Just saw a post from someone on LinkedIn that said “Nothing is permanent, don’t stress too much about it.” On one hand, it’s nice-sounding advice. Situations change. But it’s also such a privileged statement, and comes from a place where someone doesn’t feel any actual existential threat to their lives that they can just ignore whatever.

Stress out. It’s fine. Sometimes shit is stressful, and it’s correct to stress out about it. And no amount of platitudes will reduce that stress because it’s real and potentially fatal if you ignore it.

Sometimes the only way out is through.

But yeah – the idea that “Nothing is permanent” and therefore okay assumes that your situation doesn’t end in permanent negative consequences, which would be lovely *if true*, but for most people it isn’t.

The reason this bugs me is that like a lot of platitudes, it doesn’t take people who don’t come from privileged backgrounds into account, and allows people to say things like, “Just relax, it’s not permanent,” to dismiss peoples’ real struggles.

I know it’s not the intent, but it is the consequence.

At a previous job, we were building a platform. One of the teams that we were working with was creating a Beat Saber clone and intended to release it on the platform. It was a shameless clone with no meaningful differences, but it would run on our platform, and I guess the idea was that Beat Games, now owned by Facebook, wouldn’t likely ever release Beat Saber on the platform. Still, it would be fun, and the audience for our platform would not just enjoy it, but it would help them.

I talked the higher-ups into killing the project.

Why? Because releasing a clone of an existing game doesn’t just populate our platform with a game that isn’t original, it devalues the entire platform. Yes, Beat Saber is fun. Yes, the clone of Beat Saber was also fun. Yes, there were some minor changes that made it work better with our intended audience. But there were *zero* gameplay changes. There were *zero* significant mechanical changes of any kind.

And if you tolerate this kind of creatively bankrupt project on your platform, you’re saying to creative folks that you don’t care about the integrity of their work, that you don’t have internal creative or ethical standards that define how you work. You tell the creative teams you’re trying to attract that you have no compunction about stealing their creative work and creating something entirely derivative, likely also cannibalizing the market for their original work.

Legal, yes, but ethically bankrupt.

If we believed Beat Saber was the right kind of experience for our platform, it’s *impossible* that Beat Saber, as it existed, with no changes, would be the best possible experience for that audience. Aesthetically, it wasn’t ideal. Mechanically, it was good, but wasn’t ideal, because it wasn’t *designed with the correct goal in mind*. There’s no question that you could make a *better* Beat Saber for the intended audience, but you couldn’t do it by shamelessly ripping off Beat Saber wholesale.

I often tell new game developers to explicitly clone an existing, very simple game that they love, and then change one meaningful part of it and see how that works. It’s a great way to learn the ropes. But that’s a learning exercise – you learn to build by repeating what someone has built. Then you learn to be creative by adding things and changing them. But that’s an *exercise*, and not a cynical cash-grab.

Yes, cloned games are easy and successful. But they come with a cost, and that cost is that people who genuinely value creativity and innovation will be repulsed by that work. If that’s something you’re willing to do, I suppose it’s entirely legal to do so. But you’re telling the world who you are, and the world is listening.

Build original things. Games are too damn hard to make. Life is too damn short. Don’t waste it on derivative bullshit.

Company: How dare you talk about money.
Also Company: Everything we do is 100% driven by money.

If a company doesn’t understand that money is a big part of why people work, then they don’t understand people, and you shouldn’t be working for them.

A company should be paying you what you’re worth. They should be proactive about making sure you’re getting paid fairly if you’re making too little (and not exploiting your lack of aggression and/or awareness). They should be giving you fair raises that outpace inflation.

If you’re an employer, you *need* to be paying people enough that at a minimum, they aren’t worried about money. That is, they shouldn’t worry they’re underpaid. They shouldn’t be under constant pressure to pay the bills. The best amount you can pay them is the amount when they just don’t think about money anymore.

