An Ever-Evolving Industry with Gaming Pioneer Gordon Walton

December 12, 2023

An Ever-Evolving Industry with Gaming Pioneer Gordon Walton

Gordon Walton is the Chief Product Officer and Executive Producer at Playable Worlds, a computer games company specializing in gamification, online games, and game development. As a pioneer in the industry, Gordon started his career in 1977 and has executive-produced multiple MMO games. He has an extensive resume, working for companies such as ArtsCraft Entertainment (formally known as Crowfall), Monumental LLC, Playdom, and Sony Online Entertainment. Gordon oversaw the development of several MMOGs, including Air Warrior and Multiplayer Battletech at Kesmai Studios.

Additionally, he’s personally developed over 30 games and led the development of more than 200 games. His numerous years of experience and knowledge have made him a thought leader in the industry, and he speaks regularly at industry conferences. Gordon also serves as an advisor for various gaming educational programs.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Gordon Walton reflects on his career and the progression of the gaming industry
What factors contribute to a successful game?
Gordon gives insight on how to establish communities
How to market games in an ever-evolving industry
Gordon briefly discusses Playable Worlds
What does the future of gaming look like?
The benefits of inclusion and diversity in the gaming industry
Gordon shares his personal growth and how it influences how he leads

In this episode…

In the early days of the video game industry, game developers were nerdy hobbyists creating games for other hobbyists. However, the industry has changed significantly over the last 50 years.

Gordon Walton, a seasoned game developer, shares that during the '70s and '80s, a coder may have produced 100 lines of code per day. Today, it’s much faster and more interactive. The scale is also much more extensive, from as low as five-person teams to large teams of hundreds of workers. He also explains that the one-time linear career path in gaming is a different ecosystem. Gordon suggests aspiring developers should be flexible and seek positions where gaps must be filled. Although being an expert in one area is imperative, a willingness to learn other skills always proves beneficial.

On today’s episode of Here’s Waldo Podcast, Lizzie Mintus welcomes Gordon Walton, Chief Product Officer and Executive Producer at Playable Worlds, to discuss how the gaming industry has evolved. Gordon shares vital elements of a successful game, insights on establishing communities, and why inclusion and diversity are essential to the industry.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast and every episode we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the video game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. We provide a white glove experience that ensures a win outcome.

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to the connector himself, Wallace Poulter. Thank you so much for connecting us and bringing us here today. That's what it's all about.

Today we have Gordon Walton with us. Gordon Walton has been building computer games for over 45 years. He is currently chief product officer and executive producer at Playable Worlds, working on a new MMO with Raph Koster.

Prior positions include VP and executive producer at Monumental, president and executive producer at Artcraft Entertainment, VP and executive producer at Playdom Austin, VP and co GM at Bioware Austin, VP and executive producer at Sony Online Entertainment, Maxis, Origin, and Cast my corporation. He also led development at Konami of America and 360 Pacific and his own independent studios.

Let's get started. Thank you for being here. You have been in the industry for 45 years and in MMOs for 25 ish. Can you give us a brief summary of what led you to where you are today?

Gordon Walton: Let's see. I was actually building computer games while I was in college, even as I was entering college back in the cassette days. After I got out of college, I went and got a real job, discovered that wasn't really for me and I've been doing games mostly ever since.

Actually, I didn't really want to do anything significant, little did I know that the industry would grow up into something significant eventually. We were just doing hobbyist stuff for the longest time. And then all of a sudden, we won, is the way I think about it. Gaming won. We weren't expecting to win, but we won because we became the number one entertainment medium. That wasn't even a thought in anybody's mind, 25 years ago, even.

We sold a million copies at a time that there were three or four billion people, right? Nowadays, half the population of the earth games. So we already won. So I'm like coasting, is what I think. The medium won. I was lucky to be there early on and get to see a lot of the changes along the way.

Lizzie Mintus: So what were your aspirations when you started? It was a hobbyist project.

Gordon Walton: I wanted to do creative stuff, right? Just wanted to do interesting work. If you were a coder back in the 70s or the 80s, a commercial coder, the average kind of productivity was a hundred lines of code a day.

When you do games, you do many times that per day you're getting the direct feedback because they're interactive. So it was much more fun to write games than to write many other things in code.

I just wanted to code at the time. I was a coder and loved coding. And it was the most challenging coding I could come up with. So that was it. I like the challenge and being able to do stuff fast.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I think people are really fun too because they love what they do and they're having so much fun doing it.

Gordon Walton: That came later when there were more people. When I started, it was like me and one other person. Then it was me and four of my good buddies. Then it got bigger until it's hundreds of people working on a single game for years and years.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Maybe thousands today. It was huge. I just went to GamesBeat Next and there was a great talk and the women in games breakfast about how career paths are not a straight line and sometimes you work in different roles that end up leading you where you need to go. What are some of the more unexpected career moves you've made and what did you learn?

Gordon Walton: In my own career, when I go speak to kids at colleges, they all go, tell me about how you did it so I can do it the same way.

