E47: Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, Social Norms Go Astray, and Why Game Economy Needs Math

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm gonna talk shit on Chuck E. Cheese. [00:00:02] Speaker B: It's still around, by the way. Still around. [00:00:04] Speaker C: Is it? [00:00:05] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Chuck E. Cheese's. [00:00:07] Speaker B: Yeah, both. Yeah. [00:00:08] Speaker A: There's one like, down the street from me. [00:00:10] Speaker D: I've seen. I, I see Dave and Buster's every once in a while. I don't think I've seen a Chuck and Cheese. Chuck E. Cheese in since high school. [00:00:17] Speaker A: It's a cesspool. [00:00:18] Speaker C: Why do we still have Chuck E. Cheese but Discovery Zone had to die? [00:00:22] Speaker A: I think it's because parents, like, will just, like, waste money on their kids and they don't really understand what their kids want. And Chuck E. Cheese. It's all. We get into it. Should I get into it? [00:00:32] Speaker C: I mean, let's start with utility. I don't understand what it even means. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Everybody has some kind of utils in their head that they're calibrating. [00:00:42] Speaker B: There's hardly anything that hasn't been used for money. [00:00:45] Speaker D: In fact, there may be a fundamental problem in modeling. You wouldn't want to model. [00:00:51] Speaker C: But. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Up Game economist cast episode 45 getting the title right the boys are back. And it's not just the boys this time. We are ringing in 20, and we have a special guest. Amanda Cesario is joining us, longtime friend of the podcast, former coworker at Electronic Arts over there in Florida. She's not sporting her grill today. Do you have a grill somewhere? [00:01:15] Speaker A: Like jewel encrusted teeth? [00:01:17] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Is that Jacksonville thing? [00:01:19] Speaker C: Yeah, we're, we're a little bit too far to the north and to the south for that to be much of a thing. [00:01:25] Speaker B: Is the ball pit at EA still a thing? [00:01:27] Speaker C: It actually is. So we, we move to a new office that's actually downtown. And the ball pit is one of the things that, that survived the move. The statue of Superman is gone, and I, I wonder about him. Sometimes. [00:01:43] Speaker A: People play in a ball like, like a children's ball pit. [00:01:45] Speaker C: It's the center of a. It's like a ring of, like a table that's like a ring and then the center's hollowed out and there's a ball pit in the middle. [00:01:54] Speaker B: Is it often used when you visit. [00:01:56] Speaker C: For the first time? We, we entice people to avail themselves of the ball pit. [00:02:01] Speaker B: Is it like a baptism? [00:02:02] Speaker C: It can be. [00:02:04] Speaker D: I thought maybe it was like, that's how you find the new people. You're like, oh, like Charlie's dancing around in the ball pit. He's. He's new. [00:02:10] Speaker C: It's, it's definitely one of those things where, like, for folks who are newer to the industry, they get like really hyped about it. [00:02:18] Speaker D: They're like, I work at a place with a ball pit. This is amazing. This is why I went into video games. [00:02:22] Speaker C: I do have a fond memory of, of earlier, earlier in my career where one of the guys on my team was. Yeah, that's, that's the old one was in the ball pit. And we were actually all sitting around having like a, like a business discussion about the performance of the live service that week. The, the LP at that time all of a sudden just realized that this guy Jeff was in the ball pit. Like thought that he was like on the phone the whole time and then all of a sudden was just like. Cause his head was just sticking out. So it was a fun jump scare moment. I'll never, I'll never forget. [00:03:01] Speaker D: Do you ever have people spying on like high level meetings by hiding in the ball pit? [00:03:06] Speaker C: So it is on the floor that I don't think the high level meetings would occur in. Sorry, I have to answer that. Quite literally. But that is bummer. That would be fun. [00:03:16] Speaker D: I picture it's somebody with a little recording device. [00:03:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I was thinking a little submarine thing. Periscope just pops up and looks around. Do you mind introducing yourself, Amanda? You have a very interesting career path that I want to talk more about too. [00:03:27] Speaker C: It's kind of strange and you don't even know really the start. Start of it. Right. Because there's a version that you could tell that I'm an artist turned economist turned analyst turned pm. So it's, it's been, it's been a fun time. I make the joke that really a large part of how I moved into product is because my, my original manager when I was in analytics always emphasized driving impact over everything. She wasn't, she wasn't technical when it came to like stats and just like knew that I knew that stuff and appreciated that I did and had come from a consulting background originally when she was building up that analytics team. So she just emphasized, look, it's all about like driving impact to the business. And I was, you know, new and excited and like I, I want to get into games and, and work with games data because they're just these little microcosms of, of of systems with human behavior. And you can learn so much about like if you just change this little thing, like how does that change the way that, that people respond to the situation? It's just fun. So like I definitely was super academically oriented early on, but she always drove like it's about driving impact. So a lot of what I was trying to do always came down to cool. Here's my fun puzzle that I'm playing with in the situation that I'm investigating through data but also how does that turn into number go up? Um, and I don't know. I just eventually cut out the middleman and just helped to drive some of those things directly now. So the amount of time I still spend with, with raw data is probably not where it should be, but it's fun. It's fun for me. [00:05:02] Speaker B: So when do you go. When you go from I think we was an analyst on Madden into a product manager. Is that when that where the transition happened? [00:05:10] Speaker C: So I was analytics manager for Madden. So I had a, I had a few analysts under me as well. But even, even before that, even before I had been operating as like the lead for that, for that team. A lot of my focus early on was on the live service and on the game economy and I was thrown pretty quickly in. I remember like I started, I started working there in October and by December I was in a meeting room with studio leadership like presenting business outcomes, not even knowing like I didn't understand what a producer was. I didn't know who any of these people were. And I was still like so fresh from academics that like I didn't know how to be intimidated by them because what I did know is that they didn't understand a lot of the things that I was talking about and I thought that was a win. I was like, oh, I know how to. I know how the shiny thing works. And they don't even know why you wouldn't want to use an average of an average here. Like that doesn't even make sense to them. So I just didn't know how to be intimidated for, for better or worse. I think it, I think it worked in my favor because I wasn't like rude about it. But it gave me the confidence to walk into that room where thinking about it today like one of the people in those rooms is the guy who runs all of EA Sports today. Like I just the audacity and like I can't believe my, my manager at the time like put me up to that. I was so green from very early on. I was getting exposure to more than just what are the players doing and talking to designers. Also the business side of how are we running our, our week to week and our quarterly performance. How are we thinking about unit sales versus mtx? It just kind of spiraled from there because the, the more I was working in that world, the more I was trying to understand the why of it. Right. It starts with like here's the numbers and what they are and what's changed and everyone always wants to know why. And coming from a background in economics, like you always want to know like I want to know the deeper why not like the thing that was the driver, but why is that even a driver in the first place? Underlying principle that is leading to this outcome. I'm trying to just build a deeper understanding which very quickly leads into. You get better at understanding if we pull this lever like what's the outcome going to be? And then just increasingly bringing that to the actual live team especially. Gosh, I guess where it really changed pretty dramatically was in a year where performance was down pretty heavily in a way we didn't anticipate and didn't understand. I had no clue. I spent, I spent weeks in the post launch like trying to understand like why are we, why are we underperforming so dramatically? It wasn't a function of like the number of people who were playing the game. Engagement was down, some spend was down even more and it just didn't feel like there was anything that was majorly different. I was looking at every different like way of segmenting the player base. It was just like weeks and weeks of just heartache like trying to figure it out and going into that, that same room every week not being able to answer like why still like trying things, telling him let's try this, let's try that, like things not really being effective. [00:08:19] Speaker B: Did you ever come to a resolution? [00:08:21] Speaker C: Yeah. Yes. Part of it was, it was basically there was an, there was an exploit of sorts that we hadn't, we hadn't been aware of. [00:08:28] Speaker D: Damn. [00:08:29] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:08:30] Speaker D: It's insane. [00:08:31] Speaker C: I can't, I can't talk about it. Right. Obviously but it was, and it was, it wasn't something that would show up in the data the way that we would typically look at it. It was something that wasn't being caught in, in transaction logging super well. And it was only by actually going and looking at literally data that was on the game server looking for anomalies there that we were able to catch some of that. And now, and now this is one of, one of the weird things of like I've always, I've always had this like strong sense of ownership even when I'm not supposed to. Supposed to. Right. So things like, okay, do we have all of our security gaps covered when we're building this new feature? Is this, is this secure Are there any ways like the systems we can design can prevent even just structurally the ability to exploit it? Now, just another thing that I worry about forevermore whenever anything new is built. [00:09:22] Speaker D: How did that change your perspective on analytics? Every time we discover an exploit, I'm always like, I almost feel kind of defeated because it's like, well, damn, my regular analytics, like dashboards did not catch this and I don't think they ever would have. I had to go out and discover it like you described. [00:09:39] Speaker C: You can still set yourself up to catch more things, right? Like there's a. There's a broader set of standard things that I would want to have in place to make sure that I understood the health of the thing. But more than anything, it's really being close enough to the product to understand what even could be a potential driver because there's a, there's another, another major one. Again, like performance weird in a way that couldn't figure it out for a while. We had migrated. We had migrated one feature from a, to a different tech stack. And from the perspective of like the, the like short version of what's different this year, this isn't something that the designers or the producers were communicating to me as being significantly different. So it wasn't something I was really thinking about. It was called the same thing. It was presented in a lot of the same ways. But if you were actually a player and understood the systems of the game like there were. There were systems associated with it that were gone. There was complexities that had been stripped away because they just didn't make it as part of the migration. They were on the roadmap, but we didn't have them at launch. I could have preemptively known to look for that. In fact, knowing what they changed because some of it was, some of the meta progression was just not really a part of that mode anymore, I would immediately anticipate that that's, that would be a risk. But it. I would have to be. You have to be close enough to all these various components to even be able to flag that. And I think any, I think any analyst can. But to some extent in some places it's like a philosophical divide on whether an analyst should be expected to. Because I've definitely seen in some places where analytics is treated more strictly like a service Org and it's, you know, we tell you what to go look at and like, yes, you guys know what some of the standard things that should be set up and like how the best practices for telemetry, da, da, da. But they're not necessarily expected to know the product well or to be able to identify something like that, which is how I had always, I had always built my teams in that way where it was really important to get close enough to the product. And I always really valued an embedded model where not just like we were embedded with the game team, but gameplay is very, very different from meta and progression systems. And anyone who is a good systems thinker can get pretty far with the systems and progression stuff. But you really have to be close to the game, know it and love it in a certain way to really get grok gameplay stuff. So I'd have to hire specifically for people that I knew could support that. And it was more restrictive in a way versus like well any. Anyone who I would tend to hire for an analyst could meet the bar to do decent analysis and ownership of like a very systems oriented area because it's, it's also like very much the case that some of these areas of the game that are more like field based, like you can quantify them, but your stakeholders are also less comfortable speaking about it in quantifiable terms. So it just takes a different level of maturity to even take it and turn it into something that could be, you know, measured and optimized for. Even though it's, I mean it's very obvious with a lot of the early gameplay stuff we did like there are just so many little pockets where things weren't meeting their design goals. But because the player base is large and your personal experience is going to be very different from the medium player, and guess what, the medium player isn't even on social media. You just don't have visibility into it. [00:13:09] Speaker B: So one observation I've had is that you either. What I've seen from analysts is that they either die data scientists or they live long enough to see themselves become product managers. Do you accept that premise? [00:13:22] Speaker C: No, because I probably reject what you're calling a data scientist right now. Most, most analysts and even a lot of very good analysts aren't necessarily very technically proficient. So most analysts don't know how to do statistical modeling and most don't need to. Right? I don't know. I just, this is like, this is a whole thing I've, I have, I came in at like just, just when a lot of the hype around analytics was really starting. So Big data. [00:13:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, analytics, big data, Redshift, Hadoop, and then everything. [00:13:56] Speaker C: Now everything is data, science and now everything is AI. It drives me nuts because we have, we were losing a specificity of Language that's very useful because sometimes I do really, truly need a data scientist. But there are people who say they have the skill set and they don't. [00:14:14] Speaker D: It's great. Inflation, it's terrible. [00:14:15] Speaker B: So the reason I push the product manager question is because what I've observed with myself too, and it's interesting that every, every single one of us sitting in this room all started in analytics, we all did, is that ultimately I think people want to make games. I think that eventually, even if you didn't joins the games industry for a passion for games. You get into this and you see the thing and you want to see yourself in the product. And the way you see yourself in the product is you do something in the game. Like you feel responsible for something in the game. Not by building a dashboard, not by building a port. Even if we were to have something actionable, that's the keyword we love to have an analytics actionable. You still want to drive that all the way into the product. You want to see a piece of yourself in the product. And the only way you can do that is if you're a designer, a UX person, a product, product manager and analysts are always sitting on the sidelines and data science is sexy and you get paid a lot of money. And so that's why I advanced that premise. Do you think that further clarification, do you think that holds any water or that's only in shitty orgs that's the case? [00:15:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it, it comes down to like a philosophy thing because you can set up analytics as being more segregated and service oriented or you could have them right next to you in the, in the trenches. An analyst that's working, an analyst who loves games, that's working directly with a gameplay guy on how do we get out this tuning patch in a way that better serves the entirety of the player base is still going to have a lot of satisfaction even though that they don't have authority in driving those changes they're informing. So I don't think that's necessarily the case. [00:15:43] Speaker A: I'm going to chime in here because I've thought about this question a lot because in the last few years I've been like, what career path do I. [00:15:48] Speaker D: Want to go down? [00:15:48] Speaker A: And I see two basic models Amanda touched on. There's the central model where there's the central analytics service and they fulfill data requests and then there's like the product sidekick model where it's like you, you're embedded, you're there to make as much impact you Know, impact, I think is. [00:16:02] Speaker D: The key word here. [00:16:02] Speaker A: When I was at Riot, the analytics. Org was very much impact, impact, impact. Get close to the product manager, help them make the. Your purpose is subservient to making the product as good as possible. And so like, it doesn't matter if your data's objective. What matters is, is the game better or not? And a lot of those people turned into product managers. Like at some point they were, they were like, oh, actually you're just a TARS manager sidekick. And you, at some point you just become the product manager because you're just making all the decisions. And then there's another group of people who actually just don't care. Like Phil, you said you talked about like having your mark on the game, making a change that you see reflected in the thing that goes out to the public. And you can say, I did that. [00:16:37] Speaker D: Right. [00:16:38] Speaker A: I talked to some of my friends. Some of them just don't care. They're just like, yeah, you know, that, that sounds fun. But I also, I, you know, I kind of like just talking to my stakeholders and you know, like making my charts and I'm like, okay, yeah. I do think there is this bifurcation where like, do you want your hands? Do you want ownership on the product? Do you want to be able to meddle with it or are you kind of like happy doing this? You know, kind of like a, you know, a statistician, actuary job. [00:17:00] Speaker C: It's the research drive too, for some people, right? I mean, the more hands on you get, the less time you have to sit and really dig and try to understand the why of things. And the more that you become someone who kind of like guides, like, here's what I think we care about and why can you go and figure this out and then we'll talk about it. I miss having time to sit and do deep research just because I'm curious. You know, I used to always like, it's after 6 o', clock, I'm allowed to do whatever I want. And I would go and dig into, into all kinds of different, different questions