The challenges of complex risks in game design

Danny Crichton:
Hey, Randy. Good to see you.

Randy Lubin:
Likewise, good to be on the show.

Danny Crichton:
So Randy, you've been a very long time game designer. I want to say what, I'm using the term years loosely, but I feel like it's been at least a decade you've been exploring these foresight games, as you call them, these unique experiences that allow people to predict the future and explore them. Give us a little bit of that history.

Randy Lubin:
Yeah, so I've been designing games in some form for over a decade. Foresight Games probably started in about 2017, 2018 and my original background's actually in early stage startups. I've, over the years, jumped in as the first non-technical hire doing the white space, everything that the engineers aren't doing kind of role. So I have a deep love of startups and exploring uncertainty through that.
And game design came secondary, first as just a hobby. Like Many of us, I love, love playing games, started designing games that I wanted to play but didn't exist yet and then my two worlds collided when I had a cool opportunity with some friends who were running at the time Scout AI to make a serious game that explored possible coalitions and weird dynamics and adoption of technology and how it was going to shape future elections. So that was like 2017, 2018, we made this game, Machine Learning President. That was my first foresight futures game. I didn't know it that anything was going to come of it beyond that. And it turned out that that stoked a ton of inbound interest in creating games for all sorts of different purposes. And over the past decade, I've then spent anywhere from a hundred percent of my time to a smaller portion of my time doing serious game design and still have kept one foot in the startup world.

Danny Crichton:
That's amazing. And when you started, I mean, Machine Learning President was you and I know there was a little group that came together and focused on it. How do you find the topics on what to make a game about?

Randy Lubin:
It's very different answers from the consumer game side than the serious game side. On the serious game side, it's all from clients. I mean, it's very much what problem are clients trying to solve? How do we find a game that helps accomplish those goals? I can go way in depth on that in a second. But on the consumer side, it's really about what tickles me. And usually this is very similar to how I think about startups too, is what is an interesting frontier to push at? Or what is a topic that really hasn't been explored through games or what is a set of mechanics that hasn't been touched or a set of player dynamics that I want to foster. And so on the consumer side, it's usually something in that direction. And most of my consumer work tends to be storytelling games, whether tabletop role playing games or live action role-playing games, LARPs. But it's really like, "Oh, okay, I want to do something that doesn't exist yet just to see what's possible or see what it's like."

Danny Crichton:
And when you think about the difference between consumers, you dubbed it serious games, but clearly one of the things we're trying to do with any sort of gaming environment is to bring play across these sort of spectra. So even though you're dealing with sometimes very, very intense and serious issues, play opens up the space for people to experience something new, to role play and to get out their general character, if you will.

Randy Lubin:
I think play can be so, so powerful. I think one of the big things, and I know you've seen this too, and it gives folks an alibi to set aside some of their preconceived notions about whatever their model of the world is and how the world is going to be. Because as soon as you give somebody a role and a goal, in most situations, they're going to want to accomplish that goal and they're going to want to understand, what's the toy model that's baked into the game, develop an intuition for what actions are going to benefit them. It also gives them an alibi for then saying things that in an institutional context, they might not have the political support to say, or they might be a little more nervous to express, as soon as they're in character, they can say whatever they want and justify it in character. And that can be really great for getting less orthodox beliefs, opinions, scenarios on the table, which is I think great fodder for debrief afterwards.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I think when we do risk gaming, a huge part of it is as we bring people from science business policy all together, the most important thing we've found is just getting everyone to play a role they play in real life. They know their own life, they know how to play, they know the rules. And oftentimes people get very, very focused on details and they're like, "Well, this budget is actually 1.02 trillion, not 1 trillion, this changes everything." And you're like, "Eh." But then if you get people to play other roles, suddenly they're like, "I don't even know how congress functions." And so I found that it's extremely useful for people to play things that they are not familiar with,

Randy Lubin:
I think for the reasons you just stated, and also just because it's just great for helping them develop more intuition and to understand, "Okay, what are some of," at least at the surface level, "What are some of the incentives that this type of role faces?" I found that in a lot of these applied games, you can get people walking out of it being like, "Oh my goodness, I totally didn't understand why this type of actor was acting the way they were and now it makes total sense to me," which is a great, great outcome.

Danny Crichton:
One of the things, so obviously you're tickling your fancy with the consumer, you get these clients on the serious side, so to speak. So regardless, you have these ideas that are coming to you, different topics, different scenarios. But then I think the challenge, and obviously 95% of the game development is, what is the mechanism? How do you connect all these dots together? How do you even figure out what characters should be played, which characters shouldn't be played? I call it kind of parsimony or scoping, but it's like games can be absolutely wildly too large and you can't focus on anything, they can be too small and very, very boring. So I'm curious, when you think about your creative process, when you're pitting... Let's say you have a new scenario, a new storyline, you want to explore that from a policy angle, how do you start to explore that space and identify exactly how a game should be structured?

