And the Science gets done, and you make a neat gun... for the people who are still alive.

So here I was working on social games, faced with changes required to increase the friction. These changes would get the small group of paying players to pay more but they would also increase the churn across the rest of the player base. I was adding elements to disrupt the play experience -- to knock the player out of the Zen state of connection with our game -- to get him to pay money.

These changes would almost certainly generate more revenue for the company. The company wasn't evil. No one was twirling the ends of his moustache while tying helpless players to the railroad tracks. On the contrary, this company was filled with great people who wanted to make great games. Company growth -- and to some extent company salaries -- depended on the game making money.

As I struggled with these decisions, I watched the industry and I played other social and social/mobile games. I saw players struggling to try to stick to games they genuinely liked. My friends and I were even paying money in some games... just not at the whale level. I watched those games churn us all out. I saw the heart of any online game -- the community of players -- start to flounder as the friction curve increased.

Even as players struggled to stay connected to games that seemed determined to churn them out, I saw companies start to struggle because the "time to churn" was getting shorter. There was more competition in the space and the monetization mechanics in the games were so similar that the games started to feel the same regardless of gameplay mechanics.

Yet the production values were rising, so given the short churn time, even the big companies couldn't put out games quickly enough to churn players into another one of their games.

Friends got laid off. The games didn't change. The companies didn't change. Despite my misgivings and doubts, I didn't change.

Then in late March 2012, I was diagnosed with Stage IV throat cancer.

Even though you broke my heart. And killed me.

As you would expect of "the metrics lady," I did a lot of research. At first, it was dumb research because I didn't know any better. I looked at outdated studies or ones based on a different type of cancer. When I started doing better research, I looked at statistical outcomes, survival odds, and other data points. Despite everything I believed, I looked to metrics for answers. And I started to despair because the "answers" weren't promising.

Luckily, I stumbled upon The Median isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould, the noted biologist. He'd been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and his doctor refused to give him statistics. When he did the research himself, he understood why: the survival odds were terrible, with a median life expectancy of eight months.

When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.

Suddenly I remembered what I already knew: metrics aren't the answer. They're just a source of information and, like all information, they have to be interpreted. Some of that interpretation -- and even the outcome itself -- requires emotional context. Even as a scientist, Gould recognized that "...attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer."

And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire.

I worked from home during chemotherapy and radiation, but when I was well enough to return to the office, I had changed. The pivotal moment came when a designer asked me if he could add more quests to the game. In this specific game, quests clearly made the game more fun for players. They were motivating and moved the story forward. They reduced -- or in some cases eliminated -- the tedium of grind.

Except paying to skip the grind was a core monetization element. Making a change that was clearly in the player's benefit would be against the benefit of the company. In a premium game, a subscription game, or even a free-to-play game like League of Legends, there would be no question. But in the friction-based monetization world of social games, anything that removes friction also removes monetization. It's not about having a happy player base: it's about having a paying player base.

That moment -- the act of telling the designer not to add quests and soften the grind -- cemented my decision to leave social games.