Discussing how to make games that help groups grapple with complexity in the future – and the present.

Randy Lubin is an applied game designer who has made a wide range of games that help individuals and groups gain insight into complex issues. Many of these games help players engage with possible futures, with a particular focus on how technology can influence elections. We dive deep into Randy’s game design process, and important issues around player safety, the authenticity of game models, and democratising design. This fast-paced episode is chock full of insights from the leading edge.

Links to resources

About megagames
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megagame

Article about the “Machine Learning President” megagame on Polygon
https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/25/18010142/machine-learning-president-2020-election-larp

Leveraged Play, Randy’s consulting firm
https://leveragedplay.com/

Foresight.Games, a community for people making foresight games
https://foresight.games/

Techdirt, a technology news site
https://www.techdirt.com/

The Interval bar
https://theinterval.org/

The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit encouraging long term thinking
https://longnow.org/

Live action role-playing game (LARP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game

Google / Alphabet corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

Black Lives Matter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter

Koch Family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family

Mercer Family (article on Robert Mercer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer

Pew Institute typology of voters
https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/politics-policy/political-parties-polarization/political-typology/

Google sheets, online spreadsheet app
https://www.google.com/sheets/about/

Primary election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_election

Threatcast 2020, article on Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/01/30/threatcast-2020-our-new-brainstorming-game-to-explore-disinformation-2020-election/

Copia Institute, an innovation and policy nonprofit, affiliated with Techdirt
https://copia.is/

Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt and Copia Institute, and frequent collaborator with Randy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmasnick/

Mozilla Foundation, nonprofit that works to keep the web an open public resource
https://foundation.mozilla.org/

Renée DiResta
http://www.reneediresta.com/

“All models are wrong but some are useful” – quotation by statistician George Box
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

Phase-gate process (as a starting point to explore what Randy calls “stage-gate design”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-gate_process

Playstorming, as the term is used in Randy’s process
https://leveragedplay.com/games/game-design-process.html

Google forms, online form creation app
https://www.google.com/forms/about/

Thing From the Future, a foresight game by Situation Lab
http://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/

Microscope, a story game by Ben Robbins
http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

Story Synth, an app that Randy made to easily make and share your own story games online
​​https://storysynth.org/

For the Queen, a story game by Alex Roberts
https://www.evilhat.com/home/for-the-queen/

Big Bad Con Story Synth Microgrants
https://storysynth.org/Grants/

Startup Trail, a game about how tech policy affects startups (the unnamed game Randy mentions he is working on)
https://startuptrail.engine.is/

PlayingCards.io, a virtual card game tabletop that is useful for prototyping
https://playingcards.io/

Steve Dee and Tin Star Games
https://www.tinstargames.com/

Diegetic Games, Randy’s blog for his consumer games
https://diegeticgames.com/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble, the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderlands between ways of working and games. I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

[00:00:17] Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.

[00:00:20] Hailey: Jason, I’m going to tell you right now, I am super excited because we have today with us, Randy Lubin. Randy, welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:28] Randy: Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here. I’m so thrilled to be talking with both of you today.

[00:00:33] Hailey: That’s fantastic. We’ve been doing a little bit of pregame chat and I think we’ve got a really good one for you.

So yeah, to introduce Randy; I actually connected with Randy when I was first exploring this space and I was on Twitter and someone retweeted about this thing called ‘machine learning president’. It made a few waves. Actually got a few article coverages because it was a mega game about how technology plays into [00:01:00] elections. And supposedly there was somebody who played it at their ski resort that was actually involved in politics, and it was a whole thing. Maybe you can tell the story better than me, Randy,

[00:01:09] Randy: Oh, yeah. It’s even more absurd than that. Oh, we’ll get there in a sec.

[00:01:12] Hailey: Okay, cool.

And so I said, yes, this is what I’m looking for. And cause I started diving down the hole, ‘what’s this guy doing? Who made this game?’ Cause you know, your name wasn’t even attached to it in all the articles. But I figured it out and I said, this is- he’s onto it. And I messaged him on Twitter and he was up for a chat and yeah, we’ve just been talking ever since and teamed up on something.

And Randy now is the founder of Leveraged Play, a consulting firm that designs and runs games that help organizations explore the future and explain the present. Also a very experienced person in tech startups in Silicon valley, is coming to us from San Francisco today. And now doing a heap of work also creating story games, creating applied games for foresight, creating software that helps people prototype [00:02:00] applied games, and just fun story games, period. And generally doing cool stuff out there.

So thanks for coming today, Randy.

[00:02:07] Jason: Absolutely. Thank you for being here Randy.

[00:02:09] Randy: My pleasure. And you know I’ll just add to that list real quick at the top of the show for listeners. I’m in the early stages of kicking off a new community at foresight.games. So if you are interested in designing foresight games or just curious, go there is a placeholder site for now, but there’s a link to a form where you can indicate your interest, leave your email address, and hopefully we’ll start doing community events and whatnot soon just to promote the use of games in foresight and in similar fields.

[00:02:34] Hailey: I know I have already filled it out.

[00:02:35] Jason: That is probably an amazing hook. Like what is a foresight game? What’s the purpose of that kind of like- help us out here Randy.

[00:02:43] Hailey: That’s our topic for today; foresight.

[00:02:46] Randy: So foresight is a field involved with exploring the future, or more accurately different futures. All the different possible ways that trends might intersect, and evolve so that we can better prepare and better try and influence the future to preferred futures.

[00:03:00] Disclaimer, I am not a like classically trained foresight expert. People go to school and get advanced degrees for this. I sort of stumbled onto the field, being a fan of thinking about and exploring the futures and also being a fan of games and game design, and been lucky enough to combine my love of technology and thinking about the future with my love of games into this space where I’m creating foresight games.

So foresight games is a very nascent field. I’m really hoping it explodes in the near future. And there’s just so many great patterns to pull upon. From the game side, I think as you all have learned, games are such powerful tools for helping people to create intuition for certain types of dynamics, to create empathy with people who are very unlike themselves and to get them to think out of the box and really throw away some of the assumptions that might be tied to otherwise and take some creative risks.

So I think that is true in so many different domains. And I think it’s especially true in foresight.

[00:03:49] Hailey: Yeah, awesome. And I know quite a few classically trained foresight professionals here in Melbourne. We have some good ones around here and I know that all of them want to democratize their field as much as we’re [00:04:00] trying to democratize ways of working collaboration and also democratize game design. So I think they’d all be thrilled at what you’re doing, Randy.

And yeah maybe to make it concrete we thought you could actually talk about machine learning president, describe it in a little bit of detail as a way to help us understand what a foresight game actually is.

[00:04:16] Randy: Definitely. And so machine learning precedent was actually my first foray into foresight games. It came about through collaboration with scout.ai and TechDirt. And scout.ai being a cool experiment on the intersection of foresight, journalism and storytelling. So they’d have these deep dives into emerging technologies with some little short stories embedded.

And I’d been talking with their team for a while and we started talking about making a game, a mega game in particular, in probably late 2017. We were all very bummed out about Trump era America. And more and more information was coming out about how tech had been used to influence the 2016 election. And we were all very concerned about how it might influence the 2020 election.

As a sort of a, a subplot, we also were interested in what new coalitions might form as political parties realign. And so what we decided to do is a [00:05:00] mega game specifically appealing to participants who would be either experts on the tech side and in the tech industry or experts on the political side or policy-making side. And get the tech folks to better understand politics and the politics folks to better understand tech. Which was a tall order, but a very fun design constraint.

And so what we did was we decided to design a mega game. We had access to the interval bar, which is run by the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. And so we had this nice big space. And over the course of maybe a month and a half, we just threw together this game that right-

It was about playing out the 2020 election from the primaries through to the end of the general election. And we had about- I’m trying remember how many people we had in the first run- it might’ve been around 40 or 50. We split them into a bunch of different factions. So we had, I want to say 11-

[00:05:46] Hailey: Randy, just to back up a little bit, what is a mega game? You know, you’re, you’re getting yeah.

[00:05:51] Randy: So, please, please keep stopping me if I ever delve into jargon that has not been explained. So a mega game is a type of game that is somewhat [00:06:00] on the border grounds between LARP- Live Action Role Playing- and board games, in that you are usually up and moving around. There’s some wheeling and dealing and negotiating, but you’re also trying to do some board game style optimization to win and advanced your aims.

And so in this case we had a few different systems and subsystems intersecting as people were trying to advance their own agenda. So we had maybe 50 people, but they were themselves organized into about 14 teams. The teams ranged from, we had four candidates; two for either party. And so each of those was a team of three or four people who are trying to get their candidate to win.

And then we had a bunch of these other interested parties that were trying to advance their own agendas, usually by trying to get the candidates to adopt policies that were favorable to them. And then on top of that to get those candidates elected. And so we had a lot of interesting dynamics starting to emerge out of there.

So some examples. We had, I think we had a stand in for Google as one of the influencers who were not running for office. We had a Black Lives Matter team. We had groups that represented traditional Wall [00:07:00] Street interests. And then the Kochs and the Mercers; two big, very, very influential families and groups that were extremely active in 2016 election. All with their own agendas and all of their own agendas that didn’t perfectly align.

So one of the interesting problems in the design spaces we’d come up with this one okay. Well, first off, what are the dynamics that we want to represent here? And then also, how do we capture that and how do we make sure that the tech folks who are not deeply immersed in the politics can quickly get up to speed and take actions and steps that are gonna move the game forward, despite them not being experts.

And I think later in this, this talk we might talk a little bit more about how to create scaffolding to make the game more approachable for people who aren’t gamers. We’ll get there in a sec. But anyway, so high level of the game was these different influencer factions trying to get policies adopted, and then the candidates trying to win.

It was split over a few different rounds. I think we had three rounds. Two for the primary and one for the general election. And the core actions of gameplay; each team had their own budget, which we represented with poker chips. And they could spend that budget. They could bribe the other teams or, you know, or [00:08:00] donate to the other teams to try and get them to adopt favorable policies. They could go over to a little ad spend booth, where we had a breakout using the Pew Institute’s typology of voters, which was a nine fold breakout of different voting groups and what they cared most about. It was really cool. We built this fairly complex model in Google sheets, over a series of tabs where we had- oh, we pulled in so much great data from Pew in terms of what voters care about and the issues. And then we sort of cross matrixed that with all the factions and what the factions care about. And then also with the candidates had explicitly mentioned in stump speeches.

So in between each round, we’d have the candidates give stump speeches. And if they gave a shout out to certain issues that would start swaying voters who cared about those issues. So we had this super complex spreadsheet that none of the players ever saw. It was just as, as players would take actions, the people who were running the ad buying booth, or- we also had a black market tech Bazaar, where you can invest in speculative technology that could then be deployed later in the game for other mechanical benefits.

And so as people were engaging with those or giving stump [00:09:00] speeches, we would be updating the model, which would be feeding right into active polling. So as players were playing the game, we could just see, okay, who’s doing well in the polls. And then at the end of each round, we would announce that publicly or announce who’d won the primaries or ultimately the general election.

So that’s, that’s sort of high level how everything was set up. So it meant that there were these very open-ended chunks of game, where people are running around and wheeling and dealing. One of the things we wanted to see was what coalitions might form. So we were seeing all sorts of weirdness where I think we had one faction that was representing Russia and they were funneling a bunch money.

[00:09:27] Hailey: Before you go into the, ‘what happened’, just let me feed it back to you. So I come into this thing that I’ve been invited to called ‘machine learning president’. There’s 50 other people here. There’s a group running the game, who are not participating in the game. I get sorted into one of these eight factions. I might be one of these sort of side groups like Google or Black Lives Matter,

[00:09:48] Jason: Corporate,

[00:09:49] Hailey: of the Mercers. Or I might be on the team of one of the candidates and there are four candidates, right?

And what happens is there are three rounds and during each round we [00:10:00] have budget to spend. And we can use that to get things that we can use for influence to try to basically increase the polling numbers of our candidate or of our preferred candidate. Depending on you know, what our faction wants and what its goals are and what they’ve decided its preferred candidate is.

And then also at the end of each round of wheeling and dealing, we’re also making stump speeches to try to influence everybody and realign our policy platforms in order to win more interest. And the wheeling and dealing could be “yep, you know, I’ll buy this ad spend, if you’ll back me on this” or that sort of stuff.

And we do that three times and the polls change each time. And that’s all managed by your spreadsheet. You’re not just modeling what people in the room think, but modeling a nation’s worth of voters, according to the Pew model that you imported into your spreadsheet game. So this is the more board game piece that you talked about.

And then after the third one, we’ve had the last polling results. And that tells us who won the mega game. Which candidate won, which [00:11:00] factions got what they wanted. Does that sound about right?

[00:11:02] Randy: Yeah, that’s spot on. And we did things too to help scaffold play. So when players first showed up, we give them a little packet that we didn’t expect them to fully read the packet, but if they wanted to, they could read a little blurbs on each faction in case they hadn’t heard of one of the different factions and what they cared about.

And also we had other quick references about the voter topology. This is a very common pattern in games that I design, especially the applied games, is give people more information than they need. Don’t require them to read it, but have it there in case they ever feel lost in terms of either not understanding what’s going on, not knowing what they might do next. So there’s a lot, they can just pull on.

[00:11:34] Hailey: Yeah nice.

[00:11:34] Jason: Just for me, I think it’s an interesting place to be. I mean, Randy, listening to you, it’s amazing. It’s kind of like drinking from a fire hose. I think what’s important here for our listeners, maybe just to kind of reel it in a little bit, is we’re talking about in the space of, when you were saying foresight games, this is sort of an aspect of simulation, and an aspect of serious games that’s enabling people to get an understanding of a [00:12:00] particular system that they’re engaging in through some sort of simulation. And the design element of that is the work that you and your team have done to relevate the relevant mechanics that influence the game. So the aspects that drive voter behavior or the spreadsheet that you were referring to, does that sort of..?

[00:12:18] Randy: Yeah.

[00:12:19] Jason: Cool.

[00:12:19] Randy: That well encapsulates it. And when I think about applied gaming, at least the type that I do, I’ll usually break design into one of two buckets based on the goal. Is the goal more to explore possible futures or is it to help participants gain intuition for complex systems or tough topics?

And those are not mutually exclusive, but generally a successful game will try and do one more than the other. And having those priorities right at front will help the whole design process and make sure that no matter what, you are going to succeed on the main goal. And then hopefully you’re also succeeding on the sub goal.

So ‘machine learning president’, it was definitely about getting the tech folks to understand politics, and politics to understand tech. And if we got any cool insights coming out of that in terms of exploring possible futures, that was also really great.[00:13:00] So that’s where like, you could be doing foresight things, but the point of it isn’t necessarily for the facilitators to come up with new insights to deliver some client, it could be about the participants just getting their own insights.

Or on the opposite side- I can actually give you a quick example- it can be much more just about the output that can then be processed as part of some other initiative. So, a follow-up game to ‘machine learning president’ was a game we called ‘threat cast 2020’, which Mike Masnick and the folks at TechDirt slash Copia Institute created with me.

And we ran that over the last two years in the run up to the 2020 election. That was a much smaller game. It was maybe 15 to 30 participants, um, but a lot simpler. So it was only about an hour and a half long. There were five factions and the goal there was much more about seeing how bad actors will use technology to manipulate and influence the election and especially through misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.

And so this was very much a game about brainstorming interventions. So the game was played out over four or five rounds depending on the run. And every round each faction had to submit two different interventions. One that was a little more practical, one that was more wild and experimental.

And[00:14:00] this was really great because at the end of the game, we now had well, five times, uh, sorry, two times five times five. So we had 50- did I get that right? 50 interventions that had been brainstormed that we could then process after the fact. And turn it into a report for the participants and for other stakeholders.

And again, like at the beginning of that design process, which we had originally made that game for the Mozilla foundation and Renee de Resta who had brought us in. She’s a phenomenal expert on cutting edge, digital manipulation and propaganda and misinformation. And so she brought us in to help have a bunch of other tech experts who are looking at this issue collaborate to sort of see what might be coming next and how can we defend against it?

[00:14:34] Jason: Nice. What was sort of coming through there for me, like listening to you, is this sense that we have enormously sophisticated, highly skilled folks who are building a context that others can engage in to enable them to self-learn about potential sort of outcomes.

And I think this is something that happens. You described this sort of process as enabling people to see how actions [00:15:00] influence election results, how engagement in a particular issue can influence policy, et cetera. I think one of the things that we’ve sort of talked about in this space before is- and this is sort of getting to some of the deeper stuff in game design sort of space- is there’s the initial surface piece of, well, why ought leaders to engage in these sorts of processes? Like why use leveraged play to investigate a particular problem space? There are many ways to generate information. You can go and consult experts. You can do research, you can do a bunch of things.

The two pieces I’d really liked to explore is like why use leverage play as a mode to generate input? The second piece which is a slightly deeper question is; in complex environments we know that expertise counts and the ability to relevate the relevant dynamics. And you mentioned an instance where what you’re trying to do is highlight how bad actors can [00:16:00] tweak various system components so that you end up with skewed results, et cetera. When we’re setting up a context as game designers and folks like that, how do we give our participants or the people that we’re engaging with, a sense of authenticity and a sense of trust in that sort of space? So, you know, in many ways, designers in these sorts of spaces you’re handing yourself over to folks who although you’ve explicitly stated in your commentary that the facilitators don’t have an agenda, right? It’s up to the players to generate the output that they can then process however they like. But there’s a massive ask on behalf of the people who participate in this sort of stuff to assume, and to trust that your facilitation team A. Have all the right kind of components built in, kind of skewing the mechanics somehow, and B. Are themselves good actors in this sort of space who are willing to do stuff.

I’d be interested to talk about potentially there’s a second thing. So 1. [00:17:00] the why engage in it, but then 2. how do you develop that sort of trust with the people who are gaming with you. How do you build that into the environment so that your simulation becomes one of transparent actors, enacting natural sort of responses or good responses to the challenge.

[00:17:17] Randy: Yeah, that’s great. Okay.

Let’s start with the first question. So why, why use games or leverage player, whatever it might be. I think that the best answer there is going to be different based on the objectives and needs of a particular leadership team or team in general. But some of the things I mentioned, I think at the top of the show, the fact that games can get a broader swath of participants engaged potentially more deeply than other forms of workshop or technique. And we can break that down to two.

So one; some other types of foresight work involve pulling in a small coterie of experts, but you’re missing a lot of voices in that picture. And I think one thing that, when done well, games can do is just really enable a much, much broader array of people who maybe don’t have all the context or don’t have [00:18:00] all of the jargon or whatever it might be. But they don’t need that because they have their authentic perspective to bring to the table. And making sure that we can enable them to have their voice heard by everyone else- the leadership team, the rest of them- and be fed into the rest of the process is crucial. So I think games are immensely important for that. And helpful for that.

Beyond that, to the other things we talked about in terms of games being able to shake people out of certain assumptions or get them to empathize to people in very different positions. I think those are very, very, very true. And I think one of the magical things about games is that I’ve seen a lot of people who are self-proclaimed non-gamers who will come to one of these more serious or applied, and be assigned a role and a goal. And just maybe even the lightest way of how they might start achieving those goals. And it doesn’t matter that they’re not a gamer, they just, they want to win. And they’re like, cool, I’m gonna win this thing. I know immediately how I’m gonna start optimizing on it.

When a game is designed well, you have the right affordances so that they can start thinking about how to optimize and win, they know how they’re situated relative to other actors in the game space, and then they can just go off to the races. [00:19:00] I’m trying to think was there more?

[00:19:01] Jason: No, no. Like just to reflect back what I heard from you then in terms of leverage play, or participatory games or, I’m not sure what we call this sort of space. But one of the key reasons that you might want to be involved in this sort of activity as a leadership group, as an organization, as a community, is that it enables a level of participation that may not be afforded to folks who aren’t experts for instance. Because the game takes care of a lot of the underlying mechanics and you give people an opportunity to inhabit a context in which they can express opinion, engage in a way that you know is natural to them.

The other piece that I heard is that games by their very nature enable engagement. You know, they’re engaging. If you give someone a goal, if you give someone a set of rules that they can pursue, if you give someone a motivation they’re able to engage with it. Things like, you know, we want to optimize, we want to win. We want to make our actions within a particular context count.

So the two things I heard was that there’s a sort of a democratization and participation in kind of [00:20:00] complex domains. And the other piece is there’s the building of engagement, getting people invested in a particular thing through the very nature of gaming mechanics. Hails I’m sorry, I cut you short there.

[00:20:12] Hailey: No worries Jase. I was just going to pull on, well, I had another thread come up while you were talking. It was around engagement and just the role of play in this process. And just if, if this is something we’re exploring a lot is the intersection of gamefulness and the structural and mechanical, which is important to make it participatory. But also provide that hook to the instrumentality mind which wants to win or see an outcome. But where play, which is sort of essentially non-instrumental, is a crucial ingredient in what makes this work and what makes it different than say a straight up simulation process or a different kind of foresight technique. And yeah, I’ll leave it with that one. You know, what, any thoughts on that?

[00:20:55] Randy: Sorry, thoughts specifically on?

[00:20:57] Hailey: Yeah, the importance of play[00:21:00] as mixed into the mechanical bits and why that matters to get the outcomes that you’re trying to get from designs.

[00:21:06] Randy: Yeah, totally. So, definitely mean, I think this is one of the ways that by designing the right experience with the right vessel and having the right facilitators too, can really encourage people to not be constrained by a small menu of options. And by being a bit more playful, thinking a little bit more outside the box, arriving at actions and insights and moments that could not have been dreamt up by the facilitators and game designers in the first place.

And I think this is the type of thing that anyone who’s probably played a tabletop role-playing game has seen. There’s usually this magical moment, the first time that you’re playing with a new player. And they’re sort of asked what do you do? And they realize that’s just a blank canvas. I could, I could do whatever I want. I’m not locked into like the three options of video game might give me. And so I think that there’s, there’s that same magic brought to all of these applied games as well.

And then, I think this actually folds really well into Jace your earlier, second part of your question. Which was, how do you create sort of this safer environment, environment full of trust. I think that’s just paramount to [00:22:00] encouraging a more playful mindset and getting people to engage because if they don’t feel, if they don’t have trust in the systems, the designers, the goals, any of that, they’re going to be much more reserved in what they bring in terms of their engagement and creativity.

And so there’s a number of things that can be done across the board to try and increase that trust and increase then the quality of the output. I think it is everything from- oh, so there’s a line. I really love it- and I wish I could cite who originally came up with it- from I think I heard about it in the immersive theater space first. Which is like, ‘the show starts when you first hear about it and it ends when you last remember it’. And you should really, as a designer of experiences, you should think about it sort of end to end like that.

And I think that’s very much true in this context too. And so making sure from the first time that you’re messaging potential participants, making them know what the objective is, I’ll often tell them what the objective isn’t.

So in the example I gave you for ‘threat cast 2020’. Yeah, first off we were talking about ways of abusing technology to manipulate elections. We wanted to be extremely clear that like, look, we are not taking any of these ideas and using it to actually manipulate elections. That is like the antithesis of what we want to be working on. Part of that also is like, Hey, the [00:23:00] debrief is incredibly important because the debrief is how we then also engage better in how do we detect and deter these types of things before they happen. I think also a lot of the trust building carries through to the materials and handouts, the facilitators, and what the facilitators do and say.

I think there’s also overlap here with tabletop games and the safety techniques that are used there. So that if players are uncomfortable, for whatever reason, they feel like they’re not backed up against a wall. They can talk to the facilitators or they can work with their fellow players to work themselves out of that bit of discomfort. And so I think lots of parallels there too. Uh trying to think of other ways of sort of encouraging that, that safety and transparency. But I think again, just being really crisp on the objective.

And it really permeates the rest of the game design too. And a lot of this comes down to, you know, what matters most? What are you focusing on? How do you communicate that? So again, in the threat cast game, we really didn’t care about modeling the voters at all. If ‘machine learning president’ had a five tab spreadsheet that went for rows and rows and was super complex, threat cast had a one tab spreadsheet. That was an incredibly simple naive model. We had as a [00:24:00] feedback loop what are the current polling numbers, and ultimately who wins, but we didn’t have any pretensions as to trying to do that accurately because that wasn’t the point. The point was to provide enough of a feedback loop so that people can be focused on coming up with these interventions, these tech mediated interventions, and that was it.

[00:24:13] Jason: Wow, thank you, Randy. Yeah, that’s amazing. So, just to play back what I heard there in that sort of space is, there’s a sense of the trust in your players in many ways comes from I guess cracking open the box a little bit, being very explicit about what it is that the game is setting out to achieve. And what really came through strongly there is also what it’s not setting out to achieve. Like what its aims are, what the goals are and what the explicit things that you’re not going to do are. And certainly in facilitation land, those things are very well known, explicit markers to establishing a session. So it sounds like that sort of thing is parallel. That’s amazing.

The piece that I’d really like to ask, but this is probably something for later in terms of the design of the spreadsheet that’s driving it or the mechanics that are [00:25:00] driving it. There’s a piece there around our responsibility as designers of these experiences.

To what degree does that need to be transparent to our participants? To what degree does that need to be sort of co-designed with various components of the system? But I think that’s something we should probably come back to at a later stage. Or is that something that we could begin exploring through the lens of design more generally? Like, does that lead us into a conversation about what it means to design these sorts of experiences and the responsibility of designers?

[00:25:34] Randy: Yeah. I think now’s a great time to talk about it, but Hailey, you had a thought?

[00:25:37] Hailey: I was going to offer another layer or hook to this, which now that I’m talking, I’ll stick with that. Which is; you said something about, “we’re not trying to predict the future, influence the future. We’re just trying to give people an experience.” And that’s something I’ve heard a lot from foresight people, experiential foresight people as a key distinction of what foresight is and does.

So I guess just feel free to add any thoughts on that into this response, but [00:26:00] keep going.

[00:26:01] Randy: Yeah, I, I think that that is a great and concise way of framing a lot of what we’re talking about here. In terms of the models; so I’ve designed games that have no model at all and games that have the incredibly complex models. It’s a key part of early design process, especially when working with a client. Figuring out, okay, how much do we want to be modeling?

And as always it’s like, how is the model in service of our ultimate goals here? The output that we want, or the experience design that we want. And oftentimes early in that process, if it’s looking like, ‘oh, we do need a model.’ It’s ‘okay. What parts of the system do we model? What parts do we abstract away? What roles do we assign participants? What roles do we have played by facilitators or simulated?’ And so there’s, there’s so much to explore here.

Often one of the things I love doing is finding a model that already exists in the world. So the Pew topology, you can definitely think of that as a model. And it was a treat to be able to just take all of the rich work and data that they had done and then bring it into our toy model. I’ll usually use the phrase toy model.

So there’s the real world, which is super complex and messy. There’s the powerful, but still always to some degree, wrong models of the real world. And then there’s the toy model that you bring into the game. I mean, I love the [00:27:00] phrase, the classic phrase, “all models are wrong, some models are useful”. And I think with games that’s doubly true.

And so, then figuring out, “okay, cool. What’s, what’s a simple way of doing this? Both in terms of constraints of like, well, what do we actually need to simulate to get the richness of experience we want to close the feedback loops from player actions? But also how do we make this manageable? Is this a mega game that’s going to have a team of eight facilitators or five facilitators? Or are we going to have one or maybe a second facilitator, in which case we need to keep it simple. Because that’s just too much cognitive load for somebody who’s also making sure players are taken care of and nobody’s getting stuck and keeping an eye on the time.

And so there’s a lot of richness to explore there. Seeing what can we adopt from the real world, real world models and what do we make up ourselves if we have to make up something ourselves? And this actually might be a good segue to something that we, we thought we might talk about, which is stage gate design.

So stage gate design real quick, is a methodology for designing products or experiences or pretty much anything where you takes advantage of the fact of the sort of design process of ‘come up with a ton of different ideas and then winnow down’. But it does that from increasing layers of complexity and [00:28:00] richness in those idea designs.

So it might look like, okay, we’re going to come up with 30 different fragments of ideas for what this game might be like. Some of them might be mechanical. Some of them might be experienced moments. Some of them might be like, what are we asking players to do in terms of what roles they take on?

So just a little, maybe 30 fragments, and then maybe you condense that down to 15 different one sentence pitches that give you a sense of everything that might go into a game. And then maybe you take those 15 sentences and you pick the best or remix the best from there and say, okay, cool, let’s come up with five one paragraph, slightly more detailed dives into the different games that we could make to accomplish our goals. And maybe from that, you then take two of them and make one page write-ups with outlines for how the game actually might go in terms of turns and rounds and player factions.

And then maybe from there you choose the one that you’re going to take forward. And then you can put that into a more traditional playtesting funnel or a pipeline where you’re like, okay, cool. Now it’s like race to do some play-storming. Maybe you take two different ideas and you play-storm both of those.

So play-storming. I’ll define the term at least as I use it. If play testing is you have a rough draft of the game. You’re bringing it to the table and seeing what works and what doesn’t, [00:29:00] play-storming- you don’t even have that rough draft. You have a bunch of ideas. Some might be on paper, some might live in your head. But you are running it to the extent that you’re talking it through. This might just be with your co-designers or your client, but people are saying what they want to be doing.

And even if it’s like, you can do this with anything from a board game to a role-playing game, to any of these applied games that we’re talking about. But people will say, oh, I want to do this next. And then you can sort of make a note of it and like, oh, do the affordances that I’m designing into the system, into the experience, do they enable that? Do they fight that? Do I want to make sure I enable that because that’s really cool.

Something I’ve done a lot on the consumer game side is run under baked games, either as play storms or play tests, but run it with very strong improvisers and storytellers and see the types of stories they want to tell with that game. And then do the equivalent of like paving the cow pats. Like seeing what they do and saying, cool, how do I scaffold it so even a beginner improviser storyteller can tell the same compelling types of stories?

So to bring it back to stage gate though. So I love, love stage gate in general, because it does the very powerful design thing, where you have to get a ton of ideas down there and then keep advancing and winnowing them from [00:30:00] very basic and simple to more advanced as you condense and remix and rework. Like that’s just beautiful in general. But when you’re working with other collaborators, clients, et cetera, it also is very helpful because even if somebody hasn’t come up with a ton of ideas, maybe cause they haven’t designed a lot of games in the past, or haven’t played a lot of games in the past, they can still express their preferences of, oh, I like what’s going on with these candidates or not these over here. Or I never would’ve thought of this, but what if we remix idea A and idea C into some new cool thing? And it becomes a really great place for these people to still inject their ideas and preferences into the design process. So I, I really like it for that perspective too.

[00:30:33] Jason: Mate, this is so cool. You have no idea how much there’s there for us to explore Randy. I’m just saying it now you’ve got to come back on here and we’ve got to unpack some of this stuff slowly and gently together. But what I got from you just then Randy, is is this idea that as part of our responsibility- so you were talking about the design process, we’re moving into design. Specifically looking at stage gate design and sort of what goes into that, and how you [00:31:00] get these great and requisite games emerging.

But what it is, what that says is there’s a massive design process and a lot of time, energy, effort, and expertise that’s put into the development of these things. And I think I’d really like to call out and explore with you because I mean, we’re here as game designers or as facilitators or experience designers. You know, we have this sense, we understand what goes into building something so that it’s requisite to need.

But maybe people in general, maybe market in general, maybe folks who are listening to this podcast, haven’t really thought about that aspect of things. You know, you often get the phrase of ‘I don’t really like games’. You know, ‘this thing is trivial’ or ‘this idea of play here, but this is serious business that we’re getting into’.

Well, what you sort of highlighted there for me anyway, is the enormous thought, time, energy and effort that goes into the design process before we even get to the playing of the simulation. And there’s something enormously valuable in that. [00:32:00] And it sounds like you spend a lot of time thinking about with your team or individually what’s required to make a game requisite to the task that it’s being designed for.

And that’s probably speaks to the trust piece as well. Like if people are seeing that sort of effort, and the care that being put into that- and your point, if they’re being involved in that co-design process of, ‘do we need to put in this dynamic’, ‘do we need to think about this cohort of people?’ ‘how should we model this particular response from the environment?’ Like if you have people involved in that, then that similarly builds the trust and the engagement and the belief in the game or the object that you’re going to be engaging in, the experience that you’re going to be engaging in. And it leads to that kind of belief that this is a worthy thing to be invested in that’s. Yeah, it’s remarkable, mate. I have so many questions.

[00:32:52] Randy: I can inject a few thoughts there. So I think, I think one of the things you hit on just perfectly there is how it can help build trust and also help elicit better and [00:33:00] better input and collaboration from those clients who might not be game designers. Past game designers, they certainly will be when we’re done with them.

But it’s interesting I’ve had a few clients now that are, I’d say like games curious. You know, they definitely played games, but maybe not designed one. But they’ve heard about something that we’ve designed in the past and so they reach out.

And I had a call with somebody yesterday who’s at a nonprofit, reached out excited about the potential of games, but it was very candid of like, you know, I’m not a game designer. And the first thing I said after was like, I have great news. You don’t have to be a game designer. Game design does not have to be hard. Game design is a subset of experience design. And if you’ve ever planned a party, planned a conference, scheduled a meeting, you are an experience designer.

And so many of those same patterns can be brought and applied to games. That’s sort of one angle of it. Another angle of it is that games is such a broad and nebulous category. And a lot of the patterns in games flow so fluidly to other things, like even like workshop design. It’s not a stark ‘this is a game’, ‘this isn’t a game’, but-

Hey, I think actually Hailey in one of our collaborations a few years back, you know, we started by saying, ‘Hey, look, this is gonna be somewhere on the spectrum of just like traditional [00:34:00] workshop to fully immersive game. And we’re not sure where it’s going to end up, but through the stage gate process, let’s come up with a bunch of different ideas. And some will be more workshop-like, some will be more game-like, all of them will draw on patterns from both disciplines’. And I think that type of framing upfront also helps clients be like, ‘oh yeah, I can bring a lot to this beyond, you know, subject matter and expertise’. Which is really exciting and empowering to see.

I mean, one of the things I love doing, not just in the applied game side but just in my consumer games, is sort of say, ‘how can we empower more people to be game designers?’ Cause I’m a firm believer that like anyone can design a game and the more that we can make tools that lower the friction and the barrier to that, the better.

The other thing I can sort of add to the mix there in terms of how stage gate intersects with some of what you’re talking about Jason, is that a lot of times people come in and they’ve played some games or maybe a lot of games, but in a narrow type of game. Maybe they’ve played tons of board games, but no storytelling games, no LARPs. And so often during that time, and during the early parts of the stage gate, it’s really helpful to provide a survey of like, here’s some really cool and powerful games. If there’s time, maybe we can even play them. But to help them better understand the possible solution space from it being a fairly small and narrow thing to being absolutely [00:35:00] massive. And having so many great, diverse areas of mechanics and affordances to pull on and to incorporate and remix into whatever we’re going to create.