that I had in the data. I don't, I don't have the time to, to do that anymore really, because my after 6 o' clock is still chasing down, trying to solve problems. [00:17:44] Speaker A: Oftentimes do you think that's a reflection of being in product or do you think it's just reflection of being higher level than just having more shit you got to do? [00:17:51] Speaker C: It's, I think that's, I think that's some of it. But I think even as a, as a more junior person in product, I think there's much more I will tell you as, as a, as a leader of product teams, I do tend to, I like to hire people who are very curious. Right. That's just a thing. No matter, no matter what kind of team I'm running. Analytics product. If you're not curious, I have a time being convinced that you'll be able to really truly solve a problem. Someone who can just implement best practices useful. But I'm not building teams at a scope where let me pull in a bunch of people who can just execute. So a lot of the challenge is putting in, putting in the guardrails. We're like, hey, I know this is cool but like we really just need to have a good enough answer and we really need to look at it by like three. So like we could do this thing and it would be better and it would make more sense, but it's just, it's way too much. And that's always a problem in analytics as well. But it's just even more extreme in product because for my specific product, how things do or don't generalize doesn't necessarily matter very much. It's a very specific execution of whatever the problem space is. And we just can't spend a lot of time on trying to solve things from a, from a general perspective which I think loops back around to a lot of the value of the central teams because I think, I think any strong product team needs embedded analytics. You need it because you'll just. There's so much in the day to day conversations where your analysts are going to be able to ask better questions. They have better context. And your stakeholders, many of them don't have the discipline to sit and like put together a formal request and figure it out. They're just trying to solve things all the time. And if you're there while they're like in the like problem solving mode, oftentimes like, oh, this is an easy like do do, do we have this. Here you go. Right. So powerful. Especially when you're at a place like a large publisher. We have such an amazing large set of data that covers all these different, all these different titles where you can, you can learn incredible things about human behavior and trying to project what are things, what are you large scale opportunities that as a whole we're, we're just not even really seeing because it, it lies in between the gaps of all the things that we, we do know and have. And that stuff takes time and it takes Looking at these bigger sets of data and trying to connect them all together. [00:20:16] Speaker B: So from an incentives perspective, when we talk about analytics and product, one of the hot debates I've always seen occur in many different orgs is where analytics reports into. Yeah, yeah, where does analytics report into? Do they report into product or do they report into their own analytic structure? How do you think that changes incentives and which, which setup do you think is more optimal? Which do you think you get, you get the best output from? [00:20:40] Speaker C: Don't believe that there is a correct answer. It depends a lot on the specifics of the leaders that you have and how they respond to structure. Because I can tell you that for me personally I have for the majority of my career even, even today actually in product management I report through a product management org but I'm a lead for a very specific product who I take direction from. Oftentimes is like an executive producer. It's not, you know, my line in the product org there's a weird thing that there's a whole. We could talk about the why of it but for me it doesn't matter because for better or worse like I'm, I'm always so laser focused on like what the product goal is. The reporting structure doesn't super influence what I'm, what I'm doing from a day to day basis. And I, I've seen people who take to this very well. Like the original analytics org I was a part of. We always super deeply embedded people and then from a leadership perspective our leaders always super heavily weighted our stakeholders input in whether we were doing well. There are ways to do it but it depends on the structure of that leadership because if, if you're, if your analytics group is trying to appease or adhere to the vision that is outside of the game product then weird stuff can happen sometimes. [00:22:04] Speaker B: We have three wonderful topics to talk about today we will be talking about the. Before we do, let's talk about what we've been playing. [00:22:14] Speaker A: Got a selection of good things on sale. [00:22:17] Speaker D: Stranger. [00:22:18] Speaker B: Amanda, what have you been playing? [00:22:19] Speaker C: You'll never guess. It was not my intent but this has happened again. I am playing a Roblox game. [00:22:26] Speaker D: Nice. Which one? [00:22:27] Speaker C: So I'm, I'm playing Beast Swarm Simulator which is made by one guy, I think he like first released it when he was 16 or something and it's, it's largely a number go up game but there are all these little things that he's done. I will say what I love about, what I love about Roblox is that the kids who are making games on Roblox. They're, they're just, they don't really have a deep understanding of like what is the norm in game making. A lot of them haven't even played like a ton, ton of games. In the same way those of us like hey, I've been playing games, you know, for 30 years now. Like I've, I've got a lot of reps and seeing a lot of different kinds of systems and a lot of that's just kind of baked into how I perceive the world. They just do weird stuff sometimes that is sometimes just like really cool. Like that's neat. I, I, I gotta find a way to work that into something in the future. One of the first things I really like about, about Bee Swarm Simulator, the whole thing is you're collecting bees and you have a beehive and as you level up you get more spots in your beehive. The servers are four concurrent players. But where you first load in your beehive shows up physically with the slots of your bees and what levels all of your bees are. Yeah, high tech stuff. And so from the jump, no you're starting as a new player. You see the, the like the status of all these other players in the, in the server and like it's super aspirational and she's like oh, what is that? It's instead of like clicking on someone and expecting them or here's Winter celebration at the end of the match there's just this baked into the world itself a demonstration of someone's account progress that is kind of cool and aspirational and fun. The level design itself too is such that if got to find some good examples here but all the, all the areas are level gated but they have like a big, on the doorway there's just a big, here's the number of the level and you can't pass through unless you are that level. But you can see, you can see that whole area from wherever you are on the map. So no matter where you're at you can see people who are higher level than you potentially like going and playing in these other areas. And so there's like a, oh, I want to, I want to go over there and see what's going on there. It's, it's an interesting, interesting in how, how compact it is socially and it is, oh it does one of, one of my favorite things, I don't remember. I couldn't dig this up again but I could have sworn that this is like a, an og like Valve monetization. Principle that anytime you can make it so that if I make a purchase, you're also better off. That like, any purchase is strictly like a net benefit for all of the players or not to the detriment of someone else. You've done a good thing. And there's all these things. Like you can buy a bean that when you plant it, it grows a bean sprout that just drops beans everywhere for everyone around you to also engage in. And technically the number of beans that pops out versus your move speed, you can't even actually pick them all up yourself. So it, it makes it so that like, here's this resource. [00:25:28] Speaker B: Wow. [00:25:29] Speaker C: Yeah, I can, I can spawn the bean plant. But you have some too, because you just kind of have some in your inventory sometimes. And so you get into these interesting situations where like, sometimes someone will start spamming, just planting a bunch of them, which kind of. There's like a social, like, oh, well, here, let me go too. And I'll also spam some in the same place so we can both run around and pick them up together. As long as I keep doing it, they might keep doing it. And you can earn them through engagement. And you can also, you can also buy them. So there are all these little systems that are inviting people to, to like socially engage in a way that ties back to monetization, like a positive loop. So there's just a lot of little interesting mechanics like that. I'm like, that's. That's smart. I like that. It's just cool. [00:26:11] Speaker B: Amanda, is it weird to say that Roblox is like the cutting edge of game design and even monetization and game economies? [00:26:17] Speaker C: No. [00:26:17] Speaker B: Maybe cutting edge isn't the right term. [00:26:19] Speaker C: I think some of it is definitely like monkeys at typewriters effect because there's, there's. So there's some of that, which is, it's. It's really interesting to me. I, I wish I, I wish I understood a bit better the general Roblox strategy around AI. I know some of it's for, like, just make it easier to make games. You'll have more people making games, which is good because you've already have so many people just kind of making stuff like they're doing it for free. It. I feel like the, the benefits of AI are like lower in that respect and that you already have like this, this weird. People are just creating a bunch of stuff and then the same way, almost like with TikTok, then it's just a matter of discovering the good stuff floats to the top. It doesn't matter how much there is, it's low quality. If you have enough people producing enough stuff, some of it will be good and float to the top. [00:27:09] Speaker B: The thing I'm curious about is like, how, how do you scale this? These kids come up with these games. They get bigger and bigger. And I've seen like the, the, the labor, the labor force organization around this is like random bounty boards. They're still organizing, but the labor piece of this. Once something gets big and how kids self organize and form little firms, it feels like it's been underappreciated and understudied. I don't know if you've gone into like the labor side of things, but there's some fascinating shit going on there too. Behind the scenes. [00:27:39] Speaker C: I think it's really cool. It's a little bit, it's a little bit controversial. Like, people focus on the, like, children are like, working for ridiculously low wages. Um, but I kind of. Instead I cast myself back to like when I was that age. Like, I was doing tons of like, I, I literally sold shells on the beach. Like, that's not the best place to sell them. But turns out when you're like six, people will totally pay you for shells on the beach. Um, and selling cheat codes at school and trying to rope other kids in. These are just. [00:28:14] Speaker B: Everyone had a hustle, like, right? Remember those fucking like Armstrong bands? Lance Armstrong, like, everyone was hucking that shit. Sell. Selling shit in the lunchroom. [00:28:23] Speaker C: You learn, you learn so much. You learn by doing. And I think for kids who are naturally drawn to kind of do that, the fact that there's a platform that empowers them to do this in the context of a product that they understand and is fun and interested to them, I think it's pretty cool. [00:28:38] Speaker D: Do you think this is better for humanity or better for games? Whenever we get into a discussion about humanity, what do you mean by little kids learning how to code, kids learning how to program, kids getting experience with kids, maybe kids making money. You know, obviously we don't want child labor, but some of these games have produced millions and millions of dollars. Now, not a lot of those were produced by, you know, 16 year olds. [00:29:03] Speaker C: You'd be surprised. [00:29:05] Speaker D: Oh, I know, I know. There's a large number of them, but you'd be surprised. [00:29:08] Speaker C: The folks who've tried to go in intentionally as professionals are not as. They're not able to be predictably successful in a way that you might anticipate. [00:29:18] Speaker D: I mean, can anybody be predictably successful on Roblox, though? It's like. It feels like what floats to the top is somewhat random. And the only reason I say that it's less true. [00:29:29] Speaker C: It's less true in that if you look at. It's kind of like any other part of gaming right now. Like the things that are at the top, like half of them have been around for multiple years at this point. [00:29:42] Speaker D: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And that's true of Roblox. I mean you've got like the brain rock games that seem to have taken off in recent history. It feels like the people who are participating in Roblox, the devs, are not like traditional game industry folks. And it's like what is the impact on the game industry going to be is Roblox is going to be its own. [00:30:05] Speaker C: This is what this is. This is what I'm excited about. Okay. This is what I'm super excited about. Because they have completely different norms. Okay. There's one. The things that they're, that they're find they're accepting in terms of monetization are things that like Capital G gamers would just. It's like all pay to win. It's hardcore pay to win. [00:30:28] Speaker B: And if they're not shy about it, it is so in your face. It's, it's wow. [00:30:34] Speaker C: Just their, their entire mechanic like the, the idea of an obby. Like they don't, they don't talk about platformers. They're. They're obbies. Right. There's just, there's different expectations for what is acceptable. The things, the kind of jank that is fin different. Right. So they're actually coming in. It's so hard because it's really hard to do research with, with minors it's just legally very difficult to do that. But they certainly have very different expectations of what games should be. And unless you have kids and you're like really watching how they're engaging with these things or you're like a weirdo like me who could apparently play any version of a number go up game as long as it does something cutesy enough. You just won't get exposure to what these slight differences are. And I think if we want these younger gamers who will eventually at some point they'll be able to play something that's not free to play. They'll eventually have access to something better than a phone that's four generations behind. They will be interested in playing like higher fidelity games. Why not? [00:31:41] Speaker A: Are most of these kids playing on phone? [00:31:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If you love Roblox S1 it's like 80209020 phone. So one of the things, Amanda, that I remember in my political science classes going back as a millennial child that everyone used to talk about was these demographic changes. There's going to be this. There's a huge wave of young people who are left wing and you kind of project this out and you can imagine the country being rearranged. Didn't happen. Political priorities shift as you age. And so like trying to predict this forward, trying to predict these trends forward, it's kind of a strange example to use. But trying to predict these trends forward, it feels like it just never materializes the way people expect it to. You just can't take a linear extrapolation of what's happening. What do you think this does imply? As these gamers age up, do they graduate to UEFA, in your view? Do they graduate to Call of Duty? Do these norms stay with them as they continue to evolve? Because monetization norms have been this bulwark that Reddit has basically been able, I would argue, to like reinforce. And they've also been able, I would argue, to raise a new generation of gamers into this, into this idea of, hey, this is what's acceptable in monetization, this is what's not. Do you think Roblox changes that equation when they age up? [00:32:56] Speaker C: I really don't know. I really don't know. I do know that as a platform, they've done an increasingly a better and better job of actually retaining players as they age. But I don't know how people who are that young are deciding what they're going to play next. I know how it works for older folks. Like we have tons of research and how it's grown increasingly like word of mouth and influencer driven in traditional advertising. You have to spend a whole lot more for that advertising to do very much. But I just. [00:33:28] Speaker A: What about that specific point? I think I know Phil's excited about this is like, if we could normalize pay to win and people are cool with it like that that represents a large shift in what types of games can be successful, what type of models can be successful. Do you think the Roblox generation might have different beliefs about that long term? Or do you think like, as they age they'll start to turn against play to win and pay to win. [00:33:47] Speaker C: I have to imagine that they're going to be more open to it because it's all about what you're, what you baseline against. Right? Like part of why gamers today are so upset about the way things are is because like in some sense of it, like we used to get a lot more for quote unquote. It felt like free, right? The whole, like I didn't have to pay for dlc. Like, I just, I just got all this stuff. All the cosmetics were included. So that's what, that's what people are anchoring against, right? Versus if you're actually anchoring against other forms of entertainment, for example, that's your default anchor, then the pricing of things in games doesn't seem like a big deal. Or if you're anchoring against like arms around Sports doesn't seem like a big deal. So they're certainly going to have a different anchor because they've never heard of Horse Harmer, but I don't know. [00:34:33] Speaker B: It's a good reference. Everyone take a shot. One off the monetization thing. [00:34:36] Speaker C: You should go and look up, by the way, how much money that horse armor made if you haven't. [00:34:41] Speaker B: It was significant, right? If I remember correct, it was significant. [00:34:43] Speaker C: It was significant. It was multiple millions of dollars. Yeah, but isn't it. [00:34:48] Speaker B: It's the perfect. It's the perfect monetization parable because it comes out, gets criticized and ridiculed on the Internet and makes a shit ton of money for the developer and developer reinvests. I mean, this is the thing I think people understand is that when a game makes money, it incentivizes the developers to invest more resources into the game. And there's so many positive externalities that come out of that. You continue to get live service updates for years, even if you choose not to MTX into the title. And that to me means that the value of your purchase at $60 fixed price, that gets amortized over a longer and longer period. And don't be wrong, that argument will never sell for Reddit because we're not, we're not making rational arguments here. You know, it's about the hive mind. But I think people, people lose sight of that on a, on a. On a true P and L kind of econ theory. [00:35:31] Speaker C: Well, part of it, though, is because there's a version of it where you're not monetizing by creating value for people, you're monetizing by short run, putting them in a situation where there's value and then taking it away. And that feels bad when you feel like when you're playing the game that the game developer is in some way trying to trick you or work against you. It's hard not to feel resentful of that. Right? [00:35:59] Speaker D: I've always, I've always looked at like, I forget what I, I called it. But like negative versus positive monetization, one is where like you have to pay. They take something away and you have to pay to get it back versus to pay to get something additional. I've always preferred the latter. I feel like Spotify is