Thank you my name is Erin Hoffman-John, as Lou said I'm a video game designer
I am the only video game design speaker here, so this is welcome to the Freak Show
So I'll talk a little bit about my background first since I know that I'm coming from a very different place than
the rest of you
so I worked in video games commercial video games for 17 years before moving into education
Then was three years at the glass lab which was a collaboration
Nonprofit funded to bring Triple A video game development into education and see if we could inflict some of measurable change
And then as as we said I'm now an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University
So I mainly want to talk about fish tanks
and
I have to say that I
Recently discovered that a lot of video game designers are obsessed with fish tanks
Or at least a certain kind of video game designer is and I realized this
When Raph Koster is another very famous video game designer is now getting around on the UX circuit a little bit gave a talk about
Fish tanks as a video game design metaphor ah and it made me realize that
I'm not quite as weird as I think I'm very weird
But I'm not as weird as I thought relative to other video game designers. I actually this is a secret
I've never told anyone have a recurring fish tank dream, and I've had this several times throughout my life
I don't know. Why where I discover a unique fish that no one has ever seen before this is not
This is the mola mola mola ma is very cool
But they're real and this fish that I dream up is the sort of froggy strange species of fish
So this is it's actually relatively common for video game designers to think about fish tanks a lot
But before I get into that I'm gonna give you some boring slides that are more about the structure of video game development and design
Since I think that probably we don't have this shared context
So the way that video games are made we have these large
Cross-functional teams that are very elaborate and you can see these are just some charts that I borrowed off of the internet
But we usually have a game director, and they have designers reporting to them artists who report to them technologists
And they all come together
And we have these elaborate pipelines because we have to build everything that our players experience from scratch
And yet what we build has to be incredibly immersive?
So it's very difficult to get all of this right and we often have these big elaborate pipelines however our teams are not usually
Large as they are I think in the corporate space so for us a very large team is about 200 developers
And that's on a large triple-a product sometimes
We have these big sprawling arms of other contracting companies, but usually the teams are very close together
And they're working in a relatively small group compared to
enterprise design
So I come from online games
And we're even a little bit different because when you build a game for a that's gonna be shipped in a box
We call it shipping in a box even though. We don't do that very much anymore for online games
We actually sort of develop in what might be a more familiar design centered way
Which is that?
We have long beta periods where we release the software for free
to beta audiences hundreds of people usually who will play it for quite a long time sometimes years before it switches a lot so my
Perspective as an online game designer is actually fundamentally different than most of what you would consider triple-a or even mobile development
So and now I'm gonna give you my portfolio dive a little bit, so I actually started out on a game called dragon realms
Which is a text-based game?
It was it came out of muds
But we had thousands of players at the time which in the mid-90s was super exciting
I
Started as a hobbyist and was sort of absorbed onto the development team and we had a living world where we were releasing things to
Live groups of thousands of players and we knew that we were successful if we were retaining those players
And if they had high satisfaction, so it's a lot like having a live product
and this is another place where we sort of I think online game designers bridge into the UX world maybe a little bit more because
We're used to the concept of a live piece of software
And then with Sim City edu I was trying to create
quantifiable measurable change
That we could drop into a school situation with these highly specific outcomes and actually design
Something from the ground up in the case of Sim City. We were actually developing in parallel with Electronic Arts
They had donated SimCity 5 to us, and we sort of wrapped it into a classroom
And I've given lots of talks on how difficult that was
So then at carnegie-mellon what I do now I run my company kind of on the side
But I am a teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon
and we try to aim students two to three years into the future at these very small cross-functional highly collaborative teams that are
Using brand new technology technologies that don't really even exist yet
But we think will be dominant in two to three years in the entertainment space and they have a couple of programmers usually a designer
And an artist and they have to execute the whole thing inside of a semester
So that's what the UTC is we're actually primarily based in Pittsburgh
But the Silicon Valley satellite we get a handful of students every semester to do kind of an intensive usually second-year work
So when I describe what I do I build worlds
It's the clearest way for me to describe what it is that I do as a practice
I do this as a fantasy author and I do it as a designer
And I guess you could also say that what I am is a collaborative
Social systems designer to create worlds that are going to be highly immersive, but that ultimately draw people together
And it's about the chemistry of what people do when they're in these shared virtual environments
So as Lou said when I talk about what it is that we do on an operational level. I'm talking about
operationalizing a world so the world has to be
Incredibly cohesive everyone has to share the vision for what it is and as designers
We have this very symbiotic and really more pure like relationship with our players. It's also unusual compared to triple a regular video game development
So some reasons why this is pretty difficult, so this is a cosplayer. Do you all know? What cosplay is yeah, okay?
