1:56

Jason

2:09

Perez, really glad to have you here.

2:11

Excited to chat with you about creativity, how

2:13

to boost it, how to come at it from different angles,

2:16

how to overcome maybe some creative blocks

2:19

that designers often run into.

2:22

And the reason I want to chat with you is because you are a

2:24

licensed psychotherapist, you're a licensed

2:26

social worker. You're also now a signed game

2:29

designer, which is new since the last time you

2:31

were on the show. So congrats

2:33

on that. And you come at things from a science

2:36

background, but also at the intersection of

2:38

a gamer and a game designer. And

2:40

so I thought it would be really cool just to chat about

2:43

how our brains work, how creativity works and

2:45

how things, you know, what are some things we can

2:47

do as designers to make

2:49

better games that we're not just constantly putting

2:51

out the exact same, oh, it's another,

2:53

it's another deck builder. Work

2:56

replacement, except I said this time it has

2:58

this, you know, tiny change, which,

3:00

you know, it is what it is. Sometimes that sometimes as

3:02

a publisher, you just put out another game because you got to make

3:05

payroll. But I think anybody listening

3:07

to this is wanting to make a game

3:09

that is interesting and unique

3:12

and different without being necessarily

3:15

industry changing. Like that's really hard to do, like

3:17

something so innovative that no one's ever seen it before. I

3:19

think there's that kind of happy medium. But anyway, really

3:21

excited to have you here. And so

3:24

when we're talking about creativity,

3:27

give me just some some background, like as a

3:29

guy that's gone through school, you've got degrees,

3:31

you've learned about the brain, just

3:33

tell me your perspective on the sciencey

3:35

kind of side of things as far as creativity. And then we'll dive

3:37

into more of the design related

3:40

stuff. I am, as you said, licensed clinical

3:42

social worker, I am a psychotherapist and

3:45

I work with people and I

3:47

am a specialist in what they call cognitive

3:49

behavioral therapy, CBT. So

3:53

my deal is the brain

3:55

and my deal is the active thinking

3:57

that can and in a clinical sense, kind

3:59

of get

3:59

people tripped up. Right.

4:02

And it's usually a, you

4:04

know, as I go through my therapy, more

4:06

and more, it's like a kind of a lack of creativity,

4:09

a lack of vision, you know,

4:11

and most of my people who come in depression,

4:13

anxiety, whatever it is, a lot of it comes

4:16

from whatever has it

4:18

has like brought on kind of a myopia, brought

4:20

on, you know, they get very tunnel visiony,

4:23

when you get stressed, you get very tunnel visiony. So it's like shutting

4:26

down of the possibilities,

4:28

which is what creativity is kind of like the broadening

4:30

of vision and possibility in the brain. So

4:33

I've been doing that for years. That's not just writers

4:36

and artists and designers. That's just people in general, the creativity

4:38

of life, right, as far as like seeing options

4:41

in your job or options in your relationships. It's

4:43

all this stuff. Exactly. Yes. If you're coming

4:45

in your job, you're like, so many of my clients,

4:48

they're like, I feel stuck in my life.

4:50

Right. And so much of that is

4:53

not seeing the options, you

4:55

know, and that's where you know, and that's where a creative

4:57

mind that's where you know, the intersection

4:59

of what you know, talk about psychology and life and games

5:01

and stuff. The intersection is at a well

5:04

functioning broad vision, right?

5:07

So that's what my professional life in terms of my

5:09

day job that I get paid to do. And

5:11

also, you do not mention I'm a cultural consultant

5:14

in gaming. As you know, I did

5:17

the receive a Puerto Rico. Yeah,

5:19

that's right. It's the last time you were getting there

5:21

on the show, I think you were still in the

5:23

middle, I think you were still figuring out like all the

5:25

ins and outs of what was going on there. And

5:27

so yeah, that's another thing we can chat about here in just a minute,

5:30

as far as design is like how to take something that

5:32

is established that has been around for a long time, look

5:34

at it with new eyes, change some things around. Yeah,

5:36

I'm excited about that. That's exactly and that folds in right?

5:39

So like, wow, did so what

5:41

goes wrong in these kind of like

5:44

themes that kind of recur over and over again, I would

5:47

submit a lack of creativity, a lack of vision, a

5:49

lack of just kind of like broader thinking,

5:52

what I and in the board gaming

5:54

world with that we call those tropes.

5:57

So tropes being just you

5:59

know,

6:00

Well, one idea that get used

6:02

over and over and over again. They leaned upon them on kind of

6:04

thing now That's not like mental illness. I mean that's

6:06

a different kind of stuckness But

6:09

I would suggest that there the the common

6:11

factor between like an anxious

6:13

depressed mind a person who feels stuck in life And

6:16

a person who is stuck in tropes

6:18

or in the familiar That's not the similar

6:21

and the approach is generally

6:23

and this is the person I take my cultural consulting

6:26

I like to say this isn't about like doing

6:28

it my way This isn't about like me

6:30

dictating like, you know Gestapo style what you should

6:32

do. It's about okay. Let's broaden this

6:35

out What could this be? What are you

6:37

trying to say? And how

6:39

are the familiar tropes kind of roping you

6:42

into saying it only certain ways and

6:44

how can we blow those tropes out and Broaden

6:46

things out and you know kind of bring breathe

6:49

some new life into your design Gotcha

6:51

briefly explain what it means

6:54

to Consult culturally because

6:56

I know there's people listening to the show that probably don't

6:58

quite understand what that means And and there's also people

7:00

online that think they know what that means Maybe

7:03

don't I've read it. I'm like, I think you're

7:05

a little bit off So explain that from your perspective

7:07

what that makes I look like last at it But I'll

7:10

definitely kind of more than happy to get

7:12

into it. So it is

7:14

about those tropes So the misunderstanding

7:16

well the misunderstanding is that it's again I'm

7:19

telling people what to do so that the game

7:21

is quote-unquote not offensive, right

7:24

or it's it's basically like for

7:26

kids You know a nice safe,

7:28

you know thing and all This

7:30

seat that word gets kind of thrown out about okay

7:32

Well, the gift the game is safe that it's for children and for

7:35

this, you know Then where's the grit where's this where's that

7:37

and that's that is not what we do, right?

7:40

I a good culture consultant and I really aim for that

7:43

is Very attentive to when

7:46

a game is trying to represent people

7:48

and most games represent people even the fictional

7:51

ones people You know when

7:53

we even when we do fictional stuff even when it's like animals

7:56

Even when it is space aliens or whatever it

7:58

is. If you're you know analogs

8:00

from real life, right? And so like

8:02

Star Trek was famous for this stuff. The

8:05

Klingons were based on Soviet

8:08

era and the Ferengi were based on

8:11

the creator's understanding of the

8:13

time of Middle Eastern cultures

8:15

and everything. These are explicit, that was explicit,

8:17

but like they leaned into it, but we all do

8:20

it. They're all, we're all boring from like real

8:22

world ideas. So like, are you borrowing

8:25

in a way that is authentic and true

8:27

to the origin culture?

8:29

Or are you borrowing

8:31

tropes?

8:32

And the tropes are flat, tropes

8:35

are well-worn, tropes are usually kind

8:37

of filtered through a Western gaze

8:40

and some stuff can stick in. Some

8:42

stuff that's not comfortable, some stuff that just makes people

8:44

uncomfortable. So,

8:47

I guess taking from, so

8:51

like what's a trope, an

8:54

unassociated trope, right? So like the chain mail bikini

8:58

in a dungeon crawler, right? So like if you have

9:00

a woman in a board game, the tendency,

9:02

the overwhelming tendency because of who plays games

9:05

is to have the buxom wench with the cleavage

9:07

and the barely armored and all that kind of stuff.

9:10

And you can say that's for sure, that's

9:12

great. And it's whatever, it's harmless, harmless. It's

9:15

not harmless to people for

9:17

whom that is not comfortable. They wanna see themselves

9:19

in games. Everyone wants to see themselves in games. And

9:21

if you're a woman and you wanna see yourself for the game, all you see

9:24

is busting out cleavage and

9:26

all that kind of things, at least in the popular titles. So

9:29

a cultural consultant will look at those little bits

9:31

and it does not have to be that. So it's LGBTQ,

9:34

different communities around the world. And

9:36

just give a flag to the author saying, look, this

9:38

is what people see. I

9:41

know that's what you see, you don't see a problem. From

9:43

our perspective, we see an issue, how

9:46

can we, and this is the creativity

9:48

part. How can we turn 2D into

9:50

3D? Not

9:52

how can we get rid of it? Not how can we cancel

9:54

it? That's the big misunderstanding. How can we

9:57

turn this trope that you used

9:59

and...

10:00

told and and and turns turn it

10:02

into something creative and turn it into something

10:04

resonant and turn it something authentic that Is

10:07

exactly what we want to do as

10:09

a cultural consultant. Gotcha. Cuz I feel

10:11

I feel like sometimes it gets

10:14

I've seen unfortunately some people who claim to

10:16

be cultural consultants who take

10:18

on maybe a little bit of that Telling

10:20

you what to do that they're coming at it as

10:23

a you need to listen to me because I'm the expert

10:25

and if you don't I'm gonna drag you online like I've seen that

10:27

unfortunately But I've also seen the complete opposite

10:30

where people have no understanding where they think

10:32

oh So you're saying if I'm

10:34

a straight white dude, then I can't make a game about

10:36

X Y and Z. It's like no That's not no not exactly.

10:38

That's not what we're saying We're saying intentional about

10:41

making a game about X Y and Z Especially if

10:43

it's about a culture that you have no under like

10:45

you read a book. Okay, that's cool like

10:48

but I

10:49

Heard this quote a while back and I love it. It's you

10:51

can't read the label from inside the bottle Understanding

10:54

that you're inside the bottle and to bring

10:56

in other people Whether you're you know

10:58

You're going out and hiring them or at

11:01

the very least have some people around you they can look

11:03

at stuff and you'll listen to them They'll tell you the truth and you

11:05

know, maybe come from different cultures different backgrounds

11:07

different languages Whatever and and

11:09

just be intentional about it, especially

11:12

if you're making a product because to your point

11:15

if you have a game that a Certain

11:18

percentage of gamers can't see themselves

11:20

playing. They can't see themselves in it Well,

11:22

you're potentially limiting the market reach of

11:25

that game So is that worth it to

11:27

you? I mean if it is fine Okay, do your thing but

11:30

if you're wanting and more and more especially,

11:32

you know women and people from different

11:34

Backgrounds are coming into the hobby Well,

11:37

if you want to make a game that appeals to them that they would want to buy

11:39

and want to play and want to give Away as gifts. I

11:41

don't know. Maybe

11:42

maybe be aware of that Because yeah,

11:45

we're talking about

11:46

Race general we're talking about money

11:49

in a lot of this like this is these are marketing decisions.

11:51

These are business decisions more than just

11:54

Doing it because it's a right thing to do. It's a good thing to do

11:56

like at the very least Even

11:59

if you're the kind of person That you just don't

12:01

care. What do you do at least care about making more money

12:03

off of your game? Understand

12:06

like you don't have to be this certain

12:08

political slant the certain cultural

12:11

whatever Do you want to make more

12:13

money? Do you want to sell more games? And

12:15

a lot of that comes down to and I want to talk to you about Puerto

12:17

Rico in just a second But any follow-up on that because

12:19

I think you're in the same boat I'm just trying to get publishers and

12:22

game designers understand like this is

12:24

it's not black white. What is green? Is

12:27

green talking about yeah, okay So there's a

12:29

bunch of different like threads there so there

12:31

is the you know You don't want to send people quote-unquote.

12:33

I don't like that word I'd like if

12:36

you want to send people like do so intentionally don't

12:38

just do so unintentionally which I let that happens a lot Where

12:40

it's like, okay You put in a trope because

12:42

the DZ some space trope or whatever, you know

12:45

And then that offends somebody but you didn't mean it and

12:47

that that's like a complete waste of time Everybody's

12:49

upset you're upset. I don't say it as about you

12:52

know that that's as a cultural consultant We if

12:54

at the very least I can help a creator do that that's

12:56

gonna happen There are

12:58

there have been some times where I

13:01

will point out some kind of oopsie in a

13:03

game that can potentially be an issue but the

13:05

creator will come back and say this is a core

13:08

part of what I want to say and Thank

13:10

you very much for helping me anticipated

13:12

the kind of things I have to answer But I'm gonna

13:14

forge ahead and go with this and I'm

13:16

like, all right, you know I'm glad that I was able to help

13:18

you and that person again, this isn't

13:20

about like gilting or shaming I'm anti-gilting

13:23

shame. So and that's that's

13:25

a thing too.

13:26

So

13:28

Really though and this is kind of gets back to the heart of what

13:30

we'll talk about here It's so

13:32

much of my approach is about incurring

13:35

creativity and let me use an example.

13:37

I've used this in a video This was like two years ago. So

13:39

people don't know But

13:41

I love this example. So and this is a total

13:44

left field example that totally applies So

13:46

have you heard my friend Gabe of

13:48

the song of ice and fire?

13:51

The

13:52

Well, it was the book series and turned into the Game of Thrones

13:56

Exactly the brand poo by George R. R.

13:58

Martin, right? he wrote the

14:00

original Game of Thrones, the novel, 1992. Like

14:04

way back, what is a cultural

14:06

consultant at that point? You know, what that does

14:08

and that thing. But, so, yeah, so, okay,

14:10

so he's writing his book and he has

14:13

this character who is a little person named

14:15

Tyrion Lannister. And

14:17

if you read the book, it is still there, like they haven't like

14:19

edited this out or anything. If

14:21

you read the original book, the very first book,

14:24

and the very first scene of Tyrion Lannister is in, what

14:27

Jon Snow, you're aware

14:29

of the characters, Jon Snow is like dour, he's like

14:31

looking at, looking off to wherever. And

14:34

then Tyrion is sitting on a ledge

14:36

on a high building and he jumps

14:38

off the ledge, bounces off an

14:42

awning, does a somersault and

14:44

lands on his feet. And, you know, kind

14:46

of does a little bow and all that kind of thing. And

14:49

so it was like,

14:51

okay, then he goes into the whole like you'll keepering fool

14:53

thing. So then what

14:55

happens with, so the book gets released and

14:58

there's a lot of little people, folks

15:01

who have dwarfism who read the book and

15:03

they're like, what the F, what is this?

15:06

And

15:07

basically the idea being that George

15:09

Martin leaned on a trope, the trope

15:11

of the capering little man. How

15:13

did, what did George Martin play when he grew up? He played

15:16

with halflings and D&D. He

15:19

watched professional midget wrestling

15:21

with, the midgets like Skylo Lo and they're calling

15:23

like capering and moving around and stuff. That was

15:25

his only experience of folks

15:28

with dwarfism, the little nimble

15:30

person. And so what they,

15:32

you know, he, so George Martin tells a story.

15:35

He got letters from people saying,

15:37

back when people wrote letters, saying

15:39

that that's not the experience

15:40

of being a dwarf.

15:42

Most of the time it is pain. You

15:46

know, it is a lot of back pain, foot

15:48

pain, heart, trouble getting around. And

15:51

on top of the physical pain, there's the social

15:54

pain of being expected

15:56

to be the dancing fool. We call that stereotype

15:58

threat. So it's like. If I'm not

16:00

capering and if I'm not jumping around, then

16:02

I get treated worse. A person would say

16:05

that. George Warren

16:07

had no idea, no

16:10

idea why would he

16:11

of this?

16:12

So then what does he do? He goes

16:14

into the second book, the third book, the fourth book, and

16:16

he completely changes Tyrion's character. At

16:18

that point, he's massaging his feet. At

16:21

that point, he's rubbing his back. He's

16:23

constantly rubbing his legs. What

16:26

that did was by having people's

16:29

life experience brought to

16:31

him, he was able to

16:34

not cancel, quote unquote, Tyrion. In fact, he went

16:36

the other way. He made Tyrion more interesting.

16:38

It unlocked creativity.

16:42

It unlocked this whole dynamic with his father

16:44

because his father became the one that did

16:46

the stereotype type thing to Tyrion. It's like, okay,

16:49

now Tyrion

16:51

expected Tyrion to be the fool and

16:53

Tyrion's like, no, no, my legs hurt. Tyrion

16:56

was like, you're not my son. Tyrion

16:58

was like, you're not my, the whole

17:01

family drama came up. So using

17:04

real life feedback

17:06

and real experience and authenticity

17:08

to inspire creativity in one's work.

17:12

The best cultural consulting that I've ever

17:14

done with a board game replicates that. It's

17:16

like, okay, here we go. You have this in your

17:18

game. This is what it would

17:21

look like more in a resident to whatever

17:23

community. It's like, oh,

17:26

let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. It's

17:29

a fantastic process when it goes

17:31

right and it folds into exactly

17:33

what the subject of the podcast is. So I'm

17:35

happy to talk about it.

17:36

Right. And to your point, which said earlier, it's,

17:39

it's literally going from 2d to 3d because now

17:41

we go from, oh, it's just a stereotypical,

17:44

you know, little person to no, no, no, it's deeper.

17:47

He's a person. He's a real, you

17:49

know, it's a, it's very similitude, which is, you

17:51

know, a word that gets brought up in, in the English circles. And

17:53

all that means is this could be real, right?

