Two years into my tenure as UX Director at N3TWORK, we decided to pivot away from a video-based social network, into making mobile games. The founders, Neil Young and Bob Stevenson, were world-class games industry veterans. It was time to lean into their strengths…and mine. We believed we could innovate the mobile game space by fusing our expertise in game design and consumer product design.

The games business is always at the bleeding edge of monetization, analytics, psychology, economics, and technology. Games push devices to their limits and ask users to do unreasonable things. I dove in and gradually began to understand how a deep game economy with multiple currencies depends on carefully constructed loops that drive behaviors, engagement, retention and lifetime value. Plus, it was so much fun to collaborate with designers, artists, and composers to invent characters, worlds, backstory, and imaginative laws of physics and magic.

The result? Our first game, Legendary Game of Heroes was an Top 10 hit, earning over $400 million. We also created a new version of the timeless classic, Tetris. And we began experimenting with how blockchain could be used to revolutionize digital ownership and economies.