Every episode of the Professor Game podcast, hosted by Rob Alvarez of The Octalysis Group. Honest breakdowns of gamification, behavioral design, and the Octalysis Framework, applied to real products, retention, and engagement. New episodes weekly, plus interviews with leading experts.
Level Up IRL: Designing Your Purpose with Yu-kai Chou | Episode 400
Episode Summary Yu-kai Chou returns to introduce 10,000 Hours of Play, his second book, co-authored with former Octalysis Prime student Mark Diaz. He lays out a six-step framework (choose your game, identify your attributes, choose your role, enhance your skills, build alliances, achieve quests) […]
They Made $300k Per Month With Skool (Just Copy Them) | Episode 399
Episode Summary Rob Alvarez breaks down Skool as an all-in-one platform for building paid online communities, walking through its core features (community feed, classroom courses, calendar, members map, and built-in leaderboard with levels) using Ted Carr’s community as a live example. He argues Skool’s […]
When Computers Taught You to Create, Not Just Consume with Jesper Juul | Episode 398
Episode Summary Game theorist Jesper Juul returns to discuss Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, arguing that the standard Atari-crash-then-Nintendo narrative of gaming history erases the European home computer culture that actually dominated the 1980s. He traces the C64 […]
AI + Game Thinking = Retention Breakthrough | Episode 397
Episode Summary Amy Jo Kim returns to describe how she, Piyush Mahajan, and Scott Kim built JourneyMaker, a GenAI tool trained on decades of her client data that generates ICP screeners, job stories, synthetic personas, and end-to-end player-journey storyboards covering discovery, onboarding, habit-building, and […]
Why Most Community Building Fails (And HOW TO WIN) | Episode 396
Episode Summary Rob Alvarez argues that most online communities lose members not from weak content but from three structural failures: a generic first-five-minutes that feels like walking into a party where nobody greets you, the ‘spread the butter thin’ trap of producing more posts […]