AGC07: Interview with Raph Koster

f13.net: Here we are again on the final day of AGC07 with Raph Koster of Areae, and Tami Baribeau, also of Areae.

Raph Koster: Annual tradition!

f13: Well, conference tradition at this point.

Raph: Yeah.

f13: We’re just going to talk about stuff… so Raph, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at the conference this year?

Raph: Oh… whew. I loved Nicole Lazzarro’s talk, I thought it was really fantastic.

f13: Why was it so fascinating?

Raph: So, you know Nicole’s been doing research into the emotions generated by games for the last several years, and this past year apparently she spent a lot of time looking at the emotions generated by stuff that isn’t necessarily what people expect. Specifically she looked at the iPhone, she looked at Web 2.0, she looked at Line Rider, and a few other things, and basically ended up analyzing these things in terms of what kinds of fun they generate. The Wii, she looked at that. She basically put up a diagram in which she took the entire spectrum of gameplay that we have right now, and it was a dot, and then she put it in the middle of this gigantic, huge field and said we’re not going near a huge amount of what game design needs to touch.

It was really illustrating kind of an interesting divide, because I really also liked Damion Schubert’s talk, and for that matter Erik Bethke talked a lot about needing to add goals and structure back into GoPets… But Nicole was showing off just all the video and all the excitement that people had from tilting their iPhone left and right, or she described Line Rider as like the first game that is player-created content only and your scoring mechanism is YouTube: who gets the most YouTube hits is the winner. And that was really interesting because it was so not goal-oriented play, it was “easy fun”, as she calls it, and social fun. It was really interesting because I thought, in some ways, Damion’s talk – he acknowledges it – was kinda conservative. I agree with absolutely everything he said, but I also think it was for one segment of the way we should be thinking, that it really doesn’t address the entire landscape of entertainment experiences, and I think we need to quit thinking of what we make as just the videogame bit. I think there’s way more to it than that.

f13: Since you mentioned the landscape of possible experiences, what do you think are the nearest-neighbors that we can invade in order to expand the videogame business?

Raph: I think they are invading us. Social networks is an obvious one. At this point, not only did they invade our house, they are pillaging through the underwear drawers and stealing shit. Just log into Facebook and look, they’re not hiding it, it’s right there. So I think it doesn’t look to me like we are doing a lot of outward invading. Even the stuff that looks very gamelike in other arenas, like – for better or worse, one of those is marketing and advertising and brainwashing – but it isn’t game developers who are making those titles, it’s actually ad agencies who made those. An ad agency made BarbieGirls. An ad agency made CokeMusic. The same ad agency, actually: Studiocom… which makes them actually the second-most successful MMO developer in America ever, maybe third behind MTV, *laughs* which is my point, really: that for whatever reason we are not jumping off our island, and instead the other islands are swimming over, taking our coconuts and going home. So, besides the marketing and besides that – oh, serious games, of course. They’re coming in and pillaging, and we are seeing some of the game people going over to that side of the fence. That is happening. But yeah, gosh, it’s so insular an industry in so many ways.

f13: You mentioned last year that these companies were already coming over and eating our lunch. Have we actually begun to react to that in any way?

Raph: No. I think the lunch got ate. *laughing* You know, at GDC, that was when we were talking about it, and there was that panel. There was Mark (Jacobs), and Daniel James even, and I said, “The story is, you guys need to look out for this! The toy companies, the media companies are gonna come in and they’re gonna crush and we need to watch out!” Well, they came, they saw, they crushed, man! They did it already! MTV launched more MMOs in the last six months than any of the MMO publishers. And picked up more users, I mean their smallest one is bigger than the biggest one these other guys had ever made. And it’s a little “Whoa!”, it happened really fast! Really, really fast.

f13: And have we seen any of the traditional game companies budge an inch on their philosophy or friendships to other forms of media?

