Authors in August: Game Design with Jesse Schell
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How many books have you read on game design? For most of us, the answer is probably zero. But if I do a good job this week interviewing author, entrepreneur, and game designer Jesse Schell, I hope I might convince you to read at least one. And it is a masterpiece. The Art of Game Design, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. ♪

It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner. Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. If my audio quality in the intros this week is not up to snuff, it's because I recorded it from Scotland. However, good news, it's about to get a lot better as the rest of this interview comes from our normal environs in the good old U.S. of A.

Jesse Schell is an American video game designer, author, CEO of Schell Games, and a distinguished professor of the practice of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After reading Jesse's book, The Art of Game Design, more than a decade ago, I reached out to him

as one of our kids was touring Carnegie Mellon and had a wonderful chance then to connect with Jesse in his offices. Because in addition to being the superstar author of The Art of Game Design, Jesse is an entrepreneur, having worked in partnership with some of the best brands in entertainment to design for them everything from mobile and VR games to amusement park rides.

Jesse kicks off Authors in August this week with our wide-ranging conversation from philosophy to practice. I hope and trust there's something in this for everyone. Without further ado, let's get started.

Jesse Schell, great to have you on Rule Breaker Investing. How are you doing? Hey, doing great. So glad to be here. Thanks a lot. And you know, I said in my introduction, well, I'm an acknowledged fan of this book, and it's one of those books that stayed with me. I think I first read it, well, definitely more than a decade ago. I know it's now out

In a third edition, I may have missed the second edition, but I'm a huge fan of the first edition, which I assume mostly carries through. The comprehensive nature of looking at games from all angles, philosophically, technically, the stories, the elements. We're going to get into that some, but Jesse, I know this is obviously in some ways an outgrowth of your work, your wonderful work over decades, and probably continues to inform what you're doing. I hope it

continues making connections with you. Or if I were a Carnegie Mellon student, I'd be like, I read that guy's book. I want to make sure I get that, that class. So thank you for a wonderful work of nonfiction, which has enriched my life for 15 years and counting. Yeah. So I'm so glad to know that it's a, it was meaningful to you. Yeah. It's it's yeah.

It was a special book where I was able to take a lot of different lessons from a lot of things I did and bring them together. It was great when it came out in 2008. It got a very positive reception, and that was nice. And here we are today.

14 years later, and it's been continuously in print and still continues to be popular and useful in ways that I never had imagined it might be. That's wonderful. Well, of course, when a lot of people think games, they start with childhood. That's what I think about. I was a big gamer. I bet you were too, Jesse. But tell me a little bit about where you grew up and your early life in games.

Yeah, sure. So let's see. I grew up, I was in New Jersey, suburban New Jersey there. And I definitely loved games of all kinds growing up. I was fascinated by board games and card games. And of course, I'm of the age, you know, I was born in 1970. And so I

When I was really young, there were no video games. And then slowly video games started to appear. And so it was exciting to sort of see that world of games emerge. But one of the things that I've always loved games just across the spectrum, party games and athletic games and board games, card games, video games, all of them. And they...

what was nice about writing Art of Game Design, it was an opportunity to show, okay, let's look at the principles that connect all of these kind of games together.

And indeed you do. It starts really in the first chapter of the book. Really, you're speaking to the designer, the artist in us all. Now, not everybody, Jesse, fancies themselves a world famous game designer, as are you. But a lot of us might tinker. A lot of us might dream. And I love how you start the book. You call it Magic Words, the first page of the book. And what are the magic words?

Oh, the magic words are, I am a game designer. And that was really important to me because when, you know, Stephen King has an amazing book called On Writing, where he just kind of gives advice about how to write good books. And he talks a bit about imagining your ideal reader. And I kept thinking, okay, when I'm writing this, who's my ideal reader? And I remembered myself back in...

kind of high school when I was trying to, that was, that was, you know, I'd started making video games and things when I was maybe 12 years old and started to get a little more serious about understanding it when I was in, in high school. And I was trying to figure out, is there a way, is there a career in games? Is that a thing? And I, I, I kept imagining what would I have wanted someone to explain to me when I was, um, at, at that age. And so that ended up

being a lot of the focus of that was always an anchor for me. One thing that I knew was confidence was something people often don't have when it comes to something like game design. There are some things where the path towards learning it is well charted. Like you want to learn to play the piano, everyone understands about piano lessons and going to school for piano. This is well understood.

Game design? Where do you go? What do you do? Where do you start? And people often...

have this idea that you're either born to it or you're not. And it makes people think, well, since I don't know what I'm doing, I must not be a game designer. And they feel kind of stuck and they feel, I don't know, they feel foolish trying to do it because they're like, I'm not, I'm not supposed to be doing this. And they feel really weird about it. And so it was very important to give the reader permission and more than just permission, allow them to accept it into their identity.

Because one of the things that we talk about sometimes is, you know, what you pretend to be, you will become. And so I encourage the readers to say, I am a game designer out loud because it makes a difference. And this was the thing I learned with my students because I saw when I would work with students that lack of confidence, like they didn't feel like they had the right to try and design games.

And so I would do a simple exercise where I'd ask people, okay, hey, it's first day of class. Raise your hand if you're already a game designer. And you'd see one or two hands go up and a lot of people just like, oh, I don't, I'm not, I'm not really sure. And so then I'd make them say it out loud, right? And then afterwards I'd say, okay, now raise your hand if you're a game designer. And all the hands would go up. And it's just something so simple. These little, these little,

games of confidence can do a lot in order to change the way you approach something. And I really appreciate this, especially because most of us listening who've listened to one or more of these podcasts or might be a longtime Motley Fool investor and fan know that that's exactly what we want everybody to say about their money, that I am an investor. And how many times...

