Lately I've been thinking about some my personal biases and how they can get in the way of what I really want to accomplish. More specifically, how they might have been inhibiting me from giving my best at the things I'm most passionate about: Like games, game development, engine development, programming, personal growth, and my team. I also can't help but wonder how they impact my relationships with friends and family, and in particular as a parent to my wonderful daughter.

I'll share some of them with you here. Some are obvious, some might be silly, but it wasn't until I stepped back a bit that I could really see them for what they were. In no particular order:

1. "Professional" Bias : Or what I'm also thinking of as "The Boring Bias." I have a deep love for games and how they can motivate us, give us room to create, pull us together as people, ignite our passions and provide a platform for fascinating ideas and technology and have fun, real joy, doing it. But I see myself all too often looking elsewhere when I want to accomplish those very same things in the context of development. When I look at management type stuff like Gallup studies, or books like "Good to Great" or methodologies like Agile I can see a commonality: They're all so freaking boring! Nothing has been able to motivate, inspire and bring together millions of people or all different cultures and backgrounds to build things and make things and share experiences together like games - and that's something I know something about! I'm now super excited to figure out how I can apply my own models of games to a lot more problems. And just have more fun in the process.
2. Education Bias : This is peculiarity of game development. Edutainment has been such god-awful crap for so long that just being associated with anything that might be considered "learning" is often avoided, at least overtly. And this bias has often caused me to forget that fundamentally, games are *about* learning. It's the one true universal language on this planet. We not only share game playing with other humans, we share it across species. Seriously, for the folks that say math is the universal language - I can't imagine doing math with a dog, but I can certainly imagine playing a game of fetch pretty easily. It's how a lot of of us higher Earth creatures learn best. And the very best games teach us deep and fundamental lessons that we can take with us our whole lives. Come on, how long have we been collectively studying chess or go? And if we look at games like WoW or even more recently FarmVille, we're talking about games that represent the some of largest live human experiments in economics and psychology the world has ever seen - the world is learning a lot from that. So I need to remind myself to ask what I can learn, what lessons I'm sharing, or what I'm experimenting with in everything I do.
3. Programmer Bias : Pretty much universally every single time I've said or thought, "you need a programmer to do that bit, really" I've been eventually proven wrong. I have this model in my mind of programmers: something like a mix of problem-solving, math and logical/analytical thinking skills with a bit of OCD thrown in. And I'm definitely biased to think of problems in those terms. But the truth is that everyone has these same skills at different levels, they just need the right tools (or games!) and the right information to leverage what they can do and know. Not everyone can do everything of course, and someone has to write those tools in the first place, but everyone *can* do way more than they're usually given credit for (especially by me.) In games, artists construct models out of triangles, which can certainly be seen as a form of programming (which is fundamentally just doing something that converts data from one form to another.) But we also see artists building shaders and animators building complex rigs which by any measure is exactly the same kind of thing. The examples are endless. I can imagine some alternative history where some "programmers" got together and said "Only programmers can make music! It requires complex math and deep analysis of the structure to get it right!" - when of course we can see that a whole lot of people who only know three cords and definitely don't deeply understand the structure or math behind music can create real works of art that resonate with millions of people. Now when I think to myself that only a programmer could do something, I need to think instead about what kind of engine would allow someone like Britney Spears to do it instead. (Which of course now, I realize the irony of using her as the example here after I write it. Which just goes to show how insidious it is.)
4. Negativity Bias : Part and parcel with having analytical work and being fascinated with models of completion (like programming!) is being over-critical. It's a crucial part of the process, of course. You make things better by looking at what problems exist and how they can be solved. It's when I take this too far that it becomes a real issue. It's when I forget that I'm looking for areas to *improve* and idea and not reasons to *kill* an idea that it gets in the way of creativity and shuts things down too early. It's easy to forget, especially in retrospect, that pretty much every good idea, and certainly every great idea, has holes in it. Sometimes big gaping ones. You just don't have all the answers up front. Especially when you're trying something new. You're not supposed to! Otherwise, it wouldn't be new! I have to imagine all the people that have changed the world, and all the (much larger number of) people that told them how it wouldn't work and think about which side of that equation I want to be on. For Pete's sake, I was one of the people that said "Sony doesn't know shit about games, I don't see how they can compete with Nintendo and Sega" when I first heard about the original Playstation project. This doesn't mean every idea *is* a good idea, of course. Or is practical. Or affordable. Or performant. Or whatever. But I does mean that I have to help build an idea up first and see how far it can go assuming it *can* meet the criteria for success. And explore it a lot further before deciding it's definitely not going to work.
5. Expert Bias : There are some areas that I consider myself an expert in. Which really just means these are topics I've dedicated huge amounts of time, energy and study to. They are topics that fascinate me and that I can apply to what I love doing. The bias is not that I consider myself an expert at some level (admittedly there's always someone out there that seems to know more than I do) - at best, it's just factual, at worst it's hubris. The bias is that I get so lost in these subjects that I fail to see the, what are often extremely obvious, connections. e.g. How I can apply what I do to other fields, or how I can apply expert knowledge from other fields to what I do. Recently, in talking to a couple of the engine programmers on my team at Insomniac, I mentioned how I thought their Super Power as more generalist programmers was to bring disparate ideas together. To see the connections between unrelated systems and build something new and better out of the parts. It's something I need to work harder on. I need to remind myself to occasionally step back and look at fresh and new topics, ideas and areas of study and see what *else* I can learn. I can probably use some work on the hubris thing too. But whatever. Not today. :)
6. Business Bias or Art Bias : I take turns with these in seemingly equal amounts. "It's about the business!" (Generally meaning sales, etc.) "It's about the art!" (Generally meaning a desire to express what's important to me as a creator.) It's neither one, exclusively of course. Famously recently Bobby Kotick of Activision pissed off a lot of people, both developers and players, when he said making games was exclusively about the money and really shouldn't be any fun. That's not only the road to soulless garbage in my opinion, it's simply and provably wrong. And Activision is quite lucky to have a lot of dedicated developers that bring their love and passion to development (and thus have made some great titles) regardless of what their CEO says to the company shareholders. On the flip side, it's not just about "the art" either. If I push toward some extreme end of experimental development, I'm very likely to exclude a huge majority of the potential audience. And it's that wider potential audience that (1) pays the bills, (2) gives me more people to connect with on some level, which is important to me and (3) gives me the opportunity, over time, to experiment with the ideas that I'm so interested in. It's why I love pop entertainment so much - it's a blending of business and art in a way that's both artistically compelling and sustainable. I just need to remind myself sometimes to have patience. There's lots of room for experimentation in a pop art, but you have to take the audience with you along the way. Take a look at music, punk and rap and rock-and-roll before them have completely transformed pop music. It just took some time and pressure. You know, like in Shawshank Redemption. 
7. Proximity Bias : This is one I find the strangest, but see it in myself all the time. I often take the opinion of someone completely outside of my social circle more seriously than someone I'm very close to. Even if the opinion is exactly the same! Perhaps I go to some conference like GDC or talk with some people from different development studio or just read something from some random guy on the internet and I think "Wow! That's a great idea. I want to use that." But then when I take that idea back and share it, I might have people tell me, "Goddammit, Mike! I've been telling you that for a couple of years now!" It almost certainly has to do with the internal psychological model of the people I know have in my head and I become blind to things that don't match that model. And the more I work with someone, or the longer I'm friends with them, the deeper entrenched that model becomes and the more blind I get. Even worse of course is when I bring the experience I have with the person as unfair and unrelated baggage and partially (at least subconsciously) judge the idea on that too. I need to remind myself when I hear an idea or any kind of feedback really, to imagine it in a much more neutral context to try and break this model of where it's coming from in my head.
8. Film Bias : This is another peculiarity of games. It's this idea that the film industry is the sort of big-brother to the video game industry and we often look to them as a model of how to do things or what we want to do. Well screw that! This one in particular pisses me off a lot when I see it in others and so very much more when I see it in myself. It's not that there's nothing to learn from film or the great studios, because there is (Pixar comes to mind and Ed Catmull in particular is a sort of personal hero of mine.) It's that games in particular have something fundamentally deep and different to bring to the world and that's what we need to explore! I love that I get to be a part of these moments in games because there is so much for us to explore and learn. It's my view that years from now video games are going to have such a profound impact on the way we live our lives that we're not even going to be able to imagine why we thought we'd want to be more like Hollywood and their lot. I need to remind myself that we have our own destiny and I get to be a part of that!
9. Productivity Bias : This is actually where this whole thing started. I was thinking that it's so easy for me personally to get lost in what I'm doing. In projects and tasks and milestones and bugs. In making sure that things are getting correctly and on time. It's so easy to forget why I'm doing this. It's so easy to lose the passion and sheer love of the work and the things I can bring to the world under the onslaught of everyday stuff. There's no question that the stuff needs to get done, but all the work that I've ever done that I thought was really good (or even great) came from an emotional core. It's because I believed, deeply, that it was important and that I could make some kind of impact (however small) on the world. I need to remember to take a step back more often and remind myself of why I'm here and how I can make a difference. Really, just to keep inspiring myself so that I can always do my best.
10. Success Bias : Man, this one sucks balls. When I'm successful at something, I want to keep doing more of that. On the surface, that seems fine, of course. But at some point it gets in the way of failure. I can find myself avoiding things that are different than that or that don't have the same chance of success. I can easily forget that in any way in which I've been successful, it's absolutely only because I failed in so many ways before that first. I know that I have to try lots of new things and fail at most of them to create anything really good. But it's so easy for me to forget. I need remember to ask myself every single day, how have I failed today? Because if I haven't failed, then I certainly haven't been trying hard enough. 
11. Completion Bias - I'm adding this one because I realized that it was this that was actually getting in the way of me writing this little article in the first place. I know this is the reason why I don't post to my blog or work on various hobby projects as often as I want to. I have a strong tendency to want to complete something. What "complete" means is fairly arbitrary, but if I don't feel like I can do something real justice I don't want to do it. I'm sure this has something to do with the old adage my dad pounded in my head as a youth. That "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right." And I'm for sure obsessed with that. As I wrote this I asked myself questions like: "Have I written enough on these topics?" or "Have I missed anything important?" or "Did I make that point well enough?" or "Are there some better ways of categorizing these biases?" or "Is there some way I could more generalize this point?" or "Should I go back and rewrite this whole thing?" - And I needed to tell myself that what I wrote probably is imperfect in many ways but I have my entire lifetime to improve it and at the very least, trying to articulate these imperfect thoughts in some way will at least give me a good start.