There's three types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.
Kaplan invokes Sid Meier's taxonomy of fun to critique designer-centric game design, using his own Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest as an example of prioritizing the designer's fun over the player's. ✦ AI generated
Jeff Kaplan · Lex Fridman · 2026-03-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 251:47
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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 251:47
251:57the wrong instincts and sort of, I don't know how to phrase this in a way that's not damning, but there was too much focus on, "Let's make lots of money really fast." And a lot of people got dragged into it. And while Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, like and the Overwatch League players, they were awesome. I love them. The Overwatch League staff
252:30at Blizzard, some of the nicest, most motivated, great creative people- ... like all of these organizations got built and they were all great, but it was a house of cards waiting to fall. - And when it became more about the money versus, The quality of the experience of the different teams playing together and actually building this ecosystem of esports. - The financial reality kicked in, where these teams now, we didn't just
253:02have, you know, executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch. We had all these people who basically invested in the game, and then they started to express their opinions. Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person events and there's going to be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that. And I think really quickly everybody learned like, yeah, we
253:35can't do in-game events when you have a London team and a Shanghai team and, like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good, but it wasn't going to be making NFL level money- ... whatever insanity anybody thought that was going to be. So everybody quickly defaulted back to, "Hey, didn't Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year? What can we sell and what can you