Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe. Wasn't thal Joe?
Speaker 1: Did you ever play Magic the Gathering?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Really, I've never played it. The only game I mean,
Speaker 2: I spent some time playing chess, and I yeah, I've
Speaker 2: talked about on the show before. And then outside of that,
Speaker 2: it's like I never had the capacity in my life
Speaker 2: to like really learn new games. So it's like, you
Speaker 2: know what, I'm gonna play chess, try to get better
Speaker 2: out of play on my phone. But I've never like
Speaker 2: then like I want to play some other game.
Speaker 1: Man, you need to branch out.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 2: Well, I just don't want to start. You know what
Speaker 2: the thing is, I don't want to start from the beginning.
Speaker 2: I'm just like, I'm like too old for that.
Speaker 1: That's how you've learned new things. Okay, Well, speaking of
Speaker 1: being old, I spent countless hours in middle school playing
Speaker 1: Magic the Gathering. It was a huge thing in Let's see,
Speaker 1: this would have been around ninety four, ninety five, and
Speaker 1: almost everyone I knew at the time was playing it.
Speaker 2: Where were you living in ninety five?
Speaker 1: I was in Chicago, Chicago, So that's partly why. And
Speaker 1: you know, every recess was taken up with Magic, the
Speaker 1: gathering tournaments, and I really enjoyed playing, but for me,
Speaker 1: the collectibility of the cards was probably more interesting. I
Speaker 1: was obsessed with the cards.
Speaker 2: One of my best friend's younger brother was like, really
Speaker 2: obsessed with the cards in the game. Oh, I got
Speaker 2: the Wall of Brambles or whatever it is? Is that
Speaker 2: a card?
Speaker 3: No, that's not.
Speaker 1: I don't think so, although it sounds like it could be,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I remember I had no it is there's.
Speaker 2: A card called Wall of Brambles. But I think anyway,
Speaker 2: I just remember that, you know, I think it's, oh, look,
Speaker 2: you can buy one for twenty cents, so I guess
Speaker 2: it wasn't a very value card anyway. I was like
Speaker 2: around people who were really into their cards. I was
Speaker 2: Magic adjacent. I have had friends who play it. I
Speaker 2: didn't realize up until you played it. I was like
Speaker 2: sometimes when I would go like to like the bookstore
Speaker 2: and play chess or the game store, the or it'd
Speaker 2: be other people playing. So I was around the game,
Speaker 2: but I just never played it myself.
Speaker 1: Man, I spent so much time. I had so many cards,
Speaker 1: I had valuable cards. I had a Chavon Dragon at
Speaker 1: one point, and I really thanks show what.
Speaker 4: Wow?
Speaker 1: Okay, but this brings me to a serious Odd Lots
Speaker 1: esque topic, which is Magic the Gathering is really interesting,
Speaker 1: not just because it was one of the possibly the
Speaker 1: most successful card game of all time, but it had
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of economic aspects to it. So
Speaker 1: there was the card collection, and then you can imagine
Speaker 1: within the card collection aspect of it. Obviously the goal
Speaker 1: is to play and win the game, but then you
Speaker 1: had this whole sort of market spring up around these
Speaker 1: super valuable cards, and there is a big discussion about
Speaker 1: whether or not the value of the cards was actually
Speaker 1: making the gameplay worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I so this I'm familiar with, and I get. You know, intuitively,
Speaker 2: you could sort of like get this phenomenon right, because
Speaker 2: a card can be useful in the game, but a
Speaker 2: card could also just be like a valuable thing that
Speaker 2: people buy and sell on eBay or Magic the Gathering
Speaker 2: online exchange things like that. But then the question is
Speaker 2: like do they align? Does the collection of the cards
Speaker 2: lead to optimal gameplay, suboptimal gameplay, etc. Like you could
Speaker 2: see how like the value of a card from a
Speaker 2: monetary standpoint, and the value of a card from a
Speaker 2: gameplay standpoint might be like linear related, but might not
Speaker 2: be like perfectly aligned.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: And the other interesting thing is Wizards of the Coast,
Speaker 1: the company that actually made Magic, at various times they
Speaker 1: tried to fit this problem. So they almost acted like
Speaker 1: a central bank of the cards in terms of issuance,
Speaker 1: like they would increase the supply of parts or decrease
Speaker 1: the supply of rare cards as needed to make the
Speaker 1: game more interesting. So that's kind of fun too. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I could go on about Magic for many hours still,
Speaker 1: but I am very very excited to say that today
Speaker 1: we're going to be speaking with the creator of Magic,
Speaker 1: the gathering. We have Richard Garfield on the line all
Speaker 1: the way from Sydney, Australia, and we also have his
Speaker 1: colleague Arca Ray, the president and technical director of Popularium,
Speaker 1: which is the new gaming company that he's setting up
Speaker 1: with Richard. So very excited to have them both on
Speaker 1: the show. Richard and Arca, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining our thoughts.
Speaker 4: Well, hello, it's a pleasure to be here. Love talking
Speaker 4: about games, all right.
Speaker 3: Thank you both really appreciate I really appreciate your having
Speaker 3: us here. We're really excited to be here.
Speaker 2: I hope so many sarcastic tone to Tracy was not
Speaker 2: in any way coming off as dismissive towards the game.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was.
Speaker 1: Actually blocking Trady.
Speaker 2: But I do want not want, I want to make
Speaker 2: it clear that I have no condescension whatsoever to the game.
Speaker 2: So I just want to get I feel bad about
Speaker 2: that already.
Speaker 3: Anyways, I think I think you set up a lot
Speaker 3: of there for us to get into it with Richard,
Speaker 3: So let's let's let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I wanted to say that back in the nineties, I
Speaker 4: thought that playing one game like chess was like reading
Speaker 4: one book or watching one I very quickly got past
Speaker 4: that because I realized games have this really special thing
Speaker 4: where the more you play them for a lot of games,
Speaker 4: the better they get. And so there's there's something which
Speaker 4: doesn't really line up with a lot of the other media.
Speaker 4: So so I think that is a perfectly good way.
Speaker 2: To be Well, there's a very good there's a very
Speaker 2: good observation. Maybe I should play more games.
Speaker 1: Joe over here just reading one book all his life
Speaker 1: past that, So Richard, maybe just to begin with you know,
Speaker 1: I use the sort of economics framing to describe some
Speaker 1: aspects of Magic, But do you think that that's like
Speaker 1: the right way of thinking about it as a sort
Speaker 1: of ecosystem or market of cards.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think it's the most important thing with a
Speaker 4: game like Magic is the economics around the cards. And
Speaker 4: it doesn't take much to shift the game from being
Speaker 4: something which isn't primarily a game, but is more an
Speaker 4: economic tool. And that is in fact, you mentioned that
Speaker 4: Wizards acted like a central bank. Who was very much
Speaker 4: the case back in the nineties maybe ninety five, where
Speaker 4: the game, the price of the game was so out
Speaker 4: of control. Uh, there was the speculation bubble, and and
Speaker 4: there was a conflict within the company. A lot of
Speaker 4: people thought this was amazing because who doesn't want the
Speaker 4: product to hit the hit the shelves and immediately be
Speaker 4: worth you know, three times as much. But from the
Speaker 4: people who were actually making the game, like me, it
Speaker 4: was terrifying because it if you can't afford the game,
Speaker 4: you can't play it. If you can't play it, then
Speaker 4: it's not really a game. So we very intentionally overprinted
Speaker 4: the set Fallen Empires and and the market crashed hard,
Speaker 4: and people said that was the end of the game
Speaker 4: and on the other but as it worked out, play
Speaker 4: sprang up because at its route, it's a it's a
Speaker 4: it's a it's a game, it's a strong game, and
Speaker 4: the community loved the game and and uh and then
Speaker 4: you know, it flourished. So ever since then, I've been
Speaker 4: really skeptical of games and game companies which are intentionally
Speaker 4: trying to keep the prices of their cards or components high.
Speaker 2: You know one thing, and I definitely I don't know
Speaker 2: if we want to even go down the store. I
Speaker 2: mean I certainly had that thought, Like in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one when they were trying to do like and if
Speaker 2: T related games. It's like it was the point to
Speaker 2: play the game, or is the point to think? It
Speaker 2: didn't seem like any of those games were fun something
Speaker 2: I'm curious though, in nineteen ninety five, we didn't you know, eBay,
Speaker 2: I don't think it really existed by ninety five barely.
Speaker 2: I mean, if it did, it barely did hardly anyone
Speaker 2: was using it. How at Wizards of the Coast were
Speaker 2: even monitor were you able to get like real time
Speaker 2: or semi real time feedback on price to find that
Speaker 2: optimal equilibrium between the value of the cards and the
Speaker 2: amount of gameplay.
Speaker 4: There was I'm not sure what tools were being used,
Speaker 4: but I know we had data, and in fact the
Speaker 4: data was I'm not sure about eBay. It might have
Speaker 4: been eBay, but the data was so clear that I
Speaker 4: know at least one doctoral thesis that was put together
Speaker 4: using data from Magic the gathering and the idea there
Speaker 4: was that was that. The person who did it, the
Speaker 4: one I know of, was Dave Riley. He found it
Speaker 4: as a perfect tool to test different auctions to see
Speaker 4: how that affected the final prices of the sales.
Speaker 1: That's super interesting, so, Richard. One of the things that
Speaker 1: was sort of built into the game, at least initially
Speaker 1: was the idea of actually playing for anti so if
Speaker 1: you lost, you would have to give up a card
Speaker 1: from your deck your opponent, and it was sort of
Speaker 1: one way of actually building up your decks and you know,
Speaker 1: becoming an even better player. How come you built that
Speaker 1: aspect of it into the game.
Speaker 4: When we began the game, I did not anticipate it
Speaker 4: being the success it was, and in fact I expected
Speaker 4: players to buy one to four decks maybe, and so
Speaker 4: I wanted to make sure that there was some method
Speaker 4: for there to be a variety in what players had
Speaker 4: even if they stopped buying cards. Now, of course they
Speaker 4: can trade, and I expected that to be a part
Speaker 4: of the game, but I also knew that there were
Speaker 4: people uncomfortable with trading, so I thought that Anti would
Speaker 4: be a good way to get that circulation of cards.
Speaker 4: And it also acted as something of a leveler between decks.
Speaker 4: If you've got a very valuable deck, then you're going
Speaker 4: to be anting more valuable cards. This idea there were
Speaker 4: some dedicated advocates of it. It was a very exciting way
Speaker 4: to play, but it was pretty clear very early on
Speaker 4: that we were going to have to drop it because
Speaker 4: so many people hated losing the cards and so and so.
Speaker 4: I imagined by the second expansion there were no more
Speaker 4: ANTI cards the and it was phased out.
Speaker 3: Joe.
Speaker 1: One of my greatest triumphs as an eleven year old
Speaker 1: was I won a signed card in Magic the gathering.
Speaker 1: It was signed by the artist, and the person I
Speaker 1: wanted from was very upset because we didn't you know,
Speaker 1: we're all ten or eleven year old kids at the time.
Speaker 1: We didn't have a lot of signed cards circulating among us.
Speaker 2: Can I say I did not realize that the card loss.
Speaker 2: I sort of assumed that still existed, that you could
Speaker 2: lose your card. It shows you how much that I've
Speaker 2: underd that I knew about magic. I for some reason
Speaker 2: I thought maybe that was still part of it. But
Speaker 2: I could see that would seem really stressful, and I
Speaker 2: would not want to collect a deck, or I would
Speaker 2: not want to be a parent buying decks for my kids,
Speaker 2: my thirteen year old kids, and then having them lose
Speaker 2: them during lunch at the game. So I could see
Speaker 2: why that wasn't a particularly stable thank you.
Speaker 4: I should want to interject there on that though, that
Speaker 4: like today, it would be completely a non starter. And
Speaker 4: one of the one of the things was that when
Speaker 4: it was published, we didn't see them as being valuable
Speaker 4: in the way they are today. Very quickly there was
Speaker 4: a price settle on them, and so once there's a
Speaker 4: price settle on them, they actually are gambling when they
Speaker 4: play for antics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fine, but I don't know if you want kids gambling,
Speaker 2: I guess yeah.
Speaker 4: And yeah, back when when it was play test cards
Speaker 4: and when they were first out, when I was picturing
Speaker 4: them just being treated as these sort of components you
Speaker 4: might have sentimental value to it was it was different,
Speaker 4: but once they become cash, yeah, it's not really an
Speaker 4: acceptable thing to bake into your game.
Speaker 2: So just to sort of get the narrative right, can
Speaker 2: you just give the quick overview of how long were
Speaker 2: you involved? You're the creator of Magic the Gathering Wizards
Speaker 2: of the Coast. It existed as a game publishing company
Speaker 2: prior to you linking up with them, I think, and
Speaker 2: then obviously it took off. How long were you sort
Speaker 2: of involved with the business of Magic.
Speaker 4: I was with Wizards until about two thousand and one,
Speaker 4: so that was about eight years. I mean, I guess
Speaker 4: maybe ten years if you go back before Magic was published,
Speaker 4: since technically I guess I was working for them then.
Speaker 4: But yeah, one Hasbro bought Wizards. I was around for
Speaker 4: a little while, but then went off on my own.
Speaker 1: So Richard, just going back to the very beginning when
Speaker 1: you actually came up with the game. I think I
Speaker 1: read somewhere that you're a mathematician or you studied mathematics
Speaker 1: at university. Did that influence the way the game was
Speaker 1: designed at all?
Speaker 4: I was actually teaching math at the college level and
Speaker 4: it probably did influence the design of Magic. But I
Speaker 4: always like to point out that when you're a game designer,
Speaker 4: sort of all subjects are grist for the mill, just
Speaker 4: like being an author. So if you had an economics
Speaker 4: PhD or studied literature or anything, it will affect what
Speaker 4: you write about and it'll affect what sort of games
Speaker 4: you make.
Speaker 1: And Arca. I want to bring you in as well,
Speaker 1: because of course you are now working with Richard at
Speaker 1: the new gaming company Popularium. Did you play Magic when
Speaker 1: you were younger.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes I did, And you know, I grew up
Speaker 3: in India and it was a it was a very
Speaker 3: insulated community when it came to came to games pretty much,
Speaker 3: you know, people cared about cricket and that was pretty
Speaker 3: much it. So I had some cousins over here in
Speaker 3: the US who would come by and introduce me to,
Speaker 3: you know, cool things that they were doing, and obviously
Speaker 3: magic was a big thing. So one summer they came
Speaker 3: over and this was I think, yeah, ninety four, ninety
Speaker 3: five something like that, they came to visit and they
Speaker 3: had these gods that they were playing, and you know,
Speaker 3: I was I was someone who basically when I was
Speaker 3: five six years old, I would take you know, I
Speaker 3: would make my own versions of Monopoly and things like that.
Speaker 3: So making games was something that was so when I
Speaker 3: saw the cards, it was just like, you know, this
Speaker 3: this world of wonder that just exploded. And obviously I
Speaker 3: only had a handful of gods, so there's only so
Speaker 3: much I could do. But I remember trying to teach
Speaker 3: everyone I could how to play the game. So it
Speaker 3: you know, just seeing his name on those gods and
Speaker 3: you know, being here now with him. So when did
Speaker 3: you know?
Speaker 2: When did you know you wanted to make a career
Speaker 2: in gaming? I mean, I imagine it's funny you said that
Speaker 2: my daughter is really good. She's seven. She's really getting
Speaker 2: it into Monopoly right now. It's the first game that
Speaker 2: she's really into and that's really exciting, and she's starting
Speaker 2: to develop strategy, et cetera. When in your mind did
Speaker 2: it go from Okay, you love playing games. The cards
Speaker 2: were sort of fascinating to you to thinking, oh, this
Speaker 2: could be a career of building gameplay of various sorts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and it sounds geezy, but it actually
Speaker 3: was around the time when I was eleven. I swear
Speaker 3: schools because I switched cities that my parents were living in,
Speaker 3: and it was the first time I was exposed to
Speaker 3: a computer and programming. And as soon as I, you know,
Speaker 3: it was like basic or something like that was the language.
Speaker 3: And as soon as I got one and I started
Speaker 3: like writing this quiz game and that's all I would do,
Speaker 3: you know, when I was on lunch breaks and things
Speaker 3: like that. So and then obviously I discovered actual games
Speaker 3: and you know, got a computer at home and played
Speaker 3: Doom and things like that, and then you know, people
Speaker 3: would ask me, okay, what do you want to do
Speaker 3: when you when you grow up, and we're like, oh,
Speaker 3: I want to make video games, and often people were like, wait,
Speaker 3: what are video games? So it was that's that's kind
Speaker 3: of like why I immigrated through the US. I came
Speaker 3: here to study computer science specifically because I wanted to
Speaker 3: learn how to build games. And then it was fortunate
Speaker 3: enough to join Xbox in the early days of Xbox
Speaker 3: three sixty and that was, you know, the winding path
Speaker 3: that took me to meet Richard and scaff who is
Speaker 3: Richard's game design partner. Back in twenty eleven twenty twelve,
Speaker 3: when I was starting my first company and here we are.
Speaker 1: I definitely want to get into the new game that
Speaker 1: you're launching with Richard and how it's sort of maybe
Speaker 1: similar and also different to Magic the Gathering. But before
Speaker 1: we do, I just have a few more questions about magic.
Speaker 1: Just let humor me and let me relive Tracy.
Speaker 2: If I were interviewing the creator of Chess, I would
Speaker 2: have a thousand questions.
Speaker 1: So you go to town, So Richard, you know, you
Speaker 1: described that analogy of Wizards of the Coast sort of
Speaker 1: acting as the central bank and deciding at one point
Speaker 1: to flood the market with new cards in order to
Speaker 1: bring down prices in the secondary market and make it
Speaker 1: more equitable so that everyone could have fun playing the game.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit more about what that
Speaker 1: decision was actually, Like, you know, you're in the room
Speaker 1: at Wizards of the Coast. What are those conversations that
Speaker 1: are happening at that time?
Speaker 3: Wow?
Speaker 4: Well, there were a lot of people involved with magic
Speaker 4: and sort of on the sidelines of magic who saw
Speaker 4: it as a fad, and they saw it like, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't know what fads are. Cabbage patch kids, babys,
Speaker 4: beanie babies. There you go, and uh, baseball cards, and
Speaker 4: that when you had a speculation bubble, it was going
Speaker 4: to crash and that was the and the best you
Speaker 4: could do was ride that out. And UH, and and
Speaker 4: I thought, and we in R and D thought that
Speaker 4: that was, uh, that was not not going to be
Speaker 4: healthy for the game. And we had some faith in
Speaker 4: the game in the sense that we had been playing
Speaker 4: with the first set of cards for over two years
Speaker 4: and and the play the playtesters were just hooked on it.
Speaker 4: They loved it. And so if if it crashes and
Speaker 4: goes away, uh, you know that that that won't be
Speaker 4: shared with any body, there won't be any long term
Speaker 4: to the to the game. And uh So within Wizards
Speaker 4: there were lots of very heated arguments that you know
Speaker 4: that if you overprinted, some people believed it was going
Speaker 4: to crash and then we were, you know, basically the
Speaker 4: game was done. And other people who thought, if you
Speaker 4: overprint it and it crashes, that'll give players an opportunity
Speaker 4: to actually play the game. And since, uh, since I
Speaker 4: was a committed crasher, and the president of the company, UH,
Speaker 4: Peter Peter Adkinson took my advice seriously. He was a
Speaker 4: committed crasher, and so we went through with that, and
Speaker 4: and it really the the the sort of the reputation
Speaker 4: that the set which crashed it Fallen Empires got was
Speaker 4: very bad. I mean it looked, you know, people people
Speaker 4: hated it. They hated the set, and uh, but it
Speaker 4: wasn't about how it actually played. It was about the
Speaker 4: fact that it was cheap. It was they could they
Speaker 4: could buy it remaindered. But you know, the number of
Speaker 4: players just exploded after that, and and we we began
Speaker 4: to reformulate how we printed the cards to make it
Speaker 4: so that anybody who joined the game wouldn't have to
Speaker 4: pay secondary prices, secondary market prices that were substantially above
Speaker 4: buy from the company.
Speaker 2: Well, so I understand the sort of and I like
Speaker 2: the way you put it. You're a committed crasher. You
Speaker 2: want people to play the game, you want low prices,
Speaker 2: and that's I think that's awesome or it sounds really cool.
Speaker 2: But it still seems that even within the committed crasher philosophy,
Speaker 2: the challenge may not be, Okay, you want to have
Speaker 2: the cards cheap so everyone can play them, but you
Speaker 2: still need to get the proportions right in terms of
Speaker 2: you can't There still has to be some variability between
Speaker 2: the really powerful cards can't be printed as much as
Speaker 2: the less powerful cards. There has to be some rarity.
Speaker 2: How do you calibrate that aspect of it such that
Speaker 2: you get the proportion of powerful to less powerful cards
Speaker 2: right even within the crash mentality, the crash framework.
