Ian Bogost: Game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the ordinary, on the small stuff that makes life delightful

20:56So it just became very confused. And I want to be careful not to blame anyone for this, even the designers. And it was complicated. It happened over a long time and it happened because capital magnified and accrued in certain sectors. Rather than try to find the origins, it's more interesting to me to say, if that did take place, if I'm right about how that took place, then we actually stopped doing user centered design. We stopped caring about user experience and we started caring about the outcomes instead, the outcomes almost exclusively. What fell out of the middle there was that really rich attention to the moment to moment experience of whatever it is that you're designing.

21:34Let me give you a couple examples from very different sectors. Every time I use a piece of software these days, like Microsoft Teams, which is something I wouldn't choose to use, but I use for work. Microsoft's group where, and this is a giant company. Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies on the planet. They've made this supposedly to facilitate me to talk to my colleagues. And I click in on one of the interfaces to chat to somebody. and 30 years ago, the software would have automatically focused my keyboard into the text box so that I could start typing. And now it doesn't do that anymore.

22:10I click on the window and I start typing and it's like, no, I'm sorry, you're not typing in the text box yet. Please click on the text box in order to do that. This is such a very simple, obvious, used to be like bread and butter HCI problem that when the window gets focused, let's anticipate what the user is going to want to do. And that was user centricity. That's just one example of how that's fallen out. It doesn't matter anymore because Microsoft is selling a giant site license to my organization. I'm not really choosing to use the software anyway. So all you really got to do is push it out in order that you can get the renewals on your Office 365 subscriptions.

22:46I'm oversimplifying, but you get the picture. That's an example from software. But this stuff is everywhere. I've been thinking a lot about Ziploc closures these days. I remember when I was a kid, like a sandwich bag or whatever would just fold over. And then at some point we got these Ziplocs and it was like a miracle. And there was like the yellow and blue make green version to let you know it would be sealed. And they really worked. And eventually that mechanism got made cheaply enough that it could be built into packaging, not just into baggies. So you buy a bag of shredded cheese at the Trader Joe's or wherever you go.

23:21You tear it open, it has a little Ziploc so it seals in freshness, right? Right. And like lately, I have a really hard time opening and resealing them again. And why is that? Did they just get made more cheaply? Well, probably, but something happened whereby this thing that was supposed to make my life better, that was supposed to help me and also help the organization that's selling cheese or whatever, give me a better product that I would want to buy. We were supposed to be aligned there and I was going to spend a little bit more to get that packaging. And then it was going to do the thing that it said.

23:50And now it sort of does, but sort doesn't. And I've not only lost the ability to keep my cheese fresh, but also that delight, that incredible delight of feeling the zipper seat and clothes. And then as I put it back in the fridge, my life is marginally better than it was a moment before because I've had that encounter. They maybe seem ridiculous, but they're not, right? Our lives are built out of those little moments in large part. And the better those moments are, the better our lives are on the whole. And conversely, the worse they become, then the worse our lives feel on the whole. But in this tiny little way that you kind of don't notice eroding until you start thinking about it.

24:34Aarron Walter:You mentioned delight, and that brings up one of the questions that we had, which was around moments of delight and how that's been a goal of many design teams over the years. And Aaron's team at MailChimp has famously created this animation that when you sent your email campaign paying out, you get high-fived by the monkey palm, and there's some sweaty anticipation in advance of that. But what you're talking about more generally is texture. It's like when you press the button to send the email. Yes, exactly. So it's not feedback, but it's the action itself. The feedback can also give that delight, but the action itself is one of the things I'm really interested in.

25:10It's like what makes the stick shift, like feeling the gear drop into place. that feeling is connected to the action. And you have a sense of control and purpose, but it also has a very particular sensory texture to it, which is not just an animation on the screen, right? That makes sense, yeah.

