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The GGJ Podcast brings the spirit of Global Game Jam to your headphones, with people from around the world sharing how they found their way into game development. Each week, Susan Gold talks with developers, studio founders, and festival organizers about the twists, risks, and side doors that shaped their paths and communities. You will hear honest stories about creativity, collaboration, failure, and the messy, beautiful reality of making games.
The Fine Art of Playfulness - NickFortugno
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Intro
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[00:00:00] Susan Gold: This is the GGJ Podcast, a show about the games industry, the people who make them, and the communities that grow up around them. I'm Susan Gold, game education trailblazer and one of the founders of the Global Game Jam. Each week, we will be sitting down with a new guest, highlighting their own path and journey.
[00:00:26] This is a space for honest conversation from makers about creativity, collaboration, failure, and the messy, the beautiful reality of making games. So whether you're a young dev or seasoned, an educator, a student, or someone who just loves games and the people behind them, welcome to the GGJ Podcast. Take a breath, settle in, and let's hear directly from the makers themselves.
[00:00:49] Shirley McPhaul: This episode is made possible in partnership with the Global Game Jam, the world's largest game creation event, bringing together creators from around the globe. A big thank you as well to the Global Game Jam's headline [00:01:00] sponsors, Epic Games, Games for Change, and Xsolla for helping make this creative community a reality.
[00:01:06] To learn more and to get involved in the upcoming jams, visit globalgamejam.org.
[00:01:13]
Meet Nick Fortugno
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[00:01:20] Susan Gold: Today on the show, I'm thrilled to welcome my longtime friend, designer, and storyteller, Nick Fortugno. Nick has spent more than two decades pushing games into new spaces on screens, on streets, and in the classroom, and he will always do it with such fierce independent spirit. He co-founded Playmatics helped define early narrative and social games, and has built countless experiences that p blur the lines between theater play and everyday life.
[00:01:49] When I think about what indie really means, creative risk, community, caring, and making work that doesn't wait for permission, I think of Nick. Nick, [00:02:00] thank you for joining me on the GGJ Podcast.
[00:02:02] Nick Fortugno: Thank so much for having me.
[00:02:04] Susan Gold: Well, I have known you for a really long time, so I really am excited to share your story with the rest of the world.
[00:02:14] when you introduce yourself today, what version of Nick are you choosing to put forward First?
[00:02:20] Nick Fortugno: in, in this time, I think I'm primarily an academic, like that's my primary step into the world. I direct a digital game development program at City College in the CUNY system in New York. So it's a public university undergraduate program. but when I talk about what I work on and what I study, I'm a game and interactive narrative designer. That's how I present myself. And so I make systems that create aesthetic effects through play. And I make systems that tell story through play. That's how I think about it. And I call it innovative design, which I usually shorthand by saying I make games about non-game things for people who don't play games.
[00:02:56] but what it really means is I'm like looking at like spaces that [00:03:00] games haven't occupied or emotions that games typically don't approach. And then I just try to figure out how to make things for them. And that has been everything from like entertainment clients, educational clients, political clients, science, healthcare, brands generally like a bunch of different stuff, and then a bunch of art projects. But I try to isolate it around gameplay and interactive storytelling. those are the focuses that I have.
The Wandering Path
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[00:03:23] Susan Gold: Why is your kind of wandering, because you have, you've had this multimedia career and for many people it's not a straight path. and I personally love that, but not a lot of people have that kind of bandwidth or ability. How do you see that as a possible or useful model for other people?
[00:03:45] Nick Fortugno: I think that,I think it, quality of what it is, I think to live in the time we live in is that technology and taste is moving very fast. like both of those things move very fast independently and in sync with each other. And if I [00:04:00] tried to keep doing what I was doing in the earliest days of my career, I couldn't, right?
[00:04:04] I couldn't because the business models don't exist anymore. the most of the portals don't exist anymore. The audience has split and reformed countless times. Andpeople are interested in different things. And so I think that. In so far as you are interested in commercial art in any way, right?
[00:04:23] just in the sense of I'm not making the art just for me, but I'm making it because I do want to have an audience for it. You have to follow the audience along and there's a level at which you have to meet them where they are and meeting them where they are is in the broadest sense of what are the business possibilities and what, how can I make sure I can eat?
[00:04:39] And what, how is this gonna get distributed and what are people looking for? And so I've found that, Part of my career. and part of my professional and artistic life has been always been focused on that, And so that has led me to pivot because what I recognize is that the meta skills involved,
[00:04:54] like if you take game design to be an innovative practice where you're like making things anew [00:05:00] and you're really trying to solve problems with it, then the fact that those things change doesn't change the discipline. It just changes the inputs to the system. and it'll produce different outputs, but the technique is the same.
[00:05:10] And when I get hired to work on this stuff, what I usually tell people when they're like, we have this game design problem, and we're hiring you because we wanna see if you have an answer for it, I tell them I don't have the answer for it. I have the process to get to an answer, right? And that process can be consistent.
[00:05:26] And so I feel like it's really important,to recognize that these disciplines you learn. like the meta skills that you learn are flexible and so you can just follow them along. And then, just for my own personal interest, it's just it's just much more interesting to me as a creative, I could have just kept working on Diner Dash forever, right? that was a possible universe for me. it didn't happen because I didn't want it.
From Literature to Games
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[00:05:45] Susan Gold: right. let's go back to how this kind of path set itself up, because when you started, you were studying literature and philosophy and mostly experimenting with theater. How did [00:06:00] this whole idea of live performance start to affect this idea of games?
[00:06:08] Nick Fortugno: Yeah, I mean, this is very much a product of when I was growing up, the eighties and the nineties when you didn't have game programs in a lot of places, and games weren't studied as a college discipline and you got jobs in the games' industry because you worked at Xerox or something, right? that was the way the world worked at that time.
[00:06:21] But my academic life and my game art life were just two separate things that were overlapping in terms of. Intellectual content, but not in any practical sense. so I had wiped out of an engineering degree at Cooper Union and then, started going to purchase and I started studying literature 'cause I read Ulysses, in my second semester as a freshman at Cooper Union. And I was just like, this is amazing. you can study this. That's crazy. So I just started studying it, but at the same time I was roleplaying and I had been roleplaying since I was six. or running games since I was six.
[00:06:51] And so I was playing Dungeons and Dragons and games like that all the time. That was just something I was doing as a hobby. And it became more already as I kept [00:07:00] doing it because the group I was in was started to like, push it to become like a more interesting expressive field. It wasn't just me, it was like the whole group was just like, we wanna tell more serious stories, I really care about my character and I don't really care about the plot. And all this started to push up to be more like art. not that I would've recognized that as 16, but that's like what was happening. Then around the time I got into college is when live action, role playing started to surface as a form out of white wolf and out of vampire the masquerade.
[00:07:25] And then I started doing it as an experiment. And so to me, the literature and the theory weren't separate from this, they were intellectually related, but I didn't really see a connection there. I was telling stories 'cause I wanted to, that was just the art form I was interested in. I like telling stories with other people, I think it's really fun. and it charges my brain in a way that nothing else does. and then gameplay was part of that. So I would play with gameplay, right? I would like mess with gameplay. And my head works in systems pretty well. So that worked. And then literature was a way for me to learn storytelling, right?
[00:07:54] And so what happened is. The LARP is what got me into Game Lab, the first [00:08:00] game studio I worked at, because Eric Zimmerman played in the LARP as research for Rules of Play, and then hired me from that.
[00:08:07] But I wasn't doing that for career reasons, like, essentially there's a more complex story here, but the short version is Eric was basically like, when the LRP was over, do you wanna work with me?
[00:08:16] And I basically said yes. And that was how I got started as a game designer. But that was my artistic practice, which was informed by my intellectual growth, but it was not a direct line from my intellectual growth to the, to that.
Criticism and Philosophy
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[00:08:29] Susan Gold: Did any of your education help you with now your critic side did? Was that like where you were able to start to flex some bones and talk about, how we look at games and things like that?
[00:08:43] Nick Fortugno: I, studying Litton philosophy, I would never go back and study anything else. I think it's like entirely shaped who I am as a person. because it taught me to be critical. It taught me to read,to actually read and to read carefully and to analyze. And I use that all the time.
[00:08:58] And that informed my game [00:09:00] development practice. And as I'm part of a school of people in and around New York who came through New York. Who are these really nerdy intellectual game designers, right? all of us. Parlay in this kind of theory, right? over critical space.
[00:09:14] And I got there in part 'cause I was around Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lance and engaged in debates with them. But in part it was just like my natural way of thinking. and from a storytelling perspective, I'm just like, literature is incredible for storytelling because it's, 'cause it's deeply innovative.
[00:09:27] if you read enough experimental stuff, you see really weird kinds of storytelling. And I think that stuff is valuable, right? And so that directly informed what I do. and then philosophy teaches you how to think. and I don't know, everyone should study it. It's like really, it's a fascinating thing to study and to learn about that.
[00:09:45] And then studying, I think that theoretical side gave me the capacity to read critical theory. I didn't study it, but I fell into it. And then when I started becoming a critic, I could lean on it because I understood how to do that. But I think being an artist is being a critic, I think [00:10:00] there's no way, there's no way to do one not the other.
What it Means to be a Game Designer
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[00:10:03] Susan Gold: I understand. Let's talk game lab for a moment. When you walked in the door there, what did you actually think a game designer actually meant? what did you think you would be doing day to day?
[00:10:14] Nick Fortugno: I had no idea. I really didn't have any idea what was going on. When Eric first talked about hiring me, what I told him was you shouldn't hire me because I haven't played a ton of digital games and I don't own digital game consoles. Eric and Eric was right about this. not just right about me, but right in the most general sense is like, well that doesn't matter, you clearly know how to make games. So when I came in, I was just like, what do you want me to do? and because it's the kind of people they were, they just threw me in the deep end of level design. and so when I showed up, I learned like a few things.
[00:10:42] Like one was, I've never actually articulated this before, so this is gonna be sloppy, but this is a good question, so I wanna think it through. one thing I learned was that you were expressing arguments through gameplay, right? Like that, that like level design taught me that, what I'm doing is I'm taking the elements, the mechanics of this game, [00:11:00] like as elements and I'm putting them together into different arguments and every, everything I'm putting forward is like a, is a position in the game that I'm demonstrating.
[00:11:08] That was a super useful technique for me to learn from. And I think about that all the time. That like it, it became fundamentals to, the way I think about these designing these experiences is that this is a bunch of systems working together and then you're just like expressing different parts of them in different combinations is essentially what game development is.
[00:11:24] I learned not to pay attention to genre because we didn't talk about it and I realized pretty fast that it didn't really matter. It's like you could use it as a reference point, but like it's just a bunch of pieces and so you could just take the pieces apart and put them back together. so it taught me very early not to pay attention to that and to actually push boundaries of what happened.
[00:11:42] And it taught me, game lab was really interesting as a space. 'cause it was very contentious at times, like in terms of the creative conversations that went on, right? Like people would argue very vociferously for their positions and it could get aggressive in how that argument worked. But there was also a space for everyone to be [00:12:00] talking about it, right?
[00:12:00] And it taught me really early in terms of working on a team that a game is a collaborative process. And that was really rewarding to me. 'cause I'm a role player, so like storytelling is collaborative.
[00:12:10] That's how I think about it.
[00:12:11] So this idea of really formalist game design, which I learned automatically being around Eric and Frank. really thinking very hard about innovation at the core of the design practice, right? That like I never learned game design as go look at some models and make what you make.
[00:12:26] that's just not how I was taught. I was taught like come up with new stuff. and then do this in collaborative environments. Do this in spaces where everybody weighs in because people have good ideas and let artists art and let programmers polish and let that stuff happen, don't try to control it because it becomes better when you let all everybody's creativity come into it. and so that's what I learned. but it was a lot. there's a lot of stuff I picked up really fast. 'cause like I had no visual design training at all and I was terrible.
[00:12:53] and like Eric would actually like stare at me in horror at some of the visual things I created
[00:12:57] but I was like, okay, cool. I have to play a lot of games. That's like [00:13:00] the research I have to do.
[00:13:01] my research too. People just gave me Vista games to start to play. Was Diner Dash the first game you worked on?
[00:13:08] Nope. Dinner Dash was definitely not the first game I worked on. I had worked on a bunch of Lego games, and it wasn't even the first game I lead designed. I lead designed a game called Arcadia before that, which was a game where you had four windows and
[00:13:20] It was a browser based game, and you would play like these one click mini games. So it's oh, you swing a bat in this game. this character runs. It was like a cannibal game. This character just runs and you just hit the hit button for them to jump, but you play four of them at the same time. and that game made, 88 $0.
[00:13:36] at least the last time I checked.
[00:13:38] Susan Gold: No, I
Dinner Dashing to Success
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[00:13:52] Susan Gold: think it's really important because it shows where you started, but then you ramped up very quickly because. Diner Dash became a touchstone for a whole genre. And there you were, designing this game. And I wanna be honest with you, when I first met you, I was like, you did [00:14:00] that.
[00:14:00] How did you do? it was such an amazement that, and that you didn't have an Activision or an electronic arts and that you guys were, doing this yourselves. This was just I hadn't met people that had done that.
[00:14:15] Nick Fortugno: Yeah, I mean, a team effort. Peter Nikolai program Amy Kim now Kii,would designed Flow as a character, Peter Lee was the producer on that. Like the idea came out of like a brainstorming in-game Lab generally.
[00:14:26] Mattia Romeo did all the infinite levels, So there's like a bunch of people who worked on this game, a bunch of other artists too, whose names, and I'm very sorry, whose names I'm not remembering right now, but you can find them if you go look for it. But there was like a lot of yeah.
[00:14:36] But that was, I think that came about, we were swinging for the fences and like I said, my, you. My first game did, was critically loved and made no money. so like we were trying and you don't always succeed. but I think that the game worked because I went out and looked at successful games and tried to do what I had learned to do at Game Lab, which is just break them apart into their pieces and just figure out
[00:14:59] What [00:15:00] about like games, like Incent, aquarium and games like Zuma, actually work, like thinking about other successful games at the time. And then how could you twist that into something else that would work similarly but if you just played it, you wouldn't necessarily realize it was the same.
[00:15:14] And then using storytelling, I'm like, these are 35 to 50-year-old women. what kind of stories do they like? what would be aspirational for that? And that was where the narrative came from. it was just like, oh, I think if we're making games for 35 to 50-year-old women, why don't we tell stories that they'd be interested in?
[00:15:28] And it was like, I bet a whole bunch of 40-year-old women wanna quit their jobs and start a business. I imagine that's this huge desire that people have, right? Like just knowing like how the world works. And I was like, okay, let's tell a story about that and let's make a character who's a person, right?
[00:15:42] and it was a big thing that Amy and I did where we I had conversations with her, I was like, what are Flow's, flaws? And we were both like, flow's a workaholic. Like she's literally, she owns the restaurant and she's waiting tables. Like she's she just can't stop working.
[00:15:54] And like that kind of stuff informed the game, right? so all of that was part and parcel of it. But I wanna [00:16:00] be really clear, and I think this is important,and I've talked about this with a lot of people in entertainment, and I think this is true. I had no idea that game was gonna blow up as big as it did. I did not know that. I knew the game was good. Everybody at Game Lab knew that game was good. We had no idea it was gonna explode. And it partially exploded because the people at play first pulled some strings to get you know, personal contact.
[00:16:20] Hey, please show the case this game to get it showcased on certain sites. The very early days 'cause it was so new, nobody knew what to do with it. so it's a perfect storm in certain ways and I use this metaphor all the time now when I talk about entertainment that like I know if using the American grading system, I know the difference between an F and a B, I don't know the difference between a B and an A and I don't actually think anybody really knows that difference.
[00:16:41] I know how to make a very good thing that is set up to take off if the conditions are right, but I cannot control all the final conditions that take something from being like a really good game to a great game.
[00:16:53] the game I made after, Dinner Dash was Plantasia and Plantasia It was a profitable game. So it was [00:17:00] successful, but it wasn't as successful as Dinner Dash. And the funniest thing about Plantasia is when Plantasia came out, and I, and people saw me, they were like, oh yeah, I played Plantation. That game was great. It just had one problem that kept it being from being a hit.
[00:17:12] I heard this so many times. Everyone gave me a different answer, right? It was like, oh, it should have been a hit. But, and then it was just like, it was like a random grab bag of stuff about the game. And I'm like, nobody knows. nobody knows. They know it's good. It didn't hit, you know, what do you do?
[00:17:27] but like that to me is, I think it's an important thing for people to understand is that there is an element of luck to entertainment, right? There is an element of the circumstances of the time you're in, the context you're in. and you can get very far by making a good product.
[00:17:39] If you don't make a good product, it's not gonna succeed, right? like that's the ground. But that doesn't make it, a blockbuster, And it's important to recognize that because if you cord to the idea of commercial success too hard, you're gonna not pay attention to the fact that zombies just stopped being popular.
[00:17:57] It has nothing to do with your zombie game, right? It's just like people are [00:18:00] bored with zombies and like they just aren't into it anymore. And you need that as an artist to keep yourself going because if you just keep like chasing higher and higher commercial success, when the world just shifts and you miss once for nothing to do with you, you will destroy your ability to work.
Making Things that Matter
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[00:18:16] Susan Gold: What I think about is that even though you did have a hit, a lot of people in the world didn't recognize you and didn't recognize that, but they did start to recognize that you were working in other spaces, like in the serious game space.