Do I think I or my brother Tom in front of a crowd of people said, raise your hand if you're an investor? And of course, the wrong answer is not to be raising your hand because we're all investing time all the time, money, whether it's a dollar for a

stick a chewing gum or a dollar toward your 401k. And so democratizing and including, these are just wonderful, of course, wonderful spirit. You said, because they feel foolish, because they're not a game designer, but of course, we'd say, yes, small F, Jesse, but capital F. We want you to feel foolish by saying, I am an investor. And it does challenge the conventional wisdom or what we would expect

as kids, especially when we're sitting in a classroom with, again, a world-famous game designing professor asking who's a game designer here in the room. So just as you do for your students, so do you do for the book right up front. I thought it'd be fun as we talk through The Art of Game Design. First of all, this is an incredibly engaging book. My edition comes to

450 pages. Now, I'm a slow reader. I loved every page of this book. Some people will be listening right now going, I don't know if I'm going to read a 450-page book about game design, especially if they're not a game designer. But each of the chapters is so engaging. I thought the first seven chapters kind of tell a story with their title, gives us a flow for this conversation. So if you're okay with it, I wanted to start right there. Chapter one is entitled, In the Beginning, There Is the Designer.

I am a game designer. And then chapter two, Jesse goes on to be called the designer creates an experience. Now, a lot of people might think, wait, doesn't the designer create a game? But you point out it's actually about the experience, not the components, not the rules, the experience of the imagination as we experience anybody's game, card game, video game, etc.,

Yeah, I mean, that's, it's something very important to understand. Novice designers often get caught up in the game itself. They're thinking about the rules, they're thinking about the characters, they're thinking about the story elements, they're thinking about these concrete things about the game. And they think of themselves as designing those things and wanting those things to be great.

But in truth, we don't care about any of those things. Those things are just a means to an end. A game is a dead object. If you make a game and no one plays it, what have you done? Nothing has happened. That's not what we care about.

We don't care about unplayed games. What we care about is when someone plays a game, they have a particular experience. And it's that experience which is what we are trying to design. If we had some magic technology that let us just create the experience directly, I could just put this on your head and you would just have this interactive experience, that would be great. But we can't do that. So instead...

We're designing the game and it's very important to keep that in mind that the experience supersedes everything. It often makes a lot of sense to take on the approach of what do I want this experience to be like and then figure out, okay, well, what game is going to bring about that experience?

Love it. And you mentioned in the book at one point, well, you said it here, that if you could somehow get away without making components and having to print up rules and just give people that experience, I'm sure a lot of people would do an economic shortcut and just deliver that experience. Now, some people think of that as the metaverse, where I can just sort of be lying there, I guess, in my meta chair and just experience

uh, with my imagination, some of these game without having to roll out supply chain logistics printed off in China and all of these kinds of things. Where are you right now in terms of your thinking around virtual reality, metaversal experiences for gamers or game designers? Well, virtual reality is something very near and dear to me. I, uh,

I've been doing virtual reality for about 30 years now. Back in the 90s, I was the creative director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio. We created a place called Disney Quest, which was Disney's VR theme park that ran for about 20 years. And when VR started to come into the mainstream about seven years ago, my company, Shell Games, got very involved in it.

because, again, I did that stuff at Disney. I've been teaching virtual reality classes at Carnegie Mellon. How could you not? Yeah, exactly. It was really hard to resist, and it's worked out incredibly well for us. We've had great successes with games like I Expect You to Die and Until You Fall. We recently did a cooking game, Lost Recipe. So the world of VR games has changed.

gone really well. I think, honestly, I think we've done 15 or 20 VR games at this point. And so we're very much immersed in it. And it's a really exciting time because those technologies are really, they're growing, they're expanding, they're allowing kinds of gameplay that simply wasn't possible previously.

That's great. You know, thinking back to how you're speaking to the young game designer and that person thinks they need to have their rules in place to have the game and not thinking as much about the experience kind of reminds me of how I started with Dungeons and Dragons back in the day. And you and I are very near the same age. So maybe you also have a first edition Gygax rule books or I'm not sure. But I know one thing about me as a as a dungeon master. I loved doing it.

And I was pretty technical about it. And I think I was missing a lot of the spirit of role-playing games. So having grown up with things like Stratomatic Baseball or very often sports games, very rules-based, I was treating D&D... Let's stop right now because I need to look up on page 37 because I think you can't do this or we need to add plus...

So it's a reminder again about it's the experience, not so much the stuff that is the game, but especially you talk about the VR, the deep experience you have. Of course, when I read the book in 2008, VR wasn't as much a thing. I definitely knew your background in VR, but really it has been emerging in recent years.

Yeah, yeah. And I will say I'm absolutely with you. I was definitely of the time when Dungeons & Dragons was emerging and it was incredibly influential to me as a game designer. Being a dungeon master and learning to lead adventures, I mean, it teaches you so much about game design because not only...

Are you crafting a world with rules and how it works, but you're weaving a story into it. Then more than that, as the players are enjoying it, not enjoying it, you have the opportunity to change anything you want in order to make it a better experience for them. So you have this ability to iterate and change it on the fly. I found this such a meaningful and influential design experience

When I teach classes in game design, I make the students do this. We went through a period where many students were not. Digital games had completely replaced tabletop games. Tabletop RPGs are having a resurgence now, and now I'm seeing more and more students who have had that experience. Thank you, Stranger Things. Yeah.

But it really is a very powerful way. Role-playing is an incredibly powerful way to get better as a game designer. Chapter three, after the designer creates an experience, which is what we just talked about chapter two, chapter three, the experience rises out of a game. So we do acknowledge that we're back to games, but importantly in that chapter, and I'm wondering if this has changed over time, you define...

game. You challenge yourself. You sift through. It's kind of hard to put a definition on a word that means so many things to so many different people. Can you refresh my memory or redefine in 2022 what is a game?

Yeah, so the definition I like to use for game, because you'd think, oh, game, everyone knows what a game is. But when you're trying to define it, it's interesting that many people define it in many different ways. And I looked at lots and lots of different definitions that different philosophers and designers have put together. And what I ended up arriving at is that a game is a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude.

And this is important. The idea that all games are problem-solving activities isn't immediately obvious, but it's definitely true. But not all problem-solving activities are games. And this is why the playful attitude part is very important, because a

approaching things with a playful attitude with the spirit of curiosity is part of what makes games and play special. The idea that play is the opposite of work and that what distinguishes play from work is this level of freedom. And it's almost always a freedom where you're satisfying your own curiosity.

about something. And so understanding like what a game really is, is important. And the thing I talk about in the book, hearing my specific definition isn't especially important, but I definitely encourage people to explore like, well, what do you think a game is and why do you think that? That act of trying to define it yourself and looking at other people's definitions, that's where the real value is because that's when you start to get insights.

Love it. And yes, games have been defined by, certainly goes back to the Greeks. In fact, I think this has been attributed to either Aristotle or Plato, although like a lot of quotes, I'm not sure either of those gentlemen ever said this, but have you heard this one before, Jesse? It's something like,

uh, you can learn more in one hour of gaming with a man than in a lifetime of conversation. Yeah. I, I will say often attributed to Plato. I have hunted and hunted. I've gone all the way through the works. It's, it's not, I don't think it's there. Um, uh, but I, at the same time, it's something I bring up all the time. I, I, if, if, yeah, I w I would love to know the origin of that, of that phrase. I'm sure it certainly came from somewhere, but it is, uh,

It's definitely true. There's something very important about the nature of play when it comes to getting to know a person. Because when we play, we open ourselves up in a way that we don't in normal discourse. And we make ourselves vulnerable in a way. Because when we talk, we might talk about what we might do.

But when we play, we do things and we see how they end up. A game we're working on right now, there's a popular game called Among Us and we're making the virtual reality version of Among Us. And Among Us is a very interesting game because it's a party game. It's sort of a bunch of people get together and do this sort of silly pretend situation. And you're pretending that you're on a spaceship and

And one of you is the murderer, right? And so everyone goes to do their spaceship jobs. And one person is the murderer and is going to try and secretly murder somebody. And if someone finds, oh, no, someone's been murdered, then they call an emergency meeting and a big discussion happens. Who did it? Who did it? Who did it?

And so it ends up being a game about partly about being a detective. Hey, who did it partly about sneaking and, and lying and, and,

These elements end up being really powerful for people. They end up being real powerful because they break the rules of normal discourse. Normally, we don't lie and betray one another in our normal day-to-day interactions with our friends. But now we get to see our friends trying to do this. And so it sort of stretches the bounds of our friendship. And in doing so, in creating these extreme situations...

It creates memorable things and we learn a lot about each other at the same time. And I think that's been part of why Among Us has been so successful. And so we're very excited bringing the VR version into place because it kind of gives you a way to kind of connect with your friends in an even stronger way.

Yes, and I've experienced games like that. I certainly know of among us looking forward to the VR version. And I have had friends who said, I don't like to lie. I'm not comfortable doing that. And so, yeah, we do learn a lot. So I guess one thing we learned about that friend in an hour of play that we wouldn't have learned in a year of conversation is that they've never been lying to us because they won't do it in an hour of play, which I guess is good news.

I did check one of my 20 favorite websites in the world, quote, investigator.com. And sure enough, you're absolutely right, Jesse. It has been attributed to Plato, but quote, investigator. Its conclusion, no substantive evidence that Plato employed this saying. A precursor was published in 1670 by Richard Lingard.

This early instance referred to gambling and a time period of seven years conversation instead of a year of conversation. Anyway, it now occurs to me, I think I encountered that line in your book. Not that you were attributing it to Plato, but this is exactly the kind of thing you have in the art of game design. Timeless thoughts, fresh thoughts.

In terms of what a game is and what we're doing when we're gaming, well, thank you for speaking a little bit to what a game is. In Chapter 4, you talk about the game consists of elements, and there are four. And I love the analytical kind of breakdown of this big, shaggy-dog word, game, into these four elements. Mechanics, story, aesthetics, technology.

Now, I think you mean technology. Even if I'm playing Parcheesi, there's technology. There's certainly aesthetics. Not sure there's much story there. And admittedly, I haven't played Parcheesi by choice for 30 years. But this modern view of mechanics, story, aesthetics, technology, that was really helpful for me. And like a lot of your work, it stretches across from video games right through to social games that were just with each other. Would you like to speak to any of those elements? Sure.

Oh, yeah, sure. Now, breaking, you know, it's important. Once you start to design something, being able to break it down into its component elements is really important. And those four are ones that I kind of evolved over time.

They're all important in their own ways because everything has technology, even if the technology is really simple. Sure, bits of paper and to roll a die to get an answer, that's a simple technology. Aesthetics, very important because that's all about the look, the feel, the artwork, and how does that make you feel.

story is important. You look at a game like Parcheesi and you're like, well, there's really no story here. But there is because the thing about story is a little story goes a long way. You could say, oh, Parcheesi is a game about getting this little

this little token onto this square. You could say that, but go look at the game board. It's about going home. Going home. Right? This is a game about going home. And in Parcheesi, you don't go home alone. You don't just move one piece like you do in a lot of games. You have multiple different pieces. And then, of course, you have other people trying to stop you from going home. And so one of the things we talk about with story a lot is not only is there sort of the...

