The Growth Gamble

Hey, have you heard the news? Apparently development costs keep on rising, and there's more rises down the line with next-gen technology virtually guaranteeing teams of over 100 as necessary now. You haven't heard the news?

Well apparently neither had Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan Securities until just recently when EA announced that their development budget forecasts for 2007 are expected to hit $900 million dollars, compared with $758 million for 2006 and $411 million in 2003. (source: gamesindustry.biz) Pachter apparently describes the $900m as speechless, and complains about the sustainability of it. EA's answer? They expect large growth. Pachter forecasts $3.46 billion in 2008.

This seems to be the answer for a few of the big companies now. Don't worry, it'll all turn out well in the end because, in case you haven't heard, the games industry is growing by 500% every quarter and will soon become the biggest baddest medium in the world and so on. As many others have pointed out, the 'eternal growth' model of the industry is predicated on one of many myths, the chief one being that the industry is in fact a big mainstream medium now.

Rant over.

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Why the Games Industry Needs a Union

Class action lawsuits seem to be creeping out of the woodwork, so far mostly in the US EA's just had a couple, Activision seem to have one or more on their hands now, and these are the ones that we know about. The reaction from publishers is pretty much what you'd expect (according to friends on the inside etc), which is to implement overtime policies in those specific areas that have resulted in legal damages, while at the same reinforcing the no-overtime-here policy in their other territories.

It's all very legal, but these being the days of email and web-based news, of course the news gets out there, leading to more grumbling and - no doubt - more lawsuits in other territories. The terror of outsourcing might serve as a discouraging whip for some, but in the long run that is just another mitigating strategy. Putting off til tomorrow what is hoped will not surface today etc.

What we're looking at here is a big mess, in otherwords, and it could very easily become an acrimonious mess (it arguably already has) that continues to drive talented people out of the industry into other fields, propagates worsening conditions, and continues to effect the downward spiral of the quality of the industry's output. And therefore ultimately hit the bottom lines of these companies.

It's for reasons like these that the game industry needs an effective union.

You might point to the IGDA as the game industry's equivalent, but the IGDA is not really a proper professional organisation. It's full of academics and students, which tends to dilute any sort of professionals-only issues, and it is less concerned with action that advocacy. The IGDA is essentially a valuable research and debate organisation, but despite several calls from within its ranks and from the outside as well, it has on several occasions specifically said that it will not take on the mantle of any kind of union organisation.

Unionisation conjures up a variety of Dickensian misery or Arthur Scargill-style strikes (see here if you don't know who Scargill is), combined with suspicions of socialism. It also conjures up fears for jobs, in the sense of companies adopting no-union policies, outsourcing, the fear that unions automatically mean strikes, and so on and so forth. These images may well have a place the developing world and manual labour industries, but not in the modern world of technology and knowledge workers.

Many high-skilled industries have unions although they are often called something else. An example are the Writer's Guilds that cover the field of screenwriters working in television and film. Another is the International Union of Operating Engineers, or the Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

These are professionals-only unions, essentially, and their job is to negotiate on behalf of professionals for their fields. Unlike a miner's union or manual worker's unions, professional unions tend to be light-touch, negotiating in areas of importance while retaining the flexibility for individual workers in their field to negotiate on their behalf.

A manual labour union will often heavily negotiate for pay increases, ranks of pay, hours worked, working practises and that sort of thing. These kinds of unions are essentially trying to nail down every aspect of their profession and obtain what they think is a fair deal across the board for their members.

A professional union, on the other hand, doesn't take such a heavy handed approach because that approach is not what their members require. What they require is representation in key areas, but independence in many others. The Writer's Guild of Great Britain, for example, negotiates basic rates with the BBC and other major media organisations for individual writers. Under WGGB regulations and negotiations, the BBC are mandated to pay a certain minimum amount to any writer. However, the WGGB does not dictate terms outside of those minimums. Writers are free to negotiate for themselves, and working practises are frequently left to their own discretion.

Another thing that the WGGB does, which is also common to professional unions (especially in contract-based industries like the games industry is slowly becoming) is that they organise help and relief for members. Writers, in this case, are not the sort of people who work consistently, so obtaining health insurance or mortgages can be very difficult for them.