It'll never work. I was in a different place in a different time. Today, it's a very different ecosystem. The gaming ecosystem, in fact, changes every 3 to 5 years. It's pretty radically different.

it's more about meta roles than a specific way to do it. And I think most of it is just rolling with the punches and looking for where's the action and where's the missing things, right? Can I fill a gap? You jump in and fill the gap, you're going to be one of those people that they want on a game team. Because what are game teams full of? They're full of gaps, mostly. There's always a deficit of leadership and there's always a deficit of enough people to get all the work done.

If you can both produce a lot of work and, or jump in where there's a hole and fill it in, I think that's where a lot of people's careers move from one place to another. I'm not an expert at that, but I'm willing to try and do it. And then next thing you know, you pick up another skill set. And every skill set, when you think about game development, it's multidisciplinary. So what you're really doing is learning to speak several different disciplines, languages. And the more of those you can speak, the more you can set the intersection between them, which makes you more valuable to the overall project.

1 of the advice that I do give a lot of the kids I see in college that are coming out is, just be an expert at what you do and then go learn something that you're not an expert at because you're going to be more valuable if 2 things. Even if you're not an expert at both, but be an expert at one, because you need to be a individual contributor for a while until you move into management.

The ante in our world is being good at what you do. If you think about it, we have a lot of people who want the jobs. They need to be really good at what they do because we're not a stable industry, right? We're not thinking about the next generation of stuff very often.

We're thinking about how do I get this product done today? And if I can get this product done today, that's as far as my horizon goes. Even the big companies are pretty poor about managing their talent across over time, unless it's on a fixed franchise that's on a cyclical pattern. If it's a new IP, until it's proven, they're not thinking about where they're going to use that talent next. Because we're just not that stable as an industry, right? We're not like the old studio system where they had a bazillion actors under contract, and they would throw them on any old movie that came down the pipe.

Our specialties don't even lend themselves to that. And the way that we build products are not Interchangeable parts, either. People are not interchangeable parts. Even if they have the skills, they have to get along with the team. They have to work well with the others that happen to be put together on that team.

The soft skills are really important for people in our business. Most colleges don't prepare you that well for that, or other educational institutes don't really prepare you well for soft skills, when they're actually critical to your success.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, they're essential.

I just chatted with Jenny, who has a company, Talofa Games, and she went to MIT and she said there's a course at MIT about soft skills in the industry to try and prepare you for that. And I love it.

Gordon Walton: See, they're a smarter college. And they know a lot of their students are on the spectrum and need this too.

So they have the smartest of the smart at MIT.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there is definitely a big difference between IQ and EQ and intersection where they meet that is the best. It's hard to have a lot of both for sure.

Gordon Walton: I think it's also important for everyone to understand because we do draw a lot of super bright people to our business.

And sooner or later, you're going to run into some people that are better than you. They're going to be smarter or they're going to be better at the particular thing So the idea is not It's not a race to be the best, it's a race to be the collective best, at some level, right? Can our team accomplish more than another team?

Not, am I the best person on the team, and can I accomplish more than everybody else, because I'm winning locally. My local maxima is I'm the best of the best, and I don't really care about everybody else. Then, probably the game's not going to work out that well either. You have to care about the end result at some level, even more than your own ego, if you really want to get great stuff done.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to talk to you about what makes games -successful. I know you have been a part of 200 games that have shipped or more. And you've seen so many different ups and downs. What do you think makes a game successful and not?

Gordon Walton: What's the best way to put this? So I'm going to say something a little philosophical. Every shipped game is a miracle, with rare exceptions. There are some exceptions where actually there's enough resource to actually get the game done. But most of the time you're undergunned and undersupplied to get the game done. So it's almost a faith based enterprise.

The team believes it into existence. Not just wishes it, but builds it right. They put the effort in to make it happen. And I don't mean crunch. I just mean that it's an unlikely scenario to build software in the kind of time with the time and energy that we put into it to shippable point.

So I think every ship game's a miracle first, right? Just getting it to actually get to the point where it can ship is amazing. Then it has to win in the market on top of that. And that's the second miracle. So I like to think of myself as being in the miracle squared business and it doesn't always work out right.

You can't predict a hit. You can't predict something's going to be successful. The more you can predict it. the more derivative it tends to be and the less ambitious. And then you're not really predicting a hit, you're predicting, oh yeah, it'll be financially successful, which is different than a hit.

Different than something that matters to people's hearts and minds. It might be something that they enjoy, but it's not going to be with them when they're on their deathbed, right? And I think the hits are more like things that have such an impact on people that it's inscribed on their soul in some way. When I was working on Ultima Online a long time ago, I realized a little ways into that experience. I go, there's going to be people on their deathbed who are hearing the intro music to this game in their head while they're on their deathbed. Because they've spent that much time in this world and they've invested so much energy into it.

That's what drew me into MMOs too, was the fact that we're not just entertaining. We're not just getting mind share, we're getting life share out of people. Thousands of hours of energy being poured into this environment, and so that to me was, oh, this is the power of the medium of what we're doing and I'm interested. I'm always interested in the frontiers. It's still a frontier at some level. We still don't understand it very well.

