How to Create Innovative Game Designs, with Nick Fortugno

Jordan 0:00

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast, whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you all the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman. In each episode of Playmakers, I go to work uncovering insights, tactics, and know-how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. The goal? To help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

Jordan 0:39

Innovation. That is the word of the day. That is the word of today's episode. An interview with Nick Fortunio. Nick is kind of a well-known dude in the New York game scene. He's an entrepreneur, an interactive narrative game designer, and he is the founder and principal of Playmatics, which is a game development company that has created experiences for some really interesting, on-the-edge applications and organizations. They've done stuff for ProPublica, for Red Bull, for AMC, for Disney, for the American Museum of Natural History, for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, et cetera, et cetera. Nick also teaches Game Design and Interactive Narrative Design at several places—Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, et cetera—and has helped construct game design and immersive storytelling curriculums for these organizations.

And what I wanted to dig in deep with, with Nick, and what I think you're going to get a lot out of in this episode, is the art of doing truly innovative game design. What does that mean? How do you work from first principles? How do you experiment to get to a result? How do you create emotions, feelings, aesthetics when you're not starting with, "Oh, it's a first-person shooter, but with this or that?" When you're starting with, "Well, how do we create a certain feeling, a certain experience, a certain learning in a person?" These different kinds of goals that are more first-principle-based, and then you design to them. Nick is one of the best in the world at doing this over at Playmatics. So we dive deep.

We talk about his journey, from intern to founder, how he's kept Playmatics thriving for so long when so many companies who don't even innovate haven't made it nearly as long. The principles of game design that he uses to really anchor his work. How failing—what he calls "failing up" in game design—fits in, as other guests we've had on the show have used. He’s also a big fan of the MDA framework—mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics. So we talk about that and how it fits into his process, and how Nick hires game designers and producers, how he evaluates what's taught in school versus what he needs in his studio and in his team, and where artificial intelligence is going to be fitting into gaming technology in the future.

Lots of stuff in this episode. I think I mentioned during the interview, I said, "I think people are going to have to listen to this one twice because there's so much good stuff in it, and it comes at you pretty fast." It's a great episode. I'm excited to share this interview with you. Real quick, before I do, please subscribe, please write us a review, because you know, that's how we grow. That's how we do. And if you know someone who is innovating in game design, if you know someone who's a game designer and wants to bring more innovation to their work, please share this episode with them so that they can get the benefit of the incredible knowledge of our guest. Thank you so much. And with that, I present the interview with Nick Fortunio.

Jordan 3:28

Nick, welcome to Playmakers.

Nick 3:29

Oh, thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

Jordan 3:32

I remember the first time that I got to meet you was when I was working with AreaCode, and I was visiting them, and I was in New York, and we were eating lunch outside somewhere, and you walked around the corner, and, you know, mutual friend of ours, Dimitri, was like, "That's Nicholas right there." I was like, "He's the creator of Diner Dash." I was like, "Well, that's awesome!" I was starstruck. I totally thought it was the coolest thing. And so it's great to have you on the show and to be able to dive into this stuff a little bit with you.

Nick 4:00

No, thank you so much. AreaCode—you’re bringing me back. That was several years ago now.

Jordan 4:06

Yeah, I figured we could start with your story up to Playmatics, because to me, it's like you appeared with Playmatics, and I don't know anything about your history before that.

Nick: 04:16

Yeah, so I became a game designer at a small company called GameLab many, many years ago. That was like 1999. I had been an English teacher at the college level, and I was pursuing graduate education in English, but I was sort of doing hobbyist game design on the side in the tabletop and live-action role-playing spaces, and I met Eric Zimmerman through that. He hired me to be really kind of like the first intern at GameLab.

Nick: 04:42

This was when GameLab was four people, and I basically grew up there as a game designer. You know, that was where Diner Dash happened, that was where Plantasia happened, that was where Aidi happened, and a lot of my early games came out. After being there for many years and eventually moving up to being director of game design there, I stepped away from GameLab.

