Seppo Helava’s Post

So, feel-good influencer-tech-bro Gary Vaynerchuk posted a thing where he said “Kindness ALWAYS wins”, and wrote some thing about blah blah blah and it’s such colossal horseshit that I think I’m about to find out how much vitriol is possible in a LinkedIn post. First off, no it fucking doesn’t. This simplistic sound-nice-feel-good pablum makes me really fucking infurated because it’s setting up a lot of people who want this good message to be true to get absolutely *fucked* when people find out what utter nonsense it is. Look, here’s the thing. There is no fairness. There is no karma. Not in work, not in life. If you expect bad people to get their just desserts, you’re going to be *very* surprised and *very* disappointed, because in the real working world terrible people win big *all the time*. They steal your credit, they stab you in the back, they climb over people to get to the top, and once they’re at the top, the things they do are going to be literally unbelievable to you, person-who-believes-that-kindness-always-wins. What will happen to you-who-are-kind? You will be exploited. You will be abused. You will watch your abusers and exploiters get promotions faster than you. You will sit there in the middle of the night, and think, “I am kind. Why am I not winning?” Because the world isn’t fucking fair. And the charlatans selling this naive bullshit are hoping that you’ll think the simplistic garbage they’re selling is the truth, because man, it sure sounds fucking great. But it’s *lies*, it’s *bullshit*, and it’s *really fucking damaging* because it’s not how the world works, and hanging on to the belief that it works differently will turn your insides into poison. But be kind anyway. Not because it wins. Because it’s the *right* thing to do. Because it’s hard and painful and costs you. Because it’s who you want - who you need to be, because deep in your heart you have a belief about how you want to impact others. But understand that it will cost you. That you can be exploited. That people will mistake your kindness for weakness, and they will turn it against you. And if you can be kind *anyway*, in the face of all that, then fucking hell, that’s a way to live, isn’t it? “Kindness always wins.” Fuck you you goddamn liar. You snake-oil bullshit salesman. Know that the cheats and liars and garbage humans who are devoid of morals or integrity will climb that ladder by scrabbling like rats up and up, clawing at everyone in their path. They will climb over you, using your kindness to get what they want and to fuck you in the process. But be kind anyway, because most people you meet aren’t like that. And in the end, it *is* the best approach, not just because over time it will have the best, most durable results. Do it because it’s who you desire to be, and how you want others to think of you. Do it because it feels great to help others. And do it because no matter how hard it gets, you won’t let the bastards break your spirit.

What I want out of leaders isn't for them to leap willy-nilly on the next tech hype train. I want them to understand their customers and their product so deeply that they can understand whether the hype train is *appropriate* for their product. Seeing a wave of traditional game devs suddenly plaster their profiles with "web3/nft/blockchain expert" titles a few years ago, then have literally no reasonable idea of how to use any of those technologies *to make games better for their players* was really disheartening. And look - I get it - it's an opportunity to make a name for yourself, and part of that is playing that game, because people hiring and folks funding stuff are drooling all over themselves to not miss out on the next big thing. And they're not savvy enough about the space to know the difference between the "expert" and the *expert*. Which is its own problem, of course. But then seeing those *exact same people* now suddenly become "metaverse experts" and now "AI/LLM/GPT experts" and having the exact same funding people fully Charlie Brown the football yet again... it's just depressing. Look - there's one weird trick you can use to totally see through all the crap. It's shockingly easy, and 100% effective. So all you folks looking to fund the next big thing, here it is, for free. If someone hasn't shipped a product, to consumers, with the technology they're talking about, but they're calling themselves an "expert", they're a fraud. And I know! You can't wait for folks to ship a product, because you need to be on that first wave or you'll miss out on all the $$$$! I mean, ignore the fact that for every wave of super-hype tech, that's literally never been the case. But even still, I'm not saying you can't find people to fund. I'm saying that the people self-proclaiming their expertise are *liars and frauds*, because until you've shipped a thing with the tech, you *literally cannot be an expert on the technology*. The only time you learn how customers really interact with a thing is by shipping. Everything else is theoretical, and most people's theoretical knowledge is, frankly, just a matter of how good they are at handwaving and how loud they are. The people who are best equipped to deal with the next big tech? They're the people who have successfully created products *in the past* with *previous waves* of the *last* big tech. People who successfully navigated highly uncertain products with brand-new technology and turned them into successful products with happy audiences. You want to deploy your money with a higher chance of success? Ask people why this tech empowers their *customers' experience*, not the company's bottom line. If they don't have a good, clear answer, or a way to *get* to that answer quickly, they're not the right person to be leading this charge. And the self-professed experts? You can ignore them entirely.

