Author: helava

Be Specific

Hey, folks who are looking for jobs: Be specific.

If you say “I’m a recently laid-off Creative Director…” and you expect that folks will be interested based on your title… you could do better. Your job here is to hook peoples’ interest (and if you’re a Creative Director who’s not doing that in a post like this you’re not showing off your talent like you should).

What is it that people are looking for? What is it that YOU provide that others do not? For me, for instance, I can say, “Co-founder, Creative Director, Team Lead”, and it says something about me, sort of.

But if I specify that I have an established track record of building really effective multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative teams, that shows a kind of specificity. If you’re not building a multi-disciplinary collaborative team, great – I’m not for you. But if you *are*, you’re a lot more likely to ping me than you would if I just said, “team lead”.

But I can get more specific. I also work best in very early-stage teams, because a lot of my process is about building things and learning super-fast, which maximizes potential for success on projects where folks are building something genuinely new. Again, if you’re a huge company working on some iterative thing, great – I’m not the guy for you.

It’s a trade off – telling people your strengths means you aren’t going to be aligned with everyone. And that is a luxury in some cases. Sometimes you need to be everything to everyone, because you need a job – any job. But I’d also suggest that right now, it’s more important to stand out than it is to be “in the running” for a lot of roles.

So be specific. Tell people what your unique strengths are. How your experience and worldview have shaped who you are and what you do better than anyone else. Your job is to capture peoples’ attention and make them NEED to hire you. It’s not enough to say, “I’m a person who’s available.”

This is something most people are really not used to. If you’re struggling with this, I can help. No charge. DM me (with a copy of your resume and a blurb you’ve written for yourself) if you’re looking for a hand with this, and I’ll be happy to spend an hour with you working on it.

Touch-Ups

Had the front of the house repainted. They’re almost done – front door & crawlspace doors and one window in the back that needed some help left to go. Basically got the front and the right side of the house redone, back and left left as-is.

A handful of years ago, we had a neighbor repaint the front trim, but the paint he used was really not durable, and he did a pretty sloppy job. I’ve always been a little annoyed with it, even though the sentiment behind giving our friend & neighbor some work before he moved away – I don’t regret that at all.

But so last winter, we had a little water leak during the absolute worst storm we’ve had in ages. So there’s some stuff in the front that needed touching up – stucco was cracking, and a lot of wood was exposed to the point where there was significant dryrot in the stair “caps” – the wooden bits where you might put your hands.

So all that got fixed and then painted. We hired a “name-brand” company to do it, and indeed it was about 3x the cost of the neighbor doing it, but the quality is WAY better.

Because we were only doing two sides, changing color was a no-go, or we’d have to have repainted the eaves all the way around the house.  So it’s weird to have spent $$$$, and have it sort of feel like a no-op, but it’s also kind of like it went backwards in time by a decade, so that’s alright. :smile:

Funny thing is, a few weeks ago, we also spent a bunch of money to get one of our cars essentially mostly re-painted. Turns out BMW’s clearcoat just breaks apart after a while, and the car was looking really bad – broken clearcoat all over the hood, trunk, roof, and then little holes all over the doors and fenders. So we took that in, had everything essentially totally repainted. And then last week, one of the few little bits that *wasn’t* resprayed just broke. So I have to get that fixed eventually. But for the most part, the car is good again – got new paint, and then went in for service so it’s good inside and out. And the other car got new tires.

So it’s basically like we just spent enough to have bought a bunch of new stuff, but instead spent it maintaining old stuff. Which I feel alright about. Keeping the house and cars in good, safe, working order so that they’ll last us as long as possible is more cost-effective and environmentally-conscious in the long run.

QA Matters.

Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.

The Business of Games

I realize that a lot of folks who work in games aren’t game designers. Their job isn’t to “create fun”. Their job is to make sure the developer survives, and in that respect, the folks who optimize for $ and retention and all those metrics – their jobs are often more important than the folks who are trying to give the players a great experience.

Because it’s often fairly easy to make fun. It’s really, really hard to make fun that people will pay for.

Similarly, as you “move up” in the development chain, the more you have to be concerned with survival, and the less directly involved you are in the player experience.

So it’s natural that, as someone who’s been in and around game dev for 24 years, most of what I hear is folks talking about how to get to financial success. Why Monopoly Go is hot shit, or why this one weird trick will double your retention/conversion/ARPDAU/whatever.

And holy mother fuck, I hate it.