We understand a lot more than we did 20 years ago. But I don't think anybody really understands it fully yet. And so for me, that's exciting. Whenever you're on the edge of something and figuring out, you do something and you go, wow, I didn't know that now. I know now I know a little bit more. Maybe that process is sometimes a little painful or obnoxious, but that's where all the exciting things are on the edge. If you think about it, where the water meets the land is where the interesting things are happening on an edge. I think the whole business is really exciting. Even doing the most mundane things in the business is still exciting, but some of it is really exciting. That's what's kept me interested and engaged in it all these years.

Lizzie Mintus: You're in the right place doing something you absolutely love. And I think the product is always more successful when you really love it.

And you love the mundane things, even.

Gordon Walton: Well you have to.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I mean, that's what you're doing more than anything else, so absolutely, and have a good sense of humor too, huh?

Gordon Walton: That helps. It's not always fun and roses. If you think about, an average, real job, most people go to work, and why are they working? They're working to make money to go do something that they actually want to do. That's a job, right?

Most of the people who work on games actually want to be making games. So they've already gotten a lot of benefit from that. The truth is making games is like any other job. Most of it is perspiration, not inspiration.

There are inspiring moments and there's inspiring times, but a lot of it is just grinding it out. Like doing the work, right? The work can be a fulfilling and exciting, but a lot of it is a grind where you just, oh, we have to get this done for the whole game to work. And it's not the most exciting piece, but it must be there and it must be good, if not great.

The stuff that we really focus on to make great, the differentiations, the things that are exciting. You can get a lot of energy back from that, but sometimes you're in the grind and you're not getting that much energy back from it, unless you're thinking about the end result, even though the part you're doing is necessary, but not sufficient to get to that end result.

Lizzie Mintus: I think that's just figuring out your purpose, like anything in life. And if you know your purpose and you see the greater vision than all the bullshit along the way is tolerable.

Gordon Walton: Again, you need to reconcile yourself, a lot of it's just work. It's just stuff you have to do to make it work. To get to the result that you want.

The closest thing to gaming is start, like high tech startups, where you're taking something from an idea to reality... forgot the guy, but he did the 0 to 1 book and that's what Peter Teal did. But, 0 to 1, you're going from nothing to something that's complete, right? And that's unusual. A lot of jobs aren't like that. Most jobs are like, more process and they're pieces of that. And I think we get the benefit and the joy of actually taking something from when nobody knew what it was until so until it's something that's fully realized and out in consumers hands being played

Lizzie Mintus: And with MMOs, you could have such a community of people.

Gordon Walton: The joy and the pain of that. There's both. And here's what's interesting about the MMO land.

Nobody understood connected audiences, right? Because if you think about audiences before that your connections was really your social network, nobody else, right? Your friends, your family could talk about stuff. Now, so many things are socially connected beyond our little, small horizons. With a socially connected audience, all the marketing rules change.

If you're AT& T or Maubelle 30 years ago selling phone stuff, if you call in and complain and somebody actually gives you your money back or something, who are you going to tell? You're going to tell your tiny little network, right? Now suddenly 2 million people know, here's the scam to get your money back if you're not satisfied.

You can't treat a connected audience the way that audiences have been traditionally treated. And so we pioneered that. If you think about MMOs were around before social media. And what social media is a subset of connected audiences to do stuff. That's why I found the field so interesting.

With games, it's psychology and all this tech and all these specialties put together. And now suddenly you had sociology on top of psychology because it's not people, it's groups of people that are connected to each other and talking back to you. It gets more and more exciting as the scale goes up too.

That's the other lesson. Scale matters.

Lizzie Mintus: So how do you go about building these communities or building your game around building the future community?

Gordon Walton: A lot of people like to talk about building communities. I think you mostly steal them. Every once in a while you make one, but most of the time there's already affinity groups of people who are interested in particular things and what you're trying to do is tap into those communities.

Back in the early 2000s, they got commissioned. Go make a game, go make a brand new game, go make a new IP, MMO. And I went out and looked at existing communities, and came up with three sets of kind of communities, and said, which one of these would make the most interesting game? Which of these communities are easier to steal, easier to co op, to have a kickoff audience?

Because you need an audience, particularly for a social MMO game, you need an audience. So I think mostly what we're doing is trying to make stuff that will appeal to preexisting communities nowadays. Every once in a while, you can come up with something novel enough, it's viral enough to make its own community.

But remember the biggest problem that everybody has, whether you're mobile or whether you're PC or console is how do you get the word out to the right people to get them to come try your stuff?

Discovery is the biggest problem. So anytime you can find a community, that's going to have a natural affinity and again, steal or co opt it. You want to do that first and foremost, so that you can get the jumpstart, before you have to go do all that heavy lifting or spend a ton more money. When game marketing suddenly became as big as game development or bigger, you've got a discovery problem.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What do you think about marketing in 2023 and beyond. It's such a different game these days with influencers and Discord groups and all of this. Talk to me about the evolution and the future of it.

