 In this episode, you're going to learn how game design can help you to deliver better services. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Andy and this is the service design show episode 122. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about exploring what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the things that you don't see, but that make a huge difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is Andrea Morales Cotto. She's the lead product designer at MongoDB and she has a deep passion for game design. And that's the topic we'll be exploring in this conversation. Somehow game design hasn't been addressed on the show all that often. And that's really curious because when you dig a little bit deeper, there are a lot of similarities between games and services. Think about it. You have actors, you have rules, you have a context and there's much, much more. So I really encourage you to listen to this episode with a learning mindset because there's a lot you can take away from this. And when you do, I'm sure you'll walk away inspired and thinking how you can apply game dynamics in your work. If you're new to this channel, welcome and I'd love to have you to subscribe. So click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new videos come out that help you to level up your service design skills. So now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Andrea Morales Cotto. Welcome to the show, Andy. Hey, Mark. How's it going? It's going awesome. I'm really excited for this chat because we're going to touch upon a topic that hasn't been on the service design show that often. I don't know why, but I'm really excited to have a conversation with you about this. For the people who haven't Googled you yet, could you give a brief introduction of who you are? Yeah, sure. My name is Andy. It's sure for Andrea. My pronouns are she, her. I currently work at MongoDB as a lead designer. But in general, I would say I'm a designer with a strong emphasis on systems thinking and game design. I've been working for the past 11 years. I started off as a director and now I am working in product design. A director as in movie director or? Yes. Yes. I was making short films. Oh, wow. I was making short films and ads in Costa Rica. Oh, how cool. We'll also know more about that in a later episode. Yeah, of course. Andy, we have a 60-second question rapid-fire round. So I'm going to ask you five questions and just reply as quickly as possible. Okay? Okay. Oh my God. Okay. There we go. What's always in your fridge? I was going to say peanut butter, but that's not true. Why was I going to say that? I don't refrigerate my peanut butter. Okay. Peanut butter ice cream. Anyway, which book are you reading at this moment? If any fall by Neil Stephenson, which it's too long. It's taken me like three months. Maybe you need the audio book version. Yeah, maybe I do. What superpower would you like to have? I want to be like Goku from Dragon Ball T. Awesome. What did you want to become as a kid? Or is that the same as the previous one? I definitely wanted to become Goku or have Pokemon, but what did I want to become as a kid? So many things. My first thing though was an inventor, which I wasn't even sure what I meant by that, but I was like drawing like little contraptions. I was like, here's a car. Here's a cool toilet. Like I was always making up stuff that couldn't be done. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Oh, that. And the final question, because we have one left and that is I'm curious if you remember the very first time you heard about service design. Oh, man. Yeah. Interesting. I don't remember the exact first time, but I know for a fact that I read. Oh my God, what's the name? It's a service design book. It's really famous. The black one. Yes. This is service design thinking. This is service design thinking. Thank you. Yes, I read that when I was 24. No, before that would be when I was 23. I was working in Costa Rica with a person that had come from MIT and knew a lot about interaction design and that's the first time I read it. And I was like, oh, this is brilliant. I didn't know designers were allowed to go into particularly health care, which I was really excited about. Just like, you know, like these big problems, like health care, insurance, all these big systems. And I was like, oh, they're being given the opportunity to do that. Maybe I should do that. And yeah, that was the first time. And the book inspired many current service designers. So that's awesome. You're in a super interesting position because you have a different background than most people who have been on the show. You work in a different kind of context than most people who have been on the show. And we'll be talking about the design discipline that not a lot of people have discussed here on the show. So we're going to sort of investigate and explore how game design and service design overlap, how they could benefit from each other. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became interested and passionate about game design? How did you end up in that scene? Oh, wow. Okay, if I'm being super honest, I would start with them like seven or six years old. So that's a lot. But I would just say games have always been a part of my life. I had, I was going to say the blessing, but I would say the advantage that I was surrounded by parents and friends, particularly male friends that were really open to me playing games with them, which is not the case for a lot of women. And so games, particularly video games, but of course, board games and, you know, even tag or soccer, right? Football is we would call it. We're all a part of my life, right? But I think video games in particular were something that stuck with me. It was something that I thought I wanted to study for a long time, but that wasn't a possibility in Costa Rica. So I was always kind of nurturing that on the side, right? I was always playing games with my friends. I was creating mods for games. I remember I created some mods for Halo a long time on my computer. I was playing, it's so interesting because I don't play those kind of games anymore, but I was playing a lot of like Counter-Strike and Halo and, you