Ep. 9 Brooks Brown CEO of Consortium 9

Show Notes

With 20 years of interactive experience spanning website production all the way to festival winning Virtual Reality, I have been able to build my skillset across multiple verticals. Before joining the largest brands in the world, I spent my days and evenings in web production at junior and mid levels, cutting my teeth in how interactive and social media were beginning to form. From there I made my way to the largest properties in the world - Star Wars, Indiana Jones, LEGO, Avatar, and more, with success at every step of the way.

Upon joining Lucasfilm as a writer/producer for StarWars.com, I fell backwards into marketing and social media as they became the craze. Alongside the talented Lucas Online staff, we brought Star Wars into the digital age on Twitter, Facebook, Wikia, and more in an official capacity. After leading a dozen digital marketing campaigns, I lead the team who built the multiple-award-winning LEGO Star Wars III website, which garnered us almost a dozen awards, from a Webby for Online Game of the Year to Game Marketing awards for both family website and community experience. It was also notably the first official deployment of Star Wars content into the cloud, paving the way for the rest of the company.

Then I made the leap to Pandora, and joined Kathy Franklin and the amazing team at Lightstorm as VP of Digital Franchise. There I was able to shepherd the franchise digitally during the bridge period between films, sign some of the largest game deals ever signed, and ultimately make the move after four years to Starbreeze, where I took over the virtual reality development. After two years and a Tribeca Film Festival win, I quit my day job to be a dad, and soon to start my own production company.

https://consortium9.co

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Brooks brown. I don't even know what title to give him at this point. He's done so many incredible things. John and Greg, what are you most interested in learning from Brooks or getting his thoughts on today?

Jon Larson: Oh, I'm really excited about this one. Brooks is just fascinating. Worked for Lucas arts being the age. I am. I was a huge star wars fan. He's also worked with George James Cameron on James Cameron's production company on avatar and he's worked with some fascinating people. He's also, he's doing some amazing stuff in gaming too. I'm really interested in this interview and where he sees the future of that going.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah, I I'm totally fascinated how a seven can have such a cool and fascinating and interesting career arc from, clearly I don't know it didn't, it seems almost random, but obviously, or maybe it's not, maybe it is. I just want to find out like seems really cool. One thing is clear when you, when, how he's done these different things, he's he has to figure it out how to learn what he's doing while he's doing it and get over that, fake it till you make it kind of stuff. So I'm excited to hear that.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. All right. On with the show, welcome back to the show today. We have Brooks brown. He's the CEO of consortium nine Brooks. Welcome to the show.

Brooks Brown: Kevin, it's been some time. Yeah. I'm.

Kevin Horek: Excited to chat with you again and have you on this show, do you maybe want to talk about where you grew up and then get into your career? Because it's really fascinating. Let's talk about some things you've learned along the way.

Brooks Brown: So, I mean, I, it definitely has been, I've had a really weird career. It's hard for me to consolidate it into things without also thinking that maybe I'm just in a coma because it's one thing after another, that kind of is from my childhood and things coming back on me, it's been wild. I started in Colorado, born and raised, and there's no game developers in Colorado. It's not a thing. There were like two or three, a net devil. I was making an MMO. There's a couple that did like work for hire stuff for Sony, but very insular, small groups. Me without a college degree, I was not top of the list for any of them to take on at all. It was a pain and I spent basically five or six years with my brother who also he's an audio guy. He wanted to get into games.

Brooks Brown: We have ever, since were little and we drove to every games conference from 2002 through 2005, like drove to Austin games conference, drove to GDC, tiered at all of them from Denver, which is a fun drive. And, I took my resume and I took my unreal reel that I burned on to CDs and painstakingly paid someone to print on, which was a big deal back then people laugh now when I talk about it and I sorta do too, but it was my brother just same like real and pamphlet of rock around your hand, them out, you talked to recruiters and it was a heartbreaking, awful, wonderful, horrifying experience. I had, I had one recruiter, flatly say that games isn't meant for me and that I should probably just stop trying, which is awesome. That was a thing, especially where like, once we get into it later, like how wrong was that guy?

Brooks Brown: It was, it was a lot. It was motivate you like, no, well, I mean, it broke me for a day or two. I like, I, I literally just put, like, I threw out the rest of my resumes and I went outside and cried as I smoked. Like, it was the hardest thing. Cause it's years of trying to get in and doing anything you can, and it's a nightmare to be Frank. It's just a nightmare. My brother ended up getting the first gig between us and he ended up working at electronic arts in Los Angeles and the recruiter from there who ended up going to Lucas film, she ended up bringing him up to Lucasfilm and he ended up working at Lucas arts in the audio department. And that was awesome. He got to like, he got, he was the first of us to like, make it and be able to hit the studio.

Brooks Brown: We dreamed of working at Lucas arts, where we grew up with like the thing monkey islands, the reason we wanted to make games. I ended up taking a whole bunch of game writing jobs and website production jobs. What production was kind of my personal bread and butter building websites for realtors was where I actually cut my teeth and fan sites for bands. I had a fan, series of fan sites for insane clown posse and a few others. Yeah, no, it was a very different far cry. We're talking about 20 plus years ago, which is wild, but I ended up making my way to San Francisco, a guy I ended up getting to know, thanks to random online interactions with John Davidson, who is the creator of one-up dot com, which was a great game review website. He threw me some game review work. He started a new company, hired me as a production intern for 1150 an hour in San Francisco.

