Transcript

Benjamin Lindsay (00:58)
my name is Benjamin Lindsay, AKA Lobo, L-O-W-B-O. I’m a game designer. I have eight and a half years of experience in the games industry. double and triple much all of it is in multiplayer live service.

I worked for Riot Games for seven years, half of that on League of Legends and half of that on an R &D project. And then I worked for a startup called Sprocket Games. We were making a survival crafting game and then we unfortunately went under.

video games wise, as a player, games are like, I guess the best way I found a phrase, is games where I can make numbers go up with my friends. So.

MMOs, ARPGs, basically, gotcha progression-oriented RPG-ish strategy games that can be played socially are that sort of my wheelhouse. know, World of Warcraft is probably my most played game of all time. Played a lot of Destiny, played a lot of Diablo, lot of Path of Exile.

Honkai Star Rail, Genshin, lot of gacha games like that. Yeah, that’s sort of my, that’s my wheelhouse.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:03)
a lot of people would consider those as all being different genres because the core loops of those games involve completely different modes of play but ultimately the sort of outer loop is the same thing and I think it’s really interesting that that’s what appeals to you regardless of how different the gameplay is.

Benjamin Lindsay (02:20)
Yeah.

yeah, it’s, I’m a little bit agnostic as to the core loop, although I would say my favorite is like, action-y RPG-y, but my, sort of the center of gravity is MMOs, right? So I like, my favorite stuff is like action gameplay where it’s not like that twitchy. It’s more about, you know, in World of Warcraft, you’ll have like two seconds to respond to something.

Whereas in Dark Souls, maybe you’ll have two seconds to respond, but that response then has to come in a very specific window to be successful That’s not really my thing. I like to sort of do resource management. getting at really game design-ery, but I realize I’m using it on terms like, guess,

Aaron Nemoyten (02:56)
That’s okay.

Benjamin Lindsay (02:58)
Resource management under time pressure is like the thing I like the most. And then I just like progression oriented games. And I just think as I get older and older, I noticed that the social experience is more more important to me. So like even when it comes to a single player game, I’m much more likely to play a single player game when it’s like the game that everybody’s playing like with Claire Obscure and now with Silksong. So you sort of get to participate in the moment with everybody.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:23)
I’ve joked that I’m always late to the party on whatever the trendy game is. And now that I have kids, like that’s multiplied by 10. So always feel that pressure to play what everyone else is playing, but I do definitely see what everyone else is playing and talking about and go like, that looks like fun. I’ll get to it eventually.

Benjamin Lindsay (03:26)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, bet,

yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely feel the pressure a little bit. It’s like, if people are talking about a game and I’m not that interested in it, I don’t feel the pressure to play it. But if it is a game I’m interested in, I then feel the pressure because like, for example, Silksong, I’m kind of behind the curve in Silksong and I like want to beat it so that I can fully participate in the discussion without getting spoiled.

but it’s nice not to feel the pressure and be able to just do things at your own pace.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:07)
A bunch of my questions are probably gonna be, I was looking through your blue sky post for interesting things to talk about and this came up.

Benjamin Lindsay (04:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:14)
I noticed that you were talking about silk song and you sort of made the note of like, it was so satisfying to beat this boss, but the the run back to the boss was a pain. And for me, I

Benjamin Lindsay (04:17)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:28)
I like to progress in games. play games to experience them. And so if a game makes me do the same thing over and over again too much, I kind of bounce off of it. So I did not beat Hollow Knight. I probably got like three or four hours into it. And then, you know, I went exploring and found some really cool stuff and not a bench. And so then when I died and, you know, lost like half an hour of progress, I was like, I do not feel like playing this again. So yeah, so I’m wondering.

Benjamin Lindsay (04:30)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yep, that’ll happen, yeah.

Yep, makes total sense.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:57)
I think it’s so interesting as somebody who is primarily interested in games that are very much not like that, because you’ve talked about, you know, progression based games and silk song is definitely not that. So do you have some thoughts on that sort of discourse about the difficulty and the, you know, the sort of run back or like, I guess another kind of game would be the corpse run mechanic, whatever you want to call it.

Benjamin Lindsay (05:05)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, okay. So I think that there’s two sort of sub-issues here. One that is a little less complex and one that is tremendously complex. So the first one is, despite Hollow Knight not explicitly being a progression-based game in that you don’t level up and there’s ways in which you become more powerful as the game continues, but that’s sort of not what it’s about. However, like…

you do very much experience progression in terms of your skill or understanding of the game. I was probably talking about the runback to a boss called the last judge, which is like that’s sort of the boss that has the most notorious runback. And

I do think that, like, I absolutely experienced a very satisfying feeling of progression fighting that boss because the boss has very clear tells for its attacks and learning those tells and, like, experiencing, like, at first I was very overwhelmed and then I sort of got mastery and then basically over time, like, the first phase was, like, a little automatic.

Right? Like I still had to pay attention. So it was still thrilling and exciting, but like I started very rarely losing to the first phase. And then I did that for the second phase and you know, so on. like progression doesn’t have to happen in the game. It can happen in the player too. And I think the best games mix these two things. So like, I think for example, lot of, there are a lot of games where progression only occurs inside the player. Like for example, League of Legends or a lot of…

or Overwatch, lot of competitive games, fighting games, for example. And there’s a certain purity to that, which I think attract a lot of people, but I think adding some external power progression sort of gives the player a little bit of a guarantee. Like basically, competitive games are tremendously fulfilling if you really invest into them, but not everybody’s willing to do that. so,

Dark Souls has this, right? Like Dark Souls, famously tough game, it does have levels, right? Like you can, if you’re stuck on a boss, you can go grind a bunch and level up and then come back

Hollow Knight doesn’t have that, but I don’t know,

Could there be a version of the game that’s better if it did have a mechanic like that? Maybe, I’m not sure. And then the runback thing, I’m like working on a blog post about this, but I’m not sure what there is to say because to me, like this sort of ladders up into what I see as one of like the hardest and like most original question, not original, original is not the right word. Most sort of baseline lurking issues behind so much of game design, which is like,

What is the difference between good difficulty and friction or bad difficulty slash friction? a lot of people think of game design as a very specialized form of UX design, which I think is like, there’s a lot that’s true about it. But one of the major things that distinguishes it is that UX design usually involves

removing friction as much as possible. Whereas if you remove friction from your game, you are removing one of the things that makes it a game. I’m not going to go so far as to say that the thing that makes it a game is friction, you ever heard of, I’m going to fuck up the pronunciation of their name because I’ve never really said it in real life. I’ve only read it, but there’s a philosopher named C. Tien Nguyen.

I really, really love his work, but he has this very interesting book called Games Agency as Art, and one of the ways he defines a game is… basically, it’s an inversion of typical human activity, typically humans…

They have an end they want to achieve, and so they’ll take whatever means to achieve a valuable end. Whereas a game is an arbitrary end for means that are valuable. like an example here is, let’s say you have a mountain. At the top, there is a beautiful view and also like an herb that’s very valuable in medicine, right? And so you have two people who want to climb the mountain. One is a doctor who wants to get the supplies or, you know, the doctor, maybe they sent somebody or something like that.

The other is a hiker, right? So if there was a helicopter or cable car that went to the top of the mountain, the person getting the herbs would just take it there because it doesn’t matter how they get to the top, the end is what’s valuable, right? But the hiker is playing the game of climbing the mountain. So taking the tram would cheat the game because the mountain is there, but like the really valuable thing is climbing it, being at the top of it, right?

yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of silk sewing because there’s a lot of debate over whether Silksong is hard in the right way, whether it should have accessibility stuff, whether the runbacks are appropriate and things like that. And I noticed that players often use this term artificial difficulty, which as a designer, I think it’s understandable as a player why I’d use that term, but as a designer, I think it’s

a little funny because all difficulty, it’s all artificial, right? all of the diff, yeah, right. I’m a big believer in, there’s this phrase like, players are really good at diagnosing problems, but really bad at suggesting solutions. I don’t, so I would go a step further. I don’t think players are good at diagnosing problems. I think players are very good at indicating that there is a problem.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:42)
Yeah, exactly. We don’t have to do any of this.

Benjamin Lindsay (11:04)
But actually a big part of game design is accurately diagnosing the problem and diagnosis is really tough. So I think when players say something like there’s artificial difficulty, I think what they’re saying is this game is testing me on something or asking me to do something that do.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:23)
Yeah,

the game has not prepared you to do in advance, and so it feels unfair that it’s asking you to do that.

Benjamin Lindsay (11:28)
Right.

Yeah. So, so my, the sort of thesis I’m working on is, is basically like based on social contract theory. So I’m like a philosophy hobbyist. And so I like, uh, do you need me to introduce that briefly or. Okay. So social contract theory comes from political philosophy. It’s sort of this idea that, uh, it’s like this classical liberal philosophical idea from the Enlightenment. The, the sort of idea is that the.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:46)
mean, go for it, yeah.

Benjamin Lindsay (12:00)
the people of a nation or any sort of form a contract with the government where they give up freedom in exchange for the government’s protection. The idea is if the social contract is violated, then the people will revolt or whatever. The way I think about

this difficulty thing is that players of a game implicitly are in a contract with the developers of the game based on the way the game is marketed and the player’s expectations of the game as to are they like signing up to do, right? So like, I think that this happens in all for example,

Have you ever heard of the anime Madoka Magica? Okay, so Madoka Magica is a deconstruction of, you know, magical girl like Sailor Moon. Okay, so basically Madoka Magica is a anime that appears to be at start like a very cute pastel colored magical girl.

Anime where you know, they treat, you know, it’s like middle school girls and they transform into like pretty outfits and they fight evil, right? And then it gets really fucked up really suddenly, right? And that’s sort of like why That’s why it’s so famous and all of that, right? And I think part of why it’s so effective is You think you’re signing up for one thing and then all of a sudden you’ve got another thing, right? But sometimes people

get really upset at it because they’re sort of like, I didn’t sign up for something super dark and fucked up. And nowadays you don’t get this as often because like this sort of what’s, like I don’t think I’m spoiling it now, right? This sort of like why you would watch it as opposed to watching Sailor Moon or whatever.

as you can see, like I have a lot of thoughts on this, but they’re not super organized. But basically I think that when people look at Silksong,

I this is the hard thing is like everybody brings their own expectations, their own preconceptions to a work of art and games are especially tough because like

Yeah, like I think especially with a game like Sulksong, which is like, it is a very vision oriented, almost stubborn game, just like Hollow Knight was. Like I think that

This is the game they want to make. And there, think their perspective is take it or leave it. Like this is our, this is our thing. But when a game like that becomes such a sensation, then a lot of people come to it and they’re sort of like, well now, now people want to participate in the moment, but maybe they can’t maybe they’re

not experienced enough in games, maybe they have a motor disability, maybe there’s not a lot of time to get good at the game, there’s any of a number of reasons why the game might put you off. And so, sort of regardless of my individual feelings as a player about the run it’s sort of one of those things where I think that an educated consumer

When they think about Hollow Knight, they’ll think about the exciting, thrilling boss battles and like fighting some really difficult enemy and throwing yourself against it or getting lost in this sort of maze and then like eventually finding your way out, finding the cartographer, finding a bench. people like sort of forget about those modes of friction, like runbacks, and it’s sort of not really part of their

expectations and so it’s a bit of a violation of the contract and is a violation of the contract in and of itself bad, not necessarily, but it causes friction and then people will talk about it and sort of, yeah, that’s, so that’s a very complicated and inconclusive way to say, I don’t know, it’s complicated. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (16:33)
I was looking at your portfolio site. I saw that you had a blog post and it was about utilitarianism in systems design.

Benjamin Lindsay (16:34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (16:40)
which I thought

was a really cool way of looking at it. But it had this quote that I want to read here because I’ve worked on live service games so much and this really appealed to me. The quote is, a systems designer on a popular live game is an interesting position. Something like that of a government administrator. You’re making decisions that affect every player in some way or another. And that is kind of, it kind of captures why…

Benjamin Lindsay (16:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (17:05)
I have really enjoyed working in live service games and also why I have been frustrated working in live service games because it is cool that you’re making these decisions that have such a huge impact. But at the same time, you do kind of have to think of it like a government administrator where you’re trying to just balance the utility of all these things across your user base and going like, well, if I change this, these people will be happy and these people will be upset. And is the scope of the amount of people upset and amount of people happy?

Benjamin Lindsay (17:08)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (17:34)
proportionate to the change that I wanna make? Is this worth doing? And I think what’s funny also to me is that in hindsight, having done the job, that is an obvious way to look at it, but I can imagine it not being obvious to somebody who’s coming into it and looking at it from another perspective and maybe not understanding that.

There is something sort of hilariously mundane in making these changes every week or every two weeks or whatever in a live game that has millions of players.

Benjamin Lindsay (18:01)
you

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. mean, yeah, it is. I mean, that’s why I like it too. I mean, this is the thing I missed the most about working on League of Legends is like working on something that people really cared about and like sort of seeing the impact of my decisions, hopefully positive, sometimes negative. But I mean, yeah, that’s something I had to learn really fast working on that game.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:30)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Lindsay (18:35)
I would do things and I would be pretty sure that they were the right thing to do. And, you know, I would talk about them with, with, my, my leads and other people. And it’s like, okay, this is probably the best course of action. And then I do it. And then somebody would be really mad and they would tweet at me or, know,

sometimes there’d be like a player that would talk to me sometimes and I’d like them and then I’d do something and it’d be like, man, this really sucks. I hate this. And I would be like, I’m sorry, but like, you I can’t tweet at somebody like, hey, sorry, I screwed you over and I knew I was doing it.

sometimes like I even thought of a person when I was making a change, being like, they’re going to hate this, but like I still, you have to do it and you have to find a way to be.

confident in those decisions I think a lot of times when people are working on something influential The consequences are often quite abstract, but then you’re faced with them.

denial doesn’t help anybody, you have to stare that in the face. especially often because as a systems designer on a popular game, the most often thing that we had to do was

make a change that annoyed, engaged and experienced players in favor of the more casual player base. I had to do this a lot because I was working on, like, alternate game modes for a lot of my time on League of Legends, which are, the for fun game modes, but, like, they often had this, player base that was, really into it, and I was often screwing those people over in favor of, the more casual engagers. And, yeah,

I am one of those experienced players. I’m screwing myself over a little bit too, but you still have to be confident you’re doing the right thing. And I think that for a lot of people, they sort of detach emotionally and approach it from a business sense. And I guess I sort of stubbornly refuse to do that. so the thing that was more attractive to me was justifying it ethically and artistically rather than business-wise.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:27)
I think that you’re right. Like I think that your way of looking at it is a better way of looking at it in the longterm because if people look at things purely in terms of business, they will end up locally maximizing forever. And you can do that in a way that optimizes for the players that you already have, but the players you already have will not have a retention rate of a hundred percent. So if you keep

Benjamin Lindsay (20:34)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:52)
optimizing it for the people that have been playing the game the longest, eventually you’ve made a game that’s hostile to new players and then it will die inevitably. And so I think that you’re doing the right thing by trying to balance between those two factors. And that’s something that when, when planning releases for live games that I’ve worked on, I think it’s really tempting for some people to say, well, this release is going to be completely focused on

Benjamin Lindsay (20:59)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:21)
this KPI for these sets of users. So what are all the things that are going to target that? And my thought is like, no, we need to pick something for everyone. And that doesn’t mean one thing that makes everyone happy. That means this thing is going to be good for our D1 retention because we need to make that keeps pace with what we want. But let’s have something for the elder players so that they know we’re paying attention to them.

Benjamin Lindsay (21:23)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

yeah, give everybody a cookie. No, I’m very much aligned with that. Well, this reminds me of, think it might be, in my opinion, the best GDC talk of all time. It’s called Designing Path of Exile to be played forever. Yeah, and one thing that Chris Wilson really specified is that they make sure every season

Aaron Nemoyten (21:46)
Yeah, give everybody a cookie.

yeah, I’ve that.

Benjamin Lindsay (22:09)
It’s like, they don’t do like a season of this one’s for the new players, this one’s for the experienced players. Every season they try to give something to all of their sub-audiences. I think it’s actually often a trap to try to make it the same thing. this is a hot take, this is something that annoys me about World of Warcraft a lot. I think that they often try to repurpose their systems. they try to be like, okay, this is our big thing and gonna

pack something for everybody in this thing. And then I think what that often happens is it makes too many compromises and then so everybody’s mad, right? And instead, I think it’s a much better strategy to make separate features, like much smaller scope, separate features for all of your target audiences.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:56)
I think we’re in an interesting point in the industry where in the last decade, it’s made so much money that we’ve had a flood of people getting hired in who sort of come to it as a monetizable career path and not as something that they’re passionate about. And, I’ve definitely talked to people who

Benjamin Lindsay (23:11)
Right,

Aaron Nemoyten (23:17)
claim to be passionate about games and maybe they are as gamers, but I that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to approach it as a game developer with that level of care. It more like means that like, this is your hobby. And also you have a job where you look at a spreadsheet and you look at numbers and you look at data and you go, think this number will go up if I do X. I think that

Benjamin Lindsay (23:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:42)
you know, if you ignore the player experience as you’re making those decisions, then at some point you will start making things worse and not better, and it will be very difficult to know when you’ve gone over that cliff.

Benjamin Lindsay (23:51)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, mean, yeah, that makes me think two things. One is that, like, you know, behind most, some would say every, some would say most, behind most cynics is a broken-hearted idealist, right? So, like, I think it’s very easy to get into the games because you’re passionate and then just get sort of beaten down by everything and then become very cynical. And then guess the other thing is, like, especially if you’re, very spreadsheet-y, like, this is sort of a reason why, I mean, this is very rioty of me, but but…

I just think playtesting and playing your own game is so, so, so important because it, I, it’s really important to have, I guess. Okay. So people talk a lot about the difference between sympathy and empathy and like everybody has their own definition, but I’m going to define it here as empathy being like personally understanding somebody else’s experience and sympathy being theoretically understanding somebody else’s experience. I think it is vitally important if you are

Aaron Nemoyten (24:29)
Yep.

Benjamin Lindsay (24:55)
working on a game to at least be sympathetic to your player’s experience, but maintaining authentic sympathy is pretty difficult. And I think it’s just generally a lot easier to just play the game yourself and so developing it. You know what I mean? Developing your own direct experience is it’s sort of like easier and more time efficient way to do that. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:17)
Yeah,

that is I have so working on free to play mobile games. I’ve definitely been in a position where there are people on the team who come at it originally from a standpoint of this is just a job and I have made efforts to try to bring everyone in and like give talks and explain. Okay, here’s how this works. Here’s why people enjoy it. Here’s what’s fun about it. Maybe this isn’t the type of game that you normally play, but here’s why it’s appealing and I think

Benjamin Lindsay (25:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:47)
Early

in my career, I was really bad at that. And I worked with some people that actually had formal game design training when that was much more rare. And they would look at stuff and go, why are we doing this? This sucks. And I’d be like, we are doing this because it’s successful in the market and it makes money. And they’d get mad at me. And in hindsight, I don’t blame them.

Benjamin Lindsay (25:51)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

you

if I imagine that scenario, can sort of imagine equally plausible scenarios where they are applying their game design training to say that this is like bad game design, which I put in scare quotes because what is that even like?

Aaron Nemoyten (26:27)
Right, right.

Benjamin Lindsay (26:29)
The reason I’m putting that in scare quotes is that I think a lot of people, especially when they start under like studying game design, they try to derive rules of what makes a good game and then apply that right. Whereas, I have a, I have a good friend from Riot who often likes to satirically quote the framework design things to their purpose, which sounds at the same time tautological, but it’s actually really, really deep.

same time, which is why it’s funny. Right, it’s like good game design is designing the game for whatever it’s supposed to be. And like, obviously that’s very complicated and understanding all of the nuances of that is like what makes a good game designer. like there is something that might be really great in one situation is really bad in another situation. Right. So when you tell that story, I can imagine a scenario where there are like

Aaron Nemoyten (26:54)
That’s useful.

Benjamin Lindsay (27:18)
No, as a game designer, this sort of, think that this is like we’re screwing over our players, right? In order to make more money, which is a thing that you have to do some, lot of the time, either because you’re running out of money or because the executives demanded or whatever. But also I have found that with game designers from a more formal or academic background, I find that they often, although this is less true, I think this is a lot more true.

in like the early 2010s, they have this like very theoretical view of like what good game design is. And they sort of approach it from a prescriptivist standpoint of like, I’m gonna go into a room, I’m gonna think really hard about what makes a good video game and I’m gonna come up with these principles. it’s often around elegance, it’s often around like, one mechanic that can be very deep.

It’s like very simple and complex at the same time. It’s like go, it’s like chess or whatever. And then they’ll like apply this standard to other games and say this very popular game that people love playing is bad because it doesn’t match these abstract principles. And I’m very against that, approach I like to take is studying like, people really like this game. What can I learn about what makes a good game from

Aaron Nemoyten (28:36)
something I wanted to ask about, you’ve got a bunch of experience doing R &D at Riot, and I imagine that that is unique in the games industry as a job because Riot is more patient about R &D than just about any company. And I’m wondering how you feel about that now, how you felt about it at the time. And if you ever just thought, you know what, I wish I could just

Benjamin Lindsay (28:51)
Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:59)
like do a game jam and make something terrible and release it, you know, into the world, to avoid having to work on something that nobody’s gonna see for years, if at all.

Benjamin Lindsay (29:04)
Yeah.

I think that largely Riot is taking the proper approach for them to R &D because Riot is a live service game company that has a very valuable and important brand in terms of player trust, right? believe there’s this understanding that

Riot is quite good at maintaining these live service games. They respond quickly to issues. They, you know, put a lot of love. League has done a two week update cycle for its entire existence.

Essentially Riot is in a tough position as a company because they need to release new games, right?

However, the cost of releasing a new game that you cannot support because it’s not that successful is quite high, right? As we saw with Legends of Runeterra,

I think that the absolute worst outcome for Riot worse than never releasing new games is to become Google, where Google will release a promising new product and everybody will be like, well, even if this seems really cool, I don’t want to use this because they’re going to just going to kill it in a year or two. Right. So right. Isn’t a really tough position. And I think it makes sense that they’re cautious because like,

Aaron Nemoyten (30:03)
Yeah.

Benjamin Lindsay (30:18)
the cost of releasing a new game that doesn’t work out is tremendously higher than the cost of not releasing that game. So, a conservative stance when it comes to risk is important. Now, the difficulty of that then,

is that when you have a conservative stance, you want to really validate every new product, makes the teams more risk averse and also means you have to spend more time and expense validating a new product, which means that the bar for success gets ever higher, right? And so balancing that is really tough.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:48)
Right.

Benjamin Lindsay (30:51)
Anyway…

So, but going back to like from the perspective of like being a grunt in the riot R &D machine. Yeah, it was a little frustrating.

as a developer, I miss shipping things to players, but guess I was sort of aligned with the general thing of like, I don’t want to put stuff out into the wild just to do it. I want to be really confident that my shit is good because I guess I love the art form and I love games and I love gamers and I don’t want to give people weak sauce shit. want…

If I’m like, there’s so many games out there. It’s like, I guess maybe I’m stubborn and I like, I guess I like the art form more than I like myself. So I’m like, if I’m putting something out into the world, I want to be able to legitimately believe. I want to say, yes, this game is worth your time against silk song or Claire obscure or, or clash Royale or league of legends or world of warcraft, right? Like I want to

Aaron Nemoyten (31:32)
you

Benjamin Lindsay (31:48)
legitimately believe, yes, this game is that good. And if it’s not, I would rather not put it out in the wild, right?

It’s sort of a little lame looking at my portfolio and being like, the last four or five years of my career, all I can do is be like, I did this. Can’t tell you really exactly what I did. But yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (32:06)
Yep.

Yep. I, I get it.

Benjamin Lindsay, thank you so much for being on Make Games Drink Coffee. It’s been really fun talking to you. I love being able to go deep about game design especially. you know, that’s something that I love talking about. And I’m glad that you love talking about it as well.

Benjamin Lindsay (32:13)
Yeah, thank you for having me.

yeah, love nothing more. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve had a great time. yeah, hopefully you can do this again sometime.

Aaron Nemoyten (32:27)
Awesome. All right.

I would love to have a great weekend.