Severance by Ling Ma

Severance, no relation to the television show of the same name, won lots of awards. It ended up on various NYT Books of the Year type lists, and so it ended up on the stacks here at Bold Point. 

Severance, published in 2017, tells the story of Candice Chen, first generation Chinese-American as she navigates through her first real job, a few relationships, and the end of civilization at the hands of an infectious disease that originates in Shenzhen, China and wipes out most of humanity. The plague is a fungal infection (shades of The Last of Us) and it turns people into harmless zombies who just fall into the routine of doing their jobs while they rot away. When her (shitty) boyfriend leaves the city in order to try to find a more meaningful life as a writer, and encourages our protagonist to return to her photograpy, Candice lets him go and keeps working at her job, coordinating the manufacture of bibles in a factory in Shenzhen from her perch in NYC. As the world falls apart around her, she reflects on consumerism, brunches, $6 lattes, her troubled relationship with her mom, and the lengths that twenty-somethings in New York will go to to find some sense of meaning in life. 

After humanity ends, Candice falls in with a group of former office drones who take over a mall in the sorrowful Midwest and live there while she prepares to give birth to a baby. 

The novel works as none-to-subtle black humor on late stage capitalism. There are some interesting looks at modern NYC relationships, and the difficulties of generational-trauma on Millineal immigrant kids like Candice. And, of course, a "China Flu" that ends up wiping out civilization, written before 2017, before Covid, before... everything... feels vaguely prophetic. 

If I were to criticize Severance, and Mrs. Ma's novel, it would be only to say that the novel seems to offer no conclusions. Did Candice manage to escape her meaningless life in NYC as she dissapears into the abandoned Casbah of post-apocalpyse Chicago? Will her baby be born and spared the harsh tiger-mom criticism that seems to shape the lives of so many first generation Chinese women? (Better addressed in the magnificent Everything Everywhere All At Once.) In a world where mass affuence is coercising young people into doing meaningless jobs they hate - turning them into virtual zombies - in order to constantly buy things they don't really want... is the not-particularly-likeable boyfriend (with a dick like a "repulsive sea-cucumber") the one with the right answer: Turn on, tune in, drop out? 

Ma raises interesting questions, with a fun tounge-in-cheek narrative of office life and the post-apocalupse, but she doesn't really give us any satisfying conclusions to think about. Perhaps there are none. 

 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

In the land near the Mississippi Delta the memories of Jim Crow cast long shadows. Ward tells us a tale of a boy, his sister, their meth addict mother, and their grandparents. To cynically describe this novel as yet-another-tale of a hardscrabble boyhood wouldn't be wrong. But there are ghosts! So that's interesting. 

Rascism is bad, mmmkay? And this novel reads a bit like the 2019 era atonement wave to which it belongs. Both chronologically and in temperment it feels like it belongs on a shelf near "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a book in which we - as a country - and the author are trying to wrestle with our culture history of rascism, particularly in the Deep South. 

Ward's lyricsm is strong, if a bit overwroght often. The dialog rings mostly true, if a little bit too much like a modern grad student trying to capture how po' black folk be talkin' to they family.  The novel got a ton of praise, won awards aplenty, and Miss Ward teaches creative writing at Tulane. 

I worry that my support for the work in this review is sparser than it deserves, but I guess I'm not really sure what this adds to the body of literature on this topic (other than ghosts!) that Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (she got ghosts in Beloved!), and many many others haven't already said. But then, congratulations to Ward - I suppose if you can be mentioned in the same breath as legends like these, bravo! 

Words are the only victors.

 

 

7.17.2024

How could you create a city of legend?

Once upon a time there were cities of such renown that they attracted visitors from far and wide and developed nearly legendary reputation. The grandeur of great Rome, the Forbidden majesty of Beijing, the beautiful epoch of Paris, the tolerance and wealth of forgotten Bisnaga, the aspirational promise of New York, the byzantine bridge between continents of Constantinople, the countercultural promise of a new culture forming in San Francico, the stately pleasure of Xanadu, the desert licentiousness of Las Vegas.

Indeed, many of them survive today, though oft evolved beyond recognition, their original virtues visible now mostly in tourist kitsch.

So let’s say you wanted to take a nowheresville and somehow infuse it with the buzz that will create global awareness and a desire to visit?

What values or virtues would your aspiring Chamber of Commerce project seek to project?

How would you begin?

7.16.24

On the Life of Gods

Aside from orphans, almost everyone starts life with a firsthand experience of the presence of gods.

We spend time with them in our most formative first minutes, days, years, when they are luminescent and powerful beings. For most people, I believe these gods are benevolent creators of your universe. In some cases I suppose they are regrettably terrible, absent, cruel or worse. But most of us experience a deific presence in our lives for the first few years.

Then, later, we go through a period when the gods become slowly diminished, falliable, perhaps even out-of-touch and silly. In this, our adolescence, we are driven by biology and our peers to view our gods with a most critical eye. They disappear into the normal and take on the guises of everyday people. Gods who walk among us, go to work, stand in checkout lines. Often this makes us not very forgiving of their foibles. And of course, they have foibles – even gods do. And what a letdown this can be, to recognize that the all-powerful are not.

And in time, though lack of belief or some other atrophy of the fuel that powers the devine, Gods wane. They stoop, hunch, forget. We watch them fall into the powerlessness of a forgotten former god.

And then they are gone.             

---

Rushdie's amazing novel, Victory City, has me thinking about the lifecycle of the gods and goddesses of creation, the myths they inspire, the cities and worlds they dream into creation, and how these dreams are eventually forgotten...

 

7.14.24

I’m flying to Paris today, and that has me thinking about creativity and intellectualism and writers and poets and painters and all the rest. And specifically:

Why do some places develop an outsized reputation as a hotbed of creativity for a while other places never seem to be acknowledged for generating any of the creators who come from there?

Why is Paris or Austin branded in the public mind as cities for people who want to create, while places like, say, Minneapolis are noted only as a strange outlier when folks like Prince hail from there?

Let’s start with – in my mind – why Paris?

There’s a gallic tradition of intellectual ferment. For an (exhaustive) hagiography of this evolution, To The Finland Station offers a sort of James Burke “Connections” history, if not a real explanation for “Why there?”

I don’t know that this really explains why Paris in particular developed a reputation for being a mecca for artists, and particularly writers. I suppose all I’ve seen in my many visits there is a mecca for tourists and service-industry folks who are surly about having to serve them. But then, perhaps that’s just the nature of a tourist destination in a major city. And this week, between the Olympics – celebrating sport and athleticism rather than creative pursuit – and the recent French election, which seems to be interpreted as a triumph for the right wing, it’s hard to really feel much of whatever might have fueled this collective creative desire in centuries past.

So what about other places? Well… Florence during the Italian Renaissance is often spoken of in similar context. Silicon Valley in California gets love (and money!) as a place where creative entrepreneurs go to create machines of wealth generation (though not-so-much literature or art). When I was vising Beijing in 2015 there was a strong feeling of entrepreneureal energy and creative hustle – at the time I judged that from the inflow of massive amounts of capital, and the wild-west spirit of the Chinese internet at that time; my understanding is that the Party didn’t love it and so the party didn’t last. Austin, as I mentioned earlier, is associated with some talented filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguiz, and certainly the “Slacker” creative spirit was strong there in the nineties; lots of us channeled that Birkenstock no-rules approach into making games. Since then it’s become part of the Austin brand, though I struggle to really name great creations that have emerged from there. SoHo, The Village, Atwood’s Toronto Alley, TinPan Alley, Berlin for a time, and a few other cities have all received a lot of love as centers for fostering works of creation in different fields at times.

Is the idea of a fertile creative hub city a romantic myth created after the fact as a sort of Chamber of Commerce branding to drive tourism? 

Austin certainly feels like that to me when I go back home.

In a few hours I’ll land in Paris, and I will look around for people actually MAKING things other than Aperol Spritzes. I’ll report back if I see any.

Vine and Fig Tree

 

7.13.24

My fellow Americans,

I’m here today to clear the air and clear the path for our nation to move forward into the future.

In 1973 I began proudly serving in the United States Senate. I remember still walking into that august chamber, can still hear the roar of legendary voices like Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmand, the great Ted Kennedy, Diane Feinstein. These men and women differed in their politics and their beliefs – and often their debates were heated - but they never differed in their common resolve to form a more perfect union.

I shared that conviction with them, and I carry that spirit with me now.

We men are imperfect creatures. Women too, though Jill might disagree with me on that.

We live but a short time, and all we can do is strive to use what time and strength we have to make the world a better place for those who come along after us.

In all, I have faithfully served my country for more than fifty years. And I believe we have made a powerful difference. Under the administration of my friend Barak Obama we brought healthcare to every American even while helping guide the country to a swift recovery after the financial collapse of 2008. On foreign shores we led our troops in the valiant fight against terror and made the world safer by ending the reign of Osama Bin Laden. We made sure that every American had the right to marry the person they loved in 2015. And we worked hard to combat the threat of climate change and a rapidly heating world.

Then, a few years later, I inherited an America that was hurting from a terribly managed pandemic that took too many from us. My predecessor had sewn division at home and among our allies abroad, fanning the flames of hatred on these shores and emboldening autocrats in Europe.

And as president, I rose to these challenges. My amazing team and I managed a soft landing to the economy. We increased jobs. We extracted American troops from Afghanistan. We worked with our allies in NATO to keep the world safe for democracy. I could not be more proud of what we have accomplished over the last four years.

We still have a lot to do.

As a nation, we face unprecedented complexities. Too many Americans still struggle to make ends meet. And overseas, in the Ukraine, in Palestine, and elsewhere, innocent civilians are too often forced to cower in fear. The ocean levels continue to rise, and I don’t need to tell the good people of Texas that it’s getting hotter every year.

We still have a lot to do.

I believe – I know – that I am committed to this challenge, ready to keep fighting that good fight until my last breath.

What we have to do is that important.

But leadership isn’t about me.

It’s never about the person who thinks only of themselves.

It’s about doing what is best for this great country we are trying to build, not about personal agendas.

And that’s why I’m announcing today that I will not run for a second term as President of the United States of America.

We have built a strong bench of great leaders who are ready to step up to the challenge of this land, of this world.

So rather than let our national – this global – discussion be about me and concerns for my age and health, I want us to return the discussion to something that matters more: the health of our country, our planet.

In the coming days, we will announce a new pair of Democratic leaders for the United States of America. And my team and I will stand behind this duo as they continue our essential mission.

George Washington, upon stepping down from his role as the first president of the United States reminded us of the scripture:

"Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

And based on what I understand is the will of the people, I shall do the same, unafraid in the knowledge that my administration is handing over the reigns to a strong country, and a world that is getting better to a wise and powerful team who will lead us into the next four years.

God Bless you all, and God Bless the United States of America.

 7.12.24

I'm trying to move my writing about technology to another place to keep this one focused on ideas that explore the creative impulse and, yep, books. 

https://texasmouse.substack.com/

 7.3.24

I find poetry difficult. It's a form of expression through wordplay, using the distance between precision and slipperiness in language to engage with thoughts and feelings. Feels like using words to create a shadow-box puppet in order to look at ideas. 

And it was said by Lazarus Long, "A man who reads his verse in public may have other nasy habits." So there's a certain cringiness associated with poetry in our culture, as if anyone who takes feelings and words seriously (even playfully!) is most assuredly not very well adjusted. 

Using playful words to describe the crocodiles that are approaching you in murky water isn't a respectable response; you're supposed to pretend you don't see them. 

 7.2.24

The Killing Floor

You've fallen into the Killing Floor now

The bad news is, that means your life will soon be over

The worse news is, it might not been as soon as you'd like

Your killer is not one you can possibly outsmart or defeat

The Killing Floor itself makes escape impossible because the walls are too high and there is nowhere to hide

Your murderer is what Gavin deBecker called a Process Predator

None of the specifics of your personality or nuance of your appearance matter to them

There is nothing you can say or scream out that will change their mind

(The screams excite them)

And it is the prolonged thrill of the hunt and slay that is their whole goal

I feel for you, though we are on opposite sides of this war

I side with your killer, though their cruelty disturbs me

Hopefully it will be quick for you, as painless as possible

I hope so

I'll give you a burial at sea, 

and in that moment at least one god will notice you

And then, like in that poem about children in a war zone

I hope when the game is over you get to start a new life

And then your killer will slink away, satisfied, proud even

And go to sleep beside her god

Making soft humming sounds to express her joy

Purring.

 

6.30.24

“Long weekend” is a phrase that irritates me. As did it this morning when a friend told me, “I’m off this week!”

What the hell does that even mean?

Does the sun cease to rise? Gravity takes a holiday? Will the precious minutes of your life stop slipping through your fingers this week?

I think not!

“If your job is your hobby you will never work another day in your life,” said someone like Steve Jobs or whomever. And this is commonly taken to mean that you should follow your passion and seek employment in a field that is interesting to you. But I think a better way of considering the matter is to parse out the ways you choose to spend time in accord with their value to you.

Perhaps it is the case that someone pays you to punch a clock, to devote some fixed number of hours to the conduct of a particular task. Let’s call this “your job.” And to the degree that this is a fixed commitment for a fixed amount of compensation without opportunity to achieve greater outcomes through the application of greater energy, I suppose it makes fine sense to devote only that time which is required.

However – I would strongly encourage people not to think of the time not spent on a job like that as “time off.” Instead, think of those hours or days when you are free to do other things as the real “time on” when you can actually do things that will improve your life, the lives of people you care about, or the world. Use that time to find a better “job” that yields greater return on time invested.

