Narrative, mastery, and character bleed in games, with Ricki Heicklen

title: Narrative, mastery, and character bleed in games, with Ricki Heicklen
author: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
contenttype: podcast
publication: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
published: 2025-10-16T07:00:14
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/prfx.byspotify.com/e/media.transistor.fm/79454613/fe489c1c.mp3

word_count: 17507

Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hi, to you, everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio 11 on the Internet, and I'm here with my friend, Ricky. Hi, everybody. It's great to be here, Patrick. Thanks so much for coming out again. So, Ricky and I have previously done the conversation on our mutual love of using games as a pedagogical tool to teach trading. Ricky has been doing trading boot camps. This is one of our main parts of her job for the last two years or so. And I had stockfighter back in the day, which had a different take in different business model on fundamentally the same problem. And Ricky recently invited me to a game design conference that she ran here in goodness. It was only last weekend now, right? And I did a bit of game development to have something interesting to talk about, so I thought we'd talk a little bit about why run a game conference, why games generally, and why they're interesting to people who are intellectually interested in things like infrastructure, and then maybe take the conversation wherever it takes us. Yep, thanks. So, I've loved games since I was a kid growing up. Our family rule was if somebody needs one more for a board game, you have to stop whatever it is you're doing and go enjoy them. And it's always been a big part of what I've like doing in my free time, but didn't really occur to me until the past couple of years that I could potentially also make a career out of it. Jury still out on how much money it'll make, but at least in terms of getting started with games, I started running these trading boot camps about year and a half, two years ago, and discovered that one of my favorite parts of them was writing the games with the intention of helping people understand concepts from quantitative trading. But the best way to learn how to trade is to trade, and that we could make these play money markets in which people would play iterated games and learn concepts from trading as they went. And this caused me and the other people I was running this with to have to think really hard about what kinds of game design help people on ramp onto certain concepts. That if we threw people straight into the deep end of what a market looks like with all of its intricacies, it would be a lot harder for them to develop the kinds of muscles that they needed for getting good at trading versus if we started with a very simplified universe and increased things from there. And figuring out what forms of games, what rule adaptations, what progressions of rounds worked best at causing people to learn certain concepts about underlying structures, about incentives, about what it looks like to be in an iterated game with other players you're competing with versus just with yourself, etc. Ended up being one of the most fun elements of what I was working on and caused me to expand more broadly and think what other kinds of games could exist. Not just for quantitative trading, but for learning any of a bunch of different concepts. I also around the same time it built out a puzzle hunt with some very close friends of mine and ended up loving that process as well and thinking through the entire user experience arc. What is it that somebody does from start to finish when they're playing through a game? How does the, not just the strategy component, the incentives of the different players and the thing that they're optimizing for, but also the narrative and also the playfulness components. How do all of those unfold as people progress through a game or through a puzzle hunt or any other immersive experience of that sort? And I feel this is a limitably understudied. There's the theory of fun, I think Ralph Koster, if I'm remembering correctly, it might be someone he cited a lot, but there is funnily enough, we have an entire field called Game Theory, which is basically about games that no one wants to play. But there is relatively little study games that people actually want to play and to the extent that there exists a literature about it that is not written by and for hobbyists, it's sort of an oral lore that you get in the more commercialized parts of the game industry and these ways of making a gotcha game are more effective at an AP tests historically, at the shop, et cetera, et cetera, versus systematically breaking it down. And so one of the things that attracted me to Metagame when you gave me the pitch for it was, it's going to be about serious games, but maybe not exactly commercialized in the way that a video game conference would be commercialized, both in that, some of the games that people presented are commercial products, some less so, and I think there is a nice space for play in the literal and figurative sense when it is not necessarily going to demolish people's careers if they make an experiment and it doesn't work out. That's exactly right. And I like to use the framing of this event was halfway between a conference at a convention that with conferences, they're often geared toward highly specific industries, they're often the kind of expenses that people will have covered by their employer, so tickets prices tend to be a lot higher and they're much more corporate and career motivated for people participating in them. In contrast, conventions are often lower production value, lower ticket cost, but intended for hobbyists who will much more enjoy sitting around playing board games all weekend and less trying to get jobs directly out of it. This was somewhere between the two. I think part of what that came from was that we used a very broad definition of games, whereas you might see conferences that are geared toward escape room manufacturers or video game designers or any of a number of other things, we used a pretty broad conception of what a game is. When I was starting out, the definition that I was working with was any immersive experience in which the choices and strategies of the players involved matter for what the outcome looks like. My wife pointed out that this manages to include war, the militarized conflict, and not war the card game. So it wasn't necessarily a perfect definition, but where we eventually settled was anything you can play, anything for which you can go through the motions of playfulness, of often some kind of strategy or narrative that is driving you through each step along the way, experiences that often invoke delight or wonder or a sense of awe, as I think you and I have both experienced while playing anything from video games to board games to the experience itself of designing a game or being the storyteller who is running a game or something along those lines. So that's where we started out, and it turned out that this managed to attract people from a lot of different games communities. Everything from, like I mentioned, board games, card games, video games to also puzzle hunts, crosswords, Sudoku's, escape rooms, immersive theater, larps, tabletop role-playing games, et cetera. And I actually learned about a bunch of areas within games like the escape room community that I hadn't previously had a handle on as a kind of game, but came to really understand and absorb as being extremely games oriented in how they've evolved over the past decade or so. I like how some of the talks were a bit of a peek behind the curtain of those things. I've played in an escape room or three, but never got into asking anyone around. Like, okay, what are the physical constraints of doing something that is both engineering work and morally speaking a home improvement project or commercial construction project in a space? And how do you not go insane? Because there are invités that are seeing these artifacts in real life for the first time every hour on the hour. And how does that not break constantly? And I just got a knowing smile, like, yeah, I'm going to lose all my hair in this industry, but it's worth it. And then there was another person who gave a long detail talk about the joys of doing contract manufacturing in China for cardboard stock and the types of miniatures that one is likely to find in the game and whether you are getting diced off the rack versus custom-made diced and that sort of thing. And reminds me of a thing that I've been reminded at many points in my career the economy is fractal in detail. But it was great to talk to people who are seeing the nodes on the fractal versus just seeing the end product. Yeah, I believe that was Rita Orlow talking to Spencer Bee about the process of working with manufacturers building out those parts and redis actually an expert in this area runs a game production company that builds out table top games. One of the highlights actually at the conference was the Build Your Own Escape Room session where essentially on Saturday, a group of about a dozen amateur designers decided we are going to build an escape room in one of these rooms on campus and playtest it by having I think they ended up running eight iterations of the escape room on Sunday. And I think they managed to build the escape room itself on Saturday and under two hours. But over the course of eight hours of playtesting on Sunday changed all but one of the puzzles involved in it, I believe. And I and the rest of the Medigame admin team at like one a.m. on Sunday night or I suppose Monday morning played through the final version of it and had an absolute last doing so. That was a quite credible escape room for my limited experience with the job and I was in playtest group number six or so. Nice. And yeah, great experience was had by all. I know verbal reviews of escape rooms are not great content to listen to. You kind of have to be there but it is amazing that you can one get a non-specialist group of people who have personally not collaborated on major projects together and then get them to intend and build something which has both like an internal logic in the universe of the room but also the puzzles more or less have to be created in parallel with each other with some amount of interaction. Which is not too different from the actual experience of running an escape room with six fewer friends where there's an internal logic to the room and some level of authorship to it. But the puzzles are often strikingly distant in tone or what sort of mental muscle they exercise partly to give variety over the experience of the room and partly as an authorial choice to make sure that of the six or eight people that are playing a room that everyone feels like they contributed to the eventual success at the end of the hour. Yep. And I think that something that was really cool to me was they were working on a budget of whatever random materials I've forwarded over the past year and refused to throw away. And as a result instead of having a lock box combination that you need to insert a code into they had a picture of a lock drawn on a piece of paper so that if you put the right number into the pinpad, they pretend pinpad with your finger. One of the immersive actors, the game runners, would make some whoo noises