Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. U is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. How are things in Seattle, Mark?

00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Going all right. We got the cherry blossoms this week in Seattle, which is exciting, and it’s a sign that we’re turning into the strong half of the Seattle weather calendar in the summer here.

00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Very nice, yeah, we’re seeing just a little bit of flowers starting to peek out on the trees. Here in Berlin, although it’s always an experience where you see the first flowers kind of try to come out when it seems like it might be warm enough on those first sunny days in March, and then inevitably it turns really cold again and they all die. Yeah. So you see this thing where there’s the pioneers that are trying to break through, and then eventually the weather turns and it comes into full bloom, which is absolutely excellent for those that like colorful flower rich environment, like me, probably pretty bad for those with allergies, I’m imagining.

00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I’m excited to do an episode, Adam, about learning from games. Now, games, gaming, the gaming ecosystem, something that’s come up on a lot of previous podcasts. We’ve mentioned it here and there, but I thought it would be a good time to do a proper episode, collecting all of the things that we’ve learned and gleaned from that industry.

00:01:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we mentioned in passing lots of times.

I think we talked about it last time with Rasmus Anderson. It was a big part of our conversation with Andy Works, and he’s since published a great article essentially on exactly this topic called Serious Play.

I’ll link in the show notes, of course, talking about his journey of playing a lot of games when he was younger, then eventually becoming, I don’t know, an adult with responsibilities and, you know, you don’t have As much time for that sort of thing anymore, and then rediscovering really rich uh world of of games that exist now, both the big budget stuff and the indie games, and also what we can learn from that, why these are important as artistic, as cultural, and certainly as inspiration for design.

So Mark, when you’ve been inclined to reference games in connection with news, productivity, software tools for thought, it seems like they don’t have much in common, right? The productivity world is very focused on, well, being productive, which is almost the opposite of what you think of games are for, which is entertainment. So why is there a connection? Why are these two things so relevant to each other?

00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s kind of the question of the podcast, isn’t it? Maybe we can start by motivating a little bit because I think we’re kind of sleeping on games as an industry. It’s something that in the typical world of Silicon Valley kind of flies under the radar for a variety of reasons, but in fact, games are a huge deal. It’s an enormous industry. They’re extremely influential in terms of the amount of time that people spend on them and the culture, and as we’ll see, I think there’s a lot of technology, products, social things that games have figured out. I think there’s a lot to learn there.

00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one comparison you can make there is Hollywood, right? Films, TV, and I think it’s well understood, or most people would say, yeah, of course, Hollywood and films broadly have this huge impact on our culture.

It’s this really big industry. The celebrities from that movie stars are lionized in our world and in our culture, and everything from patterns of speech to social change has happened often through seeing things like, I don’t know, gay couples on TV and movies. I think that helped pave the way for a broader acceptance and legal change of that. And so, that seems fairly clear, but games maybe, as you say, we’re sleeping on them, they fly under the radar, they’re seen for some reason as less influential or less important, but of course, if you look at something like just the dollars or the total kind of money that goes into the industry, it’s actually larger than Hollywood, much larger than films, um, and maybe on par with maybe something like professional sports. So, this is something that is ongoing, already has had huge cultural impacts, and I think that’s even more so as new generations rise up.

00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the professional sports analogy is really interesting and apt.

For me personally, I kind of grew up watching sports. That was one of the things that I did.

You watched American football and baseball primarily, but when I was an adult, it basically became illegal to do so. It’s actually very hard to watch American football if you don’t have like the satellite dish, you have to buy the package and, you know, I have. Apartment or how do you even get a dish, you know, it’s a whole mess. And likewise with baseball, it was actually quite hard to buy a subscription to watch baseball. I tried, it was not fruitful. So one of the reasons that I ended up getting more into this community of games is that it’s actually just much more accessible. So Adam, I’m curious to hear a little bit about your story and how you ended up there too.

00:05:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think mine is typical in some senses that I played games as a kid and they had a really big impact on my life, and this was particularly true when for a while we lived in a pretty rural area and basically there was not a lot of other kids around and I’d go like get up to trouble at the river behind our house or whatever, but at some point, did manage to get access to a computer and that was certainly when I learned to program, but that was actually largely motivated by thinking I want to make my own games because I played these games and I had these really powerful and mind expanding experiences and I thought I want to do this too.

And I dreamed of growing up to go into the game industry.

In fact, I did exactly that, basically dropped out of college to work in my first game company, and went from there to working at some other relatively high profile companies, and after a few years, I got disillusioned.

And essentially that was because sort of the tools and practices were so bad.

This is post hoc. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I saw these really talented people working these crazy long hours, 60 and 80 hour weeks, and death marches to ship products and what have you, and maybe somewhat. Ironically, or maybe that’s not quite the right word for it, but there’s an interesting thing here where that’s part of what got me interested in tools, creative process, and I thought, OK, I love the output of this. I love games, or at least games as an artistic medium, I think can be really excellent, but that at some point the big budgets and the complex technology that went into it. And some dynamics of the industry just meant that the process of making them was kind of terrible.

Now, this was the late 90s, I think a lot has changed since then, including the indie game revolution, but interestingly enough, that was my path.

One way you could put it, or I could postdoc describe it is that the developer experience for game developers in the late 90s was terrible, and that’s one of the things that got me interested in developer tools, but also the creative process generally. So, Roku was about developing. Experience and great tools and a smooth process and of course Muse is a tool for thought and on that dimension, but they all kind of feed into that. So the bad experience I had in the game industry pursuing what was my childhood dream in fact led into what turned out to be the uniting theme for my career.

00:07:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting. So you originally sort of came at it from the developer experience as well as the user experience side, and I came at it more from the user experience side and I’ve since been learning more about the engineering side as I’ve explored the world of technology.

00:07:45 - Speaker 2: Interesting. You came in from a perspective of eSports as a replacement for sports, sort of. What were some of your first experiences or first games or first things you, I’m not even sure what you call a tournament, an e-sports tournament. What was it that was the seminal thing that opened you to this world?

00:08:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny. The beginning is sort of the present.

So one of the games that I had played when I was much younger, like 20 years ago, it’s called Age of Empires 2. This is a real-time strategy game where you have a little civilization that you collect resources for and you use it to build armies and take over the world and so forth.

And this is something I had played when I was a kid in the 90s, as one does, and had kind of forgotten about it.

But then a few years ago, I saw that the game had basically been revived by this new sort of social technology around games that includes things like YouTube, Discord, pro tournaments, Twitch, all. These things to make it more like a professional sports ecosystem or community.

And I sort of dialed back into that, it was such a fun game. And sure enough, there was this incredible vibrant community and ecosystem around it.

And based on that, I started poking around more in the world of gaming and e-sports in general.

And I saw more of that pattern. And then I looked into some of these more popular games.

That’s kind of a really niche game. There’s very popular games like Counter Strike, which is another one that I played when I was a kid, and that is now a huge eSport. That’s a game where you have like a million people watching the big tournaments. It’s the real deal.

There’s many professional players and teams, people do it basically for a living, and there’s an incredible amount of social energy around it as well as people just playing it for fun, of course.

00:09:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the competitive aspect is super interesting because I personally much prefer weird indie games that are more exploratory or puzzle games. You take it at your own pace, something like, I don’t know, Fez or Papers Please or recently been playing a lot of Babas you.

So these really competitive games, particularly. I guess I can appreciate them, but maybe I’m just not a very competitive person, but I agree that the social aspect that comes with it, which includes these huge tournaments, which I have some insight into, there’s a great YouTube channel, Kora Gaming. Basically is by an insider of this competitive world of, I don’t know, Street Fighter and StarCraft and all these kinds of tournaments.

And I also read a great book called Playing to Win by David Serlin, where I think he was a pretty high ranking maybe Street Fighter player, if I’m not mistaken, and he kind of goes and breaks down the elements that competitive games have their own special flavor because in the end, the thing that’s interesting about it is The other players and they can forever evolve, and that’s why games like chess and poker, for example, to take two, even though the rules haven’t changed in, I don’t know, decades or even hundreds of years, the game remains interesting and evolves because I think the meta game they call it, Playin talks about this, and Sirlin puts games like StarCraft which are still played professionally in these tournaments 20 years later, maybe like the Age of Empires you mentioned.

Some of these Street Fighter games and so on, and that in fact is a sign of a truly good competitive game, that the game doesn’t need updates, it doesn’t need new content to stay interesting because what keeps it interesting is the other players.

00:11:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think that’s a big part of it. Games that are competitive in the classic sense where like you’re a competitor and you’re competing against someone that can be interesting for a long time, as you were saying, as the meta evolves. There’s also this whole other layer which gets to the sort of professional sports analogy where the reason these games have become really huge isn’t because people personally want to compete competitively.

In the same way that American football isn’t huge because you want to be a world class football player, is because you want to be cheering for a team or a personality that you believe in, you want to kind of get into the play calling, you know, and understand that it’s basically a substrate for having a social dynamic. And people, they just like the competitiveness, not necessarily in all cases to compete themselves, although there are some people do.

00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s fair. And I think there’s a few elements there again, looking at the sports.

Example, which, while that was never a big part of my family life growing up, sounds like the way that it was for you, I’ve actually gotten more into European football since living in Germany because it is such a huge thing, particularly when the World Cup came around a few years ago. I mean, when a World Cup game is on, particularly when Germany is playing in, the streets are silent. There is nobody out, but you actually hear everyone’s TVs on or kind of Like in sync, but with like slight delays from the speed of sound, travel, and even like convenience stores will set up a TV they’ll just basically drag a TV out onto their front stoop essentially and set it up so you can walk by. So it’s this very unifying experience and actually a lot of fun, even though this particular sport of these teams are not something I follow a lot. That social element, that unifying element is, let’s say something I appreciate more now. Yeah. I feel also with sports, and this goes for e-sports as well, there is something about maybe something like the Olympics, which is maybe less directly competitive in terms of a lot of the sports they show, but it’s something about seeing humans kind of performing at their very best, like the very best at doing a kind of impressive thing. And people who have trained their whole life, and we’ve chosen the very best people in the world and put them on the spotlight to do this, and I think there’s something similar and it’s a different thing when you watch these, I don’t know, amazing StarCraft players do what they do and you watch them sitting there. It doesn’t look like much, right? They’re barely moving their wrist. to flick the mouse around, but if you know how the game works and you’re drawn in intellectually and you see what’s happening on the screen, and then of course you have the announcer voiceovers that help you understand the significance of what they’re doing and why this is interesting and the cheering of the crowd and yeah it’s quite interesting.

00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that. I think one of the reasons the Olympics works so well is that there are very universal athletic acts, running, jumping, swimming. It’s something that anyone can relate to. And so when you see someone doing it at a very high level, you can say, oh, I kind of understand what that would take and why it’s so impressive. And yeah, if you’re watching a game that you’ve never played before, it’s probably not going to be super interesting. But the reality is people are growing up on games now, and it’s becoming a huge part of people’s lives, and so a lot more people are in a position to appreciate and engage with these communities.

00:14:06 - Speaker 2: Now when it comes to the things that the productivity software world or the tools for thought world can draw from games, certainly there’s social elements which I think are interesting, but there’s also at a more I don’t know, pragmatic level there’s technology. The technology that has gone into games, I guess they’ve really driven a lot of computer hardware advances from the beginning, essentially, but especially in recent years, I feel like it’s pretty unbelievable how games are sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what computers can do.

00:14:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, GPUs, displays, input devices, latency reduction is something that’s all been driven basically by games again, cause there’s a huge amount of dollar demand for high quality hardware.

So there’s a lot of incentive on the part of hardware developers to improve it. I do think probably the biggest category for me from games is performance.

Yeah. I make this joke that I can load up a game on my other computer, it’s like 300 FPS photo realistic 3D world, walk around, do whatever you want, and then I’m over here scrolling on whatever this web page and it’s like choppy choppy at 60 FPS. It’s just a kind of a whole another level of performance and focus on that, and something you probably have understood from the day you started working in games.

00:15:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the culture there on performance. is both inside the game companies. I mean, first of all, there’s probably like you said, a lot of financial incentive that drives these companies like Nvidia and so forth to just be continuously pushing the envelope on what can be done with graphics, for example.

But then within companies it’s just, for example, very, very standard to have frame rate counters and all kinds of performance metrics really built straight into the app and That’s something we’ve tried to duplicate on the Muse team a little bit.

We had a frame rate counter right from the beginning, and it was part of our vision to be, you know, the iPad Pro is 120 frames per second or can update at that speed, and we wanted to see if we could keep that full frame rate throughout, and that’s a huge difference compared to, you wrote about this in your slow software article, you go to load up Google Drive or Ocean or some other thing.

It’s not measured in frames per second. It’s multi-second delays to do just a very simple operation like just listing out your current documents, which by the way you looked at that same list 5 minutes ago. It’s probably in the cache somewhere, but it’s just there just isn’t that same culture of performance.

And yet when you worked at a game company, it was just really standard. You had all these on-screen displays about frame rate counters and all this tooling, and of course you make it fast. You have to make it fast. It won’t feel good. If it’s not smooth, and that just doesn’t exist as much on the productivity tool side, and I’d furthermore say it’s also driven by users.

Users care about frame rate, they pay attention to that, they are thinking about particularly people that I don’t know, build these PC gaming rigs. I’m probably the definition of a casual gamer. I’ve got my Nintendo Switch and I play games on my iPad and I don’t want to have to do anything. I want an appliance that makes it really easy.

But people who are into pushing the envelope and getting the best graphics they can, they enjoy the process of assembling this hardware and then even running these benchmarks themselves and being able to say, OK, I can run the, I don’t know what it is, the latest Doom or some other high demanding graphics game, turn on all the settings and then be able to get this many. Frames per second, so users' care and then the developer’s care and the hardware manufacturer’s care and together all of this culture of really deeply caring about performance over the course of decades just means that games now can do incredible things and yet by comparison, most of the software we use for work is kind of sad in comparison.

00:17:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s been going on for so long that they’re now almost completely bifurcated engineering cultures. Games is C, C++ programming the GPU mostly, whereas a lot of our productivity software is now it’s like JavaScript, electron apps, Ruby back. And stuff like that. It is a kind of totally different way of thinking about engineering stuff. But notably, I think that divergence is starting to collapse because people are realizing the power of this more game style programming model, where you have an efficient language and you’re programming against the hardware more directly. And I think we’re starting to see more of this. I will be some examples of that.

00:18:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Rick Aaron’s work on MakePad comes to mind immediately, so this workshop hit switch for us sometime back, but there’s basically a code editor that uses rust and maybe web assembly, I’m not sure. It is built on the web stack, but he gets rid of the DOM, and he’s essentially just trying to render straight to GPUs. For example, when the code folds or unfolds, you can get some really nice smooth animations of that happening, which is not the sort of thing you’re used to in a programming editor.

Yeah, exactly. Now I will give ourselves ourselves here being folks making uh productivity tools a little bit of leeway on this, because one thing about games is that you do get this very much just blank canvas, build everything up from scratch.

So for example, like a great way to make a game is you write it in C, use something like SDL, which is essentially just lets you draw pixels and polygons onto the screen. It’s this and take input from the mouse and keyboard and game control or whatever else, and it’s just this very, very simple stack, and the interfaces are very simple, and productivity tools you really need to integrate extremely well to the platform you’re on if your web app, or for example, for us where we’re on iOS with Muse. You know, we need to integrate to drag and drop and various kinds of ways you can size the window and what happens with with the sharesheet, bringing things in, bringing things out, and copy paste, and all these sorts of things, and these are expected and desirable. You can do things like, I don’t know, change various settings on the device, including language and all sorts of other things, and that cascades down through the application. And I think all that’s good and necessary, because when you’re working with applications, you often have several side by side, you’re sharing data between them, this sort of thing, they need to play together. A game can just take over the screen completely, it’s got this just draw pixels or draw polygons thing. It does not need to interoperate with anything else. It can be a world into itself, and that’s just, I don’t wanna say it’s easier, but you can have this more streamlined thing. You don’t need to play what next with others quite the same way.

00:20:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s fair. Speaking of developing these apps, I’ve always felt like there was something here with games, like with movies where they do seem to be able to plan and execute on very complex projects successfully.

There’s kind of this meme in the world of typical called enterprise software development, where you have to do things super incrementally and, you know, and nothing is predictable.

You can’t estimate anything. Basically, who knows? This is kind of a meme in Silicon Valley engineering, whereas if you look at things like Movies or games, they say things like, yes, we’re going to invest $200 million in this, and it’s going to be a massive creative high risk enterprise and it’s going to involve many disciplines and we’re gonna ship it, it’s gonna be awesome. Done. And I feel like we could use a little bit of that attitude in the world of enterprise software as well.