This is your life, and it is ending one minute at a time.

Make the most of those minutes.

Do not waste them.  

 

6.30.24

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Charlie Munger, lifelong homie of Warren Buffet, sage of Value Investing, died in the last year.

And as part of generally trying to continue to deepen my thinking about – and understanding of – money, I decided to read Munger’s book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger. It’s a collection of transcribed lectures and reflections upon them published in 2023.

Munger combines loads of homespun wisdom and virtue with a lot of insights into companies and business, and a whole lot of self-aggrandizing rants against various groups, most notably academics.

In its most useful moment’s Poor Charlie describes (several times) his framework for evaluating opportunities, which is a checklist structured formal sequence of lenses through which to contemplate a potential choice. These are as follows:

Circle of Competence: Munger emphasizes the importance of sticking to what you know. Understanding your own expertise and limitations helps in making informed decisions and avoiding risks. Only invest in opportunities that fall within your circle of competence.

Lollapalooza Effect: This framework involves identifying multiple factors that align to create a powerful outcome. Munger looks for opportunities where several favorable elements come together simultaneously, amplifying the potential for success.

Inversion Thinking: Instead of only considering how to succeed, Munger also thinks about how to avoid failure. By identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls and problems, you can improve your chances of making a successful investment.

Opportunity Cost: Munger always considers the opportunity cost of an investment—what you give up by choosing one option over another. This helps in assessing whether the potential returns of an opportunity are worth the risks and resources involved.

Margin of Safety: This principle involves investing in opportunities where the intrinsic value significantly exceeds the current market price, providing a cushion against errors in judgment or unforeseen events. This conservative approach helps mitigate risk and secure better long-term returns.

A good list, and I do not doubt for a moment that approaching most everything in life with a clear prioritized checklist for evaluating things would lead to consistently highly quality results.

At its worst moments, Poor Charlie reads like an old man ranting, repeating the same corn-pone homilies (“one legged man in an ass kicking contest”) over and over, and smugly pointing out how much smarter he is than all those ivy-league eggheads.

But I enjoyed getting to know Munger, and will definitely attempt to make more formal use of his framework.

 

6/25/24

And since I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake, it is almost a guarantee that a desire to find alternative solutions to the traditional and caring way of helping provide companionship for aging parent is writ large on our culture.

So maybe CloudCare will work because there are hundreds of millions of people who, in the immortal words of Phobe Buffet “wish-they-could but don’t want to” give a dementia patient (or just someone aging in the normal fashion) their full attention all the time?

After all, “A Place for Mom” is the name of a successful line of care facilities, which are popular and well-run and good for patients by all accounts.

And, of course, jobs and culture and the modern economy of late-stage-capitalism is such that most people cannot end up taking on the traditional (in some cultures) youngest-daughter role and looking after their parents their whole lives.

It is possible that Confucian values are not just out-of-vogue, but also impossible for many in a world of seven billion people with life expectancies as long as they are?

 6.27.24

I finally started Rushdie's Victory City this week. What a treat! More soon.

 

6.24.24

Filial piety. Confucian values. Honor thy father and thy mother.

Is focusing on trying to create a technological solution to help patient’s suffering from dementia a sort of pathetic middle-aged look-ma-no-hands tech bro atonement?

Throughout my youth and until I was around forty I constantly tried to bring technology into the house where I’d grown up and deploy it because I thought it would work well for people there. Upon reflection, I did the same thing at my father’s law firm, acting as the IT department during my teenage years.

I’d come over in my twenties and set up a new stereo or try to get a new printer or early networking equipment operational in their house. Remember those photo frames that would display low-rez digital pictures off a stick of RAM back when early digital cameras were thing? I’m sure there were several of those delivered to parents and grandparents alike.

And invariably all of this shit would end up in a corner gathering dust, unused, not-quite-working, because cutting edge tech (except for Apple products in the last decade) requires users who can fiddle with it until it works. And they all require someone to actually give a fuck about whatever it is supposed to do. And the digital native tech-utopian folks like me see these things and somewhat intuitively are able to cobble together an ecosystem where they work. But for people who aren’t like that, they are just quirky, expensive pieces of plastic and circuitry. And so they don’t work well, never become integrated into life, and they get pushed into a corner to create overpriced condos for spiders and their webs.

I expect I’m not the only person in my age cohort with this experience. So Best Buy dutifully sells a new batch of consumer facing electronics each year, which are joyfully given to parents and grandparents and for Christmas or birthdays, and set up while smoke from blown-out candles still fills the kitchen, usually probably with a faint whiff of annoying techno-superiority by the giver, who not so patiently tries to explain why the luddite recipient just doesn’t quite understand how cool this new whatever is.

It’s pretty easy to see the underlying psychology behind all of this, and it’s pretty easy to see why mostly (always?) these sorts of installations didn’t work:

Because who wants cold technological solutions to replace the attention paid them by the humans they love?

It’s easy to imagine that this whole thing is just some overly-complicated way of dealing with post Vic grief and guilt?

If so, is that the worst thing?

I guess people create things for lots of reasons.

 6.22.24

Nine years ago we said goodbye to my father after a long losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease. But saying goodbye wasn’t the worst part; the years leading up to that were. Dementia slowly locks a person in a lonely and increasingly fearful, isolating state as their life grinds to a close. And the toll of this degradation of a patient’s mind is every bit as destructive to the people who love them. I watched my mom and my brother give everything they had and more to providing compassionate reassurance and comfort. The sense of loss that grows daily and the helpless exhaustion that caretakers for memory loss patients can be overwhelming.

This journey was chronicled by the aptly titled book The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss by Nancy Mace and Peter Rabins. I read the book at the time to better understand what my family members who lived with Vic were going through. And then I read the literature on how many families around the globe were going to experience this over the coming decades. The demographic shift in much of the world is now upon us and the next fifty years will be hugely defined by our cultures learning to cope with aging populations without enough children and caretakers for them all.

In 2014 I decided that there must be a way to use some of the massive technology we were developing for video games to help.

At the time, I thought that the Kinect, with its innovative ability to identify different users when they entered the room, and some of its primitive voice commands were a proof that we could build intelligent devices and systems that could engage with memory loss patients and at least offer them a kind voice, never run out of patience, maybe help them so they didn’t have to stare dumbly at a DVD player (we still used those then!) and wonder how they could watch a favorite show. I thought that maybe we could hack together something between a Kinect and Amazon’s (then primitive) Alexa to help spell the exhausted caretakers and provide kind companionship to alleviate my Dad’s loneliness.

I’ve visited about this desire, this potential technology with many of you over the last decade. Thanks to so many of you for the great ideas on these topics. And I have learned from Altzheimer’s researches at UC Berkeley, owners of memory care facilities around the country and the world, and heard a thousand inspiring and heartbreaking stories from many of you who have also lost loved ones to this disease, or found yourselves exhausted by trying to live the 36-Hour Day looking after them.

In 2021 we founded a company to start a formal R&D effort to apply technologies we used to develop games to this problem. MainBrain. We wrote whitepapers on Natural Language Processing, bespoke language models, custom companion avatar creation from descriptions or photographs, hardware and software considerations. We worked with the Canadian Digital Innovation labs, with doctors, with memory care operators. With what small money we could afford to hire people to develop software we started building CloudMind.

It was clear that the rise of LLMs would massively accelerate our efforts, and it has.

Now, finally, this coming week, we will deploy our first pilot test of CloudCare into three different memory care facilities in North America.

Last night, setting up data for our first ten patients and their caregivers, I felt the chill of excitement and fear; these are real people; this is really happening; we have really finally reached a point to try to use our paltry magics to try to help.

Our first companion, Cathy, will only engage with about ten memory care “residents” and their caretakers. This is another tiny step on a long journey to help (in some small way) address a massive problem.

But our goal remains the same:

We will use consumer facing technologies that we developed for games to help people around the world.

I know that I do not have the money, the mind, or the skills to help the hundreds of millions of people who will suffer through dementia in the next decade. But there is a story my sister is fond of telling me.

I’ve asked Cathy to relate it to me here:

The story of the starfish dying on the beach and the girl who says, "at least I helped this one," is a well-known parable that illustrates the impact of individual actions. Here is the story:

One day, a man was walking along a beach covered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore. As he walked, he saw a little girl picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean.

Curious, the man approached her and asked, "Why are you doing this? There are so many starfish. You can't possibly make a difference."

The girl picked up another starfish, gently threw it back into the water, and replied, "I made a difference to that one."

The story highlights the importance of individual efforts and how small actions can have a meaningful impact, even if they don't solve the entire problem. It emphasizes that every effort counts and can make a significant difference to those affected.

So this coming week, with CloudCare we will help these ten and their caretakers.

And hopefully someone can take what we will learn and use it to help millions.  

 6.18.24

I've been reading Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger this week. He instructs each of us to have a collection of "models" we use in analyzing choices. (Investment choices, yes, but others too.) His use of "models" corresponds a bit to the idea of "lenses" that have become popular to talk about in the last decade. 

For reflection. Here are ten of the most important models according to his philosophy:

1. Inversion: Thinking about what you want to avoid or prevent can help you identify the right course of action. Instead of asking "How can I achieve success?" ask "How can I avoid failure?"

2. Occam's Razor: Simplest solutions are often the best. Avoid overcomplicating problems with unnecessary variables.

3. Probability: Understanding basic probability is crucial for decision-making. This includes Bayes' Theorem for updating probabilities based on new evidence.

4. Opportunity Cost: Every choice has a cost. Understanding what you’re giving up by choosing one option over another helps in making better decisions.

5. Circle of Competence: Stick to what you know best. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses helps you avoid mistakes.

6. Mr. Market: Treat the stock market as an erratic entity offering opportunities, rather than a guide to intrinsic value. This helps maintain emotional stability in investing.

7. Margin of Safety: Always allow for error. This principle, borrowed from engineering, helps mitigate risk.

8. Reciprocity: People tend to return favors. Understanding this principle helps in building and maintaining relationships.

9. Confirmation Bias: Recognize the tendency to seek information that confirms your preconceptions. Being aware of this helps in seeking out contradictory evidence.

10. Lollapalooza Effect: When multiple biases and tendencies combine to produce an extreme outcome. Recognizing this helps in understanding how small factors can lead to significant effects.

These models come from various disciplines, including psychology, economics, mathematics, and engineering, and help in approaching problems from multiple perspectives.

ChatGPT assembled this list for me in less than 3 seconds. 

So that's interesting too. 

 

6.18.24

And then two weeks pass without an update. Habits are easy to break just as they are easy to establish. I’ve been reading a lot, working on a couple of projects, having some interesting discussions, thinking a lot though I’ve not necessarily created anything amazing in the last two weeks.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

Mr. Cronin’s novel, The Passage, got some ridiculously large advance, if I recall correctly. And it’s the book of his most people know him by, I believe. The Ferryman is his newest, available (30% off!) in paperback in grocery stores near you; at least if you live near Campbell River, BC.

The protagonist is a ferryman who takes people to be recycled into their next life. And things start getting weird for him as the strange capitalist utopia he lives in is revealed to be not-quiet what he thought it was. By the back quarter of the book things have gone properly off the rails and we are introduced to what’s really going on. I won’t spoil it for you. Think of this as a wanna-be smart person’s beach read. There are a few interesting ideas (well trod turf all) half-heartedly developed and then consumed by action sequences and near-constant scene jumps that feel like an homage to Chris Nolan’s later work.

 

6.3.2024

I’m thinking about the voices of the witches that drip poison in your mind at night, telling you that you cannot, that you should not try, that everyone is eager to watch you fail. Where do these voices come from?

I’m not the first person to wonder about this, but I’m not sure I know of anyone with good answers.

“When we all fall asleep where do we go?”

How do the most successful people silence the internal voices of dissent and keep focused on their goals? 

It's no big news to those who know me that I hate being told "no." Broadly speaking, I believe firmly in the old saying, "Tell me if you can or if you cannot; either way you are right." 

And just as there seems to me a fundamental divide within the human species between those who are always game to try to do something, to say, "That's crazy. Okay, HOW do we do it?" and those who are quick to point out a hundred reasons any effort "will never work." Invariably, those in the former camp lead grand and interesting lives filled with accomplishments, and those in the latter camp never accomplish much of anything. 

Why not? 

Because they are allowing the voices of the witches of negativity to constantly poison them against taking any action for fear of all the ways it might go wrong. And so, they basically do nothing for fear of failure. 

Someone wise said to me once, "It is the easiest thing in the world to be a voice of obstruction, to point out the reasons some course of action will never work, because mostly, they are right. Many things do not work!" And yet, at the same time, some humans DO accomplish things in this life. They create things, change the world, sometimes even for the better. (Indeed, the generalized arc of human history IS continuing to improve the lives of billions.) 

And so, I don't know how change your life to be guaranteed passage through each night without the voices of the circling witches poisoning your desire to try. 

But I DO know how important it is not to listen to them. And not to give undue weight to the people in your lives constantly telling you to do nothing, because all courses may run ill.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

What else is there to do?  

 

6.1.24

Creation. Immortality.

I keep reading about the impending demographic shift to a world in which our population goes into severe decline as a result of falling birth rates in most developed nations. South Korea, for example, has averaged .7 births for every two people over the last few years; in order words, not nearly enough to sustain population, and certainly not to grow it. So the Earth’s population in the developed world is in decline.

