Hello and welcome to Think Like A Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at ThinkLikeAGameDesigner.com. Thank you for making this show possible through your pledges, podcast reviews, and enthusiasm
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In today's episode, I speak with Geoff Engelstein. Geoff is an award-winning tabletop game designer and adjunct professor of game design at the NYU Game Center, his titles include Space Cadets, The Fog of War, Pit Crew, and Super Skill Pinball. Geoff has also contributed to the Dice Tower podcast series on the Math Science and Psychology of Games, and hosted the
Lodology podcast on game design. He has decades of experience, not just in games, but also has a degree in physics and electrical engineering from MIT, pretty impressive, and has had leadership positions, a company's including Mars International, Mindbillet Games, and Nover Engelstein and Associates. He is not only a wealth of information on game design, but also on the
industry in general. We talk a lot about his origin story, we talk about how he was able to program and design computer games in high school and quit his job at Burger King, which was a really fun story. We talk about the tools today and how he would recommend people that want to learn to program, or get started in game design, could do so, and how much
easier it is today to do that. We talk about the impact of psychology and psychological experiments on players and how reframing some very basic features of your game can transform them from drawbacks into advantages. We talk about when the right time to use theory to your advantage, when the right time to break the rules to make your games better and to serve what really matters, which is the experience of your players. There is a lot
of meat on the bones here. Geoff is a great teacher and a someone who honestly, I thought I would have had on the podcast a long time before now, but I corrected that mistake finally, so I'm very proud and glad to present with you, Geoff Anglestein. Hello and welcome, I am here with Geoff Anglestein. Geoff, it is great to finally have you
on the podcast. Thanks for having me. It was funny we were joking before we started recording about how we have been in the same circles, you helped get me connected when I was doing my talk at GDC. I had elucidally created the fact that I thought we had already had this conversation and it turns out we never had, so it was a pretty funny psychological trick I played on myself, but I'm glad we're finally doing that.
Well, Mandela effect action there. Yeah, exactly. I will have given some of your bio and current work before we started here. I definitely want to dig into some of the interesting things that you have done. I actually don't know your origin stories. I usually like to try to start bringing all of the guests down to Earth a little bit and talk about where you started, how you got into gaming and we'll take the fun tangents along the way.
Sure. I have always played games with family and stuff like that, all the basic mass market stuff. I was first exposed to hobby games in the 70s. I had a story I've told before, but I will repeat it here. It was my first introduction to these types of games. I didn't even know they existed and I was like summer camp where all good things happen and we all
grow as human beings. I had the reputation as the smart kid at the bunk, which really should have been like the kid is really terrible at sports and you never went on your team. I took that. This kid from an older kid came in and he just threw this game down on the bed. He was like, hey, I heard you smart. Let's play this tomorrow. I opened it up and read the rules and it was a complete mystery to me and I tried to figure it out overnight.
You came back the next day and I got absolutely destroyed. Then afterward C said, well, I guess you're not that smart after all and took his game and left. I guess rather than turning me off from games, I took it as a challenge. It's like, wait a second. What is going on here? Turned out the game was Panzerblitz. I realized years later when I finally saw the cover in Interpol context. Those you don't know is an old Avalon Hill board game about
tank battles. That kind of got me intrigued and I found out where those games were and was off to the races. The next summer, if I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, another kid just started talking my ear off about this game that he was playing with his friends. The way he described it to me was strictly about the stories that they had encountered. He didn't mention mechanics or D20 or anything at all. It was just like, this is what happened
to us as if it was a movie or a novel or something like that. I was like, wow, I've never even heard of a game that a game could do something like that or that you'd all play together as one of the first kind of cooperative games in a way. That kind of launched me into that. That was probably when I was about 11, 12 years old back then. This was in the
1970s. Then just started playing a lot of war games. It was a mini golden age, a silver age, I guess, so for the golden age now, games like Cosmic Encounter and we got into Heavily and to Diplomacy, which was from the 50s, but a lot of those types of games, the series war games in college. Then it just went from there when we had kids switched over to Euro Games. Kids in the 90s, that was when the Euro Games were just starting to come into the
US. We actually did import them from Germany and have the little translated for us and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. It has been nearly universal of the people that I speak to on this podcast that they were either brought in and hooked by Dutch and Dragons or Magic Gathering. It's like 90% plus rate of like, this is the thing that
kind of like, wait a minute, what's possible here? My working hypothesis is that there's this aspect to those games that gets you, you have to sort of create and design games within the game, right? That there's an element of you're just like, you're crafting the experience, it gives you a little bit more freedom and idea than compared to something like monopoly where you just follow the rules, do the things and pass the rule. Yeah.
So I don't know if you... Well, I think that's true. I mean, I think that that's true. It lets you be kind of creative within the framework. Magic The Gathering kind of missed me. I guess it was in the early 90s and that was what I just had just hit kids. So I like totally mismatched it. I mean, it's not mad at the beginning. It was really big. So I never got into it as much. But yeah, I think that those kind of deck construction games
and stuff like that will let you play with stuff. And so this is an interesting thing too. I just want to sort of cue in on see if there's anything here. You play this super complicated devil on hill game. You don't really fully understand the rules. You don't win. A lot of people, that's the point that they check out and they're done. Right? There's like, all right, I don't get it. I'm gone. But you found that intriguing kind of got you into it
more in a sense. You wanted to learn more. Do you think that there's something there either in terms of your personality or in terms of a key trait of what gets people past those initial hums and brings people more corley into the game or demographic, if you will? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, there certainly was. It's weird because at this stage, I don't feel like I'm a really competitive person. In that same way, it's not like I play. I
have lost so many times at this point that it's kind of gotten burned out of me. But yeah, I mean, certainly in high school and college, I was competitive. I like to win not at all costs, but I certainly played to win and wanted to do it. When presented with something where I lost, particularly when it seemed like something I should be able to do and I should be able to understand that kind of intrigued me. I think that it was the same kind
of thing. I majored in physics and electrical engineering in college. My first exposure to that and some of the more advanced concepts was a little more challenging to me and required me to kind of apply myself and dig in and really get under the covers to understand what happened. So I think a lot of the stuff that I really love doesn't necessarily come as easy to me. You got to spend a little effort to get into it.