Randy Lubin:
I always start with being crystal clear about goals and constraints, and if it's for a client, if there are a lot of stakeholders involved, I make sure, talk to all of them, make sure that you're really including all of their perspectives, and also because they're going to be trade-offs along the way, how do they prioritize those? For me, once you get the goals and constraints... And those goals can be different from what does the sponsor want to get out of it versus what do we want players to get out of it? Some games are much more about delivering insights to players, some are about generating insights to facilitators and the sponsors, and sometimes it's a mix. It's often a mix.
And so once those goals and constraints are out there and we're crystal clear on them in the priorities, for me, the next step is about generating lots and lots of ideas. And those ideas can hit a bunch of different categories. So a lot of mechanical ideas, often drawing inspiration from other games, sometimes other foresight games or serious games, but sometimes also consumer games. Others, you can grab inspiration from anywhere. Sometimes it's less about the specific mechanics than key moments like, "Oh wow, I really want..." I could see based on what we're trying to model out or what we're trying to foster, this really powerful moment where two characters, two players playing different characters come to head to head for negotiation and maybe this is the outcome or there's this surprise. And so getting a bunch of those in the mix are great, this is tied a little bit to goals. Also, it's, what are some of the aha moments we want to have, or what types of insights do we want surfaced in the debrief?
And so getting all of those out there become fodder and inspiration for as we start exploring different local maxima, different sort of clusters of game design that might self-support, we can keep tracing it back to like, well, one that's fodder to mix in to see how do these support each other in accomplishing those goals, but also, how does it align with our initial goals and constraints?
So with that, I usually then jump to a stage-gate approach, and stage-gate comes from product development and manufacturing outside of games, but I've seen it used in game design context very effectively. And what it means is taking multiple different ideas through the process in parallel and as you go, continuing to refine them and then cull down and remix. So for instance, it might start out with a dozen sentence length pitches for what this game can be. Anything from like, okay, we have 30 people running around wheeling and dealing and exchanging resources, on one end to, oh, no, this is really focused on just maybe five players and they're in deep conversation and doing a lot of creative problem solving together, all again oriented to the same goals and constraints.
And so what I've often found is by having these very different candidates that you're advancing from first sentence then to maybe half page write up, and then maybe you're ultimately even playstorming or playtesting two different forks, it does a few different things. One, if you have a bunch of stakeholders that you're working with or collaborators, it allows even folks who are not game designers or very familiar with very different types of games to still be able to express their preferences, because they'll see a lot of the different game design patterns. They'll say, "Oh, I like this here, but I don't like this here," or what if we remix idea A and idea C together and maybe come up with a completely different take on it?
And so I find that to be a really empowering way of taking others through the game design process. And also it helps express preferences that weren't expressed upfront with goals and constraints and also it's just so good for creating other ideas to remix. Because you might end up killing an idea at at the high level, but then using some insight that you got out of it later on. So I really like this process where you just keep refining and refining.
And I mentioned a term playstorming, something I really love doing both on the consumer side and on the more applied or serious side where playstorming can come in different flavors, but oftentimes the first flavor of playstorming is just with the collaborators you talk through the whole game and, "Oh, what might players do at this point? What might players do at that point? What if we change the round structure in this way or have some slightly different incentives here?" And just by talking through the game from beginning to end and often zooming into just one player or faction, you can immediately see both, "Oh, we have not designed for this whole set of edge cases." Or, "Oh, at this point the player, well, I'm not sure what they would want to do. We haven't really provided them enough affordances to express their will in the system or trying to accomplish their goal." And so I often [inaudible 00:09:00], the quickest you can get to that talk through the game, the better because learned so much through that.
And then of course the next jump from there is actual playtesting, whether it's a full playtest of the game or you just grab a few players and play just a small portion of it, either just a subset of the character roles or maybe just a subset of the rounds, almost like anything else, you learn so much by having the first contact with reality that the faster you get there the better.

Danny Crichton:
I'm listening to your whole process here. You're bringing in all these different sources, all these different models, you're playtesting, playstorming, connecting it all together, but ultimately you're a benevolent dictator. You are the designer. You could almost make a movie of this. It's a little bit of the Truman Show of sorts. But I am curious about this sort of balance between, you mentioned in your consumer games that you are very story-driven, meaning it's very directive, I'm trying to guide you to a certain place. And then on the serious side, presumably, you're kind of going a different direction, which is a little bit more open, and a little bit more of an emergent set of properties.
This is actually something that I personally struggle with in designing games, which is to what degree do I want you to get to where I want you to be? Which is like, okay, we want to simulate this and I want you to have simulated a bad thing happening here and I need all of you to do the exact thing in order to get to that spot. So a little bit of role playing with a very aggressive dungeon master who's like, "No, no, actually all roads are closed and the only road available is the dungeon at the top of the mountain. Everything else is closed, there's a sun, everything has collapsed."
Versus that open play model where, [inaudible 00:10:28] and sometimes I'm thinking of Hampton at the Crossroads, the first game we designed, two years ago, even just a month or two ago, we played and everyone just started cooperating in a way that made no sense. They were just like, "We're just going to ignore all the things that we disagree with on each other and we're going to collaborate together as one harmonious group." And so suddenly everyone who was supposed to be opposed to each other cooperated, everyone actually scored very well, although people clearly won and lost. But I'm curious how much you want to direct folks? How much do you think it's important to really push them to where they should be?