know, point-and-truders. I think a lot of people listening right now will be like, what? Games where you shoot things. Games where you shoot things. But I was also very passionate about narrative games that were more like, some people in this audience might have played it. The ones where you would just like solve a mystery. You would, you know, like click on something and then it would show you whether you could see it or take it or smell it or eat it. You've probably played those point-and-click games they were called and those were always a part of my life. And so as I was growing up, I was trying to get as close as I could to designing them. And that meant that I was very involved with reading about the creators with buying game design books. I have a bunch of game design books in my bookshelves that you probably can't see right now, but I'm happy to get at some point. And I was just like very passionate about it, even before I was passionate about any other type of design, right? I guess you could say that I was also very fascinated by industrial design, but game design seemed like something that I could do really easily, right? There were, and even growing up, there were already ways like the Crayola games had like ways of creating mini games in them, which were something that was used a lot in Costa Rica to teach how to, you know, use a computer to children. So, so yeah, they've been there my whole life, but I think I started getting more serious about them when I became like 23, 24, which coincidentally was at the same time that I started getting serious about service design. And that's when I started creating my own games and thinking, okay, how can I use all these things that I've learned and this community that I'm a part of, I have so many game designer friends and applied in my work. What I also find interesting and that's awesome to hear that this has been a passion for you, basically your entire life, even probably before you knew a thing like game design existed. You're still apparently passionate about this and when we were sort of preparing this chat, there was also like a deeper message in what game design means for you right now, what it can do, what role it plays in society, right? Can you tell a little bit about that? Well, I think there's two things. One, like I said before, games are really a hard to access to everyone in society. And I think because of that, a lot of the techniques that exist in game design for creating friendships, avoiding toxicity in communities, creating a community period, which are things that game design, particularly now that there's a lot of like online multiplayer games, game design has had to learn how to do that and how to do that effectively, both from a business point of view and a community point of view. But a lot of those like learnings are very sheltered. They're very sheltered from the rest of design for many reasons. I think one, because not a lot of women are in game design or if they are, it's not a very like welcoming space. And I also think that for that reason, there's more that game design can do for design in general, but also for society in general. I think games more and more are representing the future of the products and the services that we're all creating, right, things that are going to have to be online and offline, particularly with the pandemic. And so I wish we could take more of what we learned there and applied in our other design experiences because they've kind of already figured it out. Yeah. I was thinking sort of trying to make some assumptions why we see so little of game design mindset in the service design space. And one of my assumptions is that a lot of the service design methodologies and literature and heritage stems from more of the industrial design heritage and game design feels like a different branch of the design discipline, which is, I don't know. Do you experience something similar or do you think there's something else going on here that we haven't found so much overlap yet? I mean, there's so much, right? Games are still not taken seriously as an art form, right? Whereas, well, slowly, but surely, even at MoMA now, now they have the Museum of Modern Arts in New York City. Now they have games exhibition, which is really cool because it's starting to say props to Paul Antonelli, who's the curator there, where she sees this as an important part of the design practice. But that's new, right? Before that, MoMA had, first of all, classic art and modern art, mostly modern art. But also, they had Eames chairs, right? There was already a perception of, oh, this is a heightened sensibility of the world, right? This is what design can bring. Not only can it bring usefulness, but it can bring beauty and there's something interesting in that. Whereas, first of all, games are for children, right? And so because of that, why would you put something for children at the same level as any other type of design? So I think there's the other problem of it's hard for certain designers that are in service design or in industrial design, which is kind of like the mother ship of all design. It's kind of graphic design as well. It's kind of hard for people to feel like game designers at the same level because it implies recognizing something that's made for children. And I think in general society does not encourage that. Yeah, that's the notion. Maybe it's not even games, but it's a notion of play, which isn't. Play is not serious. Play is not an industry. Even though right now it's a bigger industry than Hollywood, right? But in the same way, right? You see things like the art departments in film, which I think Harkins back to what I do in film. There's a lot of designers in film. There's production design, right? And you don't see people saying, here's what I learned from production design and I'm applying in service design, which we probably should, but you know. So I can imagine that the people who are listening right now might be curious So what is the potential? What is the potential of bringing more game design techniques into the space of service design? What do you see as interesting venues? Yeah, well, I think there's two things that are really huge about games. One, and this was brought on by gamification