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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You may see parallels with the modern political landscape, but it’s just as relevant at work.

You can’t beat an effective con(person) by playing fair.

One of the most common questions I get from people who are “stuck” in their career is “when should I leave my job?” and my answer is usually “when you can’t see a way forward.”

And one of the things that people run into sometimes is that they end up in a situation where you’re at odds with someone who’s essentially a charismatic con(person) who’s excellent at managing up. I’ve encountered this multiple times in my career, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s simply no way to win.

You can fight a mediocre con(person) by realizing that part of your job is not just being right, but helping your stakeholders understand that by not just logical but also emotional appeals, etc. etc. But the problem is that a great con(person) is better at doing this, because they can do everything you can, and aren’t constrained by things like integrity or honesty or facts or reality.

You can’t beat that. Don’t try.

I know that sucks to hear, and I’d love to have some sort of playbook to beat them, but I don’t. I’ve tried everything *I* know how, and have lost *every time*. So the advice I can give is just this: There are times in your career where you hit a brick wall. And you can beat your head against it for years and maybe make progress, but at extraordinary cost to you. You feel like you should be able to overcome any obstacle, fight through any bad situation.

But if you can’t see a way forward, it’s time to go. There are times when your progress at a place will come to a complete stop, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. It sucks, but understanding that and finding a way out is much, much better than fighting an immovable force. And yeah – it sucks. Bad people win. Happens all the time. You need to prioritize what is best for *you*, and that’s often just accepting that if you’re fighting a con(person) and they’d good, and have their hooks in the stakeholders who you need… the way forward is out.

One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.

Videogames are software. And as critical as engineers are to videogames, if a game team fired most of its designers and artists and said that engineers would constitute the majority of the development team and that all other disciplines were secondary… you’d end up with some terrible videogames.

No disrespect to engineers at all. But just because software is code, software is a creative collaborative multi-disciplinary effort that requires top-level work from ALL disciplines involved working *together* toward a shared vision.

Creating a world where designers, artists, audio folks, producers, project managers, etc. are “second-class” citizens relative to engineers is not how to create great software. I say that with a 20 year history, and at least a few significant successes that illustrate that I know what I’m talking about.

Musk may be smart in some fields, but it’s clear he’s got a 101-level approach to building consumer software, and if I was a Twitter employee, I’d take the severance and GTFO. This is the wrong approach, and since it’s worth calling your shots, it *will not succeed*.

Caught COVID a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten all the vaccines & boosters. I’ve worn masks indoors and at public gatherings well after most people stopped. My kids are masked up at school almost the entire time. We weren’t perfect by any stretch, though, and our luck finally ran out.

Do I regret all the precautions having gotten it anyway? No, not for a second. My experience was relatively mild. One of my kids got it, and had similarly mild symptoms, and the other didn’t get it at all. Certainly a far cry from if we’d gotten it in 2020.

Here’s the thing – in business, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes some small bit of bad luck will be fatal, and sometimes everything will go wrong and you’ll miraculously be fine.

The only thing you can do is to try to be prepared for things. To take smart precautions. To try to mitigate risk as much as possible. And sometimes stuff just goes cattywumpus anyway. You can’t control everything. All you can do is mitigate risk and try to be prepared.

For me, having gotten vaccinated, having worked to minimize whatever exposure we *did* get – the result was that it was a mild experience, and I’m grateful for that. This is the same approach I did my best to take when at work – to anticipate the things that were coming at us, to try to prepare, to minimize risk, and maximize our flexibility and reactivity, so that we could change plans on a dime when needed.

And yeah – that may be COVID, that may be business. But it’s also almost everything. Be prepared, but also be flexible. Mitigate risk where possible. Assume disasters are inevitable. Work to prevent them where possible, but build in the resiliency and flexibility to deal with them when they happen.

If you think you can prevent or avoid all disaster… you’re in for a bad time. Which probably leads to a future post about ostrich optimism, and how much I hate working with people who believe “it’ll all work itself out”. 😐

The last few months have been interesting. I’ve been helping folks with their resumes for cheap and/or free, mentoring a bunch of randos – individuals and companies – also for free or cheap. And it’s taught me something: I don’t like it.

I want to like it. But I don’t. And it’s worth acknowledging that. I don’t need the money, so it’s not that. Well, it’s not *strictly* that. There’s a few things:

* It’s too slow. 1:1 mentoring is great, because you can get to really understand the person and help them specifically. But it’s a huge investment to transfer some experience/knowledge, and it feels extremely inefficient.

* Doing this for free devalues my experience. Not just to me, but to them as well. I think there’s some balance to be had with “pay me for my experience,” because then you’ll actually *act* on it, rather than getting it for free and maybe deciding to do some of what I’m suggesting.

In a way, money is sort of a guarantee that they’ll take you seriously. Charge $1,000/hr, and no one’s going to ignore your advice. And they won’t question your credentials, either, because theoretically they’ve validated that before paying you.

Devoting a week of time to help a small startup out, only to have them say, “Well, we trust our judgment so we’re going to do X,” when you know their current course of action is suicide is just frustrating. Particularly when “our judgment” consists of exactly zero relevant experience. It’s wild.

But this has happened a few times, now. I’ll invest an hour or two helping someone with their resume, then they come back with a revision having done *literally nothing* I told them to, and want feedback. The feedback is, “Yeah, the text is different, but all the problems are the same. My suggestions are the same. Glad to see you’ve found a direction that you’re happy with, but I can’t (and won’t) help you anymore.”

My time’s too valuable for this kind of shit. If you need help, I’m more than happy to help. But the caveat is that either you do what I suggest, or we *talk about* why you’re hesitant to do so, because sometimes circumstances can be subtle. But if you’re just rejecting my advice outright, then no, I’m not spending any more time with you, and I regret spending any with you at all.

So yeah – I dunno. This year, I’m hoping to find a way to have a “second phase” career either doing some mentoring or advising for $. If the rate is reasonable, and the people are good to work with and willing to take input, then that’d be super satisfying. Ideally, I’d like a one-to-many arrangement – something where I can impact more people at a time, because a lot of the advice I give is applicable to fairly broad ranges of folks. But the 1:1 stuff and the volunteer stuff? I’m winding that down in 2023, barring a few minor exceptions.

But, glad I gave it a go. It’s interesting to feel parts of it work, and parts of it grate, and realize what the problems are. This isn’t so much a failure as it is a refinement and discovery of what does and doesn’t work for me, and the kind of impact I want to have.