very kind of like deficit based monetization where it's like I've got all these ads, I can't select the song, they kind of make the app worse. Although, you know, compared to Pandora it's like the same. And I was perfectly content with Pandora when that first came out. But I'm, I'm more, I guess I'm more averse to that type of monetization compared to something like, oh, an ad popped up, hey, Buy More, you know, potions. [00:36:37] Speaker C: Well, it's harder. Like it's making the same amount of money and doing it all through value creation. It's just harder. [00:36:43] Speaker D: Yeah. Especially if that value can't progress your character at all. [00:36:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I think some of it now I'm putting this out with boilerplate. I've never, I've never actually worked in mobile. I've worked with a lot of people from mobile. I've worked with a lot of people who've transitioned from mobile into hd. [00:36:59] Speaker B: They're not really gamers anyways, who cares? [00:37:01] Speaker C: I wonder, I wonder if some of the different difference here is that mobile as an environment inherently you just, you don't expect your game to have as long of a lifespan. So doing these things that are long term, potentially not the best decision for your brand or the relationship with the customer or all of that. It might be. It's the profit maximizing solution. People don't talk about mobile publishers the same way that they talk about HD publishers. Yeah, it's just not, I mean they. [00:37:33] Speaker D: Play by a completely different set of rules. Like there's a lot more monetization you can do in mobile that you can't really do in hd. And the same is obviously true for Roblox. It's almost like every new iteration of video gaming comes along with this new cohort who has completely different preferences. But yeah, I'm kind of, you know, that's why I asked that question. I'm like, I'm curious how Roblox changes the landscape 20 years from now. Will the younger generation decide, oh, we, yeah, we want to like go kick back with an old school console game. Or is the future of video gaming on our phone and an iPad? [00:38:08] Speaker C: I do think scary. There's still a, I guess there's a The platform could put itself in a position to create more robust experiences. I don't see indication of that. It doesn't seem to be where their R and D is going. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens with Epic where they're starting from something like unreal and then they're trying to make it capable of being more. More modular and accessible because the, the depth and types of experiences you can build is. There's potentially more to it. Because I, I do think there's a. There's just an intrinsic, like desire to go to the, to the higher quality thing and I think universally across humankind for all of eternity. When you're young, you want to do the thing that feels older, right? And so that like, that's the whole thing. That's the whole. It's. It's interesting working in new ip. Part of it's like trying to figure out like what's the right art style. And art style does so much to communicate the maturity of a thing. Fortnite from a systems and like gameplay perspective is not any less mature than, you know, whatever X, Y and Z shooter. The skill, the skill ceiling is still there. It feels like. It feels like a very premium shooter. But it looks very different in a way that some people still to this day, like have will not even try it because it's just that style feels too immature. [00:39:32] Speaker D: My wife loves cute games. She loves Ori. She loves Tunic, one of Phil's favorite games. She needs it to have kind of this friendly vibe. She can still be slashing people up, but they have to be. They look, they have to look like, you know, little stuffed animals that are having fun because she's just not interested in like my scary dark souls in Elden Ring. That is totally true. [00:40:01] Speaker B: All right. What is this? What is this game? Eric? [00:40:03] Speaker A: Cool. Yeah. So I've been playing this iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. If you go to the website, play tit4tat.com you can check it out. Just real quick primer for the listeners. Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous game theory experiment. Imagine you and a friend have both been, you know, caught on a crime, but they don't have proof yet and they're trying to get you to rat out your friend. If you both don't say anything, you'll both get out on a light sentence. But if one of you rats out the other one, you get, you know, you'll, you'll get a benefit, you know, get a slightly lighter sentence. But the person who got ratted out kind of gets screwed over. [00:40:34] Speaker D: Right. [00:40:34] Speaker A: And so basically the idea is that each person individually wants to defect and to rat out the other person, but they would both be better off if they cooperated. And it's, it's an interesting game theory thing because, you know, the game theory says you should always rat out your opponent, you should always just be an asshole and just, you know, be self serving. But if you look at people's actual behavior, they usually tend to cooperate and they usually tend to try to help other people cooperate. [00:40:58] Speaker B: You want an exception for this? There's a famous study about this where econ grad students are more likely to defect. [00:41:04] Speaker C: It's because they've literally studied this. [00:41:07] Speaker A: I was at the Chicago campus, someone came up to me, they were like, oh, I'm here for an experiment, do you want to do a play? [00:41:11] Speaker B: I was like, sure. [00:41:12] Speaker A: And they did the ultimatum game experiment on me and I recognized what was happening so I was just like, yeah, I'm take the full $10 and leave. So, you know, it's not a, not exactly an unbiased demographic. Yeah, that is funny. Anyway, so Iterated prisoners dilemma says like, okay, well in reality you're not just screwing over someone else once with zero future consequences. In fact, like your reputation matters. People remember what you did yesterday and that influences is how they interact with you tomorrow. And so imagine you're just playing the prisoner's dilemma over and over every day for the rest of your life. And that's what Iterated Prisoner's dilemma is. Yeah. And so the strategies are often things like tit for tat, which is like, if you cooperate, I cooperate. If you defect, I defect. This is a very simple eye for an eye kind of moral philosophy and it does extremely well. These are basically all just variations on that basic idea where if you are mean to me enough, I'll be mean to you. If you're nice to me enough, I'll be nice to you. [00:42:06] Speaker D: 75 of the top 100 are two people from our Discord channel. [00:42:11] Speaker A: It turns out you can just copy paste the same strategy over and over and it'll score high every time. [00:42:16] Speaker B: Do you think there's a real game design here, like a consumer facing game design that's viable? Because when you show this to me, Eric, I think this is fascinating because you set up Python code and then what does it do? IT match makes 100 rounds against other people that are also having opposing strategies. And so there's a meta. There's a meta on this play. Tit for tat game that, that Evolves. Right. [00:42:40] Speaker C: What's the limit on what you're allowed to script? Because can I just do. You can custom this strategy. Unless onions in the name, in which case, here's what I'm gonna do. [00:42:50] Speaker A: Good question. I. I don't think you know names. I think you just know the history of cooperator defect. So you can't pull in like, oh, you know, if it's the number one ranked opponent, do this. And if it's the number 100 ranked opponent. [00:43:01] Speaker B: It's a great game design idea, though. But, yeah, like, how does the meta change with names? [00:43:06] Speaker A: Yeah, there's like a. I think there's a few games like this where you, like, you basically program. Like, I've seen a lot of games where it's like you make a robot that fights an arena and you give it a script and then it'll like, make the robot fight against other people. [00:43:17] Speaker D: The cool thing is this, this meta component, I think I linked in the Discord Channel. Like, the. The paper that I think is the seminal paper that this was inspired by is like, yeah, Axelrod. Oh, geez, 2000. Or was it the 1990s? [00:43:34] Speaker C: It was the 80s. [00:43:35] Speaker D: My God. Okay, in the 1980s, he did two of them. [00:43:39] Speaker C: They were doing game theory on paper for a very long time. Plus them. [00:43:42] Speaker D: Well, yeah, this was written when, like, writing your own computer program was kind of a big deal. I think these were submitted in. What language were they submitted in? I don't think it was Python. But the funny thing is, so he ran the first experiment and he had a bunch of people submit strategies. TIT for TAT one. And that was kind of the interesting thing. You have this like four line script that takes the cake. And you have these super complex hundred line scripts, 200 line scripts that granted, again, this is not like Python. So these are taking longer to code. And they still lost to TIT for tat. So then the next round, everybody plans for TIT for tat. They're like, well, I don't want to lose to. For t. To Tit for tat. I'm gonna. I'm gonna code off something that's super, super good against Tit for tat. But everybody did that and so ended up, on average, they would lose against the other ones that were optimized to fight TIT for tat. So it's like, yes, they beat TIT for tat, but they lost against each other. So it's kind of an interesting thing. The second tournament, TIT for Tat won again. [00:44:50] Speaker A: It's a solid Strategy. Yeah, it's. There's a whole bunch of metagame stuff going on where, like right now, I'm pretty sure if you go to the contest website and just submit, always cooperate, you'll get top 10, I guarantee you. Just submit, always cooperate, you'll get top 10. Because all the winnings. Top strategies involve a lot of cooperation and. But this is interesting thing where if everyone's always cooperating, then the one person who starts, you know, stealing, you know, starts to win. And then so there's a certain amount of Tit for Tat. You need like 70% Tit for Tat or something for, like, always cooperate to be viable. It's like having pacifists. You need violent people to allow the pacifists to be pacifists. If everyone's a pacifist, then someone, you know, just goes around robbing everyone. So you need some amount of violence to stop people from robbing each other so that the pacifists can exist. Yeah. Interesting evolutionary game theory implications. [00:45:36] Speaker B: I think the interesting thing is I almost never see game designers get into research like this and what it implies about their game design. To me, the lesson from Axelrod is that tit for tat was the optimal strategy, Right? It was the one that won the most because it, it, it emerges through. And so how do we give players the opportunity to have tit for tat more often? How can we set them up where they have repeated interactions with players and so they have the ability to cooperate over time? Like, I almost never see game designers think about things in that way. And to be fair, there's very little cooperation in games. Right. Roblox is a great example. Amanda. Right. We were just talking about. We were talking about the B game. Roblox spawns you into random servers, right? So there are shards that you're served into, and they almost never put you in the same shard. And there's a small cap on the number of players that can be in that shard, and that feels like a big miss. [00:46:29] Speaker C: That's because you're wrong. [00:46:30] Speaker B: I'm wrong. [00:46:32] Speaker C: One of my favorite things and something that is very near and dear to me because I tend to implement something similar because it's just common sense. So you're highlighting the thing. Shards are great because you have a neighborhood, in a sense, like a virtual neighborhood. Like, these are the kind of people you see around all the time, right. So you start to build the familiarity. It's part of why a lot of MMOs are fun, because there's, like, there's that Guy, he signed on. There's all this drama going on in chat or hey, let's go and do the open world PvP because that group of folks are around. Just fun, you know, building up reputations and all that. But shards are hard to work with. Mobile has has found some really clever solutions to get better at this. But groups of people are just going to leak over time and combining shards is always messy. What Roblox is doing and I don't know, I don't know the full extent of what they, how much they're doing this, but it is certainly the case that anyone on your friends list, you're much more likely to put into a shard with them. All you need to do network effects like go out one more degree, right? Like just do the same thing like, like Facebook is doing or what TikTok is doing. You can create virtual neighborhoods just by treating it like a matchmaking problem. In terms of who are you loading. [00:47:46] Speaker B: In when I, I first of all, I think that makes a lot of sense and I think I, I've done, I've seen. I mean I used to run some A B tests about when you jo guild like what happens if we put like your country flag. You're more likely to like, you know, guilds that are, that are akin to your, your country flag. But it never goes deep enough into the game design. Except for this one example that's been, I don't want to say bothering me, but right now we're looking at Monopoly Go and Monopoly Go launched these series events which are called partner events. And if you look at the game board, which is hard from this annoying YouTubers on the left side, but if you look at the game board you'll see that there are these, these kind of baking, baking kits and there's actually four of them that you can set up and they sit in the center of the board. And for each of the baking sets, you choose a partner that you want at each of the baking sets and it's someone from your friends list. And what you do is as you go around the board, you're collecting currency and then you can choose to allocate that currency to one of the four baking stations. And of course the players on the other side, when they look at their game board, they have you as a part of their game board because of course they have to accept the invitation and they might have three other people. And so they're constantly making allocation decisions about where they want to put their currency into one of the four baking sacks sets. And so the thing that emerges is that you get tip for tat. So if this guy chooses to invest a lot in one of my baking sets, I know he's doing that and it makes me like pound all of my currency into that baking set. And it's one of the few times I've seen real game theory emerge in game design. And it's fucking fun, right? It's a fun cooperative problem. Whenever I hear the word social in games and how important social is, I always cringe because usually what that means is a fucking chat room and a guilt system. And like it isn't, it isn't, it isn't working towards a common goal. [00:49:31] Speaker C: You got to go one layer deeper. It's not, here's the best practice. It's what, what, what's the thing that we're trying to drive? You're trying to drive real human connection. Well, what are, what are the things that engender that someone does something nice for you, all of a sudden you like them more and vice versa because we're just programmed that way. I don't know, I, I think that's a great, that's a fun little example. I've seen a lot of game systems that like try to do it too shallowly. It's like here, you can send, you can send five tokens a day to people on your friends list. [00:50:01] Speaker B: Like what, what is that? [00:50:03] Speaker C: Like that doesn't, I don't feel anything about those people in particular. Like I guess like yeah, send extra. [00:50:09] Speaker B: Lives in match three, you know, who gives a shit? [00:50:12] Speaker C: Yeah, what is that? [00:50:13] Speaker B: What does that do? That gets retention up, you know, what does that invoke as a feeling? [00:50:19] Speaker C: This is a lot. Why, why still to this day, I think a lot about a lot of the design principles that ArenaNet was leveraging in their early development of Guild wars because they, they very explicitly were like, well, let's take away some of these systems that lead to antisocial behavior. Things where like you don't want to be playing with other people. Right? Things like having open world resources be non rival, which in some games is part of the fun. I think we all remember old school like runescape and being the person to get to the node or, or the situation of being PVP'd after going all the way out there. But they did this in so many small ways where the very core principle of someone else showing up should never make your play experience worse and reinforcing in small ways. When someone dies, if they're just laying there on the ground and you resurrect them, you get a little bit of experience which mattered when the game was new and people weren't at level cap. But like all these little things together engendered this, this community that was generally more positive because there's just all these little ways where people were able to show up for one another and weren't taking or making bad experiences for one another that just led to overall game. It feels good. So there, there's definitely like the idea of building a system that explicitly under an iterated solution performs differently. Maybe, maybe folks aren't going quite that far on a standard basis, but you can have design principles and then think deeply about the systems that you've built and how they are or aren't driving the outcomes you're looking for. [00:51:51] Speaker B: Chris, what have you been playing? [00:51:52] Speaker D: I hope we're not still on the what we've been playing section. I've not been playing anything with Social because you know me, I'm a single player kind of a guy. I've been. I have been reading and I have been playing Dark Souls 2, which I know is not very exciting to talk about because there's no economics, I think, as far as Phil's concerned in Dark Souls 2. [00:52:13] Speaker B: But it's not looking hard enough, man. It's all around us. [00:52:16] Speaker D: I haven't played it since release, so I think I've bought Dark Souls 2 three times on three different consoles. Well, two different consoles and on PC. So I opened up my old Xbox 360 copy and it was empty and there was just like there was an Xbox Gold membership for three months on it. And I was like, that is useless to me. So I bought it. I'm almost, I'm almost through it. But it's been enjoyable. It's been fun to return to what people consider the quirkiest, kind of weirdest. They say it feels like a dream, and that is definitely true. But it's a dream that just won't end. My playthrough got bugged. So it says I've got 600 hours on this playthrough, but I'm pretty sure it's more like 50, 60 hours maybe. But I've been playing that and I told you my wife has been playing Tunic. She returned to the infamous Tunic. [00:53:04] Speaker B: Turmeric is back, spice and all. [00:53:07] Speaker D: I love that game. I think it's a great game. It's a beautiful game. It was there was. It was the show. One of the showcased games for UE5. They're like, look what you can do with this new editor really cute little characters. [00:53:19] Speaker C: It's cute. I don't know of this one. [00:53:22] Speaker D: Nobody has. And it's not like it was some underground thing. [00:53:26] Speaker B: All 10 listeners of Game Economist cast are religiously, religiously repeating the vows of the game. [00:53:31] Speaker D: They all love it, I don't think. I mean, I've certainly never paid for it. I'm pretty sure it's included with Game Pass. I don't know if you can buy this game, to be honest with you. [00:53:40] Speaker C: $30 on steam. [00:53:41] Speaker D: Oh, there you go. Okay, so $30 game that I've never paid for. But yeah, no, nothing too, nothing too crazy. I've just been reading and playing single player games. Phil's worst nightmare. [00:53:52] Speaker C: I have this. I said this to one of our eps the other day. Like, well, really with the line of work that we're in because