a16z Podcast
Original podcast
a16z general partners Vijay Pande and Jon Lai discuss the challenge of building a game that’s both fun and therapeutic.
6,530 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Welcome back to the A16Z Podcast. This is your new host, Steph Smith, and this week, we have a very exciting crossover episode from our sister podcast, BioEats World. In this episode, we cover the evolving intersection between bio and gaming, together with A16Z Bio and Health General Partner Vijay Pande, Games General Partner Jonathan Lai, and Olivia Webb, A16Z's Bio and Health Editorial Lead. The three come together to discuss whether games can indeed be both fun and therapeutic, and along the way, they cover the differences between strong and weak forms of technology, how technology can be used to shape behavior, whether healthy gaming is an oxymoron, the design challenge for distribution and monetization for health-centric games, and of course, what the metaverse and Web 3 might mean for the future of this space. If you enjoy
this episode, be sure to subscribe to BioEats World wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello and welcome to BioEats World, a podcast at the intersection of bio, healthcare, and tech. I'm Olivia Webb, the Editorial Lead for Bio and Health at A16Z.
Here at Andreessen Horowitz, we love to talk about the intersection of bio, health, and other areas of emerging tech. So today's episode is particularly exciting. It's a crossover between the Bio and Health Fund and the Games Fund. In this episode, you'll hear from Vijay Pande, the founding investor of A16Z's Bio and Health Fund, and a general partner focused on biopharma and healthcare. You'll also hear from Jonathan Lai, a founding investor of A16Z's Games Fund, and a general partner focused on the intersection of games, consumer social, Web 3, and more. In this episode, we discuss what constitutes a game, how games and bio can overlap, and what we call the healthy dessert problem, the challenge of building a game that's both fun and therapeutic. Let's get started.
We usually just dive right into the meat of the conversation on BioEats World, but both of your backgrounds are actually very relevant to the conversation we're about to have. So Vijay, could you kick us off by telling us about your background in games?
I feel like I've either had just like two or three jobs or zero jobs, depending on how you count them. But before coming to A16Z, I was a professor at Stanford for like almost two decades in several departments, but at the intersection of medical school and the school of sciences. And so, you know, my interest in healthcare, drug design, all of that really stemmed from that period. But actually before then, much, much earlier, actually, when I was a teenager, I was at Naughty Dog Software. So Naughty Dog is a pretty well-known studio. And actually, it was co-founded by friends of mine, Andy Gavin, Jason Rubin. And so in the early days of Naughty Dog, it was just the three of us.
That's amazing.
You know, at the time, it was just, it was just fun and interesting and so on. But, you know, Andy and Jason did a great job, especially after I moved on and built Naughty Dog into something huge.
Naughty Dog is a very famous studio. I mean, they've, they put out the Uncharted series and also The Last of Us, which is even now getting made into an HBO series, I believe. So that's, that's quite a claim to fame. You've got the VJ in the games world.
That's good to hear. Although, you know, again, like I left early enough that I think Andy and Jason deserve the credit. But it was, I think, a great experience to learn the business and to be a part of it during those early years.
That's awesome. But I'm happy to jump in and just briefly introduce myself as well. So I'm John. I'm one of the general partners in A16Z Games Fund One, which is the firm's first fund dedicated to investing in games that we launched earlier this year. And I spent over a decade working in-game as a developer and publisher. So the intersection between games and bio has like just personally interested me for so long. So I've obviously been a lifelong gamer. So I'm excited about games naturally. But what you may not know is that I was also pre-med early on in college. And so I almost went down the path of applying to med school. So in an alternate multiverse, I'd actually be working in bio instead of games.
Well, you know, it's never too late. Maybe that's part of the conversation for today.
Yeah, that's true.
I've got the right people for this conversation. Before we go too much deeper, I would like to set a definition. What is a game? How do you define a game?
Yeah. So that is,
A great, big, broad question that I think many people would disagree on. But I think most game designers, I think at a high level, have sort of coalescing three core principles as defining the game. So the idea is that a game is fundamentally a set of activities that's organized around three principles. The first is motivation, the second is mastery, and then the third is feedback. And so just really quickly, just going through those three principles. You know, motivation is just, why are you doing a certain activity? And which is commonly expressed as a goal, right? Like, for example, put the basketball through the hoop, or get to the end of the level on Super Mario. And then the best goals are intrinsically usually set by the players themselves.
And so a lot of games sort of really double down on competitive play or multiplayer play. Like, I want to get better than my friend at basketball, or I want to get to platinum rank in League of Legends. And historically, you know, those games have been the most retentive. For mastery, that is essentially, you know, once a player is motivated towards a certain goal, what are the rules of the game? Right? So in soccer, you can't touch the ball with your hands, you need to stay between these white lines. In Super Mario, like, you need to jump over enemies, you can't do these things and that. And these rules basically show the player, like, how to win. Like, this is the path to mastery, so to speak.
And then finally, there's feedback, which is just, how do players, like, learn the rules of the game? And so the best games typically teach you with iterative loops that have very clear cause and effect. So, for example, in Super Mario, you touch Goomba and you immediately die. And so that is a very clear sort of iterative loop of cause and effect. It teaches you that, okay, you need to, like, avoid the enemies as you run to the end of the level. And this also works the other way around. So when you do the right things, you know, you're rewarded with positive feedback. And so in games, this could be things like colorful explosions, EY effects, so on and so forth when you beat a level. So that's very high level, but in general, like, games are a very broad term that encompasses many different types of activities.
Just for the examples that I've used, like basketball, soccer, Super Mario, poker, chess. But I think that the way most game designers think about it is it's organized around a common set of principles.
Well, the way you describe it sounds like life is a game.
You could say that.
Maybe that's one of the takeaways from this episode.
Vijay, you've talked before about how biology is is becoming more of a developer's art. Can you talk about that elaborate on it?
Yeah, so I think, you know, when we talk about like life sciences and then its eventual impact into healthcare, I think there is this, I think, pretty cognizant, significant, ongoing shift from discovery to design from sort of empirical discovery of things like, oh, you happen to be lucky to find something almost like winning the lottery towards something that is an iterative process with continued improvement, where you build a model, you built and that allows you to build something and then you test that and you see what you didn't quite get right and you iterate. And so we see it all over the place. We see it in new ways of designing drugs and other therapeutics, new ways of designing
diagnostics, even outside of healthcare, like life sciences for food and other areas like there. I think that is much more akin to like other types of developers, like software developers. The big issue is that these loops, unfortunately, like software, the loop could be like a few seconds or a few minutes to test out code change in and iterate. Here you're lucky if you can maybe get things done in days to a week. But even, you know, a week gives you 50 shots per year at iteration and that can still be very, very material.
Well, this is a good transition point for us to start talking about the intersection between games and bio, the meat of the episode. John, you've talked about and applied Chris Dixon's essay about strong and weak forms of technology to games. Maybe start with the essay and then talk about how you conceive of this as it applies to games.
So our partner, Chris Dixon, wrote a great seminal essay a couple of years back and sort of classifying new types of technologies, of technology products into either a weak form or a strong form adaptation of that technology. And so I think a great example that he used was that when mobile phones first came out, there were sort of Weak form variations of mobile, which was a device like the BlackBerry that basically adapted the PC keyboard into a handheld device. And then there was a more strong form version that came around later on in the form of the iPhone, which basically reimagined the handheld device from ground up. And so it did not adapt any of the prior sort of generation constraints.
So there was no keyboard, it was it was just a gigantic touchscreen and fully vertically software integrated for handheld experiences and so on. So the interesting thing is that when you think about the intersection of buyer and game, there's actually been a lot of overlap already. And if you think about it from a weak form versus strong form perspective, it's primarily been to the weak form games that have existed until fairly recently. And so these are games that are primarily games, but you know, they have a secondary sort of benefit along the bio sort of healthcare lens. And so for example, you have MMOs like World of Warcraft that are that have been around for twenty, twenty plus years, and they have been great at fostering sort of friendships
online, making people, making players feel like they're part of this whole like digital community. And it's helped so many people that I know with like loneliness and depression, you know, making real friends, you know, both virtually and and in real life that they end up meeting. And for some folks that end up, you know, running guilds and clans inside of MMOs that teaches real like social leadership skills, like some of these folks are managing groups of people that are over a hundred plus, you know, and very, very complex activities when they have to take down a raid boss or, you know, organize logistics to mount a deep space expedition and Eve online and so on. And then you have games like Starcraft, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, you know, very, very high
sort of actions per minute that are training sort of hand-eye coordination and multitasking ability under very, very high pressure situations. And there's a whole sort of world of esports around these games that have developed, whether professional athletes that play video games for a living. And so these were sort of what I would characterize as sort of weak forms, sort of bio games intersections. What these games have is secondary healthcare benefit, but it's not, it's not the primary goal. The game, it's, it's a game for fun first and foremost, and then they also help players with all of these other things. And a really exciting thing is I think over the last sort of Five years or so, like we've, we've actually seen an explosion of games that are, I would consider more strong form that are designed specifically for a healthcare benefit
or, or therapy application. And there is a gameplay element to it, but it's more of an engagement or retention mechanic that's layered on top of a core utility. Um, and so for example, digital fitness has been a really, really hot category, especially with, uh, with, with COVID and people staying at home during a pandemic. Um, so supernatural, um, which is a VR app where people work out and they basically have a lot of fun while basically playing a beat saber type game. And so I think it's fascinating, sort of this, the innovation that's happening sort of amongst sort of the, the strong form products in this category where, um, you know, you, you can, you can actually target a particular sort of disease or, you
know, condition that someone has and games happens to be the, the delivery vehicle for that particular treatment.
You, you know, John, I really, really like that framework applied here. I think it's, it makes a lot of sense. And if you think about healthcare, um, you know, in this weak form of the thesis, anything in the weak form, the technology kind of tries to adapt to where the world is and just assumes the world's not going to change. And the strong form is where actually the world changes for the technology and you actually get real change in the world. And the problem in healthcare right now is that I think we've had too much of healthcare is that weak form. We're just assuming people will be a certain way and that they think the world won't change. And then like, given the way this is, what can we do? Uh, so like, you know, even the extreme version of that is like, people are gonna not be able to handle the weight loss.
So we get them things to help with the fact that they have weight or the fact that they have comorbidities. We give them pills for hypertension and so on. From a straight biology point of view, there are certain diseases that are just really complicated. It's unclear what the protein target is. It's unclear frankly, whether a small molecule drug would ever really be able to tackle it. Like Alzheimer's comes to mind and other central nervous system diseases, you know, depression comes to mind, like what's the chemical cause of the? Depression is a very complicated thing. And in those cases, actually, the cure may never be a drug, but actually it could be a game. And that actually, there's even like, I think there's been a clinical trial for games for Alzheimer's already run.
And, you know, keeping your mind active is something that people do informally, but you can imagine formalizing that. For depression, you can imagine cognitive behavioral therapy, which is very effective, but not fun at all. Gamified and like for those types of things, I think it's it's often a knee jerk reaction for people in healthcare to think that a therapeutic has to be something like a pill because we're familiar with them and they've had such great efficacy. But in these other areas where the biology is so complicated, it's intriguing thing that a game maybe should be people sort of a plan A, not plan Z. We actually want to actually change behavior. We want to change, we actually want to change the world. We want the technology to change the world. Actually,
the strong form is actually healthcare being a not sick care, but true healthcare, something where actually you help patients avoid getting sick due to behavior change. And behavior change is like one of the hardest things to get done in healthcare. Even just simple things of compliance and getting people to do what they're asked to do or what they need to do to improve their lives. Behavior change is really hard, but in tech, behavior change and in games, it can be, it seems to happen so naturally.
Yeah. And and games are are best in class at actually teaching new forms of behavior as well and in getting people to to stick with it. Right. Like I was saying earlier, like the whole set of principles that most games are organized around this, hey, like, you know, teach, teach a player some set of goals and intrinsically motivate them towards accomplishing that that that set of goals. And then, you know, help them, help them along that path. Like, you know, progression systems and so on and so forth to get them to come back and do the same set of activities over and over again. And then to your point, that's sometimes exactly what you need, you know, in healthcare as well, right? If you're trying to convince, get someone to lose weight or. Practice a particular treatment regimen, like these are activities that you need to motivate people along. And then games are best in class in motivation and onboarding.
I actually also like your definition of games to start off with, because I think a lot of people's knee jerk reaction to a healthy game. It's kind of like a healthy dessert, right? Either it's not going to be healthy or it's not going to be a dessert. You, you kind of have the choice, like if it's actually going to be good, it's not going to be healthy. And if it's actually going to be good for you, it's, it's not going to be tasty. But I think games can be different, right? Cause you, you know, there's a lot of things that can be fun and can be addictive and positive ways that you just want to do it every day. But maybe that's what people need to be convinced of, and perhaps that's what we need to see examples of.
Yeah, and I think you're hitting on one of the fundamental design challenges of the space historically, which has been. It's really challenging to design a game which doesn't fall into this sort of a chasm in the middle where it's not fun enough to be a game. But it's also not as effective. It's just like going to the gym or taking a pill or actually seeing a, you know, seeing a doctor or therapist, right? And so.
Yeah, yeah, but frankly, also you could fall onto the side where you do, it's a great game, but it doesn't help you. Or it's great at healthcare, but it's not fun, you know? And so that's basically, I guess, uh, those are the traditional spaces. So I think those are two different ways that you can fail as well.
And I think I, um, the reason why we're seeing so many strong form games emerge is that just that the definition of games has broadened. And just the number of gamers in the world is just like rapidly increased. And so I remember when I was growing up, games used to be a very niche activity, right? Like the, you know, the nineties, when I did most of my gaming, there was something that, uh, you know, only little kids did. And it was, you know, gaming was basically you either spent time in an arcade in the mall or you were in your mom's basement, you know, playing console games essentially.
Yeah.
Um, but now, you know, there's PC games, there's mobile games, there's VR, there's, you know, AR games, there's like, you know, Alexa games, like there's Wordle, there's Crosswords, there's. And so pretty much like almost everyone in the world, it's at some point in time has played a game or is a gamer. And I think that the latest stats that I read is that there are now, you know, 3.2 billion gamers in the world out of five billion internet users. That's almost, you know, sixty, sixty-five percent of users playing games, you know, actively today. You know, when, when you, when you think about it that way, like a therapy app or. You know, now that's designed for weight loss. Like if you target people through games, you're basically distributing to the majority of the population and you're doing it in a way that's, um, you're sort of meeting the user where they are, which is they're most likely already playing games.
And so you don't need to teach them to do something that they're wholly unfamiliar with. So I think that's really exciting.
Do you have thoughts on how developers can overcome that? Let's call it the healthy dessert design challenge. Because I'm thinking of, let's say, the HIPAA compliance training that I used to have to take. And it's a multiple choice with the video component and it was built on, I don't know, Windows 99. It's just, it's so outdated. So how do you think developers can, can come together or bridge that gap between healthcare technology as it stands and VR?
I have one theory about this, which is that historically, the teams that have made these apps have come from one side of the industry, but not both. And so you've had, you know, the talent pools up to now have been largely separated, right? Like you had games people that don't know any science and they're basically building games. And they, and they just like happen to build something that's good for a particular condition. Or you have, you know, science, healthcare, you know, biotech folks that don't know anything about games and they're trying to build what they think is a fun game. And so I think, you know, when you have teams that don't have sort of mixed experience across, across both industries, then you end up with products that are sort of one-sided or end up falling into that sort of, you know, chasm in the middle.
And so I think the holy grail for me is finding a team where you have both people that understand games, can build fun games, and also you complement that with folks, you know, from the bio industry that understand, you know, what, you know, what sort of therapy sort of applications you're trying to solve for, like you're building that into the game and they're sort of working harmoniously together. That's sort of maybe you have.
Yes, I'm right with you on that, except I'll go one step further. And this has been one of our key theses in the Health Fund, which is actually to have people, individuals that know both. Because it's great to have teams where you have each. But like when you have individuals that know both, it's kind of like the teams are telepathic, right? They can read each other's minds, they can live in each other's worlds. And I don't think nowadays it shouldn't be that hard. Especially as you mentioned, like kids grow up as gamers. There must be a whole new sort of generation of M Ds and P H Ds who know gaming very deeply and and get it. And that just didn't exist thirty years ago because of the pervasiveness of gaming and the ambiguity of gaming now.
I think with this generation, you'll have someone who should be an expert in both. And that will be the unique opportunity because what they, while they're understanding the healthcare challenge, they also intrinsically know what's a great game because they have good taste because they've played all the great games. It'd be intriguing to imagine a studio whose reason for existing was to create healthy games. But that we haven't seen yet, right? I mean, that's something that is, that seems natural for this intersection. But I guess that hasn't sprung up or have you seen stuff like that?
We've started seeing a couple. I think they're fairly early.
Up to now, I feel like a lot of the healthy games, the sort of purpose built, it's like, hey, like I need to build an app specifically for this condition. And they built sort of a single player game that's used only by a certain, you know, hospital or set of doctors or something. But, you know, I, I think the transition that we're excited about is actually creating like a best in class game, right? Like, what would it look like if you were to actually try to make Fortnite for? You know, mental illness, for example, right? Like something that's a large free-to-play game that's, you know, run and developed by, you know, hundreds of people, that has live apps, it's updated regularly, that basically is like
some of the best games that you can spend your time on, and it's also developed specifically to be healthy.
Well, that brings me to one of my next questions, because I imagine one of the issues that the studios that you see run into is the monetization and distribution aspects. Because if someone could build a Fortnite for depression and it's free to play, does it remain free to play and how does that studio monetize?
And then secondarily, how do people find out about it? Because I think the distribution aspects of games can be challenging, but even more challenging when you're talking about it with a healthcare lens.
Right.
Yeah, you know, there's a couple of different sort of tailwinds on the healthcare side that probably this connects to. So one of the first ones is that more and more healthcare is being driven direct to consumer. And, you know, this comes from various upforces, like from years ago, high deductible plans, but more recently, like even COVID has forced people to think more explicitly about their health. And so I think people are looking and you could have a direct-to-consumer-like motion where the game would be sold that way. That's one possibility. On the other extreme is something where I could imagine a day where, you know, the doctor's talking to a patient, whether it be a teenager or adult or whatever, and the doctor prescribes a game.
And then that game is something that the person buys, maybe, you know, in the healthcare world, there's these PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, PBM for games or whatever this type of digital therapeutic is. And you'd get your game and the expectation is as you play for a certain number of hours, hopefully it's so much fun that gets easy to do. And that that would be the channel. So you could imagine either channel would work and monetization through the latter channel would be natural with a game's PBM or whatever. I mean, then there's a whole infrastructure for that, which doesn't exist today, but in principle could exist.
Yeah. I am super excited about that, the direct-to-consumer sort of opportunities here, because I think that that leans into what games are naturally good at, right? These games are naturally viral experiences. Like the way most multiplayer games spread is through friend referrals. Come, come play this game with me, Vijay. It's so fun. And then you download the game and we play it together. And then over the last sort of decade, there's been an explosion of sort of like viral distribution channels. So Twitch is phenomenal for promoting discovery of new games. Like I think one of the largest verticals on YouTube now. And so I think you can really lean into all of those channels when you have a direct to consumer mission of the game. And then the holy grail for me would be a game led sort of bottom up
sales motion into, you know, hospitals and doctors, right? That start with the patients. And so imagine like a patient going in to see their doctor and saying, hey, doctor, I sort of playing this game. And it's been amazing for treating, you know, X, Y, Z in the hospital. You know, arthritis is part of my treatment, you know, or insurance paid for my subscription essentially. And once you have that sort of bottom up consumer groundswell, I feel like that's, that's going to be really powerful.
I'm dead. If the performance can be demonstrated, and this would be presumably through some RCT or something like that. If the performance can be demonstrated, the clinical infrastructure, I think, would be curious to do it. With that said, my guess is the first probably place to go would be probably through direct to consumer, where consumers really just feel like they're getting a benefit from it. That's just so straightforward and natural for games. Well, and one thing that I often lament is that, and this is true for this general conversation, this conversation in generally, is that tech is something that often is exciting and fun and healthcare is boring and difficult. And selling tech versus health is like something like cocaine versus broccoli or something like that.
And it's just broccoli is not fun compared to the dopamine hits that you can get. And I think if the game is good, it'll be the best broccoli ever. I, I, I, I think we're seeing examples of that because there are things that people do get addicted to that are gamified. And Peloton is one that I, I, I deal with and enjoy. But like, I think people can see that there can be this composition and it can be healthy. It is, as you said, it's still early.
I don't think the exciting thing is when. The healthy and the dessert part are actually synergistic. You know, we just invested in a company, Lumi, which makes a game called Kinder World. And basically, the point that the core loop in that game is that you're raising a plant. The primary sort of health benefit that you get from it is that it teaches you to be mindful and to be present. And to basically take moments from your day when you can just sort of like relax and water your plant. The players of this game just love it for just like little moments of meditated calm that it brings them throughout the day. And it also reminds them to take care of themselves as well, right? Like you should drink some water while you're watering your plant, you know? And one of the things the developers are sort of working on now, which we're really excited about, is adding multiplayer mode.
Where, you know, BJ, you and I might be in charge of watering the same plant. And like, you know, maybe we both need to water it in order for the plant to survive. So then it actually ends up being sort of a checkup system where BJ, if you haven't watered the plant in three days, I'm actually going to text you and see how's everything going? Like, are you okay? Like, should we get together? So I think it's an example of a fun dessert that I think actually works in both directions. It's really powerful.
While you were talking about it, it actually got me curious because in healthcare for tech startups and healthcare, one of the big challenges sometimes is barrier to entry. But in games, how do you think about barrier to entry? Like, because, you know, in principle, the games we're talking about could be made by other people too. But like, nobody worries, no one wants to play a clone of Fortnite, right? And I guess there, there's a bit of a network effect because they're multiplayer mode. But like, how do you think about that? And it makes me wonder whether games could be a means for healthcare to also have that barrier to entry. And that would otherwise be difficult.