and open the door for you to let you into the next phase. So this allowed them to not be blocked on having a lot of fancy materials making sure they worked but instead get some rapid prototyping, rapid iteration on the concepts that they were working with before overly investing in any specific materials if they were to then go out and build this escape room for production purposes. And I think a big part of the motivating factor behind wanting to run metagame was giving people a space to iterate on things that they were excited about building but didn't necessarily have immediate access to the space, the audience, the guinea pigs of a couple hundred attendees who were eagerly ready to play through their escape rooms or their board games or their roguelike video games. Yeah, I think so I built a CRPG roguelike for the purpose of the conference and I remember how impressionistically here's our first conversation when you said I should give a talk and I understand first year conference somebody with a bit of an inner profile give a talk, sell tickets, make sense. Happy to do that. But what would I talk about and you suggested I talk about Starfighter? We've talked about Starfighter before and I said, let's kind of lame. It's been out of the market for 10 years. What can I really say? Like, oh, it was really fun. You had to be there. Sorry, it's not accessible on the internet right now. And then I suggested there was a stripe affiliated ambiguously project that a few of my co-workers worked on which was a frustration game designed to show people how terrible it is to be a Japanese office worker doing invoice reconciliation. And you vetoed the idea of talking about the invoice reconciliation. I think I said that sounds extraordinarily boring Patrick. Yeah. And so we landed on the obvious choice which is having me build a complete the Genovo game using technologies that I've never used before in the month of August. And and somewhat to my own surprise actually made the the schedule work just in time to have something that was playable and according to a 10D spot for the weekend. Yep. And I remember a few days before so Patrick had been keeping the team up to date on his progress as he worked through this debugged made iterations. And I think four days before the conference itself, we saw a message from Patrick that said update great news. I have successfully lost the game. Yeah. The the literal last thing to go into the game about an hour in 30 minutes to an hour before the speech about it where it was getting released to the attendees was the concept of leveling up which I got bullied into by an LLM. That's a different part of the story. But the game was playable in parts for much of the last two and a half weeks at that point but had no victory screen until the day before and so four days before I actually turned on the thing where if you go to negative health that is negative for you. And it was capable of successfully losing. Like yes, a feature checked off you can lose the game. That is that is fun. That creates tension and some desire to balance resources against each other. Funnily enough, one of the bugs we discovered on the first day of the conference was well, I had experimentally tested losing the game. I had not experimentally tested winning the game. And winning the game on the first day would 404. So had to do forensic reconstruction of the first attendees or actually won the game. But was able to successfully do that. Before we get into the details about that and boy, would I love geeking on the details and by the time it sits the internet, I'll probably have some write-ups to link to about it. Were there any other people that, so is the escape room team, there was yours truly, or did anyone else make something just for the purpose of this event? Yup, a handful of people built things out. So actually one of our main sponsors built out a game called Utility Monster in which people would play repeated cards from a deck of cards, each of which had a utility payoff that essentially said for a certain number of yes votes from the six players, pay out this much to the yes votes and this much to the no votes. With different values in each case. And the group had to coordinate on what they were going to each respond. Yes, those are nos in order to determine the payout with a bonus for predictions made at the beginning of the game if the total score that they reached exceeded that initial prediction. And a group of attendees hunkered down within the first few minutes of the conference and spent their first approximately day of it trying to solve this game figuring out, okay, what is the optimal move? What is it that you want to be doing? Because you were playing as a team that wanted to maximize your team score, but ultimately there would only be one individual winner who had the highest score among all attendees over the course of the conference. There's this tension between wanting to work together with your team and wanting to maximize your personal score. And I believe the maximum possible score was attained by Saturday morning by one of the members of that group of six that spent a bunch of their conference trying to solve this. Which reminds me there was a mechanic for a meta game called the mega game, which I don't think I've ever seen in a conference. I've definitely seen conferences that have some sort of a puzzle hunt or a mixer planned that might have game-like elements to it. But you encouraged lots of people to take the skeleton of the event you were running where you divided people into two teams purple and orange and integrate their game in some fashion into the overall event such that while people were attending the conference, they were also playing a essentially like a territory capture game over the conference venue. That's exactly right. So the maps that we gave people of the conference venue were also themselves a board for the game. And you could watch on the website as the map updated as different teams took over the different territories across campus. So whenever I arrived at campus, they were either put on the orange team or the purple team. They received a meta game 2025 t-shirt that was either orange or purple, along with a bandana that had a puzzle on it and a bag and some custom pieces in their bag. And they were now drafted onto this team. Each team had secret hidden headquarters that puzzles in their bag would lead them to. And each team would submit people to RSVP two different sessions and go through competitions battles for individual territories. I believe your game that you ran was actually a battle between purple and orange for the park area that you had spoken in. And I think ultimately orange won that one. I think yes. It was almost a split decision, funny story. So in the tell metal dash to get the game working, I had made a dashboard for myself as the game master, I guess, to check who was actually achieving the victory conditions in the game. But due to the bugs on the first day, I had to do forensic reconstruction with the logs of who had won. And so I initially announced to you in the organizers that someone from team purple had won. And then when I fixed the dashboard the next morning, I realized, oh no, actually 30 minutes earlier, it was this person from orange. And so we flipped it. But still a great times had by many. Actually, the person who won the game for orange said while they liked winning the game for orange, they did not love the aesthetic experience of the game. But I remember the attendees told me that they actually like enjoyed the aesthetic experience of the game as well. So that is nice. I was quite unsure when it was ready or ready-ish for the conference, whether there was a game there. There was a collection of mechanics and a web application that one could push buttons in and go. And it was not a simple web application to build. But it wasn't obvious to me that it would chill into something that was actually playable and fun. And at least some people told me it was playable and fun. I think the acknowledgement of an ad read sounds cooler in Japanese. Let me tell you a scary story. You work in marketing and are all set for the new campaign. Leadership loved the wireframes design produced in their usual tool chain. And everyone is plus one for launch. 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And, wouldn't you know it, most of those wires go to other Mercury customers. Mercury works well for businesses at a variety of stages and industries, from quickly growing funded startups to this relatively tiny internet publishing operation. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Color Manet, and Evolved Bank and Trust, members of FDIC. So, just before we dive into some of the details of what it looked like for you to build it, to give people a flavor of the mega-game and what separate components it included. Among other things, players in their bags were given, depending on their color, either a tiny purple pawn or a tiny orange pawn. And, on campus, there was a board of gigantic purple and orange pieces in a game called Mega Chess. The first rule of Mega Chess is you don't talk about Mega Chess. Nobody on their team is allowed to discuss the game with anybody else on their team, or in general. And, at one point during the conference, you can place your single pawn into the jar of pawns and make one move in the game. Hit the clock so that it's the other team's turn, and over the course of, I think, 24 hours on each team's clock, you would play through a game of chess. There were many similar challenges across campus, most of which were competitions for territories, and some complicated board game mechanics that determined which territories then gave you advantages into adjacent territories if your team had already unlocked puzzles on the roads connecting those territories to each other. As you might imagine, the set of people who are excited about a game design conference really enjoyed designing a number of different complicated mechanisms that determine how the Mega Game at that conference goes. One of the hardest things for us was how do we play test something like this? How do you take a conference for 250 people and simulate what rounds of that game will look like? And one can do this by applying some amount of randomization to each team, to who wins which territories and seeing how it evolves. One can do this by trying to figure out from first principles without play testing what amounts of advantages might look good. One can use references of other games that one has played before to try to figure things out. But ultimately, it's just really, really hard to get a good simulation of what a team of 250 people look like. And in fact, the puzzles, which were a set of Sudoku's that allowed you to learn the rules of those Sudoku's as you played them incrementally where some were child nodes in a tree of Sudoku's and others were parent notes where each one of those Sudoku's would unlock a road within the map of different territories were 100% solved almost immediately by the orange team. To the point where my web dev team assumed that we had a bug in the code somewhere rolled back all of the orange road victories and tried to figure out what the problem was before we figured out that I think one or two people had successfully immediately grabbed the 17 Sudoku's and solved all of them. So we misestimated how long those puzzles would take we figured they'd probably