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Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming

Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming

 

Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming


Stephan Rabimov


Frontiers beckon the bravest as fortune favors the bold. One of the seismic cultural shifts of the last decade has been the rise of the gaming and esports industry. It has outgrown its escapist reputation to become a nearly $160 billion global market. What used to be the stereotypical domain of teenagers, now vies for mainstream influence with traditional media and institutions of power. Take fashion headlines, for example. British powerhouse Burberry showed its latest collection on Twitch, a messenger platform exclusive to the gaming community. Louis Vuitton unlocked a collaboration with League of Legends while Marc Jacobs checked-in at Animal Crossing as did Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. In 1964, American psychiatrist Eric Berne published a provocative bestseller Games People Play claiming that “pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy.” Fast forward half a century and our understanding and experience of individual relationships and community dynamics have been enhanced by the complexity of digital interactions and shared virtual spaces.



To better understand the profound appeal and impact of “games” I turned to someone whose passion as a player powered his knowhow as a developer and an investor. Maxim Miheyenko is the co-founder and COO of 5518 Studios, which ranks among the hottest art providers in the game industry, also Maxim is investor and business angel in the game industry. He was one of the success stories in a recent Russian Silicon Valley documentary (with 24 million views and counting) by Yuri Dud - Russia’s most popular independent journalist. Miheyenko was born in Ulyanovsk, a historic engineering hub in the Volga heartland. The city is famous as the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin and his signature philosophy: communism. For better or worse, it had disrupted all global systems. Technological evolution could be another potential conceptual gamechanger for the world. I wondered what it takes to run a team of digital comrades from across Eastern Europe (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and Serbia) while managing world’s biggest clients out of an office in California. We connected on Zoom across several time zones as Maxim divides his time between Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. 2020 meets globalization. Game on!



How has gaming disrupted the global infotainment ecosystem?

No other industry is so driven by the desire to impress its customers. It is the main goal to make everyone go wow every time. Great games just keep getting better and more accessible. As I see it, 5G and cloud streaming directly on mobile phones is changing everything. People love the free-to-play format and they want to start playing right away. There will be no need to buy consoles, potentially. At the same time, there is a lot of investment pouring in so gaming business is not about making immediate money now. It is about creating relationships, building communities based on shared philosophy, about loyalty instead of chasing a final dollar from the customer. Now is only the foundation. The great history of the gaming industry is just beginning. Really.



What makes a good game?

From the product point of view, you need a generous budget for developers and marketing, a high-end design team and then, magic… [Laughs] From the player point of view, it must have a good reason to come back. It is about motivation and connection. People are no longer interested in high-realistic art and explosions. Photorealism is a bit boring already. Most games now use unique stylizations to create their universes: Roblox, Subnautica, Fortnite, Apex Legends. The focus also shifts to storytelling. My great friend, co-founder and our CEO, Michael Casalino was an art-director of Disney Mobile and VP of art at Scopely. He always tells us that all the little details, each stone, barrel, cloud should have a story! What I love about The Last of US or Ghost of Tsushima is their grand narrative: trying to find community, trying to find love, trying to fix the world, big existential questions. You can see this change in Hollywood too. Compare the action heroes from the Schwarzenegger and Van Damme era to the action heroes today like new Batman or Joker. There is more character, more sensitivity. People no longer want to see power used without responsibility.



How difficult is to keep up with the changing consumer expectations?

On one hand, this is a stable business with pillars like Call of Duty, FIFA or NBA. They are reliable and relatable. On the other hand, it is very risky business. You can also put a lot of effort into something for nothing. There are too many promising startups you never hear about in a year or two. Publishers cannot predict success before release. For example, Fall Guys came out of the blue like “hidden dagger” and became one of the biggest gaming stories in 2020. Personally, I also want to acknowledge fresh stars like Promethean AI, Loona.app, and Mortal Shell.



Is such fierce competition beneficial or does it compromise the product?

For the gaming industry, competition is everything! People try to reinvent the ways we play. You cannot have monopolization in creativity and distribution. There are giants like Sony, Microsoft, Amazon. You have newer forces getting into it like Epic Games. They have high goals and I love it. There are more niche segments waiting for quality offers. For example, games in education is one of the hottest trends today, because timely content is king for kids and parents who must figure out home school options during lockdown periods. I am following a new generation of ideas like the EduDo app which combines user-generated short videos with interactive teaching and game elements. Gaming companies themselves make big headlines, too. Roblox is coming to IPO soon with expected valuation of over $4 billion! That is very exciting news for the industry.



Where does your work fit into this dynamic industry moment?

As an external art provider, our team is not some “outsourced talent.” We are strategic partners. We work with AAA-level blockbuster games and indie studios. Our job is to curate workflow for the right teams. Our small size and international positioning allow us to be proactive and very responsive. There is only one secret sauce to real quality in this industry. Communication. We encourage our artists to find the balance between functional works and masterpieces. For example, when we get a new client, we played all the games from that universe first. It is very important! We look at their souvenirs and hang out at fan forums. Then we talk with them about what they don’t like. We want to make a process and a result better. Our art is always at the service of these stories and we recruit the best people in the industry.



How do you put together a successful design team?

When we look for artists, we review anonymous portfolios. No name, nationality, gender, other identification. We only care about their vision, their passion, and skills. If we like it, we hire them. Then we find out who this person is and where they are from. It is impossible to be a single-country business in global creative industries today. For example, one of our lead 3D artists, Alexander Stepanchikov, fell in love with games as a boy in a village in Kazakhstan. He has been making amazing art for games for almost 20 years, and we hope he will continue to wow us for 20 more. It is a way of life for him. We also bring people from cinema, theater, fashion, sports on board to brainstorm new, unique and innovative ideas. Gaming will be the fastest growing intercultural platform in the next years. We have to welcome all perspectives to offer something unique.



How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the gaming industry? Aside from more people having time to play games at home…

Well, I think the bigger story is that many people are re-discovering the love of games and their new, amazing capabilities. They go, “Oh it’s not killing zombies and sudoku anymore” [Laughs] There is less and less focus on the spectacle of violence and more attention to skillshare, co-working and living together. Microsoft Flight Simulator is not a game, per se. It’s a real training program and maybe even a meditation masterpiece. Personally, I love Subnautica, World of Tanks, Transport Fever, and Age of Empires. Why? Because these are games for my brain. I love that I must establish communication with others, to think about future and how my actions impact that, to strategize my missions accordingly. Then I use these game skills in my work every day!



How do you respond to critics that emphasize addictiveness of gaming?

I liked how the Netflix docudrama Social Dilemma talked about it. The same principle is true for any mass industry: fast fashion, fast food, social media, gaming. The goal is to find human balance in the world of devices, in a world of huge amount of content. Look, I am a Gamer. I collect all consoles and games and play them every day. I also understand it is a part of my life. That is why I play only one hour daily. I do this out of respect for the rest of my life which includes my girlfriend, family, friends, wellness, the joy of swimming, the fun of going out. As I see it, gaming can be another tool to practice mindfulness… With so many specialists coming into the gaming industry from different spheres of life and business, we will soon see absolutely new projects that will change our lives and the world-at-large. The Game is never over!


https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephanrabimov/2020/11/01/game-never-over-maxim-miheyenko-on-mindfulness-in-gaming/?sh=48eaedb643ab
 

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Epidemiologist: We face an “evolutionary arms race” against Covid mutations

Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona.

The New York Times recently reported that, in the early months of the pandemic, a particular genetic strain of Covid-19 known as D14G was shown to be more prevalent in Italy than any Asian countries. This may have helped explain why the disease spread so fast in that country, and elsewhere in Europe and America.

David Engelthaler has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicates faster than earlier strains, which "likely" came out of China and through to Europe. "It's really quickly dominated all of the other strains that were seen in Europe at the time, it became the predominant strain that came into the Americas, spread throughout the United States and is now spread to pretty much every corner of the planet".

In his own state of Arizona, Engelthaler witnessed several of the early introductions to Arizona, coming from the Pacific coast straight from China, but fizzled out quickly, with less effective transmission. “And then all of a sudden we started having explosive outbreaks. When we go back and look genomically, the vast majority of those cases where we had very large outbreaks were being driven by the strains that were coming from the East Coast out of Europe, which all seemed to have this particular mutation in the spike protein.”

This doesn’t mean that the mutation is more deadly, simply that it may be more faster at transmitting, and therefore it harder to "get our arms around the virus". As such, Engelthaler argues that trying to eliminate the virus was not the right approach and instead we should have been trying to slow its spread: "What we're really seeing is a SARS-like infection that spreads like the common cold. And with there's no way that we could put in mitigation strategies to stop the common cold".

So were uniform national lockdowns the right solution with this newer mutation that potentially spread more effectively? "As an epidemiologist I think they have has just been devastating in a way that we haven't even properly appropriately characterised yet". He says that the "vast majority" of at-risk people "could have been prevented if the focus was on protecting them, rather than on trying to prevent any spread of this virus, which is pretty much is un-containable".

Engelthaler is also one of the few epidemiologists to have publicly spoken out against school closures, for which there is "no scientific evidence". "Privately, behind closed doors, there's definitely been a lot of discussion from the very beginning that there's no scientific evidence that shutting down schools actually helps to stop a pandemic...Epidemiologists knew that from the beginning, but that was not a popular opinion to take publicly and seems to have been kind of left to the side".

Ultimately, Engelthaler believes that human agency in the midst of a pandemic has been overemphasised: "I do think that one thing that does seem to get lost in all of this is that there's a really important factor in this pandemic, and it's the virus, it's not just people's policies and people's behaviours". That is especially true when there are "different strains that are acting differently in different parts of the world, leading to different outcomes, at least in some part because of that virus, not just based off of public policies in response, no matter what you do".

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Show Notes:

[2:00] Marian Tupy speaks about his work with the Cato Institute, analyzing the data of different countries worldwide. He gives background to Mikhaila how digging into the numbers actually changed his pessimistic view on world trajectory to an overall positive outlook to where humanity as a whole is headed.

[6:00] Negativity biases are built into us through survival due to natural selection. Humans that had a higher reaction to possible danger were the ones that survived to have kids. Now we as a race tend to naturally gravitate toward imagining and operating, assuming the worst-case scenario.

[8:00] Mikhaila asks Marian to cover some of the main misconceptions commonly held when it comes to global trends.

[10:00] Two dollars per person per day is what the world bank estimates to be the absolute poverty level. If a person is making this amount or any less, they will be starving to death most likely. Trend data shows that average income across the whole world has risen from the eighteen hundreds from two dollars a day to about forty dollars a day, and that is with both those numbers adjusted for inflation difference.

[12:00] “Modern life and abundance of resources has only been around for 0.08% of our time on earth.” Human psychology has not really fully adapted to generally having what we need to survive and be happy just yet.

[14:00] Climate change is a hot topic. What was ten or twenty years ago a very disputed topic is now accepted by most to be fact. What trends does the data support on the human influence on climate into the future?

[17:00] Tupy outlines the two main camps that have formed while seeking to address climate change. Those who believe that limiting population and usage of resources (what Marian refers to as a restrictionist), and those who believe climate change will be addressed through technological innovation and adaptation as many crises.

[20:00] Marian and Mikhaila discuss possible alternatives to C02 producing energy production. Nuclear power is an already available alternative. 

[22:00] Is nuclear power a safe option to use? Incidents in Fukushima and Chernobyl have cast a very negative public view on nuclear usage. Marian believes that humanity improves its designs and processes through the direct result of encountering problems. “Adversity is how we as humans usually learn”

[25:00] Another issue on many minds is overpopulation. Is this going to be an issue in the near future?

[32:00] Marian and Mikhaila talked about misconceptions in trends, and now they take a look at real trends that may be very troubling for everyone if they continue. What trends would we be concerned with? Freedom of speech in western society is one area Tupy says they have been watching closely.

[37:30] Political correctness at its worst can even influence the science or technology a country invests in. Lysenkoism in the soviet union was an example of bad science because the Soviet government didn’t want research surrounding genetics as it was a politically incorrect subject for the time.

[42:00] Are monopolies operating in capitalist nations an issue?

[44:00] Positive trends in I.Q. from the nineteen hundreds to the early 2000s have added, on average, almost thirty I.Q points to the global population. It also appears the opportunity to use higher than average I.Q. to better oneself, and the world has never been at a higher point in history.

[52:00] Marian explains how the human life span is increasing, and not just the one percent. The average life span of the richest people in the nineteen hundreds was about 50 years.

[56:30] Infant mortality was dreadful even as recently as a few hundred years ago.

[58:00] Washing of hands was discovered not long ago; even the notion of germs is a completely modern concept.

[1:00:30] Find more of Marian Tupy at his website HumanProgress.org, a source that is always trying to provide positive stories of human triumph in a difficult world, and read his book Ten Global Trends to further investigate if what we are all assuming in the world is truly happening

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