What Games Truly Are, with Tadhg Kelly

Jordan: 00:00

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. My goal? To help you win the game. Let's begin.

Welcome back to Playmakers Podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman, and this week I'm interviewing Tadhg Kelly. Tadhg is an extremely experienced consultant in AR and VR and XR—really all the Rs. And he also has a deep background in game design and production, working in mobile games, working in, you know, massive PC games.

And he also has a lot of experience in partner development relationships. So really just a super experienced guy all around. Somebody who has given some amazing talks at game industry events, and I've certainly learned a lot from him along the way, and that's why I wanted him on the show. Tadhg has worked on all sorts of game projects—from board games to live-action role-playing games to multimillion-dollar PC projects. He’s served as a lead designer, as a senior producer, he's worked at Climax, at Lionhead, Magic Leap. So just a lot of great experience, a lot of innovation he's done in his career.

We cover lots of topics in this interview, including the transition that he made from a game designer to a consultant and what he learned on that path. He talks about something called the “sexy-worthy trap” and how you can use it to your advantage when coming up with game concepts, designing games, releasing games to market, etc. We talk about balancing speed to market versus adding more features. We talk about the benefit of the game industry opening up to more diverse skill sets. He explains some simple mistakes that can get made at the beginning of a project that will cost those teams, those publishers, over the long run.

And we talk about the value of letting your team, letting your developers, letting your experts do their job and do it well. So I know you're going to get a lot out of this interview. You can find all the interviews that we do here at Playmakers at our website, playmakerspodcast.com. That's where you will find the whole history of episodes, each one with their show notes and links to the key things that we talk about on the show.

If you get a lot out of this interview with Tadhg, I would very much love it if you would share this with someone else who would be interested in it—someone else who wants to learn about game design, wants to learn about consulting, wants to learn about innovation in games. Those are the topics that we get into, and if you know someone who's interested in them, please share the interview. That makes Playmakers Podcast grow. It makes you look cool to the person you share it with. They learn stuff, get value, and go on to be massively successful—and they give you 100 percent of the credit for the rest of their lives. So it really is an awesome thing to do. With all that said, let's get into the interview with Tadhg Kelly.

Tadhg, welcome to Playmakers. It's great to have you on.

Tadhg: 03:07

Thank you for having me.

Jordan: 03:07

You are someone that I originally... So basically saw you doing talks and learned from you. I think you were doing like some monetization talks, and it was great stuff. And, you know, it seems to me that you have a reputation. You've built a reputation over the years as an incredibly creative designer as well. I'm curious to learn a little bit about your journey. I know you've done hardware, you've done games. Take me through your kind of path in the industry.

Tadhg: 03:35

My whole thing is, I'm 47 years old now. I’ve worked in kind of the digital end—as in like video game design, development, all that sort—for 20 years. But prior to that, when I was like a teenager, like from the age of about eight, nine years old, something like that, I got really into trying to make my own board games. I got super into Dungeons and Dragons when I was like 11 years old. Really what started to bring it together for me was I got very involved in an amateur con scene. I used to write and make scenario games at first for like D&D kind of stuff, or like tournaments, and for this con called Gaelcon, which was, and still is, Ireland’s national games convention. It was actually quite a small, fun event. I got my start when I first started writing LARPs for that—these tournament LARPs where you’d get 50 people in a room, and you’re giving them all characters at once. And then over the course of a weekend, you’re trying to have an emergent drama.

Jordan: 04:28

How do you write an emergent drama?

Tadhg: 04:30

So, it's back in the day, you'd sort of try and frame out a kind of a template plot for key events that you wanted to have happen. That would essentially happen kind of independent of the players because you needed that as a way to pull the action in.

Jordan: 04:42

So, like a D&D campaign, essentially?

Tadhg: 04:44

Very much so. Yeah, yeah. Except it's huge and it's very kind of a boilerplate scenario kind of thing. I spent a lot of time doing things like board game LARP crossovers and trying to come up with games where there was maybe more of a concrete system. So like, I played around with a lot of that sort of thing, and I made a three-dimensional racing game using a Scalextric track to make a board game version of Wipeout, the PlayStation game.

Jordan: 05:04

Cool. I love Wipeout.

Tadhg: 05:05

Yeah, yeah. Well, I got a Scalextric track, which involves loops and stuff. And then I had, I basically stole a bunch of rules from Formula D around minimum and maximum move points at certain turns and driver abilities and all this kind of stuff. And then the idea was that you would essentially have like a triangular piece that you were blue-tacking around this upended course, trying to figure out, "Well, can I make this turn?" and stuff while trying to read it.

Jordan: 05:26

I feel like that could work now on Steam. People would go for some sort of turn-based racing game, you know?

Tadhg: 05:32

Right? I should totally patent that. It’s that kind of thing. Like, I have that weird background, and it probably wouldn't have turned into much of a career of any kind. 'Cause again, Ireland is small, and I finished university, and I was kind of bumming around for a couple of years doing a couple of tech writing jobs.

Jordan: 05:48

Is that what you thought you were going to be doing?

Tadhg: 05:50

I didn't really know. I was actually very, in my mid-twenties, I was very adrift. Then I met a mutual friend at a wedding, and I got introduced to Dave Collins, who was the CTO of Havok.

Jordan: 06:00

That's the physics engine.

Tadhg: 06:01

Yeah. And just, I had this brain sort of flash moment. I was like, "Oh." And so I hired him during the course of the day. I was like, "I know it's a wedding, but I really want to work on stuff." And so they hired me after. I love Aaron.

Jordan: 06:12

Havok was cool. Oh yeah, Havok was super cool when it came out.

Tadhg: 06:15

Yeah, totally. And really nice group, a bunch of people as well, really fun team, really ambitious. And so I came on board as the manual guy, and I wrote documentation and stuff like that for about a year, maybe a year and a half. That job, unfortunately, then got nixed because of the dot-com crash. And again, I was back to being a bit like, "I don't know what I'm going to do." And I got it into my head to move to London and just see what life could maybe do if I was living in a bigger city. And so I moved to London. Six weeks later, it was a recruiter named Aardvark Swift—I think they still exist—they got me a junior designer job at this studio up in North London named Asylum Entertainment, who did like low- to mid-range kind of PS2 games. It was crazy. I couldn't believe it.

I remember when I went to the interview, the guy who's the producer of the team told me afterward that I was all over the place. I didn't really know what I was talking about, but I was making all of these sort of grand, "What you really need to do is this, and you really need your difficulty curve to go up on a spike," and stuff like that. And people were like, "That's completely wrong," and so on. But he thought I was weird. He was like, "He's a really strange guy, so give him a job. Let's see what happens." And I immediately had one of the best years of my life. We were working on a game called Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension or something, which was some Lego franchise game from various things that Lego was trying—like kind of the same time they were trying things like Bionicle and stuff like that.