[00:35:08] Jason: That’s so cool. So you’re enabling people to engage with materials in a safe way and put themselves in the shoes of a designer. That’s so cool.

[00:35:17] Hailey: I’m curious about that relationship with the client and the outcomes they’re trying to achieve. And this may even relate to that authenticity and trust issue is; their agendas. Are you mainly working with people who have a sort of pro-social education? You know, enlightenment agenda. Do you ever run into tricky areas about people wanting to influence through the design?

[00:35:40] Randy: I haven’t run into anything particularly sticky. I’ve been lucky to have really wonderful clients, all of whom had altruistic aims. Actually, let me just sort of skim through the past games and whatnot. But I think all of them had a really positive angle to them. I don’t think I would choose to work with any clients who had any sort of malicious goal. I’m luckily in a position where I could say [00:36:00] no to clients or to work. So I’m fortunate there.

[00:36:02] Hailey: Yeah. Nice. I’m wondering what thread to stick on because there’s this whole world to talk about around empowering game designers that we were thinking to talk about, but I feel like there’s more to say about foresight. And I think sort of five threads ago, you were starting to say, “and then the Russians did this” or something, in machine learning president.

And I’m actually really curious about what are some of those emergent outcomes and how do those bleed to those ‘ahas’. And maybe actually drilling it down into how it is that the game generates that penny drop moment that ‘ding!’, you know, that ‘eureka’. And yeah, feel free to share some of those concrete stories about that.

[00:36:43] Randy: Yeah. Well, so much of that is if you get the sort of incentive design right, and the right affordances of the game, people will very quickly start acting like the agents in the system that we’re trying to simulate or represent. And some, sometimes to a scary extent.

So the quick story from the machine learning president game was I think the Russian team started [00:37:00] funneling money through Black Lives Matter to try and pulverise the primary election. And because their goal was not to necessarily win the election, although there’s certain policies that they were trying to influence, but they’re also trying to sow chaos. And so we were seeing them funnel money to Black Lives Matter, which in turn had given the money I think to Elizabeth Warren. I forget the specifics, something like that.

And again, like one of those things that comes as readily apparent in debrief because maybe only a few players even saw that happening during the game, but the debrief is so powerful because that’s where people can sort of share their stories. Share why they made the decisions they did, what the incentives were that led to that, what they hoped to achieve. And also what their learnings were just by observing and participating in the game. So I think that debrief again, it can be so powerful from that perspective.

Another example in the threat cast 2020 game, we saw a couple times where-. So in that game for context real quick, we had five factions, five teams, representing the progressive left, and centrist left, the Trump Republicans, the more traditional centrist Republicans, and then finally the chaos agents. Who were sort of an [00:38:00] amalgam of Russia and China and other folks who, again, were not trying to win the election, but would have benefited from creating a lot of chaos and polarization in the game. And one of the things that was just amazing to watch, time and again, was that the chaos agents and the Trump faction would, it would appear as they were acting in lockstep. And we were sitting, we were in the room. So we’ve run this game digitally- which is a fun topic to talk about too- we first ran this in a conference room. And it looked like there was just deep collusion and coordination between these two teams and we were in the room and there was none of that.

It was just their interventions were so aligned because their incentives were aligned at least the start of the game. And so I think that that goes to sort of talk to what you were just asking about where like, getting the right incentives and having the right affordances will very, very often lead to the behavior that you would expect to convey. Or if there’s an aha moment; the aha moment that you want to have. That’s again maybe more relevant for games that are trying to capture specific dynamics and help people gain intuition for them. The aha moment for like exploring broad and diverse futures, generating those aha moments is often about making sure players are empowered with the right building blocks, that they might be able to connect together in interesting and [00:39:00] novel ways.

And so this sort of goes back to like, how do you build player trust and how you scaffold them and set them up for success? And so, something that I’ve employed in a bunch of games is- so we talked about handouts that have more information than they need. So in games that involve coming up with interventions, something I like to do is have the building blocks of those interventions.

So threat cast 2020 is an intervention about how to sway the election using technology. So we had a one sheet handout that had lots of different types of emerging technologies, ways that you could approach and try and manipulate the election, channels, specific types of voters that you might want to target. And that if a player was otherwise struggling to come up with interesting intervention, they could kind of just sort of pick at random or almost at random and string something together and see, oh, is this interesting? So you might be like, okay, cool. We’re going to use self-driving cars to do some voter suppression. How might we do that? Well, maybe we’re going to, or not self-driving cars, maybe it’s rideshare. So maybe… okay. We’re going to call a bunch of Uber’s and Lyft’s to the like the same critical location in certain voting precincts to create traffic jams and dissuade people from going to the polls. You know, give people a few things to draw on and have, and then they can start connecting in [00:40:00] different ways and filling in the blanks in ways that are really powerful. But give them that building block. And for somebody who’s coming with a ton of context or is super creative and doesn’t need that. They could totally ignore that worksheet and just come up with whatever they want. And that’s fine too.

[00:40:10] Hailey: Yeah.

[00:40:11] Jason: So you’re talking about, if I’m hearing you correctly, you were talking about this sort of idea of, the term you used was scaffolding. You know, providing scaffolding so that people can engage in a particular way, that enables them to participate. What does that sort of look like creating, like what can scaffolding look like? You were saying they’re giving them a set of conceptual tools that they can use as a starter point. But what else does that look like? Like what, how does a designer responsibly scaffold for their participants?

[00:40:38] Randy: Yeah, totally, totally, totally. So I think there’s two main vectors. There’s any materials that you’re giving. Printed materials or digital materials that they have access to. And then separately there’s what are the facilitators doing throughout the game? And so, let’s talk about each in turn.

So the materials that you’re giving them. Giving them enough context so that, even if they’re coming in without any context at all as to the topic being discussed, they can quickly reference and be like, okay, who [00:41:00] is this company, this organization, this industry, whatever. What are the key things to know. To the extent that there are mechanical subsystems that they’re going to be engaging with throughout the game, having a brief overview of those and how they might engage with those. Having super crisp goals are important. Cause again, you know, if you’re staring at a totally blank page saying, ‘I could do anything’, that’s really hard. But again, I guess in a role play example, if you’re just saying like, “Hey, you’re in the center of a town, what do you do?” Is a lot harder question than like, “you’re in a center of town and a dragon is slowly stalking down the main thoroughfare. What do you do?” Suddenly you have a goal, which is like, okay, you know, let’s, let’s handle this dragon. And so I think that the goal does so much to tighten the focus and prevent people from really drowning in the ambiguity of what they possibly could do out of all possible open-ended things.

Another thing on the material side, this starts blurring the line a little bit, is to the extent that the actions they can take can be very clearly detailed in terms of how they’re captured or how they’re conveyed, that can help a lot. So for instance, in the threat cast games, even when we were running it in person, but especially digitally, we were gathering all of their input through Google forms. So each team had their own Google form and,[00:42:00] instead of just having a one big open field of like, what do you do? It was like, okay, what is the specific technology and intervention that you’re doing? Who are you targeting with it? What do you hope to achieve? So that they had to have clarity and that, instead of just saying, like, come up with something, it’s like, come up with something that has these three parts that, you know, can be broken down, that you can reference your sheet for ideas, if you want. And also like secretly also really wonderful because as facilitators, we now have like a spreadsheet, results full of everything that was ever put out that we can then use after debrief when we’re bringing this all together into a report it’s just already all there. Awesome.