Randy Lubin:
So it depends a lot on, again, the goals and constraints set up in the front. And oftentimes, I like giving folks as much sandbox, as much expressive space as they can, as long as it doesn't defy those learning goals and objectives. And I think there are lots of ways that you can try and have both.
In my consumer practice too, there's a broad spectrum. So I definitely design consumer storytelling games that are very open and expressive tools and then I also have some that are very much telling one specific story. So specifically then to focus a little bit more, I'd say that when it comes to giving people that expressive space, you can do all sorts of things such as they have a lot of local agency in terms of the decisions that they're making, but in terms of how that intersects with everybody else's decisions, then maybe as a designer we put the thumb on the scale and we've had games that we jump forward in time and when we jump forward in time, we can have the rest of the world acting back in the game space in ways that make sure we keep it on track with the type of story arc or outcomes or insights that we want.
So I think there's lots of ways that as a facilitator through "random events", which are sometimes random or sometimes very pre-selected or through very strongly shaping some incentives that it would be extremely... It would get to the point of almost breaking the game of players or ignoring their incentives to some degree. We can count on certain types of things happening.
In terms of affordances. Sometimes players have a really open-ended space to say... In some of our games it's like, "Come up with your best intervention that you think is going to work based on what you know about your character, what assets you have access to and your objectives. Just tell me what the most impactful thing you could do during this time period is." And sometimes it's much more narrow and it's like you have options, A, B, C or D, pick one and maybe pick a magnitude of it, but it's not at all open-ended.
And again, some of this is about, what are the objectives? I think oftentimes for the types of games I do, if it's really about generating insights for the organizer or the sponsor, it tends to be more in the open-ended direction and as long as you're getting the high level goals and incentives right, if players go really imaginative, that's usually a feature, not a bug. And then in the debrief, and if you're running the type of scenario or session multiple times and then you're writing a report that sort of aggregates insights, then at that point you can say, "Okay, well we had a very creative player that was not maybe representative of the real world, so we're going to ignore a little bit of what happened in that scenario." I mean, that's fine, that can all be done after the fact. And on the other end, I'd say if the goal is about really delivering a few very specific insights, sometimes you can do that via a more open-ended game design or sometimes it's like, "No, we know there's some very nuanced takeaways that we want to make sure land for folks."
And so it hasn't come up yet in the discussion, but some of the more serious or applied games I've done have been online browser-based, sort of choose your own adventure kind of games that are single player, or can be played as a group, but in that case, there's no open-ended anything. You're going through a series of multiple choice questions with occasionally some more nuance in terms of how you make investments or policies you set, but it's still, it is not open-ended or sandboxed to any degree, and that's because we know we want to take people on this journey. For example, several of our games have been about trust and safety and content moderation coming in and saying like, "Oh yeah, it's easy. Just leave up the good stuff, take down the bad stuff." We want to take people on a journey from that initial conception through to like, "Oh wow, there's just endless edge cases," and even if we knew all the edge cases, there just aren't enough resources to be able to effectively judge every piece of content at a very, very high standard.

Danny Crichton:
From my perspective, I'm always trying to, I want people to feel like they're the character and in most cases you have a lot of flexibility in real life, obviously that's very hard to translate into a game, it's also very hard to balance. If someone's playing the US government and they're just like, "I'd like to fire all of the nukes." It's really, really hard to deal with. In some cases, we also have players who do actually play their characters almost too well. And so we had a game of chicken just this week in which one of the characters was just like, "Well, if you do that, I'm just going to shut everything down." They do have the ability to shut everything down, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but the threat and the militant threat of, "Well, fine then everything's shut down." It's almost like schoolyard bully, "Well fine, I'm taking my ball and going home," was very, very fascinating.
But I'm curious, when you think about iteration, you do these playtests, you do these playstorming, to what degree do you kind of balance between realism and game balance? Because this is something that I struggle with a lot, obviously all the games we do are sort of real life scenarios, if you will, and you want the experience to be good, but then at some point some characters are in real life going to lose. You are playing a tragic role. We don't necessarily tell you that in advance, but you're playing a tragic role.
And so there's this challenge of I want everyone to have a shot at winning. I'm thinking in particular Ian Curtis who did our China Electric Vehicle game, and in that the mayors in that game just don't have much of a shot. It's probably like, if everyone else was terrible, you have a shot. But if anyone is even remotely playing their character as they should, you just don't really have an out, and that's because that is accurate to real life politics, but it doesn't make necessarily the most fun experience for the people who have to play those roles, so how do you think about that balance versus realism talk?

Randy Lubin:
I think that is a key thing to be aware of as a dynamic and to be very intentional about. As always, it comes back to, what are the key goals, what are the key constraints? But I often find that balance really doesn't matter as much as making sure people are getting the insights that they need. That being said, I think there's ways to calibrate. So in that mayor example, it could be that they're being graded on a very different scale. So it's not that they're, did the mayor triumph relative to the big American automotive conglomerate? It's, how do they do relative to baseline expectations for a mayor? So I've definitely done games where it's like, "Yeah, different roles are so asymmetric, they're competing at completely different scales, but we can grade them on a curve relative to that type of role.
More important than, does everyone have an even shot of winning for however winning ends up being defined is, are all the players going on an interesting journey? Do they have interesting decisions to make it every step along the way, and are there clear affordances for how they might want to accomplish their goals? So in some of my games, many of my games actually, especially the ones that are open-ended, part of the initial character briefing and the character sheets that get handed out, there's a little background of, here's your character, here are assets they have access to. Here are possible actions they can take.
Often part of that is being really clear, even if it's open-ended, here are the types of actions you can take so that a player who, especially one who's not familiar with that type of role, can always do the obvious thing, but that hopefully it also gives them inspiration for, "Okay, if you want to get creative, maybe you take some of these obvious actions, you put a little spin on it, or you find a different role that you can collaborate with and that suddenly expands the space. As quickly as possible, get people away from a blank canvas, I don't know what to do. And whether that's in an open-ended context or even in a much more closed mechanical system saying, just a little hint or "Oh, this type of strategy might be your default."
Because even in the real world where there's endless open strategic possibility, typically institutions have been around for a long time. There's some consensus as to what at least the safe strategies are, the default strategies. And I think it's especially then interesting the types of games that we make where, okay, context is changing very rapidly due to social and technological and regulatory forces, tell people explicitly what the consensus strategy is. If you just follow a consensus strategy to a T, you're probably setting yourself up for failure, but at least that's better than having a completely blank canvas.

Danny Crichton:
I don't necessarily think I've had the same experience. So when I look at all of the different run-throughs, and we've done dozens and dozens over the last two, three years, the most common challenges is, it's not necessarily that people default or that they're completely lost, although that happens occasionally, that's usually on us as designers or presenters more than the players themselves and the onboarding. But the big challenge I found is most of our tabletop games are two to three hours. People come up with an original strategy in the first 20, 25 minutes.
And then what ends up happening is even though the game has changed and they should be adapting their strategy, they sort of just keep doubling down. They have set up not the game's default strategy, but their own kind of rut and they kind of get into that and they're saying like, "Okay, I like this. I have a plan, I'm just going to see it through for the rest of the game." And I have really struggled with how to get folks to say, "Look, it's another year, it's a new scene, stuff has changed. You have to throw away what you had before and move on and do something else," but that loss aversion is very, very real and I've never been able to solve it.

Randy Lubin:
It's a thorny problem and I think the loss aversion is a big part of it. I think depending on the game, one contributing factor could end up being just how clear feedback loop signals are. So I think one of the things that you can do in your favor is by making it clear that if their strategy failed, they know exactly why it failed. It wasn't just a bad role of the die, it was because of a different coalition that formed or different incentives at play or their initial model of how the world works is wrong and now they have an updated model. I think that's a fundamentally hard thing to do, and I think it's a core skill too. I think that playing risk gaming type experiences should help people train people on, it's like, "Okay, have a very clear mental model of the world and then be able to update it when you get data accordingly."
And then as game designers, it's just like, "Okay, let's make sure we're sending really clear signals," whether through explicit results or information that spreads via other players of like, "Okay, wait, you have to update your prior view of the world because things are changing, or it just wasn't correct to begin with."
But think you're right. I think the other thing real quick that you could do, and you already alluded to it, is the more you can have time jumps or call out how context has changed, I think the easier it's for people to be like, "Okay, no, it's clear, maybe my mental model was right, maybe it was wrong, but now we're in a very different state or scenario."
So one thing I'll do in some of my games have a kind of top of the news segment where, okay, maybe we've jumped forward months, maybe it's a year, we just kind of captured what's in the zeitgeist and some of that's going to be very relevant to play, and some of it's just going to be flavor, it's going to be about pop culture or it's going to be about maybe a natural disaster that was unrelated to any of those supply chains or character roles. But it's just to give a sense that time is moving forward, context is changing. And in a game with totally open-ended interventions, it's also a way to just give people fodder of like, "Oh, this pop culture thing that's happening, maybe I can twist that to my advantage by, I don't know, themeing my political campaign around it," or whatever it might be.

Danny Crichton:
I think this is really interesting because I think I do have a God mode. Technically in one of our games, if there's one extra character and they have nothing to do, the number of [inaudible 00:20:41], they play God and they can do one intervention per scene and so they can interact with everyone and then they have to get something pre-approved but can actually make an intervention.
But you get into this thing that I think is really interesting, which is this balance between repeating the same choices over and over again, so allowing people to get into a groove and saying like, "Okay, I'm CEO of a company, I have a budget. I'm going to have this amount of money to spend every turn and I can rearrange what I'm spending and therefore I know what to expect and I know the rule and the flow." Versus, you are a crisis PR lead and you have no idea what the crisis is going to be. You don't even know what tools you're going to have available to you each time and so it's like a complete mystery box what you're going to do next.
How do you think about the two sides of that? Kind of very structured? And I am thinking of our game New Man's Land, which we haven't published, but we are getting closer to publishing. It's a very structured game. All the scenes are the same. Every decision is going to be done four times over four different years versus one Hampton at the Crossroads where every scene has a completely new set of decisions, mostly story decisions, and so you don't actually know what to expect.