17:56

Even if you're reading Game of Thrones and there's dragons

17:58

and magic and all. It's a craziness

18:00

like you know, it's not real it's fancy But there's very

18:02

similitude in the way the characters act

18:05

towards each other the way they respond the things they think the things

18:07

they do You go. Oh, this could be real

18:10

and in game design, especially if you're a thematic

18:12

designer now if you're designing abstracts, you know Okay,

18:15

whatever but if you're designing something that has theme

18:17

and you've got flavor text You've got narrative and scenarios

18:20

and all sorts of stuff you can lean into These

18:23

things and all of a sudden players

18:25

get lost they kind of forget they're playing a

18:27

game They still know they're playing a game but they're immersed

18:30

and they're there all of a sudden it feels

18:32

like they're doing Whatever it is on the table

18:35

and you can even in the brain like I've

18:37

seen Ted talks and things talk about especially

18:39

like Dungeons and Dragons where when players are

18:41

in that zone The brain

18:43

is making memories in the same

18:46

way that it makes memories when you do things for real

18:49

It's like the brain is just like oh, yeah that you

18:51

really did slay a dragon Well, no, but

18:53

it makes memories as if you did and so all

18:56

that to say Again, we're not

18:58

trying to tell people. Oh you have to design like

19:00

this And if you're if you're this person

19:02

you can't do it's not what we're saying We're

19:04

saying you can be more creative

19:06

you have more space You have more interesting

19:09

options if you kind of understand the

19:11

bigger picture of what's going on Yeah, and if you

19:14

are attentive to whatever tropes you're using and I'm

19:16

it's a Bruno for duty wrote a very influential

19:19

I say on this this is like about Katana 2010

19:22

and he was talking about board games as a field of

19:26

It's all trips so it's all the way to like

19:28

you're playing a game most of the game occurs

19:31

in the person's mind and the The

19:33

mechanisms are more like a prompt to the month. He designed

19:35

simpler games. He's definitely on the tip

19:36

and His big

19:39

quote was you know board games aren't

19:41

really the medium for complex

19:43

tropes I go to another medium for that like a

19:45

board games. They rely on simple tropes

19:48

and

19:48

so, you know, you're basically choosing

19:50

from among simple tropes and My

19:53

thing is okay as long as you're choosing from on simple

19:56

tropes, they don't have to be the same worn

19:58

tropes, you know There's all sorts of ways,

20:01

like there's millions of tropes, there's millions of ways

20:03

which you can kind of represent something quickly, right?

20:07

Do we need to represent, you

20:09

know, purple? Let's

20:11

see. Like as soon as I see purple, I'm

20:13

immediately, okay, that's a space creature, whatever it is.

20:16

Do I really need to see the chain of the kitties? Or do I really

20:18

need to see, if I'm playing a game in the Middle East, do

20:20

I need to see, you know, camels? You

20:22

know, there's a lot more in the Middle East than camels. You

20:25

can just kind of go on down the line of the different,

20:27

you know, cultures and, you know,

20:29

settings and all that kind of stuff. So you

20:32

can use the tropes, but like, are the tropes well-worn

20:36

and just, you know, uncreative and just like, you

20:38

know, taking some stock, or are you

20:40

kind of making new ones? And then that,

20:43

you know, that,

20:45

if you do it well enough, it'll give gamers

20:47

that little like left turn, like, ooh,

20:49

I'm doing something a little bit different. And that's

20:51

where, you know, you can really get somebody,

20:54

you can, sometimes it'll miss and that's okay. As

20:57

long as you're trying and get people to be able to help

20:59

you in your game.

21:00

Absolutely, one thing I'm curious though, because I've

21:02

seen, unfortunately, sometimes writers,

21:05

movie makers, TV show, people, games are too, they

21:07

go almost too far the other way. So for instance, if

21:09

Tyrion Lannister, that

21:12

type of a character, right? A little person who's around three

21:14

feet tall, and you put him in a basketball

21:16

movie, and he, for no reason,

21:19

can dunk a basketball. He can jump, you

21:21

know, 70 inches in the air, and where there's no magic,

21:24

there's no fantasy here, and try and present that.

21:27

I feel like also we can go too far the other way. And so

21:30

it's almost finding that spot in the middle, because that

21:32

breaks the verisimilitude as well, where you're like, well, hold on

21:34

now, now I'm watching the TV show, because

21:36

that was so ridiculous and so

21:39

impossible. But you got to be careful

21:41

of that too. So can you

21:43

speak on that too? Like, do you ever find yourself in

21:46

your consulting, kind of having to rein somebody back

21:48

in and be like, okay, you're maybe trying too hard. You're

21:50

subverting a little too far. Let's pull

21:52

it back in a little more believable territory.

21:55

Not really. I mean,

21:57

I think that in board gaming, it's so- That's not the issue,

21:59

huh? Well, it's so- tight and competitive, right?

22:01

You know, like, there's such a small

22:03

window for people to make and to create

22:05

and all that kind of stuff. I think it is 99% more

22:09

of like, okay, people, okay, it

22:11

has to be space or it has to be, you know, combating

22:14

gods or has to be, you know, this kind

22:16

of like well of 10 things. Old

22:18

West, oh, I mean, how many Old West things are

22:20

I consulted on? A ton, right?

22:23

And it's like, so

22:24

the Old West is full

22:26

of

22:26

just awful tropes. So, you

22:29

know, the savage natives and the

22:32

damsel in distress and the stagecoach and I

22:34

mean, I could go on forever and ever for that. So,

22:37

you know, I said, yeah, that would be like,

22:39

it would be the other way. And again, I'm

22:41

not saying don't do the tropes. I'm

22:43

not saying like, don't do games about the Old West. I mean,

22:46

I would love that to like explore different

22:48

things, but I get the reality of like people,

22:51

they want to, you know, explore the

22:53

familiar settings and I get that, but like, okay, we're

22:55

gonna explore the same settings. We're gonna explore the same general

22:58

trope. Let's do it a different way. You know,

23:00

does the damsel need to be in distress?

23:02

Maybe the damsel could be driving the car or, you

23:05

know, maybe the savage or the quote unquote savage native

23:07

could be, you know, the only trader in town

23:09

and, you know, the person that keeps the keeper

23:12

of knowledge and lore. There's all sorts of ways that you

23:14

can kind of turn some of these tropes in their head. And

23:16

that's kind of what I want to encourage people.

23:18

And my, and also I'm a big history guy. So

23:21

it's like, okay, let's borrow from like real history

23:23

and, you know, look at someone's

23:25

life. Look at, you know, these people

23:27

that really existed, like, you know, most of

23:30

cowboys were black and Latino. We call

23:32

them bacchios. So like, okay,

23:34

can we get some look in the history

23:36

that have, you know, these people that have been kind of covered

23:39

up. And now all we think is like the John Wayne,

23:41

white guy cowboy, like, okay, let's go back in the history,

23:43

recover some of these things. And maybe that opens

23:46

up a whole rich field of

23:48

creativity in your game. So that's

23:49

the kind of things I like to look at.

23:52

Absolutely. I mean, the word buckaroo is just

23:54

a messed up pronunciation of

23:56

the Spanish word.

23:59

Right into your point, you know and

24:03

Rodeo these are all these all Spanish names. Exactly.

24:05

Exactly and looking into what actually

24:08

happened,

24:08

you know, unfortunately We we have

24:11

a tendency to just play a big long game of

24:13

telephone With the history and

24:15

with the truth and anytime people are playing telephone

24:17

You know, it only takes two or three people playing telephone

24:20

and you've already messed up up Well, how about a thousand

24:22

people? How about over a course of I don't

24:24

know two thousand years? Everybody just kind of playing telephone

24:26

with the truth and the history of things and now we're

24:28

in a place of literally the opposite You

24:31

know, that's a great way to put it It's like imagine

24:33

you're in a situation where all you're playing with

24:35

is the end of a telephone game

24:38

You know and at the end of the day like people

24:40

are people and this is another I would once

24:42

be one of me to talk About which is kind of the brain science of it. I mean

24:45

the brain is an energy seething

24:47

mechanism the brain It's

24:49

a big world. There's a lot going on Billions

24:52

of stimuli every second ahead in our head our

24:55

brains are always desperate to

24:57

find The quickest way in which

24:59

we can interpret something and kind of like put it in its place and

25:01

move on Right and we're always trying

25:03

to find little tricks little habits that kind of save

25:06

time and save energy That is what the brain

25:08

does and that is what a trope does. That's what a stereotype

25:11

does It's what a habit does, you know,

25:13

the brain is constantly looking to habituate itself

25:16

to stuff So if you're like, okay, I'm not thinking about this but

25:18

I can think about these other 10,000 things You

25:20

know like anybody who's ever, you know

25:22

driven on their way to work, but they have to

25:24

go somewhere else

25:26

You know

25:27

You're gonna lean towards going to work because

25:30

the brain is gonna take you in that direction You can

25:32

think of that metaphor as this is

25:34

what you do If you're not attentive in the creative

25:36

process that like if you're going into

25:39

game design if you're going into making a game But

25:42

you've told stories in whatever medium

25:44

that you are in a certain way Then your brain is

25:46

gonna be habituated telling the story once again in

25:48

that same way and that's where it becomes really

25:50

important to be attentive to that tendency

25:53

of the mind to just go

25:55

with the normal and familiar because of its

25:58

energy saving and

25:59

really try to step back and be like, okay, what

26:02

am I doing? And this, I like to talk

26:04

about it this way because, you know, again,

26:06

speaking to your point about cultural consulting, it's like,

26:08

okay, am I just calling a bunch of people racist that reproduce

26:11

the tropes? Absolutely not. It's

26:13

not about that. It's about like, okay, your

26:17

energy-saving brain has developed

26:19

a bank of tropes given to us

26:22

by a culture which does have ugly history

26:24

in it and because we want to save

26:26

time and energy, we've used those tropes over and over again.

