Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Scott Novis | Teaching Team Building and Communication Through Video Games

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On this week’s episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast, we speak with special guest, Scott Novis. Scott is the Founder of GameTruck, a successful franchise operating in over 30 states, and is an advocate for eSports as a means of bringing young adults together to experience a sense of community and enhance their teamwork skills. Scott also has two engineering degrees and has been named on 11 patents. 

“What a lot of people are seeing in games is that they look more like our economy and our future than traditional sports does. The skills that are transferable from traditional sports to our economy are almost all mental and attitude. I don’t need sports to create those conditions, to train you to work together with each other with respect, to include everybody, to be able to participate, to challenge your capability as a person, and to learn how to be your best. I can do it with a video game,” says Scott.

We chat about common myths about gaming, as well as: 

  • Why maximizing engagement is more important than winning
  • Teaching team building and communication through video games
  • The models for human motivation
  • The Culture Kitchen workshop
  • And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. I'm your co-host Ryan Englin and I'm here with Jeremy Macliver.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back everyone.

Ryan Englin: I am really excited about today's guest. He has two engineering degrees, named on 11 patents, has founded a franchise company, very successful one mind you, and he is really big into eSports. And if you don't know what eSports is, you're going to learn here in the next 30 minutes or so. But he connects people through video games and helps them develop grassroots communities. He has an amazing presence and amazing way of it taking complex ideas and helping us all understand them, which I love. So, Scott Novis, welcome to the show.

Scott Novis: Hi, welcome. Thanks for having me on.

Ryan: Yeah. So, video games. There are a lot of opinions about video games. What are some of the myths about video games that you want to dispel right now?

Video Game Myths Busted

Scott: Well, I don't know that I can dispel them but what, I talk to a lot of people and I think there's, particularly parents, but I think if you're a leader that you care about developing human potential, we're always after seeking how do we help people stay healthy, you know, achieve a level of healthy sociability and really have a positive future, right?

And video games, if you listen to the popular myths, sound like they're in direct opposition to those goals because we know video games make kids fat, video games make people violent and video games are a waste of time. Now, those are good stories, right? And they're scary, so they draw a lot of attention. And we live in an environment where, what did the guy from Facebook say? If the product's free, you're the product. And so your attention is the most valuable thing on the planet right now. So if I can throw a story in for you that holds your attention, I win.

Well, I'm not, I'd like to hold your attention, but if you're trying to achieve those goals of health, socialization and a bright future, those myths don't help you. They're not useful. While there might be some validity to the concerns you have, buying into those isn't gonna help you achieve the outcomes you want. So you could break each one of them down and dig into them. Like, for example, the one about health. I'll try to keep this concise.

It came out of a study in 1998 about screen time, not specifically video games, but there was a correlation between childhood obesity and screentime. People spending too much time in front of glass. Television was the big thing, then it became video games. And that correlation broke I think about 10 years ago where screentime went up, but childhood obesity didn't track with it. The real cause of the obesity comes from two things. One, phenomenal book is Salt, Sugar and Fat.

In the 80s, the food industry hacked the bliss point. There is, in an attempt to create the most satisfying possible foods, we engineered food to have an ideal mix of salt, sugar and fat. Grab a bag of potato chips today, they have sugar in them. In the 70s, potato chips did not have sugar in them. Why? Because they're way more satisfying if you get the right mix. So we're eating too much. No big surprise. The other one isn't really obvious at all and it has to do with exercise.

When we put pictures of missing children on milk cartons in the 80s, we scared a generation of parents into needing to know where their kids are at all times. And I learned this on a mission I went on that one of the things that is extremely, these are related so hang with me on this, on this mission trip I was talking to these guys, like, it's amazing, you go down, we go down to Guatemala, we help people out. It's awesome. But we are busy. From the moment we land till the day we leave, there's not an open minute on the calendar.

And I was talking to the organizer about it, he said, yeah, we learned Americans cannot stand around and do nothing. They have to be busy. One of the most stressful things you can do to an adult is leave them unstructured time. Guess what children need. Unstructured, free playtime. So, when adults took over supervising their kids activities, adults couldn't handle unstructured, free playtime, so they put structure on it. So team sports became the de facto way to socialize and exercise your child.

