Well, for me, knowing whether a game is working is, uh, is not that different from knowing whether a movie is working or a piece of music is working. You know, I have a friend who's a TV writer, a former music critic. And he said - you know, and can write very highfalutin about anything. But he says it's like you, you always have to remember that it's about shaking your ass, right? And if you forget that, you know, then you sort of become jazz or classical music where you're divorced from the experience of the dance floor. Um, so, you feel it, right? Like you feel - you feel something. And it - that game could be hard. It could be easy. It could be something that you've played ten times before. It could be something you've never played before. And sometimes it takes longer - I'll definitely give that. There are some games like where they don't necessarily reveal themselves entirely. Like, you know, a game that I thought was one of the most amazing games of the PlayStation 2 generation - some people disagreed - was, uh, Manhunt from Rockstar. And the thing is, for the first - sorry. I've got to clear something out of my eye. For the first three, four levels of Manhunt, um, all you had access to was melee weapons, so a piece of wire, a broken bottle, you know, a plastic bag. And, you know, you're killing people in these really gruesome ways, you know, baseball bat, that kind of stuff. But around Level 3 or 4, you get your first ranged weapon, which is a nail gun. And then like all of a sudden the, the palette of how you can kill opens up, right? And so like now it's sort of - it really is how do you want to play? You're not forced to get up close anymore. You can kill from a distance. You can mix it up. Um, you can get yourself out of trouble in a way you couldn't before and all those things. And, you know, I would tell people who would stall out around Level 2 or 3, I'd say, "You have to keep playing. You have to get to this point, because once you get to this point, it gets special." Um, and so that's what we look for. The challenge is, is that, you know, because games are mechanical, because they're visual and all these other things, as a consultant, just as a game develop, you're, you're playing very - games that are varying degrees of broken, you know. So, it could be - it could be progression-stopping bugs. It could be, you know, UI that's missing, like all of these elements that are there. So, sometimes you have to fill it in. Sometimes you have to sort of imagine this kind of stuff. But the best games reveal themselves, um, you know - I know them when I get them. And, uh, not to say that everyone's going to have the same reaction. Um, but when something's - and, conversely, when something's not working, um, you know, then you - then the challenge is sort of to explain and break down how it's not working, right? And a lot of times it involves comparisons to other games, right? And so, fortunately, you know, depending on the medium - I mean depending on the genre, you know, if it's - you know, if it's a melee combat game - so it might be God of War or Batman. If it's first-person shooters, it might be Halo or Grand Theft - I mean of, uh - it might be Halo or it might be, uh, Call of Duty. Um, you know, if it's a platforming, kind of action game, it might be Uncharted or it might be Mario. So, there are a whole bunch of games you can sort of draw on. The thing I will say is about games that aren't working or that are sort of broken or something's really wrong, um, the more experience we have with those games as consultants or players, the more I understand and appreciate the games that do work. You really start to see the subtleties.
