How do you make an addictive video game?

18:56We just didn't write enough trivia questions. so she remember she got all the answers and then it was like oh yeah i just answer the questions again and again uh so we were going to start a new thing but omar left and we were screwed because without omar there was nobody else who did any work and he left and went to work for blizzard uh he worked as a night crew game tester from 7 p.m to 4 a.m okay so i promised before i'd explain what blizzard software was there's some alternate version of earth where instead of being on Search Engine, Ben Brode is on Fresh Air. Because video games are a huge industry, they make more money than music and movies combined.

19:33And Ben Brode is one of the best game designers. Me explaining Blizzard Software, the place where I got to start, is a bit like explaining MGM Studios or Paramount or something. But I'm going to do it anyway, because in this version of the world, a lot of people just don't care about video games, and I think that's fine. For a long stretch of time, maybe 1994 to 2005, Blizzard just made the best games, and actually more than that. Video games in the last 20 years were a place where new genres were being concocted all the time. Imagine movies before there was ever a thriller or a sci-fi epic. Blizzard wasn't just making great games.

20:12They were often inventing or perfecting genres. When I was a kid, when Ben was a kid, the big Blizzard game was this series called Warcraft. The early Warcraft games were in a genre called real-time strategy. These games don't really exist in a big way anymore, but they were hypnotic. The way the games worked, you had a God's eye view of a map. And on that map, you could build little troops. Archers, footmen, maybe some catapults. You trained your troops, you built a little base, you mined gold to pay for all of it. And somewhere else on the map, shrouded in a fog you could not see, your opponent, often a real person with a dial-up modem, was doing the same thing.

20:51Building their base, training their troops, planning their attack on you. If you trained a bunch of archers and they had a bunch of flying griffins, you'd shoot them out of the sky and win. But if they had a bunch of heavy foot soldiers, they'd storm your base and you'd lose. Blizzard made Warcraft and Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. In the early 2000s, when Ben was in college, Blizzard was in its heyday. What he did not realize, and what, frankly, I find very strange, is that for some reason, the Blizzard offices were on his college campus. And now, his friend was working there. Ben couldn't believe it.

21:28I was like, hold up! Blizzard is here? It was literally on UCI campus. They had a building on campus. That's where Blizzard was. Really? And yeah, I was an enormous fan of Blizzard games like Warcraft 3, one of my all-time favorite games. I was playing it till 4 a.m. basically every night anyway. I was like, hey, look, man, that sounds like the best job in the world. I would love to do that. I had just dropped out of school. Turns out someone with my GPA and ST scores really shouldn't have been accepted.

22:02Dance is not enough.

22:06and I was working at this pizza place and in Irvine everything shuts down at nine o 'clock but lunchtime for the night crew is 10 o 'clock because they were 7 p.m before him and so there just didn't have many options they ate like Carl's Jr. every day so my buddy Omar would call me and be like hey dude is there any way to get pizza at 10 o 'clock and I was like listen I'll shut down the restaurant I'll take the last order out of here after I leave and I'll bring it over to you guys at blizzard so i would deliver pizzas i wasn't a pizza delivery guy but i would deliver these pizzas to blizzard to see the office and to meet the people there and so like a bunch of times in a row i would just come over and just meet the night crew and then a spot opened up on the night crew and i applied for it and because i'd like met them all through delivering pizzas i got the job and that was my first job in the games industry and so wait so night crew is it basically like you're staying up all night playing video games and finding bugs and reporting that's exactly right one of the things i did on world of warcraft was i was one of the environment leads i had to run into every wall of every building to make sure the collision worked correctly you know like that's not what people are doing when they're playing world of warcraft they're having fun you know achieving their goals there's no goals my character's not surviving past today's tests it's just looking for seams on the ground right like you're like the building inspector for the fun theme park that you were playing in yeah right and would like to design but you're enjoying it because you're just closer to the thing you love than if you weren't in the building yeah and just like the culture, you know, the category of people who were working in the night crew was just great.

23:29And so what happens from there? Like, what's the next rung on the ladder? So they would often hire people into design positions from quality assurance. So I watched some of my friends move from QA to design roles. And one of my jobs in QA was testing the Mac version of the Warcraft 3 editor. So the thing about the original Warcraft games, the games had literal maps. Like, you're building your army, the guy over there is building his army, but you're on a map. Maybe one of the maps has a big river in the middle of it. Maybe another map is ringed by high, impassable mountains. Playing on different maps was a way to keep the competition more interesting.

24:06And what was cool about the Warcraft games is that they started to ship with their own map-making tools. So even a non-video game designer could make their own maps, upload them to the internet, and allow other people to try them out. Ben was working at Blizzard testing their games by night, but as a hobby on the side, he also started using their map designer to draw his own maps. And he found out he was really good at it. Ben's maps started to become popular on the internet. Started really getting into it. I made a lot of War 3 maps. I made maps and posted them to websites that were so popular that I would be recognized when I queued up for a game in Warcraft 3.

24:43People would be like, oh, you're that guy. Really? I made a bunch of maps. Yeah, I was well-known in the map-making community War III. And then actually Blizzard took notice and made one of my maps a official map of the week. And I got to watch them kind of like remake my map in a professional way with like professional sounds and stuff. And it was, it was pretty fun. Okay. So you're seeing some people get like the spaceship is taking them up to design and you make these maps. They notice the maps. Is that, do they then move you up? No. So I applied to be a designer on StarCraft II and I made a map.

25:18I did a bunch of work i was very proud of my work to to show off what i could do in the editor and things and uh i remember a moment and i believe this is the moment i truly became a game designer i was in an interview with rob pardo he was the chief creative officer of blizzard and he said hey are you playing any fun rts games like oh yeah i'm playing rise of legends right now it's really fun i'm really enjoying it and he goes oh you know what do you like about that game and i was like oh i really like this like this unit's super cool and i love that they do this and he goes uh how would you make that game better and i was like uh i have no idea i had never thought about that that was not a thought i ever had while enjoying a video game was what would i do to improve on this incredibly great game it just didn't cross my mind and from that moment on i stopped really enjoying video games the same way like i imagine movie directors when they're watching a movie aren't really losing themselves in the film now they're like analyzing like oh why did they do this shot oh that's interesting maybe i would do that differently you know they're It's just like they're in the craft of the thing as opposed to just losing themselves in the thing.

26:20How would you make it better? Anybody who makes creative work professionally started out as someone who enjoyed that sort of thing first. Directors were kids who watched movies. That question, how would you make it better? That's the first door, the hardest one really, that you have to walk through to go from enjoyer of to maker of. Ben couldn't answer that question, and so he didn't get the job he wanted. But he was smart enough to notice how important the question was and how it mattered that he couldn't answer it. Instead of getting the job he wanted, he got a promotion working at another part of the company that would not have sounded too fun to anyone but a video game obsessive.

26:58He was now working in promotion, meaning his job was to play the games, take screenshots of the gameplay, and save them for use by computer game magazines. So I took screenshots of World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade. I took screenshots of StarCraft Ghost. And basically every screenshot you've seen of StarCraft Ghost or Burning Crusade in the magazine was what I took. But so it's like you still want to be designing the theme park. You're no longer building Inspector. Now you're just like the guy going around taking pictures of people having fun. Yeah, I'm the photographer. I'm the theme park photographer.

27:25But what that department changed into was also the hub for all licensed products for Blizzard. And one of the first big new licenses we signed was the World of Warcraft trading card game. trading card games. We've gotten to the part of the story where Ben is actually going to get on the path to making the games I want to talk to him about. Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, these are trading card games. I know this interview and this episode are in nerdy territory, nerdy even for Search Engine. And I just want to say, if this is too nerdy for you, it's only going to get worse now. Because I need to explain the genre that is trading card games.

28:04So Magic the Gathering, that is an example of one. Pokemon is another. Trading card games are card games where you collect cards, use those cards to build decks, and then you play your deck against your opponents. The fun of a trading card game is that unlike a game like poker, you actually decide which cards are in the deck that you're drawing from. Like imagine getting to draw from a deck that was all aces or all kings. But in trading card games, every powerful card has a card that counters it. And you don't know. You have to guess which cards are in the deck that your opponent has brought to fight you with.

28:43There's this paradox in games, which is that the complicated ones tend to be richer and more fun for a longer period of time, but they're also annoying to learn. And convincing people to learn a complicated game is tough. It's like asking someone to do a bit of taxes before they can dance. It's why trading card games are less popular at American colleges than, say, beer pong. But at Blizzard in the early 2000s, there was this idea that they should try to make a Warcraft-themed trading card game. They already had a big, nerdy audience who liked that kind of thing. That game would come and go, but it would lead to Hearthstone, an iPhone version of one of these games.

29:23Hearthstone would be the first Ben Brode game I would become very stuck to, a trading card game that somehow taught you how to play it very quickly. Instead of wasting a Friday night learning a game that might not be fun until Saturday, this was a version of a trading card game that, once you downloaded it on your phone, started making sense almost immediately. And Ben, even just testing this game, could tell it was a big deal. Once I got on the team, I was like learning a ton, and I could tell we were doing something that was going to be like an enormous detonation in the industry. Why could you tell?

29:57because it was super fun. Right. And like, we couldn't stop playing it. And as a huge fan of card games, I just felt this thing, which is like, they're incredibly complicated. Most people are like, card games? You know, like, this is for nerds. And I have tried to explain card games to people my whole life, including the WoW PCG. I was like an ambassador. I would go fly around to different conventions and teach people the game. And so I know how hard it is to learn these things. And Hearthstone was not like that at all. People would pick it up immediately the first time they played it with no tutorial.

30:23They were like, okay, I get it. And I was like, oh, goodness. this is a thing

30:34by the time I reached the height or perhaps the depth of my Hearthstone habit in 2018 the game had reached 100 million players it was very successful but this would not be the last ultra compelling game that Ben would help make that year, 2018, he'd leave the company where he'd made Hearthstone and he'd form his own video game company where he would make a new game that in my opinion is the greatest iPhone time waster designed by human beings.

31:05After the break, why games like this work and the actual mechanics of how Ben came up with one.

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32:49I want someone who does not play video games to be able to understand like how one thinks about games and game design like so I want to just ask you about a couple games like anyone who's been a child in America is familiar with and how you think about those games being good or bad or what the values in them are oh sure yeah okay so like rock paper scissors good game bad game interesting game, like how do you think about the game Rock, Paper, Scissors? Okay, so when I think about Rock, Paper, Scissors, I think about like what the goal is. What are you trying to achieve with a game like Rock, Paper, Scissors?

33:15The first thing that comes to mind is that Rock, Paper, Scissors is not a game about strategy, really. It's a game about becoming victorious or losing as quick as possible, right? Usually you're playing Rock, Paper, Scissors because you're trying to decide who's doing dishes, right? Or where are we going for lunch? It's like you need a way to flip a coin without a coin is like one of the ways in which people play Rock, Paper, Scissors, right? So achieving its goal, I think, great. It's a no-equipment way of making a decision. Or to have the feeling of victory or defeat quickly, the fastest way you can get there, that feels like you had some input into the decision-making, right?

33:51It's like, it wasn't just purely random, even though it was. It felt like you deserved to win or lose because you made a decision. So it's good at providing a random output that doesn't feel very random. Right. Is it a game with a lot of staying power? It's probably the most played game ever, like the number one game ever made in history. Rock, paper, scissors played by more people than anyone else. So like very successful from that perspective. I actually had to look this up later. When Ben says rock, paper, scissors might be the number one game in history, it actually goes back at least 400 years.

