Beyond Solitaire Podcast 251: Gene Koo on Ephemerality in Games
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Transcript
And now for a quick word from our sponsor. I am proud to announce that the Beyond Solitire podcast is sponsored by Central Michigan University's Center for Learning Through Games and Simulations. Their upcoming project, Line by Line, will crowdfund on Backer Kit this October. And you can find my interview with the designer, Tilac Vas, in the show notes. CJS's most recent project, The Blue Way by Jason Morning Star, is also currently up for pre-order. It's an amazing RPG about oppression and identity, and you should check it out. For now, though, let's get on with the show. Hey gamers, this is Liz Davidson from Beyond Solitire, and this week on the pod, I'm here with a very special guest. This is game designer Jean Coup. Uh you may know him from the Bonsai Diary. How you doing, Jean?
Hey, it's a real honor to be here.
Yeah, I'm super happy to have you on. Um, so, uh, you have had some good critical success recently from your cute little game about bonsai trees that also packs a punch. Uh, so why don't we start by just telling people about it?
Sure. Yeah. The Bonsai Diary is a draw and journal game. It's in this exploding category known as journaling games. Some people say solo journaling games. I tend to drop the solo part out for reasons we can talk about, but um in the game you raise a bonsai from a little tiny seedling to potentially a big huge bonsai tree uh over the course of multiple generations. And you do that by tracing uh the picture of the bonsai tree sapling. And then as you go page after page, you just add one more line and one more line and the tree gets bigger when you do that. And then at the same time, you're also answering journaling prompts about what's happening in the life of the bonsai caretaker.
So, what inspired you to make this game?
Someone tweeted, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have intergenerational games or games about generational legacy?" And this has never happened before and it's never happened since. But immediately the idea of the tracing and the tree popped into my head as like, oh yeah, bonsai are things that you know you have to hand down from generation to generation if you if they actually make it. And the mechanic of doing this tracing just immediately came to me and I basically knocked out the first version that weekend and the roots of it are still in the game now. Um, it's basic core was right there. Um, I've never had anything really hit me like that kind of inspiration before.
That's awesome. Um, so, uh, what did your design life look like before Bonsai for people who don't know?
Wow. Okay. Um, well, I actually, so I had spent most of my life dreaming and and and hoping to become some kind of digital game designer. And my closest I ever got was running a nonprofit called I Civics where we made games about uh teaching kids about democracy, but I wasn't the game designer or the I was kind of like the executive producer you might say because but my main job was actually as you do as an executive director is raising money. So uh so that was about as close as I ever got to actually making digital games. It just was a it just turned out to be really hard to crack for me. I mean I I even taught myself programming when I was a little kid to like try. I just couldn't get all the pieces together for whatever reason. But so at some point I realized that paper, if I could actually just switch to paper, paper just allowed me to have instant feedback and it was tactile and it was something that I felt I realized I really needed to do. I remember being told in digital games like everybody was doing paper prototyping. So um so if I had only tried that, I might have actually gotten to tabletop earlier.
That's
um Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That is fascinating. Um, so when when did you start dabbling in tabletop?
All right. So like probably everyone else, it would have been during or just the tail end of pandemic, but I I had actually started thinking about it um right before because the angle that I ended up coming in from, this is a strange uh kind of bounce is I was playing Pandemic Legacy and seeing that you could tell stories in a board game. And I don't know how my brain works, but that suddenly made me realize I could like put on a D and D campaign for my kids. I don't know, it it just suddenly I don't know why, but it just gave me this like belief that hey, I can I can put on a show. Um, and so I started doing that and getting really unsatisfied with that game engine and then started to explore the indie game space and you know, as you do, you just start hacking things and roll forward a couple years into the pandemic and and uh I discovered the quiet year and I'd been playing the hell out of Stardw Valley and decided I wanted to do a hack where I'm going to do the quiet year. started. I was going to do Stardw Valley via the mechanics of the quiet year. And for people who don't know the quiet year, it's a map drawing game where you're telling the story of a of a of a um of a small um small tribe, uh bracing itself for an apocalypse. Um and the core mechanic is drawing cards from a deck and and answering prompts.
And I was excited about this. I learned about both UNPUB and Break My Game and I'm extremely lucky to be in the DC area where like I could just drive up to either of these things or like Break My Game has a whole bunch of events near me and Unpub is up near Baltimore so it was just drive up there. And so I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to bring this game and just start trying it out." and then realized literally the day before I went to my first break my game event that somebody had already made this game and I was like as you do right like there's just only like you combine two things that everybody likes and and guess what someone else has already made it so but I'm like you know what I'm going to bring this game anyway and of course nobody's ever heard of the quiet year in c in certain circles it's like okay and but I got some feedback that took the game in a completely different direction and the next thing you know it was using stickers and it was like something like a um you're gonna have to edit this because I'm trying to remember the name of that thing where you Mad Libs. Okay, sorry about this.
It's like Mad Libs if you had a picture instead of a word prompt and then you take you you you you draw the rest of the picture and you put that down as a sticker on the on the picture. That's how that game worked and I actually got it licensed. probably never going to get published, but it was my first game and it was my first success story, which I don't I think is kind of uh extremely lucky that that I managed to get somewhere with my first design.
That's awesome. So, okay. Uh you go by Sticky Doodler.
Yeah. And so that comes from that game. It was sticker doodle town. You take a sticker and you doodle on it. And I happen to like that it also sounds like a cookie.
I love it. So, one trend I'm noticing in the games that you are making that we're talking about. So, one is stickers, which people with anxiety about placing stickers and never being able to place them again kind of freak out about. One is a tracing game where you do in fact encourage like there's space in the book of the Bonsai Diary to just trace directly in there and then you if you want to play again, you can get other paper. And then uh you are kickstarting a game right now, right? And that one is coloring
color jam.
How And you also kind of flagged that like you really really got interested in design and games that could tell stories while playing a legacy game notable for destructional components. Um and so what is it about the permanent use of game components that fascinates you? Because I feel like that is not always the case with people who are playing uh games on paper.
Wow. Okay. I don't think I've ever come at it from that angle. So, I'm going to have to I'm going have to think about I didn't I didn't think of myself as a destructionoriented person. But one of the great affordances of paper is your ability to write on it, fold it, um burn it. I didn't do any burning games yet, but there are people who have done burning games and and all sorts of things, right? I mean, it's for and in and this time and and and uh place in in the world, it's cheap and uh re reusable and from reusable compon um resources. So, like it it it is the thing that actually unlocked my creativity was was like noticing, oh, you can trace through the paper. And that's where I ended up with with the Bonsai Diary. Oh, you can draw on a sticker and put it on something. You can color, obviously. There's there's so there's another game I made um pretty heavy topic about schizophrenia. Um, content warning. My mom is schizophrenic, untreated. And so, one of the ways I grappled with her like kind of trying to look thing look at things from her perspective was making a game about folding a receipt into a piece of paper and folding it over and over and over again and keep reinterpreting what's in that thing until it no longer is the original idea, but there's some trace of it left. And again, like folding, writing, modifying, those are all things you can do. And it's like, you know, I I I get that also we have games that you want to be able to play over and over again, and so you don't want to destroy those, but sometimes there's experiences you can
only have by by making a change or a modification.
Yeah, it makes sense. Um, so when you were testing the Bonsai Diary, um, what did that process look like? And you know, you the kind of core idea of the game is already there, right? But especially because you're you're going through a lot of paper, you're asking people to draw. How did you like what what did testing reveal to you that helped the game evolve into it full self?
Yeah, it's a great question. And I so I was um I was taking it to like board game testing places like Break My Game and Unpub where traditionally you have more of the kind of hobby board game testing, not so much,
you know, story and role playing games, although I think actually there's been a very intentional expansion into that space, too. And so I was the one weirdo who was sitting there with some pieces of paper that that you sit down with and and and scribble and write and write out like your feelings on. And um what I was testing for was a couple of things. One was just the usability of it. I think it's it's super important to me that a game be accessible right from the very beginning. So if you start on the first if you open the thing and on the first page can you can you gro it and do the thing which is one of the hardest problems of a lot of story games is like well you need to understand the whole lore of you know whatever and why dragons are doing this thing before you can even get going. It's like okay can can you start? So one of the biggest things was really I mean this is something all all designers going through is like okay what's the usability but one thing I discovered in doing it was just how much of an emotional reaction I was getting. I did not expect people to play and then actually tell me that you kind of not not so much that you need content warnings, but that they were getting emotionally overwhelmed because they were speedrunning something that you really should be playing o once a day over the course of multiple weeks, not like sitting down one after the after the after the other. So to me that was like
you know I I guess it's it was um just realizing that actually I was having a much bigger emotional impact than I had even ever imagined because I don't flatter myself that like hey I'm going to have people have big feelings. I'm like that would be great but like I didn't really imagine that could happen. So to get that feedback live was really incredible. I was also seeing the different varieties of play that was possible. So at the I think the very last time I actually play tested it in public was at PAX unplugged and at least a couple of times a couple would sit down and play it together and it was either jointly or one person would draw and the other would would write the story out.
And just seeing them interact with each other with the game was also just very moving. and just seeing that it was raising questions that they had never even thought about in their own lives and I was like wow okay again like not what I expected. So that was all all of that was kind of so I was getting both of course the usability feedback there's so many changes I made to the game in terms of usability that are driven by like direct feedback from from multiple play testers but also just seeing that it was hitting emotionally at a level I didn't think was possible that that was what kind of pushed it forward.
That's really lovely. So, you know, obviously you can alone together things as evidenced by couples playing this game. Uh, but how dare you come on beyond solitire and reject the solo aspect of a solo? I'm kidding. Uh, why do you why why do you just prefer to call them journaling games?
Well, one is from a marketing perspective, the fewer syllables the better. So, it's like, you know, like it's already hard enough to get your head around journaling game, right? Like in some ways it was like you took solo games. I think the heritage is you had solo games and you stuck the word journaling in the middle but I'm like do we need that? But also we've now we here in in the DC area and I think in elsewhere we've run multiple events where we've just had people sit and like you say play solo games together and we've tried different formats and it can really be amazing having people play the same game but make different choices and then have the opportunity to share what they're doing with each other.
Yeah, absolutely. And so it's like, well, why why limit what the game can do by calling it a solo solo game when you could play it in a in a group, right? And so, and we've seen that it actually builds community in in a way that is different than a role playing game or a board game. So, it's like just keep it open.
Yeah. Although, I hope that people continue doing me the favor of letting me know it's playable at one because that's how I limit which ones I pick up and consider purchasing. So,
hell yeah. Yeah, I think it would be I mean it would be I mean I guess there's epistory games and others that are intentionally dual journaling games, but yeah.