for a while. I don't know if you remember there was, I would say like 10 years ago, everyone was going wild over gamification. Badges everywhere. Yeah, badges everywhere, which I despise. But everyone was going wild over gamification because of the promise of these young people that are living their lives online that are finding new ways of relating to each other online. How can we bring that power and all the things they're doing, like creating whole worlds in Minecraft or in Roblox or whatever, right? How can we bring that and put it in the real world and in a way entice these people to create things that humanity has never seen before? So I think, you know, that was the original promise. I think in general, something that I see more as a promise coming from game design is this possibility of having virtual worlds where we can kind of like test and play with what society can be, but more or less from a, oh, imagine all the amazing things we could do and more, hey, play is a successful space for people to feel more like themselves, to be social in different ways, to create relationships. And I think in that sense, game design gives us the space and the learnings, because a lot of that has already been learned in some way by those designers, that we can then apply in our design lives. And in some way, I think both the playfulness and these are the techniques that already exist would allow design thinking, service design, any sort of design to go beyond the constraints of what we think design is now, right? Because you're creating for a world that doesn't exist, right? You're creating whatever you want basically. Yes, there are constraints that have to do with how you code things, but I think it's just fascinating that we can do that. So instead of doing the opposite, which gamification was like, let's bring that world into reality. I actually think there's a lot that we can learn about how you're creating for the unknown in game design. And young people are used to that now. So how can we harness that creating for the unknown and make something better? I would be curious to explore some examples to maybe make this a little bit more tangible. Also, for me, like trying to grasp where the overlap is and where we should be seeking more synergy. So do you have an example or a story where you've seen game design techniques applied in a service kind of context? Yeah, so I have a couple. The first one is I was working at Consensus before I started working on MongoDB and in there, by the way, Consensus is a blockchain startup. It's kind of like a blockchain studio where you have a bunch of little startups inside of it. And let's not go into the complexities of blockchain because that's already difficult and there's a lot of hype right now. But I think the most important thing was that my role there as a designer was to think about not only the UX of X digital product, but also when you create a product in blockchain, you're actually creating a little economy, right? You're creating a little community of people that are exchanging goods with each other or making decisions through economic actions. So that's huge, right? That means that you have to make sure that this place is hospitable and exciting for everyone that's involved and that the heap coming back because the moment there's no exchanges between people, the product dies. So in that sense, it's really a service in a way, right? What you have to do is you have to make sure that people keep coming back and most interestingly, the people themselves are making the wheels turn, right? So in the same way that if you are designing for a restaurant, you're designing not only for the final person that's eating, you're also designing for, you know, the person that's cooking, right? So the same thing was happening at consensus, but we had the issue of how do you start creating an experience that's exciting and playful so that people keep coming back while kind of like predicting what could be the moments where people would get into conflict with each other, right? Because, again, because it's not just about the food that you're putting on the table, but rather if there's no one actually taking care of the restaurant, there's not going to be a restaurant period, right? So in this case, it was if there's no one contributing to the economy, there's not going to be an economy. So for me, as you know, putting on my game design hat, the first thing I did, just to give you a very simple example, was what we need to prototype this as if it was a game, giving people different kinds of roles and reasons to come into the game. So there are four different types of players. This is actually very well-known research. There are more than four different types of players because sometimes people in game design don't, like the research that I'm talking about. So there's a lot of polemic, but there's four types of game players. There's the people that like to explore, the people that like to socialize, the people that like to achieve things and like earn badges. That's the gamification part of it that people think usually of. And there's the people that just like to see things burn. The people that like to push the boundaries of your game, the people that like to modify your game, the people that like to troll other people in the game. And so when I was thinking about this community that we were creating, my response was, okay, we're going to prototype it. And we're going to prototype it from the point of view of giving people roles and seeing, okay, what's going to happen with a person that breaks the game? And we realized pretty quickly that the game was badly designed, that the community was badly designed, the community that we were designing because it was generating this space where if you came in first, like basically like a pyramid scheme and that's why we changed the design of the community. If you came in first and you had money and you started playing, you accrued more money and you accrued more money and you became what was called a whale. And when you became a whale, the little shrimp, the people that will come in later, which are, by the way, the people that make it fun because they're the ones that bring like novelty to the game, they would just get bored. They'd be like, I don't have a reason to be here. I'm not going to make money. I'm not interacting with interesting people. Anything I do doesn't mean anything. And so then they would leave and that would just leave the whales and the whales would get bored. And we saw this in a half an hour session, mind you, before we even coded anything. And the whales were like, I don't have a reason to be here. This is boring. I don't want to, why would I be here? This makes no sense. There's no community. I don't want to discuss with anyone. I'm not meeting anyone new. And so to me, it was so easy because I made it into a game to already see this is not going to work. Lo and behold, that was a failed experiment where unfortunately, we kept going and we coded and lo and behold, what happened was just that, right? The whales were just like, this is not fun. And then the community died. So that's one really clear case of game design coming in. I knew this is a game designer. I was like, this is not going to work. This is not going to work. I'm going to try to prove it to you. And unfortunately, in that moment, I couldn't. But you know, I think it was a really interesting example of how game design already to me made it so clear what was going to happen here. Yeah, wow. And I like how you made the parallels with a restaurant. I'm also thinking, my mind these days is a lot in online education and I can totally see how community and designing for community there plays a big part. I'm curious like, what is your take on services feeling more goal oriented than games? And do these two things line up? And I'm not even sure if that's really the case. Like a service feels more functional, transactional, goal oriented while a game maybe feels more open, playful, entertaining. Like how do you see those two concepts lining up? Yeah, that's getting a little bit into polemic that exists in game design, which is what is a game. So you'll get very different ways of interpreting this. There's people that are kind of more utilitarian about it, which is the objective of a game is to win. And so in this case, by winning, it would be solving a challenge or surpassing a challenge in a set of constraints. And there's people that think that that legitimately makes for fun. If you give someone a challenge, you give them a set of constraints, that's fun. So in that case, it's pretty much the same as service design. But then there's the more open one with sorry, you can go on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now go on that there's the more open and yeah. And the more open one, I think is where I've seen a lot of game designers come in, particularly more experimental game designers, right? More indie game designers where it's more about how do you create a suspension of disbelief? How do you create a moment of emotion? And so I still remember this designer that I meant from Rare, the company, the video game company, where he was saying to me, the first thing I think of when I start designing a game is how do I want people to feel? He doesn't even start with what do we have? He doesn't start with, you know, what's the business objective? He starts with what is the core emotion that I want people to feel at all times, which by the way, fits really well with the idea of genres, right? That they have, like if you're starting a horror movie, you're like, okay, what type of horror do I want to generate in people, right? Sorry, and I think, excuse me, and I think that's in that way very different, right? But I think a lot can be taken away even in service assigned for that, right? Like one, people are expecting more and more of their lives to be experiences, right? We've talked about this. I know millennials and Gen C, et cetera, like experiences more than products, right? But two young people are playing so many games, right? I think there's a spectrum, of course, in services, like when you need to get your train ticket, it should be like clear, consistent. There should be very little noise in there and an openness. But on the other hand, there are, of course, services that are more experiential, and I can imagine that having a more open space in there is interesting. I was writing and making notes here like in service design like the element that everybody focuses on is the customer journey where you sort of try to plan the entire narrative if we go back to movies and theater. Well, what I find interesting and would love to explore more is in games, you have games where there's an open world where there is sort of a direction, but it's up to the player to come out at the other end in the way that they want to experience this. I'm not sure if this would work for a bank or an insurance company, but I can imagine that for some services a less strict journey, a planned journey would be better. Well, you'll notice pretty quickly that open world games, usually the transactional part, the business part is at the beginning, right? You're buying the open world game at the beginning unless, and to be honest, I haven't played that many open world games that are massively multiplayer, just because honestly, I don't have the time, but I know there's a lot of games like Red Dead Redemption online that I think are all about how do we keep people online paying for the monthly subscription? And there might even be micro transactions, which is the moment when you pay for something small in the game, right? I know Fortnite certainly does that. Their whole thing is how do I get you to pay for a new skin? How do I get you to pay for new like, and by skin they mean like dresses or hats or new pants, right? Costumes in general. So they certainly have that issue too, but I think the issue is different in the sense that they are already, when you come in, there's in film, actually in script writing, there's this thing called the intangible contract. At least I learned that in Spanish. I don't quite know how you say it in English, but the intangible contract is a thing that you ask a audience member and in games they call the magic circle. When you come in, you say, I agree with you creator that I'm going to suspend my disbelief. I agree based on the description that you gave me of what we're going to do. And that's magical, no pun intended, because that's not something that you do with services. It's something that you do with entertainment. You say, I'm going to go watch a movie. I'm going to agree that what's happening in the movie is entertaining, unless it's not, right? And the moment you don't like a movie is when the intangible contract is broken. So say, if you're going to see a horror movie and the movie's funny and you didn't expect it to be funny, no one told you it was going to be funny. You say, this is a terrible horror movie and you leave, right? And I think in that sense, games and entertainment in general have an upper hand over services. But there's no particular reason, being super honest, that a service shouldn't have that intangible contract, right? Disney does that a lot. Disney is like, the intangible contract is when you go to Disney, you're going to have a magical time with magical beings, blah, blah, blah. So you expect anything done by Disney to be that, right? I think the intangible contract in services has a lot to do with the messaging a company puts out and the brand values. The branding, right. Exactly. And that's what you tend to expect when you engage with a service provider. And unfortunately too often they aren't able to live up to that and there's a lot of frustration and anger and painful moments there. Well, yes. And I would say there is one thing that games also have that services could perhaps do, although of course, like I said, because they're such different, you know, like beasts, there have to be like a process of testing this. But I think there's something interesting about how in games the going into the circle is the magic circle is slower, right? So you have, yes, you have like the branding of like the trailer or the box, right, where the board game comes in. But the first thing you do in games is you read the instructions. You choose which role you want to choose. You get to choose a little like if it's a board game you choose the little figurine that you're going to be, right? You build your character. And I think that is a part of the magic circle that you don't have as much in services or it becomes more of the physical space, right? So when you first walk into the bank, how much space is there? How welcome do you feel, right? So there are some parallels but I think games have the added like umph of the fact that people come in expecting to be entertained, right? So, yeah. You mentioned also something that in your current role at a company that creates a database basically you're using a method around loops and cyclical design, right? Yes, cyclical progression, cyclical design, yeah. Sounds complicated. What is that about? Yeah, and I would recommend anyone that wants to read more about it. You can go to a thing called Project Horseshoe which is a group of game designers that get together every day, excuse me, every year, I wish every day, every year to create these amazing reports on what they think are the biggest problems in game design. One of them is how do you create loops? So loops are a very basic concept in game design, particularly in open world design where the idea is not so much, how do you get people to go from level 0 to level 100 but rather how do you keep people coming back by doing an action that creates some sort of side effect that is satisfactory, right, to them and then they want to keep coming back and they want to find something new in the loop. So what, can you give an example? Yes, of course. So I'll give you a very simple one. In games, when you go and buy things in a store because there are stores in the games, say for example, this is, I don't necessarily like games, I have weapons but I think this is the easiest way. You're gonna go and you're gonna upgrade your weapon, right? So you go to the stall where the weapons maker is because there's always one and this becomes a loop that you do again and again and again but each time you come in, there might be different weapons depending on what you did or the stall person might talk to you differently according to what you buy. So there's not a lot that's really changing there but it's enough for you to say, that's interesting. I wonder what I'm gonna come up with this time. I wonder if I'm gonna get better weapons. I'm gonna wonder if he's gonna say different things. I wonder, there's this element of expectation. Sounds like a slot machine. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit but it always has to be driven by what you do. So there's this game Hades and I can talk about how I did this in MongoDB but there's this game Hades which is all about, it's called Rogue-like which means that you're fighting a bunch of monsters really quickly but the trick is that every time you die you have to start from the beginning again which is incredibly frustrating. So how do you make that loop interesting? And they made it so that every time you play according to what happened in play the characters that can talk to you when you're reborn, you're a god, when you're reborn, they have different things to say to you according to how you played and according to how you've talked to other people. So there's this loop where yes, you're getting better because you are, there's mastery and there's different types of loops, right? You can have loops around mastery, you can have loops around exploration, you can have different types of loops but what they do is they mix the basic core loop which is a mastery one and they add hey, you're gonna learn different things about people and so if you're a player that just wants to have the achievements, you're gonna do the achievement loop, right? You're just gonna get better and better and better, you're not gonna talk to anyone, you finished the game, great, you did it. If you're the kind of player that wants to learn about other people and about what's happening in the story, the loops are airning you that. So you're gonna keep coming because you wanna know how this ends. You wanna know what happens to these players and into these characters. And how does, yeah, and how does this translate into a service context? Yeah, so I think many times, well, first of all, if your user or the person that's gonna be coming to your service again and again and again, is gonna be coming again and again and again, you have to generate a way for them to feel like that loop is satisfying, right? So for example, in the case of MongoDB, yes, we have a product which I see more as a service where the user is coming in, the user is a developer, an app developer, they come in, they're gonna try it for the first time, they might have what we call the aha moment, right, the magic moment where they figure out, oh, this is what this product does, but then they're gonna keep coming because they're gonna use us to develop their app again and again and again. So how do I make sure that I offer them in each loop a way to become better masters of what's in the service, what's in the product, right? So I'm giving them ways for novices to do things and heating kind of like Easter eggs for experts, right? So I've been giving them that delight by saying like, hey, guess what? You can use these hotkeys to do the thing that you did when you were a novice five times as faster or hey, guess what? If you get an error, you're gonna get this really delightful little piece of information that no one else would know, right? So it's this idea of can we give you these loops in a way that's a little bit more delightful. And I'm thinking like what kind of services are there where you are coming back over and over, where you actually want to learn stuff, maybe it's not with the company providing the electricity at your house, but for instance, a restaurant, we've had a conversation here on the show with somebody from Japan and he said there are restaurants in Japan who make the menu so difficult that as a first time user, you're intimidated and they actually don't want you to be asking questions like the menu and the restaurant experience is actually in a way challenging you to become a better user of that restaurants. Like the chef is at that level and he only wants people who are at the same level. Yeah, so making that experience actually challenging of ordering the food, like you get a menu that you don't understand and then you have to build that mastery. I can see those dynamics at play in different service environments as well. Yeah, for sure. I also think it reminds me of In-N-Out Burger where they have a hidden menu that you can only know if friends have told you. So you can ask for things that they don't have on the menu, but only if someone has told you or you've looked it up online at this point. But yeah. And now I sort of get the sense that, okay, this might be a moment where people say, ah, but that's just silly. That's the playfulness thing. This is like, this isn't serious. What's your response to that? That's okay. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. I mean, to me, if it's not playful, what are we here for? A lot of creation comes from play. And I think a lot of designers don't consider what they do play, but what they do is play. They're put... It's like when you're given a blank piece of paper and you're not given any constraints, people go, oh, this is really hard. I can't do it. I need constraints. Literally, that's the definition of a game. You're surpassing an obstacle with a set of constraints. So you're playing. So whether you like it or not, you are playing. And I think the less play you do, the more you're going to be broken away from the way society is evolving, which is towards embracing play, not only escapism, but as a way of creation. And I think it's just good for business, even. Like, if those are your business objectives, like having a hidden menu creates loyalty, it probably attracts more customers in a certain way. It provides more pleasure for your customers. So I can totally see how it's just a very practical way of doing business and a smart way of doing business. It's also an earnest way of doing business. And by this, I mean embracing playfulness implies that you accept that not everything you do is that serious. And I think there's something really powerful in that because it leads to people seeing that in your brand and accepting your brand more earnestly. You know, I noticed this like even within and out, it's so funny to me. But for them to say like we have a hidden menu, it's completely useless at this point. It's on the internet. You know what I mean? If you really wanted to, you'll just go online. But there's something about having their users tell the new person and this was actually the person that brought me to in and out was a game designer and they were like, we're going to in and out. And I was like, okay, I've never been because I had been to California, but I'd never had it. And he was like, we're going to in and out and you're having the secret menu. And I was like, the what? And he was like, the secret menu. We're ordering something from the secret menu, which by the way is more expensive, I believe. Good for business, yeah. Good for business. And so there was something about it that I immediately, I don't think I would eat a lot in an out burger because I'm usually vegan. I'm not very strict about it, but I'm usually vegan. But it was just like the fun of it. I can't forget about it. You know, and I'll probably tell my friends have the in and out secret menu because it will make me feel like I'm in on the secret. Right? So it's doing the job of getting people to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. And there are, I really feel that we're scratching the surface of what's possible in this overlap and how these two game design fields could sort of strengthen each other. What would you say to people who want to take the first step into applying more game design techniques in a service context? Yeah. I'd say go play games. That would be the first one. Start with the thing that is the least embarrassing because you will feel embarrassed at the beginning. That's what games are about, about like you feeling like you're not yourself and that can be embarrassing. Right? So the first thing I would do is if you haven't played games in a while, go play games. You'll find something for you. It doesn't have to be the shooter game. It can be something else. It can be board games. It can be live action role playing games, which I love. That's really if you feel no shame at all. But it can be live action role playing games. Start with playing games and then slowly but surely you'll start meeting people that design games. It's really hard to find people that play games that don't also design them. Immediately people want to be a part of it. So as you start meeting people that design games, you'll get to know how to do it yourself. And there's a lot of ways to do that. There's a lot of books that I could tell you about that relate to the design of games. But I think the most interesting part is using tools online that allow you to make games. So you can make board games through board game simulator. If you don't want to make them physically, I would say if you're more like me, the kind of person that wants to make physical games, make physical games. You know, you don't even need to modify tag and play with people and see how it goes. Is there a course that you know of called game design for services? No, I wish. I wish there is not. I know there's a space there. I think I know someone doing game design thinking. But I don't remember. I remember seeing it on LinkedIn. But no, no one has done that. There's usually not that much of an overlap. If somebody is interested in exploring this topic, game design for services, reach out to me on LinkedIn or something like that. I'd be really curious to see where that goes. So heading towards the end of our chat, I'm really curious if you look back on your very long game design career, what are some of the big lessons that you learned along the way that you'd like to share with us? Yeah, you know, I think the first one is that when you're starting to apply these things in other design spaces in services or in products, people will have a hard time accepting game design techniques at the beginning and you kind of have to shelter those people and perhaps not even tell them that they're game design. Again, because I think game design is not taken seriously, right, or what is this game for? We don't want people to play things, right? So the first step is just saying, you know what, I'm just going to do prototyping. Paper prototyping, and in reality, what you're doing is making the service into a game and playing it out with people just to give you an example. Or the opposite can happen where they're super hyped about gamification and they just want to put like badges and points and everything and I'm like, no, no, no, that's not what game design is. A lot of games don't even have points. This is not what it's about. So I think in that case, I've had the issue of kind of like bringing people back and saying like, no, not everything needs to be a game, but you can still use game design techniques in it, like the loop design idea, right? And I think the last thing for me would be that the best way, like I said before, to start knowing when to use game design techniques or when to intervene with game design is to make games. I know that's really stressful at times for people that are new, but you can start with, I'm going to make a new version of football. This time, the person that wins is not the person that gets the ball in the net, but the person that hits the goal post the most amount of times. And it sounds like the smallest thing, but with that, you'll start getting a feel for what are rules, what are roles, what are mechanics, and so once you get that feel, you'll start applying that elsewhere. We didn't even touch upon that, like the overlap between having rules, a context in which things happen in a service. You have a service context and games. You have the game context. There's so much to explore there. How would you summarize our last 45 minutes? Oh my God, I think game design is a rich design area that has dealt with many of the hairiest design problems that we deal with in services and products. And it would be really beneficial to us, to all of us designers, if we took a look into what they're doing and adapted into our practice. Yeah, I think that would be it. There's a lot, if anything, it'll give you words for what you're designing, like the concept of cyclical progression and loops or the concept of mechanics and rules or asking yourself, who wins here? What is winning in my service? Which is another way of saying, what is the user here for? But it's slightly different, right? It's not positioned in as a job to be done. It's positioned in the context of other people as well, right? Yeah, super interesting. A few episodes ago, we had Ryan Runsey on the show and we talked about business design and one of the concepts that came up there was just digging into the business world and learn the vocabulary so you'll know what to Google the next time. And I think it's similar to this. Like, just start exploring game design so you'll know what to Google the next time. And that's already a very good step. That's already way more than you would currently have, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, go on. Well, I can imagine that some people would be interested to sort of follow your work or reach out and ask some questions. What are the best ways to do that? Yeah, sure. So for those that speak Spanish, this will be easy to follow but my Twitter is mentapurpura, which is M-E-N-T-A-P-U-R-P-U-R-A. The links are in the show notes. But yeah, you can follow me on Twitter or thank you for the links. You can also just look me up on my website, AndréMeralesCoto.com and you'll see everything that you need to see there. Awesome. Thank you so much, Andy. Again, I sort of feel that we scratch the surface but I hope we got people curious and excited to sort of do their own research and see where this goes. Yeah, hopefully. The more people want this, please come to me. Please reach out. I'm super happy to talk about game design or put you in touch with game designers that have dealt with the same problems that you're dealing with. So what's your biggest takeaway from this conversation with Andy? Leave a comment down below. And as you've made it all the way here, I assume that you enjoy conversations like this. So if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button because we bring a new episode like this every two weeks. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to see you in the next video.