S02:E17 | Creative Chat with John Harper: The Iterative Impulse in Making Art, Playtesting RPGs, & Cooking at Home

Welcome back to another Johnversation, wherein I sit down with graphic artist and game designer (and my partner) John Harper! This season, we're digging into aesthetic and mechanical iteration: John takes us through his process for creating art, playtesting his games, and co-running a food lab in our home kitchen.

I love talking with John about creative practice and process, and I'm sure you'll love hearing his insights (and his tips and tricks for making amazing steak). 

Enjoy, and, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine!

Resources

• John's social media | Twitter: @john_harper, Instagram: @onesevendesign, Substack, Bluesky: @johnharper
• The first Johnversation | S01:E17 | Creative Chat with John Harper: Cataloging Inspiration, Remixing Tropes, and Decommodifying Craft
• John's games, including AGON | johnharper.itch.io and Evil Hat Productions
• Cold-sear steak video | America's Test Kitchen on YouTube

IG: @littleoracles

Transcript

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[Intro music]

Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth. Welcome to another Creative Chat, one of our special Johnversation episodes. We did one of these back in Season One, and I'll link that in the show notes, but today I'm sitting down with graphic artist and game designer — and my partner in living, laughing, and loving [chuckles] — John Harper. John, thanks so much for coming on the show again.


John Harper: Yeah, it’s my pleasure; great to be back.

AA: So I like to have John on the show once per season because he's been a career creative for, like, ever, and so he's got a lot of insight and experience and I really enjoy talking with him about all this creative practice and process stuff, and like I said in our first conversation episode, it's something we talk about with each other a lot because both of us  are independent creators in our daily lives. So today because, uh, this season — Season Two — is all about play as practice, I wanted to sit down with you, John, and talk about something that both you and I are very interested in when it comes to creative process, and that's this idea of iteration. And I wanna come at it from a few different angles because it seems to me that iteration and experimentation, and learning, and then revising shows up in your process in a lot of ways, and it's kind of agnostic of product. So the first thing I wanna talk about is this idea of aesthetic iteration. And this is something that we were just discussing while we were making dinner the other night, how you do a lot of, like, drafting and redrafting when you're making a piece of art, or laying out a game product, or whatever it is, and sometimes  that that process gets you to somewhere new and sometimes it doesn't. So I would just love to know a little bit about that process, why it works for you, why you do it, especially in cases when it “doesn't go anywhere,” so to speak.

JH: Yeah. For me, it’s– the process of iteration is a way of exploring possibilities, uh, that maybe I wouldn't get to otherwise. If I have a concept of what I want, it might be a very strong concept to start, so the process of work will be trying to make what I'm seeing, um, or reading match my initial plan or concept for the thing.

AA: Yeah.

JH: And that can be its own challenge, creatively and artistically, just to produce the thing that's in your head to some degree of similarity or fidelity to what you're trying to do.

AA: Right.

JH: And sometimes that can just be the whole thing. Like, you have this concept and you just are working, and refining, and refining it to– 'cause you know what you want to be, and it's not that thing yet. And I think that's– that's always part of the– of the creative process for me. But I've found over the years — uh, you said I've been doing this for a long time; I am old [laughs] —

AA: [laughs]

JH: This is– this will be year 30—

AA: Dang! [laughs]

JH: –of– of creative work for me, like professionally, I guess.

AA: Yeah.

JH: And I– I have kind of developed methods that– that suit me better, uh, than others, and one of them is, trying to get to that place, that refinement place, and get something out that resembles the idea. But then often I– I wanna leave it, uh, and come back to it later, even if that's just an hour; it might be a week; it might be a year. But some break in the process there to come back and look at it with somewhat more fresh eyes. And that will often cause problems to jump out more easily or I'll see, you know, where, where it needs to be refined further. But in that process, often I can get stuck in kind of just trying to refine the thing that I had already thought of, and I've found this separate iterative track to kind of be a way of breaking out of that and just, not arbitrarily, but, but without a lot of preciousness, just kinda go, “Okay, well let's just flip this horizontally. Cut the bottom off, put it on the top. Change this color to its, you know, [chuckles] corresponding color– color on the wheel. Change the font completely, make the text way bigger, make it way smaller. Just try something very, very different.

AA: Yeah.

JH: And kind of see like: oh, hmm, well that's interesting; that does kind of work better if it's more bottom-heavy or if the– if it has more white space, or if it’s more crowded or, you know, something that wasn't part of my plan initially. Once the parts are kind of there, it's kind of a collage process, sort of.

AA: Right, I can see that.

JH: Just starting to cut it up, remix it. You know, hold these two things up to each other and go, “Hmm, darker or lighter? Bigger or smaller?” And kind of get a different direction to it, or a different vibe to it that I wasn’t gonna get if I was just trying to make the initial concept in my head.

