Since I occasionally blog about games published by my employer, I figure I might as well have a generic “conflict of interest” post I can refer to. So:

  • If I post about Playdom games, I have a conflict of interest.
  • Anything I talk about is strictly my own opinion; in fact, I’ll try to avoid talking about matters where my employment at Playdom gives me some extra insight into what I’m saying about the games in question.
  • While I’m at it, in general the details of my posts about Facebook games may age more quickly than those in my posts about other sorts of games. The games change all the time; for that matter, because of A/B testing, different people may even have different experiences playing the same game at the same time. Also, I may occasionally post about Playdom games fairly soon after their public launch, when they’re in an even larger amount of flux than normal.

On that second point: I haven’t been part of a game team at Playdom, so I don’t actually have deep knowledge about the details of individual games! Instead, I’ve been on the Business Intelligence team, which is a cross-game team whose job is to get insight about players’ behavior. That will be changing soon, though—I’ll be transitioning over to our RPG team around the middle of the month. Which I’m looking forward to, though I’ve also really enjoyed my time with the BI team: for one thing, I’m curious to see game making from the inside, and, for another thing, I’ve been a C++ programmer for long enough that it’s time to try something new. Which makes it ironic that the BI team is starting to explore Hadoop (with a corresponding switch to a Java-based infrastructure) just as I’m leaving them; a pity, it would be interesting to see that technological transition through.

My transitioning to a game team has been the plan since before I joined Playdom; it’s very much to the company’s credit that they’ve gone out of their way to fulfill this bargain, since I’m sure there are many companies out there that would say one thing to get you on board and then change their tune after you’ve joined. One of the many reasons why I like working there; on which note, we are, as always, hiring. Lots of interesting things to do, whether you like making games or processing and understanding huge volumes of user data.

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