No one has it all. Everything costs something. A lot of hustle-culture lifestyle business nonsense shows people driving fancy cars, being influential, spending time in beautiful places, blah blah blah. And a big part of what draws people to entrepreneurship is this idea that they too can be rich, powerful, and control their own destiny. Most of that is bullshit. It's easy to forget that everything *costs* something. Building a startup consumed everything about my life for years other than it, and the time I carved out for family. And at the end of it, it cost me another five years in therapy and waking nightmares and cPTSD, and a handful of relationships I once valued. It gave me a certain level of financial independence, which is a massive visible positive (and which I never, ever take for granted), but on balance, I'd trade the latter to get rid of the former, which I know may seem weird to folks who didn't go through it. And that's all invisible to people. What is visible is the "success". No one sees the cost. This is true for almost any level of any type of success. You look at folks like Elon Musk - he's got the adoring throngs of sycophants, and more money than ... well, almost anyone else in the world. But what did it cost him? He doesn't have great relationships (if any at all) with his children or spouses, he doesn't have any relationships to anyone who isn't so far up his butt that he can maintain any connection to reality. Is that a trade you'd make? I wouldn't. You know the kinds of folks at work who will stab their co-workers in the back and get promoted. You know the folks who work 20-hour days at the cost of their health and their marriage. Maybe you look around and think, "How is it that this is all I've managed to achieve when others have done so much more?" And sometimes, yeah - you hit a rough patch and don't make a ton of progress. But I think more often than not, what you'll find is that the people who achieved that thing you call success were willing to pay a price that you *weren't willing to pay*. And while hustle-culture bros will tell you you've gotta learn to pay that price, I have a different message for you: Knowing what your boundaries are is more valuable than almost anything else in the world. Understanding what you will not do and why, and having the integrity to live up to those values? Yeah, it will often cost you. But in the long run, knowing who you are, and what you believe in is a really difficult, often very expensive thing to learn. That's *character*. That's *integrity*. That's your *soul*. Don't trade it for anything.

I genuinely can’t tell if I think this post resonates because it’s true, or because I want it to be true. I feel like this fits me, and I think of my strength in a collaborative team as someone who is able to deal well with strategy. But it’s also one of those things where “Is this who I wish I was, or who I am? I dunno.” Unprofessional? Certainly … not very good at it. Contrarian? Very yes. lol. Bad with detail? No - I just leave the detail to the experts. That’s the nature of *proper* collaboration. Action-oriented? Yeah. Moving is the best way to figure out if you’re moving in the wrong direction. But I think one thing that’s missing from this is “generalist”. You have to know a lot about everything involved in what you’re building to properly assess risk and determine order, both of which are vital to sensible strategy.

You know what’d be better than private equity bullshit like Embracer Group? A group that buys and saves teams like Tango or Arkane from the reaper and funds them to stay together and keep making great stuff. Instead of buying obvious successes and then destroying them, as Embracer has done to massive financial failure, they could have “bought low” AND saved a bunch of talented teams and probably reaped massive profits in the process.

Dear colleagues who have been through #layoffs in the #gameindustry … As you look for a new job, consider the longer view for a second. It’s not pretty. A lot of these layoffs have happened for incredibly cynical reasons - protecting stock price after record years & garbage like that - but if you look at the future landscape for games, it looks awful. I know it’s an industry that’s growing, there’s tons of money in it, etc. but it’s also an industry where discovery happens through really limited channels, and all of those channels are *violently* saturated. How do you get an audience for your new game when there are a hundred new games a week you’re competing with? How do you get an audience when most of that audience is playing and spending on games like Fortnite and GTA Online that they’ve been dedicated to for *years*? Where that game is the basis of their online community? And when that game is where they dedicate the *vast majority of their available time*? You’re competing against more, higher quality, innovative, interesting, ambitious games than ever before for an ever-decreasing slice of an ever-increasingly competitive pie. I haven’t even considered building a game for entertainment purposes since the end of 2016. It’s not that I don’t have ideas for games that would be fun, it’s that I have no concept of how to even have a marginal chance at sustainability that doesn’t look like it has the same odds as playing the lottery. Now, if that sounds awful, it is. But there is a bright side: If you are a laid off game developer, you are someone who’s likely collaborated with a huge range of disciplines on high-stakes creative projects. That skill is valuable all over the place. Every artist in the game industry benefits from the way they’ve had to work with technical and product folks. Every discipline benefits from this exposure, and if you do it well, this is something that is beneficial in *every role you will ever have* in *any* industry you can work in. Game designers! You are *product designers*. You are *experience designers*. You are among the best equipped product designers that have ever existed. You understand player psychology and motivation, reward, how to iterate and test your ideas, how to use data to inform (but not drive) decisions. You understand how to use art *and* technology synergistically to get people to do things you want them to do and make them love it in the process. That is every single product designer in every single industry’s apex aspiration. So here’s my suggestion: The game industry is a mess. Between it being a massive red ocean of an increasingly-impossible marketplace, and the people driving the business and leadership side of things showing themselves to be incompetent, inhumanely mercenary, or both… Get out. Continued in comments…

Doing a really simple project in VR in Unreal just to get back in the swing of things. Basically just an array of colliders that cast out in front of you, and anything they hit makes noise. Left/right is stereo separation, up/down is pitch, but in discrete chunks so it's not just a wall of noise, and close/far is amplitude. It should be a trivial project, and I'm curious if it can be useful in some way - basically audiovision. I'm curious if you can tweak the number of colliders & tones and other parameters to turn vision into parse-able audio in a way that you can learn to understand. Of course, running into my first problem is that it's been years since I've done anything in Unreal, UE5 is pretty different from UE4, and parking something in front of the HMD in the VR Pawn has left it invisible, unless it's 1530+ units away from the camera. At 1540? Visible. 1530? Not visible. ?!?!?!? Ah, what a way to spend a morning.