34:28The game was played in China during the Ming Dynasty. I'm going to butcher this pronunciation, but it was called Xu Xilin. From China, it went to Japan, where it was called Sansukumi Ken. There are versions where frog beats slug, but slug beats snake. There are versions where the fox beats the village head and the village head beats the hunter. The hand gestures sometimes change, but the fundamental values of the game remain consistent. Rock, paper, scissors seems to show up in America in the early 1900s, where it's known as the Japanese game. In France, it was Chifumi, although it's sometimes called Pierre-Pépier-Cizot.

35:02Kawi-bawi-bo in Korea. Ching-chong-cha in South Africa. Sa-chi-pun in Chile. I could do this for days. Here's just one more. In Philippines, bato-bato-pic. Watching videos of this game, I get a very surprising little jolt of, there's no word for this, but the feeling of not aloneness when you realize that there are some human activities that everyone everywhere does the same way with minor tweaks, Rock, Paper, Scissors demonstrates that simple games, like any sort of simple idea, will almost always spread the furthest, even if, let's be honest, Rock, Paper, Scissors is free to play for a reason.

35:47It's not that much fun. I wouldn't say that it's like the kind of game I want to spend like four hours a day dedicating my life to. There are people who do. It's very interesting. I played some professional Rock, Paper, Scissors in my time. What is professional Rock, Paper, Scissors? I went out to LA. There was this big tournament under a freeway overpass and it was just like a party. There's DJs. There's like food. But I signed up for the amateur tournament and they have refs. There's a big circle of people all cheering and placing bets on who they think is going to win. And you start with a minute of taunting.

36:17And people use that for all kinds of stuff. Just like, you know, normal, just like, you suck. You know, you don't belong here. This is my town. You know, and some people try and get into the head of their opponent. Like, listen, man, I've only thrown rock my whole life. I've never not thrown rock. You think I'm not going to throw a rock today? I'm throwing a rock all day. You think I'm not going to throw a rock? Go ahead. But you're going to see rocks. You're going to see rocks on rocks on rocks. I never not throw a rock. And then their opponent's like, damn it, are they going to throw a rock?

36:39I should throw paper. But what if they're going to throw scissors, right? Then they're just trying to get me to throw paper. It creates some mind games, right? That minute of taunting changes everything about rock, paper, scissors from a random game into a game of psychology. That's all it takes. Just that one mechanic tweaks the whole thing. One of the things I've noticed about anyone who becomes an expert in anything, movies, food, music, whatever, is their capacity to answer straightforwardly if you just ask them if something's good or bad seems to diminish. Is Imagine Dragons a great band?

37:15I wouldn't say so. A music critic, though, would say, well, Imagine Dragons is a certain example of an early-odd stadium pop band with some surprising electropop influences. I really enjoy spending time with anyone who appreciates things in that sort of categorical way. I get a pleasure from hearing an expert explain, almost clinically, why a thing meant to be fun is, in fact, for some people, fun. What about poker? Oh, my gosh. You've activated my trap card here. So most people do not understand the relationship between randomness and skill. What do you mean? So have you ever heard the term, like, this is a skill-based game or this is a luck-based game?

37:59Yeah, people will sometimes insult. When they're saying they don't like something, they'll say that it's too luck-based is what I've seen in my experience. Yes. If you say those words, you do not understand how luck and skill relate to each other. So people imagine a continuum, right? And on one end is a game that is 100 % luck, like chutes and ladders, right? You just roll dice, eventually someone wins. And the other side, you've got a game like chess where there's, like, no luck. There's no random generator. It's just pure strategy, right? Yeah. And they imagine that every game exists on this continuum, right?