Randy Lubin:
Right, right. Yeah, especially when players are thinking about, I can only make this big bet one time, let me make sure I'm betting at the most beneficial point, especially if you have players who, certainly have not played this game before but maybe haven't played a lot of games and don't want to look foolish in front of their colleagues, there's this inherent conservatism to that too of, I really don't want to put a crazy bet down early on.
So I think that there are different ways of approaching it, depending heavily contextual based on the game itself, but there are degrees to which if resources or opportunities are going away quickly, then it's easier to lose it and people are going to be more willing to place a bet down because the opportunity cost of not placing that bet is high. I think there's also degrees with asymmetric roles of just making sure it's really fun.
So with the PR person who's mostly in reactive mode, maybe by having a clear list, a list that's bigger than they'll ever end up fully using of, here are not just classic PR tactics but also due to the idiosyncratic nature of the organization that you're the PR rep for, what are some cool other things you can bring to the table and allowing them to express creativity in that way, even if it's still reactive to broader events, they can do both creative expression through the pitch they come back or how they come back with things, but also calling out the, "Hey, based on the dynamics that are happening, other people are reacting to the same situation information that you are," and that creates the possibility of coalition and alliance. And maybe if you coordinate your messaging with some other organizations messaging that you're only quasi aligned with, you might together have a bigger impact. Partly you get this from playtesting and playstorming, but what's the possible design space of actions that people might take and then flagging that for the players.
Something I do on my consumer side is try and make it so that in the early playtests I play with really strong improvisers, mostly other game designers, you can give them the barest bones of rules and give them a sentence of what the rules are of the game, and they're going to tell a great story no matter what. What I love to do is see what they do and see what they do that isn't necessarily supported by the rules, but I think is totally in the spirit of the game. And then refactor, rework the rules so that even a table full of more novice improvisers who aren't as comfortable, aren't as necessarily expressive in the same creative ways, they can still tell those creative stories and they can still hit some of the same beats.
So to take it back then it's like, okay, we know that there's going to be folks playing this game with a wide range of comfort and creativity and prior knowledge through the design process, through affordances, through little hints and bits, make it so that all players coming to the table can take some pretty cool bold actions that are going to be really meaningful.

Danny Crichton:
One of the questions I have for you is when you think about learning here, and obviously that's one of the big objectives across all these games, the classic model, and I'm thinking Pentagon wargaming, et cetera, is you play the game and then there's this hot wash, you go through a debriefing session at the end it's like, "Okay, you just did this four hour experience, here's what happened and here's what to learn from it."
And I've always struggled with this idea of how do you integrate some of the learning into the game itself. That you could just do checkpoints and take people out of the game experience, I don't particularly like that. I think it's very disruptive and it kind of breaks the flow, so to speak. But at the same time, and this kind of relates to this idea of people get into ruts, but I see these moments where I'm like, "God, I need you to get this insight of you are a company leader trying to sell a product and you're not marketing at all, and that's a very obvious thing you should be doing, but you're not doing it. And once you have this aha moment, this would really change things." How do you think about helping people to learn in your games? Do you have techniques? Have you tried to do this more than kind of the classic do it all and then something at the end?

Randy Lubin:
I have definitely done the do it all and then debrief. And I am a firm believer in spend as much energy thinking about debrief as you do about the game itself because it can be so important. But yes, there are a lot of cool techniques and techniques that can be taken from the consumer side too. So there's a technique from the Nordic LARP scene called Bird in Ear. Yeah, and-

Danny Crichton:
Randy, you go to places I don't go.

Randy Lubin:
Right, the key is drawing inspiration from anywhere. So Bird in Ear is this technique where the facilitator goes up to a player who's in character and whispers it in their ear, and it might be a suggestion or it might be a little bit of inner monologue, but it's to provoke a specific type of action. So a way that might translate to the scenario you just described is maybe a facilitator either in character or out of character goes up to a player and goes, "So your CMO comes to you and says, 'Hey, there's this interesting opportunity to do marketing. We see our competitors are doing it, it seems to be working." Or it's just another way that as a facilitator you can put your finger on the scale. And I think those types of interventions can work quite well.
I think another way of showing it, so if there's a little more symmetry and you want to make sure that key insights that some players have end up propagating, you can work that into whether it's a top of the news round update type thing and say, not just, "Oh, competitor A has really leapt ahead in terms of market share," and leave it at that, but say, "They've leapt ahead in terms of market share, analysts are saying it's due to their heavy investments in marketing." And I often think in games that are iterated over a few different rounds, you often want those secrets to leak out because much in the real world, everyone's paying attention to what all the competitors are doing. And yes, a cool insider edge might persist for a round, maybe two, but typically that gets arbitraged away and you always have to be pushing the leading edge of what's possible.

Danny Crichton:
One of the things we do with most of our risk gaming when we have the right run-throughs and the right player counts is we try to bring multiple games together at the same time. So they're played in synchronicity. You have the same role played in two, three, four metaverses as we call them. And the idea there is one, it creates a competition effect if you are the CEO of a company and with the stock price it's up and down, you'll see your stock price compared to three others are in the exact same world facing the same decisions as you, and everyone gets very competitive once they see, "Oh, I am at the exact same performance as someone else."
On the flip side, they aren't going to be able to witness what those players are doing in terms of strategy. And that's something that I have continued to try to figure out is, I would love people to actually collaborate more,` maybe there's an incentive structure you can create of if all of you do super well in all the worlds, you start trading tactics or something like this, it'd be kind of an interesting model, but we have not been very successful in that. But with that, let's turn it over to what you're building right now because you are also working with us on a brand new topic and idea. Why don't we just start from scratch on what you're conceiving right now for us.