Nick: 05:02

I had met Margaret Wallace, and we decided to start a company called Rebel Monkey. We raised venture capital for Rebel Monkey, and we kind of rode the wave of that until about 2008 or 2009 when the financial crash brought us down. From the ashes of that, Playmatics was formed. So I had worked for a startup in games, with GameLab being one of the original independent game studios in the early days of the casual revolution. Then I started another company, which was a Series A venture-backed company in games before Playmatics came about.

Jordan: 05:31

Got it. Okay, we actually had Eric on the show, but I didn’t have those jigsaw pieces connected between GameLab and Playmatics. So, thank you for that—kind of coming from that lineage. I can see how innovation was kind of like in your DNA from the very beginning. What was the original idea with Playmatics?

Nick: 05:49

Well, what was interesting about Playmatics was that when Margaret and I were running Rebel Monkey, we didn’t intend to take venture capital. That’s not how the company started. She was leaving a company that she had been working with for a while, and I was getting started. We realized, “Oh, we think we can do this. We think we can make these decisions,” which isn’t to say that Eric and Peter Lee, who was the other founder of GameLab, weren’t making good decisions or weren’t…

Well, that wasn’t the issue at all. It was more that, you know, I recognized I could make those decisions. Margaret had been a CEO and an EP at many places, so we were like, “Well, we can do this together, and we can make our own kind of games.” When Rebel Monkey took venture capital, we were sort of on the VC rollercoaster, and that rollercoaster either ends with you rich or ends with you out of business.

And we ended up out of business. In the ashes of that, we were like, “Well, we need to do something.” So, we started consulting, and because of our reputation, our consulting immediately turned into a game job. We were like, “Okay, well, we have to do something to get this together.” And that’s when we kind of formed Playmatics. It was like, “Oh, well, we have, you know, in the ashes of Rebel Monkey, we have a whole development team. We can just pull one of those up and start something new.” And then we started Playmatics. When we did, we made a commitment to ourselves that, well, we’re going to keep up this innovative spirit that we carried from before.

Nick: 07:09

But we’re going to really focus on that now, rather than dedicating ourselves to one project. We’re going to be working on a number of different projects, and we’re going to really try to keep experimenting in the medium and keep doing what I found interesting, which was pushing the boundaries of what games are and what games can be.

Jordan: 07:23

When did Playmatics start? What year was it?

Nick: 07:26

That was 2009.

Jordan: 07:27

Okay, so it’s been a very impressive run. And I think that kind of remit to innovate—well, a lot of times companies don’t make it that long, especially self-funded and doing new things. How have you managed to accomplish that?

Nick: 07:43

It has not been easy, just to say that up front. And a lot of companies that were alongside us, that we considered peers and had great respect for, didn’t last as long as we did, even though they were also doing interesting work. So, I feel like it would be dishonest not to say that there was some luck in that—we rolled the dice, and we did okay—because there were just as smart people alongside us.

Nick: 08:02

I think there were kind of two big lessons that I had about keeping going for as long as we have. The first is we pivoted a lot to different kinds of design. We didn’t look specifically at one type of game or one IP that we were pushing. We saw it as a methodology, and we allowed ourselves to float with the market. So, for a good stretch of our history, we’ve done games for impact, right? We’ve done games with politics, games with education, games with healthcare. That was not the intent of Playmatics, right? That wasn’t where we started. We were doing brand-based games when we started. But that market just dried up completely from the access points that we had.

Nick: 08:41

So, we had to do something else, and I saw that there were opportunities in games for impact that were really strong. You know, we pivoted in that direction, and we’ve done a lot of that over time. So part of it is realizing that the skill set of innovative game design was useful in a lot of different places.

Nick: 08:57

And as long as we had a methodology to apply it and we could pitch it, we could keep that going. And so, we’ve had consistent work basically for 12 years. The second thing is that I cultivate—and I think our company in general has encouraged people to cultivate—a lot of network presence, a lot of conference presence.

