What a good game designer does is make the ability and goal tension consistently in the right delta. It’s never too out of whack. Geoffrey: I love thinking about game design as an inspiration for this stuff. I’m not a game designer, and I almost wish I had that skill set because those people are often doing some of the coolest work in terms of what we call onboarding. Jackson: It’s all agency. Geoffrey: They think a lot about how to organically develop people’s skills by staging the learning process into small bites appropriately, and disclosing it naturally in the course of using the thing.
