I Don't think I Could Sit for That Long

Over the course of the past several days, I watched Jeff Kaplan's interview with Lex Fridman. I was clued into it by Josh Strife Hayes, and after his commentary about it I searched and found the full 5+ hour interview on YouTube:

Yes, it's 5 hours 10 minutes.

And yes, it's worth the full time. 

But yes, that full length meant I broke down the interview into 1 hour chunks. (Your mileage may vary.)

From my perspective, there are three big takeaways from the interview:

• He's seen some shit.
  
  

  

  "That was just the biggest 'fuck you' moment I had
  in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition..."
  Screencap from the interview.

  
  Maybe I'm reading too much into the look on his face, but he gives off that thousand yard stare at times. I look at him and think that this is what I'd look like if I hadn't changed jobs back in 2001. (My kids would say that about some of my more recent foibles, but I'm not so sure. I guess it's left as an exercise to the people who know me to provide details.)
  
  
  
  
• The corporate execs at the end were complete idiots who only saw things through the lens of dollar signs.
  
  Yes, you can say that any business is in it to make money, but when some of the shenanigans that went on with Overwatch went down, Jeff had finally had it and left. I'll leave it to you to find the spot in the interview, because the full interview provided the amount of heft of what leaving Blizzard meant to Jeff. Lex did bleep out some specific numbers to protect Jeff's NDA, but regardless I felt like punching a wall or something when I saw that part. 
  
  
  

  

  From Rick and Morty.

  
  Jeff had every right to be upset, and I'm sure that I could find out exactly who he was talking about in that part of the interview, but I'd really rather not dwell on the injustice of it all. Jeff wasn't the one overpromising on the Overwatch League, and he was the one caught in the crosshairs of trying to keep riding the Overwatch wave and keeping it fresh while working on Overwatch 2. 
  
  
• Jeff is proof that you do not need an IT or a business degree to leave your mark in gaming. His degree is in creative writing, and it was his passion for gaming that eventually led to his employment at Blizzard. While yes, he's often poked fun of for making the original Green Hills of Stranglethorn questline in WoW (he talks about that in the interview, by the way) I'm also confident that he had a big hand in the Defias questline that I love so much. In the interview, he mentioned that Pat Nagle worked on quests for Elwynn Forest and he took Westfall, which meant that he was working on quests in the heart of the Defias territory. 

It's a fascinating interview, and I'm glad that Jeff seems to be slowly coming out of his funk after leaving Blizzard. Now I really want to read Play Nice by Jason Schreier, about the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment.