Author: helava

Arrival

Arrival – Films sur Google Play

How it’s taken me this long to finally watch Arrival I’ll never know. I’m a huge fan of Ted Chiang’s writing, and Denis Villeneuve’s work (Dune 1&2 + BR2049).

I thought the movie was brilliant. Took a really neat story, and for me, many of the decisions they made improved things. Not that they’re necessarily better than the OG, just that they’re better for the medium than a more literal translation of the book. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I don’t want to write much more just because I don’t want to spoil it – but man, the end (even though I recalled it from the story a while before the revelation) was just one of those things that sat with me for hours afterwards.

Two Steps to Building Better Products

Had a fun conversation with a friend this morning, and it was sort of weirdly illuminating for me. My #productdevelopment process basically breaks down into two pretty simple concepts that are *incredibly* difficult to actually execute:

1.) Know what you’re trying to do. That is, you have to be super specific and use very precise language to articulate the one big idea that you’re building your product around. Every entrepreneur can describe their product *generally*, but I find very, very few who can do it with exacting precision. Who is your market? What problem is this solving? What is the benefit to the user? If you can do this in one crisp sentence, you’re way, way ahead of the game. But the funny thing? It’s actually less about knowing what you’re doing – most people can understand that. It’s almost entirely so you can understand what you are *not* doing, which is a boundary that a lot of entrepreneurs actually never quite figure out. Which leads to scope creep, bloat, and eventual death.

2.) In traditional product development, you might do some testing, but basically, you’re going to bundle up a bunch of stuff, release it at some point, and then either succeed or fail. For me, the goal of everything I do is “How do I disassemble that one giant ball of risk, and try to mitigate every individual piece of it as early and cheaply as possible?”

That’s it. If you want to reverse engineer almost anything I’d say about product development, it’s “Do you understand what you are trying to do, and how to make good decisions about whether or not to do something?” and “How do I make this less risky and learn earlier?”

Now, while they’re simple concepts, doing them in effective, meaningful ways is an incredibly complicated, nuanced, and product/context-specific challenge that’s new and difficult and surprising every single time.

Gamification is Bullshit

A lot of people have been trying to sell the idea of gamification as a way of using the power of games to get people to do things.

This is not a good approach.

People will sell you on their consulting services that promise higher engagement/effectiveness by adding points and badges and other “game-like” things to your product. They will work for a very small percentage of your users for a short amount of time. And that’s it.

If you want to harness what make games powerful, it’s not points and badges and achievements.

Games are about playing. Trying things out in a high-feedback, low-risk, no-stakes environment. By “high-feedback”, I mean that in games, you can wildly amplify the reward you give someone for any kind of success, or make it very, very clear when someone does something you don’t want. That’s the sort of 1st level of properly using the mechanics of games.

The higher level is that you can “re-skin” experiences in transformative ways that create new meaning. I worked on a therapy game where players had to move objects from one place to another. In traditional therapy, they’d move boxes on tables. This activity, and its difficulty, was a constant reminder to the player that they were now disabled, and simple things they’d done forever were now impossible or difficult.

We built the *same* interactions, but instead of moving boxes, you picked up little birds and put them in their nests. They’d animate, and sing, and it was a magical, Disney princess kind of moment that everyone (even gruff German doctors) found incredibly enjoyable.

It didn’t remind patients of their disability. They had fun, and they worked *much* harder, because they wanted to make the birds happy.

Games are tremendously powerful, and utilizing that power can make otherwise intensely boring or difficult experiences enjoyable and engaging. But it has almost nothing to do with points and badges. It’s not simple, it’s not fast, and it’s not cheap.

It is, however, totally worth it when you do it right. But doing it right means bringing folks on with deep, deep experience from DAY ONE in the process. This is not something you can “slap on” later, and it’s not something that some snake-oil “gamification” expert can do at all.

If you want to engage the power of games, you have to build a game development *team* from the ground up, right from the start, and it has to be a foundational part of your product.

And if you ever hear some “expert” telling you how they can give you that power fast and cheap, walk away. Don’t even wait for them to finish talking. They are *lying to you*.

Oh, and an additional thought:

Game design is a field where expertise and experience matter. A lot.

Being able to understand how to incentivize behavior, how to balance risk and reward, how to properly communicate ideas to a player, when & how to provide feedback, how to manage possibility space without exploding into unmanageable complexity… all that, on top of how to get a team of people with wildly diverse creative disciplines to all understand the core idea and work together to build it…

Yes, it’s a fun job. But it’s a complex one that has a LOT of moving parts.

A lot of entrepreneurs (and I’m speaking here from direct experience, having worked with quite a few game-related startups) think that their understanding of games, because they’ve played games, is equivalent to an experienced designer/game director.

It is not.

And most of the game-based (product) companies I’ve seen only reach out for expert help when it’s FAR too late.

If you don’t bring in game-centric expertise for a game-based product from day 1, you are dooming your product to fail. I’m serious. This is a fatal mistake, and I’ve seen company after company make it, then ask for help when they realize they’ve done it wrong, but have no money or time to make any changes. By that point, it’s *incredibly* difficult to turn things around, if it’s possible at all.

Game development is an expertise, with value. It is distinct from “playing a lot of games” and your expertise in whatever other field you’re bringing to the table. It’s often strange and counterintuitive, and while yeah, some people can figure it out, I keep seeing teams on death’s doorstep because they believed they could do it based on no experience and found out it was harder than they expected.

“This Team is Great!”

Whenever I’m on a team, I think, “Man, this team is *great*. So many wonderful world-class people!” Even when there are problem folks. No team is perfect, but I’ve had a lot of really deeply pleasurable working experiences, and at almost every job, I’ve ended up making a few lasting friends.

And while I’m normally not a super outgoingly optimistic guy, I think whenever I hear, “This team is the best I’ve ever worked with!” or “This is the best team in the world!” there’s part of me that thinks, “Look, not every team is the best, how good could this one be? It’s clearly not the best in the world,” but a much bigger part of me is really happy for them.

Because a lot of teams are great. A lot of *people* are great to work with. And when you find them, they’re so joyous and uplifting and pleasurable and energizing to be around that yeah, it feels like you really can’t get any better than that.

But that comes with a downside – if this team is this good, will I ever have an experience like this again? Sometimes that can trap you in a situation that is no longer the right one for you. But the answer is, “look around”. Look at all the folks touting how wonderful their teams are. They’re *right*. They’re *all* right.

So when your team, or your circumstance, *isn’t* right for you, it’s okay to move on. It’s okay to leave a great team of (probably mostly) great people in search of the next thing for you. And you’re *probably* going to love the team you move to, and will one day think, “This is the best team I’ve ever worked with.”

New can be scary. For those of us who are socially a bit on the reserved side, it can be a really big challenge. But I think if you look out there among your peers, you’ll find a lot of people have found jobs with *wonderful* teams and excellent coworkers.

When one day you decide you need to make the leap, you almost certainly will, too.

Pressure and Meta

One of the things I find incredibly challenging as a parent is knowing how hard to “push” my kids. As the child of a fairly traditional “Asian Mom”, who was under immense pressure throughout my childhood to “excel”, I hated everything about it. I hated music, I hated most sports, I hated school. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties when I realized that I didn’t hate all those things, I hated the pressure I felt, and the constant criticism and pummeling of my self-esteem that it all meant.

So with the kids, this is something I genuinely struggle with.

This morning, something came up, and I responded in a way that felt more like “my parents” and not “what I want to do”, and I struggled with that internally for a while, and then just talked to my older son specifically about *why* I responded the way I did, the specific pressure and difficulty of trying to walk this fine line of “push so that you butt up against your comfort zone and learn new things,” and “let you discover things that you love and build skill on your own”.

It was one of the first times that I’ve had this “meta” conversation about parenting with J – that it wasn’t the conversation about the actual thing, but the conversation about the pressure I felt as a parent and how difficult it was to navigate. And then we talked about what *he* wanted, and what his motivations were, and we reached a genuinely great conclusion.

And it reminded me of a time when our game, Fleck, was really struggling to stand on its own. At the time, I didn’t know whether to put on a brave face and power through it with positivity, or whether to have the frank discussion about the state of the game & the business side of things. The same kind of “meta” conversation about the game with the team.

I was shocked. People *wanted* that insight – they wanted to contribute at that level, and they responded incredibly well to an honest, open talk about vulnerability, the struggles we faced, etc. Everyone *knew* things weren’t peachy-keen, but I’d been told that the leader needs to be positive, help folks get through obstacles, etc.

I think the lesson I take from this is that in general, folks don’t mind the meta conversation. You don’t have to “play the game” and hope to get the right results with all the mechanics hidden away behind the scenes. If folks know how the machine works, you can all play the game together.

Apple Vision Pro

The Apple Vision Pro is a weird duck. As a piece of technology, it’s extraordinary – the pass through is great, the hand/pinch gesture sensitivity is great, the hardware feels nice and is (mostly) comfortable. The big thing for me is the forward-heaviness of it, which is almost instantly mitigated by just tucking the battery into the rear strap. I get that they wanted strap options, and that they want you to comfortably rest your head while using the headset, but a well-designed counterweight strap would make this a LOT more comfortable with almost no downside. I don’t get why Apple didn’t learn this lesson. It’s not weight that matters in a VR/AR headset – it’s where the center of balance is. If you put the weight directly over the neck, it can be much heavier, and still totally comfortable. The big problem is forward-heavy headsets exert pressure on your cheeks that eventually becomes intolerable. But I can hold that same weight easily on the top of my head for hours. So that’s weird.

 

I’m struggling a bit to figure out what this is for, to be honest. I’m trying it with a keyboard and trackpad to use as a general computing device (writing this post, even) – and for that, it’s nice. But with limited battery life, and as delicate as it is, it can’t compare with a laptop. As a home-use device, it’s also weird – at home there’s usually people around, and “shutting them out” with the headset feels awkward and isolating – even with the pass through. The eyes on the outside of the device are so utterly bizarre in practice I’m kind of baffled that they released it this way. Cutting the external display would have saved weight and allowed the device to be quite a bit thinner, and that definitely would have been a trade off I’d have made. Vs. how the eyes are *supposed* to look, maybe it’s better – but as it is currently, it’s almost zero value.

I think the biggest thing for me is this emphasizes how important robust object recognition and tracking is for a device like this. I need to be able to “attach” virtual objects to real objects and have them move in total lockstep. Apple tries to do this a bit with the Magic Keyboard and a little virtual widget they attach to it, and it’s neat to see the widget track the keyboard in space, but there’s a significant delay, and the object locking is quite … imprecise. That said, it’s a hell of a lot better than anything else trying to do the same thing I’ve seen.

There’s also some weirdness to VisionOS, and I’m sure this kind of thing will be improved as time goes on – but I find that I want apps to “snap to object/surface” by default. I don’t want random windows floating in midair most of the time – I want them to snap to cabinet doors, or wall surfaces, or to lock to my (physical) desk top. Being able to “pull” windows off of physical objects would be necessary, and being able to have them float in space is obviously a must – but by *default*, I want windows to snap to objects and be tied to physical things.

Still – the pass through makes “doing things” in the Vision Pro WAY more comfortable than in VR, or even with the Quest 2’s low-fi B&W pass through. I can look at my phone, or a clock, or see someone approach – and all those things make AVP feel way less isolating than any headset I’ve tried before. But there are a LOT of straightforward improvements that are almost certain to come, and the gen-3 version of this thing will be incredible. I’m still struggling to think of something to make for AVP – for the most part, my personal lack of understanding about how object-recognition might work on a platform like this hamstrings my understanding of what’s possible. I should probably dive into the SDK’s documentation or something. But the other big thing is, “How are users going to use this platform?” And that’s something I still don’t really have an answer for.

This is definitely an interesting platform. It’s incredible tech. It’s just that I can’t easily imagine when I would naturally put this thing on and dedicate time to be in AVP, vs. using a laptop or iPad, and having unfettered access to reality. I think it’s clear that that’s the end goal – that this pass through solution is a placeholder. But this is an interesting start, and it’s nice to see what feels like a significantly different take, with a very different focus, on AR/VR that’s not Meta. If that’s literally all the AVP accomplishes, it’ll still be worth it.

RIP, Laralyn

I recently read that Laralyn McWilliams passed away. I only met her online – we had a small number of chats something on the order of a decade ago, and I’d loosely followed her on various channels since, and … dammit.