[00:18:33] And that was something that not a lot of people were doing at that time also. when did you realize that it was important to have that balance in your life? That not just making hits, but making things that mattered.
[00:18:48] Nick Fortugno: well, I mean, as an artist, I realized it when I started working on Plantasia and I was like. You know,you get something that's a hit, and then you spend some time being nervous, likedid I peak at 23? Kind of thing. And the answer is probably yes, [00:19:00] commercially, but that's not important.
[00:19:02] But like at the time I was like, am I, was that the only thing I have in me? Am I gonna be good? That's part of that motivation. part of the reason we got into serious games and games for Impact at Game Lab just because Eric and Peter were chasing work and that was the work that came and
[00:19:15] they were both interested in that too. and they trusted me to do it. I ended up working with, Barry Joseph on IET, the Cost of Life, which is a game with a group called Global Kids. that was was working with a group of student leaders, who were being trained from New York City high schools to become in leadership positions. And this was a game exploring social issues with them.
[00:19:32] And what I found really interesting was that. I didn't think very hard about it when I started working on that game. It wasn't like I was thinking like, oh, this is a game for impact and like, how does this work? And I just did the same game design process, right?
[00:19:43] Like I just walked in and I was like, okay, we have to try to make a game about education and this is actually tied to poverty and games about poverty work this way. Not that, I didn't read that. I just thought through it and I was like, oh, I can make a game about poverty. It would have to have dynamics like this.
[00:19:57] And then I started making it and it just felt like a game design process to [00:20:00] me. and it was weird, right? it,I, this is not a very helpful answer to anybody else trying to do this, but it just made sense to me. when I looked at the problem I was trying to solve in the early impact games I was working on, they looked like game design problems to me. It didn't look any different. It was just like, oh, I'm just, I just have to communicate this message rather than that message. and so it was an interesting space to work though, because. When you make commercial games, all you care about, is it being fun? So if the game deviates from the original direction of fun, like whatever, it's like you don't really care.
[00:20:30] Were we making a game about diners and now we're making a game about cats? Sure.
Making Serious Fun
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[00:20:34] Susan Gold: say, how do you make a game fun about poverty? it's just hard to oh wow, look, he gathered some more aluminum cans.
[00:20:44] Nick Fortugno: Yeah. like it's two things, right? one is recognizing that, fun is as broad a concept as good is in other forms of entertainment, right?
[00:20:50] And fun, I think just suffers because connotatively, we associate it with children and childish things
[00:20:55] But then the second thing is that a lot of games for impact I thought were suffering because they thought [00:21:00] gameplay had to be affixed to the topic.
[00:21:03] You know, and this is the chocolate covered broccoli metaphor, right? I can get you to eat the broccoli if I cover it in chocolate. what this metaphor ignores is that If you put chocolate on broccoli, it's going to be terrible because chocolate doesn't belong with broccoli.
[00:21:15] And so if I'm gonna make a game about poverty, I have to dig into poverty and find the game play in poverty. If I'm gonna make a game about, a certain kind of policy position in government, I have to find something interesting in how the Fed works, right?
[00:21:27] I can't just tack the stuff on because it'll feel separate. And often won't mesh. So to me this is a super interesting problem because A, it's not a naturally fun topic, but B, there's a bunch of facts here that I have to, hold onto.
[00:21:42] But then for me, it became a storytelling question, right? like more than anything else. not that it was a linear story, but the question I was really asking was, I'm trying to get to this point about the relationship between poverty and independence and support, And what the role of education is in helping with this. And this was not my idea. This [00:22:00] came from Haitian experts on Haiti and public policy experts. And so my idea was I want to make a gameplay that makes you experience that. That was the goal, you'll learn because you will have an embodied experience of what this is. And I don't know. I wish I had a better answer for why I came up with that, that position.
[00:22:18] But that was just what occurred to me. And like doing this is so hard 'cause you have to stick to the facts. But it became something I got really compelled by because the problems were so interesting that I was like, I just wanna do this all the time.
[00:22:30] and that's where as I kept working on street games and art, that was just for me, I started looking really hard at what are complex emotions I could explore? And can I make a game that explores this very complicated emotion? And in part that's because I'm interested in the emotion, but in part because it's just really hard to pull that off.
[00:22:47] So it's a really interesting challenge to say I want to find this very specific emotion from your childhood and get you to re-experience it. making play do that is tricky. And so it's like a really interesting thing to do as an artist.
[00:22:58] Susan Gold: and definitely a [00:23:00] challenge when let's move to Come Out and Play, because that also is something that reinforced my love for games because of the joy in playing, what were you trying to fill?
[00:23:14] What was there about you've done this work, you've done social justice work, you've done, fun. Play, experiences and now you're using the real world as your medium.
[00:23:28] Nick Fortugno: yeah, so "Come Out and Play" was the brainchild of a few people together, like primarily Greg Tre, but also Mattia, Romeo, Katherine Herdlick, me, Peter Lee eventually, Pete Vit, Debra Ever Lane, right? and then some people in San Francisco who carried it. Gabe Zuckerman and people like that.
[00:23:46] so like a bunch of people were involved in it. Greg primarily, and Greg had done street games in NYU Mattia had done street games in NYU Pete had done street games in NYU,Pac Manhattan and Payphone Warriors. From Warriors, Greg Pac, Manhattan, Mattia,and Pete. and so there were like people [00:24:00] doing this kind of work.
[00:24:00] And I think that came out of the experimental space of what ITP was doing with games at the time. Greg wanted to create it from I mean I'm speaking for Greg here, but this was my understanding when we started was like, you trying to make these games and you don't have players and there's no other designers.
[00:24:14] And we really think that if we just put a festival together, we'd see all of these people together. And that definitely motivated me to work on it. But there I had this other idea, and this has not come out and play, but it was something that was biting around my head about,to assemble stuff.
[00:24:28] 'cause at the time it was the Kerry Bush election when we were like, right before this happened, and there was this interesting phenomenon where Kerry even would have like free speech zones outside of,outside of the rallies he was holding so that you could go and protest.
[00:24:41] And I was like, this is unconstitutional. The country is a free speech zone. You're not allowed to cordon off free speech into a box. And so I was thinking a lot about how do you protest assembly? It's crazy. Like a protest is just an assembly. And I realized oh, you don't have to protest assembly, you just have to be in public. [00:25:00] And so how do you get people to be in public? And I was like, oh, just do data things. Like just do crazy data things. And then, and that was what fueled me into come out and play it. 'cause we have a right to be in the streets. We have a right to be in the parks. We have in the right to be in public places.
[00:25:14] We can do whatever we want in public places as long as we don't interfere with other people. And we leave them as we found them. And I was like, I want to make things that showcase that. And there's no better way to make that than with things that are ridiculous. And so I, that was my primary motivation.
[00:25:27] So it was like this twin thing of like maybe three things. Like you could make all new kinds of games, which is always what I'm interested in. So I could make whole new stuff. It brought together a bunch of people making these games, which was super interesting because it inspired people, right?
[00:25:41] 'cause that was the rule of come out and play. We don't play games that already exist. so all the games were new and it was like showing you like 25 different games you'd never seen before that could be played in public. And then finally you got to do crazy things in public, which was to me, the point, right?
[00:25:55] and I don't know,like thinking about deco and, and and like these ideas of, col [00:26:00] liberation, it's like an extremely powerful form of it to watch adults play and let go, right? And that, that to me was the joy of it. And this is like when we won the big fun award at indicate, this is what I talked about in my talk, was essentially this is what it's about just letting go and doing silly things. And like that's a freedom to that. and seeing that has always been really magical to me.
[00:26:20] And then it slowly became a place where I really think about art. and I think it's in part because I'm like really fascinated by the way the human body is exists in relationship to gameplay.
[00:26:28] And that there's all sorts of ways the body is engaged in the things we do that we don't think about. And play is something that can twist the body into the interesting shapes. And so you can do all this interesting play with people's bodies just by telling them to play a certain way and that can lead to certain kind of emotional states.
[00:26:45] And I got obsessed with that. And that's one of those things I've been working on for a really long time.
[00:26:49] That's like my obsession, right? that's there's lots of ways you could obsess about games and art. that's the one I cord to.
[00:26:55] Susan Gold: And I, I have to say, to me, it's one of the most joyful [00:27:00] experiences is to be a part of those. and not that I don't get joy from playing games, but there's this interaction with other people while playing the game that you don't have when you're playing a video game. There's this physicality and tactileness of it, and that really adds a layer that you can't get in a handheld game, you know?
Rebel Monkey
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[00:27:22] Susan Gold: I need to move our history of Nick along a little bit. And, moving to Rebel Monkey, your early social games, the startup that burned brightly and briefly, what did you set out to build there and what went wrong?
[00:27:37] Nick Fortugno: Yeah, Margaret Wallace and I formed that company. Margaret was, stepping away from Skunk Studios, which was the, casual development studio she had been working with for a while. And I left Game Lab and we formed that together and we, quickly just through happenstance, raised venture capital to work on,a multiplayer online casual games.
[00:27:56] And we had this idea called Camp Fu, which is oh, you play these games with four [00:28:00] to eight people, like these little flash games on the web. And, yeah, it was a really interesting experiment. I, it was the first time I'd run a company and Margaret was CEO, I was president, so I was like doing the ground stuff on the company.
[00:28:10] I liked it. Like it was cool. I like managing. And so that was an interesting thing to learn. we had about 40 ish people, I think at our highest, we released the product. It went out into beta. but the problem was that we did this at a time when MMOs were they had just passed their sort of apex point and were starting to come down at that phase as social gaming was coming up.
[00:28:31] and then, there was a small financial crisis at the time that we were doing that company. So what happened is the expectation of MMOs when we raised the money was that they weren't supposed to be profitable when you went to your second round.
[00:28:41] They were supposed to be show audience growth and time on site. And we had I would say good audience growth and great time on site. That was like what we were performing on, but we made no money. And so we went around to raise again and they were basically like.
[00:28:53] we're looking at Facebook games that are making money right now. you're not making money. We're not gonna fund anything that doesn't make money. And essentially the [00:29:00] company just got caught in that window and to Margaret's credit, Margaret saw this coming,with about six months of runway left.
[00:29:05] And she's like, we've gotta pivot this thing to some other platform because the MMOs are going down
[00:29:09] and I was just like, we don't have the runway to do it. And I think she, she was right, a hundred percent right. We should have made that pivot. I just knew we couldn't do it with the money we had and so then the company just wiped out through that.
[00:29:19] and it sucks because I thought we made some really interesting stuff and the thing that's painful about it to me, we had to let a bunch of people go and it, the whole thing fell apart and Firing 30 people
[00:29:28] stacks up to one of the worst days of your life. but as an artist, what was most painful to me is like we had this idea of how these games worked and we had started to see some traction on how they worked, but we never actually got it to the point where I could say for sure what they did.
[00:29:42] So we had this really interesting kind of gameplay. And now, and I'm not saying I would've, we would've done this. I'm not, like I'm not one of these people who, I called it first, but you look at things like Among Us and Fall Guys and Right. Like those kinds of game spaces. And I was like, oh, we were playing in that space and I wish we had a little bit longer to see [00:30:00] if we could have gotten further with it because it was possible to do with the technology at that time.
[00:30:04] And we were showcasing that we could do it and like we just didn't have the runway to really make it work. But I imagine every artist has 17 of those
[00:30:12] Susan Gold: Oh,
Leadership & Risk
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[00:30:12] Susan Gold: I think I can pull out 10 right now. I'm curious when you think about how everything went down, how do you look at risk now? and also,you said that you liked managing people. What did leadership mean to you? Now that you have this well perceived failure, although, not in my mind, what did you feel? What were you thinking about? Risk and those types of things.
