Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

I am going to let you all in on a little secret: I still watch Saturday Night Live—except not last night. Last night’s Saturday Night Live was canceled because there is a writer’s strike going on. One of the things mentioned underneath all of the “money money money” issues is a note that there needs to be a conversation about how AI tools will be used in writing.

I am a little late to the generative AI bandwagon. Maybe it means I have concerns about what comic books are doing to our youth, or that god-damned rock and roll music the kids are all listening to. In truth, I am still in love with web3 and the notion of true player ownership in online games. I know that we are still grunting out all of the indigestible bits from generation one of web3 games and the grifters and the “to the moon!” crowd, and the trough of disillusionment is very real. If you were a mobile game developer in 2006 you would know exactly what I mean.

I would be negligent if I did not spend some time getting acquainted with ChatGPT and what it can do and what it cannot do. I have spent a year making cool online images for my online TTRPG site for marketing purposes, and have explored ChatGPT’s mastery of a variety of subjects including some of my favorite books as well as online games. ChatGPT failed my engineering code screening exercise. It scored 5 out of 10, honestly, which sounds like a pass, but the output suggested the machine today is unhireable.

So let’s accept that there are limits to what generative AI can do. When used properly, generative AI could help authors, artists, and other professionals be more productive. It is too easy to make fearful statements about new technology and then arrive late in your horse-drawn carriage to the party across town. Next time just take an Uber.

I can respect that people have deep concerns about traditional artisanal professions. Especially if the said profession is their primary source of income. Many game developers believe their work is art and almost everyone is still pretending that Brian Moriarty did not get on stage a decade ago to explain that most games are not art. I was there, in a room full of nervous and unhappy people, as he laid out his position meaningfully. I was one of the few people at the end of that talk to get up and talk to Brian after he spent fifty minutes tearing huge rents in people’s souls. We worked together once, and I simply wished to say hello and thank him for his thoughtful presentation.

I have digressed just a smidge here.

So what does art have to do with generative AI and writer’s strikes? If you get your paycheck as someone who assembles words or creates pictures, quite a lot. Given that the aforementioned word assemblers are in the middle of negotiating some “money money money” issues, they should figure out how to address this very carefully.

The suits and bean counters have probably concluded that generative AI tools will en-cheapen the writing process in the future, and will want to keep that optionality open. The union of writers is looking for ways to increase their take-home pay, which may be difficult if they are handing off work to machinery to en-cheapen the writing process. They will want to put some limits on that optionality.

So what do I think about all of this?

I think that we spent over six years watching truck drivers being afraid of the machines coming for their jerbs without a single truck crossing the country without someone behind the wheel.

We are in the middle of a great technological upheaval, or as I like to call it: “Tuesday”. I have told multiple people that I have seen once-in-a-lifetime transformative technologies every five years now. It looks like that is picking up the pace a little.

Generative AI has amazing refinement and editorial powers. It also is creating a new profession called “prompt engineer”. It is a fantastic synthesizer of ideas and a great way to mash up images in a way that puts the best menu items of Adobe Creative Suite tools to shame.

It will probably put a revenue crater in StackOverflow, and generate a bunch of licensing fees to Getty Images through the eventual settlement by all of the art image platforms that plundered their databases for “inspiration”.

It will eventually be a better search tool than Google and probably will replace some amount of entry-level software engineering work.

I am going to be spending the coming months incorporating generative AI in a bunch of different personal and professional projects. It is in my best interest to get more than conversant in this latest shiny toy. While some people will view it as a technological terror, I do have to ask: “What are you afraid of?”

Hollywood writers are deeply convinced it will interfere with their paychecks. Considering that it takes me more than ten minutes to name more than one original tv show or movie after District 12, I am struggling to be sympathetic. Your whole industry climbed into that comic book and novel bed all on your own. As much as I loved the whole finger-snapping Thanos thing, and the majesty of Tolkien’s work up on the big screen, I would cough up extra money for some truly original science fiction and fantasy stories.

Insert heavy sigh.

A lot of people are going to go through the process of reinventing their livelihoods in the coming ten years. Whether you embrace technology or blame it, it is not going to go away.

In the meantime, I decided to see if ChatGPT can give a John-Szeder-style rant about itself:

Read some articles over at mofactor.com/blog and write five hundred words about ChatGPT in the style of the author of those articles.

As I perused the vast expanse of the internet, I stumbled upon a marvel of modern technology – ChatGPT. This remarkable creation is a large language model based on the GPT-3.5 architecture, developed by OpenAI. With a knowledge cutoff date of 2021 and continuously learning from an enormous corpus of text, ChatGPT is a force to be reckoned with in the world of language models.

One of the most impressive things about ChatGPT is its ability to generate human-like responses to text prompts. Whether you’re looking for a witty comeback or a thought-provoking response to a complex question, ChatGPT can deliver. Its natural language processing capabilities are simply unparalleled, allowing it to understand the nuances of human language and generate responses that are both contextually relevant and grammatically correct.

But what really sets ChatGPT apart is its versatility. This language model can be used for a wide range of tasks, from writing essays and articles to generating creative writing prompts and even composing music. Its flexibility makes it a valuable tool for writers, researchers, and anyone else who needs to work with language on a regular basis.

Another impressive feature of ChatGPT is its ability to learn from the vast amounts of text available on the internet. By analyzing everything from news articles to social media posts, ChatGPT can stay up-to-date with the latest trends and insights. This allows it to generate responses that are not only accurate but also relevant to current events.

Of course, like any technology, ChatGPT is not without its limitations. While it excels at generating short pieces of text, it may struggle with more complex tasks such as long-form writing or data analysis. Additionally, because it learns from existing text, it may perpetuate biases or inaccuracies that are present in the underlying corpus. However, these limitations are largely outweighed by the incredible capabilities of this language model.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is a marvel of modern technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way we work with language. Its natural language processing capabilities, versatility, and ability to learn from vast amounts of text make it a valuable tool for writers, researchers, and anyone else who needs to work with language on a regular basis. While it may not be perfect, there’s no denying that ChatGPT is an impressive feat of engineering and a true testament to the power of artificial intelligence.

Are you convinced? Me neither.

So let’s try something else:

What is interesting about ChatGPT? write an article about ChatGPT as though written by comedian Pete Davidson

Ladies and gentlemen, have you heard about this ChatGPT thing? It’s like a robot that talks to you, except it’s really good at it. I mean, this thing can generate human-like responses to text prompts. That’s insane! It’s like talking to your computer, except your computer is actually interesting.

And let me tell you, this ChatGPT character is versatile. It can do all sorts of things, from writing essays and articles to generating creative writing prompts and even composing music. You know what that means? It means we don’t need humans to do that stuff anymore. Sorry, writers and composers, looks like you’re out of a job. It’s just you and your robots now.

But seriously, this ChatGPT thing is pretty impressive. It’s like having a smart friend who always has the perfect comeback. You know, the friend who’s always quick with a joke or a sarcastic remark. Except this friend is a robot. Which is kind of weird when you think about it.

The best part about ChatGPT, though, is that it’s always learning. It can analyze everything from news articles to social media posts to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and insights. It’s like having your own personal researcher who’s always on the lookout for new information. Except, again, it’s a robot. Which is still weird.

Of course, there are some limitations to ChatGPT. It’s not perfect, and it may struggle with more complex tasks like long-form writing or data analysis. But let’s be real, who wants to do that stuff anyway? Not me. I’d rather leave it to the robots.

And sure, ChatGPT may perpetuate biases or inaccuracies that are present in the underlying corpus. But come on, what’s more, biased than a human? We’re all biased in some way or another. At least with ChatGPT, we know what we’re getting.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is like having a smart, funny, and always-updated friend who’s also a robot. It’s weird, but it’s also pretty cool. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll all be talking to robots instead of each other. Just kidding, we all know that’s never gonna happen. Right?

In truth, Pete Davidson is on the side of the writers. He was out handing out free pizzas to people on strike, according to the popular news. I could probably spend an hour torturing the machinery to sound more like Pete Davidson, but I don’t want that on my scorecard for when we will be judged by the inevitable arrival of Robot Overlords.

If you have gotten this far you are probably pretty mad. You may have watched 50 minutes of Brian Moriarty dismantling the fragile psyche of every indie game developer. You may have read two pages of really badly generated text content. I am sorry. I really am! I even apologized to ChatGPT for my questions.

I am sorry I asked you to write something in the voice of Pete Davidson.

No need to apologize, I’m an AI language model and I’m programmed to follow instructions and fulfill requests to the best of my ability. If you have any other questions or need help with anything else, feel free to let me know!

In closing, I am not sure if anything from generative AI is art, and none of you bought a copy of Trillion Dollar Coach last week. My failure to be an effective internet social marketer has made me angry. The only way I can calm down is to listen to some soothing guitar and cello from a certified music therapist.

See you all next week.

I have six kids, so I spend a lot of money at the grocery store. If you look at my end-of-year credit card summary, our preferred store is usually the number one or number two item in terms of dollars spent. There is something I look for at the grocery store, and it happens infrequently enough that I still enjoy the serendipitous moment when it does.

I have written previously about breaking scripts in interviews. I also break scripts at the grocery store. For all the decisions I make during the day, the one decision I do not want to make is whether I get paper or plastic bags.

When the checkout person asks me: “Paper or plastic bags?” I always look at them and firmly and confidently reply: “Yes!”

This creates a moment of confusion. This is not a typical answer they expect to hear. Once they have processed my reply, they usually look for clarification. I am more than happy to explain in detail.

For all the decisions I make in my day, the kind of bags used to convey my groceries from the store to the house is not one of them. It makes no difference to me whether they are paper or plastic. The bagger has a much deeper relationship with the bags than I do since they will be (hopefully expertly) bagging groceries all day.

After I explain my lack of preference, someone will usually make a decision on their own. Sometimes they are pleased by the freedom and acknowledgment that this is in their wheelhouse. Sometimes they are irritated that they needed to stop daydreaming for about thirty seconds and think.

