What If Your Team Already Knows What's Wrong?

If you're trying to create a healthier organization that stays grounded in reality, there are a couple of things I think are worth paying attention to.

One is playtesting. Playtesting matters, and playtesting will always matter. Staying in contact with the truth of the game, its factual state, should never be skipped. With that clear, let's get into the main topic of this newsletter...

A Warning Sign For Leaders

In a recent conversation with Leif Johansen, he made a point that I want to share. If, as the most senior person on the project, he's the first one calling out a problem during a playtest, he views that as a failure.

I think that should be a warning sign to you as a leader, too. If you're one of the more senior people in an organization and you're regularly the first person to identify a problem with the game, something's wrong.

And by the way, I'm not just talking about giant studios with 100s of devs. Once you're past about five people, if you're the first one to find problems as one of the leadership team, why is that happening? Maybe you've got people who don't understand the space or the game. Maybe they're not willing to talk. Maybe they don't have the time.

Whatever the reason, something is wrong when leaders are the ones identifying problems first.

The Diary Of An Unreal Engineer

I remember an article from probably over a decade ago. It was something like "The Diary of an Unreal Engineer," written by someone who I think was deliberately anonymous. The author was quite an expert in Unreal and tended to get hired as a contractor to go into companies and save their games. A lot of it was very technical, and honestly I couldn't follow all of it very well, but the people side was fascinating.

He described going into companies, taking a look around, and talking and asking questions of the devs. Then he'd go back to the leadership who hired him and tell them what problems he'd found and what their teams were spotting. He wouldn't name anybody, so nobody would get in trouble. And the leaders would ask him how he'd gotten this information.

His answer was basically, "I asked them."

That has also been my experience. In the vast majority of cases inside game development where there are big problems, there's no shortage of people who are happy to talk to me about what those problems are. Unfortunately and too often, no one is asking them any questions.

I think he joked that the leaders must have thought he was using CIA interrogation techniques to pull this information out of the devs or something. But from what I've seen, they're usually perfectly willing to tell you.

Start By Asking

Recognize then, that if you aren't hearing feedback and problems from your team, that is itself a problem. Either they don't want to tell you for some reason, or you're not asking in a way they feel they can answer. Both of those are things you need to solve.

Don't just send an anonymous survey once a quarter and call it good. But I'll be honest, if you're doing nothing, a quarterly survey is infinitely better than nothing. Yes, do more, but good grief, start by asking the questions and caring what answers you receive.

Attempt to be open to what people tell you and be very careful about punishing somebody who tells you something you don't want to hear, because that will make sure you never get told other things you don't want to hear that you probably need to. 

You need to change the culture. That means you need to behave differently, respond to others differently, and probably also unwind bad default responses currently within the org. If you do that, you may just learn of the problems threatening your game before they become impossible to deal with.

Leif Johansen and I got into this in a much broader conversation about shared delusions in game development in our latest episode. To hear the rest, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RkPoqgCKmQ

Ben C.
Building Better Games