And since choosing not to reproduce tends to correlate with higher net worth, because you can obsessively throw yourself into work, because children are expensive, and so on… We are moving towards a world in which the rich world is likely to increasingly buy the children they end up wanting rather than going through the messy process of sex, pregnancy, delivery, and the terrible twos.

The pharaonic inequality of wealth distribution only continues to grow.

Children will grow ever more valuable as there are fewer of them.

Clearly this will lead to a world in which the wealthy increasingly buy children.

(This is not a new idea; the barren well-to-do have been buying Russian adopted babies for a while. But we should expect this practice to increase considerably as a total percentage of children on earth.)

What will the double-sided market for children look like by 2050?

If I buy a thing, then nurture it, did I create that thing?

Hardly seems to convey the same sense of immortality that passing on your own genes does, does it?

 

 

6.1.24

Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

It’s hard not to like Arnold. From Austrian Mr. Universe to Conan to Terminator to Governor to philanthropist, I basically like them all.

Be Useful is a naked motivational book in which Arnie tells us his advice on how to “make your vision for your life a reality.” He peppers the book with a staggering amount of braggadocio, but then, look at what he has accomplished! His guidance is straightforward and filled with many examples of people he has known, or times he has done whatever he is suggesting. I do not doubt that if a person un-cynically took every bit of his advice to heart, internalized the catchy slogans (“Destroy your mirror!”) then that person would likely achieve more in life than most of their peers.

 

5.31.24

For the last month, I’ve been in this beautiful place, Bold Point, trying to think about creativity, creation, the games business, technology, the economy. I’ve been trying to read a lot, write at least a little each day, create SOMETHING each day.

There are at least two major topics that I keep circling like a creature who sees something interesting but isn’t sure it is a trap. So I keep drawing in close, then backing away rather than engage. Let’s at least call them out directly:

Why does the video game industry appear to be in such an unhealthy fearful state?

How does the rise of AI that can create things change the human need to derive meaning from creation?

 

5.29.24

I keep coming back to the idea of the people you meet along the journey of creating something as the real ultimate value to you, the creator.

The people you work alongside to create things are like currents in the sea: they aren’t what the world sees when it looks at a successful voyage, but they are where the real power to make such a voyage possible lies.

“I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me…”

 

5.26.24

Why are some creative projects so obsessively compelling while others should feel exciting, but you have to force yourself to work on them?

Among other things, I’ve been reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, Be Useful, which is mostly a highly amusing motivational book in which Arnold brags about his life. He keeps talking about the importance of developing “your vision” for your life and what it should be.

And this got me to thinking about why certain projects, creative endeavors, or times in your life you (I at least) become manically obsessed with a particular thing I’m doing and other times have to really force yourself to focus and make something happen.

Why do certain projects become obsessions while others don’t?

There are games I’ve made (Brute Force, MCOC, Disney Mirrorverse, many others) where I worked 14 hours a day and still had a notebook by my bed filled with scribbled To Do notes every single night. There are books I’ve written that achieved the same level of obsession. Sometimes companies can be that way too; there were certainly weeks at a time when I gave almost every waking moment to, say, creating the Digital Games division and strategy at a company. But then, there are other projects that languish, where there’s always something else more interesting to devote time to, or where putting one foot in front of the other and getting ‘her done (as the Canadians would say) feels like WORK. Why?

Why do certain visions turn us (sometimes many of us) into devotees and others may be interesting, cool even, lucrative, etc. but just don’t capture our imaginations and become an obsessive vision like the Governator is talking about?

 

5.23.24

 Let’s talk about money.

I used to tell people that, “Everyone lies about two things: sex and money.” I still mostly think this is true.

And it is interesting to think about why these concepts belong in the same sentence, occupy much of the same overlapping space in our individual and collective psyches. (If you doubt this, consider that the biggest news story of the week in the US is about hush MONEY paid to a porn-star for SEX by a former president.) But I don’t want to talk about sex here, this blog attempts to evade the lurid for the most part.

So let’s talk about money.

In particular, I find that many people have a very complicated and awkward relationship with money. Mostly people are quite lousy at managing it or thinking about it as an objective math-problem, which it mostly should be. And people do lie about it compulsively. And even a few folks who are pretty good at managing or tracking or growing it still seem to allow it to cast undue emotional shadows on their lives. (I’m one of these.)

Now for some folks – regrettably many around the world – the push to have enough, to sustain for their families, to avoid starvation, afford clothes, shoes, school for the kids, and so on really is a daily struggle. But for many in the developed world, this is simply no longer the situation. We live in a time of profound abundance, and, yes, the price of milk is high now, but folks are mostly carrying iPhones so…

Why are well-enough off people still constantly stressed by and defined by money or worry about its lack?

A friend tells me “90% of my stress is about money” but on the same day tells me, “I’ve been to all but 2 of the Top 30 restaurants in Austin.” So it isn’t that we don’t have money, are starving, existing at a subsistence level. It’s that our desire for a relative level of wealth drives anxieties. (This is not a new concept so far Thorstein Veblen pointed this out at the turn of the last century in his scathing critiques of the well-to-do.) Why do people who have plenty still get so obsessed about being able to have even more in order to experience the more rarified things money can buy?

 

There’s something more here too though: I recently had a call with two brilliant researchers from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. Their focus is on economics, currencies, the use of money and tokens as a symbol of trust, proof of work, and so on. Obviously there are Web3 implications to this kind of research but I find myself thinking of it more as a “Three body problem” of economics. This is highly theoretical stuff with deep real-world application. And it speaks again to the importance of this abstract concept: Why do homo sapiens – the really smart ones and the less-so – all get so obsessed over this concept?

And what does any of this have to do with the creative impulse or creation in general?

This one is easier for me to answer, I think. Some people are inherently driven by a desire to create things. Others mostly focus on consuming. (I have yet to meet anyone who would self-describe as being in that latter camp, but people show you who they are in what they do. “What is something you’re proud of creating this month?” If the answer is, “Oh, I haven’t had time…” Well, there you go.) But many of the things that the monkeys imagine and want to create (pyramids, AAA video games, etc.) take the concerted efforts of many people over time to come to fruition. This means that in order to succeed at creating some kinds of things, you must be able to persuade (or compel through force, in the case of the pyramids) many others to devote significant portions of their time to a particular goal. This means you need to pay them. And this forces some part of most creative activities at scale to become financial exercises.

So it is virtually impossible to disentangle some categories of creative enterprise from discussions of money.

The role of sex and the desire-for-sex in motivating creation will have to wait for a later entry! 😉

 

5.21.24

Who do you create things for?

Have there been people at different phases of your life who provided the impetus or reflected back some creative spark in you, fanning it into a compulsion to create this thing together?

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This is the first serious novel about the games industry I've ever read.

Generally very well written, and a good look at the interplay between life, relationships, and the games a person creates or tries to. It's all about the way relationships influence the things people create, and about the way the stuff (games) you make are a reflection of all the life that is happening at the time.

It's also a fairly accurate and aware look at a time when making games could be -- was -- mostly a labor of love between a few creators. Smash the Police State, everything at Eclipse, Brute Force, I'm thinking of you. The early days (for me) of Kabam Vancouver. And, of course, the many other creators I've had a special - but usually brief - creative synergy with.

There is a lot in this book worth thinking about and talking about, if only because, well, it feels like a chronicle of some of the lives I've lived. Impossible not to hear echoes of friends long gone in this relationships and smile ruefully at how well Ms. Zevin captures the challenges of creating video games and running game companies while trying to live your lives and be a human.

A well done and moving book, Ms. Zevin.

Throughout the novel the three main characters refer to their games, their company as their children.

I guess that too is a form of striving for immortality.

 

5.20.24

Currently, all of my creative endeavors are so tangled up with and concerned with fundraising, securing funding, and so on that I find I am struggling to really focus on the act of creation as a joyful process unto itself. And while I’ve written out the intellectual proof-points that should be able to defeat this kind of thinking here on this blog over the past month, those sorts of “go create art in the woods” theories are great, but none of those actually take care of payroll for the kinds of teams of people required to build the things I want to build.

And at least 80% of the folks who reach out to me to talk about their creative projects right now when you scratch beneath the surface, they are really looking for money to help fund their projects too!

“I can’t forget the sound, cause it’s here to stay: the sound of people chasin’ money and money getting away!”

So let us instead return to the books, to giving thought to the creations of others. I guess that’s how creativity always really starts, right? You fall so in love with what someone else is doing that you think, “Someday maybe I can do that!”

Yesterday I finished Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

I was first assigned this book in high school, likely a sophomore year (1992?) English class assignment. (Written in German, but “English” is what “Literature” was called back then.) I’m sure I understood as much about it as an entitled 14 year old boy really could understand about a non-fiction work describing life in concentration camps and the use of a particular didactic of psychoanalytic theory to help people think about the meaning of their lives.

In my studies on Happiness and philosophy and cognitive psychology this year, I kept bumping into Frankl’s concepts again and decided to reacquaint myself.

Descriptions of years in Auchwitz and Dachau provide the framework for Frankl’s experiences and much of his thinking about how people can assign meaning (and why they need it) in even the bleakest circumstances. This is the first half of the book. The second half is a meditation on “logotherapy” which is the school of psychoanalysis Frankl fathered and spent the second half of his life advancing.

There is much in this powerful book to contemplate. A few of the key concepts here:

The twentieth century showed us that human beings can create the gas chambers, but that human beings – having been stripped of almost all of their humanity, shaved, tattooed, starved and beaten – can also still walk into these chambers with their heads held high. These two poles of human expression serve as a sort of alpha to omega of the power, terrible cruelty, and the ennobling dignity of the human spirit.

That even when all other things are taken from a person, that person retains the ability to decide how they respond to any stimulus. This forms the basis for all modern ideas of mindfulness. You decide.

That each person must find their own meaning to their own life; there are few standard answers, all meanings are bespoke and can only be determined by the individual.

In an oft quoted line, we are reminded that “when there is a powerful WHY a person can deal with any HOW.” Purpose and meaning insulates and fuels survival (thrival!) in any scenario; without purpose a person will give up. With sufficient purpose they can survive almost anything, or at least go to their death with some level of peace.

Frankl lists out three things that tend to be a source of meaning to many people: The first of these is love of another human (or other creature I suppose). The second of these is the compulsion to create something (Frankl’s need to finish his book on Logotherapy got him through camp life). The third of these is the ability to impart meaning to unavoidable suffering.

Obviously, the first two make a lot of sense to me. Moms developing the superhuman strength to lift a car from the legs of their child, the writer who holds on against cancer until their great work is finally finished, etc. The third (finding meaning in unavoidable suffering) I continue to struggle with a bit, seeing it as a bit of an intellectual skeleton key designed to give people without either love or creative drive a reason to keep plodding along. But maybe upon further consideration I’ll understand it better (hopefully not through personal experience!)

One final concept that is mentioned a few times is the notion of dealing with life by imagining you are at the end of it, looking back, and believing you did everything wrong. Now go back and do it the right way.

“Think on yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what is left and live it properly.”

Maybe we’ll try on Marcus Aurelius next.

But first, let’s go try to find folks some money to enable creation in others.

Yes. I promise I will get around to doing real thinking and writing about the topic we are clearly circling here...

What does Creativity mean for humans when we have created Artificial Intelligences who can create as well or better than we can? 

But not yet. 

For a little longer I want to keep thinking about the forces that drive and impact human creativity. 

And about books, of course. 

 

5.18.24

I believe there is more to say on the role of fear in impeding the creative impulse in many people. In particular, I think it likely that loss-aversion is the motivating drive for many in never starting, never trying. There is more to say here, but I believe it is largely beside the point and risks distracting us from the bigger issue. Let’s move on from fear. We cannot let our fears slow us down.

Carl Jung tells us, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”

I maintain that the surest and most joyful way for people to add meaning to the otherwise indifferent chemistry and physics of the spinning universe is to create things that have a chance of improving the world and outliving the creator. Immortality through Creation. And fear is just an impediment, one that is (relative to time, space, physics) fairly easy to dismiss. So we move on and think more about the how.

What is the ideal organizational structure to promote creativity?

I’ve spent thirty years now working for startups. I’ve also spent many of those thirty years working for big companies, public ones. The startups: Eclipse Entertainment, Digital Anvil, Certain Affinity, Kabam, Wizards of the Coast, Cloudmind, Conjure Games, GlobalStep. The Public Companies: Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Capcom, Activision, Netmarble, Hasbro. The paradox of working regularly for both startups and big corporations for many overlapping periods gets to the heart of something I think is important: Almost every one of the startups eventually became part of a public company. And even when this didn’t happen directly, it was the resources of one or more big PubCos that allowed – paid for or gave mission and purpose to – the startup’s existence.

Public companies and large corporations in general (never worked for a really big company that was privately held) have purpose and a mission and often the ability to devote (!) a truly significant raft of resources to driving towards a particular outcome. This can be fuel for creating things.

Startups have focus, the powerful esprit de corps that makes innovating possible. Startups are constantly being beaten about the head and shoulders by that great Mother of Invention: necessity and hunger. If there is a more powerful way of driving innovation in small groups than getting a bright and dedicated bunch of diverse misfits into a too-small room full of whiteboards for weeks at a time… I’ve not seen it. The small culture of startups is fertile soil for creative innovation.

We need both.

Without the innovator’s spirit small and ragged teams promote, big companies descend into a quagmire of beauracracy and politicking and busy-work reporting. Without the resources and drive for profit of a big company, startups can become a clubhouse or a think-tank. Combinations of the two is the best way I’ve seen to unlock and fuel small group creativity.

I’m certainly not the first person to observe this.

I think about Claude Shannon in the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, in Bell Labs. I think about Xerox PARC labs, I think about E&S in Utah and the spinouts (Pixar, Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Adobe) that sprouted from that soil. In many ways I think even about my own experience with Kabam Vancouver (nee Exploding Barrel) which in my memory had these characteristics (if perhaps not quite the brilliance of Claude Shannon or Ed Catmull.) Creating safe and largely uncontrolled spaces for the very bright to innovate creates new kinds of businesses and ideas. The spark of creation is more apt to shine bright and be able to be captured in a startup culture.

But without the fuel of capital, the massive support service structures required to scale and distribute, and the discipline to remind people to tie their shoes and balance the books, these places can spin off into chaos easily.

And this is the inherent paradox – and a clear recipe – for how to create the kinds of cultural organizational structures that will lead to innovation and creation and also to the ability to bring these creations to large numbers of people.

We must kindle lights of meaning and be able to bring it to the world. And that takes innovation, discipline, capability, and resources. 

 

5.17.24

“That’s it? Silver spoon much? You entitled ponce. What about all the real and serious consequences people fear if they try something and it goes sideways?”

I am scared that if I create something the boss doesn’t like I will get fired and won’t be able to find a new job in this economy; my kids will go hungry.

I’m scared that creative failure will result in having to shut down the company, and a bunch of friends I hired will be out of work because of me.

I’m scared that people’s spouses will leave them because a project or company failed.

I’m scared that powerful forces will take umbrage to what I’ve created and will throw me in prison.

I’m scared someone will attack me with a knife because of something I’ve created.

 

And some of these – all of these! – are very real world examples of things that happen sometimes when a creative endeavor goes wrong.

Taylor Swift snidely sings, “Yeah they sit around talkin’ about the meaning of life and the book that just saved ‘em that I hadn’t heard of.”

And I recognize that there is a certain level of entitlement, privilege, and pseudo-academic snobbery associated with writing about books, writing about creativity, and with the incredible fortune of being in a position where the kinds of fears you can articulate have to do with the emotional consequences of a poor creation. These are not the fears of folks in Gaza today. These are not the fears of writers and poets publishing in secret inside totalitarian countries. These are not the fears of the hungry, those on the run, the wrongfully imprisoned, or those living in abusive relationships.

And somehow – wonderfully – humans DO keep creating things. They write poems on prison walls, they public newspapers in secret that critique the regime, they work on video games while the bombs fall on their country, they squint through the black eye and sketch with charcoal on rough paper, they write imaginative novels of their furious disrespect even under the threat of an irrevocable a death sentence.

Humans create despite their fear.

And yes, I am incredibly privileged to be able to think about books, and writing, and games, and creativity. And I am very fortunate to not have to truly worry about much other than some mild public teehee if I stumble or fail. (And, it’s important always to remember “you wouldn’t worry so much what people thought about you if you realize how seldom they do.”) And I suspect that MOST of the would-be creators who hesitate because they are afraid don’t truly face many of these real or dire consequences.

So keep creating.

Keep trying.

If you stumble, brush your shoulders off. Try again; fail better.

And remember you’re in good company:

Even the wealthy, popular, and powerful Miss Swift appears to have late night fears about her creations not being popular asking, “Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?”

 

5.16.24

Why does fear inhibit the creative impulse?

 

I want to think about the way that the things we are afraid of inhibit our desire and ability to engage in acts of creation.

 

One of the projects I’m working on right now is way outside of my usual comfort zone: It’s hyper technical, involved in a business sector I’m not familiar with, fairly novel, experimental, and could do much good for the world, but could also do much harm. I was trying to describe the anxieties I have about the project to one of my family members who asked me, “What are you afraid of?”

I am scared that ... technology ... is evolving so rapidly that I don't know how to build a business on top of it.

I am scared of potential risks.

I am scared that this will have ended up burning a bunch of money to test something that we are unprepared to really build and run; we will have wasted a bunch of money.

I'm scared of publicizing this mission and then failing at it.

I'm slightly scared of succeeding at it.

I think these fears are an interesting cross section of the kinds of things that regularly prevent people from trying to do things. It’s very scary to try something. What if you fail? What if they all laugh at you? What if it poisons future opportunities for you? What if it wastes a lot of money?

And because a bunch of these fears speak to the heart of identity and a person’s role in their community, in culture they are powerful demotivators to many. Indeed, I suspect that some of these fears are the primary reason that the vast majority of humans are consumers rather than creators: The fear of trying and failing is powerfully dissuasive.

I don’t really have antidotes to most of these (clearly) but I do find the following technique to be useful:

Sometimes when I feel overcome by an anxiety about some particular topic I try to engage in a Socratic dialog – in writing – in which I try to ask “Okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

I find often this approach helps to neuter fears like these, because you realize that really… If you try to create something and fail, mostly, you’re no worse off than you are the day before you tried.

What are examples of public failures in the act of creation that ended up defining the lives or ending the careers of the creator who failed?

 Rest in Peace, Alice Munro. 

 5.14.2024

The first game I ever made, called Tim's Quest, was made for one player, my brother Mike. He's the only one who ever saw it.

The games I created at Kabam: Marvel: Contest of Champions, Disney Mirrorverse, Fast & Furious, Transformers: Forged to Fight, Shop Titans collectively reached and (mostly) delighted more than 500,000,000 players around the world. All in they grossed somewhere north of $3,000,000,000 USD.  

The games I helped build at Hasbro mostly haven't yet reached those level of success, though Magic the Gathering: Arena delights lots of people, and some of the licensed products like Scopely's juggernaut, Monopoly Go!, could well be on track to exceed that level of popularity all by themselves. 

Add in the Call of Dutys, the Halos, the Need for Speeds, and many other creations over the last thirty years and we are probably approaching close to a billion people on Earth who have enjoyed something I had at least some small role in creating. 

.        .        .

Today I creted a piece of art that I hid in a deep part of the forest on a very remote island, where I can be reasonibly sure no one but me will ever see it. 

 5.13.24

 

How can thinking about the types of communities people are seeking help us fix the games industry?

And what does this have to do with this month’s theme of Creativity?

A decade ago, a very bright designer I know pointed out to me that the massive increase in the number of gamers around the world means that there is an appetite and an audience for almost any game you wanted to make. His point was that if it is exciting and interesting to your team, or to you as a creator, then that is probably a good indication that there are other people in the world who will be excited about it.

This reminds me of being a teenager and hiding my Dungeons & Dragons books and dice and fantasy novels (even my Commodore 64 computer) when my first high school girlfriend came around. This kind of nerd stuff was best hidden in the shadows in Austin at the time. I remember friends who would shamefully admit to collecting comic books around the same time. And, of course, Marvel and video gaming have been two of the pillars of the entertainment industry over the last decade. It turns out that our little niche subculture was far more widespread than we thought.

