Creating Worlds, Game Design & Education w/ Seth Coster

Chris McNutt: Hello, before we get started, I wanted to let you know this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons. All of our work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast, are available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Paul Kim, Brandon Peters, and Dino Lowe. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Hello and welcome to Season 3, Episode 20 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. In this podcast, we are joined by Seth Koster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotts Shenanigans, who have seen incredible success on their video and mobile games, best known for titles Crashlands and Levelhead. Butterscotts Shenanigans was founded by three brothers with no explicit background in video game creation. Seth was studying to become a certified financial analyst, and he started a law graduate program, and he soon realized that the games that he was making in his free time were just a lot more enjoyable to do. So him and his two other brothers started their own company. Brothers Sam, Seth, and Adam Koster also host their own podcast called Coffee with Butterscotch. So Seth, the reason that we invited you on today was because we just saw this inherent connection between video game design and education, as well as your own story connecting to a lot of our work at HRP. And I mean, in addition, you also know Nick, you went to college with him. So I use a lot of game examples in my class. I introduced the concept of learning by doing by showcasing a clip from Indie Game the Movie, where the developers of the game Super Meat Boy, they explained that teaching a player to run by having a pop up pop up and say, you know, press B and forward to run is not very effective. 

‍

Indie Game the Movie: When you start out, you want to teach the people you want to teach the player how to play and you need to make sure that they understand every mechanic of the game. So every level in the first chapter needs to have some example forcing the player to do something in order to beat the level that they will need further in the game. So like there's a level, I think level three, just is just a gap. And the only way to get over that gap is to hold down run and jump. You can't get it any other way. You can't just keep jumping around, you won't jump far enough. And that's to make sure that the player understands that in order to get over far gaps that you need to press and hold the run button and jump across it. It's simple. It sounds like a no brainer, but it's something that usually in games it would just say, hold run to jump far. Most people will just skip the text and they will forget. Now, just in case somebody didn't play that level, a couple levels later, I reiterate and I give them another section of a level that requires them to run and jump to make sure that they know how to do it because it's important. Like all these mechanics are very important. And each level in the chapter is another level that pushes that. Like there's a level where you need to continuously jump up one wall because there's no other wall to jump to. That's me teaching the player that you can do this and everybody in the world will see a problem and want to solve it. So if you see something where it's just a wall and you don't realize you can keep jumping up the wall, you're going to try it right away. And once you try it yourself, you taught yourself, not only do you feel smart, like you've figured out something yourself, you also now for sure know how to do that from then on in the game. So all these levels of introduction go, they go through everything and once you've basically cleared out all the things you can do with Meat Boy, then you start introducing new mechanics.

‍

CM: And I want to dive more into the game development side here in a second. That's really going to be the bulk of the podcast. Before we even get there though, let's talk a little about who you are and how you basically got into the video game industry because you didn't start off pursuing that. Why did you not just start with video game development?

‍

Seth Coster: So I'm from Iowa, which there it is. That's the thing right there. In Iowa, there's no games industry there. You may not have known that the original creators of Guitar Hero were in Iowa City. So there was one. They got bought by Activision and then immediately closed because Activision was like, all right, well, we got this IP now, see you later. So everybody came to the office after the buyout and found security guards handing them their severance packages. So that's kind of like Iowa's history with game development. And so as I was growing up, I was always interested in games, but they just seemed like these things that emerged from the ether. You know, you'd go to a GameStop or CompUSA at the time, which I think is out of business now. Go to the shelves and there were the games. Don't know how they got there. Don't know how they were made. And so it was always kind of this just weird opaque thing. I knew there was programming involved. So when I started college and so, Nick, you and I went to college together. I just want to throw that out there as get that out of the podcast. I started college in California, actually. I went to the University of Southern California for my first semester to pursue film. And I got into the film school and I thought, well, I mean, here I am in California. I think video games might come from here. So I'm going to start poking around in computer science and kind of see if I can learn some programming because I'm confident that that's involved in game development. Took some computer science courses, got Ds. Could not figure out how to program through that means. And so I kind of gave up on that. And ended up transferring over to University of Northern Iowa, which is where Nick and I both went. And that's where I studied business and finance and all that stuff because I kind of resigned myself to thinking, clearly, I don't have what it takes to actually build games myself. But I do know that it's a business, right? Like there's a business side of everything. And if I can learn a lot about that, then I can work in any industry, including games. So I kind of went on from that. I got my CFA charter, so I became a chartered financial analyst. And after that, I started going to law school and I was doing a joint MBA law degree. So I was working on that stuff. And in the process, this was around the time that some new tools started being brought to market. Tools like Unity 3D, which is a really popular tool nowadays to build games, as well as GameMaker. And so I discovered GameMaker while I was in law school. And it had this kind of like drag and drop interface where you didn't have to really know how to program. You could just kind of like throw these little commands and kind of chain them together and you didn't have to memorize them or anything. You could just kind of piece it together. So I started making a game in 2010 while I was in law school and it pretty quickly consumed all of my time. And I kind of like migrated to the back of my law school classrooms and I was just like making games instead of taking notes. And after my first year of law school, I realized this is just how I'm going to do it. So I kind of transitioned out of that into actually programming. So I slowly transitioned from the drag and drop interface over to code. And after my first year of law school, I started applying for game development jobs, got one, and then within about a year after that was running my own studio. So it was kind of a super roundabout path. And I had got it in my head that I wasn't capable of doing this, primarily because the normal avenues that you would take, like go to school, go to college, take a class to learn the thing, I just completely failed at those. And it was especially, I think, devastating for me because school had always been no problem for me. Like I'd take classes and I was one of those people who would kind of like cruise through the class and get a B without any problem and oftentimes an A. And then I'd go into a computer science class thinking I'm hot stuff and then just completely bomb the thing, which really just like put a hit into my confidence. So I think that speaks a lot to how people learn differently and how not every approach is going to work the same for everybody. And I think there's an unfortunate reality to that, which is that the path to becoming good at something, the path to learning a skill or whatever, is rarely clear and the options you have to kind of get there are also rarely clear, especially with such firmly established norms of how people learn things like just college classes, going through training programs, that kind of stuff. So yeah, I'm fully self-taught and been doing that for 10 years now.

