Skillprint’s Chethan Ramachandran On Combining Neuroscience And AI For An Adaptive Play Solution

[Music] hello world and welcome to pg. Biz and I'm your host Peggy on Sals because Brian again away he is crushing it at Scottish games week so hello to you Brian as well and we're ending the week on a high note because not only do we have great events that will be reporting on in the future but we're able to dive deep today into a newly released report confirming what we have always thought myself and Brian we have always thought games are good for you at multiple levels but it's great to say that but you sort of need the proof well we do have the proof because we have an intriguing new report that delves into the intersection of Neuroscience and gaming with our guest and he is CEO

co-founder of skill print it's a company at the Forefront of combining Ai and Neuroscience to enable adaptive and personalized games it's also a friend to several of our PG connect events I want to welcome you today Chan ramachandran welcoming you to pg. Biz chth great to have you and um you know great report first of all I mean truly truly Milestone um response to that because you've been talking about your company's been talking about quite a lot how was it received in the industry uh it's it's been received very very very well I mean I think one you know thing that we can all say about game developers is that they really do care about you know games and what games do for their audience and that's what gets game developers up every morning um so I think a lot of this is confirming what the industry has already known it's always good good to have data showing

and proving what people think they know but the idea that games actually can be good for the mind I think it's pretty powerful and it's it's definitely not the narrative that we've been hearing over the last few years in games in fact maybe never in games so the fact that now we can actually point to real data that is empirical that is scientifically valid I think has given you know a lot of folks in the gaming industry uh a lot of fun things to talk about so it's been uh it's been fun want to just go back for a little bit because I did some homework as well after seeing this it's like so who is skill print and this is exciting because you have been focused on exploring the cognitive and psychological benefits of games first of all for a while and then who looks at both of them and combines them not many so I want to hear more about how you're doing this yeah I mean we've been sort of obsessed with this for the last few years we really got going right before the pandemic hit but the con concept and

idea was always you know what if games are broadly speaking the future of how people learn how they develop skills how they grow their mind in multiple ways and both my co-founder and I kind of came to this independently through our own personal experiences which I'd be happy to talk about a little bit more but fundamentally the idea has always been well you know there are so many games out there there are so many people playing games let's dive a little deeper inside the hood you know data has always been a big part of certainly the free-to-play mobile gaming ecosystem for you know the last decade or so but within that data there's even more nuance and subtleties so what if we could start to take some of the that data around a user tie it to what is actually quite a bit of extensive research that has been going on around neuroscience and games for the last 20 30 years and if you could start to tie those together especially on a per user basis and a per game basis and really

start to build evidence between a player's behavior and actual vetted Neuroscience research then all of a sudden you can start to see linkages and make predictions and and come up with you know great conclusions so that's been you know sort of the focus and kind of thrust of the company from day one obviously you know takes time to actually surface that data build the infrastructure make predictions um and that's what we've been focused on for last few years you got me going now Chan well you've mentioned that this has a personal story to it so I'm I'm excited I want to understand this because it it it can't be just uh oh we woke up one day yeah yeah yeah no this is sort of for me it's been um something I've been obsessed about probably for the last 15 plus years you know my first Rush with uh something called Big Data when it wasn't even called Big Data was back in 2006 when I joined uh as a young executive of a company as a co-founder

that was applying predictive models taken from Wall Street to information security which was probably 15 years ahead of its time even at that point in 2006 because that's what people are doing now but basically the idea was could you understand human behavior in terms of people trying to spoof hackers or information you know leakage by using a set of data techniques that Wall Street had pioneered and put it into the context of big businesses the answer is yes the problem is you have to be able to find a way to get data out at scale continuously in a repeated fashion so that initial fora was not that successful when we could get data out we were able to see amazing things about human behavior in the most boring systems you could imagine Erp systems log systems but all of a sudden you start to get this really amazing picture of who some is and how they're interacting with information and data so I thought that was kind of interesting we ended up selling that company for the

next couple years I kind of thought about well if you can get data in a really meaningful way at scale in a repetitive way could you do even more and in 2009 I just felt that the gaming industry was ripe for that sort of approach games at that point as you remember had you know boomed on social networks like Facebook uh they were emerging in the mobile space you know you obviously had connected games and MMOs and things like that but the idea that there was this continuous back and forth interaction between a game developer or publisher and Their audience was was just emerging you know it used to be you built once shipped it and then you talked to your audience the next time when a SQL came out and and certainly some console games are still kind of like that but this whole new paradigm I kind of saw that emerging and thought wow wouldn't it be interesting if I applied some of those techniques that big data techniques you know into games and see what happened so that was 2009 and that one you know I timed

fairly well it was sort of the pioneer the company I started called plan nomics was the pioneer of using analytics and prediction in games we grew that company from 2009 to 2014 um got to I think something like 150 customers millions and millions of users across you know thousands of games and really were really good at doing things like predicting churn to a decimal of a day you know lifetime value to you know kind of a couple cents uh and ended up getting acquired by unity uh in 2014 uh and it became uh it became essentially Unity analytics and unity's sort of backend data nerve center uh so was able to see an enormous amount of data through that run and then after you know Unity acquired us but the one consistent interesting thing that I always saw even from day one when we started working with some of the most silliest social games you could imagine was the idea that people's minds their

personality traits their their whole worldview kind of started getting expressed in these games in this back and forth nature between a game and a user or the game and a group of users and people around them so we would see in in social games that were as as simple as kind of Billiards games we would see really interesting clusters of people who wanted to you know be very competitive with only other competitive types who others who wanted to just explore and get back matches people who just were there to socialize and really just wanted to play with their competitive friends but their competitive friends wanted nothing to do with them because all they wanted to do was win win win so you know we saw all these amazing clusters coming alive and this is back in 2009 at the early nency of you know connected games and so that's something that I thought was really fascinating for years and years and years after Unity uh acquired us I spent a lot of time around neuroscience and cognitive science labs I just felt like the future was digital versus the

mind and how did those two things interact and you know I thought I might go in and start something which was like chipsets in the brain like uh Elon Musk is doing with neuralink turns out that's probably a 50-year project that's a little longer than my my personal preferred time Horizon but the interesting thing was that all these amazing professors were using games uh to do all sorts of interesting things around the mind not only assess how the mind works but grow the mind in different ways and to me whenever you start to see something that people take for granted you know games people play them every day but you take very very smart people who are willing to put their careers on the line and say hey there's something interesting going on here that that pequ my interest and so that was kind of the the beginning of the skill print Journey which was okay now we've created this layer of data that you know everybody in the gaming industry is using what else can come out of that that layer of data that actually speaks more to the user and then I think if you look at the the history of these games connected games it's always been

the user becoming more and more at the Forefront of the game uh and and the developer having to map that user more and more continuously so I just thought it was another you know kind of right time right place moment I do want to get to the report but now you got me on use cases because it's one thing to understand why we play games and it's a great opportunity to understand more about us what am I getting out of this it's actionable data around personality traits and motivations but what do I do do I do that to come up with new games improve games make my live Ops you know top of mind what what are you seeing people are doing game devs are doing with your data yeah I mean so we can talk about it from The Game Dev side as well as the player side so maybe just quickly on the player side you know I think there's just a huge opportunity from the player side to provide better Discovery and you know find games that actually fit people in terms of what they're looking for and I think that's a will be a Contin ously

you know fertile field going forward because there's always going to be more people playing games and there's always going to be new games coming out how do you make sure that you match properly that matching also helps obviously game developers help me find the right Player for my game that initial fit right of Discovery and acquisition I think is really really interesting uh especially for game developers we all know how hard it's been and only getting harder over the years for game developers to find and keep the Right audience my co-founder in this actually has another interesting perspective in that he was one of the Pioneers on the publishing side of Social and mobile games he co-founded a company that was acquired by GSN The Game Show Network it became essentially he founded GSN games uh you know grew that to 100 million users and so from his point of view what he saw was the fact that the entire stack that a developer goes through or a publisher goes through when understanding how to find keep and monetize a player all of

that fundamentally could be automated and altered using this kind of technology so when we think about what game developers would use this for you know we talk about things like well think about your engagement curve think about your you know D30 retention think about how you monetize the right player at the right time all of that is live Ops and it it takes an enormous amount of people to do it but what if all of a sudden you could by using this amazing data around the human mind start to automate that stuff and do it in a very very scalable way and give the power of massive liveops team to essentially every game developer in the world now all of a sudden you've changed sort of the playing field in terms of how any game developer finds you know keeps and monetizes Their audience so we think all the use cases on the developer side kind of revolve around that because that's fundamentally what what you know the game excuse the Hunt is for for game developers you know you have to find the right audence you have to keep keep them you have to make sure they're

continuously engaged um but I think it you kind of look at it from both sides if you solve that problem of adapting and personalizing a game using this information it solves both sides of the coin for both players and developers and that's a good thing because then all of a sudden players get a more authentic experience and developers are able to deliver at scale as well what are the steps you're seeing maybe some interesting ways that you're seeing you know your customers using the data currently yeah so again on the on the player side it's just showing players more about themselves it turns out that people generally want to know who they are they want to know a lot about themselves that's why personality tests are you know so that's why BuzzFeed has a business it's essentially one long personality test so if you can start to reflect more information to a player that talks about who they are by how they played in a game all of a sudden you get that player's attention and you have the opportunity to show them more and more which kind of helps on the developer side so on the developer side the first thing we thought was the most interesting and the most lowest hanging

fruit was the idea of difficulty and balancing something like level difficulty which you know has a lot of parameters in it but doing it in a way where every player you have gets just the right combination of boredom and frustration and right in between is what's known as sort of a flow State and games are really good at delivering you know this idea of a flow state which is essentially being in the zone it's sometimes hard to do that and even some of the best games in the world like Candy Crush you know I have friends who play it and after 10 days they're like I just got frustrated I can't I can't play it anymore and when you start to think about that the idea that a player is getting either bored or frustrated and you spend all this time building a wonderful game but you just haven't hit quite that that level tuning difficulty that that's kind of an amazing thing but we think that's an easy loow hanging fruit just to say okay well let's first look at the spread of all your players let's look at all the levels you have have and let's see based on this

cognitive information where people are getting bored or frustrated and let's see if we can kind of map that to groups to players and then eventually individual players and that that's a very easy thing I think for most game developers to Gro because it's kind of tuning that they think about every step of the way is the game engaging enough is it too hard is it too easy how do I know and if you can address that it solves a lot of those problems that you can then get to more and more interesting things like like I said down the road you know imagine a Tetris that changes based on your mood and how you want to feel you're feeling a little groggy in the morning and you want to get in the zone and Tetris recognizes that it starts to deliver a more sharp experience for you that's faster paced or you just want to relax at the end of a long day and things calm down and slow down that's coming but is that is a little down the road as you as you mentioned but I'm gonna have to do a devil's advocate question here now because I have uh have a degree in philosophy and it haunts me to this day Shan so I'm one for Serendipity you know

if we get what we want all the time you know if you literally get fries with your fries right um you'll never experience anything else you know most recommendation systems are that oh you had you ordered this get give you more of it and you don't really go out and push out so I'm G to have to ask you that because it's great if it adapts to me what if it lets me stay a couch potato yeah well I think it's almost more like how can you deliver that surprise and Delight because every everybody's mind is very different and I think that's the really interesting thing is that different games light people up in ways that you would never expect so how do you find that and how do you understand that in a way where you can actually deliver it to each unique person a very you know specific example there was a great game a few years ago called drop seven which I think uh Zinga eventually acquired uh through a developer they bought called area code and drop seven was one of these games where I could just couldn't get it it was kind of a Tetris style

math game with numbers on you know these kind of Tetris blocks and you kind of had to match up the numbers and I I was just checked out however both my former co-founder and my wife randomly separately were totally addicted to this game so much so that my co-founder my former co-founder would play it in meetings and I'd be like look you got to pay attention to these meetings like no no I am paying attention but this game is allowing me to to hone in and to me that was the most baffling thing ever so I kind of put it back the other way which is the only way to get to that aha surprise and Delight is to really deconstruct the human mind to your point these algorithms that have been used to date have been pretty blunt and it's sort of like the the shopping cart analogy you buy eggs and milk and you know maybe bread at the market I have eggs and bread in my basket maybe I want milk that's not really taking me into account it's just taking in account of very rudimentary pattern of data so then the question is how do you get a little

bit deeper and actually bringing that surprise and Delight factor is sort of kind of what motivates us because we do know that now that we've seen this this data we do know that this data can deliver that kind of really interesting personalization that hasn't been seen before but yeah in general what you don't want is you don't want people too engaged and just leaning back I mean that's kind of like what TV is but what games are is very lean forward right and so going back to this idea of a flow state if you can find that intersection where someone is just challenged enough but not too frustrated and not bored that actually in psychological terms leads you to be in the zone and to be really your best self at that moment in time and then the question is how do you deconstruct all that data to kind of deliver that which is again what we've been we've been focused on a great segue because that's what you have in your report you know you're talking about exciting games that get us in the zone and I love it you've you've pointed out

that there are games that spark Joy I thought that was great you know games that help us relax you went through titles you went through genres let's just step back briefly because I want to get into the findings but I think we have to also understand a little bit of the methodology the scope I mean this was not a report with like we asked 20 Gamers a multiple choice survey on pfish right this was the real deal stepping back you know over 500 people in this study we conducted it as well as we could mimicking the best academic research studies in Neuroscience the way that typically works in the intersection between neuroscience and games is that you have Labs where people are playing a series of games Gathering data and then benchmarking that data against well-known Neuroscience batteries around things like uh cognitive abilities which is attention task switching the ability to plan and focus and execute things like personality traits how open you are

to new experiences how conscientious you are things like mood and mindset are you really focused right now are you relaxed so there are a range of Neuroscience wellestablished uh exams or batteries and at the same time what we did is we just had people play a series a series of games and gather data on both ends we'd have people play games take these batteries play games take these batteries and then create essentially this data layer that was able to look at when someone played a certain type of game what's that translation on the Neuroscience side so coming out of that framework came essentially these findings but that's how you have to do this kind of stuff you have to act like it is essentially a research lab or a scientific study within this you know kind of Enterprise because otherwise you're not tying the two sides together in the right Fidelity so that's the work that went into it it some findings that it's actionable around personality traits and motivations it's also surprising what was a surprise for you I mean what would you like to uh to share

around what you saw in the findings you know I I'm not sure it's as surprising as much as gratifying to know that at the there's a broad level where you can make some broad generalizations right so in Psychology terms there's a framework known as the big five uh personality model which is the accepted way that psychologists look at personality traits again it's how open you are how conscientious you are how extroverted or introverted you are how agreeable or disagreeable you are how you know how prone to negative emotionality you are and so those five factors are kind of the model of how your personality works from a psychology point of view and so when we started to tie that to things like game genres and game preferences we saw things that maybe weren't surprising but were quite intriguing for example people who tend to be more open to new experiences tend to be really really open to playing roleplaying games which when you think about it kind of makes sense you want to put yourself in other

shoes you want to pretend to be in a whole new you know environment and and act in a whole new way so maybe that's not so surprising but the correlations then in terms of things like how open you are and do experiences and well-known game mechanics is exactly the opposite if you're not that open to new experiences which is not always a bad thing you tend to be more traditional in the things you like you'll like mechanics that are more traditional like Casino Games sports games things that you know in your your bones exactly how they work the most surprising or interesting thing is how scalable the data is once you get away from the broad well most people who are like this like this stuff as we talked about even with that shopping cart example it you know if you have this multifaceted model of the mind that takes in cognition personality mood and mindset you can then start to get really really precise about what would surprise them Delight somebody so maybe I'm more open to new experiences than most but maybe I'm actually a little bit more uh you know

conscientious than most which would make my you know game recommendations and the kind of stuff I really like a little bit different from you who might be very similar to me on those all those different Pathways so I think what's really nice is that there are some broad takeaways that people can you know uh Implement to have effects on their broad population but the more they dive in the more they'll see more and more success in terms ter of Engagement retention and monetization because it really comes down to every unique mind and every unique person and how they react to this bundle of game mechanics game genre you know play types all that wonderful stuff it also gets very exciting when it shows you something you didn't know I mean often cases when you have research of this type you look at it you look at your audience and you're discovering different clusters within your audience you didn't know that often happens you know you find new opportunities or you find Opportunities to maybe introduce a

a mini game or some other elements to to make your game broader is there a formula because this is what I think most devs would be very excited about yeah I think it's exactly like you said how can you look at the data understand within a population who is sort of bored or frustrated at the first initial level and then dive in a little bit more and be like oh well this group over here actually really wants to be more creative so maybe a very simple miname around just coloring or things like that that has like a coloring mechanic maybe that's where we'll get them going in between levels because as they feel more creative then their engagement happens so I think it's a there's no one formula here it's really coming down to you know what are the mechanics you have a play what are the mechanics you could introduce and then what are the different pockets of audience types that find you know these different mechanics interesting and then why why and the good news about this kind of data is the why becomes pretty clear because you can see very quickly people who tend to want

more Focus or relaxation or creativity or Joy or whatever it is have unique play patterns that segment out really really cleanly so then what we you know can offer and I think is the real Ultimate value of what we're trying to do here is it's this combination of all the player you know kind of mindset types there are all the different facets that go into you know how people think but it's also all the different type of game genres there are and then Within game mechanics what are the different mechanics that light up different types of people and what are the different bundles you can offer to different audience types I think your point about it it really is one game that appeals to different audiences within that one game is exactly it and I'm not sure that's one thing that I'd be interested in hearing what you think I I'm not sure that everybody's quite there yet I feel like people are getting more and more there but you know maybe you have a different perspective on that I want to get back to one other point in your research which is um you went through specific titles and I'd like you to

maybe just for our audience because I read it and I'm going to put it in the show notes everyone has to read the report download it read it but summarize for me some of the interesting points that you uncovered with regards to mental health mental well-being you know we talked about sparking joy and giving us an exciting experience but there's other things that play here that are much more interesting as as as benefit to to players you know our thesis was that people are playing games for a reason you know and and fun is always the reason but you know different people have different versions of fun at different times and want different things out of games at different times so the idea that you can help people relax and get calm and almost use games as a you know kind of augmentation to meditation has always been something that we thought really was really interesting I mean meditation is great you know I've been practicing for 20 plus years but it's subtle and it takes time and it's not for everybody and we

would have people coming out of this report coming back to us and saying things like oh you know once you told me that this game is actually relaxing I started to recognize why it relaxed me and then I wanted more of this kind of thing or I wanted less of this and and we'd asked them oh do you do you do you have some sort of mental Wellness routine do you you practice some sort of self-care they typically say no no no I'm way too busy I'm running around with all these errands every day and just play games for a few minutes and then we'd say well what's you know do you want to meditate and do those kind of things people would be like of course I do but I play games instead and it turns out that when reframing it people started to realize that their meditative practice was playing games which is really kind of an interesting thing people know they're doing it they made us not be conscious of it and so if you could frame it in a way framed around mental well-being it becomes a lot more interesting because then people have this kind of interesting framework to look at at how their mind is working reflect back a little bit and be like

well I want some of this right now maybe not so much this type of genre maybe I'm not in the mood for you know a bubble shooter right now maybe I want this more of a puzzle you know match three type of game something that calms me down at this time of day and we've started to see that happen on the player side where the more information you provide to the player about why they may be feeling the effects they're feeling out of these games they start to respond more and start to think oh that's interesting so how can I use this in my daily life so we you know we really believe that games you know like I said at the beginning are the future of skill development learning but also mental well-being and and for many ways we think that's the most important piece of the puzzle there's also a lot of great research Labs out there especially out of um Madison Wisconsin these were the labs that kind of proved that meditation was good for the mind you know meditating with both monks now they have literally spooled up games to do the same thing but around self-care so that idea of mental well-being and mental wellness and self-care coming through you know

what people think are just a Time waster to us is super powerful it's also super powerful here and really why I'm personally pleased to hear about your work and to welcome you here as well to the podcast is that now you've got a stake in the ground around the impact of games on Mental Health very strong statement definitely a strong report you almost now have the responsibility to involve other stakeholders in a in a wider discussion I mean this should be something that it's like health professionals game devs yourself saying you know there's something here that is bigger than the sum of the parts yeah I mean we're we're on our side you know we're small company but we've been pretty conscious about aligning ourselves with a variety of different research professionals and research Labs you know initially it's been at that level of cognitive science psychology Neuroscience which by the way are slightly different fs and look at things in different ways so the fact that we're

kind of tying together personality traits from a psychologist and cognitive traits from a neuroscientist and putting them together and saying these kind of equal this because of games has been pretty interesting for them you know themselves and so now you have kind of the research scientists looking at games as kind of the key to unify this view of the mind which is the start the next step I think is going to be actually getting people involved who really think about mental well-being every day really think about education who think about learning and skill development all of those are kind of one and the same and fundamentally you know our belief is always been that the more someone knows about themselves you know self- knowledge that is the key to happiness right if you can understand who you are even better right so how do you start to push on that and how do you start to bring these groups together you'll be seeing a lot more of that from us in uh in the next uh quarter or next year now I have to ask you because we've talked about it you know we're talking about the potential of like one game to rule the all something that's adaptive something that's learning then an

ecosystem of stakeholders health professionals understanding and pursuing this to make certain that it's not just games are good for me mental health but let's try and understand why and how and then wash rinse repeat to create games that have this sort of baked in so I have to ask you chathan I have to ask you what's next so you know we've been working on the the machine here right can you put together together you know games can you take games then translate into the data layer and then the mind layer and then can you start to have you know actual results that prove that games can be good for the mind the next thing that we're going to do and and we kind of alluded to this earlier in the talk is we're really going to start opening up a platform around adaptive games and adaptive play our vision is we want every game developer in the world to be on the skill print platform we want to be able to surface really interesting insights to players who play these games and at the same time we want to deliver this unique sort of

personalization to any game out there now you have to walk before you run and we kind of started at mobile games specifically mobile casual games because those tend to be the simplest in terms of game mechanic equaling this for the mind but we're already starting to see combinatorial explosions as you talked about the the midcore games wanting more puzzle experiences in between their flow you know you can just start to see it happening more from the game developer side so what we're you know hopeful we can do in the next year or so is really open up this platform and really start to get a range of different types of game developers on board who are using this technology you know for their own purposes to increase their engagement retention and mization but from the player side to really push on this idea that games and mental well-being you know are really linked together and I think that's the kind of nice thing about a platform is it's both sides and you know you're going to see stuff on the player side coming out from us and you're gonna see stuff coming out for game developers as well you've got me

thinking again um this is your goal right you want to shape the future of gaming for the better I've seen that in your press statements and elsewhere and now you're talking about getting everyone on the platform briefly what does that look like how does the Game Dev engage with you get on the platform grab this data ingest it and apply it yeah just the idea is you you integrate either an API or an SDK uh drop that in and then we're giving people a range of insights mainly that are around this idea of level difficulty and getting in your players into a flow State and we're looking to work with you know great game developers right now so anybody who wants to work with us on that level we're working with them you know essentially free we're never going to charge for this at this layer of analytics in fact in many ways this is just my learning from my last business you want to give data for free back to the developers you want them to have as much data as possible so we'll never be charging for that kind of data and give

you know it'll always be uh free for the developer to use this data as they want to either they they put our stuff in and they see great data and they continue to use us to actually be a part of this platform connecting players and developers together if they decide hey this data is great but I just want to use it for my own purposes to make my game better even better right all we want is to have people using this really interesting information when you think about these kind of data models the people who find Value in the data they'll want to give you more and more data that's always happened and the more data that people want to give you either on the player side or the developer side it just makes the whole system work better and so our goal is to be as friendly and helpful to everybody as possible with this idea that ultimately we do want people connecting both on the player side and developer side through this unique information speaking of value our last question we do it all the time what you value personally what's your favorite game you're currently playing and what's your favorite game of all time well I'm a I'm a huge Zelda

fanatic you know it's not not the most creative thing but um you know I think okarina of time is my favorite game of all time you know breath of the wild is a close close second uh I would be playing tears of the Kingdom uh however I've been very successful in translating my love of Zelda to my whole family so that includes my wife my 12-year-old son my 9-year-old daughter they are all playing tears of the Kingdom now and uh and I'm just watching them I actually only played it twice since it came out and I'm relegated to the couch just being a kind of a you know a spectator as they as they live stream in my own in my own living room uh tears of the Kingdom so you know that's the game I I should be playing uh there is another game I do play quite a bit still which is a an older game called Super Hexagon which is a mobile game from maybe even 10 plus years ago but uh maybe this gives a little insight into my personality it's one of these games where you probably can never win it's a

kind of endlessly endless destruction and it takes uh takes a lot out of you but I find it really peaceful and calm so take that for what you will about my personality so so what does that tell us about your gameplay well you know I do like open experiences and I do like you know I tend to be very open to new experiences so I do like that kind of Zelda roleplaying kind of you know frame um and I I love the idea in breath of the wild that it is literally an open world where you can kind of play your own way and and one of the interesting outcomes of seeing my wife and two kids play is just the Divergence in play Styles and and when I actually picked up tears of the kingdom and played it once or twice my wife was horrified by how Cavalier I was about just swashbuckling through the world so that's probably one thing but you know at this at the other side of it with Super Hexagon in a game like that which um you know you can't win I just find that that kind of endless frustration kind of rewarding Ing and uh keeps me going so you know maybe that's why I'm an entrepreneur who

knows but um we never stop learning see you're proving it you just love that that constant path and constant Challenge and uh I'm going to love having you back in about a year to tell me about what you're doing adaptive gaming now that is very cool that sounds like a talk or a book in itself and I want to be the first to have it you got to bring it back to us you got it we'll do it you're on thanks so much for sharing thanks Peggy this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast

pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and saltz and that's a wrap until next [Music] week