paidia¹

this is how i wanna be remembered: enlarging the overall pool of “fun” in this world.

i spend most time of my life playing/creating games. who could tell what is a game and what is not a game? the earth, this structure of universe, with this planck’s constant² look pretty much like a default setting some entities have engineered just for us to thrive.

the origin of this obsession traces back to my family. where the first principle we uphold is to be kind, and second is to be having fun. my dad was collecting dvds his entire teenage years while other people check off the items on the list of “how to be successful”. he sold some, and in our old home there was one entire wall that was dedicated to his collection. when i graduated, he immediately introduced the world of games to me, which for me opens up a form of expression: , a lot of ios games, steam, and then nintendo switch.

my mom is a person that is full of wonders. she’s extremely sensitive to beauty and art. we used to go to hongkong a lot after my morning swimming training sesh, and those vintage stores, bookstores, stationery stores… we could spend hours and hours just studying how things are designed, and received. she made a lot stuff more noticeable for me, no matter how micro or tacit it is.

during pandemic, my dad, my mom, and i played a lot of nintendo games (we wanted to kill each other in overcooked 2, and wendy wang is the purple rabbit ³ in super mario bros where thanks to her we are able to pass, and i have to “monitor” their game time just bc they always couldn’t stop playing :)

i don’t like to work for other people or someone else’s vision, but there were 2 companies i wanted to work for when i was young: & apple. i regularly emailed them about ideas i had and realized i couldn’t count on them to execute my vision. that’s where i decided to start my own game studio. i learnt 2 things that really motivated me: (1) there’s a lot of room to gamify dyslexia intervention (i am dyslexic myself and have gone through extensive programs); (2) never expect your vision to be executed by someone else. if u see something in some year’s time, you have to make it happen. so yea, i started with a very close friend of mine. i decided to put the majority of the first years running this into development. totally forgot about testing and selling. we ended up attracting a super talented team from neurodivergent backgrounds: people who were in a national esports team, a medalist in noi⁴, an artist who has exhibited across the world and a composer who’d gotten over 10M plays, and of course, a friend who always chose games over anything, and a normal person like me. i sent a bunch of emails to all the names i know in the game industry including the founders of tencent, and that’s how a team with an average age of 15 got into the tencent tech philanthropy venture program.

selling games was hard. it was in a quite sensitive field too. we had gone through a super long beta testing/trial period and a certification regulation settling period. will kids love to play those, stick with those but not to an extent that they can’t live without me. we were never able to predict how loved a game would be.

what we did was we booked appts w all the clinics we could call. said we had some mental problems and were feeling depressed⁵. and we would walk into the room pitching about the games. it was definitely pretty disruptive but it worked surprisingly well. we signed contracts with more than half of the clinics we cold walked into. now it’s hard to be depressed.

we grew ourselves by word of mouth then and quite organically had a good healthy cash flow. we rented a dedicated small studio with gpus and monitors all over the place.

in summer 25, most of the members had to go to diff parts of the world as our paths diverged. we rented out all the gpus and have been continuing to make money as a gamedev toolchain / devkit supporter and a gpu provider. turns out you never know what tomorrow holds! now i’m in california, the rest of the team is in pittsburgh, singapore, japan, new zealand and hongkong.

our finale, magellan, is going to greet the world very soon. this is the only game we created without purpose. not to gamify anything, not to get attention, not to sell to anyone. our little wish for this little buddy is to live forever and beyond us and be as experimental and bold as it could be. in some sense, it’s an embodiment of havefun’s notion and spirit.

i was able to “get addicted” to gaming. for me, it was a positive obsession, just like swimming. it’s very very rare for me to be very positively obsessed with something, and when i do, i find myself putting in everything i could summon and reaching everything that’s outta reach.

i noticed a lot of traits i formed in games are transferable to real life. as my team described it, people are basically “mentally naked” in games.

in games, i would break legs to collect diamonds, go on a hike in a game world where you’re supposed to fly through, be very confrontational when things i value and love are disrupted, defend my creation vigorously, fight more than 1000 times w a 上古时代在深海盆熔岩的巨龙⁶.

i find games complementing the real world and thus extending certain traits of myself.

last but not least, games’ overarching theme is almost, for me, always love. a lot of love, planted in different ways.

footnotes

1. paidia: “a word covering the spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct.” ↩
2. planck’s constant, h ≈ 6.626 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s: the size of the smallest step of action the universe allows. ↩
3. nabbit, in new super mario bros. u deluxe. enemies can’t hurt him. ↩
4. china’s national olympiad in informatics, the big programming olympiad for high schoolers. ↩
5. same department as dyslexia intervention in shenzhen. ↩
6. an ancient dragon from the lava of a deep-sea basin. ↩

logo credits: xbox 360 wordmark, steam and nintendo switch logos from wikimedia commons (public domain); the tencent tech philanthropy venture plan and noi marks are from havefun.studio and noi.cn; nabbit artwork © nintendo.