Moving on from Betaworks Ventures

This past Friday was my last day with Betaworks Ventures. It's been just over six years since John Borthwick and Matt Hartman asked me to be the third partner in a new fund they were creating out of Betaworks, and saying yes to that was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I've loved working as an investor, but it felt like it was time for a new challenge and so a few weeks ago I let them know that I would be moving on. 

I'm really proud of what we've accomplished with Betaworks Ventures. The partnership I've had with John and Matt has been one of the most intellectually engaging of my career and I'll miss digging into deals with them and the team and debating what technologies are going to shape the future of how we live, work, and play online. I'm especially grateful for their friendship. John has been a trusted confidant and mentor for almost twenty years now (the story of how we met is worth reading -- it involves us being booed on stage) and it's hard to overstate the impact he's had on my career. I didn't know Matt as well before I joined Betaworks, but I immediately loved working with him, he's one of the smartest and most decent persons I know and I feel truly lucky to have gotten to spend so much time with him over these past few years.

There were so many other people from Betaworks, past and present, that I was so fortunate to work with that I'd like to thank, including Danika Laszuk (who I'd been trying for years to find a way to work with), Jon Chin, Julie Zhang, Nicole Ranucci, Josh Auerbach, Sam Mandel, Analisa Svehaug, Michelle Sommerfeldt, Ben Scheim, Jared Newman, Tyler Becker, Kit Irwin, Fahim Abouelfadl, Soren Wrenn, Patrick Montague, Ana Rosenstein, James Cooper, Dennis Cheng, Sarah McBride, Tommy Sullivan, and Kerri Donnelly. You all made my time at Betaworks so amazing. I'm sad to be leaving without having been able to see any of you in person for the past year and half since Covid put an end to my regular trips out to the New York office. I'll miss our games of Werewolf at Betaworks Studios!

I'd also like to thank all of the founders I was able to work with. I can't believe how many incredibly talented people I got to spend time with as part of my job and I'm honored to have been a small part of your journey. I'm still here if there's anything you need!

I don't have anything to announce about my future plans right now, apart from that I'll be taking some long overdue time off, but if you'd like to stay in touch I'm easy to find.

Metaplay, my new newsletter on social gaming

Despite my hesitation to commit to new projects at the moment, I’ve launched a new newsletter on social gaming called Metaplay. You can subscribe here if you’re interested.

My goal with this newsletter is to share semi-regular updates offering a mix of commentary and analysis, links, suggestions of new games to check out, the occasional interview, and screenshots of my latest Fortnite wins. To be honest I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the initial response to the announcement and my hope is that you’ll find reading this to be useful and worth your time.

So why a newsletter on social gaming and why now? Because social is eating gaming. Even though online multiplayer gaming has been around since forever, there’s something that feels different and new about what’s happening right now. Games are becoming more like places we go to spend time with our friends, not just things we do to be less bored. A year into Covid we’ve all seen now how valuable playing videogames together can be, not just as a form of entertainment when we’re stuck at home, but as a way to foster, deepen, and maintain friendships during a time when few of us, especially kids, have had the opportunity to do much of that stuff in-person.

I wrote about why games can work so well as social experiences a few months ago and won’t repeat everything I wrote here, but there a couple of key points about how social games served a crucial function during a critical time that are worth reiterating:

• What social games are able to do (and which virtual worlds that aren’t games largely fail at) is to replace the anxiety of unstructured and unbounded social interactions with a highly structured scenario in which we literally have something to do and rules for how we do it.

• Social games provide a space for what are often considered to be the four key elements needed for friendships to develop: Proximity, Frequency, Duration, and Intensity.

It’s not surprising that games that provide structure to our social interactions and satisfy these four key elements of friendship (like Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Rec Room, Animal Crossing, etc) have exploded in popularity during a time when we couldn’t see our friends IRL. Social gaming was already growing pre-Covid, so even if patterns of usage shift as we start to go back to our normal lives, I’m convinced that games will remain a primary place where a lot of us socialize with our friends from here on out.

Could Workgames Solve Some of Remote Work's Biggest Challenges?

I've been wondering if remote-first companies could use a video game that employees play together as a way to facilitate the kind of relationship building and culture development that can be tough to create when everyone's not in an office together. A lot of businesses had to transition to remote work this past year and while post-Covid most people will likely return to in-person work, we are clearly moving towards more remote-first and hybrid workforces. 

Could a workgame help a remote-first company recreate some of the social elements and serendipitous moments that are lost when you don't have everyone together in the same place? Is this even possible? I don't know the answer, but I have some thoughts on what a workgame might look like.

For starters, I've been thinking a lot about how video games can help us create and maintain friendships since that thread I posted a couple months back on social games and am curious whether a workgame could be designed to solve these gaps for remote-first and hybrid teams. 

What I'm not talking about:

• Turning work into a game or adding gamified elements like achievements or streaks to work

• 2D or 3D virtual workspaces. Apps like Teooh and Gather are definitely useful for virtual events and meetings, but they are intentionally not games.

• Video conference calls with party games or icebreakers, though these can definitely be fun and helpful.

No, what I mean is an multiplayer online game that employees play that functions as a space where people can spend time together, with the structure and fun of a game facilitating and underpinning those interactions.

There has been a small trend this past year of people playing video games together socially as part of their work, whether it's for networking, sales, team standups, etc. The New York Times wrote about this last year and I've been doing my fair share of this myself over Fortnite. It turns out that playing social games for work isn't all that different from stuff we did IRL pre-pandemic, like going out to lunch, playing golf, or going out for drinks after work. It's just that Covid forced a lot of us to look for online alternatives to what we did before -- and in the process we discovered that games could work surprisingly well for fostering relationships!

While there has been plenty of activity like this, what I haven't seen yet is anyone (at least that isn't still just a tiny startup) using gaming to try to accomplish this sort of relationship building across an entire company. 

So what could a workgame look like? To be honest, I don't exactly know, but here are some features I think it might have:

• First, the game needs to be fun to play and as immersive and engaging as GTA, Fortnite, or Minecraft. This is no small feat, but if the game feels like it's just another part of the job it will defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. (Sure, work meetings can -- and probably should! -- take place within the game, but it's primarily meant to be a space for creating social connections within the workplace, not a job in and of itself.) 

• Second, following from that, to encourage interactions the game needs to have a collaborative element or something about it that brings players together or gives them reasons to engage with each other (like a virtual economy or quest/tasks that need to be completed together). 

• Third, while the game needs to be fun, it can't overwhelm the work itself. That means no grinding or anything else that encourages people to spend time trying to level up in isolation rather than interact with other players. 

• Fourth, the game needs to be easy to pick up; starting needs to be simple enough for new employees to dive in. And if you want to drive more interaction you can design the game so that new players advance by learning elements of how the game really works from older players.

• Fifth, it needs to be a persistent gaming space or universe, one where team members can log in and expect to find others there already.

• Sixth, the game will have to appeal to pretty much everyone, since the point is to be inclusive and bring people together. This is probably the hardest part to pull off, since there are plenty of people who aren't interested in playing any game of any kind. (Something like Animal Crossing or Minecraft might have broad enough appeal, though personally I'd love to see someone create an MMORPG for companies.) 

• Seventh, each company needs to be able to have its own game world and the game likely needs to be customizable in different ways to suit their needs. Plus bigger companies will likely want different features than smaller ones. 

• Eighth, there needs to be single sign-on and other enterprise-level security and account management tools right from the start. Companies expect this stuff from day one now.

All of this is a tall order, and I'm sure there are other critical features I'm not thinking of, but as challenging as it would be to create something like this, the potential benefits are enormous. While the percentage of people remotely is going to decrease after the pandemic ends, a lot of companies are going to stay remote-first or hybrid going forward and the need for tools that can foster the right kind of company culture and team interactions is going to be huge 

Anyway, I would love to hear what others think about this, if anyone is experimenting with games at their company, or if you're building a workgame. You can hit me up here.

(And yes, I know that Slack started out as a game!)

The opportunity Nintendo is not taking with Animal Crossing

Last week Nintendo published new usage guidelines for Animal Crossing that make it expressly clear that you cannot use the game for commercial purposes, including marketing your business, selling custom designs, or earning ad revenue with game content. I can understand why Nintendo wants to prevent the game from becoming spammy or overly commercialized, but also feels like there is a missed opportunity for them to catalyze some sort of economy around virtual goods. Plenty of Animal Crossing players are interested in paying for stuff to enhance their gaming experience. To satisfy that demand a number of third-party sites like Nookazon have cropped up where they can go to buy furniture, clothes, art, etc. Fashion brands are experimenting with bringing virtual clothes to the game as well.

It's not surprising that Nintendo is being conservative about Animal Crossing going in this direction. They have tended to be relatively cautious about stuff that is outside of what they know well -- and they are the best at what they know well! It's entirely possible that they've issued these rules while they try and figure out how to best to allow people to buy and sell within the game. But in all likelihood this is more or less going to be the policy around commercial activity in the game going forward.

Eventually someone else will likely step into the gap Nintendo has opened up here and create a game that's a lot like Animal Crossing, but that embraces the virtual economy and encourages, rather than discourages, creators, brands, sellers, etc to participate. This will be harder than it looks, of course, as it's easier to add a virtual economy to a fun game than to add a fun game to a virtual economy, but I'm excited to see what ends up getting built here, and if you’re working on something along those lines, I’d love to hear from you.

Why do video games work so well as social experiences?

A version of this first was posted as a thread on Twitter.

Social gaming has exploded this year, which isn't surprising given how many people have been stuck at home due to the pandemic. I know for me it's been a great way to stay in touch with friends. But why do games work so well as social experiences? I have a few thoughts on this.

First, the numbers for social gaming have been staggering. Roblox did 150M MAUs in July, Minecraft hit 131M in Oct. Nintendo has sold over 22M copies of Animal Crossing. Fortnite crossed 350M reg users. Among Us has seen more than 100M downloads and nearly 4M peak concurrent players. Social games were already becoming an enormous part of our lives, and Covid-19 just accelerated that trend.

Why have social games proven to be so good at maintaining friendships during this time? Because the prospect of doing something fun together draws us in, while the structured play of the game organizes and facilitates our social interactions. This is because all games, whether they're video games, board games, or sporting games, are by definition constructed situations with conventions for how to interact that sit apart from regular life. 

What social games are able to do (and which virtual worlds that aren't games largely fail at) is to replace the anxiety of unstructured and unbounded social interactions with a highly structured scenario in which we literally have something to do and rules for how we do it. The game sets the stage for our interactions with others. When you play a social game there's typically no uncertainty about what you're doing in that shared space and there are rules to how you should interact. The game helps facilitate the act of being friends, so to speak. This isn't to say that abuse isn't a problem in online gaming -- it absolutely is. Every social game needs to very actively address this. And as social games become a primary place where many of us do our socializing it is critical that they be welcome spaces for everyone.

Social games work because they provide a space for what are often considered to be the four key elements needed for friendships to develop: Proximity, Frequency, Duration, and Intensity. Proximity makes it easier to see your friends and spend time with them. In real life friends tend to live close to each other, go to the same school, or work at the same place. Social games reproduce that proximity online, creating a space for people to engage with each other.

But proximity is not enough on its own. Friendship also needs both frequency and duration of interaction. It's tough to make a new friend or stay close with an old one if you only see or speak with them once or twice a year (which I can tell you as a 45-year-old, is something that can all too easily be the case as you start to get busy with your job and family). Social gaming can make it easier to increase both the frequency with which you interact with your friends (by offering an excuse to get together on a regular basis) and the duration of those interactions (because the games are fun to play it's easy to pass time quickly). 

Gaming also can offer a key element of intensity to those relationships. Playing games together creates shared emotional moments, whether that's a Victory Royale with your Squad in Fortnite or figuring out who the imposter is in Among Us. It's not just that playing a game together online gives people a space to chat about their lives. It's also how the gameplay itself offers a mechanism for people to engage with one another in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise. When you play a game with someone, you have a shared goal. You have a shared sense of purpose. You have a shared emotional investment in the outcome of the game. You have a shared emotional investment in the other players. What gaming provides is a safe framework for inducing emotional intimacy that mirrors the emotional intensity of the games that are being played. Without games we often don’t have a structure for safely experiencing those kinds of emotions with others in our daily life. 

It's also why "playing" often isn't the only thing happening in these games now. We're holding graduations in Minecraft, birthday parties in Animal Crossing, getting married in Rec Room, and watching movies together in Fortnite. Social games can help foster and strengthen our relationships so that we can have these kinds of experiences within the space of the game. None of this would be happening if the underlying games themselves weren't fun to play -- we need the magnet of compelling gameplay to draw us in -- but it turns out that the interactions that social games catalyze with our friends are often what we truly value.