Entrepreneurship

This article is about the hard reality of starting and running a computer games company. I started Intelligent Games (IG) in 1988 because I have always loved computer games and I hired my first employee and moved into real offices in 1993. I sold the company and left in 2000. In that time we released sixteen titles, which together sold over two million copies. The company grew to more than sixty-five people and worked with some of the biggest publishers in the business: EA Sports, Westwood Studios, LEGO and Hasbro. We got there without debt and without external investment. It is from this experience that I am writing this article – as they say in America: ‘your mileage may differ’.

In 2003, Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough Type blog, asked the provocative question: “Does IT matter?” His article appeared in the prestigious Harvard Business Review. It was a closely argued, well-written article, which triggered what The Economist called “an existentialist debate” in the IT industry.

Everyone’s talking about ‘big data’. There’s no doubt that there is more data than ever before. As George Dyson writes ‘when the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size’. Today, by some estimates, the total amount of data in the world is 2.7 zettabytes. But what about insight, analysis, outcomes?

It used to be a question for the biggest businesses: what do we outsource? It’s still being asked around board tables, but now the size of company is immaterial. There’s very little in business that can’t be handed off to an outside expert – even outsourcing itself.

I had a revelation. Calling our customers  ‘users’ dehumanises them. It’s the linguistic equivalent of that office scene from The Apartment, reducing individuals to interchangeable units of interaction. It’s very common in IT to talk about ‘users’ and it’s understandable but I think it’s not helpful. From now on, you’re friends, customers, readers, managers, employees, staff – and above all – people.