I think about the successful business that some creators have made out of building “work simulator” games. About a CEO I heard from a few days ago who is relentlessly focusing on RTS games and busy smirking at “execs” from big publishers who tried to tell him that there’s not a big enough market for these kinds of games.

The point here is that creating something for a small audience can be a viable business provided the team creating it can keep their budgets in check. And, as my trip down teenage memory lane reminds us, sometimes niche markets can explode and become incredibly popular. (For some reason I’m thinking of the rise of vampire fiction, Sookie Stackhouse and Twilight last decade.)

So one option for many of the creators who are worried about the huge costs and instability of gargantuan two hundred million dollar game projects and teams might be to focus instead on working with smaller teams to build smaller games.

This could yield a couple of benefits: First, there is little more joyful than a tight-knit group of collaborators who are obsessed with a shared vision for something they want to create. Small teams can be such fun, move so quickly, and create a sense of belonging, shared purpose, and esprit de corps that can be so very hard to establish or find on massive distributed AAA projects. Second, niche audiences for these kinds of games can end up being quirky, fun communities that are small enough for creators to interact with in a way that can be very hard (or unwise) to do on massive commercial projects.

There are disadvantages here; I’d be remiss not to mention. But since the goal of this post is to keep people creating, I’ll do no more than list them: Greater professional instability, fewer & worse benefits, complex market fit economics, losing the thrill of having huge audiences love your game.

One option I’d suggest to those creators who have lost the joy of working on big games with big teams for big corporations is to partner up with a smaller group focused on delighting a niche community.

I’m not sure that’s what I personally want. But it could be one solution to the angst some folks have expressed to me about their roles in the games biz.

Above all, I suppose I want to tell these folks not to lose hope. Keep making things. 

The things you create don’t have to target a massive audience to be fulfilling or financially rewarding.

 5.12.24

Two different people over the last few days have said something to me like, "Now that you're free and thinking about what you want to do next, maybe you can work on figuring out how to fix the games industry." 

And aside from being mildly flattered and simultaneously bemused and horrified at the idea that anyone could believe I would have (or want!) that level of influence on such matters... I keep returning to the idea, and it leads me to a question: 

What do we believe is wrong with the digital games industry currently?  

The Creators

This weekend there is much social media chatter about a couple of studios Microsoft acquired at some point and has recently shut down. (I’m being vague not because I do not know the details, the games, the decision makers, and people impacted, but because I don’t want to focus on this particular incident, but on the concept of a broader malaise.) This is an example of the gloom on the side of the game makers: We’ve had huge numbers of layoffs in the industry over the last 24 months, many more studios are struggling and will likely close their doors before this year is over. There’s a strong culture of fear in many places which makes people afraid to speak up or even commit to a particular course of action because they are worried about losing their jobs. “Just survive ‘till ’25” is a phrase I heard repeated so many times this spring that it was almost a rallying cry for this year’s Game Developer’s Conference.

So let’s agree that for people working in the games business, there’s a strong sense of fear and the worry that things have changed for the worse, and they aren’t sure how to find their footing again.

The Players

And then there are the players.

The current Player v. Industry dust-up involves the players of a game called Helldivers 2 who love the game but have given the publisher and the developer nonstop grief over many things, most recently some efforts to force players to use a Sony account system to log in and play the game.

Perhaps the players have legit beef in this case, perhaps there were good reasons (there usually are!) for forcing the use of a particular account or login system.

But again, the specific case here is less interesting than what I think could broadly be made as a true statement:

There is a deep sense of regular outrage and antipathy between players and the creators and publishers of the games they play.

The Investors

And then the investors are uncertain, many sitting on the sidelines. A few experienced VC groups have raised fairly sizeable amounts to restart investing after 18 months of caution. Investment IS returning to the sector, albeit slowly.

There are likely three big reasons for this: First, at the macro level, interest rates remain high. There are other places which are far lower risk to go get a return that outstrips inflation. Second, the industry is seen as being in a correction post-pandemic after 2020 highs for almost the entire sector. Third, at least a bunch of VC took a bath on Web3 gaming investment, AND are now watching companies they funded for seed rounds struggle to raise enough to bring whatever games they are working on to market; so many VC firms may feel burned by investments over the last few years.

Investment into the games industry remains depressed and uneasy.

Some Areas for Further Thought

I’ll take these three categories of malaise as a reasonable answer to the question, “What do we believe is wrong with the games industry?”

I want to think more about what solutions we can see that will bring about the kind of change folks want to see. But before wrapping up for the morning, I need to add two more observations and an exhortation:

First, I cannot help but see a bit of a backlash against the hugely expensive AAA products that dominate sales charts.

Of the games that are getting the most attention, few are big AAA $200M blockbusters. Consider this NTY article from this morning, in which almost every one of the games recommended are smaller indie projects.

Recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 absolutely swept the industry awards, for good reason. (Obviously I’m far from impartial to the success of this project, as I was involved however distantly.) But BG3 clearly delighted fans and critics the world over, and did very well for its creator, Larian. So there IS still appetite for giant, expensive games.

But there is also clearly a hunger for gamers (and creators, and investors) for smaller, lower risk enterprises.

Second, I think there’s value in zooming out from the games industry as a particular case study, and look at the broader relationship between consumers, the technology companies that provide them with content, and the workers who comprise those companies.

Noah Smith writes a provocative piece on the “death of the internet” in which he argues that people are increasingly turning away from content sources on the internet because the types of content there are increasingly low quality as a direct result of the need to drive profitability. (Cory Doctrow’s “Eshittification” of the net, “Slop” of AI generated stuff, disingenuous content posted by foreign agitators are the big three culprits in his mind.)

I’d like to think about all of this a lot more, but I see a couple of major social forces in play here:

First, employees and consumers alike feel hostile towards corporations right now. I think of this as an inevitable outcome of late-stage capitalism, in which the inherent profit motive of corporations is distasteful to folks who feel left out of the benefits of the system. This has little to do with gaming in particular, and everything to do with discomfort people who (mostly) don’t have capital feel towards a system working as designed.

The system isn’t built to make your life better, creators. The system isn’t built to delight you, consumers. The system is built to maximize return on invested capital.

Second, I think that in a world where the concept of community has largely unraveled, and there are few abiding family structures, social structures, or faith in religion or government to give people a sense of belonging… In this post-trust environment, many people may be desperate for smaller, trusted groups to feel a part of. This is a quest for identity at its heart for many.

People need purpose and a sense of belonging, and when the larger social super-structures no longer are great at providing this for many, this seems to force a splintering into niche communities.

 In a world where big structures aren’t working for many people, are they seeking out smaller communities, more niche experiences as a way of coping?