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.

I feel like this is gonna sound really dumb, but I was thinking about The Emperor’s New Clothes the other day. It dawned on me that I’d really never understood the meaning that an “innocent child” could say the Emperor has no clothes, but no one else could. I’d thought it was basically that the kid didn’t understand the social norms and just said what was.

And in most ways, that’s true. But the underlying bit – that the social norms are because the king has power and everyone is afraid of the king eluded me. Maybe it’s because I’d always seen versions where the king was basically an idiot, and not a vainglorious tyrant. But the reason people don’t tell the king he’s naked is because they’re afraid of him.

If you have a team, and you want people to bring critical issues to you, you have to build trust with your team more than anything else. You need for people to understand that not only will you not yell at them or embarrass them or harm them in some way if they tell you something you don’t want to hear, you will *celebrate* them and trust them *more*. This is super difficult in practice, because it’s humiliating to be told you’re naked, and it’s very instinctual to get defensive, or even lash out.

But yeah – if you have power, and you rule by fear, everyone will lavish praise on how good your new clothes look. It’ll feel awesome. You will feel great.

Building the kind of trust that allows people to tell you you’re naked is a huge amount of work. The results sometimes feel *awful* instead of great. But the difference? Yeah – it’s worth it.

This year…

• Lose weight. Primarily through diet, starting with not sugaring up coffee in the morning and doing OMAD at least 3x week.
• Exercise more. More walking to places for errands like grocery shopping, biking to places that are too far to walk, and driving only when I need to bring back more than I can carry in a backpack. Maybe even grab a set of panniers for the Super-V so I could carry more.
• Get up on the foil while wingfoiling while being powered by the wing. I got up on foil on an e-foil, and then a few times in heavier winds. I still can’t get a pump start to engage the foil, and that’s the task for this year.
• Keep organizing/cleaning up house stuff. I mean, this is likely an unending project, but keep fixing/painting/patching things until stuff is actually good.
• Take up a project, and “apply good pressure”. I can find myself a little directionless, because aside from the more daily tasks, I don’t have any external pressure. So, finish up the VR demo for the stroke thing, and show it to someone. This was my resolution at the beginning of 2021, and I made some really minor progress, but not a ton. I need to do this, because finishing a basic demo “unlocks” a lot of other things to do.

I have a few nice collector’s edition versions of games. But the company whose collector’s editions I have the most of, by far, is Blizzard. For the better part of 25 years, I would buy any Blizzard product (except World of Warcraft, which I knew wasn’t my speed) sight unseen. Whatever the nicest possible version of it was.

Why?

Because I trusted them. I trusted them to give me a really great experience. I trusted them to give me incredible value for my money. I trusted them to understand what was valuable and meaningful to me, as a gamer, and that they’d deliver. So I trusted them with my money, and with my time.

There were very, very few game companies I felt the same trust towards. Sure, plenty of other studios made reliably great games. But Blizzard was special. I’ve trusted them ever since Warcraft 2. I upgraded my PC specifically for Frozen Throne. I’ve purchased Diablo 3 on like, three separate platforms, including the collector’s edition on PC.

Point is, I trusted them.

When they got acquired by Activision, I knew that trust would erode. I knew the games would be less focused on giving the players extraordinary value, and be more about milking the audience for all their $. And to some degree, that’s been obvious. But I still wanted to trust Blizzard, and I’d continued to believe in the Blizzard that lived in my mind.

So the recent revelations about the toxic bro-culture at Blizzard came as a bit of a gut-punch. Not that it was a surprise, because any game developer being revealed to be a toxic brodown – if you’ve been in the industry a while, it’s all over the place. But it was a gut-punch, because I trusted Blizzard. I had this image of them in my mind that they cared about games, that they cared about gamers, and that obviously that care would extend to their employees as human beings.

So I’m sad.

I’m sad not because Blizzard has turned into this thing. I’m sad because it’s clear from all the statements that this is what Blizzard has always been. A lot of these allegations happened under the tenure of a lot of folks I held in really high regard – Mike Morhaime, Chris Metzen, etc. And look, I can’t say for certain that they should have known or not – running a large company is a difficult job, where a lot of stuff can fly by people. I’ve been there. But the Blizzard in my mind isn’t about Morhaime & Co’s intentions.

The Blizzard I trusted never existed at all. Because if the price of believing that I’d get my money’s worth out of a game is a toxic culture that drives women to suicide, no part of that is worth it, and no part of that is worth believing in.

But it’s sad. I had believed in a company that wanted to create great things. That wanted to make things their players would genuinely love. I believed that a company that did that had to be a place that would be a joy to work, even on the hard days, but one where people would band together and value each other while they fought the good fight.

And it turns out that company was just in my imagination. It’s still sad to know that it’s gone. That it never existed at all.

As for me, it’s simple – I’m unlikely to ever buy another Blizzard or Activision product again.

Because once that trust is betrayed, it’s gone forever.

Ei-Nyung and I have both been vaccinated for a while, which is great. In many ways, life is returning more and more to normal. It obviously won’t *be* normal until the kids have both been vaccinated, which appears to be at least a few months away still – likely after they go back to school, which is a little worrisome, but CA’s numbers are pretty good, and it seems like last year’s safety measures were effective (though it’ll be different when schools are fully open, instead of rotating smaller cohorts like the end of last year.

Still, it’s summer, and the kids are out of school. We’ve been doing less this summer than we did last summer. I need to step things up a bit. Part of it is that I’m a little lazier, but part of it is that the kids are doing a lot of interesting stuff. They’ve been making a card game with dozens of hand-drawn cards, and they spent four hours today playing the game with each other, which is awesome.

Need to get out on the bikes, and get some more physical activity, though. Maybe this week we’ll go for a paddle in Alameda.

I’m getting closer to getting up on foil while winging. I’ve gotten the foil “engaged” a few times now, but only for short periods of time before freaking out and bailing. A friend of Eric’s took me out on an e-Foil the other day though, and on top of it being super fun, it was a huge learning experience. I felt like I learned more in an hour of e-foiling than in the last three months of winging. But it’s good – that work prepared me to be able to take in a ton of info form that e-foil session, and I can’t wait to put some of that knowledge into practice the next time out.

Been playing a lot of board games in person, which is nice. Finally, finally got to play Star Wars: Rebellion with Klay. It’s a long game – I think it took us 3-4 hours – but it was fun & interesting. Also picked up Netrunner again & played with Sean, which was a good time. I really like the game, but definitely can’t quite wrap my head around strategy yet. I’ve lost every game so far. Still having fun. Kids have been playing Quacks of Quedlinburg and Abandon All Artichokes. It’ll be interesting to see if they play some games with their cousin who’s coming for a couple weeks in just about a week from now. Should be a lot of fun.

Still playing a ton of Hades.

Watching The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, and really enjoying it. Started The Great Pottery Throwdown last night, but allergies had me tap out. Very GBBO, though, so that’s promising. We watched a strange Japanese movie called On-Gaku: Our Sound. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, but also don’t know that I wouldn’t. Hard to say. It’s very indie in its aesthetic. We watched Ong Bak with the kids, which was half awesome and half a terrible idea. There’s a lot more horrible crap in that movie than I remembered, but the action stuff is still pretty incredible.

Been still making my way slowly through the Expanse (the books). Been stuck on Cibola Burn for a while, but it’s good – just slow going. Also been reading Ask Iwata, which is almost a one-session read, though I’ve been just crawling through that, as well.

We’ve been playing a lot of Quacks of Quedlinburg with the kids, and we started My City. I’m excited for Red Rising, which is supposed to show up tomorrow, but I expect it’ll be a while before it gets played. Just tried Lucky Numbers on BGA with some friends, and it was good. Simple, but good. Also picked up a game called The Initiative, which I’m psyched for. Ridiculously positive reviews, a known good designer, and an interesting premise round it out. Co-op, which is great for us. We also “finished” The Baker Street Irregulars (Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective) with Alan & Becky, which was great. By “finished”, I mean we got through all ten cases, and then found there’s something more… which we haven’t yet done. Overall, it was excellent.

Not much else going on, honestly. Cleaning up things here and there, and I’ve got some projects I haven’t made much headway on, like putting some sort of shelves in the downstairs closet, or nailing down some of the floorboards in the downstairs so they don’t develop gaps over time (again). Gonna get an MRI and X-Ray on my knee, and an X-Ray on my lower back in a few weeks to see if there’s anything fixable with either of them. Back’s been consistently not great for a few years, and my knee’s been getting more arthritic with time. Boo. Probably not much to be done other than get in better shape.

What a show. I thought for sure Wandavision would be my show of 2021, and I still absolutely loved it – but Ted Lasso, at least at this point, is my show of 2021, and I don’t even think it’s all that close.

If you’re put off because you’re not a sports person, the thing that stuck with me was one episode where the big buildup was to the game, and then they immediately cut to after the game, showing literally none of the actual soccer match at all. It’s not about “sports”, except in that sports can create certain types of conflict and stakes. But it’s a character-focused show through and through, and the characters in this are just fantastic.

You might have heard that it’s an optimistic show, or a positive one, and those things are true and meaningful and *necessary* right now, in a time when it’s so easy to be cynical and angry. But the thing that I was really impressed by was how Ted Lasso, as a character, can be optimistic without being naive, and kind without being a sucker. He hears the world, but chooses how to react to it.

In that way, he’s kind of a stoic. He chooses to be positive. He chooses to react to situations – even hard ones, things that cost him personally – with kindness. He chooses to believe the best in people, because those are the things he wants to bring out of them.

It’s also a funny show. Laugh out loud. And yet, it can also be subtle and very dry. It’s a show about being part of a team – so much so that I *wept* at one point because it made me miss those feelings so. There’s a whole post worth writing at some point on that – how I loved being on a team, and how I loved trying to create that sense of camaraderie at work, and why I *can’t* do that anymore in the same way. But it doesn’t make me *miss* that feeling any less.

There’s a moment in the show where Ted has a full-blown panic attack, and it reminded me *so much* of how I felt at times in the just-post-Self Aware Games era, being around folks who were still there – something about the way it was shot, his reaction, it brought me right back to that feeling. It was shocking how … immediate it felt.

There’s a lot about it. I could go on and on. How Roy Kent’s story resonated. How charming Keeley was. How every character felt like they should have been a one-note in any other show, but here they all had depth. How Sam & Rebecca’s interaction was one of my favorite moments in the whole thing. How I bought a “Believe” sticker for my laptop, and an AFC Richmond pin after seeing it, because having some physical reminders in the real world of how that show made me feel felt worth doing.

It looked like a dumb show – sort of the embodiment of Apple TV+ doing family-friendly saccharine sort of light pablum nonsense. Holy shit, though.

Watch it. I’d be very surprised if you don’t get something actually *valuable* out of it.