Revolutionizing Healthcare through Game Technology with Noah Falstein of The Inspiracy

September 3, 2024

Revolutionizing Healthcare through Game Technology with Noah Falstein of The Inspiracy

We’re entering a new era where games can be prescribed as part of medical treatment or used to train doctors more effectively than traditional lectures.

In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, join host Lizzie Mintus and guest Noah Falstein, who was among the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games (later known as LucasArts), and has also worked with 3DO and DreamWorks Interactive. Noah served as the first elected chair of the International Game Developers Association and was Chief Game Designer at Google. His contributions include classic arcade games like Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, The Fate of Atlantis, and The Secret of Monkey Island, as well as cutting-edge VR experiences.

Today, Noah applies his vast experience as the founder of The Inspiracy, advising and consulting on the integration of game technology with health. Tune in to explore how games are revolutionizing medical training and health improvement, the future of VR and AR in healthcare, and the invaluable lessons Noah has learned over four decades in the industry.

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

Noah's journey from the early days of arcade games to leading innovation at Google.
Key lessons from working on hit titles and Google Glass
How games, AI, and VR are transforming medicine.
Importance of lifelong learning for aspiring game developers.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

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

This episode is brought to you by, you guessed it, Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruiting firm that focuses on games. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity.

Before introducing today's guest, I want to thank David Fox for introducing us. I recorded with David at the beginning of my podcast journey and it was fun. And it was fun to see all the comments from all the fans on YouTube, so we're anticipating that here too.

Today we have Noah Falstein with us. Noah has been a game developer since 1980. Some notable highlights include being one of the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games or LucasArts, the 3DO company, and DreamWorks Interactive. I want to dig into that a little bit more.

He was also the first elected chair of the International Game Developers Association and chief game designer at Google. These days he works in creative roles on the overlap of games and healthcare. Let's start. Thanks for being here today.

Noah Falstein: My pleasure to be here.

Lizzie Mintus: Where to begin? We have so much to talk about. I want to start with what you are doing right now. I see you're on the Ed Fries level of advisory roles. So congratulations.

Noah Falstein: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I think Ed probably has me beat on that, but he's a tough one. I'm doing a lot of advisory work and some consulting, flipping back and forth between. I guess that sort of just depends on how you define that. It's pretty much the same role a lot of the time.

And I'm working largely, not quite exclusively, in the games and health overlap, which I find is very much like the whole games industry was back in the 80s. It's in its very early stages and people are trying all sorts of wild stuff that, when I describe it to people at first glimpse, they think it sounds like it's just not possible. And I just love that about this new area and games keep reinventing themselves and the industry keeps getting bigger and spreading into other areas. And that's been a lot of fun recently.

Lizzie Mintus: Your excitement is palpable. Tell me about what people think cannot be done. Give me an update on games and healthcare. What's going on?

Noah Falstein: Sure. Well, one of my favorite clients is a German company called Dopavision. And they have a treatment, a virtual reality treatment for nearsightedness, myopia. And the way they described it to me is you put on a VR headset and it can be the most minimal VR headset because they're not even doing head tracking. And they shine a certain frequency of blue light onto your blind spot in your eye. And I should say this only works for children whose eyes are still developing. So ages of around 6 to 15. And that blue light triggers a release of dopamine, hence the name dopa vision. And this optical dopamine helps their eyes adapt their shape and become, I think less long, so that they're not nearsighted.

And the idea of shining blue light on, and this is something that you'll need to do only for about, a few minutes a day. But every day for possibly up to two years, so that's a little bit complicated. Shining a little bit of blue light into a specific part of your eye to cure or at least reduce nearsightedness, it just sounds kind of magical.

When I first heard about it, I actually talked to my optometrist. I was getting a checkup and she said, yeah, I just heard a paper recited about that just a few weeks ago. So that reassured me it was the real deal. And they've had some really good results since then.

Lizzie Mintus: That's so cool. I have to tell you, this is the perfect moment. I just got LASIK, but I just bought a couple of pairs of new glasses that I thought were really cute. And so I'm wearing fake glasses for the first time in my life, but even LASIK was crazy.

Do you work with any companies that do training for medical procedures? Is that something that's in your world?

Noah Falstein: Yeah. That's the thing. It's so varied. I did some work with a company called Level Ex. That's a Chicago-based company. And they were founded by an ex-LucasArts guy. So we had that in common. We met at a game developers conference, oh, I don't know, it must have been about seven years ago when he was just starting out. And he's grown that into a big company. It ended up getting acquired by a German pharma company and has only grown bigger and bigger since then.

They make games that train doctors and they get continuing medical education credits, which is the accredited way doctors need to stay fresh on what they're doing. And how much better is it for a doctor to be able to play a game and have the game itself be training them and evaluating whether they're actually learning it rather than going to some kind of classroom and having to do a questionnaire at the end to see if they understand it.

It's quite amazing, although I have to say the realism of their games is extremely high level and people complain about games being too bloody and violent, but nothing is as disturbing as like looking at one of their dermatology games where you're having to look at hundreds of different lesions and decides which ones are cancerous or precancerous or benign. And just way too many awful skin diseases I've seen now.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that would not be the game for me to play, but for them, it's probably fine. It's probably really interesting.

Noah Falstein: Yeah. Well, it's also cool. I've tried to test some of these games and the reality is you need an MD or a specialty degree to even be able to play them well. So I ended up misdiagnosing all sorts of stuff. But it gives me a little glimpse into what doctors have to do to think about how to do their work.

Lizzie Mintus: So you think that we're in the infancy days of health care and games. Where do you see that going and over what time period? Where do you think it will be in a year, five years, 10 years?

Noah Falstein: Yeah, that's a tough one. Of course, I tend to be a little over-optimistic in a lot of my predictions I've found. So I try and calibrate it into that estimate now. But the main reason that I think it's going to be big is that there's currently about a trillion dollars, a thousand billion dollars being spent annually worldwide for healthcare in one way or another.

And I don't think that games are ever going to take over more than a few percent of that. But a few percent of something that big is about the size of the whole game console market at this point. So there's a lot of room for growth. And what I've seen is so promising that over and over again, I've worked on a couple dozen different projects in this area now, maybe actually probably more than 58, depending on which ones I count.

And a lot of what happens is, people try using games for treatment or for training and they have modest hopes of how it will work out. And games almost always exceed their hopes, working as well as pharmaceuticals, but without the serious side effects. Or particularly in education and training, people just enjoy using games to learn things a lot more than most other educational methods or even just educating patients on what to do when you come home from the hospital or how to increase your wellness in general, there's a whole spate of, not necessarily games, but game technology related, meditation and relaxation and anti anxiety apps out there now. A lot of them use VR or AR.

And as I said, they're not all games, but almost everybody who works in VR or AR got their training in games or maybe in interactive storytelling.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, definitely. I think it lends itself well. What are some other apps that listeners should check out in this space? I didn't know you've worked on 50+.

Noah Falstein: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, some of the highlights I got interested in this, you know way back in like, it was just 2001, there was a company called Hope Lab that was founded by the wife of the guy who started eBay. And she and her husband had been using a lot of their personal wealth for philanthropic reasons.

And she started Hope Lab to do medical treatment for kids. And a lot of it uses games. So back in, I think they released it in 2002, 2003, a game called Remission. And it was meant for kids with cancer, teenagers who had gone through treatment for leukemia. And because they're teenagers, they're being told, okay, you had this really awful radiation. Now you need to take these chemotherapy pills that make you feel nauseous. And some of them were just lying to their parents about taking the pills because they felt fine now and they didn't want to feel sick again and the game basically put them inside the bloodstream of somebody who was taking these drugs and used a little science fictional twist where you're piloting a little character through the bloodstream zapping cancer cells and to be able to see the cancer cells multiplying and the reloads that you get to zap them are in your bloodstream.

If the patient is taking the chemotherapy drug, and if not, then you have no reloads. And that sense of helplessness, as you see these cells multiplying and you can't stop them, that actually did quite a bit to change these teenagers minds. And even though their parents and their doctors were telling them, your life may depend on this, the game was actually necessary for the 10 percent or so of them that were slow to get that message.

So that was kind of what got me excited about the potential for this. And she spent, I think, it's almost $4 million just on the testing alone to show that it was effective because it's one thing to make claims, but medical testing is super expensive.

And then more recently, I worked with Akili Interactive that has, so far the only game that has been cleared by the FDA to be prescribed by doctors.

It's also available in a non prescription form now, but it treats ADHD and the Testing that the they did and that they submitted to the FDA showed that it's about as effective as Adderall or Ritalin, but the most important side effects for the playing the game were occasional headaches and frustration.