So, um you know, do you test your games by yourself? Like did you surprise yourself emotionally while playing your own game? This one uh was pretty hard to do that with, you know, like and and here here's here's my um here's my deep limitation as a creator and and one reason why I ended up at games is I find it almost impossible to write in the first or third person creatively. I have tried writing fiction my entire life and I can't get past like a few paragraphs. there's just something that holds me up about writing for just out of my own head, even if I'm given a prompt. It's it's very difficult. Whereas I find it really easy to write to the second person and like have an imagined dialogue with someone else.
So I So I'll admit it, it's actually pretty hard. I do test them myself and I do try really hard to play other journaling games, but I do have this like I don't know disability, whatever it is, from writing in the first or third person.
You can tell me what's wrong. I I I'll take I'll take any advice on on doing it cuz man, my therapist would be much happier if I would actually do more journaling.
Although, I mean, okay, is it uh is it Inky Gemson's Broken Earth trilogy that's in the second person and she pulls it?
Yeah, but is it really though? So, it kind of is in the second person, but it's not giving you any agency in the story now, is it?
No, but it's it's it's possible to do second person writing.
You could just write.
Yeah. You know what? I actually I actually going back to the point the the schizophrenic theme. Sorry. Like, I actually had a a couple of short stories in my head that were written in the second person and you're the person's voices in their head. But, oh man, that's hard to pull off.
All right. So, uh, since it's on Kickstarter and you're here, it's good timing. Uh, tell me about Color Jam.
Yeah, absolutely. So, Color Jam is a color by number game where there's a puzzle. And so, it's just like color by number. You have colors and they match numbers or there's a a nice picture that our artist uh Aaron Lowi um did by hand or or on computer by hand. So, no AI art. What's no AI? Sorry, I don't like to use AI art. No AI is imagery whatsoever.
Yeah.
And u all the spaces are numbered. But the trick is that your crayons or whatever you choose to color with are in a row one through six. And as soon as you color with one of those numbers, it moves to the end and all the other numbers shift. So if you color with number three, then four, five, six all move and move down one and then that three goes to six. So you you have this kind of puzzle that pushes back on like or it gives you kind of a a challenge as to like predicting which color is going to be where. That's that kind of is the mechanical part of it. But what I find really interesting and and by the way Joe Kell who's the co-designer says hi.
Oh hi Joe.
Uh and he was the one who invited me to come along on this journey with him uh to to design this game. Um what uh what's really really cool to both of us is that the pictures intentionally are ambiguous about what the spaces represent. And so we invite whether it's a solo player or multiple players to figure out what the picture is by coloring. And sometimes if especially you're playing in a group, you end up with this kind of like well what is this picture going to be? And we're not really sure. So sometimes two people have very different ideas of what the picture is and uh sometimes the numbers just force you into a place where you're just going to have to color that frog the opposite color of what you wanted and then we invite you to tell the story in a different way that like okay well that frog is cursed or what you know whatever the case might be right and so like and we've found that people don't even need to be encouraged to do that they just make up a story to be like well I I guess that's that's just the that's not really the the dragon's wings anymore. That is the sky.
And and and you know, just be very happy with that outcome.
Yes. For the record, by the way, everyone, I just backed it. It was 12 bucks for like the most possible coloring canvases. So, why not?
Yeah. Yeah, I I think our our our publisher Lunar Punk is doing something super exciting, which is this is a this is a print and play at a at a time in our economy where I think we could all use like lower cost, lower waste um games and it's just you you download it, you can print it as many times as you like. You want to make a 100 copies and play it a 100 times, you can do that. And there is a lot of replayability. So, like I said, you can you can color it and then come up with a totally different story of what's going on than the last time. And so we were playing when we set out to make this game, you know, it was so we were actually doing was we entered a game crafter contest and they were like trying to like promote their new coloring book product or whatever it was. And we decided from the outset we wanted to make a game that was fundamentally about the creativity of coloring, not just using coloring spaces as a substitute for like area control or something like that.
Yeah. Although actually I left out the fact that there is an error control rule in here, but you know that you can only color next to spaces you've already colored. Um but and so when we started out, we were like we really want to be tapping into what makes coloring cool, not start with the premise of this is a board game and then work backwards from well why do people color? What makes that interesting? What makes that exciting? And work backwards from there. And we hit upon the core mechanic pretty early. And then we focus a lot of energy on making the coloring part feel like you are coloring and not just like, you know, moving numbers along a board or whatever. You're actually expressing yourself.
Yeah, I'm actually excited about it. I do love I actually really I love jigsaw puzzles. I love coloring. Anything that kind of like keeps my brain half on is is perfect. Um especially because it's the only way I could listen to audiobooks when I'm not driving or walking. Um
oh man, that's there's so many that's that's a great that so yes. So one thing that I would say is that we found that this is actually a perfect chill game that you can like have a conversation and a glass of wine while you're playing. You could be playing another game and and and like doing this on the side while you're waiting for someone to to finish their turn. Um, it's actually like, yeah, it it is has enough of a puzzle that you do have to think if you want to. I've seen people play where like they're just like, "Okay, we're just vibing with whatever numbers show up. I'm not even going to plan ahead. Like, this number shows up, let's let's do it." Okay. Yeah.
Um,
and so it does not require like like brain burning thought. Although, if you want to make the picture exactly the way you want to, I bet you you could calculate it all out if you have that kind of a brain.
Yeah. Um, but the idea of it being like half your brain, oh god, this is going to sound like a cheesy thing from a romcom. But like having half your brain engaged means you can also have more room for other things to engage like your heart. Can't believe I just said that, but I think I really mean it. Like I I think you can like be more in the feels of the game of like, well, what do I want this to what makes a nice picture? One of the most infuriating rules we had in the early game, by the way, was the goal was make a nice picture. And if you want to infuriate board gamers, uh, give them a subjective goal, like make a nice picture, and they will just tear their their hair out, and they're like, "What does that mean?" We're like,
"What do you think it means?" Uh I I like an open interpretation that because the other thing is I I enjoy coloring but like okay uh you know how you're in school and there's always like it's usually girl there's girls in your class who just they color so beautifully and like everything they outline the little space it looks really good inside and you know it's just really cute at the end. I'm not like that at all. I just don't have whatever it is that makes me want to do that in the process of coloring. So, this actually looks really fun for me because I can just kind of let it roll and I don't have to like worry about getting it right because like a story will emerge whatever happens. I mean, that seems nice to me.
Can I tell you how happy I am to hear that? Because one of the things that came out really early in our design process, and I'm sorry to tell Joe's story for him, but like he shared with me from the very beginning that he hates coloring because he was I'm not going to say traumatized, but his art teachers would make fun of him for coloring, not being able to color inside the lines. Although, actually, I think he's now shared that he just chose not to color inside the lines. But whichever way it is,
it's like he was told this is not the right way to color. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So, we wanted to make a game that was like about coloring, but was also open to people who don't like coloring. At least not that kind of coloring. I mean, if you want to make a perfect picture, by all means, please go ahead. Like, awesome. And please put it on Instagram and Tik Tok, cuz man, does that stuff perform. Um, but like we also wanted to be sloppy and and like, you know, just whatever you want.
Yeah. Well, I mean like how many good times have been ruined by feeling like you have to get something exactly right or make it beautiful and like you're literally just doing it your house like truly nobody gives a if your picture is beautiful except you. It's just coloring. But like if you look at Tik Tok, if you look at YouTube, if you look at like, you know, like there's like a whole color talk and there's, oh, I have these special Copic markers and like, oh, I have everything to like make the best coloring and it's like, no, like you can just get some $8 Crayas and hang out. Like, it's really fine.
Can I tie that back to journaling games for a second?
Please do. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so, uh, one of the the leading designers and and theorists of of journaling games is Paul Sega, who's come up with the idea of of of writing to find out. And it's a, as you probably know, it's a it's a evolution of of play to find out from from uh, Powered by the Apocalypse and the Bakers. Um, and one of the core ideas that he has about journaling games, which is also about journaling, which is like you're not writing for an audience, which is probably my hang-up about writing, by the way. It's like you're you're writing like from your soul and from yourself, right? And so if you're trying to write for some imagined audience, you're just going to recycle some garbage tropes from like Hollywood.
It's not going to be real. It's not going to be true. It's not even going to be interesting. It's not going to be original, right? And so,
yeah,
um I do think that too much media awareness and too much quote unquote media literacy can really just make it hard to enjoy life sometimes, especially for these kinds of creative mediums. Like whether I'm asking you to journal or draw a picture or whatever, like one of the saddest things about both Sticker Doodle Town and and this game when we were play testing, it was also and and the Bonsai Diary, people would always sit down, this was invariably adults, and they would always caveat the play test by saying, "I can't draw." And I'm like, "That's
I just felt so bad because I'm like, what makes you feel like you have to tell me that?" Like, what why are you judging yourself? And also, why do you have to like it just it just I I'm not um sorry if that feels condescending to people, but I just feel like there's this kind of idea that you have to be perfect and good at at all these things or else you can't do it.
Yeah. I mean, it'll really suck the fun out of things. I have to be careful because I now work in the game industry. So, I have done like the ultimate monetizing my hobby and
it's true, right? and making sure that I maintain a healthy relationship with gaming
is extremely important because
you know and I think that you know actually I really appreciate games that are a little bit destructive or that make you choose where to put the sticker or because you know it's I think it's good for you to do it. It's good for you to do it. It's yeah, like unfetishize these things, right? Like it doesn't h I mean it's great if you do and thank you for buying the deluxe whatever version on everything. By the way, we do not have a deluxe anything version. We just went this is this kick this Kickstarter is just pure like you you get what you that's it. There's no extra way to I mean I guess you could donate money but there's no there's no extras in it. Um but then so thank you for those of you who do that but like yeah like we don't have to make it so precious, right?
Yeah. Um, I think actually this is a good lead into the next part of our conversation because you know sometimes you don't do things for publication even.
Um,
why would you why would you ever do that list?
Uh, you know, sometimes you just have to do the creative thing for yourself. Uh, or you know, you're actually going to be looking into that for us. So, talk about um your your upcoming isn't it a panel iss I'm very curious. a festival. Uh Tony Tran, who's uh uh Tony Tran, the the board game designer, not the TTRPG illustrator, uh and I are putting an event together for Packs Unplugged in December in Philadelphia where that's called these games are not for sale. And what we wanted to do was celebrate games that people created for the joy of making a game. And cannot for whatever reason be commercialized or monetized.
