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peter-ino-salinas · 6 years ago

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The Rise & Fall of Nerd Kingdom

First, let me say, while I adore and appreciate so much the underground movement and support of the select few who have kept Nerd Kingdom alive in your own ways, as well as our work, thank you. In so many ways you will never know those few of you have kept me going on my own path today.

Second, anyone who was involved who is looked at negatively, you shouldn’t, they are all brilliant people, but brilliant in their own regard, we are human, people had the best intentions, but sometimes values can change and shift when elements are introduced that people do not understand, for better or worse.

If any of you are reading this who were involved in any politics with Nerd Kingdom in any form, know that I always look back and appreciate the things I learned from all of you. Even if I did not always agree, I could have done better to listen and understand. In spite of my own best intentions, I lost myself with so many divided agendas and for that I am sorry. One day I genuinely hope we can be colleagues again, in whatever form that may be.

Genuine Intentions

The earliest forms of Nerd Kingdom were not EXACTLY what it was at the time, but the motivation was quite the same. It was based on some VERY old academic work and mutual interest of my colleagues in various fields. It was very simple, young minds in a social environment with the correct tools have the capacity to advance upon and outmaneuver larger entities which are subject to walls they engineer themselves into. Neat.

In not so technical speak, it was about Modders and Gamers. That was is. We had a quantifiable understanding (creepy topic, different post) that young minds who were not beaten into accepting conventions would define worlds. As it happened, the worlds we cared about were games for all the nerdiest and still most scientific reasons. Early on we had a variety of ways to access data or work with modders, but it wasn't the same as what happened when we saw Minecraft VERY early.

Comically the way we raised money in the first place wasn’t even intentional, we were just a bunch of outcast nerds who were not always understood in Academia or “Business” and we called out some truths about it before it happened. It was simple “The slow nature of content creation in Minecraft will inevitably lead to someone decompiling Java, building various versions and we can correlate that to the rise and fall of any industry or business. And low and behold, what we predicted happened.

To be clear, while we had a more technical articulation, at our core, we were also very much like many modders and gamers, we were passionate hackers who were ignored by masses and still did things that were valuable to people, even if very often we were taken advantage of. Admittedly, some of us had a chip on our shoulder early, but we hid it well, myself included. Assuredly, that chip is now gone, I have you all and my own children to thank for that to force me to see who I was and people around me.

ALL THE MONIES!

We were asked what we would do if we had access to money given that we just proved MAGIC (which was sadly obvious from our views of things) and the natural response was “Create a platform to empower people to learn and play and connect while also identifying measurable patterns of interactions to determine how to teach people how to solve problems and turn them into engineers or better creatives”. As you can imagine, this was confusing. We took some advice from some “Business Folks” we met and this was awesome and horrible down the road, but one of our first curses, which was what we had to do.

“It's like Minecraft with Better Graphics and we have PhDs and stuff”

As you can imagine. All the monies. Its something a lot of us had a conflict with, it was never about MINECRAFT, it was about an environment to play and understand. The reason we actually built our own engine was that the engines in the game industry, even now, are not REALLY all that great at empowering creation, its an inherent flaw in their architecture. So we had to go back to basics... SIMULATION! It's all nerd talk, but it's simple. A simulation engine or simulation at all is simply a single structure of code that allows access to all parts of it. Wanna know what else was a simulation engine, sorta? Minecraft Java. It's not really... well, it's slower than we liked, so we built our own. Several times over in fact, and each time we managed to benchmark performance of various areas that would actually outperform commercial engines, even now.

This resulted in some strange divides, however, this whole “Minecraft killer” thing, gave me anxiety EVERY day and I did my best to try and curb that from a market perspective, but I am sure many people saw it as a sales guise. It wasn't, but I get it, this is what “Games” and “Business” does, so I cannot even be mad about it. But as a result we actually became amazing friends with many amazing influential minds in Minecraft as a community, though the members of Minecraft themselves didn't pay much attention to us, I actually think some of them took jabs at us more than once. That was a bummer.

ALL THE DATAS!

What we tried to show, but did not always do so well with so much going on, is this really was a massive “experiment” that had a lot of potential impact in a LOT of places, not just games. But there is a good reason we kept attracting academics, amazing engineers, investors, and also REALLY pissing people of or outright confusing them. No matter what if you were exposed to what we were doing you paid attention in some way and you certainly had feelings about it in some way.

But our approach was meant to be genuine, its why we were always so transparent with stuff to the point that the industry saw us as these cathartic consumers, not developers like them. Also, nothing I can be upset about now, I get it, especially after now having spent so much time in the “Core Industry”. All that Data, all that research, all the things we were doing we wanted to go back to all of the community. To expose the environment to allow Academia to connect and understand people better, to demonstrate what young minds could do with the correct understanding, tools, and support, to break several walls with one elegant and comically obvious statement, the only way to solve a slew of problems, was understanding and empowering young minds to see how brilliant they all really are and not let us dumb adults or “professionals” make them feel otherwise.

What was NOT obvious to a lot of people, even some of them involved, is we were creating a massive digital brain. This was a result of the kind of engine we built and tools as well. The latest iterations actually had the capacity to understand the input of one thing and the output of another. And it was getting WAY faster with time. This impacted AI, which could learn from players, matchmaking, content distribution, everything. And it was funnier still that we got better at doing it the more we realized that doing it the way the game industry does, would never work.

This is something we wanted to build and give to everyone. It made the most sense that if we can create a great environment for people to play and learn from, they would naturally want to make their own versions of it and people would challenge those things and create new games with it which we could empower. This is also why we became VERY close to influencers in preparation for that. We had “big plans”, which were honestly ridiculously obvious, but we had too many motivations in too many directions which stopped that from happening.

Fighting Hacker Culture

Something that I often forget myself, but have found better ways of reminding myself of, is we are all hackers in nature, very few of us are architects or have the time to question “What was the impact of this thing”, we idolize a hack and create religions around it. Unity, Unreal, Playfab, Python, R, C++, Organic Food, Emotional Intelligence, Data Science, AI, etc, etc, etc. It all “Does a thing”, but we don't take the time to ask “WTF is it REALLY doing and how can it solve my problem better, or do I REALLY need to reinvent the wheel here”.

That being said, a hackers mentality very young when validated and accepted by the people that matter most, the masses, consumers, gamers, etc THAT is powerful and meaningful. THAT is what we wanted to empower. It's not that people who are set in their ways could NOT figure stuff out, it's sad that sometimes as adults and professionals we don't have time to ask why and we are trained to get ready to defend anything we believe in with emotions so big logic doest exist anymore.

But with games, this was powerful to us. We could empower young scientists, engineers, hackers, gamers, storytellers, who were not yet programmed in how to TREAT people, but still curious who could learn and leverage one another to do great things. That to use was disruptive, we didn’t talk about that dream much in the studio, we knew it would freak people out, but the few of us involved leading who drove it, or who was with us but had to leave, we all kept it as our motivation and reminded one another in every way we could.

The Power of Influence

The influencers were also people we became VERY close to early on, not just for their insights into the culture of gaming, but also to find ways of creating a new “Business Structure” for them to connect with indies and modders. Our goal was to not control that business, but create better connections and better tools. To us, this was sadly the most obvious thing to do.

Influencers have a LOT of Data, and even their MCNs have big teams that are sorta... well, built by humans with not great motivations, so it's hard to make sense of Data. On the contrary, we were CREEPY good with that stuff, so we were starting to explore that wedge in between. Not ironically, the same stuff we were building for our own stuff was going to be used for the data coming in from the influencers too.

To us, the influencer was the PERFECT game publisher and the solution would have been able to negate their own reliance on brands, advertisers, MCNs, etc. They would get access to games and content, they would be able to stay genuine, modders could monetize, profits could be split with influencers, we would use smart data and “AI” (still hate that term) to create a full loop. More data would come in, Science, Tech, Influence, etc would all create a symbiotic ecosystem and we would just take cuts of profits to keep building tools to keep making everyone better.

Saying Goodbye

As a few of you may know, I live and breathed this project. It cost me a lot on an emotional level. While trying to find balance and losing myself it cost me a relationship with my children, it did result in a divorce, and it led to a lot of pain and anxiety from failing everyone. I sadly was raised to take on the rough situations, but I always got good at “processing” and “growing” as it were, its also what led me to do things in Academia and in Business which would ALSO make people feel some kind of way about me :P

While its unfortunate things ended this way, and I still hold the weight of it and I refuse to ignore it, I understand why it happened. In the end, it helped make me remember who I was before we got caught up with the money. But the things I did AFTER Nerd Kingdom were interesting, things I still do today. And still, the things I do today either REALLY piss people off, resulting in amazing friends or outright confuse people, but when they hear of me or see what I have to say, or awkwardly and playfully call out every buzz word they throw at me, they pay attention in some form.

