In this episode:

Jordan interviews Robin Hunicke, an innovative video game artist. Robin was a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and also the co-founder of Funomena, a studio focused on creating emotionally engaging and experimental games. She is known for her contributions to games like The Sims and Journey, and is recognized in the industry for her support of independent game development, experimentation in game design, research in dynamic difficulty adjustment, and the advocacy of women within the games industry. Robin shares her unique takes on games as art, approach to game design, emphasizing how games can be used as a medium to evoke emotion, foster empathy, and more.

Topics covered:

• Robin's journey into the game industry and her work on The Sims and Journey
• The role of empathy and emotion in game design
• How games can explore complex human emotions such as love, grief, and recovery
• The process of designing games that offer emotional connection between players
• Robin’s approach to game mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics (MDA) theory
• Her experiences co-founding Funomena and creating games that focus on innovative gameplay
• Robin’s insights into productivity, balancing creative work, and leadership in game design
• The importance of representation and diversity in game development

For more game industry tips:

• Learn more about Jordan & Bright Black
• Listen on iTunes | Spotify (Support the show and leave a review)
• Visit www.playmakerspodcast.com for the full blog post and more!

Timestamps:

[03:02] Robin’s early inspirations: from Legos to video games

[07:04] The first Game Jam and being a pioneer for experimental gameplay

[12:00] Early mentors and influences in the game industry

[16:40] Exploring emotion and empathy in game design: Journey and Luna

[20:50] Designing games from the feeling backward: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics (MDA)

[25:00] Mistakes, learning, and transformation as central themes in game development

[30:40] Robin’s work on Luna and the emotional depth behind the game's concept

[35:10] The importance of relaxation in game mechanics

[39:00] Lessons from Journey: Creating trust and connection between players

[41:00] Designing games with a focus on community and empathy

[45:00] Robin’s thoughts on the future of games and the importance of diversity in the industry

[48:20] Robin’s productivity tips and how she balances multiple creative projects

[52:00] Final thoughts: Building a fulfilling career in game design and being a leader in the industry

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

Learn more and Connect with Robin Hunicke:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Games & companies mentioned:

• The Sims, My Sims, SimCity(Maxis)
• Journey (Thatgamecompany)
• Luna (Funomena)
• Phenomena (Funomena's new game)
• The Marriage (by Rod Humble)
• Facade (Interactive Storytelling)
• The Witness (Jonathan Blow)
• Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games)

Welcome to PlayMakers episode 8. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman, and on every episode, I interview a game industry leader, legend, or luminary, and I dive deep into their expertise to help you learn things that are going to help you achieve creative and business success in the game industry. This week, we have Robin Hunicke. She's worked on The Sims. She's got a new studio, Funomena, that's doing some really cool stuff. We talk about her unique and artistic approach to game making.

In this episode of Playmakers… Playmakers! It's not actually pronounced Plamacus, FYI. Alright, enough goofing around, let's talk about Robin Hunicke.

So, Robin is someone who really has had a truly luminary career in the game industry. She's worked on games including The Sims and Journey. She's doing incredible stuff at her new studio, Funomena—that’s F-U-N-O-M-E-N-A. And on top of all that, she teaches game design at UC Santa Cruz. So, we talk about a lot of things.

First of all, we learn a little bit about her unique path into the industry. Then we spend some time talking about her approach to making games. It's an approach that has consistently produced some really amazing, interesting, beautiful, emotionally affecting games. Now, she is known for an emotionally aware approach—an approach that involves putting the emotions the game is meant to evoke front and center. So, we talk about that.

And also, because she accomplishes so much and does so much, I talked to her a little bit about her productivity processes and how she manages all that stuff. You go to the Funomena page, and there are so many cool games being worked on there. She’s also working at UC Santa Cruz, giving back to the gaming community at GDC, and she’s an amazing guest on this show as well. Just an incredible person all around. Very excited to share this interview with Robin Hunicke. You're listening to Playmakers.

Robin, it is so great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

And thank you so much for having me.

So, I wanted to start with learning about your inspiration, about what brought you into the industry and how that happened, because you bring a very unique voice to your work, and it’s different than a lot of games. So, I’m curious about your path into games.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I started off as a curious child, someone who loved to play with Legos and make things. I grew up in upstate New York in a tiny town called Saratoga Springs, which is right near Skidmore College. It's a horse town.

I was outside most of my young adult life, so I spent a lot of time climbing, building, and playing in the snow. My dad was an engineer and a builder. My mom is actually a history buff, but also a teacher. She’s also really into crafting baskets, weaving, and making stuff like the old ways.

So, I grew up really with a hands-on education in how people made colonial crafts, for example. I’m a child of the 70s, so it was like, you know, “Alright, let’s all make soap from animal fat,” you know?

I saw that in your special collar today.

Let's hit, yeah, let's hit, you know, hand dip these candles or whatever. But, I also was, you know, exposed to video games when they first started coming out in the console form through ColecoVision and then Atari through friends of mine who had those systems at their houses. So my first, like, real video game love was I fell in love with the game M.U.L.E. in seventh grade.

I was playing it on a friend's brother's Commodore 64. And I just loved the idea that you could play with somebody else and then also play against the computer. Like, to me, that was just so mind-blowing. Like, I'd played Pitfall and, you know, Mario games and stuff, but I'd never really seen that kind of interactivity.

And then, when we finally did get a Super Nintendo, and we're, you know, playing other games and stuff, I was like, you know, these games are okay, but they're not as cool as M.U.L.E. Because M.U.L.E., you can play with a machine, and you can also kind of, like, basically try to outdo each other in the real-world space.

And so, I always had this experience of games where it was like, yeah, no, popular games are cool, but, like, I really like these games that do weird, different ways of making you interact. I ended up going to school for, sort of, I did a choose-your-own-adventure major in oral narrative and women's studies and computer science. I kind of fell into the computer science thing because I didn't want to take a math class. So, I took this class called "Computer Programming as a Liberal Art," and then I ended up becoming a programmer and really got obsessed, almost, with programming and learning how to use computers.

