Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…That’s right. The best games have a soul. You can really sense it. Like Call of Duty has a very different soul than Fortnite, and it just kind of exudes not only in what you see in the game, but also in how players interact with it and interact with each other online. That’s a really fascinating thing I wish would be studied more. I think we talked about the soul on several fronts, right? I wish it would be studied more. Yeah. These little game design decisions that the designers make have a profound impact on what players think of the game and see in the game. Fortnite Battle Royale always had a sense of mystery to it. You’re on this island, but you’re not sure exactly what’s happening here. There are all these houses, they’re abandoned. Why? And I’m not the secret holder, I’m not on the design team, I experience Fortnite as a player, but it really exudes a lot of that and a good spiritedness as well, because even when you’re eliminated in Fortnite, there’s not blood spurts and there’s not gibs, you’re just teleported out of the simulation. And often you end up losing the game in a way that’s hilarious enough that actually you’re laughing at it or you’re like respect to that player who just won because that was clever. And it creates a very different dynamic than these other games where players tend to be very positive towards each other. One of the things I like to do in Fortnite just to kind of gauge how the game is going, is I play fill squads, get match made with three other random players and play a game together. Sometimes they have voice chat, sometimes they don’t. And back when our matchmaking regions were bigger, I learned a little bit of battlefield Spanish so I could speak with the people who were down-…

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