Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

This week I wanted to continue talking about people’s intrinsic motivation for work—possibly through the lens of a jilted failed job-seeker.

Two weeks ago I laid some groundwork for this but I don’t think I was ready to lean forward in my rocking chair, squint at all you young people and tell you the real problem with job interviews these days.

I have included a very thoughtful cover letter for some percentage of times I have applied for a job. I generally do this when it feels like my resume looks good for the role, but only after four or five beers. A good example of this is online education companies. About ten years ago, I really wanted a role at an education publishing company that needed someone of my skills. Even better, they were physically close to where I was living. I wrote my cover letter in earnest. It included:

• We were homeschooling multiple children and living through the pain of online educational tools
• I coach people at work, children, and just about anyone who gets within coaching distance
• Games and FTUE (First-time user experience) generation are transferable skills

The more perceptive among you will notice that there are no online education companies in my LinkedIn profile. I did not wind up getting this job. I will never really know the reasons behind it because this company, like most companies, did not give out a scorecard. In fact, a lot of the early conversations with companies generally wind up going completely silent. I imagine that some of them find typing polite rejections to be tiring, and I imagine some percentage of them are waiting to go through a full offer cycle with someone else and they are preparing to bring you back in for another round of interviews without realizing that ghosting candidates entirely is not a great recruiting tool. Eventually, they probably do get to an offer stage with a candidate and then they look at how long it has been since they emailed you and the length of time makes it weird. At that point, they must have assumed that the silence spoke for itself, and they are not imagining that I am sitting alone in my kitchen with fourteen hours of solo violinist music playing on YouTube while I wistfully clutch a cup of chamomile tea.

A good chunk of these failed interviews generally get into the weeds for me when the interviewer asks whether or not I am passionate about their space. This is one of those places where the average candidate will make something up. I have always believed that if I made up something on the spot to make it sound like I am passionate about it, it would sound so completely ridiculous that it would end the interview on the spot. I have heard people trying to sound passionate during interviews that have come across this way to me. If someone boldly declares themselves a super huge gamer, and then I ask as a follow-up “What are you playing?” I do not want to hear about a game from over six years ago.

I have generally felt that being super passionate about a subject is a mixed bag. There are a number of people who will look for passion in startup candidates because it means they can lowball the candidate by ten percent. There are also some people who feel that it is important because people will commit themselves to outsized outcomes, and may gloss over the harm that a candidate will do to their own health in pursuit of this.

Before you think this is all a bunch of mad craziness, I was once offered a job that I was completely unqualified for while I was in the middle of interviewing for a different job that I was very well qualified for.

While I may not always have the quote-unquote passion for a particular domain, there are some things I care very deeply about. The CEO observed that I am a family man with a lot of kids for whose sake I am highly motivated to be successful. They also observed that I have spent a lot of time in the independent developer world, and while I have a great deal of experience with mobile games, my abilities to work with independent developers would be more immediately valuable to the company.

I took the job and it was an incredible professional experience. I worked with some very talented people who pushed me to raise the bar constantly, and I loved every minute of it.

It is important because it was the second time I took a hiatus from engineering. If you were going by the passion-detector numbers on more than one part of my career, you might find a few places where the passion level was very low for the market segment I was working in.

At the end of the day, there are some things in my professional life that I care deeply about. I care deeply about helping teams be successful. I care deeply about customer happiness. I also care deeply about improving products that affect the lives of millions of people.

So to get back to the article title: Do you need to love your job? Sometimes the answer is no. If you don’t love it, though, be prepared to be very good at it. I have blown up a few interviews with this answer. Very few interviewers are abundant enough thinkers to hear “I am good at this job but I do not love it”. In this situation, I prefer being blunt to making up a zany passion story.

In closing, I do think that people should be prepared to be passionate about something, even if it is not their job. Whether it is obscure whiskey, stamp collecting, or indie games, your passions tell the world who you are. For example, when the indie game Oasis came out, I called up the founder of the studio when he was making t-shirts for a conference. I asked him if he could make a special one for me, with the game logo on the inside, because I wanted it closer to my heart.

I loved that game.

Thank you for reading along! I will be back next week with more random professional stories and possibly an Amazon Affiliate Link or two.

I have had a few 1:1 meetings in the past month where somebody said “I was going to ask a question, but I forgot what it was.” I know I have done that plenty of times in the past. During the first year of writing on my blog, I also had a lot of neat ideas for posts that vanished into this very same gray fog of forgetfulness.

I have made a habit of sending people Slack messages for things I wish to discuss for upcoming meetings. I also have Post-Its, a copy of Notepad open, and sometimes I will Slack myself a reminder.

