My last job was running GameLayers, building social games in Firefox and Facebook. We didn't manage to sustain our studio with successful games - I'll be sharing some of what I learned during a March 11 session at the upcoming Game Developers Conference: "Fate of a Small Social Game Studio."

Fortunately, the people at ngmoco should be great collaborators and teachers. The company was founded by veteran executives from the console/computer game industry with a passion for innovative mobile gaming, the type afforded by devices like the iPhone. Right now ngmoco is one of the top iPhone game companies, known for experimenting with new business models and device-native game experiences.

Between 2000 and 2004 I wrote frequently about the potential for mobile games. For example:

3 January 2003 - Multiplayer - the Only Mobile Game

Single-player games are a waste of devices built for human communication (from TheFeature.com)

16 June 2004 - Mobile Entertainment: The Power of Play

Mobile entertainment serves a critical social function -- it will teach us how to be connected citizens (from TheFeature.com)

I took a few years off from the mobile game industry to go to graduate school, and to run a social games startup. Now I look forward to helping ngmoco make a connected social future of fun!

As I started this process, I was still caught up in my startup. Most of the time GameLayers was five people. We shared a lot of responsibilities, and as CEO my roles included investor relations, team cheerleading, public relations, evangelism, new product development, strategy, product management. Also taking out the trash and booking plane tickets, arguing with the landlord. So, for a formal, larger corporation, what roles was I ready for?

My ready answer was “I get excited about things and I share my enthusiasm.” Between writing, speaking, or building a game out of the entire internet, most all of my professional work comes from sharing what I believed. Most of my profesional beliefs can be summed up in two sentences:

• the internet will become better as a wider range of people participate in it
• games and play can facilitate social interactions, teaching us to be better 21st century humans

So now I wonder, what can I do to facilitate the further evolution of these beliefs? GameLayers did not turn out to be a sustained long-term business. So I would like to learn how sustainable businesses are made - ideally businesses that work to increase the range of participants in online sharing and entertainment. Any idea that I have, or any idea I want to support, I would like to be able to support the idea as well as the people who contribute to the idea and need to feed their families.

So it's both sad and inspiring to see him wrestle with new pain and priorities. Sad because he's beginning an uncertain future within his body. Inspiring because its Howard and his irrepressible spirit is already filling the channels with what he's learning about himself and beyond.

I helped him set up @rheingoldsbutt on Twitter and Howard's Butt on Tumbler. He's using online community tools to update people on his progress. What else would you expect from the guy who set up the social media classroom?

What does Martin Luther King mean in 2009? Community service is a good start:

My uncle has been scanning family photos and sharing them with us. Today I found this photo of me in the pile, I think this is from my early glasses-wearing days, probably 1981 or so :-)

I started a personal web site here jeez like sixteen years ago. It seems dated to have a weblog! And write long things, expecting people to pay attention to them.

So I went looking for inspiration - people who have compelling personal web sites in 2010. I found Matt Haughey still maintains a nice, active personal site. He introduces himself in a friendly way, provides updates from his various streams, and the site is not too crazy or cluttered. Not too bad considering his archives go back ten years now!

I just installed Movable Type 5, because it will output hard files each time I write a blog entry. Hard files fit better with years of online publishing slag in my archives. Now I've got to figure out how to style this site, maybe using a slideshow in Japanese, maybe just using some elbow grease and HTML tables!!

So this is to thank Matt Haughey for some inspiration. He's going through a medical excitement recently, so it's great that he continues to share himself graciously with the web.

UPDATE 8 January: Besides his personal site, Matt has done some innovative web business work. He started a topic-focused weblog, PVR Blog, about Tivo-type technology, and he shared some lessons on fortuito.us. Fortuitous is good reading for independent web business work; now dated for 2007; fortunately his topics and advice are evergreen. And, he's the founder of MetaFilter a sustainable, content-rich online community. Good stuff, online!

Every day we worked on games. Our goals changed from grow fast and raise money to hunker down and earn revenues. We launched three products during 2009: a rebranding of our Firefox toolbar game and two games on Facebook. To stay alive, we tried paycuts, layoffs, and insufficient attempts to make money fast online.

GameLayers was profoundly engaging employment. I am grateful to my teammates, investors, advisors and customers for their patience as they showed me how to be a better leader. I was fortunate to work with so many smart people who wanted to make a game out of the web.

By the end of 2009 it was clear that GameLayers wasn’t earning enough revenue to keep employees. After exploring investment and acquisition options, we elected to leave our game The Nethernet up and running as Merci and I begin 2010 looking for new employment.

Midway through 2009, we moved into a larger apartment in the Mission District/Noe Valley, San Francisco with our brother Justus. Good times, great eats! We hosted a number of family gatherings at our apartment, a few lit by the wide smile of our new niece Francesca.

We saw the four seasons, the five elements and the corpses of large seals as we ran with Pixley on the beach at Fort Funston, just south of the city. Merci, Justus and I swam in a cold Pacific Ocean there during the fall. Merci and I drove north of the city to eat oysters and enjoy the coastline in Sonoma and Sea Ranch, California.

By December 2009 we were no longer being paid by GameLayers. We cashed in frequent flyer miles for a belated honeymoon to Thailand. We intended to travel the country seeking adventure. Instead we ended up spending two weeks on a small tropical island reading, sunning, swimming, diving, eating, sleeping and being massaged on the beach. We pleasured ourselves like love tycoons at a beautifully reduced rate, creating a fond sense of our compatibility beyond our time working together. Hurrah!

During our honeymoon, I had a chance to read, mostly speculative fiction: Orphans of Chaos series, Mistborn, Collected Works of Lord Dunsany, I Martha Adams, Sarsen Place, Blind Assassin, Pillars of the Earth, Mordant’s Need Series, Tom Clancy’s Net Force. At home, during 2009, I completed Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Far Cry 2, Lego Batman, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Fallout 3, Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Beatles Rock Band, Borderlands, Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, and GTA Chinatown on the Nintendo DS.

2010: I am catching up on games, poking at projects, exploring opportunities - figuring out what I need to learn next. And I’m dusting off http://links.net/ as a means to experiment with the web. Enjoying my fantastic friends and family and wonderful wife. Exciting times!

(Year in (p)review - thanks to Randy for the prompt, including last year 2008/2009).

I wrote up a bit about the path GameLayers took to get to Dictator Wars on the USC IMD site.

I was able to contribute a lot of writing to Dictator Wars - it was fun to exercise my fingers again. I hope you like it!

I had a quick trip to the UK to meet with Duncan. My return trip was my first international trip in about five months. I realized, as I was leaving the customs area: I couldn't see George Walker Bush's picture anywhere, grinning at me, to welcome me back to America.

I paced back and forth along the back wall of the LAX customs area. I couldn't see any picture of Obama. I asked a security guard, "Don't you have the President's picture on the wall?"

He gestured at the wall further down - there it was. Barack Hussein Obama's picture smiling at me, to welcome me back to America.

I became excited. "That's Barack Obama! On the Wall!" At first the guard didn't seem sure if I was allowed to walk along the back wall of customs. The he relaxed, "Yes."

I smiled at the wall for a moment, and resisted the urge to wait for my iPhone to boot up to take a picture.

2007

proposed to Merci
graduated from Graduate School
founded a company based on my thesis
moved to East Oakland.

2008
Saturday 7 June we were married (3:45pm 06/07/08)
Monday 9 June we moved from East Oakland to San Francisco
Tuesday 10 June we secured a round of funding for our company

2009
make the best game of the internet
love my wife on the daily
walk on the beach with mah dog

(thanks to Randy for the prompt!)

Fifteen years ago, my web site looked like this.  Today, there's a lot more links, everywhere!  Internal, external, updated passively and actively - there's just more digitized data permeating our lives.

When I started writing I wanted to find a place for myself in the world.  I wanted a mate, I wanted to work with passionate people, I wanted to explore computers and publishing.  Those things have come to pass, I need to find new things to write about 

So just about nearly all of my creative energy these days goes into my job.  I'm fortunate because I'm working with fantastic people, and the work we do touches on very deep questions I've had for a long time: how do we make hanging out on the internet more fun?

In 1994, I thought "fun on the internet" meant trading lively fun links.  Because there was fascinating stuff popping up in the corners of the web, and no way to search, and no one to tell you what was recommended(only NCSA telling you what was "new").

Now I have a Twitter client open to hundreds of lively minds I follow, and these folks send out < 140 characters a few times a day, and I can harvest fascinating articles, awesome helpful tech, the most artful distractions from the links they find remarkable.  I have access to millions of web jockeys who curate links on thousands of subjects.  Most every publication I want to read is on the web somewhere.  It's a fantastic sea of information. Finding fun on the internet is not so much of a problem; making time for fun might be.

I'm not sure the world overall seems happier now than it did when I first encountered the web.  Is all this online communication bringing us closer together, with more understanding, more access to knowledge, more evolution of ideas?  Maybe we haven't quite arrived at cyber-utopia; it's nice to still have something to shoot for.

These days I'm shooting for immersive social fun across all of human information on the internet.  It's an experimental Firefox toolbar we've been working on for almost three years.  We call it PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.  And it's just the sort of boundary crossing I have found so exciting working with media.  Telling personal stories on business machines? Using the internet to trade endless pictures of cats and captions? Using all this nuclear failsafe network tech for idle human expression?

Hell yeah!

So it's exciting to find another media boundary to cross: what do you mean, surfing the web is a game?  Well, computers can quantify stuff, so let's take computer brains and hook them up to the work we do sifting media to entertain and educate ourselves, so we can start to keep some scores, and then we'll use game dynamics to link ourselves up socially with other folks, and now suddenly the web has another layer of reality and excitement on top of it.  A game layer!  A game layer on top of our ongoing lives!

Why bother with games? Spend a long weekend with extended family and try earnestly expressing yourself the entire time. See if someone doesn't suggest that trivia, property-trading, word hunting or card matching would be a better use of time.

So next time you stop by this weblog, and say, hmm, man, Justin used to be a lot more interesting when he wrote more about his life online, visit http://pmog.com/ and play the game that is like I'm writing my life online, except it's happening right now, and you're a part of it 

(to be sung like the 2/3rds the chorus of "do your ears hang low")

how do I post from my phone,
how do I post from email,
how do I include fresh photos
and run "mylife -tail"

For a few years I wrote letters to myself on my birthday.  Hello, here's what was happening to me.  I did this on my public website, since that's where I addressed myself most other days of the year.

Now it's been a few years since I've done that kind of writing.  I foreswore deeply personal exploration for internet publics so I could instead get to know a local individual better.  That worked out quite well.  My days are hugely exciting, exhilarating, charged with companionship and focus.

Online personal record keeping has become epically widespread and popular.  There are so many ways to chronicle your time on Earth using the internet.  I've put this page together to pull together a few of the information streams emanating from my life into a single place. Plus, I look forward to an empty text box, that I might upload parts of my brain - there are some things I would occasionally like to remember with my fingers!