On the surface, there's not much wrong with that. However, a neat guy named Jaak Panskeep discovered the neural circuitry in our heads for play. Found it in rats. Mammals are wired to play. Play is actually a biological function. It serves a purpose. What he learned was fascinating, that if you throw two rats in a cage, they will rough and tumble play. The bigger rat, say if one's 10% bigger than the other, and it's only 10%, can always win.

But it's the subordinate rat that invites the big rat to play. If the big rat always wins, the little rat stops inviting the big one to play and they both suffer. mammals are wired to not play games they can't win. So they measured it. How much does the big rat have to let the little rat win for them to keep playing together? They could track it. 30 to 40%. Now, if you go back pre-COVID and open up your ESPN app or go to website and pull up your favorite sport, basketball, football, baseball, look at the losing percent, the win percentages of the losing teams, the worst teams of professional sports win 30 to 40% of the time.

So what you're seeing is kids falling out of sports for a whole variety of reasons but one of them is if they never get on the field, if they never play, they don't get a chance, we're wired to not play games we can't win. So it's not the video games that are the issue, it's we're throwing kids into situations that can't win and we're working against our biology of like, why would you do that? That's a waste of resources. And what we find is that there's other ways to exercise that what we saw in the leagues we ran is that people will really get into individual sports. I want to compare myself against who I was yesterday, not who somebody else is today.

So if we ran obstacle courses or hiking or anything where people were focused on their own physical activity and fitness, we had no trouble getting gamers to participate and be involved and engaged and it was awesome. The moment you took a ball and threw it out in the middle of a field, you immediately watch the group fracture because you just enforced a hierarchy. There's one ball, only the biggest kids are going to get it and they're going to basically keep it away from everybody else. And the gamers are pretty smart. They're like, I don't want to play that stupid game.

And that's what we're seeing is this fraction of what's happening? So when you talk about myths, I just broke down obesity, it's a function of diet and exercise. And our attention being focused in the wrong areas is that it's convenient as adults to throw your kid into a league. It seems like it solves all these problems unless your child is one of the ones that doesn't resonate, they don't ever get a chance to play, then they're wired to go look and do something else and that creates friction in the family. So that's one myth. I've got answers for the other two as well. Run through that.

Ryan: So you spent a lot of time in that explanation talking about kids. Is this something that we as human beings outgrow as we get older and we enter the workplace?

Video Games are an Ageless Medium

Scott: No, that was what really shocked me was most of the work I did was focused on kids because of Game Trip. Game Trip is a video game birthday party company. So 95% of our clients are kids. We were saying how video games and specifically an adult working with kids, the outside impact a grown up showing interest in video games was having on our kids. lLike maybe we should be doing more of this. So we got into eSports with that idea of mentorship. Let's put a responsible adult in a position to help these kids on the thing they care about and create connection and community.

And then we went a year ago, it was a year ago like next weekend, we did Fan Fusion. And we had 15,000 people go through our booth, 95% of them adults. And what we realized is these factors affect everybody. They're human engines. They're part of, it's part of who we are as people and how we interact as social animals. So yeah, the, I have the most data on the kids because the kids get studied the most but what we saw in sort of anecdotal hands-on is, this stuff resonates all the way through the whole, our whole site lifecycle.

Ryan: Well, I, you know, I get accused of being a big kid sometimes. And I will tell you, that ring fit adventure game and some of the best exercise I get with my kids right now. And so I see how the video game companies are starting to figure out how to make it more practical and break down some of those myths. But you do this with businesses too. This isn't just something about staying healthy from exercise and giving kids an opportunity to win or adults an opportunity to win on occasion. There's some real practical application in the office for this too, correct?

Scott: Oh, 100%. And I do want to call out kudos to you for playing video games with your kids because on the social aspect, participating in play is hugely important. And I want to touch on this with the office as well because you mentioned giving people an opportunity to win. Here's kind of a little secret about me and all my companies, winning isn't that important.

What's really important is challenging somebody, giving them an opportunity to test themselves and grow and learn. When we're maximally engaged, we're being maximally challenged. That's what we strive for. Winning is a byproduct of that. But what we'll find is that people will come back again and again if they feel like they're being challenged to drive up to what their potential is. So anytime, I always encourage adults, like play games with your kids. Play the video games. Let them see you, be engaged.

But if you're in an office environment and the other environment, the thing we were talking about team building is take winning, like if winning isn't relevant, like that's not the issue. Well, what do you do? So let's go to the waste of time thing, right? That's a myth. Well, one of the things that I've always, that I had talked about with sports, and it goes back to, if a behavior transcends race, culture and time, it has a biological imperative. So we talked about rats and rough and tumble play. This is a fun one. Why do so many cultures have dragons? What is a dragon?

Ryan: I don't know.

Scott: It's a snake cat bird that breeds fire. It's our four natural predators. Therefore, it's an archetype. It's the ultimate evil. That's why it appears so often in so many different cultures, some variation of that. Every human culture has had some form of sports competition. Why? What does it do for us? It turns out competition is baked into our biology, our psychology and our culture. In our eyes, it's called opponent processing theory. We do not see blends of red and green.

Grab an apple, the traditional red apple. The, you know, the Snow White, was it Snow White Apple? I forget which one it was. I forget the Disney Princesses. I get them mixed up. Please, please forgive me. But you know what I mean? Like even back in the Bible, it was like Eve grabbed, she didn't grab an orange or a pear, it was an apple. The blend of red and green we don't see because the rods and cones fight each other. Why? To get a better outcome. When red wins, that food is safe to eat. All mammals have bihemispheric brains. All of them. There's no unibrain.

No tribrain, a quad, their's two. One half for routinization, one half for novelty. In the balance of those things, we get better outcomes. What does sports competition do for us? It's the best tool we've ever come up with to train somebody to act under pressure. It's a training tool to teach people how to be their best when their best is most needed. That is an extremely transferable skill. That is super valuable. So sports, most of the big sports we know of were created when we had a muscle aggregation economy. That's not what our economy looks like today.

So when you talk about using video games and work, well, let's compare. In my work, men and women work together. In sort of traditional competition sports, they're segregated. Isn't that illegal everywhere else in our economy? I'm just saying. If I work, we use technology every single day. In traditional, that's cheating. In my work, everybody on the team has to contribute. Everybody. We are always trying to get the maximum contribution for everyone. I don't have a bench, right? I don't have a room full of people waiting for the opportunity to contribute.

Spending time on the bench is sort of the rite of passage of traditional sports. So what a lot of people are seeing in games, they look more like our economy and our future than traditional sports does. And the skills that are transferrable from traditional sports to our economy are almost all mental and attitude. I don't need sports to create those conditions, to train you to work together with each other with respect, to include everybody to be able to participate and to challenge your capability as a person to learn how to be your best. I can do it with a video game.

So we use a video game that we simulate running a restaurant. And there's four chefs but five tasks. Any chef can do any task. No chef can do every task. You have to work together. So we use a fun game and anybody from any background, we've run it with all four generations, z, y, x and boomers have all played together in the same environment. And we use this tool to simulate the practices that allow you to work together effectively in today's work environment. I don't know any physical sport that could achieve that type of outcome.

Ryan: So how does that work? Because, I mean, I hear video game and I'm like, Well, that sounds like fun. But you're really teaching team building and communication. I love how you said the words engagement because we talk about that in business all the time. How do we get our employees engaged? And you were talking about the video games. Getting people engaged, like, that's the whole point of a video game is to consume their time,

Not All Video Games are Meant to be Time Killers

Scott: Nope. That's a misnomer. You just touched on something. It is not the point of a video game to consume your time. In fact, there's a very clear split in gaming. There's three tiers, core gamers, mid-core gamers and casual gamers. Casual games are absolutely engineered to waste your time. That's what they're there for, okay?

So that's true. But when you get into core games, or a whole range of other games, they're actually not engineered to waste your time. What they're doing that's really, so you have to understand human motivation. So this goes to your business audience and people that are trying to figure out how do I get my employees engaged? You have to understand what engagement, what produces engagement. So there's two models for human motivation. It's actually three. The first one is survival. That one's like, hopefully, none of us are in that mode.

Like, you're just oh my god, you know, you're trying to survive, nothing else matters. That's not a really useful one to build a business out of. The one that lasted us for a long time is extrinsic motivation. Carrot and stick, right? I will give you this reward but I'll punish you if you don't do what I need you to do, right? You guys familiar with that?

Ryan: Yeah.

Scott: Okay. What that buys you is compliance. And compliance has a high degree of utility in mechanically driven highly consistent repeatable processes. Now, what you sacrifice in buying compliance is you sacrifice cognitive function and creativity because they're a distraction. So if you want to focus somebody, you give them the carrot and stick and go it's this over and over and over again. That works. But if you're going into an environment where you need people to think, you need people to problem solve, you need people to ideate, carrot and stick is actually counterproductive. They've demonstrated, Dan Pink is a phenomenal author on this topic.

A bunch of research out there, you'll find it actually is counterproductive. It'll hurt your company. If you need people to think and be creative and use carrot and stick, you're going to hurt them. So what does work? It's called intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation is complicated. It is a balance of three factors. It's a balance of meaning, purpose and autonomy. So in meaning, is this work intrinsically interesting to me? Is it challenging? Do I find it hard? Like, do I, like, is this the type of work I'm doing well-suited to my interest. Purpose means is the outcome of my work affecting a group of people I care about.

So in other words, I'm doing something and I'm causing a beneficial outcome for somebody else I can relate to. The third one is autonomy. Am I doing this by choice? So to put this in context, what video games that are designed to trigger intrinsic motivation do. A game like Smash Brothers has 72 characters, I think it's up to 80 now. There are six different styles of play. They all work, they're all valid. So that means you can go in and play that game almost any way you want and get good at it and find a way to win. Most businesses and organizations have no concept of their being multiple ways of doing something, let alone six. And this is so hard to do.

Only a handful of games, ever, of the 250 that get released every year, fewer than a dozen actually achieve this level of engagement. Most of them are like, that's kind of interesting and boring and you move on. A rare subset become franchises we play endlessly. So when you look at what games are trying to do, they're trying to trigger your intrinsic motivation. And what fools most of us into thinking they're a waste of time, is they get two out of three right and they spoof the third. They spoof the purpose. Save the princess, rescue the universe, whatever, right?

The purpose seems is made up. But the challenge of the work is real and the autonomy is real. You get to choose how you want to play it and the challenge you're facing is ideally matched to your level of skill. That's super hard. So if we could take intrinsic motivation and use that tool to train people on how to communicate better or work together more effectively, it's extremely powerful. And it also gives us insights into how to structure our work at our companies to trigger intrinsic motivation. We can learn how to manage better by watching how people play together.

Ryan: So you'd mentioned Smash Brothers. And is that one of the practical ways we can go apply this is to go get some game consoles and play Smash Brothers or is there more to it than that?

Scott: Well, I'd like to believe there's more to it than that. I wouldn't necessarily say everybody should go get Smash Brothers. What I would encourage you to do that would be eye-opening, is there's a range of video games out there that are cooperative, because most businesses, you want people to cooperate together to solve hard problems, right?

Here's the way I look at this. And this is sort of one of those, especially if you've got kids with video games, how gamers see games is they're tackling a hard problem, learning skills and persisting till they overcome. In a collaborative environment, we want to do that together. And so there's a, I'm sorry, I can't read the name off my top of my head, but you could Google it. I'll try to find it for you guys so you could add it to the show notes. But there's a moving game where together as a group, you have to empty out and move people from one place to another and it's hilarious.

One of the games I'm a huge fan of is Overcooked 2. That's the game I use in my Culture Kitchen workshop. But there's a wide range of games that support cooperative collaborative play. And so in those environments, now, what you're doing is you're solving problems, but you're learning how to do it together. A game I play with my friends, Sea of Thieves, is we all get on a boat together and we got work to do. We all have different roles.

And the beauty of it is the flexibility is, today I'll be the captain and you might be the person raising the anchor and somebody else might be the one setting the sails. But there are some principles that you begin to see in common when groups of people come together and work together. So if you want to grab some games and you want to do it, roll it yourself, focus on games that support collaborative play and cooperative play.

Ryan: So let's dig into this Culture Kitchen a little bit. I'd love to know more about this workshop. I've never heard of the game you had mentioned. But this idea of collaborative play in the workplace. There's, I think there's a real popular book called The Great Game of Business. And I know there's books about the Game of Work. I mean, we're all playing games but sometimes we learn those lessons the hard way. And they may not always be fun. And I know that when we bring enjoyment into it, people are more likely to learn and retain the information. So, talk to us a little bit about Culture Kitchen. What is that? And how does that work?

Building a Psychologically Safe Environment

Scott: Okay, so what I did is this was I was a little self assured. Somebody said, We need a team building. I'm like, Oh my god, I just can't do another one of these, like, trust fall, I spent a lot of time in corporate America and we did a lot of different things. I'm like, I want to do something that will leave me with skills I can use. I'm a coach at heart. I love to teach kids how to play baseball. And to me, that's how you develop human potential saying, this is what's possible, you can do it too. Let's give you some exercises and activities and a lot of training and books hit you with the theory.

Like, when do I get to practice these things? So what I did is I started with Charles Duhigg's book, Smarter, Faster, Better. And that pointed me to the work that Google did on Project Aristotle. And you can Google it. Look it up. And it is, it really goes into the psychology of teamwork. How to create great environments that people want to work in. How do you create that intrinsic motivation? And it's five keys. So I'm like, great. I need a game where I can practice these skills.

There's five skills that go into making a great team. Like, where can I find a game? And that was when I came across Overcooked, because I'm like, oh, people get food, it's not combat, it's easy to relate to and the controls are super simple. The challenge doesn't come directly from the video game. The challenge comes from working together better with the people I'm playing with. That's exactly what I want. It turns out there's two things you need to help somebody grow, uncertainty and interdependence.

We have to work together. So by counting on each other, that's when we begin to stress the teamwork. And the uncertainty comes from just as you get good at something, this is what happens in real life, right? You run a successful business. Guess what happens. You get more customers to the point your systems break. So your reward for solving a hard problem is a higher order problem to solve. And I can control that in the video game. I could put people in an environment say let's learn how to operate the game.

And we get good at it. We're like yeah, like awesome. Reward. Next Level is harder, more complicated recipes, go. Because this is what a lady named Amy Edmondson learned. Not only do Americans not like unstructured, free play time, one of the things we all are indoctrinated in high school to loathe, we do not like to learn in front of others. It's called impression management. If you don't want to look ignorant, don't ask questions. You don't want to look incompetent, don't make a mistake. You don't want to look intrusive, don't offer ideas. And you don't want to look negative, do not critique the status quo.

Now, those work. They're very effective tools for shunting shame what Brene Brown talked about. We do not like to be shamed in public and make, and all those things can have all those negative attributes to them. The problem is they cut you off from learning. So the problem is how do we have an environment that's safe to learn? That means we have to have an environment that's free from shame. That has to be what Professor Edmondson called, psychologically safe.

I have to know that I can learn with my peers and in front of my peers, and then together, we can adapt and grow. So uncertainty is a very specific type of change. It's the change that happens when you can't predict your future performance. And it's very, very stressful for your average adult. So what we do in the game is I put you in situations so you can practice creating psychological safety. You can practice dealing with uncertainty in an environment that's safe to fail. It's a video game. Who cares if you're good at it? Nobody.

But the real lesson is, you're now practicing in a safe way the tools of communicating and learning and asking for help. How do you become dependable, because dependability is the mirror image of accountability. We have lots of talking about accountability but you can't have accountability if there's no dependability. So creating those environments, we use, the video game becomes a batting cage, right? Real baseball games aren't a batting cage but we practice in a batting cage. We get lots of repetitions to practice, and that's what the games do for us. We can run a business simulation in five minutes or less.

And then we could break it apart and talk about it and see what we learned and make adjustments and try again and try again. So that in a real business, you might only get one, you're lucky one project a week. Maybe it's one a month. Sometimes it's one every couple of years. But in the video game, I can give you a project every five minutes. So in a few hours, you could get dozens of practices learning and growing, practicing and communicating.

Ryan: So if someone, I'm hearing you talk about this taking this video game and teach really, I mean really great stuff. I love that idea that when I'm in business, I might only get one at bat a week or a month. And in the video game, I can get one every five minutes. So it accelerates the learning. I love that. So if someone wanted to do that, you do these workshops just here locally all over the country?

Scott: Well, what we did is we were doing them locally before COVID. And what we started realizing is so many companies had remote workforces, bringing everybody together was a problem. So we had invested in developing how we could do remote team workshops like a blend, and an COVID hit. We're like, Oh my god. So we actually deployed a cloud computing solution. So all you need to do is download this special browser and as long as you've got an internet connection, if you can do a Zoom call, you can play this game.

So we do this with completely remote, hundred percent remote teams. We do this with all in-person teams. And we do a hybrid where some people are local, some people are remote, because we're leveraging video game technology. The technology 250 million people to play Fortnight every night, well let you and everybody in your company play together as well. It's really robust.

Ryan: So how does someone find out about this? Because I can picture some of our listeners going you know what, I got a lot of team that are on the line. They're out in the field and we still have to learn to work together. This sounds like a great idea. How did they get in touch with you? How did they learn more about this

Scott: My website is bravous.com, BRAVOUS.com. And if they look at the workshops, because we call it a workshop, we don't call it a team building because you're going to work. It'll be fun, you'll be engaged but you're practicing and developing skills. Our whole goal is to give you, you know, for you to leave better than you came in, for you to get closer to the goal you're trying to achieve.

So if you go to bravous.com, under workshops, you'll find Culture Kitchen and a ton of other things we do. We're all about, so this was the question I asked you before, what's a reuleaux? And it turns out, it's a French word and it's that puffy little triangle that's at the heart of a Venn diagram. So my company's exist at the heart of people, video games, and human connection, or friendship.

We're always trying to create an environment where you can make a friend. And so we use video games to help people connect and play and learn and strengthen their relationships with each other. So all of the products that we have, everything we do is about building that sense of community, building that sense of connection. Because that isn't a myth, is that video games can isolate people, and that's something that we want to reverse that trend. We want to be very intentional about connecting people and then unlocking the power of play.

Ryan: And you have an event you run every week. Is that right? That people can join and learn a little bit more?

Build a Stronger and More Engaged Workforce

Scott: Yeah, we do a real fun, every Friday on Twitch.tv, bravous. eSports is the channel. And we'll give you the link. You could join us for a free trivia night and it will begin to introduce you to some of the exciting technology that's happening in the video game world. So this is something your audience might not be aware of but I'm trying to help people understand, like, I got gray hair. I'm a Gen Xer. When I told my kids don't be a consumer, I thought that meant stuff.

To them, it also meant the content. They don't want to just sit and receive broadcast television. They want to participate. And what Twitch did is it allowed the people that are competing in the video games to livestream what they're doing and interact with the audience. So pick your favorite sport. Let's say, I'm big into baseball.

So all of a sudden, you could have, I'm gonna go backwards and show my, but let's say it was Mike Trout. Mike Trout at batting practice is sitting there talking to you saying, This is what I'm working on. This is what I'm trying to do. This is how I'm doing it. And you as an audience member could interact with him while he's doing that. And if you happen to play baseball, you may take a lot of interest in that because he might be giving you tips on how you could become a better baseball player.

That's what the gamers develop. So how we're pivoting that and how we're building on that is, we're having a fun trivia night. So you can log in, it's free of charge. And then you can join the audience and you can participate in playing the trivia game that's hosted by a professional host. So we're showing you the blend of all the technology we use of real people connecting with real people through a technical platform. And so check it out. It's super fun.

We've been drawing big audiences, people are having a blast with it. But it's also something we could do for your company or anyone else. Like if you want to create an engaging experience, that is like a low barrier of entry, low risk, it's not threatening at all. We did it for the Entrepreneurs Organization for their happy hour, and everybody had an absolute blast. We can do it for private groups as well. But it's a super simple way for you to put your toe in the water of what video gaming can do to help you build a stronger community and an engaged workforce.

Ryan: That's awesome. So much information. You're definitely a wealth of knowledge when it comes to gaming and eSports and engaging and getting people to have fun together. I love it. I learned so much today. Thank you, Scott, for the time. And we've got to wrap up, although I imagine we could keep going. Thank you again, though. I really enjoyed having you a guest today and we'll talk to you soon.

Scott: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was wonderful talking to you guys.

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