(1)

When I started making flash games on Newgrounds (17 years ago!!!!) I learned a lot, very very quickly, because it was the first time I found myself in a community had a culture of honest, critical feedback, alongside the encouragement & joy of creating with others.

When it came to money, we had transparent post mortems.

The first stage was learning, "wait, you can make money doing this?". Then it was about best practice, "how to get the most money for your game", while the other side (those putting up the money) were discussing how to get the best games, for a fair price. Sometimes people got scammed, sometimes they scammed others & were shamed for this behavior & changed their ways and learned and everything got better.

What was happening was both (1) individuals learning and (2) individual's experiences collectively leading to a set of cultural norms/best practices that made the good outcomes be the default for more people, without them having to learn the hard way. Like creating "desire paths" in our behavior.

(2)

This changed for me when I did my first "really big" project. The fallout from it was too big, too embarassing, too painful, too traumatic, too expensive, too high stakes, to write a public post mortem and process "the trauma" (or just figure out what went wrong, what should have happened instead)

If we imagine a community's culture as like trails in the grass, this is like if there is one path that you take that you just explode at the end, and no footsteps remain. The only people who know are those that watched you firsthand, and even then, they don't see the full picture, just your side of the story.

This is, obviously bad. It stunts growth. It means the community can ONLY be healthy and thriving if it stays below a certain level of growth/resources/money going into its projects. And that anything that grows past that gets into very risky territory.

(3)

How do we solve this?

Fear not, for I have a plan.

It's really, really embarassing (and costly and risky etc) to be the only one who had such a massive embarassing failure and post mortem it. It doesn't matter if everyone else relates / has had the same problem. It's a tiny group of people who have been involved in "big projects" to begin with, so the general audience/community don't have a baseline of what is good and normal and what is bad shitty behavior. It's a good thing for the COMMUNITY if the individual post mortems this, but potentially catastrophic for the individual. So, we don't get to hear it.

But, what if we flip it? What if we can find skip the individual post mortem, and find the bad pattern ? Instead of talking about 1 specific case and the individual people and who acted in bad faith, what if we talked about things that are all true and concrete across THREE cases. Like create a hypothetical / story that is made up of true facts that all happened, but that doesn't refer to any one real human.

If you're a programmer this is like taking a piece of JavaScript code or w/e and making psuedocode out of it. So you can recognize how the algorithm would look in Python or any language once you see the pseudocode. It's easier to understand the algorithm when you abstract away the implementation details that don't matter.

(4)

Here's an example.

Let's say you work together informally with a friend to make a little flash game. And it gets on the front page, wins awards, makes money. Awesome! You think, what if we made this into a bigger thing?

Now it's getting serious. Now it's going from a side thing you spent a few hours a day on, and maybe a few weekends, to potentially a year or two of full-time work. There might have been a core group who did the work, but a dozen or so people who contributed from the community, gave feedback, helped out etc.

When serious responsibility comes, along with serious money, how do you allocate it?

I know of several cases like this, that have different endings. Let's look at a few cases, the following are all based on real true facts that I have witnessed.

Case 1: the game succeeds, but you don't pay people

• You work together on a game for years, it becomes a massive success
• At the very end, you push out your partner and pay him nothing

This is very bad because it's an enormous risk to your career if you end up the "pushed out" partner. The solutions are (1) sign formal paperwork upfront when you get into the next big stage of your project (2) tell the community what happened, so that he doesn't go and do the same thing to the next guy. Or sue him. This can be hard to do if you don't have money, but some lawyers may do it on "contingency" (essentially a cut of the profit) and there are loans for this (like they "invest" in the lawsuit so it's low risk for you. They buy your risk basically). You can probably come out ahead just by telling your honest story, and if you did good work, someone else will want to work with you and help you out.

Case 2: the game fails, BECAUSE you paid people/gave them power

• You work together on a game for years, it almost becomes a massive success
• Your partner is unable to handle the amount of responsibility. They were good in the informal setting, and the game wouldn't exist without them, but they crack under the pressure of the big thing.

In this case, everyone loses. There is no money nor fame to distribute. The correct thing to do in this case is (1) you shouldn't have given them responsibility / they shouldn't have taken it. You should have just paid them for the time they spent, and parted ways/essentially fired them (2) you should tell the community honestly what happened, so that he doesn't do the same thing on the next project.

We rarely do this - it's easier to get a journalist to write a big thing about how this big massive successful project didn't pay its people, than about how this project that no one has heard of failed because of someone's inadequacy / emotional immaturity. It's also like REALLY bad to label someone as "emotionally immature, do not hire".

And yet, as I'm seeing the history of this sort of thing play out over a decade for people I knew back then, I recognize now this would have been the kind thing to do. This person in case 2 who sabotages the project because of their emotional immaturity feels like a victim. They don't understand what happened. They go onto other projects, and the same cycle repeats: they have a really good time, they are really good at starting projects. They have amazing ideas, they can work VERY fast, they can really bring things to life. They have amazing vision! But when push comes to shove, when the money and responsibility comes, they don't show up. They don't know how to. They are scared. And people who put their neck out, or livelihood on the line with them end up getting burnt.

Good people get burnt when they trust other good people who are unaware of their flaws. And we all lose.

(5) - Conclusion

We need honest post mortems. Bad things will continue to happen (to us as individuals, to us as a collective/community) until we understand. It is difficult to look at these things. It is painful, it can destroy people's reputation, business, their place in the community.

But it can be done with grace, and know that it will hurt less doing it intentionally than looking away and having to find out the hard way. Or never finding out and living these cycles the rest of your life.