Why Games Work: Emotional Arcs, Flow States, and Meaningful Play (with Jesse Schell)

Why are games so deeply engaging? What psychological principles make game design such a powerful tool for shaping attention, emotion, and learning?

Game design is not a niche skill. It's one of the most refined disciplines we have for designing attention, emotion, and motivation. If you're designing anything for people, game design can sharpen your craft.

 This episode reveals how the craft of game design can teach us to build more immersive, emotionally resonant experiences. Whether you're designing products, learning experiences, or interactive systems, the lessons from games can help you design for joy, focus, and transformation.

About Our Guest:
Jesse Schell is a legendary figure in game design. He’s designed games for Disney, pioneered virtual reality, built theme park attractions, created award-winning educational games, and teaches at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. His book, The Art of Game Design, is one of the most widely recommended texts in the field.

What You'll Hear:

• Why game designers focus on creating experiences, not just products
• The surprising power of introspection in understanding users
• How "toy-first" thinking leads to more meaningful play
• The science behind flow and how it keeps players engaged
• How to use emotional arcs and tension-release patterns in your designs
• Why gamification often fails—and what to do instead
• The psychology of challenge, curiosity, and fun
• What designers in other fields can borrow from games

Questions Explored:

• What is the difference between a toy and a game?
• How do we design for emotional resonance?
• Can introspection really be a reliable design method?
• What does it mean to balance choices and desires?
• Why is iteration crucial to creating fun?

Key Takeaways:

• Games are machines for generating experiences. That means the psychology of the player is central to every design decision.
• Designers must understand not just what people do—but why they feel, focus, and engage.
• Play is not trivial. It's one of the most powerful modes of learning and transformation.
• Flow, balance, and emotional arcs aren't just game design tools—they're experience design tools.

To make things more engaging, don’t just "gamify"—design for meaningful engagement.

thedesignpsychologist.substack.com is the podcast newsletter. Get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. How do you design a game?
And what is it about games that make us care so deeply while we're playing it,
even though nothing real is at stake. Why do we crave challenge and risk and rules
when we could be doing something easy like relaxing? And how is it that well
-designed games can make time disappear and emotions rise and learning happen by
accident? In short, what is the design psychology of games.
Today, I'm excited to share a conversation I had with Jesse Shell,
who I'll introduce momentarily. Together, we explore questions like, why are games so
good at capturing attention? What do great game designers understand about emotion and
curiosity and challenge? What are the lenses of game design?
How does the concept of flow guide how we structure engagement and difficulty?
What can educators learn from games and what happens when education forgets about
fun? And why might play be one of the most overlooked engines of innovation and
modern design? By the end of this conversation, you'll see game design not as a
niche specialty, but as a masterclass in designing for human attention,
joy, and engagement. So let's have a listen as I introduce and speak with today's
guest.
Welcome to The Design Psychologist. We've got a really, really cool guest for today.
It's Jesse Schell. He has an amazing and long career designing games and other forms
of interactive entertainment. His work has included everything from pioneering virtual
reality experiences back in the '90s on up to designing theme park attractions and
building educational games and a whole spectrum of video games. He served as the
creative director at Disney Imagineering, helping to shape the future of interactive
entertainment. Today, he is CEO of Shell Games, which has led the design of a
multitude of games across many genres, many projects big and small, spanning more
than two decades. He is also a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology
Center. I wanted to make sure I got that right. He is also the author of a book
that we'll be talking about a lot today, which is the art of game design, and it's
basically considered like the Bible of game design and development. Everyone in that
industry immediately recommends it, and it's an absolute must read if you're into
this stuff. And that book, again, the art of game design, a book of lenses,
and the book's really fun to read. It takes you through. It unfolds these concepts
and gets you deeper into it. It's like following a journey. And it's almost like a
game itself. And so we'll be speaking to the author of that, which is again, is
Jesse Schell. Jesse, thank you for joining us today. - So glad to be here. - Yeah,
absolutely. So first thing I wanted to talk about is kind of your relationship with
psychology. And I know that's not your background, but reading this, you know, you
get into other things. You them to anthropology and art and, of course, technology,
software development, but it has a very, very strong central, I would say,
psychological presence. And I wonder, what's your relationship with that? Is it
something that you picked up through necessity of designing games and you just kind
of got good at or you just independently interested in it and read a whole lot
about it? You know, how does that kind of relate to you? Yeah, I mean, I guess
I'm interested in all kinds of things. The things that interest me the most are
always anything that seems magical.
And the center of any kind of magical experience is always about psychology.
That's what anything that feels magic, it's because something is happening in the
brain that is a little Unexpected and if you want to create surprising unexpected
experiences in the brain you got to understand what's going on up there And so
partly just humans are interesting So the psychology part of it is interesting, but
but really to create great entertainment experiences It's it's 100 % about psychology.
Yeah, and it's really, you know, one of the central ideas is that the Experience is
different from the game. So we're talking about game design, and I kind of would
like everyone in the audience to sort of adopt for this episode, the hat of, I'm
not just a designer of experiences, but I'm making games, but you talk about how
the experience is different from the game. And one of the quotes you have here
early on in the book is, "And this is the paradox of experiences on one level.
How do we, and Nebulous, and on another level, they are all we know. Creating them
is all a game designer cares about. We must use every means we can muster to
comprehend, understand, and master the nature of the human experience.
And I get the impression that that's mentality is kind of a core thing that you
have to Yeah, yeah, yeah. Design. Yeah, absolutely. Because so many people,
particularly people newer to game design, they're so focused on the game itself,
right? If it's the board game, they're focused on the pieces and the parts and the
rules. And if it's a video game, they're thinking about technology or pictures or
music or coding. They're thinking about like the game itself, but like a game is,
a game is nothing. A game is an inert object. And no one really cares about
creating a great game to the extent that it's an inert object. The only thing
people care about is when you play. When you play a game, a game is a machine
that generates experiences. And so you can think about the machine all day,
but what you really should be thinking about are the experiences you want it to
generate. And to do that, you have to understand the nature of human experience. And
one of the examples, you gave some good examples throughout the book, and one is on
the topic of essential experiences over here. And in chapter two,
could you tell us about a story and you could be as detailed or not as you like,
where that was the savior of the day, is the ability to like,
okay, I'm making a game and I'm going to stop and consider what is the essential
experience that I want people to actually have and versus me just,
you know, focusing on here's the pieces and here's the characters and things like
that. Oh, yeah, boy, there's just so many to pick from.
I guess One that jumps to mind is working on sort of Disney's Toontown.
So Toontown was, Toontown Online was a massively multiplayer game for kids. It was
the first, you know, massively multiplayer game for kids. Anybody had made, up till
then, everything had been kind of medieval fantasy or like these really hard edged
war games. And here we were making a thing that was going to be, you know,
designed 100 % for kids and family.
What is going to be at the center of this? And we recognize,
okay, there's a lot of things we want. We want the playfulness of cartoons. We want
the idea that like bending reality is kind of part of cartoons.
But then at some point we realized we needed to get conflict in there because you
can't have a good game without some kind
Um, and then well, what, what kind of conflict makes sense in this world? And as
we realized the things that we loved about cartoons, the thing that all cartoon
characters had in common was they're very playful, right?
They're cause, cause, you know, they're, they're, uh, that, that's just the nature of
kind of cartoon characters. They're playful and we're like, okay, well, if, if
they're playful, the opposite of play. Well, that would be work. So what if the
enemies in this world, what if they're all about work? So we made these bad guys
who are, you know, business robots. And we made a whole story where they're trying
to take over Toontown 'cause they wanna turn it into office buildings and each
office building is a factory that makes more business robots. And so the playful
cartoon characters would throw dream pies and squirt seltzer bottles and the business
robots, who we call the cogs, they would fight back with, they would bounce a check
at you and all these sort of business things. They'd squirt a fountain pen at you.
And you might look at that and say, "Okay, well, that's fine and that's goofy," but
we realized this was hitting some essence of experience in some important ways. One
is it got to the essence of what it meant to be a cartoon character. But then we
wanted this to be a game for families. We wanted this to be a game that kids and
parents would play together. And we realized that the theme of work versus play was
a really important theme for families. Because it's something they talk about,
think about all the time, right? On a deeper level, right?
Because they like, hey, you know, my kids are playing too much and they should be
doing their homework. Hey, as an adult, maybe I'm working too much and I should be
playing with my kids more. There's this balance between work and play that's the
right balance. And so we realized this is a theme that adults and kids can both
relate to. And guess what? It happens to be a theme that touches right about what
cartoons are about and understanding that like essence, like that realizing,
okay, we need to make experiences that encapsulate that essence, that really helped
us focus our design. Yeah, I think that your book that, you know, you disentangle a
lot of ideas that we normally think that we use words like fun and toy and play,
but it
Um, so in, um, in chapter four, you've got a section kind of after, uh, defining a
bunch of things and you just have a set of bullet points here and it says, uh, it
kind of has a conclusion. Fun is pleasure with surprises. Play is manipulation that
satisfies curiosity. A toy is an object you play with,
a good toy is an object that's fun to play with, and a game is a problem -solving
activity approached with a playful attitude. - Right, right, right. - Yeah,
and I thought, you know, that's just, it brings so much clarity to thinking about
games. And, you know, when you got into the story about the lemmings, I never knew
the whole thing with the lemmings. And you talk about the toy aspect of something,
and I want you to break that down a little bit for the audience, but that was a
favorite game growing up. I really love the Super Nintendo version of Lemmings.
It was just really captivating. You could spend hours on this thing.
And you brought this dynamic of the toy aspect of things and how that relates to
the game. Yeah. No, I was just talking today, I was talking to Mike Dell, he made
a game called Thrasher, which was like, it was on the Apple Vision Pro,
so kind of a bit of a groundbreaking game. And he gave a lecture about this
morning talking about designing the toy over the game. And a lot of people don't
understand what you mean, the toy versus the game. And the difference between toys
and games is that they're both fun to play with, but games have goals.
Toys don't have goals, right? So soccer's a game, but a ball, a ball's just a toy,
right? And a lot of people jump in and game design, they're like, "Okay, no, I'm
making a game, I don't care about toys, toys aren't important to me." But most good
games have a good toy at the center. Football is a good toy, right? It's a great
thing to play with and you can do all these things with it. And then you can
build a game around a good toy. And so most designers are a little afraid of just
starting with a toy because it's like, well, it doesn't have a goal. That freaks me
out. Like, okay, that's, that's fine because if I can make a thing that is so fun,
it doesn't even need a goal, right? What makes a toy fun usually is you start
making your own goals, Right, it's so fun. You're just like, oh, what will it feel
like if I pick it up? Well, how far can I throw it? What if I stretch it like
that you you start making your own goals and that's kind of what makes a good toy?
