Tiny Subversions

If you are a game developer, or are going to be one, you will need to do a lot of writing on the job. Take this advice to heart:

Really want to impress someone with your words? Then either 1) be direct/clear or 2) shut up. Anyone worth impressing will respect you for saying less a lot more than they’ll respect you for using big words that don’t actually say anything.

(That's also key to networking: there are people out there who are worth impressing, and they will not be impressed with your stupid networking tricks. You have to be an exceptional human being beneath whatever veneer you have.)

Read the whole thing here.

I will be the first to admit that if there's one discipline of game development where I lack even the most basic knowledge, it is art. Ashamedly, I don't even understand the production pipeline for art.

Anyway, artists often ask me for breaking in advice, and I'm usually incapable of providing anything useful. Here's a new article on Game Career Guide that should help with the basics: The Portfolio, by Samuel Crowe.

One fact that has slowly dawned on me over the last few months is how many of the principles that I think apply to good game design are also principles of agile development.

For example, agile development mandates that developers of software not speak of "the user" when talking about the person who will eventually use the software. You have to break out your user into different groups. If you're building blogging software, some of your users might be the poster, the regular reader, the sometime-reader, the searcher, the RSS-only user, the designer of the templates, etc. This allows you to focus on user stories that are non-generic. If you speak of "the user" all you can really say is "the user uses our software and it works." But if you're more specific you can say "the guy who only uses RSS probably wants all the formatting of the original post to show up in his reader."

Similarly, in game design, you want to break out your players into different types, and not just design for "the player". Do you have something for the explorer? The creator? The warrior?

Anyway, I just thought it was a neat parallel. To be sure, there's more parallels out there. Maybe I'll list some more in the future.

Penny Arcades seems to be impressed with a White Knight Story trailer. I watched it, and I have no idea how Tycho, who's a really smart guy, could draw any reasonable conclusions about the game or even have any expectations whatsoever. I mean, I don't love most JRPGs, so I'm not the target market. And yes, the game is really pretty. But to me, it looks like exactly what I expect from a probably-doctored trailer for a random PS3 JRPG. Lots of cut scenes, inscrutable combat, and transforming mech/monster/demons.

GDC is going to double in size in 2007.

According to that article, it's mostly going to be doubling the size of the expo, attempting to become the new E3.

Please please please GDC organizers: keep the expo and the fanboys far enough away from the lectures and developers that I can pretend GDC is like it always has been.

Labels: gdc

Here's a design challenge. Come up with a design for a game based around the following concept:

"The fear of death is the beginning of slavery."

My initial thought is a game about a small nation being browbeaten into submission by a larger, much more powerful nation. You play individual freedom fighters, and are randomly assigned one at the beginning. When you die (and you die often in this game), you're replaced with a new freedom fighter, with a new name, family, and set of beliefs. But every fighter is fighting for the same cause. You play many freedom fighters, until dozens of years in game-time pass and you finally attain independence for your nation. Over the course of the game, the player realizes that she/he is not actually playing individual fighters, but is controlling on the micro level what is effectively an entire human movement.

Anybody else up for the challenge?

(FYI: The quote is something I pulled from a Robert Anton Wilson book that I read so long ago I don't even remember which one. I read a lot of Wilson in my teens. The quote probably isn't even his, originally.)

I was discussing the whole 100 Influential Women thing with the girlfriend the other day, and she asked me a stumper of a question.

"When you start your own game company, what are you going to do to attract female developers?"

I thought I knew the answer to this question. My mouth opened, ready to impart my methodology, when I realized that I had no freaking idea. Nothing. I think that, in the back of my mind, I've always thought, "Well, my company will be cool, so that'll take care of the problem." Not exactly a briliant plan.

So I've been thinking about the issue for a few days now, and I can only think of a few ways to attain a 50/50 gender ratio. (As a side note: no, I don't believe in hiring women over men just to even out a ratio. These are ideally strategies for finding extremely talented women who I'd want to hire under any circumstances. Furthermore, I would want my company to have a 50/50 gender ratio because I believe that women provide crucial perspectives to problem-solving that men alone can't achieve.)

• Recruit from local women's colleges. There are a lot of talented game-loving women at these schools who, for mostly cultural reasons, have never considered a career in video games to be remotely viable. (The girlfriend gets all the credit for this one.)
• Don't be presumptuous about what's female friendly. I initially approached this problem thinking, "Well, obviously it would help if my games weren't terribly violent. And if they had a strong social component." But then I realized what a patronizing attitude that is. Sometimes I feel like "make it social" is the new "slap on a Barbie license."
  
• On the other hand, being super macho doesn't help at all. I remember at GDC '06, I was sitting next to an extremely talented woman that I would hire in a split second, and we were watching CliffyB's pitch for a game to bring about world peace. And she was just about spitting venom at the end of his talk w/r/t how male-centric his game design was (basically, it was the man of the household's duty to protect everyone). Somehow I don't see her working for Epic any time soon.
• When networking, don't hit on the women you meet. It's almost unbelievable, but I know some hetero male developers who get infatuated with the female game developers they meet. And while I don't blame them for being attracted to awesome people, I do blame them when they act on it. It always comes off as creepy. It's better to just lay off, turn down your natural love-god/game-developer vibes *cough*, and aim for strictly professional relationships from the start. You'll make good friends, and female developers tend to know other female developers, so these contacts are good places to start when seeking great women to recruit.

That's all I was able to come up with, aside from some other half-baked ideas that I'm not sure will work. There are also some good resources at the IGDA Women in Game Development SIG that I haven't checked out yet.

Any suggestions out there? I'd especially love to hear from some female devs on this issue...

So Jason and Kim have both responded to the Next-Gen.Biz list of the Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women. Several commenters, myself included, have questioned the content of the list. Particularly, it seems like there's way, way more executive business types on the list than creative types.

Well, I decided to count. For methodology, I went through and for the most part tried to lump people's job titles into categories without sacrificing the meaning of their job. For example, if someone is listed as Chief Executive, I lump them in with CEOs. But if there's a Game Director and a Studio Director, keep them separate, because Game Directors tend to be more involved in the games than a Studio Director, who is more involved in high-level running of the studio.

That said, here's the data. Remember, there are 100 women on the list.

CEO: 13
VP: 30 (of these VPs, 13 of them are VPs of Marketing)
President: 3
Director: 12 (of these, 7 can be classified as "creative" directors, the rest are general management)
Journalist: 9 (I lumped in editors and authors here)
Designer: 7
Producer: 7
Academic: 4
Tech Lead: 1
Art Lead: 1
Clan Leader: 2
Other: 11

All in all, 22 of the women listed were involved directly in the creation of games. In this number, I have included designers, producers, creative directors, game directors, art leads, and tech leads. I am not including executive producers.

The tech lead is the only programmer on the list.

I'm a developer. When I think "influential," I am really thinking "influential to me." And I'm influenced by developers. So of course my natural inclincation is to be offended by the list.

But I'm not going to bash Next-Gen.Biz. As their name implies, they are a business-focused website, and an excellent one at that. So naturally, when they ask who is influential, they will be more focused on who runs companies and departments, rather than who is actually making games.

On the other hand, by including women who are designers and authors and professors, they erode that focus, and in fact end up listing apples and oranges together in the same list.

Labels: industry

At networking events you'll often find yourself sort of "waiting in line" to speak to an Important Person. This usually looks like a semicircle of people all facing the Important Person, who is moving along the semicircle, answering someone's question, then moving along to the next person who showed up. (While I have advised my readers to avoid lining up to talk to celebrities, an Important Person here is not necessarily a celebrity--maybe it's someone who just finished giving a talk at your local IGDA chapter meeting.)

There are certain ways you should and shouldn't behave when you're one of the people in line.

Wait your turn. Only speak to the Important Person when he/she acknowledges you. You can speak to other people who are also waiting their turn, that's fine. Listen to other people's questions. If they ask the same question you were going to ask, either think of a new one, or leave. Don't bother the Important Person with a slightly modified version of the same question they were just asked. And keep it to one question. There are people behind you with questions of their own.

Finally, do not have an extended conversation with the Important Person while other people are waiting behind you. Even if the Important Person wants to keep yapping with you. Cut it off politely, by saying, "Excuse me, I don't want to keep the rest of these folks waiting. Thank you so much for answering my question, and maybe we can continue this conversation later by email. Here's my card."

That last bit is an incredibly slick and mature move that will probably impress the Important Person and the people behind you in line. You can thank me later.

Labels: networking

Note: This belongs at the beginning of my networking articles, chronologically. I started writing this post about 10 months ago, and then put it on hold because I couldn't figure out how to finish it. Tonight I decided it was time to actually just freakin' post it, unfinished. You can comment, and I'll fix it up later. It's a draft!

The Early Bird Gets... Everything

Perhaps my number one piece of advice to students who want to be game developers: start networking early. There are myriad benefits to starting early. The most obvious benefit is that upon graduation from college (a college education is part of your plan, right?) you'll have connections with industry people right out the gate.

But there are other benefits as well. For example, the years you will be networking while a student are also years that you won't be looking for a job. As a full-time student, you just won't be able to do something like that. The time spent networking but not job hunting is wonderful. You get to hang out with people and you don't even need to ask them if they're hiring. Because you don't care! You can even ask them what they look for in a potential hire, no strings attached. That is valuable field work right there. People love to hear that you're not looking for a job, so be sure to let them know that ASAP.

I hate to draw this analogy, but it's almost like romancing someone. Feigning disinterest can get you a lot further than being obviously head-over-heels. (Like all game developers, I am an expert on romance. You can stop laughing, please.)

So yes, start as early as you can!

Labels: networking

Tom Sloper's latest IGDA advice column is freaking great.

Dear Tom,

I'm passionate about working in games, but I don't like to work with other people. I don't like people telling me what to do and telling me when I have to be at work, and I don't like letting other people get the juiciest assignments. I'm an idea man, not a programmer or artist. So how do I go about this, what advice do you have for my special case?

Da Man

And the answer is...

So I've decided I'm going to start writing a companion series of articles to my networking ones. These will be on the topic of breaking in to the game industry.

There's already a ton of really good advice out there on this kind of thing. Tom Sloper's website is probably my favorite, but Ernest Adams wrote a book on the topic, and so did Marc Mencher. Plus there's the IGDA Breaking In site, and the IGDA Breaking In forums (which I frequent). And there's a ton of other resources, which are actually compiled in one place at Breaking In FAQ on the IGDA forums, which Jeff Ward so kindly put together.

Since there's already so much great stuff available, the breaking in articles that I'm going to write will be far more sporadic than my networking articles. They might be companion pieces to networking articles that just don't fit into the category of networking, or they might be random articles that I want to write that happen to be about breaking in. Unlike the networking articles, I have no plan for something in particular that I'd like to teach.

So the breaking in articles will be way more organic than the networking series, and will probably suck more. I'll be posting the first article soonish.

(Also, this doesn't mean I'm done with networking stuff. Those articles will keep coming, probably as long as this blog exists.)

So, I am blessed/cursed with a social conscience, and sometimes I read about something and I stew and think to myself, "Damn it, self, why the hell are you making video games and not working in a progressive think tank or running an NGO to bring fresh water to refugees or something?" Tonight was one of those nights.

Now, something inside me knows that games can really make a positive impact on the world. But it's very hard to articulate.

And then I saw that Kim linked to the transcript of Will Wright's recent talk at the BAFTA awards ceremony. His talk is about changing the world for the better, through the design of video games.

Games can also give people very different perpectives on things. An 8 year old who played Sim City was riding in a car and asked “That’s industrial! Why did they put that there? It’s right next to a residential zone”. It’s amazing that a game can teach an 8 year old to see things like that. [...]

Lately, SF has given us dystopian visions. Surprisingly, Blade Runner is often cited in city planning documents with comments on potential developments like “We don’t want this city to become like Blade Runner”. [...] Once you predict a really negative potential future and the idea spreads, people tend to move away from things that might cause it.

I love this man. (Will, I mean. Kim is pretty awesome, too, though.)

Also, I would be remiss if I did not link to Games For Change, a group dedicated to making games that impact society in a positive way.