Decoding the World of Games with Professor Colleen Macklin
Colleen Macklin is a game designer and a Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design and the author of Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure. She’s interested in how games model and reveal ideologies through systems. And, incidentally, she reports she was recently diagnosed with ADHD, which makes her doubly cool in our crowd. She joins us today to talk about games and gaming, and neurodiversity.
We explore a wide range of topics, from the impact of ADHD on Colleen's life and teaching to her love for games and game design. Colleen shares her thoughts on how games can engage attentional deficits and embrace a broad neurodiversity spectrum. She also shares her journey with the game design collective Local No. 12 and their creations, including the videogame "Dear Reader."
Playing games helps us to rediscover playfulness in our lives, no matter our age. If there’s one thing we hope you’ll walk away from this episode thinking about, it’s that you have the opportunity — the gift — that is creating more play in your own life every day. You don’t have to be a tabletop gamer or a programmer in the video game field. All you have to do is wake up and decide: today, we play.
Links & Notes
Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure (The MIT Press) by John Sharp and Colleen Macklin
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, hello everyone, hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Hi, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Over there speaking Spanish.
Pete Wright:
I was speaking s... I was so embarrassed. We talked about it in our member pre-show, our guest today and you walked in as I was frantically trying to unlock my evening chest in Duolingo. And all I could think about is Barbie, do you know that scene in Barbie with the "BolÃgrafo."? It's just amazing and it seems like just what an incredible application of gamifying something that is so fantastic and unlocks something deeply in human potential. The idea of speaking another language, and does it in a way that makes me obsessed with points and jewels and XP, it's fantastic.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's great.
Pete Wright:
Are you excited about continuing this series?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We've got some great stuff going on.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, and I feel like we got really lucky with our next [inaudible 00:01:15] and our next guest, yes.
Pete Wright:
Look, so in the first episode of this season, couple weeks back, I brought up my experience attending a lecture on games and gaming at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. And I talked about the massively multiplayer edition of Rock Paper Scissors, that was transformative in my worldview. And I talked about that quote, "Games make rules fun." That you and I gushed over-
Nikki Kinzer:
Loved.
Pete Wright:
... for straight up an hour. And I cannot believe that that speaker at that lecture, the moderator at that game, and the speaker of that quote are all one person. And they're here today to talk to us about games. I feel like I just introduced the iPhone, it's a communication device and a music player, and are you getting it? It's all one thing.
Nikki Kinzer:
And they're here right now, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Oh my goodness, I'm really happy about this. Before we dig in and do an introduction proper, let's just do the reminders. We have a couple of quick announcements, if you want to get to know us a little bit better, you can visit takecontroladhd.com. And you can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list right there on the homepage, and get an email with the latest episode each week. A brief announcement, Stitcher, for our Stitcher listeners is closing down, and there is no alternative from their parent company, Sirius XM. So if suddenly your Stitcher app loses us, please go find us anywhere else fine podcasts are served. This has nothing to do with The ADHD Podcast, we still exist, Stitcher has been one of those things that people complain about. So there you go, Stitcher's leaving, it's not our fault.
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Colleen Macklin is a game designer and professor at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design. She's interested in how games model and reveal ideologies through systems. At Parsons, she's the founder and co-director of PETLab, an extraordinary lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement, like disaster preparedness games and sports with the Red Cross, the urban activist game Re:Activism, and the physical fiscal sport Budgetball that pits college kids against Congressional Budget Officers and the White House staff. Can't get over that one.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
She's a member of the game design collective, Local No. 12, known for the video game, Dear Reader and the social card game, The Metagame. She's also co-authored with John Sharp, Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Look at Iterative Game Design, and Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure. And incidentally, she reports she was recently diagnosed with ADHD herself, which makes her doubly cool in our crowd. Colleen Macklin, welcome to The ADHD Podcast.
Colleen Macklin:
Well, Pete and Nikki, I have listened to the podcast before. When I received my diagnosis, at this point it was just several years ago, I immediately reached out and listened, and I love it. So I can't believe I'm on here today, I'm really, really [inaudible 00:05:05] to be here, thank you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, that's so cool.
Pete Wright:
I have to say, we had no idea that you had any relationship to ADHD at all, we just want to talk to you because what you do is amazing for neurodiverse brains. This is an incredible coincidence and we're honored that you are here.