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's one of the things I actually consider. I mean, you did physics degree from MIT. It's not an easy thing to do in general. I think, right? So this is this love of hard work, in a sense, or this, I don't know if love is the right word, but this is this sort of willingness to kind of do the hard things or be intrigued by the
hard problems. I feel like it's one of these superpowers, right? This kind of curiosity and obsession that kind of pair together, you know, regardless of what you're trying to do in life, you know, making games is hard. Obviously, I'm sure it's your theoretical
physics and physics is hard. I didn't make it that far. So I gave up earlier on that one, but you have to find something that, you know, you're passionate enough and curious enough about what this thing is and that you don't understand that you're willing to kind of go through this intrinsically uncomfortable process of figuring stuff out and not knowing and, you know, bashing your head against the wall for a while, so you kind of are able
to start getting some understanding. Yeah, and the head bashing is an important part. I mean, I think my, I get a, you know, being self aggrandizing, I don't know whatever, but I mean, I think, you know, my, one of my superpowers is just that, you know, I just have like a hubris that to just do it, right? I mean, I think ultimately game design or, you know, I've written books to, you know, and stuff like that. It's, it's the same
general kind of thing. It's like, well, you know, writing a book is pretty big undertaking or, you know, I'm going to design a, you know, a war game about whatever, right? I mean, it's a, it's a pretty big thing. And you just have to have sort of a, a little bit of overconfident, I guess, or lack of self awareness terms of how, you know, just, you just have
to go into it saying, oh, yeah, I can do this. You know, and then when you get into it and then you realize, oh, I can't do this, you know, of kind of getting, getting through that, but the way to get through that is just by trying to do it and failing and then doing
it again and doing it again and doing it again, right? I mean, I've known people that I've talked to that like, or very, their theoretical game designers, you know, they have this game design they've wanted to do and they think about it in their head and they kind of mess around or they, you know, they, they, they read about it from mechanics and, but, you know, but they
never actually sit down and like build a quick prototype or do it. You know, I mean, there's just certain steps you got to take or, you know, the best way to write a book is just to sit down and start writing. Yeah. No, I could not, could not agree more. And I try to emphasize that message. I mean, there's plenty of people and I'm very grateful for those people
that are listening to this podcast. There's listened to all of our episodes and 100 plus hours of stuff and they haven't picked up a piece of paper or a pencil and start making a prototype of the road, right? And the difference of as much value as I think I'm providing and our guests are providing here, there is no substitute for the doing and the learning from doing. I know. And so I think that some, some combination there of, I wanted to get
in on the things I, sorry. Well, so one of the things that was also kind of formative for me was, so when I was in high school, I designed a couple of computer games for the old Apple 2 computer, which was not a pick pick back then. 16K, baby, you know, that's what we really had to program. And, but, you know, I got them designed, published, you know, sold them, they were, they were sitting on some store shelves, enabled me to quit
my job at Burger King, which I was very excited about. And just, you know, the experience of going through that of knowing all the steps to kind of, you know, just create something till it was done was really formative for me. And, and I think was, you know, certainly help later when I started getting into, you know, board game design and stuff like that.
But it was also something I really wanted my kids to experience. So, you know, when they expressed interest in designing games and, you know, or the first couple of games that I did that I had published, I did it with my kids, as I, you know, it was great to bring them along and show them, you know, for that process that it's, yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of fun, but it's also a lot of hard work and perseverance and it's going to take
10 times longer than you think. But I think that I hope that that's really, you know, help them down the road of, you know, developing that confidence that they can go ahead and do stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, well, there's so much to unpack here. And I echo the sentiment. You know, it's funny. We're recording this like I just got back the last night, late last night from Peck's East showing off our newest game, SoulFour Fusion. But I had one of my favorite
experiences at the show had nothing to do with SoulFour Fusion. It was a, a father and son that came up to me and said, Hey, you know, we've been reading your book and listening to the podcast and now my son is making these games and he showed me the games and, you know, they were able to bond and create that experience together and kids game was actually
pretty good. Like he was nine or something, you know, maybe even younger. And it was like, this is like a really cool thing to see them bonding over it to see them learning those skills. And the father asked me the same question is like, Hey, how can I, how can I encourage him? He wasn't a game designer, you know, by trade and didn't have like, what do I do
next? Like, how do I, how do I help him? And I had a similar response to what you said, which is, you know, look, obviously, you know, continue to encourage him and support him. And, you know, you could have him get in the practice of like pitching things and moving, getting, understanding that he's going to get rejected most of the time and trying a new thing. But in regards to whether he keeps interest in excitement and game design, these
skills are so such valuable skills. Doesn't matter what field you're in, the ability to, you know, make a thing, put it out there, see if it works, see if it doesn't learn from that and move forward again is just the feels like the key skill in terms of what you can succeed at in life. Yeah, that's a great story. And I think that the value, that's what
I wanted to kind of circle back to. And I want to talk more about the game design in high school and quitting your job in Burger King because this is, I know there's more to unpack there. But before that, I was going to make a note because I did, I was working at a deli at a Jewish deli. And so I've been making very, very little as a bus boy when I started playing magic and suddenly making money, playing magic for a living. So I got, I had a different
narrative that got me out of that. So I'm sure we could share stories there before we get to that. I want to talk about this, this balance between hubris as a superpower, which I 100% agree right again, a game design entrepreneurship. This, like, I need some form of irrational exuberance that I can do a thing that nobody else can do or that thousands of people try to do or millions of people try to do and fail. I could do it,
right? But then you also need the humility and the ability to take in feedback and recognize and course correct in ways when you're not on the right path. And almost inevitably early ideas are terrible or, you know, at the very least need massive refinement. How do you
square that circle, right? How do you find or advise for either in yourself or in the people that you advise to find that balance of that, you know, sort of can do, crush every obstacle in front of me and the, okay, wait, learn, pivot, you know, adjust as feedback and data comes in. I mean, for me, it was just the harsh reality of kind of truth and other people, you know, one of the first games, board games that I had done. So this was,
you know, years, you know, maybe in 2005, something like that. But, you know, I started getting into, you know, inside of me, I'm designing board games. Kids are a little older, got some time for that. Let's do it. Let's get into it. And I had this game that I was very excited about and had designed it. And I thought it was great. And I actually got a pitch meeting
with with Z-Men games of Slazinger lived in our local area here. And I went and, yeah, I played it really, really know anything about, you know, pitching or play testing or any of that kind of stuff. And I went out there and it's to him and played it with him in a few of other, you know, designers that he had with them. And it was an absolute disaster. The game went off the rails like, you know, immediately, you know, it was just so embarrassing
and so terrible. And I went back and, you know, that game I never have taken off the shell after that. So I've considered going back and picking it up and maybe dusting it off and seeing what's there. But it just, it's just left such a psychic. But again, I didn't stop designing games. I was like, okay, you know, what I'm taking from this is that, yeah,
I love this game and I think it's great. And, but what I went into that play test thinking was that, oh, yeah, I knew, I knew, you know, emotionally or you know, I kind of knew that it wasn't totally baked, right? But I was absolutely sure, 100% sure that when I put this on the table and played it with these other incredibly experienced designers, that they would clearly see the genius that lay in this. Oh, yes. It's like, oh, yeah.
