💯💯💯

I’m sure this comes as no surprise.

I talk to these people, Mark, and I can tell you, most of them genuinely don’t have the faintest clue what builds success in games.

There are naturally those who do see the play from 100 yards out, but in my experience they are the exception, not the rule, and are in the vast, *vast* minority.

The even more insane part is the folks who are now pointing to Arc Raiders as proof it can be done, but failing to realise that game is developed by the team behind *checks notes* 25 Battlefield/front games, in the nation with maybe the highest density of PC/console live service success stories.

First Reformed up where it belongs too. 🫡

It’s honestly giving me life how fucking bad it looks. I can feel my health bar surpassing 100%

Lol

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA

💯🫡

Exactly 15 years ago yesterday I walked into a bank, opened an account called League of Geeks and put $40 into it. Weird to think about.

taleb also wrote ‘antifragile’ and he himself sees that book as a more complete perspective on the same idea. i tend to agree, but black swan was a bit more specific and applicable for me somehow

i still think about the ideas in that book every few weeks 20 years later. even though it’s not about game development specifically, it speaks to attributes of things with luck and chance that is applicable to game dev. like why to prototype & iterate, or what ideas to pick up, how markets work, etc

Organizational Culture & Leadership, 5th Edition, it's a textbook sorry

it's not specific to game direction because I don't think the industry-specific skills are nearly as difficult a challenge as the whole "how to navigate and lead and effect change in an organization full of people" problem

We're only just now starting to get decent contextual accounts of games as a medium, and I find that it's much easier to internalize lessons from related but external media. Someday Valve and Steam may be the subjects of similar documents, but we're still too much in the current moment to understand

"I Want My MTV" by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks. It's a tremendous highs and lows accounting of how a dominant cultural movement began and how it shaped the art and world around it, in a way that can only be properly be understood after the fact.

That said--as someone literally handing over the reins right now--I made it clear when recommending reading that almost every business book I've ever read was 80% filler around fairly simple (even if novel) concepts. Just read a couple summaries & watch the TED talk.

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

black swan by taleb

Innnnnnteresting! Never head of it. Why would you recommend this book? 👀