YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabriel Leydon

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81
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2021-06-08
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2021-06-08
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  1. “And that's got a lot of pull to it because you see so much like online activism, for example. Online activism that you would never see in person, because all I got to do is post something or whatever. And they matter. They'll get lots of likes. They'll get lots of retweets. Can you get the culture and then the counterculture? And they're both essentially the same thing. Like one side saying the thing because that's the thing to say. The other side's saying the opposite because that's the opposite to say. And both sides get a lot of likes. Video games kind of give more structure to that than like Twitter does. A lot more structure. They can have levels and kings and queens and weapons and kingdoms and whatever you want. You just make it up. So you get more structure and like the video games become a place to kind of get lost in because it has so much structure. That's what I did and I loved it. And for me, it was really important to me because before that, I was just like, what's the point?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In simple way to belong to something where these things actually reward time spent rather than skill. So if I just spend more time, I'll be more important. So you see that a lot online. You see that a lot on like social networking. Like they're all kind of designed that way. Like spend more time. Like you'll matter more.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And clubhouses and whatever, where we have essentially this real time leaderboard of who matters and who doesn't. So when you say that one percent of spenders, that group is even smaller with who matters online. So that's the answer is that the world has become so competitive, soul crushingly competitive, whereas if being good at something doesn't matter anymore, you have to be the best because if you make horseshoes doesn't matter if you're not good at it, I'll just order it from someone else and it'll arrive in two days. FedEx. And you better be cheap because if not, I'll wait a week and get it from China. So we're in this hyper state of competition that makes people feel like they don't matter because they don't. They actually really don't. And everybody knows it. That's the honest truth. So you end up with these like online communities, like what you see are people, it's a seductive.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “How I think about it is if you go back, I think we're tribal people by nature. And when I say tribe, I don't just mean your culture. I also mean the size. Tribes tend to be pretty small. If you look at like early America and people say, go west and land of opportunities, what does land of opportunity mean? It means if I'm a blacksmith and I'm the only blacksmith around for 100 miles, It doesn't matter if I'm the world's best at making horseshoes or not. I'm the only one around. So that's my land of opportunity. I could just keep going west essentially and there'll be less and less people. And I'll have more and more of an opportunity to become important to the community that I'm in. And we're in this age of hyper competition where planes, trains, internet, we have these social networks and forums and chats.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Captured it, you can actually go in, pay, and then the name is changed. And in order to change it back, I have to pay to fix it. Money makes the game hyper realistic. Hyper realistic. It becomes more real than real in a lot of ways because now someone used money to force change my hero's name and then I have to use money. It makes it so much more intense. And the money is actually the feature now. It's not even the name change. The money is a feature. There's a lot of humiliation built into it. It's like building humiliation into software. I mean, you couldn't get more counter culture to what's going on on the internet right now. Like the internet is trying everything possible to like get rid of all this stuff. You can't even like find memes anymore, basically.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Give you an example so, like, in the game, you have a hero that you use to manage your empire, if your empire gets destroyed, the person who destroys your empire takes your hero from you. You don't have him anymore. And he goes to jail essentially. And the person who captured, like goes into his prison, and you actually can see it, your hero standing behind prison bars. It looks really funny, but he's there for like seven days, basically. And then you get him back after seven days. Or if somebody destroys his city, all the heroes that are captured inside the city get released. So if I'm your friend and my hero gets destroyed, I'll call you and say, hey, help me, help me, help me. Help me get my hero back. And then you get all your friends, go destroy that city and release my hero. But if you've captured my hero, you can pay money to force change the hero's name. So it's a name you get to name it whatever you want.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Software that this is software that is engaging you in almost like a metaphysical way. And it's using the tools to access something that you're not in control over. You didn't even know existed really. And it's hard to, that little comment wall thing, if somebody would give me that answer, I'd hire them in a heartbeat. That's not a trivial design, actually. That's actually as expert as they come. And you don't encounter things like that in the wild very often. Because that was like purposefully built to create as much chaos as possible. And it's actually took like a day to make. It was like a machine. It just constantly created things that we would never be able to predict. And that was kind of what I was trying to do was set up a scenario where crazy things, weird things, funny things could happen and try.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Like you sit down and you think, oh, you know, this page is loading too slow. And where's the notification tab at? You know what I mean? Like that's normal way of thinking of software. This is like.