It's a little rough around the edges, but the core is really solid and they did not see that. And it really wasn't a solid, you know, a solid core. So for me, that was a real harder and less than one that I took. So the next time I went and my first game actually was published by Z-man finally. So I went back, you know, I had another design fears later, we play tested it to death, did the right things. And then that time when we pitched it,
he said, yeah, yeah, he said, this is real game. Let's, let's make these two exhibits do it. All right. I'll ask a little bit of a loaded question then to dig at something else here, which is like, okay, well, you showed him this game. You showed this game and Z-man games this game. It was terrible. It went off the rails. Okay, this is a fail. You're emotionally scarred. But somehow you were able to come back and pitch him a game later
than ends up getting published. Like, what, why do you think that was? And what is it that that, what is it that transpired between point A and point B? Um, I mean, I, I, again, I guess there's just a love of games. I mean, I, you know, it's something I wanted to do. I mean, I guess it goes back to, you know, that camp experience of me, you know, getting crushed in the game and coming back and wanting to learn it and
try again and see if I could do better. So, you know, I, I guess there's just certain personality traits in there. But, you know, you, you need a thick skin. If you want to be in this business, you're going to be, you know, stuff is going to be, or, and, you know, it happens all the time. I just showed a game just earlier this year to Martin Wallace. And he just, because he just ripped his shirts. He was very unhappy with it. Some, right? Some not
so right. But, you know, whatever, you know, but that's, you know, even it, it always is going to happen. So you just got to, you know, you just got to be prepared to dust yourself off and, and take what you can and experience before. Yeah. One of the things I like to do is just sort of, you know, redefine what success looks like when you're pitching a game, right? I mean, obviously there's the dream version where you get the product landed and, you know, it becomes a
huge runaway success as everyone's dancing on a pile of money. But really, what you're most often success is like, hey, I come across well as a person to the publisher. I am able to have a good conversation with them on a little learn from that experience. And the door is open for me to come back, right? I think that's like a lot of people, you know, your first pitch is
going to fail 90% plus of the time. But if you show up as someone that people are interested in working with and people that's good to, you know, kind of, it can, can kind of personable and follows up. Like that, that's worth gold, right? I know a tons of people that have pitched games to me that I, you know, didn't pick up, but I keep it touch with and they can, they have an open door.
I think that's a very valuable thing for people to change their frame a little bit and how hard that rejection hurts when you realize that winning is getting yourself up there and getting yourself as many at baths as you can. Yeah, and that's, you know, I think that's true in life in general, you know, and anything that you do when you get rejected, you know, I never like to burn bridges. You always like to keep things with people. My daughter works for indie games studios.
So she's the developer for them and takes pitches and stuff like that is one of her primary jobs. And she's had designers that, you know, she's said, look, you know, it's a decent game, but it's kind of not for me, not for us, you know, that's not what we're looking for or hear some things, maybe want to tweak and they get like really angry at that. Like, no, you know, it's that same, you know, you don't see the genius thing, right? When they argue with you is my favorite. It's my favorite.
It's like, you're not going to change my mind by arguing, you know, so, and so, you know, there's, she's not going to look kindly on them if they come back, you know, it's that that's a bridge that's kind of burned. You know, you know, right? Try to, you don't need to be a, yeah, you don't need to necessarily just be a, you know, bend with every breeze that comes with every comment on your game, but, you know, you still want to be respectful and, you know, take, take
what you can out of each encounter. Yeah, yeah, just because a publisher or anybody gives you specific feedback doesn't mean that they're right. It doesn't mean you have to accept it, but, you know, you can receive it in a gracious way and show that you're open to often you are going to be wrong. And certainly in the world where you see the same feedback multiple times from multiple parties, something there is wrong. No, you know, I say this quote all the time, some people in the
podcast will know, but my favorite Neil Gaiman quote, right? It's for books, but applies here is, you know, when your readers tell you that something is wrong, they're almost always right. I mean, they take you how to fix it. They're almost always wrong, right? You know, you're game better than anybody. The skill of design is figuring out how to solve the problem, but your customer, the player is the one that finds the problems. Like they're the results of it. It's a
problem for them. It's a problem, regardless of how genius you think it is. If only they knew how to play it right or do whatever, you know, yeah, from my class, when I teach my class, I have two slides that I introduce my section on playtesting about. One is your playtesters are always right, or always listen to your playtesters. And the second slide is never listen to your playtesters.
Perfect. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's tough. You know, so much of this is like, you know, understanding our conversations about this, but like so much of skill in life is holding these contradictory truths at the same time, right? Being able to balance the two extremes of, okay, yeah, listen to your audience, but really trust your gut. Have immense hubris and exuberance, but also be willing to cut bait and run when it's not right. And you got to be able
to adjust accordingly, right? There's a lot of this tension where, you know, it's easy to dull out advice, but really the skill comes in having that, you know, dialing in your intuition on where, which, which lens you should be viewing the world through and how to balance between those two polls. All right, I want to jump back. We're going to talk to about teaching. I want to leave a good chunk about teaching both in class and podcasts and how you spread your message and your new,
your new org also that you're working on for tabletop design, for tabletop industry. But I want to, I cannot leave this high school story behind. I need to understand because, because again,
these are the things like this is this is the key to the key to the origin stories, right? Like the, not everybody, but everybody lots of people talk about wanting to make games, lots of people say they want to make games, lots of people have great ideas for games, but not many, many people will actually end up getting through the process of programming a game, and especially you actually programming it,
launching it and making enough money to quit your, quit your day job or your side job, whatever. So, so talking me through a little bit about what that, how you got started, what, what your project was, what lessons were learned there. Yeah, I was just, I was of a certain age that,
you know, personal computers were just coming out when I was a kid. So, you know, the TRS 80 at just launched, I remember that was the first one that I saw in the wild in our local radio shack, a lesson memory, that, you know, and it was, that you could program it and actually, you know, got really into, into computers of just like learning about them, and actually get the opportunity to program, but at first, but, you know, I kind of ended up self teaching myself
had a program. I bought this book called the, the big book of basic computer games, which I still have to this day of my basement when I was in like seventh grade or a grade. So, this was like 1977 or something like that, 78, and it was just listings of basic computer, computer games in the language, basic, and you could type them into your computer. You had a TRS 80, you could just type them in or your Apple 2 and then save them on a cassette tape, which is how we end to save
those back in the day and play them. You know, basic games like, you know, homerombie and hunt the want this and it was a Star Trek game, it was like the ultimate, that was the longest one you had to type in. And, you know, I literally kind of taught myself how to program just from reverse engineering that book, just from like reading through it and there was no guides or stuff like that to, to, that were easily accessible. And so that was kind of my first exposure to programming was computer
games and getting and doing it that way. And so just gradually I learned more and more, I mean, ultimately, I ended up learning assembly language versus what you needed to do to do anything real on computers in terms of video games. And then, you know, I was fortunate and that my parents bought me an Apple 2. I actually wanted a cheaper, I had this whole pitch plan with this cheaper computer that was only black and white. The PET, the Commodore PET computer was the one I read,
but I decided that I could convince my parents to get me. And then my father was like, well, you know, what about this Apple one that does color as like, well, it's twice the price, but sure. And so they got that for me. And so yeah, good job parents. It was a friend of mine and I that, you know, we kind of taught each other, we kind of self learned assembly language and how to do the Apple just reading and bite magazine and stuff like that. And just, you know, just decided,
hey, let's do a game. And we did it. I love working with other people, generally. That was the first instance of that. I find that I'm much more productive when I work with another person, because they keep me honest and I keep them honest. And we kind of, you know, generally keep each other on the right track. And, you know, it was really the Wild West. There was a local here in New Jersey. There was a local computer game store that was starting to get into
publishing games. And so we went in and, you know, partnered with them and they, you know, they published it and sold it. And like I said, the timing was great. I was in high school. I just got my driver's license. And I needed gas money for my car. So I signed up for the local burger to get a job. And there was like a two month wait to start or something. It was crazy. They told me they had to wait to get the uniform in. That's why I couldn't start right away. And I started and
I worked a day. And the day after my very first day of Burger King, I got the first royalty check in from the game, which was like a thousand dollars or something like that. And, and I was very unhappy with my first day burger kick. So I was hoping for an imposition. And so I went, but I went back a second day and I worked and it was just as bad again. And I was like, I kind of said, you know, I just got this royalty. This came thing. This programming thing seems to be the way to go.
It seems to be like a much better way to make money than standing here working in a burger king. So I use that for my gas money. And that gets kind of enough to the races from there. Awesome. I love it. I love this story. So, you know, on the kind of side, you know, pretty, pretty big tangent then, you know, you learn the program and assembly language, you know, from a book on some of the earliest computers. Nowadays, there's, you know, many languages far more sophisticated
and easier to access. There's a billion different channels for how to learn. And there's also these, you know, kind of we feel like we're, it feels like we're on this cusp of pretty big revolution. The way programming is going to be done for a lot of people and kind of some variations of natural language programming or co-pair programming with an AI and things like that. What do you recommend for people today that are kind of thinking about making games or building skill sets in this
space? I am lucky that I kind of grew up when I grew up, I think. If I was growing up today, there are such amazing tools that are available for zero cost. So, I mean, if you're interested in learning how to program and you're really into video games between like Unity and Gado and the Unreal Engine, I mean, if Unity was out when I was in high school, I never would have left the house. It would have been a terrible, terrible situation. I wouldn't have gone out. I wouldn't have met people.