25:27Aarron Walter:So it's not so much you're artificially creating something that doesn't even need to be there, it's by the instance of it being there and the way that you interact with it. We all meant really well in providing that kind of feedback. In the game design world, we sometimes call it juiciness. It's like casino-style design. You press a button and there's a bunch of visual and audio feedback. And that's supposed to make you feel like, oh yeah, I did the thing. But also I'm delighted in feeling it. There's also this sense that that's extraneous in a way. Or it's trying to make up for a design problem that wasn't solved instead.

26:01Even a business system, an email marketing software tool, it's not an entertainment device. You're not eating it. You're not listening to it for relaxation or for entertainment. and it feels like it's only purpose-driven. But our work lives, they better be gratifying moment to moment because we have to do them all the time. And I talk about this a bit in the book, a lot of jobs, they're not gratifying moment to moment. You're in the same place in front of your computer doing the same thing over and over again. But at the very least, if the tools really help you accomplish goals in a way that you feel happening, not because the goals are being accomplished, but you feel the feeling of using them, then that would enrich your life much more than a little delightful animation that praises you for doing so.

26:47I'm constantly getting these emails about, like I buy something online. And you get an email that's like, yippee, you bought something. And I don't need that. What I want is for the feeling of the purchase, of meeting a need or just a want to be delightful. And when it gets like weirdly highlighted as you produced an outcome, it's this outcomes-oriented thinking. And then I get another email for every action that the product takes as it makes its way through its fulfillment process. It's like, it arrived at your door, and then I get a text message. It's kind of evaporating my sense of delight and connection rather than amplifying it.

27:21It's like we're spamming our lives constantly with that kind of feedback systems rather than concerning ourselves with making the experience of action really gratifying on its own, not just for the outcome it provides.

27:34Evan Kimbrell:You've spent a lot of time doing game design and researching games and so forth. And there's just a ton of interface design and culture, understanding of humanity and how the mind works, psychology and so forth from game design. I'm curious, what do you bring forward from that discipline into this new book and how does it inform your philosophies? Games are so weird because they don't have a purpose. They don't need to exist. It's not like a car that's trying to get you somewhere. And yes, yes, you could say, well, they're for diversion. They're for entertainment. But that's almost a non-answer.

28:11And if you think about what makes Candy Crush or Wordle or Super Mario or whatever you like to play, or a tabletop game, you know, a deck of cards or the Chits in Catan or whatever it is you use, what makes them compelling? The answer is very different than even other forms of human culture making, the novel or the film or whatever that's trying to make you feel something or express an idea or a story. And over the many years I've been involved in game design, I really shifted my thinking. I mean, when I started out, I started out working in advertising. We were making games for advertising. Even on the early web, we did this golf game on Lexus.com when I was working on it in the 90s.

28:51And I started this game studio around education and marketing and advertising and politics, using games for serious purposes. I was really into that for a long time and wrote a book about it. And I started to realize, well, for one thing, I think that other forms of storytelling are much better at that process than games are. The novel and the film and even the teleplay are much better storytelling mediums than games will ever be. This is a controversial opinion that gets me in a lot of trouble in the games world. And so then I started looking at play, like the experience of just manipulating some kind of system for the sake of seeing what it can do, which is sort of what I think play is all about.

29:30That was productive to some extent, but it's still limited to toys or games or objects whose purpose is play, is diversion. And I think the big shift in my thinking from games from the play era of my career to the gratification era, this present moment, is realizing that the game part or the toy part isn't even really required. That just interfacing with an object in the world or an experience in the world, that's kind of enough. I've picked up my water bottle a couple times while we've been talking and there's some ice in it. It's almost melted. But when I pick it up, I hear and feel the tink of the ice against the metal wall of the vessel.

30:11And I'm not playing with it. I don't have a purpose in doing so I can just drink out of the straw, which is very well designed, by the way. But that moment of just engagement with the object, that's enormously delightful. And it's not going to make my marriage better or my career more successful, but that's the kind of moment that I'm after, that I'm after capturing, that I want people to appreciate and accept, but also that I want designers to understand is kind of like a first order principle of the designed object and the the design experience. And I think that used to be an uncontroversial opinion.

30:46That used to be something that people would nod along to. And now it's like, well, that's kind of extraneous actually. Like what we really want to do is provide you with the thing that's going to help you hydrate the most effectively.

30:56Evan Kimbrell:I feel like a lot of the examples that you are putting forth here, it kind of boils down to signal and the removal of signal as we move into an intangible world and how much interpretation is required of human beings when we don't have those signals of, I picked up a water bottle and I can hear there's still ice in there. I moved a stick shift and I can hear that it just clicked into third gear. You're describing that as gratification, 100%. There's a ton of those gratifying moments in our lives. Is this an accurate characterization of the philosophy? And then how do we put that signal into software?

31:33Evan Kimbrell:because inherently it doesn't have that rich signal in so many ways. The book is for ordinary people. I mean, designers can read it and appreciate it, I think. I think it has a lot to teach designers. But trying to help people understand how they can feel better and more content in their lives and the window onto that is gratification. And if you kind of flip that on its head, because most people don't have the ability to control these aspects of their lives. They can't design transmissions or software for that matter. They are at the whim of people like us who make these things for them. And it's not fair to say, well, you have to come all the way to water in order to feel something good about your moment-to-moment experiences and advocate for legislative change or make appeals to the organizations that design.

32:19That's a totally unreasonable thing to lay at the feet of ordinary people. But when you do have control because you run a business, even a small one, or because you have the ability to design and then distribute a physical object or a software system, then we do have the ability to change how they work. That's the first thing I would say in response to your observation. It's almost like looking at the flip side of gratification is this opportunity for interpreting gratified design, gratifying design as a way of introducing what you call signal back into the systems that we encounter. I really do truly believe that we used to do more of this in software design, maybe than we even remember doing.

32:59We had more choices in the marketplace. People, when they used software systems, there wasn't the sort of switching cost associated with, I have to abandon this whole ecosystem of stuff. They could try different things. It was less a part of the constancy of their lives as well. We didn't have all these two-sided markets regulating or negotiating between your needs and the flex workers that are being mustered. So some of this is big macroscopic socioeconomic kinds of issues. But nevertheless, there's still a lot of control that we have. I find when I try to think about concrete examples, the best exercise I can muster is something that happened to me very recently.

33:40Because I'm seeing this all the time. So like yesterday, I placed a DoorDash order for something. And there's some construction going on in my street. And one of the entrances is closed. It's confusing to get there. And how do I communicate via this software service that is negotiating between my needs and goals and the person who is carrying out that task on my behalf? And technically, the software has exposed a mechanism to do it. There's like a chat function or a call function. And I can use that to supposedly communicate with the person who's doing the work on my behalf. But in practice, that's not really the case.

34:20They don't get the messages, they don't see them. They're not set up in an environment where they can spend enough time paying attention to those kinds of things. The preferences that I've put in my profile, where I've updated the instructions for delivery, don't get highlighted and foregrounded. So stuff that used to be, again, like bread and butter user experience design and sorts of problem solving, I think aren't happening. They appear to be happening. The trappings of them are there. All of the functions and services are there. Maybe even too many are there. But as a holistic experience, that kind of connectivity often falls away.

34:57It often doesn't take place. It doesn't fully mesh. The gears don't mesh. It's not like anyone's fault exactly, but solving it would require not just greater attention to the design process or the implementation process. It would be like a shift in values around what it is we're trying to build, how we're doing it, who's advocating for whom, what kinds of feedback systems are in place, what kind of user research is actually taking place. We have all the tools to do this though. It almost feels like it should be just a trim tab adjustment to the design process. But nevertheless, it kind of doesn't happen.

35:32Partly because everything's moving so fast. Scale is the all-important factor in the success of a big software business. And all software businesses are assumed to be a big software a business rather than a small one. So anything that a product manager or an executive or a designer or anyone involved in the chain can do, it's just kind of go, okay, you could ask, where's the gratification? You could ask, where's the system of communication between the sort of signaling what's happening in the system? There's lots of ways that we could reframe that. And I'm hopeful that one of the things that, who knows, you come up with ideas in the hopes that people will use them.

36:06And I hope that that's a conversation maybe that can be reinvigorated by the book and some of these ideas.

