It Started With a Quarter.

I blame video games.

More specifically, I blame the early-1980s arcade.

If you weren't a kid during that era, it's hard to explain what an arcade felt like.

You have to remember: there was no internet. No smartphones. No PlayStation 47 sitting under the television rendering individual nose hairs in 8K.

We had three television networks.

And then somebody opened a dark room in the mall filled with spaceships, aliens, race cars and electronic beeping noises.

Are you kidding me?

One of my places was Spaceport at Montgomery Mall.

Even the name sounded futuristic.

Spaceport.

You weren't going to an arcade. You were apparently leaving Earth.

You'd walk in and immediately get hit with the sounds.

Wakka-wakka-wakka.

Pew! Pew! Pew!

Explosions. Electronic sirens. Twenty machines all desperately trying to convince you that THIS ONE deserved your quarter.

And everywhere you looked, screens glowed from these giant decorated cabinets.

Asteroids. Defender. Galaga. Centipede. Pac-Man.

They weren't games to me.

They were portals.

And I wanted in.

The most valuable object in America was a quarter

I don't think kids today can appreciate the economic pressure involved in early arcade gaming.

You had a quarter.

One. Quarter.

That quarter represented approximately 45 seconds of entertainment if you sucked.

There were no save points. No "Would you like to continue from your last checkpoint?"

You died.

The machine basically said:

You have disappointed me. NEXT CHILD.

So you learned.

You watched other kids play. You studied them. You figured out patterns. You stretched that quarter as far as humanly possible.

And when someone was really good?

You watched.

There might be five kids standing behind one machine watching some 14-year-old kid play Defender like he had been recruited directly by NASA.

That was entertainment.

Then somebody told us the arcade could come home

Eventually, we got the Sears version of the Atari VCS.

Technically, this should have made me the happiest child alive.

The arcade. At home.

Except there was a small problem.

It wasn't quite the arcade.

I would look at the arcade version of a game. Then look at the Atari version. Then look back at the arcade version.

Hmm.

Meanwhile, other systems started appearing. Intellivision. ColecoVision.

And I wanted them. Badly.

Especially because their games looked closer to the arcade games I had fallen in love with.

This was probably one of my earliest experiences with technology disappointment.

Today we'd call it a "gap between customer expectations and product experience."

At age 12, I probably called it:

"MOM! LOOK HOW MUCH BETTER THIS ONE IS!"

My mother remained unmoved by my strategic analysis.

So I built Pac-Man

There was one other minor obstacle standing between me and my dream arcade.

Money.

I didn't have any.

But I did have cardboard.

So at some point, I built my own Pac-Man game.

Out of cardboard.

To be clear, this was not a functioning electronic version of Pac-Man.

I had not secretly invented Nintendo in my bedroom.

It was cardboard.

But in my head, I was making a video game.

I was trying to recreate this thing that fascinated me using whatever materials I could get my hands on.

I didn't know words like "prototype." I didn't know "interaction design." I didn't know "user experience."

I knew:

Pac-Man. Cardboard. Let's go.

Looking back, that may have been the more important moment.

Because somewhere along the way, I had crossed a line.

I didn't just want to play the thing anymore.

I wanted to make the thing.

That's how computers got me

My first computer was an Apple II clone.

And I started messing around.

Programming. Poking into things. Experimenting with the Apple II machine-language monitor. Trying to understand what was happening underneath all those pixels.

And slowly I discovered something extraordinary.

The games weren't magic.

Somebody made them.

Some human being sat somewhere and decided: When this happens, do that. Move this thing here. Make that sound. Put this pixel there. Give the player three lives. Make the ghost chase Pac-Man.

And once I understood that, computers became infinitely more interesting to me.

Because now I wasn't just looking at what the machine did.

I was thinking about what I could make it do.

That curiosity eventually helped steer me toward computer science.

For years, that's how I've told this story: Video games got me interested in computers.

True.

But I don't think it's actually the story.

I wasn't fascinated by computers

I was fascinated by possibility.

The computer was simply the first tool I encountered that seemed capable of turning imagination into something other people could experience.

And once I see that, I can trace the same behavior forward.

Years later, I was working at ThrustMaster.

We made joysticks.

And at some point I looked at one of our power joysticks and had a thought.

What if you didn't use it like a joystick?

What if you turned the interaction around and operated it more like a pinball table?

So I modified one.

Suddenly you could play the pinball video games of the time with something that felt more like... pinball.

That experiment eventually contributed to a new product.

Different decade. Different technology. Same kid.

I think Spaceport taught me to reframe

I've spent a lot of my career trying to understand what it is that I actually do.

Designer? Technologist? Strategist? Facilitator? Creative? Storyteller?

Yes.

And also no.

Because underneath all of them is a behavior that started much earlier.

I look at something and wonder:

Does it have to be this way?

What if the joystick isn't a joystick?

What if the computer isn't a computer?

What if the problem we're trying to solve isn't actually the problem?

What if the story everyone is telling isn't the story people need to hear?

What else could this be?

That's reframing.

And apparently I've been practicing it since I was a kid with no money, a pile of cardboard, and an unreasonable desire to have Pac-Man in my house.

Maybe that's why I still love this work.

Reframing feels a little like walking into Spaceport.

You start with the world you know.

Then the lights change.

Something starts beeping.

And suddenly—

there's another world right there.