‍

CM: That's interesting, Seth, because it ties into so much of what we believe in systemically changing the education system. I was kind of the same way. I did pretty well in school without a lot of effort in history and English, but I did very poorly in math and science. So I didn't really pursue them. And that wasn't really because I didn't find it interesting. It's just because of the grade and the way that it affects my self-esteem. However, that means I missed out on a lot of interesting things because I was afraid of failure.

‍

SC: Yeah. Yeah. It pushes you to take things that you're pretty confident you already know, you know, so that you can just get those grades. It kind of pushes you into that like talent mindset, which is I'm naturally good at math and I'm naturally bad at writing. And that's just naturally who I am. And these are fixed aspects of my person, you know? And I think that that and there's also that problem of recovery, which is you're halfway through a semester, you've got an F. What's your best chance? A C maybe, right? So you're just you're just screwed now. That's just where you're at. And you can never get that A. Right. So even if you turn around and learn literally all the material and ace the final hundred percent and demonstrate, you know what, I have full mastery over this subject. Guess what? You're average. You got to see. Right. And I think there are certain aspects of that, that that make it that make learning a punishing experience instead of an exploratory, fun, just enjoyable thing.

‍

Nick Covington: Yeah. I was I was literally just talking with my students today about this because we spent a lot of time. I do grading a lot a lot differently than most classes. So we were actually just looking. I have the slide up for my thing to talk about Cone's work where he says, right, grades reduced student interest in learning. Grades reduce student preference for challenging tasks. Grades reduce the quality of student thinking. And I mean, Seth, I think, you know, you nailed that grading quandary with the perspective of somebody who has been in education for a decade, you know, is like, how is it that kids can do that? And then, yeah, we put them in these narrow boxes that say that they're perfectly average. You know, it's crazy because I use butterscotch shenanigans a lot with my kids because I teach an econ class to talk about that exact same kind of thing with entrepreneurship is like we put up these narrow boxes for kids to say that if you don't go through these particular pathways where you're not going to unlock X. And the reality is you don't know what X is ever going to be for you until you go off and try to do something. And then I pull up a BS on the Google Play Store and I was like, look at how many downloads Crashlands has at $4.99 each and do the math there, guys. And then I pull up all the bios and I say, like, here's Seth Koster. I went to college with Seth and he was studying economics. And then I said, here's his both of his brothers who have no experience in gaming. And then I play the videos in the games. And, you know, we talk about that passion and that drive and how no amount of like, you can't backfill or educate that passion and that drive to want to do something. But, you know, as soon as you set your minds on something, then you can absolutely find, like you said, any pathway to get to whatever that next goal is. And it's just it's so cool to be able to use that as a powerful example, you know, of Iowa boys made good.

‍

SC: Yeah. One big aspect of being a game designer is is understanding psychology, you know, understanding how people respond to their environments. So there's the you know, you heard of the fundamental attribution error, which is like you see somebody doing a thing and then you assume, hey, that's just the kind of thing that that person does. Right. Like that's a that's just a thing that's baked into their persona. So maybe you see somebody on the street yelling at somebody just randomly like, wow, that person's a jerk. Right. It's possible that maybe they're yelling at somebody who just attacked them, you know, like you don't really know what exactly it is that's happening. And maybe this person has never yelled at anybody before and maybe they never will after this. But you just caught them in that moment. And that's now something that you believe about that person. And and I think, you know, understanding that people sort of like who they are is a really, really potent combination of something internal and external. Right. So people respond to their environment, they respond to their circumstances, they respond to how they're treated, just all these different things. And so when it comes to learning, when it comes to the grades, all that stuff, you know, you can like, you know, you said that you can't like educate the passion into somebody, but you can educate it out of them, which which is which is unfortunate. And that that comes to do with the psychology of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, which is, you know, there's all these studies about how, like, as soon as you start paying somebody to do a task, they want to do it less. Right. Because now they've all of a sudden started to think about the value of the thing that they're doing instead of just enjoying it and getting the inherent value that comes from it. And of course, like any kind of reward punishment system, like like a grading system or something, can only really serve to to do that. And it's unfortunate. But I think I don't really know of a better way. And I think that's the that's the problem. I don't know.

‍

CM: Do you ever find yourself pursuing research then to design your games? Like, are you seeking this out actively?

‍

SC: Yeah, but it's it's always to to meet a specific end. So I think a really weird example is we have this game crash lands and in the game you you crash land your escape pod on this alien planet. You got to go harvest materials and and you always come back to your base. Right. Like you set up your little base, you build you put floors down and walls and you could build furniture and stuff. You go out and you collect materials. You come back to your base. And there was a time where the game was structured such that that instead of being in the middle of this area, you were on the edge. So you would kind of land like on the edge of an island. And as you got toward the center of the island, things would get more difficult. So the enemies would get stronger and the materials would become more valuable and that kind of thing. And it felt terrible. And it doesn't make any sense intuitively, because who cares, like you're just going out in the world and collecting materials and coming back. Right. And then we came across this study of how spider monkeys forage. OK, and and researchers had tagged spider monkeys and tracked their movements and noticed that they would create this kind of looping spiral pattern. So they would have like a central base of operations and they would kind of go out, maybe like go out north one day for a couple of hours and get some food and come back. And the next day they'd kind of go northeast and loop back and come back. And then the next day they go southwest and loop back. And sometimes they would like loop out farther. But it was always like built around some centralized point. And it was always like they would always end up making a circular pattern. Right. And so so we thought maybe this is kind of baked into people as well. Like we have this idea of there being a home, like you have a home base and and it feels like that should just be in the middle. It should just be in the middle of everything. And as you as you move out into the world, you're going to make these patterns and you kind of loop out and you can go farther and farther. And so we started watching players movements once we transitioned to that model. And players were doing the exact same thing that these monkeys were doing. So. So the way that we kind of approach these problems is, you know, we always have a theory of like, OK, here's what we want the player to do. Let's build this game system and see if it works. And most of the time it doesn't work on the first on the first try. So that's when we have to go in and dig in and do the research and try to figure out what's happening.

‍

CM: So and I want to talk to you about design by chaos. So this is the planning process that you spoke about at the Game Developer Conference this year. What does that mean to design by chaos?

