GDC06

As usual, GDC was a blast. This year should have been dubbed “The Year of Guitar Hero”, because we were freakin’ everywhere. It was kind of shocking to see your game on other developer’s flyers or in their booths as a way to attract people. Red Octane had hooked up some demo stations outside the G.A.N.G. awards, and they even arranged to get many of the musicians featured in the game up on stage for a medley. I think my favorite moment, however, was a little side crack by Tommy at the Developer Choice Awards claiming that we had won a category we weren’t even nominated for.

Some of the sessions I attended were quite good as well. My favorite was the Advanced Prototyping session held by Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold. It contained a ton of extremely practical advice on using prototyping to solve both technical and design issues in game development. I originally met Chris and Chaim at last years independent Game Jam and was quite impressed with both of them (among many other people at the jam), and this session really spoke to their experience on the topic, while remaining quite entertaining. I highly recommend that anyone involved in game production get the proceedings from this session, as I suspect more and more games will be using these types of processes in the future, and there advice was so simple I found myself wanting to smack my head for not realizing it first.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me this year was a subtle feeling that the industry is being changed by a small group of maverick developers. Developers that believe in iterative processes over large design docs, developers that believe next-gen doesn’t necessarily mean 10x budgets and 10x art detail. EA has been hiring some very smart people; and they seem to be putting some very smart processed into place. In some ways, it seems as if the next few years will be make or break time for these mavericks. From my perception, it seemed as if all the cry for change is finally being taken seriously, instead of in previous years where those doing the complaining were simply labeled as curmudgeons. My perception may be skewed, of course, but it at least seemed this way to me, and that’s exciting for a fellow curmudgeon ;)

This years buzz term to avoid: Don't go to sessions with "Next-Gen" in the name. It almost always translates into "Here's this thing I did in the last generation which is still valid, but not as interesting if I don't put the words next-gen in front of it"

credits not withstanding..

This morning I had an interesting realization about my roles over the years at Turbine. I flirted with the Creative Director position several times, but each time backed away from the role at some point, sometimes after having the role for a while. For me, it was a naturally attractive position. I’m the type of person who not only has and recognizes good ideas from others, but am someone who can get them implemented either through my own perspiration or the inspiration of others. I always seemed to have the teams ear, and I think it was primarily because they had mine as well.

But what I realized this morning is that in this particular environment the management of the company was more interested in my ability to sell things to the team than my ability to rationalize the correct answer from the team. In fact, there was a repeating pattern of behavior that showed as much. What they wanted out of a CD was someone to sell whatever shlock was tossed down from high above on the mountain regardless of if it made sense or not; a yes man with the teams ear. A CD in this environment would be part used car salesmen, part fall guy. To be able to sell it, they’d need to be someone who had credentials with their team; but inevitably, it would be their credentials which would act as fuel, burned away on a given task. And thus, with each flirtation, an uncompromising position would be forced, and I’d back away from the position rather than compromise my beliefs or relationship with my team.

Now; DDO has shipped. It is what it is, but what it isn’t is a game with a proper credits list. In management’s infinite wisdom, it was deemed that anyone who was not with the company at the moment of ship would have their credit on the game revoked, regardless of if they wrote like half the game code or not. Quite a few of us bailed on that project due to a wide range of very valid reasons, as for myself, I was interviewing with Harmonix while being offered the CD position at Turbine, and when I backed away from the position yet again quickly turned in managements eyes. I was not willing to tote a line of action I didn’t believe in.

The only rational reason for not giving people their rightful credits is that those involved are acting out of petty and spite. In fact, Ken’s post on the matter seems to confirm it. You can reason the whole thing here, but I’ll pull out the poignant part for you:


“And if some of those people who had left did care that strongly, if it was or is that important, *to them*, to get a credit...they could have stayed and finished the game. A fairly simple calculation.”


It’s sad, because many of the people who were not credited were incredibly talented individuals who I loved working with (and some I currently work with again at Harmonix). Many of the things which made that game work at all can be directly attributed back to these people, who worked their asses off for the company. Crediting them doesn’t diminish the credits of those still hard at work on the game.

Perhaps they see it as a way to scare employees into staying, but I think this type of treatment speaks to the type of environment and executives that make someone want to leave a company in the first place, don’t you?