I wanted to talk about failure.

So, that's a good start. There have been a number of times in my professional career where I have failed at things.

The most spectacular of them, I mean, it's hard to say. You're always on a spectrum of failure, but I think probably the thing that I am most frustrated by is Wizard School. Which was a game - is a game - that I developed with a friend of mine with art by Karen Hallion who's AMAZING and she did such an amazing job.

I was working with Eric who has developed games before, both in terms of like developing games that are fun to play and also getting them made and distributed and meeting deadlines. And I'm just, I never missed a deadline like that one. "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," we had some serious missed deadlines with the DVDs.

It has turned me off doing anything in that world heavily. And I feel very bad. We finally have the Wizard School Expanded Set, it's actually sitting over here, the cards are.

Part of why this took so long is that we developed new game mechanics that hopefully, for people who are dedicated to playing this game, make it a little easier to play, a little faster to play. There's like a summer school kind of, is the idea of it. There's like a summer time - there's summertime cards, like Imposter Syndrome and Ecology Camp.

This is all part of the Hank's Dirty Little Secrets pack, so it's got a bunch of cards that are somewhat specific to my highschool experience. Which I now realize was a very long time ago. There's a Spice Goats card.

The fact - it took a huge amount of time to do that. Part of that was in my camp. Just writing the cards took longer than expected.

Part of it was game development, and then a huge part of it was manufacturing, which printing cards is a known quantity, people- It should not have been as hard as it was. It was hugely difficult and I apologize so much to all of the people who waited so long for this. It's been literal years, and you know I was holding up the cards just now, this does not look like years of work- and so I consider it to be a failure. And it also, like the game itself is hard to play, like the rules are quite complicated, and you have to be pretty into the game to play it. We should have developed something that was simpler and more easy to play right out of the box and less scratching your head about what phase of the turn you’re in. And so I feel like that was a big, big mess up. It was a thing that we made, that we did, that financially at this point it's in the red. Luckily, that's not a huge problem for DFTBA games, we can figure that out and get everybody the things they need and offer up refunds to everybody who wants refunds, which we've done. If you are curious about that you could check Kickstarter if you are a backer and you were like “Oh! I didn't know refunds were available.” Go check out the Kickstarter. But we will soon be sending stuff out that's like “Fill this stuff out if your address has changed and we're gonna send you the thing we said we were gonna send you years ago”. And it's been sitting on my brain for all that time feeling like I'm letting people down, and so the only thing to do was to, you know, try and yell at people who were being slow, and maybe I should have done that more and better.

But also part of my, I don't know, half-time superpower, half-time greatest weakness is I'm never doing one thing at a time, and so there's always something else to focus on. Like, literally right now I should probably be working on PodCon.

I definitely don't think of these things in terms of failure happens when you never get out of the red, I feel like failure happens when you let people down. If suddenly we had to lay off a bunch of people from our company, that would feel like a pretty big failure. Or if I had invested all of everything into something and that hadn't succeeded and then I was destitute, that would feel like a failure. If I was gunning for some kind of - ultimately, I think this is like what is the biggest failure, what feels like the biggest failure is when it's the opposite of what you imagined as the biggest success. And so there isn't any projects I've ever done that the goal was to build a billion-dollar company and so when they don't make money, it's not like the big failure that I didn't make a billion-dollar company. Ultimately, I'm trying to make stuff that makes people happy, and so the failure is when it makes them sad.

Even with little things sometimes that happens. Inevitably, in events, you're going to make people sad because you can't invite certain creators to events and that's going to frustrate them and make them feel underappreciated and, inevitably, you put something in the wrong room and 1000 people wanna go to it, but it's a 500-person room and you just estimated incorrectly or you weren't able to shift it in time and then there's 500 people who feel really let down and that also feels like a failure.

The money side of things is all about sustainability of the product, whether it can continue to exist. And so I do sometimes have people  ask me, like, "When do you consider a thing a success?"

Ultimately, a thing is not successful until it is economically sustainable, but it isn't a failure because it's not economically sustainable. Because something ends I don't see that as "because it failed." Maybe I should, maybe that would be the correct syntax, that might be the correct use of the English language. So, maybe I would say that it failed, I just don't internalise that as a failure. To me, that seems like a risk that was taken. It's like trying a dance move and you fall down, like, okay, you might've looked super cool, but it turned out you didn't look super cool, but you have to fall down sometimes in order to have other dance moves that look good. This example... That's what I came up with!

Having a non-successful business, that's like, you try things and sometimes it doesn't work. For example, we will soon be sending out - to the people who bought Truth or Fail packages - we'll be sending out the ones that we've made and refunding them the money for those because Truth or Fail did not catch on, and I think for a lot of interesting reasons, but ultimately the only way in which I feel that Truth or Fail was- If you are not aware, Truth or Fail was a trivia game that we were trying to get to sell to student unions, pubs, libraries and just have an easy, accessible trivia game that people could play and come together into a physical space and it would have a video version and just a slideshow hosted version. And I like this idea, I think it's a great idea and I just don't think that we have the ability to grab the market by its lapels and be like, "Here, here, I got this product for you!" I don't know, I just don't have the expertise in that kind of sales.