Colleen Macklin:
Well, I have to say, I think folks who are attracted to games, folks who are attracted to making games, and often those two things go hand in hand, I think in many ways might be considered neurodiverse. I've met a lot of game designers and we've shared our diagnoses and we've shared anecdotes about why games for us motivate us and why making them do too. And yeah, so it's a cool community and I'm glad to be part of it.
Pete Wright:
Oh, such a cool community, it's a cool community and it's a kind community. And I think it's a community that engages with different stimuli uniquely. And that's one of the reasons I think it's so important that you're here and talking about this stuff. Talk a little bit about your road to diagnosis, though, it sounds like it probably wasn't a surprise.
Colleen Macklin:
Well, it's really interesting because... It's so funny because my wife is like, "Yeah, I knew the whole time."
Pete Wright:
They always always know.
Colleen Macklin:
They always do, oh my goodness. And it was just getting to a point where I was having some increased difficulties as I got older. I think that you start to learn more about yourself, you've lived with yourself for a while. And so I reached out and spoke to a therapist, and that's when I got my diagnosis. But I'm really glad I did, it's explained so much in my life. And certainly I've worked and lived for a long time without the diagnosis, but now everything makes sense. And I have new strategies for managing it, which I think is really the main thing I needed.
Pete Wright:
Talking about the game development stuff in a bit, has it changed the way you approach your teaching?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, I've actually, over the years, my students, I feel very lucky, they often confide in me about their diagnoses or I hear from students about issues they might have with learning. Because learning is really, I think, where the rubber hits the road, right? You not only have to be able to pay attention in an environment that... Well, the classroom isn't the most stimulating environment, let's just say.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
I try to change it and make it a little bit more exciting for folks by having more hands-on activities and getting up out of the chairs and doing stuff. But students certainly need different levels of support, all students do. And those who come to me who have an ADHD diagnoses, I immediately can understand. And I feel like at least since I got my diagnosis and since I started medication and started other kind of mindfulness techniques, I was able to listen and kind of hear and understand better what my students were going through. So I just find it's a blessing, I'm really glad I was diagnosed and I'm really glad that I have amazing students.
Pete Wright:
Well, and those two words, you're able to listen and hear.
Colleen Macklin:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
I find my experience with ADHD, I can listen all day long, I hear a fraction of what I listen to.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So I think that's really important, having those words.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Tell us a bit about your journey with games, one of the things I observed in your lecture at Chautauqua, it speaks very broadly to our experience in the audience, right? You may not know you're a gamer, I told Nikki she was a gamer and she didn't know it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Although I do play games every day, I just didn't.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
I had a different thought around it until-
Colleen Macklin:
There you go, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
So you're a gamer, Nikki, sorry to tell you.
Nikki Kinzer:
I am.
Pete Wright:
I'm so interested in your journey, your personal journey with games. There is, I'm sure, a fascinating path that led you from there to teaching game design at Parsons.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, well, I don't want to tell you my whole life history, but I'll say-
Pete Wright:
We'll take the highlights.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, the highlights are that when I was nine, I got my first video game, home video game console, I guess, and it was the Atari 400. Now it's a little different, most people are used to the Atari 2600, right?
Pete Wright:
2600, yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, with the joystick and the single button, things were simple back in those days. But the 400 actually had the same kind of interface, but it had a little keyboard on it. And it let you put a cartridge in there, you could play Pac-Man or you could program in BASIC, okay. So-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh.
Colleen Macklin:
... I got hooked immediately. I was able to type in print Colleen, return, go to line [inaudible 00:10:26] and see my name fill the screen, right? And every kid who's ever learned a program back in the olden days has probably learned those three lines of code. And I soon started typing in, back in those days you got magazines that had code in them for different kinds of games, and you would type it into your computer and you'd be able to run them. But then I started changing the games, I started making them about my obsession, which was Jacques Cousteau and underwater exploration.
And really, if you would've asked me at the age of nine what I wanted to do when I grew up, I said, "I want to make video games." Now, that path diverged after a while, I think that it wasn't really socially acceptable to be into video games and coding when I was young, because it was very gendered, and it was mostly the boys who were into that. So as soon as I hit puberty, I kind of stopped, sadly. But I returned to it, I returned to it actually through a circuitous path, studying photography, filmmaking, and international affairs and-
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
That makes sense, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, complete sense.