Speaker 4: So there's a misapprehension there that's underlying your question, which
Speaker 4: is I was also from the start a big advocate
Speaker 4: of not making the rare cards more powerful. Now there
Speaker 4: were more powerful rare cards. But if you make the
Speaker 4: common cards very broadly powerful, generally useful, easy to use,
Speaker 4: then people who buy not too many decks have less
Speaker 4: of the disadvantage against somebody who gets a lot of decks.
Speaker 4: And so this was early on one of the ideas.
Speaker 4: I had lots of ideas. Some of them worked like this,
Speaker 4: and some of them didn't like anti. But this approach
Speaker 4: makes it so that so that your your power goes up,
Speaker 4: you know, logarithmically, as you purchase decks at the beginning
Speaker 4: rather than linearly. And and and so now the value
Speaker 4: of the cards, that's something different. It does have something
Speaker 4: to do with the power of the cards. And there
Speaker 4: were powerful rare cards. I certainly wouldn't deny that. But
Speaker 4: one of the things that I enjoyed doing when Magic
Speaker 4: first came out is going to game stores across the
Speaker 4: country and and playing against players gunslinging we called it.
Speaker 4: I think that became a term we stopped using. And
Speaker 4: I would play against them with the deck of all
Speaker 4: common cards, and my record against the you know, the
Speaker 4: the champs of the stores was eighty percent or something
Speaker 4: like that. And people would bring out their their their
Speaker 4: x with their black Lotuses and their vampire Shiven dragons,
Speaker 4: and I would clean their clocks and it would be all,
Speaker 4: you know, top to bottom common cards. And it's just
Speaker 4: because you know, I've been playing many years longer than
Speaker 4: them and was a better player and recognized the power
Speaker 4: that was there. And the common cards, now, the best decks,
Speaker 4: of course, are going to be a mixture. But but
Speaker 4: you look at the top decks even played today, and
Speaker 4: there will be a good, you know, good trunk of
Speaker 4: common cards that are being played by all the players.
Speaker 2: I guess I just sort of assumed, Tracy that there
Speaker 2: must be must have been some relationship between like, if
Speaker 2: you have these really valuable cards, they must be overwhelmingly powerful.
Speaker 2: So I did not realize that also, it's just sort
Speaker 2: of funny to imagine, you know, the the ultimate creator
Speaker 2: of the game popping into the local the local D
Speaker 2: and D board game store and whatever town and cleaning
Speaker 2: all the local right.
Speaker 1: Some guy who spent countless hours, you know, building the
Speaker 1: deck ofvaluable cards suddenly losing to someone who's playing with
Speaker 1: some really common ones. But just on this note, Richard,
Speaker 1: you mentioned the Blackloadus card, which of course is probably
Speaker 1: the most famous card in all of magic history. And
Speaker 1: I looked up on one website before we have this conversation.
Speaker 1: I think the pricing for like the most rare version
Speaker 1: of the Black Looadus was something like twenty two thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: I have no idea if that's accurate or not. It
Speaker 1: seems slightly inflated.
Speaker 2: But are you gait I see half a million? Really?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 4: I think I think twenty two thousand is I saw
Speaker 4: an article about a proxy black Lotus that is one
Speaker 4: that the players made selling for some incredible amount, huh,
Speaker 4: like twenty thousand dollars, but.
Speaker 1: The actual one is closer to half a million?
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Maybe I was looking at the wrong version.
Speaker 2: Yeah, five hundred and forty thousand have access to my
Speaker 2: mark twenty twenty three in auction house six hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand for a black Loader.
Speaker 1: Okay, well this gets to my question, are you surprised
Speaker 1: at the secondary market values for some of these cards nowadays?
Speaker 1: And especially because this kind of gets to the other
Speaker 1: thing that you did in order to make gameplay more
Speaker 1: interesting and more fair. Is I think at one point
Speaker 1: for the Pro League, and yes, Joe, there is a
Speaker 1: Pro Magic League, you banned the use of certain cards
Speaker 1: like I think BLACKLOADUS, like the really powerful cards you
Speaker 1: couldn't play with anymore. So I guess my question is
Speaker 1: why do they still have or seem to have so
Speaker 1: much value in the secondary market if they're not allowed
Speaker 1: in some of the games.
Speaker 4: That is one of the most important tools we used
Speaker 4: for making the game accessible to players coming into it.
Speaker 4: That is not making it so they felt like they
Speaker 4: had to bla BLACKLOADUS. The tournaments and the environment which
Speaker 4: Wizards supports is only the last couple of years worth
Speaker 4: of cards, and so if they're beyond that, players can
Speaker 4: still play them, of course because they own them and
Speaker 4: there will still be events set up around them. But
Speaker 4: that's not where the focus of the companies of tournaments
Speaker 4: and play is which means if you come into the game,
Speaker 4: you know that you're not competing against black Lotuses and
Speaker 4: all the old cards. And so it wasn't just Black
Speaker 4: Lotus that was banned. It was basically any card that
Speaker 4: was too old became I forget what they call it,
Speaker 4: but I don't know, a legacy card, and those there
Speaker 4: were special legacy events, but that wasn't part of the
Speaker 4: current game environments, and that was one way we managed
Speaker 4: to keep it so that the card prices were under control,
Speaker 4: and yet you have this long term collectibility, so it
Speaker 4: was collectible like stamps, but not like Panie Baby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't realize that the older cards were banned
Speaker 1: in pro play. I guess I probably didn't play Magic
Speaker 1: long enough for that to kind of be an issue.
Speaker 1: But that's interesting.
Speaker 3: Well, to clarify there is there are like two formats.
Speaker 3: Is like standard in the other one. The standard is
Speaker 3: the rotation that Richard is talking about. You can play
Speaker 3: anything that's modern, which is like I think after two
Speaker 3: thousand and something, it's considered modern in like non pro
Speaker 3: tournaments and so on. But there is also a band
Speaker 3: list which you know Richard might want to talk about
Speaker 3: which Blackloaders and cards are on which which will never
Speaker 3: be reprinted, which does contribute to a great extent to
Speaker 3: the incredible value something like a Blackloaders because it will
Speaker 3: there are there's a possibility for a legacy card, as
Speaker 3: Richard said, to be potentially reprinted and it's considered exactly
Speaker 3: the same card as far as the gameplay is concerned.
Speaker 3: But there will never be another Blackloaders printed because of
Speaker 3: many interesting reasons, which I don't know if we have
Speaker 3: time or Richard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's actually worth pointing out, like it's a very
Speaker 4: sticky relationship between the power of the card, how many
Speaker 4: have been printed, and whether it's available of whether it's
Speaker 4: in tournaments. So, for example, very early on, we realized
Speaker 4: that when we reprinted an old card which had some
Speaker 4: cachet to it, the price on the secondary market of
Speaker 4: that card would go up. And the reason for that
Speaker 4: is because that meant the card was legal for tournaments
Speaker 4: because it wasn't an old card anymore. You could bring
Speaker 4: your older version which might have different art or a
Speaker 4: different cardboard or something like that. But it seemed contradictory
Speaker 4: that you're printing more of them, and now the price
Speaker 4: goes up.
Speaker 1: Arka, I have to ask, now, what was your I
Speaker 1: don't want to say most valuable card because it kind
Speaker 1: of undermines a lot of the purpose of the game,
Speaker 1: But what was your favorite card that you accumulated when
Speaker 1: you were.
Speaker 3: Playing that I was playing Magic. Probably the most was
Speaker 3: when I was at Microsoft, just because you know, that
Speaker 3: was one of the things that we we did, and
Speaker 3: at the time, I got really into black, like all
Speaker 3: sorts of combinations of black, so I got a you know,
Speaker 3: got into black, white, black, red, et cetera. So there
Speaker 3: was one one card that I think it was a
Speaker 3: gold card that was printed in like M eleven or
Speaker 3: something like that, that was called the Dark Tutelage, and
Speaker 3: that just had the most the coolest art on it
Speaker 3: if if if you want to look it up of
Speaker 3: this guy with the blindfold guy. There was this blindfold
Speaker 3: and eyeballs and this like demon looking character like giving.
Speaker 3: I was just, yeah, it's a it's a really fun
Speaker 3: like you know, like it combos really well with red
Speaker 3: red cards also, so I just I just really enjoyed
Speaker 3: the mechanic, the both the life gain and life loss
Speaker 3: mechanic as resources.
Speaker 1: I have an embarrassing confession, which is I was scared
Speaker 1: of the the Black Cards when I was growing up.
Speaker 1: I like, I never played with them because some of
Speaker 1: the images of like so the Black Cards, for people
Speaker 1: who don't know, are sort of associated with like death
Speaker 1: and scary things, and you know, there's lots of demons
Speaker 1: and pictures of skeletons and things like that, and they
Speaker 1: freaked me out when I was little. I was scared
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, Uh, can we talk a little bit about the
Speaker 2: new company and maybe ARCA. Why don't you describe what
Speaker 2: is popularium and in the world of gaming? What are
Speaker 2: you trying to solve?
Speaker 3: What? Uh? What?
Speaker 2: What? What do you what do you want to do
Speaker 2: that isn't being done in elsewhere in the gaming world.
Speaker 3: That's a great question, and you know, I think it's
Speaker 3: best answered a little bit through the story of how
Speaker 3: actually we started Popularity and because yeah, I mean, on
Speaker 3: one hand, I've been dreaming of, you know, starting a
Speaker 3: games company since I was as a kid. But you
Speaker 3: know how things go, Like I started my company, and
Speaker 3: you know, I'm a technical person, so I got into
Speaker 3: building enterprise software for a while, and that was all
Speaker 3: fun and all that in a different way. But I
Speaker 3: always want to come back to games, and I had
Speaker 3: an opportunity a couple of years ago because of a
Speaker 3: combination of events with my prior company and you know,
Speaker 3: some availability of some some financing COVID, giving people the
Speaker 3: opportunity to like basically become much more comfortable with completely
Speaker 3: distributed development systems because you know, games especially has been
Speaker 3: a very you know, you go in, you build games,
Speaker 3: you know, and the whole like you know, classic crunch
Speaker 3: mentality that you're sleeping under your desk before you ship.
Speaker 3: So all of those things was like, you know, for me,
Speaker 3: it was the right time to start thinking about putting
Speaker 3: something together. And it was really accelerated by two things.
Speaker 3: First was that for me, what has always been very
Speaker 3: interesting is a games that essentially, through gameplay, create a
Speaker 3: new format and then be generate narratives out of the
Speaker 3: pure gameplay itself. And something that Richard's games have always
Speaker 3: done is basically, whether or not you understand the lore
Speaker 3: of the Magic Universe, let's say, or Netrunner or whatever
Speaker 3: it might be, when you're playing the game, the game
Speaker 3: is creating a narrative for you that duel that you're
Speaker 3: having with summoning the specific creatures, the counters, you know,
Speaker 3: the stack. It's it's like if you know, actually someone
Speaker 3: should do it if they haven't, is you can actually
Speaker 3: take the output of a magic game and maybe like
Speaker 3: actually train a general awaya like an LLM or something
Speaker 3: like that to actually output a wonderful narrative of like,
Speaker 3: you know, what was the battle and that you know
Speaker 3: is created purely through gameplay. And for me, we really
Speaker 3: hadn't explored that that fully in a digital format. The
Speaker 3: power of that fully in a digital format. And when
Speaker 3: I when I started talking to Richard in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: late twenty twenty one about some of these ideas Richard
Speaker 3: and Scaff, you know, and richardian tell you about Scaff,
Speaker 3: who's just an awesome person and you know in his
Speaker 3: own right. My goal was that, Okay, what can I
Speaker 3: do to create a playground for you guys where you
Speaker 3: can take the ideas that you've been cooking for a
Speaker 3: long time. And the thing that Richard and I and
Speaker 3: Scaff resonated on pretty much right away, and we have
Speaker 3: known each for a while, so we've kind of talked
Speaker 3: about this over over time, was the idea of empowering
Speaker 3: gamers to pursue their fun their way while also leaning
Speaker 3: into gameplay innovation, because I think that one of the
Speaker 3: things that doesn't really hold game gaming innovation back but
Speaker 3: definitely slows it down is once you know something works
Speaker 3: for a certain group of people, a bunch of other money,
Speaker 3: a bunch of money goes into building fact similies of
Speaker 3: that because you know that people are going to have
Speaker 3: fun in a certain way. And what's amazing another amazing
Speaker 3: thing about Richard's work is that exactly what I was
Speaker 3: talking about earlier with that whole like black approach, and
Speaker 3: you know, with with basically you saying cracy that that
Speaker 3: that you know, you were not really into the black
Speaker 3: decks at all, And I can't imagine no, no, I'm
Speaker 3: completely with you, Like you know some of this they
Speaker 3: are genuinely not like pleasant things to look at. But
Speaker 3: I can't imagine playing magic without you know, black cards.
Speaker 3: But there's an entire like gamut of four such as
Speaker 3: yourself who you know that's not so that is what's
Speaker 3: so cool about. So how do we lean into innovation
Speaker 3: while also empowering gamers to pursue the joy of gaming?
Speaker 3: The fun of gaming in the way that they want
Speaker 3: without feeling like, oh, you know, I'm not good enough
Speaker 3: or my fun is not fun enough unless I'm winning
Speaker 3: all the time. And that was my philosophy, and you
Speaker 3: know what I want to lean into. And obviously we've
Speaker 3: seen over and over again, and you know, while I
Speaker 3: was at Microsoft, Beep built Xbox Life pretty much, you know,
Speaker 3: from from the ground up. So I've seen like how
Speaker 3: much how hard it is to keep toxicity out of communities.
Speaker 3: And one of the ways that you can actually do
Speaker 3: that is if from the germination of your game you
Speaker 3: are letting people genuinely lean into fun and telling them,
Speaker 3: you know what, no matter how you want to have fun,
Speaker 3: it's okay, we will accommodate and so on. And then
Speaker 3: what Richard you know, kind of had had in mind
Speaker 3: was actually something that he had been thinking about and
Speaker 3: working on for twenty plus years. And maybe Richard, I
Speaker 3: want to maybe ask you to talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about how things came together before we actually yeah, with
Speaker 3: the company together.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So this concept that I've been working on for
Speaker 4: twenty plus years was something that had been gnawing at
Speaker 4: me ever since Magic came out, which was the way
Speaker 4: its popularity in some ways undercut one of the things
Speaker 4: which I really loved about the game, and that was
Speaker 4: that when you first play Magic, even today, when you
Speaker 4: first play Magic, but originally very much so, it was
Speaker 4: a game filled with sort of endless possibilities and treasures,
Speaker 4: and your deck was distinct. It was yours and your
Speaker 4: friends decks were distinct as well. You had the sense
Speaker 4: that the world was infinite, infinite. But then when you
Speaker 4: start playing more and begin to play tournaments, the emphasis
Speaker 4: of the game is on constructed decks. That is, you
Speaker 4: choose which cards you want to play, and you play them,
Speaker 4: and they're readily available, so to become more like commodities.
Speaker 4: And this is not the way we played originally. It's
Speaker 4: a fun way to play, so I don't mean to
Speaker 4: take away anything from players who love that way of playing,
Speaker 4: and there are plenty. But when we first played, we
Speaker 4: played with this very limited pool and it was exciting
Speaker 4: in sort of this different way. And so the way
Speaker 4: I came up with to to recreate that was to
Speaker 4: make it so that player's decks were unique. So that is,
Speaker 4: when you get a deck, it's your deck, and you
Speaker 4: can trade the deck, but you can't break it up.
Speaker 4: And so I wanted the back of the cards to
Speaker 4: be unique, and it took a while for printing technology
Speaker 4: to catch up with that. But Keyboards was the first
Speaker 4: unique game, and every deck in that game is unique
Speaker 4: and has its own unique name, and and the the
Speaker 4: the resulting play was so interesting and the audience for
Speaker 4: it was so sort of thirsty for this, this sort
Speaker 4: of gameplay that didn't involve making decks and collecting cards,
Speaker 4: that I began to think about how to apply those
Speaker 4: ideas to other games. In particular, you would think that
Speaker 4: even though printing technology took so long to catch up
Speaker 4: to this concept, that digitally it shouldn't be that hard
Speaker 4: to do. And when I was talking with Arka, he
Speaker 4: was asking what he could do to bring some of
Speaker 4: our ideas to life. And I was just coming off
Speaker 4: of dealing with many different companies who wanted games, but
Speaker 4: they were all very concerned with how limited they make
Speaker 4: it so that the cards were immediately valuable. They were
Speaker 4: talking about like play to earn money, and and and
Speaker 4: and putting out a certain limited number so that people's
Speaker 4: initial investments go up. And so they were approaching the
Speaker 4: games entirely as sort of this this well, what we
Speaker 4: began with this economic they were building it on this
Speaker 4: foundation of economics rather than on the foundation of gameplay.
Speaker 4: So ARCA was was very interested in supporting this idea
Speaker 4: of building the game on a foundation of gameplay. Uh
Speaker 4: and and and deal with the economics as sort of
Speaker 4: a secondary thing, which is there to sort of maximize
Speaker 4: the enjoyment of the game to the player rather than
Speaker 4: return on investment for the player.
Speaker 2: Tracy. This reminds me, by the way, there is a
Speaker 2: sort of corollary in the chess world, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: you think of chess as a game, but so much
Speaker 2: and it is, but so much of modern chess is
Speaker 2: just sort of wrote memorization of the first fifteen to
Speaker 2: twenty moves. And so there's this other version of chess
Speaker 2: that I think Bobby Fisher came up with Fisher Random Chess,
Speaker 2: in which you don't know in advance the order of
Speaker 2: the pieces that are going to be so it's gameplay
Speaker 2: from the beginning. There's like numerous ways that the pieces
Speaker 2: can be ordered on your back rank, so it's gameplay
Speaker 2: from the beginning.
Speaker 1: I see, you don't have like the queen in the middle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what it does is you have to figure
Speaker 2: out the game right away rather than you have twenty
Speaker 2: five lines committed to memory.
Speaker 1: Well that seems much more interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it theoretically, I think it's a better game. The
Speaker 2: pros don't really play it, but I do think it's
Speaker 2: widely considered to be more interesting gameplays.
Speaker 3: But you know, but you know what's interesting is if
Speaker 3: you I mean, I'm trying to I'm sure you've seen
Speaker 3: this and scap and Richard will tell you all about
Speaker 3: this also, But if you look at you know, folks
Speaker 3: like Carlson, what they try to do in their games
Speaker 3: is basically try to move to a position as quickly
Speaker 3: as possible that has not been.
Speaker 2: Seen its novelty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's that is exactly the for them. Glad
Speaker 3: you picked that. That's exactly the analogy that you know.
Speaker 3: What Richard explained is that like the idea of going
Speaker 3: in with Okay, you know the cards, you know the
Speaker 3: specifics of the units of power, but the combination, the
Speaker 3: engine that that builds with the deck is not something
Speaker 3: that you've ever seen before and that you have to
Speaker 3: figure out in real time, and that is what's you know,
Speaker 3: interesting about it.
Speaker 1: So Richard just touched on this idea of pay to play,
Speaker 1: and you know the fact that there are games out
Speaker 1: there that kind of focus on building up the value
Speaker 1: of existing assets or cards, and maybe this is one
Speaker 1: for both Arka and Richard, But how do you resist
Speaker 1: that temptation, like, how do you actually monetize the game?
Speaker 1: Because I imagine in the gaming industry the temptation now
Speaker 1: is to ring as much money as possible out of play.
Speaker 1: And it does seem like some of these are you know,
Speaker 1: expensive to run, expensive to design, expensive to produce, So
Speaker 1: how do you manage to do it where others are
Speaker 1: focused very much on the revenue opportunities.
Speaker 3: This goes back to the question traces are Joe asked earlier,
Speaker 3: which is one of the fundamental philosophies that we have
Speaker 3: behind doing this company because Richard, myself, John Scaffei, we
Speaker 3: all have done things in the past where you know,
Speaker 3: at this point of time, we want to build something
Speaker 3: that brings us, you know, true joy and satisfaction. And
Speaker 3: one of the things that we all very much agree
Speaker 3: upon is that if you bring if you bring people
Speaker 3: through joy and true fund through gameplay, that translates to
Speaker 3: economics in a much more scalable way than if you
Speaker 3: try to build gameplay experiences that are optimized for economics,
Speaker 3: and you see this happening intentionally and unintentionally, you don't
Speaker 3: have to just look at recent examples, like if you
Speaker 3: go back and look at World of Warcraft and you
Speaker 3: know the amount of gold farming that was completely not legal,
Speaker 3: but it was used to happen all around the world,
Speaker 3: and the amount of value that was created and transacted.
Speaker 3: Why because people wanted to use that utility, you know,
Speaker 3: within within the game and Magic, you know, the fact
Speaker 3: that is just an example is an amazing, glorious example
Speaker 3: of that phenomenon that has just lasted for for for
Speaker 3: decades at this point, which is if you create that
Speaker 3: interactivity and you know, I don't mind saying is the
Speaker 3: one of the geniuses of Magic is this idea of
Speaker 3: massively modular gameplay. That is that is a term that
Speaker 3: that I know Richard likes, of being able to let
Speaker 3: people construct the pieces to build their piece of the
Speaker 3: game in a way that is that is very flexible.
Speaker 3: If those two things come together, then the repeatability comes naturally.
Speaker 3: And I think that a lot of fo who try
Speaker 3: to essentially start with the economics, start with the business
Speaker 3: model and then retrofit the gameplay probably do themselves and
Speaker 3: their their gamers at a service. Anyway, That's something that you know,
Speaker 3: very passionate on my part, I don't want to shoot
Speaker 3: if you had any thoughts.
Speaker 4: On that, yeah, I would like to add to that.
Speaker 4: So there's been many games I've put out, and this
Speaker 4: one we're working on is part of this where where
Speaker 4: there's some question as to how much value you give
Speaker 4: to the player who just dips their toe in, and
Speaker 4: my philosophy on it is, if you have faith in
Speaker 4: the game, you give them lots of play value. That's
Speaker 4: why the common cards were powerful in Magic, and that's
Speaker 4: why in KEYBOARDE you get your single deck has many
Speaker 4: different avenues that you can play with, so it is
Speaker 4: not something where you play with it and immediately get bored.
Speaker 4: There's many different things you can do with it. Now,
Speaker 4: the cynical would say, well, that is limiting your audience
Speaker 4: because because people are going to buy one deck. That
Speaker 4: hasn't been my experience because this massive modularity gives a
Speaker 4: world of variation which people want to explore. But it
Speaker 4: gives the opportunity for people to to get involved with
Speaker 4: a very uh with with with a very modest investment,
Speaker 4: and and so and so that's something we're talking about
Speaker 4: with our game. And and I want to see that
Speaker 4: that a player with a single character has sort of
Speaker 4: can get an amazing amount of value from that and
Speaker 4: not feel particularly limited by that.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: And and that is with this this faith that you know,
Speaker 4: some players will stop there and that'll be right for them,
Speaker 4: but other players will want to get different variations.
Speaker 1: When does the new game Chaos Agents actually come out?
Speaker 3: It's a great question. So basically, you know, just to
Speaker 3: bring home the question from earlier, Richard sort of gave
Speaker 3: me this one pager this was end of twenty one
Speaker 3: early twenty two called Maelstrom that he had written up
Speaker 3: around this idea of basically, how what would it be
Speaker 3: if the deck of cards, Each card represented a unique
Speaker 3: skill that together sciller ability, that together made up this
Speaker 3: globally unique superhero. So the idea would be to have
Speaker 3: this entire large, you know, sixty plus heroes battling each other,
Speaker 3: and each hero would be controlled by this kind of
Speaker 3: unique invisible deck of cards in the background. And one
Speaker 3: of the things that Richard was sort of really into
Speaker 3: at the time was this idea of auto battlers, which
Speaker 3: is another very interesting genre of games that I'm sure
Speaker 3: Richard can talk about for a long time. But this
Speaker 3: idea of auto battlers would would basically be that, you know,
Speaker 3: unlike games where you need a lot of input, a
Speaker 3: lot of reflexes or twitch, an auto battler lets you
Speaker 3: sort of make some decisions, sort of like almost like
Speaker 3: a football and American football coach make some decisions, call
Speaker 3: the play and then see what happens, and then adapt
Speaker 3: and call the next place. So there's this lean forward,
Speaker 3: lean back experience. So Richard was like, what if we
Speaker 3: blended these two things? And I was like, that sounds
Speaker 3: amazing cool.
Speaker 1: Game chat experience, something new it is.
Speaker 3: And that's obviously like for people like me who have
Speaker 3: like not played competitively for like ten plus years, that's
Speaker 3: the only way that you know, I can play something
Speaker 3: like that. But what was super cool is that then
Speaker 3: you know, when we hear Richard Garfield, we think card games.
Speaker 3: And my idea was that, okay, we're going to build
Speaker 3: something like Heartstone, but in a big way. And you know,
Speaker 3: my really good friend John Bankert from from Xbox was
Speaker 3: actually running the Heartstone product team, so so my to
Speaker 3: my great joy. He was like, yeah, you know what,
Speaker 3: Richard's on. All the battlers, I love them. Let's let's
Speaker 3: let's jump on. But then what happened was when Richard
Speaker 3: and Scale came back with the detailed design document, it
Speaker 3: turned out that it was not just a card game.
Speaker 3: It was actually a full fledged you know, battle Royale
Speaker 3: where instead of instead of you know, you controlling your character,
Speaker 3: your character is this AI controlled bot that you're essentially
Speaker 3: coaching and giving you know, good advice to, so to speak.
Speaker 3: And that took it to a completely different technical level.
Speaker 3: But that's kind of what we've been building for the
Speaker 3: past year and a half, almost two years. So to
Speaker 3: answer Tracy's question, the reason why we're kind of like
Speaker 3: talking about all this right now is we just launched
Speaker 3: what we are calling our tre alpha, So we are
Speaker 3: not necessarily like letting everyone through the door, but basically
Speaker 3: we're letting a ton of folks to the door to
Speaker 3: come and experience a sort of with the first version
Speaker 3: of the game, give us feedback, and we are hoping
Speaker 3: to get into alpha around the late springs, around late
Speaker 3: Q one early Q two timeframe, when the public more
Speaker 3: members of the public can start experiencing, So that's kind
Speaker 3: of like the early access time frame that we're looking at,
Speaker 3: and then we're going to be in beta by the
Speaker 3: end of the next year. That's kind of like when
Speaker 3: we'll be in public. But the reason why we wanted
Speaker 3: to talk to Magic fans especially is because that's whom
Speaker 3: we are prioritizing. Is because you know, even you Tracy,
Speaker 3: if you play Chaos Agents at this stage, you'll be like, oh,
Speaker 3: I see how this takes some of the core concepts
Speaker 3: of for Richard Garfield game and just translate this translates
Speaker 3: it to something that can only happen in the digital format,
Speaker 3: and that was sort of our fundamental goal. So sorry,
Speaker 3: that was a much longer your.
Speaker 1: Question, but you know, no, that's very cool and I
Speaker 1: am excited to play this game. We just have time
Speaker 1: for one more question, and this one comes from our
Speaker 1: producer Carmen, although I think it's actually for Joe's benefit
Speaker 1: so that he can branch out into some new things.
Speaker 1: But other than Magic and Chaos Agents, what games do
Speaker 1: you like to play? What are your favorites?
Speaker 4: Wow? Well, I, as I said at the beginning, I
Speaker 4: think there is some merit to uh to really getting
Speaker 4: good at a game and playing it again and again,
Speaker 4: and that that goes against my my curiosity of games.
Speaker 4: Uh and uh so so I have this tension between
Speaker 4: wanting to play everything that comes to the market and
Speaker 4: trying to discipline myself to return to my favorites and
Speaker 4: play them again and again. But so so Uh. Some
Speaker 4: of the games which which I returned to again and
Speaker 4: again are Hanabi that's my favorite cooperative game. And uh,
Speaker 4: I am actually playing a bunch of Fairy Chess right now,
Speaker 4: which is Chess variations and uh and I play uh
Speaker 4: Lost Cities, uh my my my, one of my favorite
Speaker 4: two player games. But lots of classic games like like
Speaker 4: like Jass and Gain and the Bridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it looks like a fun game. Maybe I'll
Speaker 2: play with my family.