Gordon Walton: Oh, I wish I understood the future. If I understood the future, I could get rich. Here's the challenge, right?

I've been in this business a long time. Anybody who can forecast by three to five years out accurately is pretty rare. Because it's so dynamic.

Think about it. We're at this intersection of high tech entertainment and an evolving customer base and what we build involves the customer base. So stuff that's coming out all the time is changing customer expectations. Once they play, name your game. Suddenly it makes a difference what they're going to play next, right? Their taste is evolving because of what we're offering them. And again, that audience is not uniform.

There's a whole bunch of audiences. That are different. But now suddenly it gets harder and harder to hit the zeitgeist of a big audience. I think micro targeting, if only we can make games cheaper, we can micro target a lot better. Games cost a lot nowadays, right? That means that they almost have to get a big audience. And that makes the need to find something that's universally or large scale acceptable, it's harder and harder for us because that audience, while some of it is super evolved in their taste, they're basically wine connoisseurs of gaming.

If you thought about this is drinking. There's people drinking ripple wine way down here at the bottom. Just okay, I need a wine just to get a buzz all the way up to. I can tell you 17 flavors that are in this thing just by staking a sniff of it, not even tasting it.

Our audience is like that too. It's all over the map and finding those audience segments and really satisfying them has become more and more challenging over time. And the mediums that we're using to reach people is changing constantly too. 10 years ago, which was not much of a thing. Three or four years ago, TikTok wasn't much of a thing. Right now, it's a big thing, both of them. So this is going to continue to evolve.

Right now, business models haven't changed much since we went free to play, but business model changes also change everything. That's what I mean. The environment underneath us is constantly changing. We have three to seven year development cycles. And the market's evolving literally year by year, if not faster. So we're trying to hit a target in the future. We're building something.

Oh, I'm going to hit a target in the future. And the world's going to be just like that when it, when we get there. And of course it won't be, which means we're learning while we're developing and maybe having to shift the target of what we're doing constantly, which is more difficult than building to a schedule, figuring out what you want and building that.

We're iterating as we build based on what we're learning for the market as we build it. It's highly dynamic. This is why it's hit driven, this is why it's a huge failure rate for most games.

Most games will fail. I don't want to say most games won't ship. Most games that ship won't make money, is the problem. It's not really a problem, it's a feature of what we do. We're making entertainment, we either find the audience or we don't. If we don't, we fail. If we do, sometimes we make a lot of money, right? If it finds a big audience, we make a lot of money.

It's shocking to me at this point. 10 years ago, you couldn't find a game VC to save your life. I think there were three in the world at that point. 20 years ago, there was zero. 10 years ago, there were like three. Today, you can throw a rock and hit one, right?

So there are hundreds of game VCs. Which always shocked me because I always thought when you think about our business, I always thought of it as a high risk medium return business. And that sounds a little nuts, but even the biggest games, if you think about it, all games are high risk. But then only the biggest ones can do what you call nearing a high return. It's hard to make a unicorn out of a single game.

Here's a billion dollar enterprise out of a single game. How many games get to do that a year? Is it three? Is it one? Is it five? It's not a very big number, considering, if you look on the Apple Store. Last time I looked, I think it was two to four hundred games a day at the Apple Store. Most of them are crap, right? But even even twenty years ago, I was looking, oh, look, twenty five hundred games hit the shelves. PC games that hit the shelves a year. But who was winning?

Like 50 of those games won. If anything, the percentage is smaller of the ones that hit versus the overall that hit.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Definitely. But there are those runaway games that a small team makes, and then they just go viral. And there are these people, they make games over and over again, and they're really successful at them.

And that is so interesting to me.

Gordon Walton: They have found an audience. They have an affinity group, is what that means. Their brand means something. But I think that's the challenge, right? It is a winner take all business at some level, and it's a easy entry business. I say that even though at the high end, it's not easy entry.

But you and your three friends, if you have the right skills, can afford to make a game in your part time, right? So there is a, we have a garage band thing going on all the way to giant mega corporations making games, which is really cool. I'd like to think that the ecosystem of people who can make games is really diverse and big. But the palette we can paint on, if you think about all the devices that we put games on, which is pretty much any computer a consumer can put their hands on, we can make games work. It doesn't matter if it's the Roku running your TV or anything else. Your phone, everything, we can put a game on it.

And that's awesome. We have such a palette again that we can paint against. If you're willing to do it. Most hardcore gamers, they're thinking about PC or console or hardcore mobile, right? But the truth is, there's a super wide palette of places that we can do gaming.

And to me, that's, it's just exciting. The whole thing is exciting because we don't really know where the next big thing is going to come out. If you look at the history of innovation it always comes from the far edges and from weird places. And then it becomes mainstream later. And it's not deterministic how that happens. Because if it was, I'd give you a checklist and you go make a hit, right? Here's the checklist. Make a hit. That doesn't work that way.

Lizzie Mintus: People also feel strongly about new and emergent technologies. Big opinions whenever something new comes out.

Gordon Walton: I used to be that way too, but then I got commercial. And when you get commercial, you go, wait a minute. What's the install base? What percentage of the install base do I have to capture to make my money back?