Pete Wright:
In almost no way at all. Well, yeah, just in terms of being able to explore using these kinds of other forms of communication to explore various perspectives, it does seem to make sense.
Colleen Macklin:
Well, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Colleen Macklin:
And I think for me, photography is also, it's a technological practice. You're learning how to work with a camera and how to work with chemicals and other stuff at the time, or now you're working with software like Photoshop. And so I was doing that kind of stuff as that transition happened, and computers could do more powerful visual things. And so I just sort of got immersed in the idea of fabricating imagery. I started doing visuals at rave parties in New York City.
Pete Wright:
Describe that, visuals, what are you talking about? Is it laser shows and things?
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, really-
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm thinking psychedelic-
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, can you imagine that?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Totally. I would have Poodles jumping through hoops backwards and forwards, and Bruce Lee doing cool stuff, all kinds of content. And I was just kind of mixing these videos and applying effects to them and that kind of stuff. And that kind of brought me back to programming, and that brought me back to the joy of making things for people, making things to entertain people. And video games was kind of a hop, skip and a jump from there.
Pete Wright:
That's fantastic. So what do you find your... You're still obviously making games on the Atari 400, we don't need to ask that, of course you have that-
Colleen Macklin:
I actually do still have it, I love it. I boot it up every once in a while and I play some Centipede.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Well, I'm blown away at the love of some of those old games, right? We can still play [inaudible 00:13:51] Invaders now in VR, and I can shoot them with my phone as they descend upon me in real space. This whole sort of transition to multimodal gaming, I'm curious what lights you up about today's and our next bit of technology, just in terms of the things you're excited to work on?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh my gosh. Well, I have to say the number one most exciting thing about making any kind of game. And in your introduction to me, I've made sports, I've made tabletop games and card games and video games. And the thing that excites me the most is seeing players play and do really weird stuff you wouldn't have anticipated as a game designer. Because the cool thing about making games is that you come up with the rules, you come up with the world and the narrative and how everything works together. But people come with their own ways of thinking, their own brains that are different from your own. And you learn about people, I just love that, I just love to see someone do something I never thought of before.
Pete Wright:
That is one of the most interesting things about your [inaudible 00:15:02] is that you talk about the games that you have made for different platforms. I'm a huge fan of Dear Reader and blessedly already I just got The Metamorphosis, let me tell you that.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, hey.
Pete Wright:
I like Dear Reader a lot.
Colleen Macklin:
Nice.
Pete Wright:
So that experience, my introduction to your work as a game artist was through these platform games, right? The iPhone and things like that, but when you introduced Budgetball in your speech at the [inaudible 00:15:37], the first I'd heard of it, and it's extraordinary. Would you talk just briefly about it? Because I think it's such an interesting way to pivot your thinking about how we game, and then I promise we'll talk about ADHD stuff.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, absolutely. Well, Budgetball, it's a game about a very scintillating topic that we all are just dying to dive into, the federal budget.
Pete Wright:
100%.
Colleen Macklin:
Right? And it's a sport, physical and fiscal sport, ha ha. And every year, for several years, it was played on The National Mall in Washington, D.C. between college students and Congressional Budget Officers. And it was really meant as a demonstration of what it means to go into debt. Going into debt, strangely enough, feels great. You can do more-
Pete Wright:
Oh yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
... than you could before, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
But then getting out of debt, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Lot harder.
Colleen Macklin:
... Feels-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it's like you get the inverse dopamine push.
Colleen Macklin:
That's right, exactly. It's completely counterintuitive, but the game is really about that, it's about your emotional connection to debt. And also thinking about the federal deficit and what that means and the reasons why we have to go into debt in order to stimulate the economy and get things working, right? But then also, what happens if we try to get out of it, and the kind of constraints we have to take on. So the sport itself involved two teams trying to get the ball to the end zone. It was a game of passing, there's no tackling or anything like that. We really tried to make it very approachable to all physical abilities. And in the game, you go into budgeting sessions, normally you have-
Pete Wright:
Because it's eight minute sports quarters and three minute budgeting sessions.
Colleen Macklin:
Exactly. That's right, yeah, normally you've halftime, well, this time you've got a budgeting session. And you need to decide what are you going to do? Are you going to go into debt and get power ups, meaning an extra defensive player or the ability to score with two balls instead of just one. But then to win the game, you have to have the most points, but you also have to have a manageable budget, you can't be way out of line.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
So you also have to decide when are you going to try to get out of debt. And then to do that, you have to take sacrifices, which means everybody's got to wear oven mitts, or you might have one less player, et cetera. And they all had different money amounts, there was an interest rate, everything.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Colleen Macklin:
So it's really a game of strategy, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Colleen Macklin:
But also running around and having fun, and I have a question for you both. Who do you think won every single tournament? College students or Congressional Budget Officers?
Pete Wright:
I think it's Co-
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm going to say the college students.
Pete Wright:
I'm going to go with budget officers.
Colleen Macklin:
College students, they win every time.
Pete Wright:
Every time?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
If anybody's going to stack the deck in their own favor, it's the budget officers, right?
Colleen Macklin:
I know, you would think, I don't know what that says about this country, but regardless, I think there was some physical resilience involved there.
Pete Wright:
Advantage.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Of course, yeah. Wow, how interesting.
Pete Wright:
Well, and that leads us to something I've been thinking so much about with regard to the ADHD brain, and what I think Budgetball represents. Interestingly of your catalog, Budgetball to me hit home because it addresses two very different sort of conceptual realities in our brain, right? Moving back and forth between those two modes has, I think an interesting perspective for the ADHD brain.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Do you have thoughts on how you approach design with that in mind?
Colleen Macklin:
Well, we talked about dopamine earlier, right? The whole thing about games, and they can be all kinds of games, is that they certainly release dopamine, there's pleasure in games. It's the reason that we've been playing games as a species for since before written language. And so there's a great deal of pleasure in that. And part of that when we learn, and the way we learn best is when we have dopamine kind of happening there in the brain, when the brain is activated. And so games are designed specifically to do that, they're designed to be accessible, they're designed to be fair. They're designed to enable failure in a way that doesn't hurt, doesn't feel... Well, some folks are bad, poor losers, but for the most part, if you fail in a game, it's not going to impact your life in a negative way.
And so games kind of have this sort of special sauce of making learning fun and engaging, not just the mind, but the emotions and the body. When you are playing a game, even if you're sitting still and playing a video game, your palms start to sweat you, your eyes dilate, you lean forward, right? And I think that games kind of provide that perfect context for engagement.
Pete Wright:
There are two potential comments here. I want to start with this failure piece, which is one of the things we talk about all the time is RSD, rejection sensitive dysphoria, right? The act that being rejected or failing in the context of a social situation can create an undue burden on our brains, because we feel that rejection more strongly. And can lead to other spikes in emotional experience. And I think about this in terms of what it means to be a better gamer, right? What does it mean to be a better gamer? Not in terms of skill or proficiency in the game, but in your ability to play the game for what it is and not necessarily to win. Do you have thoughts on that?
Colleen Macklin:
Well, I think that's a big deal, right? When we sit down to play a game with each other, oftentimes when we're playing a social game, a card game, something like that, there's two goals, right? The first goal is the goal that the game identifies for us, which is to win, right? And to do that by having the most points at the end, or getting rid of all of your cards if you're playing a gin rummy kind of game. But that's the goal within the game, right? But we're also at the same time managing a second goal. And that one's kind of more overarching, and that goal is to have fun with each other. And so on one hand, the game is you need to destroy your friends.
Pete Wright:
Yes, winners will have the most fun.
Colleen Macklin:
That's right. And then on the other hand though, it's hang on here, be cool, because this is also about us getting together, socializing, and having a good time. So I think we're learning to modulate and manage our relationships with each other in these situations. Games teach us how to keep these two goals in mind and to always be kind of moving back and forth between them.
Pete Wright:
I have in my past, I admit it because I've changed, I turned over a Monopoly board in my youth.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, uh-huh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
I know I'm not alone.
Colleen Macklin:
I think we've all been there, haven't we?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, I think I've done that.
Pete Wright:
That sort of game induced rage, but one of the things that I know in hindsight is that I am also a victim of that RSD sort of rejection from myself. I turned over that game and walked away from the table in front of my parents and my friends, and I am carrying that with me now 40 years past.
Colleen Macklin:
Ouch.
Pete Wright:
It's still there in my heart.
Nikki Kinzer:
Pete, it's okay. As a coach, you need to let that go.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I know, but look at the lesson, right? I think that experience made me, quote, a better gamer.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I enjoy games more as a result of not feeling quite so strongly about them.
Colleen Macklin:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And I've played the games where I've invested hundreds of hours in video games, in online worlds. And I play the short games, Threes is one of my very favorite games too.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, wonderful.
Pete Wright:
Those games, they give me an attraction, a relationship with experimenting through social engagement that I don't feel quite so strongly about. So how do you address, or is there a way, I should say, in game design to address outsized levels of competition that players may experience?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
When I look at Monopoly as being completely wrongly designed for that experience, how do you think about it?
Colleen Macklin:
Well, we won't be able to go into the whole story of Monopoly, but what I will say is-
Pete Wright:
I don't have enough violins to play in the background, it's a sad story.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah, that is an incredible story. And Mary Pilon, who wrote The Monopolists is someone who speaks really incredibly about that. And I would recommend that book if you're curious about that history.
Pete Wright:
We'll add it to the notes.
Colleen Macklin:
But okay, what happens when you flip over the Monopoly board? Okay, this is what is happening. You are so invested in that goal of the game, right? And you can see yourself being thwarted. And the problem with the way that Monopoly has evolved, I mean its original design was actually quite good, is that it takes a long time to play. Oftentimes people play with house rules that are different from the actual rules of Monopoly. There is an auction element to the game that most people just jettison because they don't remember playing it when they were a kid in that way.
Pete Wright:
Didn't know that it existed until I played the tablet version of the game in which they enforced that rule by default.
Colleen Macklin:
And it actually makes the game better, I have to say. It's a little bit hard to learn at first, but it really does improve the aspect of the game, that is the long death march, right? You all know it, when one player is just amassing all of those utilities, or they're getting the high-end properties and putting houses on them, and you're just frustrated, right? It's just building, building, building until that board, you flip it over. And I think the thing that's happening there is that we have an emotional investment in this thing, right? That we have voluntarily come to play, and it's a really, really interesting phenomenon. I think games are kind of incredible in that way because they place us into this other reality, right? Where these goals that, you win at Monopoly, it doesn't make you a millionaire in real life.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, it doesn't really make you rich.
Pete Wright:
No.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, but that we care so deeply about that.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
And I think that actually we can use that, we can leverage that, and we can reflect on it to ask ourselves questions about real life, like, what does matter? And how do we also just manage those feelings, those emotions, when we can't succeed, what do we do? And again, I just think that idea of holding in your mind, the goal of the game and the goal of why you're playing in the first place, which is to have some fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely, and it's interesting too, because I think as a person who watches games, right? I like watching college football, I like watching the NFL as they get closer to the Super Bowl, not at the beginning of the season, but there are certain games that you like to watch. But you do, you get so invested, especially in college football, I do. And I get so invested in the team, and then I'm thinking, "Okay, it's just a game, this does not affect me personally. My day is going to be exactly the same, these players are going to be just fine."
Colleen Macklin:
Yep.
Nikki Kinzer:
You have to kind of talk yourself into it, but then I was going to say, also, I like playing poker a lot too. And I like the strategy of poker, and I think that with poker, it's not so much that... Yeah, you want to win, of course, but you want to get better. And so you're looking at every hand of, "Okay, how could I have played that differently?" It's just this drive to just get better, like, "I want to go to Vegas and play poker and feel confident."
Colleen Macklin:
Heck yes, Nikki, I support that goal.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
I love poker, I absolutely love it, I have a sort of standing game with some friends. And what's absolutely fascinating about that game from my perspective as a game designer, is that the basic rules of the game are pretty uninteresting. For most games, actually, tabletop games, what's more boring than reading the rules? Oh my God. So poker is just what hand beats the other hand? The turn order, et cetera. But the cool thing is that you develop, there's these emergent strategies. Bluffing isn't part of the original rule set of poker, but it's what we do as humans, what we bring to the strategic approach that we come to with these sort of rules. And it enables us to do and think in new ways that we don't normally think with. But then we can apply that to skills in real life, right?
So learning about your own self, I think that games really are a mirror to our own abilities, our own emotional regulation skills, our social skills, and our ability to learn. And be deeply invested in feedback and what's happening in that game. To me, a game like poker is a perfect example because it's not the game, but it's how we play it-
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly.
Colleen Macklin:
... that makes it so exciting.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I love that point because last week we talked about tabletop games and tabletop role playing games, specifically, right? This whole-
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, wonderful.
Pete Wright:
One of the things that I love so much about it, even as an old guy, we have a six-year standing game, and the whole idea of being able to take on a persona and play that persona as sort of experimental experiential theater.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh my God, yes.
Pete Wright:
Right?
Colleen Macklin:
You can try-
Pete Wright:
There's learning that comes from that, right?
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, no, absolutely, in games we become someone else, right? We can try on different personalities, we can try on different abilities.
Pete Wright:
Hearing you guys talk about poker, and I don't poker, I don't understand it, I'm not good at it, I lose all the time. But when you say bluffing was not a part of the original rule set, isn't bluffing taking on a persona just like you're doing in a role playing game?
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely, and that's what games do, they give us these little stylized systems to live within that are different from the systems we normally live within. And there's arbitrary goals, and there's weird constraints to getting to those goals. When you play golf, you have to use all these little sticks to get a tiny ball into a hole really far away that you can't even see. And so games give us these sort of interesting problems to solve. And while solving those problems, we really learn a lot about ourselves and each other, the other folks that we're playing with too.
Nikki Kinzer:
And you build memories, that's the thing too-
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh my God, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
... it's so fun to think about all of the different vacations you might've taken with other people and how, [inaudible 00:32:02] remember that when you almost peed your pants because you were laughing so hard.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's fun.
Colleen Macklin:
Absolutely, because we're activated, we're emotionally invested.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Colleen Macklin:
Games really give us that opportunity that normally you've got to make that for yourself. You've got to turn work into a game, I guess, if you're going to want to have those kind of feelings and experiences from that.
Pete Wright:
So much of what you talk about and write about is in using games and the rules of games to broaden sort of your perspective in the world. And I'm curious where your work is in moving some of those things forward. How do we use games to learn more about ourselves? And how should our minds be oriented? What should our mood be as we play a game to learn?
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, well, I would have to say my primary interest is, okay, this is going to sound nerdy, but it's how do games reveal the way that systems work? And systems and systems dynamics is this sort of way of understanding the world as not just separate stuff, but interconnected elements that have relationships and through those relationships have certain outcomes. So, so much of our world is systemic, climate change, right? How does that work? Well, it's a lot of interconnected things that behave in certain ways and lead to certain kinds of outcomes. And that's what games are too, they're these little approachable and understandable systems. The ones in the real world are pretty hard to wrap our heads around, oftentimes. Look at how we're responding to some of the bigger problems and crises in the world today, like climate change or systemic racism.
But with games, we can kind of encapsulate those systems just like Budgetball, debt, and we can make them approachable, understandable. And within a timeframe that we can get from not understanding how the system works to a deeper knowledge, a deeper understanding of those inner workings. And to me, that is the sort of magic of games. That just like film is great at understanding storytelling and understanding how people might react in certain situations, games are great at helping us understand interconnected and complex systems. And to me, that's magic. So my research lab, a lot of my work has been about translating real world stuff into accessible and approachable games. So from federal debt, to the electoral college, to what we should do during a flood.
Pete Wright:
It's just a real sweet spot for kind of universal playtime.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Exactly, it sounds light stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, super light. But to that point, in your recent... you're working with students, I assume these students are there, not by force or fiat, but by choice.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
And how do you find getting those topics and making them engaging to these other brains outside of yours? How does it work?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, well, I have to say, if you want to understand something, make a game about it. That is how you learn how things work in a way that's entertaining and engaging. And that you can show to somebody and play with someone and actually have a fun experience. And that's what learning really should be, right? It should be fun. When we're little babies and children, we play to learn, right? And I think now as adults, we kind of have to relearn how to play. And so to me, the beauty of games is that they give us that excuse and they let us learn something new, learn a whole new system, learn how to strategize within that system to get to the results that we want, to win or succeed. And they're wonderful opportunities for that. So with students, the best thing is we're not going to sit down and you're going to hear me lecture about the electoral college. It's how do we make a game about this really boring, weird, convoluted thing?