Nick: 09:16

I have spoken a lot at conferences and workshops, taken part in a lot of convocation events and mentorship events, and things like that. I enjoy that—I’m a teacher—but I also think it’s incredibly useful for finding a way to keep a company going if you’re constantly making contact with people. Because if you can get on people’s radar, like, “Oh, you have a service that they can remember,” that eventually filters out to people who are looking for work. So, most of the work that comes into Playmatics, we’re reached out to. It’s not work I hunt for. It’s that people come to us looking for things. And that’s because I’ve spent so many years cultivating relationships over time, so when people need something, they know to talk to us.

Jordan: 10:00

Yeah, and I would say, you know, from a little bit of an outside perspective that not only are you out there and people know you, but also you stand for something. And I think that also makes it easier for people to reach out to you because they kind of know what things make sense to reach out to you for.

Nick: 10:15

Yeah, and it's a conversation we have very honestly with people. I mean, when people come to us and say something like, "Oh, well, we just, we want a game that's going to be like Flappy Bird," we're like, "That's not... you shouldn't come to us for that," right? That's not what we're good at. We're not a purely technical company. We're not like a quick turnaround company. That's not what we specialize in. What we're good at is solving problems for people, which makes your business interesting, right? Because you often end up working with people outside entertainment.

I've worked a lot, like I said, with scientists, with journalists, with educators. These are people who don’t necessarily know software development processes. These are people who aren’t familiar with the commercial marketplace. And that’s been really interesting work, but it also means that, at Playmatics, we’ve gotten to work on what I consider really crazy stuff, which has been fun. There’s something about the fact that I know that when I work, I get to work on things where I’m really trying to solve new problems. That is very rewarding to me. And I think you’re right, that people recognize that’s what we do. So the people who come in the door are primed for that. We’ve selected for them. And so those relationships are pretty strong because they know they need something I can provide, and I know the work will be interesting for me because it’s going to ask me to do something different.

Jordan: 11:24

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I’m curious—well, I think for listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with what Playmatics does—if we could go through some examples of what these problems are and how you’re solving them.

Nick: 11:36

Sure. So at Playmatics, what we say is that we do innovative game design, which we shorthand to be games about non-game things for people who don’t play games. And that often means we’ll do games that go into classrooms and teach students things about history. So we’ve done games around history, math, reading. We have a game that came out just recently and is going to be promoted a little bit more called Revolutionary Choices, which is about teaching students the actual causes and forces involved in the American Revolution, which is often misunderstood. You know, people think, "Oh, there was a tea party and then we threw the British out of America," and like, none of that is true the way the war went. It’s designed to teach people that kind of stuff.

Nick: 12:19

But then we’ve also done work with journalists. The one I’m most proud of is a game called The Waiting Game with ProPublica, which is about the asylum process in the United States and giving people insight into what an asylum seeker is and what it’s like to try to seek asylum in the U.S. But we’ve also done a lot of work with brands, like less game-friendly but still very interesting ways. So, like, we did a lot of work with Breaking Bad back in the day, doing interactive storytelling with Breaking Bad and building out transmedia properties around the IP. That was really interesting because Breaking Bad doesn’t automatically turn into a game the way other properties do.

Nick: 12:59

So stuff like that is the kind of thing we think about. As a consultant, I’ve worked with people in politics around voting and thinking about voting rights. We’ve worked on topics ranging from gamification of entertainment platforms to real-world games that explore historic locations. All of that is essentially taking game design techniques and applying them either as games or as gamifications to topics where they’re instrumentalized, right? They’re used to get you to dive deeper into a brand, used to help you learn something, or even used as research. We’ve done projects where the purpose of the game is to get you to respond, and we collect your responses to understand some sociological function or psychological practice.

