Melanie: I’m saying all these things to them, I’m saying all this like abstract bullshit stuff to them, like X is a variable, and it’s a type of integer, not an integer, but it’s variable type is a float, the variable value is 0.1, and then we make it 0.2, and so we’re always assigning a new value to the variable, and so like after listening to me, Go on and on about these words, and then they can see that their triangle is indeed moving over to the right. They start to get the idea that I’ve done it, but then they realize what a variable is, and what a value of a variable is. 

[Musical Intro]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Today’s guest nerd is Melanie Stegman. I’m very excited to have her on we’ve had a lot of really good conversations at the bar and now we get to do it here, but we’ll just pretend we’re still at the bar. Melanie holds a PhD in biochemistry and is the owner of Molecular Jig Games where she combines her passion for molecular science and game design to create educational games that teach complex scientific subjects. Her work has been featured at prestigious institutions like the National Institutes of Health. The Royal Society of Chemistry. She’s currently serving as a game design faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art, or as we like to call it here in Baltimore, MICA. Melanie’s revolutionizing the way we learn biochemistry through interactive experiences. 

Welcome Melanie.

Melanie: Hey, Joel. Hi. Thanks for having me on your podcast. 

Joel: I’m so excited to have you here. We’ve had a whole bunch of chats about your journey, what you’re attempting through some of the networking events. And the point of this podcast is not just to bring in a marketing people and people who talk slick, but also people who are kind of sit on that nerd side of the divide, who are really helping people understand complex subjects in a fun way. 

So I gave you a little bit of introduction, but can you give us your nerd origin story? We’ll start there. 

Melanie: Was always really nerdy. When I was 11, my great grandma died of Alzheimer’s disease. You know, I lived close by my grandparents and my great grandparents, so I knew her. And she got sick and died pretty quickly, actually.

And I asked my mom, ” what happened? Like, what is Alzheimer’s?” And my mom said, “it’s an imbalance of the chemicals in your brain.” Well, that blew me away because I was like, well, what’s keeping things balanced normally? You know, if you can just all of a sudden become this person in a bed, not responding, how does that work?

So since I was 11, I wanted to study brains. and how your neurons worked. And and then, of course, no one in my family had gone to college. Like, I didn’t know anything about school. I was completely intimidated by everything, and basically I ended up getting out of undergrad with a political science degree and a lot of frustration.

And I started, after college, I started working on a story about amino acids and proteins. and how they can talk to each other and talk to the DNA. And the whole reason I started doing it is because I’ve thought if I could make proteins and amino acids familiar, then other people wouldn’t be afraid to study them.

I Just really loved biochemistry and I feel like it made sense to me. It was the one thing that made sense to me. I feel like everybody’s got some area of the world that makes sense to them and I wanted to try to share that with other people.

 And then, I’m out of college wondering what to do with my life. I take a drawing class. What was it called back then? AutoCAD class. Back in 1995, I took a class in 3D digital art. I was going to animate my story, and it was so hard. It was incredibly hard. I mean, I was just trying to move two spheres next to each other. The fact that there was a third axis on my screen just blew my mind.

And I decided I would get a PhD in biochemistry and hire somebody to do the art. And it worked out great. I was never again that intimidated. Never in biochemistry was I as confused by my 3D art program.

 I loved biochemistry. I worked every day of the year and it wasn’t until 10 years later as a postdoc, that I was looking around for ways to get funding for my video game, you know, my amino acid character story.

I wanted to get some funding to finally hire that artist. Ten years later, this was 2008 now, actually, so yeah, 11 years later. And I’ve found a think tank in DC that had made a video game; a third person shooter inside the body. And you actually had to activate individual proteins in order to get those proteins to do what they’re supposed to do.

Nobody ever talks about proteins as tools that have specific jobs to do. They always talk about them as if, you know, they’re building blocks. They’re all the same. So, Basically, I emailed the think tank, they emailed me back. Within two weeks I had the job. I took over the immune attack video game project at the Federation of American Scientists and I just fell in love with video games and stories and superheroes, all of these things. You know, there’s a whole lot of information to know about Alanine and out about Superman. You know, where is it made? What can it do? What inhibits it? What activates it? Like all those questions we can hold in our head for Superman. And if we could tell stories about Alanine or give you a video game to play, then you can absorb all those facts as well.

Yeah.

Joel: So we kind of have a backwards origin story where I got my start in video games and ended up becoming a nerd and doing the nerdy stuff. And then you just sort of needed to find a different way of communicating this technical subject saw an opportunity to bring in an outside Discipline, I guess, and you were like, well, let me bring in let me bring in partners, which, which spun you off into this endeavor.

And then, and now you are actually teaching at MICA, teaching game design. So you so the immune attack is still a project and still something you’re working on, but I’d love to talk about, you said before we started one of the challenges is trying to explain, you know, coding something technical to someone who thought they were signing up for an art class.

I’d love to hear about that.

Melanie: That’s true. Well, that’s good because all of my personal projects are on hold right now because honestly, teaching is so much, it’s so time consuming. And I mean, every student has questions and you just feel that every student deserves all your time constantly. I have not figured out how not to think about my students constantly.

 I’m a weird case, right? I was like, I’ll learn 3D art. I’ll try biochemistry. I’ll write grants on my own. I’ll start a business. I’ll learn how to code. I’ll learn how to manage people and do production and stuff and I’m fearless.

I’m also overworked and stressed out and, you know, I’m not saying it’s really good to be as fearless and I’m willing to charge into the unknown as I am, but I like hard problems. I’ve, 

I’m a total typical ADHD person where if I start learning a little C Sharp, I want to know everything about it. I want to know. Why it works, how it talks to the operating system, how it compares to other languages. I want to understand the whole system and that’s just how I am for everything. And there’s another kind of person and that other kind of person is like, give me just a little something so I can use it and then give me a little bit more.

And and basically most of my students are that kind of person. They’re like, give me a thing and let me use it. And I’m like, let me tell you everything about classes and methods and otherwise you won’t understand it. And that’s been the challenge for me. You need to figure out what you need to give them first.

If you’re only going to give them a little bit, which little bit should it be? And then how do you build on that? The next time you explain, as soon as you explain the second bit, you need to explain it in terms of the first bit. And, yeah, it’s a lot of work.

But, one, one thing that works. This is, this has been true, this is true with everything.

Video games, we write video games the way we teach. If you teach project oriented, if the students are trying to do the thing while you’re trying to explain the thing, then it can work.

 You can bring somebody from no knowledge at all to making something if they’re making it and you’re there to help them.

Joel: So how do you balance out and I guess, You have to do the legwork first. You might have the understanding, the bias of knowledge. You already know everything there is to know about a thing, but how do you put yourself in the mind of somebody that you’re trying to explain to and separate your own knowledge from building that knowledge and saying, okay, they know nothing.

What is the first thing that I need to get them, one, to get them interested? And even continuing this conversation or continuing this class, like, you know, if you were to walk in the very first day and they’re like, “let’s talk about the assembly language and we’re going to build a compiler.” And, you know, you probably have some of these kids withdrawing the next day, but how do you get them interested enough in the beginning to stick with you through that project cycle? 

Melanie: Yeah, it’s a really good question. Like, I remember learning to code, like, you know, I was 40, 45 when I was learning to code, so I remember being completely frustrated and just so angry that like the whole thing would just stop and not do anything because there’s a semicolon missing, you know, it’s just, you know, there’s no feedback, there’s nothing, it’s, yeah, and error messages are hard to read.

With games, it’s really fun. As soon as you make a thing move on the screen, and you know it moved, and it moved because you wanted it to move, it’s just so exciting. I’ve broken things down into really small projects, and we spend the first week just making a triangle move from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen and then we make it turn around and go the other way when it hits the right side of the screen. And so I tell the students they’re creating a physics engine where we’re just running a method that says you know this frame move the triangle we’re not you know we’re just changing the position of the triangle we’re just changing x is equal to a new number you know like x plus 0.1. 

 I’m saying all these things to them, I’m saying all this like abstract bullshit stuff to them, like X is a variable, and it’s a type of integer, not an integer, but it’s variable type is a float, the variable value is 0.1, and then we make it 0.2, and so we’re always assigning a new value to the variable, and so like after listening to me, Go on and on about these words, and then they can see that their triangle is indeed moving over to the right. They start to get the idea that I’ve done it, but then they realize what a variable is, and what a value of a variable is, and how that word is.

Joel: Some people, it almost means nothing to them.

You can tell them over and over until they see it and then they can maybe get their hands into it and discover, well, what happens if I increment it, three times? It moves faster. Well, you know, it’s like, okay, now I’m starting to link it together. So I guess there’s laying the groundwork and then asking them to do a bit of self discovery around it.

Melanie: Yes. For the, first of all, yes. Everything they write about C Sharp, it just sounds like total nonsense. Like the value of the variable, blah, blah, blah. It’s just like, what are they talking about? Like, why does it, why is the word value so different from the word variable? It, when you start learning it, it sounds like they’re just making up bullshit.

And, you know, so you can’t get into it because nothing makes sense. And the other thing is, they, you absolutely need to do self discovery. You can’t learn it by me telling it to you. There’s just not enough time. Me telling it to you, all the words mean nothing. And if I can get them to just, you know, print out the value of x and watch it change, Then they can start experimenting with themselves, like oh, X is a number.

It’s coming out as a float, and they get used to reading the console. If I can get them to do the self discovery, it works. And I just take very small baby steps. Small projects, small things. And then sometimes I have to yell at them and I’m like, okay, everyone, you have to do this.

 It’s really hard work. It’s like herding cats and steers at the same time. 

Joel: Well, I’d imagine it’s not that much different from in business when you’re trying to convey something that’s brand new to somebody, right?

I mean, these are students. They’re obviously there for, you know, a credit. They’re there to get something out of it. But oftentimes you, you don’t have that carrot when you’re, you know, for example, when you’re trying to show your your game project to somebody else or you’re going after funding, I know we’ve talked that you’ve done a lot of funding through grants, but just showing it to somebody and getting them interested in that one little bite, that one little piece to talk, I’d love to hear some challenges that you faced and what you’ve taken away from it.

Maybe, and this is sort of, sort of by proxy, some of the listeners of this podcast, being technical people who are like, “Oh, I went in there and I did a great pitch and they didn’t like me, or that they didn’t understand it, it’s their fault.” Any of that, those experiences resonate or, You know, early on when you’re trying to convey this new concept to people, that hey, we can teach complex things and make them fun and engaging through gaming.

Melanie: Yeah, it’s very difficult to explain that a learning game could be a good thing. When you say learning game, half the people love games and they now hate your idea because, well, there’s no logic in it, but here’s how the logic goes in their minds. “I’ve played learning games. They’ve sucked.

Therefore, your game is going to suck because you called it a learning game.” And you can’t, I’ve tried. I cannot get around that. I’m like, no, I’m making a good learning game. They’re like, no, that can’t happen. And then, on the other hand, when you tell a scientist that you’re making a video game out of science, they’re like, “well, that’s stupid.

It’s going to be just a dumb, violent thing that doesn’t teach anything.” And you’re like, “no, I’m making a really cool biochemistry video game.” And they’re like, “That doesn’t make any sense,” you know, like, and so you have two groups of people who would love a really awesome video game about biochemistry.

And then there’s a new part of the problem. I’ve realized that when you do make that really awesome biochemistry video game, and it’s fun. People play it and they’re like, Oh, it’s fun. And I’m like, what’d you learn? They’re like, nothing. It was a game. And so like, as soon as it’s fun, I didn’t learn anything.

And all these assumptions people don’t realize they’ve made and they don’t realize they’ve come to the wrong conclusion. It’s very difficult to explain I’m creating something you don’t know exists.

Joel: Yeah. Category creation is always a challenge. The last thing you want to do is. is throw a pop quiz in there after every I was going to say lesson, but it’s not a lesson, after every level and see, ah, you see, you did learn. 

Melanie: I know when you build a game, you always put a little test in there to make sure, can they find the sword?

I can’t send the boss after them until they find the sword. So you put in these things in games as a test. And you, I do it in the learning games, of course, you know, I don’t want to send the boss macrophage after you until you know how to activate your neutrophil, whatever. The problem was translating that knowledge out into the real world.

People didn’t realize they’d learned a real thing. So I actually think in this case, a trivia quiz after the game would help them. They’d realize they know the answers to these, Oh, these are real life questions and I know the answers. That’s sort of my next step, my next way of explaining what you’ve learned.

And and I think in all of our questions, we need to like find a way to make it fun, hands on, you know, my students can make the triangle move, but then I also need to find a way to prove to them they’ve learned something. And I have a really hard time getting my students to take notes.

Joel: As the left handed son of a doctor. I can attest. I am terrible at taking notes and my son right now is 14 and in high school and I’m like would you just please learn to write something down because I’ve done this for 40 some odd years and I never write anything down.

And yeah I can see that’s a challenge. 

Melanie: It’s incredible. Like you’re in a room with 18 people and I say, you really should be writing this down and they all go, we don’t write, you know, and they say things like, well, if I write on paper I’ll have to always have that paper with me.

I’m like, okay, fine, then you can do it digitally. But the problem is no one remembers where their Google Docs are or to take them. But so they just, ah…

Joel: There is neuroscience to support the act of handwriting reinforces, and we’ve all forgotten how to do it.

I’m exploring right now actually taking all of my notes note cards and creating a note card index system of like ideas. It’s something I might write about at some point, but there’s a it’s a German concept called a Zettelkasten. It’s literally a box of cards. That’s forcing me to actually think about, because I have a limited amount of space on a note card, what’s the one most important thing I want to take away from this chapter that I just read?

What’s the one most important thing from this meeting I had, or this conversation, or this podcast I listened to? And then there’s a, there’s an index method for transcribing it, not just from where you took the note, but into an index, so you can find it later, and You know, I think we’ve, I think people have forgotten the old ways that we grew up with card catalogs and taking notes. That’s a side quest.

Melanie: I would take notes in class and then after class I would have to go through my notes and finish all the sentences that I didn’t get to finish. Like, I’d scribble down ideas. I would move along as the lecture moved along, but then I have to go back and finish.

And if I did that, if I looked at my notes within 24 hours of taking them, I would remember what I learned. If I waited three weeks until the exam and tried to read them I couldn’t figure it out. Like, you need to, like, be there taking the notes, go back and read them again and complete the thoughts. Summarizing them, like you’re saying, in this index manner.

Joel: I’ll send you a link about it and you’ll find it interesting. I’ll post it I’ll post it in the show notes here. I’d love to talk about some tools and resources that you do find useful in communicating technical things, maybe to, you know, generations of students or people who aren’t in, in your field.

Melanie: In general, I explain how proteins affect your physiology. And the other thing I explain is how to code things in C sharp. The other thing I explain is how to do user experience research. Basically my students, designers, I really want them to come out with a basic understanding of coding, but they need a really good understanding of how to test for user experience. Because it’s not natural to just let somebody play your video game and not talk to them while they’re doing it. And it’s also not natural to say, I want to collect these five pieces of data and just those five. And I wanted to collect those same five pieces of data from 20 people.

 In all these cases, everything comes down to the same thing. Like, describe the task you’re trying to do in a very short sentence. And then how will you know your task is complete? What’s your definition of success? And then focus on just that task for ten minutes.

Write down some notes, like what questions you have while you’re trying to fix something. Do that task. And at the end of 10 minutes, like, do you need to make that task even simpler? Have you learned something new? And is your definition of success still good? 

And that’ll work no matter what you’re trying to learn or trying to design.

Joel: I think a lot of people don’t ask those second and third question, what do you want to accomplish?

How will you know when it’s accomplished? And then as they’re working on it, well, is your assumption still correct? A lot of people as you say that, you know, they don’t do user testing and they don’t do audience research. And they’re just like, if I build a thing and it works for me and I put it out there, then it, then everyone will know how to use it.

And so many people fall flat because again, they fall back into, “why don’t they get it?” and it’s not that they didn’t get it, it’s that I didn’t present it, or I didn’t build it correctly. Yeah. Do you see a lot of students trying to shortcut and just build the thing that I want?

And how do you get them to click into that? Cause not just students. I see startup founders. I see companies who are like, “we’re selling a thing. We built a thing. It’s great. And I’m like, have you talked to anybody about it? Do you even know if that’s what people want? 

Melanie: No, it’s absolutely true.

It’s always your assumptions. You have to check your assumptions. My, my PhD advisor taught me that in University of Cincinnati biochemistry program, you have to check your assumptions. Cause, you know, You design an experiment the best way you can with the assumptions you have, but then when you go to analyze the data, you know, that data, if the experiment worked, it’s true given all your assumptions.

Now you have to go back and say, okay, if my assumptions aren’t true yeah, you, all those, everything we just said is really important. And every game design professor I know. All the ones I like anyway. They’ve really forced their students to playtest. I’ve forced my students in all of my game design classes, even the first year where they’re just doing paper or tabletop games, show it to people right away.

And I force them to show it to people while there’s, it’s still not done. It’s like, it’s not finished yet.

You have no idea what’s going to be fun about this game. You have no idea if people are going to like it or if it’s going to be too hard. You just can’t guess, you know, and I point out that our textbook authors, Salen and Zimmerman, said that in the chapter that we read, that a game is so complex you can’t guess how it’s going to work in the player’s head.

And honestly, it works. If I get the students to playtest a game in some unfinished state, always the person playing the game finds some kind of joy in some tiny part of it that the developer, my students, didn’t even think about. And so they’re encouraged to do more playtesting because of the positive data they get back from actually playtesting it.

Joel: We’re finding some problem that, I never thought this edge case would come apart, and now the rules are falling apart. And I’ve got this thing finished, and now I have to rethink all of my assumptions. 

Melanie: Oh, that could be true.

Joel: Because I’ve finished it. Yeah. Yeah, 

Melanie: Yeah. We’re doing like a one week prototype. In art college. Like they learned to code like last week for the first time. And now they’re making a prototype and I’m forcing them to play test it. Like that’s me. We’re in week seven and we’ve done four prototypes already and we’ve play tested them with each other in class already.

And yeah it’s horribly painful at the beginning, but as soon as they start getting the hang of it and play testing each other’s stuff, like. It’s amazing if all you know how to do is make a triangle move left and right. It’s amazing how different that can get pretty quickly with 18 different people.

You know, somebody decides to make it go up, or somebody, you know, puts a collider on it, and all of a sudden there’s so many other stuff, or they make it, you know, it’s It gets really neat pretty quick. And yeah, you really need to give people rewards for stepping in the right direction. Because they’re stepping into the deep, dark, unknown.

They can’t see the path in front of them. They just see danger and angst and failure. And so when they take the smallest step towards, yes, playtest your game often, you want to make sure they get some Positive feedback right there.

Joel: Having been a professional game tester in a very past life the monotony of doing the same level over and over again.

We had one game, it was PBS’s Arthur the Aardvark Learns the Alphabet, and we had a random generator, and we had to spin it until we got every single letter. And it’s like, “you’re not leaving until the letter L comes up,” and There’s a, an inclination to kind of just fudge it and skip it, but you know, it’s important to to cross all the T’s.

Love to hear some of what keeps you inspired, science communicators, different resources, different things that bridging sort of these two worlds. I would have had no idea that there would have been a textbook for game development. I mean, it would make sense to me, but I never would have imagined that there, there would be one.

So there must be a whole world out there of this collision. 

Melanie: That’s absolutely true. Tracy Fullerton wrote a textbook, I think 2014, maybe 2012 it first came out and it was called Game Design Workshop and Tracy Fullerton and people she was working with at USC came up with the term user experience goal.

So when you’re creating a game, you’re creating it to cause some kind of experience in the player’s head. And what is your goal? And so by having that definition for the design it freed you up, you know, It could be anything. Your goal could be to have the player walk peacefully through the woods, like, Tracy Fullerton’s game on Walden, it’s just named Walden. It’s all about Thoreau living in a cabin in the woods.

We were talking earlier about how you need a way to take the average person from their basic idea of games, or to shoot them up, or, you know, whatever. You need a way to explain to them. What else games could be? And talking about what kind of experience you want to give your player is a really fantastic way to change your idea of what a game could be and give you something concrete to work with.

 Tracy Fullerton’s book really helped me explain to my students what, you know, what I want them to learn about game design. That they could do anything, give the player any kind of experience. 

Joel: Yeah, there’s a lot of games, new games coming up. Again, I’ve got a 14 year old. He’s playing a lot of one certain type of game, and I’m seeing all these indie games, and these cozy games, and these, you know, exploration games and it just goes to show that when different people enter a field who have different objectives, new things happen.

And so I’ll have to remember actually, I think one of the games that I’ve had on the Steam watch list for a while, indie game just dropped, I’ll look at it, look it up, but it’s like cozy, cozy letters with friends or, you know, saying nice things as opposed to trolling people online.

As people sit down and come up with an objective and they’re clear about it, they can create those things. And it’s the same with messaging and technical communications. If you don’t know what it is you want someone to walk away with, you can say anything, but if you know, “this is my objective, I want them to feel or experience this,” you’re able to very carefully craft the experience and the delivery that you give to them.

Melanie: Well, then the other thing you need is. is what kind of data are you going to collect to try to argue that you’re giving them the experience because you know you can’t do an MRI on them while they play and even if you could you wouldn’t see like oh yes they’re feeling cozy. 

What kind of data will make you believe that these people are actually feeling the way you want them to or you know being scared here and happy there and so Tracy Fullerton goes into, like, playtesting, but then Richard Lemarchand he’s also at USC, Tracy recruited him away from Uncharted away from Naughty Dog, and he also talks about playtesting, and a whole bunch of other people always talk about playtesting, but, what I really do with my students is I force them to say what’s your player experience goal? What mechanics? What assets, what are you putting in there, list them all that are geared towards giving you that experience? And then what data are you collecting that shows it’s working or not working?

Joel: I’m curious to dig into that because a lot of the challenges that I see in communicating technical subjects is, we don’t know what our audience is feeling. Like we can tell when we’re presenting something to somebody, and they’re not feeling it. Their eyes sort of glaze over, or you get that, I call it the blank stare moment.

Or, you know, you’ve done a pitch and you never get the call back. I’m curious what techniques and maybe some of them can translate into pitching and communicating, but what, how do you capture intent and emotion or what that audience or that player is feeling. Like, what are some of those techniques in gaming?

Melanie: Like, how do I do the testing for it? 

Joel: I’m just curious about the data, like, because you said, you’re not doing electrodes. You probably can do surveys afterwards and things like that, but people lie on surveys. 

Melanie: Oh yeah, they lie on surveys and, absolutely true.

I mean, the, you know, the simplest case is like, “I’m going to make my game fun.” And then, how do you define fun? Like, most people, start out by giving their game to their friends, and watching them play it, and then if the kid, you know, then deciding, oh, they were having fun. So the point is, actually, you cannot quantify fun.

There is, there’s no way to like, you know, even using a float, you can’t quantify fun. What you can do is say if they play the game and they click play next level, that means it was fun to them more than a different version of the game where they didn’t click play next level. So did they click play next level on the A version versus the B version?

Or if you have 10 levels, how many times did they click play next level? You know, if they’ve got all the time in the world and, other interesting things in the room to do. Do they stay with your game and play the next level? 

Joel: Did they come back for more? 

Melanie: Yeah. Do they come back for more or do they want to go play something else?

 There’s a lot of assumptions in there. Like, if they’re in class, they will play everything. Because they don’t want to go back to class. 

But, yeah, if there’s nothing else to do, if there’s nowhere else to go, or if yeah, you need it to be, they’ve made a free choice to keep clicking on.

And then you need several kinds of data, right? You need first, did they see the thing I wanted them to see? Did they know what it was? Did they use it? Did they use it in the way that I wanted them to? And like, you know, if they walk into a room, and then, walk past the sword, you don’t know if they saw the sword, if they thought it was a stupid looking sword, or if they, you know, whatever.

You don’t know why they didn’t do it. So you need several kinds of data to prove that. Like if you want to say they thought this sword was stupid, you need to say first that they saw it and anyway, I’m getting into the nitty gritty, but the point being is like, You have to be specific for what you’re testing for, and you can’t test for everything, so the whole point of this method that I teach. You’ve got some player experience goals, you’ve got some assets you’re making to establish that player experience in the, in their head, and you’ve got some data you’re collecting. As soon as you get enough data to convince yourself that it’s working, you don’t need to keep making assets.

Like you’re scoping your work, you’re making fewer assets. Less stuff in the game as soon as you get to that experience. And the same with data collection. You don’t want to test for everything, but you need to test for enough that your conclusions are true. But as soon as you have enough data, then I mean, obviously, you can’t watch them You can’t watch 20 people play the game for 2 hours every week.

I mean, you can if you’re you know, Blizzard.

Joel: Yeah, I see a lot of analog to the work that I do, even with communicating and working with my clients. It’s like, you’ve got to be very clear in what you want them to walk away from. You need a minimal set of assets or messages.

You can’t throw everything at them. And, you know, I would imagine in gaming, if you gave a player every single option, they wouldn’t even know what to do or what to click on, they were completely lost. And then when you find something that works, that’s the direction to go in. And you tack yourself in that direction and maybe do it another cycle through, but you don’t need to revisit all of the stuff that, that, that could have been or that you didn’t include, even if you thought it was a really cool idea at the very beginning.

Because throwing that in there may complicate and may give them too many options. 

Melanie: Yeah, but games just explain things really well. If I was going to explain complicated stuff to you first You know, like you asked me in one of the questions at the beginning, how do you explain stuff to people who don’t know anything?

You gotta give them something that works and they can keep building on that. And same thing you do in a video game. You give them one thing to do and build on that. And then when they’ve gotten bored with that, you give them a new thing, a new tool, and new problems to solve. And it’s learning.

Rafe who was it who wrote The Theory of Fun? It’s his last name. I’m forgetting it, but The Theory of Fun is a fantastic book by a game designer and his whole point is that, you know, games are not fun when there’s nothing more to learn. And it doesn’t feel like learning because it’s so fun, but if you break down your explanation to where each bit of it I can learn it while still feeling, you know, Not intimidated, and not bored, then I’m not even going to think I was learning.

I’m going to feel like I was just having a good time. 

Joel: And then you’ve got, you know, when you’re getting into some of these more complex games, you’ve got replayability, and the second time I already know this and that’s, I think when some games get less fun because they, that’s then the opportunity that introduce more stuff and increase maybe difficulty or things like that.

But once you know something, You take it for granted or you just assume but that can actually make game replay more difficult. Cause you’re like, how come I can’t do this very simple thing that the last time I played, it was so easy. It’s like, oh, well, because I don’t have that ability yet.

I’m so used to that ability. You know, I’m fascinated being a casual card game designer, former video game player, and now watching my son do all this stuff. I just don’t know how I keep track of it all in my head, and I guess the point is you don’t keep track of it in your head, you just learn it, and it becomes a part of what you’re doing. 

Melanie: I want to give people a gut level understanding of how proteins interact. You know, and similar, like a gut level understanding of how C Sharp works. And I feel like if you do it enough, if you’re hands on with it enough you get it.

If you need to use a tool, if you’re put in a situation where this tool will work and you’re in the situation and you have to recognize for yourself, “Oh, that’s the tool I need.” You get the tool, you come back, you do the thing, it works. That learning is very effective, and it doesn’t fall out of your head.

Like, in this situation, what am I supposed to do? What tool do I use? And it works with proteins, it works if you’re trying to explain code, board games, like, you know, I haven’t played Euchre in like 10 years, but if I have an ace, I’m going to know what to do with it. 

Joel: So what do you do for fun? What you know, we’re playing games all day long.

It sounds like this would be the most amazing and fun job. What, how do you unwind? What do you find to be your recharge or inspiration? 

Melanie: I like to go to science talks. I like to go like, the aquarium here in, in Baltimore has a research arm called IMET. I don’t remember what it stands for, IMET, but I’m going to a talk on Thursday about the fish kill in the bay and like what caused it and what we can do to prevent it.

Joel: Fascinating. So a nerd through and through. Can’t get away from it. Have you seen the Nerd Nites in DC? 

Melanie: I think so. 

Joel: I haven’t been able to go to one myself, and I’ll link it for anybody who’s in the region who’s interested, but they take kind of, an approach, not really a keynote, but they bring three, sometimes four speakers in, and they talk about something just completely weird and esoteric, and it’s from all over the place and You know, then it’s like a happy hour afterwards and it sounds like the perfect place to be.

Melanie: I used to go to Science Cafe when I lived in Brooklyn. I know we’ve had some science cafes with a different name when I was in DC and we had one at Guilford Hall here in Baltimore. It was physics, I forget, I think it’s not NOAA, but there’s another there’s another institute here that studies physics and meteorology and they had three different researchers come and talk.

There’s a telescope here. A galaxy viewing telescope. And they came and presented their images and their work and their research and like how they colorize images and everything. It was fantastic. So I’m really, yeah, a Science Cafe is the perfect thing.

Joel: Yeah, you’re just open to any type of input, any type of, you know, new idea that you can collide.

I was just reading a book and it was saying that the, that the definition of innovation is two different concepts from two different contexts that just seem to collide and create something new. It’s that one plus one equals three aha moment. 

I love to wrap kind of with some closing advice that you have for somebody who maybe is in that technical field who’s looking to reach into something more creative or improve their communications. Maybe a piece of advice to to somebody who’s thinking about combining two different worlds .

What would you tell your students who are like I don’t know, but I have a feeling. I got a gut feeling about this. 

Melanie: Huh. Okay, well, one piece of advice is you need a skill that people will pay you for. You know, yeah. Like,, no one’s going to pay you to be a game designer.

But they will pay you to code for them, they’ll pay you to animate for them, to sculpt 3D characters for them. But the designer also needs to do things like production, you know? Being a producer is a skill. Writing the design docs, all that stuff is a skill. So if you’re going to leave your day job and go be creative, you got to make sure you’ve, you can get paid to do something. And you need to be really good at that one thing so you can reliably get employed. Then the other thing is you don’t have to worry about whether you’re making something good or not. Just ask people to get feedback on it. And if they say they don’t like it, you don’t have to, you don’t have to change it because they said that.

You know, you could find a different group of people, a different target audience for your work. Or. You you can investigate further, like, what are they reacting to? It might just be the wrong color, or you might have asked them on the wrong day or the wrong way. But just because somebody gives you feedback that you don’t like, doesn’t mean you should squash your project.

You just need to think about it differently and stuff like that. I, that’s something that’s hard for my students to learn.

Joel: And I think probably multiple feedback. A lot of people, they get, have one meeting, one pitch, one interaction, and that didn’t go the way I expected, so I need to scrap everything, and it’s a numbers game to, like you said, make sure that you’re even talking to the right person.

Melanie: Yeah, it’s very difficult when you do a pitch and they’re like, yeah, you sound really enthusiastic, and then you never hear from them again. Yeah, it’s really true. 

Joel: Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm can go a long way. You definitely want someone to feel what you’re trying to put out there. And the right information has to be there.

And then, you know, as I always say, it’s that credibility. It’s like, okay, well, show me where the rubber hits the road.

Melanie: Yeah, the problem with pitches is what they really want to know is how are you going to make money? Because all I want is money back for my money. Like they’re just interested in cash.

And that’s, that can be very difficult. You know, especially if you’re making something that doesn’t exist yet, right? You know, whether the category doesn’t exist yet, or the game doesn’t exist yet, and it can be extremely hard, but I think join a community. Join a group of game developers, or a group of sculptors, or, you know, and then only hang out with the ones that are really, that challenge the way you think.

You know, don’t surround yourself with people who are like, Oh yeah! Whatever you’re doing is great. Stick with the ones you go like, oh, are you trying to make me feel happy or sad with this thing? Or did you know, what are you trying to do with this? And when they ask you hard questions, keep hanging out with them. 

Joel: Family and friends rarely give you the best feedback because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. 

Melanie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Joel: I would love to, to share some contact information or how people can get in touch with you, support your projects. So what is the best way, if someone wants to learn, maybe they want to come to Micah, take your class.

What’s the best way for someone to do that?

Melanie: Good question. I’m kind of in between things at this point. The thing that will always be in place is the Science Game Center. I have a website for Science Games, ScienceGameCenter. com. You can reach me there. You can reach me at Melanie.

Stegman at gmail. com. Those two ways will always exist. And I don’t know what my future brings, actually, 

Joel: And I’ll include a link to your LinkedIn as well. 

Melanie: Oh, yeah. 

Joel: That’s always a good place to find you.

I want to thank you so much for joining us. This has been fascinating.

Dipping my feet back into the world of games and game development makes me kind of want to brush off some of my some of my gaming skills as rusty as they might be. I really look forward to to seeing what comes of all of this. And and thanks for joining us today. 

Melanie: Thank you, Joel.

It’s been awesome.

[Musical Outtro]

Joel: if you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good