26:29

And those tropes are the result of a big telephone

26:31

game like you had described before. So

26:33

all we're doing as cultural consultants

26:36

is encouraging people to be like, okay, this is what the

26:38

brain is doing. This is

26:40

the bank of tropes that you are relying

26:42

upon and I get why you did it. And

26:44

so can we please think about, A, what

26:47

impact how people receive those tropes on different

26:49

than the other end and B, is there a way

26:51

to kind of

26:53

complexify? Is there a way to blow

26:55

that out, be creative, turn 2D into

26:57

3D? That's kind of what the process is all about.

27:00

Right. And what you're talking about there is like our

27:02

brains kind of lowest common denominator,

27:04

like always trying to expend the least amount of energy

27:07

as possible. Well, that's why people read headlines,

27:09

not articles. It's why they see something

27:11

online that, especially

27:14

if it confirms a bias they already

27:16

had, then they go, yep, that's

27:18

true. You know, without actually looking deeper, they

27:21

can hear something that might be ludicrous. They

27:23

might be absolutely just ridiculous, but

27:25

they'll just take it at face value because their brains like, oh,

27:27

okay. And it's just like, all right, moving on to the other 12

27:29

things that I've got going on right now. And I said

27:33

this on a show recently, but you know, our brains are supercomputers,

27:36

but they only have one megabyte of RAM. Yeah. So

27:39

you can only think about one thing, focus on one thing at a time. And

27:41

so to make it more efficient, our

27:43

brain is just boom right there and moving on to

27:46

the next thing and you'll believe something wild.

27:48

And then it'll get, like our brains are also really

27:50

bad at like memory,

27:52

like memories are,

27:53

are so screwed up.

27:55

And they find that in, in like witness

27:57

testimonies and things like that where they can compare it

27:59

to video. Footage and things are like, oh wow, this is like

28:02

your way off Like you thought you knew you

28:04

knew moment by moment But our brains are so bad at

28:06

holding ideas really good at having ideas

28:09

terrible at holding them And so that's nothing

28:11

is like even our own memories betray us, you

28:13

know, and so if you think oh, yeah I grew up playing

28:15

baseball and this is how I remember it. It's like

28:17

yeah, maybe maybe it was like that

28:22

Just something to be aware of and also

28:24

even like the cultural it's not even or

28:27

it's not only Deep kind of heavy

28:29

stuff. It's also things that might just be humorous

28:32

and embarrassing. I give an example so I'm working on Roboman

28:35

and Literally

28:40

every day someone is working on that

28:42

game and I have I have meetings

28:44

all throughout the week of different people were on The team and

28:47

like it's moving forward. It's just such a big game But

28:49

one thing about it all the town names are

28:51

based on metals kind of like a Pokemon,

28:53

you know It's like all the recovered whatever so it's

28:55

all metals and or metal related

28:58

things And so I had a town in

29:00

the game called slagville

29:02

and slag if you're not familiar It's like the

29:05

the waste product of different metal

29:07

processes and welding and things like that. I was like, oh slagville

29:10

That sounds good. Well, my main

29:12

artist who is from the UK as

29:15

soon as I told him slagville He burst out

29:17

laughing and he's like you're not serious. Are

29:19

you? I was like what what's wrong? Do

29:21

you know what slag it means in the UK? I

29:24

don't want to say that They'll

29:29

have a fun little Google search on that one It's not like

29:32

a cuss word, but it ain't a family friendly term

29:34

And so, you know again just

29:37

having other people on the team to go. Hey, let's

29:39

Let's not do that one. Let's find a different opportunity

29:42

there and we had a good long chuckle when he sent me,

29:44

you know A link he's like well here here's

29:46

what it means and like okay, that's funny but

29:48

it's also keeping you from silly

29:50

embarrassing things or Just

29:53

things that pull people out of the the

29:55

moment. I've used icons in

29:57

the past that for instance

29:59

a battery Well, the normal,

30:01

like, stereotypical trope of a battery icon,

30:04

that type of battery wasn't invented until, like, the

30:06

early or mid-90s. And so when

30:08

I used that icon on a game that was set in

30:10

the 80s, that pulled

30:13

a handful of people out of the moment.

30:15

They were like, wait a minute, that battery doesn't exist in 1983.

30:18

I'm like, first of all, come

30:20

on. But they had a point,

30:23

you know? And so it's not just these deep,

30:26

heavy things. It's everything. And

30:28

having people there to

30:29

just see it with different eyes and see it with... Just

30:32

see it in a way you don't, I guess is the main thing. And

30:34

so you want to talk about Puerto Rico? I know where I want to be my fourth

30:37

time. I'll get into a little bit of that. Yeah.

30:40

So, okay. So, the Puerto Rico as

30:43

the old game, right? And I want to kind of put

30:45

it through the lens of what we're talking about here. Classic. One

30:48

of the greatest games of all time. It's an amazing game.

30:50

Yeah. Not my opinion, just

30:53

in general, is what a lot of people say. I've played it.

30:55

It was fine. It's

30:57

one of the games that brought a lot of people into the hobby.

31:00

So when you were tackling this, I

31:02

mean, you were like changing

31:04

Mount Rushmore to some people. There

31:08

was some thoughts that people had. Anyway,

31:10

just to give people context. Okay.

31:13

Yeah.

31:14

So, it's one of those things where I

31:16

wasn't asked, right? I took it on

31:18

my own because it was a big conversation

31:20

at the beginning of 2021. And

31:23

it's okay. So I know how

31:25

these games get themed. And I've kind of known

31:28

that the entire time. And Puerto Rico is not the only one.

31:30

I mean, Puerto Rico was one of the original ones,

31:32

but there's, you know, you got the Goas and the Ecuador.

31:35

And I'm just from my own history studies

31:38

and from my college education.

31:41

We call it Orientalism. We call it the... When

31:45

a Western looks... When

31:48

a white male European Western

31:50

center looks out at the world.

31:53

The author talked about it in terms

31:55

of like the East, right? The West and the East,

31:58

but it applies to me. as

32:00

like the center and the margin. So it's like the center

32:02

is the white male center. And then every,

32:04

basically at the further you get from the center, the

32:07

more it becomes like exotic sized and

32:09

flattened and kind of romanticized,

32:12

all that kind of thing. So

32:14

Puerto Rico

32:16

and most of the Latin America

32:18

is flattened and exoticized

32:21

in very similar ways. Tropified

32:23

if we want to use that word. In

32:26

terms of, okay, navigators

32:28

brave and true across the ocean blue.

32:31

And it was an easy process of like, okay, the

32:33

land was basically empty and they

32:35

farmed and tilled and they, yay,

32:37

all these people. Anytime you see one

32:40

of the statues of like, Ponce de Leon

32:42

and Pizarro, it's all that whole

32:45

simplified, the

32:48

tropified narrative is just like baked into Latin

32:50

American culture. We all know it. So that

32:53

gets exported back to Europe

32:56

and there's cultural interchange. The tropes

32:58

kind of multiply, again, the game of telephone. So

33:01

we all, everybody's absorbing the kind of same tropified

33:04

idea. And there it is. It's right,

33:06

I'm playing it. And that was the problem. Like, okay,

33:09

I'm playing this trope and I know the trope

33:11

is BS. Cause I know

33:13

a lot about the history and in my culture and everything. So

33:16

it was like, okay, female

33:19

mechanism, the theme

33:21

was just slapped on. Andreas,

33:24

he thought I remember reading about it. He wanted to make a game about

33:26

the new world, but then that was it. You just

33:28

stopped right there. I want to make a game

33:30

about the new world. Okay, what tropes do I know about the new

33:32

world? I know about farming and gathering and exploring

33:35

all that kind of stuff. Great.

