A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
dtransposed.github.io
dtransposed.github.io
Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that executives from Japan would come visit, we were expected to periodically stop working (programming) and carry papers to and from other cubicles and manager offices.
This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.
Like they’re fixing workplace culture by careening rotary aircraft around the room?
another way to make sure nobody gets hurt by the robots flying randomly around the space is to not set robots flying randomly around the space
Nowadays many organizations have overtime pay caps, monitoring, and enforcement/encouragements - e.g. MDM on laptops, SSO login histories, or by turning off lights and HVAC. It is improving at a rate and in that kind of spirit, perhaps just not using glass breaking drones.
In Japan, it's not about doing things in the most efficient way. It's about being on the same page as everyone else. The mindset is that even if this way is less efficient, if everyone does it the exact same way every time, you can guarantee quality and consistency. Hard work is also held in high regard even if it's dumb work, because you're signaling to everyone that you're a team player-- as opposed to a rockstar who wants all the credit and recognition.
The upsides to this are what Japan is famous for-- quality and consistency. It's why the train is always on time and the convenience store is always around the corner. The downside is that you're often punished for innovating or thinking on your feet. I personally think this is why Japan is famous for quality products rather than innovative ones.
ie It's important that the big bosses know who you are and think you are productive, and sometimes that means being less productive in order to show that you are productive.
It's always a good thing to strive towards (like achieving 100% or 0), but never possible. And class mobility (in both directions) is a great attribute to have - resists classes turning into castes.
"There will always be something to envy"
I'd compare it to multi-dimensional clustering analysis.
The company's business analysts started tracking everything in dashboards, including our Slack messages. Apparently they would pull up charts of things like messages sent by team or by person, and charts showing when people sent Slack messages.
They tried to claim it was just for fun, but then someone slipped up in a meeting and said that they didn't think a team was working much because their Slack activity was low.
After that, managers asked us to move more conversations into Slack channels, send morning and evening updates, break up long messages into smaller messages, and other things to get our numbers up. You could tell the managers hated it as much as everyone else, but I guess they were doing us a favor by telling us how to play the game.
Y'all should've written some automation to send random buzzword paragraphs and system diagrams at a regular, random cadence.
I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases, and your information is imperfect.
In a puzzle game, you can (generally) see everything, you know what you can see is 100% correct, etc. Games are like an idealised chunk of real life, not the other way around. And IMO that's by design, not some accident.
Not in my solitaire game. It actually shuffles the cards, dealing them rather than working backwards from a solution. I have been dealt games with no legal first move, and many more with only one or two dead-end moves. These deals have no possible solutions. Similarly, I have run across more than a few sudokus with more than one solution, meaning there is no actual final answer.
Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.
The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game, whereas the real world is full of it.
What about minecraft and other open world sandbox games? Sometimes you can play a story, but minecraft got succesful before it had anything like it.
Tetris is actually quite lenient in that regard. Mistakes are rarely fatal, you usually need to screw up pretty badly to find yourself in an unrecoverable situation. Generally, you lose by making mistakes at a higher rate than you can fix them. This is in contrast to games where you have a limited number of lives, famously a single one for Rogue, hence the term "Rogue-like".
And while Tetris have no "hard" ending, like many arcade-style games, at some point, it becomes effectively unplayable. Maybe that's what made it successful, it is an arcade game as much as it is a puzzle game.
Funny thing about this is how knowing these tricks completely change gameplay, and that everyone who knows always reserve up to ~15% potential for immediately presentable and tangible results, and it's naive hard working players who gets punished, and it has no promises that it always works, and that these facts adds so much Soviet-ness to the game!
This is the central theme in the Tetronimia (Tetris clone) description:
> "The only winning move is not to play"
And later:
> I don't like computer games. They:
> Steal your time
> Replace meaningful activity
> Show how easy it is to manipulate a human into doing silly things
> Deceive you into thinking you're in control
> Disappoint you in the end
> Tetronimia does all of the above. Nothing more. It's ideal. Did I mention you can't win?
I find video games to be like a job, but without the good part.
In my experience the dealing with managers is inevitably more than half the work (just trying to work around all the churn and uncertainty of the company).
NOTE: Shenzen IO is a video-game that lightly emulates a remote job as a hardware designer.
But you're right that what makes it a fun video game is that the problems are:
- Clearly defined - Well specified - Solvable - Known to be Solvable - Prioritised - Unchanging - Feedback is provided - Contains closure
None of those things applies to real-life, where problems are under-defined, under-specified, sometimes aren't even known whether they have a solution, and are subject to the whims and changing desires of product management.
And even if you navigate all of that and produce a solution, you often get little feedback, or indeed sometimes never get any closure at all. Sometimes the project gets sidelined and it never goes live or it goes live and you don't know if a single customer even interacted with it.
You have to learn to deal with all of that, which can be harder than the actual programming.
Most people who play the game seriously are part of a bigger organization, usually climbing the ladder by being trustworthy throughout the years. A lot of important things take place outside of the game itself, on Discord and sometimes even face to face.
The end game is basically you being able to effectively operate within an organization. I'd argue that's what most MMOs end game is at its core, but with EVE Online there's no sugar coating whatsoever.
Haha, no; at least not much more than regular work is - and it all depends on a particular workplace.
Can you have a peaceful on-site office job with lots of uninterrupted focus time and challenging and engaging tasks? Yes.
Can you have a miserable remote job with pointless meetings, deadlines, context switching and an overbearing meaninglessness? Also yes.
In my case, despite being a programmer, I am a creative type. I have found that I routinely need:
- 1-2 hours per week playing an instrument or writing
- A date with my wife that is scheduled like a meeting that I cannot ignore or cancel
- A secondary (or 3rd or 4th) project outside of work, where there is a clear goal and progress is measurable (indie game dev for me)
Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation.
I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.
A programmer is first and foremost a textsmith. They create increasingly complex textual creations, and develop a deeply refined, idiosyncratic toolkit over the years for doing so. No reason to strip them of their best toolset if you don't have to.
I think its a waste to get 10 engineers in the room to decide how to build a single module. That would be stupid.
But it likely makes sense to get a designer, an architect, and a product manager in a room. It might also make sense to get an embedded systems engineer, a cloud engineer, and a web engineer in a room to architect something.
Candidly, in my experience, the results of collaboration, a lightweight version of "design by committee," have always come back to bite in the long-run. Primarily the issues are: diffusion of responsibility and accountability (i.e., since we all came up with it, then if it goes wrong it was bound to happen and someone else is responsible for fixing it vs. if I came up with it and it goes wrong, it's all on me) and lack of cohesive vision (i.e., the designs and decisions made are incongruous and lack cohesive vision; they're the result of slapping together everyone's, one could argue what would be in isolation, good ideas, but without the necessary steps taken to connect them altogether in a proper fashion).
If we assume the latter, rather than the former, then all that's increased is the speed of sub-optimal processes. One could even go so far as to say it's mostly theater similar to having everyone in the office: the appearance of work is more important than the actual outcomes of the work.
When everyone's together it's very difficult to get a quiet moment to yourself to really think things through and plan things out thoroughly. Instead you default to a more social, collaborative process.
From my own career, I've found I don't need collaboration often. I trust my ability to gather all the information I need, deferring to and asking for the help of experts that know more than I do, while still having the good judgement to synthesize it together into a cohesive and practical plan. In other words the buck stops with me.
Quite typically, communication between all of the above parties is required quite often, as snags are discovered along the way and they constantly require re-working and tweaking the original concept.
The people that need to "get together" to share untested ideas so they can make a decision, or share analysis to provide evidence of the validity of a plan will do so without the engineers that do the work. There has to be someone there that has an idea of engineering or architecture, but not the whole team.
In other words, even just a product manager and a CTO or architect can figure out what needs done while not knowing the details of how it will be done, but then they'll pass that information on to the implementation team. Individuals are paid to figure out how and to execute on that.
On the other hand, WFH is the only reason I have any desire to do 10-11 hour days, because I genuinely like working but only from the comfort of my own home. Even when I was in high school I preferred to skip class to read the textbook instead.
btw, is your name a pun on "Home De_pot" ?
Maybe I should move to Finland. Here in Austria the norm is working in the office and WFH the rare exception.
"You have a list of tasks, and some are side quests! Sometimes you work more directly with coworkers, some are more solo!"
It's almost as if video games are modeled after life and work and "quests" just naturally have a lot of structure in common. ;)
(Most of the rest of the post seems worlds away from video game similarities, though...)
From my first job, I took the attitude of looking at work as a challenge I can take on and have fun doing it. For example "what can I learn / what experience do I need to level up to where my boss is" (then, repeat.) Or - "what hard puzzle/challenge can I take on that I don't know how to solve today?". Or "where can I position myself job-wise so I can learn the most?"
I find that this is both a set of questions that leads you into good places (you're constantly evolving) but also you frame it as fun. Someone else could approach the same situation with "I am anxious and I need to constantly sink or swim, how do I make myself crazy doing a bunch of work" and they'd certainly have less fun and perhaps not do as well.
One thing I find really interesting is how much better some are at games compared to real life. I guess that's because games are fast paced, so you are rewarded much sooner. Just planning and sticking to that plan can get people very far in reality too, but it's so much harder because it takes so long.
Working hard is not the same as working smart. That's kinda what I was hinting at. Many people are able to make much better decisions in games compared to real life.
If I somehow got enough money to where I never have to work again, I think I'd still do software engineering at a company, but I think I would stop focusing on how much I'm being paid, and more importantly, I'd stop being scared all the time.
I've been "laid off" (really fired) twice in the last year (and there's still time for a third!), and it's led to a near-constant state of fear on my end. Every time my manager schedules a meeting, I'm petrified that it's gonna be outlining the details of my severance and COBRA. Every night, I'm psychotically checking my email to make sure that I didn't forget some requirement that's going to piss off an executive. I'm constantly afraid to speak my mind at my job because I'm afraid that if I say something unpopular that it will be the final straw, and I'll be stuck spamming LinkedIn again.
If I had millions upon millions of dollars to my name, I think I'd have less anxiety about everything. If I get fired, who cares? If I get a bad review and don't get a promotion I want, no big deal. The job would be there to supply me with a stream of interesting problems, not an existential requirement.
ETA:
Just to be clear, my managers at my current job are perfectly nice, they've never done anything to make me feel like I should be walking on eggshells, I'm just dealing with some trauma.
It's just a tough market right now, it can take months to find another job, and feeling like you're unable to hold down a job is a decidedly un-fun feeling.
Maybe all the cryptocurrency that I stupidly decided to buy in 2021 will be returned to me and the value will make a comeback and I'll be able to avoid the paranoia, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38110059)
That's 10 hours a week saved. Basically, an extra weekend. The benefits for one's mental health and family or social life are enormous. Not to mention increased productivity and extra disposable income.
I think I'm qualified to know, as I spend way too much time playing video games.
It’s super annoying to hear the guy who always makes his team sound like they are inventing the iPhone each week, but it does seem to result in better promotion opportunities for that person (especially) as well as his team members (to a much lesser extent).
It does remind me of poorly designed quests where you have setup mini quests which do little aside from wasting your time, but are required if you want to succeed long term.
Given how much time and money is invested in things like Euro Truck and Farming Simulator, I have been silently awaiting the era where people pilot (real world) drones doing real world work, and pays for the privilege.
That's when it has gone full circle. I hope I'm still around to comment on it. I also hope pensions still exist so I don't need to take part.
on the "video game" aspect, I have noticed that it seems my generation has created (or at least embraced) a world much more akin to the video games we grew up with. I really like that.
Between gig work and waypoints on a map, its like all those open world video games
One time at Burning Man it really felt like Second Life, a game that I don't consider my generation and Burning Man crowd itself skews older
I like this direction of things
Man, that acid must've hit great
While I am a little skeptical of current-gen VR tech, it might be cool if companies in the future have custom-designed digital VR workspaces.
Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them.
While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun.
It's nice when your job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun.
For example, I went into coding because I liked it as an activity, but almost non of my workplaces had any tasks on the kanban board that I would ever consider fun, nor did I consider the whole Agile/scrum thing fun or the managemnt styles I was subjected to as part of the KPIs, but I stayed in the industry because it pays the bills not because it was very fun.
essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.
Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.
wheb I use cheatcodes it usually ruins the game for me (what is the point playing now that i can have everything)
It’s a shame I couldn’t cash all that digital money into real money, but I guess I did enjoy it anyway. I have the impression that people do similar things in games like Eve Online.
These are the actual comparisons:
> You interact with people from all corners of the world.
> You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.).
> You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)
> There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian, could you take a look at this bug?”).
> Sometimes you can gang up with your teammates to slay a big beast (“Hey, I have this nasty bug that I have been working on for the past few days. I know you have better knowledge of this particular part of the repository, could we jump on a pair programming session?”).
> And you get to level up once in a while!
Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase.
That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use.
Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.
If you flip it around to say "games are like working at a remote job", then the flaw becomes obvious. A remote job is not like playing all games – only the ones with activities that mirror what we already do in real life. Which is, ultimately, not a very interesting statement.
Jokes aside, video games are first and foremost things I want to spend time with, which is the opposite of most jobs. Catchy title but yeah =/
In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.
https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap...
who knows where the person you're responding to was living when they needed to farm gold to get by
Is that also not a privilege? In most developing countries people have to do much more body or mind crushing activities to support themselves.
What is a game? I would say that a game is an abstract system used to understand our reality (or experiences in life), via a series of interactive actions that alter the system. Generally there is a set of goals (usually just to "win").
I develop software because it's a game. I do watch a lot of progress bars. Aside from that, it's one of my favorite games (to my wife's chagrin). It's fun for me and I'm not the only one. Why does it matter that other people don't enjoy what they do?
> I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'.
Not to be argumentative, but I am sure you are. You are attempting to control state and then optimizing for a goal. There are constraints on your ability to manage your own mental and physical capabilities (knowledge, limitations, etc).
when defining something it's also pertinent to ask yourself what isn't included in that set.
what isn't a game in this case ? almost any dynamical system would kinda fit your definition. including turing machines.
to go the absurd length. If I identify as a vegetarian but mostly eat meat then what is that word even supposed to mean ?
words value in communication come from their discriminatory nature helping the listener filter the state of possible valid answers to smaller subset that what they started with. the more a word is stretched to includes the closer it comes to becoming a filler expression.
I've thought about it a lot. It's a definition that came from a psychology book and various definitions I've encountered over the years. Games teach us about reality, using an abstract set of rules. Anything you can interact with, to see what happens, in pursuit of a goal. When there's a finite set of outcomes, you can optimize, but for complicated systems that do not offer any amount of control, the game loses something necessary.
- when a lion play with its cub the danger of heavy injury and death is minimized.
- when you play chess there's no danger of you being beheaded due to a failed military strategy.
- when you lose at monopoly due to failure to grasp the nature of the game or your social skills you don't end up old and destitute as a result.
etc...
I think you should reconsider some of your life choices then.
You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun?
> job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun.
This is some of the worst advice I've ever seen. Those workplaces are not rare at all!
So instead of spending your life at a fun job your advice is for people to spend their life at a job they don't like? Jeez. That sounds like a life worth living for sure.
Most people I know never had a real choice, and those who did had to exercise it around the age of 18, with no real insight into what they were getting into.
> Those workplaces are not rare at all!
What makes you think that?
I've picked two jobs that I thought could be fun but both of them ended up being the same tedium as the non-fun jobs. How do you pick a fun job?
How to pick a fun job: my vote would be pick something that isn't excruciating and then stop wondering wether grass might be greener elsewhere.
Unfortunately, nothing is fun (for me) when done 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for months or years.
Not to say there aren't better or worse jobs, of course. But there isn't anything (including any of my favourite hobbies) I would spend that much time doing, if I didn't need to earn money.