he, he's, he's fresh. He wants to play the Indiana Jones game, but he also wants to play arc Raiders. Like, well, really, you should be playing Arc Raiders. Like, there's not, you're not going to get as much out of playing a single player game in terms of what we should be doing or learning what new norms are. That's just a pure. Like you're just doing it just for fun. We're not building those kinds of games. Did not appreciate that input. [00:54:23] Speaker B: It's not a progression system. That's the problem. I'm so fucked up in the mind at this point. I'm not progressing by playing Turmeric. I think you can learn things from live service game. You're progressing in the context of the game. But like what, what can I extrapolate from that game that can, that can advance me, like as a game economist? [00:54:41] Speaker D: As a game economist, yeah. I mean, I just don't see, See that's, that's for me where like, you know, they talk about. I forget what profession it is, but, but you might love doing something, but the moment you turn it into your job, you start to hate it. I don't want that to be video games for me. I don't wanna play. I've. [00:54:57] Speaker B: It's been ruined, man. I went through the ratatouille phase, man. I gotta, I gotta refine the love, man. I'm not, I'm not even playing games on the weekend anymore. I don't feel anything anymore. [00:55:05] Speaker D: That's what I'm saying. See, there you go. [00:55:07] Speaker B: I don't think that's gonna make me feel anything. [00:55:09] Speaker C: Mm. [00:55:11] Speaker B: I played ball field last weekend and I felt nothing. And I was like, ooh, this is not Good. [00:55:15] Speaker C: Well, that's too close. Like you have having too many feelings, you know, too many of the. Of the people. [00:55:20] Speaker D: And maybe you should play Tunic. Maybe should just, you know, take a day for yourself and just relax, put on a robe, put on a face mask and just sit down with Tunic. [00:55:29] Speaker C: I'd say play board games or board games. [00:55:33] Speaker D: Do you play board games? I love board games too. [00:55:35] Speaker B: I think. I think there's a lot to milk for board games in terms of. I think so too. [00:55:40] Speaker C: This is. This is one of my favorite things. Like, there's such cool system design in. [00:55:44] Speaker B: Board games that it's all systems design because you can't have core gameplay. [00:55:48] Speaker D: Every time I design every time I design a board game, and I think I'm really clever. I'm like, oh, this is actually just like a game that Uwe Rosenberg designed in the 1990s. It is really hard to design unique board games. There's so much out there where Eric and I are trying to make up a game for the GDC Econ talk, the special interest group. We were like, oh, well, we'll make like a really cool bidding game where you have to get a certain hand of cards and you have cash that you can, you know, bid. And I'm just going through. And first of all, the first two iterations were a game that already existed, but we don't really have time to play those. But then, like, when I finally got to the thing that I was like, okay, this is probably the purest version of this. It's not that fun. You know, it's like, you need to have the fun stuff. So it is really hard to design a good board game. [00:56:37] Speaker C: The fun thing about board games though too is the iterated version of a board game, because it doesn't matter if it's been done before, if the group of people that are playing it. First of all, you don't know. You don't know all of. If it's the same as a thing you've played before until you actually go through it. Because not all mechanics are surface value. If there are any sort of different. Different with the same group over time, different with every group of people you play it with. [00:57:05] Speaker B: The iterated evolution of Secret Hitler. And for people who aren't familiar with Secret Hitler, like, some people are fascists, some people are liberals. There's a Hitler that's among the fascists. They try to elect Hitler every single round. It's. It's very similar to games you might have played at, like a summer camp. They've just Institutionalized a little bit more of it. And of course there's deceit. Yeah. And so like when you play a bunch of games with people, one of the things I've started to do is to just lie, even if I'm a liberal and just play for the fascists. So that just, just really fuck with people because I think that's the optimal long run strategy and annoys the shit out of everyone. Because the game, the game can, you can solve for Nash in the game. At some point you just ask people what cards they got and then you can kind of do little bit of card counting and it's gonna get really boring. But once you start to say like, oh, I'm gonna lie and actually sink my own team, that's when shit gets really haywire. [00:57:57] Speaker C: I mean, there's just tons of like social meta games that you can play based off of the relationships you have with specific people. [00:58:03] Speaker D: I've played social games with like one group and I was like, this is the best game ever. Get it? Play with another group. And we're like, this kind of sucks. And, and it's, it's just that it's like different people play in different ways. But even, even mechanically different games will have just the slightest mechanical difference or a new mechanic and it completely changes the way like the one we're designing for the special interest group. It's like when we first played it, we were like, this is the most boring game of all time. And then we just added this very simple, effectively, like a house. There's like a house in the game, kind of like in blackjack. And all of a sudden it completely changes the game. Oh, actually now this is kind of interesting. So. So board games are probably a good area for you to explore, Phil, in terms of finding your love of gaming. [00:58:49] Speaker B: No, I agree. Again, I think there's just so much to milk from a systems design perspective that I think people sleep on and I, you know, one of the things we talked about at the top of the hour was the, the econs always go into analytics and I almost never see them go into design. And I think there's a lot of market reasons for that, which is just there's a lot of designers and technical skills are barrier. I think if you want to get into games, I think one of the best things you can do is design a board game yourself. Again, you don't need any coding skills. There's something to just saying I have to design a game. And just that the things you have, the problems you have to solve when you do that. I think you use so much more appreciation for what game design is. That's what I'd recommend to people, even to economists. Use what. You know, we were just talking about ultimatum games. Like how could we we. That ultimatum game we were just talking about. We were just talking about the meta that kind of emerges from that ultimatum game. How, how can you take traditional economic games that people play and then can, how can you, how can you add more traditional game design elements? I think is something that we've been sleeping on. [00:59:48] Speaker C: I think, I think part of the problem is we don't have, we don't have a language for talking about these things. [00:59:56] Speaker D: Right. [00:59:56] Speaker C: Even if you go and you look at board game discussion groups like, like there are people who are super, super nerdy, like love the thing and even the way that they talk about it, there's just not, there's not a consistent set of set of terms that we use to describe certain kinds of mechanics. So it makes it harder to, to build off of one another's work. Right? Cause it's so dependent on what have you personally played. It frustrates me sometimes. It frustrates me a lot because one, because like again, coming from like an econ background, like I want to. How can we standardize this and put this together in a way where. Cause I want to diagram everything out and see how they all compare and be able to, to draw generalizations. And it's really hard. But also a lot of times when we're, we're working through a design, it's like, well, the mechanics kind of like, oh, have you, have you played this game? It's kind of like how in that game, except instead of the cap being defined by this, it's this other thing because it's. There's so much buildup you have to understand for. To get the entirety of a system and how it comes together. And it's just harder when you don't have language to build off of. Like, right? Like this is. Is math got so much further, so much faster by having a language where literally proofs, proofs are so complex. Sometimes you're talking, you have to write hundreds of lines of proofs which your brain can't hold all those ideas together. You have to keep drawing the implications like step by step by step. And then you can get to something quite complex. But we have no, no version of that for the systems. [01:01:21] Speaker B: Fascinating observation. I mean deconstructor fun. I think that that's emerged as kind of the methodology of game analysis is it's Study, Right. It's the case study with. With a little atomization, you know, it's a little bit of atomization, deconstruction, but it's not. It's not standardized and precise and it's text heavy, I guess. I mean, film has the same problem. [01:01:43] Speaker D: Even deconstructor of fun is very much on the marketing side of things. It's more on, you know, content. It's less on game design. [01:01:53] Speaker B: That's only recent though. So that's our. [01:01:56] Speaker D: Okay, I've only really. I only started listening when you got onto it, you know. [01:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I really trashed that shit up. [01:02:01] Speaker D: The funny thing is, like, if you guys. I don't know how big in a board game you guys are, but if you go to like the popular board game websites, for example, Board game Geek, that's like basically the Wikipedia for board games or, you know, repository a database with all the games, all the ratings, all this stuff. But the mechanics are super well defined. To Amanda's point, we don't have that type of language in video games. And that's partially because video games are much more complex than science. Something that can fit on my table. But I mean, you can describe a game, you'll listen to like a board game review or two board game designers talking back and forth, and they'll just use, you know, 10 keywords in a row and you kind of know exactly what kind of game they're designing. That said, one of my favorite games of all time is called. I say it's my favorite game, then I forget the name of it. Pax Palmer 2nd Edition by Cole Whirly. It's a weird game. There's stuff you do. You move pieces in ways that no other board game does. And you can't. I mean, you can use some of the common terminology, but like, there are replacement mechanics where it's like, if you've done this already, make sure you, you know, place a. Place a coin there and that kind of tells you to do these other things. So it is kind of this, like, once you add this third dimension, it becomes so much harder to talk about, especially in keywords. But I do agree, I think that even in the context of video or of game economies, like, we should have a better. Maybe we should have a better a vocabulary to talk about this kind of. [01:03:24] Speaker C: Stuff, or at least a consistent way to like diagram these things, at least to make it easier to communicate. [01:03:30] Speaker B: I'm trying, like I'm post. But hold on, you don't, you don't think we have. I think when I've gone, I guess, maybe to your point against it, like, Evo Fusion evolve, right? Classic things come out of Eastern. Eastern RPGs. [01:03:43] Speaker D: No, Evo Fusion. [01:03:45] Speaker B: Evo Fusion evolve, right? Like, you have a character, their star character. You sync other characters into that. One of the existing characters. That's what levels them up. [01:03:54] Speaker C: We have names for mechanics, for sure, but I just don't think it's robust. [01:03:57] Speaker B: Enough because I'm working on a sports game, and one of the things we talked about was, like, Squad Builder Challenge, which is a key staple of a lot of ultimate team games where you submit cards and then you can get outside. [01:04:08] Speaker C: I just get peeved because that's what FC calls them. But that's not what the other ultimate teams call them. What are they called? They're sets. They're sets. [01:04:18] Speaker B: But when I was working with a client who's considering implementing this, I'm like, oh, it's Evo Fusion or evolve. It's EVO Fusion evolve with, like, a different rule set. And they're like, what? [01:04:27] Speaker C: The UI is not as, like, the UX on. It's very different. [01:04:30] Speaker D: I don't think that there's, like, no vocabulary. I just think there's a lack of vocabulary. And it. It does sometimes make it hard to talk to. Now, I'm obviously in a much more, like, immature org than you guys have historic that you guys have worked at. But it is really hard to talk to stakeholders about kind of game economy design because I have to talk through diminishing returns. And it's like, oh, well, we would use diminishing returns in this case, and we would use, you know, like. But there's got to be a better, you know, like you said, if you describe the progression mechanic and path of exile, all of a sudden everybody's had. They have a light bulb and they go, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Compared to something like Diablo, there's distinct differences between those two games that everybody can internalize when they think about the game in the context. But you would use very similar game economy or, sorry, game terms to describe both of those games, even though they're, They're. They're different. [01:05:23] Speaker C: So. [01:05:23] Speaker B: So why has that emerged? Right, Because I think about Noam Chomsky, right? Big, big, big language guy. He did some political stuff. We don't have to talk about that. But, like, one of the things, one of the parables he's really fond of was, like, mentioning that, like, the Eskimos, all these Eskimo communities have, like, 20 words for snow. And why do they have 20 words for snow? Well, the demand is there in the sense that they're exposed to so many different varieties that it emerges naturally because they need more precision to describe things. Why hasn't that happened in games though? You think with the size of the industry, people moving around Cross. [01:05:56] Speaker C: We have seen some of it with mobile, right. Like even like having the idea of premium versus grind currency. Like, that's pretty ubiquitous now in terms of language. So I think there is some. But I think some of it comes down to we like doing the. It's like this game. It's fun to talk about it in that way and it helps to get across some of the. It also has a shorthand for the. The emotional impact of it. Like, it's contains a lot of information when you say it that way. So I, I think that's. I think that's part of it. Like, game makers tend to be people who do play a lot of games. So, like, this can be an effective language, but it's very hard when you're talking live service because it's really hard to have played deeply. A lot of live service games, you can very easily have played every, you know, like the top three, like single player RPGs from every year going back to, you know, 2000. That's a very doable thing. You can't play all the seasonal content from all these live service games. It's just not possible. [01:06:57] Speaker B: That's another really astute observation, Amanda. Like, when you, when you reference something like a name of something, like, it brings an emotion that unpacks. Like Quentin Tarantino. I read this great New Yorker piece and how he directs. Like, he'll go up to an actor and be like, all right, all right. [01:07:09] Speaker A: All right, here's what we're doing. [01:07:10] Speaker B: Here's what we're going to do. It's going to be like the Three Stooges will be in this one scene and the other scene will be like Taxi Driver. And this is like how he directs. It's like him paper macheing all this shit together because there's an emotion he's unpacking in each of those scenes. But to go back to like the econ way, like, the reason we developed math and why math is so popular is because it has precision. And I think, to your point, Amanda, we talk about systems in live service. We need the discipline of math to say, like, oh, Squad builder challenge is mechanically different than Evo Fusion evolve. And I think the math, the math is the way that it makes that Naked. The problem is that no one is trained in that paradigm like at all. [01:07:46] Speaker D: And it's even harder to describe qualitative like something that to a game designer seems qualitative but you might know is quantitatively different is basically impossible to communicate. Well, it's very difficult for me to communicate those types of things, particularly around like monetization. Oh, this is why we wouldn't want to do that and why we would want to do this. But it's hard to don't have the words to describe it to them. [01:08:08] Speaker C: It's something that like if I, I stepped away from working for folks, I'd like to spend time kind of hashing it out. It's very, it is very time consuming though. At the same time it's a hard thing to hash out without having people to collaborate with it on. Right. Because I'm sure you, you've both experienced the just going off spending a lot of time arguing about the specifics of a given word in a game dev concept context and what it means to you versus what it means to me because so much of it is just so loaded all the time. But like the position I'm in right now, now we're able to go pretty far, pretty fast on system design ahead of when we're way far ahead of when we'd be able to play in the game. Like a lot of focus on core gameplay, the technical design for a lot of our systems, like it's not complex, we have central tech that does most of it. So it's not really driving feature requirements in a way that we need to know exactly how we're going to execute against it in the same way that, that like trying to figure out core gameplay, like it just takes a lot of time. Different kinds of technical challenges that they have to work through. But in the interim like there are there are a few of us that are very systems oriented and there's just a lot of paper discussion, a lot of trying to figure it all out, just diagramming it, talking through it, trying to figure out where it might fail without being able to play through it. And it's like, well, we're trying to, trying to theoretically support something that is, is interesting over time that people can play for hundreds, thousands of hours and it's all just theoretical right now and how long will it be before we can really get everything in client and be able to play it? Well, even if it was all there today, you can't easily test what does it feel like a thousand hours in. It's just so to me. There needs to be a point at which we take the systems that we have designed, and I need to be able to simulate it. And that itself is harder because, again, without having the language and the framework already for things. [01:10:06] Speaker D: Things. [01:10:06] Speaker C: You're starting from scratch in a lot of ways. In terms of, like, how do I. How do I set this up so that it can be simulated effectively? [01:10:13] Speaker B: Our guest today has been Amanda Zario. Amanda, where can people find more of your content? [01:10:20] Speaker C: Gosh, absolutely nowhere. Um, it's been good. I mean, you can't. You can't find me. It's not doable. [01:10:26] Speaker B: You. You can't find Amanda. Don't even try. [01:10:29] Speaker C: If you need me, talk to Phil. [01:10:30] Speaker B: All right, I'll. [01:10:31] Speaker C: I'll. [01:10:32] Speaker D: She's just an AI that we've created. [01:10:34] Speaker C: If he. If he does me wrong, then I. I'll. I'll publish the. The first message he ever sent to me on LinkedIn, like, 14 years ago, or whatever it was. [01:10:43] Speaker B: You're gonna help me. Thank you so much for being on Game economist cast episode 45 in the can. [01:10:48] Speaker A: We should teach this to our children. [01:10:50] Speaker C: Economics is major, major, major, major. [01:10:54] Speaker A: Everyone has to major in economics. Number one. For personal survival, economic.