And, you know, it's that the tools that are available that are just totally free are just unbelievable to me. So, I think that, you know, if you're in video games or your kids are in video games, you know that there's, you know, if you just down, like say, Unity is a good one, Gado is a good one that you can just go and download them. 100% absolutely free. You can get things like blender for doing 3D modeling. There are such phenomenal tools that are available and there's tons,
as you mentioned, of YouTube content on how to learn these tools and how to teach it. And I think, you know, you talk about motivation. It's like, okay, I want to make, you know, this type of computer game, this type of, I love this type of video game. And, you know, I want to, I have my own idea how to do it, right? Here's a toolkit that does a lot of the gromp work for you. It'll just, you know, it'll handle the navigation and the lighting and the, you know, all of the stuff that we
had to deal with on the lower level back in the day. It abstracts so much of that, that it just, it just lets you do the fun parts and the creative parts. And, you know, but you have to do enough programming that it'll kind of get you into that and get you learning on how to do it. So, you know, there's a ton of fantastic resources out there that are just 100% free. Yeah, yeah, no, we're not, we're not lacking for, for information these days. It's sort of just
this ability, you know, the, the, in fact, it's the opposite in many ways, right? The ability to block out all of the options and information I have just to focus on the ones that I actually want
to execute on. And, and, you know, it's, it's parsing it out right? A lot of people think, you know, I want to be a game designer and there's, you know, different aspects of what it means to be a game designer and the more skills that you have this, you know, the ability to build a good game and design a good game and have the rules and understand how the player reactions going to be, is its own skill set. I don't know how to program, but I, you know, work with programmers to help
bring those visions to life. But the more skills that you do have to bear to bring into the industry, the more powerful you are and the more valuable you are and the more you can get down yourself,
whether that be from programming or creating content or, you know, whatever. And I think that the, one of the things that excites me is that with the, the, the set of tools that are coming online, more and more every year, you know, more and more people will have that capacity to, to be able to create and build stuff, you know, either a solo teams or very small teams and, you know, Indies playing like they're there with the big boys. It's a, it's a very fascinating time to be
in the industry. Yeah, 100% agree. The, the, the power that people have at their fingertips is phenomenal and, you know, I hope I think that it will lead to a flourishing of creativity and I know some people are concerned that people will just start, you know, phoning it in and letting
the, the system do all they're thinking for them. I don't think that's the case. But I think it's really going to allow for flourishing of, of, you know, why in the 10 more people, you know, it used to be a few, if you wanted to draw, you know, you needed, there was a certain set of skills you had and then computer tools, you know, then Illustrator came out and, you know, Photoshop came out and there was more tools. And now there's like AI assistants and things like that. So I think just
gradually, it just brings more people into the tent with, with new ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I think I, I view the, the state of AI tools and tools today as like a kind of a U-shaped value curve. Like, if you're bad at something, you're all, you're getting a huge amount of value out of this because you're automatically mediocre at everything, right? There's just no thing you're not bad at anything
anymore. You're always mediocre. And if you're great at stuff, then you can use these tools to kind of move yourself forward much faster and like be able to sort of accelerate yourself. If you're in the middle and you're just kind of mediocre, you've lost all competitive advantages. It doesn't, doesn't do much of anything for you. So I think it's a very interesting time to have, have a few niche skills and to be able to level up pretty quickly on everything else.
So this is kind of sideways lands us back into the other media topic. I want to make sure we have time for which is, you know, kind of teaching in general and how you think about empowering the next generation of designers. So you teach, I think it is a NYU. You have a, you have your podcasts, multiple podcasts that you've kind of hosted and you have your tabletop
game designers association that's coming up soon. Like a whole variety of things that are aimed at this goal, at least in principle of helping this, helping other people to kind of accomplish what you've accomplished and and to build this next generation. What motivates you on this and then, and how do you think about spreading this knowledge and growing this community?
I really do enjoy, you know, seeing other people, you know, learn the skills and flourish. And, you know, although I have to say part of it for me selfish that I just want to play new better games. So, and I don't want to have to design them all. So let's farm out the work. But, you know, I think that it was interesting because I kind of came evasion the board games, then over the
video games when they came out in the 80s and 90s and then kind of came back to board games. And a lot of the kind of critical analysis and stuff that you would see in the video game world surprised me that you didn't really see as much in the tabletop world. And, you know, I think that there was
more than I realized, again, because of my, you know, cubers and umbratatism. But, you know, in 2010-2011, we jumped in and said, hey, you know, I'd like to do a longer form podcast about game design to try to, you know, because the assumption was it's not just a review show or something like that, but these are games or things that can be studied. And not just video games, but tabletop games. Yeah, they've been around for 5,000 years. But actually the level of critical
analysis and breakdown and stuff is not, you know, still kind of an infancy. And so, you know, we launched ludology to start to analyze that. And just from that, and I learned a tremendous amount from from interviewing people and talking to it and just, you know, spending an hour talking about role in move games and what would work or whatever that led to some interesting
places that, you know, it's, it for me and the feedback that we got was that there was a thirst for this kind of knowledge and that there was not the same kind of level of basics, you know, when I was majoring in physics, you know, there's a curriculum that you learn, you learn this,
and then you learn Newtonian, you learn about forces, you know, there's a progression and there's the way that you do it, you know, with game design or if you study poetry or art, you take art classes, right, that there's certain things about perspective and color theory and stuff like that. But there really wasn't the same kind of thing for board games. If you're board game designer,
what do you study? What do you do? How do you get into it? And so it's been interesting to, you know, kind of collectively as a community start to develop even a common language of how we can talk to each other as designers. And that was, you know, so when I started teaching, I wrestled with that of what do you teach? How do you teach it pedagogically? Pedagogically? I don't know. Anyway, what do you want the students to take away from it? What do you want them to be able to do?
One of the big things that I wanted them to just be exposed to a lot of different types of games and mechanics, just that kind of basic literacy of playing stuff. And just, you know, one of the strengths I have as a designer is I think is just I've played so many games over so many decades that if I run into a problem, it's easy for me to reach back and say, oh, this game did that over here. Let me, you know, pluck that out from there. Whereas a lot of my students would come to me and say, hey,
we've got, you know, people are bidding and it's a tie. What do we do? And I was like, well, here's eight different systems for tie breakers. And so that ultimately led to my book with the Idoid Isaac Schalev, a building box of tabletop game design, which is an encyclopedia of all of those types of mechanisms. So it's just about the mechanisms. And a big thing we wanted to do also was to help develop that kind of common language so that people could talk to each other
in an industry. You know, I do a lot of lecture engineering computer science and there's a lot of common terminology that people use in programming about object-oriented programming and stuff like that. And you don't see that in game design. Like, you know, we would describe something like there's a common pattern where each round the person who goes first moves one space to the left. Right? It goes clockwise. The first player. It's the first player token or something like that.
There was no name for that. Every issue to describe it is that, you know, each at the end of each round passed the first player token to the left. So for designers, you know, it's not something we put in the rules, but we wanted to come up with a term. So in the book, we came up with this term progressive turn order. And if it goes the other way, it's a regressive
turn order. So now that's been a term that's been picked up. You know, one other one was like input randomness and output randomness was a term that we developed to try to help explain certain things. So for me, the goal was to try to professionalize game design, I guess, in a way, to help with that effort in helping to develop terminology and kind of core things that, you know, that designers could share and would form as a basis for things going forward.