00:21:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now there are many famous. Big attempts at big projects. I think a recent one that comes to mind is this game Cyberpunk, which was hugely anticipated, as you said, like a huge breakthrough in terms of sort of the depth and richness of the game, or at least the game world that was promised, and in fact they did deliver something very impressive, but it was full of bugs and all kinds of problems. It didn’t work right on different platforms. There was lawsuits and You know, lots of broken marriages and fired people, and I think at some point they may have even written about it in our favorite financial newsletter money stuff about essentially like becoming securities fraud, that the game was bad because of all the money that was on the line for it.

Maybe that one was pretty large in scale just because of the amount of time and money that went into it. They’re similar, called boondoggles or just struggles.

Duke Newcom Forever was a really famous one on that from years back, or maybe a more indie one was this game, No Man’s Sky, where again, they set up expectation for it, which may be part of it is just the game industry is so incredibly good at hyping games that have not been released yet, which Find kind of crazy how emotionally invested the audience gets, and then if it doesn’t quite deliver, then there’s a lot of broken hearts, I guess. So it’s hard and they don’t always achieve it, but to your point, there’s also many, many cases of and probably more cases of really grand and ambitious things like for example the Mass Effect games or one really ambitious one that I played recently that I liked a lot is Horizon Zero Dawn.

And yeah, it’s just amazing the amount of stuff in it, the richness of the universe and the story and the characters and the voice acting, and all the skill trees you can traverse and the modeling on the creatures, and yeah, it’s really, really astonishing what goes with these games. And that’s the technology side of things. Do you feel there’s things we can learn on product or design side, kind of as any works has talked about a little bit?

00:23:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I feel like there’s some things that have been so discussed that they’re almost cliche. This is like gamifying stuff. But I do think there’s some stuff there around, for example, games have very carefully designed incremental onboarding processes where you get introduced to more and more techniques and skills and moves as you become more familiar with the antecedent ones.

00:23:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ll link in the show notes to our podcast episode on onboarding with our colleague Julia, who led that up.

So Muse went through several attempted kinds of onboardings, and none of them quite clicked, and eventually we did take this game inspired one that essentially, well, there’s a few games that take this approach, but the one that was top of mind for me at the time was Untitled Goose Game, where it essentially gives you a to do list of stuff to mark off, and you don’t have to do it, but it gives you some direction while also giving you freedom, and that’s what the muse on boarding uses, and that was Yuli’s good work, and she talks about it in depth in this episode.

00:24:24 - Speaker 1: Nice, yeah, but I think perhaps the most interesting aspects of products are things you don’t jump to when you think of games.

You think of games, you think of like, you know, 3D immersive worlds and noises and stuff like that, too, that I would call out our end user programming and monetization.

Mm. These are both huge challenges for the world of computing and especially kind of indie enterprise type software, but I think games actually do very well, so there’s an incredibly rich ecosystem around games that allow it of end user programming of various forms like scripting, modding, skinning, different variations, but people are so motivated to create their own experiences in these game frameworks that if you give them anything at all to control their world, they’ll go wild on it.

00:25:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the modding thing is pretty impressive, including the whole new genres have been invented by people taking a game that you can kind of chop up and customize a little bit. Tower Defense, I think one was famously originally a mod of an existing game and is now its own dedicated genre.

00:25:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another example there would be Counter-Strike, which is one of these games that I mentioned earlier, that’s now one of the biggest e-sport games in the world, and it was originally like some guy in the basement doing a half-Life mod, and he shared it with his friends on the internet, and then 20 years later it’s a huge deal, right?

00:25:43 - Speaker 2: And that’s some of the argument we make with end user programming is to say that if you create a smoother on-ramp for more people to be able to get in there and make smaller pieces of software, that some, not all, but some may blossom into something that maybe would never have existed before if that large hurdle to sort of full professional, quote unquote real programming was the only option.

00:26:08 - Speaker 1: And I do think this world shows.

The incredible importance of access and motivation versus the programming environment per se.

I think when computer people talk about end user programming, they talk about things like languages and IDEs and things like that, whereas my sense is that what really drives end user programming access is people really, really wanting to do something in that environment and having some ability, even if it’s honestly it’s a mess, to do something with it. And at least with that, you can get the types of ecosystems you see with games where it’s not like everyone is doing.

End user programming of their game environment. It’s more like there’s out of the tens of millions of people who are part of the community, maybe 10 are really into it, and they jump through all the hoops to figure out whatever the end user programming situation is for this game, and they’re able to create 5 mods, one of which becomes a huge deal its own whole game.

00:27:00 - Speaker 2: Funny little story on that as well.

So many folks who followed me in my work on Hiroku might know that I’ve written about end user programming and in particular that I was inspired by this book, A Small Matter of Programming, which is an academic work from the early 90s, that essentially made a lot of the arguments that we now repeat in this kind of what we’re seeking in the end user programming utopia, driven by an academic named Bonnie Nardi.

I actually Managed to get her on a video call some years back, and she was quite amused because, you know, she had written this book 20 years ago or something at the time, and I think it was even out of print and was vaguely surprised that anyone was still interested.

But as I asked her what she was doing now, and it turns out she actually went on to anthropological work within multiplayer online games. And the book, I think she had just written at the time is called My Life is Night elf priest. She spent several years doing anthropological studies of World of Warcraft, which at the time was sort of the biggest multiplayer online game and really one of the biggest gaming phenomenons ever again. I think this was kind of the mid 2000s, late 2000s, something like that. And when I asked her about end user programming, actually the first thing that came to mind for her was the modding that happens in the World of Warcraft world.

00:28:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s great that you mentioned World of Warcraft, because I think that’s a very important piece of the story around monetization and social. So with monetization, back in the before times, you would have boxes that had, you know, CDs in them and you would buy it once and that would be the game, and that would be the way that you got the game, and that would be the way that the publisher made money.

And then I think it was World of Warcraft, maybe there was someone else who pioneered the subscription model, which we know from Enterprise Sass is an incredibly powerful economic model and also great for the users in many ways.

And likewise, World of Warcraft, which had a subscription model, brought that to the world of games and like you said, it was a huge success, and there still existed a world of games you sort of bought once and there still are, but it’s sort of adding another layer or area of opportunity.

But then there’s been this sort of 3rd wave of games where it’s not even monetized necessarily by a subscription, it might even be free to play, but it’s monetized by the broader community, or some other way in the game, so this could be cosmetic items in the game, it could be.

Tournaments, it could be other things like that.

And there, it becomes important for the creator of the game to invest in basically building a really big community and enthusiasm around the game, and they find other ways to monetize it that aren’t initial purchases and that aren’t subscriptions. And this kind of leads into the social thing which we can talk about next, but to my mind, those are the most advanced forms of game communities right now because there’s so many things going on that are combining to build a very rich ecosystem.

00:29:45 - Speaker 2: I’m not mistaken, one of the pioneers on the free to play with purchase cosmetic items was Team Fortress.

Essentially, you could play it and you could buy stuff that I don’t think it made you stronger, just made you look cooler, get a cool hat for your guy.

That game’s made by Valve, and Valve is one of the most, definitely a, I don’t know if I’d call them a small giant at this point, they probably are just a giant, but they are an incredible creative powerhouse that has done many, many great games over the years. You mentioned Half-Life and There’s Steam Fortress and there’s Left for Dead and many others, and then, of course, they made Steam, and Steam has been a total revolution in kind of the economic model, particularly for indie developers. We’ve talked here multiple times before about sort of the Steam early access program and how we see folks that bought subscriptions early on from you and Today as being in some ways similar to Steam early access, you know, supporting what the app can be rather than what it is today. So Valve is a really great one to study and look at if you like to see an innovative company. And by the way, their employee handbook is absolutely fantastic. I’ll like that in the show notes as well.

00:30:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, classic for sure. And this type of monetization, by the way, that is not initial purchase and not subscription, for example, in a cosmetic items, it really surprised me. Like when I first heard that there were big game ecosystems funded by this, and honestly didn’t make sense. Like, why are people gonna spend a lot of money to like get a cool whatever nice skin or something. But in fact, it’s a really, really, really huge deal. The games are able to bring in tons of funding with this stuff. So it’s an example of where you really need to follow the empirical reality and see how things are actually working.

00:31:26 - Speaker 2: Now how do you fit that in with this category of games like thinking of maybe Candy Crush or, for example, Boga, which is a pretty big employer here in Berlin, actually our colleague Julia started her career there. And they tend to make these games that are free to play, they kind of draw you in. Oh, maybe Farmville was one of the classics on this and can easily turn into a maybe a slippery slope of spending, I don’t know, hundreds of bucks a month. You sort of like accelerate the game play with special tokens or something. That whole category I always feel vaguely uneasy about the model on that.

00:32:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I felt very uneasy about it, and I think it’s actually quite disjoint from this world of more professional games, which often have this attribute that for either the initial purchase price only or perhaps nothing, you can play at a professional level forever. Like you don’t need to buy anything to be able to play it, unlike the games where you buy like power-ups or coins to keep playing or whatever.

So I’m much more interested in these games that are more, maybe you call them skill-based. And they have communities of practice around that, versus games that are more, like, honestly kind of more like gambling oriented. So I can consider them quite differently.

It’s a shame because I think the Candy Crush style game taints the world of gaming on the surface, maybe it looks similar, but

00:32:44 - Speaker 2: yeah, to your mind really is not. And yeah, I think I agree with that as well.

00:32:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so speaking of communities, this brings us to the social aspect of the games, which to my mind is the most interesting part, and it’s kind of hard to explain what’s going on there on a podcast, but we can try.

00:33:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned Twitch earlier, and I do think that’s a great starting place because, well, it can be honestly mystifying, I think it was for me when I first encountered it, and seeing that there’s this whole giant platform that is almost exclusively watching other people play games. And again, maybe this comes back to the sports thing, but in many cases you’re not necessarily watching people who are great at playing games. Maybe it’s just someone you like that is playing games. I don’t know, it’s a very interesting phenomenon there.

00:33:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think the sports analogy with Twitch is a good place to start. So some groundwork here, Twitch is a streaming platform and was basically created for people to stream their gameplay, playing games on their computer. Now does a lot more stuff.

00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Fun bit of history there, if I’m not mistaken, Twitch was a pivot from Justin.tv.

00:33:48 - Speaker 1: It was, I was actually there. This was in the, what was it called, the YC startup school is when they rented out an auditorium in Palo Alto, and Justin Khan walked down onto the stage with his camera, which is like filming his entire life 24/7. And so I saw the very beginnings of that, and eventually that would pivot into Twitch, yeah.

00:34:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the startup idea was one guy filming his life around the clock with the idea that that might lead to others, and I think they ended up building a pretty robust. Video platform at the time, this might have even been before or roughly coincident with YouTube.

00:34:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so from those humble beginnings, you get this platform for streaming gameplay and then having a lot of social interaction around that you can think about this kind of the main window, which is the streamer, and then there’s a sidebar, which is people chatting and stuff. And it’s like your situation in Berlin where people are around the family room or around the convenience store watching a game and they’re sort of cheering on you, as well as watching the game, you’re watching your friends basically and seeing how they react and enjoying that. And yeah, I would say it’s mostly kind of pro players or strong players, but there’s also people who cast like normies or whatever, just for fun.

00:34:55 - Speaker 2: One of the ones that blew my mind is this guy CGP Gray that makes these educational YouTube videos that are pretty popular, I think.

He’s done some Twitch streaming and he mostly plays games like, I don’t even know the name of it, but you’re just a truck driver, and it’s a real-time sim of driving a truck.

And so it’s just him on like an open highway, you know, the simulator of a highway. And it’s precisely as boring as it sounds, that’s kind of part of the point is that it’s kind of this meditative experience, and then I think the reason in that case, it’s not that he’s a pro player. I don’t know, maybe he’s good at it, maybe you’re not, but it’s more that you like him and his personality, and it’s fun to kind of interact in this real-time way around this casual activity.

00:35:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s Twitch now.

One of the things that’s really important here with the social ecosystem around the games is that they’re open source, let’s call it. So if you are broadcasting the NFL. You need to be the one broadcaster that’s licensed by the NFL and you gotta go to the one channel that’s displaying at the time.

And in fact, there’s only one caster, whereas in the world of games, it’s usually a much more distributed and open access. So a given tournament, for example, will be running, and anyone can jump in and cast the game and you get as much audience as you can. And you people can watch multiple casters at once. People can come and go. And so it’s this world in the same way that with open source software, people can kind of jump in or leave or and mix and match versus commercial software which is very closed and controlled. Typically in these game ecosystems, it’s very open access for the participants to come in and make a career as a caster or commentator or a pro player or what have you.

00:36:36 - Speaker 2: Do you feel the, maybe I’ve read something about there’s actually a legal gray area with the Twitch live streaming of games where essentially that’s copyrighted content and kind of in a way the game companies actually would have legal grounds to sue them to take that down, but of course it’s it’s incredible marketing for them.

I think it was something like Among Us, which is this indie game that blew up last year, we’ve played it at our. summits where you kind of hunt down this imposter on your ship, and apparently that was a game that didn’t do that well when it came out, but it blew up essentially because, you know, a big streamer started playing it.

Now everyone, including like US senators are are playing it in public places. But yeah, it’s this interesting thing where they just choose not to enforce copyright or the DMCA or whatever it is because it’s such great marketing for them.

00:37:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. My understanding is that companies, if they wanted to, can exert varying levels of control over this.

So they could say that I think they could say you can’t stream this, they could definitely say we’re going to control the officially sanctioned tournaments, and I think there are some games that especially for the latter are trying to do that, but you have this classic trade-off between Exerting that control and therefore extracting more of the consumer surplus out of the ecosystem into your company versus creating a vibrant open ecosystem where you generate a bunch more consumer surplus and even if you take a small percentage of it via say, cosmetic item sales, it ends up being a bigger deal for you.

And my intuition here is that the social dynamics around these games are so powerful when they’re firing on all cylinders that it’s really hard to compete with that.

00:38:20 - Speaker 2: Another thing that comes to mind for me here as we talk about tournaments and Twitch and so on is there are actually tools that have come out of the game world that I think are what I would call productivity tools. In fact, we may even use them in our work, so Discord is one that’s become quite huge, kind of group chat, that’s very, I mean, their, their logo is a game controller, right? You think of them as a slack competitor, in fact, they’re very similar in terms of what they provide, but their culture is all comes from Gamer world, right? That was what it was made for originally.

00:38:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Discord is actually one of the other really big pieces in the ecosystem, so it’s worth drilling in a little bit.

So you have Twitch, which is for live streaming, like the live broadcast. Typically you have recorded content on YouTube, and then for your communities, primarily those are in Discord these days. There’s some activity on Reddit, but Discord is the main one.

And again, these are very granular, focused, unique, quirky, weird things happen all over the internet. So for any given game, you typically have one Discord for each personality, like each pro player, each major caster, they have their own Discord where they have like basically have their own channels and doing a bunch of random stuff, their own weird community. And so when you become interested in the game, you might join one or two of these Discords corresponding to the casters or the pro players that you follow. And there you would hear about their upcoming games and their discussion of the games and various social commentary and stuff like that.

00:39:48 - Speaker 2: Hm, I wouldn’t have guessed you would have Discord servers around a person, that almost makes it sound more like Twitter or something, you’re like following someone whose career you want to follow along with, but then I suppose the point is now you can also talk to the other people that are there who are interested in that same thing.

00:40:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is a very important point. The job of these pro players and these casters, because it’s such a big deal, it’s going way beyond just doing that single job. I think of it more as their social entrepreneurs. They’re creating communities of content, of people, of forums, of ways of interacting that are something that people want to participate in. And in fact, It’s kind of cool as an entrepreneur to watch these people because they’re basically running their own business. They’re hiring full-time staff, they’re hiring video editors, tournament coordinators, content moderators, map scriptors, they’re hiring whole teams and turning into this whole social enterprise to create a place where people want to come in and enjoy themselves.

00:40:47 - Speaker 2: What are some examples of folks you think are doing this well?

00:40:51 - Speaker 1: I’ll give you one, it’s kind of a niche example, but there’s this guy T90 official, he’s one of the casters for Age of Empires too, he’s probably now the biggest caster, and I think it was actually largely because of his work as initially a very small time streamer and caster to help bring this game out of obscurity. Again, it’s a very old game and at one point it had quite a modest number of players, but because he worked so hard over the course of, I think it was like 5 years to build up this community of players, of audience members, of tournament organizers, and so on, it brought a lot of vitality to the game.

00:41:27 - Speaker 2: YouTube is one that’s interesting to me as well, because there seems to be a pretty substantial number of what I call game critics, which maybe is a little bit different category than what you’re talking about, but to me it does have a similar kind of sense of not just community building, but it’s something that’s around the games, it’s not the games themselves.

Right. Yeah, some critics are more just almost for fun. They do funny reviews, things like zero punctuation. or girlfriend reviews. The one that I love, who’s kind of a critic meets design school, is Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit. I can highly recommend this series.

He does these sort of like 20 minute long documentaries, sort of mini documentaries where he will take a particular game or a set of games and break down essentially design elements within it.

And coming back to how this connects to muse and tools for thought and productivity tools, I’ve seen a number of things in there, including how you ramp up difficulty and how you make complex controls comprehensible, and so on that I find, if not directly applicable at a minimum inspiring for doing my own work, because, of course, games are this mix of Obviously they’re artistic, and they are entertainment, and they’re expressing something, but they also have these practical, lots of practical elements.

You have this complete world that needs to all hang together, and trolls have to work well, and there’s physics, and there’s how the player learns it and all these elements. So diving in on that game design, in many cases for games that I have never played and probably never will, but it’s still very interesting to watch a 20 minute breakdown with lots of footage from the game about exactly what the design choices they made were.

00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and in general, I think learning socially and learning via video are extremely powerful, and this is now the main way that people are learning games. Like 20 years ago, when we were playing games as kids, I think you mostly just kind of figured it out by yourself, or maybe you had some friends who could give you some pointers or maybe there were magazines back then, I guess.

00:43:32 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I remember playing Metroid.

Just one of these great but essentially defined a genre in many ways, this kind of discovery oriented game, and I think the only way that my friend and I got through it is I had this issue of it was probably Nintendo Power that essentially had maps.

You kind of look at it and figure out where you needed to go and that sort of thing, yeah.

I don’t know if that’s cause I was just a kid that I couldn’t figure out, or maybe I would have been able to figure out if I hadn’t, but yeah, the knowledge you could get out of something like a magazine or that one kid in the neighborhood who was a really good player, it was just like gold, yeah, the fact that I don’t know what it’s like for a kid playing nowadays or the solution to anything you could find by Googling.

00:44:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think it’s much more high powered now, because you have this high resolution video and you have a ton of it, and you have the social connectivity that makes you more incentivized, like you’re a better listener, you can find content that’s a better fit for your interest and your skill level. So people are learning how to play games much faster and much better. I haven’t seen a study on this, but I would guess.

Between that social video factor and the new matchmaking capabilities, which match you online to play players of an appropriate skill level, that people actually play the same games at a much, much, much higher level now than they used to.

That’s certainly my experience. Like if you look at even casual players today at some of these games, they’re actually quite good, because basically, they’ve been watching people on YouTube a lot.

And as you were alluding to, I think that’s something that’s going to bleed over from the world of games. I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises. And you’ve seen that with a lot of stuff. And so therefore I predict that. In 10 years, you know, we’re gonna be basically doing our enterprise work on Discord or something like it. Actually, I kind of believe that.

00:45:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think a lot of technologies, I wanna say maybe something like haptic feedback, for example, you know, tends to come first for games and gets adapted later on for more, call them practical uses.

That actually reminds me of a just small tangent. We took some inspiration from a game called Batman Arkham Asylum for one of the you can switch projects. I don’t know if you remember this, but this game has something called detective mode. This is essentially a button you push that essentially changes your vision. It kind of inverts everything and lets you see things like power lines and maybe hidden entrances and the game’s very good at making you basically feel like Batman. That’s the point of it. And so having this special mode is part of that, that’s visually interesting and distinctive. We use that for when you can switch projects where you could hit a key and it was kind of like a developer inspection mode, but it would invert all the colors and it was very inspired by that game.

Nice. Following up on your point about, basically people are better at games, I just finished reading an article about Tetris, which apparently, again, this is another one of these games that its code base hasn’t changed in decades, but people keep getting better at it. And partially this is because of being able to share this knowledge socially, and I can’t remember the exact details, but I think it started with no one thought you could get max score. Someone did it once, recorded it on VHS tape. That tape circulated. People could watch the tape and see how they did it. You start to have this analysis and then this analysis starts to reveal that things that were believed to be a good choice or a good strategy in the game, eventually they figure out actually are. Essentially they evolved the strategies and now these are all very standard. Someone new coming in can go watch a bunch of these YouTube videos and essentially it’s within reach of anyone that wants to put the work in to get a max score on Tetris, where once upon a time that was assumed to be unachievable. It’s a good example of how a whole, I’m not even sure what the word is for it, it’s not a field or an industry, just a community can advance the state of the art through simply sharing knowledge with each other.

00:47:34 - Speaker 1: Nice, it’s like the 4 minute mile phenomenon for speed runs and high scores.

00:47:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Well, in speed running, there’s a whole other door we could open, right? But yeah, without going too deep into it, just type speed run space, name of your favorite game, I don’t know, Super Mario Brothers or something in the YouTube and watch the a whole rich genre unfold in front of you. All right, so we got Discord, we got YouTube, we got Twitch. What are some other examples of social technologies that are coming out of games that perhaps we’ll see migrate their way to other parts of the software ecosystem?

00:48:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so those are all big foundational platforms for these communities. Let me give you an example of a smaller, more specific pattern that I see, which I think is illustrative of the type of thing that happens in these communities. So that is emojis in Twitch. Now, one view of emojis is that they’re kind of a goofy, unimportant thing. My view of emojis is that they’re actually incredibly expressive and personal and interesting.

00:48:37 - Speaker 2: I think you’ve said on the podcast before that notions embracing of signing an emoji to a page as kind of the visual indicator for you, that was the killer feature that tipped you over from Google Docs.

00:48:50 - Speaker 1: It was a big deal, yeah, I really like my emojis.

And Twitch actually takes it to the next level, where again it’s open access, it’s open source.