Nick: 13:50

That’s really what we specialize in. What that means is we don’t really work in genre, right? It’s not like someone comes to us and says, "We want an RTS" or "We want a MOBA." We have to build things new every time we sit down. That process is us taking pieces from games and either inventing whole new kinds of games or using the elements of games that are useful to the goal we have.

Jordan: 14:20

Yeah, I mean the way I was thinking about what you’re describing is that you’re a team that does a lot of designing based on first principles. Whereas lots of games start with existing stuff and then change or add, it sounds like a lot of what you’re doing is blank sheet of paper: "What mechanics make sense for this scenario?"

Nick: 14:38

Yeah, and it’s honestly the way I was taught. It was like a practice that I had in a nascent form when I was a hobbyist. But then, working closely with people like Eric Zimmerman, Frank Lantz, and Peter Lee, we cultivated this approach to games. I think everyone would agree, it’s not really looking at it from specific channels of games, but rather looking at games as pieces that we could take apart, with principles we could use. I’m really happy I had that start and have really cultivated that skill because I think it makes you more flexible as a game designer. You’re not stuck, and especially when you’re working in weird, boundary cases, those genres don’t really help you because those genres weren’t designed to do the things you’re trying to do. So you can’t just take the hammer and hit the nail. You have to build the tool to hit the weird nail-like thing. And knowing how to build a hammer is an interesting skill to have as an artist.

Jordan: 15:37

Now I realize that this is a bit of an impossible task for a short podcast interview, but can we take some of those principles and give them to the audience? Some things people can use as they start to think about game design in this different way. Where could we start?

Nick: 15:55

I mean, one of them is just the realization that game genres, as they exist right now, are all relatively young and actually not that deeply considered relative to other forms of entertainment, right?

Nick: 16:09

The fact that we have the genres we do has been an evolutionary process that’s led us to the results we get. But that doesn’t mean that they’re locked in stone or that they’re the best ones we have. So when you recognize that, you start to see, “Oh, well, certain conventions that exist in games exist just because of tradition.” That’s not necessarily a good reason to continue them. But that also means you start looking at games in a broader way, thinking about them as components that can be pulled apart.

Nick: 16:27

Part of the practice we engage in is to be very omnivorous players, not just in terms of games we play in the digital space, but in all media. I’m constantly playing board games. I’m constantly exploring real-world games. I spend a lot of time in immersive theater and interactive experiences online because I’m picking up things from them that are just interactions I think are useful. I’m a big formalist and a serious banner carrier for MDA approaches. When we dissect games in those ways and see them as mechanical structures, that allows us to break out of the mindset that says, “Oh no, if I go down the RPG channel, I have to stay in the RPG lane and I can’t deviate.”

Nick: 17:27

I can think about progression systems as a thing. I can think about turn-based combat as a thing. I can think about character statistics as a thing. And then I can take them apart from each other and put them together in interesting ways. I think that’s much more common, honestly, in the board game industry, where the need for mechanics to be original for the game to sell is driving them to innovate, innovate, innovate.

Nick: 18:04

Just to take an example, a few years ago there was a wild proliferation of werewolf variants—just a bunch of games that were essentially different versions of Werewolf, but with different mechanics. But they’re not Werewolf, right? None of them are Werewolf. They’re all a step away from Werewolf, introducing different mechanics. I’m thinking of games like Bang, The Resistance, and Masquerade. These games are all about hidden roles, but they use hidden roles in completely different ways. That kind of game design is really useful.

Nick: 18:57

And then, leaning very hard into iterative design, you have to really trust the prototyping process because you often don’t know what you’re doing. You have to make very crude, fast, early prototypes. You need to have very clear prototyping questions to test things because you can experiment your way to mechanics. Often the process is not like, “We sit around in a room until we have the great idea, and then we make it.” It’s very often a sloppy making process but guided by first principles that are more elemental. And then we just throw things together and watch them break over and over again.