Go poke her profile page and check out her history. She was an absolute titan of the game industry, and among many other things that would define anyone’s career, she led the design of Full Spectrum Warrior, which was such a discombobulatingly novel take on something that looked like it should be a cliche that I’m still genuinely dazzled that they pulled it off.

But the thing I wish I could have expressed my gratitude toward her for was her kindness. The times we chatted, she’d reached out because she saw me going through a hard time. There was absolutely no reason she should have cared, but she did.

Every single thing I ever saw from her in the ensuing decade, whether it was about teaching or talking about game design, about her constant and unrelenting health challenges – the level of positivity and kindness and thoughtfulness she put into every exchange she ever had with *anyone I ever saw* was … It was astonishing. And it wasn’t some facade of perfection. You could see the struggle. And the optimism. And the bravery.

And dammit – it’s so cliche to talk about folks having health challenges as being brave. But facing down terrible odds, and wanting to continue to help others, to continue to create things, and in the face of everything, never giving in to nihilism and cynicism and self-absorption? If that’s not brave, I don’t know what bravery is.

She’s always going to be someone whose outlook and resilience and positivity I will strive to emulate. I’m gutted for her friends and family, and for the game industry as a whole.

RIP, and thank you.

A Few Books

A few books I’ve been reading:

Eric Nehrlich’s You Have a Choice – I’ve been reading this since years before he started writing it, in his various blog posts, newsletters, and talking with him in person. We’ve been friends since my college days, and over the last 20 years, he’s grown tremendously, in every way, as a person. Professionally, personally – but the biggest thing is that he took concrete steps to create the life he wanted, and the biggest, hardest thing he had to do (IMO) was realize he could define his own direction. In his book, he talks about that process, and he’s helped dozens (hundreds?) of people take similar steps. The book isn’t just refined because he’s done it himself. It’s because he’s also taken these lessons and already applied them to the people he coaches. So the book is great. But it’s worth putting in there that *he* is also great. His ideas are deeply explored and considered, are based on a wealth and breadth of experience, and his desire to help other people is genuine. If you’re finding yourself “succeeding”, but still kinda miserable or frazzled, this is *the* book for you.

Wagner James Au’s Making a Metavese That Matters – for all the garbage hype around Meta’s foray in the metaverse (and the absurd investor FOMO whiplash freakout and faceplant), this is a book written by someone that *cares* deeply about the metaverse, and has for longer than most of the people claiming to be “metaverse experts” have been aware of its existence. His writing is personal, and interesting and even if you’ve been metaverse-aware since Snow Crash and Second Life, this is a more definitive chronicle of its development than I’ve seen anywhere else. Like Eric’s book above, what drew me to this was its authenticity and depth. In a field that’s full of snake-oil salesmen, this is a book with real knowledge and wisdom.

Kim Nordstrom’s dn UMOP dn – Oh, wait. it’s Up Down Up. I met Kim through Paul Tozour (whose book The Four Swords is worth a read if you’re interested in diving into what seems like a satirical exaggeration/parody of the game industry’s worst tendencies, but to someone who’s seen it all, reads more like an account of any random Tuesday) a while back, and I had a chance to read an early copy of the book. Been going through the print version as well, and it’s a great read. He interviews a *gazillion* folks who’ve built & led successful (and not successful) game companies, and consolidates their collective experience into a book that I wish was mandatory reading for folks starting game studios. It’s obviously not a formula for success, but the point of it is all these interviews land on a number of recurring points, and seeing the echoes of the same sounds in all the stories begins to show you the shape of what it’s like to run a successful team. Having been through that wringer, it’s a book I wish I had before I’d started out, and I hope it’ll save new founders from a lot of pain.

The Obvious Solutions

In sixth grade, I watched a show on PBS about MIT’s 2.007 robot competition, and I knew that was what I was going to try do in college.

I wanted the challenge of solving some problem, building a machine to do it, and compete using both my wits and my engineering skill. And in 1997, I got to take the class and live out a childhood dream.

I love building things with my hands. I don’t do it as often as I’d like these days, but I find that that’s when I feel like my mind and body are fully engaged. Part of the challenge is figuring out the rules – what to build, and then executing in real time during the competition.

The year I took the class, the design of the competition… was terrible.

The goal was to get balls into your bin. They fell from a “waterfall” mechanism that triggered a few moments after the competition. There was a ramp from the starting position near the waterfall and your bin down to a central arena where the balls would land.

