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

By sorting fun into player, designer, and computer types to analyze game feel; Kaplan shows why Rust is the most pvp thing and legacy of steel raids shaped him.

Jeff KaplanguestLex Fridmanhost

Mar 11, 20265h 10mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

150 min read · 30,276 words

0:00 – 1:27
Episode highlight
1. JKJeff Kaplan
  There's three types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.
2. LFLex Fridman
  Is it PvP?
3. JKJeff Kaplan
  It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.
4. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs] Well, I don't know what that means, but [laughs] I-
5. JKJeff Kaplan
  Rust players know what that means. My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.
6. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
7. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
8. LFLex Fridman
  How painful was it to say goodbye?
9. JKJeff Kaplan
  It broke me.
10. LFLex Fridman
  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.
1:27 – 4:07
Introduction
1. LFLex Fridman
  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.
4:07 – 18:33
Early games: Pac-Man, Zork, Doom, Quake
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  I was lucky. I was born in that golden era of coin-op.
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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?
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  ...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.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  And I was so disappointed because, like, other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore-
15. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  ...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.
17. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
19. LFLex Fridman
  It's a text-based game?
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  Text-based game. You know, you just type in, "Go west, open mailbox," you know?
21. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  And, um-
23. LFLex Fridman
  Okay
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  ...but it's that power of imagination. It's why the book is always better than the movie, you know?
25. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah. So you're starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate.
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yes.
27. LFLex Fridman
  You can step into this world, and you can lose yourself in that world.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah. You're transported. You're living there.
29. LFLex Fridman
  Was Zork popular?
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  Zork was insanely popular. Um, and then there was Zork II and Zork III.
18:33 – 34:06
Writing career - 170 rejection letters
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm.
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  You know, that's one way to go about it.
13. LFLex Fridman
  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.
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
15. LFLex Fridman
  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-
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah
17. LFLex Fridman
  ... to say, "I'm gonna-- Yeah, right. I read '1984' [laughs] and now I'm going to write the next '1984.'"
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
19. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
21. LFLex Fridman
  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?
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah. It, it was, um... I think it was necessary.
23. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  It was necessary. Uh, this is like rational- rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do-
25. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
27. LFLex Fridman
  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.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
29. LFLex Fridman
  So there's a long chain of rejection. And then what was that like, the rejection?
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
34:06 – 47:04
EverQuest obsession
1. LFLex Fridman
  You switched to, uh, video games. How did that happen? Gradually, suddenly?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm. [chuckles]
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  And I just poured it all into EverQuest.
5. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  So you start to do the math on, like, how much time-
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... in those three years I was living in that world. [chuckles] It was, uh-It was kind of insane.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Well, that's over 6,000 hours-
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah
15. LFLex Fridman
  ... of gameplay.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
17. LFLex Fridman
  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.
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
19. LFLex Fridman
  And they raid together in the game.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
21. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
23. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
25. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
27. LFLex Fridman
  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]
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  The leader. [laughs] Yeah. So organizing, organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats-
29. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... '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-
47:04 – 1:02:32
Getting hired at Blizzard
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  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-
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  [laughs]
7. LFLex Fridman
  ... in, in your life journey [laughs] from peasant to emperor, but go ahead. I'm sorry.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  At, at least EverQuest guild leader. That's, that's as much as I can say.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Uber guild. Uber guild leader.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
15. LFLex Fridman
  Mm
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... would have taken, like, 12 hours.
17. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  So you actually, like, burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.
19. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
21. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
23. LFLex Fridman
  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?
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the legendary gaming... Like, it was beloved-
25. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
27. LFLex Fridman
  So you weren't, like, freaking out, freaking out?
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  No. I, I was freaking out in a different sense. I'm like, "Am I gonna get mugged when I-
29. LFLex Fridman
  Right
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... like, who are, is this a scam?"
1:02:32 – 1:08:37
Lowest point in Jeff's life
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  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.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  And we don't always know how to engage-
13. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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-
15. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
17. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
19. LFLex Fridman
  Hard work on a thing you, you love.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
1:08:37 – 1:12:54
One of Us
1. LFLex Fridman
  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-
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  Didn't know
3. LFLex Fridman
  ... 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?
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  No. No.
5. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  My boss was Alan.
7. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  And Alan was very understanding, and he c- they kinda knew what they were getting into-
9. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
11. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  And, uh, I think that's... It's got that 20-year-old-
13. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... you know, "I don't know what I don't know."
15. LFLex Fridman
  "I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games" and-
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
17. LFLex Fridman
  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?
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
19. LFLex Fridman
  To even have the guts to try, to have the guts to put in all
1:12:54 – 1:32:36
Early Blizzard culture
1. LFLex Fridman
  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
2. LFLex Fridman
  Stay a while and listen
3. LFLex Fridman
  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?
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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?"
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
13. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
15. LFLex Fridman
  So that's part of the story, part of this quest design, part of it is like how you move through the game world.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
17. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
19. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
21. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
23. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
25. LFLex Fridman
  Is the, the lighting, you know, all the, all the different kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team? Like-
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah. Lighting, you're gonna have lighting under the art team, but they're gonna be best friends with a graphics programmer.
27. LFLex Fridman
  Okay.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
29. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
1:32:36 – 1:50:20
Building World of Warcraft
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
5. LFLex Fridman
  And, uh, in the early days, there was a really strong division.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  Strong division.
7. LFLex Fridman
  Like [laughs]
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
9. LFLex Fridman
  You pick a side, and then you, uh, hang around with o- only people of your kind.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
11. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs] That's awesome
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... it's epic.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  It's like, it's become who they are.
15. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
17. LFLex Fridman
  Right
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... "Dude"-
19. LFLex Fridman
  Lose my number
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... "Alliance."
21. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs] Yeah.
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  Like, "Okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore."
23. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah. [laughs]
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  But the Horde/Alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed race.
25. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  Uh, they had all the races kind of like WoW did, but they could all group with each other.
27. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
29. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
1:50:20 – 2:07:42
How WoW changed video games
1. LFLex Fridman
  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.
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
3. LFLex Fridman
  [chuckles] Yeah.
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
5. LFLex Fridman
  [chuckles]
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
11. LFLex Fridman
  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.
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
13. LFLex Fridman
  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?
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
15. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  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?
17. LFLex Fridman
  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.
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  As a game designer, I'm at best a quack psychologist.
19. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs] Yeah.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  You know? We can motivate you to do some weird things.
21. LFLex Fridman
  [chuckles]
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
23. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
25. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
27. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
29. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
2:07:42 – 2:28:35
Single-player vs Multi-player
1. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah
2. LFLex Fridman
  ... 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?
3. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
4. LFLex Fridman
  Okay.
5. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
6. LFLex Fridman
  Hmm
7. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
8. LFLex Fridman
  Could you lay out for people who don't necessarily know what PVP and PVE is and-
9. JKJeff Kaplan
  Absolutely
10. LFLex Fridman
  ... single player, multiplayer, massively online multiplayer.
11. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
12. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
13. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
14. LFLex Fridman
  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.
15. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
16. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
17. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
18. LFLex Fridman
  Hmm.
19. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
20. LFLex Fridman
  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.
21. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yep.
22. LFLex Fridman
  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.
23. JKJeff Kaplan
  Couch co- It, it's funny 'cause it actually, like, predates the couch even. Some of those-
24. LFLex Fridman
  [laughs]
25. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... old arcade games-
26. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah
27. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... like would have two joysticks on them-
28. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm. Yeah
29. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... and then you could play with somebody else, or there was, uh, you know, famous game Gauntlet-
30. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
2:28:35 – 2:54:25
How Blizzard made great video games
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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."
5. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  "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.
7. LFLex Fridman
  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.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
9. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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"-
11. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah. Right
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... type of shooter player.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
15. LFLex Fridman
  That's amazing.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
17. LFLex Fridman
  Mm. Yeah.
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
19. LFLex Fridman
  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.
20. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
21. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
22. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... as fast as you can.
23. LFLex Fridman
  And then also to improve the game quickly, uh, to just even settle stuff, too, you know?
24. JKJeff Kaplan
  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?
25. LFLex Fridman
  Oh, those were the days. I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.
26. JKJeff Kaplan
  [laughs] One-handed.
27. LFLex Fridman
  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.
28. JKJeff Kaplan
  My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.
29. LFLex Fridman
  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?
30. JKJeff Kaplan
  It was my first game I worked on, and I joined it as this entry-level dude.
2:54:25 – 3:01:59
Online toxicity
1. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
2. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
3. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
4. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
5. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
6. LFLex Fridman
  Yep
7. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... in some way. And it's very self-reinforcing, and everybody sort of feeds into it, and-
8. LFLex Fridman
  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?
9. JKJeff Kaplan
  Yeah.
10. LFLex Fridman
  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.
11. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
12. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
13. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
14. LFLex Fridman
  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.
3:01:59 – 3:19:09
Why Titan failed
1. LFLex Fridman
  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?
2. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
3. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
4. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
5. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
6. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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."
7. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
8. JKJeff Kaplan
  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."
9. LFLex Fridman
  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?
10. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
11. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
12. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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.
13. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm.
14. JKJeff Kaplan
  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.
15. LFLex Fridman
  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.
16. JKJeff Kaplan
  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-
17. LFLex Fridman
  Mm-hmm
18. JKJeff Kaplan
  ... 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 not ship if we don't get, you know, somebody else in here. And Titan kind of had that hubris of like, well, we're gonna build a really big world. We don't know the story of the world yet. We don't really have it mapped out what it should be like. We don't have the art style really defined. We don't know technically how we're gonna make the art or what the constraints of it are, but we know we're gonna build a really big world, so let's just start hiring environmental artists and like in one year we would hire like 70 environmental artists from all over the world. You know, we're getting visas and like the top tier talent, 'cause at the height of World of Warcraft... And nobody knew the team that they were coming on. It was Blizzard's next MMO top secret and they, you know, their first day at work, like some, you know, poor guy from Belgium just shows up [chuckles] and he's on his first day at work and he's like, "Oh, are we making, uh, World of StarCraft? Is that..." And they're like, "No dude, let me show you it." And he's like, "What is this game?" You know? [chuckles] We're, we were in that world and we hired way too many people. The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on, using other engines, using art from whatever. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team.

Episode duration: 5:10:11

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Introduction

Early games: Pac-Man, Zork, Doom, Quake

Writing career - 170 rejection letters

EverQuest obsession

Getting hired at Blizzard

Lowest point in Jeff's life

One of Us

Early Blizzard culture

Building World of Warcraft

How WoW changed video games

Single-player vs Multi-player

How Blizzard made great video games

Online toxicity

Why Titan failed

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