So the deal is as a Twitch streamer, you get some amount of emoji spaces for your channel, maybe it’s 15 spaces, and for each of these spaces you come up with a little keyword that corresponds to the emoji, and you upload your little graphic for that emoji. And then typically the way that it works is that anyone can use some subset of the emojis, and then people who are basically patrons of the channel at increasing levels can use some of the rare and elite emojis on that channel. And this thing is fascinating because, again, these are all kind of unique flowers of ecosystems and So you get their own like language and memes all encapsulated into these, into these tiny little emojis. And so you have whole discussions that happen over these emojis that are unique to the channel. And it’s actually a fairly big motivation to be able to access the rare and elite emojis for a given channel. But the most interesting thing to my mind is that these aren’t silos, they’re networks of communities and. And while the emojis are specific to a given streamer, it might be prefixed by like Mark Smiley, and then whatever my unique smiley emoji is, shows up. You can use that emoji if you have access to it anywhere on the platform. So what happens is, say you get a channel around a specific game and it’s for streamer A, but streamer B is also A member of that game community, and his folks come into the channel and they start using streamer B’s emojis. And that way the emojis and therefore the streamer spreads virally. So you see, oh yeah, that’s a cool emoji. So you hover over it and it says, oh, streamer B, and then you go follow them on to their stream. And so it’s incredibly like networked, social, dynamic, fun, very Vibrant thing. And then economically, like this is a whole economy. There are like full time Twitch emoji artists, that’s all they do. And they accept commissions, and you have the entry level Twitch artists and the like elite Twitch artists who charge a lot for their emojis. You know, it’s the whole thing. So, again, I think it’s an example of something that seems very small, but it’s actually very big socially and economically.

00:51:01 - Speaker 2: ties together a lot of things. There’s the unique economic model, as you’ve said, there’s the social technology side of things and some of these things that are only possible in software sort of internet era media, some of the virality and of course emojis themselves are very internet or computer age form of communication and so all of those together make for something. Well, let’s say it’s the sort of thing that would have been hard to imagine. Even 20 years ago, let alone further back than that, but this is how internet culture is evolving and something that, as you said at the beginning, games are on the forefront.

00:51:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I do think we’re gonna see it transition over into the world of enterprise and productivity software. Like you have a notion, there’s a fixed set of emojis that you can use and Slack, there’s emojis and they’re a pretty big part of the product. You can even customize some of your emoji set for your enterprise, right? But again, it’s very siloed and you don’t really have a lot of control as a user. I think you need to be like an administrator it’s like upload emojis or whatever. I can imagine a world, in fact, I expect a world where eventually products like Notion or Slack or whatever supersedes them, adopt more of this model of open networked emojis.

00:52:14 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before we wrap up, I bet folks would like to know what’s an example of your favorite games.

00:52:21 - Speaker 1: I got 2. So the first I’ll give is in the classic boxed genre, and that’s missed. I still have very fond memories of playing this game, and I think for a long time it was the best selling video game ever for quite a while, and actually I replayed it not too long ago, some years ago, and it’s still great, so got to give that a spot. And then for the more modern pro style or social style game, I would go with Age of Empires 2, which is a total classic and what I’m still a big fan of.

00:52:50 - Speaker 2: And if I’m not mistaken, a nice little bit of background on missed, I think it was built in Hypercard originally.

00:52:57 - Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah, it ties us back to the end user programming, right, again, something that may be a specific game and a very influential game for a lot of people, and even maybe kind of a genre that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this kind of more accessible programming tool.

00:53:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like that also might be an example of driving consumer hardware, because if I remember correctly, that was one of the first things that used a CD because it was kind of unique in having all this graphics content, and so you needed at least a CD to fit it. You couldn’t put it on floppy disk, which is how you used to get games, and so people were like, well, I better get a C drive cause I want to be able to play MT.

00:53:33 - Speaker 2: That’s right, that’s right, yeah, I remember that now.

For me, I could name so many, going back to my childhood, arcade games like Strider, for a while, I was into Angban, which is one of these roguelikes that, you know, sucks up a crazy amount of time, but in more recent times, where I’ve really been enjoying a lot of these indie games, I think I mentioned Baba as you earlier, the doll name is a favorite here, Papers Please by Lucas Pope.

So this is a game where you are working as a border agent, and your job is to check people’s passports, and that’s the whole game. Yeah, they present their documentation, you look it over, and you stamp it either proved or denied. And to me it’s just a great example of how games are such a unique medium for artistic expression, so in the same way that a film or a book can transport you to this other world, show you a new perspective, maybe that you had not encountered before, but something where you are making choices actively, which obviously is what games are about, can actually show you something different. You can express something different artistically and without spoiling too much, the nature of this game is you start out just kind of like stamping these passports and deciding who to let through the border, it seems very prosaic and kind of boring, but very quickly it turns into something where you’re approached by members of resistance or someone comes through and says, please, my mother is dying. And yes, my passport expired two days ago, but can’t you just let me through so I can go see her and someone who’s smuggling, you know, some kind of contraband, but they offer to slip you a little money and as it turns out, you also have to pay the bills for your family and your child needs medicine and so on, and pretty soon you get all these complex moral choices. That are very powerful, and you can see how you get, depending on the choices you made, you, for example, can easily go down this path of corruption, but you see how you got there through active choices you were making. So it’s a really, really impressive indie game, and also just a lot of fun. And in general, I can recommend everything by Lucas Pope, his newer one is Return of the Oberin, and he just has a unique style and every game expresses some unique take on the world. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ or via email, hello and museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Mark, we’ve been having fun with some collaborative games in our recent team summits. I think I’ve got a new one for next time, so it be interesting to dive into the game with the team with everything we talked about here on our minds.

00:56:09 - Speaker 1: Nice, I look forward to that, Adam.

00:56:11 - Speaker 2: right, till next time, Mark. See you.