Lee: Resigned from Microsoft within two weeks of witnessing screen isolation
Elan Lee · Find co-creators everywhere (with Exploding Kittens Inc.’s Elan Lee) | Masters of Scale · Dec 12, 2023 · at 9:30
Exploding Kittens CEO Elan Lee recounts his decision to leave Microsoft Xbox after realizing screen-based video game design isolated players from family.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 5.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Within two weeks of that experience, I resigned from Microsoft. I just, I could not be a part of that anymore.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Elan Lee
Elan Lee: Games should make players entertaining, not be inherently entertaining
“My fundamental premise behind all game design is that games should not be entertaining. Games should make the people you're playing with entertaining.”
Elan Lee: AI fails at designing games that spotlight player interaction
“Games should make the people you're playing with entertaining. And AI sucks at that.”
Lee: Most crowdfunding projects focus entirely on funding and ignore the crowd
“All the projects you've ever seen in your life focus on that funding part and they ignore the crowd part.”
Lee: Traditional mirror-room focus group game testing produces useless feedback
“Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group. They do these blind tests. Everyone sits in a room. There's the one-way mirror. You watch people play the games. It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out like, why are these te…”
Elan Lee: AI compresses game ideation from months to hours
“And it used to take, you know, months or years. And with AI, I've actually been able to shorten that to sometimes just a few hours.”
Elan Lee: AI accelerates brainstorming by filtering bad ideas faster
“It often won't yield the right idea, but I can usually shortcut weeks Off the process, because it helps me get through all the bad stuff faster, and it helps me find the little tiny sparks that might be interesting, and then I can grab those and dive right in.”