(upbeat techno music)

As you said, when you hacked the game Donkey Kong,

we're not trying to send some kind of message.

No, I wasn't trying, but like

I learned a lot in the process, right?

So, after this had happened,

and the outpouring of opinion on the YouTube channel,

and realizing what my daughter

is going to be facing as she grows up,

now I've got this thought of how can I,

in just my daily development life, and everything else,

how do I apply what I've learned in this process

to the next thing or the next game we do,

or the next hack, or whatever?

Right.

And so, I'm in the middle of trying to figure that out.

I don't really have an answer for that.

I've got a few emails I kinda pushed up to the top

from people who are, really touching stories

about how games affected their lives

and how it continues to, video games

can actually help people.

And there's a good way to do this.

It's not something you stop and say

I'm gonna make a game to help people

like all those brain-age stuff and everything.

Not that kind of approach.

There's something even more culturally,

something that's much deeper that you can do with a game,

that film can't provide, books can't provide.

So I'm exploring that right now

and I have a few test cases that kind of came my way

because of this that I really want to

Okay to bring this to.

Yeah, I think that trying to change somebody,

trying to change somebody's life is not something

that I'm like personally comfortable with.

(laughter)

That's like, Whoa dude, it's your own life.

When you try too hard,

that pushes the people away actually.

Yeah, people have been trying to make games

to like, teach people and so on

for the longest time and that stuff doesn't work.

Or like, games for girls.

We're gonna make games for girls.

It doesn't work because people don't want

this kind of prescriptive medicine.

They don't wanna be preached to.

The irony is, the more specific

you make the thing, the more like

specifically personal it is to you,

the more kind of widely resonant that it could be

and that, this is the perfect example.

I agree.

You did something for your daughter

in this particular situation.

You never really intended for it to go wide

but then, like all these people

are like, Oh my god.

Because it didn't come from a place

of trying to make a statement or whatever

it ended up, like walking into that

and doing what it should have done,

which is be itself and stand for

what its original purpose was.

It's just a very difficult line to walk

when you're working on something

that's a lot more personal.

It's like with Field of Dreams,

like if you build it, they will come.

Just focus on what's personal,

what's meaningful for you

and that's gonna be the most genuine thing

that people will be attracted to.

I totally agree with that.

Creation and creativity, I mean

that's inherently a personal,

comes from a place of personal motivation

and to go and, like you said,

the prescriptive thing, not prescriptive

in the sense of everyone needs this,

but prescriptive in the sense of

this is how we're gonna structure this,

so as to appeal to X,Y or Z.

The sincerity is gone and if you're building a game,

to be sincere about something,

or to make an emotional impact,

it's just gonna either be cloying, saccharin,

or completely devoid of actual emotion,

it's gonna fall flat.

Yeah, there's so many examples of that.

It's just very frustrating

and being in the industry this long

and working for so many different people,

you can get jaded really easily with this stuff.

Like, you always walk into a meeting

with like, our core demographic

we want to have, Oh, kill me, kill me.

And then also, the selling of the idea,

it's stuff for fun being and all these things

It's like it's such a soul destroying process.

But when you get past that and you feel like

you have the palette now and the canvas

to do what you need to do,

that's when it gets really exciting.

Greg, when we were talking to you about Transistor,

you said when you brought it to Penny Arcade,

you said, how are we going to describe this to people?

Let's just have them play the game.

Because, having to log line this thing

that you're pouring all your time into

is just, that act of distillation

robs it of all of its

Yeah, or we didn't, like, back solve from the message.

We didn't like, come up with, here's the hook.

And here are the key features and then let's build those,

instead it's a more organic process of

build the thing, find out what the

actual heart and soul of it is,

and then, have some people play it,

report back to you what they think

is interesting about it, and then you're like okay.

Then you have a certain amount of confidence

in what's at the heart of the game

as opposed to just trying to force it

the entire time, which, games that are like

designed on paper rather than fully prototyped,

they often run the risk of that.

Prototyping itself is like a form of hacking.

You take whatever you have to take

throw it together and react to people

the way they're playing a game.

I always fall back on a old quote,

I think it was Toru Iwatani, he was asked

The designer of Pac-Man.

The designer of Pac-man.

And he was asked what is a game designer.

This was at a time when no one really knew

how to describe a game designer.

And his response was very immediate.

He was like, somebody who makes a game

that makes people happy.

Everything I've ever made

in my whole life, is always been that

Whether it was to make my friends happy,

make me happy, or whatever.

And so, when the prototype's coming together,

if nobody's happy in that process,

Oh, yeah.

That's the worst, and so you hack,

whatever you have to do to hack the happiness in.

And we're doing it right now on a project

and it's so rewarding to hack something together

no matter what it looks like or anything,

and somebody, when they're playing it,

and you see that smile come up,

you're like, done.

We got that mark.

I'm sure that people to make people sad

or whatever, and the palette of emotions,

but ultimately, I make games to make people happy.

But it's really awesome in that regard

and I don't see a difference between

hacking a game to make myself happy

or somebody else, uh, from a prototype.

(upbeat techno music)

It's really good when we get

actual game developers in here, isn't it.

It's not just you and I jabbering about

whatever pops into the top of our head.

Vague Simpsons references.

[Peter] Bootleg Street Fighter.

[Chris] Oh yeah, Chun-Li fireballs.

[Peter] Ooh, ooh, ooh, Wolfenstein characters in drag.

[Chris] Oh, Wolfenstein characters as Yoshis.

[Peter] Unicorns that poop fire.