BigPark was a Vancouver game studio started by two people who had run large Electronic Arts studios. They knew games. I brought the web and user experience, which BigPark did not have yet. The idea was to be the best fifteen minutes of your day.
In 2009 Microsoft bought the studio and gave it a new job inside Xbox: work out what Kinect, then called Project Natal, could be. A camera instead of a controller. I did not invent any of that. I got to work inside one of the most interesting periods games has had.
A level is a lesson plan.
What I learned there shaped everything after it. A rubric for teaching something is a level design. Pacing a game is pacing a lesson. Put that next to human factors, information design and how people move through a screen, and you can design the way people learn their way into anything. It is still the lens I use most.
I brought the team to Redmond to watch people play: the first minutes after switching on, and people in their own living rooms. Microsoft had done this for years. For our team it was new, and it changed what we built.
Some of what we found was physical. Ask someone to spin a car in front of a camera and you get nothing repeatable. Ask them to run and they run on the spot, or lunge, or invent something. A gesture is only natural if it is already a gesture. Anything else is a combination of buttons, memorized with your whole body instead of your thumbs.
Research Microsoft commissioned showed something bigger. Xbox had aged with its customer. The player who was eighteen when the console launched was now a parent, playing for an hour a couple of times a week after the kids went to bed. A game held forty to sixty hours. At that pace you finish two or three a year.
Xbox was built for people who play to win. Wii was built for people who play together. Each was true to its brand, which is why neither could easily take the other's customer. What I argued for was games night. Play with the kids on Saturday and you earn the hours for yourself during the week. Families buy the titles they play together, and the parent finishes more of their own.
Not every argument went my way. Joy Ride was built as an arcade game with a controller before it moved to Kinect. I argued for keeping it an arcade game, and the decision went to Kinect. A launch title for new hardware is worth a great deal, and I understood why.
Then a two-dollar cable undid a decision worth millions.
Joy Ride shipped with Kinect in 2010. Chapter one came on the disc. The rest came through Xbox Live. On the original Xbox 360, the one most families already owned, that meant a network cable. Another department had taken the cable out of the box to save margin, a sensible decision on its own terms.
So on Christmas morning a family unwrapped it, played a taste of it, and found they needed a cable they did not own. The path ran through a drive to the store, and maybe never back to chapter two. Our part was done. Nobody was wrong. Nobody owned the whole path from the box to the first session.
That is still the job, as far as I can tell: not product, engineering, design or the commercial side, but the path between them, which belongs to no one and breaks in the gaps.
After the acquisition the studio stepped back from the web and social games, which was where I believed games were going. The work I wanted to make no longer fit.
When Microsoft bought BigPark, our equity became Microsoft stock on good terms, vesting in year three. That was the retention plan. I left before year three, and left most of it behind, to build something that gave families more time together.
The best fifteen minutes of your day was still the idea. It needed somewhere else to live.