But I had a blast building levels, writing game design documents, and I wrote the story script. Basically, I was just working 12 hours a day but actually loving it.

Jordan: 07:46

And maybe finding yourself a little bit because...

Tadhg: 07:49

Yeah, yeah, very much so. I just kind of knew as soon as I was into it, I knew that I was doing something that I was good at and that was me.

Ignition Engine. I worked in quite a few places then in the UK for years afterward. I had a three-year stint at Lionhead, for instance. I worked on a game called The Movies, which people have played apparently.

Jordan: 08:05

I remember it vaguely.

Tadhg: 08:07

Well, it was cool. You're in the Molyneux zone where it's like, it's high drama, but it was very... You're down in the Guildford zone. It's all that.

Jordan: 08:16

What happened next? Take me from there.

Tadhg: 08:18

So The Movies came out, and it did okay, but didn't do brilliantly. We did have a sort of a follow-on deal to do what we now call a DLC pack, but it was actually like a CD-ROM that you could buy extra and stuff. It was a team that kept us going for about another eight or nine months, as I recall.

And then I went to work for Climax Entertainment instead, a British game dev that did just a lot of console projects. And I think they still do. I joined a team particularly that focused on handheld games, so they would make games for the PSP and the Nintendo DS. It was a little pre-mobile, but you know, that sort of small form factor type of stuff.

So I joined initially as a game designer, and I fairly quickly got promoted to be a lead designer, and then I worked on a very hard project that nearly killed me for about a year.

Jordan: 09:03

What was that?

Tadhg: 09:05

Well, I'm actually not entirely—well, yeah, okay, probably talk about it at this point. I was the lead designer on a PSP version of Oblivion.

Jordan: 09:12

Right, Climax did a lot of ports, right?

Tadhg: 09:14

Yeah, yeah. Well, they did a lot of ports, but a lot of adaptations as well. So they would take on games like Silent Hill or Oblivion or whatever.

Jordan: 09:23

So what was—sorry, what was the platform for Oblivion?

Tadhg: 09:25

The PSP, the Sony PSP. God bless it.

Jordan: 09:28

Wow.

Tadhg: 09:28

Yeah, like it was that. There was a lot about that project that was just super hard, and a lot about it, which honestly, just—the idea is great, but the technology does not quite match up to what's being promised, and the hardware really can't deal with it at all. Like, so just, yeah, craziness, craziness from end to end.

Jordan: 09:47

You could see the appeal for the executives, right? Like, "Oh, we put this on there. You'll let us do that."

Tadhg: 09:52

Totally, totally. But I think everybody who's worked in the industry long enough eventually runs up against a cliff project like this that really just is insane. I remember that the producer on the team was so tired that you'd find him like slumped in a corner. A lot of the time, people were sleeping here, there, and everywhere trying to make stuff work.

Jordan: 10:10

For me, it was my first game that I worked on that was like that, which I think I was sort of lucky in that way.

Tadhg: 10:17

What was the game?

Jordan: 10:18

And I was excited. It was called Joint Operations. It was kind of a battlefield-style game. So it was a multiplayer shooter where you could fly a helicopter and drive a car and, you know, do all these different things. Yeah. And it was great. It was a really fun game, but it was, you know, it was one of these seven days a week for months and months and months.

Tadhg: 10:37

Exactly, exactly. Where you just end up kind of like, you're so in it, it was, I mean, it was grinding is the only word to describe it. But I was the sort of person, like a lot of people who are in games, who just was kind of sticking in and sticking in and kind of hoping I could make it work.

And then I had a family event, which kind of broke me out of that, sort of that brain pattern, I feel like, which was a cousin of mine died. I had kind of grown up with him a bit, and he was kind of the same age as me. And he just had a very sudden illness and passed away within like three, four days. So then I went home to Ireland for like a week to do funeral things and all that kind of stuff. It was so unbelievably kind of sad. And when I came back to work a week later, and to see the team crazily in meetings, like yelling at each other about whatever the hell else with the new design direction we were trying to do...

I just had this kind of moment where I was just like, "Oh, the hell with this." Like, I know I'm not doing this anymore. And I resigned. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, was like, really happy to see me be not a grouchy human anymore again. So it was the first opportunity then when I flipped over from doing kind of game design properly into being more of a manager type because I joined Sky Games. So Sky is a television station in the UK.

Jordan: 11:41

I've heard about it 'cause it's in songs that I've listened to.

Tadhg: 11:44

Yeah, well, it's like... I don't know if it still is anymore, but at the time it was still kind of part of the News Corporation, Murdoch kind of blob as well. So, which was maybe a little controversial, but I just joined, it was this little team, they did what they would call red button games. And a red button game is a game that works on like a TV set-top box.

So, you know, you've got like one meg of RAM, maybe that you're working with. You've got a TV remote controller with like rubbery buttons, which is what, that's what you're playing. Most all of the games that are built for it are like tiny kind of licensed property stuff based on either like kids' TV shows, like for Nickelodeon, or game shows, like things like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

My official title was the Senior Game Development Manager, which in real world terms was essentially Exec Producer. So all I really did was commission projects for nice little budgets, deal with developers on a kind of a one-remove basis, evaluate builds, release kind of plans together for them, stuff like that, and publish them once a week.

Rather than working on one game endlessly, I was working on like all these tiny little casual games and we were seeing a lot of, you know, metrics behind. This was the first time I ever encountered like game metrics. The game's actually monetized using a telephone call connection thing where you'd like, you'd be charged the price of a text or something to play the game.

It was really interesting. It gave me a lot of perspective on the behavior of markets and particularly in the casual space, what kind of things they actually like and what sort of stuff is kind of a bridge too far. And I really enjoyed it for a long time. I very much kind of enjoyed it, being in kind of quote-unquote, video games.

Jordan: 13:18

But did you get into consulting from there?

Tadhg: 13:19

Yeah. A little bit after. The reason I left Sky was myself and a friend of mine decided we were looking at the blow-up of Facebook, particularly at, you know, like the Zyngas of this world.

Jordan: 13:28

Like everyone else at that time.

Tadhg: 13:29

Right. We were just watching these games rack up millions of users a day and just being very like, "Oh my God," you know? And so the idea that we had was like, well, can we not take some of this and maybe put it in a Facebook wrapper somehow and have versions of games that we're putting up in a social network and that somehow we'll explore whatever this virality thing they're talking about is, we'll try and figure out how to do that.

