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62: Creating Worlds, Game Design & Education w/ Seth Coster
15 Plays5 years ago
In this podcast, we are joined by Seth Coster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredibly success on their video and mobile games. Best known for titles Crashlands and Levelhead, Butterscotch Shenanigans was founded by three brothers with no explicit academic background in video game creation. Seth studied to become a Certified Financial Analyst, started a law graduate program, but soon realized he enjoyed the games he created in his free time much more. Brothers Sam, Seth, and Adam Coster also host their own podcast, Coffee with Butterscotch.
The reason we invited Seth was because we see an inherent connection between video game design and education, as well as his own story connecting to a lot of our work at the Human Restoration Project. (And it was awesome to have a connection through Nick, who he went to college with.) I actually introduce the concept of learning by doing by showcasing a clip from Indie Game: The Movie, where developers of Super Meat Boy explain that teaching a player to run and jump through a pop up that shows them how to do it, is not nearly as effective as just presenting a large gap and having the player keep trying until they ultimately succeed (see the show notes!)
Enjoy this array of topics from game design to grading to chaotic science experiments.
GUESTS
Seth Coster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredibly success on their video and mobile games Crashlands and Levelhead.
Nick Covington, Creative Director of Human Restoration Project, advocate of equitable gradeless learning and realignment of assessment.
RESOURCES
- Indie Game: The Movie Super Meat Boy Clip
- Coffee with Butterscotch (Podcast)
- GDC: Design by Chaos
- Butterscotch Shenanigans
- Medium (Chris McNutt): Game Design, Classroom Design, and the Faux Use of Gamification
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:04
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons.
00:00:11
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All of our work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast, are available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Paul Kim, Brandon Peters, and Dina Lowe.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:25
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
00:00:34
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Music Music Music
00:00:45
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Hello and welcome to Season 3, Episode 20 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:52
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My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Seth Koster's Background and Journey
00:00:56
Speaker
In this podcast, we are joined by Seth Koster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredible success on their video and mobile games, best known for titles Crashlands and Levelhead.
00:01:09
Speaker
Butterscotch Shenanigans was founded by three brothers with no explicit background in video game creation.
00:01:14
Speaker
Seth was studying to become a certified financial analyst, and he started a law graduate program, and he soon realized that the games that he was making in his free time were just a lot more enjoyable to do.
00:01:26
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So him and his two other brothers started their own company.
00:01:29
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Brothers Sam, Seth, and Adam Koster also host their own podcast called Coffee with Butterscotch.
00:01:35
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So Seth, the reason that we invited you on today was because we just saw this inherent connection between video game design and education, as well as your own story connecting to a lot of our work at HRP.
00:01:47
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And, I mean, in addition, you also know Nick, you went to college with him.
00:01:51
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So I use a lot of game examples
Teaching through Game Design
00:01:53
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in my class.
00:01:53
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I introduce the concept of learning by doing by showcasing a clip from Indie Game the Movie, where the developers of the game Super Meat Boy, they explain that teaching a player to run by having a pop-up pop-up and say, you know, press B and forward to run is not very effective.
00:02:12
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When you start out, you want to teach the player how to play.
00:02:15
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You need to make sure that they understand every mechanic of the game.
00:02:19
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So every level in the first chapter needs to have some example forcing the player to do something in order to beat the level that they will need further in the game.
00:02:28
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So there's a level, I think level three, that is just a gap.
00:02:33
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And the only way to get over that gap is to hold down run and jump.
00:02:37
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You can't get it any other way.
00:02:38
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You can't just keep jumping around.
00:02:40
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You won't jump far enough.
00:02:41
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And that's to make sure that the player understands that in order to get over far gaps that you need to press and hold the run button and jump across it.
00:02:49
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It's simple.
00:02:50
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It sounds like a no-brainer, but it's something that usually in games it would just say, hold run to jump far.
00:02:56
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Most people will just skip the text and they will forget.
00:02:59
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Now, just in case somebody didn't play that level, a couple levels later I reiterate and I give them another section of a level that requires them to run and jump to make sure that they know how to do it because it's important.
00:03:11
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Like all these mechanics are very important.
00:03:13
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And each level in the chapter is another level that pushes that.
00:03:17
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Like there's a level where you need to continuously jump up one wall because there's no other wall to jump to.
00:03:22
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That's me teaching the player that you can do this.
00:03:25
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And everybody in the world will see a problem and want to solve it.
00:03:28
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So if you see something where it's just a wall and you don't realize you can keep jumping up the wall, you're going to try it right away.
00:03:34
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And once you try it yourself, you've taught yourself, not only do you feel smart, like you've figured out something yourself, you also now for sure know how to do that from then on in the game.
00:03:43
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So all these levels of introduction go, they go through everything.
00:03:47
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And once you've basically cleared out all the things you can do with Meat Boy, then you start introducing new mechanics.
00:03:56
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And I want to dive more into the game development side here in a second.
00:03:59
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That's really going to be the bulk of the podcast.
00:04:01
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Before we even get there, though, let's talk a little about who you are and how you basically got into the video game industry because you didn't start off pursuing that.
00:04:09
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Why did you not just start with video game development?
00:04:12
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So I'm from Iowa, which there it is.
00:04:16
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That's that's the thing right there.
00:04:19
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In Iowa, there's no games industry there.
00:04:23
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You may not have known that the original creators of Guitar Hero were in Iowa City.
00:04:29
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So there was one.
00:04:31
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They got bought by Activision and then immediately closed because Activision was like, all right, well, we got this IP now.
00:04:36
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See you later.
00:04:37
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So everybody came to the office after the buyout and found security guards handing them their severance packages.
00:04:44
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So that's kind of like Iowa's history with game development.
00:04:48
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And so as I was growing up, I was always interested in games, but they just seemed like these things that emerged from the ether.
00:04:56
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You know, you'd go to to a GameStop or CompUSA at the time, which I think is out of business now, go to the shelves and there were the games.
00:05:05
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Don't know how they got there.
00:05:06
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Don't know how they were made.
00:05:07
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And so it was always kind of this just weird, opaque thing.
00:05:13
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I knew there was programming involved.
00:05:14
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So when I started college and so Nick, you and I went to college together.
00:05:21
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I just want to throw that out there as get that out of the podcast.
00:05:26
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I started college in California, actually.
00:05:28
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I went to the University of Southern California for my first semester to pursue film.
00:05:33
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I didn't get into the film school.
00:05:34
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And I thought, well,
00:05:36
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I mean, here I am in California.
00:05:37
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I think video games might come from here.
00:05:40
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So I'm going to start poking around in computer science and kind of see if I can learn some programming because I'm confident that that's involved in game development.
00:05:52
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Took some computer science courses, got D's.
00:05:55
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Could not figure out how to program through that means.
00:06:01
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And so I kind of gave up on that, ended up transferring over to University of Northern Iowa, which is where Nick and I both went.
00:06:09
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And that's where I studied business and finance and all that stuff.
00:06:13
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Because I kind of resigned myself to thinking, clearly, I don't have what it takes to actually build games myself.
00:06:21
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But I do know that it's a business, right?
00:06:24
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Like there's a business side of everything.
00:06:28
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And if I can learn a lot about that, then I can work in any industry, including games.
00:06:34
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So I kind of went on from that.
00:06:37
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I got my CFA charter, so I became a chartered financial analyst.
00:06:41
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And after that, I started going to law school and I was doing a joint MBA law degree.
00:06:47
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So I was working on that stuff.
00:06:50
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And in the process, this was around the time that some new tools started being brought to market.
00:06:57
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Tools like Unity 3D, which is a really popular tool nowadays to build games, as well as Game Maker.
00:07:04
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And so...
00:07:06
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And so I discovered GameMaker while I was in law school and it had this kind of like drag and drop interface where you didn't have to really know how to program.
00:07:15
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You could just kind of like throw these little commands and kind of chain them together and you didn't have to memorize them or anything.
00:07:21
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You could just kind of piece it together.
00:07:24
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So I started making a game in 2010 while I was in law school, and it pretty quickly consumed all of my time.
00:07:34
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And I kind of like migrated to the back of my law school classrooms, and I was just like making games instead of taking notes.
00:07:42
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And after my first year of law school, I realized this is just how I'm going to do it.
00:07:47
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So I kind of transitioned out of that into actually programming.
00:07:50
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So I slowly transitioned from the drag and drop interface over to code.
Critique of Traditional Education Systems
00:07:56
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And after my first year of law school, I started applying for game development jobs, got one, and then within about a year after that was running my own studio.
00:08:05
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So it was kind of a super roundabout path.
00:08:11
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And I had gotten it in my head that I wasn't...
00:08:15
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I wasn't capable of doing this primarily because the normal avenues that you would take, like go to school, go to college, take a class to learn the thing.
00:08:25
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I just completely failed at this.
00:08:27
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And it was especially, I think, devastating for me because school had always been no problem for me.