And actually, when I was taking those classes, the minor was actually math because there wasn't a computer science department at my university, which was the University of Chicago. So I started working in a computer lab, and then I got really interested in working with a graduate professor on robots.

One of the people on that team was working on an AI that could play The Sims or SimCity for you, called Mayor. And I started talking with that person about video games. I was like, "Oh, you know, I used to love video games when I was a kid," and right around that same time, Myst came out. And so, then I started playing a lot more video games.

So, I was in school in my early twenties, going from undergraduate into graduate school, thinking, "Wow, you know, games are so cool. What an interesting thing." And then at some point, it clicked with me that they were actually designed by people. That, like, there was a whole community of game designers. Like, Will Wright was a person that had designed SimCity, and it was like a job.

And in that moment, I think all the neurons in my brain probably exploded at once. It was this massive revelation, like, "This is a career that people do." And from that point forward, I just wanted to meet game designers and talk to them about games. How did they build them? How did they design them? You know, because they combined all of my interests: computer programming, sound design and music, art, animation, storytelling, and then, of course, this funky interactivity that you get with games—like the interactivity I was talking about with M.U.L.E., where you can be playing against a system that's been designed by a person, but then you can also be playing against people. That you are talking to about how the system behaves. And then you can play a game with somebody where you're both trying to figure out how the system behaves. And I just... that combination of human communication with each other and human-computer interaction was just so sticky for me.

And pretty much from there, that was the moment I knew, like, "Okay, these are my people." Like, I want to be around game designers all the time. I want to talk to them all the time. So, I started volunteering with the IGDA. I got a couple of IGDA scholarships, actually, so that I could go to more conferences.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, and I started volunteering to help design a curriculum to teach games in colleges. Because I was like, "Well, ooh, wouldn't it be so cool if you could actually major in games and game design?" Because at the time, you couldn't do that. And then I think the other really formative experience for me was I had some friends that I'd met in this period of time when I was a grad student that organized this get-together in Oakland where we were all going to, kind of, get a bunch of machines from Intel and then make games on them and just give them away for free, which at the time was a really bizarre idea. And we decided to call it the Indie Game Jam, and it was like the first game jam ever.

Wow.

Yeah, and so I was the first female game jammer on the planet Earth.

That is so cool.

Yeah, so we started the Game Jam, and then we founded this little get-together called the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, which is now in its, like, 16th year at GDC, where we showed the games off to a bunch of our peers at GDC, and that really sealed the deal for me.

I was like, "This is the best thing ever." I didn't even really care if I ever had a career commercially in games, because most of the people that were at the Indie Game Jam, like Chris Hecker, Sean Barrett, and Brian Sharpe—a lot of the people that I'm still really close friends with—Otman Binstock, who's now at Oculus, they were all just kind of bumming around doing odd jobs. Some of them had commercial jobs, but mostly they were just doing research on the fringes of the games community. I really associated myself with that crew, like, "Okay, I'm sort of a programmer, but I'm really interested in experimental gameplay." John Blow was another founding member of that group.

And this was before there was any XBLA or any of that stuff. The only way you could get a game published was if you were with a publisher. So if you made a game, you had to go and pitch it to a publisher and get permission from them to even put it on a disc and release it on a console.

So it was a really different environment for me. Even as I was becoming a game designer and learning how to eventually do an interview and get my first job, which was on The Sims, the idea of game design as a career for me was more about being on the fringes of that more corporate culture and trying to be more artistic and innovative. It wasn’t just about working on my favorite game, although I did end up getting to do that. I did end up getting to work on The Sims, which was great. But when I started off, it was more like, "I was just really curious to kind of make stuff and see what happens."

You've really, you know, made that your path. And I think in a lot of ways, the game industry has stretched toward you.

Yes, and it's, you know, people always say to me, "Well, it must be so intimidating to be a woman in games," or, "Oh, it seems like the community is so toxic," or this or that. And to me, it's like, you know, there are times when, yeah, like the internet is a jerk, but that's just, it's like, that's just like, as we're all seeing now, that's just the internet.

I find that the community of game development, for the most part, and especially the people that are in my circle—experimental game designers, I would say—are some of the most open, loving, accepting, diverse people on planet Earth because they're real weirdos. You know, they don't really fit into any one category.

I mean, you don't sit at home alone for seven years making Stardew Valley if you could just go anywhere and check in with anybody. You're a really unique individual if you do that. You're the kind of person that wakes up thinking about things that will make your game better. And, like, that's not a lot of people on this planet, you know?

So I think it's a really special community and one that I'm honestly really honored to be a part of. To see it expand the way that it has in the last 10 years has been... it's just been amazing. I would say over the last 15 years, the games industry has changed to become so much more than it was when I first started. And I'm really, really excited to see the future of that change.

One of the things we're going to talk more about is your work in a little bit, but it has a very human quality. And I think it's also interesting to hear that in your career and in the way you've developed it. That's also been a theme with some of the most successful people I've had on the show, and I think it's great.

Thank you. It's deliberate. I mean, I think about it often. I ask myself often, you know, "What can I do to be of service? What is the goal? Why am I doing what I'm doing?" Because it's a short ride.

You're only on the planet for... I mean, compared to most rocks, you're like a baby. So it's just interesting to think about how short your time is. To you, it seems so long, but really, like, even to the tree in your yard, you're probably just a blink.

And we only get to make so many games.

That's true.

Well, I'm curious to learn about some of your heroes and mentors along the way. I think you may have mentioned some of them already, but I'd love to maybe pick out two or three that really, really impacted you and the way you think about your work.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I always sort of say that there were two people that were extremely supportive of me doing what I do, very early on in my career. Or maybe it would be more like two sets of people, and one set would be the set of Looking Glass/MIT folks. Just around the time that I was kind of really seriously considering getting into this as a career, Looking Glass closed.

And so, that would include the folks from Harmonix, Looking Glass, and a lot of other people that ended up going off and doing really interesting things. Warren Spector, Doug Church, and I think Chris and John... Doug, Chris, John, and Warren were sort of my go-to mentors for a really long time when I was in grad school.

And then the other set of people would be the people that touched my life in the commercial setting, so people like Will Wright, who was the first person to say to me that I actually sounded like a game designer. He said it to me in a casual conversation we were having at a conference. I was like, "Oh my God, really? I'm just an academic." And he's like, "No, you sure sound like a game designer." And he's been super supportive of me throughout the years.

That's a pretty good Will impersonation you got there.

Yeah, he's so great. I really appreciate his brain. Rod Humble also was a fellow collaborator and someone that really helped me.

I don't know Rod. Who's Rod?

Rod was actually running the Sims franchise while I was working there on MySims. He made a game, which we showed at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop really early on, called The Marriage, which was one of my favorite games.

I think I remember that.

Yeah, one of my favorite experimental games.

You're like in a room in an apartment, it's nighttime, and you're trying to go out, and you talk... Is this the right one?

No, no, that's actually Facade.

Oh, I was thinking Facade.

Yeah, Facade is another colleague of mine, actually, who I work with at school now. He's also been a real supportive person in my life.

But no, The Marriage is just a very abstract game about two shapes, and it's Rod's interpretation of what makes a marriage work, or what makes a marriage not work. They kind of float around on screen. It's a very, very, very abstract game. And it's very much told from his unique perspective about his own personal experience of marriage.

But to me, what it did at the time was show that you could really conceptualize a process that was so intimate and so complex as a series of actions in a space and have it be really moving. So, he was also really supportive.

And then there are a lot of women in my later career that have been fantastic, including Siobhan Reddy from Media Molecule and Angie Smets, who runs the Guerrilla team that just shipped Horizon Zero Dawn. They've been incredibly supportive of me as I've moved forward in my career, not just as a designer, but as a studio CEO and a person in a leadership role, and Kelly Wallick, who now runs the IGF and Indie Megabooth.

I think those three women have been really, really influential in my ability to see myself as a strong leader who's also sensitive to the needs of others. Because I think we get a lot of role models in leadership contexts, especially where it's like you're supposed to be tough, you know? And I've learned over the years that the approach of really having that empathetic, putting-yourself-in-the-shoes-of-the-other-person-first-and-foremost, seeking to understand before seeking to be understood—those three ladies have really given me a lot of feedback about that.

I used this question partly to help me figure out who I want to invite on the show next. So that was great because it was a lot of people to investigate. So thanks for that. Now, as far as the next step in the interview, I wanted to ask about what you do that's unique. So we talked about a lot of people who've influenced you, you know, and I'm going to tell you my thoughts after, but you already used the word several times.

So, I mean, I believe that games are about interactivity and expression of yourself and also expression of concepts through action. And while I was in graduate school and starting to do all this outreach work and volunteering and meeting people, one of the things that I started doing was teaching in this game design workshop run by a Looking Glass alum, Marc LeBlanc. And we ended up kind of collaborating. I wrote a paper, which he's an author on, about this philosophy of mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, and the way that—

I have read that—very influential on me personally.

That's awesome. I mean, when I was first exposed to the workshop, I thought, this is amazing. Let's really delve into it. And I ended up dropping out of my PhD in computer science to go work for The Sims, but if I had finished... When I eventually write a book, which I hope I will someday, it'll be about this theory, because I think it applies to a lot of other things.

But, you know, this idea that there are the mechanics of the system, which are the rules, and then the dynamics of the system, which is the behavior that emerges when you're all sitting around the table playing poker. It doesn't say in poker that you have to bluff, but everybody does it, right? That's a dynamic.

And then the aesthetic outcome, which is the feeling of schadenfreude that you get when somebody folds and you know that you were bluffing. The aesthetic outcome of a game of poker is often that you feel like you're secretly smarter or took advantage of other people, and that feeling of schadenfreude and getting over on other people is what makes poker such a cutthroat game. It's so juicy, even when the stakes are really low—there's that feeling of cleverness that comes from it, right?

Unless you're losing constantly, which happens a lot.

Well, that's the other thing. The problem with poker is that three to five people at the table have the opposite experience of you when you win. And I'm actually terrible at poker because my tells are too big, so I don't play it professionally by a long shot. But this idea that the feeling or the outcome of the game is a unique expression of its rules and the interaction of its rules with people has been the cornerstone of my career.

And so when I started thinking about, well, okay, if that's true about games, what do I want to build? Well, I want to build games that give people new feelings. I want to build games that give people feelings about other people. I want to build games that give people feelings of understanding, appreciation, love, sadness, loss, recovery.

I'm really interested in topics that are about the things I feel other media doesn't necessarily address as well. It's a lot harder to really understand what someone totally different from you is going through if you're just reading or watching it. Because there's always that room for you being outside looking in. But if you're doing it, if you're walking in that person's shoes, moment to moment, and having to make tough decisions based on their situation, which you're embodying, there's a moment in there that is so unique to games.

And I think the sort of sad truth about games is it's very easy to make a game that's as entertaining as a very popular, explosive summer blockbuster movie, or that's as entertaining as a novel based on the idea of "there's a bad guy and you have to get revenge." Those kinds of things are really easy to do with a video game, especially if the mechanic that you put in the game is shooting or jumping because shooting and jumping are really easy to execute on screen. And then you can just slap the story on and there you go. And those are the things that we're really best at.

Well, we know what the aesthetic outcome is. We already understand it, and therefore we also know that those mechanics are then going to drive through those dynamics and get there.

Exactly, it's a hundred percent. You don’t even have to do that much work. The really hard thing to do with a game is to make it really good at what it’s uniquely good at, which is using a set of mechanics to create new dynamics in a person that then create this totally unexpected emotional outcome.

Take Journey, for example. Jenova wanted to create a genuine connection between strangers online. We worked backward from that feeling to, “Okay, what’s the dynamic that would make two people feel awe and wonder toward each other and the unknown?” We worked backward to the dynamics—trust, helping each other, guiding and supporting one another. Then we asked, “What are the mechanics that lead to that?”

I’m not going to lie, a lot of the stuff we tried was just typical platforming. At one point, as a joke, we even implemented a laser cannon from the sky just to relieve stress. But mostly, we had to work through a lot of commonplace mechanics to get to the few simple things that Journey does to create that feeling of trust between strangers, which eventually leads to that connection. It was really a process of winnowing out.

For me, I’m interested in that work. I’m interested in thinking, “What if I made a game about lust? Or recovery? Or grief?” Then I’d work backward—what would the dynamics be between the player and the characters or other players in that game? And then work back to figure out, “What are the rules the system needs to implement?”

That work is the most fulfilling and interesting for me in game design. I love playing games that aren’t like that, but when I’m making a game and collaborating with others, that’s the kind of work I want to do. I want my games to be different, experimental, artistic, and to approach interactivity from a fresh perspective.

I always want to work on something fresh, even if it’s just fresh for me. At some point, maybe I’ll build a massively multiplayer roguelike, but when I do, I’m not going to approach it from the mechanics forward. I’ll work from the feeling backward, figuring out the mechanics based on my desire to create a feeling in the player. And that really necessitates empathy.

In order to understand that goal, you have to put yourself in the shoes of an everyday player, a person who has never played games, or even someone who thinks games are horrible. Then you try to win them over through design. That focus on working backward and focusing on the end first—what’s sometimes called user-centered design in more technical circles—requires stepping into the shoes of that user, thinking about who they are, why they’re playing your game, and what they’ll get out of it.

I want to back up for a second and make sure the audience is with us because the audience isn't just game designers. So, when you're talking about mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, we’re saying, “Hey, what are the rules of the game?” That’s the mechanics. The dynamics are the real-time, unpredictable ways those rules come together to create an experience. And the aesthetics? That’s the effect on the person who’s playing—how does it make them feel? What is the subjective quality?

Exactly. So, for example, in Journey, which is a game where you’re journeying through the world, you might see another person in the distance, and you can connect with them. What we did was build an online multiplayer system where, as you’re walking through the world, this other person appears.

Normally, in online multiplayer games, there’s a lobby where you’re trying to match up with someone of the same skill level. We just got rid of all that and made it so that when you’re in the game and playing, if you’re online, other people near you in the game world show up.

We created a server that made that seamless online connection the focus of the gameplay. The core rule of the game is to get from the beginning to the end of the game. And another rule is that when you’re close enough to someone else who’s playing, but not so close that they just pop into your universe, they become visible to you.

So, we essentially hide everyone else who’s playing except for one person. You can only connect with one person at a time. This idea of having a long journey and only being able to see one other pilgrim on the same route as you means that you, as the player, have a choice. Do you stay with this pilgrim, or do you leave? Do you try to strengthen the connection with this person, call to them, dance with them, spend time with them—which has its own rewards—or do you walk your own way? That decision is a big departure from how most online games are designed, and it’s just through the design of the mechanics and the resulting dynamics.

As you’ve explained it, and as you’ve described Jenova’s idea of having a game where you could form a real connection with someone online, the insight I had was, it has this feeling of loneliness. Of course, it does—because if you want to connect with someone, you have to first put the players in some amount of isolation. Then, suddenly, the person you interact with becomes like a warm fire.

Exactly. And so, you know, when we were starting to think about building Luna, you know, one of the things I really want people to understand about this character is that the character has made a mistake. And so, you know, when we make games, a lot of times. They're about getting revenge or, like, correcting a mistake, going back in time and fixing something so that, like, it's better for everybody. But that's not really how life is, you know?

Like, in life, you make mistakes and then you have to learn to live with them. Learning to live with your mistakes sometimes means giving up on a relationship or apologizing for something you said. Sometimes it means letting go of a toxic relationship in your family or life, or it might mean being very angry and then letting that anger go. But mistakes aren’t something you just erase from your life, right?

So, when we first started working on the game, Martin, my co-founder, asked, “What should we be doing?” I said we should think about the question of mistakes. For the first year, while we were doing previs (previsualization), I was folding paper, studying transformative art, fairy tales, and the idea of mistakes in our culture. I also did a specific exercise: for about a year, I asked every new person I met—whether it was a cab driver or a friend—“Why do people do things they know are bad for them?”

A mistake is often when you make a deliberate choice that turns out to be bad for you or someone else. So I became interested in why people make choices they know aren't good for them. Some said it was for the thrill, some said they thought the benefits would outweigh the costs, and others said that no one really knows something is a mistake until it’s already happened. As I asked more people, I realized how rich the area of mistakes is for character development, and how interesting it is to explore a character who makes a mistake and has to live with it.

The residue of the mistake is there throughout the experience. I didn’t even realize that aspect of the game.

Well, of course. I mean, just like Journey, I don’t know that everyone gets the deeper conversations we had about empathy, loving others, and treating everyone as unique and special. We had a lot of deep conversations about the philosophy of togetherness, the fast pace of modern society, and how we rarely feel truly alone, but often feel isolated.

You can feel isolated and separate while sitting on a crowded train playing your DS, for example. I don’t know if everyone playing Journey gets that feeling, but, as you said, there’s the residue of those conversations in the game.

With Luna, the whole point for me and the team is to think through how fairy tales and fables educate us about mistakes. They often teach us that you can recover from mistakes, and sometimes, mistakes that seem terrible at first turn out to be beneficial.

One of the most common fairy tales is about the fool who does everything wrong and ends up king. They defy conventional wisdom but get lucky. That story—that life is more about chaos, lack of control, and being open to the future than about doing everything perfectly—is such an important and healing message for society. It helps move us away from the idea that we must do everything right the first time. If we could do everything right, we’d be robots—and that wouldn’t be fun.

And the mistakes are how we learn. They're who we are even before we make the mistake.

Exactly. You know, there was a piece that we listened to on NPR when we were first starting to work on Luna, about a family that had a trauma in its past that had hidden the trauma from future generations. At some point, one of the characters in the story said, "If you deny the mistake, if you deny the reality of that mistake, then you're denying who you are. You're really not acknowledging that this is part of who you are." And it's only by accepting it and acknowledging it that you can become who you want to become. Otherwise, you're always defined by that denial. I thought that was just so interesting, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, society sometimes figures that out when we memorialize things. And sometimes we don’t.

Yeah, it’s a very interesting process. So, you know, to bring it back to this idea of aesthetics, this aesthetic outcome of transformation through trauma—of learning from tough situations or unexpected change—that really is something I want clear in the game at its end. I want players to experience a sense of letting go, of something deep inside them. Giving themselves permission to let it go. If every person who played Luna could reach inside, take something they feel bad about, and let it go, that would be amazing. It’s a terribly lofty goal. And as an artist, you always have goals larger than what you can accomplish. But I believe in having those goals from the beginning.

Have you been to Burning Man?

No, I haven’t, actually. I’ve never been because I’m very pale and I’m afraid of getting a sunburn, but people always encourage me to go. I will go sometime.

There’s a big part of the experience that has to do with letting go. That’s why I brought it up. Every year, there’s a temple built, and people bring memories of things they’ve lost or mistakes they’ve made. They put them in the temple, and the whole thing is burned. It’s a very cathartic, very sad moment. A lot of people are crying.

Yeah, you know, I think that our ability to sort of acknowledge failure and to live through it, it's not helped by a lot of cultural messages and especially marketed messages about, you know, what’s the perfect person, what’s the perfect woman, what’s the perfect life, what kind of car you should drive, what it means to be successful.

I have a lot of friends now who are in their 40s and 50s saying to themselves, "I’m going to give myself permission to stop working in this career path and do something I really love. I’m going to go to Burning Man and build something huge in the desert and set it on fire." That’s something someone said to me literally days ago. They spent a long time building a career for themselves. They’re an immigrant, they worked super hard, and now they’ve realized, "I’ve made it. I’m on the last rung of the ladder, and now I want to do something else."

Confronting that is so hard. It’s so scary. But if you don’t confront it, you’re not really living, right? When people ask me why I like game design, I say I love it because it’s so hard. It’s so hard. I ask my students all the time, "Okay, let’s say you wanted to make a game about a child that died of cancer. How would you do it? How did Ryan and his team come up with the ideas for That Dragon, Cancer?" Like, really ask yourself, how do you make the experience of being told by a doctor that your child is going to die in three months an interactive experience that’s also respectful and gives you a sense of what they went through?

How would you do that? It’s so hard, you know? How do you build a game that’s all about perspective and looking at the world from a different perspective? When Jonathan Blow built The Witness, he had to do a lot of work on the game engine side to make the puzzles in that game possible. It’s some of the most amazing programming in a video game. Game design is a lot more than just points, ranks, or gear to kill the giant dragon at the end of a series of rooms. It’s about creating the possibility space of all human feeling.

Absolutely. And this way of processing design is, you know, it’s not the typical conversation that happens, and certainly not one I’ve had often, but I love it. For me, it’s very exciting to talk about design like this. I have two questions I want to ask you about.

First, how do you do it? You’ve talked about putting yourself in the shoes of the player and understanding the experience itself. Any tips on connecting those lines? And then, secondly—and we can get back to this—for designers working on more traditional games, how can they fit some of this into their work?

So I think that people ask me a lot of times, where do I start? And what I ask them to do is to just imagine the most simple paper prototype possible. Even to just do it with like playing cards or a couple of dice and a handmade deck. Try to think about how to get to the feeling that they want to get to.

So, you know, I had a student at school, she’s actually getting ready to graduate soon, who was in an autobiographical games class that I taught. She lives with autism; she’s on the spectrum, and she wanted to give people the feeling of passing with a disability. Like, okay, what does that feel like? So she modified a game of Set, which is a matching game you play with cards, and she gave everybody a list of five handicaps, five disabilities, five challenges—however you want to think about them—and five abilities, maybe. And they greatly constrain the way that you play the game. Then you roll a die and get one. And no one knows what your disability is, but as you’re playing, it may become apparent.

In the game, you can match sets of things that are colored purple, or you can match sets of things that have particular shapes or certain numbers of things. One of the handicaps might say, “You can’t pick up anything that’s purple,” or “You can’t match things with a particular shape in a river.” And these disabilities, as you continue to play—because everyone is looking at a shared set of cards and everyone can see all the sets—if you consistently don’t call out a set because it has something to do with your disability, someone else can guess it and take half your points, and then you’re out of the game. This idea of public information, a common understanding of what’s going on, but you can’t participate in that dialogue because of the way you see, was so immediately apparent to people that the fear of getting caught out was really high, right?

The way you get to that idea is by thinking about what you’re really trying to communicate with this notion of passing. What is passing really about? It’s about the fear of not passing. So it’s almost like a philosophical introspection into the goal of the game. The easiest way for me to get started is often just putting something down on some cards, coming up with a little bit of randomness using dice or a card-passing rule, and just trying to get to that feeling.

Doing a very basic 2D prototype, where movement was one of the first things that we did with Journey. We just sat down and built a top-down 2D prototype of multiple units moving in a space, then separated those people and only let them talk by hitting the space bar. When they hit the space bar, it just says, "Hey, hey," and that’s it. Limited communication, limited information, but you have to collaborate to get out of this top-down dungeon.