So we just talked briefly about like how you can shape the materials and shape the input forms to better capture and support players, and create really legible interfaces, legible affordances. On the facilitator side, there’s a ton you can do from how you explain the rules. I love, I try to make sure that anything that’s really important gets brought up vocally a couple of times. And it’s hopefully also in the materials too. I think having a very tight feedback loop so that when players take an action, they know that that action had an effect. Or if it failed spectacular, they know that it was at least heard by the facilitators and could have had an effect. I think that’s one of those [00:43:00] things that time and again, we’ve realized. The more we can communicate what players did and what effect it had on the game model, game state, other players, et cetera. That’s really powerful for then them saying, ‘cool, well, I know this thing had an effect, or had a possibility of having an effect, or saw this other team have an effect. Great. Let me try and do more of that or more along those lines.’ Super powerful. And then, again, just having facilitators in the room. Being able to go around, being able to check in on people who might look lost or confused is always crucial to making sure they feel supported. And if they are lost, actually helping them out and helping them find a way through.

[00:43:31] Jason: So much in there, mate. That’s so beautiful. Thank you, Randy.

[00:43:35] Hailey: I think we have time for one more amble exploration off the path here. And I thought I might bring it, bring us home with questions around democratizing this capability. We’ve sort of been talking about it. When we’re talking about democratizing the design process and how it’s possible for folks to be a designer.

And one of the things that’s been animating our whole project with Amble is, you know, foresight was [00:44:00] pioneered by mega corps like Reno, Royal Dutch Shell, or by the US military. And we see it starting to slowly filter out to the margins. But, you know, can’t everybody benefit from foresight to some degree? To a better understanding about where the world is going, and how that affects them and how that affects their decisions, and who they vote for and what they do in their community.

And it still feels like even though we’re moving it out towards the edge, that you’ve got to be kind of a clued in person that has the spare time and maybe is an expertise to come and get into one of these rooms and do one of these things. Maybe it’s not mega corps, it’s non-profits now. But you know, we’ve seen things like Thing from the Future, which you’ve mentioned before, which is a deck of cards that allows you to brainstorm different possible futures quite easily without a whole lot going on. And I wonder you have-

[00:44:49] Jason: or microscope.

[00:44:50] Hailey: Microscope, which is the microscope RPG, which we’ve talked about previously. Which is a fantastic epic world-building game that brings in some of the [00:45:00] capabilities that are inherent in foresight; combining pieces and coming up with new possible worlds.

Yeah. I’m wondering if in your practice, Randy, cause I know you’ve done a lot- we haven’t even gotten to talk about Story Synth yet, we’ll probably have to get you back to do that in depth. We’ll put a link to that in the notes. You can make your own stuff on Story Synth. Yeah. What are you doing, Randy, or thinking about in terms of how to get this even more democratized and accessible?

[00:45:24] Randy: Yeah. So as we’ve talked about in the past, I mean, I’m a firm believer that everybody has the capacity to design games. And I think oftentimes the first step on the journey of designing a game is hacking or remixing an existing game. And I think that’s really great because some designers put a lot of thought into designing the initial game. And even if you don’t even fully grok the reason for all those design choices, by starting to play around and even just changing the setting or adding a few rules here or taking away few rules there, and then play testing or play-storming, you can start seeing how those changes affect the game. And if they result in the type of experience design that you want. Even if that experience is just for you and your family, you and your friends to explore some [00:46:00] features yourselves. Or maybe it’s you in a small team at work, rather than running something for the whole company.

And you know, the two games that you both brought up; The Thing from the Future and Microscope are super hackable. Microscope, you can start by hacking by saying, ‘Hey, we actually have a defined beginning and end point. Or maybe a couple of middle points too, based on the timeline that we want to explore’, but then let’s open it up and take it from there. Or The Thing from the Future, you can easily make up your own cards.

You mentioned Story Synth. One of the reasons I made Story Synth is I loved the game For the Queen, which I think you’ve discussed on the show. And so For the Queen, from a materials perspective, is very simple in that you have a handful of instruction cards you read in sequence, and then a bunch of randomized prompts and then a final end card. That’s probably shuffled in the deck somewhere. And so early in the pandemic, so summer 2020, I was really wanting to make games that were inspired by For the Queen. And usually with an extra mechanic or two, but it was just, I was not going to be playtesting with anybody in person anytime soon and playtesting digitally, just wasn’t- I just didn’t have the right tools for that to quickly iterate.

So I quickly designed Story Synth with the goal of making it as easy as possible to quickly [00:47:00] prototype and design those prompt driven games. And so from a designer perspective, you start by copying a Google sheet, which is the template that will power a story synth. And just has rows for some custom options at the top, and then for all of the different cards and prompts, whether they’re ordered or unordered and as many decks as you want. And so edit and you enter all your content. So game design at that point is as easy as fiction writing or even easier than fiction writing – you’re coming up with some prompts. And then you can take the link to that sheet, drop it in StorySynth.org, and it will just generate the game for you. And in fact, it will generate a game long-term, so you can create lots of sessions from that. Or you can share that to beta testers, if you want. And in a session you share that session link with fellow players and everybody sees the same prompt at the same time. It’s like real-time multi player.

And so initially launched it in… I forget when I did the first public launch of Story Synth, it might have been fall 2020. But since then I’ve added a bunch of custom options, a bunch of very different formats. So now there’s a bunch of different types of play involved. But again, the idea was like, make it as easy as possible to remix. This could easily be somebody’s first game that they’re designing. They also don’t need any technical chops. That was important to me cause [00:48:00] I didn’t want people to be limited by knowing, JavaScript or HTML. And so that was very much me trying to, again, lower the bar, make it easy to remix. Cause remix is such an easy start to the game design process. Which by the way, quick shout out; I’ve teamed up with Big Bad Con, which is a west coast storytelling game convention to run a micro grant program.

So we have $30,000 in micro grants available to designers with marginalized identities. You can apply now through probably the end of the spring or, you know, while supplies last. We’re going to get me out a hundred grants of $300 US each. And the application form is pretty short. You could find it by going to BigBadCon.com, there’ll be a link on their homepage to apply. And again, I hope we see a ton of first time designers and I hope to see a bunch of games that deal with foresight too. So if you have ideas please, please apply.

[00:48:46] Jason: We’ll make sure that those links go in the show notes mate.

[00:48:50] Randy: Thank you.

[00:48:50] Hailey: Yeah, just that what you said there really just had me reflecting on something that’s been really coming through for us and our troupe. We are gamers. We like story [00:49:00] games. And something you said about constraining microscope and saying, just set the beginning and the end from the start. It was so powerful because we find ourselves designing sometimes with story gamers in mind because they want options. They want possibilities. They don’t want to be as constrained. And they all say, yeah, constraints are important and they breed creativity. The best games have some constraints in them.