Brooks Brown: I moved on into a four bedroom apartment and I got the back room and I was paying too much for it. In that time I ended up building what I could and my writing portfolio. I ended up finding a way to convince that recruiter at Lucas to hire me into the online group where I joined as a online producer, where I built websites for star wars, which was coolest thing ever. And I got to like write articles. My first, my first article, I pitched that it got picked up and it was wild, pitching it to Pablo a public dog goes down on the story team and kind of weirdly leading the franchise, which to look back on is like obviously his dream. At the time, like I pitched him this idea of doing a civil war letters from the front for the battle of Hoth.

Brooks Brown: It was like a series of letters telling about the battles that were happening on the front lines, but in the style of the old, oh, Betty fit is frigid hair, the droids of freezing, like that kind of thing. It's amazing. I got to have so much fun. I fell backwards into being able to make games, which was really my passion. Ever since unreal came out as an engine on itself, I bought this awful game. I shouldn't say awful adorable game, robo recall robo ball, whatever it was called, not robo recall. This was years ago where it was this game of this robot that rolls around a scifi world. I don't even know if I cared about the game. It came with unreal editor, which was a big deal and a full version of it that I could learn. I bought all the books to learn.

Brooks Brown: This time I just kept practicing and learning how to make levels. Lo and behold, at some point, my boss at Lucas quit and Lucas is very notorious for not necessarily backfilling as long as someone can do the job. I happily took over digital marketing for all of Lucas arts. That's amazing, which I was not qualified to do by any stretch of anyone's imagination and ended up building a total of 18 websites for products while I was there and got a chance to build my first game, which was a website for Lego star wars. I convinced him that, adver gaming was a thing and making games for Lego star wars to sell Lego star wars was the thing we could do. We built this flash-based MMO and it ended up winning a ton of awards. I'm very proud of the team. And that was a great game.

Brooks Brown: I remember playing those games were amazing. Our little website was, an MMO it's instance based at 10 to 20 players, multiplayer games, shooting each other. You could unlock all the characters and switch and swap their bodies. Like it was the full game, but in like a 2d MMO flash thing, that game would be amazing to play now. Oh, they're always fun. They're eternal. That's the fun part is that stuff's always eternal. And I won my Webby. When that happened, the president of Lucas who had Paul Meagan, who ended up becoming the president of epic games during their meteoric rise, offered me my own games team. I got to do that for a year or two before the mouse decided to buy it and canceled the game because that's how that works and it's fine, but I kind of everyone saw this coming and I put my feelers out.

Brooks Brown: One of the people who reached out to me was James Cameron and his production company. They needed someone to kind of take over all of their digital and that's the end game, streaming, social media, all of that. I had been part of the team that created social media for star wars. I had done all this web stuff and game stuff. And, did the first cloud application for Lucas film. I did a whole bunch of different stuff and they grabbed me, pulled me down to Los Angeles. I spent four years working for James Cameron, which was as wonderful and horrifying and everything, as you might expect, like all the stories are true in every way, bad. It's hilarious as a wonderful astonishingly wonderful group of people over there. From there, I ended up getting poached after the fifth time that avatar too was pushed back. I got poached by Starbreeze to run their us operations, which basically was their VR stuff.

Brooks Brown: I'd always wanted to work in VR since forever. I was a backer of Oculus as a big fan of VR is a thing. We launched a ton of stuff from IMAX VR, which I was really excited to be a part of and lead that all the way through to, we did the mummy VR installations. My big by baby that I had grown was this idea that we could do more than just what I called carnival emotions in VR. This is a lot of what we talked about last time I was on Kevin and said this idea of pushing towards real emotions and how people can really connect with each other and derive meaning from digital experiences rather than just the feeling of oh cool. Like, cause I don't like carnival emotions to me are boring. We built this project called hero, which debuted at Sundance and we took Sundance by storm.

Brooks Brown: It was amazing. And then we ended up winning Tribeca. Wow. That's huge is it's one of those things that you don't ever expect when you go into games to have Tribeca film festival to be a thing you can do. Like that's, you assume you've sectioned off that part, that branch of your life, there's a Brooks in another ultimate world. Maybe that maybe does this, but now I'm in games. That's not a thing I can do and turned out not to be the case. And we won. I got to be a Tribeca award-winning director, which is wild. That's amazing though. Congrats on that. That's huge. We want to Lumiere, so this piece here was amazing and it was just this emotional piece. We put you in a corner in Syria and it's not video. It's full realized unreal. We built a 40 by 40 room with everything built out the oil barrels.

Brooks Brown: If you reached out, there was an oil barrel there, things matched textures matched. We made the smell and the humidity match everything to make you feel like you were truly there. It's one of those things that's like when you can actually get a person to completely forget that they're inside of VR, which we're, I'm proud to say. We generally were able to do. You can do things to them emotionally. That that's amazing. I, I don't know if I regret or not, because what the piece does is you see this girl with her dad fixing an engine, you're in a marketplace, there's people all around and then a helicopter comes by and drops a barrel bomb and it blows everyone up and blows you up to. It's actually really a traumatic explosion. You have to go through a burning building to lift rebel off of the girl's arm before she dies.

Brooks Brown: Wow. With the dad screaming, please help me. Please help me. And it's deeply emotional. There's a lot of stuff. We did this terrible thing at the very end where we had the, you literally physically run over to this big pile of cement and rebar and you lift it. We have a game trigger that you lift the bar and lo and behold, the girls free and you get to see that happen. We actually had an actress in there whose hand as you reached in, would reach up and grab yours. People literally collapsed crying, like could not handle doing it. It was overwhelming. I'm really, it was a lot. It was emotionally a lot to put together and to go through that. I spent most of Sundance genuinely in tears because it was just, it was too much. Tribeca was just flatly overwhelming as well. I ended up taking some time off to say the least I left Starbreeze and I wanted to just stay home, be a dad.

Brooks Brown: My son had just been born and I just was like, I needed a break. Right. I spent three years kind of trying to figure out what the hell to do next consulting randomly here and there, random VR stuff did a VR project for Oculus that we probably won't see the light of day. Most recently I got into crypto as a thing because I hate crypto, which sounds weird. Like, I, I love the promise of crypto and the technology. I think the technology is amazing, but it's a lot like my relationship with VR. I, I look at it and I go, oh my God, this tech is amazing. I look around and I go, this is what you're doing with it. Like this is, this it's this is how you've utilized it. We have free to play gaming. This concept of actually having the people who play the most could pay the most and the people who just want to just, anyone can access it, blah.

Brooks Brown: What we've done with the district is perverted it into this weird candy crush nightmare, where it's about user acquisition and churn until people just get out of the game and then your game fails and that's expected and it's this really weird, awful place we've gone with it. I look at VR the same way. It's like, oh, this is all you've done with it. A handful of games are good. The rest of it is what I will avoid some of my more choice words, but with NFTs and crypto it's, I consider it almost even worse. What's the nature of it is the tech underneath allows for a great deal of meaning because we're able to verify things, know, things are accurate, be able to see the underpinnings and the workings of it. The decentralized nature of it means we can actually change how power structures operate in software, let alone how the structures around software operate and the opposite is what we've done.

Brooks Brown: We've consolidated into a handful of marketplaces. Mostly it's kind of scammy and garbage and it's deeply in the gaming sector, paid a wet, deeply, paid a win in a way that it's almost laughable when you start looking into it, how much pay-to-win it is. Like with VR, I kind of stepped back and I went, okay, so what can I do here? That's really weird. I started developing what consortium nine is. We recently got funded, which is fortunate. We'll be doing a big announcement soon about the whole thing, but playing into how can we have games that are flatly free to play, not micro-transactions with tons of weird, oh, I, I paid to speed up or I pay to have vanity items. Because of that, there's this really weird social stigma around, do you own these items or I'm showing off how much money I have.

Brooks Brown: Can we just remove that and get back to what games kind of are supposed to be, which is play and fun. There a way we can do that? I believe we've designed out and figured out a way, but that's its own whole discussion. That's like the short version of my career. Sorry to ramble. I did warn you that I can get going. No, I,

Kevin Horek: I love it. I, I think it's great. The one thing I want to dive deeper into what we just talked about, but the thing that I love about you is you've had to self-teach yourself throughout this and constantly be learning. I think you're a huge inspiration for people that are doing that, but also people that have kind of a nontraditional route, right? Like it's a lot of people are like, well, I took this in university. I ended up at these like big name companies. You kind of went a totally different route and worked at multiple companies that a lot of people, like I said earlier, would dream of working at just one of them. You've worked at many of them and on projects that many of them. What advice do you give to people that, to be that kind of lifelong learner and challenge yourself and pushing yourself forward and kind of being grateful when the success actually starts coming to you?

Brooks Brown: The first thing about all of that is as of now, and this was true five or six years ago, it was less true when I started learning is easy. When I first started there's a 3d buzz was basically the only way you could learn to use unreal, right? I'm not being like exaggerative, there was no online resources that wasn't a thing at all. You you'd have to go to the library or your bookstore and hope they had 3d buzz as a book. And I couldn't afford it. Cause I think it was like 70 bucks or something, which was just an, it was a lot back then for a single book. I, I check it out from the library when I could, when I saw it, if it came in and I'd sit and I do the 12 hour sprints of learning this chapter in this, and now it's one of the things that people don't talk about is the number of tutorials that exist online are not just being done by people who are like new to the industry or like anything like that.

Brooks Brown: I always had this weird stigma in my brain about, oh, if I'm doing these tutorials, it's because I don't know what I'm doing. It's like, no, actually everyone's doing them totally incredibly skilled 3d artists who are masters of Maya are sitting there and doing, duckies tutorials on blender because they're always, everyone's always wanting to learn. It's the norm is the norm to do these. Always be trying, sit down and just make some stuff. There's a filmmaker. I use his personal inspiration and this is gonna sound weird until I finish it. If you've heard of him, his name is Neil Breen, Neil bringing is an extraordinary filmmaker and feel free to go watch a few YouTube videos. Out the other side, I will just say, this guy has a very particular vision. He isn't necessarily skilled at what he does. He has made more movies than any of us.

Brooks Brown: If he's able to do it, what is your problem? Make a thing, go do a thing it's going to suck, but it won't be Neil Breen. So you're fine. Just make a thing. It's the only option when I was running around with my multiplayer CD, my CD with my multiplayer maps on it from unreal and my mutations I had coded and scripted and all that stuff. I had this pit in my stomach that it wasn't super good. And what I didn't realize. As other recruiters have explained to me, especially then, but definitely now like the level of skill that is required to get these jobs is not the high bar. We think it is. We see the final bit of work that these people put out in these extraordinary things. When the final levels in Fortnite, you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. It's like, yes, it's a team of like 150 people at a minimum that are building these.

Brooks Brown: Do they people understand that when you have your thing, when you're building your one man show, so work on it, slowly learn, do things the right way, figure out what your version of the right way is and get building. It's there's nothing wrong with that. The other half of it is I cannot say that I do not also, oh, just sheer networking. This is the humility of it combined with kind of the confidence. It's the confidence in that I did absolutely put the work in on everything I've done. I've done a great deal and I've worked my ass off, but so do a lot of people like I, that doesn't make me special. The, this other thought though, right? It's it depends. I would say it does for me because I care about doing really interesting creative work. I don't want just a job. I want to do something interesting.

Brooks Brown: Right. And for that, yeah, it takes work. You have to be one of the people who can have those conversations, even at the beginning, let alone build stuff or consider how to build stuff. That might be interesting if you're wanting to just work as not to knock candy crush. If you're working to work on something like that, you can get away with, I think less effort in order to be picked up by one of their very junior teams, the high end guys, some of the best in the world. It's one of the fun parts of that. But it's yet again, I've worked hard. I'm very proud of the work I've done. If I didn't have the people around me supporting me as I did that, and that's not just personally, I mean, professionally, the way that jobs have worked and it's not just me, it's everyone in the industry.

Brooks Brown: It's who, there is no such thing as a clean job application. It's very rare that someone comes in out of nowhere and gets a gig. You have to know someone, they have to go, oh, I started a company or, Hey, I was talking to my CEO, how the Starbreeze job, I was telling my CEO. He said, they need a new creative. Who's able to work in a bunch of places. Are you happy on avatar that conversation as a thing wouldn't happen without having that network, without having those people who are able to support each other and then my job to then pay it forward. I'll give an example of that. Which when I was at Lucas, I knew my opportunity when I had my own games team was to bring in people who needed that break the same way John Davidson gave me my first or Chris Bigelow gave me my first and got me in the door at Lucas.

Brooks Brown: I got a really good friend of mine. Now he was a guy named Josh Kolinsky, who I believe was going to be an amazing designer. He was part of what was called the conference association, the conference associates. We are the guys at GDC who walk around with the shirts and say, do you need help? Volunteers? Did you volunteer in order to just get in the door and network? Josh had done this a lot and I really liked him. And I thought he was really bright. So I hired him as a designer. Currently he's on destiny two and he's leading their economy design. It turns out it was a decent pick. I was talking to him and he's like, I'm hiring. He's like, this is my chance to pay it forward. I'm finding CA's and people who need that too. It's like, when you can actually be in that position to continue to bring new people in, to support people who don't have that network to give them that first leg up to be that first connection.

Brooks Brown: That's to me, how you're able to pay that forward and keep it going. It keeps you personally in a place of a bit more humility because you understand that there's a bit of there, but for the grace of God go, I, and every job you get,

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice. It is cool for you to mention that like just the paying it forward because everybody got a break at some point. If you can be that break for somebody else that you legitimately believe in, I do think that's pretty cool that you and other people that are still doing that, especially at these big companies, right.

Brooks Brown: Everyone is like, it's gaming gets a lot of bad rep and it generally deserves it. I'm not going to say that it's not a bunch of bowls. There are a lot of, there's my joke about the me too movement. Someone asked me I was on some other thing. Someone asked me why me too has instruct gaming as hard as it did film. I'm like, because we're the gaming industry is so terrible to women that they just don't join. Like it's so much worse. I believe that still, I think there are companies that are working against it, but it's genuinely a painful place. And it's not just for women. It's for everybody. It's a weird space. The best thing we can do is to always try to push, to have new blood come in new people, to help us new ideas and new values, because that's how you find the next thing that will make you successful.

Brooks Brown: No one ever made a breakout blockbuster hit by doing the same thing everyone else did.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. Fair. No, that's good advice. Interesting. That actually is a good segue into, it seems like you're obviously still doing stuff in tech and graphics and visual, whatever. There's a number of ways we could call it, but you seem to want to almost challenge yourself and reinvent what you're doing in that space. How has that kind of major career, and actually motivated you to do what you're currently about to kind of announce to everybody not on this show? I mean, in the future.

Brooks Brown: Yeah. It's when I was trying to figure out if I was leaving avatar, because that was not an easy decision. I, when I, because you're leaving, what could be and probably will be the largest film series ever with some of the most creative, probably the most interestingly creative people I've ever worked with and smart business people, Kathy Franklin, who's the head of franchise over there is ridiculous. I don't know if I've ever worked for someone better. Her boss, also my boss, John Landau, who is the producer of the films. Like there's a personality type he's got and just being around him, you're able to absorb information. Like it's an insane group. I'm like, but I was not happy because I was never going to be able to put a movie out. A friend of mine, I was talking with him and he said, wherever you end up, just make sure it's a place where no one knows what they're doing, because the only way you're ever happy is if you're solving problems.