On LinkedIn, I see a bunch of investors’ posts, a bunch of VC’s posts, a bunch of people “deconstructing” the “fun” of games’ posts, and they’re just mercenary shit.

And so even with all the earlier stuff acknowledged, I was wondering why I hate it so much. Why hearing someone breaking down the economic mechanics of Monopoly Go pisses me off. And I think the thing is, when I was making games, the economic (out-of-game) engine of the game and the *specific fun* we were trying to provide to people were deeply interlinked. To put it another way, trying to “deconstruct” Monopoly Go and apply lessons about its economy wouldn’t make any sense unless you were building Monopoly Go.

Because the core gameplay was the main driver of everything, and the economic engine was what you did with that code gameplay to generate money. But these days, it seems like a lot of people end up talking about the economic engine, and then trying to reverse-engineer mechanics that will allow folks to ape those economies. And then they call it “fun”.

I made games for 20+ years. The one thing that was consistent through all twenty of those years was that a smash hit was never, ever, ever a direct clone of another smash hit. Zynga made a hojillion dollars by cloning games and then out-marketing the original and crushing them under their boots. But they didn’t clone hits, they cloned games that were not yet hits. Not that that’s better (it’s much worse). But so many people seem to think that if they just ape the last smash hit – if they make the next Clash, or Genshin Impact, or whatever, that they’ll have a similar-sized hit. They won’t. That game already exists. People don’t need Fortnite 2 from some unknown bullshit developer. They already have Fortnite, and Epic knows so much about how Fortnite works that you can’t anticipate their next step. So you’ll never beat them.

You have to build a different game. You have to create an economic engine that suits that game. Yes, you can learn about the mechanics of other games. But if you’re not learning about those economic engines by playing the games, you’re fucking up your job. If you’re learning about those games by listening to podcasts about techbros analyzing the economies of smash hits and thinking you’re going to imitate those features without deeply understanding the mechanics of the source… fuck off. You’re going to fail.

And I know some folks think that has value, but I don’t. I think it has anti-value, because it tries to circumvent the understanding that you gain through experience to someone telling you “hot tipzzzz” about how to squeeze money from people without actually understanding the experience of the player. And these kinds of discussions put the economic engine first, but I have yet to see any kind of game I’ve ever loved that started by trying to figure out the hot new monetization trends.

It sucks that this is what a lot of games has become. And it’s frustrating to see a lot of really smart people devoting their mental bandwidth to this bullshit, instead of trying to come up with new, original things that create unexpected joy in players, who love it enough that they’re happy to spend money on it. Instead, they’re satisfied smashing a derivative parasitic version of success onto a photocopy of something someone loved, and believing they’re building something new.

Fuck that shit.

The Perils of Positivity

I often hear that startup founders need to have a kind of unreasonable positivity in order to succeed. The belief that this impossible thing will work carries you through the pain and obstacles to finally achieve success, or something like that.

I think this is total fucking bullshit.

I mean, yes – you need to believe the thing will work. There are going to be ridiculous obstacles in your way, and the most likely outcome is failure. But so often, I see people espousing this, “I have to be confident it’ll all work out!” and there’s two ways I see that play out, one alright, one terrible:

Way 1: I look at the thing we’re trying to do and with clear eyes, dive into the potential problems. I may not have all the answers, but I dive deeply enough that I can understand the relative risks involved, and make a clear assessment of whether we’re likely to be able to overcome those obstacles, tackle them in risk priority order, and make things work. It looks daunting, but I understand it as well as I can, and believe we can get through it, even if it’s not clear exactly how yet.

Way 1 isn’t terrible, and if you’re in a startup, it’s what you have to do. But a shocking number of people interpret this call to positivity in a different way.

Way 2: I look at the end goal of the thing I want to achieve and visualize that we’ll get there. I don’t really need to think about the obstacles in the way, because I know we’ll be able to achieve the end result. Over the course of development so far, we’ve run into a bunch of problems, but they’ve always worked themselves out, and so I know that if we just keep at it, we’ll get to the end goal. I just need to stay positive.

Which, when I write it like that, sounds really stupid. But a surprising number of people in positions of power over the course of my career have mistaken “positivity” for “lack of diligence and awareness”.

And that goes for at least two things. First, they’re not diligent about actually understanding the obstacles, in number or scope, in front of them. Second, they don’t understand how those obstacles were actually dealt with during development – who struggled with them, who overcame them, how, or at what cost. So they also don’t understand what it’s taken so far to get to where they are.

