I preordered a Vision Pro. Mostly because as a potential developer, I’m always curious about new platforms and their potential. “But what about the Quest 3, which does almost everything Apple’s talking about?” The answer to that is actually pretty simple: I don’t want the Quest 3. And it has very little to do with the technology.

I don’t want the Quest 3, because fundamentally, I don’t trust Meta. I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg. Do I think he’s a terrible guy? No – I know folks who know him, and I believe he’s sincere and well-intentioned. But I don’t trust his judgment on matters of data and privacy, and a real XR headset is a privacy nightmare.

I know folks who worked on the privacy side of the Quest. They were incredibly smart folks, who thought hard and deeply about the subject. But I also never trusted the end product, because *fundamentally* I don’t trust Meta and I never will. And I know that whatever those smart, caring folks did, it wasn’t *their* judgment that made the final decisions. It was Zuckerberg, it was the $.

It doesn’t matter what they say, because what they’ve *already done* with Facebook tells me everything I need to know. And because of that, nothing they say will ever carry any weight.

As things like XR and AI and the general total pervasiveness of phones & IOT and what have you gets … more, the thing I want out of a company is to believe in their efforts around privacy and trust. I know Apple is not a saintly company by any stretch (I’m with Epic re: store & monopoly, for instance) – but when it comes to trust and safety, it’s no contest. I’d easily pay significantly more for an Apple product than a Meta one, solely around how I perceive they will treat the data that’s necessary for deep interactions with this kind of product.

I know that for a lot of people, price beats everything, but I think more and more, how much companies can be trusted with data will become more critical, and right now, Apple’s sort of the only game in town.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Arcane – This is one of the most surprising things I’ve seen recently. It’s based on League of Legends, a game I’ve never played, but I think it might be better if you don’t know the game, because you won’t know who’s “important” or “expendable” going in. There’s a lot about the show that’s great – the music is written for the show, to the show, and because of that, the non-soundtrack songs are exceptionally impactful. The animation is genuinely mind-blowing. It’s not “Spider-verse”, because it’s trying to do something quite different. But it’s one of the most beautiful shows I’ve seen. The quality of the animation, not just the art, is incredible. Facial animation, how specific shots are framed, etc. – every bit of detail is really well done. And the characters aren’t one-note, even if they seem that way at the start. Good characters are flawed – sometimes even kinda dumb. Bad characters have recognizable, often sympathetic motivations and depth. There aren’t clear good guys and bad guys, though there are definitely people with different moral alignments and tolerances.

It’s a show that wormed its way into my mind in a way that doesn’t happen very often. There are things about it that aren’t great – some of the political stuff is slow & frustrating, for instance. But a lot of stuff is really neat – it starts out fairly slow, intentionally. There’s a nice sense of worldbuilding and pacing, and when things take off, the change in pace feels different, because of the setup. But the structure of it – the basic themes that echo through the show again and again are really nicely done. I’d highly recommend it, and if you’re interested, please stick with it through the end of Ep. 3.

One Piece Live Action – For a completely un-adaptable, utterly insane original manga, the Live Action version of One Piece is surprisingly good. The cast does a great job, and some casting is just spot-on, particularly Zoro and Buggy. I’m still getting used to Luffy – Inaki Godoy’s accent is so divergent from my internal voice for Luffy that it’s taking a long time to get used to. This may be one big thing re: folks who’ve read the manga vs. folks who are coming to the show fresh.

They’ve made a lot of smart decisions about what to keep and what to cut in order to condense things into a manageable season. I’m not a huge fan of all the Garp/Koby content, and I’m finding Koby, while they *look* perfect, the constant, “Oh, oh!” kind of character, while consistent for Koby, is annoying at scale. Which is why they weren’t this critical in the OG. But it’s not Vicious in Cowboy Bebop bad (which was unwatchably, offensively, laughably awful).

But I dislike the writing and direction. The writing for almost everything that isn’t a direct adaptation from the original dialogue is flat, lifeless, and predictable. The direction and editing is slow and awkward, and their reliance on wide-angle low shots is, once you see it, comically overdone. I get that they’re trying to mimic certain shots from the manga, and those frames are often quite extreme. But as a show, there’s so much warping at the edges of the frames that it looks cheap. And for a show that was like a $100M project… it’s a decision that has a pretty big negative impact to me.

That said, it’s an impressive adaptation overall. And it’s such a huge step *up* from Bebop (again, offensively awful) that I’m hoping w/ S2, Tomorrow Studios can take another positive step forward. Better writing, better pacing, better framing. The set design is great. The cast is pretty darned good. The structural choices have been mostly good. Here’s hoping.