Raph: Yeah, I think we are seeing some of them budge. Some of them have aspects of it already, like EA has had it with Pogo, and EA of course tapped into it with The Sims and I think when you see something like MySims on the Wii, it’s a clue they are thinking in other, new and different directions. EA just did that reorg where they split into four divisions, and they now have a casual division, and a Sims division, and a sports division, and a “everything else games” division. To me that says EA is going “Whoa, wait a minute!”, and all the buzz is that Riccitello, the CEO, is going around his teams saying “We are a media company now”. So I think some people do get it, I think you see the platform holders… so they’re kind of invested in trying to be the whole stupid digital hub thing, but nonetheless many of the steps they are taking seem to indicate they get it to some degree. Now, the traditional publishers… quite a lot of them, no. It looks like too many of the traditional publishers are trying to clone Grand Theft Auto, which is like so 2005. But, whatever.

f13: We just got out of the talk on microtransactions. Why do you think the establishment is really resisting the free-to-play, microtransaction model in the West? By establishment, I mean the Mark Jacobses, the EAs.

Raph: And many of the core gamers? Because they want to feel that when they play the game and they earn something, they actually earned it instead of bought it. Which is OK! I have no objection to it. Clearly these people don’t play golf. Or Magic. Or, well, most any physical sport, certainly any that has lessons. I think there is that sense of “Oh, here’s an arena I was good in, I was proving myself, and here comes the rich brat who can buy their way to the top,” or whatever. Some of it, there is a psychology thing here, which is: quit comparing yourself to the rich brat. I mean, just choose not to pay attention to them. It’s not like they are really impinging on you. It’s not like they are ruining your game; they are ruining your game in your head. They’re not actively taking levels away from you. Does your epic mount become less valuable because somebody else has one?

The answer is no, not really, except in your head. And then the question is: how did they get it? And in our head we seem to have the opinion “Well, if that guy had gotten up at three AM every morning to practice his mousing, and then he busted ass, and he walked uphill in the snow to Molten Core and… whatever,” then, what, does that then make your epic mount slightly less devalued than if you bought it? No, not really. Your epic mount is still there in the database, none of its stats have changed, I promise. So some of it is psychology, and in the real world we’ve learned to realize that just because that guy has a pool cue that isn’t bent, or a really cool golf club, or one of the golf balls that can fly twenty-five feet further because of the cool aerodynamic dimples on it, or whatever the hell, it doesn’t mean they are better than you. So… so I don’t know, it’s got to be cultural to some degree. Maybe it’s because we’re all geeks and we gotta have numbers to measure ourselves by, I don’t know!

f13: I was about to ask, how much do you think cultural issues like the Western notion of egalitarianism or the self-made man really plays into that?

Raph: Sure it plays into that. Of course it does, but… the whole point of being a self-made man is so you can buy that cool golf ball. *laughing* It’s the American Dream! So, yeah, it matters, but I think some of it is honestly because we’ve been pretty crude actually, I think, in design about how we set up comparisons between players and how we tell them to measure themselves against other people. We just give them this one metric, level or whatever, and then… what if there were lots of metrics? Like: You are an extremely high-level epic mount earner! That guy’s a lousy epic mount earner. Then all of a sudden you could say, “Well, clearly he bought his”, and you go neener-neener and walk away. And nobody would feel like it was awful! So some of it might be just that we’ve been bad about designing our metrics.

f13: You did mention during the talk that microtransactions do not necessarily imply RMT, which is what we were just talking about here.

Raph: Of course they don’t. The microtransaction, the common business definition is a system where… there are two flavors. One is: you actually pay a macrotransaction that converts into some point system and you eat away at the points. It’s like buying a block of cell phone minutes or a block of time, or something like that. And then the other method is: you buy something that’s really small and cheap, and then periodically the service aggregator, instead of billing you constantly, which gets expensive because they pay per transaction — they pay this fixed fee. Instead of doing it then, they let them pile up for a month and then they bill you all at once. And that is how pay-per-view works. That’s the definition of microtransaction. Notice the whole question of whether you handed your pay-per-view movie to him did not come into the equation! That’s a separate issue altogether, it has nothing to do with the billing model. Microtransaction’s just a billing model.

So, yeah… Mark Jacobs was on crack. The real question is — yeah, make a note! “Mark Jacobs is on crack”, asterisk, underline! This one’s going in the headline! … I think the secondary question is really user-to-user transaction, and that isn’t even the thing that freaks people out. Let’s face it, one hundred percent of users do user-to-user transaction. It’s called “Oh, my guildie needs this item!” We build it into the games on purpose everywhere! So it’s not users giving each other stuff, that’s not the issue. The issue is actually the third-order issue, which is the question: to whom do these bits in the database belong? At this point, we’re like three steps away from microtransaction, and it’s really annoying when people say “Step A equates to Step D” because they have nothing to do with one another. You could have the exact same issue in a subscription game. The issue of virtual property could absolutely come up in a subscription-based game.

f13: I was just about to go into that: what do you think the legal status is of digital assets in the western market right now compared to the eastern market?

Raph: In the western market, it’s about two-point-three feet this way and seven-point-eight feet up in the air. I mean, it’s just totally up in the air. Nobody knows. The big case to watch is of course Bragg v Linden, and everyone’s watching. But there isn’t really a good sense of it because there are so many ways to look at it. It cuts across too many different kinds of law, so yeah, none of the lawyers know either. Some of them might tell you they know, but they don’t. It’s somewhat more subtle than some narrowly-defined specific cases in Asia, and it’s subtle in different ways, so there isn’t really an international consensus. We can rehash the same cases from three years ago in Korea and China where, “Oh yeah, this guy stole my sword so I sued and I made them give it back and now that guy banned my account and he shouldn’t have taken my stuff and he stole my stuff and would they call it fraud, and dah dah dah….”

There is that stuff out there. But you could have had similar end-results in the US via like a fraud case without actually ever owning the stuff, even a civil suit… tortious interference, I don’t know, I mean there’s all kinds of ways it could have been done. The law is just vague. I think so much is just going to be about representations in the EULA, the question of volume of transaction is going to matter… essentially the common practices, like: are people all doing this and are they then cashing out, are people doing businesses, are they LLCs? And finally, the big determinant is actually probably going to be the IRS, and they’re the ones who say “Well, we gotta draw a line,” and they’re actually in that process now of going out there and interviewing people to figure out where to draw the line.

f13: You mentioned EULAs. Do you really think those hold water?

Raph: Heh. Uh, kinda.

f13: Why?

Raph: Habit.

f13: OK. *laughing*

Raph: Well, because… so, here’s the thing: EULAs and shrinkwrapped licenses have been under attack since somebody first stuck one in a computer box, and they’ve gone for a lot of adjustments. At one point it was like “you don’t own the disk, either” and the dongles and behbehbeh, so it keeps getting adjusted and adapted and so on. There are all the questions about whether the contract is valid if you click through it too quick, or if they didn’t make you read it every time you log in, or if you have to scroll to the bottom or not, or… whatever. It’s actually a point in the Bragg v Linden case that Bragg is a lawyer and therefore should have known to read the EULA in detail. That’s actually a point to argue, that, well, it would have meant more of a EULA for him because he knew what he was getting into. Whoa! So… whatever. So, I think the real question is not whether EULAs hold water, it’s whether the EULAs line up with the expected social contract, and they don’t always. There’s that question.

We still periodically see things that we trust plenty, like lots of people trust Google with like their whole lives and yet you look at some of the Google EULAs and it’s like “Do you know what you just signed away to them?!” There’s lots of questions like that… ah, God… there’s all kinds of sites, where you post a blog post and they take your copyright, you know, they claim they took your copyright, and it’s highly dubious. There’s actually a lot of standards about whether or not a contract can be considered valid: if it’s too one-sided or not, all kinds of crap. So, they work out of habit and also because most people do want them to work. Even the users like EULAs. I think they do need to become less one-sided; I think they need to start acknowledging… avatar rights. And stuff like that.

f13: So you’re going to write the User’s Bill of Rights?

Raph: Didn’t I already?

f13: I think so. I was like “Was that you…?”

Raph: No, that was me. That was me. I do think it needs an update, and actually Erik Bethke in GoPets is doing an initiative to do the same thing, and actually at Ludium, which is Ted Castronova’s conference, they also arrived at a platform of, hey, we need to recognize the rights of users. I think… I was only seven years ahead of my time.

f13: Are those things being accepted by the more traditional game companies?

Raph: No. Hell no, any more than the record company is going to add user rights to their music. Because people want to maintain control over their IP and the brand image. Which is a completely hopeless battle, but most big companies don’t see it that way. It’s almost impossible to actually maintain control over your brand image.

f13: One more business-related question before we go on to stuff that people will actually care about: In-game ads, yes or no? What’s your opinion on them?

Raph: Virtual Times Square, in-game ads? Rock it! In the deep, dark dungeon of the bottom of Frodoland, not so much.

f13: Have you looked at Massive at all?

Raph: Yeah! Yeah, I looked at Massive, I know about Massive. You know, at lot depends on —

f13: Are they worth a shit?

Raph: … I mean, they seem to do OK for SOE. I think it really is a question of, do they make sense for this? If you’re playing MMO Diner Dash, it is kind of nice to be able to serve your little NPC dudes an actual Coke instead of Fake-O Cola, so there’s plenty of ways in which players even want it. NASCAR game with no ads? That’s the only reason to watch NASCAR. *laughs* It’s ads, billboards, circling five-hundred times; that’s the reason it even exists. So, yeah, you have to pick and choose where you put ’em, but that happens in the real world too.

f13: Let’s move on to more of a game-player sort of thing. What’s your favorite kind of game right now?

Tami: *laughs*

Raph: Been playing Puzzle Quest. I suck at it.

f13: Why? What’s compelling about Puzzle Quest?

Raph: I can pick it up and put it down in thirty seconds. That’s rapidly become my main criterion for games, because I don’t have time for much more. I… gosh… at GDC when we talked I probably told you I wanted to finish Tomb Raider: Legend; I still do! *laughs* I have shrink-wrap waiting to be unwrapped, I’ve got God of War II, still, so I’m just hopelessly behind. I… am digging The Prince of Persia redo; I LOVED Pac-Man CE, I thought that kicked ass. I haven’t booted up my PS3 in… since the last time I tried to patch it, which took me four hours. Um… what else? Lots of just small stuff on the PC. Tower Defense, Fancy Pants Adventures. Yeah, stuff on Kongregate. Jim Greer’s constantly sending me things, saying “Oh, check out this one,” [when] he wants me to blog him again, like I don’t pimp him enough, dammit. You hear me Jim?! I’m pimping you enough! I put up a slide about you in my talk, dammit! Yeah, lots… just whatever. I’m still looking lots at what I’m thinking of as the indie-indie scene, still hanging out down there with all the guys writing things in BASIC. Because there’s all kind of cool shit, lots of cool stuff down there.

f13: What have you pulled out of that scene? What have you learned as a designer?

Raph: We actually use now, we use Blitz Basic as our in-house prototyping tool, because of that scene. Because it’s literally — actually, it’s astonishingly fast. We can literally [think] “Huh, I wonder if we could do X?” and the next day we have X. *laughs* It’s literally like, if you were doing this in C it would take a week. So, there’s that! That’s a huge value. And honestly, so much of getting game systems right is iterating, that’s a huge huge huge huge boon, being able to really try stuff quick and run through variations and mess with it. But also, a lot of those guys, because they are working with constraints, like constraints that pro devs just don’t have… like, oh, I don’t know… an artist! *laughs* They have to come up with really wild, crazy, new, different ways of doing stuff, and that’s cool. You get to see really different aesthetics, that make you go “Wow, how come I’ve never seen a game that looks like this before?” There’s all kind of cool stuff out there. Oh, gosh, there’s this awesome shooter where the objective was to turn the whole screen white. Because every time you shot a critter, they were all different colors. You shot a red one and it left a splotch of faded red, and the more you shot the more it piled up until the whole thing blended to white. So it was a game of painting the screen with…

Tami: With blood.

Raph: Blood. That’s cool! It’s like, I have never seen this before, totally off the freakin’ wall! It’s like inverse Pac-Man meets Robotron somehow. So there’s all kind of stuff like that and it’s because those guys, they can’t say “Well, I’ll just rely on my shaders” or “I’ll just rely on my 3D models”. They have to get good in design instead.

f13: You just mentioned shaders and 3D models. Do you think that this push for HD by Sony and Microsoft is hurting the progress of the industry?

Raph: What a waste of time. What a total freakin’ waste of time! Don’t get me wrong, I love my HD screen, right? I love my HD screen, I’ve got — what is it, a 46-inch screen, DLP, Samsung one, I posted about it on the forums actually, as well as the insane tangle of cables that I have to use to get everything to connect to it: all five, seven, eight consoles, whatever it is. But, honestly, what a waste of time. I mean even when I’m watching digital cable HD signals, if I order the HD things off pay-per-view and sometimes it comes mashed in a box and I have to zoom it anyway. Or whatever! I mean, come on, it looks good enough.

I think the only time you really notice it is when you have the two pictures side by side. When there’s only the one, it’s just not that big of a deal… and the evidence of that is there’s people willing to play games on the Nintendo DS, which is what, 320 by 200 per, or something tiny like that? It’s so not about the pixels. It’s about the overall experience, whether it feels like you’re really in it. Plus, the other downside of this: visual benefit. Meh? There’s a benefit, right? Like ten percent improvement. Storage increase, and art asset increased load and streaming time increased load — I’m looking at you, Sony — and it’s like, I don’t know if this tradeoff was worth it! Because all of a sudden now we’re going to have to ship our games on an insane-proprietary-giganto-blue-whatever disks, and we’re going to have to wait five minutes between levels, and we’re gonna have to not be able to run at sixty frames per second anymore because we have to paint too big a thing. There are huge tradeoffs, huge tradeoffs!

Would the game be better if it was tall as a building? Eh… there comes some point where you say: not really. There are like sweet spots for screens. I actually think the PSP, I found, they’re at the sweet spot for screens. That’s one sweet spot and there’s a sweet spot for screens which is like [desktop] distance if it’s about that person’s size, and then there’s a sweet spot for a screen where it’s about exactly this big, right to the edge of where I can see it. I don’t need any other sizes! *laughs* That’s all the ones I gotta have.

f13: So we’re not going to see the Areae TheatreVision?

Raph: *laughs* Well, actually, if you go to a theatre, what is the apparent size of the screen? And you know its resolution. So, whatever.

f13: That might connect to your comments about the indie developers. There are a lot of people that I think develop for the DS because it’s easier. You can pound out something in your tools pretty quickly. Is that the kind of thing you see inevitably happening with the user content?

Raph: It’s already happened.

f13: One day somebody’s going to have a tool where anybody can pop out a Shockwave game and —

Raph: I REALLY agree with you!

f13: Maybe [you’re] even doing it!

Raph: …

f13: Dammit! He wouldn’t say anything!

Tami: *laughing*

f13: So close! Foiled again!

Raph: It’s an inevitable step. Sure. Look at the amount of people… Flash opened up the door for artists to make games. Non-programmers. That’s what we see, is non-programmers making games in Flash. All of a sudden you have these wacky, crazy things happening, and that’s cool. It’s like I was saying in the panel about [how] we killed the modders with our Promethean technology arrogance. We killed the modders! The modders are our children! Modders are us in ten years, and we really shouldn’t kill the modders because if we kill them we have no wage slaves! *laughs* We need those guys! We need the fresh blood they bring in, the new ideas, so yeah, it’s a bad thing.

f13: I can ask a less onerous question. What does your family play? What kind of games are they into?

Raph: Let’s see. Kristen has been playing Honeycomb Beat on the DS, but she’s mostly working on writing her novel, so she’s intentionally not paying a lot of attention to games, I think. When she really wants to take a break, she goes and she plays Discworld MUD. My kids play anything whatsoever that has the letters Pokemon in it, which they destroy. They receive a Pokemon game and three days later they’re asking me for the next one because they’ve beaten it. At this point, we’ve resorted to buying them the little cheap devices: the Action Replays and everything, just so that they can go back and do obscene things to the ones they already beat, and do things like collect one of every single hacked variant version, or whatever, because at this point there’s nothing normal left for them to do! But they’ll also enjoy taking a break to play… oh, my daughter is totally into Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution… they both dig Halo 2. I don’t really let them play Halo 2 most of the time because they get all wound up and then start fistfights with each other. *laughs*

f13: Games do promote violence!

Raph: Well, it’s more like… younger brothers promote violence. *laughing* Yeah, it’s rated M but frankly the M in the multiplayer Halo is not really there, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t let them play M-rated games, but multiplayer Halo, it’s like, why is this M? The blood splatters? There’s blood splatters in absolutely everything at this point. Considering my daughter loves horror flicks… so, OK, I think you can handle the red pixels, given that you just watched some movie where someone had like a spike shoved through their jaw. Hot Fuzz, really funny movie.

f13: Yes.

Raph: She thought it was a great movie, she loved it to death, she loved Shaun of the Dead and she loved War of the Worlds. I’m like, oh my God, that person just exploded into vapor and she’s like “COOL!” Oh, God!

f13: Do you ever watch your kids make games?

Raph: Actually, I sat down and I taught them programming one day. My son was a little too young and impatient to really get it, but my daughter got it, I think. The big lesson was trying to get through their heads was: “the computer’s an idiot and does exactly what you tell it to do, so you had better learn to tell it things very, very precisely,” which is all of what programming is. She got that, she understood it. I didn’t, like, try teaching her recursion or anything, but she got the gist of it. They also love making board games, so I do a lot of… well, less in the past year, but I have a board game design kit. It’s a couple of chests from Michaels Craft Store. One of them is full of about ten pounds of the glass beads that people put at the bottoms of their aquariums, and then you go to the clock-store aisle and you buy every single shape of clock face that they have, the wooden ones — they’ve got square ones and round ones and whatever — and a bunch of sharpies of different colors… I guess there are people who make weirdo wooden dioramas with little stick figure people and circles and moons and I-don’t-know-whatever. This must be in the Midwest where people do this. Somebody does this because there’s a whole aisle of this stuff at Michaels. It’s basically like game token central because you can walk in and it’s like, I can buy round wooden disks, and I can buy squares and triangles and circles of all kinds of sizes, and pegs, and all kinds of stuff.

So I have one of those chests, also from Michaels, full of stuff like that. And then, playing cards, blank playing cards you can punch out and make your own, an UNO deck, a couple regular card decks, and you just have all this in a bin, and honestly it’s almost like “I bet I can make a game if I go,” *pantomimes grabbing stuff from a box and throwing it on the table* “Let’s see… oh, there’s a game idea!” You work with it that way, it’s just tools. And sometimes, a couple of times I did it that way and it ended up being a computer action puzzle game that didn’t work on a board game but you can simulate how it would work. And sometimes it stays a board game. My kids dig doing that. Their first ones were… like most game designers, they started out by ripping off a classic and in their case it was Chutes and Ladders. But they start coming up with crazier stuff.

Tami: His kids are awesome at games. They beat me in every game they brought out to have me play with them.

f13: I wonder why!

Tami: It’s genetic.

Raph: Actually, I’m not very good at games. I lost, if you recall. I lost badly, twice!

Tami: You did.

Raph: So, yeah, I take my games and I go playtest them with other people and I just about always lose because they’re “Oh, the strategy is this.” Ugh!

f13: Do you learn anything from watching your kids make games?

Raph: Did you read the book?

f13: No.

Raph: Jesus.

Tami: *laughs*

f13: Yes, yes I did.

Raph: Yeah, of course. Something game designers don’t, videogame designers especially don’t do often enough is sit down, shut up and watch people play their game. It’s just such an important thing to do, and [with] videogame designers especially it’s harder. Boardgame designers, it’s a regular part of practice. You make a game, then you get the group together and you play and play and play and play endlessly. I actually have a boardgame that I haven’t finished tuning because it’s one of those complicated two-hour games, and iterating on it when you have to get a group of people together and play for two hours just to discover that rule sucks, then you change it, then you gotta do another two hours, it’s kinda hard to get people to go for that. But yeah, certainly, you learn lots from watching them.

f13: Women as an audience. Is there anything special you need to do when trying to design for or to bring in the female demographic?

Raph: Yeah, don’t piss ’em off.

f13: Tami, you have an opinion on this?

Tami: Yeah, actually… the thing is, what I really don’t like is when a game is trying to target women. I feel that those aren’t really the games that I’m interested in playing.

Raph: Like games about ponies?

Tami: Exactly. Honestly the kind of game I really like to play is a fun game. I don’t look for a game that is geared towards females or geared toward women. I don’t how you can really say “This is how you make a game” and ensure that women will like it. Women are all different and it all comes down to the fact that we’re looking to play a fun game. You make us a fun game and we’re going to play it.

Raph: Yeah, but it does seem clear that if we make the game about boobies, it’s probably not…

Tami: I’ll play Age of Conan.

Raph: Yeah, but mostly, the whole game isn’t about boobies, right? We do make an awful lot of games that do seem largely about boobies, and there comes a point where it’s like: aw, come on. Absolutely. I guessing that new DS game where you use the stylus to rip the clothes off the girl is probably not going to have a huge female audience. So… not being offensive is a key step. A lot of it is just, respect your audience. The thing about the “pink” games is that they’re condescending. Nobody likes to be condescended to.

Tami: I’ll play a pink game if it’s a fun game.

Raph: But then you’re not being condescended to.

