My Path of Ignorance

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing", wrote Alexander Pope some three hundred years ago. More recently, we've discovered Dunning-Kruger syndrome, the dynamic by which the less people know about a field, the more they over-estimate their knowledge. I resemble both of these remarks. While I don't want to over-generalize, I think one of the challenges of people talking about "the game industry" is that what they mean is "the particular slice of the game industry that I have seen personally up close", and there are bound to be gaps between those two.

I don't want to cast shade on anyone else, so let's use me as an example. When I started in the industry, I was a typical junior designer, in spite of the fact I was already 30 years old. I started playing games as a kid, back when home PC's were just getting started. TRS-80, Apple IIe, these were my learning grounds. I was too early to be a digital native - we still had CRT's and cassette tapes; hell, people still had rotary phones. But, digital was coming online in that sweet spot where, as a kid, I wasn't bringing any presumptions to what it was or what it could do. I was totally open to the possibilities and willing to experiment to figure out how things worked.

And then, for a long time, I was a typical gamer - playing what I could afford (or get my hands on), starting and abandoning a few hobbyist projects, reading whatever I could about the industry. I spent about a decade in academic purgatory - primarily in the Macintosh ecosystem when a lot of games weren't ported across. It wasn't really until I started in game development in 2000 that I got caught up on where PC gaming had gone. There were consoles along the way, of course, but being closed ecosystems, no way to really experiment with game development.

As I started to think about games as a career, I did get involved in a lot of betas. That started to open my eyes a little bit to what was involved in finishing a game, but I really had no clue what went into building an entire game, much less a studio. So, I was pretty much a clueless newb when I showed up for my first gig at Atomic Games. I'd played a lot of games; I knew what I liked. I'd tried to make some games, but nothing ever complete. I'd hacked up some other people's games, but never built anything from scratch.

And I was convinced that I knew everything about what made a game successful.

In other words, I was kind of an arrogant prick.

That didn't last very long, since that first studio went out of business in six months. So, when I landed at Red Storm, I was a little more humble, but still very clueless about what game development actually was. My first project was a new IP play - a prototype on PS2 to expand the capabilities of the studio and show that we could still make things that weren't Clancy products.

Ubisoft promptly canceled that project when they had a chance to move us on to The Sum of All Fears. I did not take it well. I remember Richard Dansky having to come into my office and tell me to turn the music down. However, as a career move, it was exactly the right thing. I had an existing engine to play with, a general pattern of established gameplay, and an opportunity to make new content and a few, targeted improvements. As a designer, learning the craft, it was like working with training wheels on.

Don't get me wrong, I was still a dick.

I made all kinds of mistakes, wasted people's time, failed to treat people with respect, went down value-less rabbit holes, and the whole time I thought that I knew not just what was right for my project, but for the entire studio. But, we shipped a game. And then an expansion pack. And then I started to recognize the patterns and the cycles. I realized that I needed to listen more to the team, but I also started to believe that I knew more than I actually did about game development.

The studio had a free pass at a new team/project, so they sent me off to see if I could turn it into something. This was my third run at standing up a new project, so it wasn't as much of a disaster as it could have been, but it was still a disaster. I learned a lot about team management; I learned a lot about leadership, mostly by making mistakes. When Ubisoft killed that project in favor of shipping more Clancy brand projects, I bailed.

One of the things that frustrated me in those early years was the lack of authority or decision-making power that I felt I had. As a lead designer, I had a lot of room to move, but production set the constraints - what projects were on the table, who was on what, when things shipped and how much support they got. Since we as a development studio reported into the publishing org, I thought, foolishly, that I just needed to get into the publishing ranks and I would finally have the power I needed to move projects where they needed to go.

Boy, was I wrong. Going to THQ was an education in so many ways. I got to see what development contracts looked like, how much people got paid, what marketing estimates looked like and were based on. As part of my time there, I evaluated almost two dozen different studios on how they developed games. I visited studios across the US, working deeply with several of them on projects like Titan Quest. The more I worked with a variety of studios, the more I understood how little I had understood about game development . The more I worked with external developers, the more I realized how little I knew about studio management as a developer.

When I left THQ, I went to learn how to run a studio. I was still looking for that brass ring - creative and financial control. What I had learned so far was that the head of Product Development got to make the meaningful decisions, and if you wanted to run the portfolio, you needed to know how to run a studio. So, I made a deal with Jeff Goodsill, who had been the president of Iron Lore: I would run his team and his project; he would teach me how to run a studio. I was a little skeptical because he was working with a Chinese company, but I didn't really care, because I was only going to be there for one cycle.

Tencent was an even steeper learning curve than publishing had been. Not only did I have to onboard free to play game mechanics and monetization practices, but there was an entire country to try and make sense of. I had to learn entirely new frameworks for how people thought about the difference between the developed areas and the rural areas. I had to try and understand a completely different relationship to the internet, to PC's, to mobile devices. To their credit, Tencent did a great job of feeding me everything I needed, but it took me years to begin to understand how the Chinese market worked, at even the roughest levels.

In the middle of that, we killed our project, pivoted the studio, and switched from making an MMO to making a Facebook game. The good news was that I was ready for it. Having been through multiple start-up projects, I knew how to take a project from 0 to 1. Having shipped multiple titles on both the development and publishing side, I knew what it took to get something to market. There were still a ton of new pieces, and if I'm honest, we made a lot of first-timer free-to-play mistakes. But, we also made an entire 3D action-RPG in 10 months, concept to ship.

Operating a live game was another one of those "aha" moments. Once we had data telemetry, the importance of A/B testing suddenly became clear. The relationship between data/analytics and community management/customer support became a whole thing. Live release management, event scheduling, working with a live audience - there are so many things that I messed up and learned from and figured out how to do better.

And I realized, that every threshold I had crossed, I had discovered not only that my answers had been wrong, but my questions had been wrong. As a player, I knew what made a successful game experience, but not how to make it. As a lead designer, I learned how to make a successful game experience, but I had no idea how to build a successful studio. As a publisher, I learned how studios are businesses, but I only saw a very small slice of the overall market. By learning about China, I became aware how many other markets I didn't understand, how many different developer communities there were in different stages of maturity.

Of people who have worked in the industry, I have a wider experience than most. I've built games for all kinds of platforms - PC, Console, Mobile, Handheld. I've worked in a wide variety of genres, targeting a broad mix of audiences. I spent four years doing due diligence evaluations on studios - getting into the nitty gritty of how games get built - and sitting in on pitch and greenlight meetings - dissecting the business costs and opportunities of projects. I've worked with studios in all of the major development regions in the US, several in Canada, some in Europe, and, of course, Tencent in China. I was there before the free-to-play revolution happened, and I've developed a free-to-play game that has generated over $1B USD in revenue. I've made new IP games, licensed IP games, great games, terrible games, commercially successful games, and canceled games.

And the thing that I have learned is that no one really understands the game industry, not all of it. They may be experts in their niche. They may know more than anyone else about a particular market or tactic or audience, but no one knows the whole game industry. It's too big. It's too complex. I have spent over two decades now working with top companies on world class games, and there are vast swathes of the industry I've never met, never played the games they've made, never heard of them.

So, I get a little pissy sometimes when people act like they know more than they do. It's stupid. It's a character flaw. In some ways, I'm still that cocky lead designer sitting in the kitchen at Red Storm not willing to shut up when someone else who's wrong insists that they're right.

But, it's a good lesson for all of us. Behind the hills that you can see, there is a mountain range. Behind that mountain range, there is another valley you cannot see. You may be able to see the mountain from where you are; you may be able to plot a course there. But unless you have been through the territory thoroughly, you have no idea how to navigate the spaces beyond your experience. Be humble; you have no idea how deep that range may be.