That was the first prototype for Journey. For Luna, because we knew we wanted the touch and the idea of getting in touch or transformation to be central, we started off with folding paper, origami, and talking about what folding origami felt like. We then moved from origami to systems of untangling lines, like the puzzles in the game are actually about kind of cat’s cradle-type scrambles, which has that similar feeling of disambiguation—like finally seeing the shape in the lines. Paper folding is actually really dry and hard to do in a video game context, but that idea of sorting through the shape and figuring it out, like untangling a necklace or a pile of string, is really satisfying.

We found that this actually lies at the base of relaxation. A lot of things people do with their hands to relax, like knitting or quilting, have this quality of mindless hand movement. I love the idea of getting into that zone of just moving things to see what you see. So a lot of it is about staying minimal.

The worst thing you can do when you start a game design is to focus too much on what the world will look like, overemphasizing the art, or what the story will be, overemphasizing the narrative. You can write a really great narrative and still have crappy movement mechanics or bad jumping mechanics, whatever it is you end up using.

It's gaminess will be bad.

Gaminess will be bad. Exactly. So you really need to think about that mechanics-to-aesthetics pipeline. What is the feeling going to be because of what the player is doing? Someone asked me this in class the other day, they said, “You never mention the art style when you're talking about this stuff.” And I was like, “That's because the art style is secondary to understanding why the player is doing what they’re doing.” If it’s just art style, then why not make it a film? You could convey the same feeling in a still image. If it’s really a game, then it has to be about what the player is doing.

And a film shouldn’t be just about art style either. I mean, that would also be kind of a cop-out.

Well, you know, I’m actually kind of a fan of really deeply philosophical films. Films with almost no dialogue, like Solaris, the original Solaris.

I love that movie. I love that movie.

I love that movie so much. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. And, you know, even Blade Runner with no voiceover, like the director’s cut—I love it. I really, really love atmospheric photographic films, you know, that are very much about the sequencing of images and the way that that makes you feel beyond dialogue. It’s one of the reasons why with games like Journey or Luna, I’ve always been so adamant that we not lean on dialogue if at all possible.

It’s not in the art style, it’s in the structure.

Yes, exactly. Actually, he has a really fantastic book, I think it’s called Sculpting in Time if I’m not mistaken. I’m going to forget now, but it’s a beautiful book about the process of coming up with these films that he’s made. I mean, Tarkovsky isn’t just a genius. It’s almost like reading Werner Herzog; it has such a deep quality to it. But yes, no, it’s very much about juxtaposition.

Yeah, penetrating. Exactly. That’s a great word for it. In a way, you helped me actually discover what I think the answer is, but my question was about, you know, for maybe game designers who aren’t, you know, coming up with a new concept from scratch but working within the constraints of a pre-existing design or a pre-existing brand, how can they bring some of that into what they’re doing?

So when I first started working at The Sims, I was just working on The Sims 2, I was working on an expansion pack called Open for Business and responsible for object design and working with all the animators and engineers to make objects for the expansion pack. And it was honestly one of my favorite jobs of all time because I got to play my favorite game.

And I didn’t have any direct reports, so I could just go to work, do awesome work, and then go home and play more games, and so it was really low stress, high impact. But then eventually I got promoted to work on a new version of The Sims for the Wii, which hadn’t been released yet. So this was one of EA’s very first Wii titles called MySims.

And MySims was supposed to be a game that would be more casual than The Sims, and because it was a console title and it was going to be coming out on the Wii, we really wanted it to resonate in Japan. I spent a lot of time in Tokyo and Kyoto interviewing girls who could potentially become Sims fans. But, you know, The Sims hadn’t really picked up in Japan, so there was a lot of discussion about why.

And one of the things that I decided to do when I was working on the game—my friend Joe Maris actually was the one who talked to me about doing this—he said, “This is the core flow of The Sims,” and he kind of drew that out for me. And then he was working on Sims Castaway, which is one of my favorite Sims offshoots.

And he’s like, “This is the core loop of Sims Castaway, which is really about finding objects and crafting stuff.” And he was like, “What’s your version of The Sims going to be? What’s the core loop going to be about?” And I went and I looked at both of those loops, and I decided that the aspect he had really focused on was this idea of doing more with less because The Sims is generally about buying stuff.

And he was like, “Well, okay, if you’re on a desert island, you have to build everything from scratch. So the whole game is going to be about this cool crafting system.” And for me, I really loved the idea of crafting, and I had really loved Animal Crossing. So I was like, “What if this is a really chibi-style version of The Sims, but instead of crafting for yourself, you are crafting for other people. You were giving things away.”

What if the fundamental loop of The Sims in this game wasn’t about getting more stuff to get promoted, but it was about giving away things to people who wanted to move to the town so they could basically start their own little business there? So you start off with a little town that’s empty, and then as you collect items and build furniture for these businesses—these little people made out of pixel blocks, basically—they can start their own little setup in your town, and they come to the town because you’ve basically welcomed them with these gifts.

And the more you do that, the more diverse your town gets, the more interesting it gets. And then there was the second part of the design, which, unfortunately, didn’t ever get built out due to just platform constraints, but I had really wanted it to be online. So that you could have a little town of MySims who were the ones you had chosen to support. Like, let’s say you really liked the gothy ones, and you really liked the foodies, that was another set of characters you could get in your town. You could keep, like, a sportos sim that was really into athletics, and then just send them to your friend’s town to hang out with the other sportos, and then they’d come back and they’d bring cool presents.

So the idea, sort of, which is very typical for me now that I look back on my career, was that your town could be special for you in the sense that you would put together the characters and the little play sets that you liked. But it could also be inclusive of somebody that was just kind of different and still celebrate their difference in a way that didn't compromise your vision for what the town should look like.

