# We are seeking fun

## Concept

I was seeking fun. Then we all were.

## The humble start

The year was 2012. Yeah, I could be your father. But I ain't!

And it had been a rough year or so. I came to Japan, money ran thin before I found a job. I was still paying taxes from France, that's the pain without the gain. We cut the stove in winter. It was homelessness cold. There is nothing that can really heat you at that point. triple layers of socks, 2 trousers. I was calculating how to use my own breath to feel a bit of heat but not breathe it. The mattress was on the floor. The floor was on nothing as below was the open door lobby outside. It's like the heat is stolen from you.

But we had our ways. Did you know that they heat toilet seats in most businesses in Japan. I may be the man in the world who has spent so much of his life in a supermarket's toilet. I mean we could totally have had that discussion:

- Can you take something in the supermarket?
- I am in the supermarket. I am the supermarket.

And don't ask me "have you tried... ?". I have. That and more. The triple layer curtain and the poor man film to trap air. And I tracked every flow of air with cigarette smoke and a few drinks. Why do we even bother having a fridge, guys?

Anyway, just before my visa and money expired, I found a job. Well, any job, really. It was not bad, like clearly it was not 6 figures, but it was not low hourly pay. But it was really boring.

And it was really a weird feeling. Moving to Japan, what's the point of the struggle if it is to earn a heater and do a boring job... There was one Japanese and he left.

I had eaten enough shit, I wanted a life. Fun, even!

## The interview

So I did a few interviews. This one was with a mobile game company, Gloops.
He asked where I knew the company from. And I replied from the Tokyo Game Show. Stupidly. Because the only thing I could remember was that.

![model](fun/model.jpg)

Yeah the Race Queen we call it, when there is a race. There was no race so I don't know. She ain't no Queen. Well, in the "I'll make you a Kingdom where the King will be Love", she may have been. Oh, that's from an old song, Jacques Brel, extraordinary.

Anyway, we were politely looking. Like this time, at a trash metal bar with a 18th basement and like prison stuff, the Black Dog in Paris, and I was taking a leak, and the guy was looking at me or at it rather. And I am not ashamed and not proud. I have the right dick for the job, I think. It's like the story of the guy who says he's too little, and the other answers: the right size is when your feet touch the ground. So he was looking at my dick, and that was a bit annoying to be honest, but I did not feel it was an agressive look. More curious. Who would not be. Wait, yeah that's the place where two people on each side of the room were sleeping drunk. And one woke up and started talking like Satan on earth with a bad cold. And the other woke up and chanted in unison. Are you paid actors or is it the end?

The interview, back to fun, too much darkness in you guys.

So the interview goes quite well, and he asks me: management or development.
And I reply...
Why do I reply that? Why?
"I like human beings, but to be honest I prefer machines."

He laughs. I got the job and I was working at the Tokyo Game Show company I had seen 9 months before. It felt so weird and so earned: the interview had been flawless.

## Let the fun begin!

The first day I am asked my nickname, and I am like: what? And they are super enthusiastic: we all have nicknames! They said theirs, and I have never fully understood or remembered them. So I called them "Oh!".

The first week, I am called, hey man, you need to come, we do paper airplanes. Wow, cool! So we were in teams of 4, optimizing designs. And we had to hit a wall, and see how many we get in a circle at a given distance. I can tell you I was a bit rusty on the topic.

I was starting to feel good at work, C# development. I was worried because I felt like a fraud. I was good at University. But saying that is like saying I am good at Street Fighter in my group of 4 friends. After that it was a bit random bullshit for years, whatever the client pays. Specialist of something you don't know, tester, coder, deployer. I'd code for Unix a bit, some Java here, the always beginner. But there was this latent potential, this passion that was burning in me.

And it just would not stop. Hey man, you have seen the burger? Ah no, busy you know. No, no, no, no, the HAMBURGERS!

![macdo 1](fun/macdo1.jpg)

![macdo 2](fun/macdo2.jpg)

It was madness, we were trying to take as much as we could. Some were working as teams, one with his arms like a bucket, the other loading the truck. I just had a big curry at [Caesar](?p=caesar.md). I was dying on the job.

I started off getting things right. I was VIP one month. So one guy I did not know came to me. Checked the name. And he gave me an envelope. I opened like it would explode. $300 in cash, dude. That's the most honest money I ever made. I worked hard, I got the cash, no bullshit.