It makes it makes you makes you kind of want to touch it and engage with it And
he talked about exactly that because thrashers this game where you you control this
like dragon flying dragon thing and he was inspired a bit by
when people perform with ribbons, right? You have a ribbon on a string and you spin
it all around. And how that seems like, hey, that's kind of a fun toy. How can I
make a game out of that? So he figured out how to bring that experience into the
Apple Vision Pro and then figured out ways to make a game out of it. And I think
that a lot, like, yeah, Lemmings was a super great example. And yeah, the story I
tell in the book is the same guy who created Lemmings who started with this notion
of like, hey, I've got this vision of like, you're controlling all these little,
you're kind of getting all these little marching characters to go to a place, you're
not controlling them directly, you're kind of setting their direction. But he didn't
know what the game was. And the team he was working with is like, what's the game?
He's like, I don't know, let's just build it and see, is it fun? And he realized
it was fun and then they made a goal. And then the same guy went on to create
off the auto. And he went exactly the same way. Wouldn't it be fun if there was a
city full of people and you'd go mess with it? And everyone's like, "What's the
game?" He's like, "I don't know. Let's go build it and play around and figure it
out." Yeah. I mean, it almost reminds me as an analogy, if you were making music,
you might say like, "Well, I really want these impactful song lyrics or something
like that." But then maybe the engineer just puts on music you can dance to and it
just, there's an aspect of it, it immediately resonates. And then there's the kind
of sort of hittier aspect of it where the strategy comes into play or the thinking
comes into play. Yeah, no, that's an example. Yeah, so another thing I think is
interesting is the concept of a theme sort of, I think it kind of relates to this,
where you've got an example of a pirate game and it kind of relates to the central
idea of a central experience.
You kind of go through the story, I don't know if you wanted to touch on it here,
but it's a task to create a game about pirates that's fun and how do you do that
and is it capturing the essence of it? Yeah, we Yeah, no, we tried to create this
interactive Pirates of the Caribbean game way back in the day. It was for the thing
called Disney Quest, it was way back before the Johnny Depp movie and all that. All
we had to go off of was the ride, the old Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And we
were trying to figure out how do you make that interactive and it kind of made us
ask the question of like, well, okay, if we're going to adapt this, well, what is
it really about? Like we know it's about pirates, but What does that mean?
What does that mean emotionally? And yeah,
we realized at some point that like what it means to be a pirate is something
really, really important, really, really special because the thing about pirates is
they have total freedom. They throw off all of society and they're gonna go off and
do whatever they want, nobody can stop me. I'm gonna go off and do this and nobody
can stop me. And the thing that we made this realization is, everyone on earth is
five seconds away from being a pirate. We don't get to be a pirate in our ordinary
everyday life. And we could see it when we started building our prototype 'cause in
the proto, this is amazing. And you put on these 3D glasses, you went into this
room where all the walls were projection and we had like a, you're You're standing
on this boat deck that would tip and tilt and you fire these cannons and make
these huge booms. And it was a remarkable experience. And people just in seconds,
like you'd see little old ladies, kind of like, I don't know if this is for me.
And then five seconds later, they would be blasting the heck out of these other
boats. And just sort of realizing this notion of giving total freedom to do whatever
you want. You're empowered, you and your little band of friends, you're gonna go off
and do whatever you feel like. And to be able to kind of fulfill that fantasy,
it's more than just about what we know about pirates. You can look at the history
of pirates all day and that's fine, you might take some inspiration there. But to
understand that, like the emotion that's like at the heart of it is that's what you
want to key in on. - Yeah, one of the things that's, you know, when you think
about getting it right as a game, it's different from designing, say, a SaaS product
where you've got these sets of known tasks and that's already challenging enough.
Doing a game has got to be fun. And in the book you talked about, I love this
discussion about introspection And you sort of contrast it with sort of behavioral
science. And for the listeners who might not know in the history of psychology, in
the beginning, in the late 1800s, when folks are first grappling with this idea of
like, okay, how do you study psychology? It's inside your mind. How do you actually
get to it? There was a school of thought and methodology called structuralism where
they say, okay, we're gonna have people describe what's in their minds and we're to
give them stimuli and put something in their hand or expose them to things and have
them walk through describing what's going on in their mind. And then over time that
was shown not to be like very scientifically reliable. So behaviorism takes over in
other things and psychology moves much more into the laboratory, but then there's
sort of this soft method of introspection. And when you talked about it, I think
that The method that you guys use as introspection, it's not violating any kind of
science in my opinion because you're not like trying to publish theory based upon it
and saying, this is how mine works based upon my introspection theory, but you are
using applied psychology to sort of answer just core questions like, does this get
boring or does it? And so, I'd like you to kind of sort of give us an idea of
what that introspection process looks like for you or any game designer who's doing
that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a thing that I think is very important and I try
and work with my students on it. I think of introspection very much as a kind of
a craft because it seems like, "Oh, it's just something I do. I look at how I
feel. That's how I feel." But there's actually, it is actually a discipline that you
can get meaningfully better at. So I think of this sort of spectrum, because you
have some designers who will say, "I can only make games that I like playing
because how else would I know if they were good?" And okay, I understand that on
some level, but that means you're very limited. You're only limited to making the
kind of games that you like. And you could say, "Oh, that's how it should be for
everyone, but wait, what if you want to make a game that's the kind of game five
