Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493

0:00 There's three types of fun, fun for the player,

0:04 fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

0:07 Is it PvP?

0:08 It's all PvP.

0:09 In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.

0:16 Well, I don't know what that means, but...

0:19 Rust players know what that means.

0:21 My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest,

0:24 so I think I won the game.

0:28 And we're idiots.

0:29 We're reading the forums, and the forums are just flaming us all the time.

0:34 Like, "There's lag on this server," and, "Can't log into that ser-" And that's,

0:38 that was our perspective of what was happening.

0:41 And when I showed up at that show, it...

0:46 One of the most emotional things in my life.

0:49 It was nothing but an outpouring of love.

0:52 I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard.

0:58 I loved it.

0:58 It was a part of who I was, And I felt I was a part of it,

1:03 and I literally thought I would retire from the place.

1:07 I never thought the day would come, and that was it.

1:12 How painful was it to say goodbye?

1:15 It broke me.

1:16 Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned,

1:19 you've disappeared off the face of the earth,

1:22 but you were actually working on a game.

1:27 The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan,

1:30 a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch,

1:35 which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made.

1:41 He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met.

1:46 In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him,

1:50 including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious,

1:54 and still and forever a legit gamer, through and through.

2:00 Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative

2:04 minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years,

2:08 and they are truly incredible.

2:09 Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made,

2:13 games that to me personally have brought me thousands of hours of fun,

2:19 meaning, and happiness, from Warcraft, to StarCraft,

2:23 to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch and more.

2:26 So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team,

2:31 and to every creative mind in the video game industry,

2:34 giving their heart and soul to build video game

2:37 worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy.

2:40 This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended,

2:46 with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever.

2:50 Full of memes, lulz, wisdom, emotional rollercoaster moments,

2:54 and of course, Blizzard video game lore.

2:58 Jeff left Blizzard in 2021,

3:01 and has been secretly working on a new video game called

3:05 The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff.

3:11 It is incredibly beautiful.

3:13 Set in the 1800s Gold Rush era of California,

3:18 it's an open world online multiplayer game,

3:21 part adventure and action, part survival.

3:24 Sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and desperation,

3:28 and sometimes just awe watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape.

3:33 It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and it's

3:38 a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of you.

3:42 You can wishlist it on Steam.

3:44 Join the alpha later in March, I think, and early access is on the way.

3:50 This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

3:52 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description

3:56 where you can also find links to contact me,

3:59 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

4:02 And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Kaplan.

4:06 You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest,

4:14 before you ever became a legendary video game

4:17 designer on World of Warcraft and on Overwatch,

4:21 which I think is a wild journey to go through from gamer to designer.

4:26 But first, let's go way back.

4:28 When did you first fall in love with video games?

4:32 I was lucky.

4:33 I was born in that golden era of coin-op.

4:37 So, I literally remember the first time seeing Pac-Man.

4:41 I was with my Uncle Ronnie, and he just kept feeding me quarters.

4:45 I think he wanted to play, but was too scared to, so he,

4:49 you know, his little nephew, he would just give him quarters to play Pac-Man.

4:55 I remember being at my brother's graduation in Philadelphia,

4:58 and they had an Asteroids machine in the lobby.

5:02 That was one of the first coin-op machines I had played as well.

5:06 And my brother and I would...

5:08 we would try to get the high score, and we'd finally get it.

5:12 But we had to go to bed early 'cause we were little kids.

5:16 And then in the morning somebody else had like beat our high score.

5:20 And then, you know, I grew up in Southern California in the '80s.

5:24 I was born in '72.

5:26 So, you know, I was a kid with that skateboard

5:31 BMX culture where we'd ride two towns over.

5:34 We knew all the pizza parlors and liquor stores and arcades,

5:39 and we just lived in that coin-op phase.

5:43 That was, that was where the love started.

5:46 And then you started to see things like Pong.

5:49 You'd go over to a friend's house,

5:51 they'd have Pong, and it was just mind blowing,

5:53 like, we're playing this thing on the TV and it was so much fun.

5:58 Atari was a big thing at that time as well.

6:03 But the big one for me was actually Intellivision,

6:06 because my dad was an executive recruiter, and one of his clients was Mattel.

6:14 And he said, "Hey, I...

6:15 They gave me this thing," and he would get discounts or free games.

6:20 And my brothers and I just loved Intellivision.

6:24 Like, we would just play it endlessly.

6:27 And the comparison was always like,

6:29 "Is this game close to what's in the arcades?"

6:32 And it was just such a golden era.

6:35 And I think the big moment where it really blew open

6:40 and kind of hit the next level was when the NES came out.

6:46 And that, like, NES with Super Mario- was kind

6:51 of gaming at the next level at that point.

6:55 And I have, like, warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to this day.

7:01 I remember we played Super Mario for weeks, my brothers and I,

7:06 and then I had a friend come over, and he showed me all the secret stuff-...

7:10 in Super that I didn't know existed at the time.

7:13 And it's...

7:14 it was like suddenly, the world opened up more and games could be more.

7:20 And then there was, like, a big PC gaming push that hit me.

7:27 My parents ran their own business.

7:29 Like I said, my dad was an executive recruiter, and they bought an IBM.

7:33 And this is, like, when it was DOS before MS-DOS existed.

7:38 And I was so disappointed, because, like,

7:42 other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore-...

7:46 which, you know, they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time.

7:53 And my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I.

7:58 She bought a Zork.

8:01 You know, it was just Infocom word games,

8:05 and where your imagination would take you.

8:07 Like, Zork holds a place in my heart I think few games will ever touch.

8:13 It's a text-based game?

8:15 Text-based game.

8:15 You know, you just type in, "Go west.

8:19 Open mailbox." You know?

8:21 And...

8:24 Okay.

8:24 But it's that power of imagination.

8:26 It's why the book is always better than the movie, you know?

8:29 Yeah.

8:30 So, you're starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate.

8:34 Yes.

8:35 You can step into this world and you can lose yourself in that world.

8:39 Yeah.

8:39 You're transported.

8:40 You're living there.

8:41 Was Zork popular?

8:43 Zork was insanely popular.

8:44 And then there was Zork II-...

8:47 and Zork III.

8:48 A trilogy.

8:49 Zork trilogy.

8:50 I see it.

8:51 Okay.

8:51 A- and it was weird, and, like, the...

8:53 Sometime in the '90s,

8:54 there was this, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games.

8:58 That's how they branded them.

9:00 And they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics.

9:05 And somehow, that just shattered everything,

9:08 because the Zork you knew in your head didn't exist anymore.

9:12 Yeah, Zork was fantastic.

9:14 I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous.

9:20 But I highly recommend Zork.

9:23 There was also, in those days, on the PC that worked on our IBM, was Ultima-...

9:32 which was the Richard Garriott series.

9:37 And he was Lord British.

9:38 We knew him as Lord British.

9:39 He put himself in the game.

9:41 And you wanna talk about world- building.

9:44 You know, there was Yew Forest and there was all the characters.

9:49 And the first Ultima I played was Ultima II, 'cause Ultima I was before my time.

9:55 And that series, it was this RPG group based PC game,

10:02 and the worlds were just so rich.

10:05 Like, you could get on a rocket ship.

10:07 You're playing in this fantasy world, fighting demons,

10:10 and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship.

10:14 And then there was just all of this sort of crazy

10:18 stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world.

10:23 Like, there were bouncers in the towns, and merchants,

10:25 but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people,

10:29 or kill Lord British, you know?

10:32 That was something that was super hard.

10:34 And when you're just a jackass kid,

10:37 you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over,

10:42 and Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me.

10:48 And, of course, that led to Ultima Online,

10:50 which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest.

10:55 Yes.

10:55 Sort of starting to build these worlds

10:57 that are massively multiplayer online video games.

11:00 Can you take me to that journey?

11:03 Like, as you started to get online, MMO world.

11:08 What were influential?

11:09 What were fun for you?

11:12 Well, the big one for me was EverQuest.

11:15 But, Like you mentioned, Ultima Online sort of was the predecessor.

11:20 It came before EverQuest.

11:23 And it was, like, one of those unfortunate times

11:25 in my life where I was actually at grad school.

11:29 You were busy.

11:30 I was busy, and I missed Ultima Online.

11:32 Like, I would have had that experience.

11:35 And when you hear the Ultima Online stories,

11:38 they're some of the craziest, funniest...

11:40 You know, I know somebody who,

11:43 they learned how to poison in the game, and then they would poison apples,

11:48 then leave them on the ground, and somebody else would be adventuring,

11:51 then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse.

11:55 Then they'd steal all their stuff and...

11:57 You know, Ultima Online was kind of...

11:59 It was the earliest grief-based experiment.

12:03 Really, like, when you're treating the humans like ants in the ant farm.

12:08 That was kind of Ultima Online.

12:11 Yeah.

12:12 My first, like, what online gaming,

12:15 what defined online gaming for me was Quake and Doom and Duke Nukem.

12:22 You know, it started with Doom and they had a...

12:28 You could basically LAN.

12:29 You could network with your friends or you could

12:32 connect with a modem and hook up with somebody.

12:34 And that was like a mind-blowing...

12:37 Just seeing another entity in a video game and saying,

12:40 "That's a person on the other side of that." That was magical,

12:45 like, that that moment happened and that person could

12:48 be in another room or across town from you.

12:52 And Quake kind of took it to the next level.

12:55 Like, that's where everybody knew what they were doing.

12:59 The systems were more refined.

13:02 And this Quake community formed with all of these, you know,

13:08 great websites, mods.

13:09 The community was divided into...

13:12 There were two castes of players.

13:15 The low ping bastards, the LPBs-...

13:18 and then the rest of us, you know.

13:21 And I remember rolling into Quake matches, you know,

13:24 on a dial-up modem with a 300 ping connection,

13:30 and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.

13:33 Um, and just, just connecting with people.

13:38 Like I said, the websites.

13:40 To this day, the only gaming website I read—

13:44 I don't read any of the news sites anymore, but I read Blue's News.

13:49 Which was like, like...

13:51 Someone actually teased me recently.

13:53 I linked him a story.

13:54 I'm like, "Oh, did you hear this new thing's coming out?" And I sent the link,

13:58 and they're like, "Dude, this is from Blue's News.

14:00 Like, what time machine did you just

14:03 step out of?" And guy named Stephen Heaslip...

14:06 I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong.

14:08 I apologize, but it was actually through

14:12 that site that I learned about EverQuest.

14:16 They had those programmer plan updates, the .plan files.

14:22 And guys like Carmack would...

14:25 You know, they'd post about what code they

14:29 were writing or how they had optimized something, or just their personal life.

14:33 Like, you know, the Ferrari talk would

14:36 always happen— once they had achieved success.

14:40 And there was an id programmer named Brian Hook, and he said,

14:46 "I'm leaving id to go work at Verant," which became Sony Online,

14:51 "to work on this game called EverQuest." And I was like,

14:57 "How does anybody leave id, the greatest institution in all of gaming ever,

15:05 to work on any other game?" I'm like, "This guy must be crazy.

15:09 Or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it.

15:14 I need to know what's going on." And if he hadn't have made that post,

15:19 I never would have checked out EverQuest.

15:22 We'll talk about EverQuest, but since you mentioned Carmack and, uh,

15:25 Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack?

15:29 Why was he such an important and influential human in the history of gaming?

15:34 Those early geniuses at id...

15:36 Like, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now

15:41 if they hadn't had the breakthroughs that they had at the time.

15:47 Um, gaming engines were evolving,

15:51 but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolf 3D,

15:58 that was the first...

16:00 I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game.

16:04 You'd run around.

16:05 You'd dress up as a German.

16:07 You'd throw a grenade.

16:08 Um, to see it in 3D...

16:10 And it, it's funny.

16:11 You look back at the screenshots or videos of it now,

16:15 and it seems almost childish.

16:18 Like, "Oh, why, why were you so excited about that?" And you were transported.

16:23 There...

16:24 It was the intimacy of first person.

16:27 You know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun,

16:31 being transported to Nazi Germany, but you're the hero fighting the Nazis.

16:37 And then the evolution.

16:39 Like, when Doom came out, I'm a huge Army of Darkness fan.

16:43 Like, one of my favorite movies of all time.

16:45 And I was like, "This is Army of Darkness, the video game." You know?

16:50 Like, "Give me the boom stick.

16:52 Here we go." And the graphical advances...

16:56 But it, it wasn't just how the game looked, it was how it played.

17:01 The smoothness kept getting better.

17:05 The responsiveness the sharpness of the gameplay.

17:09 You have to credit id in those days and Carmack and Romero.

17:14 Um, I...

17:16 As somebody who worked on an FPS, I...

17:18 That wouldn't have existed without them.

17:21 Credit where credit's due.

17:23 And by the way, we should say you're...

17:25 As a gamer, your range is incredible.

17:26 You are a legit first-person shooter gamer,

17:29 but you also obviously love the more MMO world, rich, exploratory kinda game.

17:37 So it's fascinating.

17:39 But yeah, there is...

17:40 On the technology stack that brought something

17:42 like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life,

17:46 there's a threshold which you pass of realism

17:50 where you can immerse yourself into that world.

17:52 I had the same exact experience with, uh,

17:55 Wolfenstein 2D taking a step to 3D, and it was like tears in my eyes.

18:04 Like, "This is incredible." Like,

18:07 my memories of Wolfenstein 3D is it was like ultra realistic.

18:11 It's silly to say now.

18:14 It was the feeling like you were there.Yeah, what an incredible age.

18:18 And some of that, the storytelling,

18:20 a lot of that is the- technology that brings that kind of 3D world to life.

18:26 It's incredible.

18:27 But before- we get too far on that tangent you mentioned grad school.

18:34 We should mention that you have a master's degree in creative writing from NYU,

18:39 and you wanted to be a writer.

18:42 You told me your main influences were Kerouac,

18:45 but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, Orwell.

18:49 What drew you to storytelling in that medium of writing?

18:54 What aspect of the human experience were you trying to put down on paper?

18:59 Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired and reading,

19:04 and it's the, not only being transported

19:07 to a different world or into a different person,

19:12 but also, you know, the way that stories can touch emotions

19:21 in you and trigger feelings sometimes you didn't even know you had.

19:27 And that was very appealing for me.

19:31 And the big challenge with it is,

19:34 and I think this is for anybody who creates anything,

19:38 is putting yourself out there.

19:41 Um, to some degree, there's a lot of ego

19:45 that goes into that moment where you say, "Well, I've been reading, you know,

19:51 1984 or Green Hills of Stranglethorn, and I think it's amazing.

19:58 And now I'm gonna try to write something that somebody is gonna read." Uh,

20:06 that's a giant leap of faith.

20:07 You know, that's a moment of putting yourself out there completely,

20:10 and there's gotta be some part of that that's ego.

20:15 There's some part of it that's masochistic.

20:19 Um, and I think for people who want to create and build stuff,

20:25 they can't help but to do it.

20:27 You don't really have an option.

20:29 That's just how you're wired, and you're gonna do it anyway.

20:33 And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just write all

20:39 the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else.

20:44 You know, that's one way to go about it.

20:46 Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot of the stories he wrote,

20:49 never published, and he asked for all of them to be destroyed.

20:53 And then it's only because of his friend that ignored

20:58 his request that we even have many of his stories.

21:01 It's like to be that kinda...

21:03 I mean, clearly, there's some masochism there, some tortured soul.

21:08 But then there's also the ego like you mentioned.

21:11 I was entertained by this story of James Joyce, When he was a young man,

21:17 18, 19, Declared that he's going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century.

21:23 And he turned out in many,

21:25 in the eyes of many to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

21:29 But there's, like, millions of kids just like James Joyce,

21:33 writers, they're declaring exactly that, that turn out not to be.

21:37 But that is in some cases, in many cases,

21:40 maybe most cases, you have to have that ego-...

21:43 to say, "I'm gonna..." Yeah, right.

21:45 "I read 1984," "and I'm going to write the next 1984."- Yeah.

21:51 And I do think ego is a big part of it.

21:54 it's one of the many lessons I've learned.

21:57 Hearing your Kafka story is funny,

22:00 because fast-forwarding to how my writing career ended—...

22:04 I literally threw away everything, I mean, in a dumpster.

22:07 I used to keep copious notes, like journals,

22:11 my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea.

22:16 I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes.

22:20 And then I also kept personal journals of just,

22:24 you know, to keep the writing habit up of just,

22:27 you know, what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of that.

22:31 And then either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts,

22:37 and I threw it all in the dumpster.

22:40 What was that decision?

22:41 Do you remember that decision?

22:42 What was that- what was that like to just take

22:45 that part of your life and just put it in a dumpster?

22:51 Yeah.

22:51 It was I think it was necessary.

22:54 It was necessary.

22:56 This is like rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do.

23:02 You know?

23:03 But at the time, I think I was so broken

23:08 and so defeated with failure that I needed the moment.

23:12 It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer, you know?

23:17 It's that moment of like, "I'm not gonna win this fight,

23:21 and you need to move on from it."

23:24 And if there was any element of that sitting around,

23:30 I'd be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.

23:35 We should mention that you did give it a- a real try.

23:38 You've mentioned receiving over 170 rejection letters

23:41 in one year when submitting your stories.

23:45 So there's a lot of rejection.

23:48 So it was a long chain of rejection.

23:51 And then what was that like, the rejection?

23:54 It was hard.

23:55 Um, I had moved from New York.

23:58 Um, I did the most terrible dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time.

24:02 I had a really great group of writer friends from grad school in New York,

24:07 and I think writing is a very lonely, solitary thing.

24:10 But weirdly, writers kind of support each other and just,

24:14 "Who do you give the story to?" You know,

24:16 you don't wanna give it to your mom or dad, you know.

24:19 You kinda wanna give it to somebody who's gonna really punch

24:21 you in the nose and tell you what's wrong with it.

24:24 And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.

24:30 Did you take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter and drove across, uh-- No.

24:36 across the United States and then wrote a book about it?

24:39 Or just to take Kerouac as an example.

24:42 Anyway, sorry.

24:43 You went just-- I might have been more successful had-...

24:46 I done that.

24:47 Uh, so sorry.

24:47 So you went back.

24:49 So I moved back to California, and I did it for a girl.

24:52 And I think within two months of moving back, we were broken up.

24:57 So...

24:58 And I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment when it was

25:01 empty in New York and I was about to close the door for the last time.

25:05 I had that like, you know,

25:07 little me on the shoulder saying, "Dude, what are you doing?" "This...

25:13 You're making one of those epic life mistakes that is gonna

25:16 come back to haunt you." And I ended up alone in California,

25:21 and I think it was a good three years that I structured

25:27 my life where I was gonna write for eight hours a day,

25:31 because it's that writer's habit.

25:33 Like you have to just force yourself, "This is a job.

25:36 This isn't a hobby.

25:37 Whether I like it or not, rain or shine, sick or healthy,

25:41 I'm gonna write for eight hours a day." And I did.

25:46 Um, I was fortunate.

25:47 Like I said, my dad had his company and he hired me as a research associate.

25:52 So I was calling up generating name lists

25:56 for a recruiting company, and I would take...

25:58 Whenever there was East Coast assignments,

26:00 I would take those so I could start at like 5:00 in the morning.

26:03 And I created all this space for me to write, and I just...

26:08 I had a dog named Jack-...

26:11 who was...

26:12 He was a Jack Russell Terrier.

26:13 And so everybody's like, "You're a writer,

26:15 you named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack." I'm like,

26:17 "Because I named him after Jack Kerouac."

26:19 "It's poetic and epic," and-- Yeah, of course-...

26:22 I just looked like a dumbass, but-...

26:24 it was just me and this dog.

26:25 And I was writing, you know, all that time intensely.

26:30 And this was mid to late '90s, so even though internet existed,

26:36 email was very primitive and you had to send a manuscript off,

26:41 like printed paper-...

26:44 to all...

26:44 Like, I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines,

26:48 and you had to send envelope with return self-address stamp.

26:53 So it was expensive, too.

26:56 Like if you didn't have money, you were just...

26:58 There was a cost to it-...

27:00 to every single one of them.

27:03 You had to pay for the rejection letter that you would eventually receive.

27:07 Yeah.

27:07 And the, like, big thing that you were hoping for was

27:11 that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter.

27:16 Like, um-- Keep going.

27:19 Yeah.

27:19 And you'd like cling onto this.

27:22 Like, it was like, "Oh, Glimmer Train said,

27:26 you know, showing promise." You know,

27:28 and you just hang onto that for like a week,

27:31 you know, pretending like that was...

27:33 But it was just soul crushing.

27:36 And I really stuck...

27:38 And I became more and more isolated.

27:41 Part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York.

27:47 I'm prone to just introversion anyway.

27:50 The type of person I am.

27:52 Breaking up with the girlfriend at the time.

27:56 I just sort of fell into that world of like all I was doing was writing.

28:04 And it broke me.

28:06 Like, I went into very deep and heavy depression.

28:12 I drank too much.

28:14 I really had a problem with alcohol.

28:17 And all those things compounded into just deep, deep depression.

28:23 And I don't...

28:26 There wasn't like a magic rejection that broke me.

28:31 That would have been epic if like-...

28:33 someone out there is like,

28:35 "The dude who..." "I'm the dude who broke Jeff that one

28:39 day." But I just had a moment where I said, "This is gonna destroy me." And...

28:47 Like, I don't want to be discouraging to anybody,

28:51 because I really do believe, like you hear it so much,

28:55 like, "You have to work for your dreams,

28:57 never give up." Like, we're trained this way.

29:01 Like, "Never give up." The universe...

29:04 Actually, maybe not the universe.

29:07 A group of editors at literary magazines across the United States

29:14 was telling me it was time to give up as a writer, like I wasn't cut out for it.

29:21 And I stopped.

29:24 Sometimes, you know, closing a door is required for another door to open.

29:30 That's one of the hardest things to do, is to walk away.

29:33 Yeah.

29:34 And I think, rightly so, our parents, our coaches,

29:38 our mentors train us not to give up.

29:42 And I think a lot of us take pride in that, "I'm never gonna give up.

29:47 I'm gonna do this come hell or high water." And sometimes there's that reality,

29:53 especially when you're now in your mid-20s,

29:57 where you have that moment of like, "Am I really gonna be this?

30:00 Like, am I ever gonna sort of find the light here?" And, maybe,

30:06 and it's so hard, it's so hard to have this moment,

30:10 "Maybe this isn't my calling in life," especially when

30:13 you don't know what the next calling is gonna be.

30:16 That's so painful.

30:17 It's 'cause you've invested so much of yourself, of who you are,

30:21 of the dreams you've had, of this just whole conception of yourself,

30:25 and you're watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming isolated,

30:29 suffering more and And then you just have

30:32 to somehow figure out how to- get out of that.

30:36 And it is true.

30:38 In that situation, the way to get out is the dumpster.

30:43 Is to cut it off.

30:46 Is there advice you can extract from that?

30:49 There's a lot of young folks who are in that same situation.

30:54 Yeah.

30:55 This is one of those hindsight things where, you know,

30:58 having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side,

31:02 which you don't know at the time, you know?

31:05 When you're a young person in your late teens or early 20s,

31:10 there's so much pressure on you.

31:12 And I really think adults don't help.

31:14 You know?

31:15 Every time you run into the younger nephew

31:18 or whoever and you start to say things like, "Oh, what's your major?

31:22 What are you gonna do with that?" "What do you

31:24 wanna be?" It's such bullshit to do to a human being.

31:28 You know?

31:29 You're so lost in the world.

31:31 I mean, most of us are lost our entire lives,

31:34 but especially in your 20s, you know, like, you're lost.

31:37 So the questions like, yeah, "What are you, what are you doing?

31:40 What's your major?

31:41 What's the career?" And so on, that's not the point, man.

31:45 I'm trying to find, I'm trying to move through the world,

31:50 I'm trying to run through the world to find the thing that sparks my heart,

31:54 to find the passion, to find what I'm meant to be on this earth for.

32:00 And there are really, I mean,

32:01 that is a real hero's journey of searching as a young person.

32:06 That's a real, like, you know, all the adults,

32:09 with their wisdom, they've stopped searching often.

32:14 They've done the lazy, the comfortable thing.

32:17 They found their thing.

32:18 And so now they look back, they don't remember how much suffering and how,

32:24 how much uncertainty that young people have to deal with.

32:28 It's, there's confusion, there's pressure.

32:31 Like, the pressure we exert on younger people

32:34 for having it figured out is, it's insane.

32:39 So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid,

32:46 like this sounds really trite,

32:48 but focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be.

32:56 The, the pressure that society kind of puts on us is,

33:01 you know, "Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut?

33:04 Do you wanna be a firefighter?

33:05 Do you wanna be a writer?

33:07 Do you wanna be a game maker?" And I think we get

33:11 lost in the trappings of, like a vision of what that role is-...

33:18 and how to perform as a fake actor in that role.

33:22 Versus when you're off the clock and no one's asking you any questions-...

33:29 you know, you're not at Thanksgiving dinner

33:31 and your uncle's pressuring you into, you know,

33:33 what your future's gonna be for the rest of your life.

33:36 When you go home, how do you spend your time?

33:40 Like, what makes you happy?

33:42 What brings you fulfillment?

33:44 And through those paths, you're gonna find out what you're gonna become,

33:50 not what you wanna be.

33:52 It's, "What do you wanna do?"- What do you wanna do?

33:56 The thing that brings you joy on a moment by moment basis.

34:00 Yeah.

34:01 That's brilliantly put.

34:02 And speaking of which, that's where you took the pivot.

34:07 You switched to video games.

34:10 How did that happen?

34:12 Gradually?

34:13 Suddenly?

34:14 Gradually and suddenly.

34:15 So when I had that fateful moment where I just sort of gave up with writing,

34:21 I had these days where I'd structure eight-hour chunks of just,

34:26 this was writing time, you know?

34:28 I'd sit solitary typing.

34:30 All that was gone.

34:31 And, you know, I could still support myself, which was nice.

34:35 And then I had this free time and I

34:39 wasn't spending it with anybody, I was just alone.

34:42 Me and the dog, Jack.

34:44 And I just poured it all into EverQuest.

34:50 You know, I, it was 1999 when that game came out.

34:55 And I had a friend, Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend.

34:59 One of the few friends I had who played computer games,

35:03 'cause there was a stigma to that.

35:06 You know?

35:06 It wasn't, you didn't walk around telling people you played games.

35:09 They thought you wasted your time.

35:12 And my friend, Vic, had bought EverQuest.

35:14 I'm like, "That's that game that that guy Brian Hook went to work on.

35:18 Is it good?" And he's like, "Yeah,

35:20 you gotta play it." And the moment I logged in, I was just transported.

35:26 It was the world of Norrath.

35:29 And it wasn't just the world itself and how it looked,

35:33 I thought the game was gorgeous,

35:35 it was the mechanics, you know, that I was this halfling rogue that, you know,

35:42 had to go out and adventure in the world, and when I killed stuff,

35:46 I got experience, and I needed better loot

35:49 to kill more stuff to get more experience.

35:53 And the sort of draw of progression in the game it was amazing.

36:00 I, and I just lived my life of, "I can't wait 'til

36:05 the next time I log in." There was a lot of escapism going.

36:10 It wasn't all healthy.

36:12 When all was said and done, when I finally had quit EverQuest three days later,

36:17 you could type in the command /played to see how much played time you had.

36:23 I had, I think it was like 272 played days in three years.

36:29 So you start to do the math on like, how much time-...

36:35 in those three years I was living in that world.

36:39 It was...It was kind of insane.

36:43 Well, that's over 6,000 hours-...

36:46 of gameplay.

36:47 Wow.

36:48 So here going to Perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy,

36:54 massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMORPG,

36:57 set in the world of Norrath, as you were saying.

37:01 First released in March 1999,

37:04 it is an online role-playing game where thousands of players create characters,

37:09 group up, and explore a persistent shared world.

37:12 It's widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs,

37:16 helping define raid content, guild systems and 3D online worlds.

37:20 That's the other component of it.

37:22 There's...

37:22 It's all humans and they group up-...

37:26 and they raid together in the game.

37:28 Yep.

37:29 In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 people or more getting

37:36 together to conquer something that you couldn't beat otherwise.

37:40 And to do successful raiding, you usually needed to join what in EverQuest

37:46 everyone referred to as an Uber Guild.

37:49 So I had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I...

37:53 Most of the time leveling up I was unguilded

37:56 or I was in like a role-playing guild with rogues only.

38:00 And it was when I got to Level 50 in EverQuest was the top level,

38:07 I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel,

38:11 which on our server was the top.

38:15 Every server had a top guild.

38:18 And I was on a server called The Nameless Server,

38:21 and the top guild was Legacy of Steel.

38:25 And that, the thrill of getting 30 people together to go see if you could beat,

38:32 you know, Nagafen, who was the fire dragon, or Vox, who was the frost dragon,

38:39 and needing perfect coordination to pull it off, it was insane how fun.

38:44 Like, you would literally scream out.

38:46 You're alone in your room at home-...

38:49 but you felt like you were there with these people

38:52 and you would audibly cheer out when you won,

38:55 and you'd feel depressed when you lost,

38:58 and it was a game of high highs and low lows, and it did everything right.

39:04 It was amazing.

39:05 So that was a big leap for you to go

39:08 from the proud lone warrior to a member of a guild, Uber Guild.

39:14 And then there's that epic story of you rising

39:17 to the top to become the leader of this Uber Guild.

39:22 The leader...

39:23 Yeah.

39:24 So organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats-...

39:32 'cause, you know, everyone has their own will.

39:36 Some people are loot motivated, some people want the guild to do well,

39:42 some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with.

39:47 And there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community.

39:51 It was something I suffered with, but a lot of people,

39:54 you know, anytime you're feeling sad or down, you're looking for escape.

40:00 And one of the great things video games brings us is escapism.

40:04 And escapism isn't always bad or negative-...

40:11 but when you sort of abuse it to escape your real life problems,

40:16 it's bad and negative.

40:18 So there's a mix of pain and darkness that pain can manifest as-...

40:25 all part of this community.

40:27 Yeah.

40:28 And what's weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people gives you

40:34 comradery and relief and makes you feel like you're not doing so bad in life,

40:40 but you can quickly enter a cycle of...

40:43 But then you're withdrawing from life and it makes you feel that way more

40:48 to where you can only get the fix from the game at that point.

40:52 So it's...

40:54 Psychologically, there's a lot going on there.

40:57 And so you had to work with all of that.

40:59 You have to get a bunch of people together to do a raid,

41:03 who are all human beings going

41:06 through complicated psychological journeys of their own.

41:09 Some are talking shit, some are just quietly lonely, just looking for some loot.

41:17 In the late '90s, everyone was talking shit.

41:19 You know what I mean?

41:21 Like, the gaming culture was just a different thing back then.

41:24 But it was a great group.

41:27 It was super fun.

41:29 It was people from all walks of life.

41:31 And to coordinate these people,

41:33 like you just had to repeat everything like 200 times.

41:38 Like, "Okay, we're gonna port from North Ro.

41:42 Everybody get to North Ro." And then you'd

41:44 have to repeat that for like six hours-...

41:48 to have any chance of like 20% of the people showing up in North Ro.

41:52 And I sort of like...

41:54 At first I joined the guild, I was just like the bright-eyed, bushy- tail.

41:59 Like, I was like one of the few rogues in the guild.

42:02 I just wanted to be helpful.

42:03 I really admired the people running the guild.

42:07 Like, we had a great guild leader.

42:11 and it was just a really fun experience.

42:14 And, you know, the guild leader one day just disappeared.

42:18 Like, he quit and he was going through, you know,

42:22 his own thing, and that's what would happen in EverQuest.

42:25 Like, people would just kinda disappear all of a sudden.

42:28 There wasn't a, "Hey, in about a month,

42:30 I'm gonna stop playing because I'm starting this new job." People...