Red Team Blues – Cory Doctorow’s book about an old cybersecurity guy who finds a McGuffin that causes him some problems. It’s a fun, light read – mostly takes place in the Bay Area in places I’m largely familiar with, which was nice, and “in tech”, so that was another layer of familiarity. But not in the Silicon Valley way – in sort of an anti-SV way, which was more refreshing. I’d read a followup, and apparently there’s one coming.

Three Body Problem – I just started this, so it’s hard to say how much it’ll stick with me, but the opening chapter, even though it’s a translation from Chinese, has some of the most vivid imagery I’ve read. It’s haunting and beautiful and terrible, all at once.

Huh. It didn’t really occur to me until now, but I think what was Self Aware Games is now fully dead.

I mean, as a thing, Self Aware’s been dead for more than a decade at this point. But relatively recently, a bunch of artists got laid off, and while there’s one person who’s still there, but for all practical purposes, Self Aware Games is no more.

I’ve had fairly un-mixed feelings about its long slide into irrelevancy. I’d feel … nothing, if every remaining vestige of it disappeared. I loved a lot of the things we built, but Casino, which is the only thing that survived, was a means to an end, and was never intended to be an “end”. And yet.

I wish I’d done some things, in retrospect. When SA was at its apex, I had a chance to talk more about how we got there. Our methodology, our team’s culture, how we took on giants and beat them. Nearly a decade later, I’m only just starting to hear about people doing some of the things we did, and some of the things we put into our games – people are trying to do some of the stuff we did, and they’re not even close.

But all those things are dead. They all died in service of Casino, killed by people who didn’t understand that the things we learned by building those games are why casino succeeded at all.

In 2012, right after we got acquired, if you go back and look at the charts, you’ll see that Casino peaked and then fell. Throughout 2013, it was on a steady decline. Why? Because by 2013, my co-founder and I were barely on speaking terms, and the easiest way to keep the company from turning into a daily slugfest was to let him run one part of the company, let me run one part, and create as much buffer between us as possible.

I let him run Casino, because I thought, a.) it’s $$$ (so there’ll be glory in it), and b.) it’s fairly straightforward, where Fleck was a game that needed a lot of work, and wasn’t succeeding on its own. But the trajectory of casino was … poor. Morale on the team was poor. And as a recently-acquired company, having our primary source of $ dry up would have been a great excuse for the acquiring company to step in and take control. I didn’t want that to happen.

So we consolidated both teams, and I took over running Casino with the technical folks from Fleck in charge. Co-founder got ousted to R&D land, which was honestly just a way of keeping him busy and away from everyone else, since most of his team hated working with him at that point.

We left Fleck with a small team of brilliant folks who could keep making some sort of progress, and everyone else went back to Casino. There’s a turning point in the game’s momentum a month or two after that happened. It was when we starting making new types of slot machines, and running more live events and promotions based on the things we’d learned in Fleck.

Fleck never made enough money to sustain itself in the end, but it’s one of the reasons Casino became a billion-dollar juggernaut. No one accounts for it this way except me, but Fleck is one of the most profitable development endeavors in iOS history, easily.

But so we turned it around. Fleck unfortunately ended up getting canned. We couldn’t make the numbers work, and the acquiring company demanded that Fleck “stand on its own.” Which was a misguided notion, again, driven by folks who couldn’t see the bigger picture.

So the old guard’s gone. All the people who knew those old stories have left. All the people who knew what Self Aware was when it was great have moved on. All the people who built everything good about that studio, who suffered through the hard times, who built the culture and the team, who revolutionized the development process, who changed the game re: live ops are gone. And most of them have been gone for years already.

I wish I’d been able to segment how I felt about SA in the end from some of the people. There was a lot of collateral damage in how my time at SA ended that ruined my relationships with a lot of those folks. I felt betrayed by everyone that stayed. I couldn’t have realistically expected them to leave, but knowing that they saw what happened to me and they chose to stay… I couldn’t reconcile people doing that, and being my friends, for the vast majority of the folks involved. I know most of ’em are decent folks, and a lot of people don’t mind working for the fucking devil, but that’s a lesson I’d have to learn again, at least.

But there’s something to the last folks leaving that is maybe still notable.

We started this thing at the beginning of 2009. I often come back to thinking about how I feel about the whole experience. For a while, I’d have erased it in a heartbeat – good and bad – without a second thought. Now? Probably still the same. There’s some part of me that doesn’t think about “revisionist history” anymore, because anything that would change the arc of my life away from the kids I have now, I’d reject instantly. Whatever misery and pain led to those kids, I’ll endure. But absent that… yeah, I’d still erase it all without a second thought.

And now it’s dead.