Nick: 19:27

I mean, anybody who designs games knows this is the process, right? I’m not saying anything radical, but you can push that really hard. You can do it from very raw bits and come up with interesting things. When I talk to people about being innovative in game design, I encourage them to test extremely broken, early things that are just wild. You can learn from those tests, and they can lead you to things you never thought could exist. It’s a way of getting around local maxima problems in emergent design.

Jordan: 19:40

I love that. So if people are going to try some things, make the differences as big as possible, and don’t worry about whether that individual thing is going to be “the thing.” It’s more about what you’re going to learn from that.

Nick: 19:40

It's teaching people that failing in a prototyping process is not missing the mark. It's like learning something you carry forward. Having a prototype that fails is a valuable step in the process because you will learn things from that prototype, like things to stay dramatically away from, but just as likely, they'll be seeds of things that become interesting, and you evolve off those seeds.

Nick: 20:04

Particularly when you're working with health professionals or educators, they don’t care what the game mechanic is; that’s not what they’re after. They want to make sure the kids learn X or that people engage in behavior change. You can experiment that way because they won’t mind if the mechanic changes. So you can be very flexible with that. That methodology serves very well in those contexts because you can just chase the fun wherever it happens to go, as long as you keep the goals in mind. I think that becomes a great process for innovative game design, even in commercial settings. You don’t get stuck on things; you just make, break, make, break, and make again. I think that can evolve games into amazing directions.

Jordan: 20:47

Yeah. I want to clarify something you mentioned: MDA—that’s mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics. We had Robin Hunicke on the show, and we talked a little about that. I’m curious how you bring that into this process you’re describing.

Nick: 21:00

I think MDA is the best single theoretical approach we have to games right now. It really instructs us a lot on how games create what the system calls aesthetics, but really, mood or purpose or intent.

Nick: 21:14

The way we use it is by dissecting games to see their mechanical structures and, specifically, the relationships between the mechanics and what the theory calls dynamics, which I think of as play. When you give people these pieces, what do they do with them? How do they make decisions? Once you understand that connection, it becomes really interesting because you get dynamic tricks you can use in different contexts. A simple example is that a timer makes people stressed out. That’s a basic game design principle, right?

Jordan: 21:50

That’s so good. These are the first principles we’re talking about. So MDA is almost the method to tease apart these principles that you can apply to problems.

Nick: 21:58

Yeah, and you can look at two games that are similar and examine the different aesthetics they have. Then, you back up to the play: What am I doing differently that makes me feel differently? What are the pieces that made me do that? You start to come up with this vocabulary of rhetorics, as I think of it, that you can apply in different contexts.

Nick: 22:16

The reason why I think MDA is so valuable is that it's not a tool that’s going to fix your game. That’s not how it works. It’s a fundamental approach to thinking about games that gives you a heuristic to take games apart and think about their pieces. Once you can do that, you have different things you can use. You can borrow from games pretty liberally because you set up a relationship: “Oh, that rule makes this play, which makes this feeling. I could use that feeling, so let me get that play.” Will that rule create that play in my game? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s a starting place, and then I can start experimenting. That’s, I think, a good innovative process.

Jordan: 22:58

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. From what I've seen of the New York game scene, two things I've noticed you've been talking about are the iterative design and prototyping—especially a lot of paper prototyping—and also a lot of discussion. There’s a lot of, “Hey, let's actually think through why we're choosing the things we're choosing.” MDA seems like a great way to interface with those two things.

Nick: 23:26

And I think you're right to highlight it as sort of a New York thing. I mean, it’s not unique to New York, right? But there was a seed that came out of RGA and GameLab that really pushed that kind of methodology out.

Nick: 23:40

There’s an intellectualism to it, which can be good or bad depending on your taste. But I really enjoy it because it doesn’t just make me a better designer; it makes me a better teacher and a better critic of games. I think those are valuable components not just to my creative practice, but to the variety of roles I fill in the game industry.