explicit story that the designer might be trying to create. But then games are story machines. They produce stories, you know, and every game does this like baseball is a great example. Baseball is a story machine. It has no explicit story laid over it. But the stories that come out of it when people play, they end up being stories that are worth

telling. And so those are sort of the two sides of story in games. And that ends up being really important. And then, of course, the fourth element, mechanics. The game mechanics, the rules for how the game works is a huge part of what game designers have to deal with. But to be able to separate these things, to realize aesthetics, mechanics,

story and technology each needs to be addressed in its own way. And then all four of those things need to work together to be harmonious. That's what really makes a great game is when those things work together in a harmonious way. Really well put. And I think in particular of aesthetics, I would actually truly say that in our lifetimes, we're both in our 50s,

All four of those elements have consistently gotten, I would say, way, way better, in many cases more sophisticated, sometimes simpler better than

But wow, consistently pretty bad. Like let's go to aesthetics briefly, the quality of wooden pieces or of the artwork that is common on even kickstarters, unproven games popping out these days at a rate I've never seen before is so far ahead of the look and feel of games of, of my youth. I look at old Avalon Hill war games with counters that are tiny and thin and the, the, the,

The iconography isn't good, or it's hard to read the text. And these days, bigger, brighter, sometimes it's overdone. But just the beauty in particular, I would say, of tabletop games is shocking. If you were the proverbial person showing up from the 1950s saying, let's play a game today, I think you'd be blown away. We're in an incredible renaissance when it comes to games, both

board games, card games, video games, all of them have just the, and the aesthetics in particular on all of those things have advanced to incredible levels. And that partly has to do with the nature of economics, mass production, technology, 3D printing has helped. I mean, I think you and I both remember when Trivial Pursuit was a new game and that ended up being a huge breakthrough. It actually had an economically

it was a huge breakthrough because previous to that, board games simply cost between $5 and $12 and that's it. The idea of a board game cost more than that was just seemed insane.

I mean, there were a few rare examples. I think Stratomatic might have been one of those that you mentioned, but they're very rare. We'd never had a mass market one and suddenly Trivial Pursuit appears, $20 game. A $20 game and no one had ever like, whoa, a $20 board game, are you kidding? That'll never succeed and it's a huge hit. The whole board game world all stopped and looked at each other like, wait a minute.

You can have a $20 board game and have it be a huge hit. What, what, what else, what else is possible? And it kind of blew open these doors and, and,

anyway so it's it is a really exciting time uh for the for the world of games without i do think back on just the frequency of game releases this is my made-up view of history um monopoly 1933 i'm kind of making up the year you have to skip five years ahead before i'm totally making this up parcheese shows up and then four years after that um um let's go with uh

Othello, which was Go. And then Sid Saxon shows up and Acquire pops up in 1961. But what I'm trying to make light of is, while this is probably not a true view of history, it's definitely not. This idea, there was only like one new game every five years or so. And by, we're kids in the 1970s, Avalon Hill war games start popping up, Dungeons and Dragons and others start to effloresce. But

Leading up to that point, there was a real dearth of choices, don't you think? A lot of abstracts. Nowadays, we take it for granted that there are board games as an adult hobby

Of course, that's a thing. We know people who do that. It's not for everybody, but board games is an adult hobby that exists. 50 years ago, if you were an adult playing board games, you were playing chess. That's pretty much what you were playing. Other board games were fundamentally children's games. And that started to change. I mean...

I don't want to oversimplify. There always have been a few exceptions, but even the ones that were exceptions...

uh like camelot is one that i think of was like a game from the 20s was a really interesting board game for adults but even it kind of masqueraded as a game for children when it really wasn't that in this so it was this the thing that happened in the 70s was sort of this opening of like oh you know maybe um these these games can can go broader and start to uh

start to appeal to more people. It's fascinating as we went through the world of war games and then the whole revolution of European and German board games just being so different from what was going on in America. This is one thing that's just fascinating is gaming culturally in different places is

has had a huge, huge influence. The way games are played and favored in Germany really ended up influencing the entire board game world. That all had to do with the way families saw games because the attitude there was games were not nothing for children, games were a thing for the family, that the family would play together.

And so there became this notion of like, well, how do you make a game that both that's simple enough for a child to play, but interesting enough for an adult to play that they could play together. And that really started to grow there. And, uh, that's, that's such a successful formula. It started to spread the across the whole world. Hmm. And it really has. And, and, uh, it, uh,

To me, it seems to be getting, it's already very big, bigger and bigger every year. We'll talk about the future maybe near the end, but let's go back to the book. So just for listeners who might not have come across The Art of Game Design before, what I'm doing is Jesse and I are just talking through the first several chapters of his book because I think it's a nice way to do an interview on a podcast. And not everybody's a gamer listening to Rule Breaker Investing. Everybody knows the host is,

is a longtime gamer, so that's why I keep bringing back the Jesse Shells and Richard Garfields and Reiner Canizios to this podcast because of my love for this topic. But this is a 33-chapter book that goes deep across all aspects of game and design. So for us to just talk through the first seven, that's really all we're going to do. But let's keep plugging here. Chapter 5...

Again, just where do we come from? The first four chapters tell a story. Here are their chapter titles again. In the beginning, there's the designer. The designer creates an experience. The experience rises out of a game. The game consists of elements, mechanics, story, aesthetics, and technology. Chapter five, the elements...

support a theme. Now, one of the things that runs as a unique structure through the art of game design, Jesse, is you create

a hundred lenses, ways of looking. It's sort of sidebar material, ways of looking at whatever topic we're talking about right now. So you number them, and not only do you number them, we'll talk about this later again, but you've turned them into a deck of cards, and I own a couple copies of these decks of cards. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But these lenses each have a title, and then ask you a few questions as you contemplate, as a game designer, your creation.

So for the element supportive theme, lens nine pops up in this chapter of the book. And the two questions it's asking you to ask yourself, what is my theme? Am I using every means possible to reinforce that?

that theme. That is such a strong lens, and it's a lens that the world has gotten much, much better at over the years, in part because you've whipped us into shape and gotten us thinking so much more thematically than we were before. I do agree with you, Parcheesi is about coming home, but man, do I have games that tell the story of coming home so much better than Parcheesi does. So it's the theming.