Randy Lubin:
And that's actually a perfect segue because that question you just brought up, it'll be very relevant as we navigate it here. So the game that we're working on right now is about the impact of automation on economies on cities and a bit on the social contract too, looking at how labor is going to transform over the next decade plus. I mean, the game will probably be zoomed into more than the three to five year horizon, but with trends that are going to keep amplifying.
So it's a game that will take place with 25 to 35 players. There'll be assigned to different cities in a region and there's going to be some competition, some cooperation across those cities. And then within each city we're looking at triads of players where one player is the stand in for the local government, probably playing the role of mayor. Then there'll be a player that is standing for the main business interests, and different cities will have different business specialties. So there might be a port, a logistic city, there might be a city that's really focused on health care, etc. So someone who's representing those business interests and then someone who's generally representing labor interests that might be the head of a union or it might be a different role that is still sort of expressing dynamics related to labor.
Over the course of the game, we're going to be moving forward in time and the individuals both on their own and sometimes in collaboration in cities will be making a set of tricky decisions, navigating different dilemmas and trade-offs with nuance around topics related to automation and the economy. It's still in flux as we're designing it, but over maybe five or six different rounds and in different configurations of just in your city versus organized by your role type versus the whole region as a whole, you'll be facing a dilemma such as, "Okay, there's an opportunity to do lots of automation related to transport," so a combination of self-driving cars and Zipline style drone delivery and potentially flying cars as well. It's like, "Okay, well what type of regulatory atmosphere do we want in our city? Is this something that we want to be promoting within bounds?"
And going back to how we talked about different ranges of expression, nothing here is completely open-ended in terms of the decision that players can make, but there's these sort of checklist style, what are you okay with? What do you not want that you can check off? And then there is open-ended affordance in terms of only one player is really interested with making given decisions. So a city regulatory issue, it's probably the mayor's making that decision, but the folks who are representing the business interest and the labor interests have a lot of power to try and sway that decision both through contributing resources, so a business interest might say, "Hey, look, we're actually willing to recommit funding to this initiative if you are going to have policies that align and promote it," that type of thing. And on the labor side, there are ways to align and help out with both the mayor and business interest, but you also have threats such as a slowdown or going on strike, etc.
And so the idea is that while ultimately what gets submitted to the facilitators and updates to the game state is fairly constrained, there are a lot of open affordances in terms of how that's reached, how the negotiations might go, what concessions different players gather.
But to pull it back to before we started talking about this game, you were saying how do we get that multiverse working? Part of our hope here is that because we have these different cities, we're going to be seeing in parallel how different decisions play out. And one of the key insights we talked about at the beginning that we want players to have is that they're going to be highly differential outcomes for different cities depending on the actions they take and how fast they take them. We get to see modeled out as we advance year by year, month by month, we haven't locked in the timescale yet, how these different decisions lead to very different outcomes.

Danny Crichton:
And I think one of the interesting things here, this is a fairly large game in terms of the complexity, this kind of trade off between small but complex, big but relatively simple. We're kind of in the middle to fairly large, I think we're still targeting 24, 21, 24 players. They have quite a bit of decision making, so it's a very, very big space. How do you make this accessible for folks from an onboarding experience? How do you get into the game? How do you get people to understand what's going on when there's so much going on?
Because we just hosted a game last night, a brand new one that Lawrence designed, and the feedback we got from this beta test was really, "I loved it, it was super fun, but the first 5, 10 minutes was so overwhelming," because we gave a lot of rules very quickly. And then the rules were on a PowerPoint and we took the PowerPoint down and people were like, "I don't know the roles anymore, how do I do..." How do you think about the onboarding experience of something like this? Is that something that you think about right from the beginning or is it something that sort of comes in at the end?

Randy Lubin:
I'd say onboarding starts coming into play, maybe a third into the design process. And part of that's about making sure that we make it as friendly as possible, and there's a few tactics that can get in the mix here. I think one is being really intentional about the design of both briefing materials, whether it's on a slide or in a handout, as well as what the first few actions players take are.
So I'll often think about that from the guise of, have a training wheels round that only engages with a subset of the game mechanics and oftentimes has a lower stakes impact. And whether it's signaled as lower stakes or it's revealed as lower stakes later, it means that if a player completely does something across purposes to their goal, they're not out of the game from the get go.
What that might look like in this game here is, and the game that we're talking about, this economic automation game, the first decision is going to likely be that one around autonomous vehicles. And that is one that none of the business players are playing as self-driving car companies or autonomous vehicle companies and the labor folks, they're not representing gig workers, unions of Uber, Lyft drivers, so none of them are going to be particularly hindered by the outcome of that first round.
And we could sort of say, "Hey, look, for this first round, we're just going to be exploring this basic action that we're going to be taking again and again throughout the game, which is like you're going to get a sheet that has a decision to be made, there's going to be some check boxes, you have some nuance on how to decide it, and you are going to be discussing with your peers about what outcome you're going to get to." And so by having this toy example, and this will probably be one with fewer check boxes than some of the later dilemmas, and again, less obviously adversarial interests as well, it's a way of dipping your toe in and just getting, build that muscle memory with the core actions you're going to be taking throughout the game.