And so a friend of mine and I, we just were like, let's take a punt. Why don't we just jump out and see what happens? Maybe we can build a studio. Maybe we can pull together some money and build a couple of products.

ic banking crash recession of: 2008

Jordan: 14:09

Perfect timing.

Tadhg: 14:10

The climate in the UK for investment at the time was terrible, but it turned out there was actually a huge avenue to build a consulting business out of it.

And so that's what we did. I just, I started writing, I wrote an article that I posted on Gamasutra, which was called "Zynga and the End of the Beginning," which basically talked about, well, look, this social game stuff's been around for a couple of years, but like, what's actually happening? And that, for whatever reason, back in the day, back when we didn't really know what Twitter was and stuff like that, it blew up hugely. And I got a lot of like really very powerful and influential folk emailing me from around the world, like Shervin Pishevar, who at the time ran Social Game Network and stuff like that, wanting to talk to us about like, you know, your insights in these things. Like, what is it you think about this kind of stuff?

And that pretty quickly rolled into work at the kind of media outlets in the UK, but it was all like advice on projects and helping to kind of break down things. Maybe they were already live for a long time, but weren't doing that well.

Jordan: 15:05

It makes me think of something interesting, which is the environments that may be really difficult for starting a studio might be really good for starting consultancies because it's times of uncertainty, it's risk-off, and there's this big transition happening. So I bet there was a lot of hunger for insight, analysis, perspective.

Tadhg: 15:24

And that was very much kind of reinforced to me then over the next few years. There's a lot of people maybe who work within larger entities that really know that they're trying to engage with their market, but they don't have a lot of good perspective around what it is they're thinking about getting into.

And so, you know, they often go looking for someone who maybe seems like they're not talking out of their ass, and it's amazing how work just kind of comes your way, without really thinking about it. So long as you're kind of out there is the thing. So long as you're actually actively contributing to the community and that sort of stuff, it's surprising how many people like to come to your door just to hear you talk.

Jordan: 15:55

Is this kind of the birth of What Games Are?

Tadhg: 15:57

Yeah. So What Games Are stemmed pretty much directly from having written that Gamasutra piece. And I was amazed to find that the whatgamesare.com URL was available. So I yanked that, and I put together just a little blog. And that really kind of kicked off a lot of other things for me as well. Then it really sustained for one thing. People kept telling me that I was actually a pretty decent writer, which I never really knew before.

Jordan: 16:20

That surprises me because you had done the technical writing, and you had done all the...

Tadhg: 16:24

Yeah, but it's different. And there's something... I mean, like a lot of people in our industry, I have quite a lot of imposter syndrome. And so, you know, I'm not actually very good at being told that I'm good at something. Like it just makes me feel funny. My kind of default assumption is always that like, you know, I'm doing something kind of fake, or like people will find out eventually, or like that kind of thing.

As I've gotten older, less so, but definitely I've had periods of time where I just assumed that I'm kind of, you know, not really as good as I think I am, or like that sort of stuff. As a result, anytime I would see a success with something, it always kind of would blow my mind a bit, you know, or just, or I would be almost kind of shook by it or like, "Oh, wow."

Jordan: 16:59

I think that goes along with any sort of creativity because creativity being sort of birthed in the moment or sort of, as you go, you can't rely on your past. If you're doing something that's predetermined, you can just know it and be good at it. But if you have to come to work and do something new, then the fact that you did something good a week ago really doesn't help you much in terms of keeping that perspective.

Tadhg: 17:19

Not at all. And as your years go on through working in the industry, you really sort of see that a lot. Like you notice how the terms of reference in things change a ton. You notice how quickly it is that sort of like the successes of yesterday actually kind of age out. Like you find yourself in a position where you're sort of talking about things that to you are still fairly relevant because they were only a few years ago, but particularly as younger people are coming up in the industry, they give you that, like, "Sure thing."

Jordan: 17:41

Grounded out to kind of look. Well, you were like this company Climax game. They're like, "Yeah, Climax game. Right, right, right, right." Although when I was a kid, I remember being kind of confused because there was Climax games who made like Landstalker and what was it? Shining in the Dark, or, you know, there was the Japanese Climax.

Tadhg: 17:57

And then there was the UK Climax. Yeah, the UK Climax was called Climax Studios.

Jordan: 18:02

So take me into some of what you learned in that consulting period. I'm interested in like some of the things that you've developed over the years that you've found really helpful or that have, you know, a lot of clients have benefited.

Tadhg: 18:13

For me, it was, it's a couple of things. One of the things I always say to people is I became aware of the fact through consulting that the games industry is way bigger than any individual sector of the games industry realizes. There's a lot of people, for example, who work in console and PC gaming or like Steam Indie stuff.

They think to themselves, I am the games industry, right? Like, I am the games industry. Steam is the games industry, whatever. The vast majority of them are unaware of, let's say the casino industry or how massive that is, or they're unaware of the sports industry, or they're unaware of a lot of kind of niche PC RPG stuff that plays in browsers that comes out of Romania or things like that.

Jordan: 18:52

Well, like hardcore Sims.

Tadhg: 18:53

Right, right, right. Or, you know, games from like nontraditional territories. Like a lot of people in Britain are very aware of like games from the U.S. and games from Japan, but nobody, almost nobody knows of games from Korea or China or, you know, Brazil or stuff like that. And I became aware of as well, like how many people peripheral to the games industry actually, like were maybe trying to figure out ways to sort of add gameplay to their product or that kind of thing, but they really didn't have a single basic frame of reference for what it is they were trying to do.

And a lot of the times their core ideas for what it is they thought they wanted to do were on really shaky foundations. And so, you would realize that it's like a multi-headed hydra. There's a lot of different parts of the industry that believe themselves to be the thing or to be kind of literally pun intended, what games are, but they're not like, they're only actually a part of it.

They often speak in very different languages to different audiences across different demographics and all that sort of thing, but they're often wrestling with very similar problems from one to the next. They just have no idea that each exists.

Jordan: 19:51

So there might be solutions in one area that the other area isn't aware of.

Tadhg: 19:54

Yeah. And some of them are actually kind of actively hostile to others. Like some of them have like very pointed opinions about the others, but usually those are fairly misaligned.

Jordan: 20:01

There's a strong bias in hiring, right? Like if you want to do console shooters, well, you need that triple-A console shooter experience.

It's absolutely, it's just a line in the sand. Whereas maybe there would be some benefit from companies being more diverse in the kinds of experiences they're looking for.

