02.16 // Tabletop Games Before the Internet… and After // Meguey Baker

In this second episode with game designer and quilt historian Meguey “Mother of the Apocalypse” Baker, Rae dives into the deep connections between game design, graphic design, and the human need for play. Together they explore how games aren’t an escape from reality but a way of understanding it, and why joy, curiosity, and creativity are powerful tools of connection and resistance.

Meguey shares how tabletop RPGs evolved from notebook worlds to online play, how mechanics carry meaning, and why accessible, DIY design matters. Rae and Meg also unpack invisible design in everyday life, color psychology, trend forecasting, and how the internet reshapes who gets to create.

Featuring the co-creator of Apocalypse World and the Powered by the Apocalypse system, this episode is perfect for anyone interested in design, storytelling, or making things that help people connect.

Listen to Type Speaks anywhere you get your podcasts.

What is Type Speaks?

From the subtleties of typography to the emotional impact of color, and the way everyday objects influence our lives, our guests share their unique perspectives on the power of design. Through candid interviews, we’ll get a closer look at the challenges they’ve faced, the breakthroughs they’ve had, and how design is not just about aesthetics, but about problem-solving, communication, and making an impact.

Join host Rae, as Type Speaks aims to inspire, inform, and showcase the voices behind the visuals.

This podcast is supported by WEGL 91.1 FM, Auburn University’s radio station. weglfm.com

Audio Transcript

(0:00:03) Welcome into Type Speaks, the show where I dive into the stories, struggles, and sparks of inspiration behind great design. I'm your host, Rae, and I'm going to be pulling back the curtain on the creative process, but not just the work itself, but the people who make it happen. Each episode, I sit down with a different creative mind to uncover how they think, work, and everything in between. So if you're curious about the why behind design and the stories of the people shaping our world one idea at a time, you're in the right place.

(0:00:50) hi how you doing welcome into type speaks thank you thanks it's a non-determinant episode number good i think that's going to be a running bit maybe love it and i am back with mcgay baker yay in the flesh yes yes i'm
three-dimensional yeah i can see all sides of you now and not through a camera great great but you're gonna see it through a camera if you're watching on wiggle um fm on youtube

(0:01:16) How about that one? Very good. If you're listening, you can check us out on YouTube. Weagle on YouTube. W-E-G-L. 91.1 FM. Or you're listening on Spotify or Apple Music. I know a lot of people are getting off of Spotify, so that's cool, too.
That's fine. It's all good. That's why I kind of want to post on YouTube. Yeah, dude. Because I switched off of Spotify. Yeah. And most people like to get their podcasts from YouTube. Fun fact, if you didn't know. It's true. I want to give the people more...

(0:01:44) variety yeah i couldn't find that word for a second yeah yeah good especially at weagle we have lots of very strong opinions on on music and artists uh rights yeah and what they should be on yes they should be paid so yes so if you didn't listen to our last episode together which you should

(0:02:02) i i agree it was awesome it was so much fun i had a fun time i did it was very fun i loved it um i know my audience is particularly graphic designers yeah but i i think and a lot of other designers love listening to talking to other disciplines yeah so i think if you're like i don't even know anything about game design you don't have to just listen have fun yeah
(0:02:24) I mean, all design references all other design, right? Because we live in a world that is designed, whether we like it or not. I mean, like, I'm looking at so many things in this room right now. Like, someone designed that carpet. Someone designed that little squeezy toy. Someone designed that, like, United States Postal Service plastic corrugated milk plastic thing. Right? They're all designed. Somebody did that. Someone made it.

(0:02:52) in a program and then i got printed and now it's here yep i think it's crazy because i sometimes think about how i'll never be able to find a designer's name off of anything right i get really freaked out about that sometimes yeah and it's also i mean that's a really interesting point especially as it intersects with

(0:03:09) game design and the angle there on the game design that I do tabletop role-playing games we put our names on the cover yeah because usually delivered in a book format but it's really recent that you could get the name of the designer on the box yeah board game I mean you'd have the company and

(0:03:29) yeah maybe but the name of the designer is really new and i think that's a great pivot to recognize yeah not only like there is a person who's designed the game but like there's someone who's designed the graphics for the game because that's huge that's a make or break it's like for a long time we knew that on books it was like written by john doe illustrated by jane doe yep you know yeah

(0:03:55) like we've had that so why don't we put on everything oh yeah this bear was designed the the 3d model was probably designed uh-huh and the pattern was made and it was now mass produced in a factory right and maybe taiwan yep and now it's here and the best we get the you know copyright by the company by the company right

(0:04:12) And even the process of trying to discover the people behind design is – it's like a hidden skill set, hidden people who are doing things. And I think – I mean, a nod to something we touched on earlier –

(0:04:32) there's a whole global component here of looking at who is doing the designing, right? And how are they being treated? Are they considered artists? Are they considered craftspeople? Are they considered just workers in a factory? You know, at what point does the design happen? Because there's the design and then there's the implementation of the design. And especially if you think about things like
(0:04:56) clothing it can be designed but then being replicated right how do you follow that pattern to make that design and what's your quality control like and like all these other wild things that when you start like pulling at that thread it just keeps going I know right it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a metaphor in my life that will not leave me alone

(0:05:20) Yes. Well, thread is in almost every culture in some way. I mean, it is in every culture in some way. Whether or not it's metaphorical as the thread of life or in actual clothes, because everyone wears clothes. Right. And even in places where there's not a lot of clothes, there's still thread. And the way that the metaphor of thread and textiles is woven into our lives is absolutely seamless. Mm-hmm.

(0:05:48) See what I did there? Right? Seam. Woven into our lives. Absolutely seamless. I only noticed the seam. Right? Yeah. That was amazing. Because it's just that much of a constant. And, you know, we just don't even realize it. And I think that's a place where design gets in that space also. That we don't think about, I mean, unless you're really into, really digging into book design,

(0:06:17) Like, why is it designed that way? Why? What are the constraints on whatever design you're looking at? Why is it done that way? I also find it really interesting in terms of, do you know what I mean when I say something that is a complete design? Does that make sense to you?

(0:06:38) Like finished? Yeah. Yeah. So, well, but not just a finished design, like if you have an assignment or a project, but things that reach completion and they don't continue forward being designed. The artifact I have in mind on this is a factory fire barrel, right? They reached a point and then they did not continue past that because they reached their sort of

(0:07:06) platonic ideal of that thing yes it's a it's a black I mean it's a not black I mean the one I have is painted black but whatever it's a you know big stainless steel trash can with a lid and and it's got a base that's lifted up off the ground under and then there's like holes in the bottom ring so that you can put whatever is possibly flammable in there up and it won't be resting on the yeah

(0:07:36) And that sort of fire barrel thing for flammable material in an industrial setting hit its design spec in the...
(0:07:48) late 1800s and has not changed like I have artifacts in a museum collection from that time and I could buy the exact same thing now because that design is is finished and I think that's fascinating how that happens with things sometimes like people are going to innovate like oh a new trash can new for this year but also people complain about that right

(0:08:16) it's so that is that can like a lot of the product design it's called industrial design yep we have a wonderful program here i know many people in it um and this is funny i talked about this very recently with a friend where it's like their a lot of their projects are just redesigning very basic things yeah like a teapot and instead of a teapot and a set of teacups that go with it yeah

(0:08:38) And how can they make that improved? It's funny because they like to use the term like humanize. Right. Or like optimize. Right. Which sometimes is a very vague term that can mean a lot of things. Right.

(0:08:56) Yeah. But a lot of them, there is kind of a final. Like a teapot and teacup is kind of the same thing. It's just a thing you drink out of. You need a container that holds hot water. Holds hot water. If it does it, it does it. And you can improve by making the water warmer, keeps it warmer for longer. Or maybe it looks cool. Right. But then you're getting into a subjective space of design, which...

(0:09:19) where you're not, where then we have this whole conversation about form versus function and that's like now you're looking at like the whole bunch of endless conversations that are endless because everyone who enters into that conversation

(0:09:35) has to wrestle with those questions i don't think those are ever solved conversations in the same way that perhaps a functional uh fire bucket in a factory yeah maybe a finished design but the conversations around form versus function we have to wrestle with those right and in our own process as we look at how um we're going to design parts of our world and what we're going to take in in terms of

(0:10:00) designed artifacts so the the question of you know isn't a teapot that's that's new for 2026 is it actually better does it just look different and like then then we get into a whole thing of how like design trends get decided years in advance isn't that freaking wild it's wild a lot of people don't understand how how easy it is to transpot

(0:10:27) yeah yeah there are whole jobs out there in every single discipline you can come across yep that is designed like trend forecasting yes it is bigger now yeah and i think it's a lot faster now yeah um but it's also interesting because that also coincides with uh trend manufacturing
(0:10:47) Right. And then we get into like influencing. Right. And all the way those three things braid together. But go on. No, I was just all people don't understand that a lot of the designs they're getting, like even if it's at Walmart, I'm thinking about TJ Maxx because they're always like that's where all the micro trends end up is there or Target.

(0:11:06) People don't understand how much thought was put into those things. Getting in your brain on whatever site you like to scroll. Getting in your brain. Your friend's wearing it. Favorite celebrity's wearing it. Then ask to show up at your local Target. And then you have to be convinced to buy it somehow. Because all the red at Target. Red is the color that makes you buy things. Along with yellow. Yellow's for sale, though.

(0:11:32) Yeah, yellow is for sale. Red makes you buy things. Well, it creates urgency. Then we're getting into color theory, which is part of design. See how it's all cyclical? It's all connected. It's woven together. Yeah. It's all one big thing. Internet. It's like all just twisted, intertwined. Again, with everything you look at is designed by someone. Yes, indeed. Everything. The interactions you have when you're driving. Yeah.

(0:11:53) Oh my gosh, like getting, oh Lord, getting into like the design of spaces and like civil engineering and the way that, the way you move people through a space, it can be so intentional.

(0:12:09) And I remember talking to people at conventions back before the pandemic, being at conventions, having a whole booth of stuff to market our games, sell our games to people and demo games.

(0:12:25) And having to, like, over and over and over get people to move. Because just in terms of civil engineering and the places we like to stand in relation to other things, I'm like...