These issues are becoming more pertinent for the games industry, especially when the current trend of campus studios starts to falter. The industry is currently consolidating a lot and trying to internalise studios all over the place into giant places like EA Vancouver. But the day will come, and not too far off, when EA and the like realise that this system is an inherently flawed way of working because it lacks necessary flexibility in a world of fewer, more high profile releases. It's a lesson that the film industry learned a while ago, and it's coming our way too, probably within 3-5 years.

The real issue is that it's becoming more and more in the publisher's and manufacturer's interests to support an unionised industry than not. While on the surface that may seem like a perfectly insane statement, there is a logic to it. As lawsuits continue to gather pace, this means that the various companies are going to come under attack. Bad press for shoddy treatment of workers is not one of those things that is easily spun, and with every case making its way into the headlines, another company takes a hit on its stock rating, becomes a place that high-profile candidates are less likely to want to work, and overall a bad reputation carries. The best way to avoid all this mess is to draw a line under it by negotiating an agreed set of fair guides that both employees and employers can live with. That means that the employers need someone to negotiate with.

Some thoughts on how to shape an industry union in a few days.

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How to Find a Good Game Designer

Hiring good, experienced designers is hard. It is so because design is seen as such a nebulous stitching-everything-else-together task that it's not as easy to evaluate via the interview process. An animator can bring his showreel, a coder can bring his samples, and an artist can bring his album. Hell, even a producer can bring his sample schedules and track record of games produced on time and on budget etc.

What does a designer bring? Levels that they've done (assuming that they're level designers), perhaps articles or books that they've written, videos of their former games in action, a meta-critic score, a list of linkedin endorsements, a list of titles? Do any of these actually tell you anything?



Levels actually tell you very little. A level video is played at optimum speed, often edited and the prettiness of the art etc can be quite distracting (in both good and bad ways). The level design of many of the corridor sections in Halo is basically corridor-enemy-corridor-enemy, for instance. How do you show that it's "good", especially in an interview setting, and distinguish its goodness from, say, the enemy AI scripting or the balance of the game's weapons which you may have had nothing to do with?

Articles and books can be misleading. They show a mind at work, but not necessarily the right sort of mind. Quite a few journalists and academics have forged into design, only to find that they aren't good as designers. Speaking as an author of a few airy articles in my day, does my output really tell you anything about whether I am actually able to sit down and design a game? Not really.

A list of titles and achievements can mean anything and it's very very easy to big up one's involvement in a title to sound more than it is. For instance, judge

"I designed half of the levels for platform game X".
versus
"I designed over 50% of the crucial levels that proved critical to the testing and implementation of the gameplay as well as developed the narrative backbone of the game."

Academic qualifications can similarly be over-emphasised, software skill lists are nice but rarely relevant as most design-related software can be learned quickly enough, and references invariably say nice things. Previous experience in other disciplines is also nice to have, but again no real indicator of anything in terms of design skills.

While all this material is good to bring along and everyone expects an interview to have a bit of razzmatazz and spin associated, they can all be faked to a great extent. It's an easy lie to say that a bit of design work in a game was yours. Who can really gainsay that you were the one that sorted out the balance issues with the plasma rifle, or that you were the one that set out the length of the levels, or drew the 2D maps and workflows. Who can really say exactly how much of the sample GDD that you've brought along is actually your work, or the copy of the design wiki?

With the best of intentions in the world, what these different standards of screening design candidates do is reward presentation-oriented candidates. Presentation is itself an important skill for a designer, but the interview process doesn't address the other important skill. (I.e. can they design a game?) And there is much of a consensus across the industry that there are a lot more people who think they're good designers and can craft a spiel about how good they are rather than actually being good designers.

So what to do?

A lot of game designers have good secondary skills, and those are the ones that appear most in the interview. Very few have good primary skills because they're simply not tested in the interview in the same way. Here's the skills breakdown:

Primary: Abstraction, Rules, Mechanics, Constraints, User Interface

Secondary: Scripting, Feedback, Databases, Playtesting, AI, Balancing, Gameplay analysis, Progression, Writing, Enemies, Characters, Maps, 3D environments, Diagrams, Cinematics, Documenting, Pitching, Talking, Scheduling, Idea Management, Market Research, Focus groups, PR, Direction

In my view the interview process lets a candidate demonstrate their secondary skills, but we have no means of examining primary skills. So, we often end up hiring designers who are good on paper, but actually bad designers. The solution is to devise a test. Since the primary skills are all really about fundamentals, a test should also be about fundamentals too:


The particleblog design test
Place the candidate in a room and give them the following items.

1 deck of cards
4 six-sided dice
A pad of paper and three pens of different colours
1 pack of index cards (blank)
1 whiteboard and eraseable marker pen
1 bag of 50 black tokens
1 bag of 50 white tokens
2 table-tennis bats
1 table-tennis ball

And you tell them that they have 4 hours to create a game.

Here are the rules of the test:

1. The game must only use the components presented.
2. The game must be in a playable condition at the end of 4 hours.
3. The game must be playable by anyone (i.e. no obscure knowledge of trivia etc)
4. They do not have to use all the components. If they just want to create a puzzle game using only the whiteboard and the tokens, that's fine.
5. They must not replicate a game which already exists
6. They must write out the rules of the game, because...
7. They don't get to present the game

Rule 7 is absolutely vital, because it removes the personal sales pitch from the process. Ideally what the designer should do is hand the rules to the interviewers and go home, leaving the interviewers to learn and play the game for themselves. The objective of this exercise is to test raw talent.

If the game that he invents is fun (or potentially fun), then he has talent. If it is not, then he does not, and all the pitching and documentation and PowerPoint presentations in the world are useless in the design context. That candidate would probably be better suited to a PR, production or creative writer role.

The game that the candidate invents would also be highly indicative of the type of designer that they are. A candidate who invents an interesting sport, for instance, is likely to be a good Type 1 designer. Whereas, a candidate who creates dungeon-crawling roleplaying game is probably going to have good Type 2 skills. A candidate who creates a game about building little societies would likely be a great Type 3 designer, and one who creates co-operative game for several players would do well in a Type 4 environment. It's like a Rorschach test for game designers.

At least that's my guess anyway.

So is anybody up for the challenge?
If you are, assemble the components, set yourself the time limit and make the game. Afterwards, post the rules here in the comments section and we'll evaluate them.

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Gamasutra

I appear to be famous.
Bow down before me mortals.

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It Tolls for Me

Well I finished with Lionhead on Friday, a little earlier than most of my team-mates on account of having made plans to fly home for Easter long before the consultation process started. But essentially all of us are on our way. In many ways, this has been a turbulent month. But on the up side, it has been the best kind of letting go that I've heard of in the industry.

Having been on the receiving end of a company decision a couple of times (almost everyone in the industry has), I'm well positioned to compare and contrast, and in this case the comparison is favorable. Aside from the standard range of emotions going up and down, from anger and resentment to acceptance and sadness, my overall feeling is that it offers me the chance for something new, so now at the end I feel a mild sense of relief and acceptance. I've started making plans.

Those plans involve taking a big risk, going out on a limb and starting up something of my own. Like everybody in this industry, I have those ideas for games that I secretly harbour. I have a project in mind, I hope to be telling all you about very soon, as I think it's going to be something special.

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Looking for Macbeth

So I made a short film. It looks a bit better in avi form than Google Video's rendition of it. I may put together a torrent of it or something later if people are interested.

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Warren Spector response

I posted this in response to Warren Spector's latest article about the future of gaming in the Escapist.

"I think the answer to all of Warren's ills can be summed up in one word: indie.


Simply put, what he's lamenting is the lack of Spielberg-equivalent power (relatively speaking) with independent sensibilities of content and exploration of those themes. In this regard he's not alone by any means. There are plenty of developers who are struggling with what amounts to a paradigm shift in their business and their creative lives.

However, there is hope. There are engines and tools on the small end of the scale. Not everything has to be about AAA, and no idea requires AAA levels of production to work. Warren mentions that he has ideas from 15 years that he feels can only be done now. I ask why is that. Graphical punch aside, what are the key traits of these ideas that make them so tech-necessary? A lot of even the supposedly important advances in games technology are just layers and layers of effects, and Warren's own Deus Ex remains to this day the most interesting fps adventure game (not the sequel though, sorry Warren) for the last ten years. It does so on what is a comparative shoestring compared to the 20 million club.

Any idea can be developed at any level. It just takes belief and the ability and willingness to work within constraints rather than growing angry or disillusioned at their existence. What Warren needs, it sounds to me, is a little faith."

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