Jordan: 24:02

It’s an exciting energy to be around. It’s definitely a vibe and a feeling, and when I was there hanging out with that group, yeah, it was a blast just being able to listen in on these conversations.

Nick: 24:13

The fun of GameLab was having those kinds of design conversations with Eric, Frank, Greg, Alona, and Catherine, and the other people who came through the GameLab world. We were really colliding in these game design conversations.

Nick: 24:29

There are magical spaces in creative fields, and I think that was one of them. When you think about it, the Street Game Festival, Come Out and Play, which I co-founded with Greg Trefry, Mattia Romeo, and Catherine Herdlick, came out of the relationships formed at GameLab. That was an innovative street game space. We applied that same critical, slightly intellectual, very prototype-driven, discussion-oriented, collaborative game design process to public play. It’s been a wonderful school of thought around games that has produced a lot of interesting work.

Jordan: 25:14

Have you found—knowing the NYU Game Design School is part of that scene—that as someone running your own studio and bringing in employees, how have you brought this attitude to your employees? Now that you have other designers working for you, how do you help them grow into this way of doing things?

Nick: 25:31

I mean, I learned it through a modeling and experimentation process. I was sort of in the trenches with people who were doing it, so I definitely model that approach. When I hire, particularly game designers and producers, I look for people who have that kind of omnivorousness, that flexibility, and a critical mindset. You can see it. The great benefit of having schools of game design is that more people are being taught that approach. You see a subset of students coming out of game schools who naturally think of games that way. That’s very exciting because it means they can have that conversation from day one.

Nick: 26:08

There are certain things you have to cultivate. You have to cultivate a bit of mercilessness about reviewing builds. You have to get people out of the desire to be kind, to compliment, and to make everyone feel good. You have to be merciless about how bad builds are because that's the only way you grow. But you also have to cultivate a lack of preciousness around the things you make. You need to get used to your stuff breaking and feel comfortable falling on your face a lot. That’s a lot of what the early stuff is. I can’t tell you how many designers I’ve had conversations with who don’t want to show me bad things.

Nick: 26:42

I have to coach them to come forward with the bad thing confidently. It’s like, I don’t care if it fails. That’s not the purpose of this test. I don’t expect your game to be good. I actually expect it to break. I want to watch it break. That’s the value. Getting people comfortable with failure is the biggest lesson you have to impart.

Jordan: 27:03

I’m curious, would you say Playmatics spends more time in group meetings than a typical studio? Because there are these two sides: this active, iterative, prototype-driven, build-driven side, and then the intellectual, rational, teasing-things-apart side. I’m curious how you think that nets out in terms of time talking.

Nick: 27:28

I think we probably spend a bit more time, but not as much as people think, and in a different way. We tend not to think a lot when we start because that’s done without data, right? Who knows what’s going to happen when we make things? So we tend to push people out of early ideation processes just to get prototype specs together or to get paper prototypes together really fast. A lot of the talking happens simultaneously with testing.

Nick: 27:56

Once you get deep in an iterative process, you don’t even need to make a game to test it. You can just make an interaction, try it on the fly, see if it works, break it immediately, and move on. So, often, the discussions are very hands-on. We’ll have plastic pieces and paper in front of us, drawing things as we go.

Nick: 28:17

I have a phrase I use with everyone I work with called “Sikwit,” which means can’t know, will test. It’s a shorthand way of saying, "Shut up. We don’t know what we’re talking about." We’re all arguing for something we can’t prove, so why don’t we just guess and keep moving?

Nick: 28:32

People can invoke that to say, "We’ve talked about this too long. Just pick a number or write something on the card and we’ll try it." When it breaks, we’ll know it broke, and we’ll know how to fix it. But if we keep talking about it, we’re just wasting time. Analysis is valuable when you have data. We do a lot more analysis after tests. We don’t plan before tests; we just make and look. That looking then facilitates conversation.