Danny Crichton:
One of the questions I have is when you think about the early stages of these games, everything's path dependent. Everything has to connect. Your early decisions affect your later decisions, it's very hard to undo that. On the other hand, if you make a bad decision in the first three minutes of a two three hour game, you also don't want to be that player who realizes by minute 10, "I completely effed up, this is the worst thing and I know I've just lost." How do you think about catch up mechanisms? Because in real life there's not a lot of catch up mechanisms, or there's increasingly less catch up mechanisms, if you will, in our cynical times. So how do you think about catching people up and is that part of the experience here or is that something you just have to accept?

Randy Lubin:
I think it depends a lot on the game. I often will think about things from the perspective of, if there are time jumps, then you can use that to slightly equalize things and you can still signal qualitatively like, "Oh, this company is further behind, but that doesn't mean that they have half the budget they would have otherwise. They still have affordances they can pull on. Depending on the game, sometimes if there are random events, like I know in the electric vehicle game there are random events that sometimes they target who's in the lead on some metrics and some who are behind you, you can choose some sort of rubber banding and catch up there.
And I think again, there's a degree to which, so you were mentioning before games where some people are just, they're set up for the tragedy arc. There's a hard role, they're expected to lose. Maybe some players will pull a win out, making sure that that's still fun is important. And sometimes it's by just making sure that they still have interesting, exciting narrative moments. So maybe they don't have the ability to win, but maybe they can still serve as kingmaker. They can sort of look at the first and the second place player and say, "Hey, look, I have a bunch of assets or capabilities that I can lend you, what can you offer me turn?" And so they're salvaging a smaller win out of that.
I've also done games where you have, each player might have a primary goal, but then there are also secondary goals. And it's not like from a victory points perspective you can, even if you lose your primary goal, it's not like enough secondary goals is going to make you the first place player, even if there is a first place player, that you can still at least have satisfaction in, you have other things to pursue which are still very attainable even if you're out of the running for the main thing. I mean there's always an interesting game design question of do you explicitly have a winner and loser or ranked players as a whole or is everyone being graded on their own where you could end up with everyone actually won or did fairly well, which honestly maps I think better to the real world where there's lots of room for positive positive-sum interactions in many, if not all contexts.

Danny Crichton:
[inaudible 00:35:57]. I would say we do rank, the ranking is fun. Or I always say there are people who win and then everyone else, no one's a loser but not as much of a winner as everyone else, and that creates fun. I mean, the tension there is really important. And I think creating the competitive environment, I think most people generally figure out that it's somewhat positive-sum, but it's funky. There's trade-offs, if I help you, it may mean not helping someone else and so I actually have to balance on the convexity of that curve.
But I try to inculcate a little bit of positive-sum the idea that cooperation can be rewarding. What gets interesting there though is to create competition in which characters sort of lose themselves, even though overall we're getting to a better outcome. We see that a lot, I mean particularly in the policy political simulation kind of style of stuff of like, "I will lose re-election, but America's doing great," and who accepts that set up and who does not.
But let me pivot to one more thing, because obviously you're a longtime game designer, have built a lot of different games, but that's not the only thing you do, you also sort of create this community around other game designers and you've really done a lot to build, you've the Foresight Games community. So before we close out here, I'd love to talk a little bit about the community you've been building over the last couple of years and who you're looking for and how do they all connect together?

Randy Lubin:
Yeah, absolutely. And if you're listening to this and you're even a little bit curious, please go to foresight.games us out. I have a very broad definition of both foresight and games. I mean, if it's thinking about possible future scenarios in any form, sure, that sounds great from a foresight perspective. If it's games, if it's slightly more playful than a workshop, then that's good too. I mean, it all exists on a spectrum. And even if you're not a practitioner or a sponsor and you're just curious, come join us too.
And so I created this community because, it's interesting. I mean, we've talked a little bit, there are war games that have come out of the defense side of things that have been going since the Prussians in the mid-1800s that's flourished and had major impacts on actual military strategy. And we've seen it a lot less outside of a military context, and I think there's so much potential there. And I also think we're still, I mean, as evidenced by this conversation, we're still at the early days of figuring out what types of patterns work in what situations, what are some of the really thorny design issues and what tools can we bring to bear against them, and what situation is a game really effective?
The state of the field as I see it now, is that there are a bunch of little clusters of folks doing this all over the globe, and the more that we can share insights, learnings, best practices together, the faster we can discover how these tools, how these types of games can be really powerful. And so that was really the impetus behind creating Foresight Games. And so if you're curious, come hang out. We sometimes do play playtests, have speakers come and talk and share their games or talk about the impacts that their games have had. If you're a practitioner and you want to give a talk, I'd love to have you give a talk, whether it's a lightweight little lightning talk or something more involved that we'll throw up on the YouTube. But it really feels like we're at the dawn of a whole method of practice applied to a whole new set of problems that haven't had a game approach taken to them before. I mean, how do you feel about that?

