(This does refer to something in EQ2, but I’m trying to abstract it as much as possible. The specific thing isn’t really relevant.)
There’s a feature we just released. On the whole, people really like it. I think it’s going to do good things for the game, largely in terms of fostering character attachment and emergent play — Two important long term goals for us.
Here’s a dirty little secret: From the time it was proposed, until a couple weeks before it went live, I hated it. It felt wrong to me. It masked an element of worldly coolness that I had personally been attached to. Just wrong. No way. Never going in.
Its okay to be wrong, you know. No matter who you are, you’re going to be wrong a lot.
It’s how you handle it when you are that counts.
There’s this outdated vision of one brilliant guy in charge who’s always right, and seemingly lots of people who want to live out their dreams of being That Guy. I have yet to see any proof that guy exists as anything other than an ideal.
In my day job, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve started emails with some variant of, “Tell me if I’m being an idiot here,” followed by some interpretation or suggestion that may or may not jive with reality as perceived by anyone but me.
Why? Posed as a question, it gets people communicating about the best course of action.
Presented as an edict, it just earns resentment and makes you a lot more likely to make huge mistakes. The more times you do it, the worse it gets, as you train people in not bothering to argue with you.
These aren’t industrial-age factories we’re running, where the big responsibility was to appear all-knowing, making sure that the flock of ignorant sheep are reassured by knowing that they don’t have to worry about thