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.

A while back, a friend was talking about how folks with a “colonial mindset” often have trouble with certain things. And I understood the phrase at the time, but it’s been bouncing around in my head a lot ever since.

We went to Hawaii over the summer, and went on a tour with a guide who told us a lot about the history of the islands. The tour was wonderful, the history was in many ways horrible. My kids learned about the Ohlone in school. I learned about the first Thanksgiving many years ago.

One thing that repeats, over and over, is how the colonialists see “discovery” and “conquest” as all part of a zero-sum game. For me to win, I have to destroy you. I have to expand, because expansion is inherently good. I have to amass more and more because amassing stuff – riches, property, control, etc. – is inherently good.

This is, of course, all part of capitalism, and suffuses almost every “business” interaction that I’ve ever been part of. Our business must grow. Growth is inherently good. Sustainable is not. We must negotiate our salaries, because it is an adversarial relationship, and paying fair, sustainable wages is a competitive disadvantage. We must plan around exploiting every ounce of everyone’s productivity, because it is how we will maximize profits.

Yeah, I was part of that for decades. I like to think that I tried to treat my employees fairly, but there is no question that I did *most* things in a traditional capitalist way.

Even at Wonderspark, where we tried to make things more fair for everyone, it was still a startup where the founders held most of the equity.

There are some elements of capitalism that I genuinely don’t know how to discard, or don’t know a “fairer” alternative to. I think there are some models that are wonderful in concept, but in practice become quite tricky to navigate. It’s easier to fall back on the traditional model because it’s what surrounds us everywhere.

But the more and more I think about it, the more clear it is that capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand. Grow. Expand. Conquer. Exploit. Hoard.

I see a lot of growing resistance to some of the assumptions that underlie capitalism – and colonialism. I think if that momentum can be maintained, and unions continue to grow in formerly hostile industries, I’d really love to see how things like the game industry get reshaped by a radical change to the long-held balance of power.

Sometimes I can’t see my way to a better world. But I can appreciate that others are fighting hard for something more fair, more just, more equitable. And that fight is being led by the younger generations.

I’m happy to lend whatever advice and assistance I can – please don’t hesitate to ask. But I am a fish that grew up in the sea of capitalism/colonialism, and in some ways old habits die hard.

I grew up in an upper-middle class household. While we had ups and downs, as I kid I was never worried about whether the power would stay on, or where our next meal would come from. My dad was an MIT alum, and I was accepted there, perhaps in part because of legacy. My parents paid for my education. My grandparents paid for my dad’s education, with the understanding that they’d pay for my education, etc.

When I was in college, my dad got a big financial windfall from work. My parents helped me buy a fixer-upper house in 2000 with a $200k loan, without which I wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the initial work that was required to make the house habitable.

All of this made it possible for me to take some riskier jobs throughout my career, and have a safety net when I co-founded Self Aware Games. The degree from a prestigious (and $$$$$) school opened doors for me that would have been a lot harder (if not impossible) to open on my own. I didn’t have a massive, six-digit student loan debt to crawl out from under, and my bank account hit $0 multiple times after school even without that debt.

By some standards, I’d be considered “self-made” because of the success of Self Aware and some work I did afterwards. But there’s no honest way anyone could *actually* describe the arc of my life as self-made. I grew up with significant advantages at every step, and much of my life has been made hugely easier because of those advantages. Of course hard work and focus and dedication were involved. I worked comically long hours early in my career. But a LOT of people work comically long hours ALL THE TIME, and without a safety net to fall back on, or for a lot less $ than I made.

In the harder moments, it’s easy to feel like the privileges I had didn’t matter, but there’s no question that these made a huge difference. They were the difference between success and not success. No question.

I’m trying to “pay it forward” by helping folks who don’t have a lot of those built-in advantages. And one of the things that it highlights is just how much easier I had it than they do. I’m grateful for the privilege I had, and I try to not take it for granted. But most, I try to understand that someone without those privileges can work harder, be smarter, and never achieve the kind of success that I did.

Success isn’t a measure of merit. Our society is steeped in the idea that it is, but that’s a deeply insidious and misleading idea. I know a lot of folks are aware of it, but it’s also something we need to keep talking about, because the more we can dismantle the myth of meritocracy, the better.

I’m a man. Early in my relationship with my now-wife, as we were finishing college, we had a pregnancy scare. It was terrifying. Turned out to be nothing, but being faced with the spectre of the end of your life as you know it in your early twenties is a nightmare. If it had been something, and we’d been faced with having to make a decision, I’m glad we had the option to *choose* between us what we’d do. And that it turned out to just be a scare.

I think, though, that when people think about abortion, this is the thing they envision. And alone, that’s enough to make me in favor of allowing people that choice. A lot of people just aren’t *ready* to have kids, and for us, when we chose to have our two boys, we were ready for the reality of raising a kid, we were ready to devote ourselves 100%, and our kids have loving, focused, *willing* parents who will do anything for them. We instead would have been forced into parenthood, and I while I absolutely love being a dad, I cannot imagine how anyone who’s become a parent could imagine forcing parenthood on anyone who’s not explicitly excited to do it.

But of course, these situations are only a part of the picture. Abortions also happen because the fetuses become “unviable”. They’re either dead, or they cannot survive outside the mother. Or the pregnancy is endangering the mother’s life. Or any number of things.

The picture a lot of abortion opponents paint is one where people seem to enjoy making decisions about getting abortions. Whether it’s early or late in the process, everyone I know who’s had to make that decision – it’s been agonizing. But again – I say that because it’s so counter to the picture abortion opponents paint. To me, it’s honestly irrelevant. Because it’s not *my* decision. It’s not my body. It’s not my life.

It’s not about “pro-choice”. It’s about autonomy over your own body. Your own life. It’s your nothing less than freedom. Without autonomy over your own body, you *are not free*.

I am 100% in support of bodily autonomy. I 100% support women’s freedom. Nothing less.

I find game development extremely difficult to do remotely. I think so much of what *I* love about game development comes from weird side conversations and random collisions of ideas that it’s hard have any of that stuff when you’re not together in person. There’s way more time spent on communication overhead, you have to spec things out to much greater detail because of the time between conversations, and leadership’s job becomes much, much more difficult trying to keep folks on the same page and pointing in the same direction.

It’s *such* a difference that honestly, I don’t think I’d want to work in an all-remote all the time game development team. This may also be an indication that I’m not mentally flexible enough to be a leader in this new space, because in some ways, I don’t *want* to adapt to an all-remote environment.

That said, I’d never go back to an office full-time again *either*. And I’m not saying that because *I* don’t want to do full-remote that full-remote isn’t possible. Or that it can’t be as satisfying and effective. I’m just saying I don’t know how to do it, because so much of my experience has been with high degrees of contemporaneous interpersonal interaction.

But I think that in a post-COVID world, mandating full-time in-office work is incredibly shortsighted and stupid. It basically is leadership saying “Waaah, remote makes our jobs harder, so we’re going to make every single person on the team suffer to make our lives easier.”

There’s clearly an in-between that has to be more effective, more satisfying, and able to provide a better work-life balance than all-remote or all-in-person-all-the-time. I’m kind of glad I’m not the one navigating that space, but at the same time, if you’re mandating all-in-person-all-the-time, you’re going to lose a lot of talent, you’re going to have a hard time replacing that talent, and the team that stays is going to be less satisfied and less engaged than they could be. All because you couldn’t be bothered to navigate the way to that better future, and instead sat on your butt and demanded a return to an outdated status quo.

So yeah. If you’re one of those folks? Good luck. Your lunch is gonna get eaten by folks who are willing to put in the work to find a better balance for their team.