Tami: Right.

Raph: Condescending is when they give you a crap game and make it pink, therefore you’ll like it. That’s condescending.

f13: Do you think there are actual differences, generally, in how the genders experience fun?

Raph: Go read the book. There’s a chapter on it.

f13: I know…! Not everyone has read the book, Raph!

Raph: Oh. Well, you gonna ask her?

Tami: There are because women see patterns differently, I mean puzzles, things like that. There are some things women are naturally… their brains are more catered-to, they do easier than men, there’s a lot of things men do better, and the thing is when you start the game out and if it’s extremely difficult from the bat, or if I’m like “WOW!”, or like some of the games I’ve played at Raph’s, instantly I knew this isn’t my game. I can’t figure out, I can’t pick these matches out like everybody else. And other people? A lot of that is gender differences in the way they view things like that: patterns, puzzles, matches, things like that.

Raph: She read the book.

Tami: I did read the book, but–

f13: We’re talking about Theory of Fun for Game Design, right? I have it on my shelf.

Raph: That’s like Chapter Seven or something, there’s a whole chapter! No, but she’s dead-on right, and the thing is I always have to put there caveats in there because actually I got comments from some people saying the book is sexist because of facts. Sometimes facts are sexist. We always are talking about bell-curve distributions and blah-blah-blah and it’s really overlapping bell curves, and different people lie on different points on the curves, and different games fall in different locations, and so, no, you can’t say all girls are bad at math and blah-blah-blah.

We gotta get that out of the way, that said – everybody’s different, might be a good idea to take gender out of the equation altogether and just say: Look, different people are different, they have different patterns, of ways of seeing the world, they therefore have different things, just like they have different talents. So the thing is, really, I make the case in the book that you should go play the games you suck at. More than the games that you naturally go “Well, yeah, I know how to handle that,” because then you’ll actually get better at those things. There’s been all kind of cool scientific stuff showing that, that you can play these games that are things you are not strong at and they will actually train you up.

Tami: Unfortunately a lot of times we don’t have fun with those, so…

Raph: You don’t at first, but you can be led into it.

f13: Taking an entirely different track, what is your favorite product you have ever worked on?

Raph: I think it’s the one right now.

f13: This one? OK, favorite products out of the ones you can talk about, because I’m going to ask you why.

Raph: The early days of UO, I think.

f13: Why?

Raph: Because we had a small team that was doing something that we knew was just earth-shatteringly cool.

Tami: So does that differ from what we’re working on?

Raph: Well, no, but it’s an easy way to… I can actually talk about it! But that’s a lot of it. There’s something so cool about working in that kind of skunkworks kinda vibe where it’s us against the world and we’re gonna DESTROY the world! Ha ha! That feels really cool, and it’s just a lotta fun, especially when you don’t have… um, the reason why it’s better now than it was even on UO was because on UO we had people coming in and telling us to cut housing. … We came in over the weekend and put it in anyway, but… *laughs* But we did have those people — Richard, I’m talking about you now — who told us to do that. Now it’s… it’s not like that. We don’t have those kinds of people. It does mean that when we fuck up it will all be on us, but it’s that feeling of everyone pulling in a direction on something that’s cool, really different, really awesome. It’s really fun. It’s fun to come to work.

f13: You’re a musician. I’ve been talking to a bunch of other developers here in Austin, and a lot of them are also musicians. Do you think that designers are drawn to music for some specific reason?

Raph: Actually, programmers are drawn to music. A high quantity of programmers are drawn to music. That’s been observed for a really long time. You know, there are definitely qualities in common between sitting down at a computer and trying out algorithms for hours on end and sitting in a room woodshedding on a guitar. It requires the same sort of obsessiveness. I think designers… designers are just eclectic people, and I think programmers aren’t always eclectic. They’re often really focused people, but designers are just eclectic. They, just by all the ones I know, they read anything, read about anything and everything, they all have completely wacky different kinds of hobbies, and in the same person they’ll have wacky different kinds of hobbies. Music is a pretty common one.

f13: Alright, finishing up, how soon can we expect to hear about what you’re actually doing?

Raph: Probably before this transcription’s done.

f13: … I’m getting him to do it this time. *points at Yegolev*

Raph: We should be announcing something within the month of September.

f13: OK, thanks Raph. Appreciate it.

Raph: Sure.