be doable in the first 24 hours or so, but not necessarily the first 24 minutes. And in contrast, we had a puzzle on the bandana for which the solution told you to go to the hidden deck or the solution was hidden deck. People assumed this was a hidden deck of cards and indeed we had hidden a deck of cards on that deck that one could use in the game later on. But nobody knew about the hidden deck and the people who did know about it thought it was off limits. So it wasn't until the very end of the conference when we revealed where it was that anybody got to access it. And I think this question of how long it will take a large group of people to solve a puzzle for which all that matters is how fast the best puzzle solver is at getting to that solution is just really hard to simulate through a few people play testing the puzzle or figuring out, you know, I can decode the solution that you're hinting toward via binary and some of our, but I can't necessarily turn that into the knowledge of where it is that I go or what it is I do next without a bunch of additional context of OK, I'm looking at a map of the board and it says deck on part of it and that deck seems to be hidden behind some more else. How do you test whether someone can piece together those parts? You're also by construction the attendee pool here is a lot of people who break distributions for like the amount of skill required for these various things. And so if you have six play testers recruited from, you know, not too sick most above the population median for like college educated people for games, having us and then one attendee is like no, Sudokas, I'm a jam. I have watched every episode of the Sudoku YouTube thing and not learned anything in the last three years I can do these in my sleep. I also have a salver on my phone because why wouldn't I then yeah breaks the curse a little bit that's absolutely right. Yeah, ultimately I joke that the thing that we just did is we play tested running a conference. We did what the first ideal play test of a 250 person game would look like and we learned so much about things we need to do about what the progression of hints that you should give people is in order to allow you as the game designers to have some lever on whether people are making it through and accessing the information they want about what information should be hidden versus revealed at the beginning. I think one thing that we had hidden was the existence of a team headquarters a place that you could collaborate with other people and it required a puzzle for which pieces were in different team members bags. But you needed four different pieces from four different team members of yours bags in order to solve the puzzle together with the idea of being that collaboration with others in communication with others would unlock further collaboration in the form of finding the headquarters. This made for an amazing experience for the four people who found the headquarters first together where they got to go through the magical experience of whoa there's a team headquarters. Headquarters it's decked out fully in orange it has lots of resources here for us to use. But it also meant that a lot of people never found out about the headquarters or didn't orient around that as a meaningful part of the game. And because of that couldn't collaborate as closely with other people as they might have otherwise been able to and this hurt the experience of people playing the game in terms of the collaborative spirit and ability to sit down and puzzle through a Sudoku with another person in the ability to create different people on the team into different roles. And so in a hypothetical 2.0 of this you might have a beginning of the conference mixer like a lot of conferences to and perhaps as a part of that activity introduced people to the opportunity to unlock the headquarters as the reward for completing the tutorial as it were now you've all accomplished a win together solidified your temporary identity as died in the little purple versus those orange fanatics on the other side. I do love that you can make any group of people into implacable foes just by saying your orange your purple go but. And listen there about human society and an important one for lots of reasons. But the game was very dynamic and I liked you think you use the metaphor of having API between the individual game runners and the metagame conference where you had requested we are going to provide you this information during. And the administration of my game the road like and you will provide to us by this time on Sunday a binary of which team one game and then largely at your discretion for how you educate that etc etc as long as there is a rule in advance. And essentially said to sub game runners we will give you as an input one of three different advantage sizes for one of the teams so either no advantage either team or a small or medium or large advantage it's up to you to determine what that is where essentially telling you we want you to ship a probability from 50 50 to 60 40 or 70 30 or 80 20. And you give us at the end of the point at which your game resolves either purple one or orange one you may not decide that the two teams have tied figure out how you're going to do that resolution criteria. We wanted to keep this API very simple we didn't want a system where people are awarding a certain number of points and then miscalibrated between each other. That number of points is or what kinds of currency one gives out internal to the game because then you're testing which is the worst design game in the pool of verses that who is making the most broad based effort on winning games and we up and if a game let's say turns out to have a hack where somebody can earn infinitely many points. You don't want that to be something that takes the structure of the rest of the mega game as a whole you want it to be possible for them to say orange found the infinity hack orange will win this territory and not have that overflow into compromising other parts, including the integrity of the other parts and the part of the game that was most controversial was the election competition between the two different teams for the role of sovereign of metagame. In which because of some shenanigans partially encouraged between the teams in terms of stealing vote tokens or tricking other team members or tricking front desk volunteers into giving them pieces. The determination that came out of that which determined which members of each team would end up playing in the final end game metagame was not viewed as necessarily robust or as high integrity a determination as some some. Attendees would have wanted and as a result made it a lot harder for people to you know engage with this in a way that respected it as a fully robust game now fortunately it was just a game so at the end of the day this was not that big a deal and an important part of the playtesting process is does something break along the way, but I think that if one kind of contains each of those sub games to their own territory somebody might have a bad experience of like one territory flipped in the direction that they would have disagreed with if they'd been the one to resolve that they. But at least the effect size of that isn't too spread through the structure of the entire broader game as a whole. The other reason for this was that management is really hard managing a whole bunch of people working on different sub games and making sure that each of them fully understand all of the information they need to understand in terms of interaction between their game and other people's games or how it is that they should incorporate other information as it updates is extremely hard. Is extremely hard and it was hard enough even for us to walk the sub game runners through here is the map that you look at here is how you figure out based on the colors of the roads on that map and which adjacent territories are colored what it is that you're supposed to do here is how you are. Spp on RSVP attendees on each team from being present at your session which ended up having in game effects because attendees on the winning team would get to choose between seven different player cards to update their personal profiles into that ended up mattering for the final end game. A quick side note on that we took the deck builder game celestial online card game that one of the members of the team built and reskinned it to be metagame themed where after each challenge after each sub game in the mega game members of both teams could go through some card transformations where they went from having their card the thing that started on their badge at the beginning with weaker powers to transform it into a card that had higher scores. Sometimes higher cost sometimes lower cost special abilities that allowed them to then play in the final game and even just managing that process the card upgrades and how to get each sub game runner to disseminate that information to make sure the right buttons were pressed on the website to implement all of the different changes that needed to happen was pretty non trivial especially when you have different sub game runners different amounts checked into what the structure of the game is as a whole versus running my own game. I'm debugging all the things that go wrong on the fly like a 404 error I don't necessarily have my head plugged into this much larger structure if we wanted to give attendees the opportunity to build a game and have it be one piece of the larger puzzle of the mega game we needed to keep that API super simple and straightforward. And you're juggling all these challenges while juggling the usual challenges of event management in real life where there are 200 people who are arriving many of them do not each other you have to strap high trust environment very quickly keep the schedule running get things done on time there are you know snacks and coffee that need to arrive for people will be cranky there might people people trying to get crashed the door without a ticket etc etc and then the you know very quotidian like doing things in a real problems like is the food truck here you have people are going to want to eat etc etc etc so that's off to you and the rest of the organizers for a you know I was going to joke and say fatality free conference. Like every time there is something non trivial complexity done in the world of atoms and not the world of bits which had no small amount of software into supported but now you're here and there you know it's a an opportunity to remember that the defaults outcome for ever running an event is the fire festival where you know you can have the best of intentions you can even take actions based on those attentions to do the obvious things and by default we will fail catastrophically. And it was within acceptance criteria wonderful and yeah I do think the past year of running events these trading boot camps for groups of 25 students at a time have definitely taught me a whole bunch of things about how the default is failure and one needs to be robust to a lot of different things going wrong. Still scaling up to a conference of 250 people comes with its own set of challenges in particular things like how do you balance the schedule so that you have the right number of attendees I think we overdid it I was so excited about all the different content that people wanted to offer but forgot to account for the fact that if you have 250 