Ep22 Mark DeLoura
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Mark: [00:00:00] So it turns out the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House at the time was about 75 people, and every person in there is a really deep expert in a particular thing. You're the nanomaterials guy. You're the autonomous vehicles guy. You're the cyber security person. You know, now there's an army of cyber security.
And I was the games guy, which was kind of hilarious because I would meet these, you know, Ph. D. People come to you and they're like, Hey, where are you from? And I'd be like, I went to University of Washington. How about you? And I go, I got my bachelor's degree at MIT and my PhD at Stanford. And I did a postdoc at Yale.
Okay. I make games.
Alex: Okay. That was Mark Delora talking about his time working in the White House. How many people in the game industry, uh, ever worked in the White House? I think like one, maybe, maybe a few, but Mark did. That's
Aaron: pretty
Alex: cool, huh?
Aaron: That's crazy. [00:01:00] You know, I forgot to ask him about, I think I told you about this, that the guy from uh, Poland, the um, what is the title of their leader?
The president? The chancellor? The whatever, you know? The ambassador? The dictator? The dictator? Whatever Poland is.
Alex: Look at you, look at you showing off your international skills. I think you offended an entire country right now. No, no, no.
Aaron: Well, that country gave, I think it was Obama. They gave him a, uh, are you looking it up?
If you can hear Alex's keyboard chattering. No, I'm not looking it up. Where are you chatting? Let's, Poland has a president. It's a president. Poland has a president. Okay, it's a president. Well, I know because when I lived in Germany, the president, they have a president too, but they're not as important as the, uh, Merkel, which was their chancellor, right?
Alex: You're asking me? You lived in the country. It's
Aaron: so crazy though, but the president doesn't have the power, so like, [00:02:00] anyways, they gave the president of the United States a basket, you know, like a basket of like things from Poland. It's crazy. Uh huh. And one of the things was a copy of The Witcher. Like they were very proud of The Witcher.
Alex: Yes. So they got like sausages
Aaron: and jams and flowers and all the things of Poland that are great. Yeah. And The Witcher was in
Alex: there. And I was like, that's cool. That is cool. You know. So, uh, Poland not to be underestimated in the realm of video game development. Some very, uh, amazing games have come out of Poland.
I don't know. How did we get on the Poland from Mark Delora? Cause it's government.
Aaron: It's like we don't connect government, governments to video games, unless they're like telling us not to do something. You know? Yeah. That's usually the conversation when it comes to government. Where governments and video games meet.
Witcher and Cyberpunk,
Alex: CD Projekt Red, obviously. Yes. One of the most well established developers of all [00:03:00] time. But back to Mark, what a crazy career he's had. Done pretty much everything from writing code to writing in a magazine to being deaf relations, to working on policy, to supporting orthogonal uses of interactive entertainment, like education and conservation, being part of games for change.
Really impressive. The Games4Change stuff is cool. Wait, that's not a spoiler episode, though. No, well, I'm just giving you a couple of highlights. Stick around. You know, Mark's a super cool cat. It was really fun to chat with him. So, uh, we have that coming up in a minute. What's going on with you? It's like summer here, you know?
Like, kids are all out of school, doing summery things. I'm about to go on a cross country road trip. I don't know if I told you this. Did I tell you this? I'm driving to Chicago.
Aaron: I saw the chat. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, you're driving? Driving. That's what? 2, 500 miles. Is that how much it is? It's,
Alex: uh, it's not quite that far now.
It's like, I think it's like 1800, but it's, Oh,
Aaron: it's you, do you do [00:04:00] diagonal or do you go straight and then up? We are going to take basically route 66 on the way, which is east, right?
Alex: Yeah.
Aaron: But then where do you go north? Like just when you're underneath Chicago, or do you.
Alex: We're actually going to kind of carve our own route a little bit.
We're going to, we're going to go through this, this will be in the past. So I don't mind saying where we're going, but, uh, Route 66 goes straight East and then you go up like from Oklahoma, but we're going to go like Sedona. To Santa Fe. Sedona. Yeah. Are you, how long are you staying there? So we're going to stay there for two nights.
Dude. And it's, that's, that's our wedding anniversary. It's our 30th wedding anniversary.
Aaron: Congratulations. Yeah.
Alex: I'm
Aaron: so old. Are you going to be in Sedona when it's your anniversary?
Alex: Yeah. Look at this. Sort of like planned out. Is it just you and your
Aaron: wife? Or is it you and your kids?
Alex: No, no. Just, just me, Laura, and the dog.
Aaron: What? [00:05:00] Yeah. Look at you. Dude, you know Sedona is the kind of place they make, like it's like a clothing line. Like it's one of those places, right? Like they have water named Sedona and like, they have like brands, like, you know, that's a nice city when it's, it's like, Yes, I've
Alex: never been, but I've seen lots of pictures.
I know a lot of people who've gone and, uh, the reviews are all very good, so I'm excited about it. So there you go. That my summer plans kicking off with a little cross crunchy trip, going to spend some time Back in Chicago with my fellow Chicagoans. Getting all excited for the opening of Bears season, football season with the Bears.
It's
Aaron: going to
Alex: be interesting this
Aaron: year. I thought you were like hunting season. No. We're hunting Bears. Well, I'm going to LV, I think it's LV 19 or 22. Or is it LV21? Isn't that
Alex: the, that's the planet from Alien?
Aaron: Yeah, I've been playing Alien's Fire Team Elite. That's the game. So I'm, I'm doing that this weekend.
When are you leaving?
Alex: Monday.
Aaron: Monday. [00:06:00]
Alex: Yeah.
Aaron: Nice.
Alex: Wish us luck. It's, it's, I've never done a trip like this in an electric car. Are you
Aaron: taking a gaming device with you? Are you playing games?
Alex: Uh, I'm gonna take my Steam Deck and I, that's what I'll play games on. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. Any games you're looking forward to? I can recommend one to you if you want to try one out.
Alex: Oh, give me a recko. Yeah. I was just talking
Aaron: to someone about this and to Jay and I was telling him peak game design, like it's so good. It's called the game is called inscription. It's a card game. And it's so weird and so well designed. Okay. It's a good game. Yeah. It's weird. Uh, check out the Steam page, at least.
Yeah, I'll do that. The, the pictures won't, won't, won't, won't do it. They won't sell me? No, but it's a good travel game, I think, because it's a card game. Ah, okay. You play a little bit, put it away, put it away, put it away, put
Alex: it away. Alright. Alright, well, thank you for joining this week. We are excited to share our conversation with Mark Delora.[00:07:00]
And here it is we'll see on the other side. See you later Ladies and gentlemen esteemed listeners. Welcome to a very special episode of the fourth curtain the first that i'm going to call distinguished and all of that due to our fine guest mark delora if Uh, you haven't come across mark stick around because we're going to introduce you to him.
He's had possibly the most unique career In the game industry. I don't know if you feel that way about your journey, Mark, but I do. Let's just hear about some of the highlights right here. A lead engineer at Nintendo back in the early days, um, yes, editor in chief of game developer magazine. There's a little bit of a jump.
Dev relations for PlayStation. Another jump VP of tech for THQ. I bet there's some stories there. And then in 20, 2013, Mark was appointed to the position of senior advisor for digital media at the white house office of science and [00:08:00] technology policy. It has its own acronym, OSTP, um, currently on the board of directors for games for change, which is a fantastic group, Mark, truly an honor that you're here with us.
Uh, great to see you. Great
Mark: to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Alex: How's it going? Good.
Mark: It's good. How's it going? I mean, you know, it's sunny in Seattle today, so everything's great. Oh, we had another
Aaron: Seattle interview. The last episode of Seattle, too.
Alex: Yeah, we were just talking to Shannon Loftus, and she was like, man, it's pouring with rain.
So I'm glad the sun came out.
Mark: To some extent, that's what we always say to people, so they don't want to move to Seattle. But I lied. I mean, today. I lied. It's, I forgot. It's so beautiful out. I had to spill.
Alex: Yeah, I, um, so, you know, I, I lived in Seattle for a few years. Gorgeous. I loved it. It taught me a few two word weather terms.
Like there was the, uh, sun break, right? Is that, that's a thing, right? Like today is cloudy with possible chance of sun breaks it. And I was, you know, coming from other parts of the country. I was like, what, what? [00:09:00] Oh, that's like when someone's
Aaron: trying to make like a, uh, A good situation of something bad, like something bad's happening.
It's like, how can we cheer it up a little bit today? You'll have less torture.
Mark: There's like 20 versions of partly, partly cloudy here in Seattle. Sunbreaks, scattered showers, partly cloudy, partly sunny. You know, there's just like a million of them. It just makes me laugh. I think
Alex: uh, yeah Eskimos have like 20 different words for ice.
That's
Mark: right. Yeah, it's totally it's rain here for sure
Alex: All right, well so mark I I really want to talk to you about your time at the white house But let's say let's save that for a little bit because I want let's maybe we start at the beginning nintendo part Yeah, yeah, I didn't even know that I didn't even know you were at were you so Were you like writing code?
You were working on games? Yeah, I
Mark: was, uh, I think of myself as the N64 guy, so I kind of came on just prior to N64 was there through the whole life N64 and the bring up a GameCube, you know, there's other stuff in the middle of their virtual boy, game boy pocket, game boy advance, [00:10:00] but, but I was really like, just a couple of little things,
Alex: a couple of small stuff.
Yeah,
Mark: yeah, all that. But then I'm real, I came on because I was, uh, I was a 3d guy and N64 was the first time Nintendo had done any 3d. Stuff, you know, where they were working with SGI building that chip set out. And so I, I had spent five years in virtual reality, which is kind of hilarious to say now, but, uh, back when virtual reality was huge in the nineties,
Aaron: um, lawnmower, man, lawnmower, I was thinking the same thing.
Oh,
Mark: I loved that at the time. Yep. Now it's just painful, but, uh, yeah, so, so I, I transitioned from VR and making games in VR at a company, uh, and transitioned over to Nintendo and was teaching developers, how do you make a game in 3d? You know, how do you make a tree in 3d? I remember talking to the Turat guys about how you make, uh, Trees in 3d when you've got like 10 polygons, you know?
Um, then super mario 64 came out and kind of blew [00:11:00] everybody's minds about what the thing could do. Yeah
Alex: And yeah,
Mark: it was great time.
Alex: That's cool. So that you were i'm guessing you were in redmond. Yep At nintendo of america there How big was Nintendo of America back then in the N64 days? Like how many folks do you remember?
Like how big, I think it was like right down the street from Microsoft, right? I remember driving by it, you know, when, when I was out there.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They used to always say we, we used to be the biggest software company in Redmond. Now we're surrounded by the other big software company in Redmond.
Yeah. I think it was about a thousand. Really?
Alex: At one point was Nintendo had like more. Folks in Redmond and Microsoft did.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. You know, early on. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: But half of Nintendo during my time was the call center, right? It was back when people would call up going, I can't find the key. Get there.
You know, they would call. So yeah, it was like one building that was the call center. And then there was one building that was the rest of it. Wow.
Alex: Wow. Okay. Okay. [00:12:00] So, and then I had no idea you were, you, so before Nintendo, you were at SGI?
Mark: No, no. I, uh, I wish I had been, no, I was doing, uh, I was in college and then, uh, grad school.
Okay. So I had gotten connected up with one of the early VR research labs, which was here at University of Washington, uh, Tom Furness. It was called the Hit Lab. And then when I, I worked with them for three, four years, ran a, Usenet news group back when that was a thing.
Alex: Uh, and then when I went
Mark: to grad school, I went to kind of went to the other one, which was UNC Chapel Hill, which was Fred Brooks and, uh, Henry Fuchs and a bunch of these guys, and they were doing work on graphics, image generators that were kind of a lot like modern GPUs where you would have, um, Dedicated pixels, uh, dedicated processes for particular regions of the screen.
And then they were trying to figure out how to scale that up. And this is the thing called pixel planes back then. And so they had hardware that was faster than anybody else's custom hardware at that point. But it was also super [00:13:00] finicky to try to do because it was all custom. And so they were doing a lot of VR work back then on pixel planes for and pixel planes.
Five was brought up when I was there. But grad school and I, we didn't really get along. So I kind of. skedaddle out of there after a year and came back to Seattle.
Alex: What was it about grad school that you kind of rebelled against? Was it. Like the pace or you know, being sort of in theory land or anything like that, or what, yeah, a
Mark: lot of that.
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, the part that I really enjoyed was teaching students, and the part that I didn't enjoy was taking classes. Unfortunately, college is about taking classes, , , and I really liked building things and I wasn't about that either. So, you know, I had a, okay, I had a really great class from Turner Witted, who was the author of, or the creator of Ray Tracing.
I learned a lot from him. That's cool. Had a class from Fred Brooks, who's the guy who wrote mythical man month and was the creator of the IBM system three 60 software. And he's amazing. Um, just passed away about a year ago. And so I, I feel [00:14:00] really lucky that I was able to have those experiences. Um, but yeah, ultimately.
So is this
Aaron: like, is this like normal school? Like you're just going to school?
Mark: Yeah, it was grad school. Yeah. It was grad school. Okay. What
Aaron: were you trying, were you, did you want to get into games? Was that like the goal?
Mark: No, I kind of thought I would get, the thing that got me really excited was the idea of putting people in experiences that were immersive and could, you know, affect them in some way, get them to see the world in a different way, have an experience they wouldn't have otherwise, see people, you know, see places, this kind of thing.
So it was, you know, it was really lined up well with games for later. It wasn't my original intent. Although I was, you know, I was a huge game nerd as a kid, Apple two, Commodore 64, Vega 500, you know, all that stuff coming up.
Alex: Yeah. Okay. What was growing up for you? Like, where were you, what part of the country did you grow up in?
Mark: I was in the, I was in Puget Sound. So here in the Seattle area, but I was South kind of near Mount Rainier and a little town called Spanaway. It was super rural. Cows and horses kind of [00:15:00] situation. And yeah, small rural high school, 300 students in it. Um, but I was, I just got really lucky that somebody bought a computer and didn't know how to use it.
And, uh, they were like, Hey, do you know what to do with this? I was like, Oh, I don't know. But then they trusted me enough to like stay after class. They would leave me. They would go home, the teachers would all go home and they would lock the door and they'd just make sure it shuts on the way out. And I would sit there with a TRS 80 at first and the Apple II later until like seven or eight at night until my parents were like, so I'm fairly, really lucky to have had such good teachers during the course of my life.
Alex: That's cool. So that was your, your first kind of exposure to technology was TRS 80, Apple II. I'm guessing. You were teaching yourself basic.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, as one does the, the, from the like books of like 100 games written in basic and you type them in and they wouldn't work and then you debug them.
Yeah. Right.
Alex: Yeah.
Mark: Loved it.
Alex: That's a pattern.
Mark: It is, right? We
Alex: don't learn that way anymore, but
Aaron: that's, uh, I wonder [00:16:00] if you do it now, if it would help, you know, like if I did it, like if I was like, you know what? I'm going to go back and do basic games and do like line per line. And yeah. Yeah. I'll send you one of those books.
I'll send you one. Okay. Worth a
Alex: try. You got to do it from the book though. You can't cut and paste. It's not the same. You got to type it in. I'm not going to adjust what I'm saying. Yeah. Type it in word for word. Do it on an
Mark: Apple II emulator on the web.
Alex: Yeah.
Mark: Yep.
Alex: For sure.
Mark: Recommended. Okay.
Alex: So, so you, basically this magic device, you had this like, Exclusive access to these magic devices and you went sort of into the deep end and you're like, huh, this stuff is cool Yeah, got to college like sign me up for the programming class.
Mark: Yep, computer science for sure computer science and music You know, but computer science won out as you know, cuz
Aaron: music what part of music
Mark: jazz saxophone sax player Wow. So it was a toss up for a while.
Aaron: I was talking to someone who's a saxophone player, and they told me that it's the only instrument that [00:17:00] has the same like range as the human voice or something like that.
Is that true? I don't know. You're making a face. It's a good line. It's a good line. I'm like, whoa, that's really interesting. And then I got interested in the whole sax. That sounds
Alex: good to me. Mark, you just gotta know, Aaron, Aaron likes to repeat things that he thinks sounds really cool. It does. You just got to check the sources, you know,
Mark: I'm going to agree.
That's right. I heard that the sacks is the best instrument out there. Somebody told me that, and I don't know who it was, but I agree.
Alex: There's a bill Clinton, right? When he came to visit, right
Mark: after the Arsenio Hall show.
Alex: Amazing. All right. So. After you were at Nintendo, is that when you got to game developer?
Yeah,
Mark: yeah, yeah, yeah. So
Alex: that's a little bit of a, like, that's a sideways jump, isn't it? Yeah.
Mark: So I was, uh, I had a lot of fun at Nintendo. I really enjoyed my time there, but I found, I [00:18:00] found that I was always teaching developers the same things, answering the same questions. And, you know, this was the job, but at the same time I was like, why don't we Good mechanisms to spread knowledge.
We didn't really, the internet wasn't the thing that we had access to, and you can only have a conference, you know, once in a while, um, I didn't even really have email, so how could we as an industry share tips and techniques and tricks and. And so I convinced the people at Nintendo while I was there to let me write an article for game developer magazine.
And this was on a kind of esoteric part of the N64 that developers hadn't had access to yet. Actually, that's, uh, that's the front page of the article on my wall for those of you looking. And so I wrote about this part of N64, got it published and game developer. And that magazine was, you know, it was the hardcore, uh, Place of the day once it was a monthly magazine.
So it wasn't [00:19:00] a ton of stuff, but I ate that up. Like, you know, my vitamins every month. And that got me super excited. And I, I, I. At the GDC that year, I ran into a book publisher who said, Hey, have you ever thought about writing a book? Saw your article. That's really cool. And I was like, I don't know, never thought about writing a book, but let me think about it.
And then, uh, wait, what was the article about? It was about, so it's, uh, on the N64, there was, uh, they called it the RSP. Reality signal processor. It was basically a microcoded processor.
Alex: Okay,
Mark: so nintendo would release microcode and then the developer would Program to the microcode. So as let me give an example, so maybe the microcode contains a Program that draws a triangle So then the developer just tells it, here's where the vertices are.
The microcode runs and draws a triangle for you. So you don't have to do the rasterization. So Nintendo kept releasing different versions of this microcode to do different things. Here's a fast one. Here's a slow one. This is high precision. This one does whatever, whatever, whatever. [00:20:00] So I wrote one that did curved surfaces.
Cause why not? And, and I just published how that worked.
Alex: Mark, that sounds more advanced than just a triangle. Yeah.
Mark: You know, more, no, more
Alex: advanced.
Mark: It was a lot of fun. It was crazy math. Uh, yeah, it turned out to be a little bit nuts, but you know, I, I really enjoyed doing it and the writing part was just a bug, you know, it stuck for me.
So when somebody said, you want to write a book, I thought about, What was stuck in my craw, which was not being able to share enough information, you know, at scale with developers. And I thought, well, the books are great for that, but I'm not the expert. Like I'm an expert in this much tiny amount of the game industry, but I know because here I am sitting at Nintendo talking to game developers all day.
I know a bunch of really great game developers. What if I could get them to write And I'll just put the book together and edit it and, you know, we'll get, make sure we have a variety of different things. So it'll appeal to a variety of different people. And, um, so yeah, so that, so we did a book that's right there called [00:21:00] game programming gems.
That was 1999, 2000. We ended up doing nine of those. Um,
Alex: yes, I was going to say that was like a whole series, wasn't it?
Mark: I mean, it was all so many people involved. We probably had 300 some people involved in the series over time. Just writing little chunks of this and that, or contributing the covers on some of the books or artists you would know.
It was great. It was a great time. And I was, I was just so happy that, you know, so many people wanted to contribute. This, it was modeled after this book that's next to it, actually. It was called Graphics Gems, which I grew up with, which is a similar thing around computer graphics. So Andrew Glassner had. I think had similar thoughts and was like, I'll make a book that teaches people all this stuff about computer graphics and I'll get all my friends to write it.
So it's great. We'll do the same thing with games. It's perfect. Anyway, it's turning into a long story, but this is doing those books has got was a bug for me. And, um, when someone rang me up from game developer magazine, after we did this article and said, you know, we're, We're thinking about [00:22:00] replacing, uh, the person who runs gamasutra.
com, which was sort of the website version of game developer at that time.
Aaron: I remember that site.
Mark: Uh, I said, that's super cool. That sounds like fun. Uh, and I flew down and we all went out on a boat and had some conversations and some food and probably some drinks cause game industry. And, um, I told them, well, I don't, well, you know what I, would rather do is not run the website is, you know, the magazine is way cooler.
I think, and the guy who ran the magazine was there and he was like, really? Cause I want to run the website. I was like, problem solved. Great. All right. So yeah, so we, we agreed, uh, Jennifer Polko was running the organization. Then she, she later went on to start up code for America. If you're familiar with that.
Oh, right on. Yeah. So we, so I came on, I moved down to California, uh, ran the magazine. I only ran it for a year. I did 12 issues, it was super fun, got to leverage a lot of the stuff, a lot of the people I knew and, you know, kind of just bring a lot more on the [00:23:00] ground. Um, a lot, a lot more technical stuff, I think, to the magazine from people who were actually doing it, you know.
Alex: So what is, what is running a magazine? Like, like, were you, were you writing? Were you, were you like signing up people to write articles? Were you setting the content for each issue?
Mark: That's one part I didn't do. We had a pretty small staff
Alex: selling ads. I didn't do that.
Mark: Nope. Yeah. We had a dedicated sales force that did the conference and the magazine and the website.
Um, and then we had a small, like tiger team of people who worked on the setting of the magazine. Um, I would write in the editorial every month. That would recruit people to write. You know, deadlines all the time. And, uh, I would, I started trying to go out and find luminaries who maybe didn't talk very much and go out and do interviews with them.
So I did a, just a handful of interviews. Like Ed Logg is the one that jumps to mind. Ed Logg, centipede, asteroids guy. And then I would transcribe some of that and just put like a page towards the back of the magazine, like interview with Ed [00:24:00] Logg and those things, those are the things that stick in my mind the most now, especially as I get older thinking about the previous generation.
Alex: Yeah, that's cool. That's like, that's like doing a podcast.
Mark: It is. It's totally like that. Exactly.
Alex: Let's get Illuminator. Let's get Mark Delora out here. Yeah.
Mark: We should get Ed Long. I don't know what he's doing
Aaron: these days. Well, we did, we did, uh, we've done other Illuminators. Oh, so why did you stop after a year?
I was gonna ask the same thing.
Mark: I think this is a, this is like a theme in my life, I think. I tried something and, um, I enjoyed it and realized that, boy, I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. Like, like I'm a game developer. I like making stuff. I like building stuff. I really like technology and I enjoy writing, but managing a team of people with deadlines all the time, I didn't love.
Yeah, I didn't love that as much, so. Yeah, so I was like, okay, moving on. So that's when I went to Sony, I was in the Bay Area, PlayStation's in the Bay Area, PS2 was getting beat up on because it wasn't easy for developers, and I called them up and said, hey, do you need a [00:25:00] developer relations team? They were like, that'd be a great idea!
So I came on board.
Alex: They didn't have dev relations? You, you basically invented it for them.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. They, I think they had a few people over time, Bill Ray Bach, who was at NVIDIA for a long time, was at Sony and kind of filled that function for a while. But like formally starting up a team focused on dev relations.
Yeah, I came in there and started that and we built it up. Wow.
Alex: And that must've been, was that in like, where was that?
Mark: I mean, 05, 06, it's probably
Alex: 05. 05, 06. Okay. 05, 06. 04, you know? Yeah,
Mark: maybe 04. Might be 04. I don't know. If you're reading off my resume, it's probably right. We have it right here
Alex: with us.
Mark: All right.
Alex: Okay. That was PS2?
Mark: Yep. Yep. Mid PS2.
Alex: PS2. The dev kit for PS2. That was the one that was like, it looked like a PS2, but it was three feet tall, basically. That was it. Yeah. And it was expensive. Yeah. Wasn't it
Aaron: like 20K or [00:26:00] something? Yeah.
Alex: That was the
Aaron: coolest looking thing. Wasn't it
Mark: awesome though? Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron: It was really hard making games for that thing.
It
Mark: was. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That's why we committed to making PS3 easier. Oops. Wait.
We tried so hard though. I think it was just a beast. PS3 was, this is so powerful for the time. But like none of us knew how to program it. It was, it was so, yeah. Didn't
Aaron: it use something like crazy, like some crazy system where
Mark: there's a cell processor.
Aaron: Yeah. They made a really cool, like animated commercial that like, no one's like, what is it doing?
We don't understand.
Mark: It was so cool. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. I mean, the cell processor was a great idea. It was the chip for the PS3. It had eight sub processors in it, you know, fully capable. So processors are linked together on a bus. The idea was that you might be able to take that processor and put a two subprocessor [00:27:00] version in your television, one processor version in your cell phone.
You know, this kind of thing. And then they would more easily to be able to communicate. You could leverage those extra resources. In retrospect, you think like, I can't depend on those being there that somebody is going to have these other resources. So I can't really write a game that's going to use those very readily.
It'd be like saying, if you have a spare PC, I'll offload some of the graphics to it. Like, no, we won't do that. Really want making games is hard enough.
Alex: All right. So that that's. Mid 2000s, you're at Sony.
Mark: Yep.
Alex: Um, and. Were you, were you there through the launch of the PS three?
Mark: I was, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I was really involved in stuff because we had, um,
Alex: we had Dylan Cusper on Oh, yeah. And I think best, I think Dylan told us about, I think it was this home screen for the PS three that he did the, yeah. Right. Yeah. Those graphic effects for, I had a lot of
Aaron: cool stuff. Yeah. I forgot about that. [00:28:00] We'd leave it on sometimes.
I love that. And it would just be on, in the, in the living room. You'd be like,
Mark: yeah. Super cool. Right. .
Aaron: That is super cool.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really loved the PS three. I I did a lot of the. I kept flying back and forth to Japan and also Europe, but, um, have a lot of vivid memories of going back and forth to Japan and the early bring up of the hardware for PS3.
There was a moment where we came in and they brought in just a couple of teams from Japan and a couple of teams we brought with us from the U S and they rolled out the very first prototypes that developers had seen of PS3. And it was like, It looked like a refrigerator, but like the size of a table, maybe here and three feet tall and it rolled out and I had big fans and people were like, Whoa, what the heck is, but a lot of it was that the, there was a cell processor, the board main board on the bottom cell processor was, it was early stage, so it was not, you know, shrunk down and then there was this giant NVIDIA card that likes.
Stuck up to most of the height of the unit itself and had big [00:29:00] fans on it because it too was like an early car and needed a lot of cooling. Yeah, it wasn't the most reliable prototype ever, but. Okay.
Alex: And so you were basically helping developers kind of get set up to make games on that.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. We did in, in our group, we kind of did the early, I want to call it portfolio planning, but it was not really from a game perspective.
It was from a developer perspective. Like let's say we're only going to get. Eight PS3 prototype dev kits on the first round. Who are the eight developers we trust the most who are, who are going to get an early headstart. And we think they're going to be able to deliver something for launch. And so we picked those and, you know, worked with them really closely in the early stages.
Alex: Oh, who are they? Everyone wants to know.
Mark: It's a good news. If I get an older, I've forgotten it all.
Alex: It was like Insomniac and Naughty Dog were on that list. I'm guessing.
Mark: Probably. Although we, yeah, yeah. I mean, the first parties. Yeah, I think first parties probably got, um, more access. Yeah. Uncharted. I mean, yeah, right, right, right.
What about
Aaron: heavy [00:30:00] rain? Did you guys help them?
Mark: I didn't work with the Quantic Dream folks much. They might've done that out of Europe. Yeah, they, the Sony Europe team might've. Yeah, Quantic is
Alex: in France. Is that right?
Mark: I think that's right. Yeah, I think so too. That game looks so good. Right? Yeah. It did. So, PS3 was fun.
Alex: So, were you there more, you were there more than a year this time?
Mark: Yeah, I was there for five. Yeah. I did five at Nintendo. I did five at Sony. Lots of good E3s. Lots of good DevCon.
Alex: Okay, so you were at both Nintendo and Sony. Um, So I've been at a few larger game organizations and they all have different flavors to them and different kinds of personalities.
How would you compare, you know, having been on the inside? How would you compare the different personalities, uh, culture, you know, the company culture or whatever, between like Nintendo and Sony?
Mark: Um, I found, I enjoy them both a lot. I think I've, what I [00:31:00] found was that going to Sony, what was, what struck me was a difference from Nintendo.
Nintendo, when you would go visit Nintendo in Japan, NCL, you would go to Kyoto, you'd go to, you walk in, they would take you to a conference room. You wouldn't get to go upstairs to where the teams were. Um, And then you would have conversations and it was very kind of formalized, rigorous. Um, Sony was more like an, a U.
S. startup. It was like everybody was running at full speed, collaborating. Um, they were not rigorous. You know, I, I don't know if you've heard like a, sort of the Japanese, a traditional way of how you have the, The boss is upstairs. The boss of your division is probably at the front of the room and their desk is bigger than yours and it faces you.
And then all the employees face them and have smaller desks and maybe they're a little lower. You know, it's very like. Hold
Aaron: on. Let me take some notes. That's like our studio now, Alex. Alex's desk is like, takes up two rooms. [00:32:00]
Alex: I'm just going to make your window here just a little smaller.
Mark: So Sony was not like that.
Sony was very, it reminded me of an American company, you know, even though it was still Sony, it was different from Japan, but it had the flavor, you know, it was like, it was like a younger, faster company in terms of how it was moving. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: Really interesting. I guess that makes sense. I mean, Nintendo, it's like been around for like a hundred years, right?
I mean, yeah, playing cards. It's true. Started with playing cards.
Mark: They're interesting, just like thinking about the way that they operate though. I mean, I think of Nintendo as being much more stable as a company, you know, they may not have as high a highs or as low as lows, but they've been, they've been around forever, so it kind of makes me wonder about the corporate culture and how that reflects, you know.
Alex: I
Mark: don't know.
Alex: One better than the other. I guess. Conservative, I guess, you know?
Mark: Yeah. Yep.
Alex: Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. But somehow at this time frame, you end up at THQ.
Mark: Yeah. So like the, the long and the short of my exit from Sony [00:33:00] and move, kind of pivot a little bit is that I just started to feel like I wasn't building things.
Wasn't building games. I wasn't close enough to the game technology at a console company. You tend to live and die by the cycle. You know, you get at Nintendo. I was super immersed in N64. And when we started working on game cube, all of a sudden I had to like, dive into this new set of technology that had been evolving for five years, but I was not exposed to, it's the same at Sony.
You know, you're like riding that cycle, five year cycle of seven or whatever, of, of game console. And I thought like, I'm, I'm just missing out. Like, I want to get more involved in. What developers are doing. I want to get more involved with games. And so I, I left Sony to go to Ubisoft in San Francisco and Ubisoft was starting a third party, AAA group based in the U S and they needed a head of tech.
And so I came over there. So I was there and helped. Build that up for about a year. And then, um, and then I went and did some consulting work for a while, kind of doing a lot of vetting of studios and, and [00:34:00] helping out with tech on smaller projects, helped out telltale with some stuff on the Wii, I remember.
Um, and then, yeah, and I went to THQ as well, kind of for a second, both of those Ubisoft and THQs were both there. A little over a year. THQ was in the midst of cratering.
Alex: I was going to ask like what time period was that? Cause THQ had a very not, uh, maybe notorious is not the right word. That that's too negative, but it had, it had an end.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, well, there was a, I think my, my postmortem of what happened with THQ is THQ was really reliant on building licensed products, um, and, and, and, You know, game based on this DreamWorks movie, game based on this Pixar movie. Um, things like this, uh, they had the WWE, WWF, one of those WW licenses and made a series of really good games based on that.
And as a lot of the license based games, Transition to mobile, [00:35:00] particularly kids games would say they were making a lot of money off of like kids games It's kind of dried up on console and all moved over to you know, iPhone and iPad this kind of thing that left THQ trying to figure out what business model could keep them afloat.
And so they brought on Danny Bilson and a bunch of folks to focus more on heavier AAA titles. And that's when I came on to come on as the head of tech for AAA. And we did some big investments, built, built some interesting stuff, but the company really didn't. Honestly have the financial resources necessary to take it.
My opinion, um, take all those to market. And so it was a little bit dead man walking when I got there, but some good stuff definitely came out, but I just, it just felt like it was a little bit too little, too late.
Alex: Yeah. We, we had done some games when I was at Disney. I remember THQ, I think was working on cars, the cars franchise.
Um,
Aaron: did some, Oh, I had a friend that was working on that, [00:36:00] actually. Oh, yeah. The, uh, Steve McQueen game, right? Is that what it was? Lightning McQueen or Steve McQueen? Lightning McQueen. Not Steve McQueen. Lightning McQueen. Same guy. One
Alex: of those queens. One of those queens. Yeah.
Mark: Yep. Yep.
Alex: Okay. All right. So that act, I don't know if we can call that whole thing an act.
That's probably two acts in there. But yeah, in my head, um, quite a broad set of experiences being first party console makers, being at a magazine. Um, yep. Being sec, you know, at a just game development suite doing some consulting. And then I have so many questions for you about your time, uh, working for the government.
Um, like what was that job? Like, how did you get that job? Did you, were you in the white house? Did you get the fly in air force one? Let's start right there.
Aaron: Air force one. That's actually like
Mark: I never get to fly in Air Force One. Well, I'll tell you, I
Alex: have told each of my kids, actually, I just, I've only told the girls this, maybe I should tell, I should tell [00:37:00] Owen, like when they get to the White House and are president, they got to give me rides on Air Force One.
That's the only, the only thing I want.
Mark: It looks amazing. Or Marine One. You got to take Marine One and that'll take you to Air Force One. And then you got to fly somewhere else. Get both. Because the helicopter coming in and landing on the lawn of the White House, man, that is a thing. I had no idea until I stood there one day and watched it come in.
Those people that fly those, the Marine One helicopter to, you know, pick up the president and take him to the airport. They can fly that helicopter like a, it's like a ballet dancer coming in, like between two sets of trees coming in and
Alex: they just land in the backyard. They do. But it's a really
Mark: tight fit.
Aaron: Okay.
Mark: Yeah. It's really
Aaron: impressive. I believe it. They're really at the White House. I always thought that was like, you know, a set. Staged. There was, there was like
Alex: right, right behind the moon landing set. They have the, uh,
Mark: yeah, no, it's right there. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's pretty [00:38:00] good. All right. So
Alex: I'm guessing.
I'm guessing you did not write on Air Force One, which is okay. No, I didn't.
Mark: I'm sad to say. It's one of the misses. There were a lot of good hits though, but that was one of the misses.
Alex: All right. How did that opportunity present itself? Like what? Yeah,
Mark: um, I think it started because I was a loud mouth.
Mostly about, uh, the idea of using games for more. I have this vivid recollection of, there was an event in 2008. I went into, went to in Japan and Raph Koster and Robin Hunnicke and I were all there giving talks, uh, say it was called Covesta and we all gave talks that were really similar, even though none of us had, had ever discussed it.
And it was about how do we have more people able to make games so that we get more things. You know, people utilize games for more, more, more, more. It was difficult at that point to make a game was difficult at that time to distribute a game. We were all taking different cracks at that problem. And that's stuck in my craw.[00:39:00]
And slowly over time, I started getting more involved with people who were looking at. How do I leverage what games are uniquely capable of, which is that they're fun, that they're engaging, people wanted to be doing them for long periods of time. Is there a way to leverage that to make education more fun and more engaging, to make, you know, working out more fun and engaging, doing research?
All these kinds of things. You're like, man, if only that was more engaging and interesting. Well, who doesn't get engaging and interesting? Well, I mean game developers are great at that. They're like experts at that. How do we marry these two things together? But I talked to this guy Ben Sawyer who had been around the game industry and working on serious quote unquote serious games for a long time and we would meet up at DICE and kind of compare notes and Yeah, that just happened to be, I think it was in, maybe in 2012, that's probably right.
Ben was there, and he's like, let me introduce you to this woman, Constance, and [00:40:00] Constance is, she just started working at the White House. She's a researcher from UW Madison, and she wants to meet game developers. I'm like, great. Okay, cool. So she and I walked around. Turned out Constance had been recruited to go into the White House and focus on games, not really given much attention.
Guidance apart from that, and um, she was, she's a researcher, and so she gathered groups of researchers, looked into the science of video games, why they work, why they don't work, what they do, what they don't do, what they do well, and it was kind of making a justification for why maybe the government, she'd use games for things.
But she had a young child, hadn't been there very long, and was like looking for the exit door. I didn't know at the time until she called me a couple of weeks after the conference and she was like, Hey, so about that, uh, we had a, a big meeting up in Maine where a bunch of us kind of in this field of this and that.
Kind of thing games for impact. I think we all did at the time [00:41:00] came together and talked about, you know, what would the opportunity be if, if we were able to find a way to accelerate the space, get more people to focus on using games for, for more, uh, what would he do? What would we want? What would make a difference?
Um, what, what makes sense for the government to get involved with, you know? And I think out, out of that came the offer for me to, to come. Uh, and so Constance had been there for about six months and she went back to UW Madison and I went out to DC for a couple of years and was told pretty much the same thing when I got there as she had been told, which was, Hey, you're the games person go.
Alex: Really? Like no, no goal, no remit. Just, this is your domain. Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. You are the guy, so it turns out the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House at the time was about 75 people and every person in there is a really deep expert in a particular thing, like you're the nanomaterials guy, you're the autonomous vehicles guy, you're the cyber security person, [00:42:00] you know, now there's an army of cyber security people, and I was the games guy, which was kind of hilarious because I would meet these, you know, People you and they were like, Hey, where are you from?
And I'd be like, I went to university Washington. How about you? And I go, I got my bachelor's degree at MIT and my PhD at Stanford. And I did a postdoc at Yale. Okay. I make games. Um, uh, but it was an amazing community of people, you know, whose brains I could pick kind of like. The people I picked their brains for game programming gyms was like the same sort of thing.
Like
Alex: can I can I just say how how fun that is that You went to a place where as a, a guy who got, you know, to grad school for programming is like the cool guy, you know, and everybody around them are like the nerds.
Aaron: Right? What is everybody doing? Everyone's in this room. Are y'all just like set free? What do you think?
Is there, there's [00:43:00] no goals? There's no
Mark: No, well the mandate, I mean, it's, it's so broad. Aaron's starting to get a little
Alex: nervous about his tax dollars right now. I think that's what's happening.
Mark: No, here's, here's what it was. Here's the mandate. Um, you're an expert in games. You are here on behalf of the American people.
Uh, you're here because the president thinks that games can be in some way beneficial to the American people. So Go do that. Figure out what that is. Let me, that's cool.
Alex: And so that this is the Obama administration and was this position unique to that administration or is it an evergreen position? Like did it go away when Obama left office?
Mark: It went away. I mean, there was an evolution of it from, from Constance being there focused on research, me kind of being there focused on the implementation. And then a couple of years after I left, brought on a person who had basically been my intern. Um, and he focused on, he had an interesting spin on it.
He, he focused on players. I guess I could put So he worked with Twitch, he worked with, um, [00:44:00] MMO players. And so the three of us kind of arced over the course of about five years in there with gaps, but it turned out to, you know, I was able to leverage Constance's work and then Eric was able to leverage my work.
We did some stuff overlapping, but yeah, it's, I mean, it was, it was hard to figure out exactly what to do. Um, the, the tricky part was coming in, I assumed, and was a little bit kind of bracing for, That I would need to be good at politics and like an expert in politics and I would need to handle, you know, when folks in Congress were like violent video games bad, I would have to be the guy defending that, you know?
And a little of that happened because Sandy Hook happened and Biden had that big meeting and invite. So I helped set that meeting up just before I got to the White House. Constance and I set that up. That was frightening. And Biden sat across the table from me and pounded on the table and yelled at us.
And, uh, it was really, yeah. Not super fun.
Aaron: Wow. I didn't know that happened. The meeting. Oh [00:45:00] yeah.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. You can find the opening. If you look for it, it's like Biden Sandy hook video games or something on YouTube, you'll find, uh, he did an opening eight minutes, I think, with open press, so the press was all in the room and then he chased them all out and then he yelled at us.
His point was like, you know, parents think that video games are part of the problem around, um, Gun violence in schools. And I don't know whether that's true or not, but you guys are the video game industry, so you should be helping me solve this problem. And so how are we going to do this? And what he was getting, the conversations we were having in the room were a lot more sort of positioning, like executive is being like, well, you know, research says, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.
And everything's fine. And my games are great. And he was like, I'm not having that, you know, it's not, it's not, it's a little less about reality and a little bit more about perception. It's like,
Alex: right.
Mark: Even if that's true, how are we going to solve it? It was, it was pretty impressive.
Alex: So that, so that was part of your.
Role there.
Mark: Yeah, but just that [00:46:00] one time as it turned out just I went to okay I never had to deal with it after that. Thankfully the office is Aside from the fact that I didn't have much, there wasn't much incoming because I don't think, for the most part, I don't think people knew I was there on the other side of the town, thankfully.
Congress is what I mean. But um, the Office of Science and Technology Policies, all these uber nerd people who are really smart in an area of policy. I was working on game and technology policy, not politics. And so the office had kind of think of it like a tootsie roll. It's like, there was this like squishy inner center and then this hard exterior shell of people who were political.
All right. So if there was somebody on the other side of the town who was like, Hey, I want to have somebody come talk to me about violent video games. They would go to the. Political person, the political person would be able to help us navigate that situation and how to deal with it. I think that was, it's just, that's like a brilliant setup.
Wouldn't have survived without [00:47:00] it. It's still that way today. That helped a lot. Let us do our work. It
Alex: does seem terrifying to like, To kind of like push the PhD postdoc guy out to a podium to talk about political topics. I'm getting anxiety just like thinking about it.
Mark: Right? I just don't want that. Yeah, and you don't want them to have to think about that because you want them to think about, you know, they're really an expert in a thing and like run hard, um, using that thing.
Don't think about how am I going to answer this question.
Alex: How long were you, what does it mean? Like work in the white house? Do you actually work in the white house or is it like down the block?
Mark: Well, it's yes and no. Um, they call the whole, the complex with the fence that the fences around the white house, the white house complex.
So technically that means the mansion. Uh, which is like the first floor is the museum floor that you see all the pictures of upper floor, uh, where the president lives. There's the West wing where most of the president's staff works. There's the East wing where most of the first lady's staff works.
There's some basements and [00:48:00] you know, and then there's next to it is the Eisenhower. Wait, wait, wait. Blah, blah,
Alex: blah. That sounds like secret stuff. Yeah. Secret
Mark: stuff. That's secret stuff. Exactly. Yeah. It's like secret stuff. I'm here. It's secret stuff down here. Okay. Um, And then there's Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is right next to the West Wing.
And that's where more staff are, more president's staff, and that's where we were. So we were in the AEOB, you know, along with lots of vice president's staff, president's staff, council of economic advisors, you know, we were science technology policy, there's a digital infrastructure people. And it's, you know, You know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
And so we would flow back and forth from, uh, EEOB, Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the West Wing, as we needed to, to get work done. So if there was somebody we needed to work with in the West Wing, we'd walk over, ba da da, the president would come over and have meetings over at EEOB. So technically we weren't in the White House that you think of, the house that's white, but the White House complex with EEOB right there.
It's It was built in like 1860 or [00:49:00] something. It's like 150 year old, super old building.
Alex: 1860. So that was, that was after the White House was rebuilt, uh, from when it was burned down by the, uh, the British. Okay.
Mark: Yeah. Although, you know, you said that this is like the one, one of my most vivid memories of my time at the White House was I was in the basement of the White House helping with the Christmas decorations one year, which is a whole nother story.
But as I was walking from where we're building this robot for the Christmas decorations to the kitchen where they're, you know, making the stuff for the Christmas decorations, I saw a burn spot on the wall with plexiglass over it. And I was like, what the heck is this? And then I noticed there was a little plaque there.
And it's like, this is the only remaining part of the White House from when it was burnt in 1814.
Aaron: Wow.
Mark: Kidding me. That's amazing. Never would have thought I'd see that.
Alex: Yeah, [00:50:00] that's cool. That's cool. Okay. Well, so random question. What was the background check slash security application like for getting that job?
Cause like we just signed, basically it's like a work for hire deal with, with a public company. And we had to go do like two weeks of security stuff. I gotta imagine. I feel
Mark: like you just like saw a scar on my forehead and you were like, that's the, I'm going to poke that thing. Yeah, it was, uh, it was 164 pages and it took eight months.
And really, and I guess I'm not
Alex: surprised, but
Mark: 13 of my friends sent me emails or called me and said, Hey, somebody just showed up here in a black suit asking questions about you. Are you in trouble? Wow. I totally didn't expect any of that. I mean, sure, the application form. I mean, the application form was basically like, lists every place, every country you've ever visited, what you did there and [00:51:00] who you met with from now until, you know, before you got your passport.
Lists all the places you've ever lived. It was everything. It was a lot.
Alex: I guess that's good to hear, because like, you're working there to make sure you're cool.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, it's actually fine. And that was the thing. I was like, yeah, for this job. Did you take
Aaron: a physical blood? Did they do like
Mark: No, I didn't, but I, MRIs, I remember when I visited
Aaron: MRI.
What? ? Yeah. What if he's got something in the brain like recording, like in the eye, like always walking around? Yeah, I guess so.
Alex: Well, did they make you use a, like a government issued tech? Like could you not Yeah. Have your own personal phone and, and that stuff anymore?
Mark: The most amazing BlackBerry ever.
It's terrible. Yeah. Okay. I was like, really? What are
Aaron: you going to do? It was not
Mark: good. That's what it did. It did absolutely nothing. It made calls and it did email.
Alex: Yeah, it was bad. [00:52:00] Does the, um, at the time. Did the, did that office have like, was social, like at that time with social media, I mean, must've been like Facebook, Instagram and all that much.
Was that at all part of your domain or intersect with your domain or was that part of the conversation at all? Mostly no.
Mark: Mostly no. Although, I mean, the president was, you know, he was pretty tapped into that stuff more than previous presidents had been. And there was a digital. I forget what they were called.
Digital something office focused more on that. Some of the policy stuff would occasionally reflect into my universe, but for the most part, I was able to stay away from it.
Aaron: I have a question. So this came up with Shannon too, uh, regarding the like people being knighted. You know, remember that Alex, because Alex wants, Alex wants to be knighted.
Alex: No, Alex does not want to be knighted. I made a comment about the game industry in the UK and how just [00:53:00] relative to industry there, it occupies, I think, a more elevated status or just recognition than maybe it does in the US. That's all. You know, and I made the, I made the point that, you know, like Ian Livingstone and, and, uh, Peter Molyneux have all been recognized by the monarchy.
Mark: Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. And there isn't really a similar, maybe there is, but I don't know that there is any sort of similar kind of recognition of the, you know, the game industry in this country. I
Mark: agree. This should happen. Like the Kennedy center honors would be a great place to start. Maybe
Alex: you're
Mark: going to honor, you know.
Game designers, that intersects,
Alex: you know, other areas of art and entertainment, right? Yeah,
Mark: that does make sense. Yeah, yeah, there are other, there are other metals that the president bestows, but I think that's probably a bigger, a bigger reach. I think probably Kennedy Center would be a good place to start.
It'll be great to get another advocate in OSTP for games. And we don't have one now and I continue [00:54:00] to poke and, you know, try to keep those relationships fresh with people over there just to see if we can stir up trouble again at some point.
Alex: Yeah. So was there policy that resulted from your time in this post?
Good question.
Mark: I think, I think what there was, I don't know if I would say there was policy on the Regulatory level. I think we got budget on some things. I think we started some movements on some things Like what I ended up focusing on it was I learned this it took a while But what I learned was since everything is hard Everything is difficult to get done from the White House because you don't really have Budget everything's like pushing a rock up a hill because because it should be think getting things done in government Affects hundreds of millions of people.
It should be slow and difficult to make big moves. I my personal opinion in retrospect. I Didn't believe that at a time because I was like, man, I can't get anything done But so I ended up focusing on things. I was [00:55:00] passionate about And then it helped me get through the hard times, uh, when I was feeling like I was getting nothing done.
And that ended up being mostly games for learning. And then I helped spin up the computer science education in schools. So for K 12, so President Obama, he read a speech to a camera that I wrote. If you look for like President Obama talking about computer science education in 2013, I wrote that speech and it was a little bit modified by his speech writers, just a weird experience having the president read something.
But I made sure to put That's
Alex: amazing.
Mark: It was about computer science, but I made sure to put the word game in there, and that stayed in that speech.
Alex: And this was, this was before chat GPT, so we know you actually have to write
Mark: that. I sweat blood and tears over that speech, even though it was like, probably 300 words long, you know?
Um, so yeah, I think what we got accomplished Really was pushing computer science education for kids pretty hard for a couple of years in a [00:56:00] row. And then on the games front, when I look back on what we did that I'm proud of, and I think moved the needle. So we did, we worked with the department of ed. I keep saying, we, I don't know, everything's we, I'm not in the white house.
Cause it's just getting anything done requires a, But the Department of Education has been funding Games for Learning now for 10 years. So since I was there, so every year they fund through the small business grant program. Uh, You know between five and ten probably every year just shots at making great learning games for kids
Aaron: That's awesome.
Five or ten million or five and ten or ten projects?
Mark: Projects. So the the grant sizes are there's a prototype Phase one is prototype budget. So a couple hundred K and then phase two is a initial commercialization budget So I think it's at two million now So that's like for real, a real budget, um, for a smaller game.
And so there's a bunch of stuff that's come out of that. The Department of Ed now has this thing called Ed Games Expo every year, where they highlight all of those games and they hold it at the Kennedy [00:57:00] Center. And it's, it's like 150 companies come together and show off their stuff. How
Alex: accessible is that program?
Is that, like, I'm sure there's some folks listening who are like, Hey, I'm making games for education. What's it called
Mark: again? It's called, well, so the program is the SBIR. It's a small business grant program. Every agency, every government agency over a certain size has to dedicate like 3 percent or something of their budget to small business incentivization.
So this SBIR program is that program. So at department of education, the SBIR program. Uh, if you look for Ed S B I R, uh, that'll probably get you there. I would guess.
Aaron: That's amazing. I didn't know we had that in our country. Like when I was in Hamburg, they do that. Like there's a whole game just for any kind of game, you know?
Awesome. Yeah, and I didn't know we had that in the States. We
Mark: do, yeah. It's, it's mostly, so there are some of the other agencies have funded game stuff over time to National Science Foundation, um, NASA, NOAA, the Miss [00:58:00] Smithsonian has funded a bunch of stuff. Um, and I, I'm sorry, I'm leaving out NIH. NIH funds more games than anybody surprises me.
I always think about Ed, but it's really NIH that does most of it.
Alex: Yeah, well, so this whole area of like games for, you called it games for more, I mean, education, health. Yeah. I think is super fascinating. I think it's awesome. I did get a chance to work with a researcher at a Yale on a game that was funded by NIH.
So I'm, I'm aware of that program a little bit. And we've had Mike Wilson on who's. Games for mental health. And we have some good friends over in Chicago that are doing level X, level five, level X, I think they're called, but they do games in a health related field that kind of trains doctors, which is fascinating to me as well.
So really I had no idea that the government was helping to support that kind of thing. And it sounds like. Since you've left government, that you've been doing more with that [00:59:00] now. You got some of them grants,
Aaron: did
Alex: you, Mark?
Mark: I've been helping people out with grants, for sure.
Aaron: Listeners, you can't see, but he has gold teeth right now.
Mark: That DeLorean I was talking to you
Alex: about. You'd be a fantastic consultant for somebody, uh, looking to, uh, Make moves in that scene, but you, I read you were on the board of games for change.
Mark: Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Alex: And tell us a little bit about what games for change does. I'm a little bit familiar with the group, but would love to hear what you guys do.
Mark: Yeah. Well, I, so I was on the games for change for board for about four years. I've rolled off now, but I help, I still help out with different things there. Um, but it's a festival, an annual festival. Think of it as game developer. conference, smaller in size, but focused on the areas of utilizing games for things.
I think the way that I tend to describe it for people, people call it games for impact, games for change, serious games. I think of it as like games are like, they're just a, they're a form of media [01:00:00] that have. The unique ability to engage us in interactive ways. And we don't necessarily know how to best use them for other things yet.
And so this festival celebrates all of those efforts. So it's games for learning, games for citizen science, games for health and fitness, games for mental health. It also tends to also cover conversations like, how do I deal with the mental health of my players? Uh, you know, and, uh, Players are getting grief or you know, you're going on Fortnite and 10 year olds are yelling at you and cursing at you.
Like how do you deal with like mute all of this kind of thing. So that sort of mental health ,
Alex: it's not 10 year olds for me, it's my coworkers. Ah, this guy. This guy
Mark: or is it you? Wait a minute. . Yeah. Alex,
Alex: you are the problem. . Well, I guess if I was a better player it wouldn't be all. Yeah. Sorry. I hear that. No,
Mark: I hear.
Yeah, so that's, so games for, games for [01:01:00] change, uh, the, the festivals this year, it's at the end of June, it's always in New York city, it's just a couple of days long, tends to be, you know, a thousand or a couple of thousand people. That sort of size, but it's super fascinating. Last year they had relationship with the United Nations.
And so we had a day before the event where I think it was like 300 of us went over to the United Nations in a room and talked about how do we utilize to help with the sustainable development goals. That the UN is working on and we met with people from UNESCO. We met with people from all sorts of different subcomponents of the UN who were just super interested to learn if there was some way that they could leverage games to further the work that they're doing.
Um, so I, I just love that and meeting with people who think like, how can we use games to, to make an impact here? Great. Let's have a chat. Maybe we can figure something out. Maybe there's a developer I know who's also interested in that area and you guys can meet up and share and.
Aaron: That's super cool. Where does this take place?
Mark: This is so games for change. It's a, it's in New York city.
Alex: New York city. End of the month.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. [01:02:00] June 27th. So that's
Alex: coming up. It's coming up.
Mark: Yep. Yeah. It's rolling. I guess
Alex: it's open to the public. Anybody could go.
Mark: Yep. Yep. Yep. Sign up on the website. They just announced the nominees for the awards yesterday, which is always super fun for me because it's like, here's, you know, five super interesting games that are learning games, five super interested VR related games, five super interested health related games.
You know, they're all really just interesting people trying to make something fun that leaves you with an impression after you play it. There was a plastic pollution game that I played, which I thought was pretty interesting. Um, yeah, I just, I just love it. It's really did
Alex: the plastic. Uh, pollution game come in like a box you had to buy at a store, you know, shrink wrap twice.
And yeah,
Mark: it's filled with like seawater and microplastics inside. You just had to shake it off to play.
Alex: It came with a cartridge, but you didn't have to use it to play the game, but just throw it away. Put
Mark: this
Alex: in your [01:03:00] backyard. So what are you, what are you doing now? Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. What's your
Alex: current jam?
What's, what's, what's happening?
Mark: Yeah. I've been doing, um, lots of short term contracts since, uh, since my White House time, basically trying to square the circle, try to merge the worlds, like of working with AAA developers and also working with nonprofits and governmental institutions who maybe are interested in using games for something and like matchmake and stir the pot and work on projects here and there.
Like I, I did some work with, I've worked with Microsoft, worked with Verizon. Just finished up a bunch of work on a project with NASA. This is kind of my pandemic project to get kids excited about space. Um, so. Oh, awesome. Which was super amazing with this, this organization called Future Engineers. That's an easy sell, isn't it?
Is it? I
Alex: mean, I don't know.
Mark: Yeah. Space? Space! So cool! I know! It's awesome! Yeah! This project was amazing. It was, this, NASA funded this thing called TechRise, and their idea was, we're going to get kids excited about space and excited about coding, by having [01:04:00] kids build things and code. Like physical experiments, and then we're going to shoot him up in his face.
OK, like
Alex: for real,
Mark: like for real. Yeah. So they had they they worked to get 20 births on the Blue Origin rocket, 20 births on a sounding rocket, which has the same flight path as the Blue Origin rocket. It's just a different, you know, shape rocket. And then 20 on a high altitude hot air balloon, you know, for kids who wanted to do stuff that was atmosphere related, maybe.
Um, and then they said, Hey, you know, pitch us ideas, your schools, your classes, your individuals, pitch us ideas. We'll pick one winning team from each state to kind of keep it, you know, fair. And we'll give you 1500 bucks for parts. We'll give you this software and hardware infrastructure, which is what I built.
And then we'll give you a box and a berth. And you build your experiment in the box, send it back to us. We'll test it and make sure it's not going to fall apart when it's subjected to 16 G's and then [01:05:00] we'll shoot it up into space and then you get the box and the data back. Yeah, it was a great, amazing effort.
So I, I built out most of the software for that, for like a simulator and some Python layer and an Arduino layer and a block coding layer for different. Wow, that
Alex: is so cool.
Mark: It was great. Unfortunately, the first rocket that went up exploded. Oh, no. So that was kind of a bummer, but also a great lesson. Yeah, but it was it was amazing.
And they're still doing it. It's like the third or fourth year of it. And
Aaron: the goal is to get kids interested in space.
Mark: Yeah. So it's to get kids interested in space by building something. And so they basically are building Things with microcontrollers with Arduinos, um, Raspberry Pis, micro bits, whatever.
And then they program them in, you know, the language that's appropriate for them. If they're high schools, it's probably Arduino. Cause it's like C mid school, it's Python, CircuitPython stuff, elementary school use block coding and use little motors. And [01:06:00] yeah, it's, it's, it's really cool. Super, super cool.
Alex: That's awesome. That's awesome stuff. Cool. All right, Mark, we've kept you a little over. Um, but what a, what a fascinating arc. And I just, I love all of this kind of stuff that we're talking about. It's just like,
Mark: awesome.
Alex: You know, we, we talk about how games, just games in general, not necessarily video games, but just like play has been kind of part of the human experience.
Like since we stood upright, you know, basically, you know, and, uh, the fact that we've been able to harness technology, not just for the pure entertainment value of it, but to harness that play and pointed at these virtuous goals of enriching ourselves with education or improving our health or whatever it is, I think that's amazing.
So. Keep doing what you're doing.
Mark: Thank you. Yep. And it's a lot of fun. Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. And that's the, that's like the, the key. If you're having fun doing it, then that's, that's the best motivation ever. Yeah. And I hope those [01:07:00] kids whose rocket blew up, get a chance to get another ride. You know,
Mark: I'm not sure what happened.
Yeah. I was going to say.
Aaron: It shouldn't be too hard to get kids interested in space though, right?
Mark: Yeah.
Aaron: They're all like
Mark: Oh man, it's the most fun thing ever when they were calling in to let us know how they were doing. We'd have phone calls and the camera would come up and we'd be faced with like a classroom of 30 really, really excited kids.
They were having so much fun.
Alex: That is awesome. But
Mark: if people are curious to plug in and learn more about this kind of stuff, like the, probably they'd. The most interesting places to go are the games for change. You can start with the games for change awards nominees and look at those games. That's
Aaron: what I'm looking at now.
Mark: And then the Ed Games Expo, which is the event at the Kennedy Center that Department of Ed holds every year. You can just look at like at the list of things at that Ed Games Expo. And it's like so many amazing projects in there. So from things like Never Alone, which is, you know, kind of a triple A quality, beautiful game that.
Teach you about, uh, the culture of the Inuit, uh, people in [01:08:00] Alaska, to stuff that's more classroom ready, K 12, and maybe a little drier, but like, that is really good at evaluating how good students are at, you know, eighth grade algebra or something, and then trying to get them to the next level in a fun and engaging way.
So, yeah. Quite a mix. Looks cool.
Alex: Awesome. Both
Mark: of
Alex: those. Awesome. We'll include those links in, in the show notes too. And I'm going to go check it out. Awesome. Right on. All right. Thanks, Mark. Yeah. Thanks, Mark. It's you guys. Nice talking to you. Yeah. Good stuff. Right on. Yes. Likewise. We'll see you around. That sounds good.
Cheers. Cheers. Did you ever watch the
Aaron: West Wing? No. Okay. It's funny you ask that question. Cause I remember this same question happened whenever I moved to LA. And, uh, we were working in the studio, and I think West Wing was popular in that time. So like 2012, 2013, it was kind of popular, they were probably like on their fourth season by then?
Or was it 2000? Dude, you're asking me about dates I don't know, but,
Alex: [01:09:00] okay. Let's just say, for argument's sake, sure. Okay.
Aaron: Before I moved to LA, I didn't know anything about politics, like zero percent. And someone was talking about West Wing, and in my mind, I thought West Wing was like where the offices were, and then that like the food was in the East Wing.
And like left wing and right wing, you know what I'm saying? So like in my mind, I was like, Oh, like, Oh, left wing, that's, that's where the offices are and right wing is where the kitchen is. And like, you know, so yeah, so that's my comment on West wing. I don't know anything. I did. I don't know anything about what the West wing of the white house, is that where the president's office is?
I'm assuming. I think it's where the, it's the working part of the.
Alex: Yeah, so I was right. Mark just told us, he just told us. Yes, the West Wing is like the working part of the, the White House, but he was in the um, Eisenhower building? Yeah, he was in a,
Aaron: he was in another building he was saying. Yeah. That wasn't white.
It was like concrete or something, [01:10:00] stone.
Alex: So mysterious, the inner, inner machinations of our government. You ever have any interest in like working in. Public service in the government, you know, our but our buddy Marty is is
Aaron: uh Ran for president ran for Congress
Alex: ran for Congress.
Aaron: No, but I I actually wanted to what he was talking about That, to me, is super interesting.
The Games4Change stuff? Yeah. That is really cool.
Alex: And I had no idea that there were federally funded grants for, uh, games in the fields of education and, and things like that. And I think that's pretty cool. Very cool. I have some friends who are working on, you know, like, Assassin's Creed, I think they have a, kind of like a version of their games.
For educational use. And I've got a friend who's doing something similar with kind of recreating history in an interactive setting, but like realistically, like in Unreal, super cool. What? I haven't [01:11:00] seen this. Yeah. Like what, what are they doing? What history? It's like, you know, like the American revolution or other eras of history where you can kind of immerse yourself in that.
Play a role and immerse yourself in the environment and see
Aaron: it firsthand. Oh, like whenever you go to like Boston and you go to that place where everyone is like dressed like the, the 1800, no 1700. That's
Alex: right. Yeah. But there's something going on and you're getting like different opinions about what's happening.
And the British are coming.
Aaron: You get to like throw the tea over the ship and you learn why they were like throwing the tea over the ship. Yeah. You know the tea party? Yeah. No, I'm not sure. Like you're cringing. Wait, are these like controversial topics? Are they? No, they're not.
Alex: I just, I, I don't, I don't remember if you can actually throw the tea overboard.
Aaron: Well, that would be interesting if you get to play as both parties, like you get to play as a
Alex: British soldier. You [01:12:00] definitely get to see all those different perspectives, which I think is what makes it interesting. That's cool. That's
Aaron: very interesting. I think it's fantastic.
Alex: Yeah, have you ever done any, like, um Yeah,
Aaron: I have actually.
I worked for I know you're gonna ask. Like, they were called Serious Games.
Alex: Yeah, Serious Games, and I wasn't actually I mean, okay, if you've worked on them, extra plus, tell me about it. I was kind of even curious if you've ever like, played any. Yeah, I have played and did you call it play? Is that what you call it?
Do you like you play? Well, the army when you would play
Aaron: I'm with the army one America's aren't you ever play
Alex: America's
Aaron: Army? I installed it. I tried playing it and it was way too realistic and I uninstalled it Okay, it was like it was for people that like that stuff like oh, that's a LD 37 You know scope and like it, you know and like you you actually shoot the weapon like you're supposed to As opposed to having a little aim assist, you know, which is Nazi, but yeah, they're not called serious games anymore.
Now they're [01:13:00] called right. They're called something else now. Like serious games has broken up because now you have like health games. You have like serious games kind of like encompassed everything that wasn't for. Like fun,
Alex: just purely for fun. Yeah.
Aaron: And then now you're
Alex: right there, there are lots of different, uh, applications of
Aaron: interactive.
Yeah. There's like medicine now, like kids, what did you work on? We did this game for the Navy to help. The people that are on the, um, the ship, the surface of the ship on like these aircraft carriers, and these people have to, they have to use hand signals to direct planes. So the game was, you know, these F 22s and F 14s or whatever they are, are landing, I shouldn't say it like that, like it was a lot of different planes are landing on the, on the aircraft carrier.
And. you have to park them and you have to park them in a specific way. So I like worked on the animation of the airplanes and the character that's running around the [01:14:00] the aircraft carrier. And like, you have to manage, it's basically a managing game, but you're learning the signals like this means go right, this means go left, this means stop.
Also like dangerous stuff, like you're not supposed to walk behind airplanes.
Alex: Oh, yeah,
Aaron: you'll like you'll get you'll get like cooked. Yeah, cooked or shot, shot off the ship. And if you fall off the ship, they won't stop for you. Like you're gone. So you don't want to fall off a ship. That's like the worst thing that can happen.
Yeah. Besides getting toasted by a, by a, by a jet. But seriously, like, you fall off and the ship can't stop. So it just keeps going. Like there's no, it's like pretty brutal. You don't
Alex: have like, throw a jet ski off, you know, and like, vzzzzzz, and come
Aaron: and get you? Maybe, I don't, that's what I thought, but it was like, that was one of the things that, they, like, cause you learn all this stuff, you know.
Mm. Mm. So don't fall off the ship.
Alex: Okay. Yeah, no, that's good. And it was a contract
Aaron: for the military. Like it was a military contract game.
Alex: Well, that's [01:15:00] cool. Um, I don't know why this is really a side question, but Have you ever been on a jet ski? I think, I don't think I have, dude. It's kind of, it's like, it's not on my bucket list, but it's like one of those things where it's like, that looks like fun.
I want to ride a jet ski.
Aaron: It's a fricking leaf blower on the ocean. No, it's like, don't they like hurt fish? I'm not trying to be a Debbie downer here. Sorry if your name is Debbie, by the way, but I'm not trying to be a downer.
Alex: Uh, okay. If they're. If they're bad for fish, I didn't know that, and I wouldn't want to hurt the fish, kinda.
I mean, I eat fish. You eat fish? But jet ski kind of looks like fun, and I was like, Laura doesn't really want me to go on a jet ski, I don't know why. I think she thinks I'll crash.
Aaron: Wait, uh, I remember the Nintendo Wave Race 64, that was a cool jet ski game. Yeah,
Alex: not the [01:16:00] same. I don't think that's the same.
Maybe this summer. No, it's not the same. It might happen this summer, Aaron. Do it in a lake. Okay. Dude in a lake. Yeah, I'm gonna be on, I'm gonna be on Lake Michigan for a while, so. Yeah,
Aaron: that water's pretty safe. There's no, dude, bull sharks get in there. I heard. No,
Alex: they don't. That is such bullshit. Is it really?
Yeah. I saw it on like a comic book. Yeah. Yeah. Bilby tried to, Bilby tried to convince me that there are bull sharks. Well,
Aaron: I'm on his side. In Lake Michigan?
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And I looked it up and I think he was just messing with me. Is it an urban legend? I don't think it's true. Uh, maybe one, maybe
Aaron: one got in there, you know?
Yeah, they can get in there. They find sharks sometimes. In freshwater, because they're looking for food. Does it, do bull sharks eat people? Well, they like, they're like bulls. They like, they like ram, boats. That's why it's called a bull shark.
Alex: Mate, you're making,
Aaron: it's
Alex: called a bull shark because it's bull shark.
Yeah, well, crap. Okay, alright, well, um, if you made it this far, [01:17:00] you truly are a friend of the show. Thanks for sticking around. Um, if you're out at Lake Michigan this summer, maybe we can go jet skiing together, I don't know, drop me a line. We'll see you next week. Oh, one other thing,
Aaron: speaking of bull sharks, you should check out Endless Ocean for the Nintendo Switch.
It got a lot of bad reviews, but I think it's a phenomenal game, and it's about looking at sharks and fish and stuff like that. It's really good.
Alex: Very relaxing. I played it. Pretty chill. All right. On that note, thanks for joining us again. Hope you enjoyed our conversation with Mark Delora, and we shall see you next week.
Aaron: See you later. Thank you for listening to the 4th Curtain Podcast. The 4th Curtain is a production of 4th Curtain Media with community management by Doug Zardman. Lovingly edited and mastered by Brian Hensley at noise floor sound solutions in Chicago, to get a peek at upcoming episodes or to sending questions to the show, visit our site at the fourth curtain.
com and be sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for [01:18:00] listening.
Mark DeLoura Leverages Games for More
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 21 min
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Episode description
Our guest Mark DeLoura has had a stunningly wide-ranging career: game developer and executive for Nintendo, Sony and THQ, Editor in Chief of Game Developer magazine, Senior Advisor for Digital Media in the White House, author of Programming Gems book series, built hardware and software for NASA and served on the Board at Games for Change. This week he joins us to talk about building entertainment and games as a language to serve a greater good!
Thank you for listening to our podcast all about videogames and the amazing people who bring them to life!
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Transcript
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