(0:12:41) you must not stand here you have to move two feet that way because otherwise you create a wall in front of the booth and like obviously i'm like i'm not articulating it very well but you know what i mean like you have to make there is a comfortable place that you stand in relation to a thing and you have to move into the uncomfortable place if you have ever been to disney

(0:13:07) yeah i'm saying this because they are extremely extremely intricate and and purposeful about their space oh the forced perspective on the entry is like classic both like their forced perspective they have this green that they paint everything they don't want you to look at in yep but particularly the way that they lead you through the parks is
(0:13:29) is so intentional. And that comes back to the idea that a lot of the times good design is invisible. You don't even notice how well you're being led through that park until you're like, wait a minute, I didn't get lost once. Or there's wayfinding elements here and here and here.

(0:13:45) Or after this ride, there's like a food cart right after. Yeah, of course. And I'm hungry because I just waited in line for two hours. Yeah, of course. Or my favorite thing is that there's always like some type of smell. They intentionally pump smells in. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's huge. But also while you're in line, they make sure that you can see shops and see food carts you want to go to because you're waiting. You're thinking in line. You're like, oh, after I'm done with this, I'm going to go get a Mickey plushie.

(0:14:15) Yeah. I mean, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. Design is everywhere. Yeah. That's the main thing. Yeah. Well, and then one of the things that I think is very interesting and working from a museum background, like putting my museum hat on, is like, I think we mentioned this before, talking about what is designed for obsolescence and what is designed for longevity.

(0:14:38) um but and that can be an object but it can also be a place it could also be like ideas um like music does this we're sitting in a place that is a music studio right and like that the hook on a song is designed for longevity so that it stays in your head and you find yourself humming that hook and that's on

(0:15:02) purpose yes which is awesome like this is what musicians should be doing um but it's also really smart design so yeah definitely is here at wiggle anyone fm just a little promo a little promo of uh if you like music you can listen live on a website if you're not in auburn yeah if you're in auburn you can listen to us on your car if you still have that still have a radio in your car whatever

(0:15:28) I don't know. My car still does, personally. I know people here that buy old radios and fix them up because we're nerds like that. That's great. Fixing anything is good. That's amazing. And that's one of the things. This is a way you can figure out how it's designed.

(0:15:45) is if you like get in there and have to fix it you're like all right how how did this go and therefore what gear must be missing and how do i and then you realize how awful a lot of electronics are designed on the insides because you don't see the insides yeah true it's like yeah that's not optimized no but you know but i mean a lot of things only have to be
(0:16:08) optimized for efficiency or efficacy, they don't need to be fully optimized. You can be like, this is good enough and safe enough and secure enough, it'll do the job. I'm thinking right now about all of our electronics cords that come with the little Velcro wrap thingy, which we never use.

(0:16:34) I say I look down where the camera can't see, and there is one attached to a cord that is not wrapped. Yeah, of course. Because it's just there. Yeah. We don't use them, right? Some people do, and there's definitely a purpose for it, time and play.
But most of the time, we're not being, even though there's that bit of design optimization, it goes past functionality for most people who encounter that design. Yeah.

(0:17:05) also cord management is hard true there's so many cords and so little plugs so little plugs so many always in the wrong place and they're always the wrong input and the wrong output and i need a usb-c for this but oh this one's old so it's just a normal usb yeah yeah it's all it's all hard it is true especially when you like old electronics yep so yep ebay's got my back on cables though let me tell you that that's great

(0:17:34) but yeah um do you have a next question i do fabulous i'm gonna blow your nose just inhale okay yeah yeah so i had a few questions that we couldn't get to okay during our actual the first one show yeah because we talked a lot i had fun talking i love talking yeah yeah i'm a huge yapper obviously yeah i joined a radio station

(0:18:00) where all you can do is talk yeah or play music or play music yeah i'm gonna talk about the music okay you know i have a talk show yeah so it's not music it's just me and my friend talking love it um and hearing my my two cents about whatever's going on that's awesome check it out compact discourse great you get it compact disc i love it course beautiful nice pun all right questions sorry i'll move on to the actual question instead of yapping we both have adhd yeah did you notice no it's completely clear

(0:18:30) Okay, I just want to make, so you said that you had it last night, and I was like, I think she knows that I do too. Yeah.

(0:18:37) that you can tell yes also like shout out to my friend jess beck because i've met what you would be if you were in auburn anyway oh yeah me yeah oh like like one of my one of my bonus kids um who's she's at our house often and like there's so much that like the two of you would just get on like a house on fire and you'd also be like oh hello slightly younger me
(0:19:04) it would be really awesome you're because your child is like my youngest my youngest is 20 20 yeah which that means they're only one year below me yeah yeah yeah i can drink alcohol and they can't yeah that's so if you're listening

(0:19:20) about that one cool good enough all right questions sorry yeah so the questions that i wanted to ask during before about design but we got off track or really the answers just went longer yeah is that i wanted to ask because you talked about if you don't know you came to auburn to talk at pebble hill made a talk last night you can watch that live i don't have not alive you can watch the recording of that yeah

(0:19:46) I forget where. You probably can just Google it. But you talked about how much it's changed, like how communities in gaming have changed so much from the internet. Yeah. I take that for granted as someone who's always been on the internet.

(0:20:00) and i encountered tabletop games any game really through the internet like i played my first dnd game on discord yeah i think a lot of people did during quarantine sure yes i was in junior high yeah you know didn't know what i was doing but i ran one

(0:20:17) Rock on. How have you kind of... What major shifts have you seen in the tabletop game design space? Kind of pre-internet, post-internet. Maybe not even then, just maybe in the past 10 years. Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit. Before the internet...

(0:20:37) Tabletop design was very much in notebooks. You're basically just writing notebooks full of world design and world building. So a lot of folks in the, so we're talking like the 80s, really, in the 70s too. But my biggest piece of that would have been throughout the 80s. And really, it's filling notebooks with world building.

(0:21:06) There wasn't a lot of mechanics designs going on that I was aware of that were different because mostly we were just being like, all right, we're going to still make characters like D&D. We're still going to use the sort of basic first, maybe second edition D&D, like dice mechanics.

(0:21:28) But the design was in the world building of like, what do we want the world to look like? My goodness, the like notebooks filled with designing, you know, cities of glass or, you know, cities full of airships or jungle swamps full of dinosaurs, you know, all that sort of design.
(0:21:49) um coming into the world building and a lot of it was like a lot of it was very young right because there's a lot of people who were in high school or middle school or you know whatever and we were there were people who were taking a more historical bent and looking at with a lot more detail at like what would i want to do and how would i do it but also a lot of just fantasy stuff

(0:22:15) Like if I was it's like like Jenny, my DM, when I was a tiny child, you know, we were playing playing D&D and then Star Wars came out and Jenny was like, OK, we're going to.

(0:22:32) Do D&D, but it's going to be Star Wars, right? And so she made this whole Star Wars, our alt-universe Star Wars, where we play that with D&D mechanics. That's cool. That's definitely design. The place where it starts to encounter a shift is first you have to get computers, like home computers coming in, right?

(0:22:53) And we can talk about access. We can talk about who has access in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s and even into the early thousands of who has access to computers. Because that access allows for different levels of, I mean, I guess there's just some different things that computers allow you to do, even if it's just the simplicity of like,

(0:23:20) making a table. And the people who have access are people who have white-collar jobs with moments of time. Their parents have white-collar jobs? Yeah, but even before that, yes. But even before that, you have people who have
white-collar jobs that have a computer, and they have moments of time where they can use that computer for their own projects, right?

(0:23:46) Where they're like, oh, I've got to wait for this report to come back. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on my game idea. Or, you know, I can't do anything until after Bob gets out of his meeting. So I'm just sitting here. I'll work for a bit.

(0:24:02) And then you get into the 90s and there's that same thing with all the bulletin board services that predate the internet by a tiny like snap of time where, okay, I'm just like I'm here staffing this reference desk and nothing is happening because it's a two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon. I guess I'm just going to be on alt.rec.games.frp or whatever.

(0:24:32) That happened. But when we're looking at who has access to do that design, it's a certain demographic, right? That's just the truth of it. Yeah, it is.
(0:24:44) I can spell it out that these are mostly men, mostly white, mostly in white collar jobs. Not exclusively. And then the internet comes along and there's in ways an equal, not an equalizing, but an egalitarianizing. If that's not a word, I just worded it.

(0:25:06) I got it. Okay, cool. It makes sense to me at least. Yeah. I mean, there's more access, right? And now, you know, we live in a place where like PDFs exist and print on demand exists and PayPal and Patreon and like YouTube and a billion other things. So there's ways to get your design out there. So the way I think of it in terms of game design change over time,

(0:25:36) it really has to do with how you can share it. Because if I have my notebook full of world building, the way I can share it is either I'm running a game for you and our two best friends, or I'm maybe handing you the notebook and like, here's some cool things you can see. But it's on such an immediate level, right? And if I'm, you know, especially being a girl growing up in the 70s and 80s, into the 90s, if I'm

(0:26:02) very low lucky like really lucky there's a friendly local game store where i feel able to be but like friendly local game stores don't exist in every friendly local town you know they really don't so that alone is um not a given and then that it is accessible to

(0:26:25) Everyone is not a given. So as we move forward in time and eventually there's the internet and oh my gosh, the expanse of the internet.

(0:26:34) you can talk to people you know that's really cool and suddenly everything else comes along and like file sharing pdfs and things like that like hey check out my game design here you go awesome and now we have communication around the world we have community around the world and suddenly we are like on different podcasts and different video things with the people on the other side of the planet collaborating and talking about games and game design and suddenly i get to do things like

(0:26:58) hire an illustrator from the other side of the planet because like, hey, I saw your art on Instagram or Tumblr or whatever, and would you do some pieces for me? And I'll PayPal you some money.

(0:27:15) How freaking cool. That's amazing. And then that's not even touching into the design space that you mentioned in terms of into the pandemic, where now we have people designing for these other spaces, right? There's now games that are designed to be played just on Discord, you know?
(0:27:35) Super cool. I played one a while back where we're all on Discord. I'm blanking on the name now. Sorry, designer, your game was lovely. And we were all on different parts of the spaceship, right? So the conceit is run a spaceship. Yeah. And we're just using our Discord. That's our internal comms.

(0:27:57) Oh, right. So here I am in engineering and I'm like, hey, this is what's going on right here. It's how it's going. And another screen in the box is NAVS and NAVS is saying in the navigation saying, well, this is this issue.

