A design analogy for being a little kinder
My gym is undergoing renovations—they took over the lower level and moved the front desk downstairs, and added a staircase that runs up through the middle of the upper level. The strange thing is that to get to the locker rooms, you have to walk upstairs and then across some open gym area where people…
Leadership Styles and How to Put Them into Practice [Roundtable Notes]
Hi friends! I organized another series of leadership roundtables through Game Dev MTL this past summer, and wanted to share the notes here. This is article 1/3, others will be posted soon! I learned a lot from the session, hopefully these notes will help you learn too! Leadership vs Management? Pretty quickly after the round-table…
How to Interact With Us: Onboarding Tool to Facilitate Communication
Team communication issues often come from differences in how people communicate and how people want to be communicated with. This can be cultural, personal preference, or forged by previous work experience. Either way, every team member has specific ways that they like to interact, receive feedback, and collaborate on tasks. When discussing our approach to…
Learnings From Our Most Recent Hiring Experience (2024)
Hi friends! I’m back with another blog post about hiring—we recently hired a wonderful artist and wanted to share the experience in the hopes that either employers or folks looking for work can learn something from our process. We were looking for a UI & 2D artist who could do a wide variety of things…
Hiring & Onboarding – [Notes from 2023 Roundtables 3/3]
Hey folks! Anoter leadership roundtable organized through Game Dev MTL discussed hiring and onboarding. Here are the notes that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (shared publicly with their permission). Note that some information here may be missing the context of the in-person conversation, but I still think they can be helpful. Roundtable…
Feedback, Reviews & 1:1s – [Notes from 2023 Roundtables 2/3]
Hi friends! The next set of leadership roundtables organized through Game Dev MTL discussed feedback, reviews and 1 on 1 meetings. Here are the notes that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (shared publicly with their permission). Note that some information here may be missing the context of the in-person conversation, but I…
Designing & Maintaining Company Culture – [Notes from 2023 Roundtables 1/3]
Hey y’all! I organized and led a series of leadership roundtables through Game Dev MTL, and wanted to share the notes here that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (with their permission). This is part of a series of posts from the various roundtables, and the information on these sticky notes of course…
Balancing Work Input and Output
Does work constantly get thrown at you, and yet you’re also expected to produce deep thinking work? Today’s blog hopes to explore solutions of how to balance these two things for you and your team. I was talking about work recently with a friend who is also in a management position, though not in game…
Armored vs. Daring Leadership in Game Development
At this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC 2023), I gave a micro-talk as part of a leadership seminar. My talk was about moving from Armored Leadership to Daring Leadership, a concept that comes from the great Brené Brown in her book Dare To Lead. In the talk, I looked at some common problems in game…
Measurable New Year’s Resolutions vs Seasonal Focuses
Many years ago, I started writing new year’s resolutions. I would write them, forget about them until December 30th, and then judge myself based on whether or not I had done the things on my list of resolutions despite never having looked back at them throughout the year. Just like everybody else. This was… not…
Reducing a $12 decision to 30 seconds
Apologies in advance that it will take you more than 30 seconds to read this blog post, but hopefully there’s something interesting in here. A couple of weeks ago, I received a new credit card for one of our employees at the office. They had barely used their card in the last year, and I…
COVID, Remote Work & De-Urbanization
Hi friends! Today I wanted to share a little thought I was having about people moving out of the city, and the potential that the COVID pandemic has created for de-urbanization. In my industry (the games industry), almost every company I know is switching to a hybrid model where desks are made available in an…
The Sphere of Consciousness
I’ve been redoing an introductory meditation course with a friend via the app Waking Up, where Sam Harris teaches mindfulness meditation. Despite starting meditation two and a half years ago, I find that it’s always nice to go back to the start with this kind of practice and I’ve found the Waking Up intro course…
Progress Comes Faster Than Expected
When you meet someone who is very knowledgeable about a topic or skilled at an activity, it’s often overwhelming to think about the distance between where you’re at now and where they seem to be. For example, if you struggle to exercise regularly (or at all), you might look at someone who runs 5k every…
Learnings From Our Most Recent Hiring Experience
Ah, the hiring process. Exciting, tiring, and fun. I thought I would share my experience of this round of hiring at our company, Clever Endeavour Games, in the hopes that readers might get inspired or learn something. The process is very far from perfect, and I’d be curious to hear any thoughts or improvements in…
Watering the Right Seeds
With all of the changes taking place in light of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s been pretty incredible to see the enormous capacity for good that humans can display. Free food distribution from restaurants, people volunteering to pick up food and essentials for others, free online workout classes, doctors and nurses putting themselves at risk and…
Sometimes It’s Just The Wind
Biking to work last week, I noticed that I was in a higher gear than usual and flying—it was super easy today. I wondered to myself if it was the fact that I had a better breakfast that morning, or that my workout the day before was in the morning and not too leg intensive,…
Rock Stars vs Superstars at Work
I started reading the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott after several team leads in the games industry mentioned it being the best management book they’ve ever read. There’s a section in the book about understanding what motivates every member of your team, and working toward managing with that in mind. She talks about knowing…
Two Problems with “Mark Unread”
If your job is anything like mine, you need to do deep concentrated work but you also have to be on top of things outside of your control, like responding to people and fielding tasks that pop up seemingly randomly. In my quest to become more productive and less distracted, I’ve been doing my best…
Work Hack of the Day
Mini work-hack! I guess some would call it a life hack, but I’m not sure it helps your life so much outside your work—and if your work is your life there are other problems to address. Anyway, I’ve been using this cool thing called AutoHotkey at work, which allows you to set hotkeys to type…
My Experience on the IGF Design Jury
I was on the jury this year for the Independent Games Festival design award, an amazing experience that made me rethink what good game design is, and what game design is in general. None of the stuff I’ll be talking about will reference games in any way that will divulge what games were played and…
On Setting Your Baseline
The conversation started when discussing gym membership prices with my brother. I’ve been going to EconoFitness, a budget gym downtown which sees approximately 3000 people trying to work out on any single piece of equipment at one time. I’m switching to another, more expensive gym, though still far from the expensive end of the spectrum.…
What Would You Put on a Billboard?
If you could put just one (non-commercial) quote, sentence, or idea on a billboard for the world to see, what would you write? This is a question that Tim Ferriss asks in almost all of his podcasts and I really like it. Some examples of quotes that I liked from his guests are below: “Do…
Catching Yourself
I’ve been rushing to get an American Dollar credit card by the end of the month in order to pay a US supplier on time, and finally I got a confirmation email today (the 29th of the month) saying that everything is approved, the card is ready. That is, the card will be ready after…
Modesty and Dangerous Perception Shifts
As you gain experience, your perception of your position and other people’s perception of your position change. For the most part, this experience is incredibly valuable and you could surely impart wisdom to newcomers if asked. But with that experience comes an inevitable perception shift, one that I argue can be dangerous and fought back…
My Ride to Conquer Cancer Experience
As you may know, last weekend I embarked on a 200km long bike ride to raise money for the Segal Center at the Jewish General Hospital here in Montreal. If you’d like to hear the cancer stories that fuelled the ride, check out my rider page here. Around 1150 riders combined to raise $4.2M for…
A First Short Story
Hey friends! I’ve just started the Neil Gaiman MasterClass on storytelling, and it’s fantastic. In one of the lessons, our exercise was to write a short story based on some instructions. Knowing the instructions before you read will ruin the story, so I’m going to put the instructions at the end. Enjoy! — From the…
Thoughts and Questions From C2 Conference
Hi friends! Last week I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the C2 conference here in Montreal (Creativity + Commerce, as I found out it was called once I was already there). There were a lot of cool things to see and do, but I wanted to talk about some of the inspiring…
Reflections on ‘Sapiens’
It’s been a while since my last post! I’ll try to get on it more often. I guess that’s more for me than it is for you, but oh well. Now you know that I’d like to blog more often. Today’s post is a reflection on the book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. This book…
Tough Questions to Improve Your Leadership
A few weeks ago was the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. GDC is where a bajillion (I think that’s the official figure) people talk about games for a week, and we get full of knowledge, tons of new contacts, inspired and tired. I was fortunate enough to give a talk at this conference called…
How Did My 20 Year Old Self Think My 30 Year Old Self Would Be?
A good friend of mine asked me this question today, on my 30th birthday. Still weird to write that I’m 30, especially when I often feel 12. But this question was an interesting one, and while I can’t know exactly what I was thinking, I have some idea of what I expected and didn’t expect.…
On Death and Immortality
At the gym today, I listened to a Very Bad Wizards podcast about the fear of death, and about what it would be like to live forever, and I thought I’d share some thoughts. It’s a podcast that I absolutely love, with philosopher Tamler Sommers and psychologist David Pizarro, although sometimes you’d think their educations…
How Does the Future of the Streamer-Developer Relationship Look?
In our sprint meeting this past week, the question of paying streamers to play our game on Twitch and YouTube came up. It led to a longer discussion and brought up some important questions that I’d like to bring up here, and without trying to reach a conclusion, make people aware of the things we…
We Don’t Need To (And Can’t) Know Everything
Socrates said “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” There isn’t necessarily a universal truth for all problems. People have tried to find the “right” way to run a country or a nation, and we’ve come up with democracy, capitalism, communism, fascism, dictatorships, and more. Every time people thought they had arrived…
Wouldn’t it be nice to learn for a living?
I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast recently, and at the end he promoted his “five bullet friday” newsletter where he shares his five favourite things that he’s discovered during the week. These can be life-hacks, books, new strange things to ingest (supplements and otherwise), or whatever he feels like. That got me thinking:…
Some People Just “Have It”
I was speaking to my father last week about public speaking, and about the talk I’m going to be giving at GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) this March. I mentioned how there are some people who just “have it”, they speak and it comes out perfectly and everyone simply needs to listen to them. Then he…
The Opposite of Progress
In the last few years, I’ve seen countless examples of regression in social change and equality under the guise of progress. One that I saw this morning was so blatant that I needed to share it: This article in the BBC News came up, and is a complete failure in my opinion. The answer to…
Appealing to Commonalities
I recently listened to an amazing podcast with Joe Rogan and Jonathan Heidt which I highly recommend checking out. One of the topics that came up was how to fight the current sociopolitical climate and how to make real change, or rather how to get back on track to diminishing racism, sexism, and other forms…
Choosing Your Inputs and Avoiding Overwhelm
If you’ve read my blog recently, you’ll know that not long ago I discovered Seth Godin and his genius wisdom. At one point in his interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast, he talks about controlling your inputs in order to overcome a feeling of being overwhelmed. In fact, not controlling your inputs can lead to overwhelm,…
From Funnel Marketing to the Teacher-Student Dynamic
I wanted to talk today about two opposing concepts in marketing and how they might apply to game development. This article is strongly influenced by Seth Godin and I highly suggest reading some of his work (his blog, TED talk about the spread of ideas, his book “This is Marketing”, ) if you haven’t already.…
Richard's Blog 