And we have a number of folks, some of them very established in the industry, who made games that they don't or uh don't want to or can't publish. such as um one game that by Matt Lecock who he said who has said that it has unconscionable amounts of plastic. So like does not want it published because there's no way to do it ethically. Um we have games that might have as you know from from publishing like liabilitywise you it's really hard to put magnets in a game.
Yeah. So, so you can, but then you know, are you actually going to get it out there to the right audience? And so games that might have that kind of a thing going on or intellectual property that's just way too tangled to to figure out or is going to require three tables simultaneously all working on the same, you know, game, but they also interact in this complex and crazy way that is very very hard to ever pull off in real life. I guess what you'd call a convention game. Um or games that require careful supervision because they bring up really difficult topics that if you just let people go at it, they're going to come out with like absolutely the wrong idea and they could be potentially uh bad or dangerous to to folks when they experience them. So uh those are the kinds of games we're highlighting and we started from the observation that wow you know game design is becoming a hobby.
You can tell by the number of spam offers I get to help me with my game design, whether it be marketing or otherwise, right? I was like, "Wow, there we are being monetized, therefore this must be a hobby." And and there are people out there I realize um there's a lot of like when you pick up a guitar, probably most people are not thinking that they're going to get that record deal. Maybe some people do, but a lot of people just want to entertain their friends, maybe play at the local bar, you know, get to some level of like, you know, enjoyment, but not their goal is not get, you know, a deal. And so I think it's we we were noticing is that there's so many people who are doing podcasts, videos, whatever, that they're all oriented towards how to get your game published, how to make a game with the assumption that the only way to make a game is to make a game that's intended to be published. Yeah,
and fair, understandable, a lot of people that makes sense. But then what if that's not your goal? And I know that sounds super weird because games are a interactive medium. So like what is a game if people aren't playing it?
But I mean it doesn't mean they're not playing it. It just means it's not published. Yeah.
So, I mean like um one thing I've been paying more attention to in recent years because I used to not when I was a board game critic
because it was like you only wanted to play finished things because it was like it felt weird to review something that was too raw or that was just too off the cuff if that makes sense.
Um but now that I do design, I like prototypes a lot better than I used to. I used to find them irritating and now I really love them because now like my attitude is okay we're in the messy process of designing not oh my god how do I present this on YouTube um and then you know I think that the the BG community is incredible like you know there's so many print and plays like print and play contests people just get inspired to make something you know I work at leader like there's so many fan factions for root because people just feel inspired to make something and I think that that's really cool.
That's exactly the kind of spirit we want to throw a spotlight on is just create, right? And I I don't know that you need us to go out and cheerlead for that because like I said, I think I think the wellspring of creativity just pushes you to create. Like you don't need if you want to create, you don't necessarily need someone to say that you can although sometimes you do, right? Like I don't know there feel like some people are waiting for permission or waiting for Selman to tell them you're a game designer before they're willing to do that. But um with all due respect to your role as a publisher, I have I agree with you about like one of my favorite things to do and it's actually spoiled published games for me in a lot of ways is going to unpub and break my game events and playing games that have not gone through the whole polish of development because I feel like I can see the fingerprints of the artist on the work before it's been polished off so that it can sell to more And that means that the games are kind of janky and whatever, but you can kind of see the heart and the intent of where the designer is coming from much more clearly than after you've buried it in all the balancing and everything else that that comes with understandably a final product.
You know what's interesting about that is that this maybe this makes me a bad creator. I don't know. Uh but my favorite thing about cart, which is on Kickstarter from leader right now, is that it feels like the designer. I love that Alita made a game that is an Alita game, if that makes sense. Or um you know, my own designs. Uh I actually really want them to feel like me and I like being around for a lot of the development. I don't enjoy just like a handoff. Um, and you know, for the dexterity game that we're working on in the office, uh, I try to make sure that I'm in regular contact with Taylor Shest, the designer, as we develop the game because I want it to feel like something that he feels good about, too.
Um, because I I actually really do see games as an expression of the artist, like, however they're made. I actually when you showed me cart at Gen Con like I immediately felt that like presence of the artist there too. Like you could there was just this wild energy to the game that you could just it was just coming out of the cardboard. And I don't know, you tell me from a publishers point of view, but I feel like the next era that we're entering now, especially with AI looming over everything, is going to be more on artistic vision and the feeling of a person coming through. I kind of have a feeling that like this uber rationalized like, you know, um, perfectly balanced, you know, almost like soulless, but like you're just kind of doing optimization games.
Yeah. um you know like you can you don't need a person sometimes to do that. You can just you know like you can calculate that with AI is where I'm feeling like we're headed right. So so where where are we going to get fresh human ideas from? I'm I don't know. I'm just making up right now. You know what I mean? But so you tell me from a publishers perspective where do you where you see it coming from?
