On Birthday Thoughts

Having marked another Birthday this past week, I've done some thinking. The past two months on Twitter have really changed me as I got involved with my petition and advocacy for gamers. I found that I really enjoyed it.



I enjoyed it more than what I was currently doing. Which was an interesting observation which made me ask some hard questions about my life. Why was I happier with League For Gamers and advocacy on twitter than I was making games?



The truth is I've become a little disenchanted with making large-scale commercial games. When I started many year ago, we made games for the pure joy of it. There were no expectations of profit, deadlines and business. When I became a CEO, I also realized that the day to day duties of being a CEO took me away from actually making and designing the game itself. Also, the pressure for commercial success also meant avoiding exploring some of the more experimental aspects of game design that I wanted to see happen.



So, I've decided to pursue a few new initiatives. One is spending more time on League For Gamers to make it a formidable consumer group for gamers and aspiring developers. I love teaching people about games and the business and we really need more help to put positivity back into gaming. I think LFG can do this if it gets enough time and attention and resources.



The other will be developing a couple non-gaming mobile projects I've had in my mind for a long time. I'm not ready to announce these yet, but some of you on Twitter have heard some of the questions I've had about distributed software and sharing-economy applications.



Last, but not least, I will be creating some gaming experiments on the side. Partial ideas or sketches that I intend to release for free to the gaming public. But this will be my hobby, not my business. I don't want commercial pressure for these experiments, and I want them small and simple enough that I can explore them largely on my own. Again, these experiments will be made free to gamers.



The current commercial game project, Voxelnauts, I leave in the hands of the very capable team. They have been driving the process for the past couple of months and I'm sure will do a great job going forward.



Meanwhile, I've already started gunning the engine on @League4Gamers and also started on a simple game framework for some of my future, non-commercial, experiments. I hope you'll join me in these new initiatives. All I promise is a fun ride.

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