Google has trained us to be very poor at remembering things by making everything searchable at a button press. I believe that is related to the problem of forgetfulness, but I am sure someone who is more science-ey will know the truth of that statement. Maybe it is easy to point at Google the same way we point at the dog when the room starts smelling bad, and we do not want to say “something-something-old-age”.

In any event, this week’s post is short, simple, and sweet. If you have an important thought, make sure to transcribe it somewhere. Sheets of paper are cheap, and a notes.txt file on your computer is cheaper. You can always Slack yourself reminders, and in the event that you are meticulous and organized, maybe you have a personal Trello board.

Send yourself a slack. Write down your notes on a piece of paper. Save it in Notepad.exe.

My prediction is that you will forget to do this 2.5 times on average after reading this post before developing this essential skill.

If not, then now is a good time to go to my Clearly-Labeled-Amazon-Affiliate-Link and buy far too many Post-It notes.

This is probably the most TokTok-able advice you will ever get from me. I will continue to put my thinkiness into words instead of videos as long as possible. See you all next week.

I remember reading lots of emails with the super passive-aggressive opening sentence: “As you may already be aware…” Usually, I am not aware. However, I want to take advantage of that opening this week.

As you may already be aware, I did not succeed in writing a blog post on Sunday. This is probably the correct use of that opening statement. You may award me five stars on Yelp.

Instead of offering a miserable excuse for the delay, I am just going to write today and pretend that the delay never happened.

You will hear me frequently blibbity-blabbiting on the subjects of Hiring and Team Building. These are things I love to do. Today I want to talk about people’s motivation to work.

I always try to understand people’s motivations for showing up to work and doing their very best. That is the ultimate goal of the first five or six questions I ask people when I interview them. I think this is very important because your motivations for work are one of the big reasons some people get bounced out of the hiring funnel. I am speaking a little from experience here because one of my motivations for working really hard is that I have many mouths to feed and “getting paid” is a very important thing for me. I know this has been used to bounce me from the hiring queue in some places. “John is a family man with many children and is an expensive employee” is something that my spies have told me when I have been rejected from a role. I can respect that from some people, and from others who have had “the Silicon Valley exits”, I do feel a little hurt by it. I guess I managed to survive, but I do have a few professional acquaintances who I will avoid for this reason.

Another motivation for people is passion. I agree that there is a high correlation between passion and career success for a lot of people. I also think it is a huge false-negative filter that is costing many companies very talented candidates. I am okay with this because I have my own unique way of looking at employee motivations, and a subset of replacement motivations if they are not highly passionate about a work subject.

Wanting specific work experience is another motivation for people. I make the joke with some people that if you want a job at EA, you need to work three years at Activision, and if you want to work at Activision, you need three years at EA. I have been blessed with many opportunities that have let me create “gateway jobs” for people to explore careers in the games industry. Some people filter out candidates who do not have the required experience for a role.

I also think that people look at the size of a company. I learned late in my career that there are some big benefits to having at least one large-scale company as a previous employer. It is hard to qualify for some interesting jobs if you have twenty years of burning startups to the ground. Many human resources people just look at the shape of my LinkedIn profile and quietly throw up in their mouth—just a little.

The one motivation I like the most, and one that I think is not very heavily considered by a lot of hiring managers, is curiosity. I have written previously about how I will break apart an interview as a candidate as a part of my own process. I have not met many leaders who love that kind of behavior. I think that curiosity is among the most important qualities a knowledge worker of any kind can possess, and I love people who ask questions. Quite often this is a symptom of being a lifelong learner and helps people adapt to new roles and new domains. This is generally the one that gets me hired somewhere, so I have some real bias toward wearing my “I heart curiosity” t-shirt.

So when you are looking at a new job, you should always sit down and ask yourself what will motivate you to be successful. I see lots of people tilting at FAANG jobs where they broadcast stupendous pay packages. I also see lots of other people who shy away from some jobs because the company is in a space they consider boring. Whether it is a paycheck, passion, career experience, the size of the company, or just pure curiosity, you should understand why someone is interested in working on your team. It will help you to hire them and more importantly it will help you to retain them in the long term. It has helped me to identify people I would want to hire again and again.

This was a little late, and I want to thank you for your patience in addition to thanking you for reading along.

I am down to just a few more weeks of interesting posts. It is time for me to start reloading my monitor with Post-It notes for future conversations.

See you next week!

The past two posts were mostly about games I am currently playing. It is interesting to see that the World of Warcraft Holy Paladin experience was nerfed twice, and the general Diablo IV play experience is improving. I think there is some subset of grinders who will love Diablo IV when it gets a few more seasons of fixes, and that is all I have to say on the matter—the game is not for me.

I am going to get back to general engineering conversations. I am slightly nervous about doing so because I just realized that I am almost out of topics again. It has been a while since I have found myself in this state, so I will need to invest some thinky time in coming up with new things to complain about.

Today I want to talk about authenticity. Wait, no. I want to talk about authentication. Maybe a little bit of both actually.

Everything about online product authentication sucks. There are so many different ways to authenticate a customer these days, and almost all of them are a trap of some kind. I am ready to go into all of the different ways you can be your own Admiral Akbar, and decide which traps you do and do not want.

The first trap is the support trap. Many third-party auth providers give you libraries to integrate with their platform. The biggest problem with these is when the various Powers-That-Be make changes to their platforms and online stores. If you are natively integrated into an app store, for example, you might find that you will need to make an urgent update to your service or else run the risk of getting shut off for violating some privacy law or becoming a victim of some exploit. It is very frustrating to distract from core feature development for some problem created by someone else out there.

The second trap is the cost trap. Once upon a time, platforms were your friends in finding audiences. Today, they are a piece of expensive marketing machinery. Growth on the platform can sometimes “go viral” if you do it right, but that is a serious case of someone trying to make fetch happen. Many times it comes across as totes cringe. You will spend advertising dollars on these platforms to find customers, and most of the platforms are vicious red oceans at the moment, which implies that the dollar value will be high.

The third trap is the relationship trap. Sure, you will reduce some friction by having an easy button to integrate with Facebooks and Twitters. I suppose it should be Metas and X’s, to avoid a little “well, actually…” The best products I have seen have built deep relationships with their customers—making sure you have a vital path to marketing to your customers is very important. It is a lot of work to ask for people’s email addresses, and most platforms increase the amount of friction for software developers to access this information because they want to keep their audiences inside of a protective moat.

Related to the relationship trap is the knockoff trap. Because you are partnering with a platform for authentication, they will have some bored product manager somewhere who looks at authentication data and if you are sitting on bottled lightning, they might make an argument to compete in your space, either by acquiring a company or building a product from scratch. You can see the Instagram acquisition or the launch of Threads for some examples of this. Apple and Google are also guilty of this with more or less degrees of success.

Using other authentication providers does come with some benefits. It does make your marketing easier to execute, and it does reduce friction for potential customers. It might take some work off of your plate when you are first building out your service, too.

There will come a time when you will have to look at your long-term strategy and decide that having a more direct relationship with your customers is really important. Many of your authentication partners may wish to stay in the middle of that conversation and attach friction or cost to it.

The other issue is that friction is very harmful to new product development. Building relationships with people on the internet is difficult, and leveraging a trusted authentication partner can be a good way to get some early customers into your service.

In the process of writing this article, I searched for the words “consumers” and “users” and replaced both words with customers explicitly. It was interesting how many times each appeared, and how differently this whole post reads when thinking about customers.

Many of the platforms today that authenticate customers are in the marketing and advertising business and have leveraged colossal amounts of venture funding to buy their way into everyone’s heads. They live there mostly rent-free for customers. Someone somewhere will have to pay for that and unfortunately, that is you and me.

This is one of the reasons that Tim Sweeny is my Games Industry Person Of The Year, every single year. He has done a phenomenal job of ensuring Epic Games has deep relationships with developers and players alike and built a great emerging ecosystem. I also have some mild ideas about how web3 will become more meaningful for long-term player identity, but there are other problems that web3 will solve first.

Writing this post was a struggle. I am conflicted about the ease of leveraging high-scale platforms to jumpstart a customer base because it can “cheapen” your relationship with your customer, and also it erodes a sustainable competitive advantage. I think there is a time after you have found product-market fit when leveraging platform partners and third-party authentication makes sense, and I think that it is something that needs to be done thoughtfully. Most people just dump a generic auth provider in front of their potential customers and hope for accidental long-term success. I am sorry if I offended you with this statement, and in the immortal wisdom of one of my favorite eighties musicians… maybe you needed to be offended.

I tried to create a link to the artist and the album in question to make zero million dollars in affiliate fees, and I was told that there is an error. Maybe my time as Amazon’s worst affiliate marketer has come to an end. I had a good run. I have zero regerts.

I will see you all next week!