(0:28:12) Brilliant. Brilliant game. And then there's this door. I think it's called this discord is haunted or maybe this discord has ghosts, which has a wonderful thing where it does with different access and permissions into different parts of the server. Super cool. Yeah. So that immediately reminded me when I was, when I was getting into D and D and playing, um,

(0:28:39) i or at least i definitely copied it from somewhere but i have no idea where probably read it i probably googled how to run dnd over discord and i was excellent 13 probably 14 i was 14 when i was 15 when the i don't know when i were younger doesn't matter i can't remember it's all a blur yeah but we did something similar where it was just if you wanted to talk in a language you had to go to that channel and talk in it

(0:29:01) Because the others wouldn't understand it, but the other person would. But we don't know Draconic. We don't know Eladger and whatever. That's awesome. And that's emergent design that you did instinctually. You're like, we have this tool.
Discord is designed to do these things. We can use them to do this other thing. That's really cool.

(0:29:21) it was fun yeah i don't think we followed any of the right rules that doesn't matter none of us played dnd for the first time and it was awesome yeah of course it was awesome because you just rocked yeah because you picked up a thing you're like you know what we don't know how well but it's not even that it's like you know nobody says we can't so i guess we're gonna yeah you know and that's that's such a powerful place to be because

(0:29:46) I think there's a lot of stuff going on now with people and this this happens regularly there's like an artistic creative cultural cycle that goes

(0:30:00) through this that tells people oh you can't do that you know we are
(0:30:06) I think maybe coming out of it musically, but, and here's a little tangent, right? Because up until the civil rights movement in the 1960s, music was something that everybody made all the time. And then it became so subversive that it was forbidden in public spaces. Separated by types.

(0:30:32) Yeah, separated by types and also forbidden in public spaces. You know, you can't be sitting here with a guitar singing songs because that's subversive. And, you know, you might want to end war and stuff. Oh, God forbid. I know, right? So that put that tanked us into this place.

(0:30:49) of putting music, which I think is an innate human right to expression, into a place of only for people who are skilled in it.

(0:31:07) Is nonsense, I think. I mean, I have great respect for people who put a lot of time and effort into their craft as musicians, as singers, et cetera, et cetera. But I also think that it is a universal, the desire to create music is such a universal thing. And I think that we go through ebbs and flows of that sense of this is for everyone. And game design is the same way and gameplay is the same way.

(0:31:36) We go through this place of here's a thing. Everybody try it. And then everybody does. You're like, oh, this is cool. Like my first, I think I told you this before, you know, playing D&D when I was a little kid, I was seven. Jonna was nine. Jenny was
10. Jenny was our DM. Jonna was her little brother.

(0:31:54) um i was seven my sister was five my sister could barely like she could read but like she could read her character sheet but she couldn't read the books because i think it was a little too much but she knew her character oh yeah of course and of course she could play yeah what i mean we were the perfect dnd group right because jenny

(0:32:17) devoured that book like she really like oh you know and then she got her three best friends to come and play a game with her it rocked I mean we played D&D for years and as we all got older and we like read more and different books came out like the fiend folio came out and deities and demigods came out and we were like just you know just loving all that stuff

(0:32:42) And then, like, keep on the Borderlands. Like, we played through that module, like, five times because why wouldn't you? It's super fun. But there, I think we are now, you know, like, then there was a place of, like, oh, this isn't for everybody.
(0:32:58) And it very much got like into this place of like, oh, this is only one kind of people. Then you have in the late 80s and early, especially the late 80s, where it very much got like, oh, that's for nerds. You know, oh, that's that's for, you know, a social, you know, like all the negative stereotypes that

(0:33:19) The skinny white boys in the basement. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. And if you look at all of the teen movies of the 80s and how horrible they were towards...

(0:33:34) Nerds. Nerds mean. I know. It's just mean. They're just mean to them. And like eventually that changes. But it takes time culturally to like deal with that. Now we have this like so then we went into the like.

(0:33:50) I guess like the late 90s White Wolf, The Empire of the Masquerade was a big like, oh my God, everybody can play because it's not just, it's not just D&D. Now there was all the Vampire of the Masquerade and all the other noun, the gerund games. And a lot of other games hit the market. You know, Cyberpunk and Shadowrun and, you know, Tau's Lanta and Paranoia and Cthulhu and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

(0:34:21) But now I feel like we're back in a place of having to remember that everybody can play. Because I think a lot of the sort of 2010, 2015, even up to now, sort of are hitting of like, again, a thing of...

(0:34:41) I have to sound like that, I have to be like that, I have to do that. And I see that in the design of the physical book too, right? With Apocalypse World, we're launching Apocalypse World 3rd Edition on Monday, and we're still looking like, okay, how DIY can we make this look, right? It's very stripped down because I don't want to ever have the production values on things that I design.

(0:35:08) be out of reach of other people, right? Because that, I want everyone to look at my work and be like, oh, that's awesome. I could do something too, right? Whether it's run a game or write a game or design a book, you know? So that piece where you were like, I don't know, I'm 14, 15 years old and I'm, I don't know what this is, but we're gonna try it. I'm so excited about that being kind of, you know,

(0:35:39) more of what's happening now and that people look at different spaces to do that and just feel more empowered and be like you know what i we're just gonna do it yeah i see it a lot with like younger i've talked about this multiple times in the show but i don't know if i talked about it with you is over the summer i like teach children at art camp
(0:36:02) awesome and encountered like these two little girls that one little girl was obsessed with dragons and like her brother was like running a dnd thing yeah she of course she was like a um what are they called dragonoids dragon dragonborn dragonborns

(0:36:20) yes um and like she was obsessed with it and i just looked at her and i was like you're awesome you have this like these green eyes towards dnd that when i'm like and you've never played it before and you're playing for the first time ever and you're just i'm doing 20 other things trying to prepare for this this class and she's just right next to me knowing that i played dnd just talking about it sure

(0:36:43) and it's it's she's never played it and she just is so into it and then i talk to people obviously here i have a i'm calling him out his name is heath he loves warhammer he plays warhammer he talks about all the time he somehow views dnd he's like intimidated by it he's never played it before right it's but yeah he's almost like

(0:37:02) It's this, this now we're like, Oh, I can't play that because like, Oh, I'm not very good at like voices or I'm not, I'm not good at stories or something like this. And it's like, it's not intimidating. I promise. Yeah. And I want them to come at it. Like the kid did.

(0:37:19) Ah, yes, right? That's the thing. Like, if we can let ourselves respond to that sense of, hey, will you come play with me? Right? If we can let ourselves respond to that, or like, ooh, can I play? And we can let ourselves go into that space. Yeah, just heckin' do it. Like, no one is go, I promise you, I promise you, no one is gonna show up at your table

(0:37:48) and go oh you forgot that rule yeah you're not playing this right i mean okay we all have like the rules lawyers they do exist love you it's valuable but like anyway sometimes i have fun and i want to ask the dm if i can do a sick backflip and you should and yes the answer is yes yeah the answer is yes yes like right now yes do you want it to have consequences

(0:38:14) No. Okay, cool. But I know they're going to have consequences. Well, if you want them to have consequences. At least how my friends will say, Catherine and Emily, who have both run, they'll say yes to lots of things, but it's not going to be easy.
(0:38:28) Yeah, but I would say like if you want it to have consequences, do you want to roll for it? Yeah. Yeah, because then your sick backflip has consequences. And my sick backflip becomes laying on the floor in front of like a king or something. I mean, that's awesome. But like one of the things that's really powerful there that I always like to do and have always liked to do is, you know.

(0:38:50) If you blow the role, I'm always going to put that in your hands. Always. I will never even if I'm doing D&D and I'm like, oh, you got a critical failure. What the hell happens? Because I'm I don't want to do that. Right. I want you to tell me because you're always going to do something more interesting to your character than I am.

(0:39:14) You'll find it funny. I was getting so many critical failures. I played a wild magic sorcerer warlock. I'm not going to go into that. We made it because I roll so many ones that every time I rolled a one, I would wild magic surge. Yeah, why not? So it was out of our hands. Yeah, it just happens. And that was fun. Yeah, totally.
Because it made more sense in our heads. Because the rule doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Well, and I think this is one of the places where as we go through our lives, and this is another thing that happens with game design, is that

(0:39:44) And as young children, really young children, we're living in a world of magical thought. Like for all your listeners out there who are doing early childhood development or childhood psychology, I know exactly what I'm talking about. You know, there's this early childhood phase where, you know, it's just...

(0:40:00) weirdly surreal magical thinking for them all the time then around the time you're seven you go into your teeth change and you go into a very literal um uh categorizing brain phase where you're just like things are right or they're wrong it's you know it's

(0:40:20) fair or it's not fair um all that sort of things and of course we hit them right then with math and spelling and dang what a what a crap thing to do to a kid yeah you know but that's an aside that's a comment on our public education system just wait wait till they're like 10 then they'll just do all of math seamlessly with no pain you're like me and you give your letters stories and emotions and they all have little personalities

(0:40:50) Ah, yeah. You combine those two things. Yep, yep, yep. And that's... Oh, like the thing where like... Synesthesia? Yeah, yeah, that. Yeah. Do you have pareidolia too? Where you see faces everywhere? I...
(0:41:06) I don't know. Maybe. Pareidolia is just a thing that humans do because we like to recognize patterns. But it's what leads us to seeing, like, the Mona Lisa on a potato chip. Yeah. And, like, demons in the woodwork. Yeah, that's why we also are, like, really weird about Uncanny Valley. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because it's just not right. Right. Exactly. All right. Anyway, so then we go from, like...

(0:41:29) you know everything is fanciful to i need there has to be rules and then we go into adolescence where things get kind of mushy and weird and we start seeing nuance and gray areas we go through that and we're like okay now i really need some rules i need to know like what the hell is going on and then we come out of that and now we're like

(0:41:54) in our late teens, and we're like, okay, I kind of have a sense of the world. You feel more normal. Right, and you're like, all right, but by then you've been through the education system that's like, this is how you have to do it, and these are the rules, and this is what you must do. So I feel like for a lot of us, the time from like, you know, like 18, 19, 20 onward, there's a piece that is about

(0:42:21) getting back to a playfulness and recognizing that it's really okay to just make stuff up with friends yeah because once you hit like middle school at least for me maybe not actually for me i was a nerd and i'm still a nerd i still play video games when i can yeah same i'm 54 yes yeah i still play games with my friends i'm playing call cthulhu tomorrow for halloween with my friends sweet and i'm making pasta

(0:42:49) awesome so good but a lot of people it's very much socially like okay now you got to grow up right you can't play pretend anymore you gotta be a little bit more serious about what you're into um i wasn't goodness i was so you know what i will say i like my little pony maybe a little bit too long no no there's no too long but that was socially it was like i totally was getting up into 13 and

(0:43:17) And they were like, what? And you still really like My Little Pony. That's a little, like, that was socially very weird. Right. But who was that hurting? But Rarity is the best pony. Rainbow Dash. I mean, Rainbow Dash is amazing. Rainbow Dash is best pony. Okay, no, but, yes, but see for me. I'm sorry, we're going to argue about.