42:35 people had to quit in some dramatic way,

42:38 where they just disappear, and basically, our guild leader stopped playing.

42:43 Did you miss them when they disappeared?

42:45 Like, we should say that most of the people, maybe all of them, were anonymous.

42:49 So you just- ...have a username,

42:50 and you don't really say who you are in real life.

42:54 Absolutely.

42:54 In those days, there was a great stigma to mentioning your, any real-life info.

43:00 You just kind of kept it all really close to your chest,

43:04 and you never knew who was male or female.

43:07 You kind of assumed everybody was male.

43:11 Safe assumption.

43:12 And then it was a surprise if they were actually female.

43:15 Like my wife, for example, that's how I met her.

43:19 You met her in EverQuest?

43:20 I met her in EverQuest.

43:21 That is a true love story, right there.

43:23 Yeah.

43:23 Yeah.

43:24 Wow.

43:25 The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know,

43:28 you play a game as much as I played EverQuest,

43:31 and people are like, "You threw years of your life away." Like,

43:33 "You can't win a game like that." And I'm like,

43:37 "I don't know, like, sitting here today,

43:40 my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest,

43:45 so I think I won the game."- Yeah, yeah.

43:50 You're like the, the, "Well, actually..." guy.

43:52 Well, yeah, exactly.

43:54 Your life will be on the Wikipedia page somewhere that says,

43:57 "Well, here's an example of somebody-""...

43:59 why video games are awesome." Yeah, I mean, some of it...

44:04 I should mention this as an aside.

44:05 For me and many people I know, yes, it's hundreds of hours,

44:09 but some of the happiest hours and days of my life.

44:13 Like, looking back, it all worked out.

44:16 During it, you are pretty low, and you think, "I...

44:19 What am I doing with my life?" All that kind of stuff.

44:22 But, like, looking back,

44:24 just the all-nighters you pull playing a particular video game,

44:28 allowing yourself to really fully be immersed seeing the sun come up,

44:32 and by the way, many of those games, for me, were Blizzard games.

44:37 It's just an incredible thing that video games have been able to do.

44:41 I think you know, it used to be,

44:43 and still is somewhat the case, that books do that kind of same thing.

44:47 They- ...they take you on a journey.

44:49 But video games, for a long time, you're right, they had a stigma.

44:54 Like, I couldn't tell people.

44:56 I felt like I was doing, like, heroin or something.

45:00 Like, I felt like I was doing this secret, dark thing.

45:02 It's usually in the...

45:03 It's, it usually is in the dark.

45:06 There's just a secretive nature to it,

45:08 like I'm doing something really dark and shady.

45:11 It wasn't mainstream.

45:12 It wasn't.

45:13 It wasn't...

45:13 There was a stigma to it.

45:15 And one of the weirdest parts of that is, you know,

45:18 I mentioned, like, you could type in the /played in EverQuest.

45:21 Well, if you did the /played on how much TV people watch,

45:28 what would that look like?

45:30 It would blow- ...6,000 hours out of the water, easily.

45:34 Well, it...

45:35 20 years ago it would have.

45:37 You know?

45:38 Not today.

45:39 Now it's the phone, yeah.

45:41 Yeah.

45:42 But then it is hard to say goodbye to that world.

45:47 Those are also really painful times.

45:49 How hard was it to say goodbye for you?

45:52 To EverQuest?

45:53 It was really hard.

45:54 And there were times where you try to quit.

45:58 Oh, you took a break sometimes?

45:59 Yeah.

45:59 You think you're quitting for good.

46:01 You'd have those moments of, like, "I'm doing this too much.

46:04 I need to move on in life.

46:06 I'm gonna put it down and walk away,

46:08 and hopefully not come back." And there were times where you did come back.

46:13 When I finally did leave EverQuest, it was actually extremely easy,

46:18 because I was psychologically done with the game at the time.

46:25 It was not shortly, but not too long after a new expansion had come out.

46:32 At the time, it was Shadows of Luclin.

46:34 Which didn't speak to me like the expansions before.

46:38 Like, the one before that was called Scars of Velious,

46:41 which was an amazing expansion.

46:42 And I had gotten the job at Blizzard, and I guess I'm just an obsessive person.

46:50 So all the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest, the second,

46:57 you know, the second my first minute started at Blizzard,

47:01 that was my new obsession.

47:04 So speaking of which,

47:05 you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got the job at Blizzard.

47:11 As we said, you were this legendary gamer,

47:15 and now legendary troll, on EverQuest.

47:18 Username, Tigole.

47:19 You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, Telling them in now famous...

47:27 There's several rants.

47:28 There's a famous one where you tell many of them to do a bunch of things,

47:33 including to pull their heads out of their asses.

47:36 You were loved and respected because you gave a lot

47:40 of specific ways that the game could be improved.

47:42 And that's an important thing to say.

47:43 You weren't just talking shit.

47:45 You actually really loved and cared for the game, and you gave them,

47:49 in the language of the time advice on how to improve, Their game.

47:56 And it's funny, because, like,

47:59 you look back to those messages, it's inspiring to me.

48:02 It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people,

48:05 because you're really, legit, full-time talking shit.

48:09 And now, and you always have been, like, one of the kindest,

48:14 most loved human beings in the entire gaming industry.

48:17 Anyway, how did that lead to you getting a job at Blizzard?

48:22 So when the first guild leader left, Legacy of Steel, the founder...

48:25 He, he was a guy named...

48:27 His online name was Dread.

48:28 That was his name.

48:30 He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while.

48:37 And eventually, somebody stepped up and took his position as guild leader,

48:42 and that person's name was Ariel-...

48:46 who was this blonde wood elf warrior, Female,

48:51 who always refused to wear a helmet

48:53 because they thought their character was so pretty,

48:56 wanted to show their face all the time.

48:58 So Ariel was a great guild leader for us,

49:02 and made me like an assistant guild leader,

49:06 raid leader, officer type in the guild.

49:09 And over time, Ariel got busier and busier,

49:14 and, you know, would send me messages like,

49:18 "Hey, I'm not gonna be online, you know,

49:20 tomorrow," or, "I'm not gonna be online tonight.

49:22 Can you run the raid?

49:24 Can you run the raid?" And running the raids was very natural for me.

49:29 And it was my first experience with leadership in my life,

49:34 of like how do you motivate people?

49:37 Like, what does motivation look like?

49:39 What does discipline look like?

49:41 How do you inspire people?

49:43 When do you force people versus encourage them, you know?

49:47 So it was a learning experience for me on the fly,

49:51 and I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually.

49:58 I should mention, I'm just now reading about,

50:01 doing a bunch of research on Justinian of the Roman Empire,

50:05 and he rose from being a peasant to being emperor,

50:09 so I see a lot of parallels in your life journey,

50:12 from peasant to emperor, but go ahead, I'm sorry.

50:14 At least EverQuest guild leader, that's- that's as much-- Uber guild leader--...

50:17 as I could say.

50:18 Uber guild leader.

50:18 Uber guild leader.

50:19 Best guild on the Nameless server.

50:22 So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier, and then one day,

50:29 they contacted me and we were having this like whisper back and forth,

50:33 and they said, "You- you're gonna have to take over the guild.

50:36 I'm just too busy." And then it came out later...

50:40 Well, let me back up a second.

50:43 I started fooling around...

50:46 Like around this time Half-Life 1 had come out,

50:51 and with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life 1,

50:53 one of the incredible things that those companies did

50:56 back in the day was when they shipped the game,

50:59 they shipped the editor on the CD.

51:02 And if you were curious enough,

51:03 you could like fire up that editor and fool around with it.

51:07 So I made a Duke Nukem level,

51:09 and you'd send it off to like those UK programming magazines,

51:13 and you know, you'd get excited because your level was in, you know,

51:18 some random magazine.

51:20 And then I started making like Half-Life levels.

51:24 And Ariel had stepped down as guild leader.

51:28 I had become guild leader.

51:30 And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and says, "Hey,

51:35 you know, you were talking about those Half-Life levels you made.

51:39 I want to see those." I'm like, "Oh,

51:42 that's cool." Like, "I didn't know you played Half-Life." Like,

51:45 "Yeah, maybe we can get a server up and I can play them." And Ariel tells me,

51:50 "No, mail them to this address in Irvine." And- because I— again,

51:55 to rewind in the time machine for a second,

51:58 to send something like a Half-Life level over the internet would have-...

52:03 taken like 12 hours.

52:05 So you actually like burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.

52:10 So I put my Half-Life levels, I sent them to Ariel,

52:14 and he says, "You know, my name's Rob.

52:21 I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment." "Um,

52:25 we're— I— I hear you're in Pasadena 'cause you mentioned it." You know,

52:29 I would write about, you know,

52:31 the Rose Parade and all these things on our website.

52:34 You know, I kind of...

52:36 It was blogging before blogging existed, so he knew I lived in Pasadena,

52:40 and he's like, "Irvine's only an hour away.

52:42 Why don't you come down, see Blizzard,

52:45 and you can also meet..." and he names like four people in the guild.

52:51 And I'm like, "They all work at Blizzard too?" He's like, "Yeah,

52:54 we're all Blizzard." And it was so weird because during that era,

53:00 I didn't have a lot of money.

53:02 It was not like...

53:03 Kind of nowadays it feels like everybody plays every game,

53:07 but you had to be selective.

53:09 So like I never bought StarCraft or Diablo or Warcraft.

53:12 I was much more of the Half-Life, Quake, Quake III guy around that time,

53:18 and I'd never played a Blizzard game,

53:20 and I just got invited to like go to Blizzard Entertainment.

53:25 Was Blizzard already legendary, you know, with the Warcraft and StarCraft?

53:29 Is it...

53:30 Is there...

53:30 Is it...

53:31 Was it building this like great legend

53:34 of this game company that seemingly doesn't miss?

53:38 It was very much on its way to enshrining

53:41 itself as being one of the legendary game...

53:44 Like, it was beloved—...

53:46 by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who hadn't played,

53:51 you know, War II or Diablo II or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.

53:57 So you weren't like freaking out, freaking out?

53:59 No, I— I was freaking out in a different sense.

54:02 I'm like, "Am I gonna get mugged when I-" Like, "Who are...

54:06 Is this a scam?" Because you didn't meet people off the internet.

54:10 So I drove down there.

54:13 Um, I ended up...

54:15 There was— there was Rob Pardo—...

54:19 who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft III, and he was Ariel.

54:24 You know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all.

54:28 It wasn't this blonde wood elf.

54:30 You know, I don't know what you expect at that point.

54:34 It was Rob Pardo.

54:35 To this day, a great friend of mine named

54:39 Scott Mercer was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalomin.

54:44 There was a guy named Roman Kenny who was

54:47 like this—Totally psychotic wizard who played in our guild.

54:52 And I had lunch with these guys, you know,

54:56 we just went out to Irvine to like a restaurant.

55:00 And, you know, forgive me for the misuse of the phrase,

55:05 but it was like my coming out moment.

55:07 And we talked about games having that stigma and being

55:11 embarrassed about who you are and what you like.

55:14 Like I, up until that point, I would never tell- Mm-hmm...

55:17 friends, family, like, "I love games.

55:19 I'm playing this game EverQuest.

55:21 It's so cool, we just killed a dragon."

55:23 And so you were hiding this part of your identity.

55:28 And I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine,

55:33 and we're talking about dragons and swords and, you know,

55:38 raid tactics and talking shit on all the people in the guild.

55:44 And I, literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first time.

55:49 I just felt like so comfortable, and that was an eye-opening moment.

55:55 And after that, after that lunch happened,

55:58 he invited me for a couple more lunches down, you know, just...

56:02 Uh, I just saw it as like, "Oh, now,

56:05 I'm..." You know, I made friends with these people online.

56:07 Now, we know each other in real life,

56:10 and they happen to work for this game company.

56:12 And at another one of the lunches,

56:15 they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us,

56:21 whose name in the game was Barfa, the Troll Warrior.

56:25 Mm-hmm.

56:25 And Barfa, Barfa wasn't somebody who played with us all the time,

56:30 but kind of like Ariel got into the guild kind of on the side.

56:34 You know, it was one of those like inside invites of like,

56:37 "Who's Barfa?" "I don't know,

56:38 but Barfa is in the guild now." And there was at the time,

56:41 it was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never done it before.

56:45 And we jumped down in this hole, and we're doing this whole dungeon,

56:48 and everything goes wrong, as it's prone to do in EverQuest.

56:52 And the whole guild escapes except for Barfa,

56:55 whose troll character's so big, he can't jump out of the exit.

57:00 Mm-hmm.

57:00 And I had this potion that was like a really

57:05 expensive potion that was a teleport potion that, you know,

57:08 no one but someone in the uber guild could afford at the time.

57:12 And I hand the potion to Barfa, and I say, "Here, use this.

57:16 It'll teleport you out." And I'm a rogue,

57:19 I can just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own.

57:24 So I saved Barfa, not really knowing who Barfa was,

57:28 and I did it with a very expensive potion.

57:31 Mm-hmm.

57:32 Having lunch, Rob introduced me, "This is Allen Adham.

57:37 He plays Barfa." Mm-hmm.

57:39 I'm like, "Oh, Barfa!" And we, you know, he has a...

57:42 "You saved me in The Hole that time." Well,

57:44 it turns out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the head...

57:49 He was sort of the head of everything at that time.

57:52 It was Allen, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce.

57:56 And what I didn't realize what these lunches were,

58:01 like I just loved them because I felt like I was myself.

58:03 I felt true happiness being surrounded by these, you know,

58:07 people who were talkin' about video games and I felt comfortable around.

58:13 And one day, Rob logs into EverQuest.

58:15 He wasn't playing much at the time, and he said,

58:18 "I want you tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site." Mm-hmm.

58:23 I'm like, "Okay, like,

58:25 I'll check the Blizzard job site." And they had announced World of Warcraft,

58:31 and posted on the job site- Mm-hmm...

58:35 was the job for an associate quest designer.

58:38 And the funniest part of it was,

58:41 I forget if it was a requirement or a plus in the job description,

58:45 but they're like, "We really want somebody with a creative writing degree." Hmm.

58:50 And I'm like, "You guys set this up for me." Like, they were just looking...

58:56 And it was that hindsight moment of like,

58:59 actually, these guys were just interviewing me- Yeah...

59:02 for six months.

59:03 And they were actually friends, and they were really cool about it too.

59:07 And I just had the fuck it moment like that, that job opened up.

59:14 I applied with all my heart, you know?

59:16 Like, it, they had a bunch of quest writing on it.

59:20 And then I went through like a pretty hardcore six-month recruiting

59:26 process because they never hired designers from out of the company.

59:31 Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard.

59:35 Either they would like transfer out of other disciplines,

59:38 or they would come from quality assurance, tech support.

59:42 So hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them,

59:49 and they really put me through a grilling.

59:51 Um, I met with...

59:53 It was the first time I met Chris Metzen- Mm-hmm...

59:58 who is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on the planet.

1:00:05 And you instantly...

1:00:07 They paired me...

1:00:08 They did this interview pairing.

1:00:09 There were these two guys.

1:00:11 It was Kevin Jordan- Mm-hmm...

1:00:12 who was one of the original designers on WoW.

1:00:15 Really, he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions.

1:00:18 He was one of the earliest class designers, PvP designers.

1:00:23 But he's a really quiet guy.

1:00:26 Mm-hmm.

1:00:26 And they paired him with Chris, and Chris just owns the room, you know?

1:00:32 Mm-hmm.

1:00:33 Chris, you could just sit and listen to him.

1:00:36 He's so creative.

1:00:38 He's so passionate.

1:00:39 And the way he articulates things,

1:00:43 like you just instantly become a fan of Chris when you're around Chris.

1:00:47 And Chris, Kevin, and I go to lunch

1:00:51 at, at this Italian place that was across the street from Blizzard,

1:00:55 and I remember...Chris made a stop to buy cigarettes,

1:01:01 you know, on the way to the interview.

1:01:03 And then every other word out of Chris's mouth was like,

1:01:07 "Fuck," and, "Shit." And I'd come from this whole, like,

1:01:10 corporate culture from my dad's recruiting business,

1:01:13 where I'd never imagined somebody would curse in an interview,

1:01:18 or stop to buy smokes.

1:01:21 And again, it was like, "I'm around my people." Like, I never smoked,

1:01:26 but just, you know, being around people who didn't care about-...

1:01:31 what the corporate norms were was so inspiring.

1:01:34 And then my last interview was with, uh,

1:01:38 Alan and Rob, and a great programmer named Bob Fitch.

1:01:43 Like, I think he's one of the first five developers at Blizzard.

1:01:48 Uh, and they took me to an ARCO station that had a Jack in the Box.

1:01:53 You know, how, like-...

1:01:55 sometimes they'll combo?

1:01:56 It was like ARCO Jack in the Box.

1:01:59 And that was my final interview at Blizzard, was at the ARCO Jack in the Box.

1:02:04 And I remember thinking to myself,

1:02:08 "These guys just brought me to a Jack in the Box that's in an ARCO station.

1:02:14 I need to work here." Like, this is...

1:02:16 "These are my people." "This is where I belong." Like,

1:02:19 it was the greatest thing ever.

1:02:21 And so, yeah, that's my crazy journey to Blizzard.

1:02:28 Uh, started at the bottom and end up at the top in a Jack in the Box.

1:02:32 Can you speak to...

1:02:34 'Cause you mentioned some of the low points in the...

1:02:36 in depression.

1:02:37 Through that journey, how did you find your way out?

1:02:41 So, can you just...

1:02:43 A lot of people are sitting in those low points right now listening to this.

1:02:48 What kind of wisdom can you draw about finding your way out,

1:02:53 finding your people?

1:02:55 There were a lot of really low points.

1:02:57 Uh, I'll give you the weirdest one.

1:03:00 I started drinking a lot,

1:03:03 and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with until my early 30s.

1:03:09 And one of the things I'm most proud of today is

1:03:13 sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now.

1:03:17 And I remember I was- I was just ha-

1:03:20 I would like buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and-...

1:03:23 like, drink the whole thing by myself, and then watch the Oscars.

1:03:26 I remember I was...

1:03:27 Of all things, I'm watching the Oscars,

1:03:30 which is just such a fake, bullshit environment.

1:03:35 But I was like...

1:03:36 You know, I was really drunk and all those people

1:03:40 seemed so together and successful and polished, and I just...

1:03:44 It made me...

1:03:45 It was that contrast that made me feel like such a failure.

1:03:51 And it all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now.

1:03:57 Um, I became...

1:03:58 You know, I got in that constant struggle of try not to drink,

1:04:04 but drink to make it feel better.

1:04:07 I was lucky, My parents were very supportive of me,

1:04:12 even in my 20s, even after I, you know, quote-unquote left the house.

1:04:18 I went into therapy and that was very helpful.

1:04:23 You know, know, extremely helpful.

1:04:25 And one thing I learned is that you have to find the right therapist for you.

1:04:31 It's not just checking a checkbox of, "I

1:04:34 went to therapy." It's about finding somebody who sort

1:04:39 of helps you get out of whatever rut you're in, in a way that's healthy for you.

1:04:46 And, um, I tried antidepressants, but I hated...

1:04:51 I just hated taking pills and feeling like something was in me,

1:04:57 and making me feel different.

1:05:00 I never responded to it.

1:05:02 And then the hardest thing, you know, which I've never mentioned to anyone,

1:05:08 and is hard for me to talk about, but eventually I went through ECT,

1:05:16 which is electroconvulsive therapy, shock therapy.

1:05:21 And that broke me out.

1:05:24 And I would never endorse that as a miracle.

1:05:28 That was...

1:05:29 I was at such a low point that people

1:05:33 were very worried about me and my wellbeing-...

1:05:37 and what was gonna happen, and that was sort of an extreme pull-the-rip-cord,

1:05:43 like there's-nothing-else-to-lose moment.

1:05:47 And I think that was the difference maker.

1:05:53 That, and starting at Blizzard.

1:05:57 To find...

1:05:57 I mean, there is a- there is a deep

1:05:59 loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch,

1:06:03 you're alone, like in a really deep fundamental way.

1:06:08 Like, in the way you weren't in New

1:06:09 York with the writing- with the writer's group, right?

1:06:11 And so that must've been an incredible experience just to see the guild.

1:06:17 Yes.

1:06:17 It was everything I nee- I...

1:06:19 As such an introvert, you- you think that there are extroverts and introverts,

1:06:25 and introverts don't need anybody, but weirdly,

1:06:29 I think introverts almost need people more.

1:06:33 And we don't always know how to engage-...

1:06:38 in the right, healthy ways,

1:06:39 and how to find people and how to connect with people.

1:06:43 And it was- it was great.

1:06:47 Um, one...

1:06:49 The thing that had attracted me to creative writing was the solitude of it,

1:06:53 and the fact that you didn't have to collaborate,

1:06:56 and you could just write what you wanted to write and it was all you.

1:07:01 You would succeed on your own or you would fail on your own,

1:07:05 and that was very attractive to me.

1:07:07 And the thought of creative collaboration was actually off-putting.

1:07:11 I'd spent all four years of undergrad interning at Universal Pictures,

1:07:17 'cause I thought I wanted to be in film,

1:07:21 and it was such an unhealthy creative collaboration in the film industry.

1:07:26 It's a very, you know,

1:07:30 I look up unhealthily to the film industry and admire it and, you know,

1:07:35 grew up with all these legends who had come from there.

1:07:41 But it's like a caste system.

1:07:44 And I was on the bottom of the caste system as an intern,

1:07:48 and I was seeing how the other people who

1:07:52 were low caste in the film industry were treated,

1:07:55 and it was just horrible, you know.

1:07:58 But games was different.

1:08:00 Games was very flat.

1:08:02 It didn't matter if you were the CEO or the boss, like,

1:08:07 the way Mike and Allen carried themselves with, you know, me,

1:08:12 who was an associate game designer, you felt like an equal.

1:08:17 And I think it...

1:08:19 Not just the comradery,

1:08:21 but the part that shouldn't be overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic.

1:08:29 That's what really pulled me out.

1:08:33 Hard work on a thing you love.

1:08:36 Yeah.

1:08:38 I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic one of us,

1:08:42 quote, "one of us" post you made on April 18th, 2002.

1:08:46 Because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us.

1:08:51 The...

1:08:51 I apologize to bring up Justinian the emperor,

1:08:55 but remained a kind of peasant gamer,

1:08:59 a true gamer, who happens to be also be designing the games.

1:09:04 And so this post kind of speaks to that.

1:09:07 It's fascinating to read, because that was at the very beginning, right?

1:09:11 You didn't know anything.

1:09:12 You didn't know the games you would end up creating.

1:09:16 Title of the post, "If you want something done right." He wrote,

1:09:20 "This week, I accepted a position

1:09:22 as associate game designer with Blizzard Entertainment.

1:09:25 Specifically, I will be designing quests for World of Warcraft,

1:09:29 Blizzard's MMORPG based on the popular Warcraft series.

1:09:33 In addition to my duties as quest designer,

1:09:35 I will also be expected to contribute to helping

1:09:39 design the end game content for World of Warcraft.

1:09:42 The reason I'm sharing this information,

1:09:44 besides the fact that I have a masochistic

1:09:47 love of reading rants and flames about myself,

1:09:49 is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore MMORPG players.

1:09:54 The readers of the site have also come

1:09:57 to know my personal opinions on what constitutes

1:10:00 a fun gaming experience versus what feels like

1:10:03 a complete waste of time or poorly designed encounter." Wow,

1:10:07 you're very eloquent in this post and without too much shit talking.

1:10:11 "You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps,

1:10:15 obvious time sinks, devoid of any story or linear narrative,

1:10:19 quests which reward the lucky over the skilled and quest rewards which are

1:10:23 out of sync with the amount of time and effort required to complete them.

1:10:28 I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort

1:10:34 MMORPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence,

1:10:40 looking out for the interest of the player." And you go

1:10:43 on to describe some of the high hopes you have for World of Warcraft,

1:10:46 which is really fun to read because you don't realize-- Now--...

1:10:50 it's gonna be, like,

1:10:51 one of the greatest games of all time played by millions of human beings,

1:10:55 just where those millions of human beings are

1:10:57 playing for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours.

1:11:00 It's crazy.

1:11:00 It's funny that this...

1:11:02 one of us is writing at the dawn of a new age.

1:11:06 The final paragraph is, "So with all that is going on with me,

1:11:11 you'll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site here.

1:11:15 I will try my hardest to give you slack

1:11:18 or something to read while you should be working.

1:11:21 But in the meantime, there's a whole world of NPCs.

1:11:25 They need to learn the words kaksagur and mo'fucker, in quotes, and the like.

1:11:33 Although something tells me I'm already in trouble

1:11:36 with the boss." One of us, Jeff, one of us.

1:11:39 That was a beautiful, beautiful post.

1:11:41 Did you in fact get in trouble with the boss?

1:11:44 No.

1:11:45 No.

1:11:45 My boss was Allen.

1:11:47 And Allen was very understanding and he...

1:11:49 they kind of knew what they were getting into- when they hired me.

1:11:54 And that post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now.

1:11:58 There's so much ego in it-...

1:12:02 and I think that's...

1:12:04 it's got that 20 year old-...

1:12:08 you know, "I don't know what I don't know."- "I know exactly how

1:12:12 to fix this video game and all

1:12:14 video games and-" But there's brilliance behind that.

1:12:16 There's a passion behind that.

1:12:18 Like, we're...

1:12:18 when you're a gamer and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest,

1:12:23 you understand what makes for a compelling experience.

1:12:25 You don't, at that time, understand how much hard work is required to create

1:12:30 that experience and how much uncertainty there is,

1:12:33 how difficult it is, how many trade-offs there are.

1:12:36 How your designs, when they actually are brought

1:12:38 to the world and are experienced by thousands of people,

1:12:41 millions of people, they are different from the division you had for it.

1:12:46 So all those elements you don't know,

1:12:48 but you have to have that ego in the beginning, right?

1:12:51 Do you even have the guts to try?

1:12:53 Do you have the guts to put in all that work?

1:12:55 So what were the...

1:12:56 what was it like?

1:12:57 What were the vibes of early Blizzard like?

1:13:01 They've...

1:13:01 at this point, Warcraft I and II, Warcraft III is in production.

1:13:07 StarCraft.

1:13:07 These are legendary games.

1:13:09 I don't...

1:13:09 I spent probably over 1,000 hours in these games combined.

1:13:14 I played Warcraft I, II, III.

1:13:16 I played StarCraft I and II.

1:13:18 I played WoW, of course.

1:13:20 Diablo I, II, III, IV.

1:13:22 Play Diablo II with "Stay a while and listen," with Deckard Cain.

1:13:27 Stay a while and listen.

1:13:29 I mean, some of these characters,

1:13:31 some of these experiences just, they'll stay with me forever.

1:13:34 Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks.

1:13:38 What was it like?

1:13:40 What was the team like?

1:13:42 What were the developers like?

1:13:43 What were the vibes like in those early days?

1:13:46 It was the dream.

1:13:48 When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day,

1:13:52 the office was on the University of California Irvine campus at the time.

1:13:58 They have this research and development park where,

1:14:01 if you're like a tech company,

1:14:03 you can get office space there, and Blizzard took up...

1:14:07 When I joined, it was three-fourths

1:14:09 of the building was Blizzard, and there were...

1:14:12 There was like a building right next to it that had like Cisco and, you know,

1:14:16 it was like all kind of techy places.

1:14:19 And it was so funny because you drive

1:14:21 up and like everything was very serious and corporate,

1:14:25 and then outside of the Blizzard offices,

1:14:28 everybody is wearing black T-shirts and shorts and throwing

1:14:32 frisbees and playing Hacky Sack and on scooters and skateboards,

1:14:36 and you're like, "Okay, that's where,

1:14:38 that's where Blizzard is." So it was that environment.

1:14:42 I remember walking in the door and thinking like,

1:14:45 "It feels like I'm walking into a dorm room-""...

1:14:48 'cause it was just posters on the wall." And there were actually,

1:14:52 like people would have futons because they'd be

1:14:55 sleeping because we would work so much back then.

1:14:59 But the vibe was...

1:15:01 It was very small.

1:15:02 Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002,

1:15:07 was fewer than 200 people, and that included...

1:15:10 There was a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North.

1:15:15 So Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft,

1:15:22 and there were two development teams at Blizzard.

1:15:25 It was called Team One and Team Two at Blizzard South.

1:15:30 Um, Team One was revered.

1:15:34 These are the RTS guys.

1:15:36 They made, you know, StarCraft, Warcraft II, and they were,

1:15:41 at that time, they're working on Warcraft III.

1:15:45 Team Two was kind of the red-headed stepchild.

1:15:49 Like apparently, before I joined,

1:15:51 they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed,

1:15:56 and then they finally decided they were gonna make World of Warcraft.

1:16:01 There was a game called Nomad.

1:16:04 I don't know what that game was exactly,

1:16:07 but that was what Team Two was working on at first.

1:16:12 That got scrapped, and Allen stor- steered the team towards World of Warcraft.

1:16:19 And there's amazing designer named Eric Dodds.

1:16:22 He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone.

1:16:28 Him and Ben, Ben Brode basically were the core designers behind that.

1:16:34 But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these two key

1:16:39 designers working on World of Warcraft for Team Two,

1:16:44 and then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.

1:16:49 And John Cash, the first day that I showed up to work on Team Two,

1:16:55 they said, "You have to go get your login from John Cash." I'm like, "John...

1:17:01 The John Cash from id?" And, you, you know, John Cash has a skin.

1:17:06 You could be John Cash in Quake III.

1:17:09 So, and then he saw me, and he,

1:17:12 he was a huge EverQuest player, and you're like...

1:17:16 He was like, "You're the guy who runs Legacy of Steel." I'm like,

1:17:20 "You're John Cash." We had,

1:17:21 we had that moment where we kind of fanboyed out on each other.

1:17:26 And it was just...

1:17:28 The vibe was so cool there.

1:17:30 Like, there were very few producers.

1:17:33 So a game team, there are five core disciplines that make a video game.

1:17:40 You've got engineers or programmers who are writing the code.

1:17:46 You've got the art team that's making all the visuals for the game,

1:17:51 and that spans everything from like 3D modeling, characters, environments,

1:17:55 to also animation, tech art, you know, making it all work.

1:18:00 You've got game design, which some companies don't have design.

1:18:05 The artists and the engineers do it.

1:18:08 Valve famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer.

1:18:12 But in companies where design is a discipline,

1:18:17 which it very much is so at Blizzard,

1:18:19 game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people,

1:18:24 you know, setting up all the systems and content

1:18:27 in a way that gets the player to navigate through the game.

1:18:33 So that's part of a story, part of this quest design,

1:18:35 part of it is like how you move through the game world.

1:18:39 Yes.

1:18:39 So game designers, there's a spectrum, like same with art,

1:18:44 same with engineering, of roles within game design.

1:18:48 Some are more heavy on the systems side.

1:18:51 So like any game that you've played where loot drops- Diablo IV,

1:18:55 World of Warcraft, you know, Escape from Tarkov, whatever.

1:19:00 If there's loot dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully

1:19:06 what drops where and at what percentages.

1:19:09 That would be like a systems designer.

1:19:12 A content designer is somebody who's gonna make quests or write storylines,

1:19:18 or there might even be a narrative designer,

1:19:22 which is even more focused on a story.

1:19:26 But designers, you know, run the gamut,

1:19:29 and then you've got these jack-of-all-trade designers that can do it all.

1:19:33 Um, so that's the design group.

1:19:36 There's production, which is project management,

1:19:40 and production is different at every game company you go to.

1:19:43 So if you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard,

1:19:47 production might be very different.

1:19:49 They might be the boss.

1:19:50 They might actually be a designer or they might be more of a project manager.

1:19:56 And then one of my favorite disciplines

1:20:00 on a game team that's often overlooked is sound and-...

1:20:04 you know, audio, which is comprised of the sound designers and composers.

1:20:10 And there are two things, I think there are two things that no one realizes

1:20:14 how much they bring to a game until they're missing,

1:20:18 and that's audio and lighting.

1:20:21 Because most of the time, we're playing without these things,

1:20:25 and it just feels a little off and wrong.

1:20:29 And when you have a great lighting artist or you

1:20:33 have a great composer or sound designer, like, it...

1:20:37 the experience.

1:20:38 You're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise.

1:20:42 But that's who comprises the game team.

1:20:47 Is the lighting, you know, all the different kinds of graphics,

1:20:53 would that be under the art team?

1:20:56 Yeah.

1:20:56 Lighting, you're gonna have lighting under the art team,

1:20:59 but they're gonna be best friends with the graphics programmer.

1:21:03 And, you know, like I mentioned with design,

1:21:05 there's this wide spectrum on the engineering team,

1:21:08 you have some guys who are like,

1:21:10 Architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know,

1:21:15 the server client model or the networking or whatever.

1:21:18 Others are more, like, gameplay focus.

1:21:21 On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just

1:21:24 doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team.

1:21:28 And on every game team, you're gonna have graphics programmers who will work

1:21:36 with people like the lighting artists or the environmental artists,

1:21:40 character artists on shaders, and basically any way to make the game.

1:21:46 They'll always ask, "What's your vision?

1:21:48 What are you trying to get it to look like?"

1:21:50 They'll want an illustration of what should the world look like,

1:21:53 and they'll be the ones who say,

1:21:54 "I know how to write code to- that will let you do that." So

1:21:59 you partner a great graphics programmer

1:22:01 with a great lighting artist, and that's...

1:22:04 That's actually the creative tension behind games

1:22:08 and what makes game teams so unique,

1:22:10 is if we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum,

1:22:15 on one end, you're gonna have the artists who...

1:22:20 They're creative, dare I say emotional-...

1:22:25 you know, they are artistes on that end.

1:22:28 And on the other end, you have the most logical,

1:22:31 brilliant programmers whose minds just work very differently

1:22:35 from the most creative art- Like artists could be sitting,

1:22:39 you have a meeting with them and they'll just sit illustrating.

1:22:42 If there's any piece of paper, they're drawing on it.

1:22:46 Um, and programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized

1:22:52 in their thinking and everything is so logical.

1:22:55 And then in the middle are people like the sound designers,

1:22:59 the- the game designers, and the producers.

1:23:01 They're kind of a little bit in- in all those fields,

1:23:06 but it's the brilliance of taking people who

1:23:09 are so vastly different in their interests and talents,

1:23:13 but aiming them at that shared goal

1:23:16 or that shared vision of the game that, like, really makes something special.

1:23:21 And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft,

1:23:24 but you've also are well known for working

1:23:27 on quite small teams to create these incredibly huge games.

1:23:30 What is the- the power of a small team in this kind of context where a lot...

1:23:37 there's that creative tension?

1:23:38 Is it- is it because a small team avoids maybe the compartmentalization,

1:23:45 like the modular where the artists now have their own wing

1:23:50 building where they never talk to the engineers, that kind of thing?

1:23:55 Absolutely.

1:23:55 I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

1:23:57 The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine.

1:24:02 And on a small team,

1:24:03 the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.

1:24:07 If we're a small team, let's say we're gonna make a game and it's at sort

1:24:12 of the incubation period of a game and there's only 10 of us,

1:24:17 all 10 of us are in the room for every decision.

1:24:20 You know, I'm not a server networking guy,

1:24:23 but I'm in the room for that discussion.

1:24:25 I'm not an illustrator,

1:24:27 but I'm gonna sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks like.

1:24:31 As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized.

1:24:36 It's exactly like you said.

1:24:38 And there's a weird thing that happens that's just kind of a human nature thing.

1:24:44 The less you interact with somebody,

1:24:47 the more you sort of become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.

1:24:54 You tend to look at what they do and say

1:24:57 with skepticism rather than trust and belief in them.

1:25:01 And I find on smaller teams where we all know each other's names,

1:25:06 I know what everybody's working on every day,

1:25:08 they know what I'm working on, everybody can talk to each other,

1:25:15 there's none of that stereotyping of a discipline.

1:25:22 On big unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, "Well,

1:25:25 the artists just don't get it." "They don't

1:25:28 understand what we're trying to make." And when

1:25:30 you back up and you think about the statement that you just said, it's like...

1:25:34 Such an asshole statement.

1:25:36 Like, really, all the artists don't get it?

1:25:38 Like, that's...

1:25:39 A, that's not true.

1:25:41 B, that's sort of demeaning to them.

1:25:43 Like, they signed up for the...

1:25:46 This is their life's work, too.

1:25:48 This game is gonna be as much theirs as it is mine.

1:25:51 So who am I to say a statement like that?

1:25:56 Yeah.

1:25:56 It's harmful to a discipline to think that you understand the world.

1:26:00 Most silly other folks don't, and you have nothing to learn from them,

1:26:06 really, and, They're deluded in some in some kind of way.

1:26:11 That's so powerful.

1:26:13 Fast-forwarding a little bit, when we formed Team Four and...

1:26:17 Which went on to make Titan and ultimately fail,

1:26:22 and then that got rebooted as the Overwatch team,

1:26:26 the idea that I tried to get through to the team was to make an assumption.

1:26:34 And really, like, Blizzard is one of the top game developers in the world,

1:26:40 and we were very fortunate when I was there, and I imagine it's this way today,

1:26:46 that we could recruit whatever talent we wanted.

1:26:49 It...

1:26:49 The best of the best wanted to come work at Blizzard.

1:26:55 And if you sort of go through the paces of that and say,

1:26:59 "Okay, when we recruit somebody..." Let's say

1:27:02 we're recruiting an artist to make props.

1:27:07 Boxes, chairs, whatever.

1:27:09 That is the best prop artist in the industry.

1:27:12 That's who's gonna show up on our doorstep, so when they show up here,

1:27:17 we should treat them like the best prop artist in the industry

1:27:23 instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism.

1:27:27 So, when that person speaks up and says,

1:27:32 "I think..." Like, with Overwatch, for example,

1:27:34 "I think we should do this." You know,

1:27:36 "We should do X instead of Y." Instead of saying, "Well,

1:27:41 I'm a believer in Y, why are you against my idea X?" You should take a moment,

1:27:47 have a deep breath, and say, "Man,

1:27:49 the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something.

1:27:54 Why don't I listen to it?"- I actually do it for myself,

1:27:59 like this kinda thought framework or thought experiment.

1:28:04 Whenever I'm talking to a new person, especially if I feel,

1:28:07 myself, a little bit tinge of that feeling.

1:28:10 Usually, it happens with, like, a really young person,

1:28:13 like an undergraduate student or someone like this.

1:28:15 I pretend that they are the smartest person

1:28:17 in the world in my head, and then not...

1:28:20 Like, it puts me in the mode of, like,

1:28:23 assuming I have a lot to learn from them, and it helps.

1:28:28 You actually, like, really listen.

1:28:30 I literally think they're the smartest, wisest human on Earth.

1:28:35 It helps me.

1:28:37 I had that, like, I think...

1:28:39 You know, I'm no expert.

1:28:40 I'm a game designer, so, like, as much psychology as I know is

1:28:44 how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully.

1:28:48 Like, I don't know, I don't have an important job.

1:28:52 But psychologically speaking-- That's fun.

1:28:56 I...

1:28:56 One thing I think a lot about is ego, and I think about insecurity.

1:29:02 And insecurity, we all have.

1:29:04 Like, all of us as human beings have insecurity.

1:29:07 It just manifests itself in different ways.

1:29:11 And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes.

1:29:15 So, like, some people, for example,

1:29:17 use their insecurity to rip other people apart.

1:29:20 Some people destroy themselves through their own insecurity.

1:29:24 Some people destroy everybody with their insecurity.

1:29:26 But I had that moment as a young lead,

1:29:31 when I first was made a lead on, like, World of Warcraft,

1:29:36 where I felt it was very important to be right and to, you know,

1:29:42 be shepherding the correct idea.

1:29:44 And I actually got pulled aside.

1:29:47 Like, Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple people who weren't game designers,

1:29:54 and it's always tricky as a game designer because constantly

1:29:58 everybody is throwing ideas out in- on a game team.

1:30:01 Like, there's no shortage of ideas ever.

1:30:03 And we were in some meeting about something,

1:30:07 and these people kind of threw out these ideas.

1:30:10 And I wasn't mean to them, but I very kind of systematically, like an insecure,

1:30:17 you know, ego-driven new lead would do,

1:30:20 I kind of, "Let me tell you why that's wrong,

1:30:23 and let me tell you what we're gonna do instead." And after the meeting,

1:30:29 you know, Pardo pulled me aside, and he said, "You're a very smart designer,

1:30:33 but you shouldn't do what you just did to those people.

1:30:38 You should always listen to what people have to say

1:30:42 and try to make their ideas work." And I just...

1:30:47 Over and over, I was like, "Okay, anytime an idea comes my way,

1:30:50 let's try to make it work." And it went

1:30:54 from this kind of thing that I didn't believe into to actually,

1:30:59 like, a core part of who I am today as a leader,

1:31:04 as a game designer, as a game director.

1:31:07 And some of the best ideas have come from developing other peoples' ideas-...

1:31:17 where your first reaction is like, "No,

1:31:18 that's wrong," and then just kind of sticking with it and going,

1:31:22 "But how could we make it work?" And the most

1:31:26 gratifying part when it succeeds is they get all the credit,

1:31:33 and you've sort of elevated this person

1:31:36 who Whose idea wouldn't have been championed,

1:31:40 whose idea by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know,

1:31:45 early 2000s would have just said no.

1:31:49 Now their idea is the thing everybody

1:31:52 in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving, and they get all the credit.

1:31:59 I should give context to the listener

1:32:01 who doesn't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan,

1:32:04 That you're one of the most humble and always

1:32:09 give credit to the team for everything and anything.

1:32:11 And so everything we talk about today,

1:32:14 I know you're probably resisting constantly

1:32:16 giving credit to the team on everything.

1:32:19 So you're the famous, "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team," right?

1:32:26 So just as a small aside,

1:32:29 thank you for your humility through through your career,

1:32:33 and thank you for always celebrating the team.

1:32:35 But let's talk about WoW.

1:32:38 Let's talk about World of Warcraft.

1:32:40 Tell me what the early days of developing WoW was like.

1:32:44 Maybe we should talk about what World of Warcraft,

1:32:48 WoW is, going to Perplexity here.

1:32:52 World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer

1:32:54 online RPG where you create a character, level it up doing quests and dungeons,

1:32:58 and progress your gear and power in an open fantasy world called Azeroth.

1:33:03 At a basic level, you move, use abilities from your action bar,

1:33:08 follow quests, and gradually learn a combat rotation that fits your class.

1:33:13 And there's all kinds of characters and roles and classes.

1:33:16 You pick a race, appearance, starting zone, small racial bonuses.

1:33:19 In a class, how you fight, what your role is in groups.

1:33:23 Can you continue, fill in some of the gaps, what is World of Warcraft?

1:33:29 World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world.

1:33:33 Like, it's a world that you can live in with real other people,

1:33:38 and everybody's kinda living out their fantasy.

1:33:40 Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft,

1:33:44 and really, like, Allen Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard,

1:33:49 calls Chris "the heart and soul of Blizzard."

1:33:53 And it's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game,

1:33:57 you're making Chris' imagination at some point.

1:34:02 And Chris famously said, "The lead character of World of Warcraft

1:34:07 is the world." And I always believed that.

1:34:09 So you're trying to create this place

1:34:12 that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable,

1:34:15 but uncomfortable and gorgeous, and, you know,

1:34:20 it should feel massive, and it really is.

1:34:23 It, it's, you know, can take a half an hour

1:34:26 to get from one end of the world to the other.

1:34:29 But it's this world you're living in.

1:34:33 The world is divided into two warring factions.

1:34:36 There's the Horde and the Alliance, and that was a very important,

1:34:42 very controversial decision that was made by Allen Adham,

1:34:47 was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.

1:34:51 And that in the early days, there was a really strong division.

1:34:54 Strong division.

1:34:56 Like...

1:34:56 You pick a side and then you hang around with only people of your kind.

1:35:03 Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you.

1:35:05 Like, the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo.

1:35:10 That's awesome.

1:35:11 Like, it's epic.

1:35:12 It's like it's become who they are.

1:35:14 Like, if you were to say, like, "Hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me.

1:35:19 We're Alliance on Tichondrius," you'd be like-- Right-...

1:35:22 "Dude-"- Lose my number.

1:35:23 Alliance?"- Yeah.

1:35:23 Like, "Okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore." But the Horde-Alliance

1:35:28 decision was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed race.

1:35:34 They had all the races kind of like WoW did,

1:35:37 but they could all group with each other.

1:35:40 And Pardo and I came from EverQuest,

1:35:43 where we felt like this was a horrible decision Allen was making.

1:35:48 And we argued, Allen, Rob, Bob, Fitch, and I would have lunch every single day,

1:35:55 and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW.

1:35:58 Rob wasn't even on WoW at that time.

1:36:00 He was finishing Warcraft III.

1:36:03 And we would fight over the Horde-Alliance split, if it was a good idea or not.

1:36:07 And Allen had...

1:36:08 He came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community,

1:36:12 which was another massive multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.

1:36:19 And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions,

1:36:23 and he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team.

1:36:27 You weren't a loner in the world.

1:36:29 And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side.

1:36:33 And Rob and I just argued and argued against it,

1:36:38 and then sometime before beta, Allen retired.

1:36:42 He went on to run a hedge fund, of all things.

1:36:45 Like, got super into poker, got super into finance, left, and retires, like,

1:36:51 I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts.

1:36:59 And Rob takes over as lead designer in Allen's stead,

1:37:04 and to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was go...

1:37:08 Speaking to what we were speaking about earlier, he said, "Allen's a smart guy.

1:37:13 The fact that he was fighting so hard for-""...

1:37:17 Horde Alliance, we gotta do it." And, uh,

1:37:20 Rob and I sort of changed our point of view

1:37:24 and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in.

1:37:28 And so, you know, the early days of WoW was...

1:37:33 It was a great team.

1:37:35 It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to.

1:37:41 You know, we had Mark Kern running the team.

1:37:43 Shane Dabiri was, you know, legendary Blizzard developer.

1:37:48 Bill Petris was the art director,

1:37:50 and then we had Metzen, who was sort of like...

1:37:54 Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be.

1:37:59 Uh, I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother.

1:38:04 And then there were a lot of us who had never done it before,

1:38:09 or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types.

1:38:15 Like, for example, the guys building the dungeons,

1:38:19 they hired out of the Quake community.

1:38:21 And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO

1:38:25 designer on the staff at that time, it was,

1:38:28 you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers,

1:38:34 they started building Quake dungeons-...

1:38:38 as, like, Quake levels as the dungeons.

1:38:40 At one point, WoW was even made in QERadiant, which was the Quake engine.

1:38:45 And then they later, you know,

1:38:47 retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine.

1:38:51 So we were like this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears-...

1:38:56 is how I would describe the WoW team,

1:38:58 of this mix of veterans and then people like me.

1:39:03 Like, I'm just some fucking idiot, you know-...

1:39:07 who played a lot of EverQuest.

1:39:09 And I end up at Blizzard.

1:39:10 Designing quests.

1:39:12 Yeah.

1:39:12 Like, okay, we're gonna design World of Warcraft now.

1:39:17 And I've said this later with hindsight,

1:39:22 I think a huge part of WoW's success with, especially with the early WoW team,

1:39:29 Team Two in its earliest formation, was that we didn't know what we were doing.

1:39:36 You kind of...

1:39:37 Like, it's that...

1:39:38 Titan was the example for me.

1:39:41 Titan was the attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft at Blizzard.

1:39:46 And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team.

1:39:50 And it's because everybody was too much of an expert

1:39:54 on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.

1:40:01 World of Warcraft was a bunch of people, like a very successful,

1:40:05 sure of itself company who had made StarCraft,

1:40:11 Diablo Warcraft, with a bunch of yayhoos basically-...

1:40:15 who was like, "Yeah, we can compete with Sony Online." At the time,

1:40:21 they were making EverQuest II.

1:40:24 Like, if we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced.

1:40:29 And EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest II.

1:40:34 It wasn't, "Oh, cool, World of Warcraft." It was EQ2 was gonna take,

1:40:39 you know, the chalice and run with it.

1:40:43 And then, of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies,

1:40:47 and they had a brilliant designer on that, a guy named Raph Koster,

1:40:50 who had come from that Ultima Online,

1:40:53 and he's just a really smart game designer.

1:40:55 If you ever watch one of his lectures, like,

1:40:58 he lectured a lot at GDC, and, you know, we're like,

1:41:03 "Oh my God, they're making EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies,

1:41:09 and they have the Star Wars intellectual property." "We're fucked." Like,

1:41:15 "How are we gonna compete?" And everybody had seen the success of EQ, EverQuest,

1:41:21 and everybody was gonna make an MMO,

1:41:25 and it was just a question of who was gonna win.

1:41:28 So you're feeling this immense pressure.

1:41:30 You have this small team of just this hodgepodge

1:41:35 of this unlikely team that kind of looks fast forwarding to Overwatch,

1:41:41 the heroes in Overwatch, but working extremely hard.

1:41:46 Now, you told me about crazy, crazy work hours,

1:41:51 and not because you were forced to, but because

1:41:54 you wanted to, because your heart was in it,

1:41:57 because you're like, "This is everything." Like, you loved it.

1:42:02 Yeah.

1:42:02 The- the games industry has a terrible

1:42:05 reputation for insane amounts of overtime.

1:42:08 It's just called crunch.

1:42:10 Like do you crunch or not?

1:42:13 These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon.

1:42:19 If we were to work overtime, somebody'd write an article about it next week

1:42:27 and say how horrible we are for working overtime.

1:42:32 Um, back then, we worked insane, and I mean insane hours.

1:42:39 The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours.

1:42:43 That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft III.

1:42:46 This was in my...

1:42:48 I think, um, War III shipped on July 3rd,

1:42:53 2002 so this would have been, like, late June, early July.

1:42:59 Probably late June.

1:43:01 And I had nothing to do with War III.

1:43:04 I should just say that.

1:43:06 Like, in the credits,

1:43:07 I'm additional- additional help or additional testing or something like that.

1:43:11 Um, when I showed up in May of 2002,

1:43:15 it was all hands on deck World of Warcraft for E3.

1:43:19 We got through E3, and then all hands on deck,

1:43:22 the whole company, get War III out the door.

1:43:26 For shipping Warcraft III.

1:43:27 For shipping Warcraft III,

1:43:29 and because I had not been involved with the game at all,

1:43:32 and I was a brand new wet-behind-the-ears game designer,

1:43:35 they're like, "You're just gonna help test whatever we

1:43:39 tell you to test." So we're trying to gold master,

1:43:45 and there's a crash that happens rarely.

1:43:48 If you run one of the cinematics,

1:43:50 like you have to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels,

1:43:54 and then there was a crash that happened.

1:43:58 And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it,

1:44:02 and then they needed somebody to just over and over again,

1:44:06 "I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug." And I

1:44:10 sat there for 30 hours and just watched the cinematic for 30 hours-...

1:44:16 straight.

1:44:16 And it was the funniest thing,

1:44:18 like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave at the...

1:44:22 which was a trickle out.

1:44:24 Like, everybody kind of trickles out, like, at-...

1:44:27 different hours, you know?

1:44:28 The family guys go much earlier than the single guys.

1:44:31 And then watching everybody show up again in...

1:44:35 the next morning, and they're all, like,

1:44:37 dressed different, and they look all refreshed.

1:44:40 And I'm just like in the same position.

1:44:42 You know, like eyes are beet red.

1:44:45 To the soundtrack of the cinematic and yeah.

1:44:48 Yeah.

1:44:48 But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched...

1:44:51 The date slipped, so you do this thing.

1:44:54 I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying,

1:44:58 "We're gonna crunch early so we don't have to crunch later

1:45:03 in the project." And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us.

1:45:07 Like, I really genuinely believe that he believed in that.

1:45:13 But with games anything can happen, and they're just...

1:45:17 We slip uncontrollably all the time.

1:45:20 And we slipped, and it sort of created

1:45:24 just this death march endless death march that...

1:45:28 Like to this day, members of the WoW team will remember, like, Newport Rib.

1:45:35 If I say that, they'll have, like,

1:45:37 twitches because, like, they would cater the dinner.

1:45:40 They'd bring it in at, like, 6:00 or 7:00 at night.

1:45:43 And they'd...

1:45:44 Everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express.

1:45:48 It was like the worst diet ever.

1:45:50 I actually like Newport Rib, no shade-...

1:45:53 on them.

1:45:53 But you can only eat so much of it.

1:45:56 And the carpets are stained and, like, dudes are falling asleep on the couches.

1:46:01 And it was an unhealthy work environment.

1:46:05 It gets pinned on...

1:46:06 'Cause at a lot of places it is executive driven.

1:46:10 And it is mandated from the top,

1:46:13 but the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself.

1:46:18 I just wanted to.

1:46:19 I remember, you know, coming in on Memorial Day, like,

1:46:24 with sand from the beach on my feet because

1:46:27 I really wanted to get some work done that day,

1:46:30 and working through Christmas, and those were things I wanted to do.

1:46:34 I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.

1:46:39 Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because yeah,

1:46:41 okay, you could say that's unhealthy, but I know a large number of people,

1:46:45 especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career,

1:46:50 that have been at companies that do crunch

1:46:54 for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love,

1:46:57 and it's some of the most fulfilling years of their life,

1:46:59 months and years of their life.

1:47:01 And they also it's not just fulfilling,

1:47:05 they grow from it, they learn from it, and it...

1:47:09 You know, and when they...

1:47:10 Especially when they talk back about it,

1:47:13 about that time, they can see how incredible it was.

1:47:16 Of course, when you're going through it,

1:47:19 sometimes it's extremely difficult, you don't know.

1:47:22 And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it's supposed to be a month or two,

1:47:25 and then it turns out to be a half a year,

1:47:28 and then maybe it turns out to be something like

1:47:30 a Titan type game where you never actually ship it,

1:47:33 and it's heartbreaking and the pain, it's all...

1:47:35 But then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was.

1:47:39 I think, like, my reflections on it many years later,

1:47:44 and having gone through, like, pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled,

1:47:51 I think where crunch is problematic and people are

1:47:56 good to be vocal about being opposed to it, is when it's forced and unnecessary.

1:48:03 There's a lot of like, "Hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay"-- Yeah.

1:48:11 kind of, which I think is not necessary.

1:48:14 I don't think executives who take off and work

1:48:18 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late.

1:48:22 I think that's wrong and immoral.

1:48:24 But to me as an individual, as long as I'm not telling other people to do it,

1:48:32 my life's work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.

1:48:39 I find myself, I don't think I've ever worked less than 10 hours in a day.

1:48:44 Like that...

1:48:45 10 hours is like a normal-ish day to me.

1:48:49 Yeah.

1:48:49 Yeah.

1:48:50 And I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it.

1:48:56 It brings me pleasure and fulfillment.

1:48:59 And all of that said, from a place of caution,

1:49:03 especially in this era when people are very touchy about it.

1:49:08 I don't try to impose that on anybody else.

1:49:10 I don't want anybody to feel like they're obligated to, but please

1:49:15 understand it's what makes me who I am, that work ethic.

1:49:19 I enjoy it.

1:49:20 I actually...

1:49:21 Some of my fondest memories are from those WoW crunches.

1:49:25 And then looking back and reading some of these stories,

1:49:27 it's pretty cool because me, as a fan,

1:49:29 on the receiving end of some of those video games,

1:49:32 you bring joy to millions of people.

1:49:35 It's awesome.

1:49:36 Let me ask you about quests, but first, quick bathroom break if it's okay.

1:49:43 Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors.

1:49:45 Check them out in the description.

1:49:46 It really is the best way to support this podcast.

1:49:49 Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors.

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1:50:12 Choose wisely, my friends.

1:50:15 And now, back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan.

1:50:19 Okay, we're back.

1:50:20 So I think it's fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest,

1:50:26 consisted of, maybe that's simplifying it a bit,

1:50:29 but standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours.

1:50:32 You helped develop with WoW,

1:50:35 I would say a revolutionary idea of quest-driven leveling,

1:50:40 where there's a story-driven, quest-driven guide through the world,

1:50:46 and it so happens that as part

1:50:48 of doing that, you're also leveling the character.

1:50:52 So the leveling is both fun and is the engine that drives the story that then

1:50:57 also immerses you into the world and pulls

1:51:00 you in more and more and more and more.

1:51:03 So take me through this process of developing that idea of quest-driven design.

1:51:11 Sure.

1:51:11 Yeah, there were actually a lot of people involved in it,

1:51:13 and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways.

1:51:18 Allen Adham was the lead designer on WoW.

1:51:22 When we first sort of decided we were gonna have a quest-based game,

1:51:26 we used to joke that, like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it.

1:51:31 It did have quests, they just...

1:51:33 They weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way.

1:51:37 You kind of had to seek them out on a website.

1:51:39 And Allen knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of, of World of Warcraft.

1:51:47 And so he hired me.

1:51:49 That was my entry level position at Blizzard.

1:51:53 And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagle,

1:51:57 which was hilarious to me, because Pat was the...

1:52:01 He had this funny title of HR and Facilities at Blizzard,

1:52:05 because it was such a small company.

1:52:08 So, like, if you sent an application in, Pat would deal with the application,

1:52:13 or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it.

1:52:18 And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard,

1:52:21 I was going through Pat, and then on my first day,

1:52:23 they put Pat and I in an office together, and he's like,

1:52:27 "Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer." And so Pat...

1:52:31 And he was the most wonderful guy.

1:52:33 We had so much fun.

1:52:35 So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system.

1:52:38 It was Allen's idea to have it in the first place.

1:52:43 And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds,

1:52:46 who helped a lot with the interface of it all.

1:52:51 And the idea was at first, we actually on a whiteboard in Allen's office,

1:52:58 we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date.

1:53:02 And EverQuest had had, you know,

1:53:04 I think four or three expansions at that point in time, and we're like, "Wow,

1:53:10 we have to make all of these quests like

1:53:12 EverQuest has." It's gonna be a lot of quests,

1:53:16 and it's kind of up to me and Pat to do it all.

1:53:20 And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number.

1:53:26 And Pat and I started working on, like,

1:53:29 the design of the system and how it would interact,

1:53:31 and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface...

1:53:34 You know, like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that.

1:53:39 And we split up the world into like two zones.

1:53:43 He was gonna take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans,

1:53:48 and I was gonna take Westfall,

1:53:50 which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans.

1:53:55 Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen,

1:53:59 and those were the funnest meetings ever because

1:54:01 Chris just has stories in his head and visions.

1:54:06 Chris is, like, artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire,

1:54:11 and he sort of described what he wanted going on in those zones.

1:54:15 You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow

1:54:18 of what was going on with the stories of those areas.

1:54:23 So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did, like, a team play test.

1:54:30 And our assumption was because the way EverQuest worked,

1:54:36 players just wanted to level up.

1:54:37 It was a level based game.

1:54:39 You go out.

1:54:40 You kill a creature.

1:54:42 You get experience points.

1:54:43 You level up a little bit.

1:54:45 And so the way people played EverQuest is they'd

1:54:48 find these areas where there were lots of creatures,

1:54:51 and you'd usually find the best experience

1:54:55 efficiency cycle you could find, so, like,

1:54:57 fast respawn kind of easy things to kill,

1:55:01 and that's how you would progress through EverQuest.

1:55:05 And I remember Alan kind of telling us, like, "Hey, the quests...

1:55:10 When Pat and Jeff write quests,

1:55:13 they'll aim us to where the creatures are." You'll do a quest,

1:55:17 and then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards,

1:55:22 and that's how he imagined it would work.

1:55:25 So we kind of set up the world that way.

1:55:28 You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwynn.

1:55:32 I'd do a dozen, 20 quests in Westfall, and we'd do this team play test.

1:55:37 And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs,

1:55:42 like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, et cetera.

1:55:46 And they'd play World of Warcraft.

1:55:49 I think we played for, like, an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn Forest.

1:55:53 And the overwhelming feedback from our team...

1:55:57 And these are people who really didn't play EverQuest,

1:55:59 they're like, "My God, Pat, that was horrible.

1:56:03 I ran out of quests, like, right away." And we're like, "Wait a second.

1:56:09 You expect to just have quests just keep going?" And they're like,

1:56:14 "Yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way.

1:56:19 And we kinda had an oh shit moment right after that Elwynn Forest play test,

1:56:24 where we realized, like,

1:56:25 we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna need.

1:56:30 And we changed, we developed this philosophy that's kind

1:56:36 of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point.

1:56:40 And I've heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry,

1:56:43 which is you design along the path of least resistance.

1:56:50 So basically what that means, like, in EverQuest,

1:56:53 the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level

1:56:58 is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place,

1:57:03 which to some people think is very boring.

1:57:05 To me, I would do that for eight hours 'cause I think that's fun.

1:57:09 But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said,

1:57:13 why don't we make the path of least resistance,

1:57:16 so in this case, the way to get the best

1:57:20 experience the fastest not to be killing creatures in one place,

1:57:25 but will overload the experience into the quests themselves,

1:57:28 and then that will move you through the world,

1:57:31 which will get you to see everything.

1:57:33 It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines.

1:57:36 It sort of did a lot for the game,

1:57:39 and I think it was like a fundamental change in the genre.

1:57:43 Like, if you look at the things that...

1:57:46 EverQuest was very popular and very successful,

1:57:49 and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players.

1:57:52 And WoW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players.

1:57:57 And I think the fundamental difference there was

1:58:01 that WoW allowed you to play as a single player.

1:58:06 And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game,

1:58:13 massive is having the other people there.

1:58:16 And they're so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead.

1:58:21 But the concept that we have to force you to interact

1:58:25 with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.

1:58:29 And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of the game design,

1:58:36 the game design way of describing it is directed gameplay.

1:58:42 And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay.

1:58:47 Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us,

1:58:53 you know, you'll have those moments where they'll be like,

1:58:55 you'll come up to a log and then press Triangle to duck or else,

1:58:59 or whatever the duck button is—...

1:59:01 left stick to duck to go under.

1:59:03 And that's like the ultimate in directed gameplay.

1:59:06 Like, they're telling you exactly what to do.

1:59:09 On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft,

1:59:12 like vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very divisive amongst

1:59:17 gamers who love Minecraft or hate it.

1:59:20 The ones who hate it are like,

1:59:22 "I don't know what I'm supposed to do." Like, "You drop me in this world.

1:59:26 I'm supposed to dig or something." And that's the type

1:59:30 of player that needs directed gameplay or they're gonna cycle out.

1:59:35 Not all players need it.

1:59:38 And what WoW did, that it doesn't seem like an innovation,

1:59:42 it doesn't seem like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed

1:59:50 gameplay that felt optional, but really wasn't.

1:59:55 I mean, I think it's absolutely revolutionary.

1:59:57 It basically changed gaming.

1:59:59 It changed the way we see games.

2:00:02 And it was so successful in part because it became

2:00:07 a mechanism by which you could spend hundreds of hours,

2:00:10 thousands of hours in the game.

2:00:12 I mean, it's kind of a, like, obviously...

2:00:15 It's one of those...

2:00:16 All these great ideas are always like this, right?

2:00:18 In retrospect, you're like, "Well,

2:00:20 obviously if you make the path of least resistance quest-driven gameplay,

2:00:25 then it's gonna be the reason that most people play." But it is true that...