I have been offered executive roles at HUGE studios in games, many of which you all know by name, many of which are also in the public eye for missing the mark. I have become friends with “big name Venture Capitalists” literally around the world, I have become an advisor, mentor, colleague or friend to these brilliant minds who are Loved, Hated or Ignored in the space and I keep them close. More important to me, I keep them close and connect them with one another, its important to me that people have a chance to connect and understand to challenge their views but ultimately see they are wanting the same things, even if they forgot their path to getting to their success.

Saying Hello?

I noticed something a year ago after about 40 ish studios or tech companies that I was being offered work at, was advising, consulting, or just visiting to say hi... they all suffered from the pains they seemed to be ignoring. Their views on Data, Culture, Games, Technology, and even AI was... well, human. The very nature of the market in games and the creative passions and pains of gamers created a divide that results in... well, human responses, which are not so great.

As it happened the further I looked I would see little pieces of technology we were building or trying to build at Nerd Kingdom were popping up. I took the time to chat with them, even brought some of their own tech and tools into games at a few studios, then started to formally start chatting with more studios to just ask questions. Turns out, we built at Nerd Kingdom the earliest version of what a few big game studios are doing now and in tech, but they seem to be overlooking how they should connect, which simply comes from language barriers inside and no time to REALLY solve problems.

Then, those few big names from big studios out there now who know me, some famous designers, some brilliant engineers, a few investors and a handful of others put some pressure on me to get something going again. And I think it might. As it happens my meetings with people are becoming more frequent, my brain is fried, I am connecting and reconnecting with like minds in places like IBM, Qualcomm, Google, and even a few very large tech entities and it seems that with a bit of dialog we are all on the same page.

NOPE

Now, if something DOES happen, it happens because it makes sense and I would not be so bold as to promise we went back to making TUG, that would be tricky, though I did adore the world, which was also VERY calculated at the time, but what I can promise is that my work will always involve efforts of giving more power and understanding to all of you.

If somehow I do manage to make another thing I have to personally be more careful about who is involved, the money, and the terms. Hard lesson learned and I have to do it in a way that would allow things to be flexible enough to make it up to the many of you that invested a lot of time, or money where you could support what we did, while I will say it, assuredly, none of us ever forgot. And none of you were ever just “consumers” to us.

While I do have VC colleagues even if they wanted to, you can’t fund nothing without them taking a LOT of control fast, so some of the stuff I am exploring is simply a mutually beneficial agreement with a group I know well. Help them build a thing, let me take a thing and use it to make the deal work correctly. I have been fortunate enough to have a team of people, even a few very famous influencers you wouldn't suspect to support us when the time is right.

The names involved and the people in some form are easy to figure out, but others are not so easy to figure out and some names I am talking to now I won't name drop, because in my business world that is still rude until they are more comfortable with the idea of doing business is this... awkwardly honest.

Playing It Cool

While Nerd Kingdom is dissolved and TECHNICALLY this is within my “Legal Rights” I do understand that sometimes business against its better nature can result in “actions”. So I’ll do the same thing I do with each awkward conversation in games, just in case anyone is paying attention from the business world.

To whoever is potentially considering legal actions, it would be a silly thing to do. While your legal teams may not understand this, your executives certainly know it, I pay attention to details and I am not motivated by money, which makes trying to take legal action on me VERY silly. On the contrary, I’m collaborative, helpful and tend to make everyone else a lot of money ALL the time if I am given the ability to do so and their own internal politics do not devour the work I do.

In short, it's a short-sighted move to take action on someone that you know VERY well is capable of bringing people with a lot of potential together to do things with a lot of amazing potential. I do happen to have a LOT of friends in “big places” in the strangest way, I took the time to plant seeds and do a LOT of favors, any actions I am sure would be public for all the wrong reasons and in the end it would only validate the work I have done in the American and European market of the things we did and are capable of doing. So, I would rather just be friends :D

To My Nerds

To anyone that has had the patience to have gotten this far, don’t let me forget who I am, ever again. And thank you for the weight of failure I was able to pick up to remember it when I was important. I don't know how yet, or when, or in what form, but something is telling me that soon ill be doing something of interest, with a few people of interest, with a lot of potential.

Thank you, each one of you, troll, evangelist, or otherwise, you keep me human, in the best possible ways.

#Nerdkingdom

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