Author: helava

Web3, ‘Interoperabillity’, and Obvious Scams

You know the phishing e-mails you get that are full of bizarre spelling errors? Part of the purpose of those is to weed out the people who aren’t going to fall for the scam.

When someone talks to you about web3 games and uses the phrase “interoperability”, I want you to think of that as the exact same thing.

It’s something that sounds good on the surface, but if you know anything about game development, it falls apart immediately. Web3 “interoperability”, where you can take an NFT from one game and use it in another? No one’s going to do that. There’s no financial incentive to do so. It’s fundamentally not how games are built. And not just traditionally – even if someone fully embraced web3, there’s no incentive to ever make something that takes an NFT that someone bought elsewhere and create content for it in your own game.

So when someone says, “Yeah, man – you can buy this magic sword NFT, and when you get bored of Game X, you can take it to Game Y where it’ll be a super valuable house! How awesome is that?” what you should hear is, “I either know absolutely nothing about how games are made, or I think you’re stupid (or ignorant) and am trying to sucker you.”

They are literally the same thing.

The Ride of a Lifetime

Read through Bob Iger’s book, “The Ride of a Lifetime” and really enjoyed it. He’s a good storyteller, and a lot of his “leadership lessons” are things I want to have confirmed by someone of his stature, so … yeah, I liked it a lot.

One thing that struck me, though, is that Iger fairly deftly understood how streaming and other tech was going to disrupt Disney’s distribution channels. I don’t think he’s going to be CEO of Disney really long enough to ride the whole next wave, but I think whoever succeeds him will have to have a really good understanding of how much tech is about to change content creation.

I think we’re many years off from machine-written scripts – but what I think AI can do is essentially “Rapid prototype” entire movies, where you can stuff a script into it, and get some basic performances/visuals out quickly – like, faster, more detailed, moving storyboards. It won’t replicate the hand of a director, or the nuances of human actors (at least not yet), but I’d be very surprised if a lot of preproduction steps of films validate scripts and ideas by quickly turning them into like… “quick renders” of scripts that are largely done by machine.

And then you’d have a director essentially work with some folks to “tune” that quick render so it more closely matches their vision, and you’d invest time in specific sequences to flesh them out in more detail. But I expect you’ll get to a point where you can have a pretty phenomenal pre-vis of your movie by just using off the shelf tools.

Maybe the way tech will be disrupting content creation will be totally different. But that seems like a plausible path forward to me, and I think, again, that the best uses of tech/AI will be those that are *driven* by artists, and refined by artists.

The Last of Us

Avoiding the incoming crush of story spoilers due to the TV show was the impetus for me to finally get through The Last of Us after 3 attempts. I’ve bought and played every version of the game that’s been released, and this is the first time I’ve finished it.

What a ride. What a game.

The first time I tried playing it was in 2013, right after my second son was born, and that opening was absolutely crushing. It’s so good, but it also sets the emotional stakes *so high* that as a new parent, I couldn’t bear it. Once you get to the clickers, the stress level was through the roof as well, and tired, constantly running on empty, and then essentially having my professional life turned upside down at the same time… I put it aside for years, and didn’t pick it up again until the PS4 version, which I got well after its release.

And that opening. Hit just as hard. Stress level just as high. Made it further over the course of the next few years – about 1/3 of the way in, but then put it aside again. It was an extraordinary experience, but so tense that between parenting, my dad’s accident, startup life, I just couldn’t add any more stress to the equation, even fun stress, without breaking.

So it wasn’t until this time around that I finally got through the whole thing. And I’m glad I was able to do it without any major spoilers. Turns out some things I’d thought I’d heard re: spoilers weren’t what happened, so that was a bit of weird subversion.

But yeah. Also weirdly prescient re: pandemic life and peoples’ responses to it. I’ve never seen more fleshed out characters than in TLOU in any videogame. Even stuff like Mass Effect, which spends a lot more time with the characters. TLOU’s linear story allows for a lot more control and detail, and it makes for really rich, interesting, layered characters that have the depth to evolve while still being … true to themselves.

What a ride. What a game.

What’s Next??

When I think of “what’s next”, the genuine answer is, “I don’t know.”

I think AR will be world-changing the moment someone figures out how to do a socially-acceptable AR thing. I’d thought Apple was poised to do it, but it sounds like maybe it’s not coming any time soon. The Reality Pro rumors are interesting, and I’d certainly buy one, but it’s not the AR nuclear bomb going off. Not yet.