-year -old girls, like, are we supposed to leave it to them to figure out how to do
that? I often think of it as buying a gift, right? Sure,
I can buy gifts for myself, I know what I like, but there's a real art to buying
gifts for someone else. It means you have to get to know them and understand them
and what do they like. And When you start, like for me personally,
I would rather make a game that other people like than a game that I like because
I don't know. I just find that more personally rewarding. So anyway,
so on one end of it is, okay, I only make things that I like and that's easy. On
the other end of it, you've got people saying, well, How you feel that anything
doesn't matter at all everything must be done in a scientific way You're going to
come up with a hypothesis about how will your game is fun You're going to bring in
appropriate audience members. You're going to play you're gonna put them in a lab
You're gonna you're gonna play test. You're gonna you're gonna you're gonna watch
what they do You're gonna have them fill out surveys. Yep, you can go in that
point of view a lot of like I Talked to a lot of people in the kind of the HCI
field, you know, human computer interaction field, and they'll often say, well, you
know, you are not the user, right? Like, you are not the user. Like, okay, yes,
that's true, all true. However, you are a human being, and I fundamentally believe
that human beings are more similar than they are different. And so,
you can take the 100 % lab approach, but it's very time consuming. If you can learn
to objectively use your own introspection,
you can save just a huge amount of time. Just a tremendous, tremendous amount of
time. But to do that, it means you have to watch how you feel and not let it
there's this whole sort of Heisenberg problem of like, oh, like just think of
something as simple as a movie. You watch a movie and you have a certain
experience. It's very different if you're constantly thinking about like, well, how do
I feel now? How do I feel now? How do I feel now? How do I feel now? If you're
clumsy with that, it kind of spoils the experience, right? So some people will say,
oh, it can't be done. You can't because you're gonna interfere by watching yourself.
However, the truth is with practice, you can do it and you can sneak up on it.
You can certainly do things where like, I'm not going to think about this at all
until afterwards. So, you can have the experience and then say, okay, now let me
think back. And now let me think about my recent memories and how do I feel about
that? Now I'm going to get all analytical. You can do that. Another technique is I
call sneaking glances, right? Okay, I'm Okay, I'm gonna have the experience and I'm
not gonna think about it much, but once in a while I'm gonna be like, "How do I
feel right now? Why do I feel that way?" Okay, I'm done. Now I'm back in the
experience and be able to do that. And then with practice, a lot of people are
skeptical that you can do this, but you absolutely can do it. With practice, you
can learn to have the experience and watch yourself at the same time. And it's a
lot like meditating. And in fact, I think personally, I think that meditation,
and by that, I mean the kind of Zen style meditation, you know, not so much a
guided meditation, but more meditation where you just simply sit and observe your own
breath and try and keep your mind quiet,
that those skills, you can translate that into I'm having the experience And I'm
watching myself have the experience, but I'm not messing with it. I'm having it in
a genuine way But I can watch myself at the same time some some Zen People they'll
they'll do a thing where they'll still spend their whole day Narrating everything
they do now. I'm opening the cabinet now. I'm taking out the box of rice now I'm
pouring out the rice and they just get in this habit of like Observing, observing,
observing, kind of this two -mind approach. And then you take it even further because
when you're observing your own mind, that's okay,
that's you and what you like and that's fine. If you can take it even a step
farther than that and get your head into what is it like to be another person?
Say you need to make a game for 10 year old girls. Well, what the hell do you
know about if you, if you're, you know, maybe if you're a woman, you were a 10
year old girl a long time ago. If you're a man, you were probably never a 10 year
old girl. You could say that's impossible. Well, that could be, but one of the ways
we do it is immersion, like, okay, what are 10 year old girls doing today? What
are the foods they like? What are they, what videos are they watching on, TikTok or
whatever? What music are they listening to? What books do they read? And you immerse
yourself in that world and you kind of like, okay, you're reading this, talking
about this, thinking about this, looking at these kind of colors, you like these
kind of clothes. And you immerse yourself and immerse yourself and you kind of like,
okay, I'm kind of getting it. And then you kind of go in and do certain
experiences trying to hold on to that point of view. It's hard work, but it can be
done, it's possible and it can save you a huge amount of time because it can get
you to key insights more quickly than if you just do it from the outside.
So I'm a big believer in sort of the discipline of introspection. It's super
fascinating. I mean, while you're talking about it, I'm not familiar with whether or
not there's literature on it, methodological in the human factors world, but it
sounds like it's a potential frontier, because if it works at all, you got to think
scientists ought to be able to find the nuggets that are working if they kind of
are open -minded enough to pursue it that way. You know, it's a great question. I
have not seen it largely pursued. Often, it's a little bit forbidden territory for
science, because They view introspection as a flawed endeavor,
right? And so they suggest you stay away from it. But anyone who creates art,
and I guess art is one thing, entertainment is something else. Certainly anyone who
creates entertainment, they have to do it all the time. You have to get your head
into like, what does the audience think about, care about. I often think about like
one of my favorite pieces of literature is the opening to Goethe's Faust,
right? Everybody knows, you know, the story of Faust about a guy making the deal
with the devil, but very few people have gone and like actually read it as it was
written because it's a very strange structure. He's got the story about Faust making
the deal with the devil, but What's a story in a story? The outer story is a
story of we start with God and the angels, and the devil shows up and they make a
bet about like, "Hey, what's going to happen with this Faust guy? Who's going to
win out God or the devil?" Okay, so it's like God and the devil making, they're
the outer frame, and then the Faust on the inner frame. Well, there's a frame
outside of God and the devil, and So what the heck could be above that?
What's above God in the devil? And it's three individuals It's this holy trinity
that that that girls it puts out there that is the the poet the comedian and the
theater owner and So Faust actually opens with the three of them having a
conversation about well, what kind of show, are we gonna put on?" And they have
this long conversation where they all are very respectful of each other.
The theater owners like, "Look, we gotta make money, but I know we can't do it if
it's not artful." And the poets like, "Look, I can make it as artful as possible
if it doesn't connect with the people and they don't enjoy it. That's why we need
the entertainer, we need the comedian here." And, you that focus on like those three
working together, when you're in that mindset of like, what do people actually want
and need? Now you're in the realm of psychology and you're in the realm of like,
you've got to get into people's heads. And so you got to understand what's in your
own heads so you can understand what's in their heads. - And is this how you use
the holographic design lens? Thinking about lens number 10, we're talking about a
holographic design. And you're looking at something through many different lenses.
Yeah, that concept of the holographic design is looking at the mechanics and the
experience at the same time. Because you can look at the mechanics of your game.
Oh, you do this and that happens, you do this and that happens. But you can also
look at, oh, these are the experienced people, experienced someone's happening. But in
order to be really successful, you have to see how it all fits together. When this
mechanic causes this event in the mind, and that causes someone to want to engage
with this mechanic, and that causes this event in the mind, and to be able to see
how those are all related, and you've got to see them simultaneously. You can't look
at them in isolation, right? I often think of it as looking at skin and skeleton
at the same time, the skin being the beautiful experience, the skeleton being,
you know, the skeleton and the organs, those are all gross and on the inside, but
those are the mechanics that make the outer experience possible. And you have to see
and understand how they're related to each other. You can't think of mechanics in
isolation from experience or experience in isolation from mechanics. And to me it
sounds like a potentially trainable method of just observation. You could say like,
okay, you as a game designer, you want this observation technique. Can you look at
this display or this action or this interaction and be able to pull information
about this aspect of it and this aspect of it and kind of, right?
- Yeah. - One of the exercises I make my students do, we would call it the minds
of memory, or sometimes we call it the toolbox, but the idea was you're gonna list
100 games that you've played in your life. But there's a restriction. You've gotta
start from when you were five years old. And I need at least three games from when
you were five years old, at least three from when you were six, three from when
you were seven, on and on up through your life and anyway you've got to make a
list of a hundred of these games and then for each of the games that you found
you have to tell me something useful something that could be useful to you as a
designer and and the best way to do that is always to say the game had this
mechanic and it made me feel this way that's When you spend your time thinking
about how does this mechanic makes me feel this way? This mechanic makes me feel
this way then that's when you start to do this intuitively And I like to make them
do it over this the course of their life because they can they start to learn
About how they've changed over time And and they started to learn the thing they're
often surprised. They're like wow that mechanic from when I was five years result, I
still, that still works. That's still something I'd be interested in engaged with
now, but then anyway, so that it's, but yes, you have to, you do that by
exercising because most games are made out of bits and pieces of other games that
we've experienced. Very few games are like, oh, I made this up out of just whole
cloth and nothing. It's almost always like, oh, there was this part in this other
game and I like that And I wanted to bring it here. I think of Magic the
Gathering as a huge success. Richard Garfield didn't make that up out of nothing.
There was an old board game that had a deck building mechanic in it. And he always
loved it, but, and he had thought, well, what if it wasn't, what if he didn't need
a board? What if that wasn't there? And he adapted into a sort of a simpler
system. Anyway, But almost all things are borrowed or merged that way.
There's lots of hybridizing going on in the world of game design. - Right, right. We
won part of the book chapter 10, I thought was really fascinating. You talk about
there are four mental abilities that make game play possible.
And you talk about modeling kind of the ability for the human mind to model the
world. 'Cause we have to, in order to operate, we--
and empathy and imagination. Could you talk about a little bit of that and kind of
how you bring that approach to game design? Like what it is, basically,
you don't have to go into all of the details of each of the four points. Modeling,
focus, empathy and imagination.
You know, kind of like what that means to you as a game designer. - Yeah, yeah, I
mean, I definitely, you know, make the argument that those are the sort of four
most critical aspects of the mind that make games possible,
right? Because we always think we're interacting with the real world.
But we don't understand the real world. The real world would be overwhelming to us.
A simple example that I think of as, you know, we think about, you know, you look
at light, well, the only light we see is visible light. There's all this infrared
light out there that we don't see. It would be super useful if we did see it,
because then you could see bad things coming at you in the dark, but we don't see
it. And there's a good reason for it. The reason is we're glowing. We don't imagine
that we're glowing, we don't think that we're glowing the dark, but we absolutely
are. That's why you can see somebody, if you think, you know, if you use an
infrared camera, you can see people in the dark because you're emitting infrared
light, your eyeballs are full of all this infrared light bouncing around, and if you
could see it, it would blind you, right? So as a result, we're just blind to it,
it's there, but it's like, it's all part of reality, but like not part of our
reality. we have a model of like what reality is anyway since the mind is good at
modeling building models so that we can get through the world that's great because
all games are models and so people say oh it's just a game well guess what I mean
when you say it's just a game you mean it's just a model well guess what
everything's just a model and so so when you when you when you bring people game
structures the brain's ready to take them in because the brain loves models, it
loves simplified models, it's how we think about the world.
And imagination is crucial because it's the ability to kind of imagine what might
happen next. Well, this could happen, that could happen. And that's absolutely
necessary for playing any kind of game.
And empathy is really important. Any kind of multiplayer situation, whether it's,
well, partly you need it in a story to care about a story at all. You have to
have empathy, right? You have to relate to some of the characters. So any kind of
story, you need that empathy, but then any kind of game as well. Even if you're in
opposition, that was the whole point of the book Ender's Game is that, you know,
the ultimate general has the ultimate empathy because they can understand how their
enemy is feeling at any given moment, right? But of course, that's going to rip you
apart as a general, because if you have ultimate empathy, how can you destroy this
person, right? But empathy is important to us in any kind of competitive or
cooperative situation. Anyway, so all of these things are really important,
and you just need to bring them in and use them because that's what creating these
experiences is. Yeah, and the focus part of that, those four things. Yeah,
so Czech sent me high for folks in the audience who might not know that was a
Hungarian -American psychologist who spent a bunch of time studying the flow state.
And whenever you think about a time where you get really into a task, it could be
a game or something you're really into or good at, and you lose track of time. You
kind of lose track of the space around you, and you're just really in this flow
state, and that's been studied. And there's some relationship between the difficulty
of something. So if it's too hard, then you're going to get frustrated. If it's
harder than the skill level that you're at, then you're going to be frustrated. If
your skill level is way above the difficulty, then you're going to be bored. So
then there's, you know, when you plot it on a sort of a two -dimensional area, you
got this little cone, this narrow space in the middle, where that's where the flow
state happens, where it's this ideal balance between the challenge level and the
player's skill levels. That's why when you're playing a game, it gets harder and
harder as you're going, but you're trying to keep this balance of keeping at fun.
And is that something that flow state? How do you do explicitly set out to study
that? Or is it just something that's implicitly in the back of your mind as you're
playtesting? Well, it's one of these things. So one thing I'll put out there is
relatively rare that the field of psychology shows up with stuff that game designers
can actually use because I don't know, I'm going to just go out there and say, I
don't know, 98 % of the field of psychology is, I don't know, I'll call it negative
psychology, right, or pathologies, right? They're all focused. It's most of it's
focused on, oh, these people had all these bad feelings. Someone's depressed.
Somebody's anxious. Well, okay. That's great. And it's important that you help people
with that. It's super important to help people with that. I don't need, I don't
need those bad feelings in my game. I need, hey, psychologists, tell me what you've
learned about the positive feelings. Well, okay, they have some stuff, but it's,
there's less. So when we, when we stumble upon them, like to set me high with
flow, it's like, oh, damn, yeah, that's actually like, we can use that because we're
trying when we're making games, we're generally trying to architect these really
positive feelings, Right? It's why, I don't know, Ryan and Desi have been really
important for us. They have self -determination theory is kind of their thing, right?
And that has been really, there's a great book, "Glue to Games," which kind of
connects the tenets of self -determination theory to the world of game design.
These things are important. And so being able to kind of like, okay,
what have we learned? What can we take away that the psychologists have learned
about it, but then also, you know, you want to look everywhere. You want to like,
okay, what have the psychologists learned about it, but then you can see other
places. So I find this fascinating connection between, you look at Shakespeare High
talking about flow state. Well, guess what? Go look at the educators. they talk
about the zone of proximal development. Same thing. It's the same thing. You look at
there's a great book, you look at the magicians, what have they learned? There's a
great book called Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms, probably about 1960. And he
charts out what your interest curves should look like over time. And part of his
insight there is he's talking about flow state, but he's making the insightful
observation that you don't want to just stay in the middle of that cone that you're
talking about. You'd think like, "Oh, okay, if boredom is on one side and
frustrations on the other side, I should stay right up the middle." Nope,
that's wrong. That's actually kind of a slightly boring place to be. Not as boring
is being in the boredom state, but it stays too much the same. When you ping pong
back and forth between, oh, I'm getting a little bored. Oh, whoa, something just
happened. Oh, it's too much. Okay. Oh, now I got it. Now everything's okay.
Actually, it's getting a little boring. Oh, wait, no, something happened. That kind
of ping ponging back and forth, that variation, and it's a pattern that I don't
know that has a name. I just call it tense and release. It's a very human pattern
of like, "Oh, things got tense. Oh, we're released." You see it in breathing. You
inhale until it's tense and then you exhale and it's ultimate release. And then it's
tense and release. That cycle of tense release shows up everywhere. Anyway, so like
you take these different things that different people have found, you see how they're
kind of overlaid. And that's why, you know, that's why I called the book "The Book
of Lenses" because out of just this this realization that there's no one way to
create a game. When I started trying to write that book, I was younger and I'm
talking to veteran game designers and I said, "Hey, I'm going to try to write this
book about game design." There's not a lot of books about game design.
Someone I respected a lot told me, "No, that's because you can't. You can't write a
good book about game design." I'm like, "You can't. You can't." He So, well, here's
the problem. Different games are really different from each other. They're very
different. And so if you give somebody advice, it's gonna be good for one game.
It's gonna be bad advice for another game 'cause the games are too different from
each other. And I was like, oh, God, I guess I kind of see how that's right. The
same advice for hopscotch isn't always the right advice for Call of Duty. Like,
what, how am I gonna resolve this? And I made this realization that advice can be
wrong, but questions can never be wrong. And so if I make my book all about
questions that you asked yourself, okay, the question might not be relevant to your
game. Okay, at worst, it's not relevant, but it's not wrong. And so the idea being
like, okay, taking as many of these different points of view as possible and finding
And using kind of questions to like, well, what if we look at it from this point
of view, this point of view, this point of view, this point of view, if you're
looking from as many as possible, that's when you're going to really get to the
great design. And that means you want to look everywhere,
look at the psychologists and the musicians and the architects and the magicians and
the playwrights and on and on and on. Take the wisdom from everywhere, figure out
where it overlaps, but also figure out where there are unique insights that couldn't
come from anywhere else. - Yeah, one of the things I love in the book where you
talk about interest curves, you get into a story, you don't have to go through it
here, but where you're in the amusement park working there as a kid, and the story
with the juggling, and then the show started off boring, but then you got advice.
- Yeah, yeah. - I don't know how to make it better. - Yeah. - But then that led you
to kind of understand this, the sequencing of events. - Yeah. - And then you get
thrown out of that cone and you're like, oh, it's too difficult suddenly. Oh, but
now I'm, that provided the excitement and now I've got the new kind of sword or a
gun and now I can, that's really easy for a little bit. And, you know, you kind
of take them for a ride. You kind of provide this journey for folks.
- I was very lucky to have this guy as as a mentor, because he's the one who
introduced me to magic and showmanship, which really that book really changed my
perspective on things quite a bit, because it was the first time I'd seen anything
close to a formal method of analyzing an entertainment experience.
And just for him to be able to chart it out and say, "See,
"Look at this diagram when we look at your show from here." Like you've got good
elements, but if we put them in this different order, it's gonna create a different
shape. And I think the audience is gonna like it more because they like this shape
more. That was just this whole insight for me about like, oh my God, like there
are ways the mind works so that you can kind of model and get a handle on.
- Right, one I want to make sure I ask you is, is gamification and your perspective
on that, because gamification of it is of course different from making a game, but
what's your perspective on like the relationship between the two and how people you
think should view those two things? Yeah, so I, I'm always very cautious. It's not
a term that I tend to use because I, what I don't like about the term
gamification, it suggests that, oh, we should take this thing and make it into a
game. And I'm like, it's usually not what people usually say, like, oh, we should
gamify this. What they're usually really saying is, well, no,
we should make this more enjoyable or more engaging. Usually it's like, we want to
make this more engaging and games are engaging. So that's why they use the phrase
gamifying, but the part that's dangerous is there's a zillion ways to make bad
games, right? There's bad games all the time. And you can gamify your thing and if
you use bad game design principles, yep, you gamified it, but you gamified it and
you turned your thing into a bad game and like, what is it doing? That's not what
you want. What you actually want is you want what you're creating to be engaging,
which means you need to understand what is exactly, what is it exactly that's
engaging? And I've been focusing on this a lot lately. I'm actually working on a
new book with Barbara Chamberlain or we're gonna book the Art of Educational Game
Design
because creating engaging games That's one thing, that's what the art of game design
is all about, but creating things that actually change people for the better, that's
a bit of a different thing. You use some of the same stuff, but you have to
figure out like, how am I going, how do I want to transform this person, and how
am I going to make that transformational experience actually engaging? And we have
this method of, hey, There's six kinds of engagement and you want to analyze,
like what kind of engagement do I want to bring to it? So I guess that's the
thing, when people talk about, hey, I want to gamify it, really, I'm like, okay,
stop. You mean you want it to be engaging? Let's talk about how do you need it to
be engaging and why do you need to be socially engaging? Should, would story
engagement help you more here? Would a challenge of some kind create the kind of
engagement that is going to work best for the people that you are having doing your
experience, you know, et cetera. So, yeah, I always say,
okay, I get where you're going with gamification, but let's figure out what you
really want. Gotcha. The one thing that's always fascinated me is the concept of
balance in games, especially if you're dealing with like a real time strategy and
you've got the three different types of creatures and they're equally strong. And
you've got a whole chapter in it and you talk about the different types of
balancing. I'll read one set really interesting between choices and desires.
When choices are greater than desires, the player is overwhelmed. When desires are
greater than the number of choices, then the player is frustrated by the limitations.
And then when choices are roughly equal to desires, then the player has a feeling
of freedom and fulfillment. And, you know, is balancing, is this just an aspect of
playtesting? Is it just massive amounts of playtesting? Is it a goal? How do you
strategize around that? Right. So it's all the techniques we're talking about.
Playtesting is a way to get there. Some of it is introspection and intuition,
right, but yeah, playtesting is definitely part of it. Like, you know, take a real
example there from the retail world is the story about like head and shoulders
shampoo.