This is actually an example of a case where I think strong point games actually have an advantage over weak point games. Because if they're trying to take on Fortnite by building another Battle Royale game, that's really, really challenging to your point, right? Like Fortnite has hundreds of millions of people that have already played there, right? Like, all of your friends probably already have it installed and you have to overcome all of that inertia to go against the market leader. But, you know. You can put yourself in an entirely different category if it's Fortnite for weight loss or something, right? Where the primary goal of the game is actually weight loss. And then, you know, it's got all of these retention and engagement loops that are inherited from a best in class sort of free to play game like Fortnite.
It puts you into its own category and ultimately you might end up sort of, you know, getting people to download and try it that otherwise would not have been interested in playing Fortnite. You open yourself up to a new audience potentially.
Well, it goes both ways, right? Because when company building, you kind of want to have a barrier to entry, right? So it's kind of, if you can have this multiplayer mode or other strong forms, it sounds like that could be a way. It's just harder to duplicate. You know, when you look at other technologies, like technologies for meditation or something, there's like a lot of different meditation apps. And I think if that was gamified in a more of a strong form way, maybe that would have more barrier to entry.
Well, I think we would be remiss if we didn't end on Metaverse, Web3, blockchain. Obviously, this changes a lot of things, but how do you think of this affecting games, especially like healthy games?
Okay, so let's first take like Metaverse. So I think the VR element of Metaverse and just the multiplayer VR element of Metaverse is very intriguing for creating a new world where you could have a game, a workout or whatever, that would not exist in the same way anywhere else. And I think there are a few examples of that right now. I think John listed some at the beginning of the discussion. So I think that is interesting. What I'd be curious about is if the social side of the Metaverse also starts to kick in and that there's something social. I think this type of thing, if done socially, would be that much more sticky.
The crypto part is interesting, too. And while there's oracle problems to deal with, just to know, I think in principle, there are health insurance companies that, let's say, in principle, might reduce your premium if they knew you were stepping a certain number of steps or doing these workouts or so on. So there could be ways, if there's ways to sort of certify that, that could be interesting. So and I think in time, healthcare data that's even generated in these games could be interesting. And Web3 may be a natural way to do that. But both of those technologies are nascent, and this games and healthcare is nascent. So we're sort of talking about nascent squared or cubed. It's early, multi-fold, right?
I would just say that the metaverse is something that we believe in, but we also don't think it's the Ready Player Me definition, where there's one single gigantic virtual world that everyone's logging into somehow. And it's VR only and so on and so forth. There's a bunch of sort of popular misconceptions around what the metaverse is. And you know, sort of our view is that it's probably more likely to be a multiverse, where there's sort of a network of interconnected metaverses. And so, you know, Fortnite, I would argue, is actually already a metaverse. Roblox is a metaverse, right? Like League of Legends is another metaverse. Like, these are universes filled with rich character and IP and that have hundreds of millions of people that have built friendships and in some cases have jobs, you know, and that
are building mods. And I think the metaverse is sort of already here, and that games are sort of building blocks and sort of metaverse-like sort of experiences that will continue to grow and get bigger and better over time. And then we're still very early in figuring out what Web3 games will ultimately become. If you think back on mobile computing and mobile games, which is probably the last major computing paradigm that emerged, you had a game like Angry Birds, which was also one of the first sort of mobile games that everyone had heard of and given a try. I feel like we're still very much in sort of the Angry Birds sort of era of Web3 gaming. And then you have your first sort of mass market game that had reached a popular
appeal. And there's still like so much more that can be built because, you know, At the time that Angry Birds came out, you could not have predicted that Clash of Clans and Candy Crush and Pokemon Go and all of these really amazing games that are all very, very different in terms of gameplay mode and experiences than Angry Birds would ultimately come out over the next five years. And so I think we're all sort of similar state with Web3 games where there will be all sorts of sort of crypto-nated forms of game plan and business models that will emerge. But no doubt that some of them will also have an overlap with Bio as well. But it's early. Yeah, it's definitely exciting times.
Thank you for joining BioEats World. BioEats World is hosted and produced by me, Olivia Webb, with the help of the Bio and Health team at A16Z and edited by Phil Hegseth. BioEats World is part of the A16Z Podcast Network. If you have questions about the episode or want to suggest topics for a future episode, please email [email protected]. Last but not least, if you're enjoying BioEats World, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
