Rafael Brown is the Founder and CEO of Symbol Zero, a video game studio developing interactive software across games, XR, virtual worlds, and concerts. As a seasoned veteran with 27 years of industry experience, he’s contributed his talents to over 37 projects. Before Symbol Zero, Rafael founded Digital Leaf Design, serving as the Creative Director for 22 years. His expertise has garnered him a reputation as a thought leader in the gaming world, and he’s spoken at various engagements such as SVVR, Samsung Next, VR Gaming Summit, and Augmented World Expo.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Rafael Brown discusses Symbol Zero
- How pivoting during the pandemic made Rafael an expert in a new space
- Rafael’s advice for surviving the gaming world in uncertain times
- What does gaming in the metaverse look like?
- Rafael’s tips for making online spaces safer and more inclusive
- How Rafael is spreading education about generative AI
- Rafael’s background in gaming and how he became an industry expert
- The importance of diversity and inclusion in leadership
In this episode…
The unforeseen circumstances of the global pandemic posed a challenging time, but it also taught many people, particularly in the gaming industry, the value of adapting. Additionally, 2023 saw many layoffs due to studios overspending and overhiring. Because the gaming industry is known to have periods of growth and decline, how can professional developers survive and thrive during ambivalent times?
Having endured layoffs and slow seasons, veteran industry expert Rafael Brown understands that his career does not define him. He explains that these are times to reflect, take a hiatus, and study the market. Although unemployment can be stressful, this period provides an opportunity to interview with multiple companies or studios, exposing you to innovative projects. Time off also helps you explore your passions and determine your career path.
Tune in on today’s episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast as Lizzie Mintus welcomes Rafael Brown, Founder and CEO of Symbol Zero, to discuss how to pivot within the gaming world. Rafael shares how to survive the industry during uncertain times, tips for making online spaces safer, and why diversity and inclusion are vital to leadership.
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. In 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 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.
Today we have Rafael Brown with us. He is a veteran game designer, software developer. XR evangelist, studio head, and creative technologist who has built across PC, console, mobile, VR, and AR. Rafael is a Microsoft regional director advisory for the areas of games, XR, AI, 3D, and cloud. He's also a game and tech historian who lectures on everything from games to semiconductors to virtual reality, the internet, and the metaverse.
He is the CEO and founder of Symbol Zero. Let's get started. Thanks for being here. Could you start by telling everybody a little bit more about Symbol Zero?
Rafael Brown: Sure, and thanks for having me. Symbol Zero is the studio that I set up here in San Francisco. It's a remote studio for the most part. We set up during the pandemic and at a point when everyone was in lockdown. We were realizing that the prior work that we were doing was not quite going to work. Offices were not really possible. We were luckily set up for a good amount of remote work already. We've always seen the importance of having people collaborate remotely and we really just expanded that.
I had a prior startup, and back in 2019, we were pitching an original game and we went into the pandemic. We thought that we were going to be pitching that game at the Game Developers Conference in March, 2020. Then that didn't happen. So we dove into some work for hire. We got hooked in with Roblox. We started building virtual concerts for them. And we did virtual concerts for a good long while.
We still work with Roblox as a corporate client. We're now starting to build some original projects for them. And then we're connecting back in with folks like Oculus, Sony, and Microsoft. Going back to building more traditional game projects as well. We're not doing anything with the U E F M currently, but that notion of working in kind of boutique platform systems like Roblox is one thing that we've learned and put some time into. But then we also have a good amount of love for Steam, the Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation.
Lizzie Mintus: Sounds like you made a really big pivot. Can you tell me more about when the pandemic started and what you had to do and how you landed Roblox?
Rafael Brown: Sure. There was literally a point where we were like, I guess we're not pitching that game because all the conferences and expos have been canceled. We were kind of sitting there going, okay, what do we do?
In that you really start to rely on networks. You rely on the people that you know. You rely on friends and advisors and colleagues. I remember reaching out to for example to Steve Gibson over at Gearbox publishing, who I've known since he was at Shack News and I was at Retro. That was actually a really good conversation because it reminded me that even though we knew each other, he hadn't seen our latest stuff and he conveyed the transition and a little bit of quite fear, but just trepidation that a lot of publishers were going through where they were trying to sort out their own process of going remote and cloud. But the other thing that he conveyed, and I then got this from folks at EA and Microsoft even more was publishers are used to a handshake.