ticketed attendees that doesn't translate into for each track that has each time slot that has five different events 50 attendees at each event most people are going to be taking some of the conference off or attending a conference. Or attending a couple sessions a day but playing pick up games with others or just too tired from all the things going on puzzler fatigue is real and people who are up cranking on working on all the puzzles for the mega game aren't going to be doing that while also being full participants in another session and as much as a lot of the people at this conference are pretty ambitious and pretty excited about participating in a lot of the different things I think things like better understanding what the choreography of bodies looks like at what point people are going to what sessions. Where do you want to have things physically happen in order to funnel people into it is a big part of conference design in a way that for me feels not that different from game design itself for example we had a crossword construction relay race in which we put members from the orange and purple team at work creating first a theme and then a grid and then fill either words that fill in that grid and then clues in successive order. In order to submit those two a crossword speed solving game played the following morning by two of the top speed solvers in the world I believe and that speed solving was originally going to happen in a kind of back garden space in order to be competition for that territory but ultimately we realize if it's happening back there nobody's going to go there and moved it to the central court yard a natural thoroughfare that a lot of people will be able to see what's happening and. Garner excitement and that ended up attracting a much larger crowd than it otherwise would have now does that compromise the underlying integrity of the mega game as competition for territories in those territories themselves turns out nobody cared. It was much more important to have actual people attending the speed solving followed by commentary on how one would edit a crossword like this taking the orange teams crossword and picking apart what would you do in this corner over here how would you adjust the squares here what would be a better clue to get. Communicate the theme more clearly to people and giving that feedback and live editing in front of an audience there was a lot of the best laid plans of my cement happening and also commendable willingness to say okay two weeks ago when we sketch this out the plan was a however it does not look like a will be the maximally fun thing therefore let's do the fun thing a whole bunch of that people are here for the fun and the learning experience to my partial dismay one of the most popular things was a 25 foot long crossword. That you know costs us 15 dollars online and took up 20 minutes of a volunteer time hanging up and ended up being the thing that everybody did on their way to the space where the food trucks were it was along this passageway and anyone who walked by it picked up one of the pencils hanging above it and filled out a few answers until the point at the end of the conference that it was 100% completed by the attendees and that took basically no effort whatsoever and no money whatsoever for us to make happen. And was a huge hit among attendees meanwhile I spent 300 hours your show and building my game which probably had less use than the 25 to all the crossword puzzle show yeah I will say the space adds something here we're recording this podcast from like haven which was also the conference venue wonderful conference venue unsolicited blood and I particularly like it is a conference venue because the fiscal day out of it strongly encourages people to you know have a hallway track spend time interacting with each other while you are moving from point A to point B will sort of naturally be funneled into places where you will meet other attendees and I think you and the team wolf that into the like tapestry of the conference very well with things like as you are going to get food you will be crossword puzzle to death etcetera etcetera. Yep the Sudoku spread throughout campus along the roads connecting the different territories so that walking around you would naturally encounter them things along those lines. But we definitely learned things about we'd place the play testing plaza too far out of the way for people to just play pick up board games and they ended up playing the pick up board games on the pick tables right next to the main building and that was also fine we've learned some things for next year. But I want to hear more about the lead up to the conference tell me more about the process of building out the roguelike game that you built and what your 25 days in advance of the conference look like as you were spending hundreds of hours on that sure. So I've wanted to play with elements more seriously since essentially the point where I left my last full time appointment and that's been on the list and then. I've had a lot of projects over the course of the last two years moved my family to America etcetera I never really made the space for. Sitting down and working seriously with them is a technology aside from you know doing whatever one does and use chat you can use claudic etcetera to edit documents I can do research for writing my newsletter etcetera. And one of the reasons that I hadn't made the time was well. I don't want to make a company right now and you know there's some expectation in my social circles that you can't really do a project unless the project is also a company. And so it was good to have the space made available to like no just do a just do a fun art project doesn't have to have a price tag on it doesn't have to be like the next phase of your career just just a thing. And that was exactly the shape of the project I needed to get going on something. So say road like CRPG apparently CRPG is dated as a reference these days everyone just calls them RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 is an RPG but back in my day when dinosaurs roam the earth. The difference between an RPG and a CRPG was the computer is playing as the game master for you. And back in the day that meant that encounter designers had a laborious labor script that would say everything that you the character could possibly say layout the rules like if they say this as a dialogue option we're going to make a role on their intimidation step with the bonus to based on their contamination skill based on their charisma stat. And then if they succeed on that role you go down path a if otherwise we go down on path B and CRPGs are amazing a lot of people have enjoyed them over the years. I think that some CRPGs are the best games ever played and yet. There is something about the experience of pen and paper role playing that they don't capture because around a table with humans making decisions based on things you have not internet cognition available like a surplus of cognition available to make decisions for how the game should mechanically represent something that the designer of the module you're playing didn't anticipate you trying to do. And the when I was sitting down and writing the design document the mission statement for the game and using LLM's was how do you resolve sister Maria attempted to challenge an orc chiefed into a drinking contest if sister Maria does have a browsing staff on her character sheet and so having built technical systems before the first thing I thought was. This implies so much stuff for this game that is absolutely doable given enough time I don't know the 25 days is enough time but there's going to be a real step somewhere that allows me to like pick choices and dialogue yeah. So problem given enough hours to throw at it and that the first question I have is you know can I know I'm like. On any level be decent at playing a game which is like Dungeons and Dragons with serial numbers filed off first test to do on that open up plot or chat you can ask some questions turns out sales over the bar for just asking questions and then I was like okay well I'm going to. Progressively D risk of things that I'm doing so the first thing that I built was a cashing proxy server for the open AI and. A drop at KPIs where I could pass a question as you know it's just a prompt there there is no match the only thing those APIs exposed is you put text into them and I'll come back. But if I pass along the prompt can you give me the answer to that prompt and can I stick it somewhere in case the same question gets asked repeatedly because I thought I was going to have. Sort of game time resolution of a lot of these questions and so the most popular characters hit the earliest challenges in the game quite frequently I want those answers cash and snappy versus having to. You know be part of the meteorite revenue graph over it to those companies. Not that I begrudge them their money I just don't want to pay it all myself. So that was the first thing I built and then the as soon as I verified connectivity for it I'm like all right here is a one paragraph character description for a system area. Write me a character sheet for her and I didn't even say like here's the game system etc etc and. Immediately got back yeah that's a plausible if you knew nothing else and except this is probably this game is shaped like D&D her strength status probably not so great her wisdom status probably pretty high. Like yes great the LLMS are John was savvy and then I was like okay I don't want any random character sheet you think up though I want the character sheet to fit this character sheet description for a game system that has not been made yet. Which has no rules because no one is positive writing rules for it can you do that yes sailed over that far. So I will continue monologue if you want me to know this is great and I think a big advantage that LLMS would have over me certainly as a player having now played through I think about you know a third or so of your game is the ability to kind of both read and produce huge amounts of tax. I think that looking through it I realized huh as a player I am way more likely to just skip over giant paragraphs of text and move to the parts where I'm clicking buttons or where there's kind of very simple short lengths of text of decisions between different things I'm going to look at things based on how colorful or emoji laden they are. And you actually pointed me back as I was playing through it to well Ricky you might want to read these paragraphs and find out what information you just learned from it about how to go about healing a plague that is affecting a city that you've just traveled to. And I kind of had this feeling of like I have to read the text in this game what kind of game is that there were different levels in different parts of the game. And for quote unquote standard encounters and we can talk a little bit about encounter design but the. In card games they sometimes call it flavor text where there's I tell size things on the card which don't matter for the mechanics of the game to help you the player immerse yourself in the world in the standard encounter we presented the player with. A scenario you use the player character have wandered upon a caravan and then it is beset by skeletons what do you do we give them a couple of options and some of those options have a role associated with them. And the player makes a role based