Yeah. No, there, yeah, there's, I mean, there's a reason we don't play Parcheesi that much, right? It, it, it has some, it has some elements, but it is missing a number of things. Yeah. I think theme is incredibly important. Just to note on the notion of lenses, um, the way I got there when I started trying to write the book in a serious way, um,

There were not a lot of game design books out at that time. It was maybe, I would say around, I don't know, 2003, I was probably looking at this in a really serious way. And as I started talking to experienced game designers, and I would tell them, I'm thinking I'm trying to write a book about game design. A few of them shook their head and said, no, no, it can't be done. You can't do it. I said, what do you mean you can't do it? They said, the problem you're going to have

is the point of your book is to give people advice about their game. And advice that's good for one game is bad advice for another game. So any advice you give is going to be bad advice. And so your book won't be very good for that reason. And I thought about that and I'm like, wow, that's wisdom. And there's real truth in that. Because I could think of many times where there was a thing true for one game, not true for another game.

I was set back by this and like, "Wow, maybe this can't be done well." It hit me all of a sudden, questions can't be wrong. Advice can be wrong, but questions are never wrong. A question might not be appropriate, a question might not be needed at a certain time, but it won't be wrong.

And at that point I realized, yeah, what this book should be about are what questions should I ask myself? And thinking of questions as different perspectives, and that's the idea of it being a book of lenses, that there are just so many different perspectives you can take because making a game is not do this, then this, then this, now you've got a game.

Making a game is about looking at it from many different points of view and trying to figure out which points of view are going to help give you the insight to make this a great game. And so that's what the lenses are. That's what the questions are. And to the point of theme, unification of theme...

It's something I've always... I learned this at Disney. Disney makes theme parks. It's right in the name. The idea of a theme is something that can be quite deep. Herman Melville said, to write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. In other words...

When you create something, it should be about something, and you should know what that is. Stephen King tells a story about this, talking about his first successful novel, Carrie. He'd written it, and there he'd written it all out, and he was kind of revising it and going through it. And at some point, he realized, oh, I know what this is.

Book is about this is this isn't just a book about this girl who has this experience This is a book about blood and he realized blood was the theme and the the blood of the family the the the blood of violence the the the blood associated with becoming a woman like this was about blood in its many forms and once he realized that and

He didn't rewrite the book, but he went back and found ways to heighten that because he saw it as a theme, as a thread that went through the whole thing. And again and again, for great games, this is often so important to understand what is this game actually about? And then to go back and figure out how to make it

how to heighten those themes so that it can be as strong as an experience as possible. As you say in the lens, am I using, we ask ourselves as designers, am I using every means possible to reinforce that theme? While I love me some German Euros that are rather themeless but still mechanically brilliant,

If you can actually reinforce a real theme and make me feel like I'm managing an aviary wingspan, a good recent example, it does stick with people. It also just invites more people to the table, or at least they're walking by a table going, what is that game you guys are playing?

And so the games that do theme brilliantly, I do find myself defaulting somewhat to tabletop games, but I want to make it clear. I play hours and hours of video games here at the age of 56, every bit as much as I did at 46, 36, 26, and 16 playing Pong back in our day. Hate to use that phrase, but yeah, themes just being pulled through story. Obviously these are so powerful. One that I love is the story of Rob Davio creating Risk Legacy. Yeah.

It's just fascinating. I mean, most people know the board game of Risk. It's kind of this old

War game, again, designed for children. And because of that, it has a kind of a primitive quality, has a lot of problems. And Rob Davio, working at Hasbro, was asked like, hey, can you make a better version of this? What if you redesigned it? What would that be? And he has a wonderful design technique he uses, which is this sort of design by opposites, where he thinks about, okay, what am I taking for granted about this? And what if I did the opposite?

Right. So, okay. Risk as a board game. What do I take for granted? I take for granted that it's on the table. Okay. What if it wasn't on the table? Okay. That's, I don't know. That's, that's not great. Uh, I take for granted that it has two to four players. What if I had 20 players? Ah, it's not really, it's not really working. Uh, I take for granted that every time you play it, it resets to the beginning and nothing changes. And it was like, Oh, wait a minute.

What if I do change that? The idea of risk legacy was that

there are changes that happen in the game that are permanent forever. Anyone who ever plays this game again going forward, those changes are there. An example, when you win the game, you take out a pen and you mark a territory on the board, and any future time that you get that territory, you get all kinds of bonuses. The world changes. This is an interesting game mechanic and novel and different, and it's now spawned like this was the beginning of an entire genre which we now call legacy games.

But in terms of theme, part of what was so beautiful was that Rob recognized that, okay, this is a great mechanic. That's fine. But he realized risk is a game about war. And of course, this is a good idea because war changes a world.

And he realized that was the theme war changes the world. And, and he, and he talked about using everything you can possibly use. One of the things I, cause cause you can imagine how hesitant people are to like take out a pen and write on the board of the game. And Rob just rubs it in your face from the get go. Cause the box is gorgeous. It's got this handle. You carry it like a suitcase and,

But in order to open it, there's this label, this nicely made label that goes over. And to open the game, you have to cut this label. And what the label says on it is...

what is done cannot be undone. Right? And then the first thing they have you do in the game is they're like, okay, everybody take two of the different country groups. I forget what they're called. I don't know if they call them races or what, but they're basically different sort of nations. And everybody take two of them, pick the one you like, and now take the other one and rip it up and throw in the trash. No one will ever be them.