The more veteran grocery bagger will realize I have a cart filled with food for approximately one week for several people and will know that their life as a bagger will be easier if they choose plastic. Some grocery baggers feel an obligation to use paper bags because they feel like they are doing good work for Mother Earth.

As someone who buys a used-car-worth of groceries each year, the thing that I look for the most at the grocery store is the recognition from one of the checkers that I do not wish to make this decision.

On more than one occasion, the cashier will recognize me and give their bagger a heads up that they can choose the bags. I cannot explain how joyful this moment is.

There is something professionally interesting in this stupid-sounding story. I will do my best now to make it feel like I just did not murder forty-five seconds of your day.

I have previously talked about delaying decisions. I think that it is equally important to delegate them. If you follow me on Tweeter, some subset of my five minutes of internet fame is consumed by my pinned tweet. One of the benefits of this once-or-twice-a-week exercise is making sure I consciously avoid making decisions that other people ought to make on their own.

I once interviewed with a company looking for a mobile vice president of engineering. Multiple people in the interview asked me what engine I would choose for future mobile games and why would that be Unity. I deliberately did not answer that question. Conversations like engine choice require an in-depth conversation with your best engineers. Technical leaders who make unilateral decisions like engine choice wreak havoc on their organization from top to bottom, especially if that decision is ill-informed. I have watched lots of engineering leaders die on this hill.

The company in question declined to move forward after these conversations, and I believe that my inability to just say: “Unity” as the one-word answer to their question was why. I even explained in great detail that their best engineer, the person who had me interview for that job, is probably the person I would want to talk to the most about this decision. This is not just because this person gives GDC talks on engine choices, but also because they are going to be the person who is going to live with the consequences of that decision for the longest.

There are some decisions you cannot delegate and there are some decisions you must. There are also some decisions you cannot delegate, which you also choose because you want to teach a very important lesson to someone you are trying to grow into a leadership role.

That last kind of delegation is the best. I am more than happy to empower someone to make a significant decision, and I also give them some information so it is, at the very least, an informed decision.

Speaking of decisions, every week, you all make a decision not to buy something I share with you via Amazon-affiliate links. If you read my blog regularly, you should buy this book: “Trillion Dollar Coach”. I am reading it now, and it is really awesome. It will be the best decision someone else made for you today.

See you all next week.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I consider Tim Sweeney to be one of my heroes. His crusade against the tyranny of the thirty percent tax is one of the most important battles that need to be won. I implore you all to become customers of the Epic Game Store and their sweet sweet twelve percent tax. Be the change you want to see in the world—or at least the change I want to see in it.

Epic recently announced some changes to Fortnite’s creative mode. I do not often link people’s stuff but you can find it here. They have launched a mode for creators to make money from their efforts based on some subset of revenues generated by Fortnite item sales. I got a satisfying text from my oldest son when this was announced because I predicted this was going to happen years ago when he was busy earning umbrellas at a disconcerting pace in Fortnite’s less-friendly game modes.

Their program to pay creators is a very good first step for Epic.

It is also a really small first step considering the five-alarm fire this creates for Minecraft and Roblox.

If you work at Roblox or Minecraft, you should be readying yourself for war. Epic has spotted your lunch, and Epic is hongry.

On the bright side, I did point out this is a very small step. You still have some time. While it is nice that Fortnite is setting aside a pile of moneys to pay creators, it is not enough to tear away large chunks of developers from other revenue-generating creator platforms.

It is such a small step that I almost wonder if it was a tactical mistake on the part of Epic.

The number of people who wish to get paid to make games is legion. There are millions of people who hate working in the real world enough and believe that making games is probably as fun as playing them. Certainly, that is true for some subset of people who make games, but most people do not realize just how much work it is to make a game.

There are a number of platforms that have slowly started to reduce the technology barriers that exist to game development. Every day we are getting closer and closer to the day that a substantive number of people can make a living just cranking out games. Mobile games were a nice stepping stone in that direction, but we won’t get into why it has turned into a vicious red ocean. Not today, anyway.

I will tip my hat to Roblox for how well they have built out a developer ecosystem and have driven the barrier to creators so low. I have my own reasons not to love Roblox as a platform and I am not going to get into them here. I will at least state “revenue share” as one of my primary issues. I do think that if they were a bit more aggressive in putting more dollars into developers’ pockets that they would collect a larger share of development talent.

And that revenue share is precisely why everyone in the content creation platform business should be terrified.

Epic Games is on a mission to get that platform revenue share down.

They are continuing to make steps towards democratizing their tools and harmonizing them together.

While they have taken the small step of funding creators on the Fortnite Creative platform, it is a percentage of other product revenues.

The opacity of the total pool and the way to pay that out will limit the size of the stampede to the platform.

They do need to take it to the next level and let Fortnite creators monetize their content directly through V-bucks.

When that day arrives, I expect that there will be a tsunami of interest.

This is why I think that the current small step is perhaps a tactical mistake. While there is some value in starting to prove out the funnel and iterate on the tools, they have made their bigger competitors officially aware that they are headed in this direction.

A keen product manager at Roblox or Minecraft may have predicted this day is coming, but it was probably not taken as seriously as a threat until now. The burden of work to do the actual payment integration to creators is big enough that this feels like a very premature reveal to me.

I am proud of myself for getting this far without proclaiming this will catapult Fortnite to the top of the leaderboard for “metaverse something something”. I know there are a lot of people out there who immediately went there when this was all being marketed at the Game Developer Conference.

Whatever. I maintain that everyone who is claiming to be King of the Metaverse Hill fundamentally does not understand what that means. The point of Metaverse Hill is that it has no King. Now that I have made you all angery I will wrap up this post by linking you to a copy of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—You know, the book that invented the metaverse. Yes, this is an Amazon-Affiliate link. I am somewhat smug because I know none of you will buy it. As much as people are excited about the metaverse and that it was apparently first talked about in this book, I actually did not like the book. If you work in technology and feel like you need to read this book in order to understand the future—please don’t. That would be like trying to figure out how to design iPad apps by watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wish I could link you to some of those. It is a pretty good TV show. I am probably going to watch some soon after I dump Netflix for Paramount+ on general principles.

See you next week!

I have an old cd-rom case upstairs in my collection of ancient game paraphernalia. The back of the case is black and reads“Ultima Online 2: Coming soon!” This is the part where someone goes into narrator mode and says “Ultima Online 2 is not coming soon.” The game was canceled by Electronic Arts before it saw the light of day. If you do some Googling you will find comments about “company financial health” as well as “a fear it would cannibalize UO 1 revenue.”

I want to talk about the fear of cannibalizing your own revenue. This post is a little bit of a preamble for at least one article about Epic Games, because they are in the middle of transitioning Fortnite into “something else”. There are a lot of questions for what that will be and how that will affect the existing marketplace for Fortnite players.

I think it is important to compete with yourself if you have a successful product. Whenever I have this conversation with people, I like to point out general market share trends for most industries and how the top two companies generally have fifty to seventy percent of the marketplace. I always tell people afterwards that “if you are afraid to compete with yourself, then someone else will always show up and do it for you.” If you think back to early game companies, id Software was clearly a company that was not afraid to compete with itself. Quake and Doom were both top performing first person shooter games. Interestingly enough, even with their success in the marketplace, Epic Games did show up with a credible competitor in the form of Unreal. It does beg the question for how much more successful Epic would have been if some random product manager at id Software was able to cancel Quake out of fear of competing with the success of Doom.

I think that the best companies out there have a willingness to compete with themselves. You can make the argument internally that an “also ran” product will not generate as much revenue as a potentially new one. It also has less risk and may benefit from internal efficiency and marketplace learnings at the same time.

I was going to see if I could find some fancy graphs for current and historical marketplaces with percentage of revenues going to the top two companies in a few different verticals, but apparently all of those require me to sign up to get a copy of the pdf. I already have enough spam in my inbox without signing up for more.

This is an usually small post this week, but I don’t know what else needs to be said on the topic. I am expecting that my follow-up thoughts on the future of Fortnite will be bigly-er. In the meantime, you should consider supporting The-Games-Industry-Best-Person-Of-The-Year Tim Sweeney by going to this clearly-disclosed-Amazon-affiliate-link to buy some hot Fortnite merch. Bonus points if you got the same sponsored link from Electronic Arts’ very own Apex Legends, a filthy competitor to Fortnite.

See you next week!

A friend of mine had some great theories on how stuff gets popular. He used to blog about it many many years ago, but when I tried to find it on Geocities so I could share it with you, the link was not found. His blog is a victim of bitrot, which I consider to be a great tragedy.

Today I want to talk about how to create video games that everyone likes. Before I do that, I want to rant and rail against IPA beer. I am the official President of the No IPA Club. I cannot stand the stuff. Whenever I run into beer enthusiasts, whose eyes light up at the mention of the style of beer that tastes like old burned tires, I always ask them whether or not they know what IPA means, or if they are familiar with its origin story.

I am a little torn here, because I feel this is a story best told, not written. I especially like adding an angry edge to my description of the history of IPA, and how it has extra preservatives in order for the beer to best survive the lengthy ocean voyage to India. Hops, like mothballs, is something you add to keep things from going bad. The endearing quality of an IPA is that it becomes rancid more slowly than your more delicious styles of beer. The average IPA lover will double down on their defense of imbibing extra preservatives upon learning this. I have no idea why. I no longer attempt to rescue them for the sake of their taste buds. I just want them to be educated about why it is that their beer tastes like someone tried to brew old unwashed socks.

I have resigned myself to accepting that the choice of actually-delicious beers in your average store and in taps across the country have taken a haircut in volume. Upon going to a new bar, I am now accustomed to scanning the taps and seeing “IPA… IPA… IPA… tasty beer…” followed by one to three more IPAs.

I do not believe I will ever get over this.

It is only fair now to talk about sourdough bread. I do love me some sourdough bread. The abundance of sourdough bread in California’s stores and restaurants is certainly an IPA offset. I have to confess that there are some similarities between IPAs and sourdough bread. If you look up the history of sourdough bread, you will find that it became popular in California during the Gold Rush. No, not the internet gold rush, or the AI gold rush, or the NFT gold rush—the actual “Gold” Gold Rush. Once upon a time people came to California to dig in the mud for heavy shiny stones. Sourdough bread was immensely popular because it was inexpensive to make and durable. This is a desirable characteristic for someone who was doing their damnedest to spend all of their time trying to find lucky rocks. The fewer trips you make to your local grocer, the more time you can spend pawing relentlessly through dirt and mud.

Let’s bring this back to video games, shall we? Who decides what is popular? Whether it is Hold’em Poker, Minecraft, or Bejeweled, each of these games have had their moment in the sun. Some of them are trends, and some of them are fads.

My formerly mentioned friend, Rick Marazzani,  did have a write-up about some popular themes in games. I was able to use the internet wayback machine to dredge it up. It is an excellent read.

Figuring out what you can do to turn your games into genre-defining content is hard. There is some art to it, and some science to it as well. Attempting to be intelligent about it may help increase your odds of success in shipping games. It may also look a lot like that kid trying to give themselves a “cool” nickname if you fail at it.

That is the whole post today, folks. I do not have better answers today on how to make “IPA for games” than I did twenty years ago. I tell people “There has never been a better time to make games, ever. By coincidence, it is also the worst time to make games, ever.” Is that self explanatory? Does it deserve its own post? Or do I just leave you all hanging with that gaslighting proclamation, and go back to being angry that GDC won’t approve any of my speaker talks? I might be as bitter as an IPA on that last point. If you found this post insightful, interesting, or just want to reward me for my raw outpouring of emotions onto the internet, go buy this Amazon-affiliate-linked book on the history of beer making.

See you all next week.

I was at GDC over a week ago, and spent a while talking with a good friend about good game design. One of the subjects we discussed was the elegance of elemental design and how it translates into gameplay. Many games have three-element loops like “Fire, Water, Earth” in them where there is a clear “Water beats Earth, Earth beats Fire, Fire Beats Water” pattern that is easy for players to memorize. I have noticed that many really popular games have replicated this pattern, including Summoners War. They have a three-element loop that makes it really easy to manage strategy for your battles. The more astute among you might notice that while there are “Fire, Earth, Water” and “Fire, Air, Water” loops, there are in fact four basic elements that exist in canonically significant “elemental magic”. So what is so special about three elements?

I think it is because you can easily remember a linear rock-paper-scissors relationship among them. In fact, there are two extra elements in Summoners War—Light and Dark—and they have their own relationship to each other independent from the strengths and weaknesses of the Water, Air, Fire relationships of other monsters.

This is deliberate and important.

I once modified the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to play with my kids. We added a fourth element “wounded puppy”. The wounded-puppy move is to place your palm facing up and your fingers splayed like an animal’s legs are in the air and whimper like you are a wounded puppy. The rules get modified as follows.

• Rock beats scissors.
• Scissors beats paper.
• Paper beats rock.
• Rock beats wounded puppy.
• Scissors beats wounded puppy.
• Paper beats wounded puppy.

Of course, the only way to play this game with your kids is to keep picking wounded puppy over and over, looking surprised when you lose, and congratulating them on outsmarting you. If you need some cheap laughs with your young kids, this is about as good as it gets.

If you actually had to add a real fourth element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, the game rules suddenly go from a three sentence, easy-to-remember rule set into a frustrating look-up table.

If you are in the world of expert designers, you would nod sagely here and point out “players love depth, and not complexity.” Adding a new element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, that requires extending the game to one more set of victory conditions, makes it hard to remember. In fact, it is such a tedious chore to contemplate that I am not going to construct a real example of the rules for it—just thinking about it has made me tired.

When you are designing a game, it is important to make the core gameplay simple and to reduce complexity where possible. I once created a magic system with elemental strengths and weaknesses for a small, downloadable game called Spellblazer. Before every battle I tried to give the players a choice for what spells to bring into battle. I had hoped to give them an interesting decision, but after launch it was clear that for almost all of the battles, there was always one perfect answer. You had to remember the strengths and weaknesses of all the creatures you were fighting in order to choose the one spell to omit. This was needlessly complicated, and it was too easy to pick the wrong spells to start the fight.

If you take a look at some of the best games out there, you will find that the best of them have incredibly easy-to-understand strategies based around rule sets like Rock, Paper, Scissors. The less time you need to commit these kinds of strategies to memory, the more time you can spend enjoying the game.
And what better way to enjoy an amazing game like Summoners War than to purchase yourself some awesome merch like this clearly-Amazon-affiliated Funko Pop of a Summoners War Paladin? That’s what’s up, internet. Looking forward to seeing you next week, so I can talk about the deliciousness of sourdough bread and the tragedy of IPA beer.

GDC took its toll on me. See you next week!

Someone today posted on the socials about the launch of Everquest. I remember that event pretty fondly because it happened around the time of my first GDC (Game Developers Conference), and I was super hyped about the MMO space due to a raging addiction to Ultima Online. By coincidence, I am driving to GDC tomorrow to meet up with a small number of long term industry friends and acquaintances.

