Author: helava

Too Much is Too Much

I have too many interests.

I want to spend time:

  • Making a game
  • Simracing
  • Making music
  • Spending time with the kids
  • Boardgaming
  • Videogaming
  • Reading comic books & Sci-Fi
  • Wingfoiling
  • Biking
  • Paddleboarding
  • Archerying
  • Drawing
  • Playing old games I never got around to on what are now “retro” platforms
  • Cooking
  • Organizing and fixing stuff up around the house
  • Making pottery
  • Swimming
  • Writing (Resume stuff, novel, leadership/game design book)
  • Blacksmithing
  • Learning arbitrary new stuff
  • Getting in better shape

I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And I know that everyone’s got a huge variety of hobbies. And one thing that’s different, is that more than most people, I have time.

I don’t take that for granted at all. But what it causes is this kind of persistent analysis paralysis and inability to focus on one thing and go deep to the degree that’s necessary for me to improve at anything. And sometimes, worse, that analysis paralysis prevents me from doing ANY of these things out of a weird kind of FOMO that I might pick something and then have an opportunity to do something better.

And I think that served me alright when the kids were small, or time was more scarce. But now, I have a bit of time where I could “go deep”, and find myself constantly pulled in different directions. There’s another bad impulse, which is, “I’ll do this when I have it all set up “right”.” Which sometimes is “the right gear”, which is almost always the incorrect impulse. Do the thing, get better to the point where you’re limited by the gear, then change the gear. But “new gear” feels like progress, and it often serves as a proxy for real progress. This is bad, and I’ve come to be better at recognizing it in myself.

But in any case, the thing is, it’s too much. That whole list of shit above? No one could be great at all that stuff. No one could even be competent at most of that stuff simultaneously. It’s just too much. Getting good at any two or three of those things would be the work of a lifetime.

I love getting “competent” at things, though, and I like that I’ve had the opportunity to dabble in a LOT of things, and become … not “fluent”, but maybe “conversant” in a ton of weird shit. But I would like to get better at a few things – probably making music (though narrowing it down between guitar and generalized music production is hard), and getting in better shape are the two things that I’d like to focus on the most that aren’t “explicitly spend time with friends and family”.

Maybe that’s just the goal in 2024. To figure out how to put the rest of things *aside* for a year, and just focus on those two things.

2023

Definitely a mixed year. My aunt passed away. My dad had a bone infection that needed surgery, and is likely going to need to move into an assisted living facility in 2024 due to his cognitive decline, and my mom getting older & being less physically able to take care of him full-time, plus the six years of accumulated stress. We had a life-changing trip to Korea & Japan. We went to both Maui (Spring Break) and Oahu (Winter Break). The kids are great. We had some touch-up work done on the house. Most of the day to day stuff was great. We got to see friends, play games, have a lot of great food. J&K are growing up quickly. 2023 felt like an “Oh, shit – time is going FAST” year, as both kids grew up a lot this year, I think.

J’s been making some really impressive games. K’s reading ALL the manga with a kind of rabid aggression I didn’t expect. Both are finding their social circles and spending more time with friends.

For 2024, my resolutions are pretty simple, and mostly a recap of 2023’s, which I largely failed at:

* More exercise, less junk eating. Goal weight is again <210.
* Make something start to finish. This will likely be a VR ARPG (think Diablo-lite) that takes place around the player. Not a first-person game, but more of a Moss-like “diorama” experience. I’ve been less and less interested in 1st person VR, TBH.
* Do a revision of the resume book and actually try to sell it. This will be a more or less complete rewrite but with a solid example and a kind of work-flow that the reader can follow along with. Same basic ideas & content, but largely different structure.
* Be helpful in a way that I find enjoyable. I’ve found I’m not a huge fan of 1:1 mentoring for individuals. Doesn’t feel impactful enough. But through Christy, we had some chances this year to talk to groups of entrepreneurs about our experience, and both of those events were really satisfying. I also had a chance to connect with some early entrepreneurs, and some of that has been genuinely rewarding as well. So, more of that, and less 1:1 stuff. Try to submit to some speaking engagements re: team culture & product dev stuff.

So yeah. 2024. More conscious engagement, less “do the default”. More exercise, more winging, more focused projects. But I don’t expect it to be *radically* different – just challenging some things I “feel into” in 2023, that ended up being habits I don’t want to continue.

QA Is Important

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.

Interview Questions

As we go into the new year after a disastrous year for game industry workers (but not games, or game industry execs!), a reminder:

Your and your company’s values aren’t what you say. They’re not even what you do much of the time. They’re only genuinely tested when living up to your values costs you something.

So when folks come to interview at your company and ask, “How did you handle the pandemic?” Or “Tell me about that round of layoffs you did, and did your compensation change as a result?” Or “You previously said “Work remotely forever,” but then “recalled” employees into the office. Tell me about how you made those decisions?”

Those are questions that are asking about your values that matter.

And to folks searching for employment, I know it’s a hard time to ask tough questions, but *no* “theoretical” questions about values will ever be useful to you. The only questions that will illuminate anything interesting about a company are questions about what they *actually did* in difficult situations that are real. And frankly, going into the interview, you should probably already know the answers. You’re asking because you want to make sure that the folks you’re interviewing with are honest, and capable of telling you the truth.

To the execs & folks in positions of power: If you’re laying off folks, and then out of the other side of your mouth calling your employees “family”, I implore you to reconsider. Doing this is abusive, and exploits employees’ enthusiasm and/or naïveté for your explicit benefit. It is manipulative and exploitative. Don’t do it.

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.