Tadhg: 20:18

That's right. And particularly, like, I've always felt that that's a big problem for the game design field in particular, because as game development itself has kind of expanded and gone into lots of different platforms, different areas, and has incorporated much larger teams and has a whole new discipline like live ops and all that sort of stuff attached, you know, it's just led to this kind of natural need to find more and more kind of specialist talent. And for designers in particular, that means it tends to concentrate down toward people who know how to do one particular kind of design, let's say economic design, for example.

For me, game design as a whole, and maybe it's because of my experience having built LARPs back in the day... For me, there's a holistic element to game design, to figuring out the overall kind of core of a game or that sort of stuff that is really independent of what device it plays on, what technology it uses, what market it's in. But it's increasingly difficult, I think, for that kind of game designer to justify their existence in most works.

Jordan: 21:12

I don't think it's just you. I think that a lot of game designers are attracted to the field because of all the different kinds of media and modalities that are involved and are attracted to games because games is a space where... this is one of the big things that brought me to the industry. It's a field where you could and can still make, you know, grammatical-level contributions. It's not like a finished thing. There's so much opportunity for fresh ideas.

Tadhg: 21:37

Absolutely. Absolutely. And then sort of the other things that I kind of learned from that is that most of the time, most of the problems that studios kind of seem to have in my experience come down to really two things. One is that they often get themselves started on the wrong foot.

And then proceed to go in that direction kind of regardless. So it's a little... I'm making an analogy a lot, but it's a little like, let's say, for example, you decide you want to build a train to Boston and you, you know, you start laying track and it's actually heading to Chicago. And then rather than sort of go, "Wait a second," pull up your track, go back and start laying your track to Boston, you're just like, "Oh, we'll just keep building and we'll figure it out later on." Like that. There's a momentum that comes with a lot of projects where they just, they get baked into decisions that were made often somewhat accidentally very early on. It really limits what they're going to be or what they're ever going to be. A lot of projects really sort of set themselves up for failure or success like in their first month.

Jordan: 22:27

I'm curious what you mean by that. Cause there's so many different ways for that to happen, right? That can be the tech, that can be sort of the concept that's chosen. That can be the core loop. Like when you say that, are you thinking any of those things or is there something you have in mind?

Tadhg: 22:41

I'm mostly thinking about the core kind of design decisions that are made early on. So yes, that's somewhat to do with the tech. It's somewhat to do with the target device platform, things like that. But I think it's a lot to do with kind of assumptions around gameplay and players and the psychology of it. I think like a lot of the time, you know, when you come across a game where it's just like the loop doesn't work at all or that kind of thing, it's usually down to some very, very axiomatic decision that was made way back when that, you know, the studio now regards as religion and it's kind of unquestioning and all that sort of stuff, but it tends to be the source of failure sort of over and over.

Jordan: 23:18

I would love to dig in a little bit on that, man. Like what are some of the mistakes that people make?

Tadhg: 23:24

Like a really good example is thinking that players will engage with a lot of formal decisions before they go and play a game if you're making a game for mobile, right? Like where it's like, they'll, they'll quite happily choose a lot of moods and rules and all this kind of thing before they'll press play on a game and then play their mobile game, which they will not do. Or another is kind of assuming—this is one that I get into trouble a lot for—but assuming that multiplayer as a feature, like synchronous multiplayer as a feature by itself is a thing that will attract a lot of players to a game, and you know, it won't. Most successful multiplayer games generally come from having a strong single-player component that essentially teaches the player how to play well before they get into dealing with the wider world.

Another one is games that are based solely on the idea of a narrative, and then we're going to add a game in somehow later on. That usually, not always, usually means that you end up in a situation with a game where it's really great for like 10 percent of people who will actually play through more than five hours of it, but a huge amount of people will fall out of it in the meantime. Or, you know, not find it particularly engaging or things like that. A lot of the time it really comes down to, I think, just assumptions about how players will relate to the game, how they feel about play in general, what their likely interaction pattern is based on the device, what their likely interest is based on market—things like that.

Jordan: 24:45

You know, one that I see a lot is... I don't know what to call it, the slightly better than fallacy, which is like, "Oh, that product's successful. We have a couple of ideas on how to make it a little bit better. And then, hey, if we get 10 percent of the market, we are better with our thing."

Tadhg: 24:59

Oh, the market for this is like 100 million players. If we just get 1 percent of that, then dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, but you won't. So what's your plan if you get 50,000 players? A feature improvement is a big one. You've run across that with teams who are engineer-focused or that kind of thing. Like, cause they, a lot of the times, those kinds of guys, they might come straight out of college or they might come out of having worked in app development or things like that. And they often have an idea in their head that genre success in games is really just about building the best sprocket. So, you know, they're like, "Well, look, our engine can do this more," or, "We have this feature," or, "Ours is like that game, but we also add this."

What they usually fail to really understand at all is that the vast majority of the time, a successful game is not successful because of any one individual mechanic or sprocket. Occasionally it's true, but most of the time it's not. It's usually much more to do with market timing, brand timing, audience appeal, niche interest, novelty. There's a lot of different, depending on which market you're in, there's a lot of different potential factors that it can be. But mostly it's driven by not seeing a game that's the same as the other thing that they've played a bunch, you know?

Jordan: 26:02

Totally. And I think that's the biggest thing.

Tadhg: 26:04

The flip side is there are certain genres where it's like, the audience has chosen a genre king already. And so anyone who comes into that space thinking they're now going to be the genre king usually runs up against the problem that essentially the players are already existing in another game. Maybe they drift over for like a month to check out the competitor, realize that it seems like so much more work to build up to where it was, and they drift back towards whatever the genre king was.

Jordan: 26:30

And my friends are already over on that other product. And usually the other product, they actually know what their players want next. Whereas, you know, if you're trying to take them down, you have to make a guess.

Tadhg: 26:40

Yeah, you have to assume that they're going to care about something or that there's something in your game that's more exciting. And most of the time, whatever that more exciting thing is, it's not more exciting enough to attract them across long term. I wrote another article in Gamasutra years ago that people kind of ping me about from time to time. I called it the "Sexy-Worthy Trap." Where it's like the vast majority of the time developers will think that success in any given genre or whatever of games involves being worthier than the opponent. So it's like, you know, having better technology, having better features, having better whatever. And they misunderstand entirely that it's really actually about being sexy—being different, being unusual, being weird, being not the thing that everybody else is doing. And that if you're sexy, sure, you might fail. You might very well fail. But if you do happen to strike on the right kind of mix of things, you're also much more likely to succeed. Your chance of standing out from the pack is much higher if your game isn't the same thing as everything everybody else has been robotically building, you know?

Jordan: 27:38

Totally. Unique is better than better.

Tadhg: 27:40

Yeah, totally. And it can have enormously outsized success if it works. You know, it's like games like Among Us or Minecraft back in the day, Farmville in a sense, if you think of it that way. There’s a lot around that sort of stuff.

Some of it is around beating awareness. I mean, Farmville, I know for example, had Farm Town or there's a half a dozen other farm games before it. But it was, you know, Zynga was really, really good at essentially advertising like LinuxX to the point that they acquired players before other games had a chance to grab their attention. And then from there, you know, it's like they're effectively first to the perception of those players and therefore they are the genre king.

You're often working in a space where if you've got a lot of games that look like yours, you really get lost. And if you've got a lot of mechanics that work exactly the same as yours in other games, you absolutely get lost. Some markets are worse for that than others. Obviously mobile is pretty brutal because it's really easy to get predatory developers who will just come along and clone everything and all that sort of stuff. Being sexy is hard, but it actually often works.

Jordan: 28:36

I think that's a really important distinction you made between being first and being king because, you know, I mean, I'm thinking about Blizzard. Blizzard was almost never first, but they pretty much always managed to become the king. So you can take down a king. You can conquer a king. You just need to be very careful about, you know, which king you're going to go after and what's your strategy for actually getting the job done.

Tadhg: 28:59

You need to be very intentional about the thing that you're building. If Blizzard, say, for example, had come out with World of Warcraft, say way back when, if they came out with that and it looked exactly the same as EverQuest, but with spells or, you know, but with an extra thing, that thing would have sunk like a rock.

Blizzard has always valued art. They've always valued really high production values. They've always had a really signature kind of style to the games that they make. They've always been able to take that and apply it to games that belong to a certain genre but really roll their own mechanic mix, and then really stand out away from what everybody else is doing in the field. And that is sexy.

Jordan: 29:32

They have an audience, right? So they build games that they know their audience is going to love. They had Battle.net. I do think—and I was never a big Warcraft player—but didn't they have the thing where the world was like split down the middle that you could be like in the human or orc or whatever, like there were the two things. So yeah, starting paths and like the whole world was split. So that was pretty unique.

Tadhg: 29:53

I think if you ask Ralph Costner, he'd probably tell you that that's in no way innovative because they did so much of that sort of stuff on the MMOs that he worked in back in the day. But yeah, like probably to a lot of players who maybe haven't thought about playing MMOs before, that was like, "Wow, you know, you can be good and evil, or you could be human and orc," or that sort of stuff.

Jordan: 30:09

EverQuest is also very hard to approach. I mean, it was very hardcore. There was—you'd wait for hours and hours online to find certain creatures, and the onboarding took forever.

Tadhg: 30:17

I suppose the other kind of major thing that I've pulled in from all my experience in consulting a lot and working with a lot of developers, both internally at platforms and even working at Magic Leap the last few years.

To me, I apply a very kind of player’s eye view to design, and I'm particularly a big fan of writing design documentation, for example, that is in no way colored. As in, there's not a lot of waffling about what the fiction is supposed to be, who the story of the characters are, or the motivations and all that sort of stuff.

It's very functional and very like, you know, when I press A, B happens; when I press C, D happens. But I'm also a big fan of writing it from the point of view of how a user sees it rather than explaining what the rules underneath actually do. Because the way I look at it, a lot from a game designer perspective—and this is different from being a board game or an RPG designer—my view is as a video game designer, I'm not actually designing what the system does; engineers do that, and they are better at doing that than I am.

What I'm designing is what the system appears to do, which is fundamentally different. Oftentimes, what that means is I'm designing relationships between things. So, you know, pot of gold A becomes pot of stars B, becomes, you know, horse C or whatever, as experienced by what a user sees.

Like I click this, I see that, I do that, rather than worrying excessively about what the math of that is supposed to be, you know? Not really going like, "Oh, there's an 8 percent chance of this," or, "There's a 19 percent chance of that," or, "Here's a spreadsheet of death that I've built," which will somehow explain all of that sort of stuff.

Jordan: 31:45

Would you do any spreadsheeting for something like that?

Tadhg: 31:48

Yeah, but like very kind of A to B to C type of stuff. I'm very negative about designers getting too far into the weeds on that sort of stuff. When I've had teams working for me before, I tend to really knuckle down on people essentially trying to pseudocode on paper.

Because it's been my experience that once you get to the point of trying to then figure out how to balance that sort of stuff, you're murdered because you start to develop black box problems very fast. You start to develop problems where, like, you tweak value A, and then somehow value D changed, even though you don't know why. Or you changed behavior A, and suddenly NPC C has this amazing tactic that he's using against everybody, and you're like, "Why is it doing that?" That sort of thing where you're like, "Why is the game doing that?" I'm really stern on preventing that kind of thing by encouraging designers to go, "Just think of it like a human sees it. Stop worrying about what the engine can do. Stop worrying about what the dice rolls underneath that are supposed to be. That doesn't matter. That's very fungible and changeable."

But worrying much more about whether an actual interaction will make sense to a human first and foremost, right? Then from there, you can worry, like, if it turns out that, sure, it's got balance issues or whatever, or it pays too much gold, that's an easy problem to fix. Once you're into the phase of just changing values and stuff. But if you fundamentally build something that's kind of nested and weird and produces a lot of wacky outcomes, you're going to spend nights and weekends trying to figure out the right balance of numbers to make that thing behave vaguely like you think it should. And that's going to eat up all your time to actually make it good rather than just make it work.

Jordan: 33:16

I think that does make a ton of sense. I've never heard it put in that hardcore way, but I like it because I think what a lot of designers do is spend so much time thinking about the system that they lose sight of what really matters, which is the output to the user.

Tadhg: 33:31

So to me, I make a real distinction in my mind between the schema, if that makes sense. So the schema of the game to me is what the mechanics seem to do, versus the actual system underneath it, which is, you know, the crazy ball of math and code that is generating the results.

And to my mind, it's like, the schema is what needs to make sense to the players, independent of what the machine is actually doing to try and deliver that result. A game designer should be trying to build that schema to make sense, and then essentially let the engineers do their job, which is to be creative in solving a code problem that you've presented to them.

Jordan: 34:10

Like, you wouldn't ask the writers to design the systems that are going to... But here's my question: Do you have to then change the way you hire engineers?

Tadhg: 34:19

You definitely need to have engineers who can understand what's being asked of them. Some of that is down to how well designers express themselves in specs. If I get out my technical writer editing pen and go through a lot of specs, it can be a lot of like, "No, no, no, no, no. Just tell me what the actual thing does." I often ask, as a writing exercise, design students to write a design document from the point of view of the second person.