Lizzie Mintus: I thought you were going to say joy and happiness.

Noah Falstein: Yes, well, there is some of that too, but happily, that's not on the list that they have to clear for. There are so many other things coming down the pipe, and I'm working with somebody doing really interesting work with comedy improv to help people's minds stay sharp and clear and boy, lots of really fun games that improv people do just to kind of work out their skills that I think are going to be applicable for a whole bunch of, not just treating problems like, degenerative diseases, but also for people whose minds are perfectly safe and healthy, but they want to improve their acuity and their ability to think on their feet because that's pretty much what improv is all about.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, so I went on this whole public speaking journey lately, which maybe you went on tour, maybe you just love it. But part of that, I had a coach and the coach was a theater major. And she had me do all these really interesting improv exercises that made me deeply uncomfortable because it's just so far out of what I'm used to and strange, right?

I was just not used to it, but I think it was really helpful for me in my life, and I'm putting together a whole course for learning for these business owners in EO, and part of it is going to be comedy related. So I think it'll teach you a lot.

Noah Falstein: I would assume that interview skills, having to respond to what somebody's saying and think about the context of everything that is in your agenda and how much time you have left and having to help them kind of get through, or stay on course, or diverge into something new because they've been talking about the same thing for too long. It's all improv skills.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I guess podcasting is, recruiting is, life is. I mean all these skills I think are really helpful probably for you no matter what you're doing. That's really cool to think about games helping the general population be better.

Noah Falstein: Well, and this company, they're called Freestyle Plus, and their division doing the game is called Mindless Entertainment, which I like a lot. It's sort of making a play on the idea of mindfulness, and that sometimes you really need to clear your mind and be able to just let your instincts take over. But that company comes from an improv group that was co founded by Lin Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame. And even though he's not directly involved with the work I've been doing, I like the fact that there's a creativity and excitement about using improv skills.

And it's one of the many things that I think aside from being good for health benefits, it's opening up new ways to make really entertaining games that I think might even be fun, commercial entertainment titles in the future.

Lizzie Mintus: So if somebody were to really want to keep tabs on what's going on in this space other than following you. Is there a really great newsletter or blog or website where you can stay up to date on all the latest and games in this category?

Noah Falstein: There really isn't.

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, sounds like a business opportunity.

Noah Falstein: Exactly. Exactly. It does, again, remind me of what the whole games industry was like 40 years ago, where people come together at conferences and often the conferences are about some adjacent thing. There are a few conferences out there, the Games for Change conference in New York has been going on for over 20 years now. There's a serious games conference that has also had a long background that impinge on this.

There's AIVRHA, which is a VR Health Association, so that's very specifically about mixed reality and healthcare. But there's nothing really central to the kind of stuff that I'm talking about, and I do think there's an opportunity, but I was actually talking to a colleague who's just as excited about this as I am, and just as frustrated.

And the very diversity of how healthcare is using games in different ways works against a kind of central clearinghouse, because, there's so many different skill sets that you need, and doing VR to treat nearsightedness and doing improv to help train people's minds to be clear, there's almost no overlap except for people like myself who are doing game design or figuring out how to do the software production side of it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, something to think about. So what do you think about the Apple Vision Pro?

Noah Falstein: I haven't had a chance to use it myself directly. I have many friends who have. And partly it's because I'm a believer, but I'm content to wait until the more consumer-friendly version is out, which I certainly expect. And in my time at Google, I was there when they were testing Google Glass, and I got to wear it for about a year and go through, I think, oh, it must have been a dozen different iterations of their interface testing with the company. And I was a true believer, for all the bad press it was getting.

Having AR glasses and now there are several versions on the market. And Apple is rumored to be doing a much lighter and cheaper version of the Vision Pro. I still miss a lot of the things that Google Glass could do even though it was really pretty primitive by today's standards. Things like just giving you notifications. You know, you're wearing glasses now, if you could get notifications without anybody else knowing what you were getting without having to break eye contact or look at your phone or your screen, you just stay in touch with all sorts of things.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm just thinking about how that would work.

Noah Falstein: Well, with Glass, it had a little viewfinder above your line of sight. And I would be in meetings with my colleagues, and I'd say, Oh, I need to get going. I've got to get a visitor who just checked in downstairs at the lobby. And they'd sometimes look at me like, how do you know that? Your phone's in your pocket. Oh, it's glass again. And they would just realize as I was getting it and it lights up but it's so close to your eye, nobody really sees what's going on.

