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April 09, 2025 (2w ago)33 views

"Put Me in a Game”

Dakarai Cundiff

January 28, 2025

In the Summer of 2017, I graduated high school, with a plan to go to college to study Game Design. At my open house, my family and friends gave me their well wishes and left words of kindness on a board, with a big picture of my optimistic smile in the middle. I’ll miss you and the world is yours stuck out to me at the time and propelled me forward into a world of opportunity and excitement, as I started this next chapter of my life.

I changed my major during my second semester of college. As I talked with my professor, Chabane Maidi, I expressed my concern that Game Design was too specific of a major, and that I’d never be able to get a job in the industry with a Game Design major. I was more interested in engineering, and felt that Computer Science was broader, and could land me more opportunities than my original interest could. Besides, engineering was what I was good at. I didn’t enjoy sitting in classes learning about board games, I’d rather sit at my computer and write MMORPG servers.

I was right.

I graduated in the Fall of 2021, with a major in Computer Science, a specialization in Software Engineering, and a minor in Game Design. This aligned so well with what I felt my interests were. Primarily, I had the mind of a scientist, taking a research and test-driven approach to engineering. I wanted to go deeper, to understand more about the code that I was writing. The minor is where I wanted to ultimately cater my interests towards. I applied for positions in the game industry, hoping to build game engines at a big studio somewhere in San Francisco. On December 1, 2021, I received an offer letter from Microsoft for Cloud + AI. For the next year, I would go on to develop Azure’s Machine Learning technology.

I was immersed in a world of models and algorithms, concepts I had never known before. Jobs, pipelines, and parallel task frameworks caught my interest, and I would later build my own parallel processor and job system (comparable to the Unity game engine). I was impacting the world, powering the new frontier of Artificial Intelligence that we find ourselves bombarded with today.

I never got rid of that board from my open house. One day, I remember going back and reading some of the messages that the people closest to me left for me. It was almost as if they knew I would be here, right now, reminiscing. And then I saw a message from my cousin Robert Veley: “Put me in a game”. Me and Robert grew up together. I would stay at his house, and we’d play Call of Duty: Black Ops. These were some of the best times of my life.

As I read his message, “put me in a game” stuck with me. It means more to me now than it did when I first read it. Of course, I could create a game and pay homage to my cousin with a character named “Robert” or “Robbie”, but why stop there? Today, I am at a point of merging the passion that I have for gaming into the real world. I see a bridge between the digital and physical worlds, and I plan to build it.

In the reality we find ourselves in, compute is a resource that is in high demand. Parallel processing models are a necessity for training large AI models, and the hardware to run these models is required by individuals and corporations all around the world. I am very interested in exploring what I call a distributed compute grid. In this system, users all around their world can essentially “rent” their hardware to other users to run their computational jobs. This process can be gamified, and an entire economy can be created with compute as a currency. Companies like Golem (https://golem.network) are already exploring this area.

Everyone has a computer. What if you could earn with little to no effort? How would jobs change? What type of world could be created with a system like this at its core? How could this technology power the development of intelligent systems, cities, and communities? These are questions I want to explore at the University of Washington, alongside professors like Munehiro Fukuda (parallel programming), Wooyoung Kim (computational biology) and William Erdly (game design for healthcare).

I think games were put here to teach us more about our world, to offer broader perspectives, and inspire us to push the boundaries of our collective experience. I know they’ve done that for me.

You reached the end, thanks for reading.
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