The problem with the rules is that there was one very clear, very obvious solution. An arm that would extend and redirect the balls directly into your bin was the clear answer, and the winner would simply be the person who built the fastest, most robust arm that couldn’t be deflected out of position.

That was it. The best strategy by far required zero human interaction – in fact, human interaction would make it *worse*. If you wanted to build the most robust arm, that’d take all your material and space. You’d build the strongest, fastest arm you could, and hope that you could beat everyone else to the punch. If someone built a stronger, faster arm, you were screwed, but here’s the thing – if you built *literally anything else* you were even more screwed.

I didn’t build an arm.

I decided that even though the rules had a clear solution, this isn’t what I wanted out of the competition. I wanted to build an RC robot that relied on my control, that gave me options and flexibility, where I could construct a strategy on the fly and do interesting things. So I built a little bulldozer thing with skids and wheels that could Hoover up balls into a front cage, dump them into a hopper in the back, and then the hopper could extend up from the central arena and dump balls into the bin. I could theoretically use the extending hopper to also block anyone else from dumping balls into the bin. It was really maneuverable and quite fast. I practiced any strategy I could think of over and over again.

But I knew that if I went up against even a marginally competent extending arm, I’d lose.

I don’t have strong memories of the competition or its results. I think the winner in the end was an extending arm. As for me, despite hours and hours of practice, the thing that undid me in the end was a small screw protruded from the bottom of the machine, and in what felt like one-in-a-zillion odds, when I turned off the ramp into the central arena one round, that screw caught on the ramp and “beached” the machine.

I was proud of that machine, though. Aside from the protruding screw, a mistake that was easily fixable with iteration, it was a fairly robust, well-built, flexible machine. It did what I’d hoped it would do, and I got to play the competition the way I wanted to.

And I think that there are really strong parallels to my professional career.

When I look at mobile gaming, there are lots of people who “build the arm”. They look at the current winning strategy, and think they can build the best arm.

I *hate* building arms. I’ve never done it. I’ve never believed that the next hit looks exactly like an iteration of the last hit. I’ve never wanted to work on solved problems. My focus has always been on making things that are flexible, and “broad” re: strategic options, and have attempted to wield that breadth in interesting ways.

And it’s weird – until this afternoon, I never realized *how* strong the parallel was between my experience with 2.007 and the rest of my career.

But I think that “strategic weirdness” is why I love working with a broad range of multidisciplinary people. It’s why I love working on new things. It’s why I hate the kind of “iterate until optimal” business model of highly derivative games.

Back at a job long ago, we made a bingo game, under some amount of pressure from the company that’d acquired our team. The obvious thing they wanted us to do was ape the leading bingo game, and they’d market it aggressively and hope to do something. I kept kicking the can down the road, until one day we figured out how to do something interesting with powerups in bingo, where teams could collectively bring powerups to the game, and trigger them in fun, synergistic ways.

It was a system that created a huge potential for interesting gameplay, because it wasn’t just about *your* powerups and what they’d do for your cards, it was what you could do for the *other* players on your team. It made bingo a wild cooperative team game, and the results were delightful.

The game didn’t succeed in the end. I believe it still could have, given the “possibility space” of the system we’d created. The company basically said, “Welp, dislodging players from (whatever game was winning the bingo category at the time) is too expensive.” And while I think we’d have gotten to a point where we’d have a better game and those costs would have come down, they decided to pull the plug (there’s a lot I’d say here about judgment and necessary courage, but…)

But to me, the point is that fighting the winning bingo game with a clone of the winning bingo game was a sure fire recipe for disaster. It’d have been trying to “build a better arm” when the arm you’re fighting has 100x your budget, 100x your size & weight, and is *already deployed*.

We didn’t have an option to build a better arm. We could only build something new. And I think there are some situations and companies that are foundationally only about “building arms”. They’re not for me, and never will be.

Work is many things, and depending on circumstance, you can’t always think this way. What I have is a luxury. But work, to me, is about the joy of creation, and building things with other people. The most joy comes not from building arms, but from building new weird shit with strategic breadth and the possibility of wielding that breadth in shocking and interesting ways.

And it’s weird that I’d already known that back in 1997 when building a robot for a class.