My first GDC was a surreal experience. I knew very little about the industry itself and I barely knew anybody. I was understandably a bit nervous. I decided to bite the bullet and just walk up to a random group of game developers and introduce myself to them.

By some freak coincidence, the group of people I walked up to were several friends from the Asheron’s Call development team and the Ultima Online development team. These were the pioneers in the MMO space! I felt a little overwhelmed and humbled at the same time. I spent the next ten minutes just quietly listening and trying to figure out what is the best way to insert myself into the conversation. I don’t think I said anything super stupid, and I am happy to report that I still have conversations with one or two of those people up to this day. I am going to name drop Raph Koster here because it is interesting to meet people who have shaped your career, sometimes without even realizing it.

Old Man Szeder is not going to make this post about the good old days. He is also not going to make this post about why persistent worlds mostly aren’t, or why the MMO genre is still mostly “stuck” twenty years later. You will have to pour alcohol into my face before we word-fight on that subject.

Today I want to talk about networking.

Networking is an important leadership skill. Whether you are advancing your career on the IC track to be an Engineering Fellow, or if you are working your way into management, you have to be able to network. They do not teach this in your computer science classes, and there is a high correlation between “I like to work with computers” and “I do not have a lot of experience working with people”.

Over ten years ago, I used to take team members with me to GDC, or similar events, as a shadow. The goal was to get them comfortable with talking randomly to people in the industry and to start building their own network. It was successful for some people, and not successful for others. I have been trying to figure out what separated those two groups of people based on limited empirical data.

Everyone with whom I have spoken about networking agrees that it is important and valuable. For the people who have failed to grow their networks or networking skills, they all say something along the lines of “Yeah, I should probably do more.” It is an interesting statement to me because it is so consistent in its half-heartedness, both in language and in tone.

I am still unpacking what things I can do to help address the reluctance here to build this new professional habit. When I have my “Eureka!” moment, you know it will show up here.

What I want to do today is give you some exercises you can do to help work on your networking.

Attend a professional conference

Like I said, GDC is this week. I am not buying a badge to attend, but if you are looking for networking opportunities, this is a great way to jumpstart your networking. There are a few things you can do to help you here, all of which I have done:

• Sit down at a lunch table and talk to strangers. You might find that odd, but everyone is there for the same reason: To share knowledge. You would be surprised what you find just from people hanging around!
• Ask questions at the end of sessions. I have actually made a few interesting relationships at trade shows because I have asked questions at the end of panels or sessions. Sometimes it is with speakers, sometimes it is with other attendees. An industry friend of mine, who speaks at conferences, confessed that they get nervous when they see me in line for the microphone because I had a habit of asking very provocative questions.
• Go to networking events and parties. Many of these are loud and some are very boozy, but most of the people at conferences attend events where they are still “on the clock”. I remember being in a developer relations role and having my calendar booked from seven AM breakfast to 1 am parties for four to five days. Your voice is gone by the middle of it, but so is everybody’s. I am not doing that this year, thankfully, but sometimes that is what the job will ask for. These are rich environments for making deals and relationships that will pay off in the future, and many people will not waste a second of that.

Go to a local meetup

I do less of this than I used to, and it has its place. Meetups are a great place to practice meeting people, discussing interesting industry things, and finding people in your community. I live in the sticks right now, and by freak coincidence two of my neighbors are people who work in the games industry as leaders and we intermittently go on walks together. A local meetup will help you build those kinds of relationships. There is an interesting local meetup happening this week that overlaps with GDC. If GDC was not at the same time, I probably would have gone, with admittedly low expectations.

Lunchclub

During the pandemic, I joined Lunchclub. I still talk to two to three people from there and also learned several interesting new things and ideas in the process. I stopped taking new Lunchclub meetings because I was absorbed into two significant projects, and I recently debated resuming them. I was meeting great people and having lots of fun!

Creep on luminaries

There are lots of really smart people creating good content for you. Whether it is written articles or TokToks or videos, almost everyone and everything has a comment section, or people have tools for community feedback. In over two decades, there are only two times I have ever been significantly rebuffed from taking a random meeting. Only twice! If you write someone a thoughtful introduction and give a compelling reason to meet, you are likely to get thirty to sixty minutes of their time.

Some of those cold calls have resulted in life-changing opportunities for me.

The Side Hustle

To many people, nothing speaks more volumes than action. This is why I am generally always building at least one side project. Roll your eyes all you want at me. I am unapologetically GenX and steeped in “viva meritocracy!”. You learn so much by building things, and when you broadcast your projects, you will find like-minded individuals in the world to work with you, or talk to you about your passions.

Join a (related) Online Community

This is another one that is relatively easy to do. I have not had as much success in the past five years as previously, but there are interesting online communities out there. I see people actively contributing to online communities and also benefiting from those relationships. Half of the online communities I have joined have been as a result of previous relationships, and so I am discounting the return on investment for myself for that reason. I do have 2-3 significant professional relationships that are ongoing from online communities, just not many new ones.