And I'm terrible with names and faces usually, people are good at one or the other. And I'm not quite face blind but it can take me five or six meetings with someone before I stop introducing myself to them. And I met a lot of other people, I think the games industry may attract those who are similarly disabled that way, but have glasses that could recognize people. If you go to a conference and imagine that as you look around the room, little bubbles are floating above each one saying, Jim Phelps. And if you look at it, and they're using eye tracking, it expands and says, you met him three years ago at this conference, he has four children and the oldest is named Cindy and you met her that time too.

So suddenly it looks like you've got this incredible memory. But it's exactly the information you need when you need it. And even though there are privacy issues about that in public, I think for things like conferences or reunions or whatever, it would just be an amazing thing, worth the price of a headset, all for that one app.

Lizzie Mintus: I would agree. Yeah. I know a lot of things about a lot of people in my recruiter brain, because that's what you have to do to be a recruiter, right? But even sometimes I'll go to conferences and someone will come up and start talking to me and I'm like, Oh, who are you? But you don't want to ask. So it'd be really helpful. It's kind of like a black mirror, sort of...

Noah Falstein: Well, in fact, yeah, I used to tell people after the Google experience that it would be great if it could record your entire life and you could just sort of go back to whatever you couldn't remember. And there was a black mirror episode about a relationship breaking up because the couple kept retrieving things from the past of catching each other in evasions about having seen this person or not.

And it was so plausible that it actually changed my mind, made me realize that, yeah, maybe it's not so good to have something that's constantly on and recording everything you do.

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. You're fun to talk to. So what are your thoughts about, I know you have your hopes about Glasses being able to tell you, it's such a good idea. But what do you think that realistically, again you don't have a magic ball, but where do you see AR VR going?

And it's been interesting. I recruited for it when I started recruiting eight or nine years ago in VR and it's funny what people would say back then and picked up steam. But what do you think will be the tipping point where it's just so mainstream?

Noah Falstein: Yeah, that's a good question. I really think at this point, I've said I've been over optimistic and one of my roles at Google was being in developer relations and telling all the developers, Oh, yeah, you got to jump in now because by the year 2020, everybody's going to have a VR headset and sadly, it's taken a lot longer, but it's on a very typical kind of curve for technology.

It is actually getting more and more traction. Part of it is the technology keeps getting better and people keep finding better ways to use it. I do think there's a future for it. And I may derail the crystal ball here a bit, but I've been really impressed with how AI is taking over in a lot of ways, and because of the fact that I know I'm often too optimistic, I've been careful about that, but all of my colleagues in the industry, putting a lot of really high profile smart people are convinced thatAI, not just generative AI and large language models, but also machine learning and all the ways that it's kind of blossoming, are going to be really significant.

People actually talk about it being in long term on the same level as the Industrial Revolution and changing the way that two-thirds of people's jobs work. And I bring that up because combined with AR VR, suddenly that allows you to do some of the stuff I'm talking about, having glasses that are giving you the information you need when you need it.

I mentioned for a conference but if you're also wearing them in the car, and it's giving you a heads up display on, you know, turn left, or flashing thing because it's detected somebody coming in from the side that you may not have noticed and essentially giving you all the information you need or being able to say, Yeah, you've been driving for two hours. There's a rest stop coming up. You might want to take advantage of or this supercharger for your electric car, every slot is full, but there's one five miles farther up- all sorts of ways where it's going to kind of be like an extra lobe of our brains that's giving us information we would never know of any other way.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it really is most exciting in the medical industry. If you can process so much information and find trends and patterns and figure out, for me, the medical system doesn't really make any sense. You just go in when you're really sick. And if you're not really sick, everything is out of pocket, but there is so much information you could find out if you dig and with the help of all this tech, it seems like it will just be more and more available.

Noah Falstein: Well, you're reminding me also there was a company that I talked to. I ended up not working with them yet, but they have an app that listens to you 24/7 and analyzes your coughing. And they've used AI to basically diagnose all sorts of different respiratory problems and to be able to tell people the difference between Oh, you may be getting a cold or, Wow, that sounds like you might have pneumonia or potentially even something more devastating.

And these people say that coughing turns out to be correlated with all sorts of things that they never found there was a connection until computers and AI were able to start to sort this out. And coughing is just one of many different ways that we're getting wearable metrics, or I've got an Apple watch that's keeping track of my blood oxygen and heart rate and a lot of other things.

And when you've got something on your head, And it can actually have EEG leads and all sorts of other things to even just eye tracking is also a great predictor for all sorts of degenerative illnesses. It's a brave new world where I think we may end up feeling a little bit more like cyborgs.

And in terms of timing, I would say, really, the AI curve is just going like crazy. It's getting better all the time at a rate that's faster than almost anything we've ever seen. The AR curve or XR, I guess in general, that's tougher. There's a lot of Manufacturing issues of getting lenses and making things light enough to wear on a glasses frame.

So I wouldn't be surprised if that continues to lag in terms of people's adoption. But one other really great medical use for this sort of thing is doctors and surgeons doing operations because currently the state of the art is that they will have beautiful high resolution tv monitors showing x rays or MRIs or whatever and they have to look at that and then they look down at the patient and they look up to try and see if they're in the same place.

And if that was superimposed directly over the patient and was using 3D modeling so that you could actually see it, careful here because underneath this muscle, there's a blood vessel. The success rate and operations and training for doctors and all sorts of stuff, I think is going to improve by an order of magnitude.

Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing I think it's so common, maybe not really gamified, but it's Oura Ring. Many people I'm in Seattle and in tech and everyone has their Oura Ring at the conference or their Whoop Band or even their Apple watch. And I think the more people get used to this wearable thing, if they have an Oura Ring and you have a Whoop and now there's the L Mind too, that helps you sleep. So the more you get comfortable with this device in your life, maybe that will make it easier for the AR VR curve to expand.

Noah Falstein: Yeah. Yeah. I think in particular, the combination, it's a little bit like what happened with smartphones where we had all these different devices and within just a couple of years, they all just ended up fitting in one hand. There was an ad I saw online from an old Radio Shack store from, I think 1995 or something. And there were like camcorders and voice recorders and TV screens and video recorders, all these different devices. And then they had a picture of a smartphone or it's like, yeah, pretty much everything in this entire ad is now in one thing you can stick in your pocket.

And I think we're going to not necessarily lose smartphones, but in some cases, it's going to kind of move up onto the glasses that we're wearing on our heads, the sensors and the displays and everything else. So, that'll be pretty exciting.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. This is fun. Okay, so you have tons of fans from your Lucasfilm days with David Fox, and you worked on games like Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade, and The Fate of Atlantis, and The Secret of Money Island. I would love, I'm laughing because this just thinking before the interview, like it's probably almost annoying at this point. Everyone's like, tell me about this! Tell me about this! I'm sure you tell it so much, but paint me a picture. You're super early. What kind of problems were you trying to solve? Who was on your team? Your development cycle was different. Walk me through some of your favorite stories.

Noah Falstein: Sure. Wow. The Lucasfilm days, it's really interesting because at the time, I think all of us there knew that this was something amazingly special and it's kind of hard to relate to these days, but I started at Lucasfilm in 1984. We had yet to release our first video games. David Fox, who as well as being a good friend was the person who actually was my contact there. He was employee number two at the company. And we just thought it was amazing because Lucasfilm, you have to realize at that point, for Star Wars movies that come out, the Indiana Jones series was still warming up. And getting a chance to work on games there when most of the world didn't even know they were making video games, it was, I won't even say a dream come true. It was just sort of beyond my dreams.

The year before I came there, I had been standing in line for six hours to watch the premiere of Return of the Jedi. And I never would have expected that just a year later I'd be working for the company. And there are so many big special effects movies out now that realizing how special it was that the one company in the world that was known for doing this on a level beyond anybody else, it was just amazing. And the four years that we got to spend working at Skywalker Ranch, yet another thing where that is so far beyond any other kind of work environment I've ever experienced, it's on hundreds of acres, here where I live in Marin County.

I came out here to work for George and just fell in love with this area. Beautiful rolling hills, we had fantastic gourmet meals. There was a cordon bleu trained chef who George hired to do cooking for us there at the ranch. The people at ILM that were stuck in kind of the slums of San Rafael were just, really infuriated at people complaining, the secretaries at one point were complaining that the gravel walkways were ruining their high heeled shoes. And the people at ILM were just saying, Oh, Leo. I can really sympathize, you poor things.

