Jeff Kaplan on Lex Fridman: Why games have three fun types

Jeff Kaplan 0:00 There's three types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

Lex Fridman 0:06 Is it PvP?

Jeff Kaplan 0:07 It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.

Lex Fridman 0:16 [laughs] Well, I don't know what that means, but [laughs] I-

Jeff Kaplan 0:19 Rust players know what that means. My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.

Lex Fridman 0:27 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 0:28 And we're, we're idiots. We're reading the forums, and the forums are just flaming us all the time. Like, "There's lag on this server," and, "Can't log into that server." And that's, that was our perspective of what was happening. And when I showed up at that show, it... One of the most emotional things in my li- it was nothing but an outpouring of love. I had believed I would never work anyplace but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was. Um, and I felt I was a part of it, and I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, and, uh, that was it.

Lex Fridman 1:11 How painful was it to say goodbye?

Jeff Kaplan 1:14 It broke me.

Lex Fridman 1:16 Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the earth, but you were actually working on a game.

Lex Fridman 1:27 The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer through and through. Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years, and they are truly incredible. Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made, games that, to me personally, have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and happiness, from Warcraft to StarCraft to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and more. So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game industry giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever. Full of memes, lols, wisdom, emotional rollercoaster moments and, of course, Blizzard video game lore. Jeff left Blizzard in 2021 and has been secretly working on a new video game called The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff. It is incredibly beautiful. Set in the 1800s gold rush era of California, it's an open world online multiplayer game, part adventure and action, part survival, sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and desperation, and sometimes just awe, watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape. It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and it's a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of you. You can wishlist it on Steam, join the alpha later in March, I think, and early access is on the way. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Kaplan.

Lex Fridman 4:08 You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest, before you ever became a legendary video game designer on, uh, World of Warcraft and on Overwatch, which I think is a wild journey to go through from gamer to designer. But first, let's go way back. When did you first fall in love with video games?

Jeff Kaplan 4:32 I was lucky. I was born in that golden era of coin-op.

Lex Fridman 4:37 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 4:37 So I literally remember the first time seeing Pac-Man. I was with my uncle Ronnie, and he just kept feeding me quarters. I think he wanted to play but was too scared to, so he, you know, his little nephew, he would just give him quarters to play Pac-Man. Um, I remember being at my brother's graduation in Philadelphia. They had an Asteroids machine in the lobby. That was one of the first coin-op machines I had played as well. And my brother and I would, we would try to get the high score, and we'd finally get it, but we had to go to bed early 'cause we were little kids.

Lex Fridman 5:16 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 5:16 And then in the morning, somebody else had, like, beat our high score. And then, you know, I grew up in Southern California in the '80s. I was born in '72, so, you know, I was a kid with that s-skateboard BMX culture where we'd ride two towns over. We knew all the pizza parlors and liquor stores and arcades, and we just lived in that coin-op phase. That was, that was where the love started. And then you started to see things like Pong. You'd go over to a friend's house, they'd have Pong, and it was just mind-blowing. Like, we're playing this thing on the TV, and it was so much fun. Um, Atari was a big thing.At that time as well. But the big one for me was actually Intellivision, because my dad was an executive recruiter, and one of his clients was Mattel, and he said, "Hey, I-- they gave me this thing," and he would get discounts or free games. And my brothers and I just loved Intellivision. Like, we would just play it endlessly. And the comparison was always like, is this game close to what's in the arcades?

Lex Fridman 6:31 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 6:32 And it was just such a golden era. Um, and I think the, the big moment where it really blew open and kind of hit the next level was when the NES came out. And that-- like, NES with Super Mario-

Lex Fridman 6:50 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 6:51 Uh, was kind of gaming at the next level at that point, and I have, like, warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to this day. I, I remember we played Super Mario for weeks, my brothers and I, and then I had a friend come over, and he showed me all the secret stuff-

Lex Fridman 7:10 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 7:10 ...in Super-- uh, that I didn't know existed at the time. And it, it was like suddenly the world opened up more and games could be more. Um, and then there was, like, a big PC gaming push that hit me. My parents ran their own business. Like I said, my dad was an executive recruiter, and they bought an IBM, and this is, like, when it was DOS before MS-DOS existed.

Lex Fridman 7:39 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 7:39 And I was so disappointed because, like, other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore-

Lex Fridman 7:46 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 7:46 ...which, you know, they, they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time. And, uh, my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I. Uh, she bought us Zork.

Lex Fridman 8:00 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 8:01 You know, it was just Infocom word games and where your imagination would take you. Like, Zork holds a place in my heart I think few games will ever touch.

Lex Fridman 8:13 It's a text-based game?

Jeff Kaplan 8:14 Text-based game. You know, you just type in, "Go west, open mailbox," you know?

Lex Fridman 8:21 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 8:21 And, um-

Lex Fridman 8:23 Okay

Jeff Kaplan 8:24 ...but it's that power of imagination. It's why the book is always better than the movie, you know?

Lex Fridman 8:29 Yeah. So you're starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate.

Jeff Kaplan 8:33 Yes.

Lex Fridman 8:35 You can step into this world, and you can lose yourself in that world.

Jeff Kaplan 8:38 Yeah. You're transported. You're living there.

Lex Fridman 8:41 Was Zork popular?

Jeff Kaplan 8:43 Zork was insanely popular. Um, and then there was Zork II and Zork III.

Lex Fridman 8:48 [laughs] The trilogy. Zork trilogy. I see it. Okay.

Jeff Kaplan 8:51 And, and it was weird in, like, the-- Sometime in the '90s, there was this, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games. That's how they branded them, and they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics, and somehow that just shattered everything because the Zork you knew in your head didn't exist anymore. Yeah, Zork was fantastic. I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous, but I highly recommend Zork. Um, there, there was also, in those days on the PC that worked on our IBM, was Ultima-

Lex Fridman 9:32 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 9:32 ...which was the Richard Garriott series, um, and he was Lord British. We knew him as Lord British. He put himself in the game. And you wanna talk about world-building. You know, there was you, Forest, and there was all the characters. And the first Ultima I played was Ultima II 'cause Ultima I was before my time. And that series, it was this RPG, um, group-based PC game, and the worlds were just so rich. Like, you could get on a rocket ship. You're playing in this fantasy world fighting demons, and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship. And then there was just all of this sort of crazy stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world, like there were bouncers in the towns and merchants, but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people or kill Lord British. You know, that was-

Lex Fridman 10:32 Mm

Jeff Kaplan 10:32 ...something that was super hard. And when you're just a jackass kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over, and Ultima was really a profound, um, kind of experience for me.

Lex Fridman 10:48 And of course, that led to Ultima Online, which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest-

Jeff Kaplan 10:55 Yes

Lex Fridman 10:55 ...sort of starting to build these worlds that are massively multiplayer online video games. Can you take me to that journey? Like, as you start to get online, MMO world, what were influential? What were fun for you?

Jeff Kaplan 11:11 Well, the big one for me was EverQuest, but, um, like you mentioned, Ultima Online sort of was the predecessor. It came before EverQuest. And it was, like, one of those unfortunate times in my life where I was actually at grad school.

Lex Fridman 11:28 You were busy.

Jeff Kaplan 11:29 I was busy, and I missed Ultima Online. Like, I would have had that experience. And when you hear the Ultima Online stories, they're some of the craziest, funniest... You know, I, I knew somebody who, they learned how to poison in the game, and then they would poison apples, then leave them on the ground, and somebody else would be adventuring, then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse. Then they'd steal all their stuff. And, you know, Ultima Online was kind of-- It was the earliest grief-based experiment, really like when you're treating the humans like ants in the ant farm.

Lex Fridman 12:08 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 12:08 That was kind of Ultima Online.So-

Lex Fridman 12:11 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 12:12 ... my first, like, what online gaming, what defined online gaming for me was Quake and Doom and Duke Nukem. You know, it started with Doom, and they had it-- you could basically LAN. Um, you could network with your friends, or you could connect with a modem and hook up with somebody, and that was, like, a mind-blowing... Just seeing another entity in a video game and seeing that-that's a person on the other side of that.

Lex Fridman 12:43 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 12:44 That was magical, like, that that moment happened, and that person could be in another room or across town from you. And Quake kind of took it to the next level. Like, that's where everybody knew what they were doing. The systems were more refined, and, um, this Quake community formed with all of these, you know, great websites, mods. The community was divided into... There were two castes of players, the, uh, [chuckles] low-ping bastards, the LPBs-

Lex Fridman 13:19 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 13:19 ... and then the rest of us, you know. And I, I remember rolling into Quake matches, you know, on a dial-up modem with a 300 ping connection, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Um, and just, just connecting with people, um, like I said, the, the websites. To this day, the only gaming website I read... I don't read any of the news sites anymore, but I read Bluesnews-

Lex Fridman 13:48 [chuckles]

Jeff Kaplan 13:49 ... which was like... Like, someone actually teased me recently.

Lex Fridman 13:53 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 13:53 I linked him a story. I'm like, "Oh, did you hear this new thing's coming out?" And I sent the link, and they're like, "Dude, this is from Bluesnews." Like, [chuckles] "What time machine did you just step out of?" And a guy named Steven He-Heeslip, I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong. I, I apologize, but... And it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest.

Lex Fridman 14:16 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 14:16 They had those, um, programmer plan updates, the .plan files, and guys like Carmack would... You know, they'd post about what code they were writing or how they had optimized something or just their personal life. Like, you know, the Ferrari talk would always happen-

Lex Fridman 14:37 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 14:37 ... once they, they had achieved, uh, success. And there was an id programmer named Brian Hook, and he said, "I'm leaving id to go work at Verant," which became Sony Online, "to work on this game called EverQuest." And I was like, "How does anybody leave id, the greatest institution in all of gaming ever, to work on any other game?" I'm like, "This guy must be crazy, or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it. I, I need to know what's going on." And if he hadn't have made that post, I never would've checked out EverQuest.

Lex Fridman 15:22 We'll talk about EverQuest, but since you mentioned Carmack and, uh, Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack? Why was he such an important and influential human in the history of gaming?

Jeff Kaplan 15:34 Those early geniuses at id, like, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now if they hadn't had the breakthroughs that they had at the time. Um, gaming engines were evolving, but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolf 3D-

Lex Fridman 15:59 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 15:59 ... that was the first... I, I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game.

Lex Fridman 16:03 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 16:04 You'd run around, you'd dress up as a German.

Lex Fridman 16:06 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 16:06 You'd throw a grenade.

Lex Fridman 16:07 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 16:08 Um, to see it in 3D... And it, it's funny. You look back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it seems almost childish. Like, oh, it's... Why, why were you so excited about that? And you were transported. There... It was the intimacy of first person, you know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you're the hero fighting the Nazis. Um, and then the evolution, like when Doom came out, I'm a huge Army of Darkness fan, like, one of my favorite movies of all time, and I was like, "This is Army of Darkness the video game," you know. Like, "Give me the boomstick. Here we go." And the graphical advances, but it, it wasn't just how the game looked. It was how it played.

Lex Fridman 17:02 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 17:02 The smoothness kept getting better, the responsiveness, um, the sharpness of the gameplay. You have to credit id in those days, and Carmack and Romero. Um, I-- As somebody who worked on an FPS, I... That wouldn't have existed without them. Credit where credit's due.

Lex Fridman 17:22 And by the way, we should say your, as a gamer, your range is incredible. You are a legit first-person shooter gamer, but you also obviously love the more MMO world, rich, exploratory kind of game. So it's fascinating. But yeah, there's, on the technology stack that brought something like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life, there's a threshold which you pass of realism where you can immerse yourself into that world. I, I had the same exact experience with, uh, Wolfenstein 2D, taking a step to 3D, and it was, like, tears in my eyes. Like, "This is incredible." Like, my memories of Wolfenstein 3D is it was, like, ultra-realistic. [chuckles] It's silly to say now.

Jeff Kaplan 18:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 18:14 But it was the feeling like you're there.Yeah. What an incredible age. And some of that, the storytelling, a lot of that is the, the technology that brings that kind of 3D world to life is incredible. But before, before we get too far on that tangent, uh, you mentioned grad

Lex Fridman 18:33 school. We should mention that, uh, you have a master's degree in creative writing from NYU, and, uh, you wanted to be a writer. You told me your main influences were Kerouac, but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, Orwell. What drew you to storytelling in that medium of writing? What aspect of the human experience were you trying to put down on paper?

Jeff Kaplan 18:59 Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired and reading, and it's the-- not only being transported to a different world or into a different person, but also, you know, the way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings sometimes you didn't even know you had.

Lex Fridman 19:27 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 19:27 And that was very appealing for me. And the big challenge with it is, and I think this is for anybody who creates anything, is putting yourself out there.

Lex Fridman 19:41 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 19:41 Um, to some degree, there's a lot of ego that goes into that moment where you say, "Well, I've been reading, you know, '1984' or, uh, 'Green Hills of Strangelthorn,' and I think it's amazing. Um, and now I'm gonna try to write something that somebody is gonna read."

Lex Fridman 20:05 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 20:05 Uh, that's a giant leap of faith. You know, that's a moment of putting yourself out there completely, and there's gotta be some part of that that's ego. There's some part of it that's masochistic.

Lex Fridman 20:18 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 20:19 Um, and I think for people who want to create and build stuff, they can't help but to do it. You don't really have an option. That's just how you're wired, and you're gonna do it anyway. And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else.

Lex Fridman 20:43 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 20:44 You know, that's one way to go about it.

Lex Fridman 20:46 Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot of the stories he wrote, never published, and he asked for all of them to be destroyed, and then it's only because of his friend that ignored his request that we even have many of his stories. So, like, to be that kinda-- I mean, clearly there's some m-masochism there, some, a tortured soul.

Jeff Kaplan 21:08 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 21:08 But then there, there's also the ego, like you mentioned. Um, I was entertained by the story of James Joyce, uh, when he was a, a young man, 18, 19, uh, declared that he's going to be the, the greatest writer of the 20th century. And he turned out in many, in the eyes of many to, to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But there's, like, millions of kids just like James Joyce, writers, they're declaring exactly that, that turn out not to be. But that is, in some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases, you have to have that ego-

Jeff Kaplan 21:43 Yeah

Lex Fridman 21:43 ... to say, "I'm gonna-- Yeah, right. I read '1984' [laughs] and now I'm going to write the next '1984.'"

Jeff Kaplan 21:50 Yeah. And I do think ego's a big part of it. Um, it's one of the many lessons I've learned. Um, hearing your Kafka s-story is funny because fast-forwarding to how my writing career ended-

Lex Fridman 22:03 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 22:04 ... I literally threw away everything. I mean in a dumpster. I, I used to keep copious, uh, notes, like journals, my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes. And then I also kept personal journals of just y- you know, to keep the writing habit up of just, you know, what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of that. And then either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts, and I threw it all in the dumpster.

Lex Fridman 22:40 What was that decision? Do you remember that decision? What was that-- what was that like to, to just take that part of your life and just put it in a dumpster?

Jeff Kaplan 22:50 Yeah. It, it was, um... I think it was necessary.

Lex Fridman 22:55 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 22:55 It was necessary. Uh, this is like rational- rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do-

Lex Fridman 23:02 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 23:02 ... you know? But at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated with failure that I needed the moment. It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer, you know? It's that moment of like, "I'm not gonna win this fight," and you need to move on from it. And if there was any element of that sitting around, I'd be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.

Lex Fridman 23:35 We should mention that you did give it a, a real try. Uh, you've mentioned receiving over 170 rejection letters in one year when submitting your, uh, stories, so there's a lot of rejection.

Jeff Kaplan 23:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 23:48 So there's a long chain of rejection. And then what was that like, the rejection?

Jeff Kaplan 23:54 It was hard. Um, I ha- I had moved from New York. Um, I did the most terrible, dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time. I had a really great group of writer friends from grad school in New York, and I think writing's a very lonely, solitary thing, but weirdly, writers kinda support each other and just y- who do you give the story to? You know, you don't wanna give it to your mom or dad. You know, you kinda wanna give it to somebody who's gonna really punch you in the nose and tell you what's wrong with it.And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.

Lex Fridman 24:30 Did you, uh, take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter and drove across, uh-

Jeff Kaplan 24:35 [laughs] No

Lex Fridman 24:36 ... acro- across the United States and then wrote a book about it? Or just to take Kerouac's as an example. Anyway, sorry. Uh, you went-

Jeff Kaplan 24:44 I might have been more successful-

Lex Fridman 24:45 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 24:45 ... had I done that.

Lex Fridman 24:47 Uh, so sorry. So you went back.

Jeff Kaplan 24:48 So I moved back to California, and I did it for a girl.

Lex Fridman 24:52 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 24:52 And I think within two months of moving back, we were broken up. So, and I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment when it was empty in New York, and I was about to close the door for the last time. I had that like, you know, little me on the shoulder saying, "Dude, what are you doing?"

Lex Fridman 25:13 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 25:13 "This-- you're making one of those epic life mistakes that is gonna come back to haunt you." And, um, I ended up alone in California, and I think it was a good three years that I structured my life where I was gonna write for eight hours a day. Because it's that writer's habit, like you have to just force yourself, this is a job. This isn't a hobby. Whether I like it or not, rain or shine, sick or healthy, I'm gonna write for eight hours a day, and I did. Um, I was fortunate. Like I said, my dad had his company, and he hired me, um, as a research associate. So I was calling up, generating name lists for a recruiting company. And I would take-- whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those, so I could start at like 5:00 in the morning. And I created all this space for me to write. And I just... I had a dog named Jack.

Lex Fridman 26:11 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 26:11 Who was e- he was Jack Russell Terrier, and so everybody's like, "You're a writer. You named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack." I'm like, "It's-- I named him after Jack Kerouac."

Lex Fridman 26:20 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 26:20 "It's poetic and epic." And-

Lex Fridman 26:21 Yeah. Of course

Jeff Kaplan 26:22 ... I just look like a dumbass, but-

Lex Fridman 26:23 Yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 26:24 ... it was just me and this dog, and I was writing, you know, all that time intensely. And this was, um, mid to late '90s, so even though internet existed, email was very primitive, and you had to send a manuscript off, like printed paper-

Lex Fridman 26:43 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 26:43 ... to all the-- like I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines. And you had to send, um, envelope with return self-addressed stamp, so it was expensive too. Like, if you didn't have money, you were just-- There was a cost to it-

Lex Fridman 27:01 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 27:01 ... to every single one of them.

Lex Fridman 27:02 You had to pay for the rejection letter that you would eventually receive.

Jeff Kaplan 27:07 Yeah. And the like big thing that you were hoping for was that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter. Like, um-

Lex Fridman 27:17 Keep, keep going. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 27:18 Yeah. And you'd like cling onto this. Like it was like, "Oh, Glimmer Train said, you know, 'Showing promise,'" you know? And you just hang on to that for like a week, you know, pretending like that was... But it was just soul-crushing. Um, and I really stuck-- And I became more and more isolated. Um, part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York. I'm prone to just introversion anyway-

Lex Fridman 27:50 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 27:50 ... the type of person I am. Breaking up with the girlfriend at the time. I just sort of fell into that world of like all I was doing was writing, and, uh, it, it broke me. Like I, I went into very deep and heavy depression. I drank too much. I really had a problem with alcohol, and all those things compounded into just deep, deep depression. And, um, I don't-- There wasn't like a magic rejection that broke me. That would've been epic if like-

Lex Fridman 28:33 Mm

Jeff Kaplan 28:33 ... someone out there is like the dude who [laughs] I'm the dude who broke Jeff that one day.

Lex Fridman 28:39 [laughs] Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 28:40 But I just had a moment where I said, "This is gonna destroy me." And, um, and like I don't wanna be discouraging to anybody because I really do believe, like you hear it so much, like you have to work for your dreams, never give up. Like we're trained this way, like never give up. The universe-- Actually, maybe not the universe. A group of editors at literary magazines [laughs] across the United States was telling me it was time to give up as a writer. Like I wasn't cut out for it. And, um, I stopped.

Lex Fridman 29:24 Sometimes, you know, closing a door is required for another door to open.

Jeff Kaplan 29:30 Yes.

Lex Fridman 29:30 That's one of the hardest things to do, is to walk away.

Jeff Kaplan 29:33 Yeah. And I think r- rightly so, our parents, our coaches, our mentors train us not to give up.

Lex Fridman 29:41 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 29:42 And I think a lot of us take pride in that, "I'm never gonna give up. I'm gonna do this, come hell or high water." And, uh, sometimes there's that reality, especially when you're now in your mid-20s, where you have that moment of like, "Am I really gonna be this?" Like, "Am I ever gonna, um, sort of find the light here?" And maybe, and it's so hard. It's so hard to have this moment. Maybe this isn't my calling in life, especially when you don't know what the next calling is gonna be.

Lex Fridman 30:15 God, it's so painful 'cause you've invested so much of yourself, of who you are, of the dreams you've had, of this, this whole conception of yourself, and you're watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming isolated, suffering more and more, and then you just have to somehow figure out how toGet out of that. And it is true, uh, in that situation, the way to get out is, is the dumpster.

Jeff Kaplan 30:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 30:44 Is to cut it off. Is there, uh, advice you can extract from that? There's a lot of young folks who are in that same situation.

Jeff Kaplan 30:54 Yeah, I-- This is one of those hindsight things where, you know, having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side, which you don't know at the time. You know, when you're a young person in your late teens or early twenties, there's so much pressure on you. Um, and I th- I really think adults don't help. You know, every time you run into the younger nephew or whoever, and you start to say things like, "Oh, what's your major? What are you gonna do with that?"

Lex Fridman 31:23 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 31:23 "What do you wanna be?" It's such bullshit to do to a human being.

Lex Fridman 31:28 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 31:28 You know?

Lex Fridman 31:29 You're so lost in the world. I mean, most of us are lost our entire lives, but especially in your twenties, you're like, you're lost. So questions like, "Yeah, what are you, what are you doing? What's your major? What's the career?" And so on, that's not the point, man. I'm try- I'm trying to find-- [chuckles] I'm trying to, to, to move through the world, I'm trying to run through the world to find the thing that sparks my heart, to find the passion, to find what I'm meant to be on this earth for. And there really... I mean, that is a real hero's journey of searching. A- as a young person, that's a real, like... You know, all the adults, with their wisdom, they've stopped searching often. They've s- they've, uh, done the lazy, the comfortable thing. They've found their thing, and so now they look back, they don't remember how much suffering and how, how much uncertainty the young people have to deal with.

Jeff Kaplan 32:28 It's-- There's confusion, there's pressure. Like, the, the pressure we exert on younger people for having it figured out is, it's insane. Um, so the advice that I always give t- and it sounds so stupid, like this sounds really trite, but, um, focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The, the pressure that society kinda puts on us is, you know, "Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker?" And I think we get lost in the trappings of, like, a vision of what that role is-

Lex Fridman 33:18 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 33:18 ... and how to perform as a fake actor in that role, versus when you're off the clock and no one's asking you any questions.

Lex Fridman 33:28 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 33:29 Y- you know, you're not at Thanksgiving dinner, and your uncle's pressuring you into, you know, what your future's gonna be for the rest of your life. When you go home, how do you spend your time? Like, what makes you happy? What brings you fulfillment? And through those paths, you're gonna find out what you're gonna become, not what you wanna be.

Lex Fridman 33:52 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 33:52 It's what do you wanna do?

Lex Fridman 33:55 What do you wanna do, the thing that brings you joy on a moment-by-moment basis. Yeah, that's brilliantly put. And speaking of which, that's where you took the pivot.

Lex Fridman 34:07 You switched to, uh, video games. How did that happen? Gradually, suddenly?

Jeff Kaplan 34:13 Gradually and suddenly. So when I had that fateful moment where I just sorta gave up with writing, I had these days where I'd structured eight-hour chunks of just, this was writing time. You know, I'd sit solitary, um, typing. All that was gone. And, you know, I could still support myself, which was nice, and then I had this free time, and I wasn't spending it with anybody. I was just alone, me and the dog, Jack.

Lex Fridman 34:44 Mm-hmm. [chuckles]

Jeff Kaplan 34:44 And I just poured it all into EverQuest.

Lex Fridman 34:50 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 34:50 You know, I, I... It was 1999 when that game came out, and I had a friend, Victor, like, kind of a lifelong friend, one of, one of the few friends I had who played computer games, 'cause there was a stigma to that.

Lex Fridman 35:05 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 35:06 You know, it wasn't-- You didn't walk around telling people you played games. They thought you waste your time. And my friend Vic had bought EverQuest, and I'm like, "That's that game that that guy Brian Hook went to work on. Is it good?" And he's like, "Yeah, you gotta play it." And the moment I logged in, I was just transported. It was the world of Norrath, and it wasn't just the world itself and how it looked. I thought the game was gorgeous. It was the mechanics, you know, that I, I was this halfling rogue that, you know, had to go out and adventure in the world, and when I killed stuff, I got experience, and I needed better loot to kill more stuff to get more experience. And th- the sort of draw of progression in the game, um, it was amazing. I... And I just lived my life of, "I can't wait till the next time I log in." There was a lot of escapism going. It wasn't all healthy. Um, when all was said and done, when I finally had quit EverQuest three days later, you could type in the command /played to see how much, uh, played time you had. I had, I think it was, like, 272 played days in three years.

Lex Fridman 36:29 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 36:30 So you start to do the math on, like, how much time-

Lex Fridman 36:34 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 36:35 ... in those three years I was living in that world. [chuckles] It was, uh-It was kind of insane.

Lex Fridman 36:42 Well, that's over 6,000 hours-

Jeff Kaplan 36:45 Yeah

Lex Fridman 36:46 ... of gameplay.

Jeff Kaplan 36:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 36:47 Wow. So here, uh, going to Perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMORPG, set in the world of Norrath, as you were saying. First released in March 1999. It is an online role-playing game where thousands of players create characters, group up, and explore persistent shared world. It is widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs, helping to find raid content, guild systems, and 3D online worlds. That's the other component of it. There's-- It's all humans, and they group up.

Jeff Kaplan 37:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 37:25 And they raid together in the game.

Jeff Kaplan 37:28 Yep. In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 people or more getting together to conquer something that you couldn't beat otherwise. And to do successful raiding, you usually need to join what in EverQuest everyone referred to as an uber guild. So I had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I-- most of the time leveling up, I was unguilded, or I was in, like, a role-playing guild with rogues only.

Lex Fridman 38:00 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 38:01 And it was when I got to level 50 in EverQuest, was the, the top level, I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel, which on our server was the top. Every server had a top guild.

Lex Fridman 38:17 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 38:18 And I was on a server called the Nameless Server, and the top guild was Legacy of Steel. And that-- the thrill of getting 30 people together to go see if you could beat, you know, Nagafin, who was the fire dragon, or Vox, who was the frost dragon, and needing perfect coordination to pull it off, it was insane how fun-- Like, you would literally scream out. You're alone in your room at home-

Lex Fridman 38:48 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 38:49 ... but you felt like you were there with these people, and you would audibly cheer out when you, when you won, and you'd feel depressed when you lost. And it was a game of high highs and low lows, and it, it, it did everything right. It was amazing.

Lex Fridman 39:05 So that was a big leap for you to go from the proud lone warrior to a, a member of a guild, uber guild. And then there's that epic story of you rising to the top to become the leader of the super guild. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 39:22 The leader. [laughs] Yeah. So organizing, organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats-

Lex Fridman 39:32 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 39:32 ... 'cause, y-y-you know, everyone has their own will. Uh, some people are loot motivated. Some people want the guild to do well. Some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with. And, um, there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community. It was something I suffered with. But a lot of people, you know, anytime you're feeling sad or down, you're looking for escape. And-

Lex Fridman 40:00 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 40:00 ... one of the great things video games brings us is escapism.

Lex Fridman 40:04 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 40:04 And escapism isn't always bad or negative.

Lex Fridman 40:10 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 40:11 But when you sort of abuse it to escape your real-life problems, it's bad and negative.

Lex Fridman 40:18 So there's a mix of pain and, and darkness that pain can manifest as-

Jeff Kaplan 40:25 Yeah

Lex Fridman 40:25 ... all part of this community.

Jeff Kaplan 40:27 Yeah. And what's weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people gives you camaraderie and relief and makes you feel like you're not doing so bad in life. But you can quickly enter a cycle of but then you're withdrawing from life, and it makes you feel that way more to where you can only get the fix from the game at that, that point. So it's-- psychologically, there's a lot going on there.

Lex Fridman 40:57 And so you had to work with all of that. You have to get a bunch of people together to do a raid who are all human beings going through complicated psychological journeys of their own. Some are talking shit. Some are just quietly lonely, just looking for some loot.

Jeff Kaplan 41:16 In the late '90s, everyone was talking shit.

Lex Fridman 41:19 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 41:19 You know what I mean? Like, the gaming culture was just a different thing back then. But it was, it was a great group. It was super fun. It was people from all walks of life. And to coordinate these people, like, you just had to repeat everything, like, 200 times.

Lex Fridman 41:38 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 41:38 Like, "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna port from North Row. Everybody get to North Row." And then you'd have to repeat that for, like, six hours-

Lex Fridman 41:47 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 41:47 ... to have any chance of, like, 20% of the people showing up in North Row.

Lex Fridman 41:52 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 41:53 And I sort of like-- At first I joined the guild, I was just, like, the bright eye, bushy tail. Like, I was, like, one of the few rogues in the guild. I just wanted to be helpful. I really admired the people running the guild. Like, we had a great guild leader. Um, and it was just a, a really fun experience. And, you know, the guild leader one day just disappeared. Like, he quit, and he was going through, you know, his own thing. And that's what would happen in EverQuest. Like, people would just kinda disappear all of a sudden. There wasn't a, "Hey, in about a month, I'm gonna stop playing because I'm starting-

Lex Fridman 42:33 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 42:33 ... this new job." People-People had to quit in some dramatic way where they just disappear, and basically our guild leader stopped playing

Lex Fridman 42:43 Did you miss them when they disappeared? Like, we, we should say that most of the people, and maybe all of them, were anonymous, so you just have-

Jeff Kaplan 42:50 Yes

Lex Fridman 42:50 ... a username and you don't really say who you are in real life.

Jeff Kaplan 42:53 Absolutely. In those days, there was a great stigma to mentioning your, any real-life info. You just kind of kept it all really close to your chest, and you never knew who was male or female.

Lex Fridman 43:07 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 43:08 Um, you kind of assumed everybody was male.

Lex Fridman 43:11 Safe assumption.

Jeff Kaplan 43:11 And then it was a surprise if they were actually female.

Lex Fridman 43:15 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 43:15 Um, like my wife, for example, that's how I met her.

Lex Fridman 43:19 You met her in EverQuest?

Jeff Kaplan 43:20 I met her in EverQuest.

Lex Fridman 43:21 That is a true love story right there.

Jeff Kaplan 43:23 Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:24 Wow.

Jeff Kaplan 43:25 The, the funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, "You threw years of your life away. Like, you can't win a game like that." And I'm like, "I don't know. Like, sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game." [laughs]

Lex Fridman 43:49 [laughs] Yeah, yeah. You're like the, the "well, actually" guy. Well-

Jeff Kaplan 43:53 [laughs] Well, yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman 43:54 Your life will be on a Wikipedia page somewhere that says, "Well, here's an example of somebody- [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 43:59 Yeah

Lex Fridman 43:59 ... why video games are awesome." [laughs] Uh, yeah, I mean, some of the... I, I should mention as an aside, for me and many people I know, yes, it's hundreds of hours, but some of the happiest hours and days of my life, like looking back, it all worked out. During it, you are pretty low, and you think, "I- what am I doing with my life?" All that kind of stuff.

Jeff Kaplan 44:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 44:23 But, like, looking back, just the all-nighters you pull playing a particular video game, allowing yourself to really fully be immersed, uh, seeing the sun come up on, uh... By the way, many of those games for me were Blizzard games. Just an incredible thing that video games have been able to do. I think s- you know, it used to be, and st- still is somewhat the case, that books do that kind of same thing. They, they-

Jeff Kaplan 44:47 Yeah

Lex Fridman 44:47 ... take you on a journey. But video games, for a long time, you're right, they had a stigma. Like, I couldn't tell people. I felt like I was doing, like, heroin or something.

Jeff Kaplan 45:00 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 45:00 Like, I felt like I was doing this secret, dark thing. It's usually in the [laughs] it's, it usually is in the dark. There's just this secret of nature to it, like I'm doing something really dark and shady.

Jeff Kaplan 45:10 It wasn't mainstream.

Lex Fridman 45:12 It wasn't.

Jeff Kaplan 45:12 It wasn't accept- There was a stigma to it, and one of the weirdest parts of that is, you know, I mentioned, like, you could type in the /played in EverQuest. Well, if you did the /played on how much TV people watch, what would that look like? It would blow-

Lex Fridman 45:31 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 45:31 ... 6,000 hours out of the water easily. Well, it, in 20 years ago it would've, you know? Not today.

Lex Fridman 45:39 Now it's the phone. Yeah. Yeah. But then it is, uh, hard to say goodbye to that world.

Jeff Kaplan 45:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 45:47 Those are also really painful times. Uh, how hard was it to say goodbye for you?

Jeff Kaplan 45:52 To EverQuest? It was really hard, and there were times where you try to quit.

Lex Fridman 45:58 Oh, you took a break sometimes?

Jeff Kaplan 45:59 Yeah. You think you're quitting for good. You'd have those moments of like, "I'm, I'm doing this too much. I need to move on in life. I'm gonna put it down and walk away and hopefully not come back." And there were times where you did come back. Um, when I finally did leave EverQuest, it was actually extremely easy because I was psychologically done with the game at the time. Um, it was not shortly, but not too long after a new expansion had come out. At the time it was Shadows of Luclin-

Lex Fridman 46:34 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 46:34 ... which didn't speak to me like the expansions before. Like, the one before that was called Scars of Velious, which was an amazing expansion. And I had gotten the job at Blizzard, and I, I guess I'm just an obsessive person, so all the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest, the second, you know, the second my first minute started at Blizzard, that was my new obsession.

Lex Fridman 47:04 So speaking of which, you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got the job at Blizzard. As we said, you were this legendary gamer, and now legendary troll on EverQuest, username Togol. Uh, you gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, uh, telling them in a now famous... There's several rants. There's a famous one where you, uh, tell many of them to do a bunch of things, including to pull their heads out of their asses. Uh, you were loved and respected, uh, because you gave a lot of specific ways that the game could be improved, and that's an important thing to say. You weren't just talking shit. You actually really loved and cared for the game, and you gave them, in the language of the time, uh, advice on how to improve, uh, their game. And, uh, it's funny because, like, you look back to those messages, it's inspiring to me. It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people because you're really legit full-time talking shit. And now, and always have been, like one of the kindest, most loved human beings in the entire gaming industry. Anyway, how did that lead to you getting a job at Blizzard?

Jeff Kaplan 48:22 So when the first guild leader left Legacy of Steel, the founder, he, he was a guy named, his online name was Dread. That was his name. He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while, and eventually somebody stepped up and took-His position as guild leader, and that person's name was Ariel-

Lex Fridman 48:45 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 48:45 ... who was this blonde wood elf warrior, ah, female who always refused to wear a helmet because thought their character was so pretty, wanted to show their face all the time. So Ariel was a great guild leader for us and made me like a assistant guild leader, raid leader, officer type in the guild. And over time, Ariel got busier and busier and, you know, would send me messages like, "Hey, I'm not gonna be online, you know, tomorrow," or, "I'm not gonna be online tonight. Can you run the raid? Can you run the raid?" And running the raids was very natural for me, um, and it was my first experience with leadership in my life of, like, how do you motivate people? Like, what does motivation look like? What does discipline look like? Um, how do you inspire people? When do you force people versus encourage them? You know. So it was a learning experience for me on the fly, and I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually.

Lex Fridman 49:58 I should mention, I'm just now, um, uh, reading about, doing a bunch of research on Justinian of the Roman Empire, and he rose from being a peasant to being emperor, so I see a lot of parallels-

Jeff Kaplan 50:10 [laughs]

Lex Fridman 50:10 ... in, in your life journey [laughs] from peasant to emperor, but go ahead. I'm sorry.

Jeff Kaplan 50:14 At, at least EverQuest guild leader. That's, that's as much as I can say.

Lex Fridman 50:18 Uber guild. Uber guild leader.

Jeff Kaplan 50:19 Uber guild leader. Best guild on the Nameless server. So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier, and then one day they contacted me, and we were having this, like, whisper back and forth, and they said, "You, you're gonna have to take over the guild. I'm just too busy." And then it came out later... Well, let me back up a second. I started fooling around, like, around this time, uh, Half-Life 1 had come out, and with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life 1, one of the incredible things that those companies did back in the day was when they shipped the game, they shipped the editor on the CD.

Lex Fridman 51:01 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 51:02 And if you were curious enough, you could, like, fire up that editor and fool around with it. So I made a, a Duke Nukem level, and you'd send it off to, like, those UK programming magazines, and, you know, you'd get excited because your level was in, you know, some random magazine. And then I started making, like, Half-Life levels. And Ariel had stepped down as guild leader. I had become guild leader.

Lex Fridman 51:29 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 51:30 And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and says, "Hey, you know, you were talking about those Half-Life levels you made. I wanna see those." I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. Like, I didn't know you played Half-Life." Like, "Yeah, maybe we can get a server up, and I can play them." And Ariel tells me, "No, mail them to this address in Irvine." And because, a- again, to rewind in the time machine for a second, to send something like a Half-Life level over the internet-

Lex Fridman 52:03 Mm

Jeff Kaplan 52:03 ... would have taken, like, 12 hours.

Lex Fridman 52:05 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 52:05 So you actually, like, burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.

Lex Fridman 52:09 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 52:10 So I put my Half-Life levels, I send them to Ariel, and he says, he, you know, "My name's Rob. I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment."

Lex Fridman 52:24 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 52:24 Um, "We're h- I, I hear you're in Pasadena 'cause you mention it." You know, I would write about, you know, the Rose Parade and y- all these things on our website. You know, I kind of... It was blogging before blogging existed, so he knew I lived in Pasadena, and he's like, "Irvine's only an hour away. Why don't you come down, see Blizzard, and you can also meet..." And he, he names, like, four people in the guild. And I'm like, "They all work at Blizzard, too?" He's like, "Yeah, we're all Blizzard." And it was so weird because during that era, I didn't have a lot of money. It was not like... Kinda nowadays it feels like everybody plays every game, but you had to be selective. So, like, I never bought StarCraft or Diablo or Warcraft. I was much more of the Half-Life, Quake, Quake III guy around that time, and I'd never played a Blizzard game, and I just got invited to, like, go to Blizzard Entertainment.

Lex Fridman 53:25 Was Blizzard already legendary, you know, with the Warcraft and StarCraft? Is it, is there, is, was it building this, like, great legend of this game company that seemingly doesn't miss?

Jeff Kaplan 53:37 It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the legendary gaming... Like, it was beloved-

Lex Fridman 53:45 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 53:46 ... by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who hadn't played, you know, War 2 or Diablo II or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.

Lex Fridman 53:56 So you weren't, like, freaking out, freaking out?

Jeff Kaplan 53:59 No. I, I was freaking out in a different sense. I'm like, "Am I gonna get mugged when I-

Lex Fridman 54:05 Right

Jeff Kaplan 54:05 ... like, who are, is this a scam?"

Lex Fridman 54:07 Right. Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 54:07 Because you didn't meet people off the internet.

Lex Fridman 54:09 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 54:10 So I drove down there. Um, I ended up, there was, there was Rob Pardo-

Lex Fridman 54:18 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 54:18 ... who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft III-

Lex Fridman 54:23 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 54:23 ... and he was Ariel. You know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all. It wasn't this blonde wood elf. [laughs]

Lex Fridman 54:31 Without a helmet.

Jeff Kaplan 54:31 You know, I don't know what you expect at that point.

Lex Fridman 54:34 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 54:34 It was Rob Pardo. Uh, to this day, a great friend of mine named Scott Mercer was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalumen. Uh, there was a guy named Roman Kenney who was, like, thisTotally psychotic, uh, wizard who played in our guild. And I had lunch with these guys, you know, we just went out to Irvine to, like, a restaurant. And, you know, forgive me for the misuse of the phrase, but it was like my coming out moment. And we talked about games having that stigma and being embarrassed about who you are and what you like. Like, I-- Up until that point, I would never tell-

Lex Fridman 55:17 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 55:17 ... friends, family, like, "I love games. I'm playing this game, EverQuest. It's so cool. We just killed a dragon." And so you were hiding this part of your identity. And I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine, and we're talking about dragons and swords and, you know, raid tactics and talking shit on all the people in the guild. And I, I literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first time. I just felt, like, so comfortable. And that was an eye-opening moment.

Lex Fridman 55:55 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 55:56 And after that, after that lunch happened, he invited me for a couple more lunches down, you know, just... I, I just saw it as like, "Oh, now I'm... You know, I made friends with these people online. Now we know each other in real life, and they happen to work for this game company." And a-another one of the lunches, they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us, whose name in the game was Barfa, the troll warrior.

Lex Fridman 56:25 Mm-hmm. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 56:25 And Barfa, Barfa wasn't somebody who played with us all the time, but kind of like Ariel got into the guild kind of on the side. You know, it was one of those, like, inside invites of like, "Who's Barfa?" "I don't know, but Barfa's in the guild now." And there was... At, at the time, it was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never done it before. And we jump down in this hole, and we're doing this whole dungeon, and everything goes wrong, as it's prone to do in EverQuest. And the whole guild escapes, except for Barfa, whose troll character's so big he can't jump out of the exit.

Lex Fridman 57:00 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 57:01 And I had this potion that was, like, a really expensive potion that was a teleport potion that, you know, no one but someone in the uber guild could afford at the time. And I hand the potion to Barfa, and I say, "Here, use this. It'll teleport you out. And I'm a rogue. I can just stealth and get out of the, the, the dungeon on my own." So I saved Barfa not really knowing who Barfa was, and I did it with a very expensive potion.

Lex Fridman 57:31 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 57:33 Having lunch, Rob introduced me, "This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa."

Lex Fridman 57:39 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 57:39 I'm like, "Oh, Barfa." And we... You know, he has a, "You saved me in the hole that time." Well, it turns out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the head... He was sort of the head of everything at that time. It was Allen, Mike, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pierce. And what I didn't realize with these lunches were, like, I just loved them because I felt like I was myself. I felt true happiness being surrounded by these, you know, people who were talking about video games and I felt comfortable around. And one day, Rob logs into EverQuest. He wasn't playing much at the time. He said, "I want you to m- tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site."

Lex Fridman 58:22 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 58:24 I'm like, "Okay." Like, "I'll check the Blizzard job site." And they had announced World of Warcraft, and posted on the job site-

Lex Fridman 58:34 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 58:35 ... was the job for an associate quest designer. And the funniest part of it was, I forget if it was a requirement or a plus in the job description, but they're like, "We really want somebody with a creative writing degree." [laughs] And I'm like, "You guys set this up for me." Like, they were just looking... And, and it was that hindsight moment of like, actually these guys were just interviewing me-

Lex Fridman 59:02 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 59:02 ... for six months. And they were actually friends, and they were really cool about it too. And I just had the fuck it moment. Like, that, that job opened up. I applied with all my heart, you know. Like, it... They had a bunch of, uh, quest writing on it. Um, and then I went through, like, a pretty hardcore six-month recruiting process because they never hired designers from out of the company. Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard. Either they would, like, transfer out of other disciplines, or they would come from, uh, quality assurance, tech support. So hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them, and they really put me through a, a grilling. Um, I met with... It was the first time I met Chris Metzen-

Lex Fridman 59:57 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 59:57 ... who is maybe the most inspirational creative person on the planet. Um, and you instantly... They paired me... They, they did this interview pairing. There were these two guys. It was Kevin Jordan-

Lex Fridman 1:00:12 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:00:12 ... who was one of the original designers on WoW. Um, really he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions. He was one of the earliest class designers, PVP designers, um, but he's a really quiet guy.

Lex Fridman 1:00:26 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:00:27 And they paired him with Chris, and Chris just owns the room.

Lex Fridman 1:00:32 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:00:32 You know? Chris, you could just sit and listen to him. Uh, he's so creative. He's so passionate. Um, and the way he articulates things, like, you just instantly become a fan of Chris when you're around Chris. And Chris, Kevin, and I go to lunch at, at this Italian place that was across the street from Blizzard. And I remember-Chris made a stop to buy cigarettes [laughs] you know, on the way to the interview.

Lex Fridman 1:01:03 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:03 And then every other word out of Chris's mouth was like, "Fuck and shit."

Lex Fridman 1:01:08 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:08 And I had come from this whole, like, corporate culture from my dad's recruiting business, where I'd never imagined somebody would curse in an interview or stop to buy smokes. And again, it was like I'm around my people. Like, I never-

Lex Fridman 1:01:25 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:25 ... smoked, but just, you know, being around people who didn't care about-

Lex Fridman 1:01:30 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:31 ... what the corporate norms were was so inspiring. And then my last interview was with, uh, Alan and Rob and a great programmer named Bob Fitch. Like, I think he's one of the first five developers at, at Blizzard. Uh, and they took me to an ARCO station that had a Jack in the Box. You know how like-

Lex Fridman 1:01:55 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:55 ... sometimes they'll combo.

Lex Fridman 1:01:56 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:01:57 It was like ARCO Jack in the Box, and that was my final interview at Blizzard, was at the ARCO Jack in the Box. And I remember thinking to myself, "These guys just brought me to a Jack in the Box that's in an ARCO station. I need to work here."

Lex Fridman 1:02:15 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:02:16 Like, "This is-- These are my people. This is where-

Lex Fridman 1:02:18 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 1:02:18 ... I belong." Like, it was the greatest thing ever. And so yeah, that's my [laughs] crazy journey to Blizzard.

Lex Fridman 1:02:27 [laughs] Ah, start at the bottom and end up at the top in the Jack in the Box.

Lex Fridman 1:02:32 Uh, can you speak to... 'Cause you mentioned some of the low points in the, in depression. Through that journey, how did you find your way out? So can you just-- A lot of people are sitting in those low points right now listening to this. What kind of wisdom can you draw about finding your way out, finding your people?

Jeff Kaplan 1:02:55 There were a lot of, uh, really low points. I, I'll give you the weirdest one. I, I started drinking a lot, and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with until my early 30s. Um, and one of the things I'm most proud of today is sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now. And I remember I was, I was just ha- I would, like, buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and-

Lex Fridman 1:03:22 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:03:22 ... like drink the whole thing by myself and then watch the Oscars. And I remember [laughs] I was... Of all things, I'm watching the Oscars, which is just such a fake bullshit environment.

Lex Fridman 1:03:35 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:03:35 But I was like... You know, I was really drunk, and all those people seemed so together and successful and polished, and I just... It made me-- It was that contrast that made me feel like such a, a failure. Um, and it all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now. Um, I became, y-you know, I got in that constant struggle of try not to drink, but drink to make it feel better. I was lucky, um, my parents were very supportive of me even in my 20s, even after I, you know, quote unquote, "left the house." I went into therapy, and that was very helpful. Um, y-you know, extremely helpful. And one thing I learned is that you have to find the right therapist for you. It's not just checking a checkbox of I went to therapy. It's about finding somebody who sort of, um, helps you get out of whatever rut you're in, in a way that's healthy for you. And, um, I tried antidepressants, but I hated, I just hated taking pills and feeling like something was in me and making me feel different. I, I never responded to it. Um, and then the hardest thing, y-you know, which I've never mentioned to anyone and is, is hard for me to talk about, but eventually I went through ECT, which is electroconvulsive therapy, uh, shock therapy, and that broke me out. And I would never endorse that as a miracle. That was... I was at such a low point that people were very worried about me and my well-being-

Lex Fridman 1:05:37 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:05:37 ... and what was gonna happen, and that was sort of an extreme pull the rip cord, like there's nothing else to lose moment. And, um, I think that was the difference maker, that and starting at Blizzard.

Lex Fridman 1:05:56 To find-- I mean, there is a, there is a deep loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch, you're alone, like in a really deep, fundamental way, l-like in the way you weren't in New York with the writing, with the writers group, right? And so that, that must have been an incredible experience just to see the guild.

Jeff Kaplan 1:06:16 Yes. It wa- it was everything I need. I-- As such an introvert, you th- you think that there are extroverts and introverts, and introverts don't need anybody. But weirdly, I think introverts almost need people more.

Lex Fridman 1:06:33 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:06:33 And we don't always know how to engage-

Lex Fridman 1:06:37 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:06:38 ... in the right, healthy ways and how to find people and how to connect with people. Um, and it was, it was great. Um, one-- The thing that had attracted me to creative writing was the solitude of it-

Lex Fridman 1:06:54 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:06:54 ... and the fact that you didn't have to collaborate, and you could just write what you wanted to write, and it was all you. You would succeed on your own, or you would fail on your own, and that was very attractive to me.And the thought of creative collaboration was actually off-putting. I'd spent, uh, all four years of undergrad, uh, interning at Universal Pictures because I thought I wanted to be in film, and it was such an unhealthy creative collaboration in the film industry. It's a very... Y- you know, I, I look up unhealthily to the film industry and admire it and, you know, grew up with all these legends, um, who had come from there, but it's like a caste system.

Lex Fridman 1:07:42 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:07:44 And I was on the bottom of the caste system as an intern, and I was seeing how the other people who were low caste in the film industry were treated, and it was just horrible, you know? Um, but games was different. Games was very flat. It didn't matter if you were the CEO or the boss. Like, the way Mike and Allen carried themselves with, you know, me, who was an associate game designer, you felt like an equal. And I, I think it-- not just the camaraderie, but the part that shouldn't be overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic. That's what really pulled me out.

Lex Fridman 1:08:33 Hard work on a thing you, you love.

Jeff Kaplan 1:08:36 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:08:38 I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic One of Us, quote, One of Us post you made on April 18th, 2002, because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us. The-- I apologize to bring up Justinian the Emperor, but r- you remained a kind of peasant [laughs] gamer, a true, true gamer who happens to be also be designing the games. Uh, and so this post kind of speaks to that, and it's, it's, it's fascinating to read because that was at the very beginning, right? You didn't know anything. You didn't know the games you would end up creating. Title of the post, "If You Want Something Done Right." You wrote, "This week, I accepted a position as associate game designer with Blizzard Entertainment. Specifically, I will be designing quests for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's MMORPG based on the popular Warcraft series. In addition to my duties as quest designer, I will also be expected to contribute to helping design the endgame content for World of Warcraft. The reason I'm sharing this information, besides the fact that I have a masochistic love of reading rants and flames about myself, is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore MMORPG players. The readers of the site have also come to know my personal opinions [chuckles] on what constitutes a fun gaming experience versus what feels like a complete waste of time or poorly designed encounter." Wow, you're very eloquent in this post and without too much shit talking. "You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key, key camps, obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled, and quest rewards which are out of sync with the amount of time and effort required to complete them. I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence looking out for the interest of the player." And you go on to describe some of the high hopes you have for World of Warcraft, which is really fun to read because you don't, you don't realize-

Jeff Kaplan 1:10:50 Didn't know

Lex Fridman 1:10:50 ... it's gonna be, like, one of the greatest games of all time played by millions of human beings, just where those millions of human beings are playing it for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. It's crazy. It's funny that this one of us is writing at the, at the, at the d- dawn of a new age. The final paragraph is, "So with all that is going on with me, you'll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site here. I will try my hardest to give you slack or something to read while you should be working. But in the meantime, there's a whole world of NPCs that need to learn the words, uh, 'Kak Sagur' and 'Mo Facker' in quotes and the like, although something tells me I'm already in trouble with the boss." One of us, Jeff. One of us. That was a beautiful, beautiful post. Did you in fact get in trouble with the boss?

Jeff Kaplan 1:11:44 No. No.

Lex Fridman 1:11:45 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:11:45 My boss was Alan.

Lex Fridman 1:11:47 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:11:47 And Alan was very understanding, and he c- they kinda knew what they were getting into-

Lex Fridman 1:11:52 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 1:11:52 ... when they, when they hired me. And that post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now. Um, there's so much ego in it.

Lex Fridman 1:12:01 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:12:01 And, uh, I think that's... It's got that 20-year-old-

Lex Fridman 1:12:08 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:12:08 ... you know, "I don't know what I don't know."

Lex Fridman 1:12:11 "I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games" and-

Jeff Kaplan 1:12:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:15 But there's brilliance behind that. There's, uh, there's a passion behind that, like, where when you're a gamer and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest, you understand what makes for a compelling experience. You don't at that time understand how much hard work is required to create that experience and how much uncertainty there is, how difficult it is, how many trade-offs there are, how your designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, they are different from the, the vision you had for it. So all those elements you don't know. But you have to have that ego in the beginning, right?

Jeff Kaplan 1:12:51 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:51 To even have the guts to try, to have the guts to put in all

Lex Fridman 1:12:54 that work. So, uh, what were the... What was it like? What were the vibes of, um, early Blizzard like? They've, at this point, Warcraft I and II, Warcraft III is in production. StarCraft, these are legendary games. I, I don't-- I spent probably over 1,000 hours in these games combined. War- I pr- I played Warcraft I, II, III. I played StarCraft I and II. I played WoW, of course, Diablo I, II, III, IV.Like in Diablo II with, uh, stay a while and listen with Deckard Cain

1:13:27 Stay a while and listen

1:13:29 Um, I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences just will stay with me forever. Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks. Uh, what was it like? What, what was the team like? What were the developers like? What was the vibes like in those early days?

Jeff Kaplan 1:13:46 It, it was ama- it was the dream. When I, when I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office was on the University of California Irvine campus at the time. They have this research and development park where if you're like a tech company, you can get office space there. And Blizzard took up... When I joined, it was three-fourths of the building was Blizzard, and there were-- there was like a building right next to it that had like Cisco and, you know, it was like all kinda techy places. And it was so funny because you drive up and like everything was very serious and corporate, and then outside of the Blizzard offices, it's everybody's wearing black T-shirt and shorts and throwing Frisbees and playing hacky sack and on scooters and skateboards, and you're like, "Okay, that's where, that's where Blizzard [chuckles] is." So it was that environment. I remember walking in the door and thinking like, "It feels like I'm walking into a dorm room," 'cause it was just posters on the wall and there were actually like people would have futons because they'd be sleeping 'cause we would work so much back then. But the vibe was it was very small. Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002, was fewer than 200 people, and that included there was a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North.

Lex Fridman 1:15:14 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:15:15 So Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft, and there were two development teams at Blizzard. It was called Team One and Team Two at, at Blizzard South. Um, Team One was revered. These are the RTS guys. They made, you know, StarCraft, Warcraft II, and they were... at that time, they're working on Warcraft III.

Lex Fridman 1:15:44 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:15:45 Team Two was kind of the red-headed stepchild. Like apparently before I joined, they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed, and then they finally decided they were gonna make World of Warcraft. Uh, there was a game called Nomad. I don't know what that game was exactly, but that was what Team Two was working on at first. That got scrapped and Allen stor- steered the team towards World of Warcraft. And there's amazing designer named Eric Dodds. He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone. Him and Ben, Ben Brode basically were the core designers behind that. But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these two key designers working on World of Warcraft for Team Two, and then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.

Lex Fridman 1:16:49 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:16:49 And John Cash, the, the first day that I showed up to work on Team Two, they said, "You have to go get your login from John Cash." I'm like, "John, the John Cash from id?"

Lex Fridman 1:17:02 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:17:03 And y- you know, John Cash has a skin. You could be John Cash in Quake III. So and then he saw me, and he, he was a huge EverQuest player, and you're like... He was like, "You're the guy who runs Legacy of Steel." I'm like, "You're John Cash."

Lex Fridman 1:17:21 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:17:21 And we had, we had that moment where we kinda fanboyed out on each other. Um, and it was just the vibe was so cool there. Like there were very few producers. So a game team, there are five core disciplines that make a video game. You've got engineers or programmers who are writing the code. You've got the art team that's making all the visuals for the game, and that spans everything from like 3D modeling, characters, environments, to also animation, tech art, you know, making it all work. You've got game design, which some companies don't have design. The artists and the engineers do it. Uh, Valve famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer. But in companies where design is a discipline, which it very much is so at Blizzard, game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people, you know, setting up all the systems and content in a way that gets the player to navigate through the game.

Lex Fridman 1:18:33 So that's part of the story, part of this quest design, part of it is like how you move through the game world.

Jeff Kaplan 1:18:38 Yes. So game designers, there's a spectrum, like same with art, same with engineering, of roles within game design. Some are more heavy on the systems side. So like any game that you've played where loot drops-

Lex Fridman 1:18:54 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:18:54 ... you know, Diablo IV, World of Warcraft, um, you know, Escape From Tarkov, whatever, if there's loot dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully what drops where and at what percentages. That would be like a systems designer.

Lex Fridman 1:19:12 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:19:12 A content designer is somebody who's gonna make quests or write storylines, or there might even be a narrative designer which is even more focused on, uh, story.But designers, you know, run the gambit, and then you've got these jack-of-all-trade designers that can do it all.

Lex Fridman 1:19:32 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:19:33 Um, so that's the design group. There's production, which is project management, and production is different at every game company you go to. So if you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard, production might be very different. They might be the boss, they might actually be a designer, um, or they might be more of a project manager. And then one of my favorite disciplines on a game team that's often overlooked is sound and-

Lex Fridman 1:20:03 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:20:03 ... you know, audio, which is comprised of the sound designers and, uh, composers. And there are two things... I, I think there are two things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they're missing, and that's, uh, audio and lighting. Because most of the time we're playing without these things, and it just feels a little off and wrong. And when you have a great lighting artist or you have a great composer or sound designer, like, it-- the experience, you're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise. Um, but that's, that's who comprises the, the game team.

Lex Fridman 1:20:46 Is the, the lighting, you know, all the, all the different kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team? Like-

Jeff Kaplan 1:20:56 Yeah. Lighting, you're gonna have lighting under the art team, but they're gonna be best friends with a graphics programmer.

Lex Fridman 1:21:02 Okay.

Jeff Kaplan 1:21:03 And y- you know, like I mentioned with design, there's this wide spectrum. On the engineering team, you have some guys who are, like, uh, architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know, the server-client model or the networking or whatever. Others are more, like, gameplay focused. On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just doing nothing but audio, um, hooks for the audio team. And on every game team, you're gonna have graphics programmers who will work with people like the lighting artists or the environmental artists, character artists on shaders and, um, basically any way to make the game. They'll always ask, "What's your vision? What are you trying to get it to look like?" They'll want an illustration of what should the world look like, and th- they'll be the ones who say, "I know how to write code to-- that will let you do that." So you, you partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist, and that's... That-

Lex Fridman 1:22:05 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:22:05 ... that's actually the creative tension behind games and what makes game teams so unique is if we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum, uh, on one end you're gonna have the artists who they're creative, dare I say, emotional.

Lex Fridman 1:22:24 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:22:24 You know, they are artists on that end. And on the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers who their minds just work very differently from the most creative art. Like-

Lex Fridman 1:22:38 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:22:38 ... artists could be sitting... You, you have a meeting with them, and they'll just sit illustrating. If there's any piece of paper-

Lex Fridman 1:22:44 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:22:44 ... they're drawing on it. Um, and programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized in their thinking, and everything's so logical. And then in the middle are people like the sound designers, the, the game designers, and the producers.

Lex Fridman 1:23:02 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:23:02 They're kind of a little bit in, in all those fields. But it's the brilliance of taking people who are so vastly different in their interests and talents, but aiming them at that shared goal or that shared vision of the game that, like, really makes something special.

Lex Fridman 1:23:21 And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft, but you've also are well known for working on quite small teams to create these incredibly huge games. Uh, what is the, the power of a small team in this kind of context where a lot-- there's that creative tension? Is it, is it, uh, because a small team avoids maybe the, the, uh, compartmentalization, like the modular where peop- the artists now have their own wing building where they never talk to the engineers, that kind of thing?

Jeff Kaplan 1:23:54 Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine.

Lex Fridman 1:24:01 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:24:02 And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.

Lex Fridman 1:24:07 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:24:07 If we're a small team, let's say we're gonna make a game, and it's at sort of the incubation period of a game, and there's only 10 of us. All 10 of us are in the room for every decision. You know, I'm not a server networking guy, but I'm in the room for that discussion. I'm not an illustrator, but I'm gonna sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks like. As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized.

Lex Fridman 1:24:36 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:24:36 It's exactly like you said. And there's a weird thing that happens. This is just kind of a human nature thing. The less you interact with somebody, the more you sort of become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.

Lex Fridman 1:24:53 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:24:54 You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism-

Lex Fridman 1:24:58 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:24:58 ... rather than trust and belief in them. And I find on smaller teams where we all know each other's names, I know what everybody's working on every day. They know what I'm working on. Everybody can talk to each other. There's none of that, um, stereotyping-

Lex Fridman 1:25:19 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:25:20 ... of a discipline. On big, unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, "Well, the artists just don't get it."

Lex Fridman 1:25:27 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:25:28 "They don't understand what we're trying to make." And when you back up and you think about the statement that you just said, it's likeSuch an asshole statement. Like really all the artists don't get it? Like that's, A, that's not true. B, that's sort of demeaning to them. Like they signed up for th- this is their life's work too.

Lex Fridman 1:25:48 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:25:48 This game is gonna be as much theirs as it is mine. So who am I to say a statement like that?

Lex Fridman 1:25:55 That it's, it's harmful to a discipline to, to think that you understand the world and those silly other folks don't, and you have nothing to learn from them really and, um, they're deluded in some, uh, in some kinda way. That's so powerful.

Jeff Kaplan 1:26:12 Fast-forwarding a little bit, when we formed Team Four and which wa- went on to make Titan and ultimately fail, and then that got rebooted as the Overwatch team, the idea that I tried to get through to the team was to make an assumption. And really, like Blizzard is one of the top game developers in the world, and we were very fortunate when I was there, and I, I imagine it's this way today, that we could recruit whatever talent we wanted. It-- The best of the best wanted to come work at Blizzard. And if you sort of go through the paces of that and say, "Okay, when we recruit somebody, let's say we're recruiting an artist to make props-

Lex Fridman 1:27:06 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:27:06 ... boxes, chairs, whatever, that is the best prop artist in the industry. That's who's gonna show up on our doorstep. So when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artists in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism. So when that person speaks up and says, "I think," like with Overwatch, for example, "I think we should do this, you know, we should do X instead of Y," instead of saying, "Well, I'm a believer in Y. Why are you against my idea X?" You should take a moment, have a deep breath, and say, "Man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something. Why don't I listen to it?"

Lex Fridman 1:27:57 I actually do for myself like this kinda thought framework or thought experiment whenever I'm talking to a, a new person, especially if I feel myself a little bit tinge of that feeling. Usually it happens with like a, a really young person, like an undergraduate student or something like this. I pretend that they're the smartest person in the world [chuckles] in my head, and th- now, like it puts me in a mode of like assuming I have a lot to learn from them, and it helps. You actually like really listen. I literally think they're the smartest, wisest human on earth [chuckles] . It helps me.

Jeff Kaplan 1:28:36 I had that, like I, I think, um, you know, I'm no expert. I'm, I'm a game designer, so like as much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully. Like-

Lex Fridman 1:28:48 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:28:49 ... I don't know. I don't have an important job, but-

Lex Fridman 1:28:51 Yeah, right

Jeff Kaplan 1:28:52 ... psychologically-

Lex Fridman 1:28:53 That's fun

Jeff Kaplan 1:28:53 ... speaking, I, I, one, one thing I think a lot about is ego, and I think about insecurity. And insecurity we all have. Like all of us as human beings have insecurity. It just manifests itself in different ways.

Lex Fridman 1:29:10 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:29:11 And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes. So like some people, for example, use their insecurity to rip other people apart. Some people destroy themselves through their own insecurity. Some people destroy everybody with their insecurity. But I had that moment as a young lead when I first was made a lead on like World of Warcraft, where I felt it was very important to be right and to, you know, be shepherding the correct idea. And I actually got pulled aside, like Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple people who weren't game designers, and it's always tricky as a game designer because constantly everybody's throwing ideas out in-- on a game team. Like there's no shortage of ideas ever. And we were in some meeting about something, and these people kinda threw out these ideas, and I wasn't mean to them, but I very kind of systematically, like an insecure, you know, ego-driven new lead would do, I kind of, "Well, let me tell you why that's wrong, and let me tell you what we're gonna do instead." And after the meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me aside and he said, "You're a very smart designer, but you shouldn't do what you just did to those people. You should always listen to what people have to say and try to make their ideas work." And I just, over and over I was like, "Okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let's try to make it work." And it went from this kind of thing that I didn't believe in to, to actually like a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director. And some of the best ideas have come from developing other people's ideas-

Lex Fridman 1:31:15 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:31:16 ... where your first reaction is like, "No, that's wrong," and then just kind of sticking with it and going, "But how could we make it work?" And the most gratifying part when it succeeds is they get all the credit, and you've sort of elevated this-Person who i- whose idea wouldn't have been championed, whose idea by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know, early 2000s would've just said no, now their idea is the thing everybody in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving, and they get all the credit.

Lex Fridman 1:31:59 I should give context to the listener who don't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan, uh, that you're one of the most humble and always give credit to the team for everything and anything. And so everything we talk about today, I know you s- [chuckles] you're probably resisting constantly giving credit to the team on, uh, on everything. Uh, so, uh, you're the famous, "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team," right? Um, so, uh, just as a small aside, thank you for your humility through, um, through, through your career, and thank you for always celebrating the team. But

Lex Fridman 1:32:37 let's talk about WoW. Let's talk about World of Warcraft. Uh, tell me what the early days of developing WoW was like. Maybe we, we should, we should, uh, talk about what World of Warcraft, WoW, is. Going to Perplexity here. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online RPG where you create a character, level it up doing quests and dungeons, and progress your gear and power in an open fantasy world called Azeroth. At a basic level, you move, use abilities from your action bar, follow quests, and gradually learn, uh, a combat rotation that fits your class, and there's all kinds of, uh, characters and roles and classes. You pick a race, appearance, starting zone, small racial bonuses, and a class, how you fight, what your role is in groups. Can you continue filling some of the gaps? What is World of Warcraft?

Jeff Kaplan 1:33:29 World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world. Like, it's a world that you can live in with real other people, and everybody's kinda living out their fantasy. Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft, and really, like, Allen Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard, calls Chris the heart and soul of Blizzard.

Lex Fridman 1:33:52 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:33:53 And it's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game, you're making Chris's imagination at some point. And Chris famously said the lead character of World of Warcraft is the world, and I always believed that. So you're trying to create this place that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable, um, and gorgeous, and, you know, s- uh, it f- it should feel massive, and it really is. It, it's, you know, can take a half an hour to get from one end of the world to the other. Um, but it's this world you're living in. Uh, the world is divided into two warring factions. There's the Horde and the Alliance, and that was a very important, very controversial decision, um, that was made by Allen Adham, was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.

Lex Fridman 1:34:51 And, uh, in the early days, there was a really strong division.

Jeff Kaplan 1:34:54 Strong division.

Lex Fridman 1:34:55 Like [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:34:56 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:34:57 You pick a side, and then you, uh, hang around with o- only people of your kind.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:02 Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you. Like, the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo, like-

Lex Fridman 1:35:10 [laughs] That's awesome

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:11 ... it's epic.

Lex Fridman 1:35:11 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:11 It's like, it's become who they are.

Lex Fridman 1:35:14 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:14 Like, if you were to say, like, "Hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me. We're Alliance on Tichondrius," you'd be like-

Lex Fridman 1:35:21 Right

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:21 ... "Dude"-

Lex Fridman 1:35:22 Lose my number

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:23 ... "Alliance."

Lex Fridman 1:35:23 [laughs] Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:23 Like, "Okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore."

Lex Fridman 1:35:26 Yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:27 But the Horde/Alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed race.

Lex Fridman 1:35:33 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:34 Uh, they had all the races kind of like WoW did, but they could all group with each other.

Lex Fridman 1:35:39 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:35:40 And Pardo and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision Allen was making, and, uh, we argued. Allen, Rob, Bob Fitch, and I would have lunch every single day, and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW. Rob wasn't even on WoW at that time.

Lex Fridman 1:36:00 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:36:00 He was finishing Warcraft III. And we would fight over the Horde/Alliance split if it was a good idea or not. And Allen had-- He came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.

Lex Fridman 1:36:19 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:36:19 And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions, and he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren't a loner in the world.

Lex Fridman 1:36:29 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:36:29 And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side. And Rob and I just argued and argued against it, and then sometime before beta, Allen retired.

Lex Fridman 1:36:41 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:36:42 He went on to run a hedge fund, of all things.

Lex Fridman 1:36:45 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:36:45 Like, got super into poker, got super into finance, left, and retires, like, I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts. And Rob takes over as lead designer in Allen's stead, and to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was go, speaking to what we were speaking about earlier, he said, "Allen's a smart guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for-"

Lex Fridman 1:37:16 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:37:17 "... Horde/Alliance, we gotta do it." And, uh, Rob and I sort of changed our point of view and got on board with Hor- Horde/Alliance and went all in. And, uh, so, you know, the early days of WoW was, it was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. You know, we had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Dabiri was, you know-Legendary Blizzard developer Bill Petras was the art director, and then we had Metzen, who was sort of like, Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be.

Lex Fridman 1:37:59 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:37:59 I, I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother. And, um, then there were a lot of us who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types. Like for example, the guys building the dungeons, they hired out of the Quake community.

Lex Fridman 1:38:21 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:38:21 And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO designer on the staff at that time, it was, you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the, the only designers. They started building Quake dungeons-

Lex Fridman 1:38:37 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:38:37 ... as like Quake levels as the dungeons. At one point, WoW was even made in QE Radiant, which was the Quake engine.

Lex Fridman 1:38:45 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:38:45 And then they later, you know, retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine. So we were like this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears-

Lex Fridman 1:38:56 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:38:56 ... is how I would describe the WoW team, of this mix of veterans and then people like me, like I'm just some fucking idiot-

Lex Fridman 1:39:05 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:39:06 ... you know, who played a lot of EverQuest.

Lex Fridman 1:39:08 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:39:09 And I end up at Blizzard.

Lex Fridman 1:39:11 Designing quests.

Jeff Kaplan 1:39:11 Yeah. Like, okay, we're gonna design World of Warcraft now. Um, and I've said this later with hindsight, I think a huge part of WoW's success with, especially with the early WoW team, Team 2 in its earliest formation, was that we didn't know what we were doing. You kind of... Like, it's that... Titan was the example for me. Titan was the attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft at Blizzard-

Lex Fridman 1:39:46 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:39:46 ... and we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it's because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO. World of Warcraft was a bunch of people, like a very successful, sure of itself company who had made StarCraft, Diablo, uh, Warcraft, with a bunch of yahoos basically-

Lex Fridman 1:40:16 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:40:16 ... who was like, "Yeah, we can compete with Sony online."

Lex Fridman 1:40:21 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:40:21 At, at the time, they were making EverQuest II. Like if we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced, and EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest II. It wasn't, "Oh, cool, World of Warcraft." It was EQII was gonna take, you know, the chalice and run with it. And then of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies. And they had a brilliant designer on that, a guy named Raph Koster, who had come from that Ultima Online, and he's just a really smart game designer. If you can ever watch one of his lectures, like he lectured a lot at GDC, and, you know, we're like, "Oh my God, they're, they're making EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies, and they have the Star Wars intellectual property."

Lex Fridman 1:41:11 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:41:14 "We're fucked."

Lex Fridman 1:41:15 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:41:15 "Like, how are we gonna compete?" And everybody had seen the success of EQ-

Lex Fridman 1:41:21 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:41:21 ... EverQuest, and everybody was gonna make an MMO, and it was just a question of who was gonna win.

Lex Fridman 1:41:28 So you're feeling this immense pressure. You have this small team of, uh, just this hodgepodge of [laughs] this unlikely, uh, team that kinda looks, fast-forwarding to Overwatch, the heroes in Overwatch [laughs] but working extremely hard. Now you, you told me about crazy, crazy work hours, and not because you were forced to, but because you wanted to, because your heart was in it, because you're like, "This is everything." Like, you loved it.

Jeff Kaplan 1:42:01 Yeah. The, the games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. Uh, it's just called crunch. Like, uh, do you crunch or not? Uh, these days crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon. If we were to work overtime, somebody'd write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime. Um, back then we worked insane, and I mean insane hours. The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours. That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft III. This was in my, I think, um, War III shipped on July 3rd, 2002, um, so this would've been like late June, early July, probably late June. And I, I had nothing to do with War III.

Lex Fridman 1:43:04 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:43:04 I should just say that. Like, in the credits, I'm additional, additional help or additional testing or something like that. Um, when I showed up in May of 2002, it was all hands on deck, World of Warcraft for E3.

Lex Fridman 1:43:18 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:43:19 We got through E3, and then all hands on deck, the whole company get War III out the door.

Lex Fridman 1:43:26 For shipping Warcraft III.

Jeff Kaplan 1:43:27 For shipping Warcraft III. And because I had not been involved with the game at all, and I was a brand new, wet-behind-the-ears game designer, they're like, "You're just gonna help test whatever we tell you to test."

Lex Fridman 1:43:40 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:43:40 So we're trying to gold master, and there's a crash that happens rarely-If you run one of the cinematics, like you have to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels, and then there was a crash that happened. And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it, and then they needed somebody to just over and over again, "I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug." And I sat there for 30 hours and just watched the cinematic for 30 hours-

Lex Fridman 1:44:15 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:15 ... straight. And it was the funniest thing, like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave at the... Which was a trickle out, like everybody kind of trickles out like at-

Lex Fridman 1:44:26 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:26 ... different hours. You know, the family guys go much earlier than the single guys. And then watching everybody show up again in, the next morning, and they're all like dressed different and they look all refreshed.

Lex Fridman 1:44:39 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:39 And I'm just like in the same position.

Lex Fridman 1:44:42 Yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:42 You know, like eyes are beet red.

Lex Fridman 1:44:45 To the soundtrack of the cinematic and-

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:46 Yeah

Lex Fridman 1:44:47 ... uh.

Jeff Kaplan 1:44:47 But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched... The date slipped, so you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, "We're gonna crunch early so we don't have to crunch later in the project."

Lex Fridman 1:45:03 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:04 And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us. Like I really genuinely believe that he believed in that.

Lex Fridman 1:45:13 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:13 But with games, anything can happen, and they're just... We slip uncontrollably all the time. And we slipped, and it sort of created just this death march, um, endless death march that, uh, like to this day members of the WoW team will remember like Newport Rib. If I say that [laughs] they'll have like twitches because like they would cater the dinner. They'd bring it in at like 6:00 or 7:00 at night.

Lex Fridman 1:45:43 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:43 And they-

Lex Fridman 1:45:45 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:45 Everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was like the worst diet ever. I, I actually like Newport Rib, no shade on them.

Lex Fridman 1:45:53 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:53 But you can only eat so much of it.

Lex Fridman 1:45:56 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:45:56 And the carpets are stained, and like dudes are falling asleep on the couches.

Lex Fridman 1:46:01 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:46:01 And it was an unhealthy work environment. It gets pinned on, 'cause at a lot of places it is executive driven.

Lex Fridman 1:46:10 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:46:10 And it is mandated from the top. But the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself. I just wanted to.

Lex Fridman 1:46:19 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:46:19 I, I remember y- you know, coming in on Memorial Day like with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day.

Lex Fridman 1:46:30 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:46:30 And working through Christmas, and those were things I wanted to do. I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.

Lex Fridman 1:46:38 Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because, yeah, okay, you could say that's un- unhealthy, but I know a, a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career, that have been at companies that do crunch for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love, and it's some of the most fulfilling years of their life, months and years of their life. And they also, uh, it's not just fulfilling. It, they grow from it. They learn from it. And it, you know... And when they, especially when they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when you're going through it, sometimes it, it's extremely difficult. You don't know. And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it's supposed to be a month or two, and then it, it turns out to be a half a year, and then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan type game where you never actually ship it, and it's heartbreaking and the pain, that's all. But then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was.

Jeff Kaplan 1:47:39 I, I think, like my reflections on it many years later and having gone through like pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled, I think where crunch is problematic and people are good to be vocal about being opposed to it is when it's forced and unnecessary. There's a lot of, uh, like, "Hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay."

Lex Fridman 1:48:10 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:48:10 Kind of-

Lex Fridman 1:48:10 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 1:48:11 ... which I think is not necessary. Um, I don't think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late.

Lex Fridman 1:48:22 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:48:22 I think that's wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I'm not telling other people to do it, my life's work is my passion, and I wanna do it as much as possible. I find myself, I don't think I've ever worked less than 10 hours in a day.

Lex Fridman 1:48:45 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 1:48:45 Like that, 10 hours is like a normal-ish day to me.

Lex Fridman 1:48:49 Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:48:49 Um, and I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it. It brings me pleasure and fulfillment. And all of that said from a place of caution, especially in this era when people are very touchy about it, I don't try to impose that on anybody else. I don't want anybody to feel like they're obligated to, but please understand it's what makes me who I am, that work ethic.

Lex Fridman 1:49:19 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:49:19 I enjoy it. I actually, some of my fondest memories are from those WoW crunches.

Lex Fridman 1:49:25 And then looking back and reading some of these stories is pretty cool because me as a fan on the receiving end of some of those video games, you bring joy to millions of people. It's awesome. Uh, let me ask you about quests, but first, quick bathroom break if that's okay.

Jeff Kaplan 1:49:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:49:43 Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsorsWe got Fin for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for code generation in large code bases, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan. Okay,

Lex Fridman 1:50:20 we're back. So I think it's fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest, consisted of maybe that's simplifying it a bit, but standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours. Uh, you helped develop, uh, with WoW, I would say, uh, a revolutionary idea of quest-driven leveling, where there's this story-driven, quest-driven guide through the world, and it so happens that as part of doing that, you're also leveling the character. So the leveling is both fun and is the engine that drives the story that, that also immerses you into the world and pulls you in more and more and more and more. So take me through this process of, uh, developing that idea of quest-driven design.

Jeff Kaplan 1:51:10 Sure. Yeah. There were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways. Allen Adham was the lead designer on WoW when we first sort of decided we were gonna have a quest-based game. We used to joke that, like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it.

Lex Fridman 1:51:30 [chuckles] Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 1:51:31 It, it did have quests. They just-- they weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kinda had to seek them out on a website. And Allen knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of, of World of Warcraft. And so he hired me. That was my entry-level position at Blizzard. And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagle, which was hilarious to me because Pat was the-- he had this funny title of HR and facilities at Blizzard because it was such a small company. So, like, if you sent an application in, Pat would deal with the application, or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it. And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat, and then on my first day, they put Pat and I in an office together. And he's like, "Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer."

Lex Fridman 1:52:30 [chuckles]

Jeff Kaplan 1:52:30 And so Pat-- and he was the most wonderful guy. We had so much fun. So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system. It was Allen's idea to have it in the first place, and then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all. And the idea was at first, we actually, on a whiteboard in Allen's office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date. And EverQuest had had, you know, I think four or three expansions at, at that point in time. And we're like, "Wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has. Uh, it's gonna be a lot of quests, and it's kind of up to me and Pat to do it all." And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number. And Pat and I started working on, like, the design of the system and how it would interact, and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface, you know, like, how you were gonna interact with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into, uh, like, two zones. He was gonna take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans, and I was gonna take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans. Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions. Chris is like artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire, and he'd sort of describe what he wanted going on in those zones. You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas. So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did, like, a team play test. And our assumption was be-because of the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level-based game. You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you'd usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find, so, like, fast respawn, kind of easy things to kill. And that's how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember Allen kinda telling us, like, "Hey, the quests, when Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures are. You'll do a quest, and then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards." And that's how he imagined it would work. So we kinda set up the world that way. You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe twenty quests in Elwynn. I do a dozen, twenty quests in Westfall, and we do this team play test. And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, et cetera. And they play World of Warcraft. I think we played for, like, an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn Forest. And the overwhelming feedback from our team, and these are people who really didn't play EverQuest. They're like-"My God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests, like, right away." And we're like, "Wait a second, you expect to just have quests just keep going?" And they're like, "Yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way." And we kinda had an oh shit moment right after that Elwynn Forest play test where we realized, like, we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna need. And we changed, we developed this philosophy that's kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point. I've, I've heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design along the, um, path of least resistance. So basically what that means, like in EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours 'cause I think that's fun. But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, "Why don't we make the path of least resistance, so in this case, the way to get the best experience the fastest not to be killing creatures in one place, but we'll overload the experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines." It sort of did a lot for the game, and I think it was, like, a fundamental change in the genre. Like, if you look at the things that EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting, like, hundreds of thousands of players, and WoW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players. And I think the fundamental difference there was that WoW allowed you to play as a single player. And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there.

Lex Fridman 1:58:16 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:58:16 And they're so important, or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people. And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of... The game design, the game design way of des- describing it is directed gameplay.

Lex Fridman 1:58:41 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 1:58:42 And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you'll have those moments where they'll be like, you'll come up to a log and, "Press triangle to duck," or else... or whatever the duck button is. Left stick to duck to go under, and that's, like, the ultimate in directed gameplay. Like, they're telling you exactly what to do. On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate it. The ones who hate it are like, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like, you drop me in this world, I'm supposed to dig or something?" And that's the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they're gonna cycle out. Not all players need it. And what WoW did that it doesn't seem like an innovation, it doesn't seem, like, revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional but really wasn't.

Lex Fridman 1:59:54 I mean, I think it's absolutely revolutionary. It basically changed gaming. It changed the way we see games. It... And it was so successful in part because it became a mechanism by which you could spend hundreds of hours, thousands of hours in the game. I mean, it's kind of a... Like, obviously, it's one of those all these great ideas are always like this, right? In, in retrospect you're like, "Well, obviously if you make the path of least resistance quest-driven gameplay, then it's gonna be the reason that most people play." But it, it is true that I'm, I'm with you on I both like the quests and cow level.

Jeff Kaplan 2:00:38 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 2:00:39 I guess you have to design for everybody. That's the tricky thing. Like, how do you fine-tune this? If you think of it as a loop of, like, accept quest, kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding, level up, that loop. Like, how do you fine-tune that so it's maximum fun or fun for the maximum number of people? Is it... How, how difficult is that?

Jeff Kaplan 2:01:03 It, it's extremely difficult, and not everybody's good at doing that. We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick, so we're all different types of gamers. But if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was or the type of gamer I want you to think I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.

Lex Fridman 2:01:32 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:01:34 By playing lots of games, you cannot be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit out of as much as you can and understanding it on a deep level. And the weirdest part about it is you're not just looking for the greatest hits. You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game. And alsoLike a lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong or lacked the correct interface or they didn't put the right visceral polish on it. There's, there's an executional aspect to all of it. When I'm playing, I'm not only like thinking about what makes this fun, I'm thinking about what makes this not fun, but I'm also watching everyone around me. My, my wife plays games, my kids play games, and understanding like, well, what do they do and how are they different to me? Why are they finding enjoyment in this? Why are they not? What's frustrating? What did they miss?

Lex Fridman 2:02:46 And being raw honest with exactly what you're saying. I mean, I, I-- If I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am, why, why do I enjoy cow level? And why above that, why do I enjoy loot? Why, why is loot so fun? Like what, what is, what is it about opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff? I mean, I... That might be like at the core of what I enjoy about gaming. That and walking around a beautiful world with nice music.

Jeff Kaplan 2:03:16 As a game designer, I'm at best a quack psychologist.

Lex Fridman 2:03:21 [laughs] Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:03:21 You know? We can motivate you to do some weird things.

Lex Fridman 2:03:25 [chuckles]

Jeff Kaplan 2:03:26 The, the two driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic. And all of us at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, we can shift from being intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated. Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is too simplistic. Like for example, on the loot boxes of Overwatch, there is a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a business person or whatever, like not a commercial person. But beyond that, we also had a really good team who said the visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes-

Lex Fridman 2:04:18 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:04:18 ... the graphics, like the way things spill out and animate, all of that is as satisfying as well. And you're trying to... Like there's the lizard brain part of it, of like how does it... Like I see chest, I know I'm gonna-- It's gonna feel good. It's gonna feel good. And then there's the spreadsheety part of it, of what does it have? Is it an upgrade? And I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things.

Lex Fridman 2:04:49 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:04:49 You know, tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic. There, there's, uh... Like when, when I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction and, you know, these are just like basic things like plot and character development and setting and theme and whatever. And there's no like textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I, I think about like elements of fun.

Lex Fridman 2:05:18 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:05:19 What are the things that create fun for players? And they're not the same. Like it, it really-- Every human being is different. Like progression is fun, sense of progression that I'm investing. I'm putting an investment into this game, and then the game is recognizing my investment. That things like leveling, things like the amount of gold you have, those are all investment based. There's mastery. Um, there's just pure raw skill. Um, creativity is one. Um, and hand in hand with creativity is customization, and some of those can be aesthetic. Like look at my customized character and I, I have the black curly hair and I put an earring in my character and I'm customizing in that way. The other is customizing my build.

Lex Fridman 2:06:12 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:06:13 I'm gonna come up with the whirlwind barbarian and I'm the first to do it. Um, these are all elements of fun that designers can tap into and in fact are frequently tapping into. Um, but they're never defined anywhere and I find that players drift. Like I'm the type of player who's not really loot motivated. I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer and often that takes me on a detour of being loot motivated because there might be a dragon or a demon somewhere that I can't beat without this level of armor and sword. So now I'm loot motivated for some period of time to get back to being content motivated. Um, or if I'm having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look at the skills and abilities that my character's using and I have to go into creativity mode. Oh, he has that one AE where he-- area of effect, where he puts a curse on me and, you know, if I had this counter ability to the curse I could beat the boss to get the loot to get to the next boss. These are all cycles, um, that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.

Lex Fridman 2:07:37 And ultimately enjoying and discovering what the world gives you-

Jeff Kaplan 2:07:42 Yeah

Lex Fridman 2:07:42 ... has to offer to you. And you're-- You have a lot of hats as a gamer. So you, you love the, uh, the, the RPG, MMORPG world, but you're also a big shooter guy. Can you explain to me what fun in a shooter context is? And we'll, we'll talk about Overwatch as a specific kind of fun. Maybe you're-- But you're also a huge fan of the ultra-realistic shooters, Call of Duty. What is the definition of fun there?

Jeff Kaplan 2:08:09 There's a lot of skill and mastery. Uh, off-the-cuff, flippant comment would be clicking heads. You know? I'm just trying to click heads.

Lex Fridman 2:08:18 Okay.

Jeff Kaplan 2:08:19 There's an intimacy also to the first-person camera, and now not all shooters are first-person. There is a large trend these days to third-person. I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened that third-person shooter door, um, and you're seeing games like Arc Raiders are third-person. But to me, nothing is as pure as first-person. Like you're-

Lex Fridman 2:08:48 Hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:08:48 ... literally living in the world as that being. You can look at your hands, and it's, it's that pure, visceral test of skill of can you click on the thing fast enough? And when it's PVP based, you know that's coming at you.

Lex Fridman 2:09:05 Could you lay out for people who don't necessarily know what PVP and PVE is and-

Jeff Kaplan 2:09:10 Absolutely

Lex Fridman 2:09:10 ... single player, multiplayer, massively online multiplayer.

Jeff Kaplan 2:09:14 So PVP is player versus player, so that means a combative... You know, if Lex and I are up against each other, we're attacking each other. We call that PVP. You can get killed by another player.

Lex Fridman 2:09:26 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:09:27 Uh, player versus environment is any time you're shooting computer-controlled opponents. Um, so if it's a game about dragons, the dragon is the E, the environment in PVE.

Lex Fridman 2:09:41 And we should say that PVP and PVE, the P might be multiple players. So it could be, uh, five versus five, six versus six for PVP, and for PVE it could be like raids where it's multiple, multiple people, large groups of people going against the AI.

Jeff Kaplan 2:09:59 Yep. So single player, that's a game that you play totally by yourself. Like, you don't play with anybody else. You can't play with anybody else. It's not networked, uh, to play with other people. For example, I'm playing a game called Story of Seasons right now on the Switch, which I just play by myself. I have my farm. You know, there's a town. I'm meeting people in the town, and no one can come and join me and interact with that. So it's a very controlled experience. Single player games are very difficult, or they can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create. Like if you think of a game like Uncharted or Last of Us that's, uh, made by Naughty Dog, like those are kind of the preeminent best single player games you could, you could talk about. They're very handcrafted. Every experience is made just for you. One up from that is what I call co-op, um, and these terms become interchangeable, so I'm using some semantics here. But co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together, but we're sharing an exact same experience very intentionally, and it's me sharing that experience only with other people that I know. So a great example of a cooperative game, maybe one of the best of all times, was Left For Dead, which is a game where you and three other people go in and you fight, like, hordes of zombies, and you try to progress through to the end safe room. Um, it's a very cooperative experience. A game like Diablo IV you can play cooperatively with other people. Now, one up from that is multiplayer.

Lex Fridman 2:11:56 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:11:56 And that's when you're engaging with strangers who are in the same world that you might not have the same cooperative goals as.

Lex Fridman 2:12:04 Hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:12:05 You might have very opposed goals to them. You might PVP them, or they might just be random strangers that you pass in a town or city and never see again. And then massively multiplayer, which is what the MMO online, uh, sort of stands for, massively multiplayer online game, that's when you're breaking into thousands of players, um, and the world's become really, really big at that point.

Lex Fridman 2:12:34 By the way, we should say that the g- co-op could be remote connection, but there's also, uh, what would you call that, couch co-op, where you have two people. Uh, some games really design well for the experience of two humans sitting together and playing the game together.

Jeff Kaplan 2:12:51 Yep.

Lex Fridman 2:12:51 Which is a really tricky thing to design for, but if it's done well, it's a, a, it's a really fulfilling experience. Like with a friend, with a loved one, you can, like, play a game together, and Diablo IV I should say is an example of a game that does that really well. They do c- couch co-op. Like two people can play Diablo sitting together, and there's a real intimate experience in that.

Jeff Kaplan 2:13:13 Couch co- It, it's funny 'cause it actually, like, predates the couch even. Some of those-

Lex Fridman 2:13:17 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 2:13:17 ... old arcade games-

Lex Fridman 2:13:19 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 2:13:20 ... like would have two joysticks on them-

Lex Fridman 2:13:23 Mm-hmm. Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 2:13:23 ... and then you could play with somebody else, or there was, uh, you know, famous game Gauntlet-

Lex Fridman 2:13:27 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:13:27 ... had four joysticks and four people playing together. And then anybody who grew up in that early console era, like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one, uh, we would sit and we'd play NHL '93 on the couch, and anybody who lost, you'd lose the controller. Um, and you could play that with up to four people playing. Or we-- I remember one of the big games that came out, uh, was Mortal Kombat, and we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis, and it was the house rules were, you know, whoever lost. So whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddy's apartment and there's five people there, you're constantly cycling everybody in and out. But there's just a magic to multiplayer of engaging and sharing-

Lex Fridman 2:14:20 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:14:20 ... in the experience with other people.Um, that, that, that's why I've always-- I've never made a single-player game. I have great admiration for them. I, I don't know if I could do it. The, the challenge-- The reason I love multiplayer so much, the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game, it's like imagine if you were gonna be a movie director, and you were gonna have all these actors and set designers and props and, you know, writers and scripts and all of this stuff, and your goal was to get a certain movie made. But we're gonna ask you, the director, to just... You're gonna leave the room. You can set it all up ahead of time, and then you're not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it.

Lex Fridman 2:15:15 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:15:16 And now you need the actors to have an experience, and it's just kind of the wildest, funnest experiment [chuckles] like-

Lex Fridman 2:15:24 From a designer/creator perspective 'cause you don't know what the players will create, so that's fun to see. You, you, you lay out the chessboard, you lay out the world, and then you get to watch what they create together. That's true.

Jeff Kaplan 2:15:38 I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games, and that really hurts me because, like, I actually love story in games, and I counter that I'm the anti-shitty story guy. And what I mean by that is, like, A, the most magical stories that I've ever heard come out of video games are player stories about, you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion, and then I met him in real life. Like, that's better than any video game writing that I've heard in a long while. Um, the player story is so much more interesting.

Lex Fridman 2:16:24 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:16:25 You know? Lex, why do you like the cow level so much?

Lex Fridman 2:16:28 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:16:28 Tell me about some goofy-

Lex Fridman 2:16:29 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:16:30 ... time, like a loot goblin drew you into the most-

Lex Fridman 2:16:32 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:16:32 ... danger and-- but there was another player there, and then, you know. Like, those are the stories that I think are more interesting from games. Um, there are some exceptional writers in video games and some exceptional games at story. You know, I've, I've mentioned, uh, Naughty Dog. Like, they're kind of on another level. But Valve has amazing writing. The writing behind Half-Life 2, Marc Laidlaw. Uh, the writing behind Portal-

Lex Fridman 2:17:03 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:17:03 ... and Portal 2, I think it was Erik Wolpaw, who is hilarious, um, just amazing. Um, and Rockstar.

Lex Fridman 2:17:13 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:17:14 Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and that's, that's a game where you can see the expertise and mastery of the game design and the narrative design and the fact that you can have those player stories of just the goofy shit. Like, I remember-- 'cause the controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who's playing on console. Like, I always get confused about, like, taking out my gun and putting it away and what's, y- you know, the L1 and L2. Like, as a PC gamer, I'm just like, "Let me bind this stuff to where I want it." And so, like, uh, you know, a guy in town rides by, and he's like, "Howdy, partner." And I go to, like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, "Hey, what's up" back. And I just whip out my sawed-off shotgun and, like, blow his fucking head off.

Lex Fridman 2:18:09 [chuckles] Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:18:09 And then the whole town is like-- Suddenly I'm, like, under-- I'm wanted, and I'm being chased. And then there's a train that, like, takes out the posse and-

Lex Fridman 2:18:21 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 2:18:21 ... it's like those stories. And the fact that Red Dead can have, you know, this, like, touching, heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his journey, but you can also have, you know, the player story of blowing off the [chuckles] poor guy that's just trying to-

Lex Fridman 2:18:34 Yeah, that's a combination.

Jeff Kaplan 2:18:35 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 2:18:35 And then Rockstar does a really good job with, um, you know, even in Grand Theft Auto with the radio. It can be kind of a side aspect to the game that great writing there can create, help create the world-

Jeff Kaplan 2:18:49 Yeah

Lex Fridman 2:18:49 ... with, with humor, with color, with depth, with heartbreak, all that kind of stuff.

Jeff Kaplan 2:18:53 Th-there was a moment in Red Dead where it-- There's the Daniel Lanois song.

Lex Fridman 2:19:00 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:19:01 Uh, "That's the Way It Is." I just, I love Daniel Lanois, so the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and, uh, like, was able to get that song out of him. And there's this moment where you're, like, riding back, and they start that song.

Lex Fridman 2:19:20 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:19:20 And everything up to then had been, um, and gorgeous, like more of a score. There's Woody Jackson, who's, like, a really amazing game composer. He had done, uh, the score for that. And so nothing had been, like, lyrical with words. And then they play the Daniel Lanois song, and there's, like, the quotes are coming back-

Lex Fridman 2:19:41 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:19:41 ... from, like, Dutch and Arthur Morgan. And I, I'm just like, "Goddamn, this is like... This is art," you know? This is like, I know it's supposed to be entertainment. I know it's a business, but the top of the pyramid is art, and-

Lex Fridman 2:19:56 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:19:56 ... it just hit me emotionally.

Lex Fridman 2:19:58 Yeah, there are certain games where, you know, I mean, that moment, and you just imagine the number of people who shed a tear during that moment. And that's just a reflection of how much you're invested into this world and into these characters. That's a beautiful thing. Uh, I have to ask you about this, this image that you sent me. It's super cool. So, yeah, I would love it if we could nerd out about it a little bit. The zone flow for the original World of Warcraft. There's a bunch of zones. It'd be awesome if you kinda talk through how, like, this world is built.Take me to that time when you're designing this, before anyone else got a chance to play it.

Jeff Kaplan 2:20:35 All WoW stuff, it would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world. And, you know, it's so fun hanging out with Chris 'cause we had whiteboards all over the place and, you know, "Hey, Chris, we should make Eastern Kingdoms. What do you think it should be?" And he would just tell you the story of each of these as he's just drawing. And Chris is a really talented artist, so the map would be gorgeous. I have lots of, like, photographs of Chris maps, um, that he would just kind of whiteboard up. He's like, you know, "Here's, uh, the dwarven lands. There's wetlands with Cosmodon up there, and that's where this, you know, tribe of dwarves were from, and then the, you know, humans are gonna be down, uh, with Elwynn Forest, and then Westfall, there's, you know, this group called the Defias Brotherhood, and they have a place called Deadmines." So I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit. Like, as a game designer, you want to capture the experience that's in people's heads. So, like, take, um, Burning Steppes, for example-

Lex Fridman 2:21:47 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:21:47 ... supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know, all this kind of stuff. That doesn't feel like where you want to start. It feels like where you want to end. So you kind of work the world flow in a way that, um, puts that at the end. But there was also kind of some magic to the, the original starting areas, where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between, uh, the dwarf hometown was called Ironforge, the human hometown was called Stormwind.

Lex Fridman 2:22:23 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:22:23 And we allowed you to fly for free. So, like, these little newbies who were, you know, level five or something, if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I'm like, "Oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come. You know, I'll come to Ironforge and we'll hook up, and I'll just fly out to you," which is the magic of World of Warcraft. You have to fly over Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge, and you look down and you're like, "Holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous," and it plants that seed of things to come.

Lex Fridman 2:22:56 Uh, so you've, uh, designed some incredible quests. Uh, is there any that stand out that you're proud of, uh, ashamed of? I mean, you are famously, uh, have designed the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest.

Jeff Kaplan 2:23:09 [laughs]

Lex Fridman 2:23:09 One of the most infamous quests in the history of WoW, of gaming, where you had to collect a bunch of pages of-

Jeff Kaplan 2:23:16 Yeah. Yeah

Lex Fridman 2:23:16 ... Green Hills of Stranglethorn. Maybe can you, can you [laughs] comment on that one or, uh, any quest that you just springs to mind?

Jeff Kaplan 2:23:26 Green Hills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst WoW players back in the day, it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests. Um, but it holds a really special place in my heart. First of all, it's one of the few times that I just, like, wrote a short story that's actually in the game.

Lex Fridman 2:23:51 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 2:23:52 Um, it's me paying homage to Hemingway, and the guy who gives you the quest, his name is Hemet Nesingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of, um, of Hemingway. Um, there's an, there's another quest giver there that's Kerouac's name-

Lex Fridman 2:24:11 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:24:11 ... also mixed up. Um, and then it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipshit. That's-

Lex Fridman 2:24:25 [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 2:24:25 ... that's the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, like, summed up. So-

Lex Fridman 2:24:29 Yeah

Jeff Kaplan 2:24:29 ... like, I wrote the story over, like, it was, I think, winter break. Like, everybody was gone, and I just was so happy to be in the office. You know, I'm at Blizzard by myself, writing late at night. And the whole idea, and this is, this is very much, um, what I call ant farm designer, which is bad, which is, you know, you're the game designer who's playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they, they're gonna do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer. But I, I hadn't learned that yet. And there's a, there's a really great famous Sid Meier quote, um, where he says there's three types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer. And we catch ourselves. We're like, you know, "We gotta be really care- It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us." So this Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest was like an ant farm design of, I'm gonna write this honestly probably pretty shitty story. I haven't read it since 2003, so God only knows if it's any good. But I wrote the story, and then I divided it up into all of these different pages. And the quest giver, Hemet Nesingwary, wants you to put together... Like, the story's like he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorn Vale. And some, when you're doing quest design, you're really thinking about the player flow, and you're directing them from quest giver hubs out into these destinations, and you want them to do all the destinations. But sometimes we would do these bridging quests where you could do anything in the zone, and it sort of had this overlap. And so the pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale, and it was kind of like that McDonald's Monopoly game-

Lex Fridman 2:26:36 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:26:36 ... where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not gonna win.But where I really went south, I don't think the idea in a vacuum is horrible, but where this really fell apart was the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't set up. Like the pages didn't stack. There wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in. So players had very limited bag space, and as they're fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all of these pa- and they only needed so many. Like you might get unlucky and you have like three page fives that are just junk in your inventory, and I might have like eight page sixes. And then everybody-- and this was the goal, like the, the designer trying to puppeteer everybody. Everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, "Hey, I'm looking for a page six. Anyone got a page three?" And that was like my fantasy as a designer of like, and then they're gonna be social and meet each other, and players are gonna be appreciative for each other. But really all everybody did was just no-- eventually no one did the quest. They just were super annoyed or they went to the auction house. So the quest is famous in that it was so aggravating and annoying, um, and it just became a way... It not only became a way for me to learn from my mistakes, but because I was very open with the fact that I didn't think it was good and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work. Like it's always easier if you're the first one to go out and say, "Hey guys, I think I made one of the shittiest quests in the game, and here's why." Um, and then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it.

Lex Fridman 2:28:35 I mean, again, you continue to speak with so much humility. Uh, but WoW turned out to be one of the biggest games of all time, uh, both in terms of popularity, how many players play it, revenue, and critical acclaim. And then you rose to become a game director of WoW, uh, helping release, uh, Wrath of the Lich King, which by many is considered to be the greatest expansion. I mean, there's a million questions I can ask here, but maybe this is also a good place to ask about the famous, uh, Blizzard polish. So, uh, Blizzard as a company has historically, and you were certainly a, a, a big part of that, delivered these games that were just... Got so many pieces right and well-functioning and well-coordinated and just feel finished, uh, in a way that a lot of other games don't get right. So what does it take to take this gigantic game, this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people, uh, and deliver it in a way where it's like it all just works?

Jeff Kaplan 2:29:44 To have a level of polish is like a studio-wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody. Like no one can be satisfied with a bug. Um, every game is gonna have bugs, and Blizzard games have bugs. It's a question of how quickly do you fix them and with what urgency. And as players ourselves, if we're playing as much as anybody else, we're gonna be motivated to fix the bugs. There are some really tactical aspects to it too. The quality assurance department at Blizzard is the best in the industry. Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard, they are passionate gamers. Many of them want to be developers themselves, and they're not just doing it for a job. They do it because they fucking love the game. And the relationship we tried to develop between us on the development teams and QA was extremely tight. And whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA members up with the development team as po- as possible. Depending on the logistics of... You know, in the early days, we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us. We were very fortunate on the Overwatch team to have a large amount of QA sitting with us, and then developing that relationship. You know, in the early days, there, there were these fears of like, well, QA can't talk to the developers, and trying to shatter that-

Lex Fridman 2:31:26 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:31:27 ... of because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out, you would just say to them like, "Hey dude, just message me anytime. Here's my home number."

Lex Fridman 2:31:38 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:31:38 "Like call m- if there's a bug, if you think we're gonna get raked over the coals on this, you gotta speak up. I don't care what the chain of command is. Like we gotta fix this thing." So QA was amazing.

Lex Fridman 2:31:52 I mean, so can you speak to QA, quality assurance? Uh, at the peak of the craft, what does it entail? Like you're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out on a particular slices of that experience that could be improved.

Jeff Kaplan 2:32:09 Yeah. People simplify the role by just, "Oh, these guys just get to play games all day, and then like let us know if there's a bug." They are so systematic in the way they test stuff. Um, they come up with these plans that are actually amazing of like who's gonna test what. Um, there's a lot of regression testing that goes on. Uh, within QA, there will also be compatibility testing. The, the Blizzard compatibility department was amazing. Like they had every card, every machine, every configuration, and they wouldroll through to make sure there wasn't some quirk that was gonna come up on some video card or some motherboard that you weren't expecting. But it was all very systematic. It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game.

Lex Fridman 2:33:02 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:33:02 And then as a developer interacting with QA, you would find that there were certain specialists, um, whether... Like, like for example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players that... Like, we all were shooter players when we were making Overwatch, but I'm not like esports level shooter player. I'm like, you know, Gen X or, "Remember Doom, how good I was"-

Lex Fridman 2:33:30 Yeah. Right

Jeff Kaplan 2:33:30 ... type of shooter player.

Lex Fridman 2:33:31 Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 2:33:32 But we had, you know, a couple of these QA, uh, specialists who, like, they could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay, you know? And then you sit that person with an engineer and say, "Hey, I think there's some input lag here."

Lex Fridman 2:33:58 That's amazing.

Jeff Kaplan 2:33:59 And sure enough, they'd be right. But you have to have that relationship where the devs trust, uh, QA or just even on, like, uh, World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA in that they built out a full raid team to do th- the raids, and then you're not only, like, looking for bugs, like, hey, the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just, like, sunk through the world and the game crashed, which would happen. But, like, if you really value QA, you're asking them, "What do you... D- dude, what do you think? You're... You know? [laughs] Like, 10 million people are gonna see this. Your opinion, multiply it, you know? It matters. What do you think? You know, are you having fun? Yeah, this is cool. This isn't cool." Um, so QA was important. The, the other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to architect your game to be hotfixable.

Lex Fridman 2:34:57 Mm. Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:34:58 And what a hotfix is, games, there's a couple ways to fix them. Uh, the way most of us know, 'cause all the software we have gets a patch. You know, you have to update it, you have to download a new version of it. Windows, you know, you get that annoying message, like there's a new version of Windows and takes, you know, a few minutes and you update it. You know, obviously we patch our games, and that's where we fix a lot of bugs. But if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime. And what a hotfix is is a server patch that no one's client has to go down for.

Lex Fridman 2:35:44 Mm-hmm. It's 'cause you're dealing with a huge number of players and you discover an issue, and you wanna respond to that issue really quickly.

Jeff Kaplan 2:35:51 Yeah. There's, there's emergency issues like something's crashing, like the worst case, uh, scenario is anytime the server's crashing. Um, or in Overwatch, like a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero, like someone found an exploit and you have to disable a hero from the lineup. You wanna turn around that hotfix if you can in a half an hour, get that hero back live. You might have somebody who only plays that hero, and the only reason they're gonna play Overwatch is because that hero's active. You don't wanna wait for patches, and you want to hotfix-

Lex Fridman 2:36:30 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:36:30 ... as fast as you can.

Lex Fridman 2:36:32 And then also to improve the game quickly, uh, to just even settle stuff, too, you know?

Jeff Kaplan 2:36:36 Yeah. Players feel it. Like they... That's where there's this idea of, like, the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel. Like any, any product, you know, uh, your iPhone or Android or, like, any computer or consumer product, you can feel when there are people who loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf, and games have that as well, where you can feel the, like, heart and soul of the, the developer in, in the thing. And some of that's like the joy and delight of, like, that there's a cow level, right? That that's... Y- you know, you can feel the humanity of the development team through that. But another part of that is, like, do they clean up their fucking yard? You know, does this game work? Is it... And it's not just the bugs and the crashes. It's like when balance gets wacky and stupid and, you know, suddenly everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding, and no one else will play anything else. You're like, "We should probably fix that," you know?

Lex Fridman 2:37:50 Oh, those were the days. I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.

Jeff Kaplan 2:37:54 [laughs] One-handed.

Lex Fridman 2:37:56 It was... Yeah. It brought so much joy. Uh, so a lot of people modern day think of you as Jeff from the Overwatch team.

Jeff Kaplan 2:38:05 My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.

Lex Fridman 2:38:12 But y'all must have forgot, you were the game director of WoW in an era when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world. Just, you know, looking back, what wisdom can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming that changed gaming forever, where it's millions of people playing this video game?

Jeff Kaplan 2:38:37 It was my first game I worked on, and I joined it as this entry-level dude.

Lex Fridman 2:38:43 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:38:44 I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for 35K a year.

Lex Fridman 2:38:50 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:38:50 You know, that's what I was making. And, um-Very shortly after WoW shipped, y- y- you know, Allen left as lead before the beta or, like, right around the beta, and then Rob took over as the lead d- designer, and then he left the team very shortly after WoW shipped to go start StarCraft II. And he put myself and Tom Chilton in charge. Uh, Tom is a designer who-- He was a great partner of mine and a great leader, uh, and he, he actually came from Ultima Online, and so I always looked up to Tom 'cause he had a lot more experience than I did. And this is, like, early two thousand and five. The world was on fire, the servers were barely running.

Speaker 2:39:48 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:39:48 Wow was just-- had taken off like gangbusters, and they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW, and at the time they promoted me. My title-- I didn't even have a lead title. My title was senior game designer, and Tom and I were running the design of WoW at that time. So I thought it was totally normal, and I thought what we were experiencing with WoW was just normal for making a video game because it was the first video game that I had worked on.

Speaker 2:40:26 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:40:27 Um, I thought it was the funnest joyride because we were working on WoW, we were still working insane hours.

Speaker 2:40:38 Mm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:40:39 And then I'd get home, eat dinner, and then me and my wife would log in and play WoW, you know, for four hours, and then I'd go in the next day, and I'd work... And it was just this... My whole life was World of Warcraft, um, and I loved it. Like, I loved everything from, you know, the creative meetings with Chris Metzen and just what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the simplest, dumbest design stuff that, like, we as game designers-- Like, you wanna talk about why a button is in the lower left versus lower right and what does that mean? That's like two hours of discussion, and is there a better way? Like, the ten thousand minutiae problems were thrilling to me, and then also the big disasters, like the big... I had, uh... In the early days of WoW, we didn't really have all the processes in place for, like, how to deal with being a successful online game, and I literally had GMs, like game masters, these are customer support guys, calling my home phone at 3:00 in the morning. Like, I remember this one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorn Vale, and they figured out a way to exploit it, and this GM calls me panicked. It's 3:00 in the morning. He's like, "I'm just spawning," uh, what, what did we call them? Uh, Guardians of Blizzard. They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touched anything. We used to have them when we were in the beta, like, off in the distance of places players weren't supposed to get in case they cheated their way there.

Speaker 2:42:36 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:42:36 And this GM is just spawning them all over Stranglethorn Vale because he's worried because the players are exploiting.

Speaker 2:42:44 Yeah.

Jeff Kaplan 2:42:44 And it's like 3:00 in the morning, and I'm talking in hushed tones because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed. I'm doing this 'cause it was actually, like, before the cell phone days when I actually had a l- landline. But that's just how... And I loved it. I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutiae, um, and I felt like through the running WoW Live, which was me and Tom together with an amazing team, we kinda learned how to be the WoW team.

Speaker 2:43:14 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:43:14 And putting WoW in a box and shipping it was, like, only chapter one in a 12-chapter book, essentially, and that first r- how to run the game, how to patch it, what type of content, how to deal with emergencies, what should our customer support be like? I mean, we would debate should we have a launcher or not. You know, in the early days, the only reason the launcher existed in WoW was to run anti-cheat on your machine, and we had a moment where we figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher, and it was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Morhaime. He's like, "You gotta bring the launcher back, guys." And we're like, "Why?" He's like, "There's no better way for us to talk to our players." Um, and I remember trying to hide the launcher, and to this day, Mike was right. Like, that launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had. That's essentially what Battle.net has morphed into these days. But all those decisions, um, and when it came time to, to make Burning Crusade, you know, at that point, Tom and I were leads. We were full... Th- they had actually promoted us. There was... There were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard. They were disenfranchised, um, if you can believe it. Like, we just shipped World of Warcraft, and this whole group just walked out the door. I was actually sitting... My, my desk faced Morhaime's office, and I watched them all go in and quit, and they were the group that formed, uh, Carbine, which made the game WildStar. Um, ended up taking them 10 years to make.And they were just really unhappy with World of Warcraft, and they were unhappy with, um... I don't know what they were unhappy with. They were unhappy enough to walk out the door right after we had shipped WoW.

Lex Fridman 2:45:16 That's incredible. But what, what is it? Just because they put their heart and soul in the game and they maybe get exhausted in a certain kind of way?

Jeff Kaplan 2:45:23 Yeah, and I don't wanna... I- it's not fair of me to speak on their behalf. I think they were promised some compensation that they didn't immediately see. I don't know if the game... Like, here's the weird part when you make a game. When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that's the best the game is ever gonna be. And then you work on it, like, you know, games I've worked on take five years, you know. Overwatch was two and a half, three years. Every day you get close to ship, the imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality, and you're always shipping this, like, greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere n- nowhere near matches the imagination-

Lex Fridman 2:46:18 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:46:18 ... of the inception of the idea. So you become disenfranchised with the concept of-

Lex Fridman 2:46:24 So s- i- in some sense you're shipping-- You're constantly in a state of disappointment. You're, you're, you're basically shipping a, a, a lesser thing than you've con- you've been dreaming about.

Jeff Kaplan 2:46:37 Yes.

Lex Fridman 2:46:37 You're doing less and less and less, saying no and no, and cutting and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's difficult, psychologically difficult, but nevertheless, the result when you zoom out is one of the greatest games of all time that millions of people played for thousands of hours. It's just... What, uh, th- uh, did it... Did you ever have an e- experience, a realization how huge WoW was in terms of not, like, statistics on the server and so on, but the cultural impact it had?

Jeff Kaplan 2:47:06 The first time was the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005. So when WoW shipped, uh, and this is so weird to tell people, but on the team, uh, not everyone, but a lot of us were very demoralized after WoW shipped. There were, there were all sorts of issues with the servers because the game did way more successful than we expected it to do. Um, and the server load was just nuts. Like, we were just... We were doing our best to hire database programmers, you know, 'cause we just didn't know how to deal with the, the s- sheer scope of the game. But when you're an individual, like... A- and at that time, like I mentioned, there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard. They went and formed a couple notable studios. One was Carbine, um, the other was Red 5. And we lost, like, kind of our core people. Like, when Red 5 started, that was our team leader. That was Mark Kern and our art director, Bill Petras. They quit. Um, when Carbine started, it was I think all of our animators and some of our best programmers, and, like, it's really demoralizing when you lose team members like that. But then we were also underwater. Like, the servers aren't running. Um, we're, we're not able to keep up with demand, and we had to start putting patches out, and now we're making patches, like, uh... For a while we had one animator [chuckles] who stuck around, and then eventually he left also. But you're doing like, "Okay, we gotta now do a patch without an animator." Um, a lot of our art team was gone at that point, and you're trying to keep the ship afloat, and the morale was just in the shitter. Like, everybody felt very down on Team Two, the WoW team was called Team Two, and that we had somehow failed.

Lex Fridman 2:49:20 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:49:20 And during that time, there was, um, this idea to do BlizzCon, and the way that started was EverQuest had done these, like, meetups because they knew it was, like, a big guild social game, and people would get together at, like, some hotel ballroom, and you'd sit with your guild at, like, a banquet room table.

Lex Fridman 2:49:43 Yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Kaplan 2:49:44 And to give credit where credit's due, I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become BlizzCon. It was Pardo who said, "Blizzard's bigger than that. We're not just one game, and I know everybody's focused on World of Warcraft right now. We should do BlizzCon." And at the time we had a game called StarCraft: Ghost was in development, and that was getting ready to show, and there was Frozen Throne, which was the expansion to Warcraft III, but, like, we knew we were gonna make StarCraft II, and then there was a lot of motion happening with Blizzard North, which is a whole separate story. But there was like, "Hey, we could really do a cool show-

Lex Fridman 2:50:26 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 2:50:27 ... that's this BlizzCon thing." And at first we kind of announced it, and it just was crickets. You know when you're, like, excited about something and you're like, "Man, everybody's gonna love... Like, we're doing BlizzCon," and everybody's kinda like, crickets. "What's BlizzCon? Who cares?" And, and we're, we're idiots. We're reading the forums, and the forums are just flaming us all the time. Like, "There's lag on this server," and, "Can't log into that server," and that's, that was our perspective of what was happening. And then, like I said, give Mike Morhaime credit where credit's due. HeKept us, he kept us committed to that launcher, and they put the BlizzCon tickets on the launcher, which they hadn't done before. It was on the website. And so everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this like, "Hey, we're doing BlizzCon in Anaheim. Do you wanna come?" Sold out instant. Like, instantly sold out. And when I showed up at that show, it-- one of the most emotional things in my li- it was nothing but an outpouring of love. And up until that point, your perception was, because you're just reading online, um, and it was... The perception is such hatred, because people who are passionate online, they express themselves in the harshest ways 'cause it gets attention. You know, that's the lesson I should've learned from my early days. Um, and it's such an unfortunate thing, because then you met these people in person, and they loved World of Warcraft.

Lex Fridman 2:52:11 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:52:12 And all they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft, and hear about what was coming next, and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft. And-

Lex Fridman 2:52:22 It's incred-- I, it, it's a fascinating thing to me about human nature, and it's absolutely true, and I wish it was a thing that could be solved, but then again, maybe not. Maybe that's just the way it is. But in person, all of the people that are passionate about a particular topic, and whatever that topic is, it could be games, uh, it could be conferences, technical conferences, they are, they're all mostly full of love in, in just the way they talk about stuff, they nerd out. Even the disagreements are drenched in this, uh, respect and appreciation and love for the g- for the game, for the topic. And online, you're right, I don't know if it's for, because of popularity or clicks or so on, but it's just the way of speaking on the internet is more mockery and-

Jeff Kaplan 2:53:12 Cynical

Lex Fridman 2:53:13 ... if you say, "I love this thing. Here's an apple. I love apples. I love bananas. I love fru- like, I love X," whatever, you just get made fun of.

Jeff Kaplan 2:53:27 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 2:53:27 You get-- And then, so what the, the lesson you learn from that is, "Well, I'm just not going to speak up when I love something. I'm going to instead speak up when I, maybe how much I hate another thing that's similar to it, or, or maybe join in when we're making fun of a particular quirky thing about, 'Don't you hate it when bananas are too ripe or too...'" Versus, like, not saying the, calling out the elephant in the room is, "We're all gathered here today 'cause we love the thing."

Jeff Kaplan 2:53:58 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 2:53:58 It's interesting. It's a a-aspect of the internet that I think is jarring to a lot of people, depending on the game, but if you go to Discord or Reddit or so on, in the communities that love a particular video game, there's a... If you're not used to it, and I don't often go, so when I go, it's like, "Wow, there's a lot of, like, pretty intense kinda mockery and derision and so on." But you get used to it pretty quick, and you understand it. Just, I wish there was more love.

Jeff Kaplan 2:54:25 I feel bad because I played a role in the earliest development of some of that online culture. It really was social media before it was called social media. Um, you know, I ran a... Uh, I, I actually, I had this reputation for being edgier than I really was.

Lex Fridman 2:54:46 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:54:47 Um, there were a couple notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back on, um, but they don't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill, um, and that's unfortunate. I think a lot as a game designer about the design of social media, and unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that's how you get the most points, is by being max hyperbolic.

Lex Fridman 2:55:27 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 2:55:27 And usually, unfortunately, it's more in the negative direction than the positive direction. You know, if I say, "That's, that's a pretty nice mug. I've seen nicer, but I like this one," no one's interested in that. I have to either love this thing or better, this thing's a crime against humanity-

Lex Fridman 2:55:53 Yep

Jeff Kaplan 2:55:53 ... in some way. And it's very self-reinforcing, and everybody sort of feeds into it, and-

Lex Fridman 2:56:03 Especially when you're young. I got to see this kinda interesting thing. So I was at, uh, I, I spent, as what we're talking about, you're from Pasadena. I s- I've been spending a lot of time in, in Caltech, and, uh, working on robots, and we get to see, uh, students come in from high school, uh, undergraduates come in and, like, a tour, ha-hang out with the robots, and middle school also. And the interesting thing you see, the y- the younger they, they are, the more prevalent this effect, which is n- all, all of them are kind of afraid to show that they think a thing is awesome. They're all-- You can just feel they're checking, is it okay?

Jeff Kaplan 2:56:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 2:56:48 So they're, they're kinda like, the default mode is whatever. This, everything's stupid. This is stupid. You know, that, 'cause that's the safe place to be. It's a real act of vulnerability. I would say it's an act of courage, especially for a young person, to be like, "Holy shit, that's awesome." Like, "I'm gonna-- If I think this is awesome, I'm gonna be the nerd. I'm gonna take the risk and be made fun of for saying I love thisIn that case, it's I love this robot. So that, that's a actual psychological effect that also young people are dealing with in person also. So I think, I just want to say for young people listening to this, be vulnerable, be courageous, and say you love a thing if you love a thing, and do more of that on the internet. I think, um, I think people make up the internet, people build the internet, and young people more than anybody else define the future of the internet. So put more love out there in the world. If you love a video game, if you love Overwatch, say you love it.

Jeff Kaplan 2:57:50 I, I couldn't agree more. You know, as somebody who's taken a lot of heat online, like any game developer, you just get destroyed. Doing what you do, you must get destroyed, you know? And it doesn't matter, you get 100 compliments, it's the one, you know... You- and you're, you're supposed to read it and supposed to be fine with it and have it not affect you. It'll stay with you for years. You know, I have those-- And I think of it, like the cheesy, the cheesy way I think about it is like, is there some kind of social Darwinism going on? And my big worry is that there are creators... Like now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you make online videos, whatever, whatever creator means to you, make games. Now part of the skill set is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen. And I, I, I make up these scenarios in my head of like, you, you-- would Van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on... Like, how many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime or, or in a week? Like, how many influences could comment on his music directly to him? Versus like, if I want to insult Brad Pitt right now, I can just go on 10 different devices and do it. And it's like that level of access is very dangerous, and I worry that there is a whole group of people who's receding from us that will never see the brilliance, and they're being shut out by the negativity. There, there's a very real example was Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds, who was the game director of Diablo III, and he took so much heat, it just affected him to the point where he essentially retired from making games. When, you know, wrote novels, I was very happy for him because, you know, I'm glad he found his place, and I think he's getting back into making games now. But we lost, we essentially-- Like think how many people loved Diablo III and played the shit out of Diablo III.

Lex Fridman 3:00:35 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 3:00:36 And Jay is one of the people you have to thank for that, and yet that community basically removed him from making games for like 10, 15 years, and it feels criminal to me.

Lex Fridman 3:00:50 Yeah, absolutely. They-- So this is a call to action again. People out there, support, support, especially young creators, support them. They need it. Like you think negativity has no pr- no cost, but it does. You're robbing the world of some of the great creations. And also allow creators to suck and to improve because that's, it's, that's what the process of creation is like, is to take risks, to, uh, and, and take risks meaning being vulnerable, being cringe. So doing the thing that like the embarrassing failure where you're standing there, uh, on, on, you know, in a s- in a silly clown outfit on stage dancing and nobody, and nobody's laughing. And it's a, it's a, as comedians go through this all the time when they talk about this all the time when they bomb, right? They, they, the act just doesn't work. And you have to go through that. And, and you have to, you have to support the creators through that journey. Uh, in order to have great things, we need to support those, those folks.

Lex Fridman 3:02:00 So after shipping WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, again, many consider it to be one of the great expansions for WoW, you stepped down as WoW's game director and switched to developing Titan, this epic, uh, huge game that promised to be the sort of the MMO to end all MMOs. Um, I mean, it's kind of a legendary vision for a game, right? It's gigantic, uh, with a lot of, like you said, a brilliant team, a team that's now, uh, hardened and knows how to do a great game. Uh, but it was canceled after seven years in development. Uh, so tell me what was the vision of the game and what happened?

Jeff Kaplan 3:02:47 Sure. So as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn't gonna last forever. WoW would be maybe successful for five years and eventually kind of age out. And the studio would be real, in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game, uh, sort of waiting in the wings. So starting aroundI want to say 2006, maybe 2005, um, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum, and we were working on Burning Crusade. Uh, Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of Titan development. We didn't even really have a team then. And I remember, I remember being, like, embroiled in Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings. And Rob pulled a group, you know, from kind of across the company, and we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going. And eventually, it started in earnest, like real development around 2007, the first team members joined. And it was a real ambitious project, including, like, building a new engine from scratch. I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John Lafleur, who was just a stellar game programmer. And the engine which ultimately failed for Titan ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him. And the idea behind the game, it was gonna take place in future Earth, and the players played as secret agents. And by day, they all had day jobs, and by night, they went off and did cool secret agent stuff. And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but over-the-top abilities, uh, like you would see in Overwatch because that's where they came from. And the by day stuff, we were gonna let you run businesses. Uh, we took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, um, Harvest Moon, The Sims. We had a brilliant game designer, um, and game director named Matt Brown, who was the creative director on The Sims. He came over. Um, and so we had this vision that there was gonna be all this, like, daytime business, house stuff. You could, you could build a house. You could live in a neighborhood. Um, and beyond that, there was also a vision on the technical side, game design and technical side, that unlike World of Warcraft, which the, the modern day term for is, is, um, that it's sharded.

Lex Fridman 3:06:06 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 3:06:06 So meaning people play on different realms or servers. In a WoW server, I, I don't-- I haven't been on that team in a very long time, but back in the day, you might have 5,000 people on a WoW server before they'd have to spin up another WoW server. The big idea behind Titan is that everybody would play on one server. It was a one server, one world game, and the world was massive. It was gonna take place in future Earth, and we were literally building like... We had what we called Bay City, which was San Francisco. We had, you know, Hollywood, and then we had to build all of California between that, and we also wanted to build like Cairo and London. And there was this realization of like, how do we connect all of these? The game had driving in it, like full-blown, like GTA style driving. It was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a, with a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over. Like, the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure out like, are there aliens or not aliens? You know, like-

Lex Fridman 3:07:31 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 3:07:31 ... all that sounds kinda dumb and fun, but when you're building a game like you... Especially world building, you have to have rules. That's, that's what makes world building work is that like this exists in this world and this doesn't, and you know why. It's like, 'cause someone said so, and just the way it needs to be. But that development started in 2007, kind of as ideation, brainstorming, early work, really got going in late two- 2007, and then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King. Um, and it was... We had the like... We always did like a champagne toast. Uh, I r- I still remember it because it was election day. I think it was like election day and my birthday and the day Obama got elected. Then I left the WoW team on that day. [chuckles] It was like memorable in all those ways. Uh, and then I joined the, the Titan team, and, um, that game, we went on... Like the fast forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013. That was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of. And, um, probably, probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist. And by 2010, like after numerous times trying to convince the powers that be that like, "This game is not gonna happen. It's in trouble."

Lex Fridman 3:09:18 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 3:09:18 I remember going to Mike Morhaime in 2010And like you're going to the CEO of, you know, at that time Blizzard was a big company and I'm like, "You gotta shut us down. We're just gonna burn money."

Lex Fridman 3:09:35 What was your intuition about why? So like from my understanding, there was a few issues. So one was such a gigantic world, which by the way is a beautiful dream, this kind of universe simulator, 'cause I love every game you mentioned there is, is great. I empathize with the dream. I would love to play that game. But o- one of the issues as I understand was it was unclear what like the quest flow is. Like, uh, what are you supposed to really do in this game? What's the thing that connects all of the pieces together?

Jeff Kaplan 3:10:08 So it was a multifaceted failure for, for many reasons. [chuckles] Um, ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself included. Like, there's just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like a lot of games you can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the, you know, the servers didn't work-

Lex Fridman 3:10:35 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 3:10:35 ... or like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game, or design failure, like the it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly. We failed on art, engineering, and design, and I'm cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan.

Lex Fridman 3:10:56 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Kaplan 3:10:56 My criticism isn't of the art that was created, my criticism is that we never had any art cohesion, so the art looked like it could have come from 10 different games.

Lex Fridman 3:11:08 Mm-hmm. And we should say it cost $83 million across those years. So large team doing a lot of stuff, but not converging towards a game that could actually ship.

Jeff Kaplan 3:11:24 Correct. As like a game designer, I use semantics a lot and I like to define my semantics so people know where I'm coming from. Talking about ideas versus, versus vision for a second, ideas are easy. I- ideas, you know, I can have 10 in 10 seconds, you know? Let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse, you know, whatever. Like you can co- I want a s- a secret agent by day is, you know, doing all this cool shooting stuff, by night is running a flower shop. You know, ideas are just infinite. At, at least on creative teams, you know, you have no shortage of ideas. What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea but shepherd it into existence, and you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost. If you need a team to make it, you need a team to believe in the vision of the idea. And then there also has to be a technological plan for the idea, there has to be a design plan, there has to be an art style for the plan, there has to be a pragmatic production reality to the plan. And Titan kind of was like that was the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height of... Y- you know, we were over being hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft, I don't know if people are gonna like it, and we were now in the era of like, we made World of Warcraft, we can do no wrong. This next thing is gonna be the best ever. And there was also a lot of, um, what I call anticipatory hiring-

Lex Fridman 3:13:20 Mm-hmm

Jeff Kaplan 3:13:21 ... or like there's opportunity hiring and then there's also anticipatory hiring. I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy. I won't hire anybody on any team until like we're feeling like we gotta work overtime or like [chuckles] we might