Brooks Brown: It was a really weird way of phrasing it to me, but really good advice because it's just accurate. It's less than I really enjoy, this type of game making or this platform or technology. It's the space when something is new, where you're able to actually carve out how the language of a thing can be made. It early days of free to play gaming, the people who were at the forefront of that and pushed it and were most successful, literally shaped all the mechanisms for the rest of everything. There were other mechanisms free to play gaming. Doesn't have to just be the timers that we've got or these weird vanity items. That's what we got because that was what was successful. These are the people who won that battle and that cliche became the standard. This happens with everything with VR, especially. It's one of those things that space is to me, the most interesting and wherever I've been, that's kind of where I've most enjoyed my time.

Brooks Brown: It's finding ways to find technology married to very specific stuff. Now, none of this is stuff I would have realized more than three or four years ago. Why do you say that? Oh, because I didn't have the experience. Someone said to me a long time ago, if what you're meant to do before you're 35, you're wrong. It's actually good advice. It's, it's pretty good advice. I think it's, it definitely was true for me. I thought all I wanted to do was be a creative director of a game, like a single game, control it and run with it. I was brutal trying to aim for that job as hard as I could. As soon as I started, not having it come to life and it was this thing and I was killing myself to get there and I was depressed and it was awful. I kind of just took a step or two back and I went, well, what do I really like?

Brooks Brown: Allowing myself to find new spaces and what those things might be. I was more able to find that no, what I enjoy is helping figure out how new technology can tell stories, how we can find meaning within experiences. It's a little nebulous and tough, but it's been able to help me carve out my niche and everyone has their own, it doesn't have to be this one. It's, everyone's got their own. The only way to get there is to try and fail and I've failed. Very much like I, everything I'm saying that I've done, that's cool. Oh, it is cool. I'm not going to lie, but I'm leaving out. Like all of the stuff that's so f****d. There's a lot of stuff that really sucked. It's a tough road, but it's, if there's a reason we get into the things we do share, can't help it.

Kevin Horek: I think that's actually really good advice in itself. Right. I think people forget, or at least in my experience, when you talk to people, it's they think that like once somebody successful, they're always successful and it doesn't matter if you've done the biggest thing on the planet, you still will fail. Especially if you've done some of the biggest stuff, because it's harder to always reach that pinnacle. Right. Or what's your thoughts around that?

Brooks Brown: I'd say one of the things success does when you have it is you immediately kind of get stuck at that level of the stratosphere, right? You think that you need to belong there or that's where you have to be, or that it's a thing. You don't realize that the success is hyper contingent and genealogical. At some point it's naturally going to Peter out and you've got to do the next thing. If you want to getting stuck in that space is very damaging. I will say. And, and it's tough. It's tough to get out of the reality around any of it is. I make this joke when I go through hiring, now that I will take someone who's actually failed to launch a product or launch product over someone who's never launched anything or someone who's launched something that was easy, right. Because there's a, I won't hire anyone.

Brooks Brown: Who's never been on a failed game team because the first thing that happens to people is they burn out when they failed in games, because they kill themselves for something. They don't realize that is a possibility. They fall out the film, this happens a ton. They have a second that flops and then they can't mentally handle it. They drop out the games is way worse, the burn, because it's a much more abusive, hardline, compartmentalized group effort than film. I think people feel things a lot stronger, but someone who's been through that cycle who's failed and who's felt the pain and still gotten back up. I'll take them on my team any day of the week.

Kevin Horek: No, that's actually really good advice. I'm curious though, do you, or have you re like read a bunch of books that you'd recommend, or it seems like you've learned a lot by kind of trial and error, or maybe you're reading something to actually execute like a tutorial or something, or how have you kind of learned throughout your career?

Brooks Brown: It's, it's been literally just finding information and devouring as fast as I can. Right now. I would just say YouTube is one of the best things when it comes to just flat tutorials. I mean, there's a lot of tutorial sites that you can buy them on. There's a lot of free ones that are great. Again, if you're wanting to get into using unreal, it could not be more simple and epic has launched the unreal learning portal, which I've been using and going back over and it's just to see how it's built and how they put it together. And it's great. They've got a gamified learning system that really does do an excellent job of teaching you how to use it in a way that inside of a few months, you could be up and running and building something. Maybe even sooner than that, outside of that the other part that's really important is it's especially in design, which is where I tend to fancy myself as being part of it's deeply important that you have a well-rounded set of education.

Brooks Brown: There's a reason that a lot of people I know in who, in the design world that didn't go to school for video game design, it's become a thing more and more recently, but some of the top people, there are things, or they have a bachelor's in master's in architecture or philosophy or art history or whatever it may be. Those things are what give them the lens that enables them to create something that's unusual because they have something outside of the space, instead of just repeating, this is how games are made. They're coming to games with ideas about how games could be made, that changes how that's done. I, for me, it's been a combination of critical theory is been a hobby of mine for a very long time. The writers Deleuze watery, Simon Dunn, but Thai they've been a thing I've loved for a very long time.