[00:30:38] Nick Fortugno: when we started Revel Monkey, Margaret and I were both very clear-eyed that oh, we're venture-backed, right? Either we're gonna IPO sell for a lot of money and get rich, or we're gonna go out of business. Right? there are only two places you go when you have venture money, and we went the second one, so we weren't like blind about that.
[00:30:54] Um, what did it do for me in risk? It's an interesting question. Did I change my opinion about [00:31:00] risk after that? Like, that was the hardest consequence I ever had for failing at something in terms of its impact on other people. And to be honest, that was the thing that, that really hurt.I mean, they got other jobs. It's not like they needed me, but like, I, I felt this responsibility to them I didn't want to fail them and I was trying so hard to find ways not to fail them. and.
[00:31:19] Susan Gold: into your family is what you did, and now you've disappointed them by not being able to take care of them, so I can understand that.
[00:31:28] Nick Fortugno: Yeah,
Playmatics
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[00:31:28] Nick Fortugno: And so I thought about that and then when Margaret and I, you know, from the ashes of Rebel Monkey, we started Playmatics, we just flowed into that. 'cause we took some of the staff with us because Margaret had almost immediately landed other work. we were just gonna consult and then suddenly there was a development project, it was almost instantaneous. And then we just started doing that.
[00:31:44] mean, Playmatics was a combination of branded work, museum installations, transmedia, doing everything like breaking bad and then things to grow your mind, Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of that was just Margaret and I [00:32:00] chasing where we thought, where is the industry shifting? Where is the market shifting? What work is interesting? that was a lot of what that was. We deliberately tried to keep the team small 'cause I didn't wanna deal with a big team anymore, 'cause if you're gonna start a company,the day things change is when you pay someone a paycheck.
[00:32:14] I was, I got much more cautious about. What it meant to hire somebody and what kind of commitments I was making to hiring.
[00:32:20] but also it was just like seeing what was interesting in the world and where were games coming from and they just pivoted during the 14 years that we were really active on Playmatics. It was like there was a lot of entertainment games at the beginning and then that shifted to more impact games later on.
[00:32:36] and we were just, and then there was like government work we were doing and all of that stuff was where do we see a market for what we do? Which is innovative game design. That's what our focus is. And in that way I think we were in a tradition of Game Lab and area code and gigantic mechanic, right?
[00:32:51] Like these studios coming through New York that get all the weird stuff, And so that was a lot of what that was. And we worked with small teams and we worked on a lot of different, [00:33:00] interesting things.
[00:33:00] So we got like cool stuff out. We worked with ProPublica, we worked with a MC, we worked with, red Cross, red Crescent, like we did lots. We were NIH, NIMH, so like NSF, like so much interesting work we got to do through there. PBS we did street games with PBS. yeah, it was very fun.
The Impact of One is Many: Ephimeral Work
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[00:33:17] Susan Gold: But a lot of these things, they're rather ephemeral. the museum, the show will close the campaigns and artifacts vanish. How do you make peace with work? That's hits hard, but then in the moment. It's great, but then it leaves almost no trace,
[00:33:35] Nick Fortugno: when people ask me what Taoism is, I tell a story, which is like, all of the following things are true. I will die. Everyone I know will die. Everything I've built will disintegrate. The earth will fall into the sun, and then the universe will go dark. All of these things are true,
[00:33:55] So what do you do, right? yeah, the things are gonna fade. I mean, like,I'm very lucky, [00:34:00] right? that's how I understand it. I'm very lucky I made Dinner Dash, I made IED, right?I made some of the breaking bad stuff. I help me come out and play, right? Like these things, they set traces out into the world.
[00:34:12] How long does a trace have to be out in the world before it becomes a meaningful trace? I don't know. and you know, as you think about activism in particular, there is no magic bullet that's gonna change the world from anything, nothing like no protest, no political action, no piece of art. nothing does that, right? it's a, in a creation of drops that form a river that like changes the world. so how much work should your drop do? I think we get overly concerned about this as artists in a way that I think is destructive to our ability to make work. I think every time you do some kind of act towards a political cause, you are affecting someone.
[00:34:51] how many people do you have to affect before like it, for it to qualify as being meaningful. I just think it's a, it's just a dumb way to think. It's [00:35:00] because A, it's like these impacts have ricochet effects, right? They go out into the world in ways you don't expect. May not even be detectable.
[00:35:09] And B, if 200 people play your game, that's one person reaching 200 people. That's not small, right? there's something crazy about thinking about that's bad because it's not 4 million people. It's or 400 million people. yes, all things exist at all of these scales. All of these things are part of the process of making these things work.
[00:35:27] So, like the waiting game, right? The one that we did with ProPublica at Playmatics, I don't know how many people saw that game. I know a ton of people saw that game, but like a good number of people saw that game. A good number of people replay Publica a good number of awards reviewed it. did it change the world deeply?
[00:35:44] I don't know. There were discussions in Congress about asylum during the Biden administration. Asylum law changed during the Biden administration? Did they see the waiting game? Did they see the reporting around waiting game? I have no idea, but I also know I wasn't the only person doing that.
[00:35:59] there were [00:36:00] thousands of people pushing on that at the same time. I was just one voice in the thousands of people. And I believe that if we're gonna really believe in collectivist action, we have to recognize that. it's not gonna be a simple trace of your thing did X. we have to just keep he stuff into the resistance, heaping stuff into the movement and understanding that it's all has value.
[00:36:21] And like trying to quantify that value in some like complicated way is like that's not helpful, right? All that's gonna do is make you not make work. 'cause you think it's not affecting people. But so many art forms we have happen because somebody goes and sees one painting or somebody hears one song by an obscure band.
[00:36:35] you don't know how those things move. And so that's where I rest is Every so often someone will write me and tell me they saw something or they were in my class, or they played in one of my pieces of work. And I'm not gonna take the trouble to try to quantify it.
[00:36:48] That's a commercial thing to do. as an artist, that's not relevant to me. What's relevant to me is that I had an impact on the people I tried to reach. And if I did that, then that's success. And if it's an impact based thing where what [00:37:00] I'm trying to do is make a change to the world, you're never gonna get that,
[00:37:03] that's not gonna happen. So you let that go.
