 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco of Moscone West is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media, the SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Amy Jo Kim, who's the CEO of ShuffleBrain as the parent company of GameThinking.io, a variety of other projects expert in the convergence of design, gaming, computer science, and et cetera. Welcome to theCUBE. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for coming on. I'll say, you know, we've been seeing the trend, the convergence trend for a while, certainly in the tech industry. Computer science, social science coming together. That was our motto when we started our company eight years ago. But really to me, the flash point was when Steve Jobs had the technology liberal arts crossroads, that really kind of spawned that beginning of a creative generation to start thinking about the devices, how it all intersects, it's not the pure play handheld. So, gamers here at the Samsung Development Conference and developers, bringing game mechanics in, that's communities, gamification, games themselves, user interface. What's your reaction to all this? You've designed a great bunch of interfaces. I think it's fantastic. I think what we're seeing is really a flash point that has several trends converging. One of the trends we have is developers, the folks here, you know, we're right here at this wonderful conference, they've grown up with games. They're familiar with the lexicon of games, with how games work. And so it's very natural for them when they start to build their own apps and say, what will make this engaging to turn to games and look for inspiration in games? So that's been going on for a while and it's accelerating. We're also seeing that mobile technology, mobile phones have become so ubiquitous that most of the traffic coming in on many people's experiences. 70%, I recently ran a promotion for Shuffle Brain, 70% of our traffic was mobile, total traffic. So the ubiquity of mobile phones means that everybody's got a potential gaming machine or a machine where they can have a light, fun, engaging experience right in their pocket. So as you noted, we've moved away from single purpose game consoles, handheld or otherwise, they still exist, but more and more what we see is the best games and the best game-like experiences that might not be games, but they have the feel and the pull of games. Those are showing up on mobile phones like Samsung. And the screens are awesome, obviously my Note 8 here is awesome and the bigger and better and the graphics, but it's a generational shift too. Like my son was, we were designing a new app and we kind of sit in the drawing board and he's like, Dad, you're a search generation. No one searches anymore. You actually type on the keyboards. That's like so old. And so he brings up a point which is illuminated here, which is you see voice touch, voice activation. Harmon's got now the kind of interface with this audio. You're seeing cars all over the air with software. This is really the computer science, computer engineering culture interfacing with art where new user experiences are coming that quite frankly, you don't look the same. Exactly, that's such a good point. So what's happening is that a lot of the user experiences, the backend, neural networks, the AI, the sophisticated bots that we've been seeing in gaming for the last five or six years are trickling into the mainstream. And that's what you always see. Gaming is a canary in a coal mine. What we see now happening in games or what we saw a few years ago is becoming more mainstream. So if we look now at what's happening in gaming, that gives us a clue to 18 to 24 months out for app developers. We brought this up on day one, you nailed it. It's an early indicator. That's right. What are you seeing in that area? Because you're on the vanguard of the user interface. But also you have a computer science background. You understand how communities work, which by the way, you look at anything from blockchain, ICOs to game communities. Community is the most important aspect right now in the world. The community role of the people are so important. You don't have a network effect. You don't have input output into the, quote, neural aspect of the interface. Because now people are involved, not just software and data bits. I need a notification from my friend there right around the corner from me. So this is the role of people. Exactly, so I'm a multiplayer game designer. The teams I work with, because it's always a team effort, are multiplayer games. Rock band, covet fashion is a more recent one. And so we've known for a long time in the gaming industry that if you want to drive deep lasting engagement, you need to create a multiplayer experience in some sort of community around that. What you'll hear gamers say is, you know, I'm kind of tired of that game, but my friends need me. It's where my friends are. My team needs me. And so that's part of what drives long-term engagement. The socialization piece. Exactly. Now what we're seeing now in the opportunity, I think for developers even outside of gaming, is we're seeing the intersection of gaming, a style of gaming, a sort of, I would call them gaming systems, versus game mechanics. We're seeing gaming systems find their way into social media. Musically is a great example. Like what? Okay, music, okay. Discord is another example. Discord is a platform started by gamers, but now it's merging more into just other people. That's for communication, sort of like a next generation Slack, but mobile and for gamers. Covet Fashion, a game I worked on with the brilliant team who actually came up with the idea at CrowdStar, really merged a cooperative game mechanic, like you might see in, say, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead, with social media and very lightweight voting systems of the users themselves playing a crucial role in what's good or not. Just like in Facebook or in Instagram, your feed is going to show you what gets liked a lot, what gets popular. Games are starting to incorporate this too, so that the players themselves become almost like the game pieces and become a big part of what's entertaining. We see networks like Twitch, huge rush of popularity, that is people delivering entertainment to each other. It's not scripted. So this user-generated content, this systems which let people be entertaining to each other is the huge push that's going on in gaming, and we have part of what makes a game so exciting is when the game makes interacting with other people lower friction or more magical, but it's still the people that makes it exciting. Amy, did you know this is amazing? I think that you're right on it, because remember when I was a gamer, single player game on the computer, you got bored, I mastered it, then comes multiplayer, but you're bringing up a new dynamic which is the dynamic nature is the people themselves. And I think Twitch had an interesting experiment where the comments which we know on Twitch are pretty bad drove the game experience. So now you have the people being part of the input to the game itself. I mean, isn't life a game? In a way- Sure, you could look at life a game. I think that that's a semantic issue. There are people that really enjoy looking at life as a game, and if you define a game as a structured activity with roles and goals, sure, you could look at it that way. What I think is most exciting is not so much what is and isn't a game, but the bleeding over of gaming systems into places like digital health, and education, and enterprise, and fashion, and those are genealogy. Right now I have a client who's merging a game-like experience with a genealogy crowdsource experience. So I think what I'd like to leave you with and to understand is the first wave of this we called gamification where people got very excited about the visible markers of progress that are in games like points and badges and leaderboards, and that's a great opening door, but that's not where the magic is. Where the magic is is in the underlying systems that drive you toward mastery of something you care about, and that's the explosion we're seeing now. So you say, what am I seeing? I'm seeing clients come to me, a game designer, in all kind of banking, call centers, SaaS products, change transformation in companies as well as all kinds of consumer products saying, we tried gamification, it just worked in the short term, we want what makes games interesting in the long term. First of all, you said the most important thing which is other people, but it's not just other people, it's other people in a playful and mastery-based environment that helps you get better at something you care about getting better at. So this is great, so take me through what this game is because what I hear you saying is, okay, think of, people think of gamification as the one-trick pony, shortcut to something. You're taking a much more holistic approach than what I'm saying, the game system. What does that mean, what is a game system? Because what I hear you saying is that this is like a fabric, it's not like, or an operating system maybe, or I mean, how should people think of the game? It's a methodology or a system. So if you, a good way to think about this, are you familiar with design thinking? Are you familiar with an agile approach or agile lean UX? Those are systems, those are methodologies, those are approaches to creating great products and they help you. Game thinking is similar, it's got elements of design thinking, elements of agile, but it adds game design. The difference between strong game design and gamification is game design is about bringing systems to life from the inside out. And so game thinking is as much about how you bring your product to life as it is about anything that you put into the product once it's brought to life, which is where gamification usually comes in. So it's really about building a learning architecture into the core of your game using feedback loops and using simple systems. And one more thing, every complex system starts as a simple system that works. So it's really about building core systems and then bringing them to life with the right approach. It's like having a kernel or a small building block. If you overthink it, you can get in trouble. Right, but you also have to have the right building block so you build a strong foundation. Yeah, I remember the old days when game engines came out. There was no market for game engines when the first games came out. Then someone said, hey, why don't we just take the game engine and become a game engine? That was an interesting dynamic. That spawned a lot of innovation. Is there an analogy to that happening now where there's new innovations that people can build on top of? Is it open source? Is there an equivalent? I'm trying to figure out where the next level up is going to be because right now we're going to, like this and then we see a new level with AR and these new kinds of games and you're bringing this kind of integrated system approach that's coming. So I think there's two things that have to happen for those to take off. One of which is technology based. We have to have engines. So Unity's rise has been tremendous for the gaming industry. Many, many simple game-like experiences are being built in Unity, not from scratch. And other tools like that. And then ARKit from Apple is causing an explosion of really interesting work happening, making it easier to create an experiment with an experience like Pokemon Go. So those are the bottom up tools based changes that are really accelerating innovation in our industry. Now at the same time, none of that will work if you don't have the customer demand and the customer hunger. So the other thing that's happening is that customers are being trained by Pokemon Go and things like that, that oh, this is how AR could work. We've seen that VR is kind of stalled out but again, that's a special purpose hardware. That's not something easy that you can get on your mobile phone in between all the other things you do. So I think it can't be overstated how powerful it is to have these platforms combined with a huge consumer base on mobile with phones in their pocket, ready to have a compelling game-like experience that doesn't necessarily have to be a game. The world is waiting for those. Yeah, and your point about VR, you don't want to build that they will come mentality. You got to focus on the magic formula which is make customer demands. You call it sticky, but some could say, look, it's got to be a utility and that mastery component is critical, whether it's learning, friendship, or some, you know, human dopamine effect, right? Well, that's exactly what we do at GameThinking.io. We help teams and companies create a product that customers love and come back to from the ground up using gaming techniques. So anyone who's interested, that's what we do. And the reason we help people do that is it's hard and it's incredibly high leverage. Yeah, and you got to have the expertise to do it. And it really is, it sounds like GameThinking.io, you're going to bring architecture. It's not just going to be jump on the grenade that someone throws a project at you. Sure, if it's a big project, maybe, but you're kind of training the trainer, sounds like. You're trying to teaching people to fish, if you will, or, you know. It's product development. Gameification is often a marketing campaign. We're talking about product development. If you want to build lasting engagement and you're a product leader, then you can use these techniques to build it from the ground up, but it's not a silver bullet. Give a plug for what you do in a shuffle brain about your company and share some advice for folks watching that might be interested like I want to transform my web 2.0, my 1.0 web responsive app, or my off-shored built mobile app that I hired someone to just iOS it and Android it. I want to actually build from the ground up a new architecture that's going to be, have a lot of head room. I really want to build it from the ground up with good design thinking, game system, as my app, game thinking, with the game systems, all that magic potentially in there. What do they do? I don't know, do you call me, there's no yellow pages anymore. Google search it? Well, that's exact, thank you. That was a great setup because that's exact, I mean, I wish I had had this years ago when I was doing a venture-funded startup, I needed help. So that's why I do what I do. So what we do is take 20 years of what works and what doesn't in game and product design and turn it into a step-by-step toolkit with templates, instruction, training, and coaching. And let me give you a specific tip. So there's, it's a whole system we use, but one of the things that you do, and if anybody wants to, if you want to try this, it will amaze you if you're able to do it right. One of the things that the greatest game designers will write, and the folks at CrowdStar and Harmonix, what they do is when they're bringing a new game idea to life. First of all, they find out aggressively as much about what's wrong with their ideas, what's right with it, through iterative, low-fidelity testing early. Secondly, they test it on their super fans, that shortcut for high-need, high-value early adopters, not your target market, but people that can get you to your target market knowing how to find and identify and then leverage your super fans for very early product testing and iteration. That's how you bring your core systems to life, not with your ultimate target market. Most people don't know this. Knowing this and then finding those people and leveraging them will turn what's often a failure into success, and let me tell you. That's gold, that's gold. It's complete gold, let me just tell you why, because if you are able to ask very product-focused questions, again, with my guidance of these people, you can build your product around what you know they want rather than guessing. And you can also help the person might have blind spot, your customer, understand what the super fans are saying. Sometimes it's like they're just giving you the answer right there, early on. That's such a good point. And when you're inside of it. Can I have bias? I'm an entrepreneur. Oh, no, I want to hear what I want to hear. I'm going to change the world like that. Not really. When I was an entrepreneur, I know all this stuff, but I needed a coach when I was doing this, because you can't see outside of your bubble, and that's part of the value that's still in there. The URL is gamethinking.io. Gamethinking.io, Amy Jo's a coach. She's an entrepreneur, venture backs, probably has some scar tissue from that, but now she's kicking ass and taking names on gamethinking.io. Great mind, thank you for sharing an amazing tutorial. That's a free consulting here on theCUBE, right here from the expert. That's what I love to do. Thank you for having me. I'll see you live in San Francisco at the Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, back with more here in theCUBE after this short break.