But when you compare that for scaffolding, for non-gamers or something for a workshop context, when you don’t have three hours to story game, you need to dial it down by a factor of 10 sometimes. And I think that’s actually can be quite liberating for someone who is worried about trying to bring gameful elements into their experience design. Maybe there are facilitators that less is most definitely more. And some of the best applied game designers are maybe not the most rabid gaming fans, you know. They can actually, they can really bring it home to more, ‘what is the outcome we’re trying to get?’

And so also, yeah, if you’re a game designer thinking about going for a story synth micro [00:50:00] grant yeah, don’t let imposter syndrome stop you. They should be simple. Just get your idea working in there and give it a red hot go.

[00:50:09] Randy: And that doesn’t mean you have to forget about all those other wonderful ideas, features, mechanics that you might add. Just make sure you track them somewhere in notepads or where else. This is part of the beauty of stage gating. You can use that with clients at big organizations, or you can just use that on your own. I’ve stage gated just my own little hobby projects a bunch. And that way you don’t feel bad about paring down these features that you love. You’ve captured them for some future game, or maybe an expansion for your first game. The faster you can race to a play-storm or a playtest the better. In that you’re going to learn so much from that, that then you can start discarding or adding extra mechanics on. But you know, just getting something in front of players for the first time, even if you’re that player, you learn so much. So much.

[00:50:45] Jason: Thank you, Randy. This one’s been so rich and so enjoyable to be involved in this kind of dialogue. I’m just hearing so much about the fact that everybody can be a game designer. Game design is really important to create the sorts of experiences and outcomes that we want to [00:51:00] power the world by. But the idea is that there are heaps of tools out there that can help anyone get started and it should be something for everybody. Even though there’s a massive responsibility that’s associated with that, it should be something that is put in the hands of the people who are willing to go out there and sorta do it. Yeah, that’s amazing, mate. I appreciate that.

Just out of interest, what are you working on at the moment? Like what’s sort of powering your game design process at the moment. What’s in the works?

[00:51:23] Randy: Oh, I am juggling so many fun projects at the moment. Let’s see. Uh, I’ll just quickly rattle off a few on the serious side.

Well, I don’t know when this is going to air, so I’m not going to give the full specifics, but we’re going to be releasing a game that we’ve worked on with a client around issues facing technology startups and in bigger stage technology companies. And it’s again, runs the intersections of tech and policy. And it is a website game, single-player though you can definitely play it as a team and discuss what options. It’s a little bit choose your own adventure. So that’s coming out.

We’re at the early stages of working on something with the United Nations that I can’t say more about, but I’m very excited about. Again like deep foresight for a specific country, that has a lot of potential. Hoping to be able to share more soon.

And then we’re working on games around trust and [00:52:00] safety and content moderation, because there’s so many thorny issues there. I think that’s a great example of, there’ll be more on the explain that on the explore side. But the idea there being that people who are not familiar with the nuances of trust and safety and content moderation in say, a social media company, it’s very easy to say, ‘oh, why don’t you just do X or Y or Z and just that’ll solve the problem’. And just, there’s so many second order effects to any possible decision. And the idea is here to like, especially for policymakers to potentially play this, to people on the hill in Washington DC and realize, oh wait, there is no single point solution. We need to be careful how we think about this thing. Everything has second order effects and consequences. So, very excited about that.

And then on the consumer side, been really grooving out a game. Working title is called Working the Case. We’ll see if I stick with that. But it’s a 30 minute murder mystery, and this is like, I think another quick example of like the design process in action. I had the idea of making a murder mystery game. I wanted it to be like 30 minutes long and I wanted it centered all on trying to narrow down a list of suspects based on understanding the motivation, the means they had to commit the murder and what window of opportunity they had to commit it. A very common way in detective stories, you’ll see people talk about motive, means, opportunity. [00:53:00] And so I started by prototyping it just in a Google sheet. I was like, cool. I’m just gonna create a grid of motive, means opportunity. And then the list of suspects and we’re going to collectively play the role of like the investigator slash kinda like the writer’s room and see what it looks like if we’re just filling in this grid until we fully filled out this grid and then we know maybe who did it. And then from there I shifted gears. So that was really fun, but it was also one, it can only be played in Google sheets, whereas my hope is that someday this could be played around a table and two, involved a lot of just typing in sheets, which led to a very messy, dense thing. And it also wasn’t a scaffolded for somebody who wasn’t improviser to just come up with ideas. So I switched over to start play testing a card based version in playingcards.io. Highly recommend playingcards.io if you’re designing very simple card and token based games. It is limited in what it can do overall, but if the design space you’re playing in fits with just moving a few cards around a limited field of play, cos you can’t make the board bigger, it is a great way to quickly prototype. There’s some light automation you can build in too. So, immediately I imported a CSV. Just export from a list from Google sheets as a CSV, important into playingcards.io, and suddenly I have my three different [00:54:00] decks. And so I’ve just been grooving on that with some friends. With my wife, I was like, I’ll play it. It’s less than 30 minutes. And you just play a quick burst of game and then I’ll get some ideas. I’ll immediately update the sheet, pull the sheet back into playingcards.io, play another game. So much fun. So anyway, keep an eye out for that, I think it is currently available for play testing. If you check my consumer games website, diageticgames.com. My most recent blog post will have a link to the playtest version of that. So you can playtest it. I also have a form, so if you play tested it, please I’d love to hear feedback. But I’ll keep exploring that. Maybe there’ll be a physical version of that at some point, too.

So that’s what I’m grooving on at the moment.

[00:54:32] Jason: And again, folks, all of these links will be in the show notes.

[00:54:35] Hailey: Yeah. And there’ll be a little lag. So some of the mysterious stuff coming up, may be out by the time we get to air. But just hearing that, it just reminds me. Another designer who’s been influential to me, Steve Dee from Australia says A., your first game is your hardest, and B., game design is like cooking. You don’t discover new ingredients ie, mechanics, you make new recipes. And so just hearing you talk then, it’s [00:55:00] just a lot of, I tried combining and recombining this. And you can see Randy is extraordinarily prolific. He makes a lot of games just for fun, that you can find on StorySynth.Org and on diegeticgames.com.

You don’t have to be that prolific, that comes with just having that muscle memory over time. Yeah, you can just get out there and give it a try. And I think that’s the main message I’d like you to take away is whether you’re just want to design a game for fun, or you’re a facilitator or a team leader, and you want to make things a little bit more gameful, just add one little element from play, from games to that experience.

That has been awesome. Randy, thank you so much for coming on. We’ll definitely have to have you back to explore some of these other topic areas.

[00:55:42] Randy: Well, I’m always happy to come back. This was such a pleasure for me to talk with both of you. It’s been so fun to see Amble in general, grow over the last couple of years, and I’m so excited for the impact that you’re still gonna have going ahead. So this is a pleasure. Come back anytime. Just let me know, say the word and I’m here.

[00:55:56] Hailey: All right. Fantastic. All right, we’ll call it there. And as [00:56:00] always, you can find us on social media at, @TheAmbleStudio on Twitter, Amble Studio on LinkedIn, and amble.studio on the web. If you like what you’re hearing, we’d love it if you bought us a coffee using the donate button on our website.

Thanks so much and bye for now.