NOUSERFOUND
What a privilege it is to fail
You ever live out a nightmare at the AMC on the corner of 19th and Broadway in Manhattan during Tribeca Film Festival?
This past week I did.
I had the extremely fortunate opportunity to debut Escape the Internet at Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a video game designed for movie theaters, in which all 150 players in the theater are characters in a post-AI world, trying to heal themselves from brain rot through genuine human connection.
Our debut was, at best, a fun-filled shit-show, and as I’d put it, a failure.
How bad? Our surprise reveal of an audience member proudly displayed NOUSERFOUND on-screen.
Then we accidentally identified a man who said he was in a happy relationship as the one who was single and needed help on his love life.
And well, the game silently stopped working for a good 10 minutes, and I had to go to the front and fix it in real-time.
It was one of the worst ways to see several months of work come together and immediately, completely fall apart.
Failure is a funny word.
You can’t really accidentally be a failure and you can’t half-ass failing.
The pre-requisite to failure is trying. And every time you try something, you’re more likely to fail than succeed.
In that moment at Tribeca I wanted to crawl out of my damn skin, but now days later I hold my head up and am back to work to fix what was broken for the team.
Ironically there is a massive gap between my perceived failure and the audiences interpretation. Of course, family and friends in the audience won’t take a chance to absolutely kick me when I’m down! Well except a few of them.
After the show, several folks I had never met came to share their appreciation for how much fun they had, and that even though it did not go perfectly, they were impressed by the concept, the team’s work, and the direction of the show.
I smiled, said thank you, and honestly wondered if they meant it. Maybe they were just being nice. Maybe they pitied me. Probably a little of both.
Either way, I’ve got a week to fix some of this shit and fail a little less, we already sold out our second showing at Tribeca on July 14th ;)
This is post #102 in a row! After a grueling few weeks and a big ‘ole fuck-up at Tribeca Film Festival
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Love the perspective Pete, this is what life is all about and I’d even argue that the ability to make it fun when it doesn’t work well is even more impressive than when it works perfectly. Congrats!
plot twist, the bugs are a part of the show. maybe worth an easter egg in the future to remember whre it all started when this becomes a household name. i know ill register as NOUSERFOUND next time i play.