I mean I'm fortunate to work at a publisher where like over my dead body will any generative AI be making it into anything in our studio. like our art we you know we we're contracting with real human artists. Um you know I think part of what changes this for me though is that yeah I'm a creative director but I'm a designer. I'm a game designer myself. So I wake up in the morning and I work on my projects that are like weird history projects and then I go into work and I work on you know fun stuff that we're doing at Leader. Um those are deeply connected for me. I think my I think my interest in the human aspect of games comes from the fact that like I myself am a designer. So I want to honor the art of others just as I want my own to be honored. But also I'm not really interested in games that don't have anything to say at all. I think that um you can create very interesting like moving parts and that that's cool, but that's not what I want to make and it's not what I really want to play. Um I really enjoy games as an attempt to like express something about the world or to capture a feeling. So I'm a historical gamer and anything I make has like big overtones of that, including things I'm working on for a leader that aren't going to be historical. they're just going to have the the the grounding in it. But cart is about the feeling of chaos as you are rolling down a hill with no breaks. And
absolutely
to me like that's just as good because it's really trying to capture like a wildness like you said. And so it's
I hate to like I guess it's it's the vibe, right? I want to vibe.
Yeah. And and I I don't know that we can figure this out in like whatever minutes we have, but like I I I've been working so hard to like ask this question. Well, what's human, right? And no, I don't I don't I'm not I'm not promoting generative AI or anything like that, but like it does kind of push the question, okay, you know, if is po can you can can gener AI generate poetry? No, in a sense, right? because it's not it can generate words that sound very pleasing when you put it together but it's not coming from a real place. So I but I don't know how what that means in terms of games like how would you tell the difference between a game that was generated by you know a computer that then calculated the hell out of all the possible I don't know positions and whatever and then put a really cool theme on it because it just figured out what people like and versus a human.
Yeah. I think for me it's about it's not it's about communication. You can't communicate with something that doesn't have a consciousness.
And so what I want, right, is to feel
the presence of someone who had a real opinion that they're trying to get across. And like to me, even maybe even more like, you know, back to sort of this project about unpublishable games, right? Like it's the ultimate in humanity in some ways to make things that are useless. Yeah.
And like I don't mean useless in like they're stupid or they're not worth it, right? But like they're not going to like go anywhere in like a capitalist sense of like you can sell them or they're going to make you famous or but like most of the best things that have ever happened in human existence are like pointless in that way.
Yeah. Or I I agree with that totally. And um I've also been thinking a lot about what it means to have agency in a game because if you look at the Bonsai diary, you don't make any classic choices. It's not a choose your own venture where it's like, you know, if you want to do this, go to page five or roll some dice and if you succeed then, you know, you I don't know, your bonsai grows three legs or something. I don't know, whatever. But like it you every page is if you play it one well I actually do have another version in the back um that is randomized but if you play the actual core book it's literally the same game each time right and so the question is and people have raised this is this a game I don't kind of care sometimes about the question but in a way the the um but the the the bigger point about like games with agency in it is like where is the agency in that game and the agency We usually in when we think about games, we usually place it at at plot, right? Like, do I get to decide if the knight moves to the castle or the Oh, that's a chest thing, isn't it? Sorry, the knight. Yeah, I don't mean in the chest chest, but fine. The knight moves the castle, whatever. But like, do I decide that or do I decide it goes somewhere else? And it was reflecting on of all things um Candyland and that I that I was like
it's like the least agency feeling game.
It is the least and actually I have a strong memory of being like it's my earliest memory of playing any games at all was playing Candyland and hating it because I'm like what the heck? I didn't make any choices in this game. Right. And then s a couple years ago someone pointed out to me that the way to understand Candyland is it's a story game. You're who cares where you go and you're all going to get to the end anyway. Like what is the experience that you have along the way? Oh, you landed in the marsh of I don't even know what they are anymore, but like marshmallow marsh, right? Like what happened at the marshmallow marsh? I'm like, oh man, I was never playing it the right way. Like this is
if we played it more like a role playing game or a storytelling game, that would have been a completely different experience. That made me think about a different kind of agency you can have both in games but also in life which is maybe we are not the protagonist of the universe. We're not making world. Yeah, I know right. But you know we certainly are being told that we are um at least when it comes to buying products. And so like maybe one of the ways you actually have agency is to make meaning out of what's happening around you rather than make choices about what's around you. Right? So if you're flipping through the Bonsai diary and and and you're not necessarily making plot choices, but you're deciding why and you know all of that, that's a completely different kind of agency. And and I'm I'm just very curious about where we can go with that kind of of game.
I really like this because it makes me think about I don't know. It's like you know people are giving you wisdom for life when things get rough, right? It'll be like okay well you know you can't always control what happens to you but you can control how you respond to it.
Yeah. Yeah. And and I and I know this feels like it's at completely different levels but like that was the joy of watching people play color jam was like I had in one of the play test pictures I'll just tell this story quickly. uh was I I was basing it on a tarot card of the Joker and you know instead of falling off a cliff if you know the Joker picture he's like the fool who's oh sorry the fool who's about to like walk off a cliff because he's so clueless and I had I had this modern version where he's going to walk into a manhole cuz he's on his phone and at some point the the players were forced to color actually the players chose to color the manhole yellow and then were forced to color his leg yellow too and they're just looking at and being like, "Well, I guess he peed himself." And you know, maybe that is the exact opposite of the deep meaningful thing we were just talking about. But like there's an example of like you're just okay. You know what? Life handed Oh god, I can't believe this is actually works. Life handed you yellow and you're going to make lemonade, right? This is the story you're going to tell
or you know.
Yep. Exactly. Or pink. and and that brought them more joy than whatever else like this otherwise perfect picture that they were coloring was like they made up this ridiculous story about what was happening. And so that that was when we realized okay you know what there's something going on here at a different level than getting the perfect picture and getting the puzzle right and you know where do the numbers go so you can plan ahead and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. I mean this kind of goes back to like sometimes the uselessness of something is its pleasure. Like I mean how how much time have you spent on dumb jokes with your friends and like those are maybe the best nights of your life.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean cuz that's cuz you know there's another thing there you can't measure like intellectually or otherwise which is connection right. Which is why we play games often. Sorry. I know even I don't know you tell me about even solar games in some ways you're making a connection with the artist right the designer. Yeah.
With the game itself right with the ideas that it brings and all that. Um and uh you know I mean or or like uh there was another podcast I was listening to talking about like this is very common in video games is like the the completely non- mechanical mechanic of like petting the dog.
Oh yeah,
right.
Give me the option. That's agency right there. Let me pet that dog.
You Yeah, you can pet the dog. You can pet the dog a thousand times. It will never give you a reward other than woof.
Yeah. you know, it's not going to give you trinkets or a thousand points. And and yet that that gives it some What is the reward of that? And if we if we strip all of our games of that, are we left with something better? I'm not always sure. Yeah. I don't know. I think I don't know. This kind of comes back down to like, okay, do you see a connection like we've had kind of like two parts of this conversation, right? You're very interested in games with a certain ephemererality to them. Hm. That's probably true. Yeah.
And then also like you know your your current like large intellectual project, right, is games that are unpublishable. Do you see a connection between your own work and then your interest in in this kind of subject?
I think a lot of my recent work has been pushing in in two opposite directions, right? Cuz as you heard when I was describing the Bonsai diary, I'm trying to aim for accessibility or approachability, right? So like, can you pick this thing up as somebody who's never experienced a role playing game, you don't like journaling, you don't like drawing, and you can still start.
Yeah.
Um, right. And just get out of like all these definitions of what a game is. Don't care. Just can a person pick it up and start. So on the one hand, I want super approachability. And so I'm designing a a storytelling game with with Phil Gross um that is trying to use apples to apples mechanics to let you tell a story. So just party games which are the most approachable kind of game we have to enter one of the least approachable games we have which are you know role playing games. Can you do that? Right. So, on the one hand, I'm I'm kind of really interested in what like what you can do to make people access games that you normally can't. And on the other hand, or maybe these are really the same thing, I'm really really interested in um I think we were talking before we started about or maybe it was here you talking about historical games, right?
Like
yeah,
I'm really interested in truth in a sense in games, right? Especially again going back to this idea of what makes things human. And so I'm also working on a game that is a biography of my daughter's last summer before middle school, which you could say is potentially the least commercial game you can think of, or at least is like such a specific slice of life that I really just wanted to capture a very, very specific experience, but then use it as a way to open up a conversation about what was childhood like for you? And I want to get there by being as real as possible. I'm using photos um real photos from our life, not like pictures or anything like just just make it as as like textural and drawing from real things as possible.
Yeah.
But also making the mechanics also something that a person who's never played a role playing game before, cuz that's technically not a role playing game, uh could could uh could actually get into, right? And so I think in both cases I feel like I'm trying to reach for something that is very plain. And in some ways it's like you could raise all of this up to a very high flutin level of like these games are not publishable because it's high art. Like we've reached some stratosphere of performance art where like nobody can possibly understand unless you've played like the last 50 years of board games. Or it could be in some ways strangely too too normal.
Yeah.
To publish. Like you can't publish tic-tac-toe.
No. No, you can't.
But it's classic. You could play it though.
Actually, this gets to another thing I was kind of thinking about while you were talking, which is
Okay. FOMO is also really big in our culture. And um sometimes on my channel I you know I've actually thought about doing archival reviews of things that are old or out of print. But I also know that I'm going to accidentally awaken people's eye that they don't have a copy of whatever I'm playing. And I feel like unpublishable games fall into an interesting space here because um it's also a matter of how do you talk about experiences that not everyone is able to at least try to have?
Yeah.
And what does that mean for games? Because like if we're talking about katan, like anybody can play that. We could all just go get it. You know what I mean? Um but it's uh it's different when it's something that like oh yeah, I had this experience at this show of a you know of it makes me almost think sometimes of like Brar's like Train, right? Like I'll never get to play Train. Like the era when Train got played at shows is like over and it's already spoiled for me. Um, but you know, h how do you talk about things that not everybody will get to even get a good look at necessarily by virtue of the fact that it will not be published?
I think that's where great games criticism comes in, right? Just like just like with other media, not everyone can afford the tickets to the concert or the concert's not in their town. Not everyone's going to be able to make it to a convention. Not everyone's going to be able to afford the $200 box and or have friends who can. And so sometimes that is where somebody being able to report out not just oh here's the mechanics and is this worth like you know as we keep saying about games journalism right like is it a is it a product review or is it criticism because I feel like great criticism can convey the experience of the medium whether it be a painting or a game in a way a person isn't going to get the exact experience of Yeah.
But would get the gist of it or would understand why it matters and why it's important or why it's terrible and why it sucks and it's like, you know what I mean, whatever it is, but like, you know, would would be able to convey that. And I and we have great journalists out there and great critics out there. Um, I hope we're getting to the point where the medium is mature enough that like those voices are I think they are. I actually see people, you know, reading the the Danthos of the world, right? Yeah.
Or or listening to your podcast. I I I I get that people would be angry if you brought out a game that they can't. But this is this supposed to be a consumerrist podcast, right? Like
No, it is not a consumerrist podcast. Uh listen, if I were good at consumerism, my YouTube channel would make money.
