Video games – Good? Bad? It Depends?
No matter your current opinion of video games, I’m going to ask you to open your mind and consider that there is something of value to be learned from the research-backed way they are created.
In the same way that coaches creatively craft an experience to build buy-in with their athletes, UX (user experience) is an art and a mindset.
It is a mindset that requires you to shift your perspective to that of your users (athletes), because what each individual experiences happens in their own mind.
Easier said than done. As Dr. Celia Hodent explains, “It’s not because you’re aware of your own biases that you can control them – and that’s just not possible because by definition, they are implicit.”
So how do we do it?
In addition to explaining the secrets behind shifting our perspectives to that of our audience, she also unveils
- What one question you should be asking when creating a product or service (29:50)
- How to debunk the notion that video games are “bad” (34:30)
- How to distinguish between ethical and unethical marketing and design ( 48:00)
- Strategies to help your business not fall victim to its vices (1:01:00)
Dr. Celia Hodent holds a PhD in psychology and has over ten years experience in the development of user experience (UX) strategy in the entertainment industry, and more specifically with video game studios through her work at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and as Director of UX at Epic Games (Fortnite). She currently leads an independent UX consultancy, working with a wide range of international media and enterprise companies.
Celia is the author of:
The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design (2017)
The Psychology of Video Games (2020)
What UX Really Is: Introducing a Mindset to Great Experiences (2021)
Co-editor:
Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing UX Strategy and Practice in Videogames (2022)
Connect with Celia:
Twitter: @CeliaHodent
Blog: celiahodent.com
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TRANSCRIPTION
Brett Bartholomew 0:20
Dr. Hodent, How are you?
Celia Hodent 0:22
Hello. Good! How are you doing?
Brett Bartholomew 0:26
I’m doing right, nice to meet you virtually.
Celia Hodent 0:29
Yeah. Likewise. Where are you connecting from?
Brett Bartholomew 0:32
I am from Atlanta, Georgia.
Okay. Yeah, how about you, are you in the west coast?
Celia Hodent 0:32
Yeah, I’m in, California,
Brett Bartholomew 0:32
just other teacher workshop this weekend. I thought before we start recording I just want my goal is to make you feel comfortable, give you an idea of our audience, why the heck the stranger is contacting you, potential client and then did you have any potentially useful insights on the show but I want to open up to you for us to see if there’s any other questions that you had or anything I can do for you to make this an exceptional experience for you.
Celia Hodent 0:26
Tell me a little bit about your work and you know, what would you try to do and what’s, what you think your audience is going to be interested about with this podcast?
Brett Bartholomew 1:05
Yeah, well, first of all, there’s infinite tie ins, mainly because even if you look at my old line of work, which was training athletes and working in human performance, my specialty is in motor learning. And just as your background deals with a lot of learning how we process information that is the root of my specialty in that context, as well from people how they perceive information so that they can move more efficiently and effectively during complex tasks. Athletes that need to process things in, two tenths of a second to be able to do some of the most explosive moves in sport. Inevitably, that gave way to me writing a book about communication and how that impacts perception. Because we would have to get people to do things they inherently do not want to do. Right you get an athlete worth $130 million. looks at me with the implicit bias of saying that I’m a five a white kid from Omaha, Nebraska, why should I listen to you? And so anything from getting them to perform complex tasks to just being able to learn more effectively in general and connect that gave way to my current work in the doctoral sense of power dynamics, and human interaction which also perceptions the bedrock of that right like learning inevitably, in any interaction powers fluid and in this interaction, right, this is a natural piece of humanity. We all have power dynamics, yet society looks at these things as influence and power dynamics as dark or manipulative. When in reality my core work is teaching people how these things can be used for ethical reasons. And we just understand the cognitive science behind it. So when the minute I picked up the gamers brain and I saw you going into details of perception, admittedly confirmation bias, this is a lot of
Celia Hodent 2:41
Yeah, I was right.
Brett Bartholomew 2:42
I mean, 100%, though, but like, in a way, user experience is very much related to human interaction and communication. And so that’s where the time was. And so now what we do since we’ve crossed over, we use coaching as a synonym for leadership and just teaching and all that we’re trying to help people understand how professionals from all what realms of life really have to consider the way we interact with the things around us and the people around us to be more effective in what we do. So it makes sense.
Celia Hodent 3:11
So now you work with not just athletes, but you work with a lot of different people. Yeah,
Brett Bartholomew 3:15
I quit working with just athletes in 2016. I work with companies like Microsoft, Wells Fargo, the United States, Special Forces, so tech, finance, defense, but also other coaches and leaders, and we’ve opened that up from other 20 professions. So at our workshops, it’s not uncommon to see an FBI criminal profiler, with maybe a coach in human performance with somebody that works in HR, anybody that inherently deals with the messy realities of communication and interaction.
Celia Hodent 3:42
Okay
Brett Bartholomew 3:42
so I just saw so many times now, again, I’m also I’m familiar with some of the games that you’ve worked on. So I have that side of me as well. Of course, you know how these things go, right. There’s going to be some naive questions on behalf of the audience. So I will always do your full big, amazing, incredible introduction off air just so we can get right into the conversation between you and me. But I want to make sure that you know that so you didn’t feel like I Dishonored your previous work.
Celia Hodent 4:05
And that’s fine. And you can also let me introduce a bunch of stuff and just make sure to explain what I do or to let me explain what I do. Because a lot of people do not understand what UX is about. So maybe that’s since it’s going to be a broad audience. But here you’re talking about audience questions. So did you ask people some questions that you’re gonna see? .
Brett Bartholomew 4:28
Absolutely.Yeah. And this is more of a conversational style. So again, sometimes the question will be embedded in dialogue. If something’s not clear, just let me know. And also fireback our audience in a nutshell, is highly educated, but also very much part of my language, no bullshit, they like real people just talking about so the and we obviously plug your books and all your work, but the more you can just kind of relate to them and endear yourself to them, the better. But yeah, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else we will, it’ll always get to where you’d like it to go. Just not always as you’d expect. So first,
Celia Hodent 5:02
I’m happy to answer anything. I’m pretty much also no bullshit kind of persons.
Brett Bartholomew 5:08
That’s what attracted me to your work. Anything else I can answer for you?
Celia Hodent 5:12
No, I think it’s clear.
Brett Bartholomew 5:13
Alright. Perfect. I will go ahead and hit record and we will get started. Do you prefer Dr. Hodent, or Celia?
Celia Hodent 5:21
You can start with Dr. Hodent. And then you can call me Celia, it’s got to be really annoying if you call me Dr. Hodent the whole
Brett Bartholomew 5:29
three, two and one
Welcome back to another episode of The Art Of Coaching podcast. I am here with the extraordinarily talented Dr. Celia, Hodent
Dr. Hodent. Thanks for joining me today.
Celia Hodent 5:40
Hey, thanks Brett for inviting me. I’m super happy to be here with you.
Brett Bartholomew 5:43
Likewise, we talked off air a little bit but for context for our audience, something that drew me to your work and I found that really just intriguing, seductive, and incredibly insightful is everything you do and I’ll let you explain this in more depth with UX and everything you do. In the cognitive science space. Everything you do to enhance learning and people’s experiences with a product was a natural tie in to what we talked about with coaching since we do coaching as mentoring teaching and guiding. But I have to ask, it’s a very basic question at first, before you got in to your work in the video game industry and technology in general, which will go in depth on what made you just interested in learning and perception and how people perceive the things they do in general.
Celia Hodent 6:29
Oh, boy. I’m very curious by nature and when I was a kid, I love scientific books and stuff like that and try to understand the human body and then I went on to try to understand the human brain and that was a bit revealing. I was like, Oh, why do we do the things we do? And this is how I started to study psychology, cognitive psychology more specifically, and this is where I was like mindful literally, to try to understand, why is it so hard for us to do the right things, you know, whether it is for the planet, or for other people, and why is it so hard to make the right decisions for our health for long term? And it’s actually pretty basic information that the brain is so biased, we have such a hard time making the right decisions, and it’s really because of the very architecture of our brains. And so once I discovered that I was like, Okay, I really need to get a degree in this, is just really fascinating. And learning is all about trying to rewire our brain because the brain is not pre wired in the first place. It’s, we have what we call brain plasticity and knowing this, just a little bit of hope, because sometimes we can feel so desperate like we can do what we’re trying to do or we can’t make things change and once you understand that, a lot of this is not because you’re not smart or not have the strongest will enough to do something. It is more perseverance and hard work. And once you understand that, it really helps you get a shift into okay, maybe a failed now, but if I keep going or if I try to do this, but from another angle, then I will progress and I’ll get there eventually. And so that’s why learning is so fascinating and understand you know how the brain can change and game changes, connections like physically, it’s really, we have the neurons are connected and collect synapses and it’s changing constantly, depending on what we do. So that’s why I’m really fascinated about learning and more specifically with kids. You know how kids like in just very few months, they learn how to walk and talk and do a lot of things. It’s really fascinating to dive into this.
Brett Bartholomew 8:44
Now. I love the depth of that answer specifically because it mirrors my own experience of being interested in just human movement and how like I mentioned toddlers, I’m a father of a two year old, and most of my career was spent helping athletes process information so that they could improve gross motor skills and fine motor skills and now seeing this in my son. And that’s why something that you explained, UX is a very unique term. And I thought you described it really well and allow you to elaborate on it. But what in one interview I remember you saying UX is best thought of as a mindset, a way of approaching a development process. For really any product including video games. And the idea is to not just design something, but to impact how the end user experiences because of those biases. So for me, that was a lot of hey, I have information that can help somebody but they may not always know how it’s gonna help them. I’ve got to interpret that carefully like so now you took this interest into learning into UX is that so how you describe it as a mindset and this approach or would you like to elaborate a little bit more?
Celia Hodent 9:42
Yeah, sure. So UX is getting very trendy yet a lot of people don’t really understand it. So yeah, UX stands for user experience. And what it means is instead of creating a product, whatever it is, it could be coaching material, it could be a class, or it could be a product, or it could be a service. The idea is to think about the experience that the end users are going to have and you can’t do that if you only work in a silo from your own perspective, because we all have different perspectives. One of the first thing we learn in psychology is that perception is subjective. We do not perceive the world as it is we do not perceive the reality as it is. That’s why big science is so hard. And so we need to understand that we need to do that shift from our own perspective. Whenever we offer a service or we make a product for someone else, and try to adopt the perspective of the user and what do they want? Why would they care about your product or your service? How are they going to use it, how they’re going to assess it? And it’s literally impossible to do that. If you do not have some processes, if you don’t test your product with those people in your watch what’s going on? What they understand, not understand because you, we don’t know what we don’t know and we can’t all of a sudden ignore the things that we know about a product. If you make something you know about this thing very deeply. Like you’re very invested in it and you if you do a product you not, you know like the back of your hand. So it’s really hard to ignore all the things that you know, and try to understand how a new user is gonna understand your product. So it’s like the mindset it’s really about shifting your perspective to adopt the perspective of the end users. And then of course, there’s a lot of science behind it. We apply cognitive science to try to not just kind of science it’s also about a physical ergonomics. If you make a product, if you make a chair you need to understand you know how the human body works so that the chair is actually comfortable. Same thing with like courses or another product, like an app or something you need to take into account the mind of the user, because an experience is what is happening in our minds, and understanding how the science, the performance of the human mind, but also its limitations. In terms of again, perception and attention, memories can be crucial. Otherwise gonna miss the mark. So it’s all about placing the human first. It’s not about making sure we’re going to milk people as much as possible to get all the money. This is not what UX is about. UX is about placing the human first so that we can improve human lives with technology or with services and to do that we shift from our own perspective, we test a product at every step of the way. So we do a lot of prototyping. And we improve the product with the people and not in the cycle and this is what we’re trying to accomplish. So hopefully then your product is going to be much more relevant and then it’s going to make more money is it’s a win win situation. Everybody’s happy,
Brett Bartholomew 12:39
No question and you the stuff that you put out talking about how you test and how you combat these biases and the things you do with ethics are going to be a big part of the latter part of this conversation. But touching on a few points, you turn me on to the work of Don Norman, and I remember I remember reading his book where he said Good design is communic good communication, good communication is good design. You know, in some of this, I have to ask and if this is too personal, just tell me to shut up. As you dive down these routes of learning and how we perceive and our own cognitive biases Does that ever make you reflect inward? Especially because you’ve written two incredible books? And then like, it’s just thinking, man, there’s this curse of knowledge, there’s theory of mind. Have you been able to find unique ways to both? How do I phrase this? Let me turn it on me. First. I think I’ve learned more about my own strengths as uncomfortable as they are to admit because I’m very self critical. But I’ve also learned to befriend my demons and be a little bit more aware of those as your work helps you do that with yourself as well become more self aware in general.
Celia Hodent 13:56
Yes, definitely. So the thing I also teach people about implicit bias and how you have to be more inclusive for whatever you’re doing, whether your company to be more inclusive with the people you hire, or so your product and the first thing that I teach is that it’s not because you’re aware of your own biases that you can control them. And that’s not just not possible because by definition, they are implicit. So you can’t be aware at all times about your own biases. But what it’s helping me to do knowing how the brain works or our biases work is to redesign my environment so that I try to not fall for these biases. And this is exactly what UX is about. We design, it’s not about showing trying to change the human like okay, we have these, were faulty as humans, okay, we do a lot of wonderful things, but we also have a lot of walls and vices. So let’s take these vices into account and redesign the environment to not fall further. Like for example, we know that memory is volatile. So let’s not try to remember a list of groceries, if you need to go to your groceries, like write them down. Just a basic as that or if you losing your keys all the time. We know that attention to resources are a really scarce. So if you come back home and you put your keys somewhere, but you were doing $100 stuff at the same time and you’re very stressed, buy something or you’re not going to remember where you put your keys. So find a place where you always want to put your keys always the same place so then you find a way to do that. So I do that with myself. And by knowing that I can’t have the solution by myself. Like for example when I do a work I always have people reading my stuff beforehand, I test all my things, because I know I’m not the best person to have to assess my own work. So that’s the things that I’m going to do. If I say something and someone is telling me otherwise I tried to always think about okay, maybe they’re right and maybe I’m wrong because you know memory is fallible. I never tried to never take things personally and try to Yeah, I’m looking more as Okay, yeah, maybe I should stop and think about what I just said maybe I was wrong. Or maybe I miss remembered. It’s happening but then it’s not you know, and no and I’m still falling for these biases, but I’m more okay with it. Not in the sense that I’m excusing myself, but in the sense that I know that this is going to happen and instead of trying to not think about it and you know, have trying to believe that this is not going to happen. And if I’m thinking hard enough, I’m not going to fall for them in my mind says like, I’m going to make mistakes. I’m going to fall for that. I’m not going to be able to understand people and that’s okay, but now I can work on how to redesign the way I work. Try to find ways to always shift and try to dump the perspective of the person I’m talking to, so that we can find a way to progress together instead of getting into conflict mode. So this is what I’m trying to say and I’m always successful at it. But it helps to think that a lot of time things I’m not really personally someone is saying something that hurts you if I’m in a position to do so I’m not talking about when people are discriminated against, which is another story. But sometimes it’s just because we have a wrong perception. And just by stopping and remembering, that is really helping when there’s any conflicts at home or, you know, within your family or with your friends to you know, take perspective and work out like
Brett Bartholomew 17:35
What you’re saying is powerful especially because you know, I think sometimes people forget that inherently since we can’t read each other’s minds, because communication is the baseline for interaction, right, whether with a product or with individuals and even within ourselves. And I really appreciate how you talk about awareness of biases is not enough due to them being implicit because something that just drives me nuts in the leadership space is how people that they say oh, if we just think again about our biases, if we’re just aware of our biases, but to your point, being aware isn’t really enough, right? People have to face them. And I know you probably have some very helpful criticisms of this. But then one of our workshops we ran this weekend we evaluate people’s interactions through the use of role playing. Well, the evaluation inherently has a self evaluation because people have egocentric bias, right? Yeah. And then there’s peer evaluations because there’s biases that go with that. And then we have group biases. And then we’ll use video replay and a variety of other things after they’ve scored themselves and all biases have been at least accounted for. And then we say okay, how did this change your score when we look at video and and it’s, it’s tough, sometimes creating an environment and as you mentioned, memory is fallible. And one way you enhance learning is by putting, you know, learning is that happen with it’s it’s strengthened when there’s an emotional response, right. That’s why we like Oh, whether it’s music or something has hands on, when your ego is brought into play, or you have skin in the game. I learned that at a higher level and I just I think that it’s such a wonderful part of things that you’ve mentioned in your work. Like even when you do testing, there can be people that are so sure that this team is going to work this way and they’re going to figure out how to harvest correctly and I want you to explain these terms for our audience. But then oops, all I know is not what there is and here’s the curse of knowledge. So if you wouldn’t mind and use whatever example you’d like, what was the situation maybe you were consulting or on the team of an organization that they thought they had the perfect idea for this game or this activity within the game and man, once tasting, they were eating their own words,
Celia Hodent 19:24
Oh, boy, this this happens all the time. So I am currently a consultant. But previously, I was always working in the game industry. So I wanted to be soft. I worked at LucasArts and Epic Games. And this happens all the time. Like designers and artists, they put something together and they’re sure it’s going to be perceived that way and it looks obvious for them and then you test it and then all of a sudden we realize that a bunch of people don’t get it and simple example, so I work on fortnight for a bit and we, the artist were creating a lot of assets and they were creating some of among assets, some icons, and one of these icons were supposed to represent the trap category. So for now you need to harvest some resources and then you can craft stuff like traps and trucks are really good to use because they can trick animals or whatever. And so we need a category to show where in your inventory you can craft traps and then where they are and initially it was like a representative horizontal wooden plank, plank with a spikes on it. And for us it was like super clear, yeah, this is a basic basic trap that we have on Fortnite. And so this icon should be on display everyone. Surprise, surprised. We test it and a bunch of people they see it and what as them you know, what is this? They say something like, oh, it looked like trees because it really looked like Christmas trees. Or looks like animation. And this is when we realized, okay, this is not as obvious as we thought and instead of again, trying to change the humans and trying to teach them you know, oh no, this is trap train and you need to learn that we change the icon into a stereotype of a bear trap, even though they are no traps and for them it looks like a bear trap. But it’s strong enough an archetype, an archetype that it was a much clearer for the audience. So that happens all the time. I just took a one example about the UI, but we test everything you know, it has given a sound effects, with the test, you know. the objectives of the game and how people are going to understand it. And that happens every time. Because by definition, we all have a different perspective. So we can all be 100% sure that that’s going to work.
Brett Bartholomew 21:37
Yeah, well, and I love it. You know, you had mentioned to even when that organization or an organization has core pillars and guidance, right, and I believe in Fortnite you had said hey, there’s exploring, harvesting, crafting, building in combat, so it can’t seem like they have this compass this strong Northstar but that’s still not enough. And it’s interesting because you have a world I think, in some instances, at least I know our audience, very educated audience, but a lot of them feel impostor syndrome and they always feel like I don’t have enough information. I don’t have the exact thing I need. And when I try to tell them as even if you have the exact thing you need the core principles, the best assets, the best people, it’s still version one is never going to make it so you might as well just put it out in the world fail, learn from that failure, face those biases and move forward. Is that bad advice? Or have you kind of learned that and do you believe that that’s kind of the way that we best progress in life?
Celia Hodent 22:25
Yeah, so this new UX is very much what we say I wouldn’t say necessarily put it out in the world, really. But we do prototyping. We make prototypes for everything. And like even for games like it’s typically it’s very hightech, and it takes months or years to make a game like Fortnite, I think I started to work in Fortnite in 2011 and it came out in 2017. So you see like it’s years of hard work. But before we get there, we can make peg versions of it or we can make like really bloated version of it. And we see like our people understanding things. And that’s really helping doing our iterative loop. So we start with an idea, ideas are good, but it’s really not even halfway through of what you need to do, you need to execute on the idea, and this is actually the difficult part. So we start with an idea and we try to also think with this idea, what we’re trying to convey it for, products. So if you’re making a product, your idea is okay, what problem is it’s trying to solve for your audience, for users. It’s always thinking about that. But for games, it’s an art form of entertainment. So we think about okay, what emotion we want to create, what sort of challenges we want to create, and then we prototype and we test it and then we see what’s working, not working. And so we iterate first of the past test, and then we keep going and in what we call Lean UX. So it’s UX for startups are people who need to go fast. We think about it, what we call an MVP, so minimum viable product. So you think about the the minimum of your product that can be done. So a lot of times people take the example of Amazon’s they started by just selling books online. But the whole user journey was already embedded in this. And then they saw that it was working and then they extended it blah, blah blah, and this is what you want to do, you think about the minimum viable product before you open it to the world. You do. Do your your homework first. You do your prototyping and testing. When you have something that looks pretty good. Then you ship it, you ship your minimal viable product and you see how it goes and how it scales with like a real audience. And once you get that nailed, then you can start to expand and add more services to your core elements. So we do that we can do that with games. We can do that. With anything. It really depends on the mindset it depends on for games it depends really a lot on the type of game. So you can do this for every game, but for an online game. It can be good to do that because it’s so much work and it’s so much money invested in that, that you start to go small and then you add more modes and then you extend it as you know if it works and if people aren’t are excited,
Brett Bartholomew 25:15
like you said it’s an iterative loop. Right. And this is why this idea that I just think our society gets very concerned with this idea of perfect and these things inherently can’t be perfect and that’s a dangerous bias in and of itself.
Celia Hodent 25:27
And perfect for whom?
Brett Bartholomew 25:28
Right.
Celia Hodent 25:29
Maybe it could be perfect for you. But that’s not the point, it should be perfect for the users.
Brett Bartholomew 25:34
Exactly. That’s the difficult part and that was another thing that was a no brainer about you know getting you on speaking about biases it’s fascinating, I was telling a friend of mine you know that we were having you on, he said man video games, you know isn’t your audience this and this and this I go well, my audience is learners that are fascinated in human psychology. But more importantly, every single pro athlete that I ever trained throughout my career, played video games, right? I mean, we’ve had three of them on the show and we ask them, How do you detach? You know from some of this, I mean, you know, like these people that regardless of sport, this is a grind and this becomes their livelihood and they need a way to kind of have an incubation period in a way that they can get away from that. And whether it was Fortnite, whether it’s any of the games, I mean, a lot of them that you had consulted with and worked on, you know, and I remember asking them to your point, I said, What is it about these games? And they said, you know, they’re challenging, they’re social, they allow it and many of them said it, you know, to the opposite of the narrative out there. I don’t feel like games make me dumber. As a matter of fact, when I’m done playing, if they’re well designed, I feel more relaxed, more focused, and I feel like I was able to express myself. Do you feel like that’s still a bias societally that we’re working through that video games, you know, don’t really offer the cognitive benefit. Well designed games, of course, ones that are done with, what do you think about that narrative? Yeah.
Celia Hodent 26:47
So I find that surprising because I felt that a lot of when I started to work in games, I grew up with games, and I played with my parents, so we play a lot of games, including video games, but then I was surprised when I became an adult and worked on games, and I saw that people were getting scared about games, but that was 20 years ago. And today, it’s still the case and now I’m getting very surprised because games are still in many places not considered as an art form. Like movies can be considered as an art form. We saw that also with comic books. I think it took a while for people to understand well, yeah, this is an art form. And it’s not because again, they read comic books that it goes against your understanding of books or whatever. So we still very much see that with games. But there’s also, there are some problems with games like with any tech, but the problem with video games is there are at the intersection of technology and art and entertainment. So there’s a lot of things to consider but also some people are going to say like video games are good or video games are bad. It’s really as if you were saying food is good or food is bad. But to paraphrase Dr. Beverly who wrote that in a paper in Nature. You can’t really say that it’s going to depend on what sort of food you’re eating and how much and why is it you know, because you’re stressed out, that’s really not the same. If you stress eating then if you eat because you know, you find it good and you just eat a little bit and you get good, eat healthy food. It’s really the same with games. There are so many different types of games, and it depends on why you play, do you play to escape, or do you play to, you know, to relieve some stress? Or do you play just to entertain yourself, which is because it makes you feel good and because you’re going to meet with your friends or you’d like to be challenged? Depends on the type of game you’re playing, depends on so many things. So it is a bit frustrating to see that video games are still not elevated at the place that they should be just like any other art form. And we can certainly raise some ethical questions regarding certain types of games just like we can raise that with any other technology. But overall, yeah, it’s it’s neither good nor bad for you. It depends on what you play, how long you play, what types of game you’re playing, and is it you know, are you playing with your friends or it’s just so many games out there.
Brett Bartholomew 29:14
It’s a danger of this false dichotomy binary thinking that the world has seemingly got into right. It’s just like, my wife and I will watch a show every night just to try to disconnect from work otherwise, we’ll always create more work for ourselves. And I remember somebody saying, I don’t watch TV, and I go well, I think you forget that TV has written screenplay, much like these games. I mean, the 1000s of hours, people put I think the last game that I really had gotten into and it came admittedly, I had taken a long layoff but I played Red Dead Redemption right and I just remember reading about all the hours of dialogue and the narrative and some of these games have, I mean, the narrative of themselves. If they were turned into screenplays, it’s just like, this is amazing. You know, and people forget, just like, there are books that are terribly written books. There are games that have award winning narratives. If you just allow yourself to open up to different experiences. But again, that goes back to implicit bias, does it not?
Celia Hodent 30:04
Yeah, it’s a little bit of that. But just like anything that is new, and that’s the part that really gets me is it’s not that new anymore. But yeah, I think I can understand parents, when they see their kids playing for longer hours, it can be stressful, and of course, if you try to get your kid to stop playing, as they’re playing with their friends, a very exciting game. It can be weird to see their reaction. So I get the concern of parents that just want what’s best for the kids. But I think we can talk about these issues and in nuances and to make sure that kids still have healthy play and have a little bit of everything the brain needs that diversity. So it’s not a problem to play video games. It’s a problem if you only play one type of game or only video games all day long. That is definitely not good for your brain. But playing games is just like anything. Oh, it’s also not good to read all day long. you need to do other stuff. So yeah, I think it’s still present everywhere. And it’s so successful today. That maybe there’s more concern and which I can totally understand what the problem isvery stereotypical narrative that you hear in the media. And it’s like, everything is all good or all bad, right? Really not happening.
Brett Bartholomew 31:24
Oh, sure. And this is that
Celia Hodent 31:25
It[‘s like with anything, like any television, like television is neither good or bad. You know, it’s bad if you stay all day, you know, on the couch and just watching TV and not doing anything else. But there are some good stuff on TV, you have documentaries and you know you have Sesame Street on TV. So yeah, it really depends on what we’re talking about. And no wish we had more nuanced discussions about video games today.
Brett Bartholomew 31:48
Yeah. Oh, for sure. And then this is gonna bridge into something that I want to talk to you about in terms of your views on ethics and video games. But as we get into that, just a brief aside from what you had mentioned, I mean, I grew up playing Mortal Kombat. I grew up playing all these games that people wanted to blame all these are violent games. I never went to school wanting to rip somebody’s head off. You know, I never, I would never like, I was able to compartmentalize that this is a game. This is where I’m at with this. And I think you had made that note, you had talked about this, like listen like this is. these are experiences and that goes into user experience. It’s like the user, who they are what they perceive what they care about, I mean shoot, even their locus of control and all that and like teaching them to navigate this environment under safety and how to make technology a healthy addition to their life. And that brings me to the ethics in video games as a parent. I’m fascinated on your thoughts on this, especially because you’ve made a really excellent point in an interview you did previously about how lazy people are with this word, addicting. These games are addicting and, and the difference between that and what’s engaging. I would love for you to just and I know I’m giving you a very broad canvas. Yeah. I’d love for you to just go talk to us about these thoughts of how we need to be a little bit more discerning about addicting versus engaging and how you see the difference between the two.
Celia Hodent 32:58
Sure. Okay, so let me start first with academia so my background is in academia, but you know, now I work in the media industry for a while so know that I’m biased. I love games. So definitely going to try to have a more nuanced conversation here. But I did the work to try to summarize all of the research on games, whether the good of that or bad for kids and one have a really short book that’s made for a broad audience for the psychology of videogames. And it’s really digesting the research there. And in terms of violence, you mentioned Mortal Kombat, we do not have a, there’s a ton of research had been done in the past 30 years about that. And there’s nothing really that is giving any evidence that violent games and we also need to define what is a violent game can really turn people violent in real life. So there was a lot of research being done and nothing conclusive. Second, let us say that. So same for a lot of things like people were going to play video games are going to do bad at school, like all the things we put on video games. A lot of researchers actually saying either not really, or, yeah, sometimes if you play too much game and you’re not having enough sleep, that’s definitely going to not be helpful if you’re at school or trying to work or anything. Sleep deprivation is never good. So if you play too much, and you don’t sleep enough, yes, that’s gonna have some impacts. So if you’re interested in to the research, I talked about all that the good and bad, and put that into notes. Now, regarding addiction, I’m not an addiction specialist. I’ve been talking to a lot of them recently, because yeah, there’s a lot of people saying, well, these games are made to be addictive. Which is like super weird, because if we use a term addiction, and it’s clinical term, it means that someone we’ve talked, they know the addiction specialist talked about the five step thing is five C’s of addictions or was that craving and a loss of control and things like that. In most of the time when we say my kid is addicted to whatever game, we don’t find all these things, it could be, well they play a lot. Okay, but you know, the duration of plays is not a symptom that is not you know, something that we can use to say, okay, that person is addicted. It would be that you’re doing an activity that is actually harmful to you, harmful to your social environment or harmful for your studies or harmful at work. And you know, it’s harmful to you and you keep doing it, it can’t quit. So yeah, there’s really that the the notion of loss of control and craving and you really can’t stop, but it’s really hurting you. So if we use that definition, then we see that the prevalence of addiction true people, true people that addicted to video games, is it’s not that prevalent. So again, there’s a lot of different numbers, but is there like 1.5% to 2.8%. So there’s something of that. And also, there’s a lot of people saying that we can’t really talk about addiction to games. There are a lot of researchers that are that find that the World Health Organization classification of videogame disorder is premature that we don’t have enough studies to actually back up the fact that video game is something special that can make their nature more addictive, that’s something else, we don’t have a lot of. We actually only have one recognize addiction that is not a substance, it’s gambling. Yeah, the DSM which is like the the Manual of Mental Disorders, it’s yeah.
Brett Bartholomew 36:50
Go to manual, the classic defining tax on really getting clear about medical terminology. And what these things mean Yeah,
Celia Hodent 36:56
Yeah, exactly. And they talk about like, you know, sex addiction and shopping addiction as or gaming addiction are things that we don’t have enough data on and we can’t really say anything so far. The only one that is recognized without substances gambling. So, with that in mind, it’s difficult to have this conversation. Games are not made to be addictive, and it’s certainly not the work of game UX people to do that, because addiction is bad if we take the clinical term of it and again, we’re trying to make sure that we think about the human first and we ensure that the human safe and always enhance in his life, or her life with the technology. So this is not what we do. And on top of that this is not even possible. If you talk to addiction specialists. It’s not that, it’s not even the substance. If you take a substance that’s going to immediately turn you into an addictive, it depends on the substance. Yes, but also on the context. Why are you taking a drug and why are you gambling, for example, is it because you’re having anxiety? Or is it because you just. you’re grieving, you just have a loss in your family? Or you just lost your job or something like that? And depends on the person, you have some people they’re more prone to getting into an addiction than others and the understanding of that is really still a lot of studies that need to be done. There’s a lot of things we don’t understand about addiction. And again, I’m not a specialist in that, but this is what I’ve understood it. So
Brett Bartholomew 38:33
far, you bring up I mean really strong points and appreciate the science based approach. You know, especially we talked about one time kind of a paradox with the word passion when people find they’re passionate about something, but we know that sometimes can lead them to a path of overwhelm and burnout. Do you control the activity or does the activity control you? Right? There’s inherent aspects of that as well. I think too, it’s like it’s important to remind people and not to oversimplify right but UX like when we have to make things engaging, a teacher has to make a lesson plan engaging when I trained athletes. I had to get what was done based on scientific principles, but I also had to manipulate variables in the workout to still make sure it was engaging in the variables could also be in the external environment, right. What music are we playing? How am I kind of speaking to their drives, it’s more of a competitive person individually or if they like to compete in groups. What other social,
Celia Hodent 39:23
Setting a progression also. Exactly. Okay, we’re going to do this routine and then you’re going to, you know, this is how you progress. And only two minutes left, go go go. And all of that is also very important to people to engage.
Brett Bartholomew 39:36
Yes, I just I see. I think that sometimes there’s this cognitive dissonance where people they put negativity on video games because you know so much. I hear so many excuses of all these people have short attention spans these days, kids and I go no, here’s the thing video game that and UX designers know how to keep them engaged, because we’re aware of cognitive psychology, right? Like, maybe you should spend a little bit more time on that, not you. We did have this argument with coaches back in the day because when we were talking about getting buy in and improving engagement, there was a certain subset that just said no, this is about the sets and reps and the x’s and o’s and just the physiology and they couldn’t understand that physiology can be all these altered through psychology five, better buy in, better engagement, we get better outputs. And folks like you do this extraordinarily well. So I think there’s a fair amount of jealousy and other professions that because, well, again,
I don’t know about that. Okay, so I don’t think there’s any cognitive dissidence for people. Come on.
Celia Hodent 40:32
Maybe a little bit but It’s not for me to say that because there’s kind of distancing myself as well. It’s just harder for me to see it. But okay, so what I’ll say is that there are some concerns because there are ways to engage people in the way that is not really what they want to do. And that’s not new. A lot of marketing tricks are doing that. Like for example, if you have scarcity, like during the pandemic, we could not find any toilet paper and let’s say you find one isn’t given by some like a few of them, even though you don’t really need toilet paper right now, but because there’s a scarcity of toilet paper, you’re gonna buy some more just for the cost. Yeah, exactly. And so that’s something that people can create. So sometimes you go on the website is the only one left and that’s not true. But when you have the feeling that maybe there’s not going to be on that product anymore, that’s really influencing you to buy even though you were on the fence. That’s a marketing trick. And you can see that a lot in technology just like it was the case before with retail and the problem is when the business goals are going over the love for games and the art form, it can create some ethical concerns which actually I talk about a lot. So for example, let’s say that you need to, there’s a season and let’s say the season is during is it’s over. And if you play every day, then you’re gonna get some points and if you play every day, then with these points you’ll be able to buy a really off amazing reward that’s exclusive to that season. And you know, after the season is over, you’re never going to be able to buy this skin or whatever. And so, if you, let’s say, let’s say it’s 100 points, or like, let’s say 300 points to get it, and if you play every day, you’re gonna get like 10 points
Brett Bartholomew 42:34
every day. But the multiplier, yeah, you just built
Celia Hodent 42:37
So it means that you’re gonna have to play every day for a whole month to get what you want. And sometimes it’s made in such a way that it’s forcing people to play even though they did not want to play that day because they want the reward that is exclusive and is not gonna be there anymore.
Brett Bartholomew 42:55
It’s happened to me recently, within the past year with a game created by Crystal Dynamics. The Avengers game like i Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, and part of the naivete just I want to orient our audience for guys. If you don’t know what a season is, right. This is like a special event. There’s a temporal constraint on that Dr. Holden. elaborate more on it. But I also in pardon my naivete. I wonder if as you explain this, does this have to do with the term that I’m now trying to learn through you a dark pattern when people sometimes use these things unethically or is that way off?
Celia Hodent 43:22
So dark pattern is like really, a dark pattern is a design that is made really to deceive. So what we’re talking about it’s not an innocent deception, but let’s say the example I took earlier like when someone is telling you just one left, just get it fast because there’s just one left and that’s not true. So that’s the dark pattern which is this deception here or you are buying a flight ticket and you don’t really look at the fine prints and then on to you. You had like a insurance added. But you didn’t see that and you pay for it. And then later on, you realize that you bought an insurance that you not really want, that’s a dark pattern. That’s something you really did not pay attention to and so it’s really detrimental to the user and beneficial for the company. And there’s that idea of deception. What you’re talking about is not entirely deception because the rules are clear. And is front of you where there’s idea of pressure we could, we put pressure on you using the information that we know about the brain and our biases, but this time not to make your experience better, which is what UX development but design to ensure that the companies innovate more money. And in that case, it is playing with ethical lines, although they’re not defined yet. So it’s like a big gray area. But that, to me is questionable. But the problem is is really based on the design is more on the amount of pressure. Let me give you an example from real life I used a lot because it’s really telling let’s say that you’re going to a coffee shop every day is or like very frequently, it’s your favorite coffee shop and they have a card, you know, like I, plenty card Yeah, yeah. Because they want you to feel that you’re a special customer and this is something that we are, we like that, we like to feel special and like okay, if I get the card punch like 20 times I get a free coffee or a free pastry and we think that, that’s good customer service to be recognized as a regular customer. Now imagine that the punch card is limited in time and you have to get like 30 punches within a month in order to have a very special blend that was made by I don’t know Madonna or last coffee. And it’s only during that duration and after that, it’s gone forever. Or you’re never gonna get your free pastry. Unless you go there every day because there’s a limitation on the punch card like the duration of the punch card is emitted.
Brett Bartholomew 46:07
Are you gonna be dead within that month what have been so you gotta get 15 punches. Only in the month of August.
Celia Hodent 46:12
Exactly. So now, it doesn’t. It’s the same design, but because there’s this additional constraint. You have to have like 30 punches in the month and means that every day, you have to go get coffee over there and if you don’t, you’re effectively punished for disengaging. Yeah. So to me there’s a difference between giving you a reward because you engaged with the product and punishing you because you did not engage on one day or a certain time. As you can see, it’s very nuanced. And there’s not a clear line whether or not it’s ethical or not. Sometimes you say yeah, that’s, that’s good practice that we feel valued as a customer and the other side is like, yeah, you’re trying to force me to come to your coffee shop every day. Yeah, that’s the nuance and this is why all the discussion about ethics are all about and sometimes you know from my perception in games and other technologies, not just games, it is going beyond that ethical line, because it sounds more like we’re trying to punish disengagement rather than, you know, rewarding and
Brett Bartholomew 47:16
It would be like if I worked up to a level 26 And I grind it all the way up there and then all of a sudden, I take a month off because I’m working on my daughter, my book and then I get a warning that says hey, you’re now Level 15 Because you haven’t played in a while, like that’s clearly not ethical, you know, my view, right? That’s in my opinion. Now it’s funny because as a business owner, especially when we do live events or core sales, have to find that line because for example, we offer a super early bird discount for our courses and early bird. And then hey, facts, facts, it is full price, but we make every attempt to let them know just the clear timelines and all that. And you know, that’s something that I would not view as unethical because it’s just saying, hey, what we’re trying to do is if you sign up using the super early bird, and I’m open to your tag, feel free to just throw. But if they do one, it’s nice for us as a business because that lets us know that events likely to sell out. I mean, we can purchase airfare and we can kind of get our logistics organized as a company. But if people inherently wait till let’s say two weeks before the event, and then they fill it out. Well that creates additional constraints on our end. And as a business that pays salaries and employees retirement, we have to meet a bottom line and we have to have our stuff in order. So we don’t think it’s wrong to incentivize planning ahead. You know, like, but it’s tricky because there are some people that are like, Oh, well, why can’t you give me the discount that you had four months ago? And it’s like, hey, yeah, like you knew the timeline. It was talked about, like, you can’t blame. I can’t call apple and say, give me last year’s Black Friday sale.
Celia Hodent 48:42
Yeah, so that’s a great example. And to me a dark pattern or a shady practice. It’s not really as much in the design as it is in the intention. If there are like, good intentions, and you have a good reason for that. And there’s a good reason to do earlybird earlier because then you have an idea of how many people are going to show up. I organize events as well. And it can be really stressful when you’re like, Oh, we spend so much money and no one to sign up and everybody sign up at the last minute. So sometimes you’re like okay, I need to cancel the event because it’s not working now. So there are really physical and budgetary restrictions and just trimming the restriction that can justify why we do something and if you’re transparent, because I think transparency is one of the main elements of being ethical or not then it can be justified. But now if you just say, Oh, this day, like one of these days, you’re gonna have like a special discount and then people have to listen to your podcast every day and be lik th first to answer then, I would say is less ethical because it’s forcing people to listen to your podcast for maybe a chance to get the discounts. And this is really what they want to do. And it’s also targeting the people or maybe you have less money because people have enough money like yeah, whatever. So there’s a lot of elements here. That can lead to okay, this is less ethical, what you described.
Brett Bartholomew 50:06
That’s even like when we do our newsletter, you know, we have to make sure people double opt in because there are things like hey, if you’re on our newsletter, you will have exclusive discounts and there are people that are like, Well, why don’t you put this on social media? Well, you can be everywhere. I can’t do everything. I’m a father, right? So it’s like we tell people if you want exclusive discounts you want to hear about them first on the newsletter, but they have to opt in and they understand on that newsletter page. And that’s the experience right? So like, we’re letting them know that but I appreciate how much I appreciate all your dialogue around that because it is a gray area. And before I want to get to know you a little bit more personally because there’s some pieces here that just fascinate me. But I do want to give you a chance to talk about ethicalgames.org Because that is or at least I had heard that that was an initiative that you’re championing. That’s a weird, champion. You’re having that real time right now. And it’s very evidence based. Can you talk a little bit about that as we close the loop on things?
Celia Hodent 50:56
Yeah, sure. So to me, it was always part of UX. But the reason why, there’s two reasons I did that. First of all, because we don’t talk a lot about that in the game industry. And mostly, we don’t talk a lot about inclusion and accessibility. So accessibility is making something accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. And that’s the ethical thing to do. And so that’s part of my work in games is to also make sure that people with disabilities will be able to play the game and this we don’t talk about that enough, it’s getting a little bit more attraction today, but still a lot of problems. Same thing with inclusion. A lot of people don’t feel included in games, especially black women or people of color or non white, let’s say that. Oh, it’s really harder to feel welcome in certain games where you don’t see yourself represented. There’s a lot of problems there to solve for and also like this ethical discussion is not present enough and that’s entirely part of UX. Now, the problem is that because UX is not understood well, a lot of people in the UX field, tried to show you how this can be good for business and it is good for business if your users, you know, are enjoying themselves and they find they’re product good then they’re going to use it more and recommend it and so it’s again a win win situation. But I’m not here to make it a win for business and oh lose for humans. And again, not thinking about ethical considerations, accessibility, inclusion as part of this. And I feel that we’re, we don’t talk about this enough. And that’s why in my one of my latest book on what UX is really well I have a whole chapter on ethics because again, this is really central to what we do, and games. This is where I work. I really wanted to try to get this more in the conversation. So ethicalgames.org is just starting with the pandemic. It’s getting a slow start. Hopefully I can do a lot this year or the next. But the idea is to gather all the evidence from all the different researchers that we currently have. I know it’s like science always movements, but the idea is to be evidence based and try to see you know, where is, when is this a problem like if we have loot boxes in a game so loot boxes, you buy something usually with a currency in game, let’s say gems and you spend like 10 gems to be able to open something they don’t know what’s in there. So it looks a bit like gambling even though you’re not gonna win money but it’s the same because some people are saying that this is not good, especially for young players because it happens to have a hard time you know, refraining from getting loot boxes and of course, this in game currency you can buy more with real money. So okay, so do what is the research that we currently have and when is this a problem? Is this depending on the context, you know, if what’s in the loot boxes, is it something that’s really useful for gameplay? Is it as much of a problem than if it’s just yeah, yeah. And is it more of a problem if it’s for getting that money or is that playing because we know that until 25 years of age, your prefrontal cortex is not entirely mature. And that makes it harder to manage your emotions and regulate those emotions and be more reasonable.
Brett Bartholomew 54:11
Because the limbic system is just running rampant, right, like.
Celia Hodent 54:14
The limbic system is mature very early, but not the prefrontal cortex. That’s the reason why young kids are throwing tantrums because they have a hard time managing their emotions and that takes a while to mature again until 25 years of age, that is also the reason why teenagers are typically risky things more than adults. But it’s not to say, you know, once you it’s mature, like we’re a totally reasonable adult. Yeah, we can still even watch something that we really love, even though we have to work tomorrow and it’s not reasonable. So it’s not because we’re adults, and we have a mature prefrontal cortex that we’re out of the woods, but it’s harder for minors to do that. So the idea is to gather the evidence of what’s going on and in what situations is a problem so that we can come up with guidelines, and also with the like code of ethics for the game industry and not just for players. Of course players is really important. We care about the user. So we care about the players, but also for the workers. There’s also a lot of problems in the game industry, that people are working overtime. There’s a lot of discrimination in the game industry is it’s like there’s really not a lot of non whites in the game industry and there’s not a lot of women as well. And that creates problems because if it’s always the same type of people making a product, then it’s going to be biased in the same type of way. So we want it to be bias in every like with diversity that would be ideal. So there’s a lot of problems also on the side of the game industry workers. And that’s also what we want to address. That’s gonna be it’s just the beginning of there’s a lot of work to do. But hopefully at some point, we will get to someplace more concrete. Yeah, well,
Brett Bartholomew 56:00
I mentioned at one I respect your work and to our audience. We have a lot of researchers and folks that are interested in oh, these basics. Yeah, I mean, 100%. And it’s just you know, a lot of the things you touched on a representative it’s good to just remember and by the way, love that you mentioned the prefrontal cortex and limbic system because this is often times when you’ll have courses where we’ll teach performance coaches even though that’s not my core thing anymore, where they’re working with kids or adolescents, and I have to remind them, hey, you’re trying to use forms of rational persuasion and logic to teach high school kid and they respond to more emotionally connected experiences, you’re not going to be able to lie and of course, you can’t put people in a vacuum but there are archetypes as you mentioned, and that was, you know, just even my book Conscious Coaching, we talked about 16 archetypes and some people get really emotional about that word because they think they are judgement and it’s like an archetype as a motif. It’s a general example of a thing. It’s, it’s a schema. And it’s not the archetype itself that’s harmful. It’s, again, what we do and how we interact with that information and that perception, but the fact is, is when you have coaches out there trying to interact with teenagers and kids, as if they’re personal, perfectly rational beings. That’s just not the case for any of us. So I’m glad you brought that up. I’m also glad you brought up the the issues with not a lot of female designers being represented because this is something else that my audience sometimes can kind of get in a vacuum with is oh, there’s not enough women in coaching. There’s not enough there’s not enough women and a lot of these tremendous professions, right? And it’s like that and you do see this permeated throughout a wide variety of industries and it does constrain to the kinds of things that we can talk about. It’s almost like you know, the problem of video games. I remember growing up, what do you mean Laura Croft isn’t representative of all the women that should be respected, you see these things. The more diversity we can have in terms of individuals, but also the types of conversations we have, the better products, the better experiences, the better learning opportunities we have and the more growth
Celia Hodent 57:49
Yeah, and stop taking anything from anyone. There’s always going to be games that are more like testosterone driven or whatever. We just need more diversity so that there’s everything for everyone. And we can games for everyone. It’s much better than just making games for a certain type of people. So that’s the that’s the goal, again, of more diversity, and so make sure that anyone who wants to want to make a game can do that and can feel welcome in the industry and you know, express themselves
Brett Bartholomew 58:16
Speaking of, I remember reading an article and I’m going to quote from a Federal Aviation Administration recently held open enrollment hiring where they actively recruited gamers for air traffic controller jobs and they said, they said targeting young diverse candidates with the hand eye coordination and spatial skills found in gamers is critical for us because they talked about these open area, multiplayer games, and they talked about how was it can reduce utilizing a certain amount of these games and their training was able to reduce reaction times by approximately 50 milliseconds, but also improved aspects of spatial visualization which are trainable with video games
Celia Hodent 58:53
away. Yeah, so that’s the I mean, we don’t have a lot of actual evidence that the video games are, you know, making better, is good for your brain but we do have some evidence, notably with a work from Dr. Beverly that I mentioned earlier, she worked a lot on what we call a visual attention. And certain games like action games like Medal of Honor and games like this. It doesn’t have to be violence but it these are games where you have to focus on a lot of different elements at the same time and as you, it’s not just her, there’s also Shawn Green that worked with her back in the day. What they did, they got people who never play games, and then one group that they trained on, I think it was Medal of Honor and then another group that they train on another thing, I don’t know actually, remember what it was but anyway there are two groups of people
And one was trained on Medal of Honor. And one was maybe on another game that is not an action game. And maybe there was a third group that was not trained or what. And what they found is that the group that was trained on Medal of Honor increased their score, on the tests that is to use to measure visual attention. And that’s a very good evidence saying that yeah, if you get trained on certain types of games, you can have a better special condition or visual attention. Now this is not going to make you feel any more intelligent overall, but it’s very promising and depending on the games, we find a lot of different benefits from games. Again, it’s not a panacea , but it’s really interesting research. So yeah, I’m not surprised about.
Brett Bartholomew 1:00:38
Well what you mentioned it’s like, and here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to make people more intelligent directly. There are indirect benefits right and there are many also, there.
Celia Hodent 1:00:38
But just doesn’t make you more intelligent either, that we do not find in the research. We do not find that if you play a lot of chess you are more intelligent, you are better with doing a lot of stuff and notably you learn a lot of different patterns. So yeah, it’s basically like anything if you train on something it gonna give better at that thing and on the skills that are required to do that thing properly but it’s not gonna make you better at other areas even if their close to those skills and stuff
Brett Bartholomew 1:00:38
Right, you know. It’s like, elements
Celia Hodent 1:00:38
Like doing sports
Brett Bartholomew 1:00:38
Exactly, processing. One day there’s person that say Oh I want my kid to be an amazing soccer or in, you know, football player. And then they think, Oh I’m just gonna play that sport when in reality there is definitive research that shows playing a wide variety of sports that actually improve long traumatic development. Right, So lot of things here, I want to be respectful for your time, I have two more questions, are you game with that?
Okay, right.
Pun intended. This is switching gears into humor about person, your personality, some leadership oriented things. Because this is the reality of our audience just navigating some of these messy realities. Having worked at LucasArts, Ubisoft with Epic, a wide variety of organizations and your consulting and I wanna think about how to phrase this. When you join a new team whether was, as a full time member of that staff or as a consultant. What is your general approach when it comes to assimilating into their culture and for context I mean, In the sense of inherently, all of us just wanna get to work, your very confident individual, your well researched, you have experience, but there’s this, you know, power dynamic inherent to coming into a new team whether they head hunted you or they sought you or now, right, there’s all this personalities, how do you intent to manage that so nobody perceives, Oh, you know, here comes Dr. Hodent, You just not even worry about that and say I’m here to do a job, get on board, screw you if you’re sensitive, how do you manage that?
Celia Hodent 1:00:39
I definetely don’t do that. So first of all, I wouldn’t say I’m confident, I’m confident to talk with you today of my background, but you know, when I started, I was confident in the science. But I had a lot to learn, and I did not know how to make games had to learn about their reality and what are their constraints? What are their frustrations and what are their problems that I can try to solve? UX is all about that it’s trying to solve the problem of yours. As you work into the team, you also try to solve the problems of your teams. And so it starts by identifying these problems. And so started by empathy, really active listening and asking a bunch of questions. And this is how you do pretty much anything, you don’t start with your own perspective. You start by asking questions, and not by informing do this, do that. It’s not always easy to get integrated in a team or you put someone new don’t necessarily have a background and in game design, and then you you know, these people have been working in the industry for decades and you’re like here you are okay with kind of psychology and some processes. I’m going to help you make better games. And I’ve been making games for decades, you know so far. So you also need to go towards them and try to understand, you know, what can you really bring for them and try to simplify their lives and so that together you can try to accomplish their goals and their goal. Is to make games that are fun and engaging and that people are going to love and the only right what I’m trying to say is I am going to provide you with some tools that’s not going to reinvent how you make games, but it’s going to help you get there faster and more efficiently. And we’ll do that together. And I started with quick wins that okay, let’s let’s start with a small thing, like the example that I gave you. You worked with a few people that are interested in what you do and you demonstrate some quick wins with that. It’s like okay, look at this and people didn’t understand it. Either way, don’t change it for that and now the quick win and now it’s done and we can move on to something else. And then you know, the word of mouth is spreading and then oh, yeah, okay, can we test this and this is how you do it. You don’t try to force people to believe that this is the right thing to do, you demonstrate, you lead by example, let’s say right,
Brett Bartholomew 1:04:48
it’s a perfect example of you not trying to prove your value. It’s providing value. And that’s a great way to just create common ground like we’re in this together. I have wonder, you know, you mentioned you grew up in France. If I understand my research, tell me you have siblings, is that correct? Yeah, that’s correct. Okay. Did that influence some of this introspection and inherent curiosity as well? Do you think that played any role and and I’m asking you to pontificate on something that maybe doesn’t have a direct answer. This isn’t me just curious about you as a person, right. So I’m not looking just
Celia Hodent 1:05:19
That’s an interesting question. You know, I don’t know but maybe because I didn’t have any siblings and I wanted to socialize as well. I always try to understand where the others are coming from and try to integrate, I don’t know. That’s an interesting question, maybe.
Brett Bartholomew 1:05:36
But you didn’t touch on that one. I want to know that one long term. And I’ll end it with a fun one here and then I’ll give you the final word. What is this I heard about you wanting to be a rock star and traveling the world.
Celia Hodent 1:05:46
And it didn’t work out.
Brett Bartholomew 1:05:48
Tell me a little bit about that. Because that’s such you’re such a diverse individual. You’re fascinating. Like I want to have coffee with you after this. But tell me a little bit about this.
Celia Hodent 1:05:57
If you want to talk about rock you need to give me something stronger than coffee.
Brett Bartholomew 1:06:02
I’ll do that. If you much prefer drink, we’ll talk about, talking about Pearl Jam and the bliss all day long. Yeah.
Celia Hodent 1:06:07
Sure. I’d love to talk about that. I can talk about that all day long, too. I don’t know, I love music, music has always been part of my life. I just, I don’t know how to say, I love games and I love playing games and I love the connection it gives with people. But music, what I mean if I don’t listen to music, at some point, it is just like, I’m going to wither. So it’s like a necessity for me. And it’s interesting in my research, in my studies and in my background I have learned that music has a special place in your brain that can literally, so the goosebumps and all that it’s really fascinating to look into the neuroscience of music. So yeah, I wanted to, I had the bench, I was the lead singer and I was playing guitar. And I try but you know, that was in Paris back in 2000. And rock was trendy there. I wish I grew up in Seattle in the late 80s. And then maybe we will not have this conversation or when we talk about something else. But yeah, that did not happen or also probably I didn’t work hard enough. So that’s also probably why.
Brett Bartholomew 1:06:13
I think it’s fascinating. I love music as well. I especially love this conversation and I know our audience is absolutely going to love you. I hope so. They will. Absolutely. I know we can buy your books on Amazon but tell everybody everywhere they can go to support you and your work because I know they’ll be happy to do so with all the value provided today.
Celia Hodent 1:07:28
Oh, that’s very kind of you. I mean I’m very present on social media, especially Twitter, or LinkedIn so you can connect with there and yeah, I have a bunch of resources on my website like celiahodent.com and you can also find my books have like three main books and then like, some of them are really more professional books and some of them are really a broad audience type of books. But then, yes, I just like top of video games, like tell everyone that they’re an art form. And yes, there are problems in games like in any other technology, but they’re not the devil. They’re not the devil. So maybe we can have a more nuanced conversation. That would be amazing.
Brett Bartholomew 1:08:06
Absolutely. Well, I have told you on LinkedIn today and I followed you on Twitter, and I will continue to follow you because I’m grateful for you and your time. So Dr. Celia Hodent, on behalf of me, coaching and everybody listening, I just want to thank you again for spending some time with us. Well,
Celia Hodent 1:08:20
thank you so much, Brent, I’m really honored that you chose me and we talked about these amazing things and you did a lot of research on my profile. That’s about it. It was really cool. Also to to talk about all these things. And yeah, I hope that we can do that more in the future and that we get drinks and talk about music.
Brett Bartholomew 1:08:37
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I just know that having been guests on other people’s episodes, it can be troubling when they don’t do that research. So we certainly weren’t trying to be creepy, but when people like can’t even say your name right, and it doesn’t seem like they even listen to your words you’re kind of so we just wanted to get across that we respect you. So thank you again, really appreciate it. Likewise, guys, until next time, Brett Bartholomew, the Art Of Coaching team will talk to you soon.
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