2:00:30 I'm with you on...

2:00:32 I both like the quests and cow level.

2:00:39 I guess you have to design for everybody.

2:00:40 That's the tricky thing.

2:00:41 Like, how do you fine-tune this?

2:00:44 If you think of it as a loop of like accept quest,

2:00:48 kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding, level up, that loop.

2:00:53 Like, how do you fine-tune that so it's maximum

2:00:56 fun or fun for the maximum number of people?

2:01:01 Is it...

2:01:01 How- how difficult is that?

2:01:04 It's extremely difficult.

2:01:05 And not everybody's good at doing that.

2:01:09 We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick.

2:01:15 So we're all different types of gamers,

2:01:17 but if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am,

2:01:21 I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was

2:01:26 or the type of gamer I want you to think

2:01:29 I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.

2:01:34 By playing lots of games,

2:01:36 you cannot be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit out

2:01:43 of as much as you can and understanding on a deep level.

2:01:48 And the weirdest part about it is you're not just looking for the greatest hits.

2:01:54 You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game.

2:02:01 And also—like, a lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong,

2:02:08 or lacked the correct interface,

2:02:11 or they didn't put the right visceral polish on it.

2:02:15 There's an executional aspect to all of it.

2:02:19 When I'm playing, I'm not only, like, thinking about what makes this fun,

2:02:23 I'm thinking about what makes this not fun.

2:02:27 But I'm also watching everyone around me.

2:02:30 My wife plays games, my kids play games.

2:02:35 And understanding, like, well, what do they do and how are they different to me?

2:02:40 Why are they finding enjoyment in this?

2:02:42 Why are they not?

2:02:43 What's frustrating?

2:02:44 What did they miss?

2:02:46 And being raw honest with exactly what you're saying.

2:02:49 I mean, I, if I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am,

2:02:53 why do I enjoy cow level?

2:02:55 And why, above that, why do I enjoy loot?

2:02:59 Why- why is loot so fun?

2:03:02 Like, what- what does- what is it about

2:03:05 opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff?

2:03:08 I mean, I, that might be like at the core of what I enjoy about gaming.

2:03:12 That, and walking around a beautiful world with nice music.

2:03:16 As a game designer, I am, at best, a quack psychologist.

2:03:21 You know?

2:03:22 We can motivate you to do some weird things.

2:03:26 The two driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic.

2:03:30 And all of us, at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers,

2:03:36 whatever, we can shift from being

2:03:39 intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated.

2:03:42 Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation,

2:03:46 but even saying that is too simplistic.

2:03:50 Like, for example, on the loot boxes of Overwatch,

2:03:56 there's a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer,

2:04:02 not by a businessperson or whatever.

2:04:05 Like, not a commercial person.

2:04:08 But beyond that, we also had a really good

2:04:13 team who said the visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes-...

2:04:19 the graphics, like the way things spill out and animate,

2:04:24 all of that is as satisfying as well.

2:04:27 And you're trying to...

2:04:28 Like, there's the lizard brain part of it.

2:04:31 Of like, how does it...

2:04:32 Like, I see chest.

2:04:34 I know I'm gonna...

2:04:35 It's gonna feel good.

2:04:36 It's gonna feel good.

2:04:37 And then there's the spreadsheety part of it.

2:04:40 Of, what does it have?

2:04:42 Is it an upgrade?

2:04:43 And I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things.

2:04:49 You know, tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic.

2:04:53 There's...

2:04:54 Like, when I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction.

2:05:00 And, you know, these are just like basic things like

2:05:03 plot and character development and setting and theme and whatever.

2:05:07 And there's no, like, textbook that exists for game design,

2:05:12 at least none that has been introduced to me yet.

2:05:15 But I think about, like, elements of fun.

2:05:19 What are the things that create fun for players?

2:05:21 And they're not the same.

2:05:23 Like, it really...

2:05:25 Every human being is different.

2:05:28 Like, progression is fun.

2:05:30 Sense of progression that I'm investing.

2:05:33 I'm putting an investment into this game,

2:05:35 and then the game is recognizing my investment.

2:05:38 That things like leveling, things like the amount of gold you have,

2:05:43 those are all investment based.

2:05:45 There's mastery.

2:05:46 There's just pure raw skill.

2:05:50 Creativity is one.

2:05:52 And hand-in-hand with creativity is customization.

2:05:56 And some of those can be aesthetic.

2:05:59 Like, look at my customized character, and I have the black curly hair,

2:06:04 and I put an earring in my character and I'm customizing in that way.

2:06:09 The other is customizing my build.

2:06:12 I'm gonna come up with a whirlwind barbarian and I'm the first to do it.

2:06:19 These are all elements of fun that designers can

2:06:23 tap into, and in fact are frequently tapping into.

2:06:27 But they're never defined anywhere, and I find that players drift.

2:06:32 Like, I'm the type of player who's not really loot motivated.

2:06:36 I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer.

2:06:41 And often that takes me on a detour of being loot motivated,

2:06:47 because there might be a dragon or a demon somewhere

2:06:52 that I can't beat without this level of armor and sword.

2:06:57 So now I'm loot motivated for some period of time,

2:07:01 to get back to being content motivated.

2:07:04 Or if I'm having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look

2:07:10 at the skills and abilities that my character's using,

2:07:13 and I have to go into creativity mode.

2:07:16 "Oh, he has that one AE where he..." Area of effect.

2:07:19 "...where he puts a curse on me." And, you know,

2:07:23 "If I had this counterability to the curse,

2:07:25 I could beat the boss to get the loot,

2:07:29 to get to the next boss." These are all cycles

2:07:33 that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.

2:07:37 And ultimately enjoying and discovering what the world gives you.

2:07:42 Has to offer to you.

2:07:44 And you're...

2:07:44 You have a lot of hats as a gamer,

2:07:47 so you love the RPG, MMORPG world, but you're also a big shooter guy.

2:07:53 Can you explain to me what fun in a shooter context is?

2:07:57 And we'll talk about Overwatch as a specific kind of fun.

2:08:01 Maybe...

2:08:01 But you're also a huge fan of the ultra-realistic shooters.

2:08:04 Call of Duty.

2:08:06 What is the definition of fun there?

2:08:09 There's a lot of skill and mastery.

2:08:12 Off the cuff, flippant comment would be clicking heads, you know?

2:08:17 I'm just trying to click heads.

2:08:19 Okay.

2:08:20 There's an intimacy also to the first person camera.

2:08:24 And now, not all shooters are first person.

2:08:28 There is a large trend these days to third person.

2:08:33 I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened that third person shooter door.

2:08:39 And you're seeing games like ARC Raiders are third person.

2:08:43 But to me, nothing is as pure as first person.

2:08:48 Like you're...

2:08:49 literally living in the world as that being.

2:08:51 You can look at your hands, and it's that pure visceral test of skill of, "Can

2:08:59 you click on the thing fast enough?" And when it's PvP-based,

2:09:03 you know that's coming at you.

2:09:05 Could you lay out for people who don't necessarily know what PvP and PvE is?

2:09:10 And single player- Absolutely-...

2:09:12 multiplayer, massively online multiplayer?

2:09:14 So PvP is player versus player, so that means a combative, you know...

2:09:19 If Lex and I are up against each other, we're attacking each other.

2:09:23 We call that PvP.

2:09:24 You can get killed by another player.

2:09:26 Uh, player versus environment is

2:09:29 anytime you're shooting computer controlled opponents.

2:09:33 So if it's a game about dragons, the dragon is the E, the environment in PvE.

2:09:41 And we should say that PvP and PvE, the P might be multiple players.

2:09:45 It could be five versus five, six versus six for PvP.

2:09:50 And for PvE, it could be, like, raids where it's multiple people,

2:09:56 large groups of people going against the AI.

2:09:59 Yep.

2:10:00 So single player, that's a game that you play totally by yourself.

2:10:04 Like, you don't play with anybody else.

2:10:06 You can't play with anybody else.

2:10:09 It's not networked to play with other people.

2:10:12 For example, I'm playing a game called Story of Seasons right now on the Switch,

2:10:17 which I just play by myself.

2:10:20 I have my farm.

2:10:21 You know, there's a town.

2:10:22 I'm meeting people in the town,

2:10:24 and no one can come and join me and interact with that.

2:10:28 So it's a very controlled experience.

2:10:31 Single player games are very difficult,

2:10:33 or they can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create.

2:10:39 Like, if you think of a game,

2:10:42 like Uncharted or Last of Us that's made by Naughty Dog,

2:10:47 like, those are kind of the preeminent

2:10:49 best single player games you could talk about.

2:10:53 They're very handcrafted.

2:10:55 Every experience is made just for you.

2:11:00 One up from that is what I call co-op.

2:11:05 And these terms become interchangeable, so I'm using some semantics here.

2:11:11 But co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together,

2:11:16 but we're sharing an exact same experience very intentionally.

2:11:21 And it's me sharing that experience only with other people that I know.

2:11:26 So a great example of a cooperative game,

2:11:29 maybe one of the best of all times, was Left 4 Dead,

2:11:33 which is a game where you and three other people go in and you fight,

2:11:38 like, hordes of zombies, and you try to progress through to the end safe room.

2:11:44 it's a very cooperative experience.

2:11:46 A game like Diablo IV, you can play cooperatively with other people.

2:11:52 Now, one up from that is multiplayer,

2:11:55 and that's when you're engaging with strangers who are in the same

2:12:00 world that you might not have the same cooperative goals as.

2:12:04 You might have very opposed goals to them.

2:12:07 You might PvP them, or they might just be random strangers

2:12:12 that you pass in a town or city and never see again.

2:12:17 And then massively multiplayer, which is what the MMO online sort

2:12:22 of stands for, massively multiplayer online game,

2:12:25 that's when you're breaking into thousands of players.

2:12:29 And the worlds become really, really big at that point.

2:12:35 By the way, we should say that the co-op could be remote connection,

2:12:39 but there's also what would you call it, couch co-op where you have two people.

2:12:45 Some games are really designed well for the experience

2:12:48 of two humans sitting together and playing the game together.

2:12:51 Which is a really tricky thing to design for, but if it's done well,

2:12:54 it's a, It's a really fulfilling experience.

2:12:57 Like, with a friend, with a loved one, you can, like, play a game together.

2:13:01 And Diablo IV, I should say, is an example of a game that does that really well.

2:13:05 They do couch co-op.

2:13:07 Like, two people can play Diablo sitting together

2:13:10 and there's a real intimate experience in that.

2:13:13 Yeah, couch co- it's funny, 'cause it actually, like, predates the couch even.

2:13:17 Some of those old arcade games-...

2:13:20 like, would have two joysticks on them and then you could play-...

2:13:24 with somebody else.

2:13:25 Or there's you know, famous game Gauntlet-...

2:13:28 had four joysticks and four people playing together.

2:13:31 And then anybody who grew up in that early console era,

2:13:35 like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one.

2:13:39 We would sit and we'd play NHL 93-...

2:13:44 on the couch.

2:13:46 And anybody who lost, you'd lose the controller.

2:13:50 And you could play that with up to four people playing, or we...

2:13:54 I remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal Kombat.

2:13:58 And we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis,

2:14:01 and it was the house rules were, you know, whoever lost,

2:14:05 so whether you were in your college dorm

2:14:07 or just some buddy's apartment and there's five people there,

2:14:11 you're constantly cycling everybody in and out.

2:14:14 But there's just a magic to multiplayer,

2:14:18 of engaging and sharing in the experience-...

2:14:22 with other people.

2:14:23 Um, that's why I've always...

2:14:25 I've never made a single player game.

2:14:27 Uh, I have great admiration for them.

2:14:30 I don't know if I could do it.

2:14:32 The challenge...

2:14:33 The reason I love multiplayer so much,

2:14:35 the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game,

2:14:42 it's like imagine if you were gonna be a movie director,

2:14:46 and you were gonna have all these actors

2:14:49 and set designers and props and, you know,

2:14:53 writers and scripts and all of this stuff,

2:14:56 and your goal was to get a certain movie made.

2:14:59 But we're gonna ask you, the director, to just...

2:15:03 You're gonna leave the room.

2:15:07 You can set it all up ahead of time,

2:15:10 and then you're not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it.

2:15:16 And now you need the actors to have an experience,

2:15:19 and it's just kind of the wildest, funnest experiment.

2:15:23 Like-- From a designer/creator perspective,

2:15:25 'cause you don't know what the players will create, so that's fun to see.

2:15:30 You lay out the chessboard, you lay out the world,

2:15:34 and then you get to watch what they create together.

2:15:37 That's true.

2:15:38 I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games,

2:15:44 and that really hurts me because, like, I actually love story in games,

2:15:51 and I counter that I'm the anti-shitty story guy.

2:15:55 And what I mean by that is like,

2:15:58 A, the most magical stories that I've ever heard

2:16:02 come out of video games are player stories about,

2:16:06 you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion and then I met him in real life.

2:16:13 Like, that's better than any video game writing that I've heard in a long while.

2:16:21 The player story is so much more interesting.

2:16:25 You know?

2:16:25 "Lex, why do you like the cow level

2:16:27 so much?" "Tell me about some goofy time-""...

2:16:30 like a loot goblin drew you into the most danger." "And...

2:16:33 But there was another player there, and then..." You know, like,

2:16:37 those are the stories that I think are more interesting from games.

2:16:40 There are some exceptional writers in video

2:16:44 games and some exceptional games at story.

2:16:48 You know, I've mentioned Naughty Dog, like they're kind of on another level.

2:16:54 But Valve has amazing writing.

2:16:56 The writing behind Half-Life 2, Marc Laidlaw, the writing behind Portal-...

2:17:04 and Portal 2.

2:17:05 I think it was Erik Wolpaw, who is hilarious, just amazing, and Rockstar.

2:17:12 Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time,

2:17:19 and that's a game where you can see the expertise

2:17:24 and mastery of the game design and the narrative design,

2:17:29 and the fact that you can have those player stories of just the goofy shit.

2:17:35 Like, I remember...

2:17:36 'Cause the controls are a little awkward in Red

2:17:39 Dead for a PC player who's playing on console.

2:17:42 Like, I always get confused about, like, taking out my gun and putting it away,

2:17:48 and what's, you know, the L1 and L2.

2:17:51 Like, as a PC gamer, I'm just like,

2:17:53 "Let me bind this stuff to where I want it." And so like you know,

2:17:57 a guy in town rides by and he's like,

2:17:59 "Howdy, partner." And I go to, like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, "Hey,

2:18:04 what's up?" back, and I just whip out my sawed-off shotgun and, like,

2:18:08 blow his fucking head off.

2:18:09 And then the whole town is like...

2:18:12 Suddenly I'm, like, under...

2:18:14 I'm wanted and I'm being chased,

2:18:16 and then there's a train that, like, takes out the posse, and-- Yes.

2:18:21 It's like those stories, and the fact that Red Dead can have,

2:18:24 you know, this, like, touching,

2:18:26 heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his journey,

2:18:29 but you can also have, you know, the player story of blowing off the poor

2:18:33 guy that's just trying to-- And that's the combination.

2:18:35 And then Rockstar does a really good job with you know,

2:18:38 even in Grand Theft Auto with the radio,

2:18:40 it can be kind of a side aspect to the game,

2:18:44 that great writing there can create- help create the world-...

2:18:49 with, with humor, with color, with depth,

2:18:51 with heartbreak, all that kind of stuff.

2:18:54 There was a moment in Red Dead where it...

2:18:58 There's the Daniel Lanois song- ..."That's the Way It Is".

2:19:03 I just...

2:19:03 I love Daniel Lanois, so the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and like,

2:19:10 was able to get that song out of him.

2:19:15 And there's this moment where you're, like,

2:19:18 riding back and they start that song, and-- Yeah.

2:19:21 Everything up to then had been gorgeous, like, more of a score.

2:19:25 There's Woody Jackson, who's, like, a really amazing game composer.

2:19:29 He had done the score for that, and so nothing had been,

2:19:34 like, lyrical with words.

