PTW3 044 Gaming by Design: AI, NFTs, Tokenization, Blockchain with Justin Gary and Donna Mitchell

WEBVTT

00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:09.849
Thanks for checking in the pivoting to web three podcast. Go to pivoting to web three podcast.com to download and listen or web three game plan to check out the videos. Thank you.

00:00:12.550 --> 00:01:07.811
Oh, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to pivoting to web three podcast. And today I'm excited. I've been laughing and laughing and laughing because I have Justin Gary, and I'm sitting up here learning all kinds of good stuff. Cause, you know, I'm an old girl, so I get a little geeky sometimes, and sometimes I mess it up. But here we go. I finally have me somebody on the gamification side, and he's good. Justin Gary, a game designer with over 20 years of experience. You may know him as the author of think like a game designer and the host of think like a game designer podcast. Justin has also made appearances on the Tim Ferriss show. As the CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment, he has created popular games such as Ascension Deck building, Game Soul Forge Fusion, and Shards of Infinity.

00:01:07.915 --> 00:01:40.546
Infinity. Excuse me. Justin has had the privilege of interviewing renowned game designers, learning from their expertise and applying their insights to his professional and personal life. Additionally, he is a magic the gathering pro tour champion. So with that said, we have Justin Gary, and I've been so excited because I haven't had anybody in game gamification. Is that they're pronouncing? Is that how I should be introducing you with game gamification? What is it really called nowadays? I'm a Pac man girl.

00:01:40.578 --> 00:01:43.510
I'm way back beyond Pac man.

00:01:45.250 --> 00:01:59.474
It's. Yeah, yeah. So it depends on what we're talking about. Gaming is the broader term generally that we use to describe all the different types of things. And we make games that you play, like card games, like Uno. I have a game called you gotta be kitten me, which you can find in targets across the country.

00:01:59.602 --> 00:02:47.560
And games that are digital games like Salt Forge Fusion, that you can actually play on your PC, but also what we call as a hybrid game where you can play it a physical version and scan your cards into, make them digital, and now make them web three, which I'm sure we'll talk about. Gamification is something else that I work on. Gamification is typically using the principles of games to help make other things in life better, right? So you might gamify if you press in. Familiar cases are like things like Duolingo, where you can earn points and there's progress charts that help you learn a language, because games are fun, right? We can spend hours playing games and doing things that are even sometimes pretty repetitive, but we enjoy it. And the question is, can we apply some of those principles to make our life goals, achieving our life goals, our business, our products better?

00:02:47.719 --> 00:03:02.216
And so that's more what gamification typically refers to. And I'm happy to talk about both topics, but that's kind of the lingo. So you went through that real fast. So first, how did you get in the space, Justin? How did you end up doing games? How did you get there?

00:03:02.247 --> 00:03:59.731
What was your background? I really like talking to the audience about that because at the end of the day, this is very educational. It's kind of geeky, kind of techie, but I'm looking for early adoption. And basically the podcast is about letting folks know what's going on out there, what's happening, what's changing, what should we expect? So how did you get in this space? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so, you know, my story starts really just, you know, like a lot of people, I played games a lot as a kid. I played with my family. We play some cutthroat games of Monopoly around the kitchen table. But it really got going when I discovered a game called the gathering. And that game I immediately took to, it's a collectible card game. So what that means is that you can buy random packs of cards, just like baseball cards, and then those cards have game functions, and you build a deck out of those cards, and then you can go play against other people who've done the same thing. And so it's like, I like to describe it as kind of a combination between poker and chess. They have the tactical strategies of chess, but the hidden information of poker.

00:03:59.795 --> 00:04:17.117
But you get to decide what cards are in your deck and what pieces are on the board. So there's a lot of depth there. When I was 17, I became the youngest us national champion of that game. And I actually traveled around the world, playing in tournaments in Paris and Rome and Sydney, eventually winning the world team championships in 2003.

00:04:17.254 --> 00:07:50.291
And so that's why I paid my way through college, was playing cards. And so it was a really great to quit my job as a bus boy at the deli when I was 16 so I could start playing magic. And that was great. And then I honestly, I took a little detour after that. I went to go to law school because my parents were lawyers, and I thought I was supposed to be a lawyer, and I realized that wasn't the path for me. So I dropped out of law school a year later, moved from New York where I was going to NYU law across the country to San Diego to start working on games. I designed Marvel and DC games, games for World of Warcraft, a lot of really great things that I learned, and then eventually quit my job there and started my own company. And that was about 15 years ago now, believe it or not. And that's when I launched my first game, Ascension, which was a big hit. Started off as just a tabletop card game, then became an app that anybody can download for free on their Android or iOS device. We even have a virtual reality version. And now here we are 15 years later, I'm still releasing new content. We have a new crowdfund campaign that's going to be launching at the end of July. And so it's a really fun process, but where things get really interesting for me is not only do I have this game launched, and then I actually go to a conference where I, Richard Garfield, who's the guy that created magic gathering, is giving a talk. And he, of course I'm going to go to his talk because he's the master, right? He's the guy that designed this whole category, one of the biggest games in the world. I'm going to learn from the master. And then at the end of the talk, somebody asks a question and says, hey, what's your favorite game right now? And Richard says, ascension, my game. And I jump for dream. I mean, again, this is like dream come true. Like woohoo. In the back of the crowd, everybody laughs, the whole room. But it gives me my option to have an in to go start talking to him. And I do. And we talked for like 3 hours. It was so clear that we wanted the same vision for the future. And that vision became the original version of Soulforge, which was the first game on mobile, the first trading card game on mobile, and now we've revised it again to be Soul Forge Fusion, which is now the first trading card game that is, that has a physical game that's can be scanned into an online account, that can be played online, and that can also be turned into an NFT with its own web three token that's going to be launching within the next two months. And so that has been an incredible process. And in the time I've done that, not only, as you mentioned, that I write my book on game design to try to teach the process. I work with the Wharton School of Business to teach creativity and innovation. I lectured classes there. And we created games to actually help people to be more creative in groups. And so it's been a really fun process to take what I. My passion, which is that, you know, was gaming and being able to compete and travel and build relationships around the world, and then transform that not just into games that I create myself, that other people can play, but also do business and how I run a business. And then the principles, applying them to designing a web three token and designing systems that help people to collaborate better and work together. So it's been a really fun ride. So apologies for the long answer, but it's been. It's been quite the journey. I'm sitting up here saying, can I keep up? There's just so much. My brain just started going, so let me go before I forget. It sounds like this could be something that seniors could use. Well, which thing, in a cognitive standpoint or seniors, is a way to increase engagement on a clinical side, from a therapeutic standpoint, is that.

00:07:50.475 --> 00:07:57.732
Yeah, absolutely. So there's space, but it sounds like everything you just said, we don't have to go there.

00:07:57.915 --> 00:10:10.120
I just need. I'm happy to. All of that. I'm sitting here saying, so it sounds like I went on my clinical side of my brain. Yeah. So there's two things that are very strong clinical evidence to support in terms of long term cognitive and mental health. One is having some regular exercise for your brain, right? So they have a lot of these apps that are supposed to train your brain, right? And there's not. There's not a lot of evidence that they specifically do the job, but playing games, having challengings. So it could be crosswords in Sudoku's. It could be the kinds of games like I make, right. Having something that's challenging your brain and learning something new and consistently challenging yourself has really, really positive long term clinical effects. And it's just fun, right. We like to figure things out. That's what our brains are designed to do. You stop using it, you lose it. And then the other piece of this, which is even more important, honestly, than the cognitive challenge of games, is the relationships that you have, right. There's no bigger correlation in the data to happiness, to well being, and to health, actual health outcomes than the number of deep relationships and friendships you have, the amount of time you spend with people that you love, and if you look at the people who, you know, when you have the top five regrets of a dime, and you look at what people want when they're at the deathbeds, the time and the relationships are the number one thing that they want, they wish they spent more time on, or that they're grateful for when they did spend. And games are a great way to connect with people. The reason I played, I started playing magic because I loved the game. And sure, I made plenty of money playing, but it wasn't the money that kept me going. It was the friendships. And then those friendships I've kept for 30 years now. It's just for, you know, this incredible time that I now have because of those, because we've sort of gathered around the kitchen table playing games or gathered in a tournament in Rome playing games. The same can be true for digital games. I think when you talk about web three and the value of web three, in my mind is it allows us to build digital communities that can be self supporting, that can be decentralized, that can help connect people all over the world. And so I think gaming does that. I think the combination of gaming and web three is where I'm most excited to see that continue to expand. So thank you for that response, because that's really helped me understand how this all fits.

00:10:10.200 --> 00:11:21.720
Growing up, I guess I didn't have the kind of life where I could play a lot of games and do a lot of games, and I didn't have that kind of family, but I really love the ones that did. And people who play a lot of games now. So now I'm in nonprofits where gaming takes place. But let's talk about web three. So in the web three space, well, before we go straight into the web three space, so just to rewind it for those in the audience that are trying to keep up, because you talk a little fast, I just want to make sure so you can have regular. Well, in case some folks is out there with baseball cards from back in the day. So paint a picture for those folks that don't understand web three, decentralization and everything else now, like me and you, those people that are listening, that have the baseball cards and the collections, and what we used to do then and share and communicate and have communities around that. Can you walk us through, again how it fits into the web three space or how it doesn't and how it's changed? Yeah, yeah. That's a great, great point. Right. So for those of us that have, you know, been collecting things, and it could be baseball cars, I used to collect comic books. Right. Whatever. Different things.

00:11:21.759 --> 00:11:50.614
Right. You think about how you own something normally, right? I own it. I can use it if I want to use it. I can put it on my wall if I want to display it, or I can sell it to somebody else, or I can lend it to a friend all the things that you would normally do with stuff that you own, whatever it is in the digital world, we've entered a space where it doesn't quite work like that. If you have your account on social media platform, you can't really do what you want with it. In fact, the social media accounts could shut you down. They have all your data. They basically own everything.

00:11:50.701 --> 00:14:02.539
That's true with traditionally online games and everything else. Right now, if you use the Internet, your data is owned by some big company and whatever you have could be taken away from you pretty much across the board. Why web three is so exciting is that it doesn't work like that. It's a distributed network, which means that basically there's no central authority that controls everything. And so when you own something in web three, so imagine the same way I would hold a physical baseball card. Imagine I have a digital baseball card. It is special. I can know that it's relevant, and I can know that I'm the only one that has it, and I can know who owned it before me, and then it's mine and I can do whatever I want with. So I can trade it to you, I can lend it to you, I could sell it, I could just hold onto it. And so it's a great analogy. And this is why I think collectible card games and things like Salt Force Fusion are the perfect transition, because it's the exact same thing in sulfur fusion. If I have a physical version of deck, I can hand it to you and you can do what you want with it. In sol force fusion, once the web three launches, I have a digital version of that. I can digitally hand it to you and pass it off, and then you can do what you want with it. So I think web three is really about ownership of your data, ownership of your information, ownership of your digital property, which, let's face it, you know, as the world is evolving, digital property is becoming more important than physical property, right? I'm actually a digital nomad. I don't have a home. I've been traveling and living all around the world. My digital life is the real life, right, for me, right? The digital life and my Personas online and the things that I have, you know, all of my data, pictures or this I really care about. So having true ownership of your data and the ability to interact with other people and not have some central authority that can just take it away from you or control it is at the heart of what like web three provides. And I think there's a lot more places to go from there from just the simple, like, I physically think of it just like your physical cards and stuff you have in your, you know, money in your wallet or a baseball card collection at home. It's exactly the same thing, but just digitally. That's a really good explanation, and thank you so much. So with that said, when you're in the web three space and you have the games, so now that you're in that space, what can we be expecting down the line? What are some of the things that people can expect and understand, and what are you doing specifically in your games that's different from the others?

00:14:03.159 --> 00:14:16.967
Yeah. So there's a couple things that differentiate us from other games that are out there. One, as I mentioned, we're a hybrid game, which means we're not just a web three game, we're not just a web two game, and we're not just a tabletop game. We're all three together and each one connects together.

00:14:17.024 --> 00:14:20.470
So my physical decks can be scanned into an online account.

00:14:20.929 --> 00:14:33.950
My digital decks will eventually be able to print and have a physical version, so there's a real connection. So if you're not as familiar with web three, salt Forge Fusion is a great place to get started because you can understand the physical piece and kind of work your way into the, into the web three piece.

00:14:34.409 --> 00:17:05.010
In addition, we also are looking to have not just the ability for you to have your physical cards that you can play with and trade them and sell them and do all of those things, but to have the community really own the project over time. And so what we're doing is we're giving away for free a token. So anybody that plays the game now or plays the games before launch will be get a free of our web three token. You can use that to turn Dex into NFTs and trade them and do what you want, but also we'll be having a community fund where the community, the players will get to decide, okay, what new developments that we want to support, what new tournaments do we want to have rewards for? How will we push the project forward, how we reward the community, how we grow the community. And I think that there's something really empowering and exciting about that, right. If you love, let's say you love Star wars, right, or some major movie, then you feel like that can be a part of you, right? It's like a very exciting thing, whatever you grew up with as a kid, but it's some big corporation that owns them and you don't really have any control over it. You just hope they make good things and you get sad when they make bad things. But the promise of web three is that you can take these same elements, right, the heart of the soul forge world and the universe that we've created, and you can then take that and run with that ball and make some new content or make some apps that can interact with it or have supportive communities or streaming or fan fiction, whatever, right? And that can become part of an ecosystem that players and fans can all co create together and be rewarded for. Because you could make fan fiction for games, for ip that exists today, but you can't really monetize it, you can't really do anything with it. Whereas here it could be that, hey, our community is going to decide, we want fans to make full force fusion conflicts and we're going to a lot 1000 tokens to anybody that makes a cool, the best creators, and then the community can reward that. And so I think that ability to collaborate and that ability to feel a sense of ownership is something that is where we're headed. And then eventually the entirety of the process, running the servers, building the system, could over time be handed off to a community and thus survive forever. This is another piece that is a tough reality that, you know, when a company is running the servers for a game or any service, right, and then they go, let's say they shut them down or they run money or they just move on to another project, then you lose everything. Have you ever been on an email system? If you, you know, or you were on, you know, MySpace or whatever, some old system and it's gone, you lose everything. The promise of web three is that, no, look, this is on the blockchain.

00:17:05.075 --> 00:18:15.150
It's distributed. Nobody can take it away from you. I think that's really compelling also. It's very compelling. So what has happened when you. So let me ask you this way. So in the web three space, in the governance space, the global, the countries, the differences in how they're looking at web three or bitcoins or crypto rather, or anything, what have you found the differences to be as you've expanded? Anything that you can share beyond, like what's happening within United States, outside United States or just the hemisphere differences, or you could be as specific or as general as you'd like to be. What was your aha moment or what you learned in this whole governance piece? I'm sure there's a couple of things you've run into. Yeah, you know, it's one of those things that we're still actively learning and the environment is changing. So quickly, that it's very tough. And that's the thing that I think most creators are looking for right now in the space is a little bit of stability and having some clear rules to say this is okay, this is not okay.

00:18:15.309 --> 00:18:36.789
If you're releasing a token, you want to make sure that you don't run afoul of us securities laws, or you want to make sure that you're building things correctly. And the system right now incentivizes what they call meme coins, things like dogecoin and others. They don't really have an intrinsic utility, but they're just funny and just kind of people latch onto them.

00:18:36.869 --> 00:18:50.650
Whereas when you try to build coins and systems on the blockchain that have real utility, like what we're trying to do where you can, your currency lets you do stuff in the game, your nFTs let you play the game, lets you actually do stuff. It's a little bit trickier.

00:18:51.220 --> 00:19:19.518
I'm not, certainly not wanting to give any kind of legal and regulatory advice here. That's not my role. But I think it's the kind of thing that it's still sort of the Wild West. I think there's a lot of places outside the US that already are much more regulatory. They're more friendly regulatory rules than the US has. But the US is getting better. We're catching up. And I think any country that wants to be competitive in the future going to have to be, you know, kind of at the forefront of this.

00:19:19.534 --> 00:20:33.597
You have like, this is not going away. Blockchain is not going away. Web three is not going away. It provides real value to people, and it's just a matter of providing the right amount of protections because, let's face it, scams out there. There's a lot of, you know, people who aren't necessarily interested, and we want to have some protections against that, but we also want to have the freedom to innovate and the freedom to create new forms of governance and new forms of collaboration, because that's really what's happening here, is this amazing experiment. A lot like the US, the United States is really intended to be a lot of individual states all running their own experiments and haven't done just some structure overneath it. And what we want is the same kind of thing where there's a variety of different chains, right? We chose to build technology on the Solana blockchain, but of course there's bitcoin and ethereum and a bunch of others, and there's a lot of interoperability. The long term vision for Solford is that you'll be able to move between chains. And so the technology is evolving very quickly. The regulatory landscape is evolving very quickly. And I think what's important to keep in mind as a creator is, one, obviously stay informed, stay connected, and two, just always focus on the most important thing, which is true in gaming as it is in business, which is how do I provide more value to my customers? How do I provide more value to the people that I want to show?

00:20:33.733 --> 00:20:54.781
And so don't just jump to web three because it's the new buzzword. It's like, oh, I'm going to use web three and AI and blah, blah, blah, whatever the new hotness is, think, okay, well, how does this help? How do I actually make my product better, make my service better? How does it make the people that I want to work with or that I want to collaborate with, or that I want to have join my community? Does it make their life better?

00:20:54.925 --> 00:21:16.980
I think it's always just the fundamental principle I rely on when I approach a new technology. So when you're looking at the technology and from the functionality and utility you mentioned interoperability. Interoperability is really important. But can you explain to the audience how that's important on the game side, why that's something that's necessary and beneficial?

00:21:18.240 --> 00:21:21.872
Yeah, so I mean, let's bring it back to it.

00:21:21.935 --> 00:22:08.930
Yeah, let's bring it back to the physical analogy here because it makes it easier, right? If I, if I, for a collectible card game like magic gathering, if, why, part of why it got so popular is because it already had a lot of people that could play the game, right? If I go, if I go into any game store in the world, pretty much most of them are going to have synchronicity players there. And I know I can play my parts against you. And if I'm playing a digital game, I want to be able to find other players. I want to find other people that want to play the game. And so if I'm just locked in on one platform, then that limits me to only the people that are interested in that platform. And I only can sell you cards or trade cars or buy cards from somebody that's on that platform. But if it's interoperable, then okay, now other worlds opened up. So even though I think I really like this, a lot of blockchain and it's got a great community that I think I encourage people to join.

00:22:09.269 --> 00:24:16.569
The Ethereum community is much bigger. So we're also going to be airdropping some of our token to people in the Ethereum communities. And we're working on ways for them to be able to transfer assets over into the game and vice versa. So you have a bigger audience, a larger pool of people that you can reach, and it gives people more freedom of choice. Right. If they don't want to spend their time on Solana or Ethereum or bitcoin or whatever chain, they can stay with the chain they want, but still interact with the other systems. I think one of the challenges of modern business in general is discoverability and saying, okay, how do I find my customers, how do they find me when I know that they're going to like what I have? And so interoperability gives you a wider base to be able to reach people and to serve them the way that they want to be served. So it's just, there's nothing more important when it comes to the kinds of games that I make than the ability to have a community of people, you know, decently sized community, people we call kind of reaching critical mass. So that I know now I'm part of this community and I get to feel really good about being a part of that community. So interoperability is one of the important puzzle pieces to building a great, large, sustainable community. So you just walked right into it. So this is my next question. So I'm sure there's folks out there that had ideas that wish they had a game or have an idea, they don't know what to do or how to do it or what elements make a good game. Or if I got an idea, how do I know if it's a good idea for a game? Can you help how you get into this design mode or development? And I guess you got to design it and develop it or think it through first. But just to play a game right now, if there's people listening and said, I've been thinking about this game for 20 years, I don't want to die with it, you know, let me. What do I do? Girlfriend, I hope you're going to talk about this. So let's get to it. What they do in their head, rolling around and they got a game, they've been thinking about it, drinking about it, and doing all kind of stuff with a boy. I wish we could. What would you say? Yeah, so that's a great question. And I'll start off with the basics here. Right. I've written a book on this very subject. So all the principles to make this, to make your own game are in this book, think like a game designer. It's also an audiobook format if you just like the sound of my voice.

00:24:16.990 --> 00:24:56.096
But I'll give you the basics here so you don't have to read the book if you don't want to. The key to building a great game is very much similar to the same thing, building a great product, writing a great book. It's that you have to follow a very similar process. Right. So I'll tell you a little story. Right. So when I went, I kind of glossed over this part of my story, but when I went from being a professional game player and a failed law student to go become a game designer, I had no idea what I was doing. Right. The fact that I was good at playing games had no correlation to, how do you get good at designing games?

00:24:56.127 --> 00:28:26.503
They're totally different skills. And so I was like, well, okay, I don't want to go back to law school, so I'm going to get fired if I don't do a good job. So I'm just going to fake it till I make it. I'm going to figure this out. And so I started talking to all the best designers in the world. I started researching and reading books about design, and I started practicing very quickly because my job depended on it to get good at the skills. And so that process of taking my analytical brain and turning it into a creative brain was very tough, and I wanted to make it easier for other people, which is why I wrote the book. But the number one lesson is, there's no magic secret sauce, right? I used to think that the creatives were just like, different kinds of people, right? And they would be like some creative person that was like, go into a cave and work on an idea and come out with this brilliant thing. And I was like, I'm not that person. And the end that is, that is the farthest from the truth. Now, have I talked to people from all industries, and great authors like Stephen Press failed to build my podcast, Grammy nominated producers like Morgan Page, as well as the top game designers and people throughout the industry. And they all have a similar process. And that process is what I call the core design. And the core design loop has six steps. Inspiration, framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating. Okay, and I'll go through each one briefly here. Again, I flush this out more in the book, just so you have it. Inspiration is, where's your idea coming from and what is the heart of your thing? And that should always be able to be expressed in terms of what's the experience? I want to create for my customer, what's the emotional impact of what I'm doing? What is it that's going to be different for them before or after? Right? What's that? What does it feel like to play this game? And it could be told in stories, narratives, whatever. It's like Lord of the Rings meets Star wars. It's like a monopoly game, but without money. Instead, you're trying to lose all your money as possible, whatever some inspiration is. Corbin framing is really important where you put a box around your idea, right? A lot of times people will think about, oh, if I just have a blank piece of paper and anything I can do, that's the best idea. And if you ever stare at a blank piece of paper with no constraints, you realize that's very difficult. So putting constraints on your idea, saying, hey, I want something I can playtest and prototype in two weeks. I want to make a card game I could play with my family on the 4 July weekend. And now all of a sudden, you're going to have a much tighter band of stuff to do. Having deadlines and having brainstorming is where you try to come up with as many ideas as possible, and then you filter those down into an organized system and then try to end up with as few ideas as possible that you actually try to prototype. And the key to prototyping is simple, ugly, fast as possible, you can, right? Don't try to make it pretty, don't try to make it great, because your ideas, as brilliant as you think they are, they're never as brilliant as that. There's always problems, 100%. I've been doing this for 20 plus years. My ideas still have massive problems by prototyping it and testing it. And you take feedback from people, and you learn how to take feedback without your ego getting in the way. You can take in good feedback, use that to then iterate, which means you circle through the loop again, and the more efficiently you can go through that loop again and again without losing your heart, and by being able to listen to others and be able to take those things in and take your core idea and craft into something great, that's how you make a great game, great business, write a book, all those things. So that's the heart of the lesson, obviously, a lot more to unpack, but that's my short version. Well, I'm glad that's your short version. And everybody is, they can hear and see that you have a book out there, so I'm sure they'd be glad to connect with you. And if they'd like to connect with you personally or how do you prefer to be contacted? Yeah, so you can reach out to me on x.com, what used to be Twitter.

00:28:26.672 --> 00:28:51.596
Justin gary. I also have a sub stack, justingary designs. So you can just do. Justingarydesigns.com will take you there. And that is where I post all my articles. And I have a lot of this content that's written up there for free. My podcasts, you can write and comment to me there. So those are the easiest ways to get in touch with me. And then if you want to find out about my games and the projects I'm working on, stoneblade.com has all my games, ascension, soul force fusion.

00:28:51.708 --> 00:29:29.365
You can actually sign up for our email list and you'll get notified of any new products and cool stuff. Well, I just thought of something else. We got a few more minutes. Just a couple of more. Okay, so you've got all these games out there. What's the difference between the games for people like me that are listening, we're not in the games or understand it, but now we getting into the games, we got time, we retired, or we just in society and we want to play some games. Tell us the difference between everything that you're doing and how you did it real quickly. Yeah, so I've made dozens of games, so I'm not gonna go through all of them, but I'll go through the big ones. The big ones. So this one here is exciting. This is, if you don't know games, play. You gotta be kidding. All right.

00:29:29.438 --> 00:29:39.221
If you're in the US, you can get this at any target anywhere in the nation. We have international launches coming soon, and it's just a adorable, fast, fun game. You can play it with up to ten people.

00:29:39.405 --> 00:29:50.678
You're just bluffing and pretending that you're trying to figure out how many of these animals have different accessories on them. And so you're kind of like, bluffing a little bit. And it's, you know, really fun, quick fitting game.

00:29:50.814 --> 00:30:26.955
We also, you can also print your own pets onto the included cards that we have here. We have a little sticker paper and cards. You can actually include your pets in the game. So if anybody has pets for your family, this is a great one. And then, so that one's just like a fun light. So if you're new to games, you're not really sure, but you want to bring something to the table with your family and friends, that's where I recommend you start. I'll show another one here this one, actually, almost nobody's seen this version. This is Ascension Legends. It's one of the new expansions for my game, Ascension, which is the game I launched my company with. This is the one that we're going to be doing a crowdfund for at the end of July. I think the exact date is July 24 as we launch that.

00:30:26.988 --> 00:30:30.279
So this goes live. Anyway, this one is.

00:30:30.940 --> 00:30:34.519
Okay, great. So then perfect. So this will be, you can follow it on gamefound.

00:30:35.059 --> 00:31:13.226
And that one is a, you can also play it for free if you just download it on your iOS or Android device. And then it's a, it's a death building game, which means it's sort of like magic, the gathering in those collectible games, but instead of in magic, as I explained earlier, you buy packs of cards and you go from that, like all the different packs of cards and try to build a deck out of it. In Ascension, you just all play out of the same box and you actually build a deck as you play the game. So you start, everybody starts with the same basic deck of cards, and new cards show up all the time and you're adding those to your deck. So you get the fun of like a game, like magic, but instead of having to spend hundreds of dollars to buy packs, you just get a single box and you just play, and you can play as much as you want.

00:31:13.258 --> 00:31:29.355
And so it's a really fun way to distill that. So if you're interested in getting started in this world, that's a great one. And since this is a web three podcast, I would be. If I didn't talk about Soul Force Fusion, that would be a mistake. Soul Force Fusion is the one I co created with Richard Garfield, the guy that created magic, one of the best designers in the whole world.

00:31:29.468 --> 00:32:19.069
And that's when you can now play. We have it in early access on Steam, so you can just search soul forge Fusion. S o l F o r G e. It's in my background here. And that one, you can play a demo for free, or you can play the physical version of the game. And that one is, it's a like a collectible card game, because every single pack you buy is different. But we use digital printing technology, so they're not actually the same cards ever. Like, the deck you have if you buy a pack is never going to be the same as anyone in the world. And we've guaranteed that throughout the digital game and the physical game. So it's this really cool way. We say there's more deck possibilities than the atoms in the universe. So if I'm going to go on a spectrum of like, easy starter stuff, let's start with you gotta be kitten, middle of the road ascension. It's like a nice kind of way if you want to start getting into more of the kind of fantasy card game world to the, like, hey, this is the coolest, most revolutionary thing that's out there.

00:32:19.150 --> 00:32:25.809
That's all forged fusion. So depending upon where you are in the audience listening, those are the different spectrums I would go for in terms of the games.

00:32:26.789 --> 00:32:44.930
So is there anything that you're involved with we need to know about, or any concerns that we're not aware of, or is there any ethics or biases or, like, AI that you got to look out for in games or. That's the only topic I really didn't get into with this whole game piece. Is there anything that you'd like to share before we close?

00:32:45.500 --> 00:32:54.051
Well, yeah, that's a lot. That's a wide, that's a wide net you're casting there, but catch whatever you want.

00:32:54.236 --> 00:34:56.898
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I'll say is, I think the, the AI topics really interesting. And actually, I have a new podcast coming out with Ethan Malek, who is a professor at the Wharton School of Business who I've known basically my whole life. He just wrote a New York Times bestselling book on AI called co intelligence. It's, I think, the best book to explain the current state of AI and where we are today. So I'd recommend people read that book, but also you can just listen to the podcast episode that'll be coming out probably in August at this point. But this AI is a powerful, revolutionary technology. I could spend an entire hour plus talking about it. I think it's the kind of thing that we have a lot of ethical challenges. Just like we mentioned with blockchain. Right. People can use that technology because you have a lot of freedom. You can control your own currency, your own digital objects, and that means sometimes people can steal them from you or they can scam you. And AI is also, it can do a lot of work that you don't want to have to do. It can also do work that you do want to do. It's better than you. And that can be a really tough thing. Right. AI is going to be understanding how to work well with AI and leverage its abilities to make you more productive, but not, but be ethically conscious of, hey, I'm not going to just do this and take away jobs from other people. I'm going to see how I can create more jobs and how I can enhance the products that I need to do. So it's a deep conversation which I wish I had more time to get into you with, but I will just say that there's two things that you can always benefit from and regardless of where the technology of the world goes, right, one is to really just work on your ability to adapt and create with whatever is coming in. And that's the core design loop I explained earlier, I think is the best tool I know to do that. You want to constantly try new things. So if it's web three and this is new to you and you're scared of this stuff, just try it out. Go get a digital wallet, try to buy a few currencies or buy an NFT and see what happens. Just assume that it's money, just as an educational expense, and then try to play some of these games. Try to play soul Fortune, try to play some of the other games out there. Just see what it's like and experiment and play with it. And the same thing with AI, you should be playing with AI and trying it out.

00:34:57.059 --> 00:35:24.639
And the second thing is you're never going to regret building relationships. We've talked about community a lot in this podcast, and I think that the relationships you have, the genuine connections you have, that you can share your ideas with, you can share your fears with, you can try stuff out with, you can learn from each other that is going to be useful. Don't care whether AI takes over the world or blockchain takes over the world or some new technology that we haven't even thought of yet takes over. Having friends and relationships and people that you can count on, that you can learn from, that's always going to be valuable.

00:35:24.679 --> 00:35:41.954
And so I think just work on creating and testing your ideas and work on genuinely building relationships with people that are interested in the thing, things you are and that can help lift you up. And regardless of where the technology goes, you're going to be in a good spot. Justin Gary, I really enjoyed this podcast and having a conversation with you.

00:35:42.001 --> 00:36:00.322
I'm sure our listeners are going to enjoy listening to this podcast and learning so much about games and what you're doing, how you're doing it and what's going on in the future. So I'd like to thank everybody for listening. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. We're here to serve.

00:36:00.385 --> 00:36:14.489
And thank you for listening to pivoting to web three podcast thanks for checking in the pivoting to web three podcast, go to pivotingtweb three podcast.com to download and listen, or web three game plan to check out the videos. Thank you. We're shaping tomorrow together.