Games and Learning

Seattle: Home to lots of rain, “The Killing” and The Smartest Kids in the Room

We are inaugurating a new feature at gamesandlearning.org – a series we are calling “The Smartest Kids in the Room.” TSKR is an occasional conversation between game designers about their field, the challenges designers face and how the industry continues to evolve.

This first installment, hosted by Seattle digital and card game designer Eric Cagle, delves into the growth of Seattle as a game design center and the professionalization of game design.

“I think what you are saying is you start with passion, but to keep going you need to develop professional technique and that can be a long road,” designer Jeremy Holcomb says during the chat. “Very few people have a full toolbox right out of the gate.”

The group also dives into the development of games like Pokemon and others where players may not have even been using them correctly, but they created a brand and a world kids wanted to enter.

“My mom taught second grade and it’s the exact same way. Her second graders were enormously into Pokemon. They didn’t play any game that was in the rulebook. But that was ok. Sometimes, kids aren’t necessarily playing by all the rules. If they’re playing and having fun, that’s really the first step to becoming a gamer,” sayd Seth Johnson.

Listen to the whole conversation here:

The Kids

Eric Cagle – the ringleader of this feature and self-professed professional geek. He’s a 10year veteran of the game design firm Wizards of the Coast, edited a magazine covering the game design industry and currently is lead game designer at Lifeform Entertainment.

Paul Peterson – game designer who worked on Guillotine, Smash Up, Pokemon, The Pathfinder Adventure card game series.

Jeremy Holcomb – board game and card game designer who worked on the Anachronism board game for the History Channel and a professor of game design at DigiPen University.

Seth Johnson – game designer whose parents both taught public school. He has written role-playing games, developed a miniatures game series HeroClix and the board game Double Double Dominoes.

Seattle as a Gaming Hub

Eric Cagle: So… the greater Seattle area has become this center of game design, both video games and table top games and role-playing games and you name it and I think they are all pretty linked together.

Paul Peterson: Well they are because they came out of similar companies. Microsoft started a tech boom here so computer games flowed out of that as other people picked up on that and moved to be near Microsoft.

And in the board game-card game industry Wizards of the Coast was here. WizKids started here – some of the biggest names either moved here or started here. And then like gathers like.

Jeremy Holcomb: There’s a natural tendency, I think, for a lot of tech companies to bring in people they consider to be high-quality talent and that tends to include a very creative component and those are people who, even if they are not full-time industry, are very involved in designing, play testing, testing, helping these great products come into the world.

Paul Peterson: Right. DigiPen would not be here if Microsoft had not started everything here and DigiPen is a game design institute.

Seth Johnson: And even the people who don’t work full time for game design companies are at their jobs developing the kinds of skills that can be used in game design and often have a day job that pays the bills and then are freelancers in the game industry designing board games at night and there are an awful lot of those as well.

Eric Cagle: You bring up a very good point. So I have discovered that a lot of game designers tend to have spouses or significant others or whatever that have the ‘straight job.’

Paul Peterson: I think a lot of that comes from actors not wanting to marry other actors…

From Passion to a Career

Jeremy Holcomb: So there is a question of ‘Why do people do this?’ Almost anyone can make one game. Everybody has a game in them and they put that game out into the world. Go them.

Once you make your second game, once you go down that dark path now you are starting to be a – I am not going to use the word professional game designer, but let’s say prolific game designer  —

Seth Johnson: Recidivist game designer

Jeremy Holcomb: Right, recidivist game designer – that’s a great phrase — and then you are at the point where you are starting to devote a lot of clock cycles to that and like any other creative endeavor  — everybody has a book in them, but if I write enough eventually you might become quite big and famous and wealthy like we all are in the game design industry

Laughter

But somebody might need to keep a roof over your head.

Seth Johnson: I think what you are saying is you start with passion, but to keep going you need to develop professional technique and that can be a long road. Very few people have a full toolbox right out of the gate.

Eric Cagle: So that comes to the next point where we’ve got. So let’s face it, we are all slightly older than the kids who are playing our games for the most part, so there was nothing like this when we were growing up … I mean I want to be a professional game designer. Yes, there were computer companies. They were relatively few and on the coasts or spread out or literally five guys in a basement, so you really couldn’t work there.

Now there are dedicated schools to that. There’s whole curriculums at state universities and things that you could go into now.

Seth Johnson: When I first got interested in game design as a profession, I could find exactly two books on the topic. Now at Barnes and Noble you can find a half-dozen books and some of them are quite good books. So even for people who are not in centers of industry like this, there is information available and that is without even going online…

And there are incredible online communities now for supporting up-and-coming game designers.

Jeremy Holcomb:: Living in a world where somebody can go, ‘Oh, game design’ and go “How does that work?’ and they can go and pick up Characteristics of Games or Book of Lenses –

Paul Peterson: Or even something like Reality is Broken.

Jeremy Holcomb: Right, the Kobold Guide to [Board] Game Design. There’s a lot of tools now to go “Here’s what’s going on.’ And part of that is just as our industry matures, more people start building fewer games as a concept and building more sort of building blocks on which other people are going to advance.

Plus we are now in a world full of self-publishing houses and other institutions that are obviously incentivized – and I think they are the good guys – who want people to be making lots of games. That’s their business model.

The Society of Gamers

Paul Peterson: I think, too, that games have become much more ubiquitous as – like the consoles for huge for that. First, for getting sports fans to play games. I think Madden is the cornerstone of all electronic gaming that exists today. If Madden and those ilk – NHL, Blitz and those games – like where somebody who would never self-identify as a gamer can sit down with their friends and put a controller in their hands and play a game that was really the point at which things really took off.

Jeremy Holcomb: And we do have to say the words Magic: the Gathering.

Paul Peterson: Well, yeah.

Jeremy Holcomb: Because you’re right to point out one of the questions is when do people have this little flag in their identity cabinet that says ‘Gamer’ on it? When do they go ‘This is a thing that I do?’ And Madden certainly converted a lot of people to, ‘OK, I’m a gamer.’ Magic also had the effect of moving a large number people – particularly young people—

Seth Johnson: And after Magic came Pokemon.

Paul Peterson: It’s actually pretty fun-slash-funny to run into people today who are like ‘I played Pokemon when I was five’ and it makes me feel incredibly old because I worked on Pokemon when they were five and they’re adults now. But it created an entire generation that was just instant gamers.

Jeremy Holcomb: Yeah, now you have games. That’s just a thing that you do.

Seth Johnson: And that was also the difference between Pokemon and Magic. Magic was definitely for a slightly older crowd, meaning that if you were… 10-12 you could make out pretty well. Pokemon you could go for a slightly younger demographic.

Paul Peterson: I tell a story now about how when I’d go to the mall events and I would “play” Pokemon with people and if they were older kids, we could play a game of Pokemon but the younger kids would come up and they would show me Squirtle and I would show them Bulbasaur and then we would have a little discussion about who won the game.

Seth Johnson: My mom taught second grade and it’s the exact same way. Her second graders were enormously into Pokemon. They didn’t play any game that was in the rulebook. But that was ok. Sometimes, kids aren’t necessarily playing by all the rules. If they’re playing and having fun, that’s really the first step to becoming a gamer.

Jeremy Holcomb: Well and it is certainly fine from a marketing standpoint because a company can go ‘Here is a world in which you want to participate and you can engage in that world at lots of different entry points. So it’s very easy for players to sort of level themselves up with the content.