Interview: Game developer Zach Gage on Pile-Up Poker and resisting dark patterns
Zach Gage, creator of such Six Colors favorite games as Good Sudoku, Typeshift, Pocket-Run Pool, and Really Bad Chess, recently took everything he’s learned from building great iOS games and began building Puzzmo, a daily puzzle and game website owned by Hearst.
Fans of Gage’s previous games will find a bunch of the games on Puzzmo to be familiar—there are web versions of SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, Typeshift, and others—but it’s also got games you’d expect from a web puzzle site that’s also a collaboration with a newspaper publisher, most notably a daily crossword.
I caught up with Gage last week to talk to him about the latest game in the Puzzmo stable, Pile-Up Poker, and what it’s like to design for a subscription-based game website rather than an app. The most interesting thing I learned is that, with Pile-Up Poker, not only did Gage need to resist some of the darker patterns of poker-based gambling but also the darker patterns of designing game apps that must be ready to offer an infinite amount of engagement.
If Pile-Up Poker were an app, you’d be able to play it forever. On Puzzmo, you can only play five hands per day. “I’ll be honest, five hands is even more than I am sort of into,” Gage told me. “We played this game as much as we wanted during development, and we saw what it felt like… It’s a kind of game that you could play a lot, and you could burn out on.” So the website just won’t let you—instead, it encourages you to branch out and play different games or, y’know, get back to work. One of those.
Here’s my conversation with Gage, edited for length and clarity:
Jason Snell: So, why poker?
Zach Gage: We have a lot of games on the website right now that are very cerebral and based on you and trying hard and being at your peak. And for me, thinking about how we balance a portfolio of games, I really wanted to have something in there that would be a lot more random every day and would still fit the guidelines that we have for Puzzmo. The game should be healthy. It should be a thing where you are creative and clever and improve your strategy. It should be something that anybody at any skill level can play and win, but people who are really highly skilled can play at a super high level and really compete.
Poker is one of my favorite games ever. I think it’s a magical game. For me, the biggest trick of poker is that you can play poker with your friends for 20 years and then someone can show up and have never played poker before and win. And that is something that doesn’t exist with, I don’t think, any other game. So it felt like the right kind of game to bring to Puzzmo to find something that fits that space. It would be super approachable, but also there’s a depth.
The other thing I really like about games with high randomness is that they support a huge variety of approaches. You can play them in a really intense way, or you can be like, “Today, I’m just going to throw caution to the wind.” And that’s a really positive experience to be able to play games like that. That isn’t always supported by games that have a lower amount of randomness.
So how do we take something like poker and try to make it more less less sort of dangerous? The big thing was that we knew we were going to limit the number of hands you could play. And we know that we are not putting money on the table as any part of it. And for us, that really eliminates all of the big problems with poker. Like, we are not building a poker game that can ruin your life. We’re not building a poker game that can suck up all your time. Like, we have put hard limits around that stuff.
But what I wanted to do was maintain the depth of risk taking that poker has that comes from betting strategy. And the big trick for how to do that started with an idea from Jack Schlesinger early on in development and then was separately re-proposed by Brooke Husic, our crossword editor, which basically was just this idea of, let’s make it a lot easier to get a great hand. Let’s take something like a royal flush and make it a hand that you could potentially get every single game you play. And we do that in Pile-Up Poker by really shortening the deck.
And so what happened is this thing that feels really hard suddenly becomes really easy, but you still want to do really hard stuff. So then you start going, well, could I get two straight flushes in a game? Could I get three? And so it feels really approachable because everything you know about poker is telling you you’re doing really well because you’re getting these super tough hands. And so you end up getting that feeling that you get in poker where you’ve like kind of made a bet on one kind of thing that you’re pretty sure is going to work out. And then you have this other side bet where you’re like, oh, maybe I could get this card, or if it doesn’t work out, any of these cards would be just fine. Maybe it’ll pay out a little bit less. And so you end up structuring all the kinds of bets you would make with betting, but you’re doing it just like with the actual mechanics of the game instead of two separate worlds.
There’s this talk from a long time ago that’s sort of famous in game design that I actually really hate from Sid Meier, the guy who did Civilization. And his thing is that randomness just doesn’t work for human beings. If you tell someone they have a 90% chance of something happening, you need to give them a 100% chance of it happening because they’ll never feel like it was justified. And I feel like that’s like just not correct. He has framed it for you in a way where you feel like it needs to happen 100% of the time. But we understand, if you roll a 10-sided die and you say you’re going to succeed here unless you roll a one, if you roll a one, you’re not going to be like, “Randomness is broken!” You’re going to be like, “I can’t believe I did that.”
Was the thought process about building four-card hands instead of five-card hands really just a matter of trying to simplify the game further?
We did it because the game felt complicated when we were designing it. It felt like it was a little bit too much. And for a moment, we were even thinking about three-card hands. But it was too simple. And so we moved it up to four-card hands. But I think four-card hands, it does the same thing that the shorter deck does. It just makes these hands so much more approachable.
I’ve tried to make so many games with poker. And one of the things that’s annoying about poker is there’s an enormous gulf between the low hands and the high hands. It’s pretty easy to get a pair. It’s pretty easy to get two pair. But once you start going for five-card hands, suddenly, it’s really hard. That distance is huge. And it’s intentional, but in a strategy game, having that gulf is a huge problem. Four-card hands just dramatically reduce the difficulty. It doesn’t make it easier to get a pair, but it makes it way easier to get a straight.
When we usually think about poker, we think about casinos and betting and winning and losing money. That’s not happening here, so what are your priorities? You show money in the game, but it’s not real money and there’s nothing you can do with it.
We went with money because it has a really good flavor to it, and it relates to poker. For me, every game on Puzzmo has the same priority, which is, I think that one of the big contributing factors to the current sort of hellscape bad timeline that we live in is that most of what I’ve noticed I talk about with people is either gossip or I’m sharing a piece of information that I’ve received. So, “I learned an interesting fact from a podcast and I’m telling it to somebody.” Or, “I heard something upsetting on the internet, and I’m telling them how I feel about it.” And to me, those things are perfectly fine things to be taking from an experience. But that should not be the entirety of the way that I’m relating to other people. When you’re only sharing information or emotions and opinions about things that you hear, you’re not living a fulfilled social experience, and you’re only bonding with people around shared opinions and shared emotions.
And what I think is really important that people have kind of lost a little bit of is having discoveries and sharing discoveries, creating things and sharing creations with other people. Like, there’s an entire other zone of ways that you can relate with other people and share and interact that’s built around being curious, being creative, making things, trying things, discussing things. And that world ends up creating bonds and interactions with people around shared interests, as opposed to shared opinions and emotions.
I guess the thing that I’ve noticed about the Internet is that pretty much what people do is they do the thing that you put in front of them. If you put something interesting in front of them, they’ll engage with it. If you put an article in front of them, they’ll read it and talk about the things that they learned from the article before they talk about how they feel about the article.
So what we’re trying to do with Puzzmo and what I’ve been trying to do, basically, my whole professional career, is put things in front of people that encourage them to engage in a way that I feel is super healthy, that are appealing but also challenging and interesting, that require you to be creative and curious and find discoveries and try things and feel clever. And then you go to your friends and talk to them, not about the opinion of the person who made it, but just, “Here’s a thing I tried,” or “Here’s the score I got,” or, “Wasn’t it interesting that today my strategy was really weird?”
That was something that I thought was so healthy and cool about watching the way that Wordle bounced around the internet was seeing all the different ways that people were playing the game and how interested people were in hearing about that. People actually cared about like, “Oh, this person’s creating poems with their Wordles.” What a refreshing kind of thing to be seeing on a Twitter feed. And so that’s what we’re trying to do with Puzzmo. We’re trying to build these things that like feel fun and enjoyable and give you space to back off from the world and be a little bit creative and think and be and have a community of people who are interested in doing that. And trying to do that means trying to do that in as broad a way as possible and be as inclusive as possible.
It’s not super impossible to make a game that is enjoyable to a certain kind of person, but the thing that you have to do is make it enjoyable by as low a skill level as possible and as high a skill level as possible at the same time. I don’t think a game that only targets a really small level of skill is super great. I think the magic of a great game is that it targets a big swath. A game has a responsibility to educate its players and turn low-skill players into high-skill players. And that creates the best experience of the game for everybody.
Explain why it’s limited to five hands a day. You could have built Pile-Up Poker to let somebody sit there and play it forever. And you didn’t. So why?
I’ll be honest: five hands is even more than I am sort of into. I would like it to be three. We picked five for some technical constraint reasons, but pretty much the reason why we have five is because we think it’s important for you to be able to play three on your first time. So we picked five so that we could have a sort of build-up to multiple hands but still allow you to play three. Anyone could play three on their first time.
And the reason that we did that is because we played this game as much as we wanted during development. And we saw what it felt like. I played for an hour from midnight until 1 a.m. It’s a kind of game that you could play a lot and you could burn out on. I don’t want people to have an experience. I never want people to be playing one of my games and go, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?”
If this were an app, you’d have you make it able to play infinitely.
Using derivative strategies in a game about luck goes infinite if you can play infinite. The less and less you can play, the more you have to be clever about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
When I was playing Spelunky a long time ago—Spelunky is a roguelike platforming game—one of my friends and I had this structure that he and his old roommate had created, where instead of playing this randomly generated platforming game a million times, we would each only play one game a day, and they would watch the other person.
And what I found that was amazing was that I started mediocre at this game, but I played one game a day for six months, and I became incredibly good because I was really focused on what I was doing. It was a deep, meaningful thing. It was such a shocking experience for me that my friend Doug and I went to the person who created the game, and we said, “You have to make a daily mode when you make this a PC game because it’s a totally different kind of experience to only be able to play one round and have a leaderboard for this one round.” And he did. And then daily modes became like a giant thing in all these roguelike games.
And that same kind of thinking sort of takes place here. If we let you play a thousand games, it wouldn’t be interesting. It becomes more interesting the more constricted it is. If I made it an app, I would have to make it so you could play as many times as you wanted. But I would put a lot of focus into some kind of daily challenge or a tournament or something like that that focuses all of the high-level players. Sure, there’s this place you can go and grind if you want to, but I really want you to be thinking about this other place. I would situate all of the interesting high-level experience somewhere else.
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