We dive deep into the creative process, and our roadblocks and success there, before pivoting into game design, and the wealth of games that came up in Divya's conversation with Anurati Srivastva and the fascinating ideas from Kahran's conversation with Katieann Vogel.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Bonding over the creation process is really a bonding moment. It's so arduous and fun, but it can be painful at times. It's very rare to find someone who shares that.
There's a lot of overlap between spirituality and self-realization, and we quickly found those are both places we've been spending time.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kain. And this is... Thinking. On Thinking.
Welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week we talked about our last two interviews of the season, with KDN and Anurathi. We had a really interesting conversation, talking a little bit about the creative process, we decided with KDN, but really diving deep into games and game design. A particularly fascinating mind and a place where Thivya has a wealth of experience.
We also gave you a little previews of what we're going to be doing next season. And we can't wait for you guys to join us on the journey. You know, Voodoo was one of my favorite parts about recording your conversation with KDN. Yeah. Like, I think, apart from Computational Mama, she's the only person that we have interviewed
who has listened to a bunch of our podcast episodes. Although Computational Mama didn't have a lot of context, because she didn't hear any interview. She was the first person I interviewed. It's just interesting to hear you talk to someone who in some ways knew what's up. You know, it just felt like you guys got into the groove of the conversation so quickly.
And you guys were able to riff off of each other, because, ultimately, podcast is a little bit of an improv kind of a thing. Like, you have to figure out the other person's energy and you have to move with it. It's sort of like how Anurathi and I ended up talking a lot about games, because we was just like, Oh, you played this game. What was that about? Right? Like, we just ended up doing a lot of that.
Yeah, but it was just interesting to hear you guys talk about just so many common topics and so many things, but also talk in a manner that is like how you and I normally talk. I don't know how to say it. I think it came out of very quickly feeling like we had a shared context, because we had read some of the same books and just I think there's a lot of
I'm not sure whether to call it spirituality or like self-realization kind of topics, but I think there's a lot of overlap between the two and that we kind of quickly found that those are both places that we've been spending time. I think a lot of how Katie, how she thinks about spending time in nature and how she thinks about just even that creation process. And I think a lot of ways bonding over the creation process is really a bonding moment, because it's so arduous and it's fun. But it's yeah, it can be painful at times.
And I also think it's very rare to like not that we have a lack of creative people around us, like you and I are fortunate that like so many people in our surroundings are creative folk. But it's still very rare to have these conversations where you are just talking about the process of making a thing and talking to another person as a creator. I mean, you and I don't talk to each other as a creator all the time.
No, but I think the thing that we do do is that we tend to talk to each other at multiple levels. And I was actually reminded of this because of someone I met last week and something he was saying to me was he was saying that, you know, a lot of times in the queer community, he finds it difficult to find people with depth or at least we're willing to show themselves as people with depth. I think that feels particularly apropos here because even when we were talking to someone like computational mama, right, and we want to talk to her about AI, we managed to talk to her at different levels, right?
You connected with her as a mother and how that kind of experience has changed her and even kind of how society has these obligations or expectations of you as a woman in India. And you kind of talk to her at that level as well. So I think that that's kind of what you and I managed to do. And even what Katie and I managed to do a little bit was like, yes, we were talking as people who create, but also talking as people who have tried to find that balance with also making money.
And then also talking as people who know that they have these shared experiences and kind of shared joys and like in nature and in finding just love, happiness. I think like one thing that I did feel like in the conversation with Katie and and in my conversation with Anurathi was that like the listeners don't know this. Next season, we are planning to interview pairs who work together like collaborators, whether it is like founders or like co-creators or other such folks. And maybe you'll get to hear the second half of brand story. Yeah, maybe we get to hear that also.
You know, that was another thing that I was thinking about because oftentimes when people talk about making things or when people talk about the creative process, while you would say collaboration is important, there is always this flavor of solitude in the process itself. And I was like, oh, it would actually be like a very different flavor of conversation when you talk to people who are working on things together and building things together. And what does that bring to the table? That's interesting. That reminded me of, you know, those two Israeli psychologists who created the behavioral.
