Kenshi Arasaki: Psychology of Games and NFTs

The best games are often built by those who have developed a mastery over human psychology and motivation and Kenshi Arasaki one of them. He is the creator of multiple hugely popular mobile, free-to-play games, and he shares his principles and insights on what makes games enticing to players and sustains traction. 

We deep dive on why a master of psychology and human incentives is the recipe for creating good games. We’ll cover how to create an environment for interesting emergent social behaviors, capturing the full spectrum of human emotion as a means to create true community bonds, and what it means to create a perfectly competitive environment where people are motivated to progress. 

After all his experiences in gaming, Kenshi is most bullish on the opportunities NFTs are able to unlock for the industry. We explore the economic implications of the evolving vertical of play-to-earn games and how it can make spending time in virtual worlds a worthy and legitimate investment of time. We’ll talk through some of the challenges that NFTs are facing as well as what it means for gaming and virtual experience beyond, to have a real mechanism to enforce digital rights. 

ABOUT THE GUEST
Kenshi Arasaki is the CEO and Co-founder of A Thinking Ape Entertainment, a gaming company that has produced some of the top free-to-play mobile games It was recently acquired by the Embracer Group. He is an angel investor and jpeg/nft enthusiast, and is the primary author behind US patent 8918725 for systems and methods to support real-time chat on mobile devices. 

SHOW NOTES
[4:30] How to create initial traction for games and effective mechanisms

[11:00] Importance of helping people express their full emotional spectrum in virtual experiences

[17:00] Maintaining a balanced virtual economy

[21:10] Tapping into fundamental human motivations

[27:20] Play-to-earn games

[29:50] NFTs, digital ownership, and interoperability 

[33:20] Creating native containers for NFTs

[37:40] What NFT would Kenshi want to build