They're used to meeting you in person. They used to go into your office. It was a big change for them to go, we're going to do a multi million dollar deal without ever going to visit these folks. This is part of why we have the stack of games going into 2023, 2024 was because, nobody was signing anything new in 2020. They were closing up deals that were already in negotiation, but nobody was signing anything new until really they could go out and start meeting people again.
And so for us, where we couldn't sign an original project, we couldn't fully pitch it because it wasn't just, here, let us show you the thing or let us send you a playable. It was like, let us meet each other in person so that we build up enough comfortableness and confidence in each other that we're ready to get into business. That was a thing that we really realize that the pandemic made harder because now folks are more ready to understand and support and work with remote teams, but everyone still wants to meet in person.
We need conferences and we need visits. We just need that comfort of just like sitting down over coffee or, sitting down in the Marriott or the W and going okay let's talk about what we're going to make here together. So what we did was I was reaching out to advisors, friends, and colleagues. I knew that John Losopolis, who I'd known for 10 years, was over at Roblox. When he was consulting and they offered him a position, he'd asked me back in 2019. I told him that they're doing big things. Go over there. There's a lot of growth. I've been tracking them. They seem to be good.
So then in 2020, I go, hey, John, throw me a bone. What do you guys have? And what he relayed was, actually we just walked away from a developer that we're going to do virtual concerts with because they're asking for too much. They wanted access to our audience. We're the platform, we're Roblox. They want to direct access to our audience. They wanted us to incorporate their tech. They were being too needy, a little too demanding, and we want a good content provider that can figure out a thing for us. Do you want to do virtual concerts? And can you figure out what that is?
And so I was like yeah, let me get back to you. I knew the space loosely. I took a couple of my folks and said, okay, let's sit down and figure out what this actually is. We ended up actually looking closely at The Travis Scott thing that had just happened like the month prior in April 2020 and then, look back at some things that developer that they walked away from Wave had made, which were the John Legend YouTube thing and the I think the weekend TikTok thing. I know the space generally, right?
What actually is it? What is it that Roblox needs? Okay, it's a bunch of capture. It's an in game cinematic. It's an MMO scale event. It's a cloud platform. Okay, Roblox and John, you guys have the cloud platform. We've done all the rest of the pieces.
We haven't necessarily put them together this way, but I'm already starting to figure out how you need to do it. Yeah, we can do it, and we can walk you through it. And we can do it together. Let's do this. Who's on deck? Lil Nas X. Okay, let's meet Lil Nas X.
And that was the beginning of the collaboration process. Since then we've done a number of concerts with them. And, to be fair, that business is wound down now that people are going back to concerts in person. There's still some of that, but the two biggest concerts virtual concerts still are Travis Scott with Epic in Fortnight in April, 2020 and our work with Lil Nas X and Roblox in November, 2020. So 45 million in Fortnight and 33 million in Roblox. And those numbers will probably not be reached unless we have another pandemic.
Lizzie Mintus: Hopefully not.
Rafael Brown: Hopefully not. I'm happy to let those records stand.
Lizzie Mintus: So crazy to think about that time. It seems like a lifetime ago.
You made a really huge pivot and got into a new space and became the expert. I want to talk a little bit about the odd times that are happening right now and the fear and how people can survive and maybe even thrive right now,
Rafael Brown: think the big thing is still the overflow from the pandemic. I read a really good blind article post by someone from Microsoft that I can't mention that went into a whole lot of detail in terms of why. A lot of it came down to the tech folks, but also the game folks overhired, in some respects, it was over hiring because everything was going remote and they're worried about concerns of productivity. In some cases, it was like the money is coming in and interest rates are low and everything is just going so swimmingly. Like one of the charts number we're seeing last year showed a comparison of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook and their numbers were all up for hiring, especially like in 2021. This was in 2022, looking back at 2021. Facebook had hired more than Microsoft, Google, and Amazon combined.
That's what this blind article was about was like, everybody overhired. Everybody thought not that the pandemic would go longer, but that the attitude and the behavior from the pandemic would continue until 2025. They didn't realize that things would go back to normal as quickly as it did.
And they didn't anticipate that the interest rates would change. And so there's this adjustment process where everyone's going okay, they're not cutting people because they're hurting. They're cutting people because they don't want to hurt. They're cutting people to try to maintain that trajectory as public companies, or even in terms of game studios that are not public. Some of them are doing it to to please investors, but they're basically the going, if we cut people now, if we belt tighten early especially where we may see drops in revenue or drops, things will go back up. We can compensate for the changes in the economy.
