How I learned management in video games – Lesson 2

Lesson 2: Mission > Manager

A few weeks ago, I invited one of my newest team members to have lunch together. It was a great opportunity to ask her how she was feeling and if she was still happy to have joined the company. She talked about pros and cons, and she finally said ? You know, you were the person for whom I wanted to join. Even if I’m not familiar with start-ups, I look forward to working with you and learning from you. ?

Very flattering, isn’t it? Actually, not at all. This discussion was a red flag for me, as a sharp reminder of a situation I experienced in video games, that killed my World of Warcraft guild and my will to play at a leading position for long in that game.

Before going further, if you want to know more about World of Warcraft guilds and teams’ concepts, and discover how I killed my first guild and team, please start with this article and my first management lesson: Team>Player.

Summer 2006, Ironforge, the Alliance Capital City in WoW

In multiplayer video games, summer is a guild killer. At that time, most players that played for PVE (aka killing big bad bosses) performance were actually students. What happens with students during summer? They travel, they work, they try to pass their exams. More than Paris in August, Ironforge, the Alliance capital city of the game, was a total desert.

During summer, you can’t go far in PvE progress, meaning you do the same fights again and again, when events aren’t cancelled due to the lack of participants. And cancelling is the thing you don’t want to do. If you cancel too many events in a row, your players will be willing to stop playing (it’s like a detox, if you stop playing for a while, you don’t want to play anymore – so time consuming for nothing, right?) or, worse, join other random players to do some stuff, then make new connections and friends and finally leave your company/guild for theirs.

Very cynical, I know. Remember, at that time, we were needing 40 players each evening to efficiently play. We had to be cynical or die. And remember, I was a terrible manager.

So, each guild was trying to keep its people busy with almost good reasons (like summer work in real life, all projects you’d like to work on during the year, but you never have the time to do so).

Example: Pacific PvP raid on a Horde Capital City (the enemy!). We were wearing white dresses, with flowers as weapons, and danced in one of the major places the other faction was in. Believe it or not, no one killed us for a long time… Pity?

 Remember my 1st article. We were just back from a terrible guild merging, that positively created an amazing team spirit for long. But summer was harsh. Despite all my officers’ efforts, tensions started to appear in my guild, as we had to recruit more to compensate June (end of year exams) leaves, as people had more time to actually talk, had to play with players they were not familiar with, and far out of their comfort zone (Player vs Player gaming with the Horde instead of our usual dungeons and boss for example). When tensions were high, I used to pop up in discussions, say a lot of jokes and do the “me-thing”. As I recruited them all and knew them all well, they were all liking me (I’ll talk about recruitment issues in another topic, you’ll enjoy it…), and tensions were disappearing for a while. A lot of them were even telling me “I don’t like everyone and everything we do, but I like you, I want to play with you and I look forward to progressing in the game with you”.

I was really pleased about it, thinking that it wasn’t a problem if some of them were frustrated, unhappy of the way we were usually playing, or of the fact that we were keeping “not-so-good” players because we needed 40 full slots every evening. I was also OK with people not trying to optimize themselves. Some people in the team were optimized, so it was globally fine, right? I was so proud of saying “no matter how you want to play, you’ll enjoy being with us”.

What I completely missed is that people were at the end enjoying being with me, not necessarily with each other. The dissension was growing between optimized people, that were spending time (and game money) to reach their full potential during the game, and others that were here just to visit dungeons. I was the link between the 2 natural teams, and the team spirit we generated during raids was enough to hide the deeper problem.

August arrived. I was finishing my master, that goes with a 100 pages essay to give back to school. I (of course) haven’t written a single line during the entire year. A week before the deadline, I told my team that I won’t play for a few days, time to write my essay and send it back, before entering the game again.

During this week, I wrote my essay, sent it, got 18/20 (A+) and validated my master – yeah, you can hate me. Oh, and I also lost my entire guild.

How? A drama happened.

Drama were/are frequent in WoW. But this time was different. I wasn’t there every evening to talk to people and create a fake feeling of well-being. The dissensions between the 2 profiles of players, even in my own officers’ team, exploded because I was previously hiding it instead of managing it. Avoiding fierce conversations. That week, no one was here to fake the team spirit.

A small discussion between 2 people on the guild vocal tool degenerated. Issues came all alive at the same time. Officers that were present took an amazing amount of bad decisions (yelling, making the chart - guild rules - harder, kicking people out), because I never trained them and never shared what I really wanted my team to be. When I came back, about 20 messages were waiting in my mail-box in game from people explaining they were leaving the guild to create a new one, less casual. About 40 other messages were explaining they were leaving the guild to create a new one, more casual.

I’ve seen nothing coming. I haven’t realized that no one was happy except me. The structure was all about selfish me, not about the team. I haven’t made them love the project, I made them all love playing with me. And when I haven’t managed to be there, the team hasn’t passed even a single week.

I learned a hard management lesson that day. Management is not about you and how you work well with people in your team. It’s all about how the team lives and works well without you. If you’re mandatory at every single minute for usual business, you’re doing it wrong. The team has to have its own identity, purposes and will, that should be aligned with yours. But the identity of the team shouldn’t be only you. You drive and guide, by permission. A guild master with no one in the guild isn’t a guild master. It’s just a management failure.

I thought it was a hard lesson, but one I understood. I was really cautious with my new team here in my real life, and one of the things I’m the proudest of is that it works well, no matter I’m here or not. I can take a day or two off to write my essay (my 2020 budget for example). We built altogether a real team spirit that goes far beyond me. I thought I was safe from making this mistake again.

But I almost did this mistake again a few weeks ago, with this new member of the team. I’ve seen the red flag and my first move was to compensate, replacing love for the project by will to work together. I fortunately didn’t do so. I couldn’t have compensated for long anyway. I was very busy and wasn’t there enough to do so, the company was too much out of her comfort zone, a drama happened quickly. She decided to leave the company before the end of her probation period.

I think this is the best decision if you don’t like the project, no matter you like the manager or not. I will strongly regret her; she’s a great marketer and she could have brought a lot to the team. But she will be happier, and at the end, so will we be. It’s better for her to leave now than in a few months/years, with frustration and tears. Thanks to this lesson and to her strong character, it won't happen.

Oh by the way, you may be wondering what I did in World of Warcraft after killing my guild twice in a year? I decided to stop managing and joined an end-game PvE guild as a simple player. There, I managed to be on the exact same day fired then promoted as an officer/manager, then fired again (in that order). That taught me a very important management lesson you’ll discover in my next article.

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