I don't even know why someone made a real life ink item we had in the game. "Real summoning ink - On sales!"

![Magic Ink](fun/ink.jpg)

Coming back from Christmas holidays, we had a competition on a fighting game. So we fight each other, and the winner takes $600. Yeah, six. But it was fucking Tekken. Who plays Tekken except hobos? Right? I am a Blanka, that's my Zodiac sign. The tatami were unfair anyway. And we had trained with my pal at Fatal Fury for a few months for nothing. My Neo Geo buddy had been a developer for Neo Geo, he had cool stories.

![Fatal Fury](fun/fatalfury.jpg)

At that point my reputation is starting to ramp up because in addition to doing my job, I am training the young people, giving speeches, and improving the code.

We went to eat at a place Michael Jackson had been. It was cool, 10$ menu.

![Michael Jackson](fun/jackson.jpg)

A soccer player I don't know. Andy Cole. Manchester United.

![Andy Col](fun/foot.jpg)

I am still learning on the job. Especially human relationships. So for example, I spend 1 hour explaining something to a junior. And he thanks me a lot, he tells me he really aspires to be like me. And I tell him, with the true intent of being nice, "hey we have all been beginners, don't worry!". To which he replied in a touching voice: "I am not a beginner, I have 5 years of development". Yeah, well, he looked young and his code was shit, that's on him, but I apologized.

So I am assigned a new task. Different game, battle engine. I am a bit freaking out because when they ask, they are bowing at 40°. So the thing is 15,000 lines of code in one method. It is like improving a book written on a single line on a scroll with sentences only vaguely in the right order.

My boss was cool but an older guy was flexing some muscle: you should be able to do that in 2 months. The guy was full of shit. I am a simple man, I said, give me 3 days, I will sample and test, and give you the day I release. The boss accepted. It was about 3 months.

And I just did it. 3 months on it with my Neo Geo pal, eating curry and smoking cigarettes... well, at first he was not smoking, but he told me I looked so happy when I smoke. I told him I always look stupid but I am not responsible.

The seats were incredible. $1,500, an Italian brand, I don't remember the name. We spent some long time here. The morning some people were sleeping on the tatami or floor. I avoided it but not the long hours.

I was starting to have a legendary status. I knew that when someone told me that people were afraid that I was coming. And I asked: what, why? And he replied: "yeah, you know, the legendary CyberFrk coming on the project, they are worried that breaks the balance.". Sometime, you are better off not asking. But he had a point.

Basically, the guy who at that point was my pimp, sending me on hot spots, had asked me something, but this time implying I could refuse. CyberFrk (not my real name), he said, I implore you to take the task. So the task was that 4 developers had spent 3 months working on a battle engine and failed. The game was to launch in two weeks, and that was the time I had. So I said: I'll do my absolute best, you'll have something running. He replied: ah yeah by the way it is so bad it is better to start from scratch.

One cool thing also is that with artists being more likely women, coders men, we had about parity. That was really cool and genuine, everyone just had good relationships, young and a bit shy. That was so nice, really, the peace of the mind. To tell, the most outlandish thing that happened was a guy cheating with a colleague. So his wife called the company. He got scolded and stopped. The end! And people did not like that, we were in for fun, not for drama.

One couple formed, discreetly. When they announced it, apologizing, we were laughing. They were cute trying to hide it, but everybody knew it. The fun thing is that everybody knew it but noone ever talked about it to the others. For me I was sure when we were in the same train the morning. "We met by accident", they said. They were cute, really. She had worked at Sega, I had mad respect for her.

Discussions were passionate about games, user feedback. One complaint we got made us laugh. The guy was saying "I have cumulated points for a whole year, and when I used them, it was expired for a day. This is a lack of love". 愛がたらないです。We refunded the guy. We were seriously thinking about making things fun. Some members were spending $400 a month on the game they were making. Some came because they loved the game. It is like Sid Vicious taking a bass for the Sex Pistols, and Lemmy telling him: but you can't play bass, Sid. So punk!

I was having fun. That was absurdly good.

So was the scale. We had 15 millions people registered to the game. The company was taking 300 millions request a day. Any performance related mistake was the game down. And yet we had no release schedule, we would just release when it's done, no performance test.