Danny Crichton:
No, no. I think the community has gotten much bigger. I think there's a lot of folks who want to explore game design. I also just think one aspect of the popularity of video games as one of the most popular media in the world is the fact that more and more people are playing games and they want to see that explored in other facets of the world that are not just entertainment and narrative games, but also can apply to real strategic bargaining and decision making.
I also think that more and more people have experienced games in an academic setting, so business schools have been adding games and simulations, obviously international relations schools have done crisis simulations going back decades, and so I feel like more and more people are experiencing this. But that leads to a big question, even though there's this huge influx of folks, a lot of people want to play as well, there's this foreboding question of AI. And I get asked this, maybe because I work in the tech industry similar to you or at least tech adjacent, everyone's curious about AI and what's it going to do to gaming. Do they design games? Do they help flesh them out? Does it give you the power to do more open spaces? Because instead of having to give you seven prompts and highlighting one, you can just type into a chatbot and say, "This is what I want to do." The game will compute, compute exactly what it wants to do. How bullish or bearish are you on AI influencing the future of game development in the years ahead?

Randy Lubin:
It's a tricky question and one that there's so much uncertainty around as the AI capabilities themselves are changing quickly. I would say short-term, a little bit bearish and long-term bullish just because it feels like technology is getting better and better and better. I think there's very different ways AI can get involved, and you've hit on some of them, but there's AI as other player in the system, potentially if you have a 10 person game but only 7 people show up, maybe AI is able to very easily come in, fill in the gaps there. There's AI as facilitator, judge adjudicator, which can work. And then there's AI as co-designer, which potentially, depending on the type of game work you're doing, you can go from designing one complex game every three months to suddenly you're designing a new one every week within [inaudible 00:40:53].
I think that in the long run, all of those are going to be viable. I think today the headwinds that you race against are that a lot of the AI-generated content is the kind of sloppy. Game design is so much about making a lot of very intentional, very specific choices that deeply align again with the goals, the constraints, and some intuition for how players are going to play that I haven't seen LLMs yet really nail like, "Okay, I'm getting something that is so bespoke to the specific objectives I want." I think it'll get you to something that you can maybe react to as a designer and maybe it'll help explore some ideas that didn't immediately come to mind, but I feel like in the short run, it's not yet at the capability where it allows you to really be super empowered and crank out more games or games that were not yet possible before that really have a wow effect at accomplishing those objectives.

Danny Crichton:
Yeah, I think there's... I mean, obviously with some of the economic simulations we design, there's some pieces of the economic simulation getting raw data that it does fairly well. I think when you get into the design part, what I've struggled with, and people ask all the time for this, but it just doesn't really work, is it doesn't have a theory of mind. It doesn't know how people respond. It doesn't know what people know. When we host a group of senators or generals, whatever the case may be, so much of the design to create that experience and make it really magical for folks that are very experienced, is to know exactly the threshold of what they know and don't know. You both have to understand, okay, they get this, this is very obvious, this is mainstream thought in, let's say DC, or another world capital, but what they're not seeing is this, this is a factor that they've never run into. It'll surprise them and as soon as they do, they're going to be very curious with that.
And so you have to have a theory of mind. You have to understand what other people are knowing. You have to have a little bit of metacognition. Then obviously that's like an AGI, ASI thing, and so we don't have that today. So I am bullish at some of the most chore-like aspects, the activities of game design. There's always these pieces where you're like, "I'm just going to spend a day filling out boxes and make the simulation actually calculate and compute." I do think AI does a fairly decent or can do an okay job, but the more that it becomes about scoping parsimony, finding exactly what to put into the game and whatnot, it's really quite bad and I don't expect it to get better very soon.

Randy Lubin:
Yeah, I think that deeply aligns with what I'm thinking. And it aligns within other context, I can position AI in my mind as like, okay, it's a decent research assistant or a pretty smart intern, but it's not, as you were saying, it doesn't have that full context. And I think part of the context, part of it's about really knowing your players and the theory of mind that they bring to.
I think the other part of it is, maybe it's a training data problem, is that a lot of the games that we design are dealing with cutting edge complex systems, immersions within complex systems. So we didn't go super deep on this earlier in the conversation, but one of the things I love in the design process is talking to experts who are on that cutting edge, who probably have a very messy internal mental model and trying to tease that out, get them to be a little more explicit in what their mental model is and then as game designers, we get to go, "Okay, cool. What's the toy model we want to represent in the game?" But if the AI, because the training data or whatever else doesn't have access to that messy internal model that maybe has never been articulated by the expert to a lay audience, they're going to be a year or two behind whatever the dynamics that we want to explore are anyway.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I think we've determined that us two humans are not going to be replaced by AI, as all humans say they will. But Randy, where can people find your portfolio online?

Randy Lubin:
So I just do a lot of my foresight game design through my studio Leveraged Play. So if you Google, "Leveraged Play," you could find it there. If you're curious about my consumer games, you could find them at Diegetic Games or just search, "Randy Lubin games," or "randylubin.itch.io." You'll see a wide spectrum of things out there. And as we discussed earlier, if you would love to be part of the Foresight Games community, I would absolutely love to have you come stop by, share what you're working on or curious about, and get to see what other people are experimenting on.

Danny Crichton:
Well, Randy, always so great to talk to you. Thanks for joining us.

Randy Lubin:
Thank you so much for having me on.

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