00:08:33
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Like I'd go, I'd take classes and, and I was, I was one of those people who would kind of like cruise through the class and, and get a B without any problem.
00:08:42
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And oftentimes an A.
00:08:45
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And then I'd go into a computer science class thinking I'm hot stuff and then just completely bomb the thing, which really just like put a hit into my confidence.
00:08:54
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So I think that, I don't know, I think that speaks a lot to how people learn differently and how not every approach is going to work the same for everybody.
00:09:05
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And I think there's an unfortunate reality to that, which is that the path to becoming good at something is
00:09:13
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the path to learning a skill or whatever is, is rarely clear.
00:09:16
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And the options you have to kind of get there are also rarely clear, especially with such firmly established norms of how people learn things like just college classes, going through training programs, that kind of stuff.
00:09:29
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So yeah, I'm fully self-taught and been doing that for 10 years now.
00:09:34
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That's interesting, Seth, because it ties into so much of what we believe in systemically changing the education system.
00:09:40
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I was kind of the same way.
00:09:42
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I did pretty well in school without a lot of effort in history and English, but I did very poorly in math and science.
00:09:48
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So I didn't really pursue them.
00:09:50
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And that wasn't really because I didn't find it interesting.
00:09:53
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It's just because of the grade and the way that it affects my self-esteem.
00:09:57
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However, that means I missed out on a lot of interesting things because I was afraid of failure.
00:10:02
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Yeah, yeah.
00:10:03
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It pushes you to take things that you're pretty confident you already know, you know, so that you can just get those grades.
00:10:09
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It kind of it kind of pushes you into that like talent mindset, which is I'm naturally good at math and I'm naturally bad at writing.
00:10:15
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And that's just naturally who I am.
00:10:17
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And these are fixed aspects of my person, you know.
00:10:22
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And I think that that's and there's also that problem of recovery, which is,
00:10:26
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You're halfway through a semester, you've got an F. What's your best chance?
00:10:31
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A C maybe, right?
00:10:33
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So you're just screwed now.
00:10:35
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That's just where you're at and you can never get that A, right?
00:10:39
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So even if you turn around and learn literally all the material,
00:10:45
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and ace the final 100% and demonstrate, you know what, I have full mastery over this subject.
00:10:51
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Guess what?
00:10:51
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You're average.
00:10:52
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You got to see, right?
00:10:55
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And I think there are certain aspects of that that make learning a punishing experience instead of an exploratory, fun, just enjoyable thing.
00:11:09
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Yeah, I was literally just talking with my students today about this because we spend a lot of time.
00:11:14
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I do grading a lot differently than most classes.
00:11:17
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So we were actually just looking.
00:11:18
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I have the slide up for my thing to talk about Cohn's work where he says, right, grades reduced student interest in learning.
00:11:24
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Grades reduce student preference for challenging tasks.
00:11:27
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Grades reduce the quality of student thinking.
00:11:30
Speaker
And I mean, Seth, I think, you know, you nailed that grading quandary with the perspective of somebody who has like been in education for a decade, you know, is like, how is it that kids can do that?
00:11:41
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And then, yeah, we put them in these narrow boxes that say that they're perfectly average.
00:11:46
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You know, it's crazy because I use butterscotch shenanigans a lot with my kids because I teach an econ class.
00:11:51
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To talk about that exact same kind of thing with entrepreneurship is like we put up these narrow boxes for kids to say that if you don't go through these particular pathways, you're not going to unlock X. And the reality is you don't know what X is ever going to be for you until you go off and try to do something.
00:12:07
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And then I pull up a BS on the Google Play Store and I was like, look at how many downloads Crashlands has at $4.99 each and do the math there.
00:12:17
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guys.
00:12:18
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And then I pull up all the bios and I say, like, here's here's Seth Koster.
00:12:22
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And I went to college with Seth and he was studying economics.
00:12:26
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And I said, here's his both of his brothers who have no experience in gaming.
00:12:30
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And then I play the videos in the games.
00:12:32
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And, you know, we talk about that passion and that drive and how no amount of like.
00:12:37
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You can't backfill or educate that passion and that drive to want to do something.
00:12:42
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But, you know, as soon as you set your minds on something, then you can absolutely find, like you said, any pathway to get to whatever that next goal is.
00:12:50
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And it's just it's so cool to be able to use that as a powerful example, you know, of Iowa boys made good.
00:12:56
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Yeah.
00:12:56
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One big aspect of being a game designer is understanding psychology, you know, understanding how people respond to things.
00:13:04
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their environments.
00:13:05
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So there's the, you know, you heard of the fundamental attribution error, which is like, you see somebody doing a thing and then you assume, Hey, that's just the kind of thing that that person does.
00:13:16
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Right.
00:13:16
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Like that's a, that's just a thing that's baked into their persona.
00:13:20
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So maybe you see somebody on the street yelling at somebody just randomly.
00:13:25
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You're like, wow, that person's a jerk.
00:13:26
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Right.
00:13:27
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It's possible that maybe they're yelling at somebody who just attacked them.
00:13:30
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You know, like you don't really know what exactly it is that's happening.
00:13:34
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And maybe this person has never yelled at anybody before, and maybe they never will after this.
00:13:40
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But you just caught them in that moment.
00:13:42
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And that's now something that you believe about that person.
00:13:45
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And I think, you know, understanding that people sort of like who they are is a really...
00:13:53
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really potent combination of something internal and external, right?
00:13:57
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So people respond to their environment.
00:13:59
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They respond to their circumstances.
00:14:00
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They respond to how they're treated, just all these different things.
00:14:05
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And so when it comes to learning, when it comes to the grades, all that stuff, you know, you can like, you know, you said that you can't like educate the passion into somebody, but you can educate it out of them, which is,
00:14:20
Speaker
which is which is um unfortunate and and that that comes to do with the psychology of of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation which is you know there's all these studies about how like as soon as you start paying somebody to do a task they want to do it less right because now they've all of a sudden started to think about
00:14:40
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the value of the thing that they're doing instead of just enjoying it and getting the inherent value that comes from it.
00:14:47
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And of course, like any kind of reward punishment system, like a grading system or something can only really serve to do that.
00:14:56
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And it's unfortunate, but I think I don't really know of a better way.
00:15:01
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And I think that's the problem.
00:15:03
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I don't know.
00:15:04
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Do you ever find yourself pursuing research then to design your games?
00:15:07
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Like, are you seeking this out actively?
00:15:09
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Yeah, but it's always to meet a specific end.
00:15:14
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So I think a really weird example is, so we have this game Crashlands, and in the game, you crash land your escape pod on this alien planet.
00:15:23
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You got to go harvest materials, and you always come back to your base, right?
00:15:27
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Like you set up your little base, you build, you put floors down and walls, and you can build furniture and stuff.
00:15:32
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You go out and you collect materials, you come back to your base.
00:15:36
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And there was a time where
00:15:39
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the game was structured such that instead of being in the middle of this area, you were on the edge.
00:15:46
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So you would kind of land like on the edge of an island.
00:15:48
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And as you got toward the center of the island, things would get more difficult.
00:15:52
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So the enemies would get stronger and the materials would become more valuable and that kind of thing.
00:15:57
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And it felt terrible.
00:15:59
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And it doesn't make any sense intuitively because who cares?
00:16:03
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Like you're just going out in the world and collecting materials and coming back, right?
00:16:08
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And then we came across this study of how spider monkeys forage.
00:16:16
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And researchers had tagged spider monkeys and tracked their movements and noticed that they would create this kind of looping spiral pattern.
00:16:23
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So they would have like a central base of operations and they would kind of go out, maybe like go out north one day for a couple hours and get some food and come back.
00:16:32
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The next day they'd kind of go northeast and loop back and come back.
00:16:35
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And then the next day they go southwest and loop back.
00:16:38
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And sometimes they would like loop out farther, but it was always like built around some centralized point.
00:16:44
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And it was always like they would always end up making a circular pattern.
00:16:48
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Right.
00:16:48
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And so so we thought.
00:16:51
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maybe this is kind of baked into people as well.
00:16:54
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Like we have this idea of there being a home, like you have a home base and, and it feels like that should just be in the middle.
00:17:02
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It should just be in the middle of everything.
00:17:04
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And as you, as you move out into the world, you're going to make these patterns and you kind of loop out and you can go farther and farther.
00:17:10
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And so we started watching players movements.
00:17:12
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Once we transitioned to that model and players were doing the exact same thing that these monkeys were doing.
00:17:20
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So,
00:17:22
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So the way that we kind of approach these problems is, you know, we always have a theory of like, okay, here's what we want the player to do.
00:17:28
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Let's build this game system and see if it works.
00:17:32
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And most of the time it doesn't work on the first try.
00:17:36
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So that's when we have to go in and dig in and do the research and try to figure out what's happening.
00:17:41
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So...
00:17:41
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And I wanted to talk to you about design by chaos.