The alternative title I was considering for today is “only MMOrders in the building.” Today I am going to talk about World of Warcraft. I do not have very kind things to say about World of Warcraft, and I feel a little guilty because they finally fixed my favorite class and spec (Holy Paladin) after seven years. I am actually really enjoying healing at the moment, and unfortunately, I have been planning on dunking on this game since June.

Ultima Online was the game that convinced me I should become a professional game developer. I am humbled to have met many of the key people who brought this incredible product to life, including Raph Koster, whose game I am eagerly awaiting, and Richard Garriott, whose Ultima IV game was probably one of the most influential games I have ever played. 

Ultima Online was a wild sandbox game. The violence between players was so intense that you could not really call it PVP. It was called Player Killing (PKing) because it was so savage and abrupt. At the same time as being a deep, deep pool of violent online despair, it also had shining moments. I was briefly a homeowner in the game on a choice piece of island real estate, I was an elected mayor of a player town, and one of the people I met in the game early enough found my behavior so entertaining and “in character” that they could have sworn I was running an in-game event.

Early Ultima Online was really special to me. While there were a lot of exploits and bugs in the game, there were also some fantastic people forming communities and having fun together.

I was privileged to meet a handful of people who were also interested in game development and could see the promise of persistent world games and letting players shape the future of their games.

I was also part of a great mailing list called MUD-Dev at the time. Its administrator was an amazing gentleman who curated a community of craftsmen and theoreticians who were the progenitors of today’s large online games.

While I was going through the polite fiction that I could bootstrap an MMO into existence, or somehow figure out how to raise money, I had no idea that the whole category of games was going to get hit by a truck.

That truck was called World of Warcraft.

Do not get me wrong. World of Warcraft (WoW) was a great game. It still is today. While I did not play it at launch because I was running a startup at the time, I did manage to get into the game during its first expansion, and I absolutely understand the charm and the appeal of the game.

In fact, I still play this game today. I fully intend to stick around to see the day that Blizzard creates its own black swan event and blows the whole game to pieces. It almost did during the Cataclysm expansion and also people had a tremendous amount of rage for the Shadowlands expansion, but the game has endured. You could almost forgive them for what happened in Shadowlands. Between world events and the issues happening at Activision-Blizzard, it was a rough time.

So why am I so butthurt about WoW?

It is because the persistent world sandbox approach to MMOs got brutally murdered when this game went live.

So what does that mean?

The first generation of MMOs had some really wild stuff in it. There are some interesting stories about how they took out the simulated ecosystem in Ultima Online because the real point of creatures in MMOs is to wander infinitely until some PC comes on screen and decides to turn them into experience points and skinned corpses. Asheron’s Call had some neat dynamic dungeon experiments that were fun, even if the game failed because none of us knew what the flying shit an Olthoi was.

World of Warcraft did a lot of things to put players into amazing quests, participate in cheeky stories, and group up into groups of five-ten-fifteen-forty adventures to do some kind of quest…adventure…instance…thing.

In addition to giving people interesting group activities, WoW put people into instances so they could do their content with their chosen team in private. This is one of the places where the game breaks down as an MMO for me.

The other place it breaks down is that ultimately nothing the players do affects the world. Ultima Online was turned into a giant player-owned slum, but it was our giant player-owned slum. Sure, one person gets to be the Scarab Lord, but that is scarcely enough really cool world persistence, especially when the winner of that title decides to delete the game.

Regardless of my opinions of how this really is not an MMO, the game is considered the top-performing MMO game by everyone else— and given the volume of sales, is it any surprise no one really cares?

I mean, when I bought the game, I remember picking up a copy of the box with a sticker that said “Over five million units sold!” Right beside that box was a box that said “Over three million units sold!” and “Over four million units sold!” The game was selling so fast that they had to reprint new stickers. It was a surreal moment to be sure.

The problem now is that WoW created a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar technology mountain that everyone needs to climb in order to be considered a competitor in the category. This is kind of important. I did some research on replicating a billion-dollar mobile franchise that I admire. I am not the first person to do so, and I certainly will not be the last.

I decided to peel back a few layers of the Summoner’s War onion to see what it looked like at launch. If you had to knock off the game today, it would be a ten-million-dollar product. About sixty to seventy percent of that is stuff they added to the game after they found out they had a hit. Once a game becomes live and develops an entrenched fanbase, it erects massive moats to competition through live operations and iterations on elder play.

WoW is in that spot right now. If you wanted to make an MMO today, the amount of stuff you have to pile into the game is being measured against your friendly “kill ten bears” genre champion.

That sucks terribly because nothing that has happened in the game has enriched the category of MMO since 1998. Arguably, it has substantially backslid as an actual MMO. We are still in “MMO 1.0”. The only game that has stretched the genre at all in my opinion is this inscrutable space game called Eve Online that is so obtuse that it boasts of two insane features: First, it has a product integration directly into Microsoft Excel. Second, when you get run over by another player in this massive player-vs-player zero-sum game, the total loss of your ship is so horribly broken of an experience that they boasted at a game developer’s conference that their solution to this is to flag a live operations specialist to help you through your loss and keep playing. If that sentence sounds terrible, it is because even typing it hurts my brain.

If anyone is confused at this point because I am not writing about engineering leadership or mentorship, I do apologize to you. I do have some posts queued up that fall under those categories. I had some kind of obligation to shake my fist at the clouds over two games, and school is still out for summer. My career touches on the games industry from time to time, and I have been paid on more than one occasion to participate at the edge of online games innovation.

Despite collecting some dribs and drabs of coin, I have not yet made a real dent in online game innovation. To be honest, hardly anyone else has either. We have found many more ways to get up to 100 people into a single room and hand them badges, points, and even umbrellas. In WoW, putting 40 people in the same room made everyone tired. They never desired to be as cool as Fortnite. The latest set of instance changes do nothing to give players serious agency in the world. Even the way that the NPCs talk to you reminds you, as the champion, that you are really not playing together but merely playing with yourself. Maybe we shouldn’t repeat that out loud.

After the first decade of “not seeing anything interesting in MMOs”, I have stopped hoarding my late 1990s ideas. Some of them are interesting for niche games, and some of them would be exciting to see operating at scale. At this point, I would just be happy to play a multiplayer game that was as meaningful as Ultima Online felt so many years ago.

So there you have it. Once again, I have sprayed so many words that I am not going to go viral on TokTok anytime soon. I thank you once again for reading along, and I will resume my regular posting of mentorship things and links to affiliate merchandise that no one ever buys. If you do not feel like buying any of the random crummy things that I link to you for affiliate fees, I did write a collection of short stories once while commuting on a train. One of them might even be good. I do not collect an affiliate fee… from myself… if you choose to buy it. You won’t anyway because I am not that good at reverse gaslighting. 

I shall see you all next week!

Warning: here be spoilers.

I finally finished Diablo IV the other week. I finished the game with my own definition of “finished”, which to me means to complete the campaign. I did the same thing with Diablo III. I know some people believe that “finished with the game” involves getting to level 100 with every character and doing all kinds of other crazy things. I can respect that. That also was closer to my definition of “finished with the game” for Diablo II.

I consider Diablo II to be one of the better games I have played in my life. It is a magical product, and it got many things right. I have replayed it recently, and it largely holds up to how I remember it. Ultima IV also does this. It is another game I am willing to replay from time to time to respect its majesty.

Diablo III was unfortunate when it launched. I played it. I understand what they did with it. I did not love it and moved on to other games. That is the entirety of my thought process about Diablo III. I did not love the story in Diablo III. I apologize if this is spoilers, but the ending is functionally equivalent to “Cabin Boy”. I heard from many people that Diablo III eventually became a fun game and I cannot say how long that took, but to me, that kind of transformation in a game must happen before you launch it.

That brings us to Diablo IV.

Diablo IV is a very beautiful game.

Diablo IV is also a very stupid game.

I have caught flack from one individual for giving this game a 6.5 out of 10. Many other people feel I am being far too kind. Aesthetics carries this game very far, honestly. I can respect the craftsmanship that went into making this such a beautiful experience.

I want to say that I have a large number of questions about the mechanics in the game, and the deep truth is I only have one.

Did anyone with any decision-making power play this fucking game?

Where do I start with my critiques?

I think that the auto-leveling of the world is the first one. Diablo IV leveling is a tedious chore. It is like mowing five acres of unkempt lawn while eating a bowl of oatmeal at the same time. God help you if you picked a class that you thought might be fun vs just listening to all the people on the internet and loading up on a broken OP character. Your gear becomes ineffective at an incredible pace given how infrequent replacement items are. Eventually, you will get one or two epics that have some great aspects on them that you need to maintain to overcompensate for the continued state of decay on your build. You can strip the aspect off of your items and reapply it to a higher-level item. This is a one-time fix. You cannot reapply that affix to a different item, which is not something that is well communicated upfront.

In other games, if you ever fell off of the power curve, you could go back to old areas and upgrade your character. Most every game I have played has had this as an option. In the best games, you will achieve a state of flow while this happens. Because everything is constantly leveling up, you are afforded no such luxury in Diablo IV. A bad character build will continually remain bad and will eventually bring you into a spot where you will be powerless to progress.

There are a few higher-level zones where you can fight some bosses and clear out a part of the map. I encountered the first one of these at level 19. After dying repeatedly, I discovered that I should push my character to level 20 and go purchase a potion upgrade. The four levels before a potion upgrade (levels 20, 30, and 45 respectively) are terrible. They are made worse because you know there is an arbitrary upgrade to your potions coming because number.

The other rage-inducing random decision for character progression is tying your potion count to how much extra side questing you have done. Before going into the game’s final act, I ran around the world picking up side quests and waypoints that were totally unnecessary to get to an arbitrary magical unlock threshold to increase my potions.

What the hell is a Murmuring Obol anyway? I was running around at maxed-out Obols for more than half of the game because I did not realize that this is a special currency for gambling, vs gold. I am not sure why it needed a special currency for gambling, or why it had such an insanely low cap of 500, which forces you to go and spend currency when you might want to bank it up to desperately try to replace really outdated items.

Dungeons are the next thing to talk about. I cannot complain too much about dungeons. I decided to stop doing them because I accidentally wasted a lot of time in them, mistaking the first few for the one-floor cellars that populate the terrain. The complaints that I perceived, and were largely validated by talking to friends, is that all of them share the same repetitive structure and mechanics.

This is also the problem with the boss fights.

I vaguely remember the boss fights in Diablo III, I had no real issues with them. I greatly remember the bosses from Diablo II as being interesting, varied, and challenging.

Diablo IV bosses are just boring. They mostly have the same mechanics, and if you are playing as a Barbarian, you spend a lot of time just running around dodging red shit on the ground while waiting for your cooldowns on your powers to expire.

Another challenge for the boss fights is that the boss arenas are tiny. It is made worse by the fact that the final boss fight area (SPOLIER ALURT) shrinks over time. Someone thought this would be a good idea.

Clearly, there are a lot of mechanical deficiencies in the game. They are buffing some of the classes and making some adjustments to “end game” because they know they have some problems. There are also clipping issues with horses and terrain that are being addressed. I heard that some people got stuck at level 50 before finishing the game (I finished at level 49), and that you needed to do some crazy hard-mode things to keep progressing in levels. Much like so many other things, that feels so arbitrary.

I am glad this game will eventually be fun for the people who decide to stick around, in much the same way Diablo III became fun for people who stuck around.

For me? I don’t know. This might be the last Diablo product that I pay for. I am not planning on sticking around to see it.

I got sucked into Diablo II hard because it was fun from the beginning. The story was captivating, and the whole thing just worked. There is a certain gestalt in an amazing product that you can feel. In hindsight, the one criticism I could level at it is that the game could be called “ZOMG SO MANY POTIONS”, because you do need to get your drank on to win the game. Back when it came out, I had to step out of the boss fight and go farm for gold and drops to rebuild my potion stash to get the boss down. It was a little unfortunate, and somehow it was still immensely fun.

The real criticism I have for Diablo IV I saved for the end. It is a fucking. Stupid. Story.

There are going to be some more spoilers here. If you are concerned about such things, you should probably stop reading.

The game starts with your character rescuing a bunch of villagers. After you rescue them, you have a party where they give you a drink that is drugged and you black out. After breaking free, you go find someone named Lorath… The very first thing you do is accept food and drink from them? Did we just forget what happened ten minutes ago?

Hard pass.

Setting aside the amount of drinking that you and the NPCs do, I could not identify with most of the decision-making in the game up to the end. Watching the final scene, I was reminded of all things from an episode of The Simpsons. This is not where I wanted to be at the end of the game. Of course, very few games stuck the landing as hard as Diablo II did. If you did not go through the OG game before, it is well worth your dollars to play it through now.

Another criticism for me is the mechanics of the story. Yes, you heard that right. They added a mechanism to the map to watch cutscenes that moved the story forward. You constantly found these piles of clearly marked blood petals that would let you move the story forward. The idea to tie these visions to the mechanics of the game felt alien to me. I could literally feel the shattering of the fourth wall every time I saw them on the screen.

Speaking of shattering the fourth wall, this brings me to my final criticism of the game.

The always online connectedness of the thing. I had one game-breaking crash in the wee hours of the night when I committed to finishing the game. It was in a dream-sequence quest that I had to restart from the beginning. This was an awful experience, and unfortunately, it felt par for the course.

That does not compare at all with the disruption of seeing a tricked-out character named b0ngBrUhl33t666 go tearing across the map while you are deep in the throes of battling for the citizens of Sanctuary.

