was proven by by Tarkov on some level and so I do think there's a piece of all of that within this, which is fire break or Super Vive or some of these others were almost trying to do too much could be I mean I do think that the the interesting thing is that you kind of have to do both if you're going to be successful with a live services game and I want to just suggest we're not arguing that you shouldn't do progression based mechanics, but it's that it's the idea that if you're if you're putting all of your eggs in the progression based basket in order to engender that emotion to elicit that emotion that's going to make someone feel about your game in a way that's going to make them want to play it more and pay for more things in that game over time that that I think those things need to be there on day one they just can't be the sole focus of the play experience it's like here do this mindful game solve these Sudoku puzzles for, you know, an hour, and then come back and we'll tell you how great you are, right? And we'll give you a bunch of loot and you can go and spend that in our store and, oh, maybe you can't get the item you want, so you're going to have to pay a little bit to buy that item, et cetera, et cetera. Like that doesn't work, but the League of Legends approach to it, for example, or the Arc Raiders approach to it, where you have a play pattern that is fun and engaging, and would be fun and engaging on its own, without progression is sufficient. Yeah, I think it's just a lot of the games, even that you and I are pitched, are on some level arguing like we're going to continue to improve the game once it's out, and that might just be a total myth. The reality is you only get, and this is true in all software, which is it's hard enough to get the user as it is. And if the moment to moment core gameplay or core app experience or whatever it is, is not fun in that first five minutes, you can't solve that through live ops, you can't solve that through any amount of wrappers or progressions systems that are out there. And so that I think that's the core message I would be trying to just argue here. Yeah, I mean, I think there are very few examples of games that launched and that kind of failed or stumbled on launch and failed to deliver that experience of pleasure, that experience of emotion, but then were repaired and succeeded in the future. I mean, even something like Among Us, which didn't have a particularly notable launch, but then obviously had a second life as basically the parlor game of the pandemic, didn't really get fixed. It was really fixed more through UGC, right, through the fact that big time streamers and celebrities and other people decided to play it. And that made the experience of it like, you know, it sort of elevated the experience of it in a way, right? I mean, no, the only the only real no man, no man, no man, no man, no man, no man, no, the only real example I could think of is and it's sort of a cheap because not even real, which is which is Fortnite, which obviously launched the Battle Royale game mode after they saw the PUBG success in H1's East. At the time, they were building save the world version of it, which was almost like tower defense, yeah. And so the tower defense game. But I would argue that that's a little different in that, that's to say, like, we're just going to go and build a new game. You know, like we're and we have the core elements that can be reshifted to a core gameplay pattern that they're seeing working. And so that's way more kudos than like, hey, we're going to actually just reshape the game into something different. Yeah. Before we move on, I do want to point out that this is not simply a free-to-play versus premium problem, right? There were plenty of premium games that released that failed for similar reasons, right? And there were plenty of free-to-play games that released that didn't, right? The game games like Balatro, for example, right? That did really, really, really well with both providing an innovative but familiar play experience, right? It's like you're playing poker in some way, right? But kind of poker on steroids. And that experience itself is very fun. And again, it sort of gets back to your point about taking too many chances. And, you know, multiplying risks. It's like, you know, did they go and reinvent a brand new card game and try and teach you a bunch of mechanics? No, they relied on the fact that a large portion of the audience kind of already knows the rules of poker and already knows that, you know, three of a kind beats two. Yeah, it's at the risk of giving too much alpha out into the universe. But at this point, I feel like we've shared all of our trade secrets. There's a little bit of this framing of like, you just don't want to stack too many miracles. And like, look, it's hard enough to get people to your game to begin with, which is obviously a huge recurring theme. But it's another to like try and invent a new gameplay pattern at scale. And so it's just is understanding the risks that you're taking on the game innovation side. And don't try and get too cute with it because I think a lot of the games that are out there really do try and try and add a little bit too much in this goes back to the organs point that will just continue to drive home, which is you should really always be striving for this elegance of subtraction rather than addition because I think the impulse is always addition here. Yeah, agreed. Let's talk about the master of the genre is the best Nintendo, right? Because whenever we talk about this, we always circle back to this. And I know neither of us are I would say are true Nintendo fanboys. And I think get a little bit of. I respect it from afar, but I am not someone that is a true Nintendo or Apple fanboy in that sense of I always carry the banner. Look, in this sense, you have to respect them. I want to start this discussion of Nintendo with a personal anecdote because I have had some really interesting experiences with Nintendo in my career. But one of them really stood out to me and it remains kind of affixed in my memory as a way I think about games and sort of why Nintendo is good at them in a way. What makes Nintendo, you know, you can see people a lot of times over rotate on the brands. They're like, well, they have great, great IP, you know, Mario card and Mario himself and Zelda and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, I disagree with that. I think you share that perspective. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit more detail. But let me share the sandic toe. Maybe two decades ago, I was working with a developer California developer and they were going to do some games for me at Activision and they had just come from doing a couple of second party games for Nintendo and they had their contract had them doing one original title that was coming out of Japan and they were working under the tutelage of Miyamoto's son, the legendary game designer, the man who's responsible for most of the great games in Nintendo's modern history. And this was a game. I don't think this game was ever actually published, but it was a game that was supposed to be about anthropomorphic automobiles, kind of like Disney's cars if you remember that movie. Amazing. Yeah. But at the same time, they were doing a game with Nintendo of America. They were doing a baseball game called Ken Griffey baseball. And just as a side note, for those of you don't know, Nintendo of America actually owned the Seattle Mariners. So at the time, and for long period of time, for years, they owned the Seattle Mariners. So hence Ken Griffey as their signature athlete, who was a famous star of the Seattle team. So anyway, Nintendo of America to make this Ken Griffey baseball game sent them like a six inch thick binder, this design book and basically said, go execute this design. Like these are the features that need to be in a completed product that what we can call Ken Griffey baseball. Meanwhile, Miyamoto's son got on a call with them and basically said, look, we've sent you a character. You have the controller. Make the character fun to play with the controller against a black screen. And once we feel like there's a delightful control mechanic that allows you to do fun things with the character and make the character feel alive, then we'll green light the game, then we'll build the game, then we'll figure out what the design is. But again, it's this almost obsessive focus on that lowest temporal layer, right? Is the character delightful to control independent of environment, independent of puzzle, independent of obstacle, independent of enemy? Is that fun? And if that's fun, okay, then we'll go make the game. If it's not fun, we do it again. Oh, it's every every time you tell me that story, I'm just like, wow, that explains everything. That explains so much of Nintendo success and that it's this obsession over the moment to moment or a temporal layering of fun. And he's basically saying, create a motion on a black screen, which is a character. Yeah, yeah. And you're going to be seeing that character. You're going to be seeing that character the whole time that you're playing. And I remember when David Perry, amazing game designer, when he was working at Virgin back in the 90s, did Aladdin for us at Disney. And there was this one moment where if you took your hands off the controls, the Aladdin character would stand still and it would have an apple because the the combat mechanic in the game was that Aladdin would toss apples at things and it was the equivalent of shooting them. If you stopped Aladdin would take an apple out of his pocket and just very casually toss it up and down. Both to remind you that you were not doing anything that you needed to do something, but also it was just this little delightful moment where it was like, oh, they didn't have to do that. They could have just made the character stand there. But he didn't. He added just a little bit extra that would that sort of strengthen that emotional bond that you would have with this character that you're going to have to identify with in hours and hours and hours of play. It's, I mean, we talked about Mario Kart at the beginning of this episode and I think it's just a perfect example of this where I look, the core mechanics drifting in item boxes and even I like a I will continue to give Nintendo a hard time on multiplayer just because you know, it's still largely a local multiplayer thing than than even online multiplayer. But like all of that has roughly stayed the same since you were talking about Mario Kart 64 in 1996. Like that game is largely the same and the it's because they've protected what is fun. It's this elegance piece which is so many people like the you know, standard let's call it the mid-twit version of that would be like, oh, just keep keep improving and keep adding new mechanics whenever and The thing that maybe, which is one theory of why Nintendo is so special is just they've protected the part that has made the game the most fun and the area that the player touches the most. And I just think it is a very good example of your theory of fun, just like completely actual. And really, in a line version of that, which most of the industry has not went this way. And again, look, their IP is icing on the cake, right? But it is not, in my opinion, the fundamental reason these games work, right? I mean, I think I completely agree. I think you could take the rest of the wild or one of these things and substitute new characters, right? And you know, I mean, I don't know how far a field you could go, but I think that that game is not necessarily successful because it's so pleasurable to play Link and, you know, to rescue Zelda and to have this, you know, what's pleasurable that it is the design. Yeah, I would go as far as like, if you deleted all IP from Miyamoto's hands tomorrow, he would still come back emerging. Even if it was not published as Miyamoto, it was just, you know, complete no-name anonymous game. I almost guarantee you would still break out and be universally loved just because of how they approached the craft in a way that very few do. So I want to stress the centrality of emotion to this conversation, right? Which is, and, you know, having worked now for over a decade with Genova Chen, we've had a lot of really interesting conversations about this because Genova's core thesis for his designs and his company in itself is that the cornucopia of human emotion are ill-represented in games that we only, let's say, you know, if we had a pie chart with all of the various kinds of human emotions, anger, love, fear, whatever, like that games have historically only really gone after a very limited slice of that pie in terms of their emotional depth. But nevertheless, the emotional piece of this is extremely important because that is the human element of this. And I think in the last episode where we talked about the things that we thought were going to survive the AI entry into the video game business, one of the things that we called attention to as one of those pillars was curated taste. And the key, we didn't really spend a lot of time talking about, we talked a lot about the curation piece of it. We didn't really talk that much about the taste piece of it. And I think we wanted, we should spend a little bit of time here talking about it, because what we're really talking about when we talk about sort of this nexus between mechanics and emotion, elegance, et cetera, we're talking about taste. And taste is really hard to talk about, right? Because it is so subjective, but its subjectivity, its humaneness, is exactly what makes it so compelling and so enduring, right? In the industry, it's why we can recognize a game and we can be like, wow, there's really something to that. And we may not be able to express exactly what it is in well-formed ideas, but we just feel it. And it's that sense of feeling, that emotional quality that is so, so, so very important. It's both what you put in the game, it's also what you don't put in the game. It's what you do and what you don't do in the design. And the discipline to sort of both add and to remove. Yes. Yeah, and look, I think it's, there's countless examples and Nintendo, again, will probably be the one that I would point to the most of just really leaning into what you remove or what you choose to innovate on the Mario Kart example or even in Brut's of the wild where it actually chose to remove a lot of the historic tropes of Zelda. And I think it is, you know, all of this is really key to what is taste. And it's a hard thing to articulate in a whole bunch of ways, which is, again, why I would totally recommend reading time in book, because I think time is book will articulate this better in, you know, the 200 plus pages and Mitch and I maybe you ever could, but it's a lot of fuel. And, and, and I think that's actually the core of this, which is, look, in a world where we're getting towards operational efficiency. And, that's a lot of what we've talked about so far on the season of AI is going to help, you know, with making art better or writing code better or whatever. The thing that is not going to become easier or better is taste. And, and that I think is just a huge, huge piece that I just want to drive home here, which is the human elements of this will continue to do or within, within the games in the street. Yeah, I agree. And look, I, I, let's go back and talk a little bit about the breath of the wild thing, which I was a game that was a big pandemic game for me and my family. Like when we were all forced together and we were all living together during the period, we probably replayed this game many times and all the way through from different perspectives with different people playing. And, I think a couple of things like stand out. I mean, look, the previous iterations of the franchise had included, for example, things like a deep dungeon structure, right? Yep. They eliminated it. They replaced it with this sort of shrine and tower system, right? Instead, they took out the constant companion character that had been in the, that had been in the series since Ocarina of Time in the eight in 98. They took a lot of other stuff out, but they actually distilled in their own taste, the essence of Zelda from that experience. And they, they cut things that the franchise had been adding over time. And instead sort of rethought and, and, and recreated that moment to moment experience, like making things like climbing and the, the kite gliding and all the other physics-based puzzle solving and other things that were always features of the game, they just amplified those, right? And it was such a great game design, just such an unbelievably great, and again, didn't pander to the pre-existing franchise, you know, constellation of mechanics and rules. It eliminated a lot of them in the service of something greater. Yeah, and it is, I mean, look, Brexit of Wild is almost a universally considered one of the greatest games of, you know, the past 40 years, even maybe even better than Ocarina of Times or, you know, original type of Zelda's. And I don't think that's an accident. It's clearly not an accident. It's a return to the obsession of like taste. And, you know, I think they described it as like the re-thinkings of the conventions of Zelda. And what that really means is like, what is actually fun in Zelda? Where and for me, so much of Brexit of Wild, the part that was like, magic was this like open world aspect, even though what's a really open world, but like, it felt like that because of, you know, removing the standard, like, go to your quest and walk this way and whatever, like, it just felt completely different. And I think they're not perfect, right? I mean, I think the sequel to Breath of the Wild added back new mechanics. So for example, they added back in crafting, right? Which I thought sucked, right? Like I did not enjoy that at all. Like I really, it really detracted from my experience. It took me out of the game in a way. Now, your mileage may vary, right? You may have loved the crafting parts of that. But I thought that it was interesting because a lot of what, what, what, what, a lot of the elegance of Breath of the Wild was, it was sort of backtracked. Yeah, every, yeah. It's spot on, which is, you know, they almost, they almost just went again. And they're like, oh, what worked on this? And like, let's fall into the trap of let's just amplify that a little bit more. And in reality, it might have, the answer might have been let's subtract more. Let's go even more into that moment to moment. So let's turn to talk a little bit about how a game that actually does rely on its progression, right? More than its moment to moment play, if you will, actually can be successful and elegant and highly functional and fun. Yeah. Well, I think there's, there's one genre, which, you know, not intentional that we will talk about this again, but, you know, we're going to talk about match three as a genre on mobile games. Royal match, maybe, is the best example from Dream Games where, you know, match three as a core mechanic is, is I might argue the core product market fit of mobile games, and that it clearly resonates as a fun play pattern, quote unquote, but it's also largely a highly retensive and high monetization game. And the pieces that have emerged as a giants. And so, let's just use Royal match or King or playwrights as the real winners of this genre. Those are the ones that have have really lean into the progression. So it's almost complete inversion of everything we're talking right here. Yeah, I mean, they've kind of they kind of had to write on a certain level. Because the because the match three format, the match three play pattern is so limited in a way, right? It's like, there's only so much you could really do with it. And there's only, I mean, okay, yet, do you get a dopamine hit from matching the, the whatever it is that you're matching and seeing them disappear? And, you know, we talked about adding the blast me in the Istanbul episode, the blast mechanic that was introduced that was like, you know, it's sort of like a, it's just a different visual, different auditory, but you're basically doing the same damn thing over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah, it gets more complicated and it's highly addictive. And you do get those kind of dopamine hits from the, from the moment to moment. But the gameplay is relatively limited. And it really in many ways does rely on its progression mechanics in order to be, quote unquote, fun. I mean, it's certainly fun in the moment to moment, but it's limited fun. And it's kind of potentially monotonous fun. And so you're, you're really pushing the, the player to completion and progression to get a little bit extra dopamine hit. Yeah, I mean, look, one of the one of the pure signs of that is in Royal match, they push a lot of like these mini leagues. So when if you start playing and you pick it back up literally right now, if you've churned, they'll be like go and play and see who can get the most levels done of the next 20 people in the next five minutes. And it's just like, okay, like create a little competition actually unclear if it's async and even real or not. But yeah, but the challenge of basically keep you there for five minutes and it works incredibly well. Or, you know, another example of that is if you play for, you know, if you win 10 levels in a row, then they'll give you like additional bonus or super powered versions of your items. And so, okay, then like now I'm going to keep playing because I want to make sure that I get to my 10 levels and now I can keep going on runs. And so I think it is, it's, I mean, look, it's an amazingly successful game. But I think it's fair to say that they're, you know, the taste that they're applying is far more in this like how do we keep long term retention. And that's a fundamental difference than, you know, the corpus that you and I are maybe talking about. True. And I think I want to stress like this is a good game. Right. This isn't it's not a bad game. It's quite the opposite. It's a very, very good game. Even though again, it pushes a lot of that emotion, if you will, into what we would consider to be more the meta game, right? More the, the outer game as opposed to the inner game. I don't know what the right, the right way to talk about the point is I think that the most that most of the business value. And I think this is a crucial point because it kind of links up with something you mentioned to me when we were talking in the pre show. And that is most of the business value of Royal match lives in the wrapper, not in the core gameplay. Right. It's what makes it so what makes it so attentive, what makes it so monetizable, what makes it so long term engaging is in the wrapper. And all of those things are things that make it a successful business. Right. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is you made a point earlier when we were talking about this about the indie market. And that really we've seen and you were talking about this, a potential consequence of this fatigue that the industry may be feeling around the push of pleasure to progression as opposed to the pleasure of the moment. And that Indies actually have exploited this and have really benefited that they've been this kind of laboratory for innovation and experimentation around moment to moment play patterns and mechanics. And a lot of their success is not really due to the due to distribution on steam or clever marketing tactics or whatever, but that they that they are really like. The ones that are innovating, the ones that are experimenting in this really crucial area of emotion and pleasure and that there a lot of those indie games are one time priced right so they're highly incentivized to link that pleasure to the to the game so that it gets strong word of mouth and others potentially then buy it right because their monetization isn't in the wrapper their monetization is not in the oh hey come in and play this game you already know how to play. And maybe we can get you to continue to play it along enough that you'll monetize they got to get you to monetize up front maybe for a small price but nevertheless it's still we all we know in every industry getting from zero to one dollar is much harder than getting from one dollar to $10. Yes, yes, getting that first monetization I think that's I think again it's I think it's just I don't know what to make of it but I think it's a really interesting again facet of this problem. Yeah and look I again I just want to drive home like Royal matches one of the greatest games of the past decade just from a like performance standpoint but also like I play it is like you know I'm an idle game and that street that players well and so I love all games but I do think it's there's this larger conversation that you and I have had over this entire series of this podcast which is on some level Royal matches is actually just a result of like the medium that it's on. Which is you know there isn't really room for you know premium indie games to flourish on on mobile and actually the games that have broken out on mobile and in on the premium side all almost broke out on steam or or PC to begin with which you know like blotcher I wouldn't finally get supported to mobile does phenomenally well or start to valley or those what it's very rare to see any that bubble up directly through mobile and so I do just want to say there's like there is a piece of like leaning into the platform or the mobile. And so I just want to take that into account as well so we've already kind of talked in length length about like taste and and AI I just want to reiterate that that you know we're again entering this age of potential AI enable mental production and marketing and all these other things is not going to substitute for taste right it's like I think we've made this point will just make it again. Kind of taste is the domain of human beings of creative human beings and I think it's going to be really incumbent upon the industry to make sure to preserve that you know and I see it a lot with writing right like this I'm a bit of it as you've unfortunately had to endure in the years that you've known me I'm a bit of a stickler for writing for good writing and and so often like you know you will see stuff that has come back from AI with this sort of. Like there'll be a paragraph with six like six words staccato sentences each of the senses you read and you're like yeah this is a sentence like and yeah this is kind of like something then but you read him to get like once I stop reading the whole paragraph i'm like that makes absolutely no sense like there was no idea in that there was nothing to that and I think you know yeah it it it it it's readable but it's not good. And again I think that we're that there's a there's an inherent danger in this sort of AI revolution that we're going to get a lot of readable games that aren't particularly good. Yes and and I think it's looked a game director on some level easy real director not even on some level they are a director and their role will be increasingly important and actually look they might even have superpowers in this new world of AI where you know they can go in it or a fast or they can go and do it. And I think that's just again the message that I would be trying to put on to the world if you are you know skeptical of AI or how I was going to flood the industry with a bunch of games it's the reality is like tastes doesn't get cheaper in this this new world or you know if anything it gets way more valuable and the best game designers obviously have that but I do think it opens up. And it enables you know a longer tail of people who maybe wouldn't have had access to to iterate or test these things and so maybe the range of taste will my hope is even further. Yeah I think there's a lot of people out there who have good taste and who could potentially be great designers would have absolutely no way to be enabled or to acquire the credentials necessary to get a foothold in the industry who could now potentially do things DIY. That happens that's a great result of this like that would be the ideal result of this right is the ideal result might actually just be continued renaissance of vene games and the long term you know my or like long tail of developer of like cool I can go be a solo dev or a team of three and build a really high quality game and go and explore all just this tastes aspect that we're talking about. Back and close this episode with a reiteration of something that we mentioned earlier but we want to talk about a little bit more depth here which is the investing lens right it's like you're going to need to raise money for your project potentially and you're going to have to talk to people like us or you know in my case younger version of of me to get your game you know funded in greenlit and if not us then it's going to be a person in a position of power at a publisher or. Or lender or in whatever and at some point you're going to encounter someone who's going to be savvy enough about games I would say that would be maybe not the majority of the venture capital is that you talk about that you talk to but if you're going to talk to the if you talk to the good ones the ones who actually do know and appreciate games. They're going to be interested in a lot of these things and they're going to have a hard time potentially if they haven't come up through the industry as operators articulating the kinds of things we articulated at the beginning of this episode in terms of the things they'll be looking for in your design to help them feel like they're on solid ground writing you a check and so I think it's useful for us to just sort of repeat some of these things to make sure that like when you're putting your decks together. When you're putting your pitches together you're able to be clear and articulate about some of these things. Yeah and look I've taken so many pitches with you and I think a lot of people probably who would listen to the podcast would just assume you'd be fully focused on distribution or those pieces but I mean I distinctly remember one one call that we were on and you spent no joke 45 minutes talking about the actual mechanics and the moment to moment gameplay you're like what's the first five minute experience and you're like I'm going to do that. I've been in an experience. You're like, okay, what is the player doing every 30 seconds. I remember you asking like, what is the camera angles it over the shoulder is it top down? And you're like, okay, and top down. There's a lot of constraints on how you might monetize that because the skins might not be as visible. And I think it's all of these questions in one. But it really comes back to, like, the player. like the emotion and status and taste and all of these pieces that we've really tried to nail down in this episode. And I think it's more a test and correct me from wrong. But the line of questioning is really coming from a place of like, does this game designer themselves have tastes? Does this game designer themselves understand what they're building? And look, you could talk about Genova and that game company on, you know, for hours specifically on this axis where, you know, Genova is better than anyone at articulating these pieces. He really is. And I think one, but interestingly, it took him a long time to link the mechanics successfully with the desired emotions. So even somebody as adept as him, somebody as thoughtful and as creative as him, right, needs to experiment, needs to iterate in order to get to make sure that those mechanics are actually doing what they're meant to do and are doing them in the right way. I remember a pitch that I heard actually when I was working at one of the large publishing companies that I worked at, I won't name which one, in which a franchise was being reinterpreted. And it was a real time strategy game and the real, with a military component. And the pitch came, the pitch came in and the basically the team started to go through it. And they were like, here's the way we're changing it. Here's the essential core component of this new design. You're going to be able to go down from the strategic view of a real time strategy game into the tactical view of a first person shooter in order to change the course of the battle. And then you can pop back out to the strategic view to reorient your troops on the battlefield. And they showed all kinds of beautiful graphics and contrails with smoke effects and all these other things. And sitting in the back of the room with some very famous names of people that you would recognize. And I raised my hand and they were like, they called on me. And I was like, okay, so what happens when you're in the tank? What happens to the rest of your troops? Like who's managing those? And why would you ever leave the strategic view to go in the tank? If that means abandoning the rest of your troops for minutes on end while you go down onto the battlefield. And they were like, and they were dumb struck. They had no answer for it. They were like, well, we'll solve that in the design. We'll figure it like they just tried to hand wave it. And I was like, okay, and similarly, like, if it's so effective for me to be down on the battlefield as a hero, why would I ever care? And you're going to manage the strategic game for me. Why would I ever play the strategy? Why would I even care about the strategic game? Why would I ever do anything but trust the AI? And again, they sat there like dogs watching television and they had no idea what the fuck I was even talking about. And that this is happening inside of big companies. Right? These kinds of conversations are not like, you know, me and Blake, like picking on indie developers who are pitching us. Like these are core concerns for people who are making games with hundreds of millions of dollar budgets. And a lot of times they haven't done this thinking. Yeah, well, look, I think it's like a human tendency. And this is something that you see just even across software companies where just the natural thing is to drift and blow and add more. And I don't you know, the most common example that you hear in the software world is just like, if you don't have a top-down direction of where the product's going, your random engineers is going to keep building random things. And this is the exact same thing that happens in games. It's like, oh, of course, we should build this side feature because that means so much more fun. And like, what you really need is this ruthless prioritization and focus on like, what are the sacred cows that we're not going to to remove. But like, everything else should be always on the chopping clock. And you know, again, Nintendo is as the gold example, like the gold star example of this. But it is just like, I can't drive that point at home enough where it's just focus and don't try and drift and blow because that is the natural thing. And the most common example again is we hear so many games tell us they need more funding to ship it. And it's like, what? Like, you don't need to go and add a million more things. Like the core gameplay should be fun. It should stand on its own. I agreed. I think we can leave it there. We'll let that be the final statement of the episode. Thank you so much. This was a fun one. No pun intended. And we'll be back next week with another great episode of the Gamecraft Podcast. Thanks listeners. Thank you.