[00:37:05] Susan Gold: But I, I think that, that whole mindset carries into your teaching as well, and I think that,who you can affect when you can affect them I feel like that's how you I'm here, I'm a resource,all those things. But I think you also as an educator, do something else, and that is introduce people to new ideas and things that you, I see you as a cedar of ideas, and that's what you, I see you as,
[00:37:34] Nick Fortugno: that's how I think about myself.
[00:37:36] Susan Gold: yeah.
[00:37:37] And also
Criticism
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[00:37:38] Susan Gold: the thing is though, that you have become more of a cultural critic in my mind. You, look at things and you actually sit down and write your thoughts and try to come up with interesting debates, and try to push conversation along again, your seeding.
[00:37:58] recently you [00:38:00] have been replying to some substack. There was a response that you did to Jenny Nicholson's Star Wars Hotel video
[00:38:08] Nick Fortugno: Oh
[00:38:09] yeah.
[00:38:09] Susan Gold: a lot of conversation. And from your side, what were you actually trying to do with that essay?
[00:38:15] Nick Fortugno: Oh, okay. So I went to Star Cruiser, right? I was one of the people who came to one of the last, like the late runs of Star Cruiser. I I thought Star Cruiser would be around for a while, so I was like waiting and then it was closing, and then I did a scramble. Thank you Catherine Yu of the Immersive Institute for got us the tickets.
[00:38:29] so thank you. in terms of like getting us to be able to purchase the tickets. So that was great. and it was a, it was an amazing experience. It was like a truly amazing experience. it get, it got bashed a lot for the price, which was not an accurate reporting. And then I went and I was like, this is incredible.
[00:38:43] This, this is a whole new version of this form and I'm interested in interactive storytelling. So I was like, this is great. Everyone who worked on this deserves credit, right?
[00:38:49] And then I saw Nicholson's talk. As someone who teaches interactive narrative, I was like, I have to watch this because this is getting a ton of views and it's becoming the [00:39:00] defacto, opinion about this piece. And I was like, this is not accurate, right? like I, it was a very, something is wrong.
[00:39:07] I said this in the article, it's, guess something is wrong on the Internet moment, but where it wasn't accurate was, I felt like it was not representing the experience of many people who went on that, that, that experience. and it wasn't representing it in a way that was like, like clearly omitting things that she was either unaware of or assumed. And I, it annoyed me because like she had clearly done research into other areas, so I was like, you could find this stuff. Right? So, I wanted to talk about it because as someone who experiences this, and as someone who has seen a lot of immersive work and felt a lot of immersive storytelling, I want there to be another voice in the record that's responding to what she's saying and just pointing out another part of this experience, but not like in a trolley way.
[00:39:51] Because Nicholson is very good at some of the stuff that Nicholson does, not just as an influencer, but some of the arguments are great, and Nicholson's personal experience was a trash [00:40:00] fire. And like she has every right to be upset about that. I would be upset about it too, but like the way she forms that piece is not accurate.
[00:40:06] And I think that I became a critic because. I very much think about that practice as a practice of teaching, right?
[00:40:15] like, I don't want you to read something I write for my substack. because you wanna know if you should see it or not. yeah, you can. And I will tell you that I wanna talk about the form, right? 'cause I think everything we see, and this comes from like new wave film criticism from the mid 20th century, right?
[00:40:29] like everything we see can be framed in our understanding of the medium. So, let's have a conversation about the medium, right? It's much more important to me that I get you to think than you agree with me. so I just, I write that stuff to get people to think. And what I thought was that. in that case Nicholson's argument is very polemic because she has a story she wants to tell about Disney's being crap. And that's not an accurate story to what I saw. And I wanna invite a deeper discussion about this with [00:41:00] evidence from the piece so that there's a counterpoint to what she was saying and I was like, I don't know if anybody's gonna read this.
[00:41:05] I'm not as popular as she is, butI'm like, at least I want to exist. You know?
[00:41:10] Susan Gold:
[00:41:10] But
[00:41:10] was there anything that, that you misread about the situation and how people would react? that's the thing that always surprises me is what the internet can do.
Expertiese Performance
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[00:41:23] Nick Fortugno: I mean, the thing that mostly upset me is that. it has become possible on the internet to perform expertise, and objectivity in a way that is deceptive. and what I didn't like about that piece is that and I think a lot of people do this in media now, so it's not, I'm not blaming Nicholson for this, but like it's a move I see where people are like, I'm just giving my opinion, but then I researched this whole thing and now I'm stating these things as fact.
[00:41:49] And they don't wanna get called out under the rigor of journalism. So they don't wanna be able to be called out as being wrong or corrected or have to get away from a polemic. They [00:42:00] have, because they're thinking of themselves as a brand and they know that a certain argument's gonna sell better than another argument, which is the only way I can understand
[00:42:05] that essay, but they also want to pull the evidence in. And to me what was disappointing about it was people were like, oh, she clearly is good. She's clearly an expert and she clearly knows what she's talking about and she clearly researched this, and so I can trust this as an opinion without having any other critical insight into it.
[00:42:22] And I was like, this is deeply cherry picked. Right? And so there are places where it's a very strong argument and there are places where it's a very weak argument and we need to be able to have that conversation. And I got mad about it because to me it was just obvious that Nicholson decided that she did not want to represent the opinions of people who liked it because there's no way she could have done all that other research and not found that people love Star Cruiser. Right?
[00:42:46] so I mostly wanted to like to go into the public and just say that look, we have to approach this stuff with this kind of rigor. And as a critic, I think that's part of the rigor of being a critic. It's it's type of journalism and it's a type of journalism because it's not just your opinion because it can't [00:43:00] just be your opinion.
[00:43:00] You have to have a little bit more rigor to what you do. You have to have a sense of ethics about what you're doing as a critic and that means not omitting, you have to, at least in my opinion, there's a certain kind of fairness you have to approach the work with.