Yeah, that's great. I think there's value. There's so much value in having common language and vocabulary that you can kind of share and be able to talk through things at a higher level more quickly. And the encyclopedias, you put it a kind of knowledge of things that you can pull from the toolbox that you can pull out of when you need for your various problems you're solving
throughout design. I think the other piece of it that occurs to me is this, you know, there's the process knowledge itself, which I think is probably more where I focus a lot of my teaching on is this sort of like, you know, the kind of court, what I call the core design loop, right? Like how you go through the process of ideating and framing and brainstorming and prototyping and like iterating, right? Like that process of learning as you go and how you refine and how you kind of
approach specific problems and the process of creativity. I feel like it's another big piece of the puzzle that people need to absorb and kind of get, you know, get kind of into your bones really, you know, like practice with in order to get good at the craft of design. Yeah, absolutely. I'm fortunate in the class that I teach that so it's in a game design program. So my class is a second year program and they've already had introduction to game design for a year and by the
before they take my class. So that kind of stuff is covered in their song, focus more on specific board game stuff and that's why I've kind of kind of focused in on that. Nice. So then maybe talk to me a little bit about what you've got, which I think by the time this podcast airs should be live, the this tabletop game designers association. What is that? And why should I care? Well, you get to be with all the cool kids. So that's nice.
So this has been idea that's kind of been bouncing around my head for a little while. You know, just I got a little frustrated just over the years from, you know, in the design role, I've never like self published any of my stuff or had a publishing company always I've always licensed my games to other publishers. And I've worked with like five or six different publishers and every single publisher that I've worked with, I've had some issue with royalties
or something that's been something that's that's happened at some point. And almost all of them were not there was nothing malicious, right? It wasn't, you know, and you know, with some phone calls and some prodding eventually I was able to get paid and get the royalties or get what needed to happen or things like that. But I shouldn't have to do that, right? I mean, I've written four or five books and you know, I've worked with book publishers and I've never had
an issue with them. You know, they've got systems set up and they they just go and it's like clockwork and you get paid and it's fine. I mean, I think the issue with a tabletop game design in particular is that most of these publishers are very, very small. A lot of them are just like one or two person operations. And unfortunately, the designers are kind of the last person on the list of people that they need to pay to keep things going forward, right? They're they're going to pay for their
booth of GenCon before they pay the designer. They're going to pay the printer who's making the games or the freight company or customs or what or marketing or Kickstarter or whatever, right? The designers are always going to be the last person on their list of people to worry about. And so because of that, you know, I think a lot of designers have had issues with that. I've talked to a lot of designers and all of us have had problems at one time or another.
And plus it's one of these industries where a lot of people want to do it, right? Like designing video games or or or or is it becoming a famous singer or whatever. And you know, in a situation where you've got a lot of people that you're trying to get into it, it's right for abuse and exploitation of people. You know, a lot of people, they're so excited to design their first game and there's, you know, they pitch it, they get over all of the stuff we've been talking about and all
the fear and the rejection and the anxiety. And somebody finally puts a contract in front of say, I want to publish your game. Nine times at a 10, where do I sign? You know, they're not looking at the details. They're not looking at what's going on and and then they get into, you know, they can get into a contract which could be a problem for them. I was just recently, you know, talking to a very well-known game designer who's got a pretty well-known game and he did not, they did not put
in an audit clause into the contract. So what an audit clause is is that, you know, you have the right, like once a year, if you want to, you can pay, your own expense, you can pay an accountant to go in and audit the books and make sure that they're paying you for the actual number of games that they sold. And he didn't have that and he didn't get, he didn't believe the royalty statements, but he had no recourse. He went to him and he was like, hey, you know, I want to come in and,
you know, you have to prove to me and they're like, we don't have to prove anything. This is what it is, you know, there's no clauses. Actually, you, you have that right. And so he's kind of up the creek. So, so what we're hoping is with, we started the Tabletop Game Designer Association, which by the time this air should be live, we're just a couple of weeks away from going live. And it's the three founders are myself, Elizabeth Hardgrave, who did Wingspan and Senfum Lim.
Yeah, she's been a guest on this podcast also for anybody that wants to talk about her. Elizabeth is on the screen. There you go. I've had Senfum. I'm just saying, get on. He's a good guy too. So Sen, who did junk art and my management, a whole bunch of really cool games as well and some RPGs, Chang-Gee and stuff like that. And so we've been putting together this organization to kind of North American centric,
English language centric. There are other organizations in other parts of the world that do this already, but to kind of put some help organize designers, not like a union, but just to give them the education, the tools. Here's what a contract should look like. We will help you review contracts. If you're having an issue with a publisher, here's an organization that can step up and say, you know, can contact them on your behalf and say, hey, you know, the contract says this,
you have to pay within this time frame you haven't paid. You know, if there's an issue, you know, if it doesn't get resolved, we can go public or we'll inform our membership and things like that. So that's what we're hoping is to help designers be less exploited, give them more tools to, you know, be able to negotiate decent contracts and understand what they're what they're getting into and help them when things don't go according to plan. That sounds like a good value ad.