When you have a problem with a startup, someone fixes the problem. It may not be you – hell, often it’s better if it’s not you – but nothing ever, ever, ever “resolves on its own”. And holy shit, the number of times I’ve heard these positive people say “It just works out,” or “The problem just goes away,” makes me want to stab a lot of folks. Nothing “just works out”. Nothing “just goes away”. Someone makes it happen. Someone dives into the complex problem, builds understanding, attacks the weaknesses, and figures it out. What you’re saying when you say the problem “just works out,” is really “I have no idea how it worked out, who put in the work to make it happen, but I don’t really care to give people the credit they deserve.”

And yeah – I’ve often been in the situation where I’m solving critical, urgent, difficult problems and then had someone above me say, “Yeah, these problems just work themselves out! Amazing!”

“Positivity” isn’t something you inject into the process. Positivity is a symptom of trust, understanding, and hard work. Running into a room full of bears with your hands over your eyes yelling, “I believe it’ll all just work out!” is a surefire recipe for being eaten by bears. And that’s the correct god damned outcome for you if that’s your approach.

You want positivity, look at your problems. Assume that no problem will ever solve itself. Figure out who is doing the work to solve the problems, figure out who should be working on them if no one is already. Give them the time and resources they need to take a solid stab at figuring it out, and the credit the ever-loving shit out of them if they make it happen.

As a leader, some folks think that “the buck stops with me,” means “I can take all the credit for everything,” because I’m ultimately responsible. And sure, to some degree that’s technically true. But it’s a really counterproductive, ego-centric, and … well, childish approach to things. A good leader takes no credit. They give away all the accolades for success. They take all the blame for failures. Because leaders get too much by default. People remember Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs didn’t resuscitate Apple or invent the iPhone on his own. Leaders get too much credit. It’s their job to give as much of that credit away to the people on their team who made things happen.

But that starts with being aware of who’s making things happen. So if you think positivity is that problems just go away on their own, you’re failing as a leader and you’re failing at your job.

Out in the World

A month or so ago, our friend Lindsi had some extra tickets to go see the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service concert. So we went. Up until the concert, I was fairly ambivalent about it. But it was great.

And throughout the concert, I was reminded of other shows I’ve been to. I saw Pearl Jam & Rollins Band at the Greek Theater in 1993. It might have been the last concert I went to at the Greek, though I feel fairly certain that I’m forgetting something. So it made me think about the various folks I’ve seen live. Radiohead, The Prodigy, Foo Fighters, Cake, Doomtree, Flobots, Bon Jovi, Rush, New Order, Green Day… I think maybe Tool, Helmet, Garbage? But I’m not sure. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are a LOT of bands that I may or may not have seen over the last 30 years, and I don’t remember.

But the show reminded me of what things were like before the pandemic, when I spent more time out in the world. I default to spending a lot of time at home, now. And it’s not that weird – I’ve never liked crowds in any context. Working in a coffee shop is like … not a thing I’ve ever had any desire to do. But engaging with things – going to things like Teamlab: Planets, or seeing artists I love performing live… there’s nothing like it.

I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve wanted to play board games more than videogames recently. Doing stuff with people – making new memories – I think that’s what life is for. It’s why the summer Korea-Japan trip was so good. Time spent not just with family, but with good friends doing new things… I want more of that, and every time I get it, I love it.

I went to GamesBeat NEXT – a conference about a lot of things I hate about games. AI, “Metaverse”, Blockchain… but there were good, meaningful, experience-based talks among a lot of bullshit. I met some new people. Reconnected with old friends. I almost didn’t go – too much work, too far, blah blah blah. But I’m glad I did. And I think it’s basically like that – home has a lot of inertia, but getting out into the world is what makes time worthwhile.

Gear and Persistence

One of the things I struggle with is how much of a hobby is “gear” vs. how much of it is “persistence” and “make do”. This year, I bought a bigger wing for wingfoiling, and it was a transformative experience. I’d been using a 6m wing for two years, and struggling a lot to get up on foil. I always felt like there wasn’t enough power, but had assumed I was just doing things incorrectly because, you know, novice.

But at the beginning of the season, I talked to someone at MAC Kiteboard, which (like Sweetwater for music) has a pretty robust “sales engineer” program. So I talked to a guy, described my gear, the conditions, and where I was at, and he said unequivocally, “You need a bigger wing.” So I got an 8m wing. When I started, 8m wings didn’t exist. It’s only in the last year or so that they started making wings with additional structure to support a deeper chord length, allowing you to have more sqm surface without increasing the width of the wing, which, when it’s too wide, makes it impossible to keep the wingtips out of the water.The moment I got new gear, the whole sport changed. I was up on foil instantly.