And so they're doing it not because any of them have run out of money, but they're doing it because this makes them look good. Facebook, for example, ended up cutting 10,000 people in 2022. And they're going to cut another 10,000 across 2022, never mind the fact that telling your entire company that you're going to cut people in waves across a year is one of the biggest disincentives for them to actually be productive because they see a giant sort of Damocles hanging over their heads.
But doing that and buying back stock, put Facebook's stock way up. And the thing is like Epic I don't claim to know the financials at Epic, but I do know that they had their best year ever in Fortnight, 6 billion in 2022, 5.5 billion in 2021, 5 billion in 2020, they made a lot of money. They also took in if I remember correctly 2.8 billion in the period from 2020 to 2022. They took in a lot of money. They're not hurting, but they have investors. And they have a responsibility to listen to their board, listen to investors who are telling them, maybe you overreached a little bit and you need to tighten your belt. They're not going to have trouble making payroll tomorrow.
Folks like Embracer or Unity are in a different boat because they weren't making money. But Epic was basically going, okay, we've got to listen to the folks we brought in to tell us how to do this right. And it hurts, and they cut a lot of people, and they cut companies that they just bought, but they seem to think that they're on a path to fiscally do what they need to do.
I can't argue with that, but what I can say is that. They hurt a lot of people and I really hope that they're much more careful about it in the future.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it was such a swing from a recruiting point. It's like the housing market, and you have to think this might be out of control. This mediocre house went 500 over asking in Seattle and has 12 offers. That's a sign that things are out of control, but people get caught up and they're like now I need to buy a house. Same with the job search right now. I need to get a new job.
Rafael Brown: It felt like 2009 all over again. It really did. I was at EA when the recession hit and EA went in every city that EA had two studios, they closed one studio. They did that in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, LA and a bunch of others, but everywhere that they had different studios that were profitable. They just were like, Oh, we're, like in Vancouver, we had black box and the EAC sports complex in Burnaby and both were hugely profitable. It's like need for speed was pulling in a billion a year and they closed that just to reduce headcount.
It's the same thing right now that folks are just going if we cut staff, it makes us look responsible to shareholders, and that's who we're beholden to even if we cut employees, and even if people are scrambling for jobs, that they're not doing it to stop going out of business, they're doing it to maintain trajectory. That sucks.
Lizzie Mintus: That's how a corporation works. What do you think companies or even employees can do to protect themselves from this?
Rafael Brown: This is what I had to do back in 2009. They just closed our entire studio. And to go okay, I am not my job. It's to remind yourself that you have a career, that you can even change that thing over time. You can redefine yourself. Sometimes between jobs is the best time for inflection, sometimes between jobs is the best time for vacation, even though it can be stressful, but you have to clear your head. You have to get out of yourself for a little bit and go, I am not this thing, and I can get into a better place, but what I need to do now is step back and think about what I want to do next.
And oftentimes there's really good growth that comes out of stepping back and going, let's take the temperature of the market. Let's see what projects people are up to. Is it a time where I want to go out and start something fresh on my own? Or do I want to jump back into work with a larger corporate partner or an indie studio. But sitting down and consciously making that choice. The one thing people don't think about is the process for interviewing going back to taking the temperature, when people are interviewing, you get under NDA and you find out about a whole bunch of different projects.
And you're finding like, where do I want to work next? Do I want to work with these folks? Who do I click with? But also it's good for going, what are people doing? What do people think is the next big thing? And what are people passionate about that they're going to then expose me to and go, Hey, we're doing this cool thing over here.
Do you want to join us? Finding out about several of those things together is actually a really healthy thing. They're going to, pull the veil back and show me cool things because they might want me to join them. So people need to think about it as both a pause to refresh and then a positive to both learn about, they may have had their head down working on one thing, what are several other studios doing?
Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. What do you really want to do? And I think people also toggle along and you're making a game for a long time and you, maybe you'll leave before it's done, but a lot of people want to see it through to ship. And so you're going to stay and you put your head down a little bit, but sometimes you do have this new opportunity.
Big tech companies maybe had some golden financial handcuffs and then they have a nice severance package and they've been freed of them and they have a lot of options. But it is really sad when you read about people that move across the country and then a month later they get let go and they've left their family and, made all these financial commitments.
So it's challenging. I love to follow you on LinkedIn because you're always posting really thought out opinions and articles and trends. And you have a lot of thoughts on the metaverse. Can you go into that a bit? What is the metaverse to you? What's the future?
Rafael Brown: Yeah. This will date me a little bit. As a kid, my parents took me to Tron in the theater back in 1982. And that same year, I read a lot of science fiction and decent bit of fantasy too. I would just go and pick stuff up and be like, oh, this looks good. And and I, so I read William Gibson's Burning Chrome which was the kind of short story anthology he had before he got into like normal answer and that sprawl trilogy, but it was part of that same thing of early visions of cyberspace. The metaverse was just Stevenson's term. The rough story between them is that Neil Stevenson went to William Gibson was like, I really like that cyberspace idea. And it's an idea that's been around for decades conceptually. It's like I want to do my own spin on it. I'm going to take that same thing and call it metaverse and William Gibson is said make it your own. Figure it out. But like that notion of a network for spatial computing that is 3D, around us and that we can feel, we can live in and go in, and interact through that's a thing that we've had kicking around.
There were early notions of that back in the 30s, even before when we had just mainframe computers that were horribly crude. We've had that thing for a while, but I came out of Tron going, I want to build this. You don't really know what's possible, but I got into game development in the 90s because I always got 3D.
It was normal and comfortable for me to build in 3D and I had always understood games and rules and systems. And the metaverse as a concept coming out of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson with Burning Chrome, the Neurodancer and Snow Crash, well before Ready Player One. It's just a notion of a information network that you interact with through human interfaces of movement and speech and being, and a thing that we have never yet built but that we could and it could replace the internet. And so what happened in, 2020 is that we had a whole lot of people who discovered the internet. And to be fair, like we, we really did.
2020 was a point where the developed world reached a peak of 90% user access like the U. S. and other countries that had been on it since the beginning reached 90 percent population access to the Internet and the developing world reached 50 percent for the first time. We will have other Internet peaks as more groups of countries go towards 90 percent and the notion that mostly everyone who can functionally be on the Internet is on it other than, really old people or really young people.
We're not going to get babies on the internet and that's okay. But that's the thing is like getting it to the point of where everyone functionally has internet access. That's what happened. It wasn't that we had any metaverse thing that we're zipping off in the future, it was also that it was the notion that everyone had a computer in their hand that could both access the Internet through cellular and Wi Fi networks, and that as of 2020, the cheapest $150 Android phone could render 3D. Every major computer out there could do 2D and 3D and nevermind virtual reality or augmented. That's all the next several decades.
What happened was we're getting to where the Internet is starting to go from 2D to 3D. And we have all of us who are becoming the adults now, and our parents may not be all gone, but we are becoming the generation that defines the information age, and we're used to 3D.
And young people growing up have never lived in a time before there were video games, or a time before there were social media, or before there was a time where there was 3D on the Internet. So they are getting comfortable with the notion that they functionally can interact on the internet, and they don't just go, oh, text in a browser, they go into games. And so that's what we're starting to see is a notion that young people are like, oh yeah, I go into Tik Tok and then I go into Call of Duty and then I go into Fortnite and this and that. But it's natural. It's like breathing. That's what the internet is becoming. And it's not, here we need to have tokens and we need to have this and that.
No, we're still just getting everybody used to being on the Internet, using it, feeling it, building community, finding new ways of interaction. We need to sell games and experiences. We need to have things that are more inclusive, that are more social, that are more open, that can be more creative, but we're not yet getting to the point of where everyone needs to be like, oh, I, where I need a VR headset.
We don't need everyone using these yet. These are still early. These are like the equivalent of an Apple Newton in 1992. We haven't had an iPhone moment for VR. We haven't had a Blackberry moment. We've got the equivalent of Palm pilots for these things right now.
And that's okay. Like they need 25 years.
Lizzie Mintus: 25 years. Yeah, I have a three year old and we have a Google device. We always talk to it and he was like, Hey, Google, and he asked us some questions and then we were using Siri in the car and he was like, No, that's Google. And it was just, this is what you think the world is, kid.
You justtalk to this device in the car. Like how crazy.
Rafael Brown: Yeah, I got started on Apple IIe's and playing around with the bits of ARPANET through my dad's account at a university. It was this programming and basic and just like messing with early computers. And we have this whole generation that's, I just talked to it and it responds. And it speaks to me.
There are still a great many of them that will drill down and learn all the layers below that. But we're getting to a point where every consumer coming up, every person is a gamer talking about are you a TV watcher? Isn't everybody, doesn't everybody watch movies? It's not like what movies you watch, but which genres you like or which directors you like, what TV series you like. It's, I really love Game of Thrones. I really like Friends.
