About a year ago, I think offended a few businessmen for saying something to the effect of, “Profits are like oxygen – you need them to stay alive, but they’re not why you exist.”

Now, if you heard this statement in isolation, I guess you’d think I was some kind of tree-hugging socialist. And, of course, I am. But I didn’t say profits weren’t important. I said they weren’t why you existed.

If your absolute and stated goal as a business is to make as much money as possible, you’re basically a pirate (the bad kind). To a pirate, the world is simply a space with money in it. The problem is that there’s more money outside of your ship than inside. The pirate doesn’t have to think about things like creating brand appeal, satisfying customers, or creating unique and interesting products because, to the pirate, other people are simply places containing things that you would like to have.

The non-piratical way of making money is to

1. Figure out what people want, need, or could want,
2. Figure out what you’re good at doing,
3. Do things that satisfy the above conditions, and
4. Accept money in return.

If you keep focusing on new and interesting ways to help people, then customers will follow you. If you simply focus on getting their money, you will inevitably chase the customers – with a cannon.

Now, pirates don’t stop being pirates just because they recognize that it is (for the time being) more profitable to obey the law than not. These businessmen were perhaps a touch piratical. I don’t think their company is doing very well, and I’m not surprised. Rather than trying to make people (employees included) happy, they’re trying to extract money from them.

There’s definitely a place at every company for people who have this utilitarian worldview. They are vital, in fact, because they ask the hard questions other people aren’t willing to. But if the company forgets, along the way, that their goal is to provide useful goods and services (and accept money in return), then they’re going to gradually mutate into, say, Apple in the 1990′s.

Now, that brings me to another anecdote, which is particularly funny in this context. I think I was rejected from a job for asking how they intended to make money. That doesn’t make me a pirate any more than the above makes me a hippie. It just makes me a guy who would like to continue to have a roof over his head.

I recently finished Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the first time. Overall, I found it to be a great game that was really well-tuned in terms of difficulty (after Demon’s Souls and Dwarf Fortress, my perception of difficulty levels has… changed). I did finally drop down to Ninja Dog mode for the final boss, but only because I had blown all my consumables and didn’t want to go back to farm.

However, I thought the game’s jumping puzzles and some boss levels were rather teleological. This term basically means that stuff in the world exists for a specific, ultimate purpose. A good example of this is when this nutjob talks about bananas, asserting that God created the modern banana specifically for our enjoyment, blithely ignoring the hundreds or thousands of years of careful breeding that went into turning the seedy, astringent wild banana into the fleshy, sweet banana we know today.

Game worlds, unlike bananas, are made specifically by designers for our enjoyment. We know this. Usually it isn’t a problem. However, it becomes a problem when it looks like something should be possible, but it isn’t. Then, the game becomes absurd. The difference between these two calls attention to the game’s artifice.

Ninja Gaiden’s boss encounters often featured invisible walls that roped off geometry that a player could hide behind, thus making boss encounters trivial. My problem with these walls wasn’t the walls per se: It’s that they were invisible. It’s like they held up a big sign that said, “In the last month of playtesting we found that the boss could get hung up on this rock over here, and we couldn’t even ask the artists to build us a shimmering forcefield.” A shimmering forcefield is at least consistent with a world that has demons and lasers. An invisible wall isn’t.

The jumping puzzles also had some offenders in this regard. There was one time where I had to look up a solution to a puzzle that involved swinging off of a tree branch. Now, I could have just been a bit thick-skulled, but I felt the game hadn’t trained me sufficiently to regard all branches as swingable. If this were the case, everything that it looked like you could swing on would have been swingable, even if it was pointless. This makes me really appreciate Thief and Assassin’s Creed. In Assassin’s creed, the levels were meticulously designed so that anything it looked like you could do was possible. In Thief, they simply built fewer artificial restrictions into the game, which enabled you to solve puzzles in ways that even the game’s designers didn’t foresee.

This is something that games which involve any level of stealth need to get right. I think a lot of game designers are lawful-oriented people who are uncomfortable with dishonorable tactics, and it’s hard to tune a game’s difficult both for proud warrior race guys and sneaky sniper-assassins. People who like to be sneaky (like me) are also inclined to exploit game mechanics, which many people consider to be cheating. I don’t think it’s an accident that I also like to automate and optimize things. I want to play sneaky because sneaky is smart. It screws with my suspension of disbelief more to see a guy could run into a room and shoot everyone than to see him pick off a dozen guards from across the building. Even in Demon’s Souls, bastardly hard that it is, there is nothing that stops you from arrowing most monsters to death from a comfortable distance. And nobody who plays Dwarf Fortress would call you a cheater for lining the entrance to your fort with dozens of merciless traps, siege weapons, fortifications and magma cannons – they’d call you dwarfy. These are the people who look at immortal, bloodsucking vampire dwarves as a convenient opportunity to create a workforce that can survive without food provided they are kept separate from their fellows, and you know what? They are smarter than people who play Call of Duty.