Or there was a scandal at one point because we were served artichokes as a side dish at lunch. And we were used to having mayonnaise and somebody had decided that because mayonnaise might not be healthy, they weren't going to put it out there. And there was a huge, just ridiculous kind of argument about whether this was fair or not. And again, the ILM folks were getting in saying, oh, we understand because the place we go to lunch, we often get food poisoning and we're really concerned about the kind of stuff that we're getting to eat.

It was just a marvelous group of people who most of us has stayed in touch with each other. And a lot of us have worked with each other on many different projects and many different roles. Most recently, a bunch of us came together for the Return to Monkey Island game and that was a really fun experience.

But I would say the main thing was just getting to work with a lot of creative people. George Lucas didn't get too involved with our game stuff, but he brought his friend Steven Spielberg in, and Steven is a hardcore video game junkie. I worked with him again at DreamWorks Interactive, and at one point he was spending about six hours a day playing video games when he was working between movies. It was so much fun to be able to do that and to work with people whose creative work just felt so far above what we were doing. And yet they enjoyed the kind of work we were doing as well and to have that kind of mutual admiration was both really gratifying and very inspiring.

Lizzie Mintus: What was it like to work with Steven Spielberg? It's always so interesting, especially when you meet celebrities and then you realize, hey, you're just a normal person, maybe with more problems, but what was it like? And what did you really learn from being around him?

Noah Falstein: Wow. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, first of all, he's a really nice guy, very down to earth. I have been lucky enough to meet lots of celebrities in the various companies. I worked for their many of them been run by billionaires. It's actually kind of shocking to me how many billionaire-led companies I've worked for now. But I would say out of all of them, George and Steven were both really kind of humble, normal people, I guess.

And Steven, as I say, he was a real game nerd. When I was at DreamWorks and in LA, I got to meet his family. I was actually invited to work on a project with one of his sisters and she invited me to a holiday party that they had. And I got to meet his father and his mother. And it was really interesting seeing somebody's family like that. And his father, when I met his father 30 some years ago, Steven now is just a spitting image of how his father looked at that point. And it's really clear to see where it come from. His father had made, we talked for a while there, and he had made some of the very first point of purchase credit card machines, that we're so used to now, having our credit cards be automatically swiped or just tapped now.

And back then he made some of the very first ones that didn't quite make it because it, I think the mean time between failure was about nine hours. So they were having to fix these things constantly because they were just breaking down. But you could see that a lot of Steven's love of Technology and special effects and film came from his father's side.

And, um, anyway, Steven himself, what did I learn? Wow. He was great at teaching us how to look at films and talk about what was unique about each one and made us think about that and apply it to games. When I worked on a game called The Dig, I was the first project leader on that. And it came from an idea that he pitched to us at one point that he said it's the Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Forbidden Planet. And these were two movies from, I think they're both from the fifties. And being movie buffs, I had seen both of those and they just didn't seem to fit together at all. But then he described. He's a very good friend of mine. And he was talking about why he was taking some of the best elements in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a Humphrey Bogart film, and he goes up with a bunch of strangers to go mining gold in the hills in Mexico.

Their trust breaks down and everybody is sure that the other person is trying to steal the gold. And that more than anything else was what he was taking from that one. Forbidden Planet was one of my favorite science fiction movies as a kid. It was actually a huge inspiration to Gene Roddenberry for the Star Trek series. And if you see that movie now, you can see exactly what he took out of it.

But the idea of finding an alien civilization that was huge and then overnight just suddenly died off and nobody knows why and mixing those two things together. Just a really brilliant concept that made me realize, since then that cliche you see it in a lot of movies about moviemaking of its, Oh, this is one hit movie meets another hit movie and they're doing it just because you're saying both of those made a lot of money so my movie will make a lot of money. You have to go beyond that and find the obscure reasons why people actually like a movie and not just, you know, judge it on its surface.

Lizzie Mintus: Well, I think that's true for any product, if you're just trying to make money and copy somebody that did this thing and you want a piece of the pie, it's probably not going to work.

And when he would analyze films and get these ideas, can you summarize some tips for how a listener could do that, or is there something you can put into words?

Noah Falstein: Well, so I worked with Steven briefly in two companies, but I worked a lot more with Hal Barwood, who was the co-designer I worked with on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. And we worked on some game projects subsequent to that. And Hal is not as well known, but he was a friend of both Steven and George. He actually helped, he taught them in film school before he ended up becoming a filmmaker himself. He was the co-ghost writer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In fact, there's a famous scene where Richard Dreyfuss is making a model of the mountain out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table, and that was one of Hal's many contributions to that film. He even shows up at the very end of the film as one of the people getting off the mothership when they have the humans that they're releasing from their ship.

Anyway, Hal, and just a lesson in not just filmmaking, but visual storytelling. And I'll give you an example. A really concrete thing that he did is that in the game we were working on, we're talking about having two characters talking to each other and having the camera follow them as they were walking and my first suggestion as a programmer and game designer was that they would walk from side to side across the screen, and we would just pan along and follow them that way, because that was it was easiest to have something that scrolled a background that scrolled. And this was all in technology of the early nineties that was fairly primitive.

And Hal said, no, no, no, we actually have to have them walking towards the camera, and the background recedes. And I said, Well, that's going to be technically a lot harder to do. Why is that so important? And he says, Well, if two characters are walking along, you feel like you're an observer, and you're just connected. If they're coming towards you, a part of your brain automatically says, Hey, this is important. I have to watch out. And it was very logical. But then I started to watch movies. And just in daily life, I realized you're sitting there watching people walking by at a cafe. It's great to do people watching if they're coming straight towards you.

Suddenly, all of your senses are going alert. Is this an opportunity? Is it a threat? And we had a lot of talks about the brain and neuroscience as well as how that applies to filmmaking. He also taught us about he actually gave a little class for us at Lucasfilm about camera positioning, that if you want to make the player or the film viewer feel small and insignificant, you put the camera down low and have people looming over you.

And if you want to feel sort of godlike and detached, you flip it around so that you're far up and looking down from a distance. And he would show us how great filmmakers have played with that to manipulate your emotions. So Steven, in fact, I think, learned some of those things from Hal, who, in turn, learned them from generations of filmmakers before him.

And Hal and I worked together on trying to come up with rules like that for game makers. And these days now, you can get dozens of books that are all about how to make really good games. And when we were starting out, it was part of the fun was that nobody had those books and we were all figuring it out as we went. So that's been, probably the most significant information I got from filmmaking.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, kind of like the state of healthcare and games today, which is why it's so exciting.

Noah Falstein: There you go.

Lizzie Mintus: You can write the playbook. I'm going to noodle on this. So in all of your roles, like you've been so early at all of these different companies, and then I saw you were also the first elected chairman of the IGDA, you were a game design columnist, you were the chief game design officer, and You're very early in all these different things, and I was just curious, how did all of these things come about?

Like, what is it that you're doing? Do you think you're putting yourself out there and volunteering and being a part of a community? Do you think you're networking really well? Do you, like, how have all these things transpired? Because there's definitely a common thread between all of them.

Noah Falstein: Well, I think about that a lot, partly because I do a fair amount of mentoring for both game accelerators. And it's something I enjoy sort of paying it forward and people will sometimes say, how do I break into the games industry?

And my experience is totally irrelevant because back then, it was a totally different thing And yeah as a recruiter, you're acutely aware of that. But in fact If they ask how you stayed in the games industry all this time, or how can I establish a long time career? Then i've got one really clear suggestion that I realized was a big part of what would work for me. And it's that, having a love of lifelong learning and wanting to constantly be learning and understanding new things.

This is an incredibly good industry for doing that. And it's actually a really bad industry if you don't like learning new things. If you want to basically learn something and stick with it. Then you should get into leather working or something that's been done the same way for a couple hundred years. And games are just changing, sometimes on a year by year basis. The mention of AI before, it's already causing a bit of a revolution within in the games industry.

So I went to a college, uh, Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts, that is a very experimental place and lets you design your own curriculum. And I went in there thinking that I might be an astronomer or maybe a physicist and got kind of disillusioned when I learned how boring being a young astronomer is.

But I also started learning computer programming. And so when it came time to do this big project that everybody there does for their last year before graduating, I said, well, I've been seeing these computer games. I actually had done a computer game to show off my programming skills already. And I want to make a really elaborate game about being having a spaceship in 100 and some years in the future and mining the asteroid belt. And all of the asteroids and planets will be in the right place with the right composition.