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Endless. It would trigger like years of conflict, entertainment, in a way that a spinning wheel with a stop button can't do. Does that make sense?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “They'd get like a little symbol and a name and all this stuff. Everybody's clan had a comment wall. And if I was in another clan and I left a comment on your clan comment wall, it would be anonymous. It would only be attributed to the clan that I was in, not the person. And the only way to figure out who left the comment was to kick the person who left the comment out of the clan. So what this did was people would infiltrate clans, go start trouble anonymously to get two clans to fight with each other. And the clan owner of the person who's been infiltrated is like having to purge his whole clan to try to figure out like who the hell was sabotaging him. And the players would be like, why are they anonymous? But it just created so much chaos. It sounds so simple, but it was like endless amounts of chaos.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Mindset game of war and mobile strike, we made a lot of games, we made a lot of top grossing games. I don't know, like 12. But they were all the same in a lot of ways. Those games were all purposefully very social and volatile and more about belonging to something and being in the mix of something than it was about spending a wheel over and over and over again. So, I mean, that's a different aspect, though. And the addiction stuff works You see it everywhere it works to me it's just kind of boring because it's easy. It's not that hard to do it's hard to do the sense of control really really well ultimately it's pretty straightforward but the social stuff is weirder I'll give you an example like one of my favorite things that I designed in the game everybody would have clans so there'd be clans, there'd be groups in the game and people would join these groups of like 50 people”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In the back, like in the back of the arcade, because nobody there, it was a school day or whatever and me raining outside. But when I went on the game, I was the world's best. And I finally had some kind of feeling of importance. And all I had to do is keep playing. So that's pretty hard thing to turn off, especially when you're making 325 an hour. And I ended up spending thousands of dollars on that game that I could not afford. And I don't care. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It didn't bother me at all. It was so much fun to be in the mix in something in life. There's a tournament coming and I can win it. And there's a lot of people trying. That was really important to me. So the games I made are for that. That's a different.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And I've been good at video games my whole life. So I said, I'm going to get good at this because I can make money doing this. So I play the game like, I don't know. So I was playing the game like 10 hours a day, something like that. It got to the point where I was gripping the steering wheel so much. It's like still permanent. I still have it is that my pinky, if I make a fist, my pinky doesn't come back up. It's stuck down because it was just permanent damage from this game. And I got so good at it that people were wanted to be my friend. I had people who drove up from LA just to meet me. I had like rivals and the North Bay up in Sausalito, like my enemies. And then there was these other guys and like in Sunnyvale, they were like patrols of the game. And there was like this little community. And in my normal life, I was just literally falling asleep on boxes of soda syrup.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Where the sense of control is so deep that you feel in control, so well designed. And that's a style of game that I never really, that's kind of what Josh is talking about when you look at like Facebook and Twitter. And they have elements of this, but not really purposefully in a way that multi-line slot machine does. But then there's the other kind, which is the kind that I made. When I was a kid, I was like a complete loser. I did really bad in school. Basically didn't go to high school, got out of high school and started working at golf land, which is an arcade for like 325 an hour. And this was like 1998-ish. I didn't have a PC. I never had a computer. I'd never been on the internet, really, except for to check the weather at school, basically. You're kind of average loser, basically, like faceless name.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “A style. You could see it too. Like, I love telling poker players that the game is random. I love saying it's all luck. They lose their minds. And you can see the success of the sense of control. If you ever talk to a poker player, they've totally lost their mind. They actually see the whole world through poker playing. You always know a poker player because they'll sit down and talk about how all their decisions are based on the odds of this. It's total nonsense. The game has so thoroughly conquered them that they see the world that way. They have to invent solutions. You have to. Your brain has no choice. It will invent solutions no matter what. So that's a style and like the kings of that, the things that work that way, the number one is the video poker, you know, the hundred hands video poker, the multi-line penny slots. These are like the ultimate manifestation of those. Poker is like a deeper sense of control.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Meaning that sense of control, it's not actual control because it's a variable outcome. Sense of control. How these manifest itself is stuff like stop buttons on slot machines. Those don't do anything, but tell that to someone playing the slot machine. So if you put somebody in a highly variable, frequent, with hopefully a complex sense of control, some kind of interface between this variable outcome frequent thing that you've designed, the brain actually just malfunctions. It doesn't know what to do. It gets trapped in a learning state and starts inventing ways out. So this is how you end up with a lucky rabbisfoot because the brain is just so freaked out about not being able to figure out what's going on. And the reward of getting money out of the slot machine or whatever is so big, it's going to start inventing patterns. It has to. It has no choice. That's like.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “There's two ways that people go about it. Josh Buckley was recently on your show, and he mentioned something that I put together years ago around the qualities of a game. I love Josh, but he sort of mischaracterized it as like flow and all this stuff. But reality is like he added a fourth piece, but it's really three. It's variable outcome, frequency, and sense of control. These are three things that create addiction. not flow. The human brain is built to learn. The brain needs to learn, like it has to. It cannot be stuck in a state of learning. So what these three things do is when you have random outcome, variable outcome, you can't predict what's going to happen next. And then you have it happen frequently over and over and over and over and over again. And then you layer in what's called the game, which is sense of control.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “For me, as a 19 year old kid really set me up for the rest of my career, I understand I have a pretty deep understanding of having to do both things at the same time. So when you interview game designers, they all know how to add pets. They all know how to make levels or whatever. They all know how to play Pokemon. They've all been playing Dungeons& Dragons for like thousands of years. They know how to do this stuff, but they don't know how to do the other side at all. And they actually hate it. So that's why I asked the question because if you hate the business side of it, you're not going to be good at it.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Investment for somebody that has a small footprint, it's not too heavy, the parts, if they break, they're easy to replace. There's a lot of things that you have to do to make something for the investor. And at the same time, it's got to be good enough for the players to keep putting money into it. Steve shows me, and the number one arcade game in the whole country was Cruising USA. Cruising USA is a driving game that if the gas pedal is broken on the machine, it just goes for you. If the steering wheel doesn't work, it doesn't matter, like because the game is on rails and you always get third place. And here I am complaining about the hardest game of all time, basically, not being hard enough. And that was a big moment of me. God bless Steve Richie because that was a big moment for me. I realized I was like, whoa, this is actually a business. They're not just making this thing to be fun or cool for me. Like they have to figure out this complex combination of games for investors and games for players. That setup.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I was in this room, and Steve Ritchie was in the room, and Steve was working on a game called California Speed, which was a competitor to the biggest, most successful arcade driving game of all time, cruise in USA. And I was complaining about the rush sequel. And he goes, Gabe, come over here. I get up. And he goes, look at this. What do you think makes the most money in the arcade? I said, I don't know. And I kind of knew it wasn't going to be rushed just based on the question. And he goes, and he shows me the list. And in the arcade business, you get earnings reports of all the games. So the arcades will collect the earnings reports and they'll send them back to the kind of the manufacturers to get an idea because these people buy these games as investments and I had no idea. I was just playing video games. And arcade games are investments. They have a dual mandate. They have to make money for the investor in 90 days and they have to be fun. They have to get two and a half continues from every player who plays them, basically. That's a hell of a thing to do at the same time. Making an”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Would hire me. My resume was a joke. I'd only worked on Coin Op games. But in that business, I was a kid Pretty much the people that invented software, modern software. And I was 19, and I didn't really realize who I was working with. I mean, this is like the same place like Steve Jobs' first job was at. I was in there as a tester, like a typical gamer just complaining about how the game sucks and it should be better or whatever, right? It got really bad. I was tester for San Francisco Rush 2049, which is like the hardest, probably, well, the second most difficult driving game of all time. Like the game is really hard, except the sequel 2049, was easier than San Francisco Rush. And I was so upset because I was really, really good at the first one and I wanted the second one to be even harder because I spent thousands of hours getting good at it. And I'm in a room and they kept moving me around rooms because I kept complaining all the time. So before they laid me off, I ended up in a janitor's closet. But I was in one of the rooms. So after they moved me out of the office and”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “CEO, you got a game designer, a video game company, that's the CEO, they tell the artists what to do, they tell the engineers what to do, they tell everybody what to do. And if they're in their head, they're going, oh, I don't really like spending money on video games. It's going to be a big problem, right? That's going to be a problem. So it's not that games are all about money, but if they're free, there's an aspect of it that is you need creative people who can handle like really tough problems and not necessarily around amounts of money spent or whatever, but just in general, because you have to balance two different things in your head between the player and the business. I feel really fortunate because I have been in games for a long time, but I spent the first seven years of my career in the arcade business, which at the time was a complete waste of time. Once I couldn't get any more jobs making arcade games, you know, no.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I asked for a feature, you know, not an item. So they kind of take the easy way out. The follow-up question is design a car that costs a million dollars, which is very easy. And the reason that is because you like cars and you hate video games. That's a really important thing to kind of recognize about yourself. Just in general, just in designing products, it's very easy to design a million dollar car in your mind because I love cars and a million dollars for a car makes sense to me in some ways. But if I change the question to design a game feature that costs $10, all of a sudden it's very easy. It kind of exposes like the root of the thinking of the person around their own limitations on what they think a game should be, which honestly, it's a great question just in general because you can really find out like someone's biases. And if you're hiring a game designer, the game designer is essentially CEO of the company. I don't care what anybody says.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, just pause and think about it because you're going to find yourself stuttering, stammering, you'll end up coming up with like God mode. You'll say, well, just give them something that makes them like God, basically. You'll end up coming up with something like that or a rare item. Like there's only one of them, right?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Valley funnel metrics and video game design and marketing and a bunch of other things. The purpose of this question is not to actually like get an answer necessarily, but to expose your bias. Because free to play is a business and it's tough because you're giving away your game for free. You know, most people don't pay and you have to somehow make money in that scenario. So what I would ask everybody, and it's not necessarily literal, it's more of just exploration is design a feature that costs a million dollars to complete. And the responses that you get from that question, I mean, if you just think about it, like I almost want like a long pause in the podcast, just like let everybody just try to answer that. Pause and think.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “People talk about game design and apps, nobody's talking about a gigantic bat that is like blocking your inbox and you need to find this legendary pink beanie with cat ears on it to max out your shriek level to destroy the bat to get your email. Like nobody's talking about that. That's not what they mean. What they mean are these kind of features that create predictable outcomes. They don't really mean video games. So I think that's important to recognize because there is a difference. There's a big difference between the art of a video game or the sound design of a video game or exploration or whatever and what Silicon Valley talks about is gamification. Like these aren't the same things. So when you're making a game, especially gosh, my question is really related to free-to-play, this weird combination of silicon.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Of, like, big push towards that because it makes them seem kind of like cool or interesting in a way that they can't comprehend. And then they kind of hope you end up being like the fortnight of email apps. It's like crazy idea in your head, like in their head, like that's what's going to happen. And of course, it doesn't happen that way, but it is kind of like this confusing, in my opinion, purposely confusing way to describe their productivity app.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “They're jealous of the retention. They're jealous of the engagement. They like demonetization, but they don't like video games. But it's also really mysterious to them. They have no idea what it is. So when you go in and pitch a video game, it's really kind of, it just becomes a funnel analysis conversation. What is your install's cost? What's your retention? Like, that's it. That's all they really care about. And then you have to convince them that you can keep doing that. God forbid if you're a fintech company because, oh my, these people know everything about you. If you go in there and you pitch like a fintech company, like anybody who gets funded in a fintech company is a genius. They're all like super gene. They know absolutely everything because they can be vetted like from here to the moon. But there's also like these people kind of in the middle that are building a lot of like products that add gamification. Because the VCs and those, they actually don't understand it at all. So it adds like this level of mystique to your product that the VC can't quantify, but they like. So you see this.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So when you pitch video games, like the first slide in your deck should be why you're not like Zynga. So anybody's going to ask you is Zynga's doing great now. But for a decade, if you're making a video game company, you might as well just spend the first 30 minutes talking about why you're not like Zynga, because that's all these guys know about. The financiers, the financial guys,”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I'm not like a big person on late stage capitalism. Like capitalism is just human condition. What does that even mean? I think it's more like we just don't know what to do anymore. So we're just going to add levels to the stuff that we already know how to do. And there's a lot of margin in it too. So it's like a big gravity well where it's like, well, we can just take the existing stuff and add achievements to it and we'll sell more pills. There's also another part of it in Silicon Valley where you're a VC. So if anybody ever tried to pitch you a video game, do you understand it at all?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Think it's because when people think about capitalism, they think about the early 1900s, they think about cars and radios and TVs and microwaves, and it almost never ends. And I think it kind of peaks in the 60s and the 70s with all that futurism that the futuristic art, flying cars and skyscrapers. And that's the same time we go off the gold standard and there was like this infinite optimism around money printing and innovation, basically. And we could just print as much as we want because we're going to be immortal space beings zapping around the galaxy. So who cares? That didn't happen. So when the innovation growth didn't really match the expectation, it's just like things just start getting like design. They start moving towards a design phase and then eventually a gamification phase, like kind of what you're seeing in the financial markets and software and pretty much everything.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source