Run the Table. Don’t Railroad It.
Running tabletop games taught me most of what I know about producing. A bad game master railroads the players. They block choices, ignore what players do, and force the ending they planned.
A good game master plans ahead and stays flexible. They use their authority to tell the most interesting story, not to control the outcome. They welcome debate, and they weave each player’s backstory into the plot so everyone has a reason to care. They manage the mood, the pace, the resources, and the limits.
That’s the job of an executive producer.
Products live or die on their stories.
The user story, the pitch, and the narrative are all storytelling, and I build them in that order, like a screenplay. The logline is the user story: what do players do, why, why will they keep doing it, and how will they progress? The pitch tells everyone from stakeholders to customers why that journey is worth taking. The screenplay is the design and the build.
No story is sacred, including mine. The curriculum team and I argued over every Little Passports script, and the result beat anything I’d written alone.
Planning is a utility belt.
A plan should hold a tool for every problem without stopping you from handling the one you didn’t see coming. Mine holds MoSCoW lists, risk lists, buffers, decision deadlines, pre-mortems, and trapdoors: planned off-ramps for when something you counted on disappears.
Succeeding by crunching is a failure of planning. If someone has to crunch, I make it me, and then I fix the schedule.
Good ideas come from anywhere.
The best idea should win, and “best” means tested. Every idea is an experiment until user tests, A/B tests, and telemetry say otherwise.
When a junior teammate has the better idea, I champion it and make sure they get the credit. When a senior leader’s instinct is wrong, I bring the data. The people closest to the product see things leadership can’t.
On AI
AI didn’t eliminate expertise. It made expertise more important. A translation program gives you the words, but not always the meaning. You need people who understand both sides.
“I don’t ask my team for anything I won’t do myself. I do the prep before they arrive and after they leave, so I’m ready when they are.”
— Seth Thygesen, Executive Producer
I Started Making Games at 12
I made my first games in RPG Maker when I was 12, writing the stories and scripting every event by hand on projects like Radiation Man and Flowers for Algernon. It taught me how games actually get built, one piece at a time.
That’s why I can talk with engineers and artists as a peer. I’ve done the work myself, and I know what it takes to turn a spec into something that’s fun to play.