33:36

So Puerto Rico emerged.

33:38

What I did with that game was turn

33:41

2D into 3D. Period

33:43

point blank in the story. I know

33:45

what a flatness is. So it's like, okay,

33:48

how can I go back into the mechanisms? And then that was

33:50

a big thing. I didn't change a single mechanism. Like that was

33:52

really important. I knew they would want it, but not even them telling

33:54

me that they wouldn't want to change a thing.

33:57

What else can this game be? Okay. I

34:01

looked at the

34:02

center, the central actor. Who's the central actor

34:04

is the contractor. Who's

34:07

a merchant and who's a farmer? It's an agricultural game.

34:09

So it's like, okay, can I find another

34:12

farmer, central actor in

34:14

Puerto Rican history? And then kind of

34:16

from there build the game out. And

34:19

I looked, it took a long time.

34:22

Puerto Rican agricultural

34:24

history is very difficult because basically always been a colony

34:26

to this day. We're a colony of the United States. So

34:29

I looked at the period before.

34:31

I looked at some kind of like Afrofuturist

34:33

stuff. I looked at way back to the distant past with

34:35

the Indians and all, the Taino natives and everything.

34:38

And I settled on, I read

34:40

some books. I

34:42

settled on a farmer in 1897, a very

34:44

specific date between

34:48

the empire of the Spanish and the

34:50

empire of the American. So like there was this little window of time

34:53

where it was possible to imagine that Puerto Rican

34:55

would be independent. Like we didn't know that Americans

34:57

would invade. So it was like, okay, wow. So I'm

34:59

gonna be like, boom, boom, done. I would have focused

35:01

on this actor. And

35:03

I read about him and I saw pictures

35:06

and I went to museums and I talked to people and

35:08

I was able to build out

35:11

a whole re-envisioned world based

35:14

on that real person turning 2D

35:16

into 3D. And I

35:18

got creative. I looked

35:20

at, with different perspectives within the

35:23

bounds of the mechanisms. There was only so much that

35:25

I can do. Like the biggest thing that I wanted

35:27

to do that I couldn't was pay the workers. So

35:29

I'd love to have put in a little bit of like, just

35:31

to tell the

35:34

players that like, okay, you are not a slaver, you

35:36

are paying these workers. But they were,

35:39

and I knew that they would upset

35:41

the game balance because like these are, it's a very tightly designed

35:43

game. So I just

35:45

worked and tried

35:47

to be creative. And hopefully, I told

35:50

a resident story and I've had, I mean,

35:52

I've had nothing but great feedback. Nothing

35:54

but either I've had great feedback or

35:56

dumb feedback. I haven't had like truly like

35:58

this is bad.

35:59

feedback. It's either like people love it,

36:02

or they're like judging it based

36:05

on some kind of like, local Rico standard. And I don't

36:07

listen to that. I've yet to have without

36:09

even like knowing what you did or why, like

36:11

they're just again, going and they're making a joke like

36:14

they're going off the trope of the SAW, like they're

36:16

going off their own lazy trope. I've yet

36:19

to encounter anybody that said, okay, this is not a well

36:21

rendered

36:22

version of it. And I'm very proud of that. And

36:24

what was the process and this is it's all about the creativity

36:27

process. I was creative by wanting

36:29

to turn like by wanting to take tropes and subvert

36:31

them and, you know, make them my own and

36:33

tell different stories.

36:35

So that's, that's exactly what that process was.

36:37

And just thinking from the gamer's perspective

36:40

as a player, doesn't it feel better to not be a

36:42

slave owner? Doesn't it feel better to like, be

36:45

a person that it's

36:46

positive, that's helping the community farmer

36:49

like that? I mean, my, basically, my great grandfather

36:51

could have been that, you know, I ran into

36:53

that whole thing.

36:54

Right. And as a gamer, that feels better. Like

36:57

I, all of a sudden, I don't have to compartmentalize

37:00

what was actually happening. I don't have to

37:03

abstract that away. I can, I can have

37:05

a full verisimilitude style experience

37:08

and have an enjoyable one that I'm not having to

37:11

pretend that some kind of shady,

37:13

terrible, awful things were happening as they

37:15

were. Right. And so that's nothing. Again,

37:17

just putting yourself in the shoes

37:20

of the person playing the game, right?

37:22

What are they going to be thinking? And how can you go deeper?

37:24

How can you tell

37:26

interesting stories again?

37:28

But it's also not, it's not just

37:31

people that we would call

37:33

marginalized wherever. Give an example.

37:35

I come from Alabama. Why

37:38

is it 99%

37:39

of the time? Maybe not 99, most of the time

37:41

people represented in movies, TV, games,

37:44

whatever, from where I come from, they're racist, they're

37:46

dumb, they're lazy, all these things are

37:48

those kinds of people around. Absolutely.

37:51

But to make that a trope is

37:54

frustrating to me. Right. And I bet

37:56

everyone listening to this podcast or watching

37:58

it on YouTube, there's something. About culture

38:00

where someone has extractified you

38:03

where you're from and it's annoying and

38:05

frustrating and bothersome and you would be able to go on

38:07

a rant about how it's wrong and how it's not

38:09

like that and that's a small group of people as a stereotype

38:12

whatever yeah that's what we're saying yeah

38:14

be aware of that because it's everybody everybody

38:16

on the planet is dealing with something like that and to

38:18

put yourself in that position or

38:21

at least have other people that can help you that's all we're

38:23

saying and then you can create a more interesting dynamic

38:26

what's the the old comic jeff

38:28

foxworthy his whole bit was like you

38:30

won't want your brain surgeon to talk

38:32

like this right

38:35

he made a lot of money off of the truth he

38:38

made exactly like he's turning I

38:40

mean maybe a little bit too much because

38:42

he much else to offer but like the idea

38:45

being that like he is you paid money to see him

38:47

and he's a successful person and so it's

38:49

like he's he's trying to kind of highlight

38:51

the trophy for people right it's like okay

38:53

you know people laughing ha ha ha but like

38:56

at the end of the day it's like I remember coming out of that

38:58

coming out of like you know watching that going why

39:00

wouldn't I want my solid research if

39:02

it's all like this doesn't matter you know

39:05

so and that and that's where you want you and that's

39:07

what the best use of a trope is when you get when you get people

39:10

to think and you get people to kind of be a little

39:12

bit more accepting and creative and you

39:14

know you're getting

39:17

in the right direction in terms of that stuff yeah

39:18

yeah absolutely I had a really good chat with Peter C

39:20

Hayward this is a while back when he was working on

39:23

this audio show and he had all these

39:25

voice actors coming in and it was like a spaceship

39:27

and the guy that was doing the

39:29

voice of the ship like the

39:32

AI the computer had this amazing

39:34

voice but he had a British accent and I asked Peter I was like

39:36

hey man why don't ships ever talk like me

39:40

never have a redneck AI

39:42

on your ship why is that can we try to push

39:44

him I was trying to get myself a job to be fair but

39:48

again that's a way and you got to do it

39:50

right though you can't yeah get what

39:52

I'm saying earlier like you can't push it too far

39:54

where it's silly you can't be in a

39:56

patient it can't be a kid like

39:59

you know, a

40:01

copy, you know, what's

40:03

what's to say, Chadwick. Yeah, Chadwick Boseman

40:05

talked about his luck because he did a lot of biopics when he was

40:08

alive. He did Thurgood Marshall,

40:10

he did James Brown, he did Jackie Robinson.

40:13

And he was very, he talked so much

40:15

about like, when I'm representing another

40:17

person, I do not want it to be an imitation,

40:20

I do not want it to be a cheap knockoff. And

40:22

it was James Brown, in particular, it's like super

40:25

easy. Hey, you know, all that stuff. And

40:27

it's like, no, I have to. And

40:29

what did he do? What did he do to kind of achieve

40:32

what he achieved was spend

40:34

time with the family. And Doug did his research

40:36

and, you know, practice practice, and like

40:39

to really just kind of hammer it home, like the nuances,

40:42

like there's so much room available in terms of nuance,

40:44

and it's like, okay, what emerged was something that

40:46

felt resonant, and felt real,

40:48

you know, and we're not gonna do that in a game,

40:51

I understand, like, we're not going to be like, you

40:53

know, do the research and all kind

40:55

of stuff, but you can do better than

40:57

just the flat, ordinary,

41:00

whatever. And speaking of the spaceship thing, like you

41:02

never seen like a native person in our spaceship.

41:05

You've never seen, you know, as if like Native

41:08

American history ended in 1897.

41:11

And like, there's nothing else for us. So like, no,

41:13

no, no, like that we still exist. In fact, there's more

41:15

of us now than there were at any point before European,

41:17

you know, it would it the whatever

41:20

the we call the conquest. So it's like,

41:22

why can't we be in the flying and the stars? Why

41:24

can't we be, you know, like you said before, voicing

41:27

the ship, I would love that, you know, we should

41:29

there should be all that stuff in shifts, it can't

41:31

it doesn't not just have to be like the same four or five,

41:33

you know, body types and skin tones and

41:35

all that.

41:36

Yeah, absolutely. And again,

41:38

you can you can tell some very interesting stories.

41:41

But back to I think maybe the main point overall, it's just

41:43

be intentional. Be aware, be aware how

41:45

lazy your dadgum brain is. I

41:47

remember this. Absolutely. When I was playing

41:49

football, we would do the sit

41:52

ups and you had to hold to 10

41:54

pound weights and a five. So you had to hold 25 pounds,

41:56

but it was three plates. So it was always shifting

41:59

and moving around. And it was so awful because you would

42:01

have to like force yourself to like grab

42:04

these things and do the sit-ups, right? And

42:06

your body would naturally especially as you

42:09

got tired It would want to cheat it would want to

42:11

like curl up and go to the side and not

42:13

go straight down and straight back Up because it was

42:15

trying to be as efficient as possible especially as

42:17

you wore out and whatever and you

42:19

had to be so focused and so

42:21

intentional and If I think

42:23

about that if I could be that intentional and

42:25

focused on a sit-up Maybe

42:28

maybe I can be focused and intentional and things

42:30

that maybe matter a little bit more, right? But

42:33

the main thing was your brain is constantly trying

42:35

to take the easy way out and don't let it don't

42:37

let now There gets to a point. You can't go to all the museums.

42:40

You can't read all the books You can't hire all the people whatever

42:42

like there comes a time You're just like hey, this is what it is and that's

42:44

fine. But at least be intentional about

42:46

what you're doing If

42:49

you're gonna do things about human beings, there's

42:51

no there's not to stop you from like partnering

42:53

over the human beings and It's funny

42:56

like you I'll post something like that on like a BGG

42:58

forum and I'll get so much pushback

43:01

Oh, you can't the the creator is independent

43:04

Then you want them to have the freedom to just create

43:06

and you know now we have to submit it to the Politburo

43:09

and we have to check with 17 different people in order

43:11

to make anything and it's like Creativity

43:14

is not just about like the Promethean

43:16

solitary person that you know Reaches

43:19

ideas from on high matter of fact if we trust

43:21

that person to probably get a couple of the same old crap over

43:23

and over Again, you know, you know, we're gonna

43:25

get the same white male lead. We're gonna get the same

43:27

damsel in distress you know, like you

43:30

trust people to their own devices the single solitary

43:32

person and You'd be surprised

43:34

how much the same gets reproduced over and over again the

43:38

the most creative stuff comes attached

43:40

and comes in Relationship and partnership

43:42

with people who know and I always

43:45

like, you know refer to like, you know, Star Wars, right?

43:47

So, you know if you're going

43:49

to make a game or make a product

43:51

that is resonant with Star Wars Wouldn't you want to talk to

43:53

us a couple Star Wars fans? I guess

43:55

someone shows up with a cube Death

43:57

Star then all the Star Wars

43:59

fans out there gonna go, wait a minute, you

44:02

know, why don't you talk to one

44:04

of us? And it's like, that's all we're asking in

44:06

terms of a culture idea,

44:08

you know, and even if you're even if it isn't like

44:10

directly, if even if you're only

44:12

doing animals, or if you're only doing, you know,

44:15

space creatures, or whatever it is, you're still taking

44:17

from that bank, that lazy

44:19

bank of tropes, you're still

44:22

unconsciously grabbing from that well. And

44:24

it's worth, you know, people taking a look

44:26

and going, Okay, what are you grabbing? How am I? How

44:29

you representing it? How can we turn

44:31

to D into 3d with your product?

44:34

That is the ultimate way

44:36

to understand what we're doing.

44:38

Right. And that word you just said product.

44:41

I'm not making art. I'm making

44:43

a product. Those are different things. Now they

44:45

can kind of have some intersection, there can be you know, some parallels

44:48

in tandem, whatever, but at the end of the day, I'm trying

44:50

to make something that other people will hopefully

44:52

buy. And that I can pave

44:54

some bills with like, and so when people get

44:56

super upset, like you're saying earlier, like, Oh, the creators should be

44:58

free. But yeah, go for it, feel

45:00

free. They can do whatever they want.

45:03

But as soon as you turn this into a product, product

45:05

as marketable thing, that's

45:07

a whole nother whole nother thing we got to be thinking about.

45:10

And so I think there's just a misunderstanding there.

45:12

I'm not trying to limit somebody's creativity. We're

45:14

trying to how do you make the best product for the market?

45:17

And not that you have to, you know, feel

45:20

like you got your boxed in by a certain group

45:22

of people or political movement or that's not

45:24

what we're saying. It's just being aware.

45:27

Let's switch gears and talk about the value

45:30

of putting yourself into a different

45:33

box, so to speak, where you're trying

45:35

things to avoid like, especially

45:38

if you're a game designer, you probably have a

45:40

tendency to design the same kinds of games. You

45:42

know, if you really like Euro games, you're

45:44

probably designing Euro games. Well, there

45:46

can be some value in designing

45:49

a party game. You know, you and I were talking before

45:51

the hit record about Vlado Chavado,

45:53

who has made some of the heaviest, most complicated

45:56

games in the world. Mage Knight,

45:58

right through the ages, but games that

45:59

take forever to set up and play and figure out and

46:02

like rule books on top of rule books and understanding also

46:04

and he also made Codenames because

46:06

he let his brain go into a new new

46:08

place and then that turned into one of the best party games,

46:11

you know That they were made in

46:13

the ouchy truckers from like, you know

46:15

chaotic, you know real-time they and

46:17

space alerts like some of my favorite games I love space alerts

46:19

that cooperative programming and Chaotic

46:22

and the back same bait that same mind may be

46:24

another one favorite games. Yeah

46:26

Yeah

46:27

To get outside your own personal troops that

46:30

you've kind of like that your brain has just like alright

46:32

The box has been checked, you know As far as like

46:34

what kind of games you make and themes and things like that

46:37

I'm reminded of so Aretha

46:39

Franklin's song natural

46:41

woman was co-written

46:43

by a man

46:45

It's like wait, what

46:46

you made me feel like a natural woman was written

46:49

by a dude Well, I think I

46:51

think he was allowing himself to get into a

46:53

new zone there and maybe see things through

46:55

new eyes and have a different Vision for things that

46:57

turned into one of the you know, most well-known songs ever

46:59

made Jams

47:02

are written by German dudes exam

47:04

Scandinavian dudes I mean you'd like you

47:07

like seriously like you look at the liner notes of like

47:09

a Mark Anthony or whoever else and You're

47:11

gonna see a bunch of you know names with 15 consonants

47:17

To

47:19

finish Yeah, no,

47:22

the mind is wonderful and it's very flexible

47:24

when you can allow it to be so, okay How do

47:26

you? You know prompt that

47:28

creativity and kind of go less and set it right and it's

47:30

not just game design like in life You know when I

47:33

talk about you know, bringing it back to my psychotherapy, you

47:35

know Sometimes you just need to what you know, we call shake

47:37

the snow globe, you know Like you're the

47:40

snow is settled on the ground and there's not

47:42

much happening Sometimes you just need to

47:44

kind of give it a shake and there's different

47:46

like ways to do it You know, like

47:49

this is this gets it's like a little bit of life hack territory

47:51

But like, you know brush your teeth with the wrong

47:53

hand You know start doing

47:56

things with your left hands or your right if you're

47:58

right handed if you left Do it with your right

48:00

hand. Do things that are off-handed.

48:02

Do things that are, you know, that

48:05

challenge you. Like, you know, I was

48:06

just recently doing some homo improvement projects

48:09

and I was starting to, you know, screw things with my left hand. And

48:11

it just, it matters.

48:13

It does, it does different, like the different

48:15

parts of the brain kind of wake up and shake

48:17

it, shake itself a little bit. The word

48:19

plasticity, am I remembering right? Plasticity is the word

48:21

there? Neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, yes. You want to get that going.

48:24

Yeah. Talk about what that is. Because that's what I've heard.

48:26

I've heard several people talk about this now where you,

48:28

like you're saying, using your left hand to do things, it

48:30

literally creates new pathways and different things in your

48:32

brain. Speak on that for a second. Correct.

48:35

Yeah. So neuroplasticity is the idea.

48:37

When I talk about like the habit forming brain

48:39

and the energy and the energy saving

48:41

brain. So what that is, is

48:43

neuropathways that are setting in and it actually

48:45

gets way deep down into your brainstem. And

48:48

your brainstem is the center of your habits, right?

48:51

They call it your lizard brain. And what, you know, what's the

48:53

idea with like lizards, right? Lizards, they

48:56

need to routinize a lot of things because, you know,

48:59

they need to find the watering hole, need to find the mating area. And

49:01

there's no time to like think about, oh, where'd it

49:03

go? Where'd it go? No, you get, it gets in there.

49:06

You habituate to it. You zip there towards there. You

49:08

avoid the predators and all kind of thing. So like this

49:10

stuff is deeply coded. We're talking 500

49:13

million years, at least of evolution of, you

49:16

know, a habit of the brain

49:18

to routinize and get it to sink

49:20

in there. Yet what makes,

49:23

one of the things that makes mammals different is a

49:25

mammalian thing, but like humans can kind of turbocharge

49:27

it, is that we can with

49:30

enough intentionality actually change

49:33

those familiar pathways. And, you know,

49:35

we make new neural connections, but we

49:37

also kind of shift

49:40

the existing connection. So if like, if I make

49:42

an association, this and this, you

49:44

know, this is the way to the watering hole or whatever it is, and

49:46

that becomes like a simultaneous

49:49

fire in the brain. And it's like, okay, now

49:52

I'm thinking about going to the watering hole, but then

49:54

it's like this, this, this, and this. And all of a sudden

49:57

I've shifted that and I've created all

49:59

these like new.

49:59

pathways to do things. I'm

50:03

working with a woman right now who has very, very severe

50:05

OCD,

50:06

very severe like germaphobic and

50:08

could barely get out of bed and everything. And the

50:11

science of OCD is that their neural

50:13

pathways are sending what we call false signals.

50:16

You know, so it's like, okay, they look at a, you know,

50:18

anything and they see dirt, and they

50:20

see germs and they see contamination. It

50:23

can be anything and their brain is sending that false

50:25

signal. So the science

50:27

is that we are trying to take advantage of the brain's neuroplasticity

50:30

and do things. And

50:32

sometimes it actually takes, you know, neurostimulation

50:35

and, you know, electric

50:37

treatment and all that kind of stuff, magnets they're using now

50:40

and reestablish different

50:42

patterns so that the brain isn't sending that signal

50:45

so that when the person sees purge

50:47

slippers, when the person sees a handkerchief,

50:50

they don't just immediately associate it with

50:52

dirt and grime and danger. It's

50:55

now, you know, whatever something else is more healthy.

50:58

And we can all do that. We can all like me my

51:00

my catchphrase is change your mind, you can change the world.

51:03

That's the thing that I end all my podcasts with. And that's

51:05

what that means. You change your mind, you change

51:08

your your your literal neural pathways,

51:10

the way that you associate. And

51:12

that's really what it is is change your associations. So

51:15

like, and that's what tropes are

51:17

all about. So it's like, if I think Egypt, and

51:19

my association is pyramid,

51:22

I can retrain myself to be like, Egypt,

51:24

that that that that that. And now I'm telling you know,

51:26

a broader story of whatever it is. And I

51:28

could just go down the line for whatever, you know, Mexico

51:30

is sombreros, you know, Eskimos

51:33

are like the big whatever that

51:35

the big coats and freezing all kinds of no,

51:38

there's plenty of eximos that are not know

51:41

the different cultures. So like, and

51:43

so neuroplasticity allows us literally

51:46

to change

51:46

the neurological firing

51:49

that prompts those tropes.

51:51

And on a again, a physical

51:53

level, which we're changing our brains in order to be able

51:55

to make broader associations. Right.

51:59

And we can We can literally change our

52:01

brains by simply, in our case,

52:03

designing games differently than we have

52:05

before or than other people have or leaning

52:08

into themes differently. Like you can literally change

52:10

your, change your brain chemistry by designing

52:12

board games. And I find that to be a much more enjoyable

52:14

way to do it. I've been brushed my teeth, my left hand,

52:16

and it's, it's not nearly as fun. It's

52:18

trying to, uh, to do different things creatively.

52:21

I tell you what, but

52:22

and also like, just in terms of the, I mean,

52:24

like designing a game, writing a book,

52:27

uh, like doing, taking on something

52:29

that has a lot of detail, a lot of spade

52:31

work, like, um, you

52:34

can actually enlarge certain

52:36

parts of your brain just by that work. Uh,

52:38

you know, some of the people that have like the, like

52:41

the biggest memory cores, like hippocampus is

52:43

your memory core. Uh, and they've looked at this, like,

52:45

you know, cab drivers actually have huge hippocampus

52:48

because they have to know

52:51

every single aspect of a city. They

52:53

have to know when the, you know, the best times

52:56

are. And if it's this time drive here, and

52:58

like the spatial memory, it actually takes a lot of, um,

53:01

brain power to like spatial memory,

53:03

like, as opposed to kind of like written word memory. Um,

53:06

so like the physical brain,

53:08

the memory centers are bigger because

53:11

they are working, literally working that out like

53:13

a muscle. And when you do

53:15

detail oriented work, like a game is,

53:17

and you mentioned before, I'm, uh, engaging

53:20

my own game design now, uh, I've, I'll

53:22

never do this again. This is tense. There

53:25

is so much little work that has

53:27

to happen. Like if you change one thing, you change seven

53:30

things and holding

53:32

all that in your head can literally

53:35

like, you know, enlarge the size and,

53:38

and, and not create, you know, different

53:40

ways of thinking. And so it actually becomes

53:42

even more important to do something different

53:45

after. Because you, what

53:48

you don't want to freeze there, like

53:50

you don't want to, you know, do something complex

53:53

and then freeze in that complexity. Cause that really

53:55

limits your vision.

53:56

You know, like now all of a sudden I've taken my, all this brain

53:59

resource and I've

53:59

But it one way. You're

54:02

going to want to, if you're doing

54:04

like a worker placement, if you're doing like a euro thing,

54:07

you're going to want to shift gears

54:09

a little bit. And so even somebody like Vital

54:12

Acerta, who's known for the heavy euros, he makes

54:15

a big deal about doing radically

54:18

different themes every time and doing a lot of

54:20

speed work and research based on his theme. So

54:22

he'll do huge research on Lisboa. That

54:25

game is actually really good at representing the

54:27

rebuilding of Lisboa after the earthquake. And

54:30

has a lot of little speed work in there. And then

54:32

you go to a game like CO2 or on Mars,

54:35

and speed work and research.

54:37

And even though it's all heavy euro

54:39

family, the vibe

54:42

is different. And the pathways are different.

54:44

And that's how he works out his own

54:46

creativity. So even within the

54:48

same genre, as long as you're doing different

54:51

themes or saying different things in your game, you can

54:54

keep flexible and keep that neuroplasticity

54:56

going, definitely. Right.

54:58

One thing I've learned is when I get deep

55:00

into researching a topic or a theme

55:02

or something like that, I find all these really

55:04

interesting ways to bring

55:06

it out. Whereas if I had just troped it

55:08

over, if I was like, OK, it's the old west, therefore

55:11

we're going to have this, that, and the other, well,

55:13

I missed some really cool moments

55:16

that I could have leaned in and had these creative

55:19

avenues that people hadn't seen before.

55:21

Because people don't want to do the

55:23

research. They don't want to do the. I've

55:25

said this before. I

55:28

give you stats on podcasting. I was talking to a guy today who

55:30

wants to start his own podcast

55:33

and game related. And so I was chatting with him, just

55:35

trying to give him some feedback and encouragement, whatever. And

55:37

I looked up the stats. I hadn't seen them in a while. And they're actually

55:39

worse than they used to be. 90% of

55:43

podcasts don't make it past episode

55:45

eight. And then 90%

55:48

of those that do make it past eight

55:51

don't make it past 20. So

55:53

as soon as you get to episode 21, you're

55:55

in the top 1% of all podcasts ever.

55:59

Like 21. Like

56:00

that's it. Yeah, that's it. Like people

56:02

don't want to do the work. We're lazy We

56:05

want to give up, you know, we don't see instant results we

56:07

quit and so success

56:09

can come in doing just a little

56:11

bit extra and Going

56:14

deeper learning some things finding interesting

56:16

creative ways to to present

56:18

the same story that's been told a million times Yeah, but

56:21

how could you tell it differently? You know if you do

56:23

a deck builder, maybe you draw seven cards Maybe

56:25

it doesn't have to be five every time like it doesn't have to

56:28

be a theme I get to be mechanism, you know,

56:30

and a lot of people have made good money

56:32

designing games that are the same But

56:35

the differences in their worker placement system

56:38

or whatever Makes people go. Ooh,

56:40

I Understand it because

56:43

I've done this kind of game before but that's different

56:45

That's an interesting way to do it and all of a sudden it opens

56:47

up these different, you know Strategies and creative options

56:49

and things I get for the actual gameplay So, you know

56:52

not just theme but also mechanism but

56:54

like you're saying at the same time. It's it's

56:56

making your brain bigger So I

56:58

feel like there's there's almost no

57:00

downside to a lot of this stuff Right,

57:05

I mean it's very easy again

57:10

The creative process is easy and

57:12

a lot of ways consumer buying habits

57:14

are also Tropey too, right

57:16

and then we you know, we someone comes

57:19

on they log on They want to see a big burly or

57:21

with an axe and like okay like dungeon

57:23

crawler They want to see you know dour

57:26

man staying across the distance euro They

57:28

want and and there's a there is a familiarity

57:30

there And so I can see

57:33

where people are like, you know, what I'm not here to

57:35

reinvent the wheel again Like you said before we have to make payroll.

57:38

We have to you know, do things so it's like

57:40

that like the sort of gravity towards Same

57:43

old same old is very very strong but

57:46

When you can bust through when you can do

57:49

your wingspan, which is a creative project when you can

57:51

do your You know game from

57:53

left field that hits then

57:55

it's almost like you're reeducating our

57:58

community brains

57:59

You know, we

57:59

We didn't think that a game like Wingspan, like the

58:02

whole hobby, nobody in the hobby thought a game like

58:04

Wingspan could be successful. And then

58:06

all of a sudden Wingspan shows up and it's almost like

58:08

a community neuroplasticity hit where

58:10

it's like, oh, now we can

58:12

do all these games. Now you got Castilla,

58:14

now you got like Apiary's coming soon from Sohmya.

58:17

And now like your whole field

58:19

of vision kind of opened up. And that couldn't

58:22

happen if we didn't have the openness

58:24

to something that was a little bit different,

58:26

it's making an aviary

58:28

of earth of earth. So

58:32

those are a little bit more moonshotty. For

58:35

every one of those, there's going to be 10, 20 on

58:37

the cutting room floor. Like, okay,

58:39

the community is not going to buy this. So

58:42

there's a risk aversion that sets

58:44

in. That's a big thing I encountered in cultural consulting

58:46

of like, no, we don't want that. We want something

58:48

that the community is going to like. And

58:51

so there's two answers to that. Not

58:55

every one of your safe products is going to be great either.

58:57

Like you might have a slightly bigger chance of hitting, but

59:00

now your risk can get lost to

59:02

see if like the other 10,000 things that you're doing. So

59:04

that's number one. Instead of letting you

59:07

take a risk, number two, even if you do the

59:09

same old thing, maybe there's a different way to do the same

59:11

old thing. Maybe there's a little curveball that you can

59:14

put in. One of my favorite games over the last

59:16

couple of years was the Transformers deck building

59:18

game. And it's a deck building

59:20

game and you draw five cards and you do your deck

59:22

building things. The innovation in that

59:25

game is that the market where

59:27

you buy the cards is actually

59:29

they call it the matrix and you have standees,

59:31

you're walking on the cards. So

59:34

if you want a card, you really have to get your, get

59:37

ready to move with your cards and then walk, walk,

59:39

walk to the next card and buy

59:41

that card. And they were able

59:43

to kind of make this really cool, like,

59:46

you know, Optimus Prime running past

59:48

Megatron and, you know, like, you know, ducking

59:50

through and hiring Grimlock

59:53

and everything. And they were able to kind of use

59:55

the familiarity of buying cards from a market,

59:58

but give this

59:59

Spin

1:00:01

was it successful? I mean it's that game happens

1:00:03

to have a little bit of mechanical crunch things that

1:00:05

are difficult But it stayed with me

1:00:08

At the very least that game stayed with me and I pulled

1:00:11

out I barely bought it I'm a reviewer

1:00:13

if I believe we do games all the time But like I that's

1:00:15

a game that stayed with me and I pull it out I

1:00:17

want to play this again

1:00:18

one of the few

1:00:20

just because it did something different

1:00:22

Right,

1:00:23

that's a really great way to look at it. How can you take something

1:00:25

that is tried and true so to speak but

1:00:27

then Turn it on its head, you

1:00:29

know where it's not just a market where you buy whatever

1:00:31

card is out there No, no, you have to land on the card

1:00:34

now It's part of the gameplay now. It's part of the mechanism

1:00:37

to be able to buy again It's wonderful

1:00:39

and we've seen over the years so many interesting mashups

1:00:42

of things that may be on its surface Someone

1:00:44

would have gone. No, it wouldn't work. But

1:00:46

then Somebody figured it out, you

1:00:48

know gloom haven in a lot of ways is a very euro

1:00:51

game. That is also a dungeon crawler It's like

1:00:54

huh? That did okay. It's

1:00:56

done. All right, and so, you know just finding ways to

1:00:59

Again, think outside the box be intentional be creative

1:01:02

Like there was a game released by check-ins it is be plenty

1:01:05

about shavado So that's his

1:01:07

imprint but it was a sign game that he signed

1:01:09

called adrenaline which was a first-person

1:01:11

shooter euro game and

1:01:13

it was a solid game, but it didn't hit and

1:01:16

You know was it just kind of

1:01:18

like came and went but I appreciated the

1:01:20

effort

1:01:21

You know, and so it's like okay and I bet like, you

1:01:23

know Vlada and the people that are developing games of they appreciate

1:01:25

the Effort they're like, okay. We gave this a shot and Okay

1:01:28

you know things learned and you

1:01:31

know We went left and now we can kind

1:01:33

of like learn for the next one and they end up with a hit-but-on-ack

1:01:35

and You know more miss and hit and miss and

1:01:38

hit and then and that's that's that is the creative

1:01:40

process And I really I've

1:01:42

learned to value the misses and also the hits

1:01:44

and kind of and use those of learning experiences, too Right,

1:01:47

but also depends on what success is. I love adrenaline

1:01:49

I think it's one of the better games

1:01:51

ever made like overall like it's somewhere

1:01:53

in the top 500 for me and I think

1:01:56

that's another thing that you you have the potential for Okay,

1:01:59

you might take a

1:02:48

for

1:04:00

like a year and a half now and you know how this goes.

1:04:02

Even a simple game, you know, we wanna like, really

1:04:05

the challenge here is to make it, make

1:04:07

sure it says the right thing. You know,

1:04:09

like there's a lot of, like there's a lot of ways

1:04:12

to kind of say not the right thing. Or

1:04:15

say just something like so funky and people kind of like, it

1:04:17

doesn't resonate with people. But we wanted

1:04:20

to make a game that feels like you

1:04:22

are, you know, gathering together,

1:04:25

the forgotten bits of history, your Harriet Tubman's

1:04:28

and your John Browns and, and

1:04:30

really, you know, you're struggling against like

1:04:32

empire and you're struggling against the establishment and doing

1:04:34

that in the format of a card game. So

1:04:37

that's taken a lot of time and you

1:04:39

know, I've definitely learned

1:04:42

that I don't want to design. Or

1:04:46

I'd be the primary designer. I love being like the assistant

1:04:48

person, but no, I'm not having

1:04:50

a lot of fun, but just kind of like, you know, with the, I'm

1:04:52

learning a ton, you

1:04:54

know, I'm learning a ton in this experience.

1:04:56

And it's, I feel like it's made me a better reviewer, I

1:04:58

feel like it's made me a better gamer and a better teacher

1:05:00

of games, the process of like actually

1:05:03

making one. So highly recommended

1:05:05

at least once, you

1:05:06

know, do something, do something with detail, like

1:05:08

design a game, write

1:05:11

a book, do a like a blow

1:05:13

it out piece of art, like, you know, write a poem,

1:05:15

like a, you know, pick one, like, like

1:05:17

create and do something substantial

1:05:20

with it. And you're like the neural

1:05:22

benefits are just off the charts. It

1:05:24

really is.

1:05:26

Yeah, absolutely. Well, cool, man. I

1:05:28

hope the game comes together. I know how hard it is to make a game

1:05:30

in general, but especially one that the

1:05:33

onus is on you to

1:05:35

tell the whole truth in that kind of situation. Like you

1:05:37

can't abstract out and then make it, oh, it's

1:05:39

fantasy pirates. Like, no, no, this is based on real

1:05:41

life events. And that's a hard thing

1:05:43

and it takes so much more detail work and

1:05:45

you just got to dive into all the research and

1:05:47

all that. So I hope you all are, I love Greg.

1:05:50

He's been on the show a couple of times. He's an excellent designer. And so

1:05:52

you're at least partnered up with an excellent dude. And

1:05:54

I hope you're able to kind of pull it all together. And man,

1:05:57

thank you so much for being here.

1:05:58

All right, thank you very much. Thank you.