Emo Travarsky. I don't remember the pronunciation of his name. Yeah, I think you're about right. When you hear in interviews what he talks about creating after his partner died, it sounds like it was just, it's so hard when you have kind of built your creative process with someone and then if you no longer have them. Yeah, it's also interesting, at least like for me personally, because I think I like psychologically worked solo until like very recently. I would say like until 2020 when Charu and I made our games together. And then like when we started working together, even though like I would be working on projects and I would be with teams, I knew that like psychologically I was still shielding myself from other people.
And it's only like now that I've sort of opened myself up that like, yeah, okay, this person will be able to impact me and will be able to significantly impact the thing that I'm making. As our longtime listeners will know, one of my very good friends and I have been working on a fantasy novel for the entire duration of our podcast. So at least two years at this point. And I was just thinking about how maybe we started it a little early before either of us had fully developed a creative process of our own. And then trying to kind of find one together when you aren't really sure what you yourself want or need has maybe been part of the struggle that we've faced.
I enjoyed your conversation with Anunati also. It was interesting to see you get to kind of dive more deeply as a game designer and kind of have someone who could meet you there. Because I think we talk about games sometimes, but you know, I never have examples of my own to tell you, right? It's only you telling me examples of games that kind of illustrate this cool thing. And her examples are so interesting.
It's yeah, it really makes me think about what kind of lessons we teach through all of the activities that we do and how much you kind of learn and take away things. Like you were saying about examinations. I think one of you was saying about examinations that the way schooling is it really teaches you that if you fail, that's it. Right. And having things in your life that can teach you to keep trying and trying. Yes, you die, but you get another life and you get to go again.
It's really nice, you know, I guess sports are kind of like that. But for a lot of people, sports are not accessible for whatever reasons. I suppose so. I was thinking when I was talking to Anunati that it would be interesting to talk to different people about where their inspiration comes from.
Like it was an interesting dive into why she chose the path that she chose because she had like learned certain things. I've had this very deep sense, especially more recently that for a lot of people, their primary source of media might be books or it might be movies or it might be music. Like for me, it is games. And just like, you know, understanding maybe it's a genre. Maybe it is like a specific author.
Maybe it's a specific, like, you know, style. Like there are people who are like, oh, I only watch sci-fi or like, you know, I will watch sci-fi, read sci-fi, play sci-fi, but sci-fi is my thing, etc. etc. Right. Like how does that sort of play into not just your creative process, but like how you go about life and what lessons have you learned from that? It's interesting because when you think about other art forms, I don't think people bring that, right? It would be so weird to be like, oh, I dislike painting or like maybe you have a bias towards impressionist, right?
And maybe your bias towards impressionism goes across painting and sculpture and like all these different mediums. And I think that's kind of the equivalent of like sci-fi as you were saying a moment ago. But I feel like some people have really kind of closed the door on games. And to me, it's like, it's an art form, right? It's like saying I don't like any sculpture. Yeah, but then many people are like, I don't like stand up comedy or I don't like improv or I don't like theater.
I don't like musicals. Like, you know, that's not genre. That is actually a media form of its own, at least for me. I agree with that. But I also wonder how much are those like Trump-unformed responses, right? You know? Because I think especially with something with what you started with, right? Would like stand up comedy or like improv in some cases, those are right? Where people have felt like this was the place that didn't feel safe for them for whatever reason.
I don't know. As you come to movies, I think, yeah, then there's other things that play. Maybe it's more like how you look at your time and, you know, whether you feel like this kind of singular focus is something you want to do for a few hours or not. I mean, that is true for games also, though. Like for a lot of people, their experience of games is more informed by addiction, you know, in all consuming nature. I have a friend, he does not have a good system that he like, you know, uses for his personal stuff. Because he feels like he's very prone to binges of all kinds. So he does not have a Netflix subscription.
He does not watch YouTube like he never logs in in his YouTube. So he never gets suggestions. So every time he goes to YouTube, it's for a specific reason. He does not play games. He does not like play games on his phone, on his computer. He has minimized all of that. And I think sometimes it's never about the medium. Sometimes it really is less about the medium and much more about how has that medium affected you in your interfacing with it.
Which could be a trauma informed response. Maybe not as maybe a slowcase tea trauma, not necessarily a big tea. Yeah. Yeah, not a capital tea trauma. I think also your conversation really reminded me of the topic we talked about, I think in our first season, but you know, something you and I have talked about a long time. Which is just that it feels like there's a gap in understanding about how
game designers or product managers are thinking about people's attention. And we are taking this like zero sum game, right? Where it's like, I have to win all of their attention and no one else can win any of it. And that just actually is going to lead to loss. Because when every single app on your device is trying to get as much of your attention as possible, like you don't have limitless attention. We're wearing down people by grabbing for them all the time. I actually just went on this retreat in the jungle in Costa Rica.
And so I didn't have my access to my devices for a week. And now I'm finding my Apple watch so annoying. I'm like, why did I ever want something to tap me every time I got a notification? Like, I don't need to respond to your messages. I can look at it in an hour. Yeah, it's also interesting like how there is voluntary attention and there is involuntary attention. Being present with something, you are giving your attention to the thing, whatever you're giving it to, right?
Even if you're just sitting and looking out of the window, that you are actually giving your attention to whatever is out of the window. But like that's very different. And in some ways, it feels like non consensual attention seeking when like apps and messages and notifications sort of start coming like
last night, I think when I was trying to sleep, somebody was messaging me and of course they were messaging whatever they were messaging. There was no expectation of an immediate response. Right? Like I responded to them in the morning. But the problem is that my watch and my phone were acting as if this person is expecting an immediate response. And like that is similar to what you said, right? Like the watch is annoying because like, why do you want me to respond right now?
Why is this important? And like there is almost just like no sense of priority. I can quote unquote waste my time if I'm choosing to waste my time. But a lot of it also feels like there is no choice. Like nobody asked me if I wanted to do this. It reminds me of something I used to think a lot about early in my career as a product manager, which I was like, I feel great technology should help us make decisions in our best moments for our worst moments.
And in some ways I feel like that paradigm has gotten really broken because now I maybe like I've decided I really want to focus on something. And I it's really hard for me to build that space, right? I want 20 minutes. I'm going to work on this thing. And it's just like if I had ever made one small choice, right? If I've forgotten to turn off notifications for this thing or like right one small little mistake and it's going to be so hard for me even in that moment to be able to do the thing I wanted to do.
Yeah, it's so so true because it's like do you want to turn off your device notifications? Do you want to turn on your iPad notifications? Do you want to turn on your watch notifications? Do you want to turn off your computer notifications? And then even on your computer, do you want there to be a dot even if the notification doesn't come to you because there are so many small ways of like just things grabbing at you almost. It's so interesting that I used to feel like it was such a benefit.
Right? I remember when I got my Apple watch, I was like, oh now I don't have to check my phone as much. But somehow that switched. Well, now I'm just like, I just don't need to check my phone as much and I wish I didn't have something reminding me to check my phone. I see what you mean. My mom recently got a garment like a few months back and
she's like, she just loves the fact that she doesn't have to pick up her phone. There are times when like, you know, she wouldn't touch her phone for the whole day. Like maybe in the night when she's back in her room, then she might pick it up because she's like, I know if there is a call, I'll get the call on my watch and I'll know that there is a call. Otherwise, like messages in most cases, they don't matter.
And it's just interesting that like, you know, for her, it doesn't create that connection of go pick it up right now or go respond right now. And maybe it's just the nature of the relationships that I have, you know, where so many of them are instant communication kind of relationships, right? Like we are texting. And to be fair, like the apps encourage it, right? You can see when someone is typing. And so you're like, oh, you were just responding to me. Now aren't we having a conversation? Yeah, it's very interesting. Like how the
asynchronousness of texting relationships has almost, I wanted to use the word it's become obsolete. Like when I match with people on dating apps, oftentimes, like, you know, people are like, oh, I'm so sorry. It took me time to respond. And I'm like, it's okay. This is like an asynchronous medium. But if a person is like apologizing multiple times, then it's a sign that they do expect me to respond
immediately because they think that they are breaking a social norm. And it's so interesting, right? Like generally, when you think about like attention grabbing stuff or like, you know, poorly using attention, people put games or gamification or those kind of things in the evil category. But in reality, if you stop playing the game, you stop playing the game. The game does not, you know, like stick around in your pocket the whole day, buzzing you five times a day.
Five is an underestimate. Five is such an underestimate. I looked at my phone once. I think I get like 200 notifications a day more. Wow. I think I respond to 200 notifications a day. I think it doesn't, it doesn't, it tracks how many things you actually tap on. It's insane. I wonder a little bit if that notion will start to percolate a little bit more. Like, do you feel like there's more credence in like product development or game development
communities being put on this notion that like attention is not sustainable? I don't think so. Though I think on the user side, things are changing. So I wouldn't say globally, but it's more like people who used to use their devices a lot. Somebody like you or me, we are a lot more mindful and like we are actively trying to cut down the time. And I think that's happening to a lot of people, at least like that's what I see.
Although I do not see more responsible behavior from the makers of these things. I think the makers are behaving more irresponsibly in some ways. I think there's like no hold spares. Yeah, it's also like there are zero incentives to care about the ethics of something, right? That you gain nothing out of like being ethical and you lose everything in the short term. I find it interesting how Duolingo goes into the negative realm sometimes. So like they will use
guilt, right? They'll use, they'll try to trigger some of these other kinds of emotions are not always just positive emotions. And I just find it interesting. I feel like they kind of have, at least in my view as a user, they kind of are saying we're trying to help you learn. So it's justifiable. And I don't know if it is. I don't know if it is either. I'm like, yeah, it's questionable to me. It's like, dude, the ends always justify the means. I don't know.
I also think that like treating full grown adults as students in fifth grade, there is also something very questionable about that. Really? I don't know that you guys could justify because it's like appealing to their inner child, right? You're trying to help them connect in a place where they were in a learning place. Oh, I don't mean in the playful parts or anything like that. But sort of the way Duolingo uses reprimanding language towards people is like,
oh, you lost your streak. Oh, you haven't done this thing in so long, like that kind of tone. Like that, I just feel like why are you infantilizing an adult? I never really felt that way. That's really interesting. Maybe you didn't lose streaks. Strong enough. I didn't feel the loss enough. But I do feel a sense of guilt when I think about the app,
which is interesting because it doesn't necessarily bring me back to it, right? But I mean, definitely the game mechanics worked, right? Because I have feelings about it. Or maybe I'll actually ask that in the question. Do you feel like if successful game mechanics do create feelings in the users or successful games? It's not just the mechanics. You are successful at creating the emotion in the user. But if the emotion is directed in the same spectrum that
you were intending, I think there is no success without intent, especially when it comes to design. Like you really need to have a clear idea of, oh, this is where I want the user to go. So does guilt make people more motivated to learn in small doses? Maybe. But is guilt a sustainable way of making people motivated to learn? I don't think so. And I don't think that, like, you know, there is any study that sort of shows that. But the problem is those kind of things would show up
as how likely is this person, let's just take Duolingo as an example. Ultimately, your aim of learning a language is to be able to speak in the language, right? Duolingo is really bad at that. Like Duolingo is really bad at making people feel conversational in a language. So it's almost like you're playing a game and you can infinitely keep playing the game because they really have not structured their system in a way that you become proficient at the language.
And in a weird way, they don't have an incentive to because they lose a user. In the short term, if you think about it, they are not creating deep connection users. They're not enabling people to learn four, five, six, seven, eight languages. What they are doing is like, oh, my God, I've been wanting to learn Japanese for five years, and I've been on my Duolingo course and I like, you know, make one month long streak,
but I break it. But the streak is not going to teach you Japanese. That's interesting. That almost reminds me of some of the conversations we were having with our client on the project we just finished. You want to try and draw as much correlation between the desired objective and the reward as possible. And as you're starting to think about what rewards you're offering, it's just so important to think about, is there a good matching between the frequency
that you want this action to be performed and the difficulty of the action. And then I think, also, I'm not sure if we went into this that much in our project, but the sentiment, which is kind of, I think, what you were saying, right, that when you feel a sense of victory or you feel a sense of guilt, is that actually appropriate for your end result? Right? Like if you're feeling guilty about something that doesn't matter, and you feel joy and success about something that is not correlated
with actually learning something, then we have an issue because you're creating the emotions, like you just said, you're creating the emotions, but for the wrong circumstances. This was something Anurathi and I also talked about games actually having shown to increase your resilience. Like kids who have grown up playing games, you have higher resilience, like higher failure resilience. There's also another thing, right? Like if you have grown up
playing sort of 3D or first person, third person or first person games, your spatial reasoning is a lot better. So like kids who have grown up playing those games, they're able to find their way and like remember pathways in real life situations much better. Because like, of course, you're navigating through a space and you have to remember the landmarks and oh, I have to go left from here and I have to take like, you know, this turn, etc, etc. And I do remember, like, you know,
for example, I would have played Witcher like what years ago, 2017, it's been a long time, right? And I remember what happened. I remember where I went and how I went there, etc, etc. That's so interesting. I played a lot of those expansion games like Age of Empires, the first Starcraft, right? And I mean, now we're talking like mid 90s, I want to say. But yeah, I think all of those, right, you have to, you keep expanding, you have to go
adventure, you have to understand where things are, you have to understand the patterns of how things appear. And I am very good at that now, right? It's very easy for me to like find how spaces will work and figure out like, where will a bathroom be? And like, you know, where will it make sense for, I don't know, navigating an unfamiliar airport? That's really interesting. Yeah, you sort of like gain a meta mechanical advantage that there is something that you learned
and it is implementable in real world. But I don't know how powerful those things would be if I was directly rewarded for remembering the parts. The same as like, you know, if a kid was directly rewarded for trying again and again in a game, I don't know how much they would learn that they can get up and try again when they fail. Like generally games that teach people that failure is good, are brutal about the failure. It's just that it's a zero cost to come back and try.
Apart from like, you know, battling your own ego, you can just come back and try that. Do you feel like a game like Hades is brutal about failure? No, right? No, no, Hades is very gentle. Okay, okay. I was going to say that I really love the way failure is treated in that game. Brutal about failure are games which are like souls like, so for example, if you've played
Hollow Knight or Dark Souls or Bloodborne or Elden Ring. Oh yeah, I played Elden Ring, I think, long, long ago. You drop all your stuff, right? If you die, you have to get back to their body. Oh my god, yeah. And sometimes it's impossible to get back to your body. Those are the games that treat failure brutally, but I think they teach you failure resilience the way endurance sports teach you failure resilience. You're like,
you can just go do it again and again and again and again. But again, they're not rewarding you. I think that like, this is the thing I feel like many people go wrongly about when it comes to like motivation. They feel that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is the same. Like, it's okay if a kid is doing better if they are getting rewards, it's okay if like, you know, my employees are doing better if I'm giving them bonus, it's fine, right? But like, what they don't think about is
like, what are the systemic effects of it? Right? Like extrinsic rewards are always rewards because they are limited. Inspiration is infinite. Praise is limited. You'll always feel like you're chasing a scarce resource. None of it is actually scarce. But the point is framing in the context around the reward in an extrinsic reward scenario only works because it is phrased in a scarcity space. Intrinsic rewards are generally infinite in their conception, because they're
like, oh, connection. That's infinite. Agency, that's infinite mastery. Yeah, you can keep growing, right? Like there is no end to how much mastery you can have. But there is only first rank in like a single first rank in a class, there is only a single top performer in your office. That's so interesting. It makes you think a little bit about where some of those programs fall down, right? And it's when you do try and do too much with them. When you do start saying, oh, we're
going to reward everyone and then it starts to become meaningless. Even when it's like you reward them for different things, it's like, why are you giving out so many rewards? Like just move on. It's a contrived problem, right? Like I wonder if motivation inherently is a wicked problem. Have we talked about wicked problems? A long time ago. Yeah, I feel like I don't know, maybe behavior and motivation, like together, they just feel like a wicked problem, I'm sure. Like as soon as
especially when you add like systems in it, it's like, ah, there will always be some incentives which are counter aligned. Switching gears a little bit now that we've come to the end of a season of having guests on our podcast, how do you feel about it? I loved having the excuse of just bringing our friends on and talking to them. Like for me, everybody was like, you know, somebody I had only met in like 2023 and I had found them like, ah, this is such an interesting person.
And it was just like really great for me to have like this hour of just sitting down with them and just chatting with them about things that matter to them in a way that like matters to me. In some ways, it felt like partially selfish, but I also feel like it's okay. You know that sneaky feeling of I'm getting away with something. Yes. Yes, absolutely. What about you? Well, I definitely loved getting the chance to ask people questions about how they do things,
right? Because I think I looked around me for people who I was just curious about it and getting a chance to kind of have those kind of open ended conversations with them was really fun because otherwise it's very hard, right? Like what is the context to ask someone about their history and their life and why have you made the decisions you've made? It's it's hard to kind of create that space sometimes. And I think our podcast has let me be able to create that space with it
whoever I want, which is very cool. I do kind of miss our podcast a little bit. And I think I've told you about this as I listened to some of our older episodes, I just feel like there was both an insightfulness and insights that we would sometimes arrive at together that we're really lovely. And I think it's hard to do that with our guests just because every time it's the first time we're meeting them and talking to them like this. So sometimes things come out, but it's not
with that same frequency that I feel like we kind of had in our earlier episodes. It's okay, we'll solve for that. We'll figure out how to do more of our conversations while also talking to many more interesting people. I do feel like we've become better at podcasting. So I wonder if someday we might be able to just live stream or something good that not even have an editing process at all. Sure. Let's try that.
Like I feel very happy that like our first season was an all women season. And there were multiple queer women on it. We didn't set out to go about it that way. But it was just great to have voices that you who are really incredible and who are doing like, you know, interesting work and like just living their life in interesting ways. And just like talking to them, it was, yeah, it was really quite something. It's also such a cross section of different ladies, right? And who have
made such different choices with their lives. It's kind of cool. Like, I guess the only kind of person that we didn't meet over the podcast was someone who had kind of maybe focused more on like a family life and less kind of focused on their career. I think that was the only like kind of archetype that maybe we didn't. I guess so. Maybe computational mama, I guess a little bit, but she's really balanced it, right? She's really like, yeah, she's
Yeah, that's also an interesting question, right? Because like computational mama is married. She has a child. Fran is married. Meghna is gonna get married. And I don't know about KTN. I don't know how you would define family focused in the world of today. That's also a good question. I think there was a stereotype in our parents generation of like, oh, it means that you're at home raising the kids. But I don't know if that stereotype even remotely
exists anymore in the same way. Yeah. One of my friends, she works at Amazon. She's pregnant. And she also started a masters in Georgia Tech this year. You know, you would not imagine pregnancy and a masters in computer science together. But like she's doing it along with like, you know, putting in 14 hours days at her work. I'm like, you're a little bit crazy, but I'm excited for you that you're able to do all of this. And I don't know, like it could also be a factor of like the
people that are around us, that who are like, because we would only keep people around us who we connect with on some level. That's fair. And my friends who have kind of stopped working and really focused on raising children, I kind of have lost touch with, unfortunately, right? It's just, I think exactly what you're saying, right? Like the things that kind of connected you and that you can connect over kind of start to slip away when you don't reinforce them. And I also feel like
over time, it becomes more and more about having multiple points of connection. For example, maybe initially you and I connected because, oh, we are both in Bangalore and we have a common friend, then it's like, oh, we are both queer. And then like, you know, there is another thing and then there is another thing. And then, oh, now we're working together. And then when you start working together, there are like, you know, 20 other things that you find out. Like, I don't think that like,
you know, as time passes, it's easy to sustain relationships which only have one or two joinery. I wonder about that. Yeah, because I sometimes feel like having shared experiences can be so powerful. But I do think they have a half life, right? And in some ways, yeah, those can be one strong joinery. But yeah, over time, they will half life, right? They will decay. And like, if you don't give more, it can really be difficult.
The music is by Akshay Ramuhali of BTRPT Music. Editing is by Beatnik.