Why working with the Freeos team is so utterly special.
The Freeos team—and its supporting partners—combine to create one of the most satisfying endeavours I have ever been a part of.
I’ve been a part of some truly memorable projects and teams, but Freeos easily stands out amongst the greatest yet.
Before outlining all of the particulars of why this is so, I’d like to explain how two other endeavours I’ve been involved with — as they share some of the characteristics, weight, gravity, and satisfaction (on many levels) to working on the Freeos project.
The first endeavour that stands out is the childhood shenanigans we got up to in my old neighbourhood back in Canada — especially related to some of the epic forts us neighbourhood kids would construct together.
Our epic—but rickety—eight-story treehouse — complete with a covered bridge from the main oak tree to a neighbouring cedar — is nearly a contender, as it had most of the neighbourhood kids involved, contributing to many summers of endless games and play.
But the childhood endevour that really stands above the many others is the ten-room underground fort we built — complete with a labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels.
This maze of rooms and tunnels represented a reasonably decent, and concentrated effort of work that lasted one spring until summer vacation led to months of imaginative play.
Most of the kids involved were a bit older at this stage than when we constructed the treehouse, and had better skills and capabilities from our prior experience and more advanced age.
I took the role as the initiator, planner and did my fair share of the actual work. This idea was brewing within me for a while, but it was a bit harder to convince the neighbourhood kids to do the backbreaking work of digging and carving out rooms and tunnels.
I hadn’t been able to gather any supporters until a new kid named Ken moved into the neighborhood. Possibly due to being a new kid hoping to meet some friends, Ken quickly accepted and I had my partner-in-crime.
Ken and I started digging out the first room — nowadays we’d call it our MVP, or prototype — in a large grassy hill that was a mound of earth placed back when the neighbourhood was first cleared and flattened by earthmoving machines. It was reasonably soft soil, and made a good, raised area to start such an endeavour.
My vision was to create a hidden room that blended into the hill naturally, so we cut out sods of grass in little squares and placed them carefully into a pile.
We then proceeded to dig a hole that was roughly about 5x3 meters in surface area, and about 1.5 meters tall. We created a wooden roof, and then put the soil back on top, and carefully placed the sods of grass back to cover the hill.
Then we tunneled into the room from the far side of the hill (opposite from the neighbourhood). Sods of grass were carefully placed on a hinged door attached to a wooden beam that was half buried and bound by hay bale wire. The door, and the underground room perfectly blended into the hill.
Then we took some of the other neighbourhood kids to our hidden door, that led to a candle-filled long tunnel into a fairly spacious room (for kids).
Immediately this sparked everyone’s imagination, and subsequent weekends leading to the start of the summer holidays had kids all coming together to tunnel and dig additional interconnecting rooms. Our final room even had a working fireplace and chimney that led out the top of the hill (which doubled as a little skylight).
This hidden fort in the hill was the theme for the entire neighbourhood that summer.
We played games of underground tag — the person who was ‘it’ carried the sole flashlight while others scrambled out of the way (with many kids getting backed up in tunnels).
We periodically got caught in the rain, making the tunnels fill with thick mud, and forced us to take a cold, high-pressure hose-down by one of the more forgiving mothers.
A stray cat came to live as a permanent resident, with kids taking turns to bring food every day.
An epic, end-of-the-summer camp-out had a number of kids staying the night, telling ghost stories and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows in the main, fireplace room. A late evening encounter with a pair of wild coyotes had all of us kids huddled in the furthest room watching the door with our flashlights — but that’s another story.
This experience stands out due to how a number of diverse individuals came together out of a desire to make a vision come to life. It sparked a lifelong appreciation for the power of teamwork, cooperation, openness and sharing from an early age. And it was a good, early lesson on the power that a compelling (and fun) vision has to unite towards a unified cause.
In my early adult years, I took a break from a hectic and demanding video game designer job that had me working twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week to go and teach in an English-immersion school in Taiwan.
Using my game design experience simply as a way to hold my head above water in this new teaching experience, I stumbled upon a realisation of the power of games to teach rapidly and effectively.
Applying gamification to the many subjects in the class, I discovered that the students retained the knowledge far easier than many other ways of teaching — and powered by their new skills and capabilities, learning became a breeze.
Class work was finished rapidly, which led to extra time for more fun, creative activities that squeezed in extra fun on top of what was already a fairly fun schedule.
Near the end of the year, I started interviewing to return back to the games industry and needed to take some days off for interviewing.
I instructed the substitute teacher that if the students get out of hand, to simply threaten to erase one of their collective “game stars” on the whiteboard.
When I returned on Friday, the substitute teacher asked me what kind of voodoo magic was this? As soon as he even put the eraser near these “game stars” the kids would all sit down and behave impeccably — immediately.
Unlike most substitute teaching experiences, managing the class was suprisingly as simple as raising an eraser to a bunch of crudely drawn stars.
All that these “voodoo magic” game stars represented was simply including some of the more loved games (which still covertly taught many core skills) in the week’s schedule. Erasing would eliminate some of the favourite games from the week’s activities—a fate worse than death for these kids.
Years later, a return visit to Taiwan brought nearly the entire class (grown to be teenagers) out to come visit. Most had stayed in touch with each other and myself over the years (also due to the influence of the loving Taiwanese homeroom teacher) and had been fast friends ever since.
Years later, I ended up repeating the experience with another class in another city of Taiwan to nearly identical success.
Despite the many successes I had in my career afterwards, this experience stood out as a special and unique journey that positively impacted lives — including my own.
It gave me a taste for the satisfaction of working to benefit others — not just simply to work for career goals, achievements and material acquisitions.
Working with the Freeos team reminds me of these two special times in my life — working with a great, positive and enthusiastic team that is united together to work towards a common goal and vision.
And this vision includes the potential to bring about meaningful positive change, and dignity to people’s lives. A vision of people working together to economically empower themselves, and to empower each other simultaneously.
Also to add a new economic tool in humanity’s toolbox—arguably as important as the shovel was to our fort-building.
A true cooperative spirit is encapsulated in the Freeos product vision — which in turn is born from a team that already embodies and enacts this same cooperative spirit daily.
And for this utterly special experience working with the Freeos team, I am utterly grateful.