So they dress up. This is a Blizzcon cosplayer
She's dressed up as an orc players get super super into our products
And we'll gather together and dress up in costumes that also means that they're incredibly
Picky about the worlds that we develop you have to have absolute consistency. This is something
That's across all sort of triple-a game development
But it's especially sharp in online world
Where if you have something that's slightly out of whack or you say this piece of lore says this
But then this other characters say and something else that contradicts that they're just gonna set you on fire on the forums, so they're also
Super connected, and they're talking to each other all the time these days
They mostly hang out on discord servers
And they're constantly are actually talking in real time while they're playing and they're highly connected so the spread of information through these players is
Lightning-fast and finally and most importantly, and I think we have this concept of critical delight
We don't talk about it very much because we take it for granted in the side of the video game world
But being delightful is the only thing that game does it has no other purpose?
And so if you're not delighting your users every second and more than anything else on the market you fail on the game dies so
It's a early impressed profession
You compare that to something like uber if uber doesn't delight you and it's been rather under delightful recently
I understand it will still get you to the airport
So it still has this fundamental function and yes it can be out competed and it can be done better
but at the end of the day
It doesn't really have to delight you as its core value as compared to World of Warcraft where the second that World of Warcraft stops
Being delightful and stops being the most immersive best
Experience that anyone has ever had and the best thing that they can do with their voluntary time. They'll stop playing and lose them so
What do we know about building these highly complex worlds for highly picky user bases
It's actually when I stop to think about it about this choice
So we often are told you have to keep the big picture in mind you have to see the forest for the trees
But then we're also told that the Devils in the details and these two things are in direct
Opposition to each other so when we make very complex highly interrelated
Systems for players that they experience immersively what we're saying is that we need to bridge both of these things and system design is
ultimately the bridge between the high-level idea and those Devils in the details
So this big system design is this connection
This is a design map
That we created for Mars generation once so again
Mars generation one was even more different in that we were trying we had kind of two parallel systems that had to run at the
Same time we had the game which had to be immersive and triple-a equality, and then we had to have the learning experience
but had which had to be
effective and measurable
so
When we designed the game we started with these sort of high-level ideas
Which is this forest for the trees the notion of the game Mars generation one the notion of argumentation?
And then we had second-level abstracts underneath this and the design process and then in the middle they all met with the very
Fine-grained actions that the player would perform inside of the game and then in our particular case
We had to match
Every single action in the game with something that would be measurable so that we could infer what the player knew because the game had
to evolve and change
Depending on what we thought the player knew to give them the next experience that they needed to have on their scaffold and learning our
imitation
so fishtanks
So
when you think about a fish tank you have to think about an ecosystem and
Not only is the product an ecosystem especially with an online world but teams are ecosystems, and they're highly interrelated
So how do ecosystems work and what I'm gonna?
Talk through is three sort of major concepts that we have in designing complex systems
mostly relating to systems theory and I heard cybernetics mentioned earlier, which excited me, so
Ecosystems have loose and when we study ecosystems or system design broadly I teach a class on system design
Particular to video game development, but also I call it system design for games in life
We talk a lot about loops and in particular we talk about two kinds of loops
Reinforcing or positive loops are things that when the mechanics of what you do in a piece of software or in anything any
Behavioral loop that produces a positive outcome so in my case. I have a fish tank that has been out of control
Reinforcing positively, it sounds like it's good. It's not always good. This case. It's not good lots of algae, and it's a
constant problem
I'm trying to keep ahead of it by putting enough algae eaters and stuff in it if I had enough
Consumers of the algae I might have a balancing loop
So in a balancing loop for everything that you produce you have something that's consuming it and ideally these things exists in a symbiosis
It's usually a lot more complex than that where you have kind of a web of interrelated complex things
But when you have a balancing group you have equilibrium in the system
So what I would say about operationalizing worlds and design is that you can ask yourself
What are the reinforcing loops that are in the system of your operation and what are the positive loops?
What are the out of balance loops that are inside of your organization and those reinforcing loops and the balancing loops?
The reinforcing loops are they producing something good, or are they producing something you don't want
And how you potentially convert one kind of loop into another as you need to and then with these balancing loops?
What are their constituent parts and how do they relate to each other? What are they consuming and is that a good thing or not?
Ecosystems also have leverage points in my class
This is probably the thing that resonate most with the students and the thing that they hang on to so
Informal systems study I used an element of thinking in systems
She recognises 12 different kinds of leverage points
And so there's higher leverage and lower leverage
What this means is that depending in on?
What you want to change in a complex system you have a lot of dials that you can change
With people these are you can move people in and out you can
Connect them together you can group them differently and so in a fish tank
How many rocks you have and changing around how much sand you have is a pretty low leverage point it doesn't really matter how much
You change around the rocks because they're constants
It's a low leverage point on the overall system
But how much water you have that starts to get higher leverage
Changing the amount of water has a more radical effect on the rest of the complex system
and then
Your ratio of food to fish even bigger leverage change those things you're gonna get a pretty radical change throughout the system that might unbalance
the other loops and then filtration systems
And then at the very top she's talking about system change and especially social system change
So you get it into this value space at the top of the leverage point and so when you say
What kind of tank do we have or what kind of ecosystem do we have this is a value judgment and you have to spread?
that the
communication of that value throughout a space everyone's in agreement
and they're moving towards that same goal so up at the top you actually get away from the concrete and into the abstract but
Into that abstract space becomes the high leverage that you can really have a radical change on a given system
Because if I decide that I want to have a saltwater tank instead of a freshwater tank
I'm gonna have a problem with all the constituent fish that are in my space
So you can say on an operational level
Do we need big change or small change are we fine-tuning or are we making radical shifts in our space?
If you're fine-tuning, what are the constants?
What are the things you can kind of switch in and out and there's not that big of a change you can increase them?
But it's a relatively small point of leverage you're gonna
Have a small tuning type change as opposed to the rules that people use to interact with each other
That's going to be much bigger leverage, and then finally again the direction that you're moving in with the system is much much stronger
And you can ask yourself
What kind of change do we want and also are we getting where we want to go?
So if you think that you're spinning your wheels, and we keep making these changes
And it's not really taking it could be that you're trying to twist a low leverage point when what you need is a big one?
Or if you keep making changes, and they have these radically disruptive effects throughout the system. It's possible that you're turning a leverage point
That's too strong and what you need is more of a fine-tuning touch
And what I would say in particular is that you have to be careful with this so especially when organizations have regime change
You usually have
Radical shifts in leverage especially when you have people that move from high in the organization. They move out there people move out
It causes a potentially catastrophic destructive effect sometimes. That's
Positive structure, it's destruction that you need and sometimes
It's not intended, but I think the thing to that we think about in the video game
Space is that we just wouldn't think about taking an entire world offline switching it around and turning it back on again
We wouldn't assume that that would work and it almost never does these things have to regrow organically
And it takes a lot of time so your commitment to the system has to be very high if you're gonna go ahead and twist
one of those high leverage points
Finally this is the sexy word in the video game world which is emergence so emergence is this thing that we all talk about and
We all want from video games especially system based video games. I'm not entirely sure we're all on the same page about exactly
What we mean, but this is my angle on on what it is
And how we identify it and the best
Illustration that I know of this get from Mike sellers who teaches at, Indiana
That a flock of birds or a school of fish is an emergent property that flock or that school depends on each
constituent fish acting independently
And yet when they all act independently and together you get this emergent thing which is a school and yet the school is something that
We can identify
As its own thing and we can say the school is moving this way the school is migrating the school is eating something even though
What we mean is that thousands of fish are sort of doing something we might not exactly know why?
But it has this greater functionality in the form of the school itself and so in an operation
I think that we have these consistent emergent properties and one of them especially you're talking about culture is
the core emotion of the organization itself
That core emotion a sort of shared feeling that the culture has
Is an emergent property that is controlled by all of the mechanics of how the people interact and the Constituent people inside of that interaction
Space so you can ask
what is that core emotion is it the one that we want do we have a name for it do we all think that it's
The same thing and do we all think that the rules that we have
Create that emergent property of emotion that binds us all together and then also
Are we all part of the same school and who are our outliers?
Are the outliers the ones that we want to be outliers would we rather that they would be inside of the school?
Or is there a reason for them that symbiotic within the organization so by looking at the emergent properties you can look at the individuals
Connection to that emergent property and try to decide is it intentional, or is it something?
That's just sort of works, or is it something that we want to change and fine-tune
So from a systems perspective in the design of complex interrelated things
Remember that you have loops that are created by rules you have leverage and that there are different kinds of leverage and different things that
You might change in different ways and that there are emergent properties from your system that you can think about in the abstract
But in an abstract way that can give you guidance about the choices that you're making
So and now a coda
I want to kind of talk about something that I think is more relevant to recent issues in complex system design especially with regard to
Organization and that's our hyper-connected world
so I
Said that our players are hyper connected
But all people are way more connected than they've ever been before
If there's a world event we usually know within the same day all over the world or at least some of us do and enough
Of us do that we communicate it to the rest of them if you know someone in high school that you don't have any contact
With anymore really, but they have a baby you tend to know within a day
Which is weird, and you probably know within an hour or so?
What a lot of your friends had for lunch
There's a real reason for that
but we do know and its significance a part of our knowledge space in a way that we've never had before and
I think that that's significant because
If we're trying to operationalize a hyper-connected world we have to think about
Dynamics that we've just never had to think about before no-one's ever ever had to think about before if these
Users, and if our designers are hyper connected we can expect instant communication
We can expect really elaborate collaboration. We can expect deep personal awareness and that really cuts both ways
so in addition to deep personal awareness
your design leadership is always under a high degree of
inspection and on a personal level that we just haven't had to deal with before and
Where I go with that is that being nice to each other's really hard in a hyper-connected system
And that's some of the the difficulty that we're having now across a lot of different cultures the hyper connected world
Tests our ability to be empathic
Tests our ability to relate to people who we now know way more about than we used to know before so
We also know from an online world. I try to give this Julian develop out to people who are curious about video games
But don't know very much about it
he went on this deep dive that was sort of an anthropological study of one of these complex online worlds which was Ultima Online and
What we know from?
Complex online world is that these failures of empathy that when we drop?
That empathic connection both between our developers and our players and between our players and each other
It collapses the world so in Ultima Online
There were these richly connected worlds
I talked to a woman who had an entire experience within the game where she was a
Barkeeper the game was an adventure game you would run around and kill things like you kind of would expect
It was an adventure medieval fantasy game
But she was a tavern keeper that had acquired a physical space in the game pseudo physical and filled it with
drinks which are fictional and then adventurers who would go out and kill things would come in there and
Drink their drinks and talk to each other. She had a social space within the game
This is a kind of
emergent behavior where she was doing something way outside of the intentionality of the design space she wasn't ever killing anything which was weird and
She was relating to all of these people and becoming a social center inside of the game
So it's one of sort of the most beautiful emergent things that has happened in these online games
But ultimate had a mechanic that was gradually
Incentivizing elder players to consume the younger ones so if you were a new player in ultimate at a certain point it was advantageous
for elder players to find you kill you and take your stuff and
Because there was no back pressure against that because the designers didn t evolve to adapt to that problem
It gradually ate out the inside of that world and it collapsed so these beautiful things can fall
Really quite quickly if there are these fundamental failures of empathy between development and within the community itself
which is to say that confined spaces really test our ability to get a lot that online world and ecosystem fishtank an
Organization is fragile and it can collapse very easily
So all of these things you have to take a fine touch with them
You have to grow them over time and as I heard mentioned earlier
It's a problem if you have high turnover because then you're getting the ecosystem rebooted every time you don't have time for these complex
relationships to really mature
These games worlds and orgs are all confined spaces and in a family anybody knows
They feel it
When the parents aren't getting along
And I think to the same extent because designers are the vision leaders of a space when the designers aren't getting along the whole company
Tends to know and so that places a high responsibility on that
It's also especially difficult for design leaders
So as a design leader you have to keep everyone moving in the same direction
And what we find at least in videogames we have these highly complex tasks that
flag is emotion
And it's difficult it requires bravery and open this especially in this hyper connected high inspection world we now live in but when you are
Vulnerable and when you expose how you feel about a thing it has a way of bridging culture
And so what I would say
To the point of addressing empathy inside of these complex spaces is that it's important to reach for the universal
And I think it's not super coincidental that a lot of the fantasy spaces that we try to create
Also are all based on mythical universals
So we're 10 we tend to be fairly proximate to the exposure of this and we're also less embarrassed about talking about
Knowns and warps and things, but we speak in a language of storytelling
And I think that that has a value to cross culture so even if you don't necessarily
Share the same cultural background of a given fairy tale or men the language in the style of speaking in metaphor and speaking in
storytelling with reversal and conflict and overcoming that can become
Universal so you can ask yourself what your fairy tale is for your organization. You can ask yourself
What the core emotion what the lesson of the organization is and how do you communicate that throughout?
How do you tie people together using these Universal myths?
And that's all I've got
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