I feel pretty safe in saying it’s not “web3/blockchain”. I’ve spent months thinking about it, and find it so utterly uncompelling and pointless that I’m genuinely confused about what I’m missing. But everyone I’ve asked for help understanding has basically said some variation of the same things, which are all nonsensical to me. (To be clear, this is me being diplomatic. I understand why a company would get in on it, as investment money is there for the taking, but I haven’t heard a web3/blockchain gaming proposal that has *any* utility to the actual player.)

I do think, though, that the answer to “what’s next” is somewhere in the sea of people who just got laid off. Whether it’s some team within Meta that was pushing hard for something creative that didn’t fit the plan, or some folks in Google that was doing something strange, or a frustrated Hololens engineer… it’s probably not even anyone I expect, working on anything I can conceive of. But it’s out there. Bubbling away.

In 2008, when I got laid off from the company I worked for, the opportunity was there, and I saw it. But I wouldn’t have *taken* the chance if I’d still had my job. It was getting laid off that enabled me to co-found Self Aware Games.

I took the shot because I had nothing to lose, and the financial and social security to do it, along with the ticking clock of my first son’s impending arrival, which meant we knew how much time we had to make it work or it’d be over.

I imagine there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to put their fate into some huge corporation’s hands again. Folks whose severance gives them a bit of padding, and their specialized knowledge about cutting-edge stuff gives them a window into the future that few people have.

I’m super excited to see what comes out of it, and I know it’ll be something none of us expected.

Pain

There’s a bunch of studies about pain that show that the intensity of your recollection of how painful something was isn’t about the maximum pain you felt, it’s about the *last* pain you felt. A surgical procedure that goes on longer, with *higher* maximum pain, is recalled as though it was less painful if a superfluous low-pain thing is added to the end of it.

I’m hearing a lot about folks who were let go from companies after long tenures in terrible ways. Cut off from their communities without a chance to say goodbye or get closure or grieve with friends and teammates.

So add on that low-pain thing at the end. Find the people you want to say goodbye to and say goodbye. Organize a last lunch, or a small get-together. Reminisce and grieve and cry and laugh and whatever. Make that your last memory.

My last three jobs have ended in ways that were painful, and I was never able to get any kind of proper closure. You may want to walk away and never see your team or be in that environment again after having been treated poorly, but you have a choice how to end things for yourself. A little bit of effort to put a nice bow on it, and a great side effect is that your long-term perception of how badly things “actually” ended will be significantly reduced.

Read Only Memory

I picked up a book by Read Only Memory – a beautiful retrospective on the Dreamcast – and it’s a delightful trip down memory lane. The DC remains one of my favorite consoles, and it’s the only “classic” console that I regularly play.

Not only that, but some of my very best friends to this day were from my time working on Seaman, and from a DC-focused online message board from the era.

From that perspective, the Dreamcast has had a surprisingly significant impact on my entire life, and earned a meaningful place in my heart.

Startup Advice

Running a #startup for the first time? Here’s a few bits of unsolicited advice from someone who’s been there a few times. Most of this is relevant to software development – there are some things that can be different working with hardware or other things with longer lead/iteration times.

1.) Secrecy doesn’t matter. Until your product is successful, it’s not worth it for anyone to care about it. If you’re pre-product/market fit, you shouldn’t hesitate to tell anyone you think can help you what your idea is. Don’t bother with NDAs. Don’t bother with patents. Nothing will protect you better than speed. Secrecy and speed work against each other.

2.) Don’t worry about competitors. You may hear of someone doing something that on paper sounds exactly like what you’re doing. That’s fine. It’s easy to get scared off of a concept when this happens, because you’re worried about losing first-mover advantage. But in most things, first-mover advantage doesn’t actually exist. And literally everything I’ve ever worked on – someone’s out there trying to do something similar. But it’s never *the same*, because no one has the experience and perspective that you do, so if you’re trying to solve someone’s problem, you’ll do it in a different way than anyone else. And those differences are what will differentiate your product, not the high-level thing that your product is doing. So if you’re working on a tool that auto-annotates meetings and follows up with important tasks, and you hear someone else working on something that sounds similar – don’t sweat it. Your products will almost certainly be totally different, and prioritize different things.

3.) No, really – don’t worry about competitors. Early on, some folks do a lot of “competitive research” to figure out the features your product needs to have before launch. If you’re doing this, you’ve already lost, because you’ll always be months, if not years behind the competition. All you need to do is focus on the problem you are trying to solve for a particular audience, and understand what that specific, small audience needs to have a great experience. Stuff that already exists that you can see in your competitors’ products? They’re basically “solved problems”. If you’re building something new, you have “unsolved problems” that you absolutely need to address first.

