September 14, 2025 / Tokyo, Japan: Author of the Game Development Strategy Guide, Cheryl Platz, debuted her second new talk in two months as one of the closing keynotes at Design Matters Tokyo 2025. Entitled “Future Sight in Design: Using Process and Context to Solve the Right Problems,” this talk focused on two case studies that demonstrated how the use of Cheryl’s opti-pessimism framework for design ethics at scale, helped her and her teams to design around critical issues before they occured.
About Opti-Pessimism
The opti-pessimism design framework was first introduced by Cheryl Platz at her DEVit 360 2018 talk in Thessaloniki, Greece, followed by keynotes on the topic at UX Scotland 2019 and Interaction Latin America 2019 in Medellin, Colombia. These were followed by Medium posts and a dedicated section in Cheryl’s debut book, Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences.
The Tokyo Case Studies
Cheryl has been applying these prompts and principles to her work for almost a decade, and the two case studies presented in Tokyo demonstrate how opti-pessimistic thinking can help you appear psychic in your own work.
Case 1: Gates Foundation Teams Enablement
Cheryl’s application of opti-pessimistic frameworks helped her to drive the Gates Foundation to accelerate their replacement of their on-premises teleconferencing servers with a cloud-based Teams deployment, which required a $2 million investment in new conference room hardware first; the changeover was officially made 2 weeks prior to the pandemic closures and without her work the foundation would have been stuck attempting a hugely disruptive migration to new software in the middle of a global crisis.
Case Study 2:
Riot Games +
Xbox Game Pass
During her time as Director of UX for the Player Platform at Riot Games, Cheryl served as Design Lead for their partnership with Xbox Game Pass. Her application of opti-pessimistic design frameworks during business development helped her identify in just 48 hours a critical need for new functionality that helped reduce customer service volume at launch; she also used these principles to drive her team to stronger design and localization processes that helped them avert catastrophe when last-minute legal text changes came through just weeks before launch.
How does Opti-Pessimism apply to the Game Development Strategy Guide?
As demonstrated by Cheryl’s second case study, Opti-Pessimism is a general-purpose framework that works well in video gaming contexts where you’re forced to deal with the unexpected like emergent behavior. In Chapter 3, the Game Designer’s Toolkit, Cheryl adapts the Opti-Pessimism framework specifically for application to game design, where ambiguity is often high – and ties it into case studies around worst-case scenarios.
Learn More about Opti-Pessimism
To learn more about these case studies, check out Cheryl’s slides, read the Design Matters Magazine post about these case studies, or view the actual recording on the Design Matters learning platform.
Read the full article
If you’re more of a narrative learner, you may appreciate the magazine article Cheryl put together for Design Matters magazine: “Opti-Pessimistic Design at Scale: Finding the Best in the Worst”
Explore the slides
View the talk
To view the full talk, you can engage with the Design Matters platform (account creation required):
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