So there you have it. At the end of the game, I felt like I bet on the wrong horse—or wolf. For more than half of the game, I actually felt that a team-up with Lillith might not be so bad. When asking myself what that ending would look like, I remembered some sage-like wisdom from Logan V. What is curious to me is that more than half of the people I talked to about this game also felt the same way.

Thank you for reading along. I really hope this game becomes the game that everyone who worked on it wanted it to be. I do. Right now, it is not a game I feel good about paying for.

See you next week!

I have a fancy curved 49” Samsung monitor on my home computer for evaluating products for professional reasons—or as my wife calls it: “Playing games”. It is nice because I have a row of Post-it notes at the bottom for potential subjects to write about. This week, I have a note that says “Split PDF Learning Style”, and it took me about an hour to remember what that meant. Note to everyone: “How to remember gooder” is a future conversation. I had some trouble remembering this week’s topic for a second reason: I wanted to write “Why I think Diablo IV is a stupid game.” I am going to complete the story mode before I shake my fist at all of you teenagers and explain why I think this game is the last Diablo game I am going to purchase. If the game graces me with a good ending, I may recant that position.

So what the hell is a split PDF and what does it have to do with learning styles?

I may have mentioned once or twice that I play World of Warcraft. I run a late-night raid guild (always recruiting the ranged dps!), and treasure the start of each new tier when we enter the new raid.

Every raider prepares for the raid differently. Some people watch a lot of videos. Some people read all of the strategies on the web. Some people wait to show up and get an explanation from the raid leader.

One thing we do each new tier is that we blindly pull each boss once. This means there is some subset of our team who has no idea what to expect at all. Especially me. I learn best from experience, and this is one way to really get into it very quickly.

Yes, I am an experiential learner. I struggle to learn by watching videos, and I can kinda get the gist of things by reading the strategy guides. I learn the best by jumping in and doing things. When we want to discuss ideas or develop products, I am the first person to want to workshop things and make some prototypes.

Which brings us to the PDF.

For some strange reason, ADOBE winds up winning so many of the format wars. From the decades of horror and “punch the monkey” banner ads, Adobe Flash was one of the default standards for web content creation. Much like the fax machine, that died a much-needed death a long time ago.

PDF is starting to feel the same thing to me.

We get a lot of work documentation in PDF format and trying to make sense of it can be like trying to figure out the color of a cupcake by licking it.

PDF documentation needs to have some better web viewing modes that are not “print this out on paper like it is the 1980s”. On a widescreen monitor, there are a bunch of settings you can tweak in your browser or PDF viewer to make the document marginally more presentable, but the inability for PDFs to be really viewable on the internet is probably why people pay for Atlassian Confluence. As an aside, I will save my rants about Confluence for another day.

Creating and sharing documentation is a fundamentally important task for making excellent software. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and I will wear that “I am a poor craftsman, and all I got for it is this crummy t-shirt” proudly while I point the finger and sneer at the PDF format and its current dominance in documentation formatting.

We are all doing our very best and this is one of those things that I glare at and think “Do better”.

I love it when I see developers, product managers, designers, and customers achieve shared understanding expressed through great products. Sometimes the path to that greatness leads us through difficult journeys and attempts to teach how to use that product that needs 17th-century “here be monsters” warnings. If you have some preferred formats for sharing product documentation in the “not PDF” bucket, my DMs are open, and my inbox is waiting.

Thank you for reading along. I do have a rant about Diablo IV coming. I also have a long conversation coming about World of Warcraft. The latter post is going to wait a while. This last week Blizzard returned the Holy Paladin play style to the way I like it after many years, and I am not ready to assume the guilt of shitting all over them after they made the game fun for me again. They Made Paladins Great Again, and I hope you join me in ordering some sweet, sweet Paladin merch to celebrate this occasion. An Amazon-affiliated link is here for you to not click on.

I hope to see all of you wonderful people here again next week.

I am back after an unplanned extended absence. After a multi-week trip to Europe, the first real vacation I have taken in a long time, I was blessed with having my oldest son home for a little extra time after his college year ended, and before his new residence was available. This meant that Dad’s home office was not available during my usual writing hours. I chose not to try to fit the square peg of “writing time” into the round hole of “the rest of the day”, and thus, you have all been starved of my brain leakings.

I have a row of Post-it notes on my monitor as prompts for my weekly writing. The last one I wrote was during the height of the House budget crisis. There was so much partisan spin on both sides of the aisle about what was happening that I was getting dizzy reading the news.

