Year in Review – 2014
I've never tried to write end-of-the-year posts; they tend to be biased towards recent events, and I find it disingenuous to summarize a year's worth of events meaningfully into a small,...
Thoughts
The Indie Game Bubble
I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about the state of gaming and where we'll go as an industry for the next few years. As we're in the...
The Troublesome Portrayal of Women in Video Games
Video games are notorious for catering to teenage boys. Puzzlingly, it's an increasingly outdated focus, persisting mostly in the creative direction and subsequent marketing of games reflected in big-budget titles more than in general-appeal casual games. The recent controversy over Assassin Creed's exclusion of female avatars is just the latest of...
The Big, Slow Company Stereotype
The playbook for “startup disruption” has remained the same for a while: the small startup moves faster than its much larger competitor, hustling out new features, products and markets at a much higher clip. Raw...
The Hardest Problems
Recently my friend and colleague Jack Danger tweeted this question: We engineers say we want to work on "hard problems." Know what's the hardest problem, though? Building a product that's worth a damn. Jack Danger (@jackdanger) January 18, 2014 To which I responded: @jackdanger Take it a step back...
Flowers for Algernon
I just finished reading Flowers for Algernon, a sci-fi novel written in the 60s about a mentally retarded man who undergoes a surgical procedure to become a genius. I never got the chance to read...