38:31So you could have more luck and less strategy or more strategy and less luck. But it is absolutely not the case. Luck and strategy are independent vectors. It's more like a graph where you could plot the amount of luck and strategy. You could have games like Tic-Tac-Toe, which have no luck and almost no strategy, right? is you like that mastering tic-tac-toe is incredibly easy you put an x in the middle sure yes exactly right like the heuristics to become the world's best tic-tac-toe player like i could teach a first grader or something right it's just like really easy to become the world's best tic-tac-toe player so like no strategy no luck and then you take a game like poker poker has enormous amounts of luck and enormous amounts of strategy right it's not like you've sacrificed one like in order to become the best poker player in the world it doesn't require just like rolling high.

39:22You have to be incredibly good at poker. And yet, it's undeniably an enormous amount of luck in poker. Right. It's got both.

39:33This idea, which is that luck or randomness in a game does not render skill obsolete, I'd never really considered it. People who play games often complain if they involve luck, particularly if they lose because of their opponent's luck. But Ben's saying those people are wrong. And once he explained his thinking, I agreed with him. It also made me understand a large part of what I love about games. I'm drawn to games because there's supposed to be these little worlds we build that are, unlike life, actually ordered. There are rules. There are points. You can actually tell when you've won or lost.

40:09Skill is rewarded. Cheating is punished. Or that's the promise. If you pay attention, you notice that against our will, our games over time almost always begin to resemble real life. Games are often unfair. The best player does not always win. Randomness sneaks in. Even the outcome of the Super Bowl sometimes turns on a coin toss. All that mess used to annoy me, but through Ben's eyes, I see it differently. Luck in games, in life, creates situations that we can't foresee, and real skill is revealed in how we navigate the unforeseeable. We can never control what happens. We can sometimes control how we respond to it.

40:52Although, Ben did extol the pleasures of one game that is actually completely without randomness, another one of the most popular games that people play, one that comes from India in the 6th century. chess has this phenomenon where their opening moves right you should memorize a line of play to be best right you shouldn't just like randomly move your stuff there's like universally recognized these are good openers this is how you respond to their opener if they open like this right and so what you're doing to get it to a certain level there's a lot of memorization yeah and that's not like problem solving skill you're not executing strategy you're just executing the memorized line of play and at some point you get to a point where you basically can't memorize you know infinite moves and it becomes interesting and now you're doing problem solving one of like the greatest chess players of all time bobby fisher suggested to change the chess rules basically you randomize the back row of units when you play chess oh interesting and then it changes everything you can no longer memorize an opening move it goes straight to the problem solving that's the fun part of chess i've always avoided chess because I just felt like the amount of hours I'd have to spend memorizing.

41:58It's like I'd have to learn a language before I visit the country versus other games where it feels like. Yeah, right. I'm learning poker. I'm bad at it. I played recently with a friend, and he afterwards offered to buy me a poker strategy book because I played so poorly. And I did okay. Like, I went home with most of my money, but he was like, I could tell by the way you're playing you don't understand the game. Like, read this big green book. But there was something about like, okay, what I like about randomness is both it creates new situations and also the reward for skill is like at least slightly muted.

42:31Like over time skill will win, but you will have luck some of the time and that will keep you in the game while you're acquiring skill. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people really don't understand that you can have high luck and high skill. Poker is the game that says no, you certainly can. Card games, collectible card games, are closer to the poker quadrant of that graph than anywhere else. They have a lot of luck, right? Like shuffle a deck and then draw random cards, right? Every game is different for that reason. But you also have to play the cards you're dealt correctly. I'm in a new situation.

43:01What do I do here? No one's ever been in this situation before. I have to figure out what the best move is given a situation no one's ever been in before.

43:12Hearing Ben describe all this helped me understand why I find the latest game he's made, Marvel Snap. So, not addictive. Sticky. Hypnotic. Playable. The way the game works, you build yourself a small deck of cards, and then you play six quick rounds with your deck against an opponent. You can play your card at one of three spots on a board, and you're trying to get the most points at two out of three of those spots. The game is simple. Cards have power. You play cards at locations to try and get the highest power you can. And if you have more power than your opponent at two out of three locations, you win.