Emerging technologies aren't that exciting if they're small and they always start small. If you're going to play in that arena, that's a super high risk area to play in. You're betting on everything working. You're betting on that technology is going to be the one that takes off and becomes mainstream.

Later when I was doing more PC work, I actually did more Macintosh games than PC games. Why? I love the Mac. I did a lot of work on the Mac, and I love the Mac.

The PC just kept selling and selling, and one day I just stopped doing Mac things. Why? Because a dollar in that gave 10 out on the PC, 1 a dollar in gave a dollar out on the Mac, because there were 10 times as many PCs as Mac, later 100 times as many PCs as Mac.

If you really want broad scale entertainment, you have to go where the players are, where the customers have the tech. What's the biggest platform in the world that hardly anybody, people do work on it, all our hardcore gamers poopoo it: it's a web browser. Web browser is the largest accessible platform in the world, not the PC. It's not the Mac. It's not any gaming machine. It's the web browser has the biggest install base.

If you can do a cool game on the web, you can reach the most people, theoretically. So it's really about how do you do that?

Who's that audience? How can you reach them?

Lizzie Mintus: And get involved with the community. How can you steal the community?

Gordon Walton: Of course, stealing is important. Think about it. Almost all our games are stolen too. We take other people's ideas, file the serial numbers off and combine them in a different way and then ship them.

Because you can't copyright gameplay, it actually opened it up to for us to have a wider diversity of things available to us as consumers.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to hear a little bit about Playable Worlds and I want you to pretend like I'm a really exciting candidate that doesn't know too much about you and you really want to hire me.

What would you tell me? What's your spiel?

Gordon Walton: The first time I would have to NDA you because we haven't said much about what we're doing.

Lizzie Mintus: What can you say?

Gordon Walton: Is that terrible?

Lizzie Mintus: I haven't signed an NDA. I might not, but you want to give me some teasers.

Gordon Walton: I think, We're working on a MMO. I can say that. It is metaverse-y, is what I would say. It has some metaverse elements. We are not Web 3 in any way, shape, or form.

We have some very experienced people working on our team. That's about the end of what I can say, unfortunately, because we've kept it under wraps for a reason. When we're ready to roll it out, we want to roll it out.

One of the challenges when you look at our market again, right? If anything, the consumers are less patient than they've ever been. They have less deferred gratification. Anticipation is not, is a dirty word not a titillating word in any way, shape or form for the audience. So it's really difficult sometimes.

In the old days we would announce a game two or three years before it was going to ship, do some updates and big trade shows, and then one day probably slip in a year and then finally ship it.

That's not working as well as it used to be, except for established franchises, because the consumers again are more sophisticated, more educated than they've ever been have a bigger background in gaming.

If I announce XYZ game today, and I'm not going to ship it for two years even, the expectations for that game start to grow the day I announce it. So the mental model of what the player has in their head about what that game's going to be starts getting better and better. Probably faster than I'm developing whatever it is, right?

Or releasing information. And how many games have you seen where people are underwhelmed when it finally ships? It's this phenomenon that's driving that. The phenomenon is it's driven by other mediums of entertainment where it used to be, you could see 30 seconds of a TV show before they would cut to a new scene. Today it's 3 to 4 seconds, almost. If it's kids TV, it's 2 to 2 to 4 seconds.

We are being trained to have less and less of an attention span, less and less of any deferred gratification, because we've catered to the consumer. The consumer doesn't like that. And they've trained us to not do that at some level.

So that's what leads us to be a little bit reticent to really announce what we're doing. You still see people doing it, and I wish them luck. Again, the consumer expectations can so easily outstrip what we're building. Because even though we try to go fast, we're going as fast as we can.

And, but their imagination is bigger than our implementation skills.

Lizzie Mintus: I've never heard it put quite like that. But that makes that whole follow along for updates eagerly.

Gordon Walton: Yes. Okay. So what am I drawn to? I'm drawn to really hard things to do that are interesting and might change the marketplace. That's the only thing I'm interested in doing at my age in place in the business. If I wanted an easy job, there's a relatively easy, there's no easy jobs in gaming, but there's easier jobs than the one I have. I could easily go get rather than do this. So for me, it's all about the challenge, all about, can we break some new ground? Can we do something a little different? Where can we push the boundaries? So I'm interested in the edge. Like I said, I'm not interested in the mainstream.

Lizzie Mintus: Without revealing what you are doing and what your edge is. Can you just just chat a little bit about what different edges you think are in games right now and how people can stay ahead of the curve.

There's so much evolution.

Gordon Walton: Wow. Again, thinking outside the mainstream hardcore gaming box is big. Think about all the people who are not hardcore gamers that we serve, but so many of the big companies don't focus on. For a little while, the social gaming actually, focused on non gaming gamers. For a while and that worked and mobile to a big extent tries to do that now.

The discovery problems and the privacy issues now have made that economically less viable. But I think the audience is still there. I think there's still a whole bunch of people who are not in our audience yet, who would be in it if we could bring them the entertainment that matched what they were interested in.

