…or how incremental progress can kill you.

Rather, not how it can kill you, but how incremental progress can lead you to a dead end. The simplest example is bowling. When you start bowling, you roll the ball down the lane. Not terribly difficult. Try to hit pins. As you improve, you roll the ball down the lane into a better spot. Your score goes up by a few points, or down by a few points, but over time, you improve.

Since bowling is at least sort of competitive, you take some pride in your increased score, and when you play with friends (probably most of the time, if not always), part of you is striving to beat them. So you play, and you improve. Slowly, over time, you reach a plateau, and no matter how hard you try, that’s the best you can do.

You’ve seen that professional bowlers all bowl differently than you do. So you try to replicate that, and you roll gutter ball after gutter ball. You give up, because you’re sick of posting terrible scores, and you go back to striving to cross that plateau… which never happens.

I don’t know about you, but that’s how almost everyone I know bowls.

That’s how I bowled, for a very long time, until at one point a few years ago, I decided to resign myself to losing for an entire year.

I don’t bowl much, if at all, anymore – but in that year, I posted scores sometimes in the single digits. Then it slowly improved, and improved. Three months in (I was unemployed at the time, so I was going bowling maybe twice a week), my scores substantially exceeded where I was. And then I got another job, ended up moving, and was no longer a short walk from a bowling alley, at which point I basically stopped.

In the years since, I’ve realized that the most critical thing I learned was that I had to abandon what I had in order to improve it.

The thing is, this is an obvious lesson. What’s hard is seeing where it applies, and then actually doing it.

There are tons of things that have this quality:

• You make a substantial investment of time & effort into learning how to do something
• There is pressure or competition that encourages you to perform “your best”.

But it’s insidious – the pressure to perform your best is a trap that causes you to not be able to say, “Look, I’m going to make substantial change, and I’m going to fail for a while.” The education system is like that. You cannot say to a teacher, “Look, I need to learn how to learn, and there are going to be some hiccups along the way.” No, if you’re a B student, you work harder, and then you’re maybe eventually a B+ student. But your habits haven’t really changed, you’ve just learned to do whatever you’re doing moderately well more.

This happens in the game industry. This is why, I believe, so much of the “social game” industry looks the same. You invest a lot of time in building something. You’re constantly under pressure to succeed financially. And so you do what you “know” works. In many cases, it seems a lot of social game developers “play the Zynga game”. And they do that, trying to compete with Zynga by bowling the ball straight down the lane.

They make incremental progress. Their audience increases by a percent. .1% of people come back slightly more regularly. There’s so much pressure to improve the numbers, but there’s even more pressure to make sure they never get worse.

I’ve played FPS games for many, many years. Halo, Call of Duty, Resistance, Killzone, blah blah blah. In multiplayer, I’m rarely at the top of the leaderboard. I’m decent at getting into an advantageous position – tactically, I think I do quite well. Where I totally fail is in the act of shooting. But I can consistently reach the midfield on the scoreboard. There’s SO MUCH feedback in these games that encourage you, or reward you, to do well that it’s hard to say, “Time to take a different approach,” and have people trash talk you, mock your lack of skills, and otherwise make your life miserable.

I’m not saying incremental improvement doesn’t have value. It has massive value. But you have to be aware that it can also be a trap, and if you’re stuck at a plateau, you cannot break through it incrementally. You have to understand what fundamental problems you’re having, and accept that working on the fundamentals can mean that you will fail for a good period of time as you learn. The system is unforgiving of failure. There are certainly times when that fear is correct, and now is not the time to upend the system.

But there are probably more times than you’d expect where what you should be doing is wrecking your skills, trying something completely out of your comfort zone, abandoning the success you have in favor of something with a higher potential. Look at what you’re doing carefully. Because it’s distinctly possible that incremental success will kill you, and failure will set you free.

This is just a list of random stuff I’ve really enjoyed recently.

Food (in Oakland, CA):

• Hawker Fare – This is a pretty regular lunch spot. They serve a take on Thai rice bowls. The food itself is uniformly excellent (you have to try the sundae), the staff is super-friendly, and it’s got a fantastic vibe.
• Trueburger – My favorite spot for a burger. Excellent milkshakes (the Toasted Marshmallow FTW), first off. Salty, crispy fries. They’ve got something called the True Deluxe, which is a burger topped with a mozzarella-stuffed deep-fried portobello. What’s not to love? Also, try the Spicy Slaw Dog.

I’m sorry, were you looking for a tall, cool glass of AWESOMENESS?

I’ve got one right here!

Looking for a wallpaper fer yer phone, pardner? Here ya go.

Do you love Fleck?

Nominate Fleck Touch for Best Location-Based App

Nominate Fleck Touch for Best Casual Game

Nominate Fleck Touch for Best MMO Game

Or do you love Card Ace: Casino?

Nominate Card Ace: Casino for Best Casino Game

Nominate Card Ace: Casino for Best Word Game

Nominate Card Ace: Casino for Best Card Game

On an earlier post, I’d mentioned that insecurity can be a good thing. I don’t know that insecurity in itself is a good thing, but as a symptom, it’s not a bad one. People strive, I believe, for a sense of security. What I hope to convey is that I think it’s a poor goal – a false one – while the ability to project security & confidence is a good thing, developing an internal sense of security is actually a step in the wrong direction.

Donald Rumsfeld got mocked for this quote:

“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
—Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

While I’m no fan of Rumsfeld’s, I like this quote a lot (though not in the original context), and I think it was sad that this is what he was maligned for.

When you start out at something, you know you don’t know anything. At least, you should know that, because if you don’t, you’ll never learn anything.

As you gain experience in that thing, you begin to feel more confident. You know some stuff. You know what you know, and you feel good about it.

After a while, as your knowledge of that field expands even further, you begin to realize – at least if you’re in an interesting field doing interesting things – that it’s incredibly difficult, and that experience matters. You realize the scope of the things that you have left to learn. You know what you don’t know, and more importantly, how far you have to go before you understand it.

Then, there’s the phase where you realize that even when you absolutely master your field, when you are the expert that other experts seek out, that there is a whole system of events that you cannot control, you cannot understand, and in many cases, you have no impact on. Some of this, maybe you know. You may know that you’re more likely to like someone who hands you a hot drink than a cold one. You may know that you’re more likely to make a higher estimate after reading the number 501,208,281,291 than the number 4. And you may know that even if you know these things you can’t affect their impact on you. Those are still part of the known unknowns. But in that vein – if those are the known unknowns, trying to imagine what the unknown unknowns are is like looking into the mouth of madness. And while these examples may seem ludicrous, the point is that in almost every endeavor, there are things like this – things that are almost impossible to anticipate, but will have a dramatic impact on whatever it is you’re doing.

How’s that relate to being insecure?

There’s a level of expertise you reach, I think, where you can make excellent calls. You can have good judgment to deal with new situations, and you can have enough experience that you have a whole toolbox in your pocket to deal with situations like those you’ve encountered before. But in any field that involves some level of complexity, things quickly spiral beyond the point where that system can be completely contained in one mind. So you know there are things that you don’t know. And you know there are things you can’t know. People who make decisions in that space who are confident and assured don’t know they don’t know those things.

I’m not saying that you have to be wishy-washy, or that you have to project that insecurity. I think a good leader will project a calm, steady presence, and make decisions with authority. But I don’t think those people make those decisions with security that their decisions are the right ones. They’re just the best that they can do with the resources available. At some point, those are the only kinds of decisions you can make. No one makes the right decisions all the time, they just make the best decisions they can.

So while you ideally shouldn’t project your internal insecurity, you should feel it. You should internalize it, be aware of it, and understand what you have control over and what you don’t. It will help you remain flexible, because you will always remember that you may have to be adaptable. So to me, a little insecurity isn’t a bad thing. You make the best calls you can, you learn from your mistakes, and you move on.

I hope you’re insecure.

Because then it means you’re doing interesting things – and that the results may be even more interesting than you expect.

I’ve got a copy of Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken sitting on my shelf. I’ve read about 2/3rds of it, and I keep meaning to go back to it and finish it because I feel like I have to finish it before I talk about how much I hate it.

And then I realized that 2/3rds of the way through it, and having heard her speak on a number of occasions, I don’t need to finish it, because I already know what I don’t like about it. For a little discussion on why, let me point you to Daniel Pink’s book, Drive.

There’s also a really charming video summary of Drive, and its main points, here:

If nothing else, watch the video.

The summary, which resonates deeply with me is:

• Extrinsic rewards, like monetary bonuses, are great at encouraging rote behavior
• They actually hinder performance for tasks that require creativity
• People are motivated by three main things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose

Now in Drive, Pink talks a lot about money. Monetary bonuses for performance. Gamification is largely about achievements, awards, experience, points, and the like. For all practical purposes, they are the same. They’re rewards that aren’t about the thing you’re doing, and the result is that you end up doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing worse.

So why are we talking about extrinsic motivators if we’re trying to change the world?

If you want to provide encouragement for people to optimize rote behavior, then by all means, gamify. Add a scoring system to your assembly line widget creation. Create a series of achievements for memorizing the crap they make you memorize & repeat verbatim in school. But you’re going to have an impossible time gamifying the process of learning, because even if you succeed, the science says that you’ll actually cause them to do worse.

Beyond that, it’s not just the science. I don’t want someone to learn to learn by consuming extrinsic rewards. I don’t want someone to learn to create by being motivated to score points, because as long as the motivation is extrinsic, it isn’t internalized by the learner/creator/whoever. All they’ve internalized is the hunger for more points. They aren’t motivated to understand anything deeper than, “How does this tie into the gamification layer?”

And that’s the thing – that feels terrible. It feels wrong. And it turns out, the science agrees and it is wrong. It’s harder to create when pushed by extrinsic motivators, because your brain will then focus on the specific task that you’re trying to optimize for, and it will be much harder to find the creative solution you actually need.

So what do you get by fixing reality with gamification? You get people who are encouraged to optimize rote tasks. You get a system that invisibly makes you worse at creativity and synthesis of information. And you get a world where your motivation and encouragement aren’t driven by your desire to seize control of your destiny, to become a better person, or to create a cause & believe deeply in it. You get a world where you’re in it for the points.

That’s not fixing a broken reality – it’s destroying everything in it that’s genuinely worthwhile.

I get that Reality is Broken is a nice story. It’s a nice thought that a bunch of nerds can change the world by adding videogamey things to everyday tasks. Who doesn’t love an achievement? But it’s a nice story that doesn’t work. It doesn’t address the real problems, and distracts from the things that are. The research has shown that it makes you worse at almost everything that matters.

Reality may suck sometimes. Gamification may be fun in the short term, but it’s fatally shortsighted. Throw it away. Spend time working on the stuff that matters. Understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Improve how you do it. Look around you, and find the completely unexpected solutions to problems. Not just the ‘sploitz and the hacks. Believe passionately in something, dive deeply into it – fight through the parts that suck, because that’s usually where you’ll actually learn - and only then will you be the kind of person who can bend reality to their will.

And then ask yourself, can we make a game without gamification?

Okay – there’s a lot of discussion about “gamification” and what it means, and something just crystallized in my head a moment ago. Gamificiation is great for tasks that are simple, straightforward, and in themselves uninteresting. It’s TERRIBLE for anything that requires any creativity whatsoever. If you want a world where people strive for points and don’t think then by all means, gamify. Otherwise, understand that nurturing real creativity is a difficult process, that living is hard work, and points don’t make everything better.

It’s been a while since the last time I’ve posted. It’s not due to lack of activity. If anything, it’s that everything’s insane all the time. Card Ace: Casino is growing like a weed, and Fleck’s undergone so much change in the last month and a half that if you haven’t played it in a while, I’d encourage you almost to start fresh, just because the new tutorial is so good.