And I worked out the physics of the propulsion system for the rocket so that it was reasonably plausible and made a video game. None of my professors had seen a computer game on a screen before. Our school had literally just one video monitor. Everything before that had been teletype printouts on paper. And yet they were encouraging it because the school was all about, sure, this is a new thing. Figure it out and we'll help you along as best we can. And it had no concept that I was actually, essentially preparing the perfect audition for my portfolio for getting into games, because I didn't even think there was a career in video games in the late 70s when I was in college.

And that kind of love and willingness to say, somebody says, Well, here's a brand new thing. And rather than say, I don't know anything about that, to say, Oh, that looks interesting. Let me see what it's like. That has been the key to exactly what you said that I've always been eager to find out what some new thing is about, fascinated by how the more you learn, the more everything you know, starts to fit together. And it all helps the stuff I learned about how the brain works, as I said, was helping us understand how filmmaking would be better and how games would be better. And now it's all come full circle that I work with doctors because they want to use games to find out how people think or how their diseases progress or how treatment can actually work for them.

It's just a really exciting thing. If you have the kind of personality where you want to learn new things, and you're not afraid to try them, you become an expert, a relative expert very quickly. If the industry is only five years old, you've been doing it for three years, you're suddenly you're an old timer, an expert. And I see no sign of the games industry or technology slowing down that way. So I really counsel people to cultivate that kind of interest and excitement and willingness to try new things.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, well first you have to find what you love to do and be honest if you're in the right path.

Noah Falstein: That also helps. I mean, I also think about how lucky I am that I just happen to love games, playing board games as a kid and never gave up on that. And it never occurred to me that would be a career or also that I love travel. And so I've ended up finding ways to speak in, I think I'm up to 47 or so different countries around the world and of those 47, probably 40 of them has been somebody paying to fly me out somewhere so I don't have to do it myself. And that's another thing I never would have thought of when I was younger.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I have passion and you say yes to things. I like it.

Noah Falstein: There you go.

Lizzie Mintus: I have one last question. What do you think? The recipe is you've made a lot of different games for making a successful game or app or product. What things do you really have to have in place to make it go right?

Noah Falstein: Wow. Well, the way I describe that to people is that there is no one way. There are dozens of ways to take a specific game idea and make it successful. And when I say dozens, I mean different has creatively technologically on the sales and marketing side and on the publicity side. Building the team actually is another critical thing that is important.

And just having luck. The older I get and talk to my other friends who've been in the industry a long time, the more respect we have for the luck of being in the right place at the right time, which you can increase your odds by being willing to be in a lot of different places or to try new things.

But for the dozens of ways you can succeed. There are millions of ways to fail. And so there isn't a magic formula, but I think respecting the fact, I recently saw the TV series and then read the book, Dark Matter that's out on, I think it was Apple TV now, or I forget where it was, maybe it was Netflix. Anyway, it talks about traveling to multiple parallel universes and seeing what your life might have been like if different things had happened. And sort of the philosophy more in the book than the movie is that, we are actually only dealt one life in real life. And you have to make the best of it.

And when you're making games. I think the real trick, I would say if there's one technique that works better than anything else, it's rapid iteration and failing fast, trying to find the fun early in a game and just follow that. And if it gets a little less fun, always keep changing it until it gets back on the right track.

Very easy to say that, really hard to do it for a whole bunch of reasons. And one of the nice things is that you never know where it's going to go. I certainly didn't expect that, as you said, I get people asking me about these games I worked on 30, even 40 years ago now, going back to my arcade game days. And almost every time I go to Europe, I find people when I tell them the games that I worked on. They say, Oh, I learned English playing your game. And again, that was not what the games were intended for, but I feel like those of us at LucasArts are responsible for the English quality levels of literally thousands, if not millions of Europeans at this point, just from my unscientific sampling.

Lizzie Mintus: That's a great story. Yeah. It's fun to think about the impact. That you've made. Well, your passion is contagious. Thank you.

We've been talking to Noah Falstein, who is an advisor and consultant, and sometimes both. Noah, where can people go to hear your talks, contact you, or ask you to consult for them?

Noah Falstein: Well, that's an easy one. At least as of now, I'm still the only Noah Falstein in the world. So Googling me, that comes up right away. And my website is archaic, but I keep my LinkedIn information up to date. I'm on primarily LinkedIn, Facebook, a little bit on Instagram. So if there are people want to follow me in any of those places, I'm pretty available and LinkedIn for most of the business stuff is probably the best way to go.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

Noah Falstein: My pleasure. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's 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