Brooks Brown: That secondary side, where I'm able to dive into that, think about what makes games meaningful or what meaning actually is, or how it works upon us and how sensations are generated through our core interactions. How I, as my subject, are actually produced through my interactions within the game and my desires as such are produced. The loot loops can be designed in very particular, like these are discussions that I like to have. This rounded side of things means I'm not just talking about all the games that are out there. It's good to have that knowledge and I have a ton of games, but to be able to have the rest of it allows you to make something that's beyond what everyone else is doing.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. I think that's actually really good advice. I want to dive deeper into what you're building now. Do you want to talk about it without kind of whatever you can talk about?

Brooks Brown: Yeah, no. Look, I look at the world of NFTs and I look at the world of crypto and I look at the world of gaming in general, and I see we've kind of hardened ourselves into, we'll say a handful of very specific cliches. If we look back over time, one of the things, the thing that has shaped the way games are designed is literally how we capitalize on them as an investment. The only way that we've designed this way. The game is first hit there in the arcades that they were just free, just fun little table games. The first place we started was actually pong this original game that people didn't even buy. The first games we programmed, it was basically tennis. We were trying to build that and replicate a sport is this first place we started and they loved it. They had fun with it.

Brooks Brown: So they built more. It ended up becoming a thing they could then capitalize and sell. There's a lot of ways they did. I have the original Sears pong system from long ago. I have one on my shelf. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, you need a TV for it to twist its things onto the antenna thing, which I don't actually have anymore, but it's, it, I hope it still works. The, the thing that switched is when went into the arcades, you couldn't have people just play for free. I mean, that was not the quarter pay money. As such game design followed this push and we started doing this thing where it was, a handful of quarters would give you a handful of lives. At some point you die and you'd lose forever. There was no more continues. It didn't matter how many quarters you have, because what they wanted is they wanted you to move on in the next person to start.

Brooks Brown: They wanted people to constantly pump quarters and the arcade machines got very adept at doing this. If you go to arcades, now they are essentially gambling machines trying to take as much money as they can. The, the classic arcade of that I grew up with in the eighties and nineties doesn't really exist anymore in the same way. That shift changed well, then at some point we had the home market, it became this, oh, well, we have a $30 game, $50 games, $60 games. The way that we set up was in comparison to the quarters, they needed to be built differently. They started doing the same thing. We got three lives. And if you survive, you can continue. You die, which is the quarters model. Didn't work for home markets. They started switching it up into being longer games, larger amounts of content. You go back to like old games on the Nintendo, these final fantasy, which was insane concept to have this huge game, that incredibly good seller.

Brooks Brown: It turns out it wasn't the final fantasy they've done quite well with the series. The switch to the $50 model meant that you needed to have tons of content in there. That has kind of gone to its logical conclusion where now we have games, something like I make the jokes, Skyrim comes out and it has a hundred plus hours of content. People aren't satisfied with it for $50. Like the shift is huge. At some point we also end up having free to play, pop up and free to play is a very specific monetization. It's a free, but basically we charge you for little bits of the game. There was a lot of ways that could go where it has landed is speeding the game up and vanity items essentially. Because of that, the way that these games now operate, it's not about even content in the same way.

Brooks Brown: While you have a last of us that is massive and exceptionally expensive with amazingly talented people, working on it, to make these ridiculously brilliant storylines and single story arcs. It's the opposite. Now you have Ginza and impact, which is as much conscience as they can shove in to get you to pump in more money, closer to quarters, but not quite enough. So they're pushing in this other direction. All of these things are falling the capitalization of the player and all of it changes how we play, because I go back to this core idea that play as a thing is actually what people want. My son wants it. He's four. We go outside, we kick a soccer ball. We, we do all kinds of stuff. We have all of these different things happening. If were to step back and look at how gamers are being used and utilized, we don't really play anymore.

Brooks Brown: If you look at sports, look at FIFA, how do they monetize players? They don't like they literally don't. It's literally the only person actually, who's not monetized. Again, FIFA who are, if you're a soccer fan or football, wherever I'm gonna be in the world. If I were to say FIFA decided not to monetize something, the first question out of anyone's mind is why like, Jesus, of all the people they've decided. It's like, they've decided that now they could make an absolute metric ton of money, but they've made choices not to allow MSCI to have golden shoes, for example, or a slightly faster or better clothing. All the clothing is regulated. It's all the same size shoes are the same. You can't wear all these different things in, and it's such a soccer. This is every sport. This is how sports work, because what matters is the player.

Brooks Brown: It's the only group of people who aren't monetized. Now. They make money outside of the game, everywhere players do. Everyone does these games. I won't say FIFA doesn't make money. They do just fine. But, but my question would be, why are we monetizing players in our sports? It's because we started down this road of the only way to monetize our games is to do that. And we've gotten stuck in that. My question would be, is there a way to do it without having the player be the thing we monetize? I believe that there is a way.

Kevin Horek: Got, that's actually quite fascinating because you're right. I'm really curious now to check out what you guys are building when it's ready. The other thing that I'm curious to get your thoughts on then is it seems to me, I used to game a lot as a kid and even into my, early mid kind of late twenties. I find like, just now that life's gotten so busy, like just trying to play casually sometimes is so challenging because I don't remember, the million combo buttons and whatnot. Like, what is your thoughts around that? Do you think.

Brooks Brown: You're spot on? Well, it's the same problem because again, right. I just recently played through three quarters of a Metroid dread, which is amazing. I love Metroid and I love these games, but I'm also a dad. I've got all this stuff. I took of a break and I go back and the controls and abilities are incredibly complex. I have to hold this button to do this while doing this other thing. This other button does a thing. Also the controls aren't exactly, particularly great to be perfectly honest. It's a really weird mix, but that has to be the case because the only way that someone feels their $60 purchase is worthwhile is if by the end of it, they feel they have personally grown in skill and ability and experience. You have to build in a certain level of that for a person to justify this purchase.

Brooks Brown: Now, depending on how long that game is, you can make it insanely long curves. I, my favorite example of this would be world of Warcraft. I went back recently to play Warcraft after like a seven year hiatus. Don't do that. It is lost. It doesn't work because you're talking about 15 years of people learning things and having the game shift over time and adjusting and practicing and skills continually being built up and growing that someone starting from scratch or someone who quits partway through, I can't pick that back up. I have to effectively start from zero and it's necessary because it's how you keep people believing that they're continually moving forward. It's how they stay on the treadmill, which you call it that because people feel like they're moving forward when they're not the way we can do it instead is just allow people to play as they do.

Brooks Brown: There's no need to have that turn towards skill. Have people develop the skills they want because let people play as much as they want. What, what are the reasons stopping this? What's the financial, it's the only thing there. There's a lot of really amazing games that are flatly free that are out there or indie developers who would adore, letting people play their game for free. If they didn't have to, I have to pay for rent and I, I want to have enough money to make my next game. I know I'm not alone in that most indie devs would be very happy to live like that. What if, what if we could change how it's financialized, what if it's not the players? Again, it's keep pushing back to this thing where the play coming first, the player coming first, how do we think through that? Hilariously I've gone down the road in that with crypto and NFTs because they feel like, and they have been used in the same way that we've done everything else that people have come to crypto or people in crypto have been building games based on the very same cliches and standards that we've been subjected to in gaming, but they're adding this extra layer to it, which just kind of makes it even more insidious the idea of having to pay four or $500 to even play a game.

Brooks Brown: How do you even know what you like? Those are your items and your cards like magic, the gathering. I think my favorite, everyone talks about that. Oh, it's just like magic because you have to buy cards. I'm like, I've seen guys in magic tournaments, walk in and buy a brand new deck, like unopened and just sit down and play with that and dominate, like, since it's different, it's designing for play. I think there's a lot of people wanting to do that. I think there's a ways to do it because crypto does a lot of really unique things at a purely technical base level that people haven't really jumped on yet. Not a lot, at least.

Kevin Horek: Do you think part of the reason that hasn't happened in the crypto NFT kind of space is because it's been a lot of kind of technical developers doing a lot of development and we haven't had as many creative people like yourself, actually come up with new ideas and bring new kind of creative ideas to that, or what do you, why do you think it's been kind of how it's gone so far?

Brooks Brown: I tend to think that it's because there's not a lot of people who fill a weird role, which is someone who's part engineer, part designer, or at least has the ability to have a technical conversation NFTs as a thing. Anyone who says NFTs are images is lying. They may not know it, but they are NFTs are just database entries. Now the database is distributed, which is very cool, but there's no such thing as an image on the blockchain, I'm not buying an image. I'm not buying that. The NFT is an entry that points to that item on a centralized server somewhere. The reality of how these things work from a design perspective, don't get talked about properly because at a base level, they're not talking about them properly. Once you actually get into that, where they're actually, oh, this is actually how it functions. Here's how this thing actually works from a bits and bites, perspective.

Brooks Brown: That changes how you handle a lot of it. Again, you have the hyper-technical people who generally grasp it, but they have to utilize metaphors in order to even describe it to mostly business and marketing people who then go, oh, that sounds great. And they dive forward. Games has been fortunate because games being its weird technical slash art form, people who have to build levels myself, this is one of the fortunate things I come from, a coding background, web and server coding on the web stuff. Right. I diving in and doing JavaScript. Isn't a big deal to me. So happens with crypto. That's kind of the, it's not exactly a far cry. If some Java scripts, you can generally do just fine in a lot of this, but because of that, you can start having more interesting conversations. I would say that plus the fact that it is absolutely Marred with get rich, quick schemes and it is difficult not to see that and go, we'll all aim right at that.

Brooks Brown: And I'll make a million dollars. Like I, people do that. There's a lot of people who just don't and are happy to do that. And it's really frustrating. Sure. It doesn't sound like you're motivated by money at all. No, no, you can definitely not definitely say that's not my first thing. Especially with this is a, it's a unique opportunity. If it turns out to be a real thing and I, if we can change and invent a new form of monetization for games, I think there's a lot of power there. The other direction that crypto gaming can go and cause again, it's like free to play. It's like all of these, there's a lot of voices, the play to earn category, which is close to kind of what I'm talking about. It's not really has games that you can earn money through play. Now it's not earn money through play like an e-sport or like a sport.

Brooks Brown: Instead through tapping the right things, like an idle game, you can over time generate a capital that then partially gets split off and sent to you. This is not play to me and idle games or not play. I don't believe at all. The cookie clicker is a joke that's gotten out of hand. The painful part for me is when I see people talking about play to earn as if these games would have anyone playing them, if they didn't pay out a meager living a subsistence living, if everyone, what are the joke I made? If, if tomorrow we actually had an actual universal, basic income and everyone got $5,000 a month. Would anyone play any of these games? The answer? No, like just flatly. No.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. That's interesting. That's totally fascinating.

Brooks Brown: The question is like, how can we make things where people actually want to play them in word? Like sports, like the ways we know actually money can be generated in this world. Can we do that without being hyper exploitative? And I think there's ways.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. No, that's fascinating. I'm curious as we're kind of coming to the end, how do you stay creative on what motivates you and how do you feed that creativity.

Brooks Brown: For me, it's reading and writing about things that don't matter to anyone else, which sounds weird. What do you mean by that? I, I run the world's largest Luiz reading group gills to lose as a critical theory philosopher. He wrote with Felix watery, the capitalism and schizophrenia do all the G of anti Oedipus and a thousand plateaus. He's a prolific author as well. I run the largest reading group for them. My free time, my hobby time is kind of spent doing readings of their books, as well as writing my own about subjects that are, we'll just say up because I don't really care. Like the whole point is to do something that I truly love that lets my passions, play around and get running. What I've found continuously is when I allow that to happen, then it can happen via this. Sometimes it happens in the right games.

Brooks Brown: If I'm playing the right kind of game for awhile, Minecraft was this for me, actually I find my brain kind of gets to hit a Zen place. As it gets there, I'm able to think and rebirth that creative energy and allow it to get started again. It's been very useful for me to do that. I would also say as the boring stuff is eating healthier, helps a great deal. Working out helps a great deal, not a lot, just doing enough. Having that baseline of taking care of yourself gives you a, a different way of handling your own energies. I think that allows you to be more positive with how they're put out into the world.

Kevin Horek: Sure. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. Do you meditate them too? I do. Okay. How have you found that to go?

Brooks Brown: Wonderful. Well, I'm my old joke is if someone demanded that I be religious, I'd say I'm a towel list. The, to me it's that it's Bikram yoga, which I was doing prior to. COVID very difficult during COVID to do yoga, nor do I want to, but it's, anytime you can kind of allow yourself to be doing nothing. Jon Landau who's, incredibly in demand as a human being, he was producer of Titanic and avatar and all the new avatar films and battle angel and a whole bunch of different things. He actually reveled international flights and because you didn't have internet on it. When internet came to international flights, he was actually kind of upset about it because it was the only time where they had, he had an excuse to not talk to anybody and to have his own time entirely. I think we take for granted the idea that we can at any time cut things off.

Brooks Brown: And that includes Reddit. That includes Twitter, these things that ultimately just suck our energies away and ruin our days and allow ourselves to do something that's truly meaningless. For me, I call my readings that they don't produce anything. They're not, I'm not making money off of them. I'm not going to ever sell my books. I don't even know if anyone's ever going to read them. I'm not, I'm doing random art. I'm doing garbage that will never, ever make me a dollar nor do I. It is actual meaningless work. In those times that's where I find my ability to recharge is the best. It's where I really encourage people to be meditation is a meaningless activity. If you're doing meditation. You can be more calm, you're not doing it. Like that's not how that works. It's again getting and allowing yourself to be based in that as a thing, it could be great.

Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's actually really good advice, but we're out of time. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself and any other links you want to mention?

Brooks Brown: Yeah, the easiest thing is if you're wanting to learn more about a delusion lottery, you can search the losing watery, quarantine collective, or on YouTube and Twitter and everything else. Otherwise I've deleted all my social media and I have no interest in anyone following me anywhere.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. No, that's interesting. Great, man. Well, I really appreciate you again, taking the time to chat with me and have a good rest of your day. I look forward to keeping in touch.

Brooks Brown: With you. Well, this is always great. We'll have to do it again soon.

Kevin Horek: Sounds good. Thanks. Bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that?

Jon Larson: Well, that was great. That was awesome. Yeah, it was a really, that was a really great interview. Kevin, you didn't really have to do much work today, which is.

Kevin Horek: Awesome.

Jon Larson: It's always great way to where we have somebody who can, who we can learn so much from one thing he's obviously a lifelong learner. He, he's always trying to learn what's coming up and what you can do to get ahead of that or to use those tools. I'm really interested in what he has coming up.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah, totally. I got to say I I'm excited because, or just, I feel affirmed. I feel more confident in myself when he talked about tutorials and how people who are super skilled. It's highly skilled. People are sitting there doing tutorials because I also feel like a loser when I'm doing the tutorial. So, so I, I really appreciated him, helping me get over that. I think I'm gonna start sharing more of the tutorials that I've done on learner too. Cause that's really cool. I love it.

Jon Larson: Yeah. I'm also, I was also fascinated by his views on NFTs because I'm trying to figure out how those are going to be used going forward and all the ways that people would, will innovate with those. I was really interested in that part of the conversation.