So literally, like "You do this, the game does that." Almost as though they're writing a choose-your-own-adventure novel where they're really trying to explain what you see when something happens. Because when you can get what you see into someone's head, like an engineer, they often then go, "Oh!" and are able to run off and figure it out. Maybe the first go is not quite right, or in the first brush of building it, they come across something that works better than what the spec initially came up with. But the act of doing that, I think, really helps get things on the right track in the first place.

Jordan: 35:11

I think it's a very interesting and useful tip. I've done that second-person kind of exercise, but only for a couple of pages to get the idea across of a concept or a mechanic—not as the baseline method.

Tadhg: 35:25

Yeah. It's hard trying to write documentation like that, which is basically all active verbs, second-person perspective, completely extraneous of details. There's a lot about making sure the grammar isn't full of bullet points and bolds and excessive quote marks and all that kind of stuff. So it's legible and simple. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of effort. It's very easy to fall into the passive voice, for example.

Jordan: 35:46

I want to clarify one thing for people who might be listening and thinking about trying this. When you say, "without extra details," what level of detail do you have in mind? Because I was originally thinking relatively detailed just from the user experience point of view. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean like even removing details from the experience?

Tadhg: 36:02

No, I’ll give you an example. So years ago, I was working for—well, the first job I had when I moved over to the U.S.—I was working for a company named Jawfish Games, and we were trying to build synchronous mobile multiplayer games as a thing and make that technology work. There was a particular game I was working on, which was sort of a multiplayer bingo equivalent, where you had a much larger grid than a normal bingo game does. You were trying to set all these squares so people could dob a whole lot of things, try to make rows, and all this kind of stuff.

I remember writing up a design for it. The field itself was, I think, 10 by 10, maybe 12 by 12. I was trying to come up with a way to describe how the field would be auto-generated with a set of numbers at the start, but they would kind of cluster in certain ways so that you wouldn't have lots of edge-case numbers at the edges and stuff like that.

I wrote this multi-page description: "These rows do this, these columns do that," and all this stuff. I handed it to one of my engineers, and he just was like, "What the fuck is this? What does it do?"

And I found myself saying, "Well, it's like, imagine this number does this, and if that works, then it kind of goes like that." After about an hour, he was like, "Why don't you just tell me to generate some stuff, and we'll see what happens?"

So I wrote a much shorter spec that said, "Numbers fill in here, and they mostly cluster in the middle." That's it, right? And then he was able to go off and solve it and enjoy solving it, rather than have me tell him how to suck eggs. It worked perfectly fine. I didn’t need to have gone and done all that crazy work.

Jordan: 37:31

It makes so much sense because that literally is software engineering, right? Object-oriented design and all these things that the engineers are trained and experienced in doing.

Tadhg: 37:40

And the other part of it is I noticed that over the years of doing this kind of stuff, one of the things I realized as a designer, when I was being overly deep in the weeds, is I was really taking the joy out of the job for a lot of engineers. What's often forgotten, I think, in game dev is that engineering itself is a fairly creative discipline. It's creative toward trying to find the best solution to things. But, you know, it's like any kind of professional creative work. If you imagine you were writing a game design document and trying to specify exactly the art style for all the characters or something like that, rather than letting the artists go, "Cool, we’ll run away with it, do concepts, and see what we come up with." That collaborative thing with engineering is the same.

If you over-specify the game design down to the nth degree, all you're doing is killing your engineer’s ability to be innovative and essentially telling them how to do their jobs, which you shouldn't do. It's actually extremely counterproductive. A lot of game designers who were engineers before often have to unlearn that. They come into it thinking, "I know how the engine works. I know how these objects work. So here's exactly what I want it to do." And it just makes their team go, "There’s a better way," or, "Get out of my patch, go sit at your desk. This is my desk. I do the thing here. You do the thing at the other desk."

In a sense, it's because I’m trying to unmask a lot of things and make it simple for everyone else to do their stuff. And once you do that, I think the result is coherent. When it’s coherent, then it’s play-testable. And when it’s play-testable, you can actually see what’s working and what’s not. You can linearly solve those problems rather than building a spooky box where you don’t know what it does or why it doesn’t work.

Jordan: 39:26

I want to turn a little bit to a different topic, which is—you know, you've worked on several hardware projects over the years. We didn’t get into that on your career journey, but I know that you worked on, well, there was that red button product you talked about. And there was... Ooh, yeah. Ooh, yeah. Am I saying that right?

Tadhg: 39:43

Ooh, yeah. Yep.

Jordan: 39:43

What else? Magic Leap, right?

Tadhg: 39:47

Magic Leap is the third one.

Jordan: 39:48

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I think what’s really interesting about this, and this is something that you brought up before we started recording, was, you know, the relevance of these new platforms for developers, maybe new developers or any developers that are trying to catch a break. So I'd love to talk a little bit about that.

Tadhg: 40:04

There’s a couple of things that always kind of happen when a new platform obviously looks like it might be a thing. One is that it attracts a lot of younger developers, a lot of developers who work in more indie spaces, and that kind of stuff. A lot of them are trying to figure out how to get on board with something that maybe has a lot of tailwind behind it already and therefore help grow their success in ways that working in very stuffed platforms maybe doesn’t anymore.

You know, being Rovio back before mobile gaming was a thing, and then figuring out how to be Rovio, even just with that first Angry Birds game, and ride it to a gigantic fortune, and then from there go wherever—you know, “We’re kingpins of the world” and stuff.

Jordan: 40:43

There’s no way Angry Birds would do that well if it were released now.

Tadhg: 40:47

No, not anymore. There are probably people out there thinking, “I just need to build a better version of Angry Birds,” but it’s like, you’re way too late, man. It’s not sexy like that anymore. Nobody writes about it in national newspapers anymore and goes, “There’s this game that I’m playing, oh my God.”

Jordan: 40:59

There are still people who are like, “I need to make the next Jetpack Joyride.”

Tadhg: 41:04

Exactly. And so, there’s all of that. So yeah, trying to find the edges, trying to find blue oceans rather than red oceans, that sort of thing. But then the flip side, of course, is there’s a lot around trying to understand what the platform actually wants or what is going to work within the bounds of the platform. That can be, I think, for a lot of developers, a very hard act of navigation. VR has been a lot of that in the last few years. It’s been really trying to understand what’s going to make it work—what are the different outlet devices like Oculus or whoever looking for? Where’s the development money to be found, to be honest? That kind of thing, that’s the other side of it.

Jordan: 41:36

You mean, what are the companies that own these platforms looking for?

