Authors Talk 'What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love'

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News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Google announced a new version of its AI world model that generates more realistic, real-time virtual environments and advances a technology that has rattled investors. in video game companies.

Called genie for genie for unveiled today, uh, by the company's Google deep mind AI lab. It lets users create explorable worlds from text prompts and navigate them with keyboard controls. Now people can also alter a scene as it unfolds by typing instructions, such as changing the weather, adding a character.

We are, getting so much control about everything.

Fair to say the world of video games has changed a lot since 1982. That was when Bing Gordon and others started Electronic Arts, the company that ultimately brought us The Sims, Battlefield, Need for Speed, Apex Legends, Dragon Age, and so many more. Bing Gordon is the co-founder of EA, and he was with the company. for almost 30 years.

He's on the boards of Take-Two Interactive, Duolingo, and more. Spent more than a dozen years, too, on the board of Amazon through a period of huge growth. He and his daughter, Chloe Gordon, are out with a new book. It is out today. It's called Everybody Wins, What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. They both join us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studios.

Welcome. It's great to be here. Congrats on the book. In the house that Mayor Mike built.

We love it here. We do love it here. I want to talk about the book, but first I want to talk a little bit about the environment today and how much different it is than when you were starting the company back in 1982.

There have been a lot of technology changes. So when we started, we didn't realize at the time, but Moore's Law was going to be our guiding principle. It turned out every six years from 1982 on, a new console came out with 10X the polygons and 10X the RAM. So we were in the 10X business every six years until mobile phones. So when Apple launched the iPhone... what at the time people thought would never eclipse a Blackberry. Suddenly, we got a billion more monthly gamers, and we got a much more diverse audience, and everything changed. We stopped being the Moore's Law business. The world of AI is maybe a bigger transition than mobile, which was as big a transition as home computers. So we've you know, seeing

a lot of transitions and every time people get nervous, you remember the Y2K bug, every time people get nervous and every time we come out the other end and it's a.

Little bit better.

So you see, you're saying we'll be fine. The bots won't kill us.

We'll be fine.

Is it a little bit better or is it going to be dramatic?

It depends on your timeframe. Okay. If you look back, you know.

I got so many years, our grandparents, you.

Know, who are just thinking, wow, a horseless carriage or great grandparents, uh, And in geologic time, it's only 100 years. It's not very long. You know, the microprocessor was invented in the 70s. That's 50 years ago. And the proliferation of microprocessors is astonishing. I think, again, Steve Jobs said one day everybody's going to have a home computer in their house, and now we have multiple. James Watt of the Steve engine said one day everybody's going to have one motor, and now there's, you know... tens and hundreds of motors per house. So I think a guy named Regis McKenna, who was Steve Jobs' consigliere back in the day, said technology usually takes longer than you think to arrive, and when it does, it's bigger than you ever imagined.

The AI takeoff is a faster takeoff than we've ever seen. It's faster than mobile. It's faster than home computers. It's even faster than internet.

Does that mean it's going to be more dramatic, though, in terms of the impact and how.

It seems like it.

It's the first time we've ever seen a technology that self-learns.

Yeah. And so that is wildly interesting.

Well, so that's the, that's the Northern California view. Okay.

I want to get to that.

I grew up in Detroit and I moved to Northern California.

I wanted that point. Okay.

I wanted the Southern California view, Chloe, because you're a director, you're a writer, you're a creative. You co-wrote this book with, with your dad. You are in the epicenter of an industry that is afraid that it will be disrupted by this technology. What's your view?

Um, I'm of two minds about it. I think, disruption is okay and the outsourcing of creative thought is not. So one of the amazing things about all the technological evolution that's happened since the inception of video games is that the meta lessons and motivators have stayed pretty consistent throughout.

It surprises a lot of people to find out that the most important reason that gamers come back tomorrow is for social interaction and cooperation instead of competition and productivity. And that's been consistent. And the more that video games have leaned into our human desires and intrinsic motivations, the more popular they've become. So on one hand, I can remain pretty optimistic that even as the tools change, we still have great quality content. I worry that what I've observed in Hollywood in the last two years is that more and more people are not preserving what makes art great, which is humanity, and outsourcing the craft and increasing their ability to produce creativity, and instead they are changing what's

at the center of it. And it's making entertainment worse. So I hope that's a short-term hiccup and not a long-term outcome.

I don't know.

Time will tell, right?

It's a hard thing.

Tell us about this book and you guys working on this together and why. Why did you do this?

I have observed my dad mentor so many gaming startups, product teams, incredible thoughtful CEOs, you know, from Jeff Bezos to Daniel Ack to... Mark Pincus. And we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could scale Bing and take all of the lessons from a life in video games that he's been able to teach so many incredible people over the last couple of decades and put it in the hands of more people.

Aww. What she said. Well done, Dad. I do have kind of the.

The soul of a teacher, and I like having impact on others. We saw the launch of a company called Coursera, where Andrew Ng and Daphne Kohler went from 200 kids at a time to 100,000 at a time, and that's the kind of thing that media can do. So I love hearing from parents that they now understand their kids.

I like hearing from teachers, now they can teach better. I like hearing from managers, now they can motivate employees better. And so the hope is that this thing um, will benefit a lot of people. What I find pretty remarkable about the environment that we live in. I mean, people think of a video games, maybe they think of the console based games that, um, you know, we grew up, some of us grew up playing.

I'm going to like date myself, but maybe who.

We are today.

Maybe they don't think of things like, you know, wordle, which like from a social perspective, like, you know, everybody in my family, except for me is on a group chat about this or like the New York Times crossword or, or those sorts of things. I'm wondering how you view the distinction between like puzzles, the social element and sort of like the OG video games that your dad worked on.

I mean, you can't believe how many people say that they're not a gamer and then pull out their phone and game for the next 60 minutes. Um, I, I think that it's all, you know, they're different genres of the same craft. Um, you're leveling up, you're benchmarking successes, you're playing with friends, you're building relationships. And I think that's true whether you're in a head-to-head Madden NFL game or you're playing Words with Friends on your phone. The principles are the same. The skins are different. And then I think that we've seen that a lot of these games learn the same lessons. So, you know, Fortnite, is learning that giving everybody career points motivates more people to come back, even if at the end of the game

there's one winner and 99 losers, everybody's leveling up. And that's sort of a thing that they draw from Successless and mobile games, where everybody levels up together.

How do you think about, though, the communities that playing games creates, especially in a society right now where we feel like Communities are just not talking to each other. They're very separate. And I just wonder, I don't know, do you think of gaming as a fix? Gaming as a catalyst?

Gamers report they feel more socially normalized by going through the screen the way kids my age used to go through the telephone and making friends. It's the equivalent of making friends on a golf foursome. So we do stuff together. What we can do in games is we can keep people right on the edge of success. You know, in golf, if you're out with somebody else and you're a 20 handicap and there are five you're not having much fun in golf if you run out of golf balls you're not having much fun we can we can tune it digitally so it's always just the right amount of challenge for you personally and for the.

Whole group there's a new rule here in new york city for school children in the public schools no screen time until third grade is that a mistake Yeah.

I think screen time is probably the future. I mean, early in my career, I remember when people were afraid of being addicted to spreadsheets. It kind of changed New York in the 80s. Jazz was once thought to be semi-illegal. Motion pictures were thought to be too low class. I think the screen time shows that people want agency and feedback.

The....

I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that looking at a screen changes your brain.

I grew up in a TV generation. We watched a lot of TV.

We also played a lot of board games, played a lot of sports, and read a lot of books. My mother, the librarian, never said, get away from that paper. You can't look at paper until you're eight years old.

It's like, oh.

Here's what I can tell you. My dad and what was probably a little bit misguided of a parenting technique used to punish me for not wanting to go to school by taking me to work. and forcing me to sit in the office all day and play video games from start to end and take notes on what I was doing. And that was the punishment. And I think the thing that made the difference was that it was a lot of collaborative work.

Well, now you collaborated on a book. So I think it was all good. Bing Gordon, co-founder of Electronic Arts. Chloe Gordon, the co-author. Both of them are co-authors of the new book, Everybody Wins, What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love.

Authors Talk 'What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love'

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