00:17:44
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So this is the planning process that you spoke about at the Game Developer Conference this year.
Game Development Methodologies
00:17:50
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What does that mean to design by chaos?
00:17:53
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Sure.
00:17:53
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Well, it's the method by which we make our games, which is essentially we operate on a very high level concept that we kind of work toward.
00:18:06
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Are you familiar with the concept of a biased random walk?
00:18:10
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This is something that bacteria do, which is bacteria, they can sort of detect whether or not they're like sort of like concentrations of chemicals in their environment, okay?
00:18:23
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So all they really know is like, hey, there's more of this than there was a second ago, or there's less of this than there was a second ago, right?
00:18:30
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And so what bacteria do is they just randomly flip on sort of like a timer.
00:18:36
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Like every couple of seconds, they'll flip around and go a different way.
00:18:39
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And if there's more of the stuff that they want, they'll flip a little bit less.
00:18:44
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Okay.
00:18:45
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So over time, they end up right smack in the middle of the nutrients.
00:18:51
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And this is called a biased random walk.
00:18:54
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So, so we try to be pretty humble about what we know about the world.
00:19:01
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And we believe that we're probably wrong about everything.
00:19:05
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And that we probably know just as much about what's going on around us as that bacteria knows about what's going on in its, I don't know, droplet, whatever it's in.
00:19:17
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And if you think about your past experiences in life, almost every time you make a plan, things end up pretty differently.
00:19:28
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I mean, every time, right?
00:19:30
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So like you get up in the morning, you're like, you know what?
00:19:32
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I'm going to go to the gym today.
00:19:34
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And then you don't, right?
00:19:36
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You just don't because you just changed your mind at some point or maybe it snows that day or whatever.
00:19:41
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So you don't know what's going to happen six hours from now.
00:19:46
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And so when we think about how large game companies produce their games, they do so on these two year long timetables where they've got a process.
00:19:56
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They've got their pre-production.
00:19:57
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It's been six months.
00:19:59
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Concept art, game design documents, team of designers.
00:20:02
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They hire up exactly to fit the needs of the project.
00:20:05
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They pitch, they get a budget from their publisher.
00:20:09
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Now they have milestones.
00:20:10
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They got to hit those milestones on a timeline.
00:20:14
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Something that we know about
00:20:15
Speaker
about game companies and and i don't know how much you guys hear about how the games industry tends to treat its employees um but crunch is a is a plague across the entire games industry employees of game studios tend to work 80 hours a week just constantly all the time they tend to get paid a half to a third of what somebody with their same skill set would get paid in a different industry
00:20:42
Speaker
Um, it's to the point where, and actually, so I have another GDC talk that I'm working on for a couple of months from now.
00:20:49
Speaker
And I referenced the fact that, that people who've been in the games industry a long time call themselves veterans.
00:20:56
Speaker
Uh, like as if it's a war or something, you know, like as if they're just surviving.
00:21:00
Speaker
Um, so it's, it's a brutal industry, which, which to me says that, that that model doesn't actually work.
00:21:07
Speaker
Right.
00:21:08
Speaker
Like, like, how could it possibly be that you could spec out this project, make these plans at every single time?
00:21:13
Speaker
The only way to get it done is to work everybody to the bone until they basically die.
00:21:17
Speaker
Right.
00:21:18
Speaker
It means your plan was just wrong.
00:21:21
Speaker
And then also games get postponed.
00:21:23
Speaker
They go over budget.
00:21:24
Speaker
They launch with these horribly buggy just messes.
00:21:28
Speaker
And then they have to do day one patches to fix all the thousands of things that went wrong.
00:21:32
Speaker
So there's a clear process problem there, and it comes down to having an incredible amount of confidence in your ability to see the future.
00:21:42
Speaker
So we say, I don't think so.
00:21:44
Speaker
I don't think you can do that.
00:21:46
Speaker
So instead, we try to operate in the present, and we basically just continuously reinterpret and iterate over the game as we see it.
00:21:57
Speaker
And we try to just sort of like continuously wiggle the game around like that bacteria until we get it to the point where it lands somewhat close to what our original vision was.
00:22:11
Speaker
And sometimes our original vision is wrong and we have to kind of recalibrate that.
00:22:17
Speaker
But as long as we are continuously iterating on it and getting it toward a point where it's more fun, more interesting, then yeah, it'll just become what it is.
00:22:28
Speaker
And it's gonna be fairly fun and engaging at pretty much every point.
00:22:32
Speaker
along the way because there's no there's no specific like set of you know all right here's the 30 exact things that need to be there for the game to be done you know we can just put it in a player's hands at pretty much any point and it's still fine and it's still fun so that's kind of the that's the philosophy that kind of goes behind uh how we make our games
00:22:52
Speaker
What I could think about, and one of the things that drew me towards that design by chaos idea applied in the classroom is because there's kind of this little mini debate being waged in education circles right now between, you know, ooh, should education follow a more explicit instruction, direct instruction model, which is very much based in
00:23:14
Speaker
teacher talk and modeling and students basically mimicking sort of those teacher responses.
00:23:20
Speaker
So that way, right, they can gather up some kind of basic skills and be successful in the next level of stuff.
00:23:26
Speaker
It's kind of, it's kind of the model that you alluded to earlier, where your success in A is going to lead to B, is going to lead to C, is going to lead to D, you know, call it a guaranteed and viable curriculum, call it direct instruction, you know, call it whatever.
00:23:40
Speaker
And then there seems to be another sort of side to this too,
00:23:43
Speaker
And I think even in some circles, it has a label called, you know, constructivism or even constructionism, which is really based around that idea of iteration.
00:23:53
Speaker
So it's so interesting that, you know, watching the GDC talk and hearing you use that word iteration as it relates to game design and basically the idea that you make the game better by playing it or, you know, you make the game better by playing
00:24:09
Speaker
by doing the game, you know, you don't necessarily track the game to go with the plan.
00:24:15
Speaker
You play the game to, to develop the game.
00:24:19
Speaker
I don't know if I'm representing that idea.
00:24:21
Speaker
You play it and you say, what does this need?
00:24:24
Speaker
Right.
00:24:24
Speaker
You play it and you just think like, what am I feeling?
00:24:27
Speaker
You have to basically analyze your own response to it.
00:24:29
Speaker
Right.
00:24:29
Speaker
What's missing.
00:24:31
Speaker
What is fun about this?
00:24:32
Speaker
How can I take that to the next level?
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:35
Speaker
So yeah,
00:24:36
Speaker
Instead of instead of trying to force the game to be a thing, you're just asking it what it is and what it wants to be.
00:24:44
Speaker
Right.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:45
Speaker
Just do that.
00:24:46
Speaker
Just do that.
00:24:48
Speaker
Just do that.
00:24:49
Speaker
And then that fixes it.
00:24:50
Speaker
And that's what's so crazy, because I feel like in the classroom that and Chris, maybe you're with me on this, too.
00:24:56
Speaker
But like, I feel like that's what I'm doing in the classroom.
00:24:59
Speaker
Right.
00:25:00
Speaker
Like that's what we're doing with students.
00:25:01
Speaker
And it does.
00:25:02
Speaker
It seems like it's that easy.
00:25:04
Speaker
It seems like we can just say, well, just let the students be students.
00:25:08
Speaker
Right.
00:25:08
Speaker
Let the kids be.
00:25:10
Speaker
It's it's let them do the natural learning thing that they are intrinsically designed to do as human beings.
00:25:18
Speaker
And it'll happen.
00:25:19
Speaker
And this this is the battle that Chris and I and I think like progressive education wages is that
00:25:25
Speaker
People like to make education this big, complicated plan and interventions for kids who don't fall into the plan and plans for kids who don't fit those plans.
00:25:34
Speaker
And we make it so complicated.
00:25:36
Speaker
And all we are saying is just strip it down to exactly what you're saying is, right, let the game show itself and then respond to it.
00:25:45
Speaker
Let the child in the classroom show you who they are and respond to them and grow it from there.
00:25:51
Speaker
rather than try to expend so much energy in there.
00:25:55
Speaker
And so, yeah, that moment that I had of watching that video and hearing you talk about iteration and thinking like, this is exactly what we're trying to do in the classroom and developing kids is the approach that you're taking to, you know, your little baby games and then trying to develop them into, right, you know, full blown adult games that go out into the world.
00:26:13
Speaker
Well, not adult games, but yes.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah, we're not in that industry, although it is growing.
00:26:24
Speaker
So is it is that weird?
00:26:25
Speaker
Do you do you see what connections do you see?
00:26:27
Speaker
I guess is what is is something I was really curious about between I don't know, like your classroom experiences or a right way that you see education or clearly you've thought about this.
00:26:38
Speaker
I mean, you mentioned flipped classrooms earlier.
00:26:40
Speaker
So so you have some some sort of a sense of how this works.
00:26:43
Speaker
Well, I mean, I.
00:26:43
Speaker
The thing about people is they're really resilient and they can put up with just about anything.
00:26:48
Speaker
Right.
00:26:50
Speaker
So, you know, in my example of these game studios that are using these methods of making games that are incredibly expensive in the sense that they just they have to continue their turnover is crazy.
00:27:02
Speaker
They're losing employees every day and they're hiring new employees every day.
00:27:06
Speaker
They finish a game, then they fire everybody because that wasn't like finishing the game and starting the next game.
00:27:11
Speaker
We don't know.
00:27:12
Speaker
We need a plan for the next game.
00:27:13
Speaker
We don't have a plan yet.
00:27:14
Speaker
We got to fire everybody and start a new plan.
00:27:16
Speaker
So this is just like churning people in and out.
00:27:19
Speaker
And all of the people who are kind of crushed under this wheel, they're just like, well, you know, I mean, that's just how the games industry is.
00:27:28
Speaker
And it sucks, but it's better than not being in the games industry.
00:27:33
Speaker
And so, you know, I think if you want to take this back to how people respond to educational environments and how people respond to teaching and stuff, whether or not you're teaching people using like the best system, it's very hard to gauge because students can adapt to however bad of a job you're doing.
00:27:57
Speaker
And some of them will still flourish and thrive and some of them will do terribly and some of them will land in the middle, right?
00:28:04
Speaker
And so my brother and I actually taught a course at Washington University about, it was a game development course.
00:28:12
Speaker
And we kind of found the same thing.
00:28:13
Speaker
Like we had our own ideas about how this class was gonna go.
00:28:16
Speaker
And it was essentially, it was a combination of us sort of throwing down like a concept every week and explaining how it works and then giving the students a challenge of, okay,
00:28:30
Speaker
Next week, you're going to come back and you're going to have this thing in your game.
00:28:33
Speaker
Like you will have figured out how to incorporate this into your game.
00:28:37
Speaker
So everybody in the class made their own game.
00:28:39
Speaker
They got to design it themselves.
00:28:40
Speaker
They built it solo.
00:28:43
Speaker
And, and there were, there were some people who just, just took this and ran with it.
00:28:48
Speaker
Like one, one kid ended up making a two and a half hour long Metroidvania style platformer by the end of the semester.
00:28:56
Speaker
And actually we had, we had to make two games.
00:28:57
Speaker
So he made that in eight weeks.
00:28:59
Speaker
It was the last half of the semester.
00:29:01
Speaker
Very impressive.
00:29:03
Speaker
And then we had a couple of kids who, who, who plagiarized.
00:29:05
Speaker
They just went online and stole some source code and just threw it in and submitted it.
00:29:09
Speaker
And we, of course, we turned them into the relevant authorities.
00:29:14
Speaker
And so, you know, we had our ideas about like, oh, this is how this is how you're going to teach a class.
00:29:18
Speaker
Right.
00:29:19
Speaker
Like we're going to do this good.
00:29:20
Speaker
We're going to do this right.
00:29:22
Speaker
And it clearly didn't work for everybody.
00:29:25
Speaker
Some people excelled and some people didn't.
00:29:27
Speaker
And I think the difficulty here is you're you're trying to measure outcomes that have so many possible inputs that it's really.
00:29:38
Speaker
I don't know, like, yeah, you can have the debate all day about which method is better and which one is worse.
00:29:45
Speaker
First, you have to agree on your outcomes, then you have to agree on how you're going to measure those outcomes.
00:29:48
Speaker
And then you have to figure out how to control for the thousands of other things that might go wrong along the way.
00:29:54
Speaker
I have no idea.
00:29:55
Speaker
People are really messy.
00:29:57
Speaker
I don't know.
00:29:57
Speaker
I don't know how you can do it.
00:29:58
Speaker
There's an interesting connection to a point that you brought up earlier to Seth to education, which is how the games industry relates to the education industry.
Game Industry vs. Education Systems
00:30:08
Speaker
So in games, there's a lot of dichotomy between indie game studios like the one that you own, which are these smaller studios that tend to focus on really high quality products.
00:30:18
Speaker
There's a lot of reiteration, there's polish, but they do cater to only a certain audience.
00:30:22
Speaker
They're financially limited in some way, shape or form.
00:30:25
Speaker
Then there's the vastly more financially viable AAA game industry.
00:30:29
Speaker
So they have hundreds of employees, they crank out these massive productions.
00:30:33
Speaker
However, many game players are becoming more and more frustrated with these AAA companies because of how focused they are on trends and gains and markets.
00:30:43
Speaker
They don't see games as an art form.
00:30:46
Speaker
They see it as this percentage growth over time.
00:30:49
Speaker
At least the higher ups see it that way.
00:30:52
Speaker
So as a result, the AAA industry rarely innovates.
00:30:55
Speaker
They just want to make a slightly better version every single year to sell millions upon millions of copies of like FIFA or Call of Duty or something like that.
00:31:03
Speaker
So the connection to education would be that there are these smaller schools and districts that are trying really innovative things, and those are like the indie game studios, whereas the testing industry and those who follow it are kind of like the AAA studios.
00:31:15
Speaker
The testing industry is trying to create or produce students as commodities that have their own knowledge raised up by percentage points, and they see all these different one-off ways to change how humans behave.
00:31:28
Speaker
The same could be said about a lot of different programs like PBIS or SEL or even like the ACT and SAT.
00:31:34
Speaker
There's just this overall neoliberal connection between how big corporations operate and how our children are raised, just like there is a connection between big corporations and really most things that we do.
00:31:44
Speaker
Well, and I think there's an extra layer to that, which is kind of interesting because you're talking about percentage increases, right?
00:31:52
Speaker
And I think, Nick, was it earlier you were talking about, everybody's debating about how to do things slightly better.
00:31:56
Speaker
Like what we're already doing and just do that...
00:32:01
Speaker
better get get 5% more results right and we see this exact same thing when it comes to so we so our current game is called levelhead it's like a it's a game where you build your own levels and then you can publish them and other people can play them it's a mario maker inspired kind of a title
00:32:17
Speaker
and it's been in early access since last April, and we have channels through the game through which our players can give us feedback and suggestions and all that stuff.
00:32:28
Speaker
The goal of early access is to collect that feedback and use that to refine the game.
00:32:34
Speaker
And what we found was that largely the player's suggestions are essentially an endless...
00:32:43
Speaker
stream of ideas about what's already there.
00:32:49
Speaker
Right?
00:32:49
Speaker
So it's like, here's this enemy that does this one thing.
00:32:54
Speaker
I want one just like it, but that does this very slightly different thing.
00:32:58
Speaker
I want a new environment that's like these other two environments, you know, but a little bit different.
00:33:05
Speaker
And so what we rarely get, and we do get it from time to time, but it's pretty rare to get a suggestion for a completely new thing
00:33:13
Speaker
that has no analogies in the game and that doesn't exist already, right?
00:33:19
Speaker
Those are the things that we have to come up with.
00:33:22
Speaker
Like those are, that's the value that we bring to the, like those are the ideas that we bring to the idea generation process is
00:33:29
Speaker
is it's our, we view our job as to sort of, you know, throw a wrench in the whole thing and completely change stuff, add completely new things that nobody would have ever thought of.
00:33:40
Speaker
But largely I think people on average,
00:33:44
Speaker
They look at what's around them and that's the thing that they give commentary about.
00:33:48
Speaker
That's the thing that generates their ideas.
00:33:51
Speaker
And it's pretty rare for somebody to then like take two, three steps back and be like, wait a minute, what if we just didn't?
00:33:57
Speaker
What if we didn't do any of these things and did this completely different thing instead, right?
00:34:01
Speaker
And that also takes, it takes courage and it also takes, it takes a certain safety net, which I think as,
00:34:11
Speaker
you know, where you guys are at as educators, you have certain criteria that you have to be meeting based on an already established system.
00:34:21
Speaker
And I don't know of a way, because I'm not familiar with your, I don't call it an industry, but should I call it an industry?
00:34:30
Speaker
Your field?
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:33
Speaker
So, I mean, in your field, there's very strong established frameworks of how things happen.
00:34:39
Speaker
And I don't know what the model is for somebody to just up and start doing things completely differently and then have...
00:34:48
Speaker
parents come in and be like, yeah, I want, you know what?
00:34:51
Speaker
I want my kid to be in this completely unproven, untested program.
00:34:56
Speaker
Cause it's fine.
00:34:56
Speaker
Like they'll probably turn out fine.
00:34:58
Speaker
It's not a big deal.
00:34:59
Speaker
Right.
00:34:59
Speaker
Um, I assume parents don't operate that way.
00:35:02
Speaker
So you guys have this like different threshold of risk and, and the way that you can operate compared to the kind of stuff that we do.
00:35:08
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:35:09
Speaker
Sounds like a big challenge.
00:35:17
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast so far.
00:35:20
Speaker
If you are interested in diving deeper into progressive education or you want to just support the Human Restoration Project in some way, I encourage you to visit humanrestorationproject.org to learn more about our Patreon, which is the way that you can support us, as well as see all of our fantastic resources, materials, and other podcasts to share.
00:35:40
Speaker
Now, back to our discussion.
00:35:48
Speaker
So we have this kind of a joke, but kind of not a joke saying in our studio, which is anytime somebody is talking about how
00:35:58
Speaker
something is clearly set up badly in the world.
00:36:03
Speaker
Maybe it's that Australia is on fire and there's a lot of things that contributed to that.
00:36:08
Speaker
And that's a big problem, right?
00:36:10
Speaker
Maybe it's that all these animals are dying because the permafrost is, is thawing, or maybe it's because we're not getting a, people are coming out of school and not getting the things that they need to be able to be successful.
00:36:22
Speaker
Right?
00:36:23
Speaker
Like,
00:36:24
Speaker
Or maybe there's a big health crisis like we have in the United States with mental health and physical, I guess people are just falling apart, right?
00:36:31
Speaker
And that's the thing that's happening.
00:36:33
Speaker
And anytime you're thinking like, why is it like this?
00:36:37
Speaker
The answer is literally always, it makes more money this way.
00:36:43
Speaker
And it's not necessarily for you, but it's making a lot more money this way for somebody.
00:36:50
Speaker
And if things changed, then that person would stand to lose, that person or that company or whatever it is, right?
00:36:57
Speaker
And so, I mean, you guys know about the TurboTax lobbying, right?
00:37:02
Speaker
Like TurboTax wants it to be really hard to pay your taxes.
00:37:07
Speaker
So they lobby the IRS to keep
00:37:10
Speaker
really complicated loopholes and regulations and everything in there instead of simplifying the tax code to make it so you could just pay your taxes in a minute right because turbo tax makes more money this way um so it sounds like like
00:37:25
Speaker
like the ace what's the act like the college board the college board is the turbo tax of education is what you're saying like they want they don't like they're not in the business of educating they're in the business of selling tests right and what's amazing is that they're they're a non-profit so despite the billions of dollars that they make they're technically they're technically a non-profit the only criteria is you just spend as much as you make as far as i understand right i mean
00:37:52
Speaker
No profit.
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:53
Speaker
Which means big salaries, right?
00:37:55
Speaker
So, but I think that's just such a simple thing is just to look at, yeah, who has, you know, a vested interest in seeing those things change.
00:38:03
Speaker
And, and it does seem like every time that we have the kind of conversations about why can't things in education be different, people point to colleges and say, well, college admissions process this and that.
00:38:13
Speaker
And what is really interesting, I'll bring this up every single time it comes up is that in Iowa, now Seth, you might have, and I graduated, you and I graduated high school and we had a class rank.
00:38:22
Speaker
And I don't know if you know what yours was.
00:38:23
Speaker
Mine was probably not important enough to even think about.
00:38:26
Speaker
But that was, at least in our time, part of our RAI score, right?
00:38:30
Speaker
The Regents Admissions Index score was based on class rank, ACT score, and the GPA.
00:38:38
Speaker
And so it was really important for kids to have class rank, you know?
00:38:42
Speaker
So it really mattered who was number one, number two, et cetera, because that could determine, you know, the kind of school that you get into or the financial aid package that you get, et cetera.
00:38:50
Speaker
But but in the last couple of years, maybe the last five years, bigger the bigger high schools in Iowa started to drop class rank as part of, you know, data that they reported about students, you know, just kind of seeing seeing how it was not serving learning that, you know, generally the distinctions between, you know, students don't matter so much as, you know, all those other kinds of things.
00:39:12
Speaker
And so as schools started to drop that reporting, the regions actually split their formula.
00:39:19
Speaker
So then there was a formula for schools who could report if they use class rank still.
00:39:24
Speaker
They stick with the old formula.
00:39:25
Speaker
But there was a new one for schools who reported absent that class rank.
00:39:30
Speaker
And then they made the transition in the last year to entirely drop class rank from
00:39:35
Speaker
that the RAI score that kids get.
00:39:38
Speaker
So it's so interesting to think like we can't change class rank because it's so important for college admissions.
00:39:44
Speaker
And how is, how am I going to know where my kid is if they're not number one or number five or number 10 or number 100?
00:39:49
Speaker
When now we live in a, we live in a world where that's not the case at all.
00:39:53
Speaker
And somehow we managed to survive and kids learn and kids thrive.
00:39:57
Speaker
And there's still, there's still, you know, kids who go on to do great and wonderful things in college.
00:40:03
Speaker
And there's still kids who find, you know, other paths.
00:40:05
Speaker
it's weird how that, how that happens, isn't it?
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
Well, not only that, but a class rank is, is a zero sum game, right?
00:40:11
Speaker
Like it's, it's completely relative.
00:40:13
Speaker
So, so being number one at school a versus being number one at school B don't know if, what is that?
00:40:19
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:40:21
Speaker
And also if you're in a school of geniuses and you're number 100, you're,
00:40:25
Speaker
Is that is that good?
00:40:27
Speaker
Is that still good or is it terrible?
00:40:30
Speaker
Right.
00:40:30
Speaker
Big fish in a small pond kind of thing.
00:40:32
Speaker
And it's super interesting, too.
00:40:33
Speaker
I was just talking with my students about this today.
00:40:36
Speaker
But the same thing is happening now with GRE.
00:40:39
Speaker
And I don't know, Seth, you had to take a GRE to get into a.
00:40:43
Speaker
I took the GMAT.
00:40:45
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:40:45
Speaker
Dang it.
00:40:45
Speaker
I didn't know what your program was.
00:40:46
Speaker
That was for the MBA.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:49
Speaker
So the GRE for graduate schools.
00:40:51
Speaker
But now the conversation in the last couple of years has shifted to graduate schools realizing that the kinds of students who are successful in their programs or the kinds of students that they want to come into their programs
00:41:04
Speaker
either don't come in because they don't have the right scores or they're afraid to apply because they have to go through that GRE ringer.
00:41:11
Speaker
It costs money, it costs time and everything else.
00:41:13
Speaker
So, I mean, Ivy League schools have dropped GREs.
00:41:16
Speaker
There's programs within smaller schools who have, you know, made department decisions whether or not to accept it.
00:41:21
Speaker
But it's based exactly on that.
00:41:23
Speaker
It's saying the kinds of students that are successful in our programs are
00:41:29
Speaker
it's irrelevant what their GRE scores are coming in.
00:41:31
Speaker
So why do we use that as a metric in the first place?
00:41:34
Speaker
I really wonder if anything truly matters because, okay, I don't know if you guys had this experience, but when I was in high school, I did all kinds of things.
00:41:47
Speaker
I was interested in everything.
00:41:48
Speaker
I was in art club.
00:41:49
Speaker
I was on swim team.
00:41:51
Speaker
I loved math.
00:41:52
Speaker
I took college courses for chemistry and stuff like that.
00:41:55
Speaker
And I was just kind of all over the place.
00:41:58
Speaker
And I always felt like, well, everybody else in my, not everybody else, but most of the people in my class, like they're here because they just have to be because it's public school and we all got to get our high school degree.
00:42:11
Speaker
Right.
00:42:12
Speaker
And I was so looking forward to the day when I could go to college and be around all these enthusiastic, brilliant people who just love education.
00:42:23
Speaker
They just want to learn stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
Right.
00:42:26
Speaker
And then I went to college and I was like, oh, my God.
00:42:30
Speaker
These are the exact same people that I was going to high school with, just with different faces.
00:42:36
Speaker
Which then, and this was even at USC, which had at the time an under 10 percent acceptance rate.
00:42:44
Speaker
Right.
00:42:45
Speaker
And then I taught this this course at Wash U, which also has very high standards, which means they're screening students based on these tests.
00:42:53
Speaker
They're screening students based on their grades and possibly on their class rank or whatever it is.
00:43:00
Speaker
And they're picking the best of the best.
00:43:02
Speaker
And then and these kids are sitting in our in our classroom that we're teaching.
00:43:06
Speaker
They're paying ninety dollars an hour.
00:43:09
Speaker
to sit in that classroom.
00:43:11
Speaker
And then they steal code from somebody else and submit it as their own assignment.
00:43:18
Speaker
Right.
00:43:19
Speaker
So if, if this screening process worked just at all, this wouldn't have happened.
00:43:29
Speaker
Right.
00:43:29
Speaker
I think that's fair to say, right.
00:43:31
Speaker
It clearly doesn't.
00:43:34
Speaker
It doesn't work in any measurable way that you could point to.
00:43:40
Speaker
What happens when people go to an Ivy League college is they get connections.
00:43:44
Speaker
And it is the case that connections allow you to succeed.
00:43:47
Speaker
It's who you know.
00:43:49
Speaker
But I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence that people coming out of a high-tier college are any more brilliant or have any higher educational achievements necessarily.
