2048, success and me

> Many of the people around me, however, didn’t feel the same. My friends and parents thought that my choice was honorable, but at the same time I was probably throwing away a chance that I would be unlikely to get a second time.

> A few days later, all of the issues I thought I had overcome crumbled back on me much harder than before. I had started to regret “wasting” this opportunity, and I felt as if the people around me were disappointed by my actions.

It can be really disorienting when our intuitions and convictions clash with those of the people we listen to and trust. The cognitive dissonance can be so great that we find ourselves desperately trying to reorient our perspective to dissolve this conflict, as Gabriele manages to do:

> Thanks to the help of my parents and my friends, I realized that the only way to get over this without feeling like I had missed an opportunity would be to embrace it and produce an app. I wouldn’t be doing it for profit, though. In fact, that is not what matters to me. All that matters is knowing that I didn’t waste a chance, no matter if I’m going to succeed or fail.

This is not to say that Gabriele "sold out" or did the "wrong" thing. Rather, "right" and "wrong" are concepts we assign to actions as we fit them into our own patchwork of moral attitudes, and are probably more malleable than we'd like to believe.

I was once faced with a very lucrative offer from a major tech company to work on analytics for their popular ad engine. I was extremely conflicted about this as I happen to dislike online advertising, and especially search engine marketing. To my horror, the majority of my friends and family encouraged me to take the position despite my ethical qualms, as the benefit to my resume would be enormous. Up until this point my own ethical intuitions had more or less aligned with those of my peers, but suddenly I found myself alienated. Was I stupid to pass up this opportunity, or were they wrong to tell me to take it?

It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life, but I decided to turn down the offer. It was liberating, in a sense; I came to realize my own ethical agency and that I could choose for myself what "right" and "wrong" meant. But it was also a lonely decision, one whose "rightness" was not shared with those I cared about.

I'm not sure what my point is here, except to say that I'm glad Gabriele found peace with his decisions. When you believe one thing and everyone else believes another, it can be difficult to know whether to change your own beliefs or not, especially when the content of those beliefs is something as abstract as "right" and "wrong." In some sense, there is no right choice, only the one you make.

Instead of being obsessed with entertainment and other forms of self gratification, it would be nice if people focused on important problems with actual historical consequence.

No. Not at the same %: Just take a look at how many startups are deliberately stating to change the world.

The claim is pretentious and false: it gives a sense of virtue which is absolutely not there. I'm not referring to the author of minor projects, I'm referring to Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, as well.

People that changed the world range from M. L. King, to Ghandi and N. Mandela with numerous others in between. To me is disrespectful to those who gave their lives in order to change the world to make such a claim while becoming a millionaire in the process, sitting on a cosy sofa behind a computer screen. Developers are creating technologies (from Bitcoin to OpenGPG). These are tools which can be used for good or bad (surveillance). Software doesn't take the streets, nor will pass legislations through parliaments. So it might change some aspects of every day life, but meaningful changes do not happen using iPhones: Syndications in China are illegal. And there's no technology (Tor, Bitcoin, OTR, GPG, Twitter, etc) that will make syndications legal. Only people can do that and it's not an easy and peaceful process.

The world changes when ideas turn into social/political movements and then legislation are passed. Usually many people die in between.

So if for you Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and StartupXYZ chasing VPs are the same thing, then we have different values, views and not much to discuss.

The article has an entire section (Changing my mind) dedicated to the topic whereby the OP admits that for the most part he has been espousing that he is not motivated by $ and does not want to "profit" from 2048. If he was really ONLY motivated by getting his mobile version out there, as the original author of the game, why not just release a free version?

Again, I am not against him monetizing his app. Go for it, I say. What I commented on is that he's seemingly not being entirely honest with himself about his motivations.

I already quoted the key phrase, but here it is again:

Thanks to the help of my parents and my friends, I realized that the only way to get over this without feeling like I had missed an opportunity would be to embrace it and produce an app. I wouldn’t be doing it for profit, though. In fact, that is not what matters to me. All that matters is knowing that I didn’t waste a chance, no matter if I’m going to succeed or fail.

This is the paragraph in the Changing my mind section where he reveals the reasoning to release an app that includes monetization. Yet, in the same breath, he says he's not motivated by profit. Hence the confusion.

Threes hardly came up with this combination game idea. I know for certain Triple Town [1] has basically the same gameplay (except you drop instead of swipe, some extra cutesy elements) and is from 2011, and I highly doubt it originated the concept or gameplay. To use their example, I feel like Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend created Dr. Mario and not Tetris, and were shocked when people started playing other Tetris knockoffs. I understand being frustrated that someone else hit success with the same idea and different execution, but I don't get the "my copy is novel" attitude. Feels like a 1 click buy patent.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spryfox.tr...