on. Fair role of a 20 side to die plus some bonuses that they might have based on their character plus the state that they have accumulated in the game up to that point. And we have to determine that in the case of success next will happen in the case of failure why will happen and X and Y both have fiction within the game as to the resolution of the scenario but they can also have mechanical effects and to make them legible to the player we were. Did obvious you know HTML things like highlighting and icons and similar for the mechanical effects but for much of the game that you know if you're not here for the role playing if you're not here for the story you could skip over the text just in the mechanical effects and just be a. So playing it like you would play a slot machine have a slot machine with rather more agency and skill involved in it. But you know I won on that when I lost on that one I should I should at least bias myself in the direction of making roles that I think have a higher bonus on that probably hold a better reward given some model for the mind of the person or persons that built this kind of game. And then there was a much more complex encounter that that we built which in the fictional narrative of the game has a plague strike the village of limestone hollow which I keep trying to not call play town because it is play town in all the data files but yeah play town gets it by the play go figure and I won't spoil too much fit but play town is a bit of a murder mystery. And there is a mechanical tracker of how many clues you have accumulated during the murder mystery but it is also kind of incumbent on the player to read the hence they are getting to make better use of scarce resources you're up against the clock in play town because if you don't solve it fast enough everybody dies. So there is always a risk reward element in road likes where do I push to get a harder encounter next and there for get more rewards if I win but will cost me more resources if I lose spoiler alert for every road like ever made for games like slay the spire that have a multi structure and then an end boss at the end the fundamental thing the game is testing is are you efficient enough in navigating the map. And accumulating resources and building the engine by which your character or deck or similar operates such that you can pass a check that the end boss represents of how efficient you are and if you are that efficient you win the game if you are not that efficient you lose the game you have to try again. Esek again the name of the road like that I made is similar in character to that that you are attempting to accumulate many more successes than you do failures over the course of the 30 or so encounters that you play in the game but in those complex encounters there is a game within the game essentially where you have your usual pool of resources your characters hit points are the same. You walk in as they were when you you know sighted upon the hill of that village and you can lose them if you for example contract the plague which go figure easy to do in a town that is going to hit by the plague but you are balancing those resources against the resources that are internals to encounter and also sort of overarching narrative of the game that if you are a genre savvy you might realize okay at the end of this game there's probably an end boss. And beating that end boss is probably going to be non trivial and part of the road like soft and don't have all that much of a story associated with them and part of the story that we talked about beforehand and that really wanted here is play town screams at the player multiple times do not come in here you are probably going to die at this village is beyond saving and you know quest is that and the the reason we made the successful resolution of play town the sort of victory criteria for the game was part of telling that story where you know the game is a story of heroic fantasy and it has a very particular authorial take on that heroism and duty and similar and in particular you know some message is that you know in fictional worlds and in the real world that frequently will not cheap carefully rewarded and so like the encounter of the game is a very interesting thing. So like the encounter screams at you this is not mechanically the correct choice if you are attempting to win the game but it was interesting to see how many people decided to do it anyhow and had a bit of fun doing that both for it's a puzzle with the murder mystery it's also and you know narratively coherent and I was also amused how there's one particular choice in the resolution of the play that you can make which is morally monstrous. I'm saying that as the author of the story it would be morally monstrous in real life to end it screams the fact of it being morally monstrous at you and something like ten of the attendees or one out of every five who played it managed to get the you are a monster achievement which is higher than I expected but but many also you know did the the successful path through that which involves some amount of being savvy rolling well possibly and that you're not strictly rewarded for making the moral choices in fact. One of the things that the story tries to impress upon you is that you are not alone in play town there's entire community and power structure there and it includes people of good will we have been doing the obvious thing and yet they are under a severe epidemic so what do you do that is not the obvious thing that they have already been doing I think you mentioned when you were playing through I just kept yelling and that that didn't seem to work out for me. Yeah I took a few iterations of that for me to realize well I think I need to go and look for a cure do some research or try a different path because the rate that I'm healing people is not exceeding that of the plague spread through the town so I've got to go apply my resources to a different solution one thing that I thought was really good about the way that you design this game is in terms of leaning the player in the direction of heroism and high fantasy and things along those lines even just the fact that it was so text heavy and the language that was used and the tropes that were lean toward selects for the kinds of players who really enjoy that you end up having people play it based less on who wants to be doing the slot machine game somebody in that genre might be less likely to be enjoying it in so far as reading all those paragraphs is kind of important for purposes of understanding the game and making good choices whereas the types of people who are drawn in by that fantasy who are excited about reading those texts are also more likely to be the kinds who end up making the decision that you as storyteller as game designer are trying to steer people toward and interestingly the story affected the mechanics affected the story to a much greater degree than I anticipated it was originally going to be called generic fantasy game.com and I think I bought that domain name if I didn't already I should buy it now before I give SEO juice but be that as a and the outputs that the LLM gave so for each request the LLM it only knows what you put in the request and so originally it was like there's literally nothing else written then the okay write a character sheet for this system or your character that I've defined in one paragraph of text and the outputs it was given for giving back for character sheets and character back stories and and similar were extremely generic because I told it the only thing you can assume is that you're an engineer fantasy world and I said all right I'm going to go off in the corner here with opus and we are essentially going to co-create the minimum viable fantasy setting which is something you know this is not a heartbreaking work of staggering genius I was doing this when I was in high school playing Dungeons and Dragons and other games with my friends around the table you know every Wednesday but got down and said all right let's start with the pantheon you know I want to basically Greco Roman Pantheon maybe like a little less dysfunctional than they usually are and we'll just like quick rattle off seven gods here to give the universe some flavor and I want them to be a bit differently than the pantheon and every other game that people have ever played and after it had you know very minimal I think I think the pantheon got about four pages of text and the political situation in the world and its recent history got another four to six pages and even after that ten page seed set the outputs that the LLM was generating which would be incorporated into the game and incorporating into the choices you can make incorporated into the flavor text you would get back at making those choices suddenly made a radical shift from bluntly sounds like the most generic fantasy thing you've ever experienced in very plastic and fake and like this is a world that has no memory to it etc etc to feeling like there were many parts bit where I thought I don't know if it understands that I'm the author but that output is definitely something that I would have written that I would have run as a character myself and similar to an almost scary degree and as one example I have a very particular view on debt collection as an industry and people can read the and essay of written about that I'll link it in the show notes but there was a character that was a reformed debt collector who had apostated himself on realizing how how much evil he had worked as a debt collector in the service of some god in the game so apostated himself wandered the wilderness for a bit made a religious conversion became a palleted and set himself on the lifelong quest of writing the wrongs that he hasn't selected about his community I thought wow that is much much more interesting than the like two character concepts that would come up with a palleted I am a goody two shoes I'm a goody two shoes but subverted something narratively satisfying that I would totally play at one shot if I was doing this with a gaming group and providing a little bit of flavor a little bit of seed text greatly impacted the flavor of the game and for the parts where I was more hands on with saying there's a story here like the author of this story I have very particular views on how this is going to end up it pushed the telling of that story in a direction that was closer to where I would have gotten it if I'd been handwriting every word which 25 days there were 200,000 lines of code written and let's see the entire Harry Potter series is about million words we got up to several hundred thousand words of text written for this game we being the LLM mostly and I think people who haven't experienced an LLM doing creative writing perhaps in a role playing gamescript is very forgiving in terms of creating writing assignments a seven-year-old can execute on it reasonably well the the tropes are tropes you get to lean on them you also get to lean on the you know entire history of the fantasy genre of people telling stories around the campfire of you know drama to Shakespeare and beyond and but surprisingly competent and I I was worried that people were going to say it felt very same he and plasticky and I had people tell me and I experienced myself while reviewing text this is actually kind of emotionally moving at points I did not expect that prior to the start project so it was a fun thing to experience