Now I’m sitting here relaxed yet displaced, in our temporary housing just northwest of Los Angeles, and having been to my first two days at THQ I’m starting to feel like my old self again. Moving away from San Francisco wasn’t exactly high on my list – I really enjoy the entrepreneurial vibe there, from the social games community in the city to the web-focused churn of Silicon Valley. There are always so many interesting things going on, and brilliant people trying to change the world around every corner. But in recent years it’s seemed like the people of MY games community, pushing the boundaries of technology and story-telling in games, had slowly moved out of the area. Studios had shut down in San Francisco, companies had closed in Marin, East Bay companies were encountering hard times, and publishers on the peninsula had downsized or moved away. I really enjoy mobile and social games, of course, but the hub of AAA games has slowly migrated away from the hub of technology innovation, to the center of entertainment: Los Angeles.

So I was already thinking, “Hm, if I ever had to move, it’d be either Los Angeles or Seattle.” (Seattle is where I grew up, and my family lives.) Peculiarly, the day I left Google, as I was literally driving out of their driveway, some friends in LA rang to see if I knew anyone who could do some game technology consulting for them. “Why, yes! Let me drive another 10 feet forward and then tell you a story…” Hm, fate calling! Soon after, I heard about the VP role open at THQ and we started having a chat.

During the three years or so that I did game technology consulting, what I enjoyed most was visiting studios and vetting them for publishers or investors. I’d get the chance to talk to the executives in the studio, as well as the directors of production, tech, art, audio, and design. I’d learn about their best practices, and share with them tips I’d learned as well. Then I’d compare the studio against the project or publisher or investor and highlight where the match worked well, or poorly. It was always so much fun to analyze the studio and see how it worked, and try to find ways to make it operate more smoothly.

As a consultant though, at the end of the day, you always walk away. As a consultant you don’t build up much over time except contacts and your own personal knowledge. What made me immediately interested in this role at THQ was the feeling that I could take all the knowledge I’d built up as a consultant, as well as my connections to the game engine, middleware, and console companies, and use it to help build up the company by doing what I enjoyed most as a consultant: analyzing studios and helping them make their games more fun, more efficiently. How could it get any better than that?

I talked with a lot of other really good people on the road toward joining THQ, at social games companies and mobile games companies, game engine creators and middleware manufacturers, as well as other large games publishers. But seeing THQ in the middle of a reboot, with a team of new yet veteran executives recreating the company by taking risks in AAA and casual titles, with a future roster of intriguing AAA titles on track, and a back-catalog that includes Company of Heroes, WWF, Red Faction, Homeworld, and MX vs ATV… it just sounded like so much fun.

So being here in LA – it’s kind of weird. I miss walking. I miss the fog. But I feel like, perhaps, I’ve found my people here. The place may be different, but the conversations are familiar: how do we make a really great game, how can we create an experience people haven’t seen before, how do we do it in on a budget, how can we finish it on time. And in that way, I have to admit, it kind of feels like home.

This past Monday, I left Google. There are a lot of very interesting things going on at Google right now, and I enjoyed working with many of the people there, but it was not the perfect fit for me. I’m looking forward to my next adventure.

One of those things Google is working on that I do think is particularly great is Native Client. Opening up the web so that you can readily use languages other than HTML/JS and ActionScript is a really big deal. I hope that other browser providers will also adopt Native Client – it is open source after all! The web feels like it is blossoming open with this next wave of technologies, moving past its history as a markup language wrapped around text and toward a fully interactive platform for applications.

For game developers, I’m looking forward to the day where we see more games running in the cloud, like Farmville and World of Warcraft do now, and it is easy for developers to create clients on multiple platforms so I can bring my game with me no matter where I am. As game developers we’ve talked about the idea of making multiple-platform game access simpler for a long time – trans-platform play where the experiences may be different, as opposed to cross-platform play where the experiences are the same – and it should be easier for developers to create clients for web, mobile and desktop without needing to write them in completely different languages or using vastly different SDKs. Microsoft is closest to this with XNA and Silverlight across multiple platforms; Apple’s SDKs across iPhone, iPad and Mac OSX are pretty cleverly designed as well; and Google is approaching it with Android NDK and Chrome Native Client. The increasing use of web services can abstract away a lot of the need for platform-specific SDK features, but there’s still a lot of work to do all around. Games aren’t getting cheaper to make, that’s for sure, and it’s important that technically complex features are still easily available to independent developers working alone.

Game engines and middleware are only getting better and better, and make increasing sense to use to bridge all these gaps. But the costs can be difficult to bear for indies, and there are also the different market systems, social graphs, and platform tech requirements to deal with… it’s clear there are still a lot of problems for the game industry to solve to make things easier for small developers. Which is good, because we all don’t like being bored. I’m going to continue studying and talking about the game technology space in this blog and occasionally on my Gamasutra expert blog, as always.

Lastly I want to apologize to those of you I haven’t kept in good touch with these past few months. A lot of people reached out to me during my time at Google, and I’ve been pretty lousy at replying back or staying in touch due to how busy I was. Sorry about that! I’ve found that increasingly my inbox overwhelms my ability to get work done, so I hope to do more tweeting and blogging in the future to help with that, a lesson I’ve learned from the very wise and public Robert Scoble.

I’m looking forward to sharing with you what I’m up to next!

My second week was just as busy as the first, or maybe even busier. But at least I’m getting used to my productivity tools. I find myself mostly working on my laptop – a MacBook Pro – and while I still find the MacOS harder to use effectively than Windows 7, the hardware is an absolute joy. You mean I can close the lid without worrying about losing docs? Nice! And it auto-connects to wi-fi and holds the signal? Yay! And I can sweep two fingers on the trackpad to scroll up and down? Why didn’t anyone think of that sooner? (Oh yeah, no one else has multi-touch trackpads.) So, I’m not a Mac convert, but I’m getting along with it better and better.

I used Synergy to tie my Linux desktop’s mouse and keyboard to the Mac laptop, so when I’m at my desk I have a much more ergonomic keyboard and mouse and a couple much larger displays. That works out great.

On the software side last week I found myself bailing out of the cloud a lot. I just haven’t figured out a good analog to my hierarchical file system, so I have only been using Google docs for ToDo’s and sharing with others. Meeting notes etc have wound up in TextPad and on my desktop or in folders. I had to do a couple presentations last week and I tried used the presentation software in Google Docs, but quickly abandoned it in favor of using Powerpoint and then uploading the result back into the presentation app. I was just much, much more effective in Powerpoint, and I was in a hurry. Friday I got Keynote installed on the Mac, and I’ll give that a go today.

If there was some good hierarchical file storage in the cloud and the presentation software worked better for me, I would love to be doing more there. Maybe I’m missing some things… I’ll keep looking at it.

One of the amusing and wonderful things about the Google Mountain View campus (the “Googleplex”) is that it is near a lot of wild open space along the San Francisco Bay. Last week I kept having wildlife sightings – and in the morning when the campus is quiet, with its lush trees, it is quite peaceful. Or at least more so than my urban San Francisco dwelling. I appreciate that a lot. Here are a few shots (Pokemon Snap style, I guess) from last week

Wild turkey wandering around in one of the parking lots.

There have been some goats next door mowing the lawn.

This happy little bird was hanging out in the fountain at the garden.

The T-Rex doesn’t seem so mean in his old age.

My personal email is a massive graveyard at the moment, so I apologize if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t gotten back to you. I’ve been literally non-stop since starting at Google, including a trip on the weekend after my first week (though admittedly, that was for fun) and this past weekend, an IGDA board meeting all weekend. Still looking forward to taking a deep breath. Maybe next weekend.

Shuttle got to my building just before 8:30am. So from home to work, about an hour. Not bad – got a blog post written, time to check some email, time to imbibe some caffeine. We’ll see how the trip home goes!

My first week at Google was extremely busy. On my first day everyone was encouraging me to take the courses for newbies that they have all week – it sure seemed like a good idea on Monday. But after midday Tuesday, all bets were off, as my schedule filled with people to meet and things to work on. With so many interesting things going on, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a newbie class! (The good news is that they have them all recorded, so I’ll watch the videos later. )

One thing that has been incredibly marked for me has been the change in my productivity tools. I’ve gotten used to using Exchange, Outlook, and the suite of Office products. I really, really like the system I have down for file organization. And I’ve got a laptop with Windows XP and desktops with Windows 7. My first day at Google I got a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop. Beautiful pieces of hardware, but – woah! So different. And of course we’re using the suite of Google Apps products. I felt like not only did I need to learn a new environment and new job, but my productivity habits now also all needed to change. Yikes!

At first it felt a bit painful. As the week has gone on, however, I’ve realized just how valuable it is to have my data in the cloud. Mid-week, I converted my Nexus One over from my Gmail account to my corporate Google account, and suddenly all my business information – calendar and email in particular – was in my pocket. My manager was probably pretty happy, as I suddenly stopped missing meetings and messages. Then Thursday I started really using Google Docs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am still having a hard time getting used to popping open a web browser to edit my documents, and I have yet to come up with an alternative for my trusty hierarchical file system. But the moment of epiphany came when, in the span of an hour, I had taken some notes in a meeting on the Mac, booted up my Linux box and made some edits, and then over a coffee meeting later I brought the doc up on my phone to review what I had written. Totally seamlessly, without worrying about copying files around or anything. Holy smokes! This whole cloud thing is pretty great. But it is definitely a shift in mindframe.

Right now I’m at the airport, as I mentioned earlier. Today I did a bunch of work in the Mac’s Text Edit program. When I got home, I suddenly realized I needed to copy all that stuff onto a USB stick, since I was bringing my personal laptop (my Windows XP one) on the trip with me. It wasn’t a big deal, but one point I lost the USB stick and couldn’t remember if I had packed it. What if I forgot it? After a few moments of argh, once again the idea of the cloud really sunk home for me.

So it’s been an interesting week to be sure (and that’s leaving out all of the most interesting parts!) But the idea of the cloud, which sounded good in theory but I hadn’t put into full practice, is really growing on me. I’ve loved my Android phone for months and months… but when I embraced Gmail, Google Docs and Google Voice, all the sudden my cell phone became so much more useful. It’s a very interesting transformation.