Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493

Jeff Kaplan: Focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The pressure that society kind of puts on us is, you know, 'Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker?' And I think we get lost in the trappings of, like a vision of what that role is... When you go home, how do you spend your time? Like, what makes you happy? What brings you fulfillment? And through those paths, you're gonna find out what you're gonna become, not what you wanna be.

Jeff Kaplan: There's a really great famous Sid Meier quote where he says there's three types of fun. Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer. And we catch ourselves, we're like, you know, we gotta be really care... It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us.

Jeff Kaplan: Jeff Goodman just kind of off the cuff said... 'I wish instead of making, like, six classes, I wish we could make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having, like, you know, 100 abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had, like, one or two things that was really interesting about them.' ... I took every version of, like, the Titan Jumper, and I just distilled it into what I thought was the best version of the Jumper... And Arnold, 'Uh, what if she's British, and her name's Tracer?' And, like, that was the origin of Overwatch.