Right. And it's just fascinating. It was a wonderful use of using theme to unite a game to make a very strong experience. Absolutely. And longtime listeners may remember, and this might sound like a brag for anybody new, but

On June 22nd of 2016 on this podcast, Rob Davio came on and talked about risk legacy. And I hope Rob's not listening, Jesse, because I actually think you did a better job explaining what Rob is. Of course, you've had some more years to think about it. So has Rob, too. No, Rob was a wonderful guest, but absolutely the legacy innovation. And I know that innovation spawns so much of what we're discussing. And you talk about throughout your book, you've done it in your life with your company. We'll get to that.

in just a little bit. But let's close the loop on just...

The last two chapters I want to mention, chapters six and seven, their titles respectively are, again, we've just done the elements support a theme. So now here comes number six, the game begins with an idea. And number seven, the game improves through iteration. Now, at the risk of prompting you because you wrote this book 14 years ago, you may or may not remember that the game begins with an idea and

You start to talk about how you were a professional juggler and you learn something as a young, I'm going to say as a boy, from an older juggler at the time, which helps inform what you are conveying to game designers about beginning with an idea.

Yeah, no, that was a story I just had to put in there because it was something very meaningful to me when I was young. I picked up juggling as a hobby. And when I was a teenager, I later went on to do it a bit more professionally, traveling with some circus troops. But before I had that level of confidence, I went to my first...

juggling festival. I'd never been to a juggling convention or festival. And I didn't really know what to expect, but I was like, "Wow, I learned to juggle on my own from a book, and I think I want to go see what this is." And I remember going to the door, and the person says, "Oh, okay, well, are you a juggler?"

And remember, it was just like, are you a game designer? Magic words. And really, the only reason he was asking is there was different prices for spectators and for jugglers. But here I was confronted with the question, right? And was I? Was I a real juggler? And I'm pretty sure I said no. No, I'm not.

Cause I didn't, I wasn't ready to commit. Uh, I also think this got me in at a lower rate, which was, so I didn't, I don't, I didn't, I didn't realize that until after, but, but so I'm in here. I'm very, I'm very shy. I've got, I've got my, I brought like three, you know, rubber, rubber balls that I have like in the,

pockets of my windbreaker, but I don't take them out because I'm not sure what's what. So I'm walking around this place and I see all these amazing jugglers doing things I've never seen, never could have comprehended. So this is just very exciting. And the nature of juggling festivals is

is wonderful because it's very much about sharing. It's all about just sort of sharing what you do and comparing techniques. It's very open, very supportive community. But it was all new to me and I'd never seen any of this.

And so I walked around and I saw all these different people doing these different things. I was very intimidated because everyone was so much better than I was, but eventually I got up the courage to, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to take out, you know, my, I'm going to take out my juggling balls and I'm going to do, you know, I could do maybe two tricks. And so I'm there, I'm doing my, my little tricks and, and just doing some of that. And as I'm doing that, I look over and I see there's this, this older man in this powder blue jumpsuit and he is,

doing these tricks that are just amazing. I can't even believe what I'm looking at. I don't know. There's one where I swear he's throwing the balls and they're going at right angles. Some of them are just beautiful and different. And I'm just, wow, he's so different than what everybody else is.

is doing and I'm just captivated just watching these tricks. Then I realize I see one trick and I'm like, "Wait, that's one of the tricks. I can only do two tricks and that's one of them, but it sure doesn't look like that when I do it." I'm just absolutely hypnotized. Suddenly he stops and he stares right at me. He says, "Well," and I'm like, "Well, what?" He says, "Well, aren't you going to copy me?" I said, "I don't think I could."

And he says, yeah. He says, yeah, none of them can. Look, look around. Right. And I'm looking around and he says, see that guy over there? See what he's trying to do? He's trying to do this. And he does this trick that looks like, you know, it makes it, I don't know, it looks like the balls are kind of fluttering and flying. And he says, but he can't, he can't do it. And I said, okay. And he says, where do you think I learned to juggle like this?

And I thought about it. And of course, the only way I'd learned was from books. So I'm like, from books. And he says, from books? No. Nope. Not from books. I'll tell you. I'll tell you where I learned these things. Right? And he shows me the move with the right angle in it. And he says, see that? I learned that from a paper punch out on Long Island. Right?

And then he does one where he kind of twirls around and the balls kind of flutter. And he says, you know, I learned that watching a ballerina in New York City. And then he does one where the balls kind of like kind of coast off of each other and kind of glide up high. And he says, this one I learned watching a flock of geese take off from a lake. And he says, so kid, this is what you should remember.

People can steal your moves, but they can never steal your inspiration. And I was like, okay, Mr. Thanks. I think I got to go to a workshop or something. I was so intimidated by this guy. But it stayed with me and stayed.

I realized that this wasn't just good advice for jugglers. This is good advice for everything. The idea that no one can steal your inspiration, that where you get your ideas from is really important, and that you shouldn't, as a game designer, don't just copy other games. Sure, look at other games, study other games, learn from other games, but you should be taking the inspiration from the things in your life.

that the experiences you've had that no one else has had, those are going to be what let you make the games and experiences that no one can make except for you.

Beautifully told. And thank you for bringing that story back to my memory. You told it just as beautifully in the book. And it is from the chapter, the game begins with an idea. And your point is, it's your idea. I mean, we can copy mechanics. We can copy themes. Hey, maybe I'll also do a

Traditional swords and sorcery fantasy theme. We can copy themes, but the inspiration, the lived experience, what each of us has seen and what our attitude was about it, that's unique. And so, yeah, we're definitely not all jugglers, but I think we all can be game designers. But more to your point and what I love about this work of nonfiction that you have now put into a third edition in recent years is that it's really a book about...

design. I mean, I love games. I think that's very evident. I know you love games, but what I especially love is that this is bigger than games. You're writing about design. When people say stuff like, you know, Stanford D school is the new B school. I'm sure you hear things like that around Carnegie Mellon. I think Carnegie Mellon has a business school, but

But I know one thing, it's got Jesse Shell teaching people how to design entertainment in it as well. I know it does have a business school. But anyway, it's that design sensibility that I was not exposed to as an undergrad. And I've kind of admired it and looking at some of my favorite products, like anything that I own by Apple or some of the beautiful games on my shelves. And I've grown over time to realize it's the design, stupid. And design itself is so deep.

And so worth pursuing over the course of one's life and your book. We're going to stop with chapter seven here, but improving through iteration. So you introduce a rule, an important one that I think a lot of us can appreciate, especially the older we are, perhaps the game improves through iteration, the rule of the loop, which you coin and call it like this. The more times you test,

and improve your design, the better your game will be. Now, that's probably not true in every instance. I can imagine there are cases where somebody does it too much and they ruin it for some reason. But really, the spirit of it is, of course, iterate, iterate, loop, loop, loop. The faster you can loop, the quicker you're going to improve a game. And the more you loop, the better that game will be.

Yeah, and that makes your ability to iterate as fast as possible critically important. And this is the thing, novice designers...

fail to understand. They often imagine that the way a game is made is that you sit around and think hard, and then you write a big document like some kind of weird movie script, but for a game, and then you just execute what's in that document, and there's your perfect game. And that's just not ever how it happens. Not ever, ever. What happens is you come up with an idea for what you think might be good, and you build it. And

The act of building it and playing it makes you realize, oh, this is how it really works. It doesn't work the way I thought. It works differently than I thought. And then you want to iterate and improve it and improve it and improve it. And so it is very important to kind of create situations where you can iterate as fast as possible. Video game designers often talk a lot about paper prototyping.

Because early versions of your game, they don't need to be done digitally. Because doing things digitally can take time. You've got to write code, you can make digital assets. When I can, a lot of times, get out a pair of scissors and some paper and a pen, and I can make like a fake version of the game where I pretend to be the computer and someone else plays the game. And we can see, is this fun at all? Is this worth spending three weeks to code up? Or should we just chuck this idea and do something else?

iterating as fast as possible is really crucial and critical. And again, one more reason that as a designer, if you want to become a video game designer, start by making card games and board games because you can make them so fast. Anybody can make a card game in an hour. You got a pair of scissors and a paper and a pen, you can make a card game in an hour. It's probably going to not be very good, but now you'll know, well, okay, that wasn't good the way I thought. What if I change it like this? What if I change it like that?

Some of the best known games, you look at a game like Scrabble and you think, oh, that's simple. It's letters and things. How long could that have taken to make? It took years. It was years figuring out like, well, how many tiles should you have? Where should the triple word score go? Is triple word score a good idea? Why? And in order to do that, you have to play it over and over and over and over and over. And you have to start to understand, well, what is going to make this game stronger?

weaker. It really is a process of evolution that you just want to accelerate as much as you possibly can. Do you know what an OODA loop is? Oh, I don't know that I do.

Well, you've already correctly intuited it and you've written in support of it, maybe without knowing. But I came across this. This is one of those tropes you'll encounter in business books and some other thing. But it comes from, I'm looking up now, U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. And he used to go up and compete against the new recruits up in the air tactics. And he won every single time. Nobody could beat Colonel Boyd up there in the air. And

They eventually said, yeah, how do you, how'd you do it? And he's like, it's, it's simple. I was doing OODA loops and OODA is an acronym, O-O-D-A, observe, orient, decide, act.

And that's what we do, not just when we're up there, I'll never be in a fighter plane as an Air Force professional. That's what we do all the time in life. We observe something. We orient ourselves to position. We decide we're going to do it, and then we act. And you were just saying, Jesse, just a couple minutes ago, the more and faster you do that. And that's what Boyd did so well. He did 40 of them before one of his –

noob recruits could do three of them and so that's the way he described his mastery and it's kind of back to your rule of the loop in this case it's got a military acronym tied to it of course because it's the military but uh but you know observe orient decide act over and over as

as fast as possible. Yeah, there's a famous game design essay called Less Talk, More Rock. And the premise is people's instinct is, oh, okay, if I want to design a game, let me talk about it. Let's all talk about, talk and talk and talk about what this should be, and then maybe we'll go build it. And what the essay says is like, look, until you've built something, you don't actually have something to talk about.

If you have an idea, build it quick and then look at it and talk about that and then do something else and talk about that. So the talking should come after the doing. The talking should not stop you from getting the doing done.

Words to live by. Wow, that's great. Well, Jesse, I really could spend easily another hour. I feel like I haven't even touched on things like, well, maybe I can still ask you one or two questions. I'm kind of curious whether anything is impressing you these days out there in the gaming world, either the work of a designer or any new trend. I certainly want to ask you briefly just to say where you are with your own company, Shell Games. Yes.

You are a very successful lauded entrepreneur. You are operating out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have visited you in your lovely offices once before. I'm just curious. We heard some of your work, but maybe some mix of how about these two closing questions? What's cool out there that more of us should be paying attention to right now? And how are things going with you and your career? What are you looking forward to?

Yeah, Shell Games is a studio I run out in Pittsburgh. We're pretty sizable for an independent game studio. We have about 150 people. We've been at it for about 20 years now, typically working on about eight games at a time. And we're an interesting studio because about half the projects we do are our own projects that we made up. Projects like, you know, I Expect You to Die, I might have mentioned before, and...

But then the other half of the projects are projects we do either for hire or partnerships. And some of those are educational. Some of those are entertainment projects. So we end up doing a huge mix of things. And recently, the virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality spaces are the places where we've been really just...

really dug in, making all kinds of things, everything from Star Wars games to cooking games to everything in between. But really, just the world of VR and AR has really changed us as a studio. So whatever one might think of the metaverse or whatever that word means, one thing is clear, Jesse, you and your studio are

very invested in augmented reality and virtual reality. For somebody like me, I haven't actually bought an Oculus yet. I have a brother who has one and gives it out as gifts to friends. I feel like PlayStation VR has been important. I feel like it's clearly becoming a bigger and more used platform, but I'm not there yet. So Jesse, you're telling me that I'm getting there because that's where we're headed. Yeah, it's...

Over the course of the pandemic, VR became surprisingly popular. We are at a point now where there are more Oculus Quest headsets on the market than Xbox One consoles.

But most people have no concept of that. They think of VR as a thing that, oh, very few people do it. But we're in the realm of, I believe, 14 or 15 million of these headsets being out there. And what's fascinating about the Quest headset, because it's so inexpensive and because it's wireless... It's not tethered. It's not tethered at all. It's so easy to pick up and use. The people who buy it, they don't buy it, play a couple games and put it on the shelf. They tend to keep...

playing, keep buying new things. And so we've just seen it has quickly dominated the VR market. And we're really, we feel like we've been seeing a doubling of

Just in terms of number of headsets that are out there. A few years ago, it was 2 million, and then it was 5 million, and then 10 million. And now we're approaching, you know, over the course of this year, I think we're going to approach 20 million. And I do think that we'd be on track for 40 million by the end of 2020.

of by the end of 2023. So we really are in a place where this this is, this is going to be coming mainstream. And right now, it's mostly about virtual reality over the next couple years, it's clear that mixed reality, augmented reality is going to be part of these headsets. If you if you look at what

what's already happening on the Quest headsets and some of the rumors about forthcoming headsets. I think we're going to see this becoming really mainstream over the next couple of years. In terms of what's cool out there, I think one of the biggest trends happening right now is the whole trend of games inside games. We're seeing games like Roblox and Fortnite that started out as just kind of

you know, Roblox was like, oh, it's about building places and Fortnite is, oh, it's this, you know, it's this kind of arena shooter game. And now both of them have grown into these, these experiences that, um,

Roblox has thousands of experiences in it, and even Fortnite now has a library of different games inside the game. It's interesting because people talk about the metaverse as if they have any idea what they're talking about. Most of that talk is nonsense, but

If you want to understand the future of the metaverse, you should be looking at this notion of games inside games. Because that's

I think that's really what we're going to see. Not a metaverse, but instead a collection of metaverses. Roblox is going to be one. Fortnite is going to be one. I don't have any information about this. I have a strong suspicion Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be one of these. It's going to allow people to create their own games inside the other games. I laugh only because Grand Theft Auto 5, which has had a good 10 years or so run, just kept...

adding DLC, downloadable content, just kept iterating and iterating. So in a way, it feels like a thousand games to me. Right, right, right. But I think that, again, I have zero information. But when I stare into my crystal ball, I'm like, when I look at where all the trends are going and I look at how much success they've had taking that 10-year-old game and making it incredibly successful, continuing to sell well over time,

why wouldn't they make it so other people can make games and put them inside it? I think it's likely to happen. Love it. And Jesse, off the air before we started today, you mentioned you're working on another book right now.

Yeah, I am. This hasn't been broadly announced, but we'll talk about it here. Working on a book that in a sense is a sequel to The Art of Game Design. A lot of what I've done at Shell Games over the last 20 years has been in the realm of educational games. We do education, entertainment, health games, even theme parks and museums. Also, a lot of the work I've done at Carnegie Mellon has been about making educational games.

So I teamed up with Barbara Chamberlain, who's another amazing game designer who makes wonderful educational games. And the two of us are working together on the art of educational game design, looking at the principles of how you best create games that aren't just fun, but games that are designed to change the player.

Love it. Well, if games are problem-solving with a playful attitude, yeah, we do that in school. And the longer we live as adults, we learn we're living in the school of life, which we never really leave until we leave. And so...

constant lifelong learning, constant problem solving. If that's the way I can now justify my many game nights that I have in my mid-50s, I look forward to more deep insights from you and guidance for this generation of game designers, many of whom, of course, are working in and around schools, everything from academia at a high end to

to, I don't know, how to make a better version of Parcheesi for the kids these days. Jesse, I've just had so much fun with you. Thank you so much for joining us on Rule Breaker Investing. I do see a lot of overlap between investing as a game and how to play it and really how to design a portfolio.

And so when I first read The Art of Game Design some 15 years ago, I was doing it with my investment cap on saying, I think a lot of what he's pointing out here, if you just kind of substitute the word investing for games or game designer portfolio, you come away with all kinds of creative insights and ways to see things with a new lens. So I do want to put a real plug in, not that Jesse needs this or asked for this, but I want to say that I love The Art of Game Design portfolio.

deck of lenses. So the book, The Art of Game Design has as its subtitle, a book of lenses, but anybody who's a big fan like I am can buy a deck of cards off Amazon these days that takes each of your hundred or so lenses, puts it on a playing card and enables me anytime I want to be creative or challenge myself or look at things from a different angle, shuffle it up

deal out a few. Some people look at tarot cards, I don't, and try to think what their future is going to hold, I don't. But others flip out the deck of lenses and start going, how can I think about this smarter or

or in a way that will make me happier or challenge those around me. And so whether you're a game designer, a portfolio builder, a nonfiction writer, the list goes on. All the makers out there, all of us, the makers in us, I think our design can be improved, not just by the Art of Game Design book, but that deck of lenses, which has been really fun. So there is a prolonged plug for one of the lesser known awesome things you can buy on Amazon these days.

All right. Yeah, definitely appreciate it. And also there is a free web app for people who want to check out and see a digital version as well. So that's, and again, you go to art of game design.com. You can find all of that. Thank you for mentioning that. And it just occurs to me, I have that on my phone, but I never think of it because I look at my Deco cards each day, but thank you, Jesse shell, foolish, best wishes. And let's talk again sometime.

As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.