What do I value?

Week 8 of Fractal Tech's AI Accelerator & Engineering Bootcamp

What do I Value?

After spending part of last week's Career workshop working on a new version of the dice-rolling app instead, I thought that I might just be dealing with misaligned priorities. Do I really want to find a job in software? Am I ready to put in the effort of putting myself out there, finding those opportunities, and working/learning in a new position? Or do I feel that I need more personal growth or upskilling before I'm ready for that?

Or perhaps a misalignment of values. Do I value the freedom of being able to work on whatever I want more than I value having a job and a steady income?

After a long talk with Andrew, I decided to do an assessment of my values. There isn't "one correct path" to take in life, and there's also no path in life that is perfect. Everything involves tradeoffs, and you decide which tradeoffs you're okay with by examining your values and deciding which ones to prioritize.

My results can be seen here

This values assessment also led to a reflection on my relationship with games, or otherwise prioritizing the projects which I'm most excited to work on, rather than which ones would help me learn the most, provide a steady income, etc. This reflection will be the rest of this week's reflection.

Relationship with games and internal conflicts

Stream of Consciousness

I like games. I like solving logic puzzles and playing games and putting smiles on people's faces. I want to build games. I have a lot of ideas and I think I could be really good at designing/making games. I think I have a good intuition for it, though I don't necessarily have the skills yet. I would like to learn the skills. The skills that I have learned so far give me a sense of excitement and competence, which motivates me to learn more and become more competent. Putting finished products in peoples' hands would be cool, as I cherish seeing the joy I have added to people's lives and impact made on the world (sense of accomplishment and personal fulfillment) - however, the real motivation and joy comes from building things with my own hands, creative expression, and solving difficult problems.

Games are difficult to make (and to sell), and so is hardware / embedded systems. I am pretty good at design work. I am a very technical and analytical engineer. I am not very good at emotional management, time management, or hierarchical planning and execution. I grew up building things and playing games, so it's no surprise that I ended up in engineering and I want to build games.

The projects where I feel I've made the greatest impact are typically related to hardware integration, new product development, designing medical devices, simulation/modeling, and prototyping/manufacturing (Cerelog internship, senior capstone mirror therapy device, surgical device PM, railroad trackwork design and automation, aircraft wing instability research). I can brag about these and genuinely believe that I did something important, i.e. not feel like an imposter embellishing my résumé.

While there is a ton of creative expression to be found in the solving of difficult problems, i.e. "applied philosophy", I've found that many of these projects lack opportunities for creative expression, leading to my drive gradually fading until one day I find myself still typing away at the keyboard even though my brain had given up a few months ago.

Unsure if this table is valuable - just trying to evaluate different fields based on what's important to me, i.e. creative expression, intuition, being good at what I do, doing difficult things, money:

The game dev projects I've done thus far (CLI Dice game, Slime Game, Infected Phone in React Native, vibe-coded Balatro-Dice, Pokemon ROM hacks, tic tac toe, Blackjack, etc.) have been super interesting to work on and to learn new concepts. The ones that feel finished give me a similar feeling of "I did this thing that I am proud of", and there is the added joy of "I built this thing in my own image, this is my creativity manifested", but when asked if I have created something valuable, I still have this feeling of "it's still just a game". This feeling shows up in other projects from high school and college, such as my solar go-kart, piston-cylinder pump, and architectural design projects.

My relationship with games

My history with games is messy. My brother and I had the original GameBoy Advance, which came out in 2001, and one of the earliest games I remember well is Pokemon FireRed, which came out in 2004, so I was somewhere between the age of 4 and 7 when video games became a significant part of my life. Long car ride? Pokemon. Waiting at the doctor's office? Pokemon. As I grew up, this morphed into something more like: Painful feelings? Difficult emotions? Pokemon. In other words, I started using games as an escape from responsbility and/or difficult emotions.

Around 2020, I started forming a different relationship with games - rather than your Call of Duty type, which makes me never want to leave the game and does not transform me in any positive/meaningful way, I became more interested in games that provided unique and transformative experiences that either changed me as a person and made me want to return to reality and become a better human - Horizon Zero Dawn, Subnautica, Undertale, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Outer Wilds. To me, these are not just games - these are more like interactive movies that have different endings based on your actions. And I think most people would agree that movies can be very transformational (go watch Lés Miserables, Interstellar, About Time, Good Will Hunting).

Unfortunately, there seem to be a limited amount of truly transformative games like those I listed, at least for my taste. While I was unemployed circa 2023 after the medtech startup I was at laid off half the company, I was really into Sudoku puzzles - not the boring OG ones, but rather the "variants" with clever and endlessly creative rulesets (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C). These puzzles dopa-max the logical, analytical, and technical parts of my brain, and they require truly mind-blowing logical deduction, making it feel like I'm solving very difficult and important problems. They don't have that same transformative quality as something like Outer Wilds offers - in fact, they are closer to the "instant gratification and pleasure" side of the spectrum, like I would consider Pokemon, Call of Duty, Smash Bros., etc.

My love of Sudoku variants is actually what guided me to my next career move into the more technical design side of mechanical engineering, and subsequently automation and programming. In the last couple years, I've taken to games that give me the same rush as coding does, with parallels to computer science, automation, or system design concepts: Opus Magnum, Factorio, Balatro, Faster Than Light, Plate Up, etc. This also seems to be the type of game that I enjoy designing the most - backend-heavy systems and "engines" that lean into automation and/or emergent complexity. I've already tried my hand at about 4 different Balatro clones in the last couple months.

While it would be a dream come true to design and build games for real money, I still have trouble shaking this feeling that at the end of the day, they're still "just games", and that my intelligent brain might be put to better use by, I don't know, working in aerospace or defense or on the Millennium Prize Problems? Obviously I need to do more reflecting on why I feel such a strong need to "do something inherently valuable for humanity", or more accurately why I don't consider games to be inherently valuable to humanity, and why I feel such strong guilt for pursuing something that I really want to do.

Infinite Pockets

This week I started CS50x

GPU - unblieeveable that 4400 earths worth of people working at 200% capacity 24/7 is simply living inside our pocket, everyone's pocket. No wonder people want to play games so badly! No wonder we don't want to spend out limited time doing dumb shit! We have an unimaginable amount of ENERGY, DECISION POWER, COMPUTATION POWER, right at our fingertips! In another sense, we are still human. We still have to eat, take shits. Wash dishes. Where is the balance? How do I console it with myself these two vastly different metas?

This new perspective has led to some forgiveness, some gentleness viewing my own behaviors and mistakes. Why are you being hard on yourself for wanting to spend your time grappling with 4400 earths worth of human decision making rather than more mundane things like mowing the lawn?