And this would be like a membership organization or something for designers to join? Yep. Yeah. There's two levels of membership. There's the full members, which will have access to, we can have a lot of comprehensive information on the website about just resources for designers, you know, videos, free fonts, icons, all kinds of different things. We've got tons and tons of links, a we're putting together a publisher directory of like, who's accepting submissions,
how to submit, stuff like that. And and and a lot about contracts and annotated contracts and things like that. But you also, as a full member, you, you can get those services where we would review contracts for you and help you if you're having an issue with a publisher, things like that. And we've got associate members, which is have access to the, to the website, which has all that information. But and then there's there's also a bunch of free materials that are on there just
for that any designer can go up the cup. And that's a TTGDA.org table top game design, this is designers association. Great. Yeah. It's it's funny. So I've I've been on every side of this equation, right? I have my own publishing company. I've licensed games. I've worked for Hive, done work for hire. I've done, you know, kind of been been all around this industry and each
piece of it brings its own unique challenges, right? I mean, the I generally recommend people go the licensing route when they're first getting started as a table top game design because it lets you just focus on the design, right? And less on the marketing and production and risk management and whole running a company things that takes up now most of my time, even though I think of myself as a game designer first, it's really, you know, a smaller, smaller segment of the work I do because
of so much company to run. But yeah, licensing is not a free pass either. I mean, sure you get it, right? I mean, I have, you know, things like an audit clause, you know, things like a kind of sunset clause and ways to get your game back if they don't publish or, you know, keep a game in print or things I always strongly push for for designers to have. And so having those resources around
is super valuable. Okay, I think the idea of crossing between, which I'm to different, sort of crossing between this sort of world of helping and teaching and the world of doing and creating, right? So the I think we've kind of addressed this a little bit, but I love this, you know, the theory part of design, which I, and I've had a lot of guests who are, you know, actually, you know, philosophers and people who just like, you know, really just sort of study the craft.
In that sense, you know, a lot of people can get lost on the connection between that and the real work of design. And I think you did a good job of connecting the two things when it came to your book and saying, hey, look, these terminologies for all of these things may not matter in a given moment, but it really does help you to be better at both working with other people and collaborating on
design as well as, you know, having easier tools and things you could pull from. Are there other areas where you've seen either, you know, good or bad examples, right, where people have been either too caught up in theory or spending too much time in this, you know, the kind of more esoteric, or where the connection between, you know, some of the what may seem like a more abstract lesson that ends up having real practical impact, either a story from your own experience or students,
or otherwise. I love kind of bridging this gap for people because I find I find the theory discussion fascinating and useful, but but often I would, if people don't grind it as much as it needs to be. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I really learned about just from doing the ludology podcast and the game tech segment mainly for the Dice Tower was the impact of psychology and psychological experiments on on players and, you know, how as designers, some of the tools
that we can use to, you know, manipulate the psychology of the players. And a lot of that I find is it's very, you know, kind of abstracted, I think, and it's sort of theoretical, but, you know, everyone's a while I'm able to take, you know, something really kind of concrete out of the psychology playbook and say, oh, you know, I can use it in my game over here. And it helps enhance, you know, what I did just because, you know, it points me in a right direction.
So just, you know, one example of that of the theoretical from the practical, you know, in general, I'm a huge fan, I'm a fan of the right word, but I'm a little bit obsessed with this concept of loss of version as a root of a lot of psychological phenomenon to the point where I wrote an entire book just about loss of version and it's, it's relation to game design.
And it wasn't something that I even knew existed until I started doing, you know, these little game tech segments where I just report on people's research or find little fun facts and just one thing led to the another, it was like, you know, kind of uncovering an entire, you know,
digging up a whole giant dinosaur out of the ground, just one bone at a time and then also you put it together, it's like, wait, there's like a unifying principle here, which is, you know, that people are much more afraid of losing something than they are excited about gaining the same
thing. And that leads to so many different aspects. And, you know, just one little, uh, and I knew it in the abstract, but then I was designing a game, um, uh, one of my games, Pit Crew, which was about, uh, it's, it's, you're a Pit Crew and you're trying to get your race car back out on the track as quickly as possible. And it's a real time game and you're trying to play as fast as you can. And the thing I wanted in the game is there's, there's choices to be made
between trying to get everything absolutely perfect on the car. We're getting the car as quickly as possible. And when you get the car quickly, if you're the first one out, you can start rolling a die moving your car on a track while the other people are still frantically trying to fix their car and get it back out. So there's, there's a little bit of a trade off there. And the way it
works is that you just link cars out on this thing. And if you make a mistake in the car, you lay out, which you can often do intentionally as a strategy, uh, you get penalty points. And after everyone is done fixing their car, you go back at, at no longer on the clock and figure out how many penalty points each team has. And for every penalty point that you had, you move backwards a space, your car backwards a space on the track. Um, and simple play tested it with, we're,
we're aiming at like a family thing, played it with kids. Kids hated moving backwards. They did not want to move backwards at all. You know, they would play super carefully just so that they didn't make any mistakes. They went forward, which was not what I was going for. I wanted that to be, you know, even a reasonable strategy or just, you know, free wheeling, you know, man, I really,
I forgot to put a fourth lug nut on this tire. Well, you know, that's what it goes. Um, and so, I went back and, you know, one of the things that we looked at was this idea of framing of how do you present information to people and how do you, how do you do it? And what, um, what I changed it to was that instead of you moving backwards a space for each penalty point, all the other teams moved forward to space. Now, it's exactly the same thing mathematically. It's, it's, you know,
there was no end, there was no finish line where you're trying to get across. So it didn't affect anything in the game. It was just strictly, and it was actually a little more complicated to do, because you got to other people got to remember and yours more cars that are moving. But when I just changed that rule, kids, they didn't care about, they didn't care about the penalties at all after that, right? If they didn't care that the other people moving forward, they cared that they
were moving backwards, but they didn't care that everybody else was moving forward. And that just totally unlocked the design of the game and just, you know, that was like the last little little cherry that we put on top. But, you know, it just was so interesting that we were able to take this very theoretical concept and just do this little tweak of how we presented the information
kids and just changed everything. Yeah, I love that example. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna, potentially try to get you to give me one more of a different category because I love this space, but I'll give it, I'll buy you some time because my favorite example of that exact, that exact principle is a world of warcraft. They had after a certain amount of time when you played your Gain AXP, you're playing for a while, they wanted you to kind of like log off and come back and they gave
you an exhaustion penalty, which cut your XP in half. And you had to like log off the game, wait for a little while, come back. You know, they have a subscription model, they want you to like play longer time over time. Not necessarily just play for 24 hours or stretch, you know, and for multiple good reasons. Anyway, people hated it. They were in, they were livid, the play tests were mad. They was like, how dare you, you're money grabbing your scumbags,
you're evil, you're the devil, all these things. And then they were like, all right, no problem. And they changed it. So that instead of getting an exhaustion penalty, you got a rest bonus of 100% extra XP for the first X hours you play after you log in. And then all of a sudden, it's all this the coolest thing of all time. Oh my god, you guys are awesome. This is such a nice thing to do. It helps save mechanics, save math, nothing changed. Just the way you presented it.