There's something for everyone there. Games in the last decade, we're moving towards that and we're at about half the world population being gamers and we're going towards where everyone will be. And that will still take some time because honestly, it literally just means that the older people who were from a time before games need to just die off.
And it's not like we want them to, but like the same thing happened with film and radio and TV. A new medium comes in and you need to have a point where no one lived in the population before that medium existed.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you also need to get companies like India into centralized payment platforms. That crazy to me even to think about 50% of people in developed countries not on the Internet. What happens when they're on the Internet?
Rafael Brown: Yeah. And mobile has been a fantastic democratizing process there. That's when people are like add the metaverse. I'm like, there's still a lot of people like in India or in Africa or parts of China that do not have consistent internet access, that have inconsistent or variable internet access. We don't actually really need to worry about the metaverse. We need to get to a point of where the rest of the developing world has good internet access because internet access becomes a barrier to entry for jobs and for business and for functioning in life now.
I care deeply, conceptually about the metaverse because I like building towards that thing, but on a basic level I just want people to have the access that I've had as the son of a professor who dug into my dad's computer and I could always get on to pre internet stuff. We didn't have a ton of money, but we had computers. My dad always stressed that computers were tools. You play on it, you work on it, you make things on it. You explore it, you express through it. And a lot of people still don't have that access.
And that to me is hugely important. You get more diversity by giving people opportunities. You give people access, you give people a leg up.
Lizzie Mintus: My dad told me the internet was a fad maybe 12 years ago. So you have a very different perspective.
Rafael Brown: So your dad was saying that as YouTube was exploding.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Different perspective. He's maybe you should try recruiting teachers, not gamers. I'm like, thank you for that feedback. So all these kids coming onto the internet and playing games, super young.
Rafael Brown: I think that games can help to lead the way for where the Internet is going, which is that, again we're not getting off into VR and AR yet, and most people are not, but if you think about people connecting via mobile console and PC devices, there's more 3d interaction and 3d representation. There's more audio. We're getting to where people are starting to expect voice. And it is incredibly helpful to play a game, like to play a team game and to have voice back and forth.
I used to play soccer back in school, You'd yell things out back and forth, or in basketball like communication is key. But if there's anonymity then people can say whatever they want to. You wouldn't do that on the basketball court because the people right there. And you start insulting someone, they'll kick your ass. You just don't do that.
This is one of the beefs I have with the whole Web3 thing. No, actually, we don't need anonymity. Game platforms are showing that they're, in order to have accountability you don't necessarily have to go, everything broadcasts your real name, but there have to be platform holders that know who you are, that mediate communication and commerce, so that there's accountability. You can go to Steam and you go, my account got hacked, I need my account back. And they look through it and they set up your account again.
You go to a bank and need to reverse the charges on my credit card. I was not in this other part of the world. I'm still in this location. Somebody got access to my card info and they reverse it. Customers need protection. They need refunds. They need tech support. They need to be walked through and have things fixed and have hacks undone. And in the gaming space, there needs to be cloud AI based moderation that can go through and goes, this person just said these words to this person. That's an insult. We want to flag that. If this person is doing that a lot, we need to put them in time out. Things like that.
If someone was in, let's say, a college amateur basketball game and they just start yelling out expletives all over the place, the ref's gonna go get this player out of here. We need that in online spaces. We need referees and moderators and admin, and we need some things to be manual because it's happening at the time. Sometimes the range of that is that you need to have AI systems that go through, and then you still need to have manual adjudication to go, okay, the AI screwed up here, but we need that sort of stuff to continue to grow. That's actually some of the biggest use of AI on game systems is moderation of content and of users to keep things safe so that we don't have racial or sexual harassment. We don't have people making insults.
People can get hot headed in a competitive game. Sometimes it's not that you're banned, it's you just need to be muted for the next five minutes, or you need a timeout. You need to cool down, like you have points where you go, this person isn't necessarily a bad person. They're just pissed off. Anyone can have that happen. Or you can go, you know what, both of these two folks just escalated each other, give them both a timeout.
But those sorts of things need to keep happening. User and content moderation. Sometimes you got to go that piece of content, that word, that costume... the TV show Mythic Quest had a thing about giving people shovels and they start digging Nazi swastikas. It's like user generated content can always lead to people doing things that are either sexually inappropriate or politically inappropriate and you just have to go, we're going to take away your ability to constantly affect your baser instincts.
We need you to be safe. All of you together. Community does actually matter. And if you don't have that, then you have anarchy. And we don't actually want the online space to be Mad Max's Thunderdome.