(0:43:39) just saying i i i agree that objectively rainbow dash is the best pony but for me personally rarity is the best pony now i will say you are wearing purple i'm wearing purple my hair is silver and gray and i have a dyed purple stripe or you know brown and silver or i mean i wish it was silver it's brown and gray and i have purple stripe in my hair that is fairly faded right now but when i put then like when i do it and i trust him like oh my goodness look at me i'm ready your rarity
(0:44:06) Yeah. Yeah. And I love blue and rainbows. Yes. So, okay. So side on that. The thing is collecting, like, even if we go into the archaeological record and we look at what remains in terms of little stone figurines, people have always...

(0:44:26) collected toys, collected things. Like this, this, this phrase about like putting away childish things and this idea of now you must become a man, my son, and all that. It's like so rooted in some wildly strange ideas about how we go through our life and ages. I wanna say, in my bit, I was firstly thinking it's like about work.

(0:44:53) Oh, sure. Yeah. It's like you need to stop playing and go to work. Yeah. But I mean, yes. And even if we go back into like the 1700s, really you don't hit that narrative strongly until the Industrial Revolution. And the reasons because we wind up in the Industrial Revolution and then shortly thereafter we get these things about the body being a machine. Mm.

(0:45:20) You know, and you get this thing like, oh, you have to fuel your body and you have to like all these. Oh, there's some wild, wild how to talk to your children about sex books out there from the like from the late from like mid 1800s in like like 1905. That feels fascinating because they do nothing. Right. But they're they're so in this place of they're like your little machine, you know, and it's.

(0:45:48) It's like that robot movie. Yeah. Everyone remembers but can't know the name of. Right. It's super weird because it moves away from thinking of the body as part of the natural world and into conceiving of the body and all its processes as an analog for the machine. And it separates us as human beings from being part of the natural world to being part of an industrial model, which we are still trying to recover from.

(0:46:18) um but like if we go back in time the idea of like making toys or collecting toys like constantly yeah sure why not of course you're gonna you know not everybody's gonna have but like having things that are beautiful and cute just because yeah

(0:46:42) Ritual object, maybe. Sorry. Could it be a ritual object? You talked about that during your talk, and it's so funny because I'm in an art history about Mesoamerica right now. So many objects are labeled ritual object. And my lovely professor, Dr.
Haley Woodward, I think she's a doctor. Yeah.

(0:47:01) we'll give her the credit credit yeah um she she talks about it where it's like they could have just liked it man they could have just thought it was nice right oh my gosh there's this incredible example of this some like a couple years ago um there was a
(0:47:18) content creator person who put a picture up of a whole bunch of little stuff from an archaeological find outside of it wasn't in Pompeii but it was in that sort of part of the world and they were like ooh this is like the sorceress's

(0:47:42) toolkit and it was so freaking hilarious because if you look at it like um have you ever met someone who does crafts that's just what they this is craft stash that's their purse yeah it's their purse or it's like there's some like broken beads and like there's some jewelry she needed to fix and there's some spare parts and things like that and we're like

(0:48:06) buddy that's just it's so funny have you ever seen a woman purse or any any crafter like anybody who paints lead minifigures i mean they're not led anymore but you know anybody who paints minifigures anybody who's warhammer 40k right anybody who's into gundam right or lego you know if you want to get like broader and broader about it like

(0:48:29) we like stuff yes we really do as people it makes us feel cozy um and so that piece of like the freedom to do the fun thing whether that's playing a game with your friends or watching little pony my little pony friendship is magic or that one specifically oh yeah that's the good one

(0:48:54) or reading comic books right um is another big piece where they're like the um uh sort of social acceptance level of that has shifted back and forth over times y'all might not remember but i remember very much when suddenly

(0:49:18) there would be graphic novels in libraries, in public libraries. Like that came into being. That was not a thing that was acceptable until the 90s. You know, there wasn't a graphic novel section in the libraries.

(0:49:35) Because there weren't enough, first of all, it was a new media. And I feel like there's a way in which role-playing games now are having a bit of a new media thing too, especially coming out of the pandemic of like, oh, hey, wait a minute, we can make up stuff with our friends. And now it's like this incredible, you know, it's like, I don't know, the image that comes to my mind is like,

(0:50:00) some sort of like verdant ground after rain when you have all these little things going out of the ground because there's so many different ones and it's not just like you have dnd or nothing you have like a thousand yeah thousands sections in like their bookstores yeah which is books about different games yeah i'm gonna oh
(0:50:23) Our engineer here at Weagle lovingly referred to this type of game as friend slop. What? Okay, unpack. Games that are specifically made like multiplayer games that are very calm right now. Think about like...

(0:50:39) um if you've heard lethal company sure repo content warning yep yep we came across one that was called rv there yet oh god and you're a family trying to cross the country in an rv oh hold on i've done that i can tell you stories no seriously last year last year um my family and i were gonna my my husband and our three kids uh three adult kids and i rented an rv um to go visit my father who lives in ashville north carolina

(0:51:08) And we set this up a year in advance. I'm like, okay, this is when it's going to work. Perfectly planned. Yep, perfectly planned. This is when we're going to do it. It meant that my youngest had to take some time off from their first semester of college. Whatever. We were all doing it. The exact... We never got there. The exact weekend that we went. Because by the time we were driving south and we were getting there and like, ooh, it's kind of stormy. And then we got into...

(0:51:38) uh where'd we get into we got into rocky bottom tennessee on the way down and all that like we it's like oh there's a tree down on the power lines reroute oh there that whole freaking chunk of the highway is closed i guess we're getting a reroute got a reroute then we stopped and they're like all right we've been rerouted we've been rerouted okay look up here like trying to find a way all right here we can't turn left up there go back well we passed like a parking lot

(0:52:08) We'll go back and park in the parking lot for a minute and try and figure it out. So we're in the parking lot. We're like in some industrial place. We don't know, like the industrial part of town. I'm parked there. You know, I'm, you know, Vincent's navigating. I'm trying to, I'm looking at my phone and I'm seeing like this spider web of red coming out from Asheville, North Carolina. Suddenly there's like a flashlight in my driver's side mirror. And I'm like, what?

(0:52:32) the heck do the police want there's this officer right there and i open my door i'm like hey and he's like hey what's going on i'm like i don't know i'm just trying to go get to this place and it's we keep getting turned around he's like well uh

(0:52:48) That seems like a hard deal, but you can't stay here because you are trespassing at a nuclear power plant. Oh, right. No signage. No anything. No, do not park here. Apparently not this one. It was so wild. So anyway, when you say RV there yet, I have like flashbacks to writing in what we eventually called the cement mixer because it was just going every time we went over a bump.
(0:53:17) Wild times. Anyway, there's a tiny peek into my life. That's great. Yeah. I thought they'd had a lot of stuff for that one. We sure thought that that would have been closed off. Anyway, he was very nice. And he said, go back on up to the Walmart parking lot. The Walmart next to the nuclear power plant. Yeah, exactly. And then the very, very nice firefighters came along and said, no, you're not getting to Asheville except by air. Because the hurricane had hit. Oh.

(0:53:47) oh my god right so the red was just water yeah yeah it was just like road closures it's just like not happening oh my god anyway it was wild yeah so yeah um i'm intrigued by the slop angle um slop is like a term being used a lot online right now yeah it is in my generation yeah kind of i've noticed um referring to stuff that is mass produced

(0:54:14) yeah often now that one is i think is a little bit tongue-in-cheek maybe not because there are a lot more games now that are about being silly with your friends right which i love yeah they're like 10 to 20 bucks yeah and you can spend maybe a week on them yeah and it's worth it it's worth it because maybe i don't want to buy the new battlefield game and get angry with my friends right right right keep dying or no actually because i have to play medic

(0:54:39) you know what maybe that's the reason yeah because no one else will yeah but there's this like with emerging new media like those games existed those games where you could play and have fun with your friends i can think of like battle beast where it's like just a funny game where you're playing for people and it's not super serious you're not really there's not really an objective or there is but it's silly yeah i kind of think of that as also the emerging media along with these actual games because

(0:55:06) I think during the pandemic, we learned we just want to hang out with our friends more. Totally. And when we were removed from that, it made us like, I feel like it made a lot of us panic. Absolutely. It made me panic. Yeah, for sure. As someone I was like, I've never been without peers my age. Right. You know? Yeah. And now I'm in my room for an entire year. Yeah. And it's crazy. It is not how we are evolved to be. Like we are a social mammal. We want to be around other social mammals.
(0:55:34) Even if you're like a really like a by nature, a more introverted person, you want to know there's other people nearby if you need them. You know, we want to know that if we get hurt or get sick or something goes wrong, that we can go help and somebody will be there. Right. We want to know that. We want to know that there's someone we can call on the phone and said, oh, my God.

(0:56:01) This thing just went horrible in my house. Can you come help me? Not even necessarily like friends online that you can say, oh, I'm having a bad day. And they can be like, oh, well, here's a cute cat picture. That helps. But we want to have people around in some capacity. And then like the whole piece of moderating our own sense of like how we refill ourselves of like, are we really super social?

(0:56:29) And that's how we refill? Or can we be really social? And then we just really need some downtime then to like recharge. That's fine. That's personal. But we do like the, there's a reason why we have, and I'm so strongly for prison reform, but this is a piece like cutting people off, cutting a person off from other people is a thing we do as terrible punishment. As torture. Yeah.

(0:56:56) Yeah. It is not something that we do by choice. Yeah. You know, if we are doing it by choice, that's by choice. Like put me in a, in a, like a sensory deprivation tank on my own choice. Then I can leave whenever I want. Yeah. But like the pandemic wasn't like that. And so finding ways, like the incredible drive to connect. Yes.

(0:57:22) by whatever means was safe and possible is a wonderful, like that's a place of huge innovation in design. People going, all right, how are we going to do this?
How are we going to make this work? How are we going to use the tools we have to do the things that we need to feel human? And some of that stuff was amazingly innovative.