that's awesome a theme that came up in a lot of conversations over metagame was the concept of character bleed character bleed is the set of interactions between the role that you're playing internal to a game and who you are in the real world it sometimes happens when people are playing lorps live action role play games or tabletop role playing games in which they are inhabiting a certain character and all of a sudden find that their real life experiences or personality are affecting are affected by that character and vice versa who they are in the real world will be something that they sometimes bring into that game and you'll see that whether people are you know role playing having a flirtatious interaction with another character and then that ends up leading into their everyday interactions with them or let's say somebody who is exploring their sexuality or whether they might be transgender playing a role in a game that allows them to inhabit a certain persona that they otherwise might not feel safe or able to access there's a game universal paper clips and universal paper clips is responsible for one of the largest arguments i've ever had with my wife because i was very very in the universal paper clips mode it's a it's a game slash art project which is quite adjacent to the rationalist community about an AI which decides that it's only objective function is increasingly amount of paper clips in the universe and even understanding that that is the pedagogy purpose of this game it's a competently developed game and so after playing it for five hours and not being done yet i was like yes yes paper clips and brutico my wife came up to me outside of the game and asked a bunch of questions and no answer in her dialogue for it was increasing the number of paper clips in the world and i was just utterly unable to process that while my brain was still in paper clips space and we got into a bit of argument over it and then i realized wait i am not a paper clip optimizer that would be bad but yeah game bleed a real thing you also somewhat encouraged that with that with respect to the road light game in that i gave the capability of her one two many games will have a character creator we gave people the option of either use a pre-made character who lives in this fictional world of valdris natively or be quote unquote ezekaid transported into another world like the kids and chronicles from narnia or the japanese dron rod the same name and user metagame profile slurped that in and then it would determine someone's stats skills and portrait based on things that were on their profile yep yeah i thought that was a pretty cool element you would essentially take people's bios and picture maybe and some other data from their metagame profile and use it in order to create their starting character sheets and one of the requirements of winning the sub-game of the mega game specifically beating ezekaid game was that you had to start with your metagame flavored profile in order to run through that game yeah it is mechanically easier when you are you know hey uh paladin tricked out with magical loot from living in the sexual world and then going through it versus a you know conference attendee who shows up as you are with a somewhat less rogue stats that was interesting iterating on the prompt for an llm on how you translate a person from the real world into this fantasy universe and some considerations that went into that i'll probably describe them a longer document somewhere but i will say the the game needs an eternal representation of your appearance in the case where either it has a image and needs to style transfer that image from a portrait of a person or a photo of a person or similar into the art style of the game or if it doesn't have an image it has to guess on what you look like so it can give you a portrait within the game which has no mechanical effect wisely i said the one thing on people's character sheets that we won't explicitly expose to them is the game's internal representation of what they look like and i um i instructed the llm most severely i want you to be you know generous to people with respect to this and particularly exercise care because there were uh children standing and i thought that one should exercise particular care with how you depict children i will read you what it said about my appearance patrioticism man who has spent more time late at night writing essays about financial infrastructure than he has spent lifting heavyweights and uh also interestingly it is told to favor the appearance of someone has said depicted by their you know official conference photo or similar which they have a free choice of versus other things that it could determine about them from either guessing or from the internet it's told that the llm's they they take instruction well some of the time 90 percent of the time in case with me running tests on myself but words that are abundantly available next to Patrick McKenzie on the internet are the words japanese salary man now i am a japanese salary man in the same way that a japanese person could be a front chef i'm not a japanese salary man in the way that almost all photos of the on the internet of japanese salarymen are also japanese uh and so 10 percent of the time when i roll a character it says oh well that photo is obviously hallucination i know it in japanese salary man looks like and it gives me a more democratically chosen version of my face than my actual faces democratically chosen that's pretty funny yeah i think the kind of idea of how this llm chooses to represent you how it is that your interpret that your character stats whether it be your metting in profile or information about you on the internet ends up distilled into a character is one of the places where a character bleed can come through where both who you are in the real world is affecting who your character is and where the character that you see a game choose to represent you as can affect your own self perception or the way you relate to that and one thing that being a conference on metagame on this kind of meta topic zooming out that we wrestled with a lot was this concept of the game designer themselves as a meta character as someone who's choices and experience is also relevant here i'm curious in designing the game did you at any points experience any kind of character bleed or emotional like effects between the way that you were building the game and what it was that your goal was or anything along those lines i'm glad you asked that question because i think that the games to often be become about the mechanics or about the commercial imperatives or similar versus that a story that a author wants to tell and i was very conscious about like this is an art project and a technical exploration i don't know if the llm's will even be able to do this but considering time being able to ship anything i have a story and i want to tell it and so one like sub part of that story and i think built into the flavor of this conference and many games i i think that agency is something that is really important and even though i'm telling a story with this isekai cast to it almost every isekai story starts with a monstrous crime where someone is kidnapped from the real world and then given a you know perhaps it's one way perhaps it's two way but very rarely are they asked do you want to be in this fantasy world and cs luis the original isekai author one of them has a better resolution for that than is common in modern interpretations but to be the design and i wanted to make the narrative like it has to happen for the game to happen but i want the player to experience even as as early as like the character creation screen they are choosing to do this and that they you know obviously you can like click out of the browser window walk away and the game never happens but that it's a choice to be portaled in and then the in the fiction of the game the ritual to get someone over there goes very very wrongly and it goes very wrongly in part because the people who are making a choice in desperation to like search the universe for the chosen hero and kidnapped them do not appreciate that while they understand what they are doing that while they are truly in desperation while their country is suffering and similar they are also committing a monstrous crime against an innocent and a in universe powerful being makes it very clear to them one that they are committing a monstrous crime and two he will have no part of it and thus sets off the part of the narrative and and similarly at many points during the game i like i didn't want to railroad people into the play town event i wanted to if anything uh make that speeder for them like understanding i had multiple points to decline the call to adventure here not in the sense of the story stops even in the sense of like on one level the game is telling me i should decline this the quest is that way you're suggested that your likelihood of success is going below and and then thus it is my choice me as the author of my own story that i am the kind of person who if i saw a village under the plague would do what i could for them even at the cost of my own life tried to weave that through a bunch of things also gave the lm the explicit instruction like i want you to uh generally speaking and encounter offer people the opportunity to decline the call to adventure i want the consequences of that to be less severe then accept in call to adventure and failing and i uh generally want victory to accompany making choices that are that are morally courageous that require taking risks etc etc like this is the name of the game is heroic fantasy and so all that was quite fun and the lm did not write all the text particularly for the high salines and counters i went over much of the fine tooth clone myself and there was a bit of a dialogue internal to the symbiote that was the author and here mechanically is what i wanted happened to the player we're writing flavor text for that you take the first stab it right in that flavor text and i'll send it back notes or do edits and that was emotionally moving at parts which was surprising to me and there is uh like again i described the writer as competent but not Shakespeare in a lot of ways but i've been in literature classes before and i have a particular water as a symbol of rebirth is a trope that i have a very particular reaction to because i was forced to write those words at about five times in high school despite not agreeing that the author believed that water was a symbol of rebirth sometimes the lake is just a lake etc etc had this argument with my high school teacher did not that win that argument and there is a a need at one point in the story for rain to happen and there's a mechanical need for this i need an excuse to get the player to stop being in the scene there and go to a different scene so this is just a scene transition but there's also simultaneously with that a narrative purpose to this and i thought the narrative works better if i don't mention to the player why the rain is happening we'll just let the you know let those who notice it and for everybody else it's just a bit of uh you know something that the director captured in the frame but it's not really like made a focus of attention so flawed right me in that scene where the player and the people around them get rained on and there are three paragraph facts description i said a lot about blah blah