Founders as Game Designers
About 7 years ago I attended a hackathon to make a game in a weekend. This was part of the circuit of hackathons I used to go to for the free food when I was funemployed in Richmond during late 2015. Scrounging for a living, it made a lot of sense to live on pizza and raid the free food at these events and maybe build something cool while doing it.
They called it the Global Game Jam and Surj + I showed up to the event without any sort of concept. At the end of the weekend we had built something spectacular that wowed the judges.
I’m talking about the mythic Emoji Ouija board:
Neither Surj or I can code. Or if we do, it’s absolute crap. We went in with our eyes + hearts wide open, coming up with a list of 100 ideas of games to work on. After realizing that everyone had already formed teams, I thought quickly to myself: let’s take advantage of the skills we have and make a board game.
We jetted over to HackRVA, our beloved local hackerspace and quickly had mocked up and laser etched a prototype Ouija board to test on. We brought back the game at the end of the weekend + with a quirky presentation, got an honorable mention.
The experience of building a board game in a weekend caused Surj + I to launch Aileron Games (Slippy do a barrel roll!) and create a number of fun games in 2016 like DNA chess, Haggler’s Den, Feynman Flow, Punbearable and more. None made it out of the testing phase to a full launch but it taught me the principles of game design.
Come to think of it, I’ve always been a gaming geek. Whether it was wandering away from my mom at 3 years old in the mall to the local Games Workshop, hanging out at the Lucky Frog (RIP) playing Counter Strike LAN games, or watching my friend Kyle play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in his basement, I’ve been fascinated with game design and mechanics.
One of my first internships was with an educational gaming company called GameDesk that used things like the Muse headset to promote mindfulness training for middle schoolers. The use of novel interfaces and the new game mechanics brought about by these interfaces has been endlessly fascinating, especially as it reflects upon the human condition or creation of new knowledge/experiences (I’m looking at you Cards Against Humanity). I even dabbled a bit with a drone racing league in Richmond, VA, purchasing the website dronegno.me. More recently I’ve been tracking the work of some folks out of the AR House in LA that have been using AR headsets to come up with sports games.
Animals learn through play. From baby lion cubs to octopus, play is a wonderful way to approach any new topic. As Jane McGonigal says, “Playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” In essence, it’s training and “purposeful play builds self-confidence and real-world problem-solving skills.”
Games are incentive-based learning. When you master a game, you enter a flow state where you lose track of time and end up accomplishing quite a bit. I love RPG and strategy games. I’ve spent over 50+ hours on Skyrim, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Total War. Each of these games has taught me quite a bit about incentive-based work and how this might be applied to our lives.
Habitica is a really good example of one of the ways this could be applied personally, a game in which you “level up” your life like an RPG. You create your own goals, break down the way you train and accomplish tasks and get rewarded by in-game loot.
When thinking about this as it applies to business in particular, I’ve begun experimenting with a number of things at Spira.
One of the main things is a solid understanding of a leveling system + how this relates to your role. There’s a lot of confusing and misunderstanding of how to receive a promotion and the salary associated with your role in companies. I want to completely dispel the confusion around compensation by providing a similar in a way to Buffer in how they opened up their compensation structure. Having a clear picture of your “level” and how you can train to level up is really key. Lincoln Electric does an excellent job at this by rewarding certain certifications and bonuses if you’ve received training in a particular topic.
For example, what we do currently at Spira is hire as consultants, then part-time, then full-time, then add benefits, then add equity, then promote. This means that you always have some kind of incentive to growing in your role and demonstrating follow-through on responsibilities.
The second way I’m planning on having us go about “leveling” people up is by having tracks in which someone can advance in their titles. That means going from Apprentice to Associate to Research Scientist I, II, III then Director, then Head then VP then Executive. That way you’re always advancing depending on what kind of skills, accomplishments and effort you demonstrate.
The key to these kind of roles is follow-through on certain metrics. If you’re in a game that means leveling up certain stats. In the real world that might mean completing a certain number of experiments, sales calls, customer support tickets, etc. You also need to understand certain skills and topics before advancing otherwise it’s quite difficult to have in-depth conversations about those topics. I think the best companies also serve as educational institutions for their personnel. The kind of training you get on-the-job is project-based and directly aligned with performing solid work to follow through on goals and objectives.
There are challenges in setting the proper metrics and compensating properly. We do this right now for consultants by doing incentive and deliverable-based payments. This sets a certain bounty for each task and then pays on the basis of completing those tasks.
All of these incentives enable really solid alignment of the team and a good understanding of how to grow/improve in the organization. The speed at which people learn is dependent on effort, not on politics, and compensation is incredibly transparent.
I aim for our company to be employee owned and operated with these kind of incentives being pre-determined so that it’s as unbiased as possible. This is to create and build the “game” of Spira so that we truly enjoy playing it, learning and growing.