New apartment. Better insulation. You know that 15 years later, it happens that switching on the AC, I think: it really is a good life. I have decided to never look again at an electricity bill. I don't care. I felt like a king tempered room, a super fun job.

Oh, one guy's nickname was Danpei. Danpei-sama. Why? We will never know.

There are reasons why I was good. Most people were fans of games, newly graduated from a 2-year course or even just their teeth and passion. The genre of gacha game was thriving, we were making millions, we simply did not have enough hands. We say that in Japanese: I'd even borrow the hands of cats. Well, clearly, catman was the norm, and I felt like Godzilla walking in Tokyo. At home. I had 7 years of mildly interesting experience, that gave me... patience and some background. 5 years in University with a master in "Software Development". I had spent these years sleeping 5 hours a night, reading algorithms, Doom code and Linux Kernel for fun. I loved coding, it is just that I had compromised with some corpo stuff. I don't regret though, it was a name that got me there in Japan, the kind where an interviewer thinks: he's the real deal. I wasn't. But I was still incredibly more qualified than virtually anyone else. And my mind has an affinity with the job, the associations, the absurd associations, the memory of places, the patient system unravelling I love.

We started to know each other, and they started to look at me the same way. These two guys with a Microsoft MVP prize. The infra monster who later invited me in his cloud company. The design wizard who changes values in a database and says "it will be more fun like that". And it is.

So I am reaching my peak here. I do the battle engine. People are looking at me with a mix of respect and nervousness. Don't worry, I say, I am not here to change anything, I will make this battle engine and you will ship, that's it.

With this 15,000 lines scroll, I had in my head the perfectly balanced game engine. The way I should separate abilities/powers, manage exceptions, derived abilities, offer common code. I simplified everything a designer could think in terms of explosion pattern in simple code rules. And two weeks in, it was running and it was beautiful. The original non working code was 100k lines of code. Mine was 6,000, very elegant.

The kid who can't code told me there is a bug. I told him: you are looking at cat pictures the whole day, fix it yourself. He was shocked. I was getting cocky. But I could afford it.

The end of the year was kind of insane, we gathered in the yearly party, and we were so many people, drinking, speaking some non-sense. And then Antonio appeared on the scene with the CEO. All hell broke loose.

![Antonio Inoki](fun/antonio.jpg)

So you may not know him, but he was the man. The guy is an absolute legend. I think he invited Hulk Hogan in Japan, but anyway they had been opponents and Hulk Hogan played dirty, and they were in a team also. He fought freaking Muhammad Ali, and that's sometimes credited as the start of MMA. At the very least he is someone who matters in MMA, Wrestling, US-Japan relationship. And also he flew to Iraq to liberate some hostages before the Gulf war, and converted to Islam. He was a politician also. Yeah, he's our real life Chuck Norris.

And he gave a gigantic slap to our boss. Not a metaphorical one. That was his thing, he slapped happiness into people. I would have been ready to help, I had a lot of slaps and happiness to give, I'd be honest.

I was a cigarette away from enlightenment. That's how I felt.

## The landing

It is incredible but at that point I have only spent one year in that company. I feel like I have always been there. So I won't say the fall, because to me it was bullet time, flow motion. The next 3 months will feel very slow, anticlimactic. Which does not mean boring, OK? There is some life in me, don't bury me yet.

So the game I made the engine for, it was internally reviewed. I am not defensive, it was not a coding issue. But it was canned. Too similar to other games, not fun enough, etc. There was this growing disconnect between the high level leadership and game teams. They wanted more ambition, but did not allow the budget for it and greenlighted things that when produced as intended would fail their standard. I was sad for the team, I knew almost all of them.
The game was not that common either, it was 16 players in team battle, with abilities, like a mad Bomberman. A lot was technically new, a young prodigy was writing the javascript, I was doing the logic. I was using the latest MVC .NET framework from Microsoft, first game in the company to do so. We were sitting next to one another, almost real-time coding. Like "Oh I would need this value also", then me 3 minutes later "done, how does that look", and we'd just play. That was frantic. The decision felt administrative. It was just canned. "Like a dog!", if you like Kafka.

So after that we moved to a new place. It was kind of weird. The new place was by any perspective better, floor wood, more spacious, still heated normally, more meeting rooms, nice. But we were a bit nostalgic already.

Artists were unhinged, the walls became fair game.

![art](fun/art.jpg)
![art2](fun/art2.jpg)
![art3](fun/art3.jpg)
![art4](fun/art4.jpg)
![art5](fun/art5.jpg)

We were leaving place we had inhabited.

![Tatami room](fun/tatami.jpg)

In the new place, unrelated, I had a problem in my eye. I was so busy, I did not go quickly to a hospital. When we did, I found myself in a shitty place, the doctor having greasy hands and unsure. He told me it was the cornea, that he had to cut it in emergency. I did not imagine he would do that with a cutter and his greasy hands. Afterward he said "that was my first time, I am glad it succeeded". Well, I am not the only one that can't shut up. Beginner! But it was a hard time. The pain was redefining the word, I was screaming my tears out, moisture was of the essence.

Then I was sent to a project, something new and ambitious, I am still in a bad shape, with a white patch on my eye. It was cool but it did not have the means of its ambition. I wanted to give it a chance, I talked about it to a higher up I was good with. He seemed interested. He was interested. But in a meeting, when it was announced the project was canned and everyone turned to me, I knew why. That was uncool.

My evaluation was average. I said I am not average. I thrive or I suck. He told me to escalate. I did. I found myself in a room, they were 5 sitting. They wanted to impress me, they didn't. We call that 威圧感, intimidation, often by numbers. So I explained my case. They told me I was acknowledged and the best coder in the 100 developers of the department. They showed me the spreadsheet to prove it. I was impressed. I said I wasn't. And I continued: then what you don't have the money and you gave us mediocre evaluations to not raise our salary? And that was pretty much that. So I said: then why do you buy stupid dart machines and you don't give money to the young members who are working hard all day?

They removed the dart machine.

After that they announced a plan. They wanted to focus on the people on board, but they would support those who are not fit for the adventure. Money to leave, the Japanese way. I had felt entitled to fun and coolness. My bar was raised, I could not be satisfied with just room temperature, I wanted more, and I saw it clearly, the best people leaving.

I discussed with the best people, they were all leaving. It was not good. One woman told me: they even removed the dart machines! Aaaah, sorry.

So I decided to leave.

## The aftermath

The company survived for years. Much longer than anticipated. But the people I really liked had left. So I could have had a few years inside a nice place, with stagnant salary. It was not bad. But I left.

I still meet some. One is a great buddy I go see movies and eat tacos with. There is a group, we were kind of a foreigner club. A group also, we do a BBQ every year that is super cool. A lot of people moved to "serious" business, Accenture, IBM, Google. I was recommended by some. We met again at a wedding or in a workplace.

We all tremdendously grew. Some young people coming because they like games, me because I had been in half-assed jobs, we all learned so much here. I would prove myself that in dev, I had become the real deal.

We kind of gravitate around the same things. One Japanese guy was born in a French speaking country. We gave him our baby bed when his first kid was born. His brother took it in the subway. I said good-bye in the smoking room. In my current company's smoking room, we met again. That was cool. He told me he was buying a place. I don't know, I felt it had to be that: is this that place in xxx? He said yes, how do you know? We are neighbours, dude!

When I left, we had a party, and it was all great. And they offered me a present for my next job. And to this day, I have it near me, dearly. I can't exactly explain my feeling. But I felt something. The present was oddly specific, a certain model of fountain pen from a German maker, Lamy. It is the very same I got from my great-grandmother when I was 11. I had cherished it for years until it stopped working. Ok, let's be modest: in my brain, there is this relation that is created through that same pen offered twice across time and space, by someone with a good heart encouraging me. After that, I don't know, it is almost uncanny, to me.

Edit: Fuck it, I downplayed it too much. My Great-Grandmother offered me this pen in 1992, for my first communion. At 95 years old, for her birthday, I was sitting alone, and she sat next to me, very politely. She told me: "I heard you are into computers? That's the future! How are you doing?". A communion is a bridge. I ain't mystic, I don't believe. But I had tears my eyes. Even writing that I am emotional. Yeah, random, I know. And yet, in my mind, these events 10,000 km and 25 years apart kind of related. And as I am writing, I mean a pen, of all things.

That was a village we formed there, and the village is still there. But the company is dead, that's why I talk so freely. The first place we were working at is now a parking lot. It is weird.

The company motto was that, in English: We are seeking fun!

And to this day, it is my gold standard of what a job should be. You can tune around that, but you should be happy in life.