But it’s complicated. So, to follow it is a big ask of the audience. It’s interesting, we are at a point as a network, as well as with Game Changer, where the audience is so big at this point, and it consists both of people who love game design and of people who just love comedy and performance art, that we’re never going to please everybody.
So, there’s a way in which I feel like I have to tune out the audience and just focus on creating the thing that I’m most excited about, whatever that is. And I’m very proud of what we did this season. But yeah, if I had to make an adjustment between this season and next season, it’s pulling back a little bit on crunchier game mechanics.
AVC: There are quite a few games that have some layer of social deduction in them this season. What’s interesting about that to you?
SR: I mean, at a base level, it’s probably because, first and foremost, I’m a Blood On The Clocktower fanatic. And secondly, because I think social deduction games are, by their very nature, social. And so, that game is going to read more on camera than a lot of types of games would, just by virtue of the fact that what is happening there is an interaction between human beings. Also, it gives people the opportunity to lie.
And that is not something that we’ve done a lot of in Game Changer, historically. Like, usually it’s me pulling the wool over people’s eyes. So, for me to introduce a game that then gives others the opportunity to pull the wool over each other’s eyes gives them an opportunity at mischief, which I think is fun.
AVC: Do you have a favorite of the various social deduction layers that were in this season?
SR: I think my favorite is probably “Kangaroo Court,” in the sense that I love this idea of playing the game and winning the game is actually not the point. It’s, “Can I convince people that I did?” I just think it’s really elegant as a game mechanic, which I haven’t seen a lot of before.
AVC: Shifting the topic a bit, are you familiar with the game design term “the magic circle?” It’s the idea that people playing a game enter into a contract to treat the outcome like it matters, even though it really doesn’t.
SR: Hell yeah, love that term.
AVC: How do you foster that idea when you’re working with improv people, who generally want to make the most entertaining, funniest thing happen—which is not always “Caring about the outcome of a game”? How do you handle the interplay between those two ideas?
SR: It’s a good question. I think that those things are a little at war with each other in Game Changer. Ultimately, I think my cast is going to do whatever is going to create the most entertaining possible episode, even if that means throwing the game to the wind. The way in which that helps us is, when we need to do something as a show, whether it’s be generous to a particular player, or we need to balance the scales somehow. And then the ways in which it can shoot us in the foot are clearly when players aren’t taking the game seriously, to the point where it’s like it has no stakes.
I think that what’s interesting is Game Changer is no different from any other Dropout show, in the sense that there are no real stakes. We are not offering big prizes on Game Changer. We did during the COVID season, because we were trying to raise morale. But fundamentally I’m resistant to offering meaningful prizes on Game Changer because I don’t want the show to turn into a Mr. Beast kind of thing. Once there’s actual money on the line, the show starts to feel more exploitative. The only stakes that there are are these meta stakes that have to do with people wanting to say that they won the show, or the fact that they know a lot of people watch the show, or the fact that the crew’s all there. “This is a big production.This is very cool. It’d be fun to say that I walked away a winner.”
And the truth is just sincere, which is that some people actually care about that more than others. It happens to be the people who are more into games. Ify [Nwadiwe] wanted to win “Count The Rice.” Demi [Adejuyigbe] wanted to win. Catherine [McCafferty] wanted to win. Jiavani wanted just an experience of the game. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine.
AVC: Once the game is going, does it ever surprise you how that turns? I’m thinking a lot about “Night Shift,” which is a very, very funny episode of TV, but one where it doesn’t always feel like the game is being played competitively.
SR: I think it’s a balance, on a per-episode basis. So much of this boils down to, you can only do so much planning for this show. And then if we’re going to show you what authentically happened on screen, it’s just going to be whatever that was, for better or for worse. If we were moreso manipulating either the players or the outcome, we would be able to control more for this variable, and decide that the show is more or less competitive.
By the way: If we decided that the show is more competitive, I think we’d be appealing to one set of people and not the other set of people, and vice versa. So maybe it’s for the best that we don’t have control over this lever. But it’s a really authentic show. It’s cut down a lot, but what you see is basically what happened. And Game Changer, even before it’s a game show, is sort of a social experiment where it’s like we’re trapping people on a stage and they have no idea what’s going to happen. How are they going to respond to what’s going to happen? Are they going to start playing the game, or are they going to throw their hands up? It’s all part of it.
AVC: You’ve built whole episodes around attacking the structure of the game. But you and your team have also done a lot of work making these rules; presumably, you want players to at least attempt the game for a while.
SR: I don’t think that we’re anticipating that anyone will simply turn their back on the game. I saw some weird meme-ish thing that had to do with people going into an escape room and they just stand there for an hour and do nothing and then say thank you very much and leave. I think every player on Game Changer fundamentally understands that playing the game is a part of what makes the show entertaining. At the same time, let’s use “Last Talent Standing.” If a player gets voted out first, second, third, or fourth, if you’re too invested in it, that’s legitimately disappointing. And to watch our players be legitimately disappointed is sad. You know? Like, fundamentally, I think the show wants to stay in the spirit of good fun. What’s the right amount of taking the game seriously? Maybe it’s like a seven out of 10ten, or a seven and a half out of 10ten. But we really aren’t in control of that dial.
AVC: “What’s The Catch” is fascinating in that context, because there’s no winning it. There’s only deciding how you and other people lose.
SR: It is a setup for art. If you’re playing that game for real, you are leaving prizes alone, or trying to get your punishments off of your prizes. And then when we see that play out, it’s just nice. And how is that funny?
AVC: It’s also got a cast that, maybe out of anybody this season, perfectly understood the game they were playing.
SR: Jacob [Wysocki] and Kurt [Maloney] and Kimia [Behpoornia] know each other very well. They’re going to be very comfortable giving each other shit. And it is a game that kind of asks that of them, right? Whereas if you put people in that episode who aren’t as comfortable with each other, they’re maybe not going to give each other as much shit as these three do. And it’s very funny that they do.
Or take “Count The Rice”: Having a range of players in that game is actually kind of important, too. Because it’s way more fun, as the audience, to watch people who are floundering and succeeding all at the same time. At least in my opinion, you know?
AVC: On that score, was it a conscious decision to have so many episodes this season with larger casts?
SR: I don’t think it’s super conscious. If there’s a piece of it that’s subconscious, it may have to do with there being so many Dropout personalities at this point that I want to get involved in the show in some way, shape, or form. But to me, it’s more that we have the means now to do these games that feel a little bit bigger. And so when it comes to games that we don’t think would be as entertaining with three contestants, we’re able to say, what about five? What about seven? With “Count The Rice,” there’s no version of “Count The Rice” that works with three.
Because like, literally, again, from a crunchy game design perspective, a player only launches into another world upon a clash with another player. So the version of “Count The Rice” with three contestants is a version where there could only be three levels to it.
There’s also this idea of cast members on my side of the aisle, right? So in “Night Shift,” Chris Grace and Demi being kind of ensemble members there support the humor of it, which, you know, I love to pull in cast for clownish roles whenever I can.
AVC: Which episode from season eight went furthest afield from your initial vision? And which ones were you like, “Oh, that’s what we thought would happen”?
SR: The one that not only went off kind of how we planned/wanted it to, but felt the most like a miracle that it did, was “Count The Rice.” Because we felt like we were entering into that episode with a lot of unknowns. It also just felt like a huge lift. And this is very technical, but we have cameras in those rooms and an ability to monitor what’s going on in those rooms, as well as everyone outside of those rooms who’s helping us and responsible for keeping the game on track. But limited, particularly for me, limited visibility into what’s actually going on that entire game long. So by the time the first cut comes back to me, it’s like, “Oh my God, such a gift. There’s so much material there. So much of it is so funny.”
I don’t know that this is quite an answer to your question, but the episodes that left the biggest gaps for the players to fill, meaning the games that in some ways were simplest on their face, were our first and last games, “Standards And Practices” and “Last Talent Standing.” Just, this is a very old-school Game Changer format: Here’s a prompt. There are an infinite number of things you could do to answer this prompt. What are you going to bring to the table, cast member? Those are the ones that asked the most from our cast, because they’re like, you’re the content here, for better or for worse. All I did is lob you a softball. Or in some cases a fastball.
Those episodes, I feel like, capture magic maybe the best, in some cases where you could have done anything, and you did this very imaginative thing. Like Zach Reino’s legally clearable Disney parody song in “Last Talent Standing,” as an example of just, like, never in a million years would I have guessed that would end up in a Game Changer episode. Jiavani saying that she’d slid into Gianmarco [Soresi]’s DMs, and that he rejected her.
AVC: I just watched the edit today that someone did of Jacob and Kurt’s improvised pod racing audio.
SR: It came out like 24 hours after the fact. That was staggering. But it’s interesting, because the most surprising thing probably at this point is when we set up a game and then the game happens and nothing breaks or is unusual about it. The meta is so much a part of Game Changer. When everything goes according to plan, it’s usually pretty surprising.
I think an episode that did go pretty according to plan would be “Noise Some Makes.” We set up a game. The players played that game faithfully and, honestly, pretty competitively. And you can’t write for this, you sort of hope it happens or doesn’t happen. But as we headed into the back half of that game, and particularly the back third, it was like, the players are playing this faithfully and the game is getting harder, and they’re getting bad at it. So are we going to have an ending to this episode that just kind of fizzles out? That could have been the case where everyone’s just scoring ones and twos, and then it’s over. And then what happened instead was a miraculous five, which made for an amazing ending. But there’s absolutely a world where that just didn’t happen.
AVC: If that does happen, what, then is your job, and your team’s job, in terms of making good TV out of it?
SR: I think we have the ability as game designers, show creators, whatever it is, to plan for things that we may do or may not do depending on how the game goes. So I think that’s kind of the lever that we have at our disposal, right? Is a little bit of maybe we could throw this in at the last minute, for lack of another option, to make for great TV. This pivot, or whatever it is. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there are at least a couple of examples of Game Changer episodes where we came up with something on the fly, maybe even with the players involved during a stopdown, because we were like, “We want to end this a little bit stronger.” But it’s tricky, because I really don’t want the show to become artificial.
And there is a piece of me that would rather accept an outcome, even if it’s not ideal, if it’s true. Because at the end of the day, that matters to me, that the show be authentic to what actually transpired, at least a little bit.
AVC: To finish out here, I have some rapid-fire questions about specific episodes. “Don’t Wake Standards And Practices”: Was Phil real? A real guy found on the street?
SR: Is Phil a real person? Look, we haven’t been able, we just in the last two weeks managed to track Phil down, finally. And I won’t tell you why, and I won’t tell you whether or not that has anything to do with season nine. I would say… Ask Phil!
AVC: “Night Shift”: What were the purposes of some of the unused newsstand items?
SR: First row was pure nonsense. Third row were communication devices that wouldn’t be all that easy to use, but could be useful. Second row was sheer trolls that would make the day shift’s life harder. To punish you twice over—they’re going to take away your time, and they’re going to hurt the day shift.
AVC: “Count The Rice”: Was it by design that players could get trapped in that final room for indefinite periods?
SR: Absolutely. We wanted for it to look like hell, a little bit. And then the notion was that they needed to square off against someone in order to get back up the ranks. At the end of the day, we had four people in competition with each other who knew the win condition, which is actually more than I thought there would be.
AVC: “What’s The Catch?”: Were you ever tempted to relent and let Jacob have a full day at Universal?
SR: Jacob did get to ride… I let him ride two rides.
AVC: “Let him” is so funny in that context.
SR: I can’t remember what they were off the top of my head, but it was our last day, and I let him have two rides. [Cackles.]
AVC: And then for “Last Talent Standing”: How long was that shoot, total?
SR: The actual shoot, I think, was four hours, which is not so bad. The thing that people do or don’t realize, I don’t know, is that we don’t start shooting an episode until after lunch, because we’re teeing everything up. So it’s like, we keep people there, they go through the works, and then we tape the shoot. And then if a shoot does go four hours, now we’re running late, you know? So it’s not that long of a shoot. It’s just a long day.
AVC: Very final question, in honor of you having Taskmaster‘s Alex Horne do a voice cameo this season: What’s your dream Taskmaster cast, either from existing contestants, or casting your own?
SR: You know, I’m out with enough Taskmaster asks that I’m not sure I should answer this, for political reasons. But I will say that any time we get to collaborate with those guys in any way, shape, or form, it’s a dream. My hope against hope now is that the cameo casting goes the other way. It doesn’t need to be me. In fact, it should almost definitely be a Brennan [Lee Mulligan] or a Vic [Michaelis] or a Lou [Wilson]. They would hold up the Jason Mantzoukas/Kumail Nanjiani mantle really well.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.