Speaker 3: It's a wonderful game. And I can watch for the
Speaker 3: fact that Richard plays a lot of games and Common
Speaker 3: and I were talking about this at the top of
Speaker 3: the r Richard is it plays and that is actually
Speaker 3: amazing because like for me, you know, I would I
Speaker 3: would love to play that much. But you know, I
Speaker 3: kind of play vicariously through Richard because he comes back
Speaker 3: and tells the oh, you know what you check that
Speaker 3: one out. And that's you know, I have three recommendations
Speaker 3: of different sort of fidelities with put it that way.
Speaker 3: One that you know, anyone who's interested in Auto Battler
Speaker 3: should check out Vampire Survivors. That was one of the
Speaker 3: first games that Richard recommended to me, and it's really
Speaker 3: blown up since then, so a lot for a lot
Speaker 3: of folks in the gaming community know about it. But
Speaker 3: it's just a fantastic game. It's just so simple but
Speaker 3: so so deep. The other one that I highly recommend,
Speaker 3: it's a completely different type of game, but I'm sure
Speaker 3: it doesn't get that much coverage. So but it's been
Speaker 3: something that has been a great game for me and
Speaker 3: my my family to play together. It's called The Case
Speaker 3: of the Golden Idol, which is which is this little
Speaker 3: indie game that essentially gets you to solve this mystery
Speaker 3: set in the fictional nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Oh that sounds like so much fun.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, it is just so cool, you know, Like
Speaker 3: I don't want to give away anything. It's one of
Speaker 3: those games that issues go in blind, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: take You can probably beat the whole game in less
Speaker 3: than five hours, and it's just such a such a
Speaker 3: fun experience, so always always fun to support indeed developers,
Speaker 3: and you know, for anyone who's not heard yet, I
Speaker 3: mean I highly recommend Alan Wake too. It's just it
Speaker 3: is just so cool to see that kind of innovation
Speaker 3: in Triple A gaming. And this has just been an amazing,
Speaker 3: amazing up for gaming overall, just in the quality of games.
Speaker 3: But something like Alan Wake two is just like shows
Speaker 3: us the next bound the next kind of like boundary
Speaker 3: that we're hitting in the blending of like passive entertainment
Speaker 3: interactive entertainment, because you know, no one can look at
Speaker 3: alan Wake two like you know, there's just stuff you
Speaker 3: can go and watch, you know, people let's play and
Speaker 3: things like that. No one can look at that and
Speaker 3: deny that it's you know, art. So I think at
Speaker 3: this point of time, we've you know, crossed that Roger
Speaker 3: t Wood spreshold where you know, gaming is undeniably getting
Speaker 3: into that category. So it's exciting to see what I think.
Speaker 4: Sorry to add to that list my favorite auto battler
Speaker 4: since since since that's where we're working now, which is
Speaker 4: Heartstone Battlegrounds, I think it's really added a lot of
Speaker 4: innovation to the auto battle or category.
Speaker 1: Well, Arka and Richard, I think you're both going to
Speaker 1: be responsible for a massive dip in all lots productivity
Speaker 1: as we go off and experiment with all these new
Speaker 1: recommendations and of course chaos agents as well.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. That was so great. I'm going
Speaker 2: to order Hanave right now on my phone, so I
Speaker 2: get it. I'm going to play more games. Even though
Speaker 2: I even though I appreciate Richard your endorsement of the
Speaker 2: single game approach, I think you've actually inspired me to
Speaker 2: maybe start playing more games.
Speaker 4: Well one is a little bit narrow.
Speaker 1: All right, Ton, Arka, thank you so much. That was fantastic.
Speaker 1: Thank you for allowing me to reminisce and be all
Speaker 1: nostalgic about Magic the Gathering and the middle school experience.
Speaker 3: Thank you both for having us so much. It was
Speaker 3: so it was so fun spending this hour.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: It's always fun to talk about games to go on forever.
Speaker 1: Joe, You're you're inspired now, Yeah, I am, I'm inspired.
Speaker 2: I love to I love that conversation. I'm gonna play
Speaker 2: more games.
Speaker 1: Maybe you know what I was thinking as we're talking
Speaker 1: about Magic the Gathering and you know, Richard and Richard's
Speaker 1: purposeful avoidance of building a sort of ecosystem that was
Speaker 1: all about the economics and value of the game. I
Speaker 1: was thinking about Axie Infinity, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: like opposite, exactly right.
Speaker 2: I had the exact same thought, which is that that's
Speaker 2: no one could actually explain how that was a fun game.
Speaker 2: No one even really tried to make the argument that
Speaker 2: the gameplayer was fun. Who's clearly all about the value
Speaker 2: of the various NFTs in the game. It felt like
Speaker 2: there are two levels to this. So there's the first level,
Speaker 2: which is that it's not a fun game if you
Speaker 2: have to spend a ton of money on rare cards,
Speaker 2: et cetera, and people just get obsessed with collecting collecting
Speaker 2: valuable cards. That is negative for gameplay. So he talked
Speaker 2: about he was at pro crash price. And then there's
Speaker 2: the other element, which I thought was really interesting, which
Speaker 2: is that it also ceases to be less fun if
Speaker 2: the game becomes more and more about deck construction, what
Speaker 2: happens before two people sit down in front of each other,
Speaker 2: and less about the gameplay that occurs when the two
Speaker 2: people are there. And so you know, just this idea
Speaker 2: of continuing to pursue fun, active, creative, improvisational gameplay and
Speaker 2: how to avoid these other traps where other factors start
Speaker 2: to overwhelm that. I thought it was really interesting.
Speaker 1: Well, also Arca's points about the pay to play model, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the idea that, like you can build a very
Speaker 1: popular game by purposefully resisting some of that temptation. And
Speaker 1: I think if you look at something like Magic, the
Speaker 1: proof is kind of in the pudding, right, Like, people
Speaker 1: are still playing this game. It's made a ton of
Speaker 1: money for Wizards of the Coast. I remember again in
Speaker 1: middle school, like there was a whole network of media
Speaker 1: tied to this. There were Magic the Gathering fiction books
Speaker 1: that I read at the time. Yeah, God, don't judge me,
Speaker 1: but like this was a huge thing. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: because the cards themselves were valuable or because players were
Speaker 1: stumping up a ton of cash in order to play
Speaker 1: the game.
Speaker 4: It was this.
Speaker 1: It was everything. Yeah, it was everything, you know. It
Speaker 1: was the gameplay and everything attached to it in the community,
Speaker 1: and it was a fun time. Anyway, shall we leave
Speaker 1: it there, Let's leave it there. This has been another
Speaker 1: episode of the ad thoughts Potcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You
Speaker 1: can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Now I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart,
Speaker 2: follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, dash Ol
Speaker 2: Bennett at Dashbot and Cal Brooks at Calebrooks. And thank
Speaker 2: you to our producer Moses On. For more odd Lots content,
Speaker 2: go to bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we
Speaker 2: have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter that comes out
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening in