Nobody asked for a point-and-click adventure set in a dying 90s mall. Nobody asked for a turn-based RPG where your party fights a monster called the Algorithm. Nobody asked for a Scorched Earth tribute, a brick-breaker, a pong clone with a dog mascot, a forest sim, a Hearts client, a rhythm game, a squirrel-chaos platformer, or Minesweeper-meets-miniature-golf.
These exist anyway. Ten of them now, in a password-protected section of this site called the Arcade. I started writing this post when there were five, and the count kept moving. I want to explain why — because the reason matters for how I think about work generally.
The Cabinets
The Arcade is laid out like a row of cabinets. You walk in, pick one, and play. Roughly in order of when they entered the lineup:
None of This Is a Business Decision
The games don't generate leads. They're not SEO plays. They're not in the pitch deck. Nobody hires a consultancy because they played a turn-based RPG about the Algorithm on the consultancy's private beta page.
They exist because they were interesting to make. Which sounds simple, but is unusual for something that lives under a business domain.
Why Ten And Not Stopping
The honest reason there are ten now and not five is that each game taught me something the last one didn't. GALLERIA taught me about pacing and dread. Fellowship taught me about combat math and instruction-manual writing. Canopy taught me how unforgiving emergent systems can be when you balance them wrong. Tank Brothers taught me that physics previews are harder than they look — the first version of the aim arc didn't actually match the trajectory of the shot, and watching playtesters miss because of my bug was its own lesson.
Card Room and GolfSweeper were the ones I didn't expect to finish. They started as one-afternoon experiments and turned out to have real loops underneath. That's the thing about building without a brief: you find out, sometimes belatedly, what was actually worth your time.
What Building Games Teaches You
Making a game — even a small, janky browser game — forces you to think about systems. You have to design an experience for someone who doesn't know what you know and hasn't made the decisions you made. You balance difficulty against accessibility, complexity against clarity, explanation against discovery.
That's the same problem as consulting. You're always designing a system — a strategy, a framework, a brand architecture — that has to work for someone who isn't you, in conditions you don't fully control. The feedback loops in game design are faster and more honest than in most business work, where "the strategy isn't landing" takes months to surface. In a game it takes thirty seconds.
Building things that need to feel right makes you better at knowing when things don't. That's the skill that transfers, and it's hard to develop by only working on things you're paid to deliver.
The Brand Isn't Separate From This
There's a version of a consultancy website that's all case studies and "we increase your ROI." It's legitimate. It's also boring, and it tells you one specific thing about how someone works.
The Arcade says something different: this is a creative operation that makes things for the pleasure of making them — things that might be weird, things with no brief except "I want to see if this works." That's information about intellectual range, about whether someone brings energy to a project or just executes a spec. It's information that's hard to fake. You either built the point-and-click adventure game or you didn't. You either tuned the artillery physics until the preview matched the shot or you didn't.
What's Next
The Arcade isn't done. The current ten are the ones that survived contact with their first players; a few more are in pieces on the workbench, and at least one might never leave it, which is fine. Nothing in the Arcade is on a deadline. That's the part that matters: work that's done when it's good, not when the schedule says.
That standard is harder to maintain in commercial work. The Arcade is where it gets practiced.