Create a speaking engagement

The last, and probably hardest, thing that you can do is to create a speaking engagement. I have spoken at multiple conferences in multiple countries. I have also spoken to many undergraduate classes over the years about what life is like as an engineer and as a game developer. I have been on a few different podcasts to talk about projects I am working on or technologies I am interested in.

Being able to speak with some authority to a room filled with complete strangers requires some prerequisites. You need a cool title, or a cool employer, or … “something”. You might have to look for your “something” to find it, but honestly you probably have it. I have had at least three opportunities to speak to students, for example, where my pitch was “students probably want to hear from themselves in the future”, and that has put me in front of hundreds of students who are interested in messages from ten to twenty years of experience.

So there are some tools for you to think about for increasing your networking reach.

We should not forget that people you have worked with in the past are also an important part of your network. If you look at my list above and find that daunting, you should take a moment to reach out to someone you have worked with in the past just to say hello, and that you remember working with them in the past.

If it was such an enjoyable experience, and it is mutually felt, who knows? Maybe the two of you will find a way to work together again in the future!

That being said, I am going to go get ready for GDC. I have a pretty free calendar this year, and I am looking forward to reconnecting with many good friends. If everything above seems scary or hard, then ping me on my Socials. I am glad to take a meeting and see what I can do to help you!

Have you ever looked up a recipe on the internet? Most of the websites with recipes have this two-thousand word “It was summer in Tuscany when I first learned this recipe from my nana” preamble in front of it. There is a lot of scrolling down involved in order to find the three things you need from the store, and the temperature you need to set the oven to. It has given me this irrational fear that all of my leadership coaching stories here are the same—a bunch of random storytelling followed by three things you need to buy at the grocery store. I am pretty sure that is not true, but the struggle is real.

Good leaders need to be able to predict the future. This is an important skill to develop. Since it is March, and you probably put your bonus in the bank last week, next week, or “hopefully real soon now” if you bank at SVB, I am going to give you some late breaking advice on an engineering leader super power.

Here are some magic words to use in your job interview: “I am going to tell you about the software projects I have shipped on time and under budget.” If you do not have any of those handy, it is time to start figuring them out.

If you are at work this week and one of your team starts asking questions about this, congratulations! You have found a fellow reader of my blog on your team.

In all seriousness, shipping software on time is very important. It is also very rare. One of my peers a decade ago loved to repeat a saying from a game developer he worked with: “I love deadlines, and the loud whooshing noise we make when we blow right past them.” Hardly a statement that inspires confidence, but the statement drips with truthiness.

An important skill to learn and master is being able to communicate deadline changes. The secret is: The earlier the better. If you find yourself being asked from time to time about incremental milestones, or “can I get an ETA?”, you should not feel alarmed. Most of the time these questions are designed to look for yellow flags that something is going to be late. This is because for some reason, people have this really bad habit of trying to hide things when they are about to be late. I generally believe that it is due to a scarcity mindset, and it is an important thing to deprogram if you have this tendency.

I get it, everyone wants to be the hero and ship stuff on time. What a beautiful thought. Even the best engineers have projects that run late. I always tell people that building software is like planning a subdivision. You figure out where the roads should be created, what are the lot sizes, and where the various utilities need to go. Sometimes when you are planning out a subdivision you might not know that there is a massive granite chunk right where you wanted to put the sewer lines, or that there is some other kind of physical impediment to construction that did not show up in the surveys.

In order to readjust the work, budgeting, and timing of everything, it is best to find these things out early. It is better to reroute the sewer drainage plans for a subdivision before you have built half of the houses.

This is one of the many reasons why you break down your tasks into small chunks and estimate them.

If you have broken down your big project into twenty pieces, and the first three of them start to slip and run late, the odds are you are likely going to be late overall. Many people like to believe they can power through and put in some extra time to get the project completed. This is a bad pattern to apply because it is habit forming. It is far better to communicate the delays early, and make some deadline course corrections where possible. Sometimes it is not possible. I jokingly tell people that one of my favorite user stories that never makes it onto the planning board is “As a software developer, I wish to move Christmas by one week.” Certainly once or twice a year you might find a deadline that is immutable like that, and you need to coordinate with leadership on the things that you can do together to get the project done on time.

Some deadlines do have some flexibility and can be moved. Those are easier to do earlier in the project. You are more likely to have happy leadership when you ask to move the deadline one week during the first month of a project than if you ask to move it by a week the day before it is due.

There is a small problem here that you might find you need to ask to move the deadline again. This is where things get really challenging. You might get a second opportunity to move a deadline, but it is also a really bad habit to get into.

The solution is to improve your software estimation skills, and to be able to have some amount of prescience about how late a project is going to be once you have established it is going to be late.

If you are a month into a four-month project and you are a week behind, you can either ask for a week extension or extrapolate that you might land a month late. There is some uncertainty there. It might be worth averaging out those two numbers, and giving leadership a heads up that you are at risk of being two and a half weeks late.