43:46In a lot of ways, it's like rock, paper, scissors. You know what I mean? Like, where are you going to play your card? Oh, he went left, but I went right. Oh, you know, he's got more power there than I do, right? It's a little bit like rock, paper, scissors. It's also a little bit like poker. The game board selects random rules each time, so you're thrown into unpredictable situations and forced to improvise. And it's a little bit like chess. You get better over time as you learn to recognize common strategies from your opponents. One opening move might suggest they'll probably follow up with that other one.

44:15Games take about five minutes. The other little innovation that weirdly makes the game very sticky is that at any time, you can make a bet, not for money, but for points, on the outcome of the game. If you've ever played backgammon and used the doubling cube, that die with numbers printed on it, it's the same idea. You have the ability to bet and bluff on the outcome of the round as you're playing it. The most fun moments in Marvel Snap involve recognizing how your opponent thinks they're about to destroy you, lulling them into betting too many points on the game, and then outmaneuvering them.

44:48The worst moments are when they do it to you. Many times a day, I pull out my phone and engage in a test of wits, a battle against some other person somewhere on Earth. I try to bluff my way through a short round with some bored Uber driver waiting for a fare, or a new mom with a kid in one arm, her phone in the other. I am, at best, mediocre at Marvel Snap. The game has millions and millions of players. And sometimes I just marvel at the vast assortment of people all across Earth who have outsmarted me. I know how it feels to play the game. But I wanted to see if I could understand a little bit what it was like to create it.

45:25What does it look like to design a game like Marvel Snap from scratch? Like, what's the beginning? What's the brainstorming? Like, what's the process? It's horrifying. So, you know, when you're employed by a company, They own what you create. And so we didn't want to like come up with a game idea while we worked for Blizzard. Technically, Blizzard would own any game ideas we created while there. So when we left, we had no ideas. And that's like really freaky. You know, like, will we have good ideas when we started working on this thing? I don't know. So the first day, we didn't have computers yet.

45:57We just like sat on the couch and just kind of started talking about what games we liked, what kind of stamp we might make to different genres, what our values were when it came to games. And one of the things that Hamilton said was, I've always wanted to feel what it would be like to use the backgammon doubling cube with a strategy game. And I was like, oh, we could test that right now. So I loaded up Hearthstone, and every turn of the game was like, if you could double the stakes right now, would you do that? If your opponent doubled the stakes right now, would you bail out of the game? And immediately we could tell, hey, this is actually really fun.

46:27This is all the fun of Hearthstone, plus betting and bluffing mechanics, which are incredibly deep, right? Like poker has never required an expansion to remain strategically deep for decades. It's because these mechanics are so hard to master. They're so interesting. And with that like initial burst of inspiration from Hamilton, we said, okay, we can make an even simpler card game where the strategic load is being carried by this doubling mechanic. And then we can make a card game that like literally anybody could try and pick up immediately and love. So do you pay attention to the community of people playing?

47:01like do you read like the subreddit do you watch like the videos do you watch people enjoy the amusement park you built of course yeah it's one of the most fun parts of it man it's like uh you know just seeing what people think and honestly development takes a long time with four and a half years of working on marvel snap and motivation comes and goes right you know there's like moments where you're like this is it let's go you know there's moments where you're like uh it's hard to get going smart and you know and after shipping the game it is so motivating you have so many people who are loving it and talking about it all the time.

47:29But the thing that's more motivating than people loving the game is people being rude to me. Really? Yes. I realize this is very strange, but I found it to be incredibly motivating when someone would tell me I suck and that the game sucks. Why? Because I have the power to make them happy. And my ego desires making them happy. I want to make everyone happy. I want to make everyone love the game. I want to make everyone love me. and so when someone's like this sucks and you should feel bad I'm like okay I can go to work tomorrow and improve things I can make things better and then that person will be like oh you know you were right all along or you know you were this game is actually better than I thought or whatever it is right and will you pay if there's like some random person on like Reddit who points out a flaw in the game that does feel real and you fix it will you then go back and see if the person has changed their tune like are you paying no no good Good, good, good, good.

48:24Good.

48:27And do you ever see someone enjoying the game enough that you're like, perhaps this is too sticky for you? Like, do you ever see a fan where you're like, you're playing too much? No. I mean, look, we have like streamers who play full time every day. You know what I mean? People will engage with your game at all different levels, right? It's just, you know, it's probably one of those, you know, normal distributions or whatever, where it's like most people playing an average amount and there's people on both sides who are lightly engaged, heavily engaged. It's like anything. People will engage the amount they want to engage.

48:56And we build a game that can be whatever it is to you that you would like it to be. Yeah, and I don't mean to be like, I love your game. I love your game. I love your game. Do you feel bad that you're a purveyor of moral corruption or whatever? It's strange. Like, I also try to make something, like, sticky. Like, when we put out podcast episodes, I can look at the data and see, like, where someone stopped listening. And if I don't get people very, very close to the end, most people, I fix it next time. You know what I mean? But it's hard with what you do because the upper bound on how much someone can enjoy it is like, no one's ever like, I got to listen to that podcast episode seven times in a row.

49:31Yes, right. Yeah, you're not spending 20 hours a day not getting sleep, not filling your obligations to do this thing instead. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, you know, honestly, I haven't heard like stories about that kind of like unhealthy engagement with Marvel Snap, right? Like people are playing it because they love it. And that's great. I'm we're not like putting out fires or solving world hunger, but we're creating something that's fun and people really enjoy and that like adds to the texture of life. And those are things that like make me feel good as a creative person and someone who's putting stuff into the world and like make it like inspires our whole team.

50:04We have 80 people at the studio now who are working on, you know, Marvel Snap and things. And it's just like, you know, it's we're all very motivated by the people who love it and dedicate their time to it. Yeah, it's nice. I mean, I think when you meet the people who make the things that you get a lot of pleasure from, you want them to be happy. It's so fun just hearing how much thought goes into like a simple pleasure, basically. Oh, yeah. I mean, it is the best job working on video games, whether it's art, engineering, quality assurance, production. It's just like you create this thing. And then if you're lucky, a bunch of people enjoy it.

50:42We look back fondly on games that we really, really loved. And it's really, really satisfying to be part of that for people.

50:54that was my conversation with Ben Brode can I say it's a funny part of this job that I call brilliant people and ask them how did you learn to be brilliant because the really blunt honest answer is that they can give you some tips but a lot of this is mysterious talent and skill that people build up over years Ben was making highly addictive games on a graphing calculator before he even knew he wanted to make mobile games. It's just in his fingers. I don't know. It feels like a not very satisfying answer to the question that got us here. If you wanted to, how would you, how would I make an addictive video game?

51:30Here are the notes from this conversation. Here's what I'll take away. One, when you're consuming the thing you want to learn how to make, you have to learn to ask yourself, how could this be better? Two, you need to identify the values of the games you're enjoying. What is Rock, Paper, Scissors for? What are these games trying to do? And how are they designed to do them better than anything else like that? Three, the deepest, most satisfying games are the ones that resemble life. They combine luck and skill, and they can never quite be mastered. That is what I learned this week from Ben Brode.

52:11Ben, thank you for talking about this. It's been a pleasure. This has been really, really fun. Not every chat I do gets this deep into the crafting of game design, so it's been really fun. Ben Brode. His company is called Second Dinner. His game is called Marvel Snap. I've warned a lot of people not to download it. Many have ignored me.

52:52Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Truthy Pimanini, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Sinta Taylor. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Vazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Parello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Shaw. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

53:26You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJVote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would like to help us pay for this show, you can become a paid subscriber and help support the show over at PJVote.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

54:04Transcription by CastingWords