There are times when work sucks. Things are stressful, uncertain, need to happen yesterday, have exploded, or are just messy in ways that cause you abject misery. I think that’s the same about anything that you really care about, or anything that’s worth doing. But then there are so many moments when I’m reminded why I absolutely love what we do. Times when a piece of art perfectly conveys what it needs to. Times when a gameplay mechanic “clicks” and makes perfect sense, after literally months of effort. Times when the changes work, and when you can see how everything will build off them.

In the case of Fleck, it came from a bit of focus. It’s a game that can be everything. One day, I hope it will be. But right now it needed less, and finding the right less that made it more has been a spectacular challenge. But one that’s had immediate, tangible, and fantastic results. I’ll post more about the specifics sometime soon. There are two other posts that are waiting in the wings.

1.) Why – a followup to an earlier post – The Why. Like everything else we do, I’ve iterated a bit, and have a better answer than I had before. The thought process had a specific structure, and I’d like to get that across, so finding the right way to capture that might take some time.

2.) On Being a Fraud – why insecurity isn’t always a bad thing, and how Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, said it best when he talked about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

If you have a preference for which comes first of the three potential posts, lemme know in comments.

At this point, most people have said what needs to be said about the passing of Steve Jobs. One thing I think can be said, though, was that he wasn’t really into videogames. Despite a couple unsuccessful attempts, the Mac never really became an extraordinary gaming platform, and with the iPhone/iPod, gaming was only a side effect of its other utility, even if it ended up becoming one of its most lucrative & successful elements.

I say that because I don’t want to say that Steve Jobs set out to revolutionize the game industry. That he did exactly that only really speaks to the fact that the underlying philosophy that he instilled Apple with made that so – and that’s quite a spectacular thing.

For many years while working in the traditional console industry, I (and almost everyone I knew) dreamed of independent development – but it was always a dream that was out of our grasp. Things were getting to complex. Too graphically intensive. Games became too expensive and too complex to develop, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Instead of teams of 10, teams were now 300+, and only the top 5-10 games in any year ever made any appreciable amount of money.

The kinds of stories you’d read about as a kid – id Software, Apple Computer – that kind of garage development was gone forever.

And then suddenly, it wasn’t.

The iPhone wasn’t built to be a gaming platform that could be served by a bunch of indies. It wasn’t built, really, to be a gaming platform at all. But the core ideas behind it – omnipresence, ease-of-use, and accessibility – are the things that make it so appealing, and that applies just as much to games as non-games. Previous to the iPhone, you had to deal with what platform your phone ran, how to get the game (whether you’d download it from the developers or the carriers, or if you could even get anything at all), and then you’d have to deal with wildly varying hardware specs which meant that all mobile games were developed for the lowest common denominator… the iPhone gave developers the first and best single platform to develop mobile games on.

Even today, if you compare the difference between Android & Apple, the things that make iOS succeed are the bits that are deeply ingrained with Apple’s core DNA. The biggest being that there are fewer variations on the hardware because people don’t care about specs, they care about what the device does. And that simpler interactions are often ultimately more powerful than complex ones.

But more than that, it created a whole segment of games that you could create with your friends in a garage. Graphics had to be good, but good no longer meant normal-mapped high-poly 3D with dynamic lighting. Good meant that it had to feel good, not that it had to be expensive. The tools that were available – persistent online, GPS, tilt, etc. were fantastically varied, and enabled a whole new type of game – types of games that we haven’t even seen fully realized yet.

Self Aware Games exists because Apple created this thing, almost from nothing. They took the chaotic, fragmented, carrier-dominated world of mobile phones & completely redefined it. They gave us the platform, and it’s let us realize our dreams. I work with friends. We make things we want to make how we want to make them. We don’t need a team of a hundred people to make something awesome. We need a handful of brilliant folks who passionately love what they’re doing, and we can have an impact.

So while creating a new generation of independent developers was most likely not Apple’s goal when it created the iPhone, the philosophy behind the creation of the device made this possible. And while there are many, many others to thank, if I’m going to thank folks for allowing me to have the best job I could ever dream of, I feel a tremendous personal debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs. He changed the way people think about technology. The future will be built, in large part, on his shoulders.