But money is intrinsically a part of work. It is a critical motivating factor – often THE motivating factor for a lot of people, and that’s just reality. It’s not an indictment of their passion for the job or their personal integrity or whatever to talk about money. It’s a necessity.

If your company doesn’t like people talking about money, the thing you should be asking yourself is why? Because you’re worried there’s unfairness in the system? Because you can’t justify the CEO’s 100x multiple on an IC’s salary? Because there’s a huge gender pay disparity? Because some n00b is making 2x what your 10 year vet is making due to circumstance?

Just fix your problems, and let people talk about money if they feel the need to. If you feel a need to enforce secrecy, that should be a big honking red flag to all your employees. And is probably something they should talk to each other about.

But yeah – money’s part of work. Talking about money is part of work. Needing to get paid doesn’t make you a bad employee. If you could work purely out of altruism and love, that’d be great. It also wouldn’t be a *job*.

There are many reasons to stay at a job. But there are also many reasons not to.

I feel like some of them are obvious – your manager’s a jerk, your career path is limited, the work isn’t something you enjoy, etc. But one thing that I think a lot of people miss, because it’s not obvious at all unless you’re doing it, is that if you stay at a job for a long time, you’re going to progress, both in terms of titles and money, very, very slowly.

A friend of mine stayed at their job for something like 8 years. We started at roughly the same experience level. After 8 years, I’d changed jobs 4 times, and gone from an entry level designer to running my own team. My pay had gone up roughly 5x. Theirs had gone up between 1-3% per year, and they’d had a title change maybe once every 3-4 years, going from “entry level” to “senior”.

I’m not being self-aggrandizing or trying to brag, here. The fact is that if I’d stayed at that job, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near where I got. Each jump, I got a 20%+ salary increase at minimum, and a title jump + increase in responsibilities.

Yeah, it’s scary. Yeah, it’s sometimes frustrating. Yeah, you need to essentially re-establish your credibility at every job you go to. You need to interview. You need to keep your resume up to date.

Sometimes you leave a job because it’s a dead end. Sometimes it’s a bad fit. Sometimes you get laid off or the company goes under. But sometimes you leave because you can move a hell of a lot faster by doing so.

No manager will ever look out for you the way you will look out for you. And I’m not suggesting you have to be mercenary and self-serving above all else. Far from it. If you change jobs frequently, one of the best tools in your arsenal is for everyone who’s worked with you to LOVE working with you, and want to work with you again.

But one of the biggest reasons I hear people don’t change jobs is that it’s “scary” or it’s “a pain”. But would you do it for a 20% raise? That title change you’ve been wanting for years? I imagine that investment would be worth it. Companies don’t have any loyalty to you. They’ll lay you off in an instant without any regrets if they have to. They aren’t your family.

Treat them like a team. Kill it while you’re there. Watch out for better opportunities. Take them when you can.

I’ve found a weird parallel between how I learn board games and how I do product development. Some people pore over the rulebooks and want to know exactly how everything works. I’ll generally give a rulebook a quick scan, get what I think is the gist of the game, and then dive in.

I’ll often make rule mistakes, miss things, and the session can sometimes be a chaotic mess. For folks who like to have rule precision, it can often be frustrating. My expectation is that the first playthrough will be trash. It’ll be full of errors, the wrong person might win, and there might be a lot of corrections & rule-checking.

Sometimes I’ll do this first playthrough by myself, and soak up all the ways I screw things up.

If I know that the people I’m playing with can’t tolerate a giant mess, I’ll do my best to put in effort to make it right the first time.

But most of the time, I’ll just dive into that first play half-cocked and screw it all up. Why? Because it’s *much* faster to learn that way.

Trying to read rules absent the experience, it’s hard to understand what the rule-writers mean. How am I supposed to understand what this rule means without any context? Without trying to make a decision and all the associated pressures, how do I understand what the bounds are?

I find that I get a lot of pleasure out of diving into that process with a bunch of other people that don’t mind going off not really knowing what we’ll encounter, and who don’t mind throwing out that first game in the name of exploration and discovery.