I still struggle going goofy-foot, but regular stance, things are rock solid. I need to practice turns next season. But the gear made a tremendous difference, and while I couldn’t have chosen better when I started, I wish I’d gotten one of these wings the moment they released it.

I got a new laptop the other day. In part because the Intel Macbook was starting to struggle with regular web pages (!!??) like Boardgamearena.com – it’s still fine for more basic stuff, but it was starting to get unpleasant for things I actually use. One of the things I wanted to use, and did, but irregularly, was Ableton Live. I have a silly amount of music crap, but Ableton “brings it all together” – if you want to record stuff, Ableton’s the thing. The Deluge and OP-1 both can do that to an extent, but Ableton’s much, much, much easier to use.

But the laptop constantly maxed out on CPU, and when it does that, audio crackles, stutters, and pops. It’s awful to listen to. More than 2-3 tracks, a few effects, and that was all the laptop could handle. So I’d poke at Ableton, run into these CPU problems and give up after a bit.I spent the morning with Ableton on the new laptop, and it’s night and day. It’s not about “How do I minimize CPU usage?” which is not “Let’s make some music!“, and now it’s more, “Oh, I can experiment with music stuff and not worry about overhead.” It’s great.

Sometimes it’s best to struggle with what you have, but sometimes a step up in gear makes it all actually work in a way that it didn’t before.

Game Development In the Future

AI is definitely coming to game development. While obviously, early uses of AI are for business clowns to try to fire all their artists and suck, there’s going to be an eventual stabilization of AI, where it’s utilized with curated training data sets to act as tools that empower developers, artists, and even non-developers to build game content fairly easily. This isn’t going to replace artists. The best art will be made *by artists*, but in order to be competitively *fast*, you’ll have to start utilizing AI tools to “fill in” the less important content, or speed up art production by automating tedious art-related-but-not-art tasks.

I have no doubt this will happen, and become commonplace over the course of the next five years. It’ll happen faster, but it’ll be ethically questionable for another few years, at least, and it’ll take some time to figure out how to draw boundaries that give these tools power, but also deal with protecting human work. It’ll be a weird few years, for sure.

I’m still convinced, however, that web3 is useless. Hearing folks at a conference today talk about how “Player ownership is inevitable!” and “Now is the best time to really dive into blockchain because the hype has disappeared!” It feels like a bunch of guys who found a tool that they really, really want to use, but still genuinely have no idea what it’s for or why any player would want it, but boy, it’s valuable, so just keep saying so as loud as you can and one day someone else will believe it, too! It’s bullshit.

“Player ownership” isn’t ever likely going to be tied to blockchain or NFTs. It’s never going to be interoperable. And listening to vets who’ve worked in early genuine “metaverse” iterations who sincerely believe that interoperability is a boondoggle, I’m more interested in their opinions about the validity of interoperability than I am in listening to the web3 bros, who are espousing some sort of utopia that they’re sure will materialize one day, even though it’s been technically possible since the beginning of gaming and yet no one’s ever, ever done it with any scale or success.

So yeah. AI yes. Web3 no. Development process, team structure and size, are all about to change pretty radically. I’m not sure for the better. It’ll make content creation easier, for sure. Which will undoubtedly reduce iteration time and help people make better games. But it’ll also make it much, much easier for there to be MORE games – so many that quality is really going to be the thing, not just “can you make a game”, but “can you make a game that stands out over the now-extreme level of trash noise.

It’s gonna be weird.

Ugh.

I loved making games. It’s a hugely creative endeavor, full of challenges. Wrangling a lot of peoples’ visions, managing a tremendous amount of complexity, trying to understand how players will receive what you’re building, and whether you’re building the right thing.

I was gifted a pass to GamesBeat Next by a friend, and have been thinking about whether to go or not. The timing is kind of a pain, and getting into SF is always a little bit annoying. But a lot of people I know will be there, and it might be fun to catch up with some of them if they have a few minutes to chat.

But look at this agenda:

Pacific Hall

  • 10 AM | Build Beyond: The future of game development with cloud and generative AI

  • 10:30 AM | Are You Ready for the EU’s Digital Markets Act?

  • 11 AM | AI and gaming: Shaping the future of interactive experiencesReimagining beloved IP: how to get it right

  • 11:30 AM | The right and wrong way to do blockchain games

  • 12 PM | Building and operating a game with a symbiotic bridge between Web2 and Web3 gamers.

Landmark Library

  • 10 AM | Keys to survival in Web3 Games

  • 10:30 AM | Practical steps to making the metaverse

  • 11 AM | The changing world of games by the numbers

  • 11:30 AM | Navigating the challenges of AI in gaming

  • 12 PM | Using AI to personalize games

There are a few potentially interesting tidbits. Detail on what the Digital Markets Act entails, but I could read up on that in 10 minutes and probably be just as informed. The changing world of games by the numbers is probably an interesting demographic breakdown of what modern gaming looks like that would have data I probably *don’t* have easy access to.

But everything else… who the fuck is giving talks about “The future of game development with cloud and generative AI”? Experts who’ve shipped content using those tools? No. Because no one’s *done that* yet. So it’s a bunch of people who have experimented with it, but built up no meaningful genuine experience. Which goes for *every fucking AI talk at this conference*. And the talks that aren’t AI? Metaverse and Web3.

Who gives a fuck.

I absolutely do not just not want to know about the Keys to survival in Web3 Games, I don’t want anyone in the goddamn industry to give a shit about it either.

But more, this is a conference whose content is essentially directed either at “business bros” who need to know about the “hot new buzzwords”, and fucking no one else.

Everything I love about games is people. It’s the vision for the art. It’s the complexity of interesting systems. It’s the elegance of paring down what a game is into something simple and expressive, or the complexity of systems interacting with one another. It’s an expression of feeling, emotions, or evoking them in players.

Everything I love about making games is people. It’s being surprised and delighted by concept art that is both exactly what I asked for and something magical I never would have imagined. It’s about working with engineers to find clever solutions to things that do 80% of the work in 5% of the time. It’s about trying to take this big, squishy, out-of-control monstrosity that only exists in our collective imaginations and do the difficult work of pulling it out of our heads and making it work in the real world.

AI is a tool. At best. Web3 is scammy bullshit that provides literally nothing of value, even in the best possible scenario. And it’s funny, because it feels like whoever approved all these talks thought, “Yeah, this conference is gonna be on the bleeding edge!” and in the year it took for it to all come together, it already seems hopelessly stupid.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the AI talks will be about finding ethical training sets for AI tools that empower artists and designers, and not just ways to suck the joy and fun out of gamedev and replace it with profit to enrich the Bobby Koticks of the world. But I doubt it. Maybe the web3 talks will be reflective sessions about how to not fall for baseless claims of “interoperability” and “ownership” without actually giving any consideration to how any of that shit would actually work, or why players would ever even care about it in the first place. But I doubt it.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll go to this, because there will be people there I respect and admire (100% guaranteed), and maybe some of the talks will not make me want to burn the whole industry down.

 

But I doubt it.

Resume Book

One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the last few years has been helping folks write effective resumes. I started out just helping friends, but then helping friends-of-friends, and then randos through LinkedIn. And over time, a few things became pretty clear:

  • Everyone makes the same mistakes
  • I was repeating myself a lot

Every time I’d sit down with a new resume, my criticism was the same. My approach was the same. I assumed that for different people in different industries, with different backgrounds, I’d end up with more varied approaches. But no – almost everyone made the same mistakes with their resume, and because of that, the advice and perspective I tried to impart was nearly identical for everyone.

The tl;dr version that’ll get you halfway there in one sentence is this: Your resume isn’t an advertisement, but it should be. Most people don’t really think too much about what a resume is trying to do, or who’s reading it. It’s not a historical record of your work, even though you’re told that’s what it should be. It’s an ad. It’s purpose is to get you an interview. That’s it.

This message seemed to surprise nearly everyone, and the consequences of it were things people just didn’t ever consider when writing their resume. So I finally decided to just write it down. You can read the doc here, totally for free. If you do read through it, comments and feedback on the doc are totally welcome.

If you find that doc useful, or if you just have different preferences for format, you can also check it out here, where you can pick it up for a few $ for your Kindle, or in paperback form.

At some point I’m going to write a second version of this with more detailed examples, but this version has all the perspective and wisdom I’ve acquired from working with dozens of folks over the last few years.

If you know anyone whose resume could some help, or someone who’s sent out a lot of resumes but hasn’t received a lot of calls for interviews in return, please pass this on to them.