36:12Aarron Walter:I played PC games mostly in my childhood, things like Ultima, the Ultima series of games, if you remember those. Oh, sure. And they built these whole very extensive worlds where you could go in and you could just go bake bread. Essentially, you could go bake bread and sell bread to the villagers. And for some people, that was enough that got them really into it. And so there's that side of it, but there's also sort of this textural side, which is each series, the graphics progressively got better. At one point, it was like a VGA with a sort of isometric perspective. And for some reason, that's sort of the sweet spot, I felt at least when I was a kid and interacted with it.

36:46Aarron Walter:Because as it got more sort of 3D and realistic, it felt it lost some of the magic. Whereas these earlier versions, and I actually rebooted it on an emulator recently just to play around with it, that sort of like pixelated, but textural distancing you from the real world enough so that you can kind of maybe fill in the gap with your imagination a bit more. And I see that now with my son with games like Minecraft, where yes, you could render it more photorealistically, photo realistically, but purposefully, it's more blocky and pixelated to some degree. And that seems to be engaging for even kids of his generation.

37:16I think there's a couple of things going on. One of them is that's sort of like craft, like making bread in the video game or making stuff in Minecraft. We are fortunate to work in the creative industries, broadly speaking. I spent my whole work life trying to be creative and sometimes hopefully succeeding. And so I don't want that in my leisure time. I want kind of mindless television, actually. But I think for a lot of people who don't get the opportunity to express themselves creatively day to day, having these tools that make it really easy to do so without having to become a printmaker or something like that, that can be really satisfying.

37:53The same way that people started making sourdough during COVID, well, now I can go and construct this whole little virtual universe inside of Ultima or Animal Crossing. I think that's one thing that's going on. But I also think that just pressing a button is incredible. You remember the old coin-op arcade games of the 70s and 80s? You'd feel the quarter drop into the slot and you'd feel it drop into the slot. The heft of it in your hand and then the gravity of it pulling in and the way the machine would gulp it down. And then to that feedback issue that you were mentioning, it would give you some sort of audio feedback until it was ready and then you'd press this delightful fat button that would release.

38:31Why do you think people like elevators? They just want to press the button. and they press it impatiently, but you feel as though you're connected to the world. And that is almost enough. And as the games got more visually scintillating and supposedly verisimilitudinous, they looked more like the world. That didn't make them more realistic, but they looked more like the world. There's also less to do or less that you felt that you could do. And that sense of picking up the controller and just mashing the buttons a bit, that's so incredible. It's really a first order outcome of the whole medium that when you think, what do I do as a game designer?

39:07I give people an excuse to press buttons. That's not false. But that's not necessarily a popular way of thinking about it. It's not like a socially progressive way of thinking about what you're doing. Instead, it's like, well, this is the future of entertainment or the future of storytelling or this is bigger than cinema. Yeah, maybe, but also you're just giving people an excuse to mash buttons because that's delightful.

39:28Evan Kimbrell:So if you were thinking about the way that software is designed today and you had a magic wand and you could make one change and every software design team would think and work a little bit differently that would result in better, more gratifying experiences for real human beings, what would that change be? I think it would just be curiosity. If we could expand our curiosity, the scope of phenomena of things, of encounters, of opportunities, of subjects, of backgrounds that are of potential interest to us and just be a little more accepting that there's something interesting and worthwhile about almost anything.

40:11I think that would be the thing that I would change. It's upstream from gratification. But I think to get there, you have to increase the surface area to ask questions that result in a kind of reaction that's kind of like, huh. And that's the sign to me. That's the tell. huh, something weird happening there. Like the stick shift, huh, what's going on there? Or you think about what's working and what's not, and it's not just delivering your KPIs or your net promoter score results for whatever you're surveying, looking right. But something about the experience kind of feeling like, I think this is part of it.

40:46This thing that I didn't really used to think about. There's something there. And if you could treat that signal as an opportunity to ask the question, what if that were the whole center of the design experience? What if it were all about that and not about this thing that I thought I was doing? Not necessarily because it's going to be, but because that exercise will help you exercise that curiosity and it will lead to design opportunities and solutions that would produce more gratifying design. I just have the sense that in my experience, that's kind of how that process works. Many years ago at the game studio, we were doing this game for this ice cream store called Cold Stone Creamery.

41:26They're still around. You know that place? It's delightful. So the thing that makes Cold Stone work is that they have this cold slab and they take the ice cream and they munge up all the mix-ins that you want on the cold stone in front of you. And then you get it in a big pot and it's like way more ice cream with way more junk in it than anybody needs, but it's delightful. And they had a number of interesting business problems, like all businesses, but the company also thought of themselves as a best first job kind of place where you're a 16-year-old kid or something like that and you want to get a job.

41:55So I went in and I did the training for the employee training. So we're going to make a video game about ice cream serving. To my delight and surprise, the different mixes, the different ice creams, they pulled like totally differently, like pulled in the sense like you use these spades to get ice cream out. And something like cake batter, which was much more viscous because it had like literal cake in it. And mint was super smooth and lithe. And so just the feeling, I'd seen them do this, you know, but I hadn't experienced it with my own hands and body. the feeling of moving those different ice creams around.

42:26It was just different. And that's something that that person in that situation, working that minimum wage job, they're going to encounter that hundreds of times a day in their shifts. So knowing that that's a part of the experience, how do you account for it in the design? We built a viscosity model in the software to simulate doing so for serving size portioning. It's the stuff we were supposedly training for. That's why I think it's an interesting example. Rather, it's interesting because if you're there on the ground, that experience of knowing, gosh, how do I go about doing this well? I'm supposed to serve up four ounces or six ounces of this ice cream.

43:01How do I know I'm doing it right every time when it feels different in my hands? That was a major part of that little work experience. And I didn't know that it existed at all until I did. And then when I did, it was magical. It was like, I will never forget the difference in viscosity between ice creams at this commercial ice cream parlor. And I just think the world is riddled with stuff like that. And it's not even that you have to look for it. You just have to be curious and open-minded about it. Sometimes it's accidental, like it was in this case, just a consequence of the ingredients that are in different mixes.

43:38But then when you find it, you're like, oh, I really enjoyed doing that. I don't know why. Well, why? Like, what is it about it? How do you characterize and talk about it with people? How do you make it seem less weird and more normal? Those are some of the exercises that I think will lead us to center gratification rather than to think of it as an accident that is nice if we can get it, but not really that important.

43:59Aarron Walter:And as we wrap up here, we often ask our guests what's inspiring you right now, but I've got a slight twist on it from our community. Joey Primiani asked a question, what's your core strategy to balance your busy life in ways that you can get outside and connect more with the physical world? Since I've been living this small stuff, gratifying idea, what I've tried to do is just allow everything that I do to deliver a gift like that. I enjoy, you mentioned going outside. And I think we're mistaken in thinking that we need to get away from our, even not from our computers, but our desks or our homes or our offices.

44:33I want to do that more. But what's really helped me do it more is in everything that I do to try to accept those gifts, like the feeling of my mouse clicking or the seal of the refrigerator door gasket in the break room. When I let myself enjoy those experiences, when I depart the office and I feel the sun on my face or the twig crunching under my foot. I feel them more because I've been exercising this muscle of feeling them more often in other parts of my life and other parts of my day. So rather than like, there's this part of my life that's ungratifying and then I need to seek out the part that is physical.

45:11It's rather, no, my whole life is lived in my body all the time, constantly. The more I can exercise the process of accepting those gifts, then the more gifts I will have to accept. That's sort of how I've gone about it.

45:25Evan Kimbrell:That's great. Ian, where can people learn more about you, your work, and your new book, The Small Stuff, which is out already, right? It's out July 7th. Yeah, you can order the book now, smallstuffbook.com. And then you can find me at bogost.com, B-O-G-O-S-T.com. Fantastic. Ian Bogost, thanks so much for being on Design Better. Oh, thanks so much.

45:49Evan Kimbrell:This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

46:20Thank you.