Video Games: Optimized Learning Environments — David Edery

Deep Future

David Edery is a buddy of mine who I think you guys are really going to love. Dave is one of the co-founders he's the CEO of Spry Fox, which is a unique game development studio here. They're based here in Seattle, but they have people spread out. They made Alphabear, Steambirds, Triple Town, and Realm of the Mad God.

These are games that all together have 50 to a hundred million people playing them worldwide. Dave is a very successful game developer making really delightful games. They're trying to make the world a happier place. You should definitely play their games on your phone. Dave used to work at Microsoft and and he wrote a book about transforming business with what can be learned from video games. The book is called Changing the Game. I think even now a lot of those lessons can be super relevant.

I think of games as like the future of almost every industry. Video games are an industry where there's a lot of competitive dynamics. Unlike almost everything else, no one's paying you to play a game. If you get bored, you'll quit. And nobody wants to read a manual to play a game or take a class to play a game.

So the games have to teach you how to interact with them. And there's so many things that can be done with video games. I've seen so many other industries learn from games. We also talk about the capacity of games to be used for education and learning.

I'm really interested in that topic and have thought a lot about it over the years. Dave is a guy that you would want to talk to about that. He also has a really unique culture in his company that he's tried to create. As well as a really unique view of developing culture in online communities. He has a lot of experience with this.

I think anybody in the game industry knows Dave by now because he's also involved in creating a community out of game developers. There's a lot to learn here and I'm hoping that you guys really enjoy this episode.

Pablos: I have a zillion questions for you. This is going to be fun for me. At this point, you had a super interesting and maybe not extremely long but long career in building video game companies. Video games are the glue or something that connects a whole bunch of people to computers, computation, coding and all this stuff. People don't realize how responsible they are for scaling the interest in personal computers. That's important because it attracted a lot of people, money, investment and even things we take for granted, especially like the obvious ones like GPU's are almost entirely made possible by the demand from the video game industry.

To some extent, ramping up the scale, reducing costs on hardware, all the things that exist in the CAD industry, for example, for making 3D models and designing stuff on computers, that industry can pay $10,000 or $20,000 for a workstation that's top of the line and super-fast to render models. They don't have economies of scale. They're never going to get the custom hardware they would want. They're never going to get the price down to the point where a lot of people could use it, but video games did that for everybody. The industry itself is the first entertainment-related industry that got computers connected up to real people.

David: I don't think it's a coincidence that when you look at systems that are being put in place to teach kids how to program, a lot of them have a big focus on, “You can make a game this way.”

Even when I was a kid, we didn't quite have video games or the ability to make them, but we had things like logos, which was like, “You can make this thing move on screen like a video game.” It