So again, thinking outside the mainstream, whether it be in the genres or the platforms or even the territories. While we weren't looking, India's game market finally grew up some. It's going to be big, it's going to be bigger than China before the decade's out. People just don't understand why, but that's going to happen.

When we were doing MMOs back in the early 2000s, Korea already had become a fully integrated online country. At one point. Over half of the country had an account to play, whatever the name of the game was, the racing game.

Half of the country had an account to play it. We've never seen that still in the United States or any Western country. So the opportunities are all out there. But they are in the, they are where everyone else is going. You're always going to be going someplace where nobody else is going or very few people are going.

If you really want to go for the opportunities. And there'll be a high rate of failure at the same time. They won't all work. If you can embrace some in the learning of failure and not let it get you down too much, there's a ton of opportunities out there.

Lizzie Mintus: In unique places.

I like that you mentioned India. I like to listen to the Deconstructor of Fun Podcast.

Gordon Walton: Yeah. I just started that the other day too.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. You heard that episode about India.

Gordon Walton: Yeah. And I started going to India in the early two thousands and there was almost no gaming going on there. Then they started doing some gaming. Outsourcing and they were behind us, but now they're right up with us.

Again, it's every time somebody goes, oh, yeah, that country's behind us. We'll give them a few years. Everyone out there is just as smart and just as motivated as anybody over here. Whatever superiority you have, you're really competing with the entire world.

If you think about India and China. India and China have more smart people than America has people. Think about that for a second.

Lizzie Mintus: That's right. For a second, right?

Gordon Walton: It's an issue, right? So if you're really competing on brains, they got a lot more of them. We need to have a little bit of humility and focus on what we do best as much as we can.

Lizzie Mintus: I thought the podcast is really interesting. I didn't know that two thirds of India is not using credit cards.

Gordon Walton: Oh yeah. If you get into the payment stuff, it's not that didn't surprise me at all. There are several, even European territories that have very strange to us payment methods predominate. We think Visa MasterCard, but there's a whole bunch of territories in Europe where that's not a thing. Where it's 5 percent of the payment method. And there's, we do it through the bank. It's a bank payment thing, or it's the Denmark card, which is all Denmark have everybody in. Every sovereign entity has solved this a little bit differently.

Lizzie Mintus: I think that's also why it's so important to have a team that is comprised of people who don't think just like you and maybe come from somewhere else or have a little bit different of a background so they can point these things out. Because you're right, it's so easy to just think, this is how I play games.

This is my little world, right?

Gordon Walton: Frankly, that's what we were doing when gaming started. It was a bunch of nerdy white guys who had the privilege of, oh, I've got a computer and I can do this. I'm middle class, probably, and I've got a computer and I've got enough of a safety net to where I can do something crazy and stupid for a living.

Believe me, it was 20 years before my family figured out what I was doing was legit in any way, shape or form. I was that odd person doing. What do you do? You do games. That's strange. That's really weird. I never heard of anybody doing that. Now we're all mainstreamed, right? But for a long time it was, what the hell are you doing?

We were hobbyists building games for other hobbyists. That's the way to think about the really early market. And then we got more and more people who were not hobbyists to go, Oh yeah, that's fun. And it expanded slowly, but surely. And then whenever a team is saying, we're building a game for us, what they're saying is I'm limiting the audience to who we are. And the less diverse that team is the narrow that audience is going to be.

Because it's really hard. To me, 1 of the signs of professionalism is can you set your own worldview prejudices aside and try to get in the shoes of this other person who's not you and understand what their worldview is and what excites them. Can you do that? And, of course, the more degrees of difference there is between you and them, the harder it is for you to do that.

Frankly, the younger you are, the harder it is for you to do it because you don't have the life experience. You haven't had enough scar tissue and bumps and bruises to maybe have a little bit of a retrospective, looking at things and then trying to think about it from another person's viewpoint.

I don't mean that only old people figure this out. A lot of young people are super empathetic and figure this stuff out. But in general, it took me a while to figure this stuff out. I didn't wake up 1 day and just go, I figured it all out. No, it took a long process. of going, wait a minute, somebody explain to me. Wait, I don't look at the world the same way you do at all, right?

I have a different life experience and a different lens that I'm looking at the world through. And they can explain it to some degree, but I'll never 100 percent get it. It's if you move to a foreign country, you're never going to be a citizen of that foreign country per se. You're not going to be fully integrated into that because you didn't grow up there.

You don't have all the nuances. You can learn a lot, but you can never get to most people can never get to 100 percent, almost forget their past and become their present.

Lizzie Mintus: I have a friend named Julie, and I think I've talked about her on my podcast, Julie Pham. She has a company called Curiosity Based.

She started her business when I started my business, and she has a TEDx talk coming up. I'm so proud of her. But her business is all about being curious about why people are the way that they are. And it's an exercise that you can go through. There's a course that let everybody company go through and it's just thinking about why you are the way that you are and why other people are the way that they are.

You have all these life experiences. You're from this culture. This is the way your family raised you. This is something major that happened in your life that changed you. And it's really powerful to think about that. And recruiting to and business and everything, right? This person is odd, or I think they're rude, or I don't understand why they are the way that they are, but curious. It's not an offensive, right?

Gordon Walton: We can't help it. Our part of our makeup is to judge things. It's a safety mechanism at some level. We look filters and lenses that we look at the world through and most of those come from scar tissue. Somebody looking at me today is going to go, some ball guy was mean to me 1 time. I don't like that guy. Why? Because they have a lens around it. There's a lens and a filter. That's all. And they come from the background and they may not even be conscious of it either. It's an unconscious lens quite often. Whenever I'm doing this, I'm always trying to catch myself. Okay. What is what's real and what's my internal stuff going on?

Why am I flipping the bozo bid on this person? Why do I think they're a bozo? Let me back up for a minute. What triggered that? Is it real or is it just a pattern match that hits a filter that I have from something that happened to me in the past? Trying to process all your own crap and figure that stuff out and not let it interfere with your present is part of being human, right? How do we be better humans? It's hard to be a good human. Most of us are failing at that at some level all the time.

In the end, we're in a people business, right? Only teams build these things and we can't get along with people if we can't get the best. Out of the people that we work with, we can't make the best stuff.

What's my job? My job is to design a team that makes a game. My job is not to make games anymore. I don't make games. I don't get to do any of the work.

So my job is to build a team that can make a game, not build games per se. I got a chief creative person who does part of it and I got a game director who does part of it, but I'm not doing that stuff. What I'm doing is giving them the right ecosystem to build a game with them, that's made out of people.

Lizzie Mintus: People are the most important. So I read your LinkedIn as, of course, I'm a recruiter. That's what I do. That's my medium. And I would just want to read one of your LinkedIn recommendations. It's profound and inspiring.

It says Gordon is one of the most thoughtful and progressive managers I've worked with.

He is constantly on the lookout for new ways to break down barriers to communicate effectively and how to enable people to give their best and become better without burning out in the process. That's such a sweet recommendation. I just want to know more about your leadership beliefs and how you enable people to give their best and become better.

Gordon Walton: The first thing I'd say is I fooled another one. Awesome.

Lizzie Mintus: There's no fooling.

Gordon Walton: Yeah, I know. But, but I'm a human like anybody else. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. I make bad judgments. I think the key thing is, are you trying to learn, right? One of my things is when I hit one of those five year birthday things, I always try to look back and go, okay, what's changed in the last five years? What was Gordon like five years ago? And about the third time I did it, I finally figured out each time right at the end of that assessment, I go, yeah, Gordon was a dumb ass five years ago.

is what I figured out each time. And about the third time that happened, I figured out, oh wait, Gordon's a dumb ass now I just don't know it. I'll know it in five years from now, but I'm a dumb ass right now. So that's the thing. If you're not trying to learn, if you're not trying to change, then you're already dead. You're walking around like a corpse, right? You have to.

You're either trying to improve or you aren't. And I think for me, it's always been about change. Can I adapt to the changes that are happening around me? Can I be a better contributor in the things that I'm trying to do?

What's holding me back in that? Because I think mostly, it's easy to blame the external world for crap that happens to you.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah.

Gordon Walton: But it's harder to look at yourself and go, what part did I have in this happening? What lessons should I actually embrace to avoid that kind of future pain by not doing something dumb that I shouldn't have done. They got me here.

That's the human challenge. And not doing it out of some altruism thing. It's selfish. It's totally selfish. I want to be more effective.

So I'm totally selfish. I'm only doing this because it works, not because of any other reason, right? Not that I'll be a better person at the end of the day. No, I want to be more effective. And the only way to be more effective is to connect with people and get to try to get the best out of them and grow them where you can and use them at things that they're going to succeed at rather than trying to use them for stuff that they're going to struggle with.

In a team, for example, like people can be miscast. And the saddest thing is when somebody is energetic and enthused about something that they have absolutely no talent for. And they're like doomed to failure, even though they're going to put all their energy into it. That's the worst case scenario for any employee that I've ever had is, how do I get them to get on a track where they might actually be successful rather than stay on a track where they're pounding their head against a brick wall?

Which isn't really that common, but it does happen.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I always think about, do people get it? Do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do the job? And there's several where you can move the good people around, but sometimes one of those is missing. Management's hard. I like what you said about taking responsibility for everything. I used to read a lot of Tony Robbins y kind of books, but they, I feel inspired by them. And I listened to this talk once by Gary Vaynerchuk, who's a love or hate him kind of person, right? But I always think there's some goodness you can extract from many different people. And he talked about how the most life changing thing for him was taking responsibility for everything.

A bus almost hit me. What did I do wrong? And once you do that, your whole life changes because. Everything is your fault, even if it's not your fault.

Gordon Walton: If I get hit by a meteor, I'll call that act of God, right? I didn't, I'll never see it coming. There was nothing I could do to dodge it yada, yada. But most, almost everything else, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who brought you there? You brought yourself there, right?