[00:43:12] that requires you to get outside of your own taste a little bit and get outside of. Some of your own motivations
[00:43:18] And yeah. So that's a lot of what I'm thinking about.
The Single Thread
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[00:43:21] Susan Gold: Interesting. I have to start to wind this down, so I need to, ask you a couple of wrap up questions. But you're so fascinating, and the breadth of your work is so much. I hope that people will, start to look for you and the things that you're doing and, because personally I, it's not that I want anyone to mirror what you're doing, but I want them to see that you can have this multifaceted life in games that doesn't have to be I just code, right?
[00:43:54] You can think, and that is something that you really bring to the table. When you [00:44:00] look across all of your stuff, all the casual hits, the series games, the street festivals, the startups, teaching criticism. Have you found a single thread that comes through it?
[00:44:11] Nick Fortugno: Uh, single thread, In part, it, it's, it is designed to be scattered so that I can, constantly be expressing creativity in different places. I find it regenerative to have different creative projects that use different parts of my brain, so that if I get tired of this thing in an exhausted way, I can like switch to this other thing.
[00:44:32] what are the threads in my head? I mean, seeding is a good word. I like that word. I don't wanna tell people what to do. I don't think that's interesting. I'm not interested in linear storytelling that much. I might do some of it in cases, but that's less interesting to me because I don't wanna tell you a story, I wanna tell a story with you, right?
[00:44:48] I don't want to teach you a thing. I want to have a conversation with you about a thing that inspires you. I like teaching because teaching feels like roleplaying. it feels oh, I have, I [00:45:00] know where the ship is going. Sorta. I'm gonna steer it there. 'cause I know what's gonna make an interesting experience for you, and I know what's gonna hit these beads, but I don't know where this is going.
[00:45:09] you're moving this. And I don't know what you're gonna do with this. And I don't want to, I don't want to make clones of myself in my classes. I'm not interested in that at all. a lot of my students come out these classes and they have this kill the Buddha idea of I wanna go into public and argue with Nick Ferno.
[00:45:22] Or I'm like, I'll have a fight with Nick Ferno about this thing. And I love it. I love it. I'm so happy about that. yeah. I don't want you to come out and think what I think that if I did that, then you, we did this wrong. I want you to come outta my class and be in a space of your own taste making.
[00:45:38] And my play is like that Zach age who makes, PMO said this once about my game work. He saw one of my games and he's like, your games are very loose. That was the phrase he used. Like they have a lot of space for people to just do what they want in 'em. And I'm like, yeah. Because that's what it's about, right?
[00:45:54] I'm playing with you. that's what I'm doing. I'm playing with you as a designer. I'm playing with you as an educator. I'm playing with you as a [00:46:00] critic, right? Like I, I don't want to tell you things. I don't want to control your opinion or your taste. I want you to come into the playground I made and mess around with it and see where you, what you find in it.
[00:46:12] And I'm a designer so I know what you're gonna do, but I also want you to surprise me a little bit and that'll be fun.
Keeping it Together
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[00:46:17] Susan Gold: I was gonna ask you, if someone were to look at their life and go, wow, I am all over the place, is there anything that helps you keep it all together? Is it just constant fascination and a desire to learn? Or is it that, you just can't be satiated in one thing?
[00:46:42] Nick Fortugno: I think it's, if you want to do innovative art, it's really important to cultivate a very broad curiosity about the world. and you have to be able to find things interesting. It's like this is the most important thing to the games for impact side of it, right?
[00:46:56] some of the stuff is really heavy, some of the stuff is really dense. Some of the stuff can be really [00:47:00] pedantic and you have to find a way to make it interesting to yourself, right? Because that's where you're gonna find the play in it. So I think that was part of what happened is I had to make games about things I didn't care about and I had to make myself care about them. To be able to make them. And so I think cultivating that is very important, but I think that's important for all artists. I don't know how you be an artist and not be curious about the world. like, I make games and I play games all the time, and I study games, but I also go to museums and I also do weird things and that kind of approach to the world where you just are experimenting all the time and you can be very bad at things, which is the other part of it, right?
[00:47:32] I'm still learning how to be a critic. I'm not great at it. So it's it's a question of like, how do you make all those things work? that I think is really important. And then the second part of it, it's like being curious and being comfortable with being bad at things, right?
[00:47:45] It's like being comfortable, being in the dark, being comfortable making mistakes, being comfortable, like seeing things fail and recovering. And then if you can do those things, then what you find is that, actually, you start building a resilience and a capacity to pivot [00:48:00] that will serve you in all of those forums.
[00:48:02] I'm not saying everybody should do this. Like I, I have not had a steady paycheck until I started working as a professor, right? there are, there's a price to this. but what I'm happy about is I can look back over my life and see all that crazy stuff and I can have these moments where I remember hundreds of people in Governor's Island playing 15 different, really stupid games in public, that's where this becomes rewarding for me. But to do that, there's a knife, I have to keep sharp. And that's like one side of that knife is curiosity and the other side of that knife is, resilience.
[00:48:35] And you just have to, you have to just keep doing that and it requires a kind of playfulness about the world because if you don't have that, it would just be really painful.
[00:48:42] Susan Gold: For you and me both. Nick, this is a wonderful conversation. I truly have enjoyed speaking with you. There is so much more. I have a feeling you will be sharing with us in the future, and I just appreciate your time today. Thank you.
[00:48:59] Nick Fortugno: [00:49:00] No, thank you so much. This was great.
[00:49:01] Shirley McPhaul: Want to get involved with the GGJ Podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please send your ideas, suggestions, and questions to ggjpod@globalgamejam.org, and tell us who you think we should be talking to next, what stories or issues matter most to you about the future of games, and help us highlight the people and practices that make a sustainable creative life in games possible.
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[00:49:47] Catch us on Substack and on YouTube and anywhere else you find podcasts. This has been the GGJ Podcast. Thanks for listening, and keep making games