And I really, really like that idea now that I’ve gotten some distance from the game. It’s been a long time since it was built. Even though that feature never got implemented because the Wii didn’t ship with an online capacity right away, I still think that this idea of giving things away to build a diverse community and then letting people come and go as they please, as a way of getting sort of revitalized and rejuvenated and bringing their creativity back to the center, is really interesting.

And I always think, like, I’d love to do another game like that where the online component really was a strong feature and you could care for a little group of creatures or people or whatever, and still have them not need to all be the same in order to get along.

In fact, actually, if you think about it, Wattam, which is one of the games that we’re making here at Funomena, is a little bit like that. I think a lot of Keita’s vision is similar in that it’s about a lot of different people—little people—that are all different, but they all get along to create, ultimately, a shared common goal.

And so, you know, those kinds of ideas—you can work them into a very big franchise. You can even sort of do a franchise split and still have it remain core. Like, the Sims games are still Sims games, but you can look at the core loop and then just make an adjustment for feeling.

And like, in my case, this was an adjustment to make the game feel more focused on community and building community. I think that’s actually a really fun exercise. And I often tell young designers who are like, "Oh, I really want to make my own game, but I have to go get a regular job working on someone else’s game." I always tell them that when I first started, that was one of the best things I did in my career—working on a game that someone else had already designed. Just learning how games work, seeing how the sausage gets made, you know?

And like, getting good at meeting my commitments and managing my time. Those were so much more important than my gigantic game ideas at the time. And I think it’s something that we overlook, especially early in our careers.

I just had a similar conversation with someone who was out of school and wanted to connect with me. And it's like, "Hey, in two, three, four years, you can still revisit those ideas at that company, and you'll be so much better equipped."

Oh, totally. Yeah, there's so many little things that you don’t learn in school, you know? It’s so important to be able to communicate with integrity and honesty, and to let go of your own failures and other people’s failures. Not hold grudges against yourself or other people on your team, not start fires—all these things.

And, you know, not to say that I have nailed any of those. I mean, I’m just as bad as anybody else when it comes to being totally honest and confronting things when they present themselves, as opposed to putting it off. But those are the things you have to learn through practice. And it’s like, you can take a class in it in school, but you can’t really learn it in school. You have to learn it on the ground. And being able to do your job really well while learning that, I think, is really important.

Well, I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about that because, you know, with everything you do—teaching, running the company, designing, and all the community work you do—you must be some sort of productivity guru. And I’m just curious how you manage all that.

Well, you know, it’s funny. I’m actually teaching a class right now called Game Design Experience, and it goes with a game programming experience class. It’s two classes that are taught at the same time. So, they have class on Monday, Wednesday, Friday with my friend Nathan, and then they have class on Tuesday, Thursday with me. It’s all the sophomores in the bachelor’s programs that we have at UC Santa Cruz. And so, they’re just getting ready to go from doing solo game projects into a group game project.

At the beginning of every class, I have them all sit still and then I say, "Okay, how are we doing?" And we all say together, "I’m doing the best that I can," because really, you just have to assume that everyone is doing the best that they can.

I think for a long time, because I’m someone who loves lots of things, and I love to give back, I love to be social, to learn and to teach, and to travel and do all these things, I definitely always felt like, "Oh my gosh, there’s a million things I want to do. I’m going to run out of time. I’m never going to have enough time. I’m always rushing, rushing, rushing." But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve actually learned that the most important thing is just taking the time to focus on the goal and to think, "What am I doing?" And then to do that as best as you can.

So, I make them use a tool that I just started using last year, on the advice of one of my older mentors, Bob Bates, who’s an old game designer—a very classic, text-based adventure game designer—who’s really kept up with the industry and written some great books. He’s still one of the more influential people in my career, him and Noah Falstein, both.

And Bob was saying, "This book is so great." The book is called The Productivity Planner. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s like 25 bucks. It’s black, and I get the one that’s undated so you can put your own dates in it. It’s a process where, every week, you write down the top five things that need to get done that week, then the next five, and the next five. And I think of those as being urgent and important, urgent and important. So, really like stuff that’s in crisis mode or needs to get done really quickly, things that just popped up out of nowhere.

Then the stuff that is like, you need to do it because if you don’t do it, in the long run, it’s going to be a real pain. And then the stuff that you really think is important to do in your life, and you want to plan for. So, you bucket those things out for each week, and then every day, you sit down in the morning and you write down the number one thing that you want to get done that day, and you don’t do anything else until you get it done.

And the process is very helpful for me. It really helps me each week think about, okay, where am I totally in terms of all of the things that I’m managing? Which of them are boiling up to the top? Which ones are generating tasks that need to be planned? And which ones are things that really need to get into the flow of motion so that they can move forward, unblock people, and make other opportunities available?

And I use that pretty religiously. It’s very, very helpful for me. I’ve also gone through periods of really scheduling my life out in a Google spreadsheet, where I kind of maintain those buckets more manually and more granularly over the course of a day. But I find that when I’m doing it with the Google spreadsheet, I get a little fussy and picky, and because you can type really quickly, you kind of jam stuff in there without really thinking about it. Whereas having to write it longhand in the notebook forces me—and there’s limited space, and I don’t like to have scratches in there, things written out and then crossed off—so I really try to be particular about what I write down.

And then at the end of the week, there’s a process by which you evaluate all the things that you were supposed to do, and you look at your throughput. So, for every task, it says, how many Pomodoros—which is a 25-minute segment of time—did I spend on this task? Pomodoros allow you to plan for 25 minutes of work, and then you take a bathroom break or a water break or a stretch break. It’s a very healthy way to portion out your time.