4.) This is the tough one, because very few people know how to do it correctly. But prototype fast, and test with real users as soon as you humanly can. And I don’t mean “build a shitty version of your thing” or “build something janky and busted that doesn’t do the right thing.” Building a honest-to-goodness minimum viable product that will *answer the questions you need answered* about whether you’re building something someone desperately needs – that’s a very tough challenge, and it’s *very* specific to your product, what you know about your audience, and what you don’t. There is no boilerplate answer for “what features are necessary for an MVP” that you can steal from someone who’s done this before. It requires deeply understanding your potential audience, and deeply understanding what you’re trying to do, and then finding out what you don’t know in order of “biggest risk” on down.

In addition to the base complexity of trying to understand what a real MVP should contain, you’re also fighting everyone’s existing process, training, and how they evaluate whether something is “good” or not. By most metrics, MVPs will be “bad” products. They shouldn’t be robust. They shouldn’t be pretty. They shouldn’t scale. (Of course, those statements can be wrong if your product specifically is focused on one of those areas, and for some reason that’s the thing you need to get answers about.)

Great artists are great because they make great art. Great engineers are great because they write great code. By whatever definition great is in your field. But a great MVP is evaluated by if you’re getting great, actionable, understandable *information* from your target audience. The information doesn’t even need to be *positive* for your MVP to be doing a great job. If you are learning things you didn’t know before, and couldn’t have known before, then your MVP is doing a great job!

It’s a way of thinking of greatness that is surprisingly counterintuitive, because you will feel bad about showing it to people (because it’s not “great work” by a traditional definition) and you will often feel bad about the data you get back (which is that your first iterations of your MVP are showing that users are NOT responding to your product the way you thought they would).

But imagine if you’d spent three years working on that product, and *then* users didn’t respond the way you thought they would. Then your company would be dead. So if you’re learning, and creating actionable data, and gaining a better understanding of your audience and product, the MVP is doing its job.

Learning fast is 100% of a startup’s job in the early days. Every decision you make as a #leader should be geared toward maximizing how fast you can learn. Usually that means maximizing iteration speed and minimizing risk (which can mean building infrastructure that doesn’t feel like “product” at first!), so that you can learn quickly.

If you’re doing this for the first time, and this all sounds wrong to you, DM me. Let’s talk. Because *so* many startups make the same mistakes – they keep things under wraps. They spend years building before showing anything to anyone. They trust their own judgment and insight. And then they launch and are dead in months.

There is no more expensive and wasteful mistake than building the wrong thing. Learning fast with real users is the absolute best way to make sure that doesn’t happen. It may be the only way.

Leadership & Counterintuitiveness

When you’re in a position of leadership, there are a lot of things that feel counterintuitive. A lot of your “natural” responses will be wrong.

When something goes wrong, you may get upset, frustrated, or angry. This was “fine” when you were an IC, but *fatal* when you’re a leader. This trains people to not tell you when things go wrong, and every single time it happens it will have ripple effects that will last for years.

Take a breath. You don’t need to solve this instantly. If you need to, try, “Thank you for telling me this. Give me a second to digest things before we move forward,” then take a walk around the block, or scream into a pillow behind closed doors, or whatever. But your public-facing response, and your response to the person who told you whatever catastrophic news is positive, grateful, constructive. Because you *want* people to come to you with bad news, from small bad news to company-destroying catastrophic news. And if they’re scared of your response, they’ll hide bad news from you until it’s too late. So even if you can’t do it in “real-time”, ask for a moment to process things, go freak out in private, and then come back ready to solve problems.

This is hard to do. You will fail at it, and freak out in public. That’s alright. It happens. But do your best to keep your responses in check, because this is genuinely one of the most important things you can do as a leader – be open and positive and constructive when you get terrible, terrible news from your team.

This doesn’t mean you can’t hold people to account. It just means that you do it *after* you’ve addressed the immediate crisis. Because often the problem isn’t quite where you think it is, and the problem is rarely with the messenger.

So yeah – that’s the big one, but the obvious one. For one that’s weirder and less obvious (and will make you a bit paranoid until you learn to live with it)…

When you tell jokes, people laugh. This is feedback that tells you you’re funny! People like you! You should tell more jokes!

But laughter is sometimes a genuine response to humor… and sometimes it’s a social signal that you’re in the in-crowd. Yeah – people are laughing not (just, maybe?) because you’re funny, but because you have *power*. And it’s really easy to overlook this, because it *feels* good. People listen to you. They pay attention. Because you have good ideas, and are charismatic… and(or?) you have power.

You feel validated in speaking up, because people listen. They respond. They laugh. So you speak up more. You interject. The feedback encourages you to do more.