That, to be honest, this was one of the first games I made with my students, and I didn't even understand how the electoral college worked.
Pete Wright:
How the electoral college works.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh my God.
Nikki Kinzer:
I bet you do now.
Colleen Macklin:
I'm embarrassed to say.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh my God, as my student said at the end of that project, "Now I understand how the electoral college works as well as I understand baseball."
Pete Wright:
Oh.
Colleen Macklin:
And to me, that was just mind-blowing, I was like, "Okay." I've got creative, amazing art students who want to make incredible media. They want to make video games, they want to make all kinds of stuff. And I can take something like the electoral college or climate change, or you name it, whatever they care about too. I have students making games about student debt, they care about student debt.
Pete Wright:
Oh, they care about that.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
They have to. And then designing a game about it is really trying to understand at the core how that system works and how we can actually make it approachable and understandable. [inaudible 00:37:47].
Nikki Kinzer:
That's so interesting to me, I wrote it down because this is so inspiring to think if you want to learn about something more about the systems, make a game out of it.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow, so how do you start to do that?
Colleen Macklin:
Sure.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, where do you go? What do you do?
Colleen Macklin:
Well, I think the thing about games, right? Is that they're about action.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
So the way I like to break it down, I like to do nouns, verbs, and adjectives, okay. So let's see, give me something you want to learn about.
Nikki Kinzer:
I want to learn how to build a second brain, I'm learning how to store my notes.
Colleen Macklin:
Okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
Where do I store my notes? And how do I organize that? That's what I'm learning right now.
Pete Wright:
This is a long-running crusade for you.
Nikki Kinzer:
It is.
Colleen Macklin:
Okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
This is very exciting.
Colleen Macklin:
Great.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Colleen Macklin:
Excellent. Okay, well, what are the nouns involved in that, right? Is it a notebook? Is it a physical notebook? Is it-
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I'm learning from a physical book, and then I'm going to-
Colleen Macklin:
Okay, Building a Second Brain.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, and then I'm going to be putting it in Obsidian.
Colleen Macklin:
Is it an ideas or ideas, nouns in this context?
Nikki Kinzer:
Is that what you're talking about? I'm sorry, Pete, what did you say?
Pete Wright:
Well, I was just saying we have the atomic elements of notes are the ideas that go on a note.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
The notes are individual sort of units of measure [inaudible 00:39:09].
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
We have tags to tag your notes, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Tags, category.
Pete Wright:
Tags are important.
Colleen Macklin:
Absolutely, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
We're doing okay so far, all right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Colleen Macklin:
You're doing great.
Nikki Kinzer:
All right, good.
Colleen Macklin:
You're doing great.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Colleen Macklin:
So you've got lots of nouns there, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Colleen Macklin:
You've got the stuff that you take the notes on, you've got the kind of notes that you're going to make, and the idea of just even a second brain is super cool.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Colleen Macklin:
So then you might think about, well, how does a brain work too? How does it store stuff? Store, okay, that's a verb, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Colleen Macklin:
What are some other verbs involved in-
Nikki Kinzer:
Organize.
Colleen Macklin:
Organize, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
File.
Colleen Macklin:
File, write.
Nikki Kinzer:
Write.
Colleen Macklin:
Maybe draw-
Pete Wright:
Oh, yeah. Oh, I like that.
Colleen Macklin:
... a picture.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah. So we can think of all these verbs, right? And then what does it feel like to have a second brain, Nikki?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, just-
Pete Wright:
Does a sigh count as a-
Nikki Kinzer:
Is that something? Yeah, what is that sigh? Just relief, I guess.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Relief, and-
Colleen Macklin:
You don't have to hold it all in your first brain.
Nikki Kinzer:
... you don't have to worry about it, you know where it's at. You can go get it when you need it.
Colleen Macklin:
Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
Relief.
Colleen Macklin:
Relief, okay, so that's how I start. Basically, it's okay, we're going to take the nouns, we're going to relate them through verbs. And we're going to make a game that feels like relief, right? So some of the best games out there, I don't know if you've played Overcooked or Diner Dash. These are time management games-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, fun.
Colleen Macklin:
... and they really are kind of about work, right? They're about how do you manage lots of information and relay it and act in ways that kind of keep that stuff-
Nikki Kinzer:
Going.
Colleen Macklin:
... happening and going and not falling into chaos. And how to keep it organized, right? To a certain extent. So I could imagine that kind of genre working really well for your second brain game.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Where you got all these ideas, all this stuff coming into your brain, how do you store it? And then develop that kind of calm, that sense of relief.
Nikki Kinzer:
Ugh, I love it.
Pete Wright:
It's wonderful, and it gets to something I think we talked about, maybe not quite thoroughly enough in our first episode, which was this idea of gamifying your life. Is this every day for you? You just see, "Oh, here's a new thing I have to do-
Colleen Macklin:
Whatever nouns, whatever verbs.
Pete Wright:
... I want to make a game out of it." Nouns, verbs, adjectives, right?
Colleen Macklin:
Well, I've been involved, right now I'm working on a new project where I am trying to make a game that uses machine learning. And have you ever tried ChatGPT?
Pete Wright:
Oh, yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah, everybody, right?
Pete Wright:
[inaudible 00:41:48]. Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah. So I'm trying to make a game that makes it really weird ChatGPT to have a conversation with, and part of it is programming and coding. And so for me, what I try to do is I write down what is my goal today? What do I want to kind of get done in terms of programming? And the reason I think I was attracted to games since I was nine years old is that when you write a line of code, you get immediate feedback. You run it and you see it completely break and shatter in front of your face-
Pete Wright:
Love how that's your first example, yes.
Colleen Macklin:
... usually.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
Yeah, but then you iterate and you get better. And I just have to say, I think the best skill for living is learning what games teach us, which is failure is okay, that's how we learn. You start with Super Mario, you don't know that that red stuff is lava until you jump into it. But you have multiple lives, right? And you can iterate, you get better over time. You can keep trying and getting better and fail better, really to use Samuel Beckett's term. So that to me is really about to gamify one's life, I think to me is to recognize and understand you're not going to be good at it the first time. And to give yourself that forgiveness and to be approaching things in a playful and forgiving spirit so that you know when you fail you're just learning something new and you can try again.
Pete Wright:
Oh, that's-
Nikki Kinzer:
Lovely.
Pete Wright:
... lovely, I'm not going to butcher that by asking another dumb question, but I will-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, [inaudible 00:43:31].
Pete Wright:
... ask you to pitch what are you excited about plugging for our audience? What do you want them to try of yours? What's your most favorite thing right now?
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, wow, well, gosh, I love so many different things, but what I have to say is please try to play my game, Dear Reader. It's on Apple Arcade, which is a subscription service, but if you get an iPhone or a Apple TV or any kind of new hardware, usually you get a few months for free.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Colleen Macklin:
So try it out, see what you think. I've even gotten responses from some of our players that one in particular said they have ADHD, and they struggle sitting down to read for an extended period of time. But with Dear Reader, they've been able to engage with all these different books. So it is a game of playing with classic literature, you put it back together. So if you like word puzzles, there's 24 different types of word puzzles in that game. And you can make it through Pride and Prejudice or Ulysses.
Pete Wright:
It is [inaudible 00:44:43].
Colleen Macklin:
[inaudible 00:44:43] Emily Dickinson, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Which are all fantastic. And the mechanics, some of the mechanics are extraordinarily frustrating, I get the swap mechanic in particular drives me batty because my brain can just make sense of anything in there.
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
And it's deceptively challenging, it seems like an incredibly easy conceit and just wait because-
Colleen Macklin:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
... it gets very challenging. And it's not like throw my phone challenging, but it is, I try to [inaudible 00:45:16] that particular response. Colleen, you're fantastic, thank you so much for sitting down with us and sharing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Colleen Macklin:
Pete and Nikki, thank you for having me here, and I just really hope that you stay playful, right? And that everybody just remembers that if you don't get it the first time, you can always try again. There's always a do-over and failure is not a bad thing if you're approaching things in a playful spirit.
Nikki Kinzer:
Love it.
Pete Wright:
Thank you, Colleen, and thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute about this conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server. And you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level, or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Colleen Macklin, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