So yeah, taking responsibility for your own actions is really important if you want to, if you want to grow. Most people can't do a hundred percent of that or even 90 percent of that. So I don't fault people for not being able to do it because it's tough, right? It means that you got to have some uncomfortable conversations with the worst boss you'll ever have, which is yourself, right?

Lizzie Mintus: It's the worst boss. Yeah.

Gordon Walton: Nobody's a worse boss than yourself. You run your own company.

Lizzie Mintus: I am my own boss.

Gordon Walton: Who criticizes you the most? You do at night when you're staring at the ceiling.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, definitely.

Gordon Walton: I know. I've done that a few times too.

Lizzie Mintus: But for me the trick is to get myself a boss.

Get my own board of directors or my own people that can call me on my shit or inspire me or talk me through it when I have a hard day.

Gordon Walton: You're still tougher than they are though. You're still going to be tougher on yourself than they are.

Lizzie Mintus: That's true. Having your own business is a big adventure. The book I was reading, a lot of people go into business themselves so they can get out of having a boss.

But like you said, it turns out you have the worst boss of all time and it's you. And you have to stuff yourself.

Gordon Walton: And you have to forgive yourself too, is the other half of that, right? Otherwise you just, you get in that cycle of beating yourself up and that's not positive. It doesn't help anything.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I just hire really people smarter than you to help you.

Gordon Walton: Yeah, but then they're all racehorses and they're hard to manage. Racehorses and draft horses is one way to think about employees. Some of them just pull the thing and good stuff happens. They're steady they make stuff happen. And the resources can make amazing thing happens, but they're always tugging at the reins or running off to the left or running off to the right.

So you need both. You need the ones who will break out. You'll need the ones that just keep the thing moving forward.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, absolutely. And if you have a business, you're probably a racehorse and pain to manage yourself.

Just speaking from experience here. I have one last question before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, playable.

Gordon Walton: worlds dot com.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. What is the best piece of advice you have ever received in your career?

Gordon Walton: Wow. That's not expected. Damn. Did I listen to her or didn't listen to her?

Lizzie Mintus: It could be either. It sounds like you might be a racehorse.

Gordon Walton: I'm just stalling. I'm stalling because it's hard to come up with one really good piece of advice.

Lizzie Mintus: You can have a couple. I'm sure there's people that have really influenced your career and a lot of them along the way.

Gordon Walton: I'll cast it a little differently.

The best bosses I've ever had let me run. They gave me a mission and then they helped me get there. They stepped back and they didn't care about the how they cared about the what.

So when somebody gives me a what mission, this is, here's what I want, and if I get behind it and they're not micromanaging how I can do, then I can do my best work. The hardest bosses are the ones that want to be intricately involved with the how.

How are you doing that? Here, let's tweak this for you and help you with... then it's not yours anymore. Then you don't own it completely.

Wow, so much advice over the years. I remember somebody told me once don't work for a family owned company and then I did it. That was good advice that I didn't take. There you go. I've done that a couple of times. I've worked for a couple of family owned companies. Don't do that. Working for him is like a worker is probably fine. Working for him, if you're a manager, probably not.

I don't know. I can't give you a really great answer because I wasn't ready for that one. It's like a concomitant of little pieces of advice here and there.

When I think about my career, it's really more about the people I've been privileged to work with who've made me better. That's what gets me excited and seeing people that work for me that have gone further than I did. That's really exciting. Super exciting to see people who laugh at you. Frankly, I never wanted to be more than what I am. Like exec producer is where I'm happiest. I don't really want to be the next level of suit above that because I still get to touch product a little bit. I get to work with the best people in the world, which are people building product. I found my niche 20, 30 years ago, and this is where I've wanted to stay, even though I've been tempted once or twice to go the route beyond this.

But that's a different game, playing the corporate game, a different metagame than making games. A lot of that metagame doesn't have anything to do with making games. Anything it has to do with making it harder to make games.

Lizzie Mintus: Not a red tape.

We've been talking to Gordon Walton, Chief Product Officer and Executive Producer at Playable Worlds. Gordon, where can people go to follow along with Playable Worlds or contact you? Are you on Twitter slash X, LinkedIn?

Gordon Walton: I'm on X. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm still on Facebook because I'm an old fogey. Haven't completely bounced off. I killed one of my accounts, but then I have a business account there.

Definitely on LinkedIn. I'm pretty accessible, been in the business a really long time, held a lot of jobs, know a lot of people. And really again, enjoy the people who are in the game business.

I'm one of the 25 people went to the first GDC whenever that happened and been to every one since. I think there's two of us left that have been to every GDC. So we're in a race for who dies last on that. But this community is something that I really cherish.

The community of game makers is something I cherish because we're collegiate. We compete with each other, but we collaborate. At the same time in a way that I rarely see in any other. And that makes us special if we weren't special enough already

Lizzie Mintus: It is a special group. Everybody is so supportive and it's really a community. A lot of fun.

All right. Thank you so much

Gordon Walton: Thank you, ma'am.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week to catch all the latest from his Waldo You can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time

Share this story