I am not going to issue any red-tinged or blue-tinged opinions on the outcome that was eventually reached. I am going to talk about the process to get there and the negotiating that barely happened.

I am fond of telling people that there is a very good book on negotiating out there called Getting to Yes. It was an excellent read to help you think about the different ways to negotiate, the way that you negotiate, and most importantly, the way that people negotiate against you. After telling people to read the book, I often tell them that learning the different negotiating styles taught me to essentially ignore the advice of the book and the notion of principled negotiation.

I remember having a contract negotiation with a friend of mine for some development work about a decade ago. We went front and back a few times before the contract was ready to be signed. When we reached an agreement, he noted “You must have had some really bad experiences with your contracts to require so much work in them”. On the contrary, making sure that everything was spelled out nicely in the contract helped to ensure they were all very seamless.

The only deal I really did not negotiate was the first one I ever signed, and that was mostly because the people who sent it to me, in all of its eighteen-page glory, said it was a mere formality and really did not mean much. I worked with this company for the better part of the next two years without thinking much about it.

Around that time, my first son was born and I became a parent. Setting aside all of the excitement and positive emotions of that experience, I experienced a step-function increase in my cost of living. I communicated this to the primary mobile game publisher I was working with as we were coming up on the end of a six-month contract.

The problem was, the more I mentioned that we needed to discuss the next steps in our relationship, they kept delaying a conversation on terms. Finally, in the second last week of our six-month contract, they sent over a contract for one year with a lower monthly amount than the current monthly amount which I had told them was not enough considering I now have extra costs.

We scheduled a phone call for later in that week where their VP of publishing tersely asked “Look, do you want to be in business with us or not?”

I sighed heavily and said “No”, and we ended the call.

I do not think they were ready to hear that, and they were pretty angry at me.

In the final month of not negotiating this agreement, I had a lengthy conversation with some people who worked at a competing publisher. They offered me a much more flexible contract for twice the monthly amount as the first publisher.

I did not know this at the time, but this is referred to as a BATNA (Better Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). I teach this word to lots of people I mentor because it is a very important thing to have, and it is a powerful concept.

Most developers are super shitty negotiators. I know that I was. I was accidentally a great negotiator a few times in my life leading up to this moment and now I understand why:

I was willing to walk away from the negotiation completely.

Whether you are negotiating a job, or negotiating contract work, most developers have some sort of really strong desire to sign the agreement. This is a really dangerous tendency because if you are negotiating against a hardball negotiator, this will be leveraged against you.

We saw this play out in the House budget conversations. For the longest time, there was a lot of “not-negotiating” going on, or as I like to call it: No-gotiating.

It is super important to know what you want out of an agreement when you enter negotiations and what you are willing to give up. I developed a reputation as a hardball negotiator for jobs because I am a family man with a very high cost structure due to having kids. I have had to patiently explain that to a lot of people who somehow think you can share a three-bedroom in the bay area with four kids, or wait until your end-of-year bonus in order to pay your rent. I am also super grateful for the companies that understood that and were willing to be flexible on terms in order for us to do great things together.

So where does that leave us?

It is really important to make sure you understand what you can and cannot negotiate. I have helped some people add both cash and other considerations to their various negotiations over the years. Many of them were shocked at what they received by stating their position and giving some room to adjust terms. In some cases, where there was very little flexibility in dollar amounts, a few people have gotten formal reviews scheduled into their job offers or contracts where they received bumps in pay at the six-month mark as the very last thing they could have added in order to have their consideration re-examined.

Recently I have talked with people after they accepted an offer that had a lot of room for improvement. They admitted that they figured if it was not enough, they could always ask for changes after the fact. That is hard to do once you have put your name on that agreement. Sometimes it is hard for a company to do that due to its size, sometimes it is hard to do that because you do not have any leverage to request those changes after it has been fully executed.

If anything, I hope that this encourages people to make sure they are getting what they want in an agreement before signing it. You might be wondering what are all of the moving parts that you can negotiate. Goodness me, look at the time. We will have to go into all of those things at a later date.

It is good to be back, I really missed writing for you all. Please feel free to Socials this. Retweet. Re-mastodon? Re-Thread? Whatever it is you do. Also, feedback is a gift and I love presents. Please comment on this post, email me a note, or fax me your impressions.

See you next week.

I am back… Sort of. After a two-week whirlwind tour of Europe with my recently graduated son, I am once again in front of my computer. I have a small list of posts to make, but I apologize to all of you because today is not the day I resume them.

It is Father’s Day. I have also spent two weeks not playing Diablo IV. Today I am going to fix that.

I will see you all in hell!

Cheers!