Sometimes it’ll even be a few turns in, and we’ll just end up tossing out this play, resetting things, and starting over before even finishing, if it’s obvious that things have gone off the rails. And that next playthrough? It’s almost always great, because we know what we’re doing.

Here’s the thing – in my experience, even if you read all the rules – you’ll make fewer mistakes. You’ll start with a better understanding. But you’ll still screw up. You’ll still potentially make fatal errors while playing that will ruin the game. This happens enough of the time that in my experience, going in knowing you’re gonna make a huge mess is *faster* and more efficient. And as long as it’s not going to upset folks (which it has in the past for me, and in those cases it’s a mistake!!) – it can be a great collaborative exploration experience.

I often do this wrong in board games – because there’s only one manual, it’s hard to get everyone to have the same access to the core information. But in product development, that’s a huge part of what I try to do – get everyone as exposed to the rulebook as possible. And then rather than knowing everything before we start, we take a giant flying leap off a cliff together and hope we can build a parachute before we go splat.

it’s a great time. 😀

A bunch of accelerators and mentorship programs rely on volunteer mentors. There are a couple of reasons I hate this:

1.) If you’re a for-profit company benefitting from the value of folks’ knowledge, pay for it. You think that experience isn’t worth any money? You think the mentors will benefit through “exposure”? I get that the draw is supposed to be “leads” for these mentors to get a jump on investing, but that’s like saying artists are fairly compensated through exposure.

2.) It biases the kinds of mentors you get, to those that are financially secure, and likely have *always* been financially secure. Which means your mentors are going to be heavily steeped in survivor bias. But what kind of advice and perspective are most of your people going to encounter? Failure and struggle. And while almost all of the “survivors” encountered failure and struggle and then succeeded, there are *far more* people who encountered failure and struggle and then didn’t. But their advice isn’t less valuable or meaningful, and for a lot of underrepresented communities, probably contains more helpful, more relevant information for their experience – struggles that a lot of homogenous “winners” at startups *literally never experienced*.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with an accelerator that paid a fair rate for mentors, and would happily do so again. But I’m not interested in donating my time to a for-profit structure that will rely on my good will so they can make money.

Games are really great at one of the most difficult and vital things you can do.

They’re a fantastic way to play. And by “play”, what I mean is that you can try out things in an environment where you get very rich feedback, and there’s almost no genuine risk.

Why does play matter? It’s how we learn. And I don’t mean “how we learn a few select things.” It’s how we learn *everything*. How to move. How to think. How to perceive the world. We learn *everything* through experimentation and feedback, and being able to do that and minimize risk… that’s play. Think of two lion cubs wrestling with each other. Think of monkeys chasing each other through trees. Think of children playing tag, or “store”, or… anything.

Which is why games are *great* for education. Or therapy. Or rehabilitation.

But why are SO many educational games, or medical games, or therapeutic games *so awful*?

It’s because most of them are developed by people with experience in education, medicine, or therapy, but no experience in games.

Gamification “consultants” come in and preach simple, easy-to-understand solutions. But if a medical professional preached a simple, easy-to-understand solution to Parkinson’s Disease, you’d understand they’re a quack, and their opinion isn’t worth anything.

Games are hard to make. Creating games that provide the right kinds of interaction, and the right kinds of feedback? That expertise has to be there from day 1 during the development process. It absolutely *cannot* be effectively “applied later”. It is not a layer of points and awards.

Games are about meaningful, engaging actions with rich, emotionally-resonant feedback that helps you continuously improve. Doing this requires it to be a fundamental expertise your team has when developing any game-centric project.

If you do not have that expertise, you will fail. I see it over, and over, and over again. And it sucks, because inexperienced people can’t even vet the purported experts that are trying to sell them game-based solutions.

So if you’re in this situation, and you need an expert in the field to help you understand what you need and how to build it, and who you might engage to help you with the game side of things, let me know. I’m happy to help.

An early injection of this kind of experience can save you literal millions of dollars even on relatively small projects, and will often be the difference between success and failure.

