YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Kaplan

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326
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2026-03-11
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2026-03-11
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  1. “The first time was the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005. So when Wao shipped, and this is so weird to tell people, but on the team. Not everyone, but a lot of us were very demoralized after Waowshipped. There were”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, and I don't want to, it's not fair of me to speak on their behalf. I think They were promised some compensation that they didn't immediately see. I don't know if the game, like here's the weird part when you make a game. When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that's the best the game is ever going to be. And then you work on it like games I worked on take five years. Overwatch was two and a half, three years. Every day you get close to ship. The imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality and you're always shipping this like greatly sacrifice thing that nowhere near matches the imagination. Of the inception of the idea. So”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had. That's essentially what Battlenet has morphed into these days. But all those decisions, and when it came time to make Burning Crusade, at that point, Tom and I were leads. We were full, they had actually promoted us. There were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard. They were disenfranchised. If you can believe it, like we just shipped World of Warcraft and this whole group just walked out the door. I was actually sitting my desk faced Morheim's office and I watched them all go in and quit. And they were the group that formed carbine, which made the game wild star, ended up taking them ten years to make. And they were just really unhappy with World of Warcraft. We were unhappy with.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Putting Wow in a box and shipping it was like only chapter one in the twelve chapter book, essentially, and that first how to run the game, how to patch it, what type of content, how to deal with emergencies, what should our customer support be like? I mean, we would debate, should we have a launcher or not? You know, in the early days, the only reason the launcher existed in WOW was to run anti-cheat on your machine. And we had a moment where we figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher. And it was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Morheim. He's like, you got to bring the launcher back, guys. We're like, why? He's like, there's no better way for us to talk to our players. And I remember trying to hide the launcher. And to this day, Mike was right.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Players weren't supposed to get in case they cheated their way there. And this GM is just spawning them all over Stranglethorne Vale because he's worried because the players are exploiting. It's like three in the morning and I'm talking in hushed tones because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed. I'm doing this because it was actually like before the cell phone days when I actually had a landline. But that's just how, and I loved it. I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutiae. And I felt like through the running WOW live, which was me and Tom together with an amazing team, we kind of learned how to be the WOW team.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We're thrilling to me. And then also the big disasters, like the big, I had, in the early days of wow, we didn't really have all the processes in place for like how to deal with being a successful online game. And I literally had GMs, like Game Masters. These are customer support guys calling my home phone at three in the morning. Like I remember this one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorne Vale and they figured out a way to exploit it. And this GM calls me panicked. It's three in the morning. He's like, I'm just spawning, what did we call him? Guardians of Blizzard. They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touched anything. We used to have them when we were in the beta like off in the distance of places.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Know for four hours, and then I'd go in the next day and I'd work, and it was just this, my whole life was World of Warcraft. And I loved it. Like I loved everything from, you know, the creative meetings with Chris Metzen and just what an inspiration and muse he was down to the simplest, dumbest design Stuff that we as game designers want to talk about why a button is in the lower left versus lower right and what does that mean That's like two hours of discussion. And is there a better way? Like the 10,000 minutia problems.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And they basically put me and Tom in charge of wow. And at the time they promoted me my title, I didn't even have a lead title. My title was senior game designer. And Tom and I were running the design of Wow at that time. So I thought it was totally normal, and I thought what we were experiencing with Wow was just normal for making a video game because it was the first video game that I had worked on. I thought it was the funnest joyride. Because we were working on wow, we were still working insane hours. And then I'd get home, eat dinner, and then me and my wife would log in and play wow.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It was my first game I worked on, and I joined it as this entry level dude and I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for $35K a year. And, um, Very shortly after Wow shipped, Alan left his lead before the beta or like right around the beta. And then Rob took over as the lead designer. And then he left the team very shortly after Wow shipped to go start StarCraft II. And he put myself and Tom Chilton in charge. Tom is a designer who he was a great partner of mine and a great leader. And he actually came from Ultima Online. And so I always looked up to Tom because he had a lot more experience than I did. And this is like early 2005. The world was on fire, the servers were barely running, Wow was just had taken off like gangbusters.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You know, you can feel the humanity of the development team through that. But another part of that is like, do they clean up their fucking yard? You know, does this game work? And it's not just the bugs and the crashes. It's like when balance gets wacky and stupid and, you know, suddenly everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding and no one else will play anything else. You're like, we should probably fix that, you know?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Players feel it like they That's where there's this idea of the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel like any product, you know, your iPhone or Android or like any computer, consumer product, you can feel when there are people who loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf and games have that as well where you can feel the heart and soul of the developer in the thing. And some of that's like the joy and delight of like that there's a cow level, right? That that's”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, there's emergency issues like something's crashing, like the worst case scenario is anytime the server's crashing or an overwatch, like a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero. Like someone found an exploit and you have to disable a hero from the lineup, you want to turn around that hotfix If you can in half an hour get that hero back live, you might have somebody who only plays that hero, and the only reason they're going to play Overwatch is because that hero is active. You don't want to wait for patches and you want a hot fix as fast as you can.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And what a hot fix is games, there's a couple ways to fix them. The way most of us know, because all the software we have gets a patch. You know, you have to update it. You have to download a new version of it. Windows, you know, you get that annoying message. Like there's a new version of Windows and takes a few minutes and you update it. Obviously, we patch our games and that's where we fix a lot of bugs. But if you really want to run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully You need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hot fix the game on a dime. And what a hotfix is is a server patch that no one's client has to go down for.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And sure enough, they'd be right, but you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA or just even on like World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA and that they built out a full raid team to do the raids. And then you're not only looking for bugs, like, hey, the dragon was supposed to fly. And instead, it just sunk through the world and the game crashed, which would happen. But like, if you really value QA, you're asking them, what do you do? What do you think? 10 million people are going to see this. Your opinion, multiply it. You know, it matters. What do you think? Are you having fun? Yeah, this is cool. This isn't cool. So QA was important. The other thing that was important is the Blizzard Engineering, which you have to architect. Game to be hot fixable.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But we had a couple of these QA specialists who could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay. And then you sit that person with an engineer and say, hey, I think there's some input lag here. That's amazing.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “With QA, you would find that there were certain specialists, whether like, for example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players that, like we all were shooter players when we were making Overwatch, but I'm not like esports level shooter player. I'm like, you know Gen X or remember Doom how good I was type of shooter player?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, people simplify the role by just, oh, these guys just get to play games all day and then let us know if there's a bug. They are so systematic in the way they test stuff. They come up with these plans that are actually amazing of like who's going to test what. There's a lot of regression testing that goes on within QA. There will also be compatibility testing, the blizzard compatibility department was amazing. Like they had every card, every machine, every configuration, and they would roll through to make sure there wasn't some quirk that was going to come up on some video card or some motherboard that you weren't expecting. But it was all very systematic. It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game. And then as a developer interacting,”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Dude, just message me anytime. Here's my home number. Call me if there's a bug. If you think we're going to get raked over the coals on this. You got to speak up. I don't care what the chain of command is. Like, we got to fix this thing. So QA was amazing.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “For a job, they do it because they fucking love the game. And the relationship we tried to develop between us on the development teams and QA was extremely tight. And whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA members up with the development team as possible. Depending on the logistics of in the early days, we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us. We were very fortunate on the Overwatch team to have a large amount of QA sitting with us and then developing that relationship. You know, in the early days, there were these fears of like, well, QA can't talk to the developers and trying to shatter that because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out, you would just say to them, like, hey.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “To have a level of polish is like a studio wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody. Like no one can be satisfied with a bug. Every game is going to have bugs. And Blizzard games have bugs. It's a question of how quickly do you fix them and with what urgency. And as players ourselves, if we're playing as much as anybody else, we're going to be motivated to fix the bugs. There are some really tactical aspects to it too. The quality assurance department at Blizzard is the best in the industry. Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard, their passionate gamers. Many of them want to be developers themselves. And they're not just doing”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The quest is famous in that it was so aggravating and annoying. And it just became a way, it not only became a way for me to learn from my mistakes, but because I was very open with the fact that I didn't think it was good and that the quest had failed. It opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work. Like it's always easier if you're the first one to go out and say, hey guys, I think I made one of the shittiest quests in the game and here's why. And then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Three page fives that are just junk in your inventory, and I might have like eight page sixes. And then everybody, and this was the goal, like the designer trying to puppeteer everybody, everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, hey, I'm looking for a page six. Anyone got a page three? And that was like my fantasy as a designer of like, and then they're going to be social and meet each other and players are going to be appreciative for each other, but really all everybody did was just eventually no one did the quest. They just were super annoyed where they went to the auction house.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And so the pages of green hills of Strangle Thorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale, and it was kind of like that McDonald's monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not going to win, but where I really went south, I don't think the idea in a vacuum is horrible, but where this really fell apart was the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't set up. Like the pages didn't stack. There wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in. So players had very limited bagspace. And as they're fighting in Stranglethorne Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all these pages. And they only needed so many, like, you might get unlucky and you have”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Not fun for us. So, this greenhill is a Stranglethorn quest was like an ant farm design of I'm going to write this honestly probably pretty shitty story. I haven't read it since 2003, so God only knows if it's any good. But I wrote this story and then I divided it up into all of these different pages. And the quest giver Hemet Nessingwary wants you to put together, like the stories like he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorne Vale. And when you're doing quest design, you're really thinking about the player flow and you're directing them from quest giver hubs out until these destinations and you want them to do all the destinations. But sometimes we would do these bridging quests where you could do anything in the zone and it sort of had this overlap.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think winter break, like everybody was gone and I just was so happy to be in the office. You know, I'm at Blizzard by myself writing late at night. And the whole idea, and this is very much what I call ant farm designer, which is bad, which is, you know, you're the game designer who's playing God and players are the ants in your ant farm and you want to see what they're going to do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer. But I hadn't learned that yet. And there's a really great famous Sid Meyer quote where he says there's three types of fun. Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer. And we catch ourselves. We're like, you know, we got to be really careful. It has to be fun for the player.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Greenhills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst wow players back in the day it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests But it holds a really special place in my heart. First of all, it's one of the few times that I just like wrote a short story that's actually in the game. It's me paying homage to Hemingway and the guy who gives you the quest, his name is Hemett Nessingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway. There's another quest giver there that's Kerouac's name also mixed up. And then it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipshit. That's the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, like summed up. So I wrote the story over like it was.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You know, level five or something, if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I'm like, oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come. You know, I'll come to Iron Forge and we'll hook up and I'll just fly out to you, which is the magic of World of Warcraft. You have to fly over burning steps and searing gorge and you're look down and you're like, holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous and it plants that seed of things to come.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That doesn't feel like where you want to start. It feels like where you want to end. So you kind of work the world flow in a way that puts that at the end. But there was also kind of some magic to the original starting areas where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between the dwarf hometown was called Iron Forge, the human hometown was called Stormwind. And we allowed you to fly for free. So like these little newbies who were”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And they have a place called Dead Mines. So I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit like as a game designer. You want to capture the experience that's in people's heads. So take burning steps, for example, supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know, all this kind of stuff.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “All wow stuff, it would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world. And, you know, it was so fun hanging out with Chris because we had whiteboards all over the place and hey, Chris, we should make Eastern kingdoms. What do you think it should be? And he would just tell you the story of each of these as he's just drawing and Chris is a really talented artist. So the map would be gorgeous. I have lots of like photographs of Chris Maps that he would just kind of whiteboard up. He's like, you know, here's the dwarven lands. There's wetlands with Cosmodon up there. And that's where this tribe of dwarves were from. And then humans are going to be down with Elwyn Forest and then Westfall, there's this group called the Defias Brotherhood.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “The score for that. And so nothing had been like lyrical with words. And then they play the Daniel Lenois song and there's like the quotes are coming back from like Dutch and Arthur Morgan. I'm just like, God damn, this is art, you know, this is like, I know it's supposed to be entertainment. I know it's a business, but the top of the pyramid is art. And it just hit me emotionally.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “There was a moment in Red Dead where it There's the Daniel Nois song That's the way it is. I just love Daniel Lenois. So the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and like was able to get that song out of him. And there's this moment where you're riding back and they start that song. And everything up to then had been gorgeous, like more of a score. There's Woody Jackson, who's like a really amazing game composer. He had done”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It's like those stories, and the fact that Red Dead can have, you know, this touching, heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his journey, but you can also have, you know, the player story of blowing off the poor guy. That's a combination. Yeah.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Of the game design and the narrative design and the fact that you can have those players stories of just the goofy shit. Like I remember, because the controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who's playing on console, like I always get confused about taking out my gun and putting it away and what's the L1 and L2 like as a PC gamer. I'm just like, let me bind this stuff to where I want it. And so a guy in town rides by and he's like, howdy partner? And I go to like give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, hey, what's up back? And I just whip out my sawed off shotgun and like blow his fucking head off. And then the whole town is like.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Writers in video games and some exceptional games at story, you know, I've mentioned naughty dog. Like they're kind of on another level. But Valve has amazing writing. The writing behind Half-Life 2, Mark Laidlaw, the writing behind portal. Portal 2. I think it was Eric Wolpaw, who was hilarious, just amazing. And rock star. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. And that's a game where you can see the expertise and mastery.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games. And that really hurts me because I actually love story in games and I counter that on the anti-shitty story guy. And what I mean by that is like, A, the most magical stories that I've ever heard come out of video games are player stories about, you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion and then I met him in real life. Like that's better than any video game writing that I've heard in a long while, the player story is so much more interesting. You know, Lex, why do you like the cow level so much? Tell me about some goofy time, like a loot goblin drew you into the most dangerous. But there was another player there, and then those are the stories that I think are more interesting from games. There are some exceptional”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “That's why I've always made a single player game. I have great admiration for them. I don't know if I could do it. The challenge, the reason I love multiplayer so much, the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game, it's like, imagine if you were going to be a movie director and you were going to have all these actors and set designers and props and writers and scripts and all of this stuff and your goal was to get a certain movie made. But we're going to ask you the director to just, you're going to leave the room. Can set it all up ahead of time And then you're not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it. And now you need the actors to have an experience. And it's just kind of the wildest funnest experiment.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And then anybody who grew up in that early console era, like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one, we would sit and we play NHL 93 on the couch and anybody who lost, you'd lose the controller. And you could play that with up to four people playing. Or I remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal Kombat. And we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis. And it was the house rules were, you know, whoever lost. So whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddies apartment, there's five people there. You're constantly cycling everybody in and out. But there's just a magic to multiplayer of engaging and sharing in the experience with other people.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “It's funny because it actually predates the couch even some of those old arcade games. Would have two joysticks on them, and then you could play with somebody else. There's a famous game Gauntlet had four joysticks and four people playing together.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Now, one up from that is multiplayer. And that's when you're engaging with strangers who are in the same world that you might not have the same cooperative goals as. You might have very opposed goals to them. You might PVP them, or they might just be random strangers that you pass in a town or city and never see again. And then massively multiplayer, which is what the MMO online sort of stands for, massively multiplayer online game, that's when you're breaking into thousands of players. And the world's become really, really big at that point.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Very handcrafted, every experience is made just for you. One up from that is what I call co-op. And these terms become interchangeable. So I'm using some semantics here. But co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together, but we're sharing an exact same experience very intentionally. And it's me sharing that experience only with other people that I know. So a great example of a cooperative game may be one of the best of all times was Left for Dead, which is a game where you and three other people go in and you fight like hordes of zombies and you try to progress through to the end safe room. It's a very cooperative experience. A game like Diablo 4, you can play Cooperatively with other people”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yep. So single player, that's a game that you play totally by yourself. Like you don't play with anybody else. You can't play with anybody else. It's not networked to play with other people. For example, I'm playing a game called Story of Seasons right now on the Switch, which I just play by myself. I have my farm. There's a town. I'm meeting people in the town. And no one can come and join me and interact with that. So it's a very controlled experience. Single player games are very difficult or they can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create. Like if you think of a game like Uncharted or Last of Us that's made by naughty dog, like those are kind of the preeminent best single player games you could talk about.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Of a play So PvP is player versus player. So that means a combative, if Lex and I are up against each other, we're attacking each other. We call that PvP. You can get killed by another player. Player versus environment is anytime you're shooting computer-controlled opponents. So if it's a game about dragons, the dragon is the E, the environment and PVE.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “There's a lot of skill and mastery off the cuff flippant comment would be clicking heads, you know. I'm just trying to click heads. There's an intimacy also to the first person camera. And now not all shooters are first person. There is a large trend these days to third person. I really think PubG and Fortnite sort of opened that third person shooter door. And you're seeing games like Arc Raiders or third person. But to me, Nothing is as pure as first person, like you're literally living in the world as And when it's PvP based, you know that's coming at you.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Characters using it, and I have to go into creativity mode. Oh, he has that one AE where he, area of effect, where he puts a curse on me. And, you know, if I had this counter ability to the curse, I could beat the boss to get the loot, to get to the next boss. These are all cycles that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “These are all elements of fun that designers can tap into and in fact are frequently tapping into, but they're never defined anywhere. And I find that players drift. Like I'm the type of player who's not really loot motivated. I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer. And often that takes me on a detour of being loot motivated because there might be a dragon or a demon somewhere that I can't beat without this level of armor and sword. So now I'm loot motivated for some period of time to get back to being content motivated. Or if I'm having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look at the skills and abilities that my”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “What are the things that create fun for players, and they're not the same? Like it really, every human being is different, like progression is fun, sense of progression that I'm investing. I'm putting in investment into this game. And then the game is recognizing my investment, that things like leveling, things like the amount of gold you have, those are all investment-based. There's mastery. There's just pure raw skill, creativity is one. And hand in hand with creativity is customization. And some of those can be aesthetic. Like look at my customized character and I have the black curly hair and I put an earring in my character and I'm customizing in that way. The other is customizing my build. I'm going to come up with the world. barbarian and I'm the first to do it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “All of that is as satisfying as well. And you're trying to, like, there's the lizard brain part of it of like, how does it, like, I see chest. I know I'm going to, it's going to feel good. It's going to feel good. And then there's the spreadsheety part of it of what does it have? Is it an upgrade? And I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things, tap into the intrinsic. And extrinsic. There's like when I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction. And, you know, these are just like basic things like plot and character development and setting and theme and whatever. And there's no textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about like elements of fun.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “The two driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic, and all of us at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, we can shift from being intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated. Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is too simplistic. Like, for example, on the loop boxes of Overwatch, there is a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a business person or whatever like not a commercial person. But beyond that, we also had a really good team who said the visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes. The graphics, like the way things spill out and animate.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Watching everyone around me. My wife plays games, my kids play games, and understanding like, well, what do they do and how are they different to me? Why are they finding enjoyment in this? Why are they not? What's frustrating? What did they miss”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source