Episode summary
Authors Talk 'What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love' | Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily
· · Hosts: Carol Massar, Tim Stenovec · Guests: Bing Gordon, Chloe Gordon
Summary
Bing Gordon argues that the video game industry has repeatedly adapted to major technology shifts, from home consoles to mobile and now AI, and that each wave has expanded the audience and changed how products are built. He says the current AI cycle feels faster than past transitions because it is self-learning, but he still expects people to adjust and emerge with better tools and experiences. The host presses him on whether that makes the future more dramatic, and Gordon says the answer depends on the time frame.
Khloe Gordon, who co-wrote the book with her father, says she is optimistic about new tools but wary of outsourcing creative thought. She argues that the core motivations that bring players back have stayed consistent: social interaction, cooperation, leveling up, and the sense of progress. She also says games have taught product teams to keep users right on the edge of success by tuning challenge to the player and the group.
Together, they frame gaming as a design discipline that now extends far beyond consoles, from Wordle to Fortnite to educational and workplace products. They say the book is meant to scale Bing Gordon’s lessons for parents, teachers, managers, and product teams who want to understand what makes people return and engage.
Key takeaways
- Bing Gordon says each major technology shift has made games better and broadened the audience, especially after the iPhone created “a million a billion more monthly gamers.”
- Khloe Gordon says the biggest gaming lesson is not competition but social interaction and cooperation, which she says has stayed consistent across generations of games.
- Bing Gordon argues AI is the fastest technology takeoff he has seen, but he still thinks people will adapt and the world will be “a little bit better.”
- Khloe Gordon warns that Hollywood is in danger of making entertainment worse by outsourcing the craft that keeps art human.
- The book aims to translate gaming principles for parents, teachers, managers, and CEOs who want to motivate people and build products they love.
Notable quotes
“So when Apple launched the iPhone uh what at the time people thought would never eclipse a Blackberry, suddenly we got a million a billion more monthly gamers”
“the um you know the world of AI is maybe a uh a bigger transition than mobile which was as big a transition as uh um home computers”
“the most important reason that gamers come back tomorrow is for social interaction and cooperation instead of competition and productivity”
“I worry that what I've observed in Hollywood in the last two years is that more and more people are not preserving what makes art great, which is humanity”
“the hope is that that this thing um will benefit a lot of people”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts, radio news. — You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio. Google announced a new version of its AI world model that generates more realistic realtime virtual environments. It advances a technology that has rattled investors in video game companies
Called Genie4. — Yep. Genie 4. unveiled today uh by the company's Google DeepMind AI lab. It lets users create explorable worlds from text prompts and navigate them with keyboard controls. Now, people can also alter a scene as it unfolds by typing instructions such as changing the weather or adding a character. We are getting so much control about everything.
Fair to say the world of video games has changed a lot since 1982. That was when Bing Gordon and others started Electronic Arts, the company that ultimately brought us The Sims, Battlefield, Need for Speed, Apex, Legends, Dragon Age, and so many more. Bing Gordon is the co-founder of EA, and he was with the company for almost 30 years.
He's on the boards of Take 2 Interactive, Duolingo, and more. Spent more than a dozen years, too, on the board of Amazon through a period of huge growth. He and his daughter, Khloe Gordon, are out with a new book.
It is out today. It's called Everybody Wins: What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. They both join us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studios.
Welcome.
It's great to be here and the house that Mayor Mike built. — We love it here. We do love it here. Um, — I want to talk about the book, but first I want to talk a little bit about the environment today and and how much different it is than when you were starting the company back in in 1982.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- gamification
- product design
- video game strategy
- amazon growth
- consumer engagement
Companies and tickers mentioned
- AMZN
- Amazon
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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