(0:57:47) and like continues into innovation that we continue to see in like podcasting equipment right and um recording technology and does you know design in games um for uh different types of interaction and then also your friend slop idea of like recognizing that sure you know

(0:58:15) we want to do like let's all fight the big bad guy or you know me against the world sort of thing but also we just want to hang out right yeah there's a reason jackbox is so freaking popular yes right it's every like hangout for the past few years it's been like oh i got the jackbox nine yeah and i have the jackbox five back and let's do some things let's hang out and laugh right what if we hang out and laugh because i think i mentioned this before you like my
(0:58:41) thing about like if they can keep us inside isolated depressed and consuming the extractive forces that want us to just be little cogs in the machine win yeah right and if we can break through that in any way so that we are you know connected like it and you can just connect with one other person hang out and do anything like hey we're gonna we're gonna like sit quietly together and i'm gonna like write in my notebook and you're gonna

(0:59:11) draw yeah i love parallel play right parallel play is the bomb it's so cool and it so gets into a place of you know and that's why i think that there's like you know i have a little issue with the friend slop thing because of the negative connotation yes and i think it's really easy for ourselves in this epoch um in this time we're in right now to denigrate the things that make us feel good that's putting it back into like

(0:59:41) oh it's it's just like a silly little game with our friends it's friend slop like all these games are coming out but they're kind of silly it's kind of almost reverting back to that game silly you know what i mean in a negative way not like in a i'm having so much fun with my friends because i don't have to think about taxes yeah i'm gonna think about grad school tomorrow

(1:00:00) I'm not going to think about grad school at all. Yahoo! I'm going to, my friend's making, my friend's mom is making me a gluten-free, because I'm
gluten-free. Good. Okay. Pie. Nice. I haven't had pie in years. Oh, that's awesome. I'm so excited for you. I'm excited. Yeah, do you know what kind of pie? It was chocolate. Ha! Ha ha! Yeah. And then she's going to give me a little bit of a pudding. I can see right now you're like, you're excited.

(1:00:24) If you're a person with an allergy, you know this very well. I've been gluten friends since I was six years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember many of the treats I had. Yeah. That were, I call it, me and my mom call it glutenized. Yeah, yes, of course. It's got gluten in it. It's a real thing. You get excited when things. And then you feel crappy. Don't, yeah. You get excited when things don't have gluten in them and you can have them. Yeah, I hear you. And, yeah. Yeah. But I think, and that's the thing of like,

(1:00:53) You know, there's a really interesting thing there, right? Because the excitement you feel to have a treat that you can have in a safe way that won't make you feel terrible. You know, that's a real feeling. And like calling that like food slop would be nice.
(1:01:17) really terribly disrespectful and crappy free slop all right not so cool not such a cool vibe there are other things that i would consider gluten-free slop i mean there and that is a net shore powder where it's all your nutrition in a bowl yeah there i mean there's definitely places but i think that the thing of you know that the the piece back to like why do we use

(1:01:44) derogatory dismissing like you know that's just yeah language to describe something that makes us feel good that is you know you've hit an interesting thing about i notice it in my generation everyone wants to be nonchalant right

(1:02:03) every good luck y'all y'all are super freaking passionate and hyper fixated and i love you for this is the thing i'm here at a radio station yeah well there are people here who are into music heavily yeah they they're they're their front line they're they're at barricade they're they're buying on bandcamp they're interested in smaller artists they're into music because it is music yeah but also sometimes you can't be too into music okay

(1:02:30) You have to be cool about music. You have to be cool about it. Why? Exactly. Why? Because in our heads, you have to like something, but in the right way. You can't be cringe about it. You can't be exuberant about it. Right, right, right. Now, I'm someone who can't control that. Right. I can't control the level of excited I get. Right. It's all or nothing. Right. If I'm excited, I'm excited. If I'm not, I'm not. Right.

(1:02:58) So, but seeing that in my peers, it does affect me where it's like, am I too excited about D&D when my friends are like, yeah, I'll play. Yeah. I mean, part of it is I think that, you know, people get told they're too much. And I think that sucks. Yes.
Right? Because our exuberance as human beings is responsible for all of art ever. Right? And to be...

(1:03:27) to have someone be told that they're too much is asking them to dim their light, is asking them to, you know, hide their joy under a bushel. It's just, it's, oh man, like don't do that to yourself. Don't do that to other people. Just please, like the more, the more,

(1:03:49) the love and harmony and beauty and joy and mercy and compassion we can put in the world and justice, the better, right? There is a caveat, which I understand, which kind of ties back to what we were just talking about a second ago of like how people fill up, right? And if you fill up by being really social and bubbly with other people, that's awesome.
(1:04:14) But if you fill up by like having your quiet time, you know, I think that a lot of what gets put into that sort of you're too much. Don't don't be too enthusiastic about your thing is actually more about like.

(1:04:31) either a timing thing of like recognizing that each that each person has a different like you know the spoon theory yeah a different amount of time that they can do that and like recognizing that if you if you're if we're in sync then we can be

(1:04:47) super enthusiastic and it can be like it can be like this right it's really clicking and it's awesome and fun and if we are not in sync that's gonna feel awkward and bad and i think that's more what's going on you know and when you layer that in with um the intense pressure that all y'all are living under right now which i am

(1:05:14) I'm so in awe. I kid you not. I am so in awe of the way anybody between 15 and 30 is like standing up right now. Because it is really like...

(1:05:34) is calculably measurably hard for you right now yeah you know when i was in high school all we had to deal with was aids so sex was maybe going to kill you and any time now there was going to be nuclear annihilation that's all we had to deal with we still got one of those yeah true but i'll let you decide which one yeah well you know if certain people in certain departments have their

(1:06:02) way with vaccines and et cetera than two furs. But I think it is different now. I think that the, I think that, so that pressure of like, don't be too much is filtered through

(1:06:18) The incredible pressure that you're all under every day all the time. I recently learned this and it's been helping me is like the panopticon effect that's happening to a lot of. I notice it now. I was excited about doing video. I've done it twice now and doing all of this. Mm-hmm.

(1:06:35) It's exciting for me. Like, entering this new space, I entered a new space doing radio and doing podcasting audibly. And I got over my fear of sounding bad. Right. I have a way of speaking that sometimes I get in my head about. I tend to slur. If two words have the same ending and beginning letter, I will just continue those together. It's a thing for me. It's probably the ADHD thing.

(1:07:02) possibly yeah but i just said sawsome which is it's awesome yeah as a sh as a schmear it's awesome but coming into this and knowing that there could possibly be eyes on me and in the beginning there could possibly be listeners on me it it affected my excitement for what i was creating got it yeah
(1:07:23) And in design and graphic design, at least, is also a thing. Now, design, graphic design, for going into the public space, which a lot of it is, you do have to design with eyes in mind. Sure. Yeah. But it does affect you in a different way now. I think it affects everyone now because you're almost forced into the public eye in some extent. Agreed. Or else you're...

(1:07:46) i wouldn't say ostracized but you're pushed to the back like it sucks because i'm thinking like obviously right now i'm scrolling on instagram too much i can say that my friends are too we all are because wow you get dopamine every time you scroll fun fact also and then you're like god what have i done with my last hour right yeah and then your dopamine crashes crashes and you feel like it sucks garbage yep

(1:08:09) but i'm sitting here as someone who has an audience i'll be at small you know both in i take photos for concerts i do my podcast i design and i post my design i just do art i have many titles and it's kind of weird to call myself all these things but i was like i can't get off instagram because then how people are gonna how people how are people gonna see me and

(1:08:34) and it was like i shouldn't be like it affects you mentally in a way you don't expect and right even people who are just posting their formal they attend they're thinking about the people that are going to view them in a way that we haven't experienced before as humans and it's like i think that we're going to look back and we're going to see a weird thing that's happening with us

(1:08:58) Yeah. So there's an interesting thing there about the desire to be seen. Right. And a lot of us go through a phase in, you know, usually in middle school. But it can it can be brief or it can be long. It can be lifelong of whether you have a desire to be, you know, I do not wish to be perceived or you have a desire to be seen. And I think that one of the things we're wrestling right now with culturally is.

(1:09:28) the sort of
(1:09:32) Way in which we are less likely to be deeply seen because we are less likely to have deep in-person conversations and connections with people that we've gotten together every Friday night for game night for the last decade. We're less likely to be deeply seen by a few close friends and more likely to be lightly, shallowly seen

(1:10:00) by a great many people so I think that we are simultaneously in a place where we are longing for that sense of being truly seen you know when you have a friend who like sends you something like shows up for you in a way that you like maybe you're not like oh my god I need help but like they just do a thing you're like oh you really get me hey right yeah or you know a friend who
(1:10:29) sends you a meme, DMs you a meme. They just know, right?
(1:10:34) That's awesome. And simultaneously we are living in a space where we have moved so drastically from the written word in like all of the 1900s to the visual image from 2000 onward where it's so much more visual and we are also at the same time

(1:11:01) It's utterly barraged with a constant stream of content, content, content, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, news, content, content, content. Don't miss that new thing. You know, FOMO, huge. Yeah.

(1:11:20) digital cameras, like having a camera on your phone. Everyone can do it now. Everyone can do it, which I think is wonderful in ways of, you know, citizen journalists and citizen documentarians. I'm super for it. Also very for actual journalists who actually have like journalistic standards and do the thing, love them. But when I look at even my own childhood, you know, in the 70s,

(1:11:43) Film was expensive. You know, you couldn't, you didn't know how it was gonna turn out. You might wind up with a whole roll of double exposures because you didn't realize you'd rewound the film and then you shot over it and that was wild. And if you go back before then,

(1:11:59) having a picture of someone becomes more and more and more rare. And then it becomes more and more rare as you're going for four film. So the question of how constantly we are seen everywhere all the time and we want to be seen and we have to show up and be seen...

(1:12:16) Because we're not really being seen. Yeah. You know, and I think that's really interesting because, you know, you're 21. Yes, I am. Right. And already on the wheel of like, oh, my God, I can't I can't get off to not to talk. And I can't get off Instagram. Right. Yeah. Because like then they won't know who I am. Yeah. And I'm like. Everybody. You're you're you're going to be fine.

(1:12:46) You know, you know, but that's the thing. Right. You're you're growing up in a space where you're being told you have to be constantly, constantly available and constantly on and constantly documented. Yes. And so how do you recover from that?

(1:13:04) Because your life is being designed. I mean, I'm talking, you know, but like, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But there's a thing where your life is being designed for you of like, here's what you will consume. And here's how you will make yourself consumable. And like what will be pushed. Yeah. People. Yeah.
(1:13:20) yeah algorithms control a lot of people's lives and they don't even understand what they are exactly right and someone's designing that algorithm oh yeah and like oh my gosh i right now i'm in a whole like argument with um google because um once upon a time it was a useful tool for me to research things it is not and now i'm like why ai overview is the bane of my existence i hate it so much same same same same

(1:13:47) It sucks. Yeah. And I wish I could turn it off. Yep. I mean, the process of making it like so hard to turn these things off is very clear. Like, you know, and there's a reason why that's designed that way. Yeah. Because you're going to read it because the first one that pops up and you don't have time to scroll. And also, hey, guess what? The two things below it are ads. Yeah. All right. Do you have another question? Because otherwise we're going to keep getting, otherwise it's going to get real ranty in here real fast.

(1:14:16) Do we have time? I'm sure we have time. Okay. You know, if you have time. I have so much time. Sure. Like no one's knocking on the door yet saying I need to be anywhere else. I don't know where the time is on that thing.

(1:14:30) Yeah, I don't either. Oh, 120. Okay. It's really tiny. That's really tiny. All right. Okay. Awesome. All right. Let's see if we can get through some other questions faster. This is so freaking fun. I'm having the best time. I'm having fun. I'm having so much fun. I love talking. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I started a podcast. That's why I invested money into this.

(1:14:51) Good job. So, yeah. It's funny. I'm going to the second question, and I feel like we already answered this. Say it quick, and we can say it. I was going to ask, is there something the wider industry still consistently misunderstands about what games can do? Oh.

(1:15:09) Wider industry is a really interesting question. I think that games do everything. I think that the part that is hard is recognizing that not all games do all things. Don't try to make all games be all things to all people. We have games for education. We have games for therapeutic use. We have games for career development. We have games for interpersonal relationships. We have games for...

(1:15:34) a billion reasons and we have games just to support friendship you know and like all of the game history that we have going back into at least the 1600s games are for
(1:15:46) passing times passing time with friends and company you know that's why there's endless card games and board games and parlor games is because before people needed to complete the internet right and i think we all fall into that like oh i have to complete the internet and that's why we're losing time to scrolling it's like oh i just gotta i just gotta finish reddit

(1:16:08) Yeah. Before I go on to the next thing. It's bad. Yeah, it's really bad. There's so many things. It's not going to happen. But before all that, gameplay is part of life always forever going back for a very long time. And it's used...

(1:16:25) to support uh friendship and community and the way that like one of the fascinating places of game play and game design that I like to look at is work games as you go back through history there's wonderful work games around um

(1:16:44) bringing in the corn harvest right it's like okay all this corn is here it all has to be shucked before we can put it in a corn crib to keep it over the winter it's going to be so much easier to get this acres and acres and acres of corn you know this monster pile in front of us um shucked if we make it a game and this particular game is if you find an ear you shuck the corn and occasionally corn will have a genetic

(1:17:11) mutation that makes it red yeah and if you get a red ear you get to kiss anybody here and that's just a true game that happened yeah right and it but it makes it more fun yeah because games are fun and if you can make anything a game

(1:17:27) It'll be fun. It's more fun. I immediately thought about like sailors or rowers specifically having songs that would have the beat of the row because there was multiple people in the rowing because boats need multiple people because there's no engines.

(1:17:42) And that's why they're songs. And this is back when music was for everyone, right? Because you needed work songs. Work songs carried you through the day. I have a cookbook that my mom wrote for me when I went to college that has instructions about making bread and that in terms of kneading the bread, you have to knead it to the length of, I think it's one Creedence Clearwater song or two Rolling Stones songs. Uh-huh.

(1:18:09) you know whatever because you know you use music to mark time people that immediately made me think about people online being like my shower is only three songs long yeah or that's actually pretty long like i have one song showers because i have to save water or something like that
(1:18:25) yeah go i mean that's awesome and then we look at how long songs uh are over time and change and like um if we go back in the 1920s and like the length of the song being much shorter yeah you know so yeah so that's a piece i think in the answer to that like uh that question it's kind of a roundabout wild answer to that um but i think it's it'll it'll add on to the rest of what we've said yeah that it did yeah cool next question i was going to ask is

(1:18:56) I said advice, but it may not be advice, but like what advice would you give emerging designers about designing responsibly and not just successfully?
Interesting.

(1:19:09) Responsible, I mean, there's a lot of load in there, right? Are we talking about, like, ecologically responsible? And the first thing there is don't fucking use AI. Yes. Full stop. You know how much water that uses? Yeah, full stop. I just don't, nope, none of that. The second thing is about, like, what is true to yourself. Mm-hmm.

(1:19:31) then there's a whole question about appropriation. And are you writing, you know, are you doing game design in a way that, you know, that you're not committing harm to anyone, right? That's a huge thing. That's a whole other tangent about fantasy. And funnily enough, going back to my Mesoamerican art history class, I'm writing a paper right now about...

(1:20:00) um shadow of the tomb raider and its um presentation of mesoamerica yeah absolutely because it the the game had a responsibility to or should and does yeah to represent that culture because it's it is selling that to the audience right and i think this is something that your generation is much more keyed into you know people in the 15 to 30

(1:20:21) you know, that chunk, which I think are the people most impacted by the pandemic shutdown for, you know, 2021, 22.

(1:20:34) That the awareness, you know, and I think it is because of the internet and like everybody listened to podcasts from everywhere and music from everywhere and, you know, content from everywhere. Y'all are much more keyed into the fact that there are people involved.

(1:20:54) Yeah. On the other part of the planet. You know, that there are people there. Yeah. And that you love, like, Aaron from Soul's cooking show, you know, or whatever, podcast from wherever, or, you know, that you have an awareness, a planetary awareness of there being...
(1:21:14) people that you know and follow in other parts of the world and when that happens the world gets so much smaller and you have a greater understanding i think and hope and you know have hope for the future in an understanding of like hey i gotta do right by these people yeah

(1:21:34) So, I mean, that's part of the responsibility thing. Another, like, first do no harm, you know, try the best you can to do no harm. And then the other piece is, it is hard to understand and accept that when you are designing something, you're doing the best design you can, and then it is out of your hands. Mm-hmm.

(1:21:59) right you can design the best like i'm i'm like looking at this screensaver over here which has like it's a funky design it looks to me like like yeah the pringles can it's it's a bunch of pringles on a screensaver but they look like are they plastic are they glass there are lots of different colors

(1:22:17) Someone designed that, right? Or this bear or whatever. You can design a thing and do your very best to do no harm. But after that, it's out of your hands, right? There comes a point where whoever designed this tiger in this book and whoever produced these items

(1:22:37) then it is out of your hands and you have to let that go. And if you've done your best to do no harm and if you're willing to stand behind your design and say, here is why I made the design choices I did in the most informed way I could with an awareness of the impact I have on any marginalized communities and the environment, et cetera, et cetera. If you've done that minimum bit,

(1:23:06) and you're good, that's the best you can do. It's wonderful if you have the ability and capacity to call in people and say, hey, what do you think about this tiger? Is this cool? Is this not cool? Is there a place I can more ethically source the material for it? That's all awesome. And in terms of role-playing game design, this gets extra tricky because

(1:23:33) I'm designing an object, right, that hopefully creates an experience for someone else. And that is a place that is full of danger. But I can't, at the end of the day,

(1:23:57) You know, it's like the person who designed this book, you know, could that be used to hit somebody? Maybe. Yeah, but it's not why they designed it. I'm going to tell the Glamorata staff over in the other suite that that's what people are using it for.
(1:24:12) Bam! I mean, that is a hefty looking book. But that's the thing of the responsibility of design. I think we have a responsibility to tell our truth the best we can, do no harm the best we can, be willing to accept accountability. If someone comes back to me on any of my work and says, hey, this kind of sucks, actually, it is my job to say, oh, damn, I'm sorry, and see if I can fix it. It depends on what they think sucks.

(1:24:41) uh that's true i mean there are times when if someone says like this font is nonsense you know i don't like this font that i'm not going to take but if someone comes to me and says this font is causing uh yeah this con this font is causing a um breakdown in uh speech to text to speech i'm going to really consider that you know those are different issues

(1:25:05) Yeah. I mean, that brings up, I meant to mention it earlier, but I think I got lost in whatever thread we were on. It's all good. But talking about accessibility in games. Yeah. I think also the rise of the internet has helped that. Definitely. I think a lot more people who cannot maybe leave their homes or they aren't as mobile.

(1:25:24) um, can play these games online and play with people and connect with people. A hundred percent. Um, and also there's games that are made for them. Yeah. There's, I mean, I was talking about tabletop, but I even mean like, um, video games. Um, my brother has cerebral palsy. Oh, okay. And you know, there are 20 different controllers that are made to be accessible, but he would rather just use his chin to move the joystick because he can't use his left hand. Yeah. But like, there are these more options out there.

(1:25:54) There's clothes being designed that are more accessible because people are now beginning to understand that. Right. And the technology is caught up with the impulse. Yeah. Right. The idea that because now there's people doing like things like 3D printing. Yeah. That you could have an accessibility aid system.

(1:26:14) Just printed. Yeah. Yeah. And that's amazing. And any place you have like like here at University of Auburn that you are Auburn University. I don't know which way you all like it. Auburn University. It's OK. OK, cool. Thank you for that. You have a maker space. Yeah. So it means like I've got this idea and I think I'm going to do this thing.
(1:26:34) and ah man i love that you know um there's so many things in the world because people's desire is to help one another yeah right we want to play games together we want to hang out together we want to be like hey look at this thing i made isn't it cool oh that's a cool thing you made you know we want to do that and um then we want to help each other um i mean look at the whole history of disasters like what happens is that people rush to help

(1:26:59) Yes. Right. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. But the overarching thing is you rush to help. Doesn't matter, you know. So I think that that's another piece of accessibility in game design is recognizing that we want you to be able to.
Yeah. You know, play is for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

(1:27:25) that that was a just a big point i think mainly in like in the pandemic i think even just for people just knowing that was an option yeah because it felt unaccessible yeah definitely you know and also like both sometimes it was physically inaccessible but also mentally in a way you know no i totally get it i don't have friends that come to my house and now online 20 different friends from 20 different places can just talk and play a game yeah

(1:27:51) yeah and i think that's really interesting that's really insightful because like to be 15 and to be like i kind of want to play dnd but there's so many hurdles to get over to do that in person sometimes oh yeah whereas online you're like hey i think it's like you and a couple other people yeah initially and you're like one from ireland yeah you're like hey let's do this thing okay yeah okay i have nothing else better to do right why not

(1:28:19) And so that's incredibly cool. And the accessibility piece there of why not give it a shot? And this is what comes up to me sometimes in terms of getting people to play a new game.

(1:28:36) You know, where you're like, if I say, hey, I got a new game and it's Borderlands 3. And like, hey, come over and try it out. Awesome. Cool. But if I say, hey, I got a new game and it's Under Hollow Hills tabletop role playing game. Yeah. People are like, oh, I don't know.

(1:28:56) i don't know how to play that yeah and i'm like buddy it's the same just like show up yeah have fun or a new card game it's like you will understand in like three rounds right that's the same right it is play katana please i promise i'm i will not fun it's fun it's easy yeah yeah and i want to do that instead of watch a movie

(1:29:17) Yeah. Yeah. It's more interactive. Yeah. There's great movies out there. Great time for that. But also like that piece of like having the courage to say.
(1:29:29) Come and play a game with me. Yeah. And then people being like, oh, I don't know if I can. You're going to be fine. You can do it. No tiger is going to eat you. I promise. That one can't get you. The one on the table if you're listening. Yeah. No.
It's a cute little stuffy squishy. You just squish it and it's fine. Yeah. That's its whole purpose in existence is to be squished if you're stressed. Right. Yeah. Awesome. Its whole purpose is that and keeping students sane because the school gives it to us. Yeah. More tigers should be like that. Exactly.

(1:29:59) More.
(1:30:00) tigers maybe shouldn't be mean and more tigers should let me pet them i love that so there you go life goals okay i haven't yet played a druid but i feel like i'd love it

(1:30:11) Yeah, because I do have... You could have a pet tiger. I think that any animal would be able to understand that I'm chill. Yeah, sure. And they would not attack me. Okay. Good. Exactly. Moving back into the design. All right. Tigers, wonderfully designed, first off. Hell yeah. Stripes blending into the environment. Yep. Amazing.
Yeah. White tigers. Super quiet. Beautiful. Yes, true. Beautiful. Agreed. Agreed. But... What am I going to ask next? I don't know. What's your next question? I don't know.

(1:30:44) I don't know. It's an interesting question. Then it's worth asking. It is worth asking. It's when you're designing a game, how do you know you're onto something worth pursuing? Oh, that's a good question. When I'm designing a game.

(1:31:05) I think probably it's like when I find myself thinking about it when I should be thinking about other things. Yep. You know, when I'm like, when it's what's, when solving the design problems there is like what's fun, even when it's a pain in the ass.

(1:31:23) you know um that that's like okay this is actually working in a way i like and it's also part of when i know that a game isn't working yeah um of like all right i keep hitting up against the same design problem and i don't like any of the ways i've

(1:31:42) I've approached it or tried to solve it um that usually means I need to back up a couple steps in the design and figure out you know like all right I gotta let's let's let's try it we need to try a whole other route um

(1:32:01) I think that's really good. Because you can definitely get into a flow state with any design. I mean, I know graphic design works like that. And I think it's the same with game design. Because that's one of the reasons I so enjoy talking with you is because the design thing is such a different angle from a lot of the game podcasts. Because they're like, OK, let's talk about. And you're talking about design broadly.
(1:32:29) And I think that's really, really cool to think of game design broadly. And it's the same process for me in similar ways as doing graphic design or textile design or things like that, where I'm just like, sometimes it super flows and sometimes it just doesn't. Yeah. You get stuck. Yeah.

(1:32:50) No, that's why I have a huge interest in the intersectionality. Yeah. And there's a term like multidisciplinary. Yes. That I think we forget about. And it's maybe because a lot of designers get shoveled into a specific type of job. Yep. A specific... I mean, right now, I'm a graphic designer. And next to me are industrial designers.
And then there's...

(1:33:16) in like architects and there's environmental architects and then there's specifically it's all this very niche things and we forget how interconnected it all is at the end of the day we forget that like being a graphic designer is not that much different from i mean it is different from designing like let's say someone's a like a circuit a circuitry designer sure but circuitry has to be designed yeah

(1:33:38) But there's a thread there, or a circuit there. Mm-hmm. I made it a little part. Yeah, I see. That is the same throughout. Yeah. And I think we've forgotten about that. Yeah. And there's...

(1:33:53) When I remember that, it makes life easier, almost, in a way that, like, life is not as intimidating when I understand that there's a lot of the similar things throughout different paths, in a way. I don't know if it made any sense. No, it absolutely does. Okay, I'm glad. Yeah, I mean, because...

(1:34:11) You know, and that, because another thing you're looking there also is an answer to the prior question about, you know, because the inverse is what do you do when you get stuck, right? You know, how do you know when you're in a good, when it's flowing well? What do you do when you get stuck?

(1:34:29) And one of the answers is show it to somebody else because they're going to come at it with a different perspective. And that piece, that intersectionality, that interdisciplinary space of looking at it with our whole selves. Because I think also in doing design, we can get into a head of like, oh, I'm just doing this thing. And if we can look at it like, what if I looked at it from this other thing in my life, this other aspect of who I am?

(1:34:55) it can give us a window into how to proceed um but yeah it's definitely good stuff to have different brains around you need some more brains yeah sometimes more brains i mean we're it's halloween right halloween yeah brains brains zombies brains
(1:35:14) you know what i i haven't seen lots of zombies um recently like halloween like movies yeah well it's it the all those things go in in flows like um sinners was great if you haven't seen sinners sinners is amazing wonderful movie vampires are coming back right so one of the things we can look at in film historiography is the ways that that intersects this part of film history sorry i know you've like hit i love horror movies

(1:35:41) I'll let you explain it. One of the things we can look at in film historiography is how different types of horror map on to different things going on culturally, socioeconomically, what we're wrestling with. And my favorite thing to look at in this, although I'm not like a human,

(1:36:02) huge Godzilla nerd but is the way that like Godzilla coming out from different places in different times unrecognizable from each other like what is what is in the original you know coming out of Japan versus what is you know coming out of the America you know a couple years ago Godzilla

(1:36:21) versus king kong anyway yeah i just watched the original frankenstein um like a couple years ago and unrecognizable from first of all she's credited as mrs percy shelley in the credits crack up but also uh just a very wild experience for that anyway um

(1:36:46) But yeah, that thing, like we haven't seen it. We're like, are we not seeing, we're not in zombies right now? We're in something else right now? I don't know. We're in lots of different things. Yeah. There's a lot to be afraid of. Yeah. There's a lot to be afraid of. That's so true. Yeah. My favorite thing is to compare the like
post-World War II and then when alien movies got popular. Yeah, right. We were so afraid of invasions. We were so afraid of invasions. And we thought aliens. Yeah. Well, it's a nice stand-in for Russia. Yeah. Scary things that are technology that we don't understand. You don't understand. Yeah.

(1:37:15) anyway and then we like you know what floor like we spent all this time all these all these years all of these movies about like how horrific it would be if there was a uh a super virus in the world yeah and like like what if like what if that happened and it was horrible and then you know the triumph is the world comes together and fights it and like
(1:37:40) We had a freaking chance. We had a chance and we were like, we're too selfish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people. Well, we're going to make money off this one. Yeah. Anyway. That isn't. Yeah. Politics coming through. Sorry. I mean, there is. Well, there is there is a separate thing from zombie movies, which is viral virus horror.
Right. Yeah. Viral horror. Yeah. This is a different podcast we're doing right now.

(1:38:00) I know. We had a film podcast a while ago. Maybe that is what we're now doing. Yeah. All right. Film is design. Absolutely. And it also is interdisciplinary in the way that you're looking at it because you're looking at visual design, sound design, set design, costume design, makeup design, hair design. Mm-hmm.

(1:38:19) an actor who has to deal with all of that oh yeah you know and speaking of frankenstein the new uh guillermo del toro yeah cannot wait cannot wait um what's his name jacob belordi had to sit in the chair for 19 hours for that makeup lord

(1:38:33) so that but they designed that makeup and they put it on him and now he has to create yeah frankenstein monster sorry i just called him frankenstein which i know he's frankenstein that's okay that's okay everybody does it that's just true it's frankenstein i know it's the doctor yeah but it's just like it's easier to say the monster is franken yeah sorry that's right we all know it's all good and it's the bride of frankenstein but that's marrying the monster and

(1:38:59) True. And not the doctor. Right. And the son of Frankenstein, same. You know, you know, so they did like somebody not Mary Shelley and like the condition conditions under which Frankenstein was written. I love I love what's going on there ecologically.

(1:39:19) and like they don't know what's happening they don't know why it's so freaking bad and why they're stuck where they are um because we didn't they didn't have like as much you know like storm data as we do now and like the whole thing like all right we're gonna all of us write a spooky story and oh my gosh i just i there's so much about like the origins of how that happened i'm like yeah super great yeah

(1:39:45) Anyway, next question. Next question, yeah. Halloween. Spooky. This one's kind of, I wrote these in an order, so it obviously connects to the last one. Yeah, of course. What part of the process feels

(1:40:00) most instinctive and then which parts feel more deliberate.
(1:40:04) in doing game game design because sometimes in my head yeah some things are instinctive about games and how they're played yeah like rolling for damage sure because you won't know how much that punch is gonna hurt yeah but some things are not as instinctive but still need to be there yeah like no actually initiative is much more instinctive yeah you gotta know what order people are fighting yeah i mean not empowered by the apocalypse

(1:40:31) Oh, sorry. But in D&D, yes. See, I've played D&D for a long time. I did too. And I have that in my mind. I'm right there with you. And I need to play more games. Yeah, that's fine. That's cool. But it's a really good... What's instinctive and what's not? Because part of it is...

(1:40:52) Are you designing some – how far from what you're currently doing are you designing, right? Are you hacking something you like to make something you love?
Or are you trying to assemble something whole cloth from nothing, which is so much work because you're literally trying to crack open the world and put something new in the world that's never been there before –

(1:41:15) This is perennially impossible, right? It's something that we all want to do, but everything comes from everywhere else, right? All of the little things that we've done in our entire life and have influenced us and we've experienced in our entire life show up in the practice of our craft to produce our art.

(1:41:34) That said, what comes easy and what comes hard, what feels instinctual and what feels like something I have to really study and craft. For me, in my design, and I know that some of my role-playing game design colleagues will be like, ah! For me, mechanics are instinctual. Mm-hmm.

(1:42:03) I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the mechanics exactly or fussing with them.

(1:42:15) I think about, like, what story do I want to tell? What conversation do I want people to have? And then what randomization system, whether it's cards or dice or, you know, flip open a book and, you know, the third line down, fourth word in or whatever, you know, whatever randomization system.

(1:42:37) tool I use or tensioning mechanic I use like a Jenga tower or a stacked deck and once you get to like the ace of diamonds the game is over you know whatever however I do that that is in service of how I want the experience how I want the conversation to be structured you know and the time like flow of time and the social footprint like you know all those things
(1:43:02) um and i might be wrong i might have to like try a time or two like here's what i think nope don't like that put that part back on the shelf try a different part yeah that'll work um i like in my game thousand one nights that has this whole dice mechanic where you know you gain dice for you know

(1:43:29) There's just a whole... It's very cool. It's complicated. Ask Dr. Friedman about it. Yeah, it's fun. You and your friends would have a blast with it, I bet. Probably. You play members of the Sultan's court and no one can leave court. And as in any place where no one can leave, all kinds of like spears.

(1:43:50) petty yes envies and irritations build up but you can't be overt about them yeah so instead you tell stories and in the stories you play so you have a courtier character and in the stories you play a second character and then you can be in as over as overt and rude and flirtatious as possible because it's just a story um and it's super fun and um the places where i have to be

(1:44:17) really thoughtful and like really spend a lot of time thinking about the design of it is in support of that conversation that's not mechanics and then tons of the technical writing of like how do I break this down enough? How do I think at a granular enough level to be like okay you have to do this

(1:44:47) And this. I can't just say, you know, and then you do the thing, you know. That's not going to work. Yeah. And it's a place where a lot of games can fall down.

(1:45:02) You know, there's video games that do that too. And I'm like, oh my goodness. I really want to love this game. I really want to play this game. But you've made it so that I can see the puzzle I need to solve. But I went about it in a slightly different order and now I'm stuck and I can't solve the puzzle. Yeah, softlocked. Yeah, it's like so freaking annoying. And I'm like, nah. Happens all the time in RPGs. All the time. Yeah, in video game, like video RPGs? Yeah, sorry, video game RPGs. That's the...

(1:45:30) Genre. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about every Fallout game I've played. Yeah. And then you're like... You're using your mini-nuke and someone that shouldn't die dies. And then you can't get a quest. And then, okay, I'm done. I have to reload. So annoying. And it's annoying. It's really annoying. Like, I... I, like, stopped playing Skyrim when... That will happen in Skyrim. Right? Because I was like, look, I don't have time in my life to, like...
(1:45:58) know exactly what i need to do but you want me to stand on that pixel not that pixel right that like there's so many games where i've been like i'm doing it right i'm doing it right what's the problem and it's because i'm not like my hitbox is not in the right spot for the game to know that i am there yeah and it's like this is

(1:46:21) frustrating because i know from a design angle right the people who designed that did not want that to happen yeah you know they did not they did not because what it meant is that i was like well forget that i noped right out

(1:46:36) and i like haven't gone back because it was such yeah i'm like i'm so freaking i can give so many games yeah the second amnesia game i a triangle that i needed to solve a puzzle flew out of the map yeah and i can't get it anymore there you go and i can't play the game and i'm not replaying it up until that point

(1:46:52) Yeah, and I'm very sad about those. This is another design piece, not necessarily for my tabletop board gaming design, but since we've drifted into video game design a little bit, and also it is relevant for my tabletop board game design, where I want things to collapse in gracefully. I want to put all my rules there for you if you need them. If you want like vehicular damage rules, they're there.

(1:47:19) If you want extended harm sequences stuff, they're there. If you want to go shopping in my game, I want to have a way to do that. You have to have a shopping sequence.

(1:47:32) I want to make that. If I think that's a relevant part of my game, I want it in there. Not all my games have it. Whatever. But I don't... So I want it to collapse nicely, right? I want you to be able to have all that if you want it, but I also want you to get the whole story and the experience if you're just doing this a little bit. And likewise, in video games...

(1:47:56) I just want to play, it's an accessibility issue, I just want all the story. I would love to play Horizon Zero Dawn. I have seen all of her. It's been played in my house. But there's pieces where I'm like, I don't have the time and patience for that. And it's not, so there's a piece where some folks will be like, skill issue. But I'm like, dude,

(1:48:25) I have a job. I run a business. I have three kids that I've raised. I have responsibilities and stuff. I don't have the time that I might have when I was 16 to pour into video games.
(1:48:43) and now right like we run a couple different minecraft servers that because i love minecraft i love minecraft too but because of um tendon damage in my wrist i have to play in creative mode yeah i cannot like i just i can't in order for me to play with my friends who like to who play not in creative mode

(1:49:08) Which is cool. This is an accessibility issue for me. And I feel like that's a place where more AAA games could potentially lean into that space of like, I would love to have a way to play Horizon Zero Dawn and like find all the little trinkets and do all the little stuff.

(1:49:29) without like the climbing piece like because i can't i can't i just physically there's stuff about anyway this is just a rant about me being sad and having like no it's it's true some games are the the mechanics of them are difficult sometimes to be difficult because they have to add interest to the game like it isn't a movie it's an interactive experience sure and i know that's the thought process that went into them but sometimes it's inaccessible it's annoying like

(1:49:58) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(1:50:00) things can be like it can be like interesting to some people but then it can be like i don't want to do this right why isn't there like a super super easy mode right because sometimes easy mode it just it just makes me feel i'm sorry go ahead sorry i know eldon ring and i know dark souls and bloodborne are hard games and they're hard on purpose yeah that's fine i think the stories are really interesting and i really want to play them but i get mad really easily at when i lose multiple times in a row it's not fun

(1:50:29) And it's not fun. It's not fun for me as a player to interact like that. And for me as a designer, I feel bad for the people who design, who like doing the design, who there are a lot of people who would be super fans of the work you've done to design incredible stories and incredible stories.

(1:50:52) like puzzles and stuff, but they can't because they, for whatever reason, time, attention, physical ability, like all of these, the many, many, many reasons, they're the shut out of that experience of loving your game, loving your character design, loving your story, even loving like some of the puzzles of like, this is a thing.
(1:51:24) You know, they're shut out. And that leads into the stuff we talked about much earlier about, like, games going through this cycle of, you know, this is awesome and this is for everybody. Oh, that's just for, you know, like, you know, we're going to denigrate that. And, like, the same goes for video games. Like, people who are, like, ah, you know, there's criticism that is out there about people who love video games. Mm-hmm.

(1:51:51) yeah yeah wild wild stuff um i am i do have more questions but i feel like we're gonna talk forever okay and it has been two hours all right well let's just speed run the questions i'm gonna speed run them okay good okay i'm ready what are some of your favorite mechanics

(1:52:08) Okay, I'm a super big fan of 2d6 plus stat. Surprise, because that's what I designed for Apocalypse World. I'm a really big fan, as you can see in my game Siren, of a dice pool that is then divided into specific, like, you know, you have a goal, you have a goal, you could get an answer to a question, you could be hurt, your psychic powers could go wild, the people chasing you could catch up.

(1:52:38) roll a dice pool and assign them to any of those boxes in the way that makes you the most happy. Love that. I like, I'm a huge fan of the fan mail mechanic in Primetime Adventures, which is a game from way back that Matt Wilson should really reissue.

(1:53:03) Yeah, that'll do for now. Next question. Lightning round. What game, tabletop or otherwise, has recently inspired you? I'm really liking, there's a game out now, it's a card game, it's called Courtiers. No, I think it's called Courtesans. And it isn't, like, Courtesans is the wrong word for it, because it's about court.

(1:53:25) It's not about courtesans, but I think it's called courtesans. And you have a like a board in the middle that has like all the different houses and they're color coded. And then you have a hand and you're trying to like operate, you know, arrange things the best you can according to your hidden goal.

(1:53:41) of like, oh, I want the, you know, the house that's signifying animal is a rabbit to be in favor at the end of the game. And I want to have more of the house that's signifying animal is a deer in my hand than the person to my left. Super fun game. And I don't know quite what I'm doing with that next. I don't know if that's where it's going to go. But it's the game that is definitely the most of like, oh, this is cool right now. Yeah.
(1:54:11) Definitely. Next question. We're doing good on the speed round. It's the last one. Holy moly! I know. We were almost there, but... That's all right. It's all good.
What's the most rewarding part? What's the most rewarding part of doing tabletop role-playing game design? That, yeah. That's how you want to answer it. Okay, because I will go a different way with that. If you want to. What's the most rewarding part...

(1:54:43) um for me uh the most rewarding part is the opportunity to um listen to and amplify underrepresented voices in the world and the most rewarding part is that um

(1:55:09) through Powered by the Apocalypse and people building on, people looking at work that I've done and said, I think that's not quite it. I'm going to do something different. Or being, ooh, that's cool. I'm going to expand on this part. The most rewarding part is that there are people in the world out there who tell me

(1:55:30) I mean, they don't have to tell me, but damn, when someone says, you know, hey, I got through something because of this. Or, you know, just knowing that there are people who can breathe, I've said this a billion times, can breathe a little easier at the grocery store on any given day because they wrote a PBTA game and they get a little...

(1:55:58) You know, they can sell little products that they gave them some way to practice their craft and produce their art, put it in front of the audience. And the audience, even though it's, you know, whatever size it is, may be like, ooh, yes, I'm going to support you as an artist and a creator. That's damn cool. I don't know.
That's, I don't know. This is hard to beat.

(1:56:24) Oh, this? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Like, seriously, for real. Like, you know, beyond, like, what I just said, which is really true, is, like, you know, a life ethic for me of, like, being able in my work in museums and storytelling and sex ed and game design and textile work, everything I do, like...

(1:56:43) amplifying underrepresented voices under heard voices like women and queer folk and people of color and people you know incarcerated people or yeah you know currently or formerly enslaved people or on and on and on indigenous people people living under oppression in any kind that's awesome I want to do that forever yeah and

(1:57:05) And it is like blows my mind that that leads me to be able to do things like have flown in a freaking airplane. Right. It's not like I've never flown before, but it's still baffling. Right. To come down and get to talk to you, you know.
(1:57:23) i am profoundly grateful for that that is really i'm grateful that you're here yeah because you're in my not my own you're in the studio and i'm talking to you and it's awesome and i get to like edit and upload this and it's gonna be great i'm super psyched for that i'm super psyched yeah so yeah is that really your last question yeah hey we got through it yeah that was my last yes

(1:57:47) Hey, thanks for listening to Type Speaks. Hope you had a good time, because I sure did. But unfortunately, the episode is over. But don't worry, you can check us out in other places. Be sure to follow the show to listen to every new episode or listen back to some old ones. Check us out on Instagram at typespeakspod. And remember, always keep curating and always stay curious. I'll see you next time. I've been Ray.