You will notice that some patterns emerge as you develop the habit of predicting your deadline changes. More than half of them will get delayed on the same kind of work. As you become familiar with the recurring hiccups, you can use that information to recalculate future estimates.

You will also notice that you will need to ask for deadline changes less and less. This means you are now better at predicting the future, and should add that to things you brag about when you are trying to get a shiny job at NewCo.
There it is. That’s the post. Alexa, send tweet. This post is brought to you by the letter “H”, and the Amazon-affiliate-linked Mueller wrist brace, for those of you experiencing repetitive stress injuries from your work: Mueller wrist brace! Be safe out there, and have fun practicing your prediction skills at work tomorrow!

Hello everyone! Spring is around the corner. Annual bonuses at large companies are appearing in bank accounts. This must be the month of March.

I am unapologetic for advertising March as “International Replace Your Job” month. When you reach a certain point in your career, there is a fine art to figuring out the right time and place to trade up for your next opportunity. There is a mix of end-of-year bonuses, available opportunities, and quality-of-life issues that everyone needs to balance. I have had a number of conversations with people over the past few years about new opportunities, and what is the opportunity cost of a new role versus what goes into the bank from your current employer. I will probably speak to that some more in the future if it is already not buried deep within my blog.

Today I want to talk about making tools. I think that making tools is very important.

“Good companies make products. Great companies make tools.” I am not sure if this is my wisdom or not. A Google search on the subject yields lots of drills, hammers, saws, and wrenches. I am likely to link some from the Amazons later in the article as a matter of course.

Over my career I have worked with all kinds of software—good software, bad software, new software, and old software. Over twenty years I have observed a few interesting questions that come up when I am in my stupid-or-new phase at a company.

“How long does it take a new developer to be ramped on our stack?”

“How do we put software into production?”

Excellent answers to these questions define a thriving business.

At a recent game company, I noticed that there was an interesting pattern forming during product planning. Because we were doing SAAS (software-as-a-service), we needed to build accompanying tools for our product so product owners could make changes in production.

The bulk of the team would play an unusual game during planning. When asked how long it would take for them to build the web tools necessary for the product to be successful, everyone would attempt to play some bizarro-universe version of “The Price Is Right”. What was the largest estimate they could submit to the planning team without bidding so dramatically that it was clear they were sandbagging? It was a fascinating process to behold. People on this particular game team hated making tools. They wanted to focus on making the game. Each person was doing their very best to make sure they could evade tool development by engaging in a super passive-aggressive sandbagging process, where the losing developer would submit the least outrageous estimate, or alternatively, having made such a mockery of the process with their bid that they earned the task as a punishment for sandbagging too much.

Why did this happen?

To understand, let’s discuss what happens when a new game feature goes live in a SAAS game.

The deep truth for game development is that most of the ideas for feature development are stolen from competitors, or they come from a product owner’s butt. There is always a preconceived notion for what product owners will need to tune, and what players will love.

The funny thing about most of these preconceived notions is that they are often dead wrong.

When a feature goes live, there is usually a need to revisit the tools, add new parameters, and change the business logic in order for the feature to thrive.

A big problem here is that most of the squads on a SAAS game are on a rolling feature development schedule—by the time they find out that the tools need to change, everyone is onto something new.

There is no developer alive who is working on “Shiny New” who wants to be pulled off of their project in order to modify tool features—AKA “Stanky Old”.

I watched this pattern play out month over month with tremendous fascination. After a few iterations of this, I observed that the follow up “we need to change the tools” requests were generally a vicious negotiation process that escalated to leadership, and often resulted in a common concession: Let’s Make a CSV import tool.

A Comma Separated Values (CSV) tool would enable product managers to open up their best friend in software development, Microsoft Excel, tweak a bunch of values, and then save that out to a file to be loaded into production.

At that point it occurred to me that making custom UI tools was a painful exercise for everyone and should be done away with. We should build in CSV importers from the very beginning and let product owners Excel at their work.

Some of this holds true today. “Build CSV import/export” ranks high on my personal backlog for tool development.

While this is a powerful feature to add to a product for a plethora of reasons, it papers over a problem. Many production tools are designed well before their use case is fully understood. Oftentimes, you need to build and ship a product in order to really figure out the best way to use it. The “ship-and-iterate” Agile reader is nodding smugly at this point. Get the code into customers hands and improve as we go.

Figuring out what you need to manage your software is a very hard problem to solve. After a few years of building tools you will find that there are recurring patterns for most business users. You will want data driven import tools, you will want a template for building fast CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) pages, and you will want a small handful of other tools for things like managing users and permissions.

If you are fortunate enough to build successful software products, you will find that building out tools like this will be important to iterate on your product. Creating a toolkit to enable new developers to be successful is also really important. If you can make tool development easy and enjoyable for your development team, you will get some of that “1 + 1 = 3” mathematics that people who go to “Bidness” School are so very fond of.

That’s it. That is the whole post. If you love making software, you should learn to love making tools. Being great at that will enable your organization to ship better stuff faster and give you time to explore hobbies. Like me, about to buy this CLEARLY AMAZON AFFILIATED Cintiq tablet.

See you all next week!