And it went from you're the devil to you're the best. I just amazing. It's really, really powerful, how you frame stuff, really makes a big difference. And the fun part as a designer is, you know, is there's not a right way or wrong way to do it, right? You don't always necessarily want to present things positively, right? Sometimes you want it to be negative, right? So, you know, when I did my, I did the expense game based on the TV show. And, you know, in that one, you could
spend, you could spend victory points to, to do special things or something. Sometimes you could actually spend your victory points to try to save cards or other things. And I looked at, you know, switching that one around also. And it was around the same time of the pick crew design. And so I was like, ah, maybe I used that trick here. I just have everybody go up the victory point. But in the end, I wanted it to hurt, right? I wanted it to people to really agonize over whether
they were going to give up that victory point. So I kept it that way. So, you know, all these techniques, you know, there's no, you know, there's no good or bad, right? Sometimes you want your players to agonize over something and sometimes you just want them to, you know, feel happy and move on with their lives. Yeah, yeah. Knowing that, you know, player experience is the metric that matters, right? You have to decide and the skill comes from just what is it? What is the experience you want to
create? And all the kind of rules of thumb and like general principles of design, you know, understanding those rules and why they're there gives you the freedom to break them intelligently, right? Like so we have a game, we actually have a target exclusive games coming out. You got to be kitten me, family, bluffing, you know, kind of card game with adorable animals on it. And this one I, I do things I would never do in like a more traditional hobby game. Like we have, as you
lose the game, you lose cards and thus it becomes more likely you're going to lose. Players get eliminated while other people are still playing. Like, but I want that feeling of like ridiculous, like helplessness and like random, you know, rare, rare, incredible comebacks because it's like so painful as you start losing. And like you want to build those experiences that are like light and fun and you're not going to take it as seriously by just kind of making things super unfair
and high variance and putting some, putting some real consequences in it. And so I think it's just a good, it's a good lesson and probably a good thing to kind of as we start to move towards wrapping up to a really great way to tie in. Like how do you, you know, cross that grip, that, the gap between theory and practice. And one of the answers I hear from what you said is like, you know, sometimes it's knowing the theory to let you know when to break the rules, right?
Know when to take the things that are the sort of common practice and know that you can intelligently say, Hey, here's, I, here's where I want to flip the script and that's going to have power on its own. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it's funny like that. I mean, you know, player elimination. It's like, Oh, you know, never do player elimination. Well, in certain cases where player elimination works really well or, you know, or roll and move, you know, no one wants to play a role in well.
I can point to 12 different role in those games that are fantastic, but you know, but you got to do it the right way and know what you're doing. So, you know, that's the experience and that's where it comes with, you know, playing lots of games or testing your game and seeing what is. And most importantly, which you talked about, which I, which I love when you're talking about the kit and the I miss is, is the vision of what you wanted to be like, right? If, you know, people always ask like,
Oh, do you start with mechanic or do you start with the theme? It's like, I try to start with an experience, right? That's what I was, say, it's like, I want an emotion. I want to, you know, what's the story that the players are going to tell when they're done? And that is kind of my load star. That's that's the thing that keeps me going through all the mistakes and the mistakes and the bad feedback from playtesters because they don't, maybe they don't want to play the game
that you want it designed. So, that's fine. You know, just do something else. But, you know, it's important to have that vision to the level where I always write down when I start any new project, I spend a couple minutes at the beginning for whatever. Something got me excited about the idea. So, I write down one or two paragraphs describing why I'm excited about the idea. And then a year later when I'm in the weeds and flailing, then I can go back to that and if you can just,
can usually put some back on track. And that idea, when you write that down, because this is a great concrete practice. Is it that idea is the is generally written in the form of the stories that your players will tell or the experience they're going to have that they're going to be, you know, how do you, how do you write that idea? What's that? Yeah, I don't worry about the mechanics at all. It's about like, you know, you know, you're, you know, that just random one from another game.
But like, you know, you're, you're trapped in them all with zombies are attacking you and you've got to
vote, you know, you're, you're, you're dashing from store to store. And, you know, just so, so those kind of emotional verbs and action verbs and things like that, I don't worry about how it's going to go, but, you know, but I will put it in there like, you know, this is for, you know, it's, it's for heavy gamers or this is like going to be a super light game or I want it to less like 30 minutes or whatever,
a couple of those things, but I don't get into the weeds at all on the mechanics. It's, it's just about the emotional experience kind of the narrative of what the players are trying to do. Yeah, sort of, what is the core of this experience and who is this experience for it in many ways? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I just wrote one just the other day. So I was talking about potentially doing a conversion
of a video game into a board game. So played the video game. And so the vision statement that I can present at the woods is this is an economic game, but it's about the economics of abundance. You can always buy anything you want to buy. There's other issues down the road, but it's not like you're, you're tightening up the input faucet of resources. So that's going to guide the whole design, you know, it's about the economics of abundant resources and what that means. Yeah, yeah, I love it.
Awesome. Okay, well, this is a, this is a great place to wrap it up. I think it's been a pleasure to actually finally get to have you in the podcast. It's lived up to my imagined memory hype. What I thought we had already had. So I could check you or whatever. Yes, and I look forward to getting to actually do this in person either, either when you come out, come out and visit my neighborhood or or to show soon. This has been a ton of fun. You already mentioned the where people
could find the tabletop game designer association. Are there other areas you want to direct people to find you your stuff, your podcasts, anything that would be awesome that people could discover by the day, if discovered you on my podcast. I mean, the easiest place to find me. So is on on blue sky and Twitter, whatever it's called now, at G Angles team is G E N G E L S T E I N. From there, you can reach most of my various things. Awesome. All right, Jeff. Thank you so
much for your time. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening to. Listen to reviews and shares with huge difference and help us grow this community and allow me to
bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Things Like a Game Design. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life.
If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at www.ThinkLikeAGameDesigner.com or ever time but yourself.