Lizzie Mintus: I hadn't thought about that perspective, but you're definitely right.
I know you posted an article lately that took off about impact, legality, moral implications of generative AI and gaming and copyright issues. Can you talk a bit about that?
Rafael Brown: It's a complex issue, but the main thing is that, generative AIis really generative algorithms as a particular type of cloud AI. Cloud AI is really just take machine learning and parallelize it until you can have really massive data sets which is really just possible because of cloud. We now have the point where Amazon, Microsoft Google, NVIDIA, IBM have these massive data centers and you can just send stuff in there to churn. We could do this sort of stuff, but on such a smaller level that we couldn't do the particular thing that we're doing now, which is folks are like, okay, let's take all of this data that we just ingest where we scrape the web and let's mix it all together and then let's have stuff pop out the other end.
They create these training libraries and I'm horribly simplifying it. A good example is lay on 5B which is a image data set that has five, five, the 5B is 5 billion input instances so they work best with these huge chunks of data. That data came from somewhere.
The core issue around copyright is that it's somebody's data. And you have aI companies that are charging every step along the way, but don't want to be charged for the data that they initially ingest. Where they want to take in things that they scraped off the internet and go, hey, we'll learn from these things. And in my view, and I believe in the view of Supreme court, and as this goes forward, that goes beyond fair use doctrine because fair use doctrine limits the amount of commercial exploitation that you can do off of somebody else's copyright.
It's one thing for an educational group to be like, we're repackaging this thing and just part of it, and we're going to use it to teach or we're going to satirize, or we're going to comment on it, but it's another thing to go. Yeah, we're going to scrape the entire web, put it all together, remix it and now we have a tool that we're going to charge money for. And not only are we going to charge money out to consumers, but we paid money to the folks that did the scraping. And we've paid money to the folks that did the labeling and the filtering and the safety training, but we didn't pay anything to the folks that created the data initially, because they were quote unquote, stupid enough to put it on the internet.
That's insulting. But I will say it's also they're still just realizing that approach is limiting. The reason it's limiting is because if you look at the internet and you look at the web, the web is just a subsection of the Internet. The things that are heavily on the web are 2D images and text. And you can go, hey, there's a ton of books that have been scanned, text. There are all these images in the layout of websites, and all of these images that people put up, 2D images. The audio and video is generally lower source, lower quality is not original source, and there's very little 3D.
So when it comes to games, yes, you can go, we created a chat bot and output some stuff, but people have extrapolated from web scraping to the notion that games are just going to be made in worlds are going to be made. I'm like, no. Again, around this notion of copyright, the folks who have spent decades building 3D, building high quality video, and building high quality audio are game companies, movie companies, animation companies, TV companies, entertainment companies. And none of us put our depots on the web. None of that's been scraped. Pixar has been around since 1985. Yes, you can scrape some amount of their images, but they have vast depots in Emeryville, not too far from here. And none of that has been scraped.
If anyone's going to make a good tool around Pixar's data, it's going to be Pixar because they're the only ones that have it. And the same for Blizzard is making a tool for concepting that they're keeping internally, which has all of their blizzard concepting since 1990 put into there. So enterprise data is going to become hugely important, and it's going to become special sauce for a lot of these bigger companies because the more data you have, the more you can do that. But for everybody else, you've got a handful of companies like Open AI and Stable Diffusion and Mid Journey that are pushing an anthropic that are going like, hey, use this thing that we don't want to pay for, but we want to charge you. We didn't pay for any of the data, but we want to charge you when you use it cause we need to make money. The people that you scrape from, they need to make money also.
So the thing that people are not necessarily think about thinking about is that more specialized data that was not on the web will only progress into AI when enterprise companies put that into specific tools, but for people who are playing around with 2d images and texts, that stuff needs to be paid for because, when Pixar makes a tool, they don't need to pay for it because it's their data.
Enterprise companies, entertainment companies are only putting their own data in. It's starting to happen outside of entertainment as well. Other companies are realizing that the data has incredible value and the ownership of the data, it's not just, possession, it's who actually made the data and who has the right to use it. And this is something that the companies that are making more general purpose tools are going to have to pay for eventually.
Lizzie Mintus: I'm learning a lot from this podcast. That's very true. I think cybersecurity will become so much of a bigger issue, too. It already is wild.
Rafael Brown: Oh, yeah.
Lizzie Mintus: What are some of your highlights? You've worked for EA, Activision, BioWare, 2K. Tell me about prior to having your own company. Sure.
Rafael Brown: I'll start with just a general statement, which was that there was a point early on where I was like, Okay, I know how to do this thing. And now I'm going to intentionally try to do different projects. I'm going to go from an apprenticeship to a journeyman phase. I'm going to intentionally relocate around North America and go to different studios because if I want to learn to make RPGs, I'm going to go to Bioware. If I'm going to want to learn to do racing games and then go to Black Box, FPS, open worlds.
I intentionally was like, let's go and learn how other people are doing it and learn from them. Two places in particular that I really learned a lot philosophically were Id Software and Looking Glass. So at Looking Glass learning under people like Doug Church and Tim Stelmach and a handful of others working on the Thief games.
It taught me a lot about AI. We were diving into AI back in the nineties. Our engine didn't always look as good as it could, because it ran two to four times as much AI as any other game that we knew of. We had a world simulation with AI is running around in that all was functional.
I learned about emergent systems from Looking Glass because the notion that you could make a thing where you could predict based on the rule set, but you did not necessarily know the variables until you looked at the individual instance of what was happening- that's the sort of thing that helped to lead to things like, Grand Theft Auto.
Emergent systems help to build living worlds. That was something I learned very early on from Lookingglass. And then from Id Software, I was coming out of EA. They'd closed down EA Blackbox. There's a whole story around. I was going to go off to Ubisoft. I had my Chinese work visa. I was getting ready to go to Shanghai. Ubisoft was terribly slow with the contract. I still didn't have my final contract.
Recruiter called me up and was like, Hey, Id wants to interview you. And I was like, ah, I'm just, I'm waiting for Ubi to send over the final contract move. They haven't. They're like, I give another two to four weeks. They're never fast. And then, the contractor was like, John Carmack wants to interview you.
And I'm like, Damn okay. I can't turn that down. They said, great, we'll get you out there in three days. This was on like a Thursday.
I fly out Sunday. Monday morning, I go into Id. I sit down, I talk with John first thing. We hit it off. He likes the fact that I had worked at Looking Glass and he remembered the point where it was like, Id and Looking Glass and Epic and 3d Realms and Bungee and a few of these folks in kind of the shooter space like he remembered that era of the 90s and this is you know 2010. But then, the other part was just like he needed someone who could take initiative and run projects and get things done for him because John at Id at that point was like Tim at Epic. Even when he's not the CEO, he's still the one in charge.
He's John Carmack. He is absolutely the one in charge. And he's I want us to do more small projects. I wanted us to do this and that. So I had a meeting with a whole range of folks there, but it basically came down to John and I hit it off. We had similar philosophies about development. I realized I can learn a lot here. And I could to this day, John is the smartest human alive that I've met. Not that we agree on everything, but I appreciated the fact that he would let me argue with him. And sometimes I'd learn what his rationale was or what his points of data were in the argument.
Sometimes I would be right, usually he would be right. But he was never precious about arguing. It never became a fight, and I really respected that. The biggest thing I think I learned about him was, it took me back to days of going to arcades. He cared about the microsecond feel, the almost intangible feel of the game.
He re-reminded me to think about the accessibility of how the frame rate and the UI and the mechanics fit together to where you can play a thing and it just feels unconscious to play it. It was always funny. I'd go in and chat with him, and I'd learn something every time. And just sometimes observing him, I can remember we're doing a mobile game, and and he's got the mobile game instead of running on his iPhone, he's running it on a 40 inch TV. And, he's like this close to it. Part of it is, like his eyesight, it wasn't great even back then, but be that as it may, he knew the frame rate that it was at by looking at it. He could guesstimate the frame rate that it was running at by looking at a TV showing this thing right in front of him and he was like, no frame rate counter up. He just knew it by looking at things that much. He knew the feel of it and he knew what he wanted to get it to.
And he knew how important that micro feel of the UI and mechanics and the rendering. He was always stressing, like, how can we make it more accessible? How can we make it easier for people to understand what we're trying to get them to do? And that was a really good reminder of that. Yes, you're always making games for other people, but sometimes we forget to analyze how they're processing it. And yes, there are times where we can make more complicated games than the ones that you would set up. But his principle of making the game functionally accessible and smooth to feel, to play, to interact, to do that's something, I take the emergence from , the emergence from looking glass and the accessibility from Id as two things that I take into everything I do.
The other thing that John reminded me was, in that first interview, we're going to work on PC and console and mobile and maybe other stuff. He hadn't yet told me that he was going to be interested in VR. I found that out later, but he reminded me, you're a developer. You're a game developer, you make games on computers. Everything that's here, he gets you to cross his desk and he had this range of devices. These are all computers. It doesn't matter. A good developer doesn't have favorites. You build on everything because you're a better developer by going from one to the other and learning the differences between them.