But a lot of this feedback is social validation of your *power*, not (just?) the quality of your ideas or humor.

What do you do about that? Nothing. Just keep it in mind. Question whether you need to talk or not. Whether the positive feedback you’re getting is because your ideas are good, or because you happen to be up in the hierarchy. If that’s all you do, you’ll do a better job than most.

Good Managers, Bad Managers

One thing that I’ve found over the years is that almost all good managers I’ve worked for or with, didn’t learn from good managers. They learned how to be good managers by having bad managers.

While it’s easy to understand how being managed by someone awful would teach you what you don’t want to do when you have the chance to manage others, it’s a little un-obvious why having great managers wouldn’t teach you the things you *want* to do when you have a chance to manage others.

The main problem is that when you’ve been managed by great people, you don’t get yelled at. You never feel what it’s like to be humiliated in public. You get a chance for your career to develop, and you often don’t feel the unjustness of being passed over for something you genuinely deserve. There’s a lot of things like that. When you’re managed by someone good, these things happen, and they feel natural. They often don’t feel like someone’s put in a ton of work to make those things happen. You don’t see the effort they put in to remain calm, to ask “why” instead of lashing out, to build structures that are fair and responsible and foster growth.

And so when someone who’s never had a bad manager then gets a chance to manage folks, they can be frustrated when things go wrong and lash out. Why did (underling) screw up?!? Why weren’t they paying attention?!?! And while there are some folks who are observant enough to have understood that a great manager walked them through some of *their* mistakes, I’ve found that a lot of folks don’t understand the work that made their experience great.

So they respond with emotion. They nitpick. They think career progression “just happens”. They promise their managers work that their team is underequipped to do. They manage up, because that’s what got them here, and they didn’t see the work that was required to manage down.

Someone who had a terrible boss? Well, some of them get into power and say, “My turn.” Those – those are the absolute worst. But they’re also obvious. Having a bad manager who only ever had good managers? They can be *super confusing*, because their behavior makes almost no sense. They seem to want the right things, but are just incapable of actually doing them.

This pattern has been so consistent for me that I hesitate to hire someone who *hasn’t* had a garbage manager at some point in their career. And I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever worked (above OR below) a great manager who didn’t have someone looming in their past that they didn’t like.

What’s your experience been?

teamwork management

Vision Pro?

I’m definitely interested in the Vision Pro. And I say that as someone who’s been a VR enthusiast since the Oculus DK2 and someone who spent a few years making a VR product for healthcare, but *not* a fan of Meta and their “leadership” in the space. It’s been great that they put a tremendous amount of money into trying to build out a VR ecosystem, and a lot of absolutely brilliant people have worked under Meta’s umbrella. But Zuckerberg’s obsession with “social” as a driver for *VR* is about as big a mistake as I’ve ever seen at that scale.

I’d love to have seen someone with that kind of $ work on VR as a great “transportative”, isolating experience, which is what VR does extraordinarily well.

While Vision Pro’s price is obviously limiting, it’s clear that this is a “top-down” approach that I think is likely to work. And it’s likely to work because VP offers a competent, usable AR *work* device, where the Quest Pro/2 have been limited by their screen resolution and comfort, and their general … “social-first” approach.

It feels to me like Apple’s approach has been a focus on AR. But instead of getting sucked in to the massive problems that Hololens and Magic Leap and nReal have had trying to make waveguide-based “overlay” tech work, they’ve instead cranked up the resolution and fidelity of pass-through tech… which seems like the correct option to me given the fatal problems of the current crop of AR headsets.

I do *not* think Vision Pro is the thing that will make AR/VR take off like a rocket. There’s a technology limitation that will keep this a niche device for a few generations, IMO, around either “true” AR, or some sort of trickery that lets passthrough-style VR appear invisible. When that happens, AR will instantly become a gajillion-dollar industry faster than anything else, ever. This isn’t that.

But VP is a *huge* step in the right direction if it works as advertised, which, given Apple’s history I presume it will. Which will baffle folks looking at specs and $, and wondering why not Meta Quest Pro?

But the last bit of this puzzle is trust. XR requires a huge amount of environmental and personal data. I *do not want* Meta to have that data about me, because I know it’ll be abused at every opportunity. While all big companies are highly incentivized to utilize that data as much as possible, Apple’s shown a commitment to data privacy that’s well beyond anything their competitors are even willing to talk about.

And this means that once there’s a viable alternative to Meta, I’m going to drop Meta’s products like a hot rock and never look back. And that means as a developer, working on VP is a prospect I’m unlikely to pass up.