‍

SC: Sure. Well, it's it's the method by which we make our games, which is essentially we operate on a very high level concept that we kind of work toward. If you're are you familiar with the concept of a biased random walk? This is something that bacteria do, which is bacteria. They can sort of detect whether or not they're like sort of like concentrations of chemicals in their environment. OK, so all they really know is like, hey, there's more of this than there was a second ago or there's less of this than there was a second ago. Right. And so what bacteria do is they just randomly flip on sort of like a timer, like every couple of seconds, they'll flip around and go a different way. And if there's more of the stuff that they want, they'll flip a little bit less. OK, so over time, they end up right smack in the middle of the nutrients. And this is called a biased random walk. So. So we try to be pretty humble about what we know about the world, and we believe that we're probably wrong about everything and that we probably know just as much about what's going on around us as that bacteria knows about what's going on in its, I don't know, droplet, whatever it's in. And if you think about your past experiences in life. Almost every time you make a plan. Things end up pretty differently. I mean, every time, right, so like you get up in the morning, you're like, you know what, I'm going to go to the gym today. And then you don't you just don't because you just change your mind at some point or maybe it snows that day or whatever. So you don't know what's going to happen six hours from now. And so when we think about how large game companies produce their games, they do so on these two year long timetables where they they've got a process, you know, they've got their preproduction. It's been six months, concept art, game design documents, team of designers. They hire up exactly to fit the needs of the project. They they pitch, they get a budget from from their their publisher. Now they have milestones. They've got to hit those milestones on a timeline. Something that we know about about game companies, and I don't know how much you guys hear about how the games industry tends to treat its employees. But crunch is a is a plague across the entire games industry. Employees of game studios tend to work 80 hours a week, just constantly all the time. They tend to get paid half to a third of what somebody with their same skill set would get paid in a different industry. It's to the point where an extra. So I have another GDC talk that I'm working on for a couple of months from now. And I reference the fact that that people who've been in the games industry a long time call themselves veterans, like as if it's a war or something, you know, like as if they're just surviving. So it's it's a brutal industry, which which to me says that that that model doesn't actually work. Right. Like how could it possibly be that you could spec out this project, make these plans at every single time? The only way to get it done is to work everybody to the bone until they basically die. Right. It means your plan was just wrong. And then also games get postponed. They go over budget, they launch with these horribly buggy just messes, and then they have to do day one patches to fix all the thousands of things that went wrong. So so there's a clear process problem there, and it comes down to having an incredible amount of confidence in your ability to to see the future. So we say, I don't think so. I don't think you can do that. So instead, we try to operate in the in the present, and we we basically just continuously reinterpret and iterate over the game as we see it. And we try to just just sort of like continuously wiggle the game around like that bacteria until we get it to the point where where it lands somewhat close to what our original vision was. And sometimes our original vision is wrong and we have to kind of recalibrate that. But as long as we are continuously iterating on it and getting it toward a point where it's more fun, more interesting, then, yeah, you know, it'll just it'll just become what it is. And it's going to be fairly fun and engaging at pretty much every point along the way, because there's no there's no specific like set of, you know, all right, here's the 30 exact things that need to be there for the game to be done. You know, we can just put it in a player's hands at pretty much any point and it's still fine and still fun. So that's kind of the that's the philosophy that kind of goes behind how we make our games.

‍

NC: What I could think about in one of one of the things that drew me towards that designed by chaos idea applied in the classroom is because there's kind of this this little mini debate being waged in education circles right now between, you know, who should education follow a more explicit instruction, direct instruction model, which is very much based in teacher talk and modeling and students basically mimicking sort of those teacher responses. So that way they can gather up some kind of basic skills and be successful on the next level of stuff. It's kind of it's kind of the model that you alluded to earlier where you write your success in A is going to lead to B is going to lead to C is going to lead to D. You know, call it a guaranteed and viable curriculum, call it direct instruction, you know, call it whatever. And then there seems to be another sort of side to this, too. And I think even in some circles, this has a label called, you know, constructive is constructivism or even construction ism, which is really based around that idea of iteration. So so it's so it's so interesting that, you know, watching the GDC talk and hearing you use that word iteration as it relates to game design. And basically the idea that you make the game better by playing it or or, you know, you make the game better by by doing the game. You know, you don't necessarily track the game to go with the plan. You play the game to develop the game. Yeah, I don't know if I'm representing that idea, but you play it and you say, what does this need?

‍

SC: Right. You play it and you just think like, what am I feeling? You have to basically analyze your own response to it. What's missing? What is fun about this? How can I take that to the next level? Yeah. So instead of instead of trying to force the game to be a thing, you're just asking it what it is and what it wants to be. Right. Yeah. Just do that. Oh, just do that. Just do that. And then that fixes it.

‍

NC: And that's what's so crazy, because I feel like in the classroom that and Chris, maybe you're with me on this, too. But like, I feel like that's what I'm doing in the classroom. Right. Like that's what we're doing with students. And it does. It seems like it's that easy. It seems like we can just say, well, just let the students be students. Right. Let the kids be kids. It's let them do the natural learning thing that they are intrinsically designed to do as human beings. And it'll happen. And this is the battle that Chris and I and I think like progressive education wages is that, you know, people like to make education, this big, complicated plan and interventions for kids with who don't fall into the plan and plans for kids who don't fit those plans. And we make it so complicated. And all we are saying is just strip it down to exactly what you're saying is right. Let the let the game show itself and then respond to it. Let the let the child in the classroom show you who they are and respond to them and grow it from there rather than try to expend so much energy in there. And so, yeah, that moment that I had of watching that video and hearing you talk about iteration and thinking like, this is exactly what we're trying to do in the classroom and developing kids is the approach that you're taking to, you know, your little baby games and then trying to develop them into right, you know, full blown adult games that go out into the world. Well, not adult games, but yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not in that industry, although it is growing. So is it is that weird? Do you do you see what connections do you see, I guess, is what is the something I was really curious about between, I don't know, like your classroom experiences or a right way that you see education or clearly you've thought about this. I mean, you mentioned flipped classrooms earlier. So so you have some some sort of a sense of how this works.

‍

SC: I mean, the thing about people is they're really resilient and they they can put up with just about anything, right? So, yeah. So, you know, in my example of these these game studios that are using these these methods of making games that that are incredibly expensive in the sense that they just they have to continue their turnover is crazy. They're losing employees every day and they're hiring new employees every day. They finish a game, then they fire everybody because that wasn't like finishing the game and starting the next game. We don't know. We need a plan for the next game. We don't have a plan yet. We got to fire everybody and start a new plan. So this this is just like churning people in and out. And all of the all the people who are kind of crushed under this wheel, they're just like, well, you know, I mean, that's just how the games industry is. And and it sucks, but it's better than not being in the games industry. And so, you know, I think if you want to take this back to how how people respond to educational environments and how people respond to teaching and stuff, whether or not you're you're teaching people using the best system, it's very hard to gauge because students can adapt to however bad of a job you're doing. And some of them will still flourish and thrive. And and some of them will do terribly and some of them will land in the middle. Right. And and so my my brother and I actually taught a course at Washington University about it was a game development course. And we kind of found the same thing. Like we had our own ideas about how this class was going to go. And it was essentially it was a combination of of us sort of throwing down like a concept every week and explaining how it works and then giving the students a challenge of, OK, next week you're going to come back and you're going to have this thing in your game. Like you will have figured out how to incorporate this into your game. So everybody in the class made their own game. They got to design it themselves. They built it solo. And and there were there were some people who just just took this and ran with it. Like one one kid ended up making a two and a half hour long Metroidvania style platformer by the end of the semester. And actually, we had to make two games. So he made it in eight weeks. It was the last half of the semester. Very impressive. And then we had a couple of kids who who who plagiarized. They just went online and stole some source code and just threw it in and submitted it. And we of course, we turned them into the relevant authorities. And so, you know, we had our ideas about like, oh, this is how this is how you're going to teach a class. Right. Like, we're going to do this good. We're going to do this right. And it clearly didn't work for everybody. Some people excelled and some people didn't. And I think the difficulty here is you're you're trying to measure outcomes that have so many possible inputs that it's really. I don't know, like, yeah, you can have the debate all day about which method is is better and which one is worse. First, you have to agree on your outcomes. Then you have to agree on how you're going to measure those outcomes. And then you have to figure out how to control for the thousands of other things that might go wrong along the way. I have no idea. People are really messy. I don't know. I don't know how you could do it.

‍

CM: There's an interesting connection to a point that you brought up earlier to Seth to education, which is how the games industry relates to the education industry. So in games, there's a lot of dichotomy between indie game studios like the one that you own, which are these smaller studios that tend to focus on really high quality products. There's a lot of reiteration. There's polish. But they do cater to only a certain audience. They're financially limited in some way, shape or form. Then there's the vastly more financially viable triple A game industry. So they have hundreds of employees. They crank out these massive productions. However, many game players are becoming more and more frustrated with these triple A companies because of how focused they are on trends and gains and markets. They don't see games as an art form. They see it as this percentage growth over time. At least the higher ups see it that way. So as a result, the triple A industry rarely innovates. They just want to make a slightly better version every single year to sell millions upon millions of copies of like FIFA or Call of Duty or something like that. So the connection to education would be that there are these smaller schools and districts that are trying really innovative things. And those are like the indie game studios, whereas the testing industry and those who follow it are kind of like the triple A studios. The testing industry is trying to create or produce students as commodities that have their own knowledge raised up by percentage points. And they see all these different one off ways to change how humans behave. The same can be said about a lot of different programs like PBIS or SEL or even like the ACT and SAT. There's just this overall neoliberal connection between how big corporations operate and how our children are raised, just like there is a connection between big corporations and really most things that we do.

‍

SC: Well, and I think there's a there's an extra layer to that, which is kind of interesting. So you're talking about about percentage increases, right? And I think Nick, was it earlier you were talking about everybody's debating about how to do things slightly better, like what we're already doing and just do that better. Get to get five percent more results. Right. And we see this exact same thing when it comes to. So our current game is called Levelhead. It's like a it's a game where you build your own levels and then you can publish them and other people can play them. It's Mario Maker inspired kind of a title. And it's been an early access since last April. And we we have channels through the game through which our our players can can give us feedback and suggestions and all that stuff. The goal of early access is is to collect that feedback and use that to refine the game. And what we've what we found was that largely the the players suggestions are essentially an endless stream of of ideas about what's already there. Right. So it's like it's like. Here's this enemy that does this one thing. I want one just like it, but that does this very slightly different thing. I want a new environment that's like these other two environments, you know, but a little bit different. And so what we rarely get and we do we do get from time to time, but it's pretty rare to get a suggestion for a completely new thing. That has no analogies in the game and that doesn't exist already. Right. Those are the things that we have to come up with. Like those are that's the value that we bring to the like those are the ideas that we bring to the the idea generation process is is it's our we view our job as to sort of, you know, throw a wrench in the whole thing and completely change stuff, add completely new things that nobody would have ever thought of. But largely, I think people on average, they look at what's around them and that's that's the thing that they give commentary about. That's the thing that generates their ideas. And it's pretty rare for somebody to then like take two, three steps back and be like, wait a minute, what if we just didn't? What if we didn't do any of these things and did this completely different thing instead? Right. And that also takes it takes courage and it also takes it takes us a certain safety net, which I think as you know, where you guys are at as educators, you have certain criteria that you have to be meeting based on an already established system. And I don't know of a way because I'm not familiar with with your I don't call it an industry, but should I call it an industry in your field? Yeah, so I mean, in your field, there's very strong established frameworks of how things happen. And I don't know what the model is for somebody to just up and start doing things completely differently and then have parents come in and be like, yeah, I want you know what? I want my kid to be in this completely unproven, untested program because it's fine. Like they'll probably turn out fine. It's not a big deal. Right. I assume parents don't operate that way. So you guys have this like different threshold of risk and the way that you can operate compared to the kind of stuff that we do. So it sounds like a big challenge.

‍

CM: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast so far. If you are interested in diving deeper into progressive education or you want to just support the Human Restoration Project in some way, I encourage you to visit Human Restoration Project dot org to learn more about our Patreon, which is the way that you can support us, as well as see all of our fantastic resources, materials and other podcasts to share. Now, back to our discussion.

‍

SC: So we have this kind of a joke, but kind of not a joke saying in our studio, which is any time somebody is talking about how something is clearly set up badly in the world. Maybe it's that Australia is on fire and there's a lot of things that contributed to that. And that's a big problem, right? Maybe it's that all these animals are dying because the permafrost is thawing, or maybe it's because we're not getting people are coming out of school and not getting the things that they need to be able to be successful. Right. Like or maybe there's a big health crisis like we have in the United States with mental health and and physical, I guess people just falling apart. Right. And that's the thing that's happening. And if at any time you're thinking like, why is it like this? The answer is literally always it makes more money this way. And it's not necessarily for you, but it's making a lot more money this way for somebody. And if things changed, then that person would would stand to lose that person or that company or whatever it is. Right. And so, I mean, you guys know about the TurboTax lobbying, right? Like TurboTax wants it to be really hard to pay your taxes. So they lobby the IRS to keep really complicated loopholes, regulations and everything in there instead of simplifying the tax code to make it so you could just pay your taxes in a minute. Right. Because TurboTax makes more money this way. So it sounds like like like the what's the ACT like the college board? 

‍

NC: The college board is the TurboTax of education is what you're saying.

‍

SC: Like they want you know, like they're not in the business of educating. They're in the business of selling tests. Right. And what's amazing is that they're they're a nonprofit. So despite the billions of dollars that they make, they're technically they're technically a nonprofit. 

‍

SC: The only criteria is you just spend as much as you make. As far as I understand. Right. I mean, no profit, which means big salaries.

‍

NC: Right. So but I think that's just such a simple thing is just to look at. Yeah. Who has, you know, a vested interest in seeing those things change? And it does seem like every time that we have the kind of conversations about why can't things in education be different, people point to colleges and say, well, college admissions process this and that. And what is really interesting, I'll bring this up every single time it comes up, is that in Iowa. Now, Seth, you might have you and I graduated high school. We had a class rank. And I don't know if you know what yours was. Mine was probably not important enough to even think about. But but that was, at least in our time, part of our R.A.I. score. Right. The Regents Admissions Index score was based on class rank, ACT score and the GPA. And so it was really important for kids to have class rank. You know, so it really mattered who was number one, number two, et cetera, because that could determine, you know, the kind of school that you get into or the financial aid package that you get, et cetera. But but in the last couple of years, maybe in the last five years, bigger the bigger high schools in Iowa started to drop class rank as part of the data that they reported about students. You know, just kind of seeing seeing how it was not serving learning that, you know, generally the distinctions between, you know, students don't matter so much as, you know, all those other kinds of things. And so as schools started to drop that reporting, the Regents actually split their formula. So then there was a formula for schools who could report if they use class ranks still, they stick with the old formula. But there was a new one for schools who reported absent that class rank. And then they made the transition in the last year to entirely drop class rank from that the R.A.I. score that kids get. So it's so interesting to think like we can't change class rank because it's so important for college admissions. And how is how am I going to know where my kid is if they're not number one or number five or number 10 or number 100? When now we live in a we live in a world where that's not the case at all. And somehow we manage to survive and kids learn and kids thrive. And there's still there's still, you know, kids who go on to do great and wonderful things in college. And there's still kids who find, you know, other paths. It's weird how that how that happens, isn't it?

‍

SC: Yeah, well, not only that, but class rank is a zero sum game, right? Like it's completely relative. So so being number one at school A versus being number one at school B. Don't know if what is that? What does that mean? And also, if you're in a school of geniuses and you're number 100, is that is that good? Is that still good or is it terrible?

‍

NC: Right. Big fish in a small pond kind of thing. And it's it's super interesting, too. I was just talking with my students about this today. But the same thing is happening now with GRE. And I don't know, Seth, you had to take a GRE to get into.

‍

SC: I took the GMAT. Oh, OK. Dang, I didn't know what your program was for the MBA.

‍

NC: So so so so, you know, the GRE for for graduate schools. But now the conversation the last couple of years has shifted to graduate schools realizing that the kinds of students who are successful in their programs or the kinds of students that they want to come into their programs either don't come in because they don't have the right scores or they're afraid to apply because they have to go through that GRE ringer. It costs money, it costs time and everything else. So, I mean, Ivy League schools have dropped GREs. There's programs in within smaller schools who have, you know, made department decisions whether or not to accept it. But it's based exactly on on that. It's saying the kinds of students that are successful in our programs are it's irrelevant what their GRE scores are coming in. So why do we use that as a metric in the in the first place?

‍

SC: I really I really wonder if anything truly matters, because, OK, I don't know if you guys had this experience, but when I was when I was in high school, I did all kinds of things. I was interested in everything. I was in I was in art club. I was on swim team. I loved math. I took college courses for chemistry and stuff like that. I was just kind of all over the place. And and I always felt like, well, everybody else in my not everybody else, but most of the people in my class, like they're here because they just have to be because it's public school and we all got to get our high school degree. Right. And I was so looking forward to the day when I could go to college and be around all these enthusiastic, brilliant people who just love learning. They just they just want to learn stuff. Right. And then I went to college and I was like, Oh, my God. These are the exact same people that I was going to high school with just with different faces, which then and this was this was even at USC, which had at the time an under 10 percent acceptance rate. Right. And then I taught this this course at Wash U, which also has very high standards, which means they're screening students based on these tests. They're screening students based on their grades and possibly on their class rank or whatever it is. And they're picking the best of the best. And then and these kids are sitting in our in our classroom that we're teaching. They're paying 90 dollars an hour to sit in that classroom. And then they steal code from somebody else and submit it as their own assignment. Right. So if if this screening process worked just at all, this wouldn't have happened. I think that's fair to say. Right. It clearly doesn't. It doesn't work in any measurable way that you could point to. Right. What what happens what happens when people go to an Ivy League college is they get connections. And it is the case that connections allow you to succeed. Right. Like, do you know? Right. But I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence that people coming out of a high tier college are any more brilliant or have any more any higher educational achievements necessarily. Right. So what is what is happening? What are we doing here, guys? We're back around to the nihilism part there. Yeah.

‍

NC: So what is so crazy, right, is if you think like, oh, if we judge Seth Koster based on your coding programming classes that you took it. If we looked at your transcript, right, we would get a completely different picture of of your right. Or we would make certain inferences about your future success in the gaming industry based on based on a D on your on your coding thing. But if you think about it and one of the reasons that that Chris and I push gradeless learning so much and I've seen it happen in my classroom, which is which is, I think, the most interesting part where where people tell me online or colleagues or something will tell me like, oh, you know, going gradeless will never work. Kids don't do anything without grades. Kids don't do anything else. And and you think like, OK, well, we need to develop a new language to describe these things, because exactly what you're saying, it doesn't matter if at the end of the day, they get an A, B, C, D. I mean, it matters more if they get an F and they can't graduate. But all those other things in between don't matter if when they graduate, they're not motivated, right? They're not empathetic if they don't care about the community around them, if they can't do anything about the, you know, the problems in the community, if they if they get of all of this, what was the point? Yeah, if they don't have any idea. We just talked today in class about the the the bulletin of atomic scientists moving the the doomsday clock to one hundred seconds to midnight. And I put it on my students to say I am going to be dead. But you're going to have to live with the effects of this thing. And what are we doing today to help move that clock backwards? And I start to think that maybe learning about the price elasticity of demand is not going to be the one thing that helps us move the clock backwards, you know, to give us a couple more minutes of time here. Yeah.

‍

SC: What you want is is you want a generation of of brilliant, motivated people who love challenges and who have a lot of compassion and who are curious about the world like that's the that's the thing that you want. I can't really say that anything that anybody is specifically doing sort of systemically is actually getting those outcomes. And I also don't know if you I don't know if there's a thing you can just like do, you know, to to get that. I think it's a combination of things. But then, Seth, do you see a role of the Internet in allowing for less control on how we receive information or how we learn? So what I mean by that is, is that indie games saw a lot of growth due to the Internet, because you could avoid the triple A industry and sell directly through a platform like Steam. And as educators, there's something to be said about being able to reach out and find like minded folks that may have not been possible in a very traditional education system where it's hard to speak with other people. This is an interesting note about the the Internet decentralizing things, because because actually I've come to the opinion that it is the ultimate centralizer. I think I think the Internet creates the illusion of. Of the democracy and everybody having an equal voice, but really what it's doing is it's clustering everybody into the same place in specific domains. So if you're a musician, where are you going to put your music? Spotify, right? And you're going to get point zero zero zero zero eight cents per listen. I believe is the going rate. Can't quite remember how many zeros, but it's a lot of zeros, which means if you get millions of lessons on there, then you will still only get a couple of thousand bucks at best. And so so but it's also the case that if you don't so if you don't have your music on Spotify, then your fans will complain. Right. They want to listen to your music. They're not going to buy your CDs anymore because nobody does that because they're Spotify. And so so this creates a winner take all market where now you you as a musician, like, yeah, maybe you're a brilliant musician. You can you make all these incredible songs and you do have legions of fans, but you don't get to dictate the terms of how you engage with the rest of the world. Spotify does. They you have to go through this process. Right. And so writing books is is the same. You write a book where you're going to publish it. Amazon, right, you're going to publish it through Amazon. And if you don't, you're at least going to sell it through Amazon. You're going through some centralized place. Right. And and the the fascinating thing that's happened with the games industry as far as this goes is. The the idea that like anybody can create something, that's that's the idea that got us into it right back in 2010, 2011. And all these tools started appearing and we started making games. You know, we weren't the only ones who had that idea. At the time we started publishing mobile games, there were 500 games coming out a week on on iOS. Now there's 7000. OK, so so that's so many games that even with the billion people, you know, who go to the app store every month, any given game is probably not going to be seen by pretty much anybody. So instead, we go right back to the original model of Apple gets to decide which games go to the top of the list and get seen by everybody. Right. So so even though even though the ability to create has been has been decentralized, the ability to succeed is still it still goes through a centralized place. Right. And I think this is the case with with pretty much everything. You know, you see these people who want to become a famous model or actor, whatever. Well, they got to be on Instagram and that's where they're going to get all their followers. Like they have to bend to the will of Instagram, which is actually owned by, of course, Facebook, which controls our elections through their algorithms. I mean, I mean, that's pretty conspiracy theory ish. But but there's also a realistic bent to it. And of course, they they now hold in. So so these companies kind of hold an outsized sway far beyond what was ever possible before before we had the Internet. And so that's those are the kinds of trends that we see in the games industry, as well as is the supply of games is going up and up and up. And the the the delivery methods. So like the different storefronts, steam and stuff like that. They are they're collapsing under the weight. I think thirteen hundred games came out on the Nintendo Switch last year. And and, you know, we know that the the folks over at at Nintendo HQ are scratching heads trying to figure out like. What do we do about this? Because actually, like it's too many, it's too many games. What is it? Three, four games a day coming out. I don't know anybody who has the time or money to to even play a 10 percent of those games. Right. And so so we've kind of we've kind of now looped back like back around in the games industry to it's it's who you know. So so now it's all about establishing these these relationships with people in centralized positions of of power who are able to give you those give you access to those players through their their centralized platforms. So that's that's the big challenge that I think faces anybody who's coming into games nowadays is they don't have those connections. They don't have those things until they've kind of already started establishing themselves. And it's a circular problem. You know, you can't establish yourself without the connections and you can't you can't get the connections until you're established. So we got in at a time where it was a lot easier to kind of break that wheel a little bit and stop it for a second and get on. Nowadays, I think it's a lot harder. But and I don't I don't quite know what is necessarily going on when it comes to to teaching in this way, because I know that there's a lot of online courses now like you to me sells a class for everything for a dollar fifty because everything's on sale all the time, you know. I don't know what do you like? What are you guys seeing in that?

‍

CM: And certainly there is a problem of how information is controlled on the Internet in order to promote only certain voices. I think the Human Restoration Project is meant to be a curdler of sorts. But in our world, I mean, there are certainly corporate donors such as the testing industry 

‍

NC: …or even just like Chan Zuckerberg, Bill and Melinda Gates. If you can get money from them or get those things, then you're off to the races. But but I mean, and that's also supporting your agenda. Right. Right. And all of a sudden you don't support unions anymore. Really? And everything's got a price.

‍

CM: Yeah. So for you, Seth, what do you see as the future then of your industry? So if there's all these issues, how do you go about solving that?

‍

SC: This is why this is why things become centralized, though. You know, it's because of the choice paralysis problem. Like nobody has the time to sift through seven thousand things. But it needs to be somebody's job or a team of people. It needs to be their job to sift through those things and then come out and say, hey, here's the three good ones. Right. And then. Yeah. And that's the value that they bring. And that's, you know. I don't want to I don't want to seem like I'm complaining necessarily. It's just like this is just the state of things. There's just there's the Internet brings brings. I mean, too many voices together. And it's too much to process like it's too much for any one person to sift through, to parse, to hear. And so this the system is going to naturally give rise to mediators. You know, people who basically funnel it all into one place. They throw out the the stuff you don't want to see. And then they hand it to you. I like I had a really weird experience last week where my wife was like, I want a keychain because she just has like this just just a crappy like metal circle with a couple of keys on it. And she's like, I want a cool keychain. And I was like, time to do something nice for my wife. So I go go into Amazon. I look up keychains and every keychain they show me has a knife or a flashlight on it, because at some point I bought a pocket knife on Amazon and now they're like, this is a knife guy. He's he needs knives. He needs knives on everything. Keys, whatever it is, put a knife on it, sell it to Seth. So I I genuinely couldn't find a keychain that made sense to to give to my wife. And then I so I told her I was like, I tried to I guess Amazon just doesn't have good keychains somehow. Like they have everything in the universe, but no keychains. And she's like, I'll take a look. And so she opens up Amazon and all of a sudden, boom, all these beautiful golden like rhinestone and crusted keeps like a peacock keychain and like a unicorn keychain and stuff. And somehow Amazon just decided, like, I don't get to see those things anymore. I don't I don't get to make those decisions anymore. That's not part of my day now. Which also kind of speaks to the the danger of these source of things is now now my experience is is cut is cut.

‍

CM: And that Internet decentralization component does have an unintended consequence on the students that we work with as well. So it's great that we have access to so much information. We can find things easier. It's easier to have quality content if you know how to find it. So there's that digital literacy side of things. But there's also a social emotional issue that's baked into being able to use the Internet, how we use it now. So many of our students are placed in these algorithms that reinforce negative stereotypes about them or promote like non pro social behaviors or they just make them depressed really.

‍

SC: Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of statistics about about mental health issues with the teams, especially just just how they're they're lonely. Their rates of depression are dramatically higher. Yeah, just I don't know. It's it's weird because like, you know, the Internet was supposed to be this thing that was going to you could talk to you could talk to someone from across the world any time. It's like it's going to was going to bring us all together. And then we all end up getting just like tunneled into by these these these companies that just they just need us to look at ads and buy stuff.

‍

NC: Right. Yeah. Well, I think I think it's like what you were saying earlier with, you know, it I think you were missing the silver lining about you buying a pocket knife on Amazon now and not having any choice, because, I mean, it's clear the case that you do have choice choices because you've made the decision to be a knife guy. Now you get to choose from all these all these. You get to choose from amongst the key chains that have knives.

‍

SC: Yeah, well, that's I mean, that's actually that's the other weird thing about this. It's like, OK, think back, Nick, think back to your 20s, your early 20s. OK, I'm going back. Put yourself in the in the brain of college, Nick. I'm in the mockery union. You're in the Mocker Student Union. We're we're organizing students for all kinds of stuff. We got big ideas and opinions, many of which are dumb and bad because we're 20. Right. Now you are on Facebook and making posts. You are buying stuff on Amazon. You're doing all these things and they've got real sophisticated algorithms. Right. And so so you've got your account. They know you. They know who you are. And everything that they show you and everything that you see is going to reinforce whatever dumb, bad 20 year old Nick idea you have at that time. And you're locked in now. Right. So so by the time you're you're now in your 30s, who are you? Like, are you able are you able to make that same kind of leap over that over this, you know, 12, 13, whatever your span in the present day compared to what you were able to do without those things happening? Or is this just who you are now?

‍

NC: Right. Well, and that's what I think is so interesting from the student perspective is is that's where I was kind of going with. That is, is you were lamenting it as a lack of choice. And I was saying, no, look at the comfortable silo that Amazon has created for you. This is just who you are now. And so then that that that I think is the problem that I see, you know, with students in that is is that as it relates to that, that sense of depression and anxiety is that really those silos are isolating because then because then that that just kind of feeds you the image of who you must be. And so it is so much easier to, you know, just keep scrolling through TikTok and have it just keep playing videos for you that you know that you like rather than than than reaching out from from those silos and trying to find some of those other things. So I think that's the danger is that it just keeps feeding you those things that you that you want to see and that you want to keep diving into to the exclusion of of any other, you know, concept or idea or anything. If you're into a fandom, it will dive you to the bottom of that fandom and you will never come out from the bottom of that, you know. Or if you you know, I've seen this with a lot of I teach suburban white kids. So I see this with alt right stuff all the time. And, you know, it starts with they have like an edgy Google image. You know, their little Google logo is a Pepe the Frog. And, you know, you know, start to look at some of their things and they're they're really on the edge of some of those those really dangerous alt right ideas, because, you know, that's kind of just the identity that they've bought into. But it's the identity that's being in the feedback loop coming right back at them. So so that's kind of the fraction fracturing that I see is not jocks versus nerds versus goths and maybe a traditional, you know, 80s Breakfast Club kind of sense. But really, it's 30 individual students who are in these individual silos. And occasionally, you know, they bump bump at each other because they sit next to each other at lunch and browse the same kind of things or whatever the case may be.

‍

SC: Yeah. And this this goes through everything. I mean, I was thinking about how like I could hear a song playing in, you know, in a grocery store or something. And I'm like, yeah, that's one of the songs from the 90s, one of the 30 songs that we had that everybody heard. And nowadays, when I look through my like my Spotify playlist, which, of course, I use Spotify, Spotify. And I bet I bet you if I took my sort of like my main playlist that I normally am just jamming to and you and I overlaid our two playlists on top of each other, there'd be like maybe three out of 400 songs that overlap. Right. Because we are unique individuals now who have literally no shared experiences and have no ability to talk to each other about anything because we live in completely different worlds now. Right. Exactly. And that's. There's nothing. What sucks is there's nothing to be done about it. Like this is just this is a systemic thing. And we've all we've all sort of tacitly agreed that this is what we want because we keep funding it. Like we keep supporting it. We keep engaging with it. And even if we don't, everybody else will. And that's just that this is just what's happening now.

‍

NC: And that's that's what's super interesting is, is you think, well, I think about our experiences, Seth, because, you know, we we we what do we share? We share that we're Iowans. We went through, you know, an Iowa high school system. We attended the same college together. And so like those are the experiences that we draw back on. And now to kind of come back, if we were to compare some of those things, you know, we would have those differences. But what is what is super interesting is to think about the 30 kids that might be in my classroom who all live in Ankeny. They all go to the same school every single day. So you would think that all they have are these shared experiences together because they do the same thing. They go to the same, you know, five or six classes next to each other all all day long. But you're right. Like, imagine comparing those two kids playlists compared to ours, where we've had, you know, 10, what, 20 years of difference before we met. And now 10 years since then. But so we would expect right to have not have those things. But it's weird to see 16 and 17 year olds who don't have that same kind of thing.

‍

SC: Yeah. And it's because, yeah, they're they're present physically in the same space, but their minds, their minds are not experiencing the same world as each other. Exactly. And in thinking about like this, this idea of of some some teenage kid, like seeing some, I don't know, a racist meme and thinking like, oh, that's funny. And then reposting that or something, you know. And thinking about how how algorithmically that that just gets reinforced, like whatever, whatever you like, we live in this world, we're kind of like whatever you want, you get it, you get to have that thing. Whatever ideas you have, you get to have those ideas and you never have to hear otherwise. Right. And I think I think back on some of the ideas that I had when I was a teenager or or in college. And and, you know, I'm I'm I wasn't a religious guy at the time and I'm still not. But at that time, I was that was like who I was. Be like being being being an atheist was like a core part of my identity, and now it's basically irrelevant to to anything about what I do or who I am or what I care about. It's a it's a footnote. And I think like. Had things been then the way that they are now, I possibly might have been radicalized because I was already I was already on the edges of having some very strong opinions about about certain religious groups or whatever the case may be. Right. It could have happened that way.

‍

NC: A lot of those people have bought into those ideas about, you know, bell curve and racist science about IQ tests and a lot of transphobia. I mean, so so that that has been the natural progression. I think of a lot of people who started in that place and just dug themselves an identity in that hole and followed the whole movement clear through to Charlottesville. And, you know, and then they're marching with torches, saying the Jews will not replace us. It's yeah, it's nuts. So I don't I don't know if if I have kind of a cliche question to ask, you know, of of a game designer in the industry here, just because we have, you know, some some listeners who are students and we've had some episodes that are like based around that idea of of student voice. And so, you know, as as being a person who's in that gaming industry, is there I mean, just kind of in closing arguments, is there any like advice that you would just give to what advice would you just give to young people and not even necessarily about about games? But what's cool is that I mean, I think just talking to you and, you know, knowing you and seeing seeing the Coster vitality expressed through Butterscotch is really fun, first and foremost. But but what is so cool is you guys seem to understand, right? Some core aspect about human psychology that that really distinguishes the way that you approach a lot of those things. And I don't know if you just have advice for for younger people about the way that they should live their 20s or what they should do. What should high school students do if they want to go do that awesome thing that is not in their path right now, but might be 10 years from now? I don't know.

‍

SC: So I think the thing that I'm the most grateful for is that I I think this is possibly because of how I was raised, but there's there's there's something that I generally have fun doing anything that I'm doing. And I I love to learn about stuff. And it's I've never been able to wrap my mind around the phrase like, well, what am I ever going to use this for? Which which I would hear all the time when I was in school is is, you know, a teacher would be like, oh, yeah, so now we're going to talk about the Pythagorean theorem and it works like this. And then invariably, some kid would mutter. I mean, what's the point of this? Like, what am I going to give a crap about triangles? Which is, you know, in that context, I get it. Like, what's your what's your life as a as an eighth grader is like you are just generally confused and nobody takes you seriously and you're either awkwardly tall or awkwardly short. Like those are the things that you're mostly concerned with. And triangles are like number 400 on your list. And I have to say, going into games has been the most eye opening thing for me, because I have used everything like everything that I've ever learned in any field, spider monkeys or bacteria or or anything. It has come up. It's come up time and time again. And I have to think like if I had if I had had that that attitude of I'm not going to learn this thing because what am I ever going to use it for? Then I never would have gotten to use it. And I and I never would have gotten to where I am. I never would have been able to think of the things that I thought of because I just wouldn't have known things and I wouldn't have been able to combine them together to to make weird alien planets or goofy stories or teach myself how to code or or any of that stuff. And so so I think to kind of like. To kind of boil it down to just like a single idea is is you can use everything so. And you and you will like if you learn it, you will use it. And so that's so just learn it. It's going to be fun. It's going to be interesting and it's and it's always going to pay off. So that would be my advice.

‍

CM: Right. And that's exactly why we need educators to band together and teach young people about the worlds they live in, the experiences that they have and bring to the table, rather than just cramming them full of information. I know it's a trope and people say it all the time. And there's a time and place for people to learn anything. But when we focus exclusively on test prep and don't dive into things that our students do on a day to day basis, such as using social media, it shouldn't be shocking that these issues arise. I really don't understand why the focus of the curriculum wouldn't be on a student's daily life and what they want to learn about. To me, that makes sense on both a practical and motivational level. But then again, that's sort of the human restoration project thing. You have to be able to see the humanity and people and teach them like full humans, which means that they're not receptive goals to have knowledge deposited into them. They're not some purpose for financial gain. They're not as percentage point. It's a lot more complicated than that. And you can't standardize knowledge in that way to just narrow it down to something very simple and easy to understand. It's incredibly complicated. They're a whole person with wants and needs and desires and motivations and experiences, et cetera, et cetera.

‍

SC: I can get behind that. It's a big challenge. I wish you guys luck.

‍

CM: Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project. I hope that this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at human restoration project dot org.

‍