When I was younger, especially when I was programming in grad school, I would sometimes just stay at home in my pajamas for a week, drinking coffee, not sleeping, programming, and being totally obsessed with making something work, right? As I’ve gotten older and learned what my strengths are, and what rejuvenates me, I found that it’s really bad for me to be locked away for days at a time just to answer an email, or just drawing, or programming, or making plans and schedules. I get a lot done, but by the end of it, I feel really...

Burned out.

Yeah, just crusty and fried, and not happy. And one of the core things about Phenomena, when we started the company, was that Martin and I really wanted to build a deliberately developmental organization that allowed all of us to get to the place where we could plan our days not just based on what needed to be done, but on what was important to us and what our values were.

And it is really hard. I’m not going to lie—it’s really hard to run a commercial business that way because so many other businesses you’re interacting with are not run that way. You’ll get an email from a publisher at midnight on a Sunday, and you get in in the morning and think, "Oh my God, I didn’t answer that email." It’s like, well, of course, you didn’t—you were asleep.

But when you encounter other work cultures that are toxic, and that don’t deal with goal setting or measurable throughput analysis toward those goals, it’s very difficult to maintain your own process in the face of that. But if you do it yourself personally, it’s easier to lead by example and show others that it does work. You can have a fulfilling life where you do things that are important to you because they’re important to you and let go of things that you might assume you need to do but don’t.

I don’t spend a lot of time watching television. I’ve never seen Game of Thrones. I’m sure it’s great, and I’ll binge-watch it at some point when I’ve shipped my game and have a whole summer to lay around and do nothing. But I don’t really miss it. I read obsessively. I bought like 30 books off Amazon this weekend. I buy used books like crazy. I have a huge library. I have a library here at the office, one at my house in Santa Cruz, and one at my place in San Francisco. I just fill them with books. I love reading, and I can read on my own time. I can read across a variety of subjects and create little maps between the subject matter, in a way that is so pleasing to me. Whereas with watching television or YouTube, I just can’t get that same experience. I’m really about ingesting information through books.

You’re about depth, Robin.

Yeah, I'm all about connecting things. For me, the experience of watching television is an experience of shutting off and just absorbing what someone else is showing me. It's like watching a movie. I love to do it, but I don't do it that often because I would much rather be spending my time learning, being creative with what I learn, and connecting that to other people.

I just recently did a survey online called VIA. It's the VIA character analysis, like a creativity survey. You fill out a bunch of questions—it’s like anything, you know, like a Myers-Briggs or whatever—but it tells you what your values are, like what your top strengths are.

And when you do the self-analysis, it's interesting. But then, you can also, if you want to, have other people do it for you, which is also interesting. My top strengths, from my own analysis, were creativity, kindness, love of learning, curiosity, and appreciation of beauty and excellence. When I look at that list, I think, yes, that's exactly what I value.

That’s what I want to put in front of myself every day. I don’t really spend a lot of time reading Twitter because it’s mostly negative and people complaining, or it’s distracting and silly. All of the Twitter feeds that I follow are artists, people that talk about art, or people that talk about science. So there’s the love of learning and the appreciation of beauty and excellence.

Occasionally, I follow podcasts because I’m interested in learning and curious about weird subjects. It’s not that I’m not active or that I don’t have opinions about how we should treat one another, or how much kindness is required to make the world a more peaceful and loving place. But I just don’t immerse myself in knowing about it in detail. Because I know it’s there, and my best effort is to resist through my creativity, my kindness, and my love of learning, right?

So, I really encourage everybody who wants to be productive and do a lot to sit down and ask themselves, what are their goals? What are their values? And always be asking, “This week, what can I do to get myself closer to those values?” How can I drive my game design, this job I have to do right now, or this relationship I’m in towards the things that align with my values? If everybody did that, and everyone was kind to children, the world would be a much better place.

Well, I think that says it all, Robin. We’re going to put links to the Productivity Planner and the VIA StrengthsFinder on the blog post, and we’ll also put links to Phenomena and anything else where people can find and connect with you. It was great having you, talking to you, learning from you, and being inspired by you. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to talk to you.

So there you go. That was Robin Hunicke. I had a great time having her on the show. I learned a lot. I was inspired. I really appreciated her artistic approach, her emotions-first approach, and her empathy-first approach. All those pieces meant something to me and are something that I took away in terms of how I’m going to approach some of my work.

And I hope that you will as well. If you are getting something out of these interviews—if you’re finding them useful, if you’re finding them inspirational, if they’re impacting the work that you’re doing—I would love to hear about it. You can shoot me an email at Jordan@brightblack.co (no M), or if you’d write a review on iTunes. You can do that by heading to iTunes and doing it the usual way, or if you head to playmakerspodcast.com, you’ll find links there to do it. You’ll also find links to everything that came up in the talk with Robin—all the game designers, all the games, the Productivity Planner that she mentioned, all that stuff is linked right there. You can also find out how to get in touch with Robin because we linked to her Twitter and Phenomena’s company page, where you can see what they’re up to. The art for their games is fantastic, so take a look. I think you’ll dig it. Don’t forget to sign up for the Playmakers Insiders newsletter.

You can also do that at playmakerspodcast.com. You’ll get weekly updates about upcoming guests and some bonus information as well. In the last episode I put out, or in the last letter I put out, I was recommending a very cool newsletter that I’ve discovered called Indie Weekly. You can find it at IndieWeekly.co (again, no M), and it’s a really cool newsletter where you can get a quick weekly update with game industry news. They talk about some of the notable releases, funding a little bit, and keep you up with big-picture stories. The last newsletter I got talked about how Battles.net is having their first non-Blizzard game come to it for distribution. So that’s a new thing—Bungie is going to have Deathmatch. So that’s kind of crazy. Anyway, Indie Weekly is a cool newsletter. You might want to check it out, and Playmakers Insiders is pretty cool too. You can check that out at playmakerspodcast.com. That’s all I’ve got for this episode of Playmakers. I swear that joke is going to get old. That is going to get old. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode.