Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Yes! AKA hash brown casserole :-)

My current game project actually harkens back to my GDC talk You’re Not Broken. Looking ahead at and then recovering from open-heart surgery is a great way to test out my game design theories and let my physical and mental experience inform my work.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWc...

Then I got lucky in a clinical trial and… here I am, still alive and cancer-free 🤞seven years later. I never imagined I’d be placing my bets on living to 75 or older. That’s still really hard to process—even harder than open-heart surgery!

I know how risky chest surgery is after the huge amount of cancer radiation treatment I’ve had. So yes, there’s some anxiety.

But there’s also joy and gratitude. For about 4 months in 2016, I had terminal metastatic lung cancer. I’d be lucky if I lived two more years.

Then the choice becomes more clear: delay the safer, easier TAVR and do the harder thing now, while I’m younger. If I have open heart surgery now, the mechanical valve will also eventually fail but at that time, I can still have TAVR.

So I’ll be having open heart surgery sometime in the next month.

My valve is not just abnormal but also small. When the biomed valve failed, I’d need open heart surgery. So the question becomes: how strong do I think I am now, how long to expect to live, and which procedure do I want to delay until the replacement valve inevitably fails: open heart or TAVR.

There are minimally invasive valve replacement procedures, that implant a biomedical valve with a lifespan of 7-10 years. That’s fine for the average replacement patient who’s 75… but not for a patient who’s 58.

It's a delicate balance for sure, but it's really important to learn how to walk the line between loyalty to your team, and respecting and carrying out direction that comes from higher-up leaders.

I did that on a particularly difficult project with a director who would put changes straight into the build without discussion, and also mandated many changes for the team to me. I learned you can be TOO MUCH of a human shield and the team feels like changes are random and there's no leadership.

It's tempting sometimes to present changes you disagree without discussion and a simple "it came from [publisher, execs] and we have to do it." Basically you're trying to be a human shield between the team and the whims of execs/publisher.

I promised to assess and share the impact on our schedule with [exec] and that I'd schedule check-in points, so we could demo it to [exec] before we'd made too much investment.

And then I made it clear by my own actions that we would work on the change with the same quality as if we agreed with it.

If they ask questions (which hopefully they do, you want a team that feels empowered at least to voice opinions), then I'd admit that I expressed similar concerns and that's why we discussed it at length. If someone on the team has an objection I hadn't considered, I'd raise that issue with [exec].

I'd usually say something like:

"Hey, this is a thing we need to do, coming from [exec]. I discussed it with them at length and the bottom line is that we need to add it to our plans and assess the impact so I can update [exec] on the cost."

Note that it's a "we'll do it" with some backstops.

Building on that foundation of trust, you need to deliver news of the change clearly and transparently, but in a way that doesn't mock or call out the leader who mandated the change. Explain the reasoning behind it. If you can't explain the reasoning, then go back to the exec and ask them.

The first step is the foundation: trust.

Your team has to trust that you have their backs, that you understand their work/goals enough to represent them, that you'll listen to their concerns and raise them with leaders, and that you would have argued against the change before it got to the team.