Jordan: 28:56

Nick, there's been so much good stuff already. I do want to slightly change tack here and talk a little bit about some of the technologies that are coming down the road and some of the changes to the industry and to the world, really, from what's happened over the last year, which is, you know, coronavirus.

Jordan: 29:12

You had mentioned, and I saw in my research, that Playmatics has worked on so many new technologies over the years. So I thought you would be a great person to talk to about, you know, what’s actually going to be super disruptive in the next, let’s say, two to five years versus, you know, what might not be.

Nick: 29:31

Yeah. I mean, I’m constantly fascinated by this question and I think that there’s a lot of hype cycles, right? And I think that it’s a matter of like kind of divining from the hype cycles of what’s going to happen. I think that a lot of the things we’re seeing right now are interesting, less in their immediate manifestations and more in like where they’re heading down the road.

Nick: 29:50

I think augmented reality is fascinating. I think a lot of the cases of augmented reality right now aren’t great, but the technology is kind of amazing and we’re seeing it develop out in really interesting ways. I’m a big believer in the potential of artificial intelligence, but not in the ways it’s often talked about, in the more hidden ways that it actually exists. Right. Like, artificial intelligence is smoothing rails for things in good and bad ways. And that, like, if we think of artificial intelligence as an intermediary that's helping us do the things we do, and then we start worrying more about how it does that, that’s really fascinating to me.

Jordan: 30:26

What do you mean by smoothing rails?

Nick: 30:27

Oh, well, just that, like, you know, artificial intelligence that exists in the world is, like, the YouTube recommendation engine, or, you know, like, smart design features in office software, right? It’s stuff that’s much less like "the robot tells you what to do," and more like the robot sort of makes the right suggestions that then you choose from, which is problematic in tons of ways. Right? Because there’s an enormous systemic bias that gets built into those systems from design. So, I’m not saying this is utopian, but what I think is really interesting are these questions of like, well, what does it do to game development when you have machine learning, not necessarily in the live environment, but machine learning in the development process around testing? Machine learning in terms of like, what would it mean for a machine learning device to do heat maps for you and like learn from those heat maps of player attention, right? That’s the kind of stuff that I find really, really fascinating.

Nick: 31:21

I think there has been a fascinating set of evolutions in web technology that was largely invisible, that mainly came out of online theater. Suddenly people rediscovered sockets and rediscovered that you could do interesting things on the web with websites. Given the rise of responsive web technologies as ways of delivering content to phones, I think there’s certainly enormous potential for those experiences to get more interesting. Live experience online has been really interesting to watch because everything right now—and I think I’m speaking for almost everyone in this space—is real early. Like, people don’t know what to do with it yet.

Nick: 31:59

But watching people try has been fascinating because it’s disrupting all of these industries that had gotten stuck, right? Like the immersive theater industry and these quasi-game escape room industries—all that stuff got broken by the fact that you couldn’t be in public.

Nick: 32:16

But the breaking of it led to questions of the design principles that have been fascinating to watch unravel. I think that stuff’s going to come roaring back as soon as we’re on the other side of this, but it’s not going to come back the same way. The disruption that happened there, you know, not that I’m happy that any of these things happened in the world, but I’m really excited to see what people have learned from those spaces.

Nick: 32:39

And then I’ve done a lot of tabletop role-playing in Zoom. A lot of people have done a lot of tabletop role-playing in Zoom. That’s been a huge change in the world. I’m wondering what that’s taught us about being online with people and how games serve a role in helping people connect online. I’m really curious about that. It’s not an accident that in the pandemic, you’re talking about Roblox, Fortnite, Among Us, Animal Crossing, right? Like, the games that really define the pandemic in certain ways are social. They’re games that were social.

Nick: 33:15

Social in different ways, which is really interesting, right? Looking at those games in particular and starting to think about, well, what were the things that made those games hit is, I think, going to be a question of game studies for years.

Jordan: 33:28

I've heard the pandemic called The Great Accelerant, or The Great Accelerator, because we're now living, you know, five years further into the future than we might have been had it not happened. But I'm still trying to figure out what that means for the game industry.