AA: Right. And when you say, uh, earlier, you said you wanna “get it out,” you mean get it out of your head, basically? Like, get it from someplace where it isn't just theoretical, to someplace where it is, you know, tangible in some way, even if it's a digital product?

JH: Yeah, a lot of the stuff– you know, I have, like, the things I'm supposed to be doing, um–

AA: [chuckles]

JH: –daily and weekly, to complete projects and that kind of thing, but on top of that, there's all the other creative work that is coming to me, or is future stuff, or new things or whatever.

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: And, you know, I– I've been burned enough– [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] Right.

JH: –uh, opening a folder years later, like, “Oh yeah, I should go back to this project.” And like, it really isn’t there. I didn't really put anything down that's gonna help me now. So I try to avoid that as much as I can and squeeze out a couple hours here and there. If I have an idea for something I know I'm not gonna get to for a long time, I try to get something down, an image that’s evocative of what I wanna make later, or– and text or something together, so that future me will open that and go, “Oh, right, this was cool. I should work on this more.” I have an idea of what this was supposed to be. It's not just a title or a, a few notes or something.

AA: Yeah.

JH: Yeah, that– that has happened a lot. [chuckles] I've had several projects. AGON, uh, was one of those, um — it's a roleplaying game, you know — but there were several different versions of a sec– potential second edition, and those sat around for a long — over 10 years before we ever went back to it. And fortunately, I remembered that I had those— [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Right!

JH: –and was able to to kind of go back and mine that stuff for the future project.

AA: Yeah. Well, and you called it a collage process, which I think is really interesting; like, it's a collage in and of itself in the individual project, but do you ever find yourself going through all of those folders and files of past projects and collaging anything together as part of that iterative process? Like, do you mix and match and find new ways to recreate there and remix?

JH: Yeah, sometimes. Especially with game stuff, I will have developed something a long time ago, maybe for a system that I thought I was gonna make that never came together, or maybe for somebody else's system. And again, with AGON and the– the Paragon system, which is kind of this, sort of, setting-free version of the game system to be applied to different genres and stuff like that. I have old projects that I thought might be their own game, or would be, like I said, using someone else's system, that now I look at this Paragon system that we wrote for AGON, uh, and go, “Oh wait, yeah; this– that old idea would be a perfect fit for this now.” So I might have graphic design already made for it. It might have, you know, a cover and a logo and some layout files and stuff like that.

AA: Yeah; right.

JH: But I just didn't get anywhere with it in terms of how the game was working, and I've got a couple future projects like that, that are kind of sitting there waiting graphically and– and visually they're kind of already there, and they just need this– this new game system, which is well-suited for them to kind of be slotted in and released that way. And sometimes it works the other way. Sometimes I have an idea for game design that doesn't have yet its own, like, identity, and I'll remember some old graphics project and go, “Ah, I can repurpose that for this; that'll be a nice fit; I won’t have to start from scratch.” 

AA: Mm-hmm. You know, you're talking about game-making and applying conceptual elements and thematic and almost branding elements — those– those looks and those feels — to games, which have a critical component of mechanics, right? So there is an interlock there with mechanical iteration, too, which is this concept of playtesting, which is something that several people have brought up here on this podcast, that is a concept I don't know that everyone is familiar with. And it's a very iterative process as well, so could you go into that? How that works in, you know, the development of– of a game iteratively and experimentation-wise?

JH: Yeah, it's a big part of it. One of the biggest parts really to me is the playtesting process as part of the design process, not as a phase at the end. Some game development, the way it works, it's often a case where, you know, the game will be fairly far down the road and the playtesting be kind of a phase that happens–

AA: Mm, like, kind of a confirmation bias; like, let's prove—

JH: Kind of, yeah; like, just making sure that, you know, nothing is actually broken. These numbers are, are the numbers we want it to have; less conceptual, more just, um, does it work the way we thought it would and that kind of thing.

AA: Right.

JH: And that's– if that works for someone's process, that's a good way to do it. But for me, it's much more about starting the playtest as early as possible. If I just barely have a character sheet — in the case of a tabletop game — and maybe not even that, but something — an interface for the players — some kind of starting idea of what it's gonna be, what I'm trying to make it be. And then some kind of mechanic that not just, “Let's just use group consensus”; something– something to test, whether or not it’s gonna be in the final game, and then starting that playtest process really, really early and just seeing right away, like: is it sparking with people? Are they excited to go into this world as these characters in this situation–

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: –and to have a mechanic about the gloom of the world, or their heart's desire, or whatever the hook is there as a system. Do people find it interesting? Is it boring? Is it too complicated? Is it too simple? These characters: are they fit for the situation they're in? And, you know, all those kind of things you need to know about a tabletop RPG> And then, through– through play and iteration as fast as possible, hopefully — maybe weekly games, or– or more frequently if possible, but that's very rare these days [laughs]—

AA: [chuckles] Yeah.

JH: –playing, kind of getting the vibe. Maybe the game dies right there; people are like, “Eh, I am not into this,” you know, and then I have to find a different group to playtest with, or just abandon it, or whatever. But if there's a spark, then I have a week or so, whatever, to iterate the next thing and say, “Okay, that was working, but there were too many parts. I need to streamline it.” Or “It was too simple; no one had anything to grab onto. I need to give them more material to work with.” And then the next week, we show up again, and we have new character sheets, and new dice stuff, and play again. And hopefully through that process of play, iterate, play, iterate, play, iterate, the game starts to take shape. aAnd the painful part of that is that most design projects are abandoned, at least for– maybe not forever, but at least temporarily. [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] Yeah.

JH: And when you're doing that with a group of people, uh, you know, it's not just your time, it's their time that they're giving.

AA: Yeah.

JH: And it can be– it can be painful when that happens, when you play and iterate something for a month or two or something, and ultimately decide, like, “No, this isn't working; it’s not coming together,” and everyone kind of goes, “Ah, damn. Yeah, I– I thought it would, but, yeah; nah, we, we spent all these hours on it and–” [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] “We tried.”

JH: Yeah. And usually, you know, at this point in my game-making career, and in picking the people I playtest with, we're gonna have fun doing that. It's not gonna be like this tedious chore. Those– those hours spent together playing are gonna be a good time.

AA: Sure.

JH: But at the end of it, sometimes you do have to sort of say goodbye to it. But that's the point of it, you know? It’s– it is a test. It's– it's– before we put the ship out to sea, you know, we're gonna, put it through all these trials, and make sure it’s a ship, and it’ll float, and it’ll go where we want it to go. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] I– I hope so! [laughs] So do you ever find that there's, like, a symbiosis with the teration on the mechanical side — that playtesting stuff — and the iteration on the design side — the look and the feel? Do those two inform each other?

JH: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. At least the way I tend to work, 'cause as much as I can. I want to give the players some kind of style touchstone, design piece, or something. And if it can possibly be my thing that I've made, that's even better 'cause, now I’m also testing the, sort of, brand and marketing materials and everything for the game at the same time.

AA: Yeah; right.

JH: If people look at that and go, “I can't read … what is this game called?”

AA: [laughs]

JH: “This is– this is too graphic; I can't read those letters.” Or just, you know, they look at the sheet and go, “Oh, are we, like, space truckers?” And I go, “Nooo. That's not what you're supposed to be getting from this.” [chuckles]

AA: [laughs]

JH: It's a way of testing that immediate reaction, and also just to see if it helps with the immersion in what we're doing. And a cool graphic of some sort, or typeface, or logo, or something can help ground everybody. And I think tabletop games, all tabletop games really benefit a lot from all those materials. Whether it's sound stuff, or music, or visual stuff, or whatever. Having that way of helping all of us kind of get into the same headspace together: it's a shorthand, you know? It’s– especially at the beginning of the process, I don't want to be there giving a, you know, hour-long discourse– [laughs]

AA: [laughs]

JH: –on “this is what the setting is like, and there's this guy, and that guy, and this is what happened before, da-da-da-da-da.” [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Yeah.

JH: I can just put down a character sheet and an image or something and people go, “Oh, okay; so we're like pirates, but we’re, like– it’s in a weird space setting,” or something like that. [laughs]

AA: Right, right. Wasn't there a time where you were thinking about making the AGON logo type, the actual word AGON? It was gonna be a capital Gamma instead of the G?

JH: Yeah, the first design was the Greek letters on the cover. And, uh, it stayed that way for a while there, for first edition. Ultimately it felt too, kind of, forced to me.

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: And I got some feedback from people, too, who were kind of like, “Eh, it makes sense, but also it kind of; you know, it's not the Greek edition of the game.”

AA: Right; yeah.

JH: “It has a bit of a weird feel.” It wasn't like a no, or a strong feeling necessarily, but when we were first playing — that was a playtest-iterate thing that we did. We played well almost every other day for, oh, the first week.

AA: Wow.

JH: And then the second week we played maybe three times. And by the end of that, it was– pretty much had come together, [chuckles] and, uh — yeah, that group was just on top of it, and we all had a lot more free time back then.

AA: Right. [laughs]

JH: This was 2005. But the very first character sheets and little graphics that I brought to that first night, it was written like that — in with the Greek — and I think that helped–

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: –in the sense that we're talking about here, because everyone looked at that and went, “Oh, okay; I know what we're doing. This is classical Greek hero stuff. So it– it was useful during the playtesting to have it in that form.

AA: Right; right. Well, and then, you know, the ultimate iteration is, is a second edition, right? You know, speaking of AGON, we have the AGON second edition, which you've– you've iterated on that and created something slightly new. And I know that you were really experimenting with the art style–

JH: Yeah, that changed completely.

AA: Yeah! And, like, taking it a little bit further than that initial gut reaction of, “Oh yes, I understand that this is a Greek heroes game.” So do you wanna talk a little bit about how those changes kind of fell into place with– with AGON specifically, and the second edition?

JH: Yeah, when we — Sean Nittner and I — were– did the mechanical design, and Sean always remembers the right number; I think we did 18 versions or something.
AA: Oh my god! [laughs] Really? Holy cow! [laughs]

JH: It might've been more than that. I can never remember. He– he always says it in interviews, and I– I can't remember the number. [chuckles] It's something like that. It might've been 20 or something.

AA: Oh my gosh.

JH: And we– we played and iterated probably six or seven of those, and then other people in our sort of beta, inner circle playtest group got ahold of it and played through all those other versions, and at Go Play Northwest, we played it, playested it, with– with genius players who helped us a lot.

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: And so yeah: it iterated many, many times, and it went very far afield, and the sort of collage-y kind of thing happened several times with me, where we got to a point where we were pretty happy with it, and I kind of just stepped back and went, “Well, what if we just cut, like, half of this?”

AA: [laughs]

JH: “Does it still work? Does it still make sense? 'Cause it would be way better if it was just leaner.” And we were like, no; no, it can’t be half but maybe that’s a good direction to try.”

AA: [laughs] “I've got this bicycle; what if it was just one wheel?”

JH: [chuckles] Yeah. I think I did that to Sean at least three times during the process where we were pretty happy, and a few days went by and I was like, “I have got bad news.” [laughs]

AA: [chuckles] Oh boy.

JH: “I'm breaking everything apart.” And he was like, “Okay.” So I think it's a good case study for people who– who have the game, or want to check it out. It's– it's a very slim game, [chuckles] um, and it doesn't use a lot of words to convey what it's trying to do, and it doesn't have a lot of systems to do what it's doing, and part of that is because of that process of stepping back, and looking at it over and over again, and just trying to pull as much off as we could, and also kind of mix-and-match and do things that maybe weren't part of our initial ideas, but through play and through exploration, we started to get to something.

AA: Right.

JH: And then graphically, kind of the same thing– a similar thing happened, where the first edition was all Thomas Hope drawings, that were his sort of copies of statues and reliefs from antiquity. And so I was taking those — the original was this very, sort of, spare, black and white line art kind of thing — and I thought I would take the same idea and use this kind of imagery from antiquity, but give it this very colorful treatment. So it would look kind of like first edition, but with this kind of obvious, kind of new coat of paint on it. And that was going fine, but I, just, it struck me out of the blue one day; this– I was working on a different graphic for another thing, and it kind of looked like the sort of black figure pottery style, and that was wrong for this project. And I was like, “Oh yeah, this– I shouldn’t go in that direction, 'cause it kind of has that– it's looking like this, sort of, ancient Greek thing.” [chuckles] And I went, “Wait a minute; hmm.”

AA: [laughs] “But I have an ancient Greek thing!”

JH: “I need an ancient Greek thing!” And– and so I spent, I don't know, almost a year, kind of like teaching myself how to get better at that style of illustration and graphics, and as we worked on the game, and it became more streamlined and simplistic, I wanted the art to be kind of bold and straightforward–

AA: Mm; mm-hmm.

JH: –and we started to really take our new touchstones pretty seriously — modern myths: Xena, and the Fast and the Furious, and that kind of thing. And I started to really think, “Okay, yeah; like, it should evoke the ancient world, 'cause that's the setting of the game, but it should also kind of have a somewhat modern take on that.” And at a glance, you know, you wouldn't think it's just trying to reproduce these classic looks; it's something of its own style. Which is kinda what the game is supposed to be: it’s set in these myths and legends of the ancient world, but it’s supposed to be your own thing, with kind of modern sensibilities in a lot of ways.

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: So as we got to that in the writing and the game design, the art kind of started to merge conceptually in that direction, too. And it took a long time for me to, kind of, create a skillset to produce all of the art for that book in a reasonable amount of time– [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Yeah!

JH: –because when started, it took me way too long to do a piece, so I had to level-up to get that done.


AA: Yeah, there's something so interesting about the juxtaposition within each piece, right? 'Cause you have these very clean-lined, silhouette-style, black-figure–inspired characters in the foreground, and then most of the backgrounds of those pieces are these color washes, almost like watercolor. And I feel like that kind of gets at this concept of: yeah, it's ancient, but also it's nebulous; it can be kind of whatever you want to project onto this watercolor background.

JH: Yeah. Yeah.

AA: So you've, you've done a nice job. [laughs]

JH: [laughs] I'm proud of that one. It– it was a really fun project.

AA: Well, and I had a good time — I mean, just to, insert myself here [chuckles] — I had a really good time writing the music for the trailer for the Kickstarter; uh, when we made the Kickstarter video. And your request was, “I want it to sound like this track from that virtual reality game Beat Saber.” [laughs]

JH: [chuckles]  Yeah. It was very hype; it’s like an exercise track, basically–

AA: It is; yeah.

JH: –about being a li being a living legend.

AA: Right.

JH: So when I first heard it, I was like, “Yes, this is modern AGON; this is what it is.”

AA: So it was this kind of heavy industrial, hard sounding, driving beat piece with lots of clashing metal sounds, and, you know, it echoes the– the ancient world in that way, but it feels so modern.

JH: And you pretty much hit it immediately.

AA: [chuckles] Thanks!

JH: But we did iterate after that.

AA: We did! Yeah, we totally did. That was a really fun process for me to do together with you — not that we haven't done a zillion projects in our professional careers together, so we have a history of– of iterating — but– but yeah; it was really fun to– to do that together.

JH: Yeah. It was– it was great. And I, you know, got to be the naive client–

AA: [laughs]

JH: –that had the really unreasonable request at the 11th hour to be like, “Could the timing of this all be different?”

AA: Yeah!

JH: “'Cause it needs to be– to have a different time signature, essentially. You can do that to a song, right? That’s no problem?”

AA: [laughs] No problem; no problem. Yeah, and I think that kind of gets at this idea of, you know, iterating alongside people who maybe aren't speaking the same language of the art that you're working in. And that's always a learning curve for everybody because you were saying things to me, and I had to kind of interpret what you were saying because you don't have the exact same words to talk about music that I have.

JH: Yeah, yeah; it was more kind of pointing at another thing–

AA: Yeah.

JH: –and being like, “This is kind of what I want. I don't know how to– how to describe it.”

AA: Yeah.

JH: And then with the edit, when Ryan was doing the edit, that was driving it, too.

AA: Right.

JH: Because we needed it to fit a certain rhythm, and then–

AA: The video edit you're talking about, with Ryan Dunleavy.

JH: Yeah, the video edit, yeah. And the– the original, sort of, script had a certain number of pieces, and then those– that number changed– [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] Right!

JH: –and the overall length of the video didn't really change. So that mean it had different breakpoints now, all of a sudden. And the music was written specifically to hit these crescendo beats of the video.

AA: Yeah.

JH: So, yeah, it had to– everything had to just, sort of, shift and change and slinky around to make that work, and it did. It turned out great.

AA: [laughs] Collage process.

JH: Yeah.

[Music break]

AA: You know, speaking of creative projects that we do together, the other angle that I kind of alluded to when I teed us up, here, to talk about iteration was the fact that you and I have what is effectively a food laboratory in our home kitchen, and we iterate on a particular dish until we quote-unquote “get it right”–

JH: [laughs]

AA: –which, obviously, that's kind of fallacious, but I think we both value that experimentation within that food space, 'cause it yields a better meal, or it's just a fun experiment, or whatever it is. So I'd love to talk about that. And before we get into it, though, can you just give us a quick overview of, like, your food and cooking history? Like, have you always cooked? What's your experience in the kitchen? Would you consider yourself a foodie? Just kind of as a waypoint, because this is something that I don't know that everyone does in their home kitchen.

JH: Mm.

AA: So, where did you start out, and, kind of, why are we doing this now? [laughs]

JH: [laughs] Yeah. Well growing up, I didn't cook a whole lot; just a bit. I would have, like, the thing that I made — you know, like, that was “John's dish” that I made for the family or whatever. (There's this kind of, like, breakfast sausage roll thing that I do that, that, uh, it was my thing to do.) But mostly it was my mom. She's an amazing cook, and provided meals, you know, for the community, and all the other kids would come over, and, you know. And she would do these themed, you know, pizza party nights and make Sesame Street menus and stuff for everyone–

AA: [laughs] They were hand-drawn menus, weren't they?

JH: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And– and colored and, um, you know, it was this hosting kind of thing that was really amazing, um, around food. And that's, that's where I got a lot of my, you know, that’s what I do now: I, like, make art and host people at a table and, like, have a good time–

AA: Yeah.

JH: –while we kind of– it's playing an RPG, not eating, but you know, that impulse to do that was– I'm sure it came from just watching her, like, create these social situations–

AA: Yeah.

JH: –and like illustrate them, and write menu, you know, clever puns and stuff on the– on the menus. [laughs]

AA: [laughs]

JH: And, yeah; it was– it was amazing. So I always loved food, and, you know, my mom was an Air Force brat, and so she, you know, traveled all over the world. And, um, so we got all these different kinds of cuisine at home and it was very, you know, adventurous eating; it wasn't strange to have any kind of food at all. And so that– that helped a lot, too, to kind of develop excitement around trying new things and not feeling like there's, like, one type of food because you're from a place or whatever, you know.

AA: Right; yeah; yeah.

JH: So yeah, that's where it started. And then just before I moved to Seattle, I got a job at a– at a diner in Lexington, Kentucky, called the Rockabilly Cafe. And, uh, it's exactly what you would think from the name. [chuckles]

AA: [chuckles]

JH: Black and white checkerboard floors, and everyone in their period server outfits. And we had our little paper hats, and– and, uh, aprons. I was a– a short order cook at the diner there for a while, and I had done a little food service work in high school; I worked at a baseball field at the, like, concession stand and that kind of thing, making hot dogs and stuff. [laughs] But, uh, yeah; Rockabilly was– trained on the line and I made, you know, hundreds of hamburgers, and Kentucky Hot Brown, and um, to Turkey melts and, you know, you name it. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Yep!

JH: It was great; that place was an amazing place to work. Everybody there was so cool. And I'm still in touch with some of those people to this day. It was just a lovely, magical kind of thing, you know, playin’ Elvis on the jukebox, and it was just like hanging out with your friends at work and then, and then we would go out after, you know, together. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Yeah. 

JH: But, uh, yeah; that was– that was the most, kind of, cooking I– I had ever done. And– and as a job, like, it– it was really good training: we had six-minute tick,ets and, you know, you had to, like, figure it out and get it done. And, um, uh, really nice to have, you know, uh, everything, you know, prepped– [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Right!

[Cat meows insistently]

JH: [laughs] Yeah, you like that, Gulliver?

AA: [laughs] Yeah, he's into– he's into mise en place. [laughs]

JH: Yeah. [laughs] But it was– it was great. And after that, I went for a long time with, you know, just kind of not cooking much at all, and just making little things that, you know, for myself at home. Until now, with you. [chuckles] That's kind of the– that was the resurgence of all that, because you're such an amazing cook, and, you know, just being around, like, made me interested in that again, and um, made me wanna jump in and contribute to that. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Thank you for that very nice compliment. I– I guess I should say that I had a food blog for a while called Tiny House Supper Club, and I did a lot of, uh, iteration in that space, because I was making up my own recipes, right? But I never really thought about it as a food lab. And I did, you know, I did cook a lot; I liked the idea of hosting and everything that comes along with that. But I feel like it was something that you and I just kind of came into together — this idea that we could take a dish and just iterate on it, and experiment with it, and find new ways of doing it that suited our palate or maybe what we wanted to do that week, or whatever it was. And I think it was pizza that we first started with, right?

JH: Mm-hmm. Yeah. well, just the idea of making– trying to make pizza that we really liked at home– [chuckles]

AA: [laughs]

JH: –because, you know, that's a challenging thing to do. You don't have a big, wood-fired oven or something.

AA: Yeah.

JH: So how do you do it? What's the– you have to find techniques and expertise online, and there's a thousand different suggestions and methods and tools and stuff. So, right away it was a lab.

AA: Yeah.

JH: Right outta the gate it was like: well, I guess we should get a pizza stone. Should we get a pizza stone? Should we get a metal one?

AA: [laughs]

JH: There were all these variables all of a sudden to start to sort through.

AA: Right; like crust composition, and proving time, and layering technique even. There were all these different things that we were– we were getting into — and still are doing, arguably.

JH: Yeah.

AA: But I think– I guess I'm curious: you know, for me, what draws me to the iterative process with food specifically is that tiny little things make really big change on the backend for food.

JH: Mm-hmm.

AA: So, you know, if you add just a little bit more salt, the result is gonna be a different flavor, right? Um, if you take away some time and turn up some heat, you're gonna have a different result at the end of it. So, I don't know, what is it with you that makes you want to apply that iterative impulse that you have in your creative life? Like, why do you wanna do it with food? [laughs]

JH: [laughs] Yeah. Well, I think, um, there's multiple reasons. One– one: it’s– it's fun to do. It's, like, an engaging process.

AA: Yeah.

JH: It's– it's curiosity and playing to find out. [laughs]


AA: [laughs] Yeah! Yeah, you're right.


JH: Yeah, you know, like: “I don't know where this exactly is gonna go. It's– let's see what happens when we change this. Let's see what happens when we change that.” I like that exploration in that sense.

AA: Yeah.

JH: And it's also makes it very interesting. You know, it's not just having dinner. Having dinner at a nice conversation and listening to records with you is great on its own, but when we add that component where there's this thoughtful, critical component to it, where we're thinking about it, like, “Hmm. This was a little drier; this was a little more– this was kind of soggy this time.”

AA: Yeah.

JH: I find a lot of enjoyment in critical thinking and exploration of a thing. It makes me enjoy it more when I dive more into it and think about the process and the technique and the materials and the–

AA: Mm-hmm.

JH: –history and the– all the variations and how they do it in this part of the world and how they do it in that part of the world. It just adds so much interest; it’s, like, a bottomless thing, really. There's no– you're never gonna run out of interesting approaches.

AA: Yeah; yeah.

JH: Even– even for just one dish. Like, you know, you could just go forever–

AA: [laughs] Yeah, right!

JH: –on variations and different cultural styles and different regional styles and everything, so I– yeah; I love that part of it.

AA: Yeah. I feel like you're kind of echoing what you were saying earlier, uh, especially with regard to AGON, when you were saying, I wanted to get to a place with this art, and so I had to, kind of, figure out how to do that–

JH: Mm-hmm.

AA: –and look at resources, and look at, uh, examples, and get expert advice on how to replicate this thing that I have in my head. And I think the iterative process around food is– is very much like that as well.

JH: Mm-hmm.

AA: And you know what I was just thinking: the food angle kind of combines aesthetic iteration and mechanical iteration because, and– you know, the mechanics are kind of on the front end; of, “How long do I put the steak on the grill for, and at what temperature? How long does it rest? At what point do I slice it? And on what side of the grain effectively?”

JH: Mm-hmm.

AA: But there's also the aesthetics of it where, “How does it look when it's put on a plate, and what do you put around it to make it be appetizing, quite literally, to someone who's gonna eat it?”

JH: Yeah.

AA: And even though it's just the two of us, like, I appreciate a beautiful plate as much as the next guy. So–

JH: [laughs] Yes.

AA: –I think there's definitely a lot of ticks and ties there with that. But speaking of steak … [laughs]

JH: [laughs] Yeah.

AA: Speaking of steak, I think we might as well just share our latest findings with the listeners. [laughs]

JH: Mm-hmm; yeah. [chuckles]

AA: If you don't eat steak, I apologize, this is not relevant to you, but we've had years of iterating on steak.

JH: Yep.

AA: We have cooked all kinds of cuts, and I think there's palate variation there in terms of what people are gonna gravitate toward, uh, so what we've found works for us is not necessarily across the board, but we've experimented with time; we've experimented with the type of vessel we are using to cook the steak. And I don't know if you wanna share your latest and greatest in terms of our Steak Lab findings, John.

JH: Yeah. Well, it– it was mostly you doing the cooking of the steak lab of the steak lab for most of it–

AA: That's true, yeah.

JH: –up until, not that recently, but for a, for a while, and I was contributing more on, like, feedback, and taste, and conceptual, and doing research and, you know, that kind of thing.

AA: [chuckles]

JH: Finding, uh, new methods, or finding a– a nice cut or whatever. And it was kind of, uh, one of the purest of the labs in some sense–

AA: Yeah.

JH: –because it is– it is just– it is that piece of meat in a cooking vessel. And it's time and heat, and there are some other variables, but it's very direct. Like, it's easy to see what the changes are doing, because the dish is just kind of one ingredient plus some other stuff.

AA: Aromatics and fats, basically.

JH: Yeah. Right, yeah. So in that sense, it was kind of the purest experiment and– and iterate. Plus it is a very direct, straightforward kind of thing–

AA: Yeah.

JH: –like, it's two minutes per side, and then you rest. Or it’s three. Or you turn it every 30 seconds or, you know, it's not– there's not a lot of nuance to it. There's just a million ways to do it.

AA: [chuckles] Yeah.

JH: And when you start researching it, everyone has their preferred thing, and so it's easy to kind of go, “Okay, we're gonna do Gordon Ramsey's version tonight, and let's see how that goes.” Or, “We're gonna do America's Test Kitchen version tonight,” or whatever; or Kenji Lopez-Alt, or whatever. And you can kind of just look at what they say to do, and do it [laughs] — with some variation on the temperature of your burner or whatever — and then go, “Okay, well, great; we got this different result. And do we like this more? Do we like this less? Should we combine things?” And so we ran this whole gamut of different chef's techniques, and cooking techniques, and science of maillard reaction, and how you get the right one and, um, which oils to use and everything. [chuckles]

AA: [laughs]

JH: And it's been really fun. Plus we have a, you know, a very good, uh, source for pretty good steaks that aren't super expensive, so, um, that has helped a lot as well. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] It sounds like we're in the Mafia or something.

JH: Yeah: “I know a guy!” [laughs] Uh, yeah, it's just Grocery Outlet.

AA: Yeah! [laughs]

JH: But that was a factor, because it meant that we could just go, “Oh, let's try it again; let's try it again.” You know, and it wasn't, uh, breaking the bank. But the current state is what I think was what you were asking. I had kind of started doing the cooking on steak night, 'cause I wanted to start cooking more, and so I started to do that and try different things and started doing butter basting, which we hadn't been doing, um, before–

AA: I know; It's so shocking to me that we never did that.