Obviously, if you go to the store and you want a certain kind of a thing and it's
not there, you're frustrated, right? And maybe you're like, hey, I'm looking for, I'm
looking for dandruff shampoo, but like, oh, man, this kind isn't really good for dry
hair and I have dry hair. So you want some variety there, right? So not enough,
that's when you're like frustrated. The head and shoulders people found, in one of
the problems you have in retail is the more kinds of a thing you have in the
store, the more shelf space you get. which creates this weird pressure where like,
like if you have like many, many varieties of a thing, you get more shelf space,
which creates a pressure for you to create probably a lot of varieties. Sounds good,
more varieties good, right? Well, there was a time that head and shoulders people
had 44 kinds of head and shoulders out there. You go to the store, try to buy
your shampoo, good Lord, how do I pick the one? It's overwhelmingly, how the hell
would this? I'm getting proud, you You know what I mean? And what they did is they
culled back and they said, "We're going to go from 44 down to 11." And when they
went from 44 down to 11, they sold more shampoo. They had one quarter of the shelf
space, but they were selling more shampoo than they were before because they were in
that middle zone where people felt autonomy because they're like, "Okay, I can make
a choice, but I'm not overwhelmed by choice." And so partly get there,
you know, through intuition, but a lot of part of it is through playtesting. Very
often, one of the kinds of playtesting we do is looking for when are people up
against a wall? When should we, when should we add and when, when, like, are there
game options nobody's using? Take them away. Just get them out of there. It's just
cluttering up your game. Get it out of there. But then sometimes you got something
that, like, um, When we worked on the game, I expect you to die, which is kind of
a little James Bond parody. We wanted to have you in the super villain's car,
so we put a champagne bottle in the car. And this is a VR game, and people are
like, "Whoa, champagne bottle's cool, this is so luxurious." And then,
of course, they would try and open the champagne bottle. And we're like, "Oh, yeah,
shoot, I guess, okay. Maybe we should get rid of this shit. No, they want to open
it. Let's support that. So, okay, we, all right, we changed it. Pop, you can pop
the cork. And now they're like, oh, where's the champagne? Oh yeah, all right, okay.
So now we got to have it liquid. Okay, now we got to simulate liquid and they can
drink it and they can spread it around. Okay, cool, that was great. They love that.
Well, guess what they do now? Now they're like, I've got an empty bottle. Can I
break it? And if it's unbreakable, they're like, "Uh, this is fake boo." "Oh, okay,
we'll support it. "Now we'll support it so you can break the bottle, "brakes into
pieces, there's glass everywhere, "if that's what you want." Okay, and they're like,
"Whoa, I can break the bottles, it's so realistic." And we're like, "Okay, great."
And then they're like, "Oh, wait, can I take this broken glass "and cut the wires
on the bomb?" I'm like, "Oh, my God, we didn't even, "you're supposed to use the
knife for that "and that's a puzzle and now you can go around it." Okay, I guess,
like you have to make these choices about how far do you go? Cause if you go
really far there, it can make people feel really in control, right? But this is one
of these balances, like when do I go and add more options and possibilities?
And when do I'm like, nah, that's enough. But the play testing helps you find the
right ones. We wouldn't have thought of going down this rabbit hole with a champagne
bottle, but the players were consistently doing it. And we're like, okay, this is
where people want to go. We're going to support it. And so sometimes, this is why
it's so important to leave time for iteration. And people who don't make games often
don't understand this. We'll work for people from theme parks sometimes. And we'll
explain to them like, yeah, if you want to make an interactive theme park ride,
we're going to leave a lot of time to change it and change it and change it and
change it and they'll get mad sometimes and they'll say, why? Why wouldn't you just
do it right the first time? And because the truth is it's too complex,
it's too dynamic for you to imagine what that means to do it right the first time.
So instead you have to leave time to iterate and that's how you get to a thing
everybody loves. - Oh, I love this. So much great stuff to talk about here.
And so, Jesse Schell, today you still consult to help any type of game developer
create their games or is it you creating your own games for listeners who want to
either reach out or... Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, Schell Games, we're a pretty
sizable studio. We've got about 160 people. We're usually working on about half a
dozen games at a time, but we do a mix of making our own games,
but then also we work with partners all the time in all kinds of different fields.
And so sometimes we're making like whole games for them or whole games in
partnership with them or they'll have an IP or something or a new technology and
they want games for that. We love working that way. And then Sometimes we have
people who say, "Hey, we need kind of a game perspective, and we'll do some
consulting that way to kind of help people figure out how can they get a more game
-like perspective on a product they're designing." We're happy to do that as well.
Awesome stuff. And how do people find you or what you're working on or things that
you're doing out there? Yeah, the easiest thing, you can go to shellgames .com. You
can see what's going on with the studio, you can also go to jessyshell .com and see
all the things that are going on with me personally. Awesome. So, ladies and
gentlemen, that's Jesse Schell, the art of game design, a book of lenses, and then
your new book that you're working on that'll come out soon as Art of Educational.
We'll see how soon it is, but yeah, the Art of Educational Game Design, I'd say
keep an eye out for it, we've been working hard on it for a while, we're hoping
to have it out in the next couple of years. Yeah, sounds great. Jesse, thank you
so much for joining us today. Alright, thank you so much, Thomas. So, to wrap
things up, this conversation with Jesse Shell reminds us that game design isn't just
a craft for entertainment. It's a discipline for understanding and shaping human
experience in profoundly immersive ways. We talked about how games capture attention
and create powerful, emotional arcs. And they do this all while keeping us fully
engaged in a made -up world with imagined rules and invented stakes.
We explored how things like challenge and curiosity and feedback pave the way for
flow. And how game designers have methods for fine -tuning that balance.
And we heard about how the structure of play, when it's intentional, can teach and
can transform and even unlock creativity in ways that few other mediums can.
Well -designed games aren't just an escape from reality. In a way, they're a deeper
engagement with our own reality. They show us how carefully crafted challenges and
the offering of meaningful choices and just the right amount of uncertainty can
create powerful emotional experiences and even lasting growth. And when we play,
we're not just immersed in a system, we're looking into a mirror. Games can reveal
how we learn and things about how we struggle, how we adapt, and even what we
value. And if we want to understand the human psyche, not just how it works,
but what it longs for, then game design is a field worth studying deeply.