So, in this TED talk, Simon Sinek makes a case that great leaders inspire action, or great companies attract loyal customers by not starting with “what”, but starting with “why.” He does a good job of describing his case, so you should watch the video, but to sum up, he basically says that Apple, for instance, attracts a loyal following because they start with the concept of upending the status quo, not that they make great computers. And because of that, they attract people who believe what they believe, and will buy their products whether they’re computers or music players or DVR’s, or whatever.

Do I believe that he’s uncovered why Apple attracts the people they do? No.

I think he makes a fascinating argument, but that ultimately, Apple’s success comes from the fact that they don’t approach development of their OS from the computer to the user, they develop it from the user to the computer. Well, in as much as anyone *has*, at least. But it still got me thinking – what is our “why”?

And there are a lot of nice, flowery things that you can say – we love to make games we like to play, we make stuff that’s really beautiful & elegantly designed, we make games that people can play together. All that is true, but it is in some sense, the result, and not the driving force.

So, here’s the driving force, as I see it:

We make games that you couldn’t have made before.

There’s probably a better way of phrasing that – but the core concept is that most things are best when they use the advantages that are unique to them. Something like the Sixth Sense, for instance, would have been much, much harder to pull off as a book, because so much of it depended on the assumptions you make about what you see when you go into a movie – it depended on the conventions that the audience implicitly understood.

And with something as rapidly evolving as the newest generation of mobile devices & social media on the web, to make something that really leverages those conventions means making something where the ability to do this didn’t exist before.

You might think that’s a weird thing to say about say, Taxiball & Word Ace, but it really was the driving force behind building those games.

Taxiball was tilt-controlled because it was a control scheme that was really unique to the iPhone. It had friend lists & leaderboards because the persistently connected nature of the platform demanded it.

With Word Ace, we expanded the multiplayer aspect to synchronous real-time multiplayer that you could play anywhere, across a really wide range of devices. We were the first & only Pre/iPhone/Facebook cross-platform game for a very long time, and we still may be the only one (though I could be wrong, now). On top of that, things like the visual emote system, in-game gifts & chat – only the visual emote system was completely unique, but the features were there because the goal was to give you the sense that you were playing with your friends, not just random people you didn’t care about at all. The goal was to create something you’d love to play with your friends – and making the social aspect of it feel real & meaningful (which on a mobile device was something you couldn’t do before) drove the decisions about what to include.

So, in the end, I think that’s a good description of our “why” – to make games that you couldn’t have made before. And whether it’s something relatively simple, like our social multiplayer blackjack, or something like our super-secret new project, that underlying philosophy is what drives us forward.