00:44:02
Speaker
Right?
00:44:04
Speaker
So what is happening?
00:44:07
Speaker
What are we doing here, guys?
00:44:08
Speaker
We'll track around to the nihilism part there.
00:44:11
Speaker
So what is so crazy, right, is if you think like, oh, if we judge Seth Koster based on your coding programming classes that you took it...
00:44:22
Speaker
If we looked at your transcript, right, we would get a completely different picture of your, right, or we would make certain inferences about your future success, right, in the gaming industry based on a D on your coding thing.
00:44:36
Speaker
But if you think about it, and one of the reasons that Chris and I push gradeless learning so much, and I've seen it happen in my classroom, which is, I think, the most interesting part where people tell me online or colleagues or something will tell me, like,
00:44:51
Speaker
Oh, you know, going gradeless will never work.
00:44:53
Speaker
Kids don't do anything without grades.
00:44:55
Speaker
Kids don't do anything else.
00:44:56
Speaker
And you think like, okay, well, we need to develop a new language to describe these things because exactly what you're saying.
00:45:02
Speaker
It doesn't matter if at the end of the day they get an A, B, C, D. I mean, it matters more if they get an F and they can't graduate.
00:45:08
Speaker
But all those other things in between don't matter if when they graduate they're not motivated.
00:45:13
Speaker
They're not empathetic if they don't care about the community around them, if they can't do anything about the problems in the community.
00:45:21
Speaker
And what was the point of all of this?
00:45:23
Speaker
What was the point?
00:45:24
Speaker
Yeah, if they don't have any idea.
00:45:25
Speaker
We just talked today in class about the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moving the doomsday clock to 100 seconds to midnight.
00:45:36
Speaker
And I put it on my students to say, I am going to be dead.
00:45:41
Speaker
But you're going to have to live with the effects of this thing.
00:45:44
Speaker
And what are we doing today to help move that clock backwards?
00:45:47
Speaker
And I start to think that maybe learning about the price elasticity of demand is not going to be the one thing that helps us move the clock backwards, you know, to give us a couple more minutes of time here.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:00
Speaker
What you want is you want a generation of demand.
00:46:03
Speaker
brilliant, motivated people who love challenges and who have a lot of compassion and who are curious about the world.
00:46:12
Speaker
Like that's the, that's the thing that you want.
00:46:16
Speaker
I can't really say that anything that anybody is specifically doing sort of systemically is actually getting those outcomes.
00:46:27
Speaker
And I also don't know if you,
00:46:32
Speaker
know, to get that.
00:46:33
Speaker
I think it's a combination of things.
00:46:35
Speaker
But then, Seth, do you see a role of the Internet in allowing for less control on how we receive information or how we learn?
Impact of the Internet on Creative Industries
00:46:44
Speaker
So what I mean by that is, is that indie games saw a lot of growth due to the Internet because you could avoid the AAA industry and sell directly through a platform like Steam.
00:46:54
Speaker
And as educators, there's something to be said about being able to reach out and find like minded folks that may have not been possible.
00:47:01
Speaker
in a very traditional education system where it's hard to speak with other people.
00:47:05
Speaker
This is an interesting note about the, uh, the, the internet decentralizing things because, because actually I've come to the opinion that it is the ultimate centralizer.
00:47:17
Speaker
I think, I think the internet creates the illusion of, uh,
00:47:23
Speaker
of a democracy and everybody having an equal voice.
00:47:26
Speaker
But really what it's doing is it's clustering everybody into the same place in specific domains.
00:47:33
Speaker
So if you're a musician, where are you going to put your music?
00:47:37
Speaker
Spotify, right?
00:47:38
Speaker
And you're going to get.00008 cents per listen, I believe is the going rate.
00:47:45
Speaker
Can't quite remember how many zeros, but it's a lot of zeros.
00:47:49
Speaker
which means if you get millions of listens on there, then you will still only get a couple thousand bucks at best.
00:47:58
Speaker
And so, so, but it's also the case that if you don't, if you don't have your music on Spotify,
00:48:04
Speaker
then your fans will complain, right?
00:48:07
Speaker
They want to listen to your music.
00:48:08
Speaker
They're not going to buy your CDs anymore because nobody does that because they're Spotify.
00:48:12
Speaker
And so this creates a winner-take-all market where now you as a musician, like, yeah, maybe you're a brilliant musician.
00:48:20
Speaker
You make all these incredible songs and you do have legions of fans, but you don't get to dictate the terms of how you engage with the rest of the world.
00:48:28
Speaker
Spotify does.
00:48:30
Speaker
You have to go through this process, right?
00:48:32
Speaker
And so writing books is the same.
00:48:35
Speaker
You write a book, where are you going to publish it?
00:48:38
Speaker
Amazon, right?
00:48:39
Speaker
You're going to publish it through Amazon.
00:48:40
Speaker
And if you don't, you're at least going to sell it through Amazon.
00:48:43
Speaker
You're going through some centralized place, right?
00:48:47
Speaker
And the fascinating thing that's happened with the games industry, as far as this goes, is...
00:48:55
Speaker
The idea that anybody can create something, that's the idea that got us into it back in 2010, 2011.
00:49:03
Speaker
And all these tools started appearing and we started making games.
00:49:07
Speaker
We weren't the only ones who had that idea.
00:49:11
Speaker
At the time we started publishing mobile games, there were 500 games coming out a week on iOS.
00:49:18
Speaker
Now there's 7,000.
00:49:18
Speaker
Okay, so that's so many games.
00:49:25
Speaker
that even with the billion people who go to the app store every month, any given game is probably not gonna be seen by pretty much anybody.
00:49:38
Speaker
So instead we go right back to the original model of
00:49:42
Speaker
Apple gets to decide which games go to the top of the list and get seen by everybody.
00:49:48
Speaker
Right.
00:49:50
Speaker
So, so even though, even though the ability to create has been, has been decentralized, the ability to succeed is still, it still goes through a centralized place.
00:50:03
Speaker
Right.
00:50:04
Speaker
And I think this is the case with, with pretty much everything, you know, you see these, uh,
00:50:09
Speaker
people who want to become a famous model or actor or whatever.
00:50:12
Speaker
Well, they got to be on Instagram and that's where they're going to get all their followers.
00:50:15
Speaker
Like they have to bend to the wheel of Instagram, which is actually owned by of course, Facebook, which controls our elections through their algorithms.
00:50:24
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty conspiracy theory-ish, but there's also a realistic bent to it.
00:50:31
Speaker
And of course, they now hold an... So these companies kind of hold an outsized sway far beyond what was ever possible before we had the internet.
00:50:42
Speaker
And so...
00:50:44
Speaker
Those are the kinds of trends that we see in the games industry as well as the supply of games is going up and up and up and the delivery methods.
00:50:53
Speaker
So like the different storefronts, Steam and stuff like that, they're collapsing under the weight.
00:50:59
Speaker
I think 1,300 games came out on the Nintendo Switch last year.
00:51:03
Speaker
And we know that the folks over at Nintendo HQ are scratching their heads trying to figure out like,
00:51:13
Speaker
What do we do about this?
00:51:14
Speaker
Because actually like it's too many, it's too many games.
00:51:18
Speaker
What is it?
00:51:18
Speaker
Three, four games a day coming out.
00:51:21
Speaker
I don't know anybody who has the time or money to, to even play a 10% of those games.
00:51:28
Speaker
Right.
00:51:29
Speaker
And so, so we've kind of, we've kind of now looped back, like back around.
00:51:34
Speaker
in the games industry to it's who you know.
00:51:39
Speaker
So now it's all about establishing these relationships with people in centralized positions of power who are able to give you access to those players through their centralized platforms.
00:51:53
Speaker
So that's the big challenge that I think faces anybody who's coming into games nowadays is they don't have those connections.
00:51:58
Speaker
They don't have those things until they've kind of already started establishing themselves.
00:52:03
Speaker
And it's a circular problem.
00:52:05
Speaker
You know, you can't establish yourself without the connections and you can't, you can't get the connections until you're established.
00:52:11
Speaker
Um, so we got in at a time where it was a lot easier to kind of break that wheel a little bit and stop it for a second and get on.
00:52:19
Speaker
Um, nowadays I think it's a lot harder, but, uh,
00:52:23
Speaker
And I don't quite know what is necessarily going on when it comes to teaching in this way, because I know that there's a lot of online courses now, like Udemy sells a class for everything for $1.50 because everything's on sale all the time.
00:52:38
Speaker
I don't know, what are you guys seeing in that?
00:52:43
Speaker
And certainly there is a problem of how information is controlled on the internet in order to promote only certain voices.
00:52:50
Speaker
I think the human restoration project is meant to be a curder of sorts.
00:52:54
Speaker
But in our world, I mean, there are certainly corporate donors such as the testing industry.
00:52:59
Speaker
Or even just like Chan Zuckerberg, Bill and Melinda Gates.
00:53:02
Speaker
If you can get money from them or get those things, then you're off to the races.
00:53:06
Speaker
But I mean, and that's also supporting your agenda.
00:53:09
Speaker
Right, right.
00:53:09
Speaker
And all of a sudden you don't support unions anymore.
00:53:12
Speaker
Well, you know, everything's got a price.
00:53:15
Speaker
So for you, Seth, what do you see as a future then of your industry?
00:53:19
Speaker
So if there's all these issues, how do you go about solving that?
00:53:23
Speaker
This is why this is why things become centralized, though.
00:53:26
Speaker
You know, it's because of the choice paralysis problem.
00:53:28
Speaker
Like nobody has the time to sift through 7000 things.
00:53:32
Speaker
But it needs to be somebody's job.
00:53:35
Speaker
or a team of people, it needs to be their job to sift through those things and then come out and say, Hey, here's the three good ones.
00:53:42
Speaker
Right.
00:53:42
Speaker
And then, yeah.
00:53:43
Speaker
And that that's the value that they bring.
00:53:45
Speaker
And that's, you know, I, I don't want to, I don't want to seem like I'm complaining necessarily.
00:53:52
Speaker
It's just like, this is just the state of things.
00:53:55
Speaker
There's just, there's the internet brings, brings, I mean, too many voices together.
00:54:03
Speaker
And, um,
00:54:04
Speaker
It's too much to process.
00:54:06
Speaker
Like it's too much for any one person to sift through, to parse, to hear.
00:54:11
Speaker
And so this system is going to naturally give rise to mediators, you know, people who basically funnel it all into one place.
00:54:19
Speaker
They throw out the stuff you don't want to see.
00:54:21
Speaker
And then they hand it to you.
00:54:22
Speaker
I had a really weird experience last week where my wife was like, I want a key chain.
00:54:29
Speaker
Cause she just has like this, just a, just a crappy, like metal circle with a couple of keys on it.
00:54:33
Speaker
And she's like, I want a cool key chain.
00:54:37
Speaker
And I was like, time to do something nice for my wife.
00:54:40
Speaker
So I go, go into Amazon.
00:54:42
Speaker
I look up key chains and every key chain they show me has a knife or a flashlight on it.
00:54:50
Speaker
Because at some point I bought a pocket knife on Amazon.
00:54:54
Speaker
And now they're like, this is a knife guy.
00:54:57
Speaker
He needs knives.
00:54:58
Speaker
He needs knives on everything.
00:54:59
Speaker
Keys, whatever it is, put a knife on it, sell it to Seth.
00:55:03
Speaker
So I genuinely couldn't find a keychain that made sense to give to my wife.
00:55:10
Speaker
And then I told her, I was like, I tried to find, I guess Amazon just doesn't have...
00:55:15
Speaker
good keychains somehow like they have everything in the universe but no keychains and she's like I'll take a look and so she opens up Amazon and all of a sudden boom all these beautiful golden like rhinestone and crusted keych like a peacock keychain and like a unicorn keychain and stuff
00:55:34
Speaker
And somehow Amazon just decided, like, I don't get to see those things anymore.
00:55:39
Speaker
I don't I don't get to make those decisions anymore.
00:55:41
Speaker
That's not part of my day now, which also kind of speaks to the the danger of these sorts of things is now now my experiences is cut is cut short.
00:55:52
Speaker
And that internet decentralization component does have an unattended consequence on the students that we work with as well.
00:56:00
Speaker
So it's great that we have access to so much information.
00:56:03
Speaker
We can find things easier.
00:56:05
Speaker
It's easier to have quality content if you know how to find it.
00:56:08
Speaker
So there's that digital literacy side of things.
00:56:11
Speaker
But there's also a social emotional issue that's baked into being able to use the internet how we use it now.
00:56:17
Speaker
So many of our students are placed in these algorithms that reinforce negative stereotypes about them.
00:56:22
Speaker
or promote like non pro social behaviors, or they just make them decided depressed, really.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of statistics about about mental health issues with teens, especially just how they're they're lonely, they're
00:56:39
Speaker
rates of depression are dramatically higher yeah just uh i don't know it's it's weird because like you know the internet was supposed to be this thing that was gonna you could talk to you could talk to someone from across the world anytime it's like it's gonna it's gonna bring us all together and then we all end up getting just like tunneled into uh by these these uh
00:57:00
Speaker
these companies that just, they just need us to look at ads
Algorithms and User Identity
00:57:03
Speaker
and buy stuff.
00:57:03
Speaker
Right.
00:57:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:04
Speaker
Well, I think, I think it's like what you were saying earlier with, you know, I think you, you were missing the silver lining about you buying a pocket knife on Amazon now and not having any choice because I mean, it's clear the case that you do have choice choices because you've made the decision to be a knife guy.
00:57:21
Speaker
Now you get to choose from all of these, all of these, you get to choose from amongst the key chains that have knives.
00:57:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:26
Speaker
Well, that's, I mean, that's actually, that's the other weird thing about this.
00:57:29
Speaker
It's like,
00:57:30
Speaker
okay think back nick think back to your 20s your early 20s okay i'm going back i think put yourself in the in the brain of college nick i'm in the mocker union you're the mocker student union uh we're we're organizing students for all kinds of stuff we got big ideas and opinions many of which are dumb and bad okay
00:57:54
Speaker
because we're 20.
00:57:58
Speaker
Now you are on Facebook and making posts.
00:58:01
Speaker
You are buying stuff on Amazon.
00:58:03
Speaker
You're doing all these things and they've got real sophisticated algorithms, right?
00:58:08
Speaker
And so you've got your account.
00:58:09
Speaker
They know you, they know who you are and everything that they show you and everything that you see is going to reinforce whatever dumb, bad 20 year old Nick idea you have.
00:58:23
Speaker
at that time and you're locked in now.
00:58:25
Speaker
Right.
00:58:25
Speaker
So, so by the time you're, you're now in your thirties, who are you?
00:58:31
Speaker
Like, are you able, are you able to make that same kind of leap over that, over this, you know, 12, 13, whatever year span in the present day compared to what you were able to do without those things happening?
00:58:45
Speaker
Or is this just who you are now?
00:58:48
Speaker
Right.
00:58:48
Speaker
And that's what I think is so interesting from the student perspective is that's where I was kind of going with that is you were lamenting it as a lack of choice.
00:58:56
Speaker
And I was saying, no, look at the comfortable silo that Amazon has created for you.
00:59:00
Speaker
This is just who you are now.
00:59:02
Speaker
And so then that I think is the problem that I see with students in that is as it relates to that sense of depression and anxiety is that really those silos are isolating.
00:59:17
Speaker
Because then that just kind of feeds you the image of who you must be.
00:59:22
Speaker
And so it is so much easier to just keep scrolling through TikTok and have it just keep playing videos for you that you know that you like rather than...
00:59:32
Speaker
Dan Levy, Ph.D.: than then reaching out from from those silos and trying to find some of those other things, so that I think that's the danger is that it just keeps feeding you those things that you that you want to see and that you want to.
00:59:42
Speaker
Dan Levy, Ph.D.: keep diving into to the exclusion of any other you know concept or idea or anything if you're into a fandom it will dive you to the bottom of that fandom and you will never.
00:59:52
Speaker
come out from the bottom of that, you know, or if you, you know, I've seen this with a lot of, I teach suburban white kids.
01:00:00
Speaker
So I see this with alt-right stuff all the time.
01:00:02
Speaker
And, you know, it starts with, they have like an edgy Google image, you know, their little Google logo is a Pepe the Frog and, you know,
01:00:09
Speaker
you know, start to look at some of their things and they're, they're really on the edge of some of those, uh, those really dangerous alt-right ideas because, uh, you know, that's kind of just the identity that they've bought into, but, um, it's the identity that's being in the feedback loop coming right back at them.
01:00:24
Speaker
So, um,
01:00:25
Speaker
So that's kind of the fracturing that I see is not jocks versus nerds versus goths and maybe a traditional, you know, 80s breakfast club kind of sense.
01:00:34
Speaker
But really, it's 30 individual students who are in these individual silos.
01:00:39
Speaker
And occasionally, you know, they bump up at each other because they sit next to each other at lunch and browse the same kind of things or whatever the case may be.
01:00:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:47
Speaker
And this this goes through everything.
01:00:49
Speaker
I was thinking about how.
01:00:52
Speaker
I could hear a song playing in a grocery store or something.
01:00:55
Speaker
And I'm like, yeah, that's one of the songs from the 90s.
01:00:59
Speaker
One of the 30 songs that we had that everybody heard.
01:01:05
Speaker
And nowadays, when I look through my Spotify playlist, which of course I use Spotify because everybody uses Spotify.
