Jeff Kaplan: uncertainty

Transcript context

…… it’s gonna be, like, one of the greatest games of all time played by millions of human beings, just where those millions of human beings are playing for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. It’s crazy. It’s funny that this… one of us is writing at the dawn of a new age. The final paragraph is, “So with all that is going on with me, you’ll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site here. I will try my hardest to give you slack or something to read while you should be working. But in the meantime, there’s a whole world of NPCs. They need to learn the words kaksagur and mo’fucker, and the like. Although something tells me I’m already in trouble with the boss.” “One of us,” Jeff, “one of us.” That was a beautiful, beautiful post. Did you in fact get in trouble with the boss? No. No. My boss was Allen. And Allen was very understanding and he… they kind of knew what they were getting into- … when they hired me. And that post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now. There’s so much ego in it- … and I think that’s… it’s got that 20 year old- … you know, “I don’t know what I don’t know. ” “I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games and-” But there’s brilliance behind that. There’s a passion behind that. Like, when you’re a gamer and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest, you understand what makes for a compelling experience. You don’t, at that time, understand how much hard work is required to create that experience and how much uncertainty there is, how difficult it is, how many trade-offs there are. How your designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, they are different from the vision you had for it. So all those elements you don’t know, but you have to have that ego in the beginning, right? Do you even have the guts to try? Do you have the guts to put in all that work? So what were the… what was it like? What were the vibes of early Blizzard like? They’ve… at this point, Warcraft I and II, Warcraft III is in production. StarCraft. These are legendary games. I don’t… I spent probably over 1,000 hours in these games combined. I played Warcraft I, II, III. I played StarCraft I and II. I played WoW, of course. Diablo I, II, III, IV. I played Diablo II with “Stay a while and listen,” with Deckard Cain.…

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