JH: –which is just. I know; it’s so much better; it’s ridiculous. [laughs]

AA: [laughs]

JH: But, uh, there was this problem, which was ultimately we had the windows open, the oven fan going, the ceiling fan, the back door open, and a, like, circulator fan next to the oven, because the smoke being generated was, it was a lot. And you know, you watch videos on making steak and they all go, “Oh boy, there's gonna be a lot of smoke. That's how it is. You know, you've got your cast iron pan, and you've got your oil, and that's just what it's gonna do. So good luck to you.” And after we had done that — and the butter basting component had, I think, contributed a little bit more to that — and there was one night where it was really smoky. And I just thought, “You know, this is– someone has solved this problem.” Even though I'd watched, like, dozens of videos of professionals who all kind of shrugged and were like, “It's smoky, whatever.” I was like: nah, no, no, no. There's gotta be a way around this.

AA: [laughs]

JH: So I just started searching around on YouTube, and wouldn't you know it, America's Test Kitchen [chuckles], they had a video that was specifically like, “Hey, do you not want it to be– have a smoke-filled kitchen when you make steaks at home?” [laughs] And I was like, “Yes! That's exactly– that's exactly what I'm looking for.” [laughs]

AA: [laughs] “I’m a guy like me!”

JH: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I watched their video about cold sear, and it seemed like it was not gonna work at all because it's completely backwards from every other method. So I just wrote down the instructions, and then did them exactly the way they did, and it turned out perfectly exactly the way they said it would. [laughs]

AA: It did!

JH: And there was no smoke, and it was amazing. So yeah, if you haven't tried cold sear: it's essentially, you– you do the normal thing; you let the meat come to room temperature, you pepper it, you don't salt it, until the end. And then you put it in a cold non-stick pan with no oil.

AA: A cold non-stick pan; I think that's important to to note a non-stick pan–

JH: Yeah, it has to be a non-stick pan.

AA: –because that's rare for a steak.

JH: Yeah, it is; cast iron– everyone says cast iron, which obviously it's great; cast iron steaks are amazing.

AA: Right!

JH: Um, but, uh, yeah; turn the heat up to high, and then after about two minutes, you flip it, and then turn it down to medium and just keep checking it, uh, until you feel it's at medium rare, and pull 'em, and rest for five minutes. And it sure enough, [chuckles] as the pan heats up, it– not only does it cook it beautifully, but you do get this amazing crust sear, which I didn't think it would do because everyone else, including Kenji and the America's Test Kitchen before, was all about this very, very, very high-heat pan so that when the steak touches it down on it, it immediately has that maillard reaction and gets the crusting and all that stuff. So I was like, well, it obviously can't do that if it's coming up to temperature slowly, [chuckles] but it does anyway. And salting at the end is great. Uh, yeah; cold sear: I can't recommend it enough, and I don't think we're gonna go back.

AA: [chuckles]

JH: I– we've tried all kinds of different versions, but this is a definite keeper. It's, like, way, way better.

AA: No smoke, no splatter: I love that for my home kitchen.

JH: Yeah, that’s the other thing: there’s no oil to splatter, either, yeah.

AA: Yeah; I will link that video that you watched in the show notes, so if anyone at home wants to try it, they can go forth and multiply with their steaks.

JH: Yeah. Skip to the end of that video if you want to just get the technique. It's an interesting video; they go through sous vide, and cast iron, and all the– all these different methods, but, yeah, cold sear’s at the end of that.

AA: Yay. It is delicious, and so I guess all that is to say iteration is really valuable for a creative process.

JH: And you know, in some ways, the cold sear is, to circle back to the beginning of our conversation, the collage kind of, “Well, what if I just turn– flip it upside down? What if I invert the colors? What if I make it everything bigger? What if I make everything smaller?” And you hit on something sometimes and go, “Oh yeah, that's a much better direction.” And this is that kind of case.

AA: Yeah.

JH: What if I use it non-stick pan? What if I use a cold pan? What if I don't put salt on? Like, completely approach, and what do you know: it works.

AA: Beautifully said. John, thank you so much for joining me today. Before we go, where can we find you on the internet so we can follow your steak-cooking journey–

JH: [laughs] Umm–

AA: –among other things! [laughs]

JH: Uh, yeah. I– I'm on Twitter at john underscore harper. I'm on Bluesky: it's just John Harper with no underscore, I think. Onesevendesign on Instagram, uh, which I will probably be using more; it's been a long time since I posted it on Instagram [chuckles], but, I'll be using that more; and Bluesky, probably, too. I have a Substack, which you can find with my name, which I am gonna be using for some more sort of game design thinking and design theory posts and that kind of thing. And johnharper dot itch do I-O is where my games are, and with Evil Hat Productions; they publish my books and stuff.

AA: Yay. Thanks for joining me for another Johnversation; these are always so wonderful to have with you.

JH: Yeah, this was fun; yeah.

AA: I think we're cooking salmon tonight. Is that true? [laughs]

JH: That's the plan, and the– you know, you can cold sear salmon if you wanna try that. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] Yeah; we– we might do that tonight. We'll see!

JH: [laughs]

AA: You can follow Little Oracles on Instagram (at) littleoracles. For more big book energy and creativity content, you can check out the blog at little oracles dot com. And as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]