Nick: 33:41

Yeah. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know that anybody knows. I think one thing is that a lot of us figured out that having a programmer in the office, if that wasn’t already clearly kind of dumb, is pretty dumb, right? To have the person who spends all their day coding actually commuting and then being forced to be distracted by you.

Nick: 34:01

That probably was never a good idea, right? And, you know, learning those collaborative methods has been really interesting. Playmatics became, like many companies, completely virtual in the pandemic. We had been before that, but we actually, our office ceased to exist—the whole building closed. So we are actually a homeless company at this moment.

Jordan: 34:21

How's that affecting these innovation strategies and techniques?

Nick: 34:25

It was really hard for the design side of it because it’s hard to get the same kind of fluid conversations moving when you’re not in person. So, on the projects we were working on at the time, we had to innovate these siloed and then coming together innovation processes where we would have people just prototype on their own and then come back with their results. Which was okay because everybody I worked with at the time, I’d worked with for a while.

Nick: 34:52

Thankfully, we started a—I can’t talk about it much right now—but we started a bigger and a much more radical innovation project recently, and it’s just after many of us have been vaccinated. And so as soon as that happened, I was like, we have to be meeting like once or twice a week. Just so we can sit in a room for four hours and hit stuff. I have to say, getting back to doing that, I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t have over the last year. I realized how much faster we could move when we could see each other and have a conversation and interrupt. It was such a much better experience. So I’m not a big believer that virtual work is going to destroy all in-person activities.

Nick: 35:32

As a teacher, I’ve seen it be pretty horrific, actually, what this does. I think there’s a role in design for having those things work. But I think what it’s doing from a company perspective is it’s challenging us to really recognize that being present has a value. And you have to consider its value, because that’s not always true. It is not always best for everyone to be present. There are types of work that work better when people can be remote and being generous about that and respecting people's desires around that. But then really thinking about what the value of in-person stuff is so you can maximize it. That’s, I think, one of the biggest changes that’s coming to work, at least in Playmatics, that has been a significant, positive change.

Jordan: 36:12

Nicholas, thank you for being present with me here remotely.

Nick: 36:15

Oh, no. Thanks so much, Jordan. This has been a lot of fun.

Jordan: 36:17

I think this is one that people are gonna want to listen to multiple times because you said a lot, and I think there’s a lot in there that people will need to tease out and, hopefully, implement. I really appreciate it. What was it? Sikwit?

Nick: 36:30

Yeah, Sikwit.

Jordan: 36:32

I really like that because I’m constantly wrestling with that problem where people just want to keep arguing. We have no way to solve it until we just do something.

Nick: 36:41

You know, it’s funny because I have to hit this as hard as I can in game design classes because people won’t believe me. I’m like, guess, just guess, stop thinking, just guess. It’s like, "how many cards do I have in hand?" And I’m just like, "four." Would four be okay? And they’re like, "I don’t know." And I’m like, "Would four be okay?" And they’re like, "Yeah, I guess so." And I’m like, "Great, try it." And it’s like, "No, I think five." "Great, try that." Just stop worrying because it’ll break and you’ll see it and you’ll know. Stop overthinking things. It’s so hard to get people outside of the game industry to understand that methodology because no one wants to do it.

Jordan: 37:11

Totally. Well, now I want to put that in the interview too.

Jordan: 37:22

Another episode of Playmakers Podcast is in the bag. And if you want the show notes with all the links wrapped up with a bow for you, you can find all that at PlaymakersPodcast.com. That’s PlaymakersPodcast.com. If you’re interested in giving some feedback on what you’d like to see on future episodes, you can also reach out to me there. In the meantime, if you want to support what we do, the way to do that is to write us a review and subscribe.

Jordan: 37:49

I will see you on the next episode. We have some great stuff coming your way, so I will catch you then on Playmakers.