A lot of game designers I know eventually want to move out of games into something broader. Which is great. I’ve done both product and game design, and I think game designers make extraordinary product designers.

Why?

Because they know how to understand user (player) behavior. They know how to change that behavior. They know how to create interactions that are intuitive and *satisfying* to users – often much more so than traditional product designers.

Most product designers don’t have things explode when you touch them. 😀

No disrespect to traditional product designers. I think a super team would be pairing someone with a deep background in traditional product design with someone who’s got a ton of experience with game design. Each would be enhanced by the other, and the result would be significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

But even without a traditional product designer, a lot of companies that make user-facing products (which is most products) would benefit from hiring game designers.

The biggest obstacle I’ve found when working with game designers who want to reach out to new industries is that they don’t understand how to frame their experience. And the companies don’t understand what a game designer actually does.

Working to reframe game design experience into generalized product design isn’t lying or cheating. They are fundamentally the same pursuit. They just use different languages. In software engineering, if someone doesn’t have experience with a specific programming language, that’s a small obstacle. The deeper experience translates easily across languages, and languages are easy to pick up.

Same problem. A game designer *is* a product designer with an extraordinary set of skills any company could benefit from. But there’s a new language to learn.

If you’re a game designer looking to get into different industries, you have to “translate” your experience into that industry. If you need help with that, I can help with that. But more, the big message is “go for it.” The difference isn’t as big as you think it is.

Just a reminder to everyone out there who’s looking at other folks’ successes and wondering, “Why not me?”

Everything on social media is a performance. Intentional or not, people don’t show you the price they pay for the things they’re showing off.

Maybe you’re jealous of that person who got promoted. You’re not seeing the long nights that led to their last breakup. Maybe you’re jealous of the founder of that new thing. You’re not seeing the people they stabbed in the back to get where they are. Maybe you’re seeing vacation photos of extravagant journeys to exotic destinations. You’re not seeing that their family hates that the only times they spend together are spent orchestrating beautiful photos for Instagram and that their parents are never there for the big moments *they* care about.

Everything has a price. Everything is a trade off.

Sometimes the thing you get instead of visible success is affirmation of your values. Sometimes you get the intangible things – love, time with friends and family, mental well-being. Sometimes you might even get enough sleep. Sometimes you get nothing.

And yeah – sometimes it’s harder for you than it is for others because circumstances are worse for you. That’s legit.

We’re all on our own journeys at our own speeds. It can be frustrating to see others further along. But never forget that everything costs something. You never see the price tag, but everyone pays.

Went to Legoland and Universal Studios for spring break with Eric & his son. It was super fun. Four days of theme parks with a pair of folks who are sort of unstoppable, energy-wise, might have not been the *best* plan, but it was a good time even still. 😀

I think something I have to contend with is that as much as I really want to do a simple rehab VR thing, the thought of having to try to sell it to people is maybe a fatal obstacle in my way, . I think someone *should* do it – there’s clearly an opportunity to help a ton of people, it’s just that the financial incentives really don’t align, and honestly, I can’t imagine they ever will.

What I’d propose is simple, it’s cheap, and it could get out to a lot of people *if* it had a bananas sales channel. But establishing a bananas sales channel is $$$$, and not something I’m good at *or* something I want to do. And trying to raise the money to hire someone to do it well? That’d require more $ than I have available, and getting funding to do such a thing would require either getting a lot of grants, or some sort of investment from a “social good fund” or something. Even with that kind of funding, it’d be a multi-million dollar project, and I don’t know that I want to shepherd a thing like that and give up time with the kids.

Maybe I’m just lazy. I dunno.

But I think it’s something I should say that I’m *not* actually as interested in working on as I thought. I like the prototyping process, I like the idea. I like potentially being able to help folks. But trying to convince people to get the thing, trying to sell it, and even profiting off it to a degree that’d make it “worthwhile” are all kind of … not things I want to be doing.

So yeah. Alas.