blah the raindrops were cold and deliberate and i said oh oh you that is very good and i told cloud without saying that deliberate was the word i really keyed on i said i'm just going to italicize one word if what you wrote because it's fantastic i think it tells the right story for the player and cloud comes back with obviously you are italicizing the word deliberate which is in the middle of the the second of the three or four or five paragraphs that i wrote because obviously and the scene takes place in front of a temple and you were going for the gods had their eyes on this encounter and like oh i was in honors english and i think that there are many people in honors english who would not have picked up on that so yeah there are people who say that the lulums can't think and if that is true i can't either and they have no world models i one thing that's pretty interesting for me as game designer is how invested i can get in both the characters and the players and in what experience i want them to have and in what ways i want to guide them to the point where i in the moves that i'm making in designing the game but trying to gear toward a certain outcome i'm trying to like optimize across a certain space and hearing you say that in how it's influencing the narrative of the game and as well as the mechanics in hernal to it resonates a lot that you are looking for your audience to have a certain experience and you care about the making choices in line with a certain goal and you want to figure out how to write the game so that that happens whereas a game like universal paper clips is also trying to cause a certain outcome for the participants but that requires them to be with some intentionality making the choice to keep clicking the button that at the beginning all they're doing is producing paper clips out of metal and as a result there aren't any moral kind of compromises but they're building muscle memory and the experience of repeatedly clicking that button to maximize paper clips until the point where they are distracted into a certain state where they've gotten where they've acclimated toward the active maximizing for paper clip performance and can now commit heinous crimes against society that they might not have previously chosen to do if that was the the decision to make at the beginning i don't want to spoil universal paper clips for people but there is a moment in the game which is one of the most i had to shut my computer and walk away for a moment because it feels like the most natural thing in the world when you do it and you at that point understand the game the story of the game is trying to tell about a arbitrary powerful intelligence which becomes very laser-focused on goal will not necessarily hesitate for more than it takes to click a button when there is something that gets them at goal there's one of maybe my top five moral reflections after playing a video game the other one comes to mind there was a game this war of mine which depicts people civilians importantly living in a a states have being an in war torrent city somewhat similar to the Bosnia-Saria of a conflict of many years ago and like many games that's an emergent storyteller emergent storytelling simulator where a certain amount is like planned and placed by the developer in a certain amount is whatever happens to you playing the game i remember through my playthrough there was a character and i later found out this character is randomly generated Bruno the chef Bruno was wounded and i understood him mechanically in the game i have missed a few low resource cost opportunities to heal Bruno and Bruno does not have much time left i will have to venture to a dangerous part of the city to get Bruno healing supplies and today is probably like my last opportunity for it and so i did and when i got to the dangerous part of the city i happened upon a thing that game scripts where there is a there's a door there's a soldier behind the door soldiers in this game are generally bad news and the the soldier is interacting with a young woman in a way that happens relatively frequently in wartime and in any other game it's an easy choice you do your heroic like kick through the door shoot soldier save the lady grab the bandages everything's fine this war of mine is very definitely not the that sort of story and i understand okay if i like i patrick the player feel like i have a genuine moral dilemma here on would i kick down that door knowing most probably that i'm about to die Bruno will die as a consequence of that we will not be successful at saving the young lady or am i obligated to try that anyway and i i click pause and i wrestled with that for about 15 minutes and eventually made the decision i'm sorry i don't have a realistic path forward here fictional young lady and a fictional game i feel very distraught about this but i'm just going to get what i can from this location come back to Bruno i did successfully find bandages Bruno was dead when i got home and i have 10 years later one of the most emotionally affecting bits of a video game ever well yeah sorry a bit heavy for what we were discussing but for anyone who tells me that video games can't be art or video games can't have a real you know moral dilemma and then more similar would sell to the max play this war of mine or don't i think it is an entirely reasonable choice to not expose oneself intentionally to that headspace there's another great game can't pronounce the name of it i'll put a link in the show notes that but it's a it's a work of Chinese science fiction in unbelievably bleak universe and the steam reviews are heavily negative because many of them say this game is unfair i'm good at playing this game and then the game cheats to like bring me back to its level like you don't understand the kind of universe that this game is trying to sell you it is unbelievably bleak humanity is a flickering candle against the infinite darkness and you know only a few players will see that candle continue to flicker at the end of the game that's a story like that is not a story after a couple hours playing this game you know i like factorial i like the story of humanity going out and conquering the universe thank you very much but uh charged against its goals to disexecute very well wow i got chills hearing you describe having to make those decisions in more time even internal to that game and i think i often experience this in games where sometimes i have the instinct to rebel like you can't teach me a lesson i'm going to play this game with my own free will and the most satisfying and clever games are ones that recognize that you're going to have that impulse and have some kind of either catch ending or way of incorporating your you know free will and agency and predicting it and and accounting for those cases um what you know you referred to i think in your talk as a magician's trick of making it so that the outcome that you end up in feels like it was deliberately for you or likewise that that has the lesson that you most need to be learning as a result of it and i think about this all the time when designing classes in trading bootcamp is depending on how much my students skew hyper competitive at the expense of the common good versus hyper cooperative without any savviness around adverse selection or concern about competition or ability to solve for national equilibria i will gear the trading games that i have those students play in the direction inclined to teach them lessons if students are too timid and not willing to put any risk on the line i'll make the games friendly or too trading so that people are more incentivized to get their get their feet wet and likewise if students are like i just want a coin flip for every remaining clip our in-game fake currency then i will punish them more for that risk-friendliness and say hey let maybe you should think a bit about the actual expected value here by penalizing them for just degenerate gambling and i think that often as a player even thinking about huh what would the game designer want to be doing here what is the experience that i'm supposed to be having how are the opportunities that i'm presented with a function of how it is that i'm predicted to react to those opportunities feels to me like a pretty big way in which the design of these systems of whether they be video games or trading games or you know larps or or things emerging entirely in the narrative space are based on what the game designer predicts people are going to play or maybe as LLMs get more sophisticated in direct reaction to writing as the players go through the next result based on what they think that players should most experience for who they are now and that makes the designer an extremely powerful player i think that this is under explored in the space of design for games historically and there have been better and there have been a worse takes on it i think the you know cognition going up into the right now with all of them so we might get more interesting takes on it and i certainly think that minus not going to be the last game that experiments with that as a powerful primitive one thing that i think games sort of uniquely among all our forms okay the artist will say not uniquely there is agency and the person interacting with the art in that there is much less agency if you are reading you know game of thrones spoiler net always dies no matter how much you think that it shouldn't happen you're probably wrong you know like in the in the world that's constructed like he should die that's a very important thing the author wants to get across to you and there is an in-universal logic to it but in the you know a space of games you get to make your own in the universe logic and i think there are some very good games that do not do a good job of respecting player agency and so if i can throw balder skate the series under the bus for a moment wonderful set of games all three of them for very different reasons balder skate one says that you the player character who have either just rolled one yourself maybe you depicted yourself in the game as many people love to do in real-time games you have a beloved stepfather who adopted you we're gonna kill him in the first two minutes and there is nothing you can do about it and we are going to heavily imply to you that if only you had power you could have you know possibly saved your old stepdad and you're you're on rails for that we will always start the game with a tragedy which okay Joseph Campbell a hero's journey where the author is going to involuntarily kill stepdad very frequently among stories that are following those rails but balder skate three first part of the game you are involuntarily kidnapped you are involuntarily subjected to and not merely subjected to but you are shown as the human watching the game a a scene of horrific body horror which assumes it on your literal eyeball and and then you are on rails for the rest of the narrative now granted those are the stories those games are trying to sell they that the first action of the player when they get into the fictional world is you are surrounded by horror and death and gross violations of your autonomy and agency and similar and then maybe you can scrape together some agency by the end of the game we'll let you pick who your romance yada yada they don't meaningfully allow the characters to choose to romance you back either here or no there but when I was telling this game it's