Tadhg: 41:40

Yeah. A lot of the time, there’s a lot of developers who kind of really want to have a conversation with you that basically says, “Please tell me what to build,” right? Because like, “What’s the project you want?” type of thing. That could be a key property on that platform maybe, or it can become a founding title or stuff like that, you know? And so, I mean, it’s understandable. It’s just, it’s a tough act to balance sometimes.

Jordan: 41:57

And what are we balancing here? We’re balancing...

Tadhg: 41:58

Yeah. For developers, it’s trying to understand whether things are actually a viable opportunity or whether they’re actually kind of trouble.

Jordan: 42:05

I see. You don’t know if you’re going to be one of the first releases on the Nintendo Wii, which was—you know, a lot of people didn’t believe in—or you’re going to be one of the first releases on, I don’t know, Oculus Rift, which was really hard to sell on, you know?

Tadhg: 42:18

Exactly. OUYA had a huge amount of developer interest, like at its very start, before things kind of went sideways. A lot of people were trying to bring their builds of things to OUYA first, or that sort of stuff. There was a lot of groundswell support that it would work. And then, when it didn’t, there was so much of a scramble to try and get out from under it maybe, or, you know, go to Steam, which was having a renaissance at the time or those kinds of things.

Jordan: 42:39

What do you think was the challenge with OUYA?

Tadhg: 42:43

Well, I think it was three things. One was there were a lot of marketing missteps with OUYA. They were trying to understand who their audience was and kind of came down on the idea that it was like a small Xbox or a cheap console, or those kinds of things.

Jordan: 43:03

But that was never anything that the dev community particularly cared about at the time when it was very new and kickstarted and all that sort of stuff. The thing that really appealed to a lot of people in that time was that console was such a closed-up business. Like, there was no real way to get on Xbox 360 after a certain point, unless you had deep relationships with Microsoft.

Tadhg: 43:23

Exactly. They had a very throttled attitude about when content would come out and what content they wanted, and all that sort of stuff. There wasn’t room to do anything. And the same with Sony and Nintendo. They didn’t really have an indie wing. They were just like, "We just make our stuff."

Jordan: 43:39

Digital was very throttled and...

Tadhg: 43:40

Yeah, exactly. There were a lot of developers, especially younger ones, who maybe had a couple of years working on Android, trying to figure their way through. But by the time OUYA actually came out, that had already started to change. Steam had opened up a lot more. PS4 was on the horizon, and they were talking a lot about commissioning projects from indies, being very friendly to indies, and trying to get their hands on as many cool indie titles as possible.

In the midst of all that, OUYA wasn’t doubling down on that "we’re the homebrew platform" that it represented as an alternative channel. Instead, they were trying to market it as "we're the little console that could," and that just didn’t go anywhere with anyone. The other thing was a technical misstep—they based the console around the Tegra 3.

Jordan: 44:31

It was a mobile device, basically.

Tadhg: 44:33

Yeah, whatever the version of the Tegra was, that was just before it could support shaders. And, yeah, just before that point. And shaders boomed across the universe when Unity and all that sort of figured that out. And everyone was like, "Oh my God."

Jordan: 44:46

Right.

Tadhg: 44:47

And then OUYA happened to accidentally be on a platform that was essentially outdated. It’s one of those things that’s completely unpredictable at the time, but it meant that for a lot of developers, there were suddenly a lot of porting costs that didn’t need to be there. And so a lot of them started to think, "Yeah, maybe this isn’t worth it." And the dev community totally gossips. Word got out pretty fast that a lot of software wasn’t selling a lot of units, or stuff like that. And they just knew it wasn’t working.

Jordan: 45:21

We had on Tommy Tallarico, who’s doing the Amico. Are you familiar with that?

Tadhg: 45:25

No, not super familiar, no.

Jordan: 45:27

They basically rebooted Intellivision, and they have a new piece of hardware coming out called the Amico. I’ll tell you about it offline. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. But yeah, they’re making a big play to do a new piece of hardware, and you know, I wish them the best of luck.

Tadhg: 45:41

Absolutely. Hardware is a really tricky beast. More companies have failed at hardware than have succeeded, and there are a lot of bets that are made on somewhat shaky foundations. It can go very wrong, really fast, and very expensively.

Jordan: 45:54

Exactly, yeah. Well, they have a lot going for them. You know, they’ve got the right brand. Everyone knows Tommy, and they’ve got a lot of cool content coming. They’re basically trying to kind of redo the Wii, with collaborative, family-friendly games.

Tadhg: 46:09

Oh, sure, yeah.

Jordan: 46:10

Lower-end, in that same mini-console category. Each controller has its own screen, so it has some really cool, unique capabilities.

Tadhg: 46:21

That’s great.

Jordan: 46:21

But obviously, yeah, supply chain challenges right now are a big deal.

Tadhg: 46:30

Nobody can get microchips from gold dust. Absolutely.

Jordan: 46:34

So before I let you go, I wanted to ask you your thoughts on where things are going. Particularly over the last year, there's been a lot of change in the world, an acceleration of a lot of trends. So I'm curious how you perceive the industry changing and what you see as the impact of what's been going on.

Tadhg: 46:53

Several years ago, I was probably one of those people predicting the death of the console. I’m sure that there are articles on my site from like seven, eight years ago, talking about how certain hardware was going to get to a certain parity, that there’d be a need or a want for the audience to have an easier way to game. Stuff very predictive of, say, cloud streaming or that kind of thing.

And almost none of that has proved to be true. The amount of appetite among even the younger audience for changing up their way of gaming has been a lot smaller than many predicted. We’re in a situation where 10 years ago, people thought the PC might tap out as a technology at some point, but 10 years later, they’re still buying high-end PCs, still queuing for miles to try and get $3,000 graphics cards, still trying to get their hands on PS5s and Xbox Series Xs.

Jordan: 47:46

It seems like it’s almost accelerated because of YouTube, streaming, and Twitch.

Tadhg: 47:51

Exactly. It’s become much more stratified. The audience isn’t liberalizing as much as some thought; instead, it's stratified to a huge degree. Their interest in playing in other venues is pretty minuscule. Mobile remains the biggest obvious difference in that respect, but it mostly talks to a completely different audience than your standard PC or console gaming.

And I personally don’t see that dissolving anytime soon. Over the next few years, I think those kinds of verticals are just going to double down. I think Nintendo will produce a Switch Pro—I hope.

Jordan: 48:28

Supposedly they're announcing it in like a week or something.

Tadhg: 48:30

Right, yeah. Well, I’ve wanted it for ages because I love my Switch, but because I’ve got slightly older eyes that need progressive lenses and stuff, the screen is too small for me. Like, I literally need it to be bigger so I can see things.

Jordan: 48:41

I 100 percent play it on my television. It’s a docked device for me.

Tadhg: 48:45

I want to be able to bring it to the airport and stuff, but then I’m trying to read text in Octopath Traveler or whatever, and I’m just like, “I can’t quite make it out,” you know?

But yeah, I think the big question for me, obviously, because I’ve just come out of working in the XR space for years, is whether VR and AR are going to find their way, whether they’re going to find a path to freedom. And that’s very much an open question at the moment.

I hope—maybe there are some signs with what Oculus is doing. Quest 2 is actually a really good piece of hardware. Have they managed to actually talk to people yet in the right way? Are they managing to turn people's heads or not? And what might that mean?

Beyond that, the cloud streaming stuff seems like it’s not really working out. It’s maybe becoming another one of those trendy areas where every tech company decides they’re going to get in on it because everyone else is, but the player numbers aren’t really there for that kind of thing.

Certainly, I’ve been a Stadia Pro subscriber for a couple of years, but it feels like it’s really struggling a lot to figure out what it is or what it wants to be when it grows up.

Jordan: 49:45

Has that been a good experience for you, just as an end user?

Tadhg: 49:47

You know, the real surprise is that it actually is. Yeah, it’s very unusual for me, at least.

Jordan: 49:51

Yeah?

Tadhg: 49:51

For years, I thought services like OnLive and all the rest were just doomed because of latency issues and stuff. But then I played my first Stadia session—I played Destiny, and I think Metro: Last Light or Metro Redux—and it worked really great.

I had fiber in the house, and I’m pretty much on a router that’s right next to where the fiber comes in. And it’s off a Chromecast that’s hooked up to my TV. So I’m as close to the gate as possible, but it worked. The issue is more that its business model doesn’t make any sense. And its positioning—how it’s trying to brand itself—does not work at all. It feels like a retro service, or it’s always trying to sell content that’s six months old. It makes a big deal out of things that feel a bit DOA.

Jordan: 50:31

That sort of tech probably is the future, but it does seem like it’s still a ways out.

Tadhg: 50:36

I bet it does end up becoming the future, but it’ll probably come under the banner of something like Xbox. It’ll be a technology that works, but the user won’t even realize that’s what it’s doing. It’ll feel like seamless downloading.

Jordan: 50:50

Yeah, I think Microsoft’s hybrid model is a much better play for this transitionary period.

Tadhg: 50:55

Exactly. It’s a technology the industry needs, but it’s not a consumer solution that consumers particularly need. So it’s more of a backend thing.

Jordan: 51:04

Now, speaking of Microsoft, Game Pass is one of these new things that does seem to be playing out super well.

Tadhg: 51:12

Yeah, super. Do you use it?

Jordan: 51:14

Probably four times a week.

Tadhg: 51:16

It’s great. It’s really simple. Unlike Stadia, which has made its life complicated, Game Pass is easy to understand and offers great value. Microsoft has learned not to get in the way of that, and that’s fantastic. That’s why it works, I think.

Jordan: 51:31

Anything else in terms of trends that you want to cover?

Tadhg: 51:33

Having had a lot of experience, particularly with the AR world, you know, I would really like to see smaller form factor glasses—kinds of headsets or whatever—come out.

I think there’s potential for something to happen there. There are about nine things that need to happen before it can, but nevertheless, I’d love to see that style of device become a reality. I had a privileged position at Magic Leap to see a lot of apps and developments that really did work. For example, they worked in rooms, and you could do things like set up a solar system in your living room, spin the planet Earth around you, and that kind of stuff. And, you know, it had pretty decent fidelity and was occluded properly. But that was with a headset that’s quite heavy and very techie. Still, the core idea actually works.

Jordan: 52:15

I’m curious, what is the physical interaction capability? Like, if you had a ping pong table, can you have an experience that feels anything like hitting a ball?

Tadhg: 52:23

You won’t get the tactile feel, obviously, because there’s no ball there, right? But there’s a lot around things like, if you’re using a controller, is it actually precise enough, or does it feel a bit flaily? Or if it’s trying to use hand recognition, same thing—does it actually track your hand positioning one-to-one? I’d say all of those are areas for improvement.

I remember playing a multiplayer version of Dr. Grordbort, which was Magic Leap’s sci-fi shooter. It was very fiddly to set up—getting two headsets going, a server communicating, all that. And then we were actually running around the canteen at work, shooting at each other behind tables and chairs.

There were a bunch of things that kind of half worked with it, and there was stuff that, because it was an early dev version, still needed improvement. But you know what? It friggin’ worked. It was cool. And you could see the beginnings of how this could be a thing.

Similarly, like art packages where you’re actually graffitiing your wall or something like that in AR—it works. You can do it. It’s just not widely available, and most people haven’t had the experience. And most people don’t have the money to buy a HoloLens 2 or whatever.

Jordan: 53:30

Here’s what you think—my gut about those sorts of experiences, obviously there’s the price issue and the difficulty, but once that stuff is dealt with, it sounds like it’s great for children.

Tadhg: 53:39

Yeah, yeah. Sort of. There’s one fairly big roadblock around getting kids using systems like that, which is that there’s a lot of concern around optic development and the impact on their eyes, literally, and that kind of thing. So there would be a lot of governmental worry, particularly around whether a device would be licensed for eight-year-olds to use on the basis that you’re kind of shining beams in their eyes or whatever.

And it’s like, well, does that actually have an impact on the development of young retinas and stuff like that? So I know what you're saying, but at the same time, I think it’s a ways off being proven that it’s safe for juvenile users and that kind of thing.

Jordan: 54:16

Is Apple going to do something?

Tadhg: 54:18

Everybody says Apple’s going to do something. Who knows? I don’t know.

Jordan: 54:22

I thought maybe you did.

Tadhg: 54:23

That is the biggest rumor around the campfire and has been in AR for years. It’s like, you know, when are the eyeglasses going to happen?

Jordan: 54:31

Along with the Apple car, Apple TV...

Tadhg: 54:34

Right, exactly. Microwave.

Jordan: 54:36

They’re the Blizzard of hardware.

Tadhg: 54:45

Yeah. Very much so, yeah.

Jordan: 54:46

Ty, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us.

Tadhg: 54:49

Thank you for having me. It’s been fun, it’s been really fun. Wow, we talked for like two hours.

Jordan: 54:54

It’s easy to do with you. Next time, we’ll do it over beers. Thank you.

Jordan: 55:04

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.

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