01:01:13
Speaker
And I bet you, if I took my main playlist that I normally am just jamming to, and you and I
01:01:21
Speaker
overlaid our two playlists on top of each other there'd be like maybe three out of 400 songs that overlap right because we are unique individuals now who have literally no shared experiences and have no ability to talk to each other about anything because we live in completely different worlds now right exactly and that's
01:01:42
Speaker
There's nothing.
01:01:43
Speaker
What sucks is there's nothing to be done about it.
01:01:46
Speaker
Like this is just this is a systemic thing.
01:01:49
Speaker
And we've all we've all sort of tacitly agreed that this is what we want because we keep funding it like we keep supporting it.
01:01:57
Speaker
We keep engaging with it.
01:01:58
Speaker
And even if we don't, everybody else will.
01:02:01
Speaker
And that's just that this is just what's happening now.
01:02:04
Speaker
And that's what's super interesting is you think, well, I think about our experiences, Seth, because, you know, we, what do we share?
01:02:12
Speaker
We share that we're Iowans.
01:02:13
Speaker
We went through, you know, an Iowa high school system.
01:02:16
Speaker
We attended the same college together.
01:02:18
Speaker
And so, like, those are the experiences that we draw back on.
01:02:21
Speaker
And now to kind of come back, if we were to compare some of those things, we would have those differences.
01:02:27
Speaker
But what is super interesting is to think about the 30 kids that might be in my classroom who all live in Ankeny.
01:02:34
Speaker
They all go to the same school every single day.
01:02:36
Speaker
So you would think that all they have are these shared experiences together.
01:02:40
Speaker
because they do the same thing.
01:02:41
Speaker
They go to the same, you know, five or six classes next to each other all day long.
01:02:46
Speaker
But you're right.
01:02:47
Speaker
Like, imagine comparing those two kids playlists compared to ours where we've had, you know, 10, what, 20 years of difference before we met and now 10 years since then.
01:02:58
Speaker
But so we would expect, right, to have not have those things.
01:03:01
Speaker
But it's weird to see 16 and 17 year olds who don't have that same kind of thing.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, and it's because, yeah, they're present physically in the same space, but their minds are not experiencing the same world as each other.
01:03:16
Speaker
Exactly.
01:03:17
Speaker
And thinking about this idea of some teenage kid seeing some, I don't know, a racist meme and thinking like, oh, that's funny, and then reposting that or something.
01:03:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:34
Speaker
And thinking about how, how algorithmically that, that just gets reinforced.
01:03:40
Speaker
Like whatever, whatever you like, we live in this world, we're kind of like, whatever you want, you get it.
01:03:44
Speaker
You get to have that thing, whatever ideas you have, you get to have those ideas and you never have to hear.
01:03:50
Speaker
otherwise right and i think i think back on some of the ideas that i had when i was a teenager or or uh in college and and you know i'm i'm i wasn't a religious guy at the time and i'm still not but at that time i was that was like who i was be like being being being an atheist was like a core part of my identity
01:04:17
Speaker
And now it's basically irrelevant to anything about what I do or who I am or what I care about.
01:04:24
Speaker
It's a it's a footnote.
01:04:27
Speaker
And I think like.
01:04:29
Speaker
Had things been then the way that they are now, I possibly might have been radicalized because I was already I was already on the edges of having some very strong opinions about about certain religious groups or whatever the case may be.
01:04:46
Speaker
Right.
01:04:47
Speaker
It could have happened that way.
01:04:49
Speaker
A lot of those people have bought into those ideas about, you know, bell curve and racist science about IQ tests and a lot of transphobia.
01:04:58
Speaker
I mean, so that has been the natural progression, I think, of a lot of people who started in that place and just dug themselves an identity in that hole and followed the whole movement clear through to Charlottesville.
01:05:09
Speaker
And, you know, and then they're marching with torches saying the Jews will not replace us.
01:05:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:15
Speaker
It's nuts.
01:05:16
Speaker
So I don't know, Seth, if I have kind of a cliche question to ask, you know, of a game designer in the industry here, just because we have, you know, some listeners who are students and we've had some episodes that are like based around that idea of student voice.
Advice for the Young Generation
01:05:34
Speaker
And so, you know, as being a person who's in that gaming industry, is there...
01:05:39
Speaker
I mean, just kind of in closing arguments, is there any like advice that you would just give to what advice would you just give to young people and not even necessarily about about games, but what's cool is that I mean, I think just talking to you and you know, knowing you and seeing you.
01:05:55
Speaker
Seeing the costar vitality expressed through butterscotch shavigans is really fun, first and foremost.
01:06:01
Speaker
But what is so cool is you guys seem to understand, right, some core aspect about human psychology that really distinguishes the way that you approach a lot of those things.
01:06:13
Speaker
I don't know if you just have advice for younger people about the way that they should...
01:06:19
Speaker
live their twenties or what they should do.
01:06:21
Speaker
What should high school students do if they want to go do that awesome thing that is not in their path right now, but might be 10 years from now.
01:06:28
Speaker
I don't know.
01:06:28
Speaker
So I think the thing that I'm the most grateful for is that I, I think this is possibly because of how I was raised, but there's, there's, there's something that I generally have fun doing anything.
01:06:48
Speaker
that I'm doing.
01:06:49
Speaker
And I love to learn about stuff.
01:06:53
Speaker
And it's I've never been able to wrap my mind around the phrase like, well, what am I ever going to use this for?
01:07:01
Speaker
Which which I would hear all the time when I was in school is is, you know, a teacher would be like, oh, yeah, so now we're going to talk about the Pythagorean theorem.
01:07:08
Speaker
And it works like this.
01:07:10
Speaker
And then invariably, some kid would mutter.
01:07:13
Speaker
I mean, what's the point of this?
01:07:14
Speaker
Like, what about I don't give a crap about triangles?
01:07:17
Speaker
which is it, you know, in that context, I get it.
01:07:22
Speaker
Like what's your, what's your life as a, as an eighth grader is like, you are just generally confused and nobody takes you seriously.
01:07:30
Speaker
And you're either awkwardly tall or awkwardly short.
01:07:33
Speaker
Like those are the things that you're mostly concerned with and triangles are like number 400 on your list.
01:07:40
Speaker
Um,
01:07:42
Speaker
And I have to say going into games has been the most eyeopening thing for me because I have used everything, like everything that I've ever learned in any field, spider monkeys or bacteria or, or anything.
01:08:02
Speaker
It has come up.
01:08:03
Speaker
It's come up time and time again.
01:08:06
Speaker
And I have to think like, if I had, if I had had that, that attitude of,
01:08:12
Speaker
of I'm not going to learn this thing because what am I ever going to use it for?
01:08:16
Speaker
Then I never would have gotten to use it.
01:08:18
Speaker
And I never would have gotten to where I am.
01:08:22
Speaker
I never would have been able to think of the things that I thought of because I just wouldn't have known things.
01:08:27
Speaker
And I wouldn't have been able to combine them together to make weird alien planets or goofy stories or teach myself how to code or any of that stuff.
01:08:39
Speaker
And so I think to kind of like,
01:08:42
Speaker
to kind of boil it down to just like a single idea is, is you can use everything.
01:08:49
Speaker
So, and you, and you will, like, if you learn it, you will use it.
01:08:53
Speaker
And so that's, so just learn it.
01:08:56
Speaker
It's going to be fun.
01:08:56
Speaker
It's going to be interesting.
01:08:57
Speaker
And it's, and it's always going to pay off.
01:09:00
Speaker
That would be my advice.
01:09:02
Speaker
Right.
01:09:02
Speaker
And that's exactly why we need educators to band together and teach young people about the worlds they live in, the experiences that they have and bring to the table rather than just cramming them full of information.
01:09:12
Speaker
I know it's a trope and people say it all the time and there's a time and place for people to learn anything.
01:09:17
Speaker
But when we focus exclusively on test prep and don't dive into things that our students do on a day to day basis, such as using social media, it shouldn't be shocking that these issues arise.
01:09:28
Speaker
I really don't understand why the focus of the curriculum wouldn't be on a student's daily life and what they want to learn about.
01:09:35
Speaker
To me, that makes sense on both a practical and motivational level.
01:09:39
Speaker
But then again, that's sort of the human restoration project thing.
01:09:43
Speaker
You have to be able to see the humanity in people and teach them like full humans, which means that they're not receptacles to have knowledge deposited into them.
01:09:51
Speaker
They're not some purpose for financial gain.
01:09:54
Speaker
They're not a percentage point.
01:09:56
Speaker
It's a lot more complicated than that.
01:09:58
Speaker
And you can't standardize knowledge in that way to just narrow it down to something very simple and easy to understand.
01:10:05
Speaker
It's incredibly complicated.
01:10:06
Speaker
They're a whole person with wants and needs and desires and motivations and experiences, et cetera, et cetera.
01:10:12
Speaker
I can get behind that.
01:10:13
Speaker
It's a big challenge.
01:10:16
Speaker
I wish you guys luck.
01:10:20
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
01:10:24
Speaker
I hope that this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:10:29
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.