And, he reminded me, it's like going between engines, going between hardware, going between platforms. It makes you a better developer. No one should be like, I'm a unity developer or I'm a PlayStation developer. No, you're a game developer, develop on everything. And then you'll be developing for the rest of your life because you can understand how to move between all of them.
Lizzie Mintus: And it sounds like you really believe in having a wide range of experiences, all types of platforms, companies to just become a better holistic developer.
Rafael Brown: Absolutely. And I, I know we're, I'm just keeping an eye on the time. I do want to share something that I always try to bring up when I can which is diversity and like a way for people to think about the importance of diversity.
We are growing as an industry. And the most important thing for us to think about is that if you want to connect to a diverse global audience, that we are now 184 billion and growing. The game industry is the largest entertainment industry. It's grown meteorically and it shows no sign of really slowing down that much because it is continuing to reach more people.
Diversity and inclusion are hugely important because in order to reach a diverse audience, we have to build on screen diverse representation, and you do that by behind the screen, having diverse creators.
It is incredibly important that women, that people of color, that folks who are LGBT, that folks who understand ability and disability, folks of different religions and ethnicities, there's a whole world of people out there that are going to enjoy playing games and they need us to be better.
As an industry, they need us to represent them better. And yes, we can all get out of our own heads, but the whole point is have a diverse team in anything that you're doing in anything that you're making, always have a diverse team because you will make better games. And you will provide more entree points for new people to come in and go, I like this game because they did this thing that oftentimes we don't even realize because we do it unconsciously. So the thing I just want to leave people with is recruit diversely, hire diversely, mentor diversely, bring more people in. We need that to grow as an industry. It's actually vitally important.
I started as generally speaking, the only black, person of color and the only mixed race person in several of the early companies that I worked at and then gradually found more diversity as a group. But I've always been conscious that, yeah, there have been diverse people since the beginning, but we need more of that because that's how we get out to everybody plays games. Reflections of everybody has to make games first.
Lizzie Mintus: Thank you for saying that. Yes. I talked to so many people about this and I think you have to make sure that your whole company is on board because a lot of times the leadership thinks that or you have some mandates in the top, but you're hiring manager doesn't think that. One of the interviewers doesn't think that, and they're not on board and it ruins the whole process.
And I really think that from a recruiting standpoint right now, everyone's saying, there's so many layoffs. Guess what? It's layoffs. So sorry, a bunch of white dudes. Yes, they're qualified for the job, but if you're only in taking people for all of your roles and you are not external and you are not hat hunting and you're not looking in places outside of your own network that all looks the same, most likely you're not going to have a diverse team.
It's an effort. And when a people of color do not apply to jobs the same way white men do, they apply a lot less often and they feel like they have to be really qualified for everything. And that's a fact.
Rafael Brown: Yeah, and I've seen a lot of glass ceilings. It's very obvious. I'll give an example. When I was at Bioware, and I love Bioware. I did not love Edmonton. Edmonton was really damn cold. But I love Bioware. I still keep in touch with Ray. I loved Ray and Greg. But Bioware got to a point where all the leadership were white men. It wasn't intentional, but it comes from folks promoting. I don't think Ray and Greg meant this, but everyone who's running every project at this point in time, when I was there was a white guy. They were nice white guys, but it was all white guys. What I saw was that many of us left there and went and got promoted elsewhere.
That's actually one thing I have to talk to Ray again about more but it comes from the top and if the folks at the top are well meaning but they don't notice it, then they don't fix it. The folks at any company have to fix it from the top down because they have to make it a directive and go, we're selling to a global audience.
We want to sell to 50 percent women. We want to sell to the world. We want to make games that entertain everybody. We need a better, more diverse staff because it helps us to make better games. It's not oh, we just need to promote. Promoting the best person is the composition of the overall team.
Lizzie Mintus: I completely agree. Thanks for saying that. I've been talking to Rafael Brown, who's CEO and founder of Symbol Zero, where can people go to contact you and learn more about you?
Rafael Brown: I don't use Twitter that much anymore, unfortunately. I use LinkedIn a lot. I'm still on Facebook and looking for an alternative to Twitter.
You can go to our Symbol Zero website, but the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn, ping me, engage me, show me cool stuff that's going on and always love to talk about games.
Lizzie Mintus: Thanks so much.
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.
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