So, right. So, if we're not even going to be playing in that arena, then don't even play at all. Like, let's just talk about games that moved us, right?
So, you can't buy it. So what? Like like is is the whole world about ownership and possession? It can't be.
Yeah. Just like it's not about everything you make is something that you should be able to sell.
I mean Yeah. And and like look, we've we've we've done the math a million times and certainly in the in the role playing game space, but it's also true in board game space. The the sum total of all the hours of theoretical play you would get even if you just played all the games on your shelf once is beyond the amount of remaining play time in your life. I'm sorry. I'm a mid. Okay. Okay. I'm 51, so I'm probably shorter than other people's lifespans, but you know, like you just there's just there's just not enough time to play them all. So, having critics be able to tell you,
yeah, here's what the experience was like. So, I wish that you could spend four hours playing it, but you can spend 20 minutes getting some sense of it.
Yeah, that's true, man. You got me.
I think it would be a service. I uh I uh read I I I looked at how many books a year I read. I turned 40 this year and I was like, "Okay, if I make it another 40 years, that's so such a small amount of books compared to the number that I want to read." And that doesn't even include the board games.
Right. Right. And so is it is it a shameful thing if you read the reviews of the book instead?
You got to skim out what you actually want to spend your time on. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Also, a good DNF is good for you. Like, don't don't waste your time reading stuff that you don't like
or playing for.
Okay. So,
Oh, so true. So true.
So, okay, we could go on forever. Like, you'll definitely be a repeat podcast, but Okay, for now though, I'm giving you the softy questions, so this episode stays about an hour. Um, so okay, we've talked about like games that give you emotional meaning that really do something for you. So what is a game that you have played recently that resonated with you and moved you?
Okay, so two things completely opposite and I'm going to manipulate your question a little bit. The game I've been playing a lot recently has been called the algorithm. It's the Instagram and YouTube algorithm. I've been trying to put up videos, watching them cap my numbers. I've been like trying to do all the optimization, you know, I'm reading the strategy guides for how to beat the game, but the rules already changed since the last since the last three strategy guides came out. Like, you know, it's they keep patching the game, and it's like you can't keep up. So, that I hate to tell you this, but it's been pretty addictive. Um, as it's supposed to be. It's addictive not just on the viewer end, it's addictive on the creator side. At least for me, it is. because there's enough of an optimizing gamer in me that I haven't killed off yet that is still like I can beat this system. I'm going to find the I'm going to find its weakness. No, it's it sucked me in. So, I've been making these videos and I keep like trying to make them better. I'm watching the numbers. I'm not getting a good high score. I probably never will because I just I'm going to give up on it because it's not getting me ROI. But that is a game and it's a game that's addicted a lot of people both on the creator and viewer side with a lot of consequences for society. So I'll put that aside. But that is legitimately one of the games I'm playing and I think I feel better about it if I think about it as a game rather than a total waste of my time. But it has definitely moved me just not moved me in a way that I feel like I'm a better person for it. So fair enough.
But it certainly knows how to manipulate your feelings. Um, uh, I told I told you about Sticker Doodle Town at the top of this interview, and there's this game called, and I think you've seen this. It's Wobbby Blobby.
I've not seen this.
Yeah. So, it is this game where it is basically you take Sticker Doodle Town and you strip out all the and you're left with the core idea, which is here's here's like instead of stickers, here are postcards to doodle on and prompts for what to doodle on them. And instead of being oriented towards telling a story, it's actually a little bit closer even to my journaling stuff where it's like more oriented towards like creativity and wellness. And then here's the really cool thing. You then can uh flip it over and it's a postcard.
That's like this is like this is everything I wanted to accomplish with sticker doodle talent minus all the like fluffy stuff that actually got in the way and has the actual core idea in it. So incredible. Um I actually don't think I have one of my completed not also I'm realizing this is not a visual medium. So my showing you this is of no use to your listeners right now. Um, so showing the a finished version of it would not do them any good. But it's it's basically these ink blotss and you are asked to decorate them and and draw them and and find creativity in it. And uh so so I' I've been playing a bit of that and it's made me incredibly jealous that it kind of cracked the formula that I was trying to crack with sticker doodle town.
I'm doing this now. Like do I need this?
You might. You might.
I might need this.
It's you can absolutely solo it. I'll tell you that. right now is soloing in at the airport and you can you can get in a session like just sitting right there, get out your pen, do a little doodle, put it away, pull it out again in a couple of minutes, do another doodle.
Oh, that's so cute. Um, and then, um, you know, if you want to be found online, which I'm assuming you do, given that you have been playing the algorithm game, uh, where do you want to be found?
I'd probably want to be found on Blue Sky uh, at Sticky Doodler. Um, I know that a lot of people are not really on Blue Sky, so I'm also kind of begrudgingly on Instagram and YouTube also sticky doodler or sticker doodle games if I couldn't get that handle. Um, those are probably the best ways to to find me, but Blue Sky is where I interact the most.
Awesome. Uh, Jean, thank you so much for coming on. This has been an absolute delight. What a fun podcast episode. I've really appreciated it.
I've had such a great time. Thank you, Liz, for having me.
All right, everybody out there. I can be found anywhere is beyond solitire. Uh so please like, subscribe, comment, ask questions, and most of all, happy gaming.