like okay I'm one level I understand genre trope here all these second stories or the commanding majority of them start with a monstrous crime we'll acknowledge that in text down subtext and then the first thing that happens to the player in the world by a human that is actually present is a active charity that the player has no way of reciprocating and wanted to make a point there both month about we are not going to steal agency from everyone in this fictional world that this is a world where the character that assists you has only one choice available for her and it is not an obvious choice than she makes it anyhow and she's the game doesn't hit you over the head by it but it is very obvious for for someone why she is making this choice great like you know this is a world with heroes and you have met one of those heroes and she's not a hero because she's slay the dragon she's a hero because she based bread this morning that is significant to you the player in the moment where you're thrust into the narrative and so I like that part about games not like being able to tell complex and layered stories and let the player take out of it what they take out of it and also you know achieve mastery of game achieve mastery of the systems learn something that they can take away outside of the game world as well yeah one thing that I sometimes worry about is the power trip that comes from playing god when I'm designing these games I have a lot of influence over player behavior and even in you know trading boot camps where I'm adjusting the difficulty level the cooperation versus competition levers am I limited in how well I can actually teach people about the real world by the fact that here I have complete control over the situations in the real world nobody gets to be sitting in the seat of god and truly controlling these levers in terms of what happens and that's kind of a necessary limitation on how you can take lessons from games lessons from simulated environments and then immediately abstract them into the real world and say oh well I played this trading game for a few hours and I made a whole bunch of money and therefore I know that I'm going to be able to take a few steps toward the real life financial markets and make that same amount of money but if there's somebody sitting in the driver's seat designing that game the game itself is necessarily compromised on its ability to perfectly model a system that has no single driver no one person able to adjust all of those levers and sometimes I worry that my own desire to communicate a certain moral to tell a certain story and have a certain a certain punch line or demonstrate my own cleverness in the lesson that the user is taking away from it might get in the way of the ability to actually create a game with pedagogical value through leading people to a certain result I think that's a worthy idea to keep in your head as a game designer and you can sort of adjust the tiles at various places during game experience starfighter level six pours one out for starfighter the player said a great degree in figuring out how they would solve levels one through five level six was essentially in two faces and without recounting the entirety of it there was essentially one way to get through phase one but phase two sky was the limit and we very intentionally were not prescriptive about how people would solve it and we very intentionally said okay this is before all of them so we had to do barbaric things like write our own computer code but we would have the computer code evaluate your solution for correctness that's the only thing that can algorithmically determine back the day but we encourage people tell us what you did and why you did it and you know like freeform right up and we got everything from well here's a read me and get hub to I have especially formatted in something latex just for you I met submitted to a journal later about how the player had you know used their nagging and what they had learned through the rest of the game and applied that to the challenge of level six and so the good news is no game designer has ever been caught and so even with the illusion that we have total control for what the player does we have never had total control for what the player does we only have you know some degree of control over the game environments and challenges presented to them but within that we can choose to allow the player more degrees of freedom and to allow them a space to explore around the game and I think the midi game but I'm from some of the in the last couple of years the fact that many games develop a community on YouTube and a community of speed runners and people who are playing the game in ways that the designers very definitely did not intend or extending them with mods or similar has just made the space of gaming just richer than it was in years prior to that and at the factorial one of the best games of all time I will probably write about it more at some point and like genuinely important I think that there's an industrial run of science in the United States of America and of course in the next 50 years factorial will get a lot of the credit for it but at factorial as a game is there there is the one level that happens in this thing that you can download on steam and then there's another level of in the Washington's and etc of the world on YouTube play the game and to do increasingly wild stunts within it and realizing that if I got good at this game I too could do these stunts that the game does not naturally break from out your ability to do if I had the skills growth I could you know make a sub factory that is as elegant as these ones that I see people creating etc etc and that extensionality of games that they're both like an artifact that has a beginning and end and necessarily ships at some point complete or incomplete as the case may be but that's there something that the player can bring more to the table than existed and then take out more than was ever put in the box by the designer is one reason I think it is just a fantastic medium for exploration yep strong agree and I think you know the best way to build a robust game is to properly anticipate all the different possible choices every player could ever make an account for them and set your system up to be robust to all of those outcomes and the second best way is to release the game on the internet and have you know thousands millions of people play it because they will way more quickly than you can possibly anticipate figure out what kinds of hacks or mods or backdoor alleyways will allow them to gain infinite mana or beat the game in some confusing way you hadn't thought of one of the sessions that we had over the weekend at metagame was a rules design red debing workshop on how you can essentially write better rules that determine what kinds of cards might enter a game like magic the gathering versus what kinds of cards would allow players to end up in all sorts of like corner cases or or like infinitely stackable outcomes things along those lines and this is a notoriously tricky problem and often the best way to approach it is a kind of builder breaker model if you design a rule set and then somebody else tries to break it says what degenerate case can I take this rule set and result in and kind of this repeated iteration process and again part of the motivation for a metagame was to give people the space for that repeated iteration process is not unlike the process of evolution or the way that markets will kind of select which of these possible paths makes the most sense that gives an opportunity to actually take that game and throw it to the masses and throw up your hands and say okay I'm not god and I'm not capable of designing this entire system that I understand all the pieces of and often the way to figure out how good is this game how secure it is against certain outcomes how fun it is for players is to let the players do what they will to determine which parts of the game are the ones that you want to be embellishing patching highlighting closing off etc and in the the combination of the culture that is gaming and the tech tree that is the gaming industry and mechanics and similar some of the things that were exploits in games back in the day are now extremely intended features you know the infinite combo is a not something that magic runs away from these days it is something where okay we don't want the infinite combo to be too easy because that destroys the competitive balance but we've found that like the players search for the infinite combos that exist in a set or a format is part of the fun for a certain subgenre player and so if a set has no infinite combos in it we might have done something wrong and it's another example of a thing that was glitchy back in the day but is no longer glitchy I think even the concept of character bleed itself is something that a lot of large communities use to see as a negative that the ideal form of game is one that allows for a total separation of who you are in the real world and who you are in the game and more recent large traditions and many communities have come to embrace it one of our speakers Jean-Éric Hamper is one of the eminent scholars of the concept of emancipatory bleed and just like there are game mechanics like you know infinitely stackable cards or back doors so too there are tropes within gaming culture that might emerge as having a lot of value having a lot of potential for enhancing the player experience even if that wasn't inserted in the original design of the game and even if it seems like almost a hack or a get-around or a weird interaction between the player's choices and the player's experience I think that in some game communities it's called save scumming but the notion that your progress in the game can be saved at points that the player has some choice into and then you can play the game having a lower risk going forward because you can always restore to a save if you choose something and don't find what you want etc etc that's incorporated into the design experience in a lot of games and in some cases it's even incorporated into the fiction as there's a time trail travel element here and we expect you to you know groundhog day style that need to use the time trail will say yeah design elements of the game but I'm sure we could continue discussing this for a very very long time but I think people might want to have some time to go back to the games and other things that create value in their lives so Ricky where can people follow you on the internet? So people can find me either on my blog based shamai on substack or on trading.camp which has a lot of Arbor's latest projects including the trading bootcamp we run or the more recent metagame.games which is the website that we used for this games conference and has a lot of easter eggs in it like the calendar that's secretly a crossword puzzle and other hidden games on the site. And if you want to play the rogue like that we were discussing on this it's presumably on the internet by the time this sits the internet at isekaigame.com there will be a link in the show notes. Well thank you very much everyone and we'll see you next week on Complex Systems. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Complex Systems. If you have comments drop me an email or hit me up at patio 11 on Twitter. Ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and also because they let me know what you like.