Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] The games that you've worked on have are very meaty projects years long. In the case of Walden, it was 10 years. I believe people interested in creating games probably have a lot of ideas. How would you help them kind of say no to certain things?
Tracy Fullerton: Wow. How to say no. That's such an interesting problem for all of us. Right. First and foremost. Welcome
Nate Kadlac: to the Hey Good Game podcast where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. We just got done chatting with Tracy Fullerton and really impressive conversation. I've thought the dedication to the games that she's been building is extremely inspiring.
Nate Kadlac: And also exhausting in some ways when I think about how long it takes to actually create something of that magnitude. Aaron, what did, you [00:01:00] take away from that conversation?
Aaron Kardell: You know, I think in some of the stories, there was this healthy contrast about when to say no and when to say yes. And on the no side, like really scoping it down on the yes side, especially early in your career, being very open to opportunities.
Aaron Kardell: So I think it's better to hear that from Tracy herself. So onto the podcast.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Kavlak, and I'm here with my cohost, Aaron Cardell. And today we are thrilled to speak with Professor Tracy Fullerton, the creator of Walden, a game. Tracy is an experimental game designer, writer, author, educator, and a director emeritus of the USC Games Program. Her research center, the Game Innovation Lab, has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, Flow, Darfur is Dying.
Nate Kadlac: The Night Journey, who, which includes the incredible artist Bill Viola, [00:02:00] and Walden A Game, a simulation of Henry David Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Walden A Game is the video game representation of Thoreau's experiment. It follows the loose narrative of Thoreau's first year in the woods, with each season holding its own challenges for survival and the possibilities of survival.
Nate Kadlac: for inspiration. I just played this game minutes ago, and it is an absolute delight, Tracy, we are so thrilled that you're here.
Tracy Fullerton: All right. And well, it's my pleasure to be here.
Nate Kadlac: Well, we usually kick things off with what is your favorite game to play?
Tracy Fullerton: You know, obviously an impossible question to really answer it because I'm not like, it's the same as asking, you know, what's your favorite movie?
Tracy Fullerton: Right? What mood are you in?
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. Do you like music?
Tracy Fullerton: Yeah. What's your favorite song? I mean, come on. That's an impossible question to answer. So you kind of have to qualify it by mood, who you're playing it with. It's so qualified, right? So if I'm playing a game with, maybe [00:03:00] with my nieces and nephews, then Super Smash Brothers, right?
Tracy Fullerton: If I'm playing a game quietly by myself, I think I love, you know, sort of beautiful experiences like Journey or The Stanley Parable, right? If I'm thinking about systems, right, I mean, then I would say something like chess. If I'm thinking about cozy, you know, sort of make me feel good games, then I'm thinking about Animal Crossing, right?
Tracy Fullerton: And if I'm thinking about social experiences, then I'm, I'm watching baseball. I don't know. It's, it's an impossible singular answer. It's a range of, of moments and emotions and experiences and I can only answer it. In the, in that way,
Nate Kadlac: well, that is the best answer I've heard.
Tracy Fullerton: It's like, you know, maybe some people come up with their favorite game of all time, their obsessive favorite game of all time.
Tracy Fullerton: Right. But [00:04:00] it's an honest answer at least.
Nate Kadlac: Well, I'd love to kind of go back real quick and I'm just curious, what got you into games? What really is the start of your story?
Tracy Fullerton: It's such a crazy thing. So I'm a bit older than, I guess, probably people who are listening to this. So when I was growing up, there were no video games.
Tracy Fullerton: The first games that I played were board games, and then they got more and more complicated, interesting, and I got more and more into them like Dungeons and Dragons and things like that. I remember my first experience with digital games was Pong. My parents were. very much early adopters. And we stood in line to get that black and white, you know, Sears and Roebuck's Pong game.
Tracy Fullerton: And I was enthralled by, my dad set it up with, I remember, an A B switch. So the television would go between, you know, watching it, and there was like, you know, three or four channels, you know, three channels plus [00:05:00] PBS. And then there was this pong thing. And so this A B switch was magic to us, that you could flip it into, into this mode where we would lay on our stomachs for hours and play it.
Tracy Fullerton: So it was magical to me. I never really thought, Oh, I'm going to be a game designer. I did a lot of things as a kid. We put on plays, I made super great movies. We built a mail system in our neighborhood where we deliver local mail. And we built a telegraph system in our backyard. You know, we would build things.
Tracy Fullerton: And one of the things we got was, early on, we got a IBM PC Junior. And we started programming. And so, built a game. Right? Built tic tac toe, but I had seen the movie War Games, so we built around it this idea that it was global thermonuclear war, and that if you lost tic tac toe, then it would blow up. So we built a little [00:06:00] image of a So I think for me, games were part of a spectrum of theater and film and comic books that we were writing and, and experiences that we were creating.
Tracy Fullerton: And we had this whole like sort of local group of kids where we were making, we were makers and there wasn't, you know, a lot of opportunity back in the 70s when I was growing up to, there wasn't a lot of other media, right? There was no internet for us to go on. There was, like I say, only three channels and PBS.
Tracy Fullerton: We did go in religiously and watch like Kimba the White Lion and Speed Racer, but there wasn't a lot of distraction, right? So we were making all the time. I think that's how I became a game designer. It's because I, not because of games, it was because of making. It was because we were constantly making things and games were eventually, as I grew up, I actually went to film school and then after film school got a job at an [00:07:00] interactive laser disc, interactive laser disc company, games became the most interesting thing you could make.
Tracy Fullerton: And that's how I got into its most interesting problem solving, most interesting sort of experience creation. And that was the path, the sort of meandering path that led me. To start to understand games as how I could express myself, how I could tell the stories that were important to me, and how I could understand the world in a way that was an inclusive experience, it wasn't just Images on a screen.
Tracy Fullerton: It wasn't just words on a page or images on a page. It was this sort of inclusive, holistic experience that I was creating for other people to engage with and, and build their own experience around. So that's the long answer, I guess, the meandering answer to the meandering path.
Aaron Kardell: This might be a hard [00:08:00] left turn, but we really like to research our guests ahead of time, if I've got this right, Tracy.
Aaron Kardell: I think in the past you were a co founder of Spiderdance, is that right?
Tracy Fullerton: That's right, yes.
Aaron Kardell: And you had a number of games at Spiderdance, but one of them was, well actually all of them appear to like have licensed IP from other parties. As an example, one was NBC's Weakest Link. And I'm just curious, Well, I think for a lot of independent game developers, there's probably just a, seems overwhelming to approach an IP holder and try to license their IP for use in your game.
Aaron Kardell: How did you think about that with maybe you or your co founders?
Tracy Fullerton: Yeah. Okay. So first of all, yeah, so Stephen Hoffman, Naomi Kukubo, Mike Gresh were the co founders of Spire Dance with myself. And we began. That [00:09:00] company based on massively multiplayer technology that, you know, we had built and we actually built some original IP on it.
Tracy Fullerton: But at the time it was really hard to get, you know, a million people together on your original IP unless it was like EverQuest or something. So we thought, well, I built this really interesting technology where we can service all these people at once. You know, what's the best way to get so many people?
Tracy Fullerton: in playing all at once, and it seemed to us because, co watching and playing games was a real phenomenon. Watching television and playing games at the same time was like this real phenomenon. Our idea was, oh, people are watching and playing at the same time, so what if we synchronized those experiences?
Tracy Fullerton: And we made, You know, watching television, this massively social activity. So that was the sort of core for people who aren't familiar with Spider Dance. It was a technology based on a theory of [00:10:00] social, like, massive social media before Facebook and all that. So the idea was we would attract people with the television shows and then, Put up the the URL for the game and then people would go and they'd interact with each other and they'd have this great time and sometimes there'd be prizes and sort of backing off of things like the weakest link for a minute.
Tracy Fullerton: Our very first partner in this was MTV and what was so interesting is we had built this technology and then I heard through the grapevine that MTV was making this show with Amit Zappa where they wanted to do exactly the same thing. They wanted to build a television show with virtual contestants. And, you know, it was called, what's it called, Web Riot, sorry.
Tracy Fullerton: It's been a long time, dig it out in the rain. It's called Web Riot and, you know, there was like these three on screen contestants and then there was millions of other contestants at home who could also win the game. And you just have to understand that this was prior to like, Zoom and web calls and everything.
Tracy Fullerton: And so there was this [00:11:00] idea that at least one of the people would show up on this fancy webcam. And it was crazy for the time. This is back in 1998 when we start building it. So I kept calling, I kept calling the MTV offices. I'm calling and I'm calling and they don't take my call. Cause I'm like nobody.
Tracy Fullerton: And then I go and I happened to speak at a, on a panel at CES and The executive in charge of it was in the audience and he runs up in the line after the talk and he says, we need to talk. And I take his card. I've been calling his office every day. He's like, we need to talk. And I look and I'm like, I know.
Aaron Kardell: And
Tracy Fullerton: so of course, you know, long story short, we did get the contract to build out the, the, Online component to Web Riot. And that was really the way that the company was able to get its legs under it. And then of course we were able [00:12:00] to secure funding and. Go on to work with larger partners like weakest link and folks like NBC and stuff like that.
Tracy Fullerton: So It's a funny thing. You see you're saying, you know, it might be intimidating Well, it's also just hard to get the call
Aaron Kardell: totally
Tracy Fullerton: and you don't know when you don't know when as an indie developer when and where The call might come. So that's a funny story about being ready for the call is call 300 times.
Tracy Fullerton: And then when they come to you, you're ready.
Aaron Kardell: Be persistent and also a little lucky. Yeah.
Tracy Fullerton: Lucky in the end.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah, that's great. Love it.
Nate Kadlac: Well, Tracy, I would love to chat a little bit about this. First, the Walden game, Walden, a game. And, you know, I downloaded it myself. I was playing it. It really just reminded me, kind of had this [00:13:00] nostalgic feeling of playing mist back in the day a little bit.
Nate Kadlac: And I'm just kind of curious, like how a game like this comes to be and your role in it, and it's just kind of a fascinating little glimpse as a fan of the book as well, like I actually felt that this game made me feel much more. immersed in the story and I took away a lot more than probably like in the few minutes that I played the game than like reading the book.
Nate Kadlac: Like, it just felt like I connected with it much more. Tell me a little bit about the process of creating this game.
Tracy Fullerton: Right. So first of all, it was a long, lengthy labor of love because there's no one who's you're going to pitch this game to who's going to. say I'll give you a bunch of money to make a game about Thoreau.
Tracy Fullerton: It's just not gonna happen, right? Although, ironically, almost 20 years later now, survival games are quite popular. So it's a, it's an ironic thing that back in 2007, when I started making this game, [00:14:00] it was actually the most outrageous thing I could, you know, when people say, well, what are you working on at parties?
Tracy Fullerton: I'm like, well, I'm working about the game about Henry David Thoreau. And people were like, Why? To me, first and foremost, this is a game about time and how we spend our time in life. It's not a game about survival. It's a game about how we thrive versus how we survive. So it has, as a kind of MacGuffin, a survival system.
Tracy Fullerton: And for those who aren't familiar, it's a red herring, right? So it's, it's a red herring that this is a game about survival. And if you play it as a game about survival, you will not necessarily thrive in the game. And if you only played it for a few minutes, you might not have experienced anything I'm talking about.
Tracy Fullerton: So I will tell you that it is a slow unfold. And basically this is a game. [00:15:00] Where you first go out and you survive in the woods, but there are turning points where you start to understand that you are there for other reasons. Thoreau did not go out to the woods to prove that he could live in the woods.
Tracy Fullerton: He knew he could live in the woods. By the way, it was only two miles from his house, so. He went out to the woods to, as he says, reduce life to its sort of simplest form. And see what else. there was to discover. So yeah, we're surviving, but if we put all this effort into surviving and then building a bigger cabin and get a fancier fishing pole and all this like tacking up as we do in our survival games, we're going to miss the point.
Tracy Fullerton: So this is basically a game about a particular kind of exploration, an exploration of the soul. Not, you know, you can explore this whole woods. There's a great [00:16:00] huge woods to explore in the game. But what you wind up finding if you do that exploration is this connection of the human soul to nature. And our woods change subtly day to day in the game.
Tracy Fullerton: It changes over season to season. There are eight seasons in our world because Therodin believed that four seasons were enough. So it's a subtle change, a shift in mindset over the course of the game. And there are ancillary stories that are being told, his relationships with his family, with his mentor, with other writers, with social moments, like the abolitionist movement.
Tracy Fullerton: So there's a lot of other stories that he's related to that are being told throughout this, these eight seasons, this that you spend in the woods. So That's a long way to say that this is an impossible game to pitch for funding. And back in 2007, it was a ridiculous [00:17:00] idea. So we started paper prototyping and then making small digital prototypes.
Tracy Fullerton: And then, Making bare bones 3D prototypes once we sort of figured out the system, the underlying system, and all the elements. And it was about 2013 or 2014, 20, 20, maybe even 2012 where you started seeing grants come out that were speaking to video games. So like the NEA. changed its wording of its media artist grants, which we had gotten a media artist grant for The Night Journey with Bill Viola, but he's an established artist and it was one of, way back in 2004 or 5, that was one of the first media artist grants that the NEA would have ever given to The Night Journey.
Tracy Fullerton: I think it was 2012, 13, somewhere around there, they rewrote their, the verbiage of the call for media artist grants for the National Endowment for the Arts and included video [00:18:00] games. And so of course, my team and I were like, boom, jump on it. And so we applied and got a grant and you know, it was tiny, it's 40, 000, I think if I'm remembering correctly.
Tracy Fullerton: And, that's tiny for anyone who makes video games knows that you're not making a fully immersive 3d world with like six hours of content in it, 40, 000, even on a small team, but we used it to start getting more interest. We got, selected for the. workshop the from the for Sundance workshop for new frontiers and got mentored by a lot of really great other media creators.
Tracy Fullerton: And we also then apply for and got another grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. So that really sort of kickstarted us, we were able to bring some people on just a couple people on, like not completely full time, but like enough time. So we [00:19:00] weren't just doing it in our spare time kind of thing.
Tracy Fullerton: So we had a very small team, but we were able to bring some people on and, able to really start building out. The more media intensive parts of the world because we had a fair idea of the system by the through paper prototyping and, and, and just really rough digital prototyping. And so we were bringing along this very incremental sort of experience producing a game of this scope with limited to no resources.
Tracy Fullerton: And then, you know, just to for the TMI part of it. in 2013, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And had to take some time off and all these things just started coming in and sort of saying, don't make this game and yet I persisted, right? And so, you know, eventually we were able to make the game. We were able to talk some pretty great people into participating with us.
Tracy Fullerton: So Emil Hirsch plays the [00:20:00] voice of Thoreau. And we had Michael Sweet, who's an absolutely brilliant composer and audio designer, do our dynamic audio system and, and composed and then, you know, recorded at, at the Berkeley School of Music. The score, which I think brings the whole thing alive. and you know, really makes it emotional.
Tracy Fullerton: So we had some amazing people along the way, including the folks at the NEH and the NEA and Sundance and our other supporters. So I call it the Tom Sawyer method of producing. It's basically you make the fence look so cool to paint that people come and like, I'll give you an apple to paint part of your fence.
Tracy Fullerton: You're like, bring it on. Right. So that's what we did. And we did it for a decade.
Nate Kadlac: That's an incredible story. Thanks for sharing that. I, looking back at that process, I'm curious, what would you have done differently, if there's anything that stands out from that?
Tracy Fullerton: It's so hard to answer that question because [00:21:00] the right answer, the answer I give my students at the end of the process is scope it down.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah.
Tracy Fullerton: Scope it down, scope it down, and scope it down. Those are all the answers. However, I'm so happy with the way we were able to articulate Thoreau's world in such a deep, rich way. And had we scoped it down, I feel that it would not have been a full vision of his world. I think, honestly, we did the best job we could of articulating this, like, 200 page book in this six hour.
Tracy Fullerton: long experience, it's actually takes about as long to play the game as it does to read the book. And there is about, if you were to go through the, about, I would say maybe half to maybe a little bit more of the book is in the game represented either as a system, [00:22:00] as a piece of media, you know, as a piece of text, like, We are representing the book.
Tracy Fullerton: I feel we did our duty to the book. We did it. And, and had I scoped it down, had I made a little thing about just, you know, surviving in the woods, which is quite frankly, when I see other people who, who've done, you know, like people do at Minecraft and stuff like that. That's what they do. They didn't actually translate the philosophy.
Tracy Fullerton: They just translated. I'm at a pond fishing. We wanted to translate the philosophy and it's hard to scope down. The test of a philosophy, which is what this is. I want to test my philosophy about living simply in life through the seasons of a year. How do you test a philosophy if you don't challenge people to have to live it and discover its nuances?
Tracy Fullerton: If you don't have them go through an emotional arc, of that year, and he was there [00:23:00] for two years, two months, and two days, but he writes the book as over the course of the year, and then he says at the end of it, and the second year was very much like it, so he takes the course of a year as his book ends, and that's what we did too, and there is an arc in the book, it is not really a story, but it is an arc of how a year goes, and it begins in the easiest, most lovely part of the year, you know, in the summer, And it gets harder and harder.
Tracy Fullerton: And, and then of course we come to the spring with the rebirth and the recommitment to the theme. And we had to have that arc. And that meant that this game had to represent this whole year. It had to challenge you to respond as the nature, as nature changed. So scope is the right answer. But it's in this particular case, it is the wrong answer.
Tracy Fullerton: Students do as I say, not as I do.
Aaron Kardell: Love that. I love that. Been very guilty of that on, scoping things over time. It's, such easy advice to give and [00:24:00] so hard to follow sometimes. So appreciate your transparency there. I'm curious just from like a business perspective, obviously it was a journey to get this built.
Aaron Kardell: I'm really curious on the. Pricing strategy. So, you know, I think the world we operate in a lot of it is free games or it's a 99 cent or 299 apps. And then, you know, obviously pretty familiar with 40 to 60 PC and console games, but I see a 9. 99 price. I'm just wondering like, what was your journey to choosing that price?
Aaron Kardell: And, and were you happy with that choice?
Tracy Fullerton: Okay, so you don't know that this is hilarious because the very first price for the game was 18. 45, which is the year that Thorough went to the woods.
Aaron Kardell: Nice.
Tracy Fullerton: And that was on Itch, where they let you price anything. When we went to [00:25:00] PlayStation and Xbox, of course, we had to have the 99 cent ending because they don't allow you to price a game at 18.
Tracy Fullerton: 45. It had to be 1899 and we're like, well, then our joke doesn't work, right? So I'm being flippant. we did do research at the time when we first came out. So we first launched in 2017. There's life before COVID and there's life now and you can't really remember the years before. So we did our research about, you know, what a six hour indie game should cost, and most of them were around between the sort of 14.
Tracy Fullerton: 99 and, and sort of 19. 99. So around, you know, 15 to 20. We thought, okay, we'll be 18. 45. Because it sounded so right to us. So that's what we launched at, 18. 45. And, and that was great for us. And then of course we would go on [00:26:00] sale and we'd see these bumps and listen, there's no marketing math behind our strategy.
Tracy Fullerton: It's literally us going, let's cut the price so more people can have it. So our strategy literally is completely shooting from the hip. We're like, Oh, now all those same games are, you know, nine 99. So let's be that. And it's a few years old. So let's, give people a break. And then if it's 9. 99, we can go on sale all the time.
Tracy Fullerton: And it can be 4. 99. And so now you'll find us on sale a lot at 4. 99. So most people who buy the game will probably get it at 4. 99. And also it just like allows us to be a little bit viable in terms of bringing some money in to, you know, just keep supporting We kept building. So there's the commercial version of the game, and then what you may or may not have noticed is on the website there's a section for teachers and We kept building and so we made [00:27:00] web based versions what we call modules There are five modules that are free for teachers that take excerpts from the game.
Tracy Fullerton: And some of them actually extend, so there's like a whole civil disobedience module that is content that is not, there's some of it is in the game, but we took it a lot further. So there's modules for teachers that have associated curriculum, which was a whole nother development process. We did after we launched the indie game, we wanted to have some revenue.
Tracy Fullerton: So we kept putting it back into this educational version and then just supporting the website for teachers hitting our website costs us money, and we give it away for free. So we just need some money to pay for our website so teachers can continue to use the games. And so that's the entire theory is, what do we need to keep running games?
Tracy Fullerton: You know, upkeep, we just need a cycle [00:28:00] of, of upkeep, you know, so we can keep casting our spells.
Aaron Kardell: Totally makes sense. Well, you can always say you popularized year based pricing before Taylor Swift did. So
Tracy Fullerton: that's hilarious. For those that
Aaron Kardell: don't know, her recent re release of her 1989 album was priced 19. 89.
Tracy Fullerton: I love it. We were cutting edge that way.
Aaron Kardell: That's right. And so it sounds like, you know, you are still seeing new players purchase copies. That's helping pay for server maintenance and the least.
Tracy Fullerton: Yeah. I mean, it's actually a pretty evergreen game to be honest with you. And every time we go on sale, like, We didn't launch on all our platforms all at once.
Tracy Fullerton: That's the other thing. So we launched on itch, then we launched on steam, then we launched on PlayStation, then we launched on X Box during COVID and every time we launch a new platform, it's a whole new set of players. So we actually had a [00:29:00] huge response to the Xbox launch during COVID. It was our biggest launch to date, frankly.
Tracy Fullerton: It was just the right time for a game about, a cozy game about living in the woods because there was that other cozy game about living in the woods. We're living in islands at least. So it was like, it was our biggest launch was Xbox during COVID. So because we've taken, you know, we took so long to launch on each platform.
Tracy Fullerton: There's like a whole new batch of players there who haven't had the game. And it went at Xbox was our virtual worldwide. Well, I guess you count steam and itch, but it was our first worldwide console launch. So there's a ton of international players. We get all these letters saying, When will you be porting the game to German?
Tracy Fullerton: You know, and I'm like Okay, it's me here. It's just me.
Nate Kadlac: How many people have downloaded the game in your estimates?
Tracy Fullerton: That's such a great [00:30:00] question. I have all the sheets and I've never had time to. To add it up. But I mean, during COVID, we also were part of all these free millions have downloaded because we were part of those free packs.
Tracy Fullerton: So answer is millions. I just don't know how. In fact, that's one of the reasons I freaked out recently. There was a whole thing about unity. backpaying and for units, possibly having to back pay for units down. I was like, no,
Tracy Fullerton: they backpedaled it. So it's all okay now.
Nate Kadlac: I
Tracy Fullerton: gave them away to teachers and everyone for free. So, yeah, we, I mean, we, we made the game completely free to teachers and parents educating at home during COVID. That was the commercial game we gave away for free. During that time, we were making the modules. So now they're free and we still offer a discount to [00:31:00] classrooms for the indie game.
Tracy Fullerton: But, now we just basically say, here's the modules for you. If you're teaching with it and that's easier, it's usually easier in a classroom to not have to download and install anything, but yeah, millions of players, honestly, and we get letters. I swear to God, the range of letters are hilarious.
Tracy Fullerton: Everything from really older players who are like, I have never played a game since mist, you know, to bring back to your earlier reference and I've never been interested in playing a game. And this game was so interesting to me. And I now come home every night and look forward to chasing rabbits through the forest and basically living my life in the woods.
Tracy Fullerton: And that's so beautiful. I I've gotten letters from people. It's their first, first person game. That they've ever played. It's so interesting to teach people how to be in an immersive first person [00:32:00] experience. We think, of course, as gamers, that it's completely natural. But it's absurd to think that it's completely natural to be moving in one's feet.
Tracy Fullerton: With four keys and moving one's head around with a mouse. That is not natural. And when you're walking around the world, you don't think like this as you walk. I'm doing this, but of course, in 3d worlds, one can. Move one's head all the way around when walking forwards and backwards. And then you have to break that down and teach it to people who've never done it before.
Tracy Fullerton: And it's just fascinating. by the way, this is a part of my, the journey with Night Journey as well, is teaching folks at art galleries who may or may not have ever played a first person experience. How to navigate in a world, and in that case, in the Night Journey, it's a very surreal world with very few visual landmarks.
Tracy Fullerton: So, that one was crazy to have to teach [00:33:00] new players how to navigate a 3D immersive experience, right? So we get letters all the way from, this is the first game I've played since Myst, and I love it, and I just reach out and tell you how much I love it, to I love the letters from students, younger people, who are like, we read this book in class and I hated it.
Tracy Fullerton: But then we played the game and now I get it, right? And that speaks to me, right? Because I think this book is about the same things we're wrestling with today. He was writing at a time when life, the speed of life was increasing due to technologies that were taking over, right? So they were dealing with the telegraph, which is like the internet of its time, right?
Tracy Fullerton: They call it the Victorian internet, right? They were dealing with the telegraph and the, and the train, right? And, and sort of cables across the ocean, being able to tell you what was happening in Europe. And so, To those [00:34:00] people, the speed of information was accelerating so fast. So fast. It's the same way we feel today that with, you know, social media, it's just everyone knows everything all at once.
Tracy Fullerton: Boom! Our pods of learning are intersecting from all around the world, and we are influencing each other and changing and learning and growing as a species so much faster, right? Well, that's what he's writing about. And he's writing about, if I slowed it down for a minute, what could I learn? What is essential?
Tracy Fullerton: in this world where things are speeding up so quickly. And I think that's really important for us to think about. And a lot of people, you know, they have, it's like the slow movement. We have slow games. We have slow music. We have slow architecture. We have slow food. People wanting to understand what does it mean to slow our lives down a bit?
Tracy Fullerton: Where are the essentials? [00:35:00] How do we judge? How do we value The essentials. One way to do that is to just strip away the things that are complicating our lives and begin to understand a little bit better what we really need versus what we think we need. So to me, when kids are reading this book in classrooms, you know, they're sort of put off by his, you know, archaic, Long sentences, he has like paragraphs that are sentences, and it's weird because he has paragraphs that are sentences, he also, he's also one of those pithy, quoted guys out there, right?
Tracy Fullerton: So here he is saying simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, and then he's got a paragraph of a sentence, and kids are put off by that. But then, this game allows them to simply drop into his world.
Nate Kadlac: It's different when you're playing the game and having it almost read to you at the same time, like around. So that's, that's really unique. I want to switch gears a little bit. So you had [00:36:00] mentioned a night journey, getting people who are art goers or museum lovers, like introduced to a game like that.
Nate Kadlac: What was the impetus for that game and the challenges there?
Tracy Fullerton: Okay, so first of all, that game is a game that I made with the artist Bill Viola. And that was crea the idea for that game was created by Bill. And he kinda got this, this media arts grant. And he went around and talked to a lot of game designers to try to find a group to collaborate with.
Tracy Fullerton: And, he originally collaborated with a group at Intel, and they kind of wrote a spec for what I, when I got the spec, it was like, I thought was like, you know, mixed with, like, Buddhism. And, When I had a meeting with Bill, I brought some games. I brought, like, I think I brought, like, Ico, as I recall, and, I can't remember what else I brought, but I brought my PlayStation, and I wanted to show him, I was so passionate, I wanted to show him that games could be this beautiful art [00:37:00] form, and that we didn't need to just have it be sort of puzzles.
Tracy Fullerton: visual puzzles, that the experience of the game itself could be expressive, the system could be expressive, right? And we had this conversation, and I'm like playing Ico very passionately. When I look back on it now, I just kind of laugh at myself. But at the end of the conversation, I'll always remember, and he's a really beautiful thinker, and Bill came up to me and he grabbed my shoulders and he said, I love the way you think, and I don't know if this is visual, but sparklers just went off behind me, and that's how I felt when Bill said that to me.
Tracy Fullerton: He got it. Like, he got through my naive, sort of, young passion. He got what I was trying to say. And he related it to his experiences as a young artist working in video. When video was snotted upon, By the, sort of traditional art institution. And the idea of showing [00:38:00] video art in a museum was ridiculous.
Tracy Fullerton: He told me at one point that they used to put the video art back by the bathrooms. So for him, what he saw was a young artist, I'm getting emotional because you know, when you're seen, you feel that way. A young artist trying to express themselves in a field that is not respected. So we worked together for a long time, actually.
Tracy Fullerton: When you're seen, it's very emotional. And working with Bill, so this is before Walden, I had actually had the idea to make Walden before this, back in 2002, when I was traveling, I had written in my journal, I had been visiting the pond, and I said, I want to make a game about this experience, but I don't know how.
Tracy Fullerton: I had written that line in my journal. And then, I met Bill in 2005 and then we started working on The Night Journey and then also was teaching Jenova Chen and working with him on [00:39:00] his games and working on Cloud and Flow. And so all those experiences, by the way, are what built up my confidence to then go try to do Walden.
Tracy Fullerton: But going back to the experience with Bill, it was so interesting because as a game designer, we often start with our goals. We say, we would like the game to be this. And that's what I would try to have those conversations with him. And he would always sort of gently steer the conversation off to these beautiful philosophical discussions and stories and expressions of, and I realized that he was teaching me about his process.
Tracy Fullerton: I was trying to teach him about my process, which I did, but he was teaching me about his process as an artist. The design of the game was this sort of meandering experience where we would make a paper prototype and then come and have a philosophical discussion and then we would make a digital prototype and then [00:40:00] we'd come and have a philosophical and then we come back and forth between the two processes and then the day that we what I would call I was sitting, I remember just sitting in my office and we had been trying to make this sort of explorable video moments.
Tracy Fullerton: And, The mistake we are making, I'll call it, is A equals A. It was very logical that the video would be the thing that you were looking at in the 3D world. And I made a mistake. I typed the wrong thing. And instead of a tree in a tree, these birds came out of a tree. And my heart stopped. And I realized it's not A equals A.
Tracy Fullerton: It's not logic. That poetry is about collision of ideas. And so this was visual poetry, these birds coming out of this tree. And then I said, I went [00:41:00] wild and we started making all these combinations of things. Right. And when Bill came the next time, he hugged me again and he said, we got it. And this was after a long time of discussions.
Tracy Fullerton: And then we went and we started building out the world. we had this huge map of the world and all the ideas that he'd put in on poets that he'd given us to read and we started making these moments. of these collisions between these two worlds. This 3D world is that you're walking through, which is a kind of representation of sort of the edge of night in our lives.
Tracy Fullerton: And then this, these video worlds, these reflections, which are the memories and the kind of the visions and the sort of spiritual world seeping through the quote unquote real world of our lives. And, so yeah, once we had the mechanic, then we could build the, you know, the, the stanzas of the poem, if you will.
Aaron Kardell: So [00:42:00] we've talked a lot about, you know, games you've individually authored, but you've also got a rich history with mentoring students through being a professor and more importantly, the, founding director of the USC games program. What are some of your learnings from mentoring students along their journey?
Tracy Fullerton: So I was the founding director of the, of USC games. which is a cross disciplinary sort of meta program across a number of schools at USC. But I recently, several years ago, passed that on to Danny Bilson. And so I'm Director Emeritus of USC Games. And I very gratefully have passed it on to Danny, who's done a fabulous job, with the program.
Tracy Fullerton: I am focused on the Game Innovation Lab, but also as you're pointing out, kind of more focused on mentoring. I recently, sort of [00:43:00] re took on the core undergraduate game design class, which is called Game Design Workshop. It's, they're together. They were, they came about together, Game Design Workshop.
Tracy Fullerton: So I recently re took over that class after a number of years teaching other classes and kind of, Becoming reinvested in teaching new, young designers the bare bones craft of game design and how to really put yourself into the mindset of designing. rather than the mindset of being a player, which I think are both extraordinarily valuable, by the way.
Tracy Fullerton: And I think that becoming a better player, which we could talk about if we had a lot of time is, it's also a real passion of mine. I actually am just completing a book with Matt Farber about how we play games. It's called the well read game and [00:44:00] it'll be coming out next year from MIT press, but that's a real passion of mine, how we become better players.
Tracy Fullerton: But in my class, it's really focused on how we begin to learn to think like a designer and become a designer, both individually, but also importantly, within teams, how we value the contribution of others and work well with others on this really wonderful complex process. It is that designing an experience for others, designing the potential for others to become playful.
Tracy Fullerton: is so beautiful. It's so rich. I think the best designers are very generous people. And so it's almost like teaching generosity to young people who are coming to college. They're usually freshmen and sophomores come into this class and teaching them about that sense of generosity is really fun for me.
Tracy Fullerton: It's really great. I love [00:45:00] it. So I'm reinvesting in that, that process of early designers.
Aaron Kardell: And, and earlier you mentioned, seemed like your number one, number two, number three, number four, number five rule for students was, scope it down. If you had to pick a number six, what would it be?
Tracy Fullerton: It's not as easy to state.
Tracy Fullerton: Scope is so easy to state, but the number, number six after scope, scope, scope, scope, scope, is I'm trying to come up with the way to word it, but it's focus on the experience. Okay. And many young designers have a passion for a particular game or type of game, and they want to remake that game, but with.
Tracy Fullerton: They want to add a feature or change features, and they're very, very focused on kind of recreating the experience that they had, but they're doing it by looking at the paint job. And my point is, [00:46:00] look at the experience. Look at what happened in your mind, in your heart. What unfolded? To make you love it so much.
Tracy Fullerton: What twists and turns and moments of epiphany unfolded to make you love that experience so much. And if you can articulate that, then you don't need to focus on someone else's paint job. You can get down to the bones. You can get down to what were the rules, what were the sort of elements that led you to have those epiphanies, that led you to have that experience.
Tracy Fullerton: And once you can start to articulate your experience, then you can start to deconstruct those bones. And that's what I'm trying to teach them. I'm trying to teach them that it is all about the experience. That understanding your own experience will lead you to understand better how systems create [00:47:00] experiences.
Nate Kadlac: Such a universal truth, too. Whitney Cummings is a comedian who was asked, Can you learn how to be funny? And she said, Hell yeah! You just have to look at the world with curiosity and just ask yourself what's funny about this or acknowledge the silliness, right? That's the same with design and a lot of things.
Nate Kadlac: I love that. The games that you've worked on have, are very meaty projects, years long. In the case of Walden, it was 10 years, I believe. People interested in creating games probably have a lot of ideas. How would you help them kind of say no to certain things? Like what are the things that they should watch out for?
Nate Kadlac: That is it again, kind of getting back to this curiosity and what drives you and what's your experience and how does someone choose what to work on?
Tracy Fullerton: Wow. How to say no. No. That's such an interesting problem for all of us, right? First and foremost, I don't know that you should say no. So, [00:48:00] especially when you're young, I feel like you should say yes a lot.
Tracy Fullerton: I had some of my best experiences by saying yes to things that I was hesitant about. I, for example, said yes to a game show. I was never a fan of game shows. I said yes to a game show and wound up making one of the projects I'm most proud of in my career called Netwits, which was a really early multiplayer, you know, online multiplayer casual game, like really early.
Tracy Fullerton: There were five people on the internet, so we made a game for them. I love it. I love its style. I love the team. There are still every once in a while I run across some of the prizes that we gave away on eBay. Cause we gave away like a, it was set in the 1950s. So we gave like party lampshades away cause you were the life of the party.
Tracy Fullerton: So you wore it home. It just was. A pleasure, an absolute pleasure and if I had been [00:49:00] in my snotty art student mode, I would have said like, I don't want to make a dame show and I never would have had that experience. So from that, I actually learned say yes, say yes to things that. Maybe, and then once you say yes, throw yourself into it 150%, like, like 300%.
Tracy Fullerton: Throw yourself your whole commitment and every piece of yourself into it and make it full of you. So that's what I say to young people saying yes a lot. And then as you get older, I think. You start to realize you have less time. That's when it's important to start saying no, because you have all these opportunities and I don't know about you, but I'm a person who, I'm like, I'm a person who everything sounds good.
Tracy Fullerton: I'm like, Ooh, that's such a good idea. I want to work on it. Ooh, ooh, it's so cool. So I get overwhelmed because I say yes to too many things. And that's when you have to decide what's your heart's, there's [00:50:00] cool. Ooh, I think it's so cool. And then what's your heart project? What's the project that you need to make?
Tracy Fullerton: And like, for example, Walden was a project I needed to make. At the time that I said yes to Walden, I also was saying yes to a whole bunch of other projects. You see on my website that I did, which were great, but they weren't my heart project. And I probably should have said no to some of them, because I really burned myself out by trying to do a bunch of projects all at once.
Tracy Fullerton: And so that's a lesson that you learn as you get older, which is do the thing that when your time is limited, you don't want to say you didn't do it. If somebody said, okay, you've got until tomorrow to make games, what are the games that you You know, you really want to have had made do those. Don't just do the one.
Tracy Fullerton: Oh, that's so super cool. It's so funny that it does that, you know, we can make a trick of software and it's funny, but that could be fun too. I'm not dissing like super fun tricks of software because some of [00:51:00] them are really great. But for you as a, as a designer, as an artist, you have to live with that, what you spend your time with.
Tracy Fullerton: You know, for me, I had to make a cutoff on, I'd made enough game shows. All of a sudden I made one game show and I threw my heart into it and then everybody wanted me to make game shows. So I made Netwits and then folks at Columbia TriStar asked me to make Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. I was like, okay.
Tracy Fullerton: And then we started a company and we ended up making like Web Riot and you know, game shows basically. And I was like, okay. We're done with this. I really want to go back to my roots and that's when I started the Game Innovation Lab and really started focusing on, on things that I heart games, heart, you know, games I really felt like with the time I had, I have to make these games.
Aaron Kardell: So Tracy, you're the author of Game Design Workshop, a play centric approach to creating innovative games and There was just the 20th anniversary release of this. That's got to be exciting for you. What are, [00:52:00] what are some of the takeaways from that?
Tracy Fullerton: Yeah. So game design workshop was first released in 2004, which is an eternity ago in terms of game design.
Tracy Fullerton: And this year we have just released the 20th anniversary, fifth edition. Of the book, which is core textbook for many introductory game design classes. And for this version, what I really wanted to do was dig into some of the things that I see are difficult for young designers. So similar to what I was talking about before, this idea of the experience goals and specifically the emotional experience goals, I have found over the years that it is difficult for young people.
Tracy Fullerton: to articulate emotional experience goals. So, you know, by that I mean, rather than saying it will be [00:53:00] an immersive world, it's a goal, but it's a kind of a technical goal in a way. Rather than saying that, you might say, for example, players will feel that they are part of an evolving culture. That their choices change the culture of the world.
Tracy Fullerton: Now, this is a artistic goal. We have to figure out what does that mean. Another example is like, player generated content. So, you could say, My pillar is that there will be player generated content. Okay, great. Check it off the box, technical. The folks in technology come to me and they say, We've made it possible for people to upload their pictures.
Tracy Fullerton: Whatever. Of penises, probably. No. But, you know, what if we articulated that differently? What if we said players would feel appreciated for their contributions to the game world? Right? Now, that basically implies that there's player generated content. We're going to contribute, but that there's a sort of a systemic [00:54:00] element to how we appreciate that content.
Tracy Fullerton: And I think it's important to articulate our goals in that way. Because otherwise they just become checkboxes for us to kind of say, click, we did it. But if we say, I'm going to feel a sense of wonder around every corner of the world, that's different than saying, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff in the world to find.
Tracy Fullerton: And, So one of the things I've done in the book is really dive into this idea of setting emotional experience goals and testing. How do you test against those emotional experience goals? So I really sort of blew out that section a lot. I also got contributors who I think are particularly good. at this.
Tracy Fullerton: So I, I have like, for example, a whole article by Bruce Straley that's new about designing the emotional experience goals of The Last of Us and how that game was designed [00:55:00] to meet a particular moment, right? I'm not, you know, for, you know, The two people who haven't either seen it or played it, I'm not going to say it, but we all know what it is, right?
Tracy Fullerton: There's this moment where everything changes in the game. And the entire game was designed so that you feel a certain way until that moment happens. And when that moment happens, you feel completely differently. And you wouldn't feel completely differently If the entire game hadn't been mindfully designed to make you feel one way so that the twist creates that particular moment.
Tracy Fullerton: And so that's what I mean when I say, you know, designing for emotional goals, right? So I've included examples in the book and also a host of new, more diverse design voices. I always take some of the older interviews. I have a lot of interviews with designers. I put them on the website, make those available for everybody.
Tracy Fullerton: And then I bring in new voices. And so [00:56:00] I brought in a lot of new voices and I'm really pleased with that. Yeah, so the book is, is out and I really hope that classes who use the book will, will, upgrade to it because I feel like it does a better job articulating this core idea of setting emotional experience goals and, and designing, your game flow to meet it.
Aaron Kardell: Well, that's, that's great. Yeah. encourage people to go check out the 20th anniversary edition of Tracy's book, Game Design Workshop. Tracy, if people want to find you online, are you okay with that? And where should they look?
Tracy Fullerton: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I get a lot of stuff. And so if I don't respond, first of all, I'm on sabbatical right now, so I don't want to respond to anything.
Tracy Fullerton: So I'm just sailing. And scuba diving and otherwise unreachable. But yeah, I mean, I'm at a Kino Jabber pretty much on most platforms. My website is just Tracy Fullerton. com [00:57:00] and there's links on there to reach me.
Aaron Kardell: Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for being here, Tracy.
Tracy Fullerton: Absolutely. It was my pleasure talking and, yeah, I look forward to, having another conversation.
Aaron Kardell: Absolutely. And, enjoy your sabbatical. Thanks, Tracy.