2:19:35 And then they play the Daniel Lanois song,

2:19:38 and there's, like, the quotes are coming back-...

2:19:41 from, like, Dutch and Arthur Morgan,

2:19:43 and I'm just like, "Goddam, this is, like...

2:19:48 This is art." You know, this is like I know it's supposed to be entertainment,

2:19:52 I know it's a business, but the top of the pyramid is art, and-...

2:19:56 it just hit me emotionally.

2:19:59 Yeah, there's certain games where, you know...

2:20:01 I mean, that moment,

2:20:02 you just imagine the number of people who shed a tear during that moment,

2:20:06 and that's just a reflection of how much you're invested into this world,

2:20:10 into these characters, and it's a beautiful thing.

2:20:13 Uh, I have to ask you about this image that you sent me.

2:20:17 It's super cool, so I'd love it if we could nerd out about it a little bit,

2:20:21 the zone flow for the original World of Warcraft.

2:20:24 There's a bunch of zones.

2:20:26 It'd be awesome if you kinda talk through how, like, this world is built.

2:20:30 Take me to that time when you were designing

2:20:32 this, before anyone else got a chance to play it.

2:20:35 All WoW stuff.

2:20:37 It would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world.

2:20:42 And, you know, it was so fun hanging out

2:20:45 with Chris because we had whiteboards all over the place,

2:20:48 and, you know, "Hey, Chris, we should make Eastern Kingdoms.

2:20:53 What do you think it should be?" And he would just

2:20:56 tell you the story of each of these as he's just drawing.

2:21:00 And Chris is a really talented artist, so the map would be gorgeous.

2:21:04 I have lots of, like, photographs of Chris maps,

2:21:08 That he would just kind of whiteboard up.

2:21:11 He's like, you know, "Here's the Dwarven Lands,

2:21:14 there's Wetlands with Khaz Modan up there,

2:21:17 and that's where this, you know, tribe of dwarves were from.

2:21:21 And then they, you know, humans are going to be down, With Elwynn Forest.

2:21:25 And then Westfall, there's, you know, this group called the Defias Brotherhood

2:21:30 and they have a place called Deadmines."

2:21:32 So I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit,

2:21:37 like, as a game designer,

2:21:39 you want to capture the experience that's in people's heads.

2:21:43 So, like, take Burning Steppes, for example.

2:21:47 Supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know,

2:21:52 all this kind of stuff.

2:21:54 That doesn't feel like where you want to start.

2:21:57 It feels like where you want to end,

2:21:59 so you kind of work the world flow in a way that puts that at the end.

2:22:06 But there was also kind of some magic to the original starting areas,

2:22:11 where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between...

2:22:17 The dwarf hometown was called Ironforge,

2:22:20 the human hometown was called Stormwind.

2:22:23 And we allowed you to fly for free.

2:22:25 So, like, these little newbies who were, you know, level five or something,

2:22:31 if you played a dwarf and I played a human,

2:22:34 I'm like, "Oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come.

2:22:36 You know, I'll come to Ironforge and we'll hook up and I'll

2:22:39 just fly out to you," which is the magic of World of Warcraft.

2:22:42 You have to fly over Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge,

2:22:46 and you look down and you're like, "Holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous."

2:22:52 And it plants that seed of things to come.

2:22:57 Uh, so you've designed some incredible quests.

2:22:59 Is there any that stand out that you're proud of ashamed of?

2:23:02 I mean, you are famously have designed the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest.

2:23:09 One of the most infamous quests in the history of WoW,

2:23:13 of gaming, where you had to collect a bunch of pages, or...

2:23:17 Green Hills of Stranglethorn, maybe, can you,

2:23:21 comment on that one or any quest that just springs to mind?

2:23:26 Green Hills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value

2:23:30 for me because amongst WoW players back in the day,

2:23:34 it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests.

2:23:41 Um, but it holds a really special place in my heart.

2:23:44 First of all, it's one of the few times that I just,

2:23:48 like, wrote a short story that's actually in the game.

2:23:52 Um, it's me paying homage to Hemingway, and the guy who gives you the quest,

2:23:58 his name is Hemet Nesingwary,

2:24:00 which is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway.

2:24:06 There's another quest giver there that's Kerouac's name also mixed up.

2:24:13 Um, and then it was the typical hubris of a junior

2:24:19 game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipshit.

2:24:25 That's- That's the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, like, summed up.

2:24:29 So, like, I wrote the story over, like, it was, I think, winter break, like,

2:24:34 everybody was gone and I just was so happy to be in the office,

2:24:39 you know, I'm at Blizzard by myself writing late at night.

2:24:43 And the whole idea, and this is,

2:24:46 this is very much what I call ant farm designer, which is bad.

2:24:50 Which is, you know, you're the game designer who's playing God,

2:24:55 and players are the ants in your ant farm,

2:24:58 and you want to see what they're gonna do,

2:25:00 which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer.

2:25:05 But I hadn't learned that yet, and there's a, there's a really great famous Sid

2:25:12 Meier quote where he says there's three types of fun.

2:25:17 Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

2:25:22 And we catch ourselves, we're like, you know, we gotta be really care...

2:25:26 It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us.

2:25:29 So this Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest was like

2:25:32 an ant farm design of, I'm gonna write this, honestly,

2:25:37 probably pretty shitty story,

2:25:38 I haven't read it since 2003 so God only knows if it's any good.

2:25:43 But I wrote the story and then I

2:25:45 divided it up into all of these different pages.

2:25:48 And the quest giver, Hemet Nesingwary,

2:25:52 wants you to put together, like, the story's like,

2:25:55 he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorn Vale.

2:26:00 And some...

2:26:01 When you're doing quest design,

2:26:03 you're really thinking about the player flow and you're

2:26:07 directing them from quest giver hubs out until these destinations,

2:26:11 and you want them to do all the destinations.

2:26:14 But sometimes we would do these bridging quests where you could

2:26:19 do anything in the zone and it sort of had this overlap.

2:26:22 And so the pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could

2:26:26 be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale,

2:26:31 and it was kind of like that McDonald's Monopoly game where you

2:26:37 have to have all the pieces or else you're not gonna win.

2:26:40 But where I really went south, I don't think the idea in a vacuum is horrible,

2:26:47 but where this really fell apart was

2:26:50 the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't set up.

2:26:54 Like the pages didn't stack, there wasn't a dedicated container to put all

2:27:00 the pages in, so players had very limited bag space.

2:27:04 And as they're fighting in Stranglethorn Vale,

2:27:08 I'm just shitting up their inventory with all

2:27:11 of these pag- And they only needed so many.

2:27:14 Like you might get unlucky and you have like

2:27:17 three page fives that are just junk in your inventory,

2:27:21 and I might have like eight page sixes.

2:27:25 And then everybody...

2:27:26 And this was the goal, like the designer trying to puppeteer everybody.

2:27:32 Everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, "Hey, I'm looking for a page six.

2:27:36 Anyone got a page three?" And that was like my fantasy as a designer of like,

2:27:41 and then they're gonna be social and meet each other,

2:27:45 and players are gonna be appreciative for each other,

2:27:48 but really all everybody did was just no...

2:27:50 Eventually, no one did the quest.

2:27:52 They just were super annoyed, or they went to the Auction House.

2:27:55 auction house.

2:27:56 So the quest is famous in that it was

2:28:00 so aggravating and annoying and it just became a way...

2:28:06 It not only became a way for me to learn from my mistakes,

2:28:09 but because I was very open with the fact that I

2:28:13 didn't think it was good and that the quest had failed,

2:28:16 it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work.

2:28:22 Like it's always easier if you're the first one to go out and say, "Hey, guys,

2:28:26 I think I made one of the shittiest quests in the game and here's why." Um,

2:28:30 and then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it.

2:28:36 I mean, again, you continue to speak with so much humility.

2:28:39 But WoW turned out to be one of the biggest

2:28:42 games of all time both in terms of popularity,

2:28:45 how many players play it, revenue, and critical acclaim.

2:28:50 And then you rose to become a game director

2:28:54 of WoW helping release Wrath of the Lich King,

2:28:58 which by many is considered to be the greatest expansion.

2:29:01 I mean, there's a million questions I can ask here,

2:29:04 but maybe this is also a good place to ask about the famous Blizzard polish.

2:29:09 So Blizzard as a company has historically,

2:29:14 and you were certainly a big part of that, delivered these games.

2:29:19 They were just, uh, got so

2:29:21 many pieces right and well-functioning and well-coordinated,

2:29:25 and just feel finished in a way that a lot of other games don't get right.

2:29:31 So what does it take to take this gigantic game,

2:29:35 this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people,

2:29:39 And deliver it in a way where it's like it all just works?

2:29:44 To have a level of polish is like a studio

2:29:48 wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody,

2:29:52 like no one can be satisfied with a bug.

2:29:56 Every game is gonna have bugs, and Blizzard games have bugs.

2:30:01 It's a question of, how quickly do you fix them and with what urgency?

2:30:08 And as players ourselves, if we're playing as much as anybody else,

2:30:13 we're gonna be motivated to fix the bugs.

2:30:17 There are some really tactical aspects to it, too.

2:30:21 The quality assurance department at Blizzard is the best in the industry.

2:30:28 Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard, they are passionate gamers.

2:30:35 Many of them want to be developers themselves,

2:30:37 and they're not just doing it for a job.

2:30:41 They do it because they fucking love the game.

2:30:45 And the relationship we tried to develop between us

2:30:49 on the development teams and QA was extremely tight.

2:30:53 And whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA

2:30:58 members up with the development team as as possible,

2:31:02 depending on the logistics of...

2:31:04 You know, in the early days,

2:31:06 we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us.

2:31:10 We were very fortunate on the Overwatch team

2:31:12 to have a large amount of QA sitting with us,

2:31:16 and then developing that relationship.

2:31:18 You know, in the early days there, there were these fears of like,

2:31:23 "Well, QA can't talk to the developers," and trying to shatter that-...

2:31:27 of, because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out,

2:31:32 you would just say to them like, "Hey, dude.

2:31:35 Just message me.

2:31:36 Here's my home number.

2:31:38 Like, call me if there's a bug.

2:31:40 If you think we're gonna get raked over the coals on this, you gotta speak up.

2:31:46 I don't care what the chain of command is.

2:31:48 Like, we gotta fix this thing." So QA was amazing.

2:31:52 I mean, so can you speak to QA, quality assurance?

2:31:56 At the peak of the craft, what does it entail?

2:31:59 Like you're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out,

2:32:04 particular slices of that experience that could be improved?

2:32:09 Yeah.

2:32:10 People simplify the role by just, "Oh,

2:32:13 these guys just get to play games all day and then,

2:32:15 like, let us know if there's a bug." They

2:32:17 are so systematic in the way they test stuff.

2:32:21 They come up with these plans that are actually amazing of, like,

2:32:26 who's gonna test what.

2:32:28 There's a lot of regression testing that goes on.

2:32:32 within QA there will also be compatibility testing.

2:32:36 The Blizzard compatibility department was amazing.

2:32:40 Like, they had every card, every machine, every configuration,

2:32:45 and they would roll through to make sure there wasn't some quirk that was

2:32:50 gonna come up on some video card or some motherboard that you weren't expecting.

2:32:55 But it was all very systematic.

2:32:58 It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game.

2:33:01 And then as a developer interacting with QA,

2:33:04 you would find that there were certain specialists whether like,

2:33:10 for example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players that...

2:33:17 Like, we all were shooter players when we were making Overwatch,

2:33:20 but I'm not like esports level shooter player.

2:33:24 I'm like, you know, Gen Xer, "Remember Doom, how good I was"-- Yeah, right.

2:33:30 Yeah, yeah.

2:33:31 type of shooter player.

2:33:33 But we had, you know, a couple of these QA specialists who, like,

2:33:41 they could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every

2:33:45 time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay, you know?

2:33:49 And then you sit that person with an engineer and say,

2:33:53 "Hey, I think there's some input lag here."- That's amazing.

2:33:59 And sure enough, they'd be right.

2:34:00 But you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA.

2:34:05 Or just even on, like World of Warcraft,

2:34:09 they had a great relationship with QA in that they

2:34:12 built out a full raid team to do the raids.

2:34:16 And then you're not only, like, looking for bugs, like,

2:34:20 "Hey, the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just,

2:34:22 like, sunk through the world and the game crashed," which would happen.

2:34:26 But, like, if you really value QA, you're asking them, "What do you...

2:34:31 Dude, what do you think?

2:34:33 You're..." You know?

2:34:34 Like, "10 million people are gonna see this.

2:34:37 Your opinion, multiply it, you know?

2:34:40 It matters.

2:34:41 What do you think?

2:34:41 You know?

2:34:42 Are you having fun?

2:34:43 Oh, yeah, this is cool.

2:34:44 This isn't cool." Um, so QA was important.

2:34:48 The other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering,

2:34:52 which you have to architect your game to be hotfixable.

2:34:58 And what a hotfix is, games, there's a couple ways to fix 'em.

2:35:03 The way most of us know, 'cause all the software we have gets a patch, you know?

2:35:07 You have to update it.

2:35:08 You have to download a new version of it.

2:35:11 Windows, you know, you get that annoying message, like,

2:35:13 "There's a new version of Windows." And it takes,

2:35:16 you know, a few minutes and you update it.

2:35:18 You know, obviously, we patch our games and that's where we fix a lot of bugs,

2:35:22 but if you really wanna run a game

2:35:25 like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully,

2:35:28 you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server

2:35:35 in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime.

2:35:38 And what a hotfix is, is a server patch that no one's client has to go down for.

2:35:44 Mm-hmm.

2:35:45 That's 'cause you're dealing with a huge number of players and you

2:35:47 discover an issue and you want to respond to that issue really quickly.

2:35:52 Yeah.

2:35:52 There's emergency issues like something's crashing.

2:35:55 Like, the worst case scenario is anytime the server's crashing.

2:35:59 Or in Overwatch, like,

2:36:01 a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero.

2:36:05 Like, someone found an exploit and you have to disable a hero from the lineup.

2:36:11 You want to turn around that hotfix if you can in a half an hour,

2:36:17 get that hero back live.

2:36:19 You might have somebody who only plays that hero,

2:36:22 and the only reason they're gonna play Overwatch is because that hero's active.

2:36:27 You don't want to wait for patches and you want to hotfix-...

2:36:30 as fast as you can.

2:36:32 And then also to improve the game quickly to just even settle stuff to do that.

2:36:37 Yeah.

2:36:37 Players feel it.

2:36:38 Like, they...

2:36:39 That's where there's this idea of, like,

2:36:43 the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel.

2:36:50 Like, any, any product, you know your iPhone or Android or, like,

2:36:56 any computer or consumer product,

2:36:58 you can feel when there are people who loved it

2:37:03 behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf.

2:37:06 And games have that as well, where you can feel the, like,

2:37:10 heart and soul of the the developer in, in the thing.

2:37:14 And some of that's, like, the joy and delight of, like,

2:37:17 that there's a cow level, right?

2:37:19 That that's...

2:37:20 You know, you can feel the humanity of the development team-...

2:37:25 through that.

2:37:26 But another part of that is, like,

2:37:28 do they clean up their fucking yard, you know?

2:37:31 Does this game work?

2:37:33 Is it...

2:37:33 And it's not just the bugs and the crashes.

2:37:36 It's, like, when balance gets wacky and stupid and, you know,

2:37:41 suddenly everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding

2:37:43 and no one else will play anything else.

2:37:46 You're like, "We should probably fix that," you know?

2:37:50 Oh, those were the days.

2:37:52 I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.

2:37:55 One-handed.

2:37:56 It was...

2:37:57 Yeah, it brought so much joy.

2:37:59 So a lot of people modern day think of you as Jeff from the Overwatch team.

2:38:06 My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team.

2:38:08 I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.

2:38:10 I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.

2:38:12 But y'all must have forgot, you were the game director of WoW in an era

2:38:17 when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world.

2:38:21 Just, you know, looking back, what wisdom can you draw from that time when you