The long game

I read Ethan’s piece two days ago where he mentioned being in the long game when creating for the web. That phrase “long game” then proceeded to follow me around in my head.

The long game is the difficult game. It requires patience, it requires waiting, it may require more work. If you are looking at the long game, you may take longer to code that site, ensuring accessibility, ensuring it works on a wide variety of devices, ensuring everyone, no matter how they choose to access it, can consume your content. But often times, we don’t have the patience required. Or we are lazy and we make excuses as to why we shouldn’t bother with it.

I am just as guilty as anyone else of this, in work, I often forget about the long game; it is so easy to do when you have been in this industry for a while and the things you’ve made are no longer on the web anymore. Sites, applications, ideas, they come and go with ease in this medium. Then again, other things I worked on still linger on, usually the things that I am embarassed about because I didn’t think of the long game when coding them.

As an industry, we don’t seem to like the long game. We prefer quickness, we want the new shiny. So we push businesses to be successful quickly, we push to get the site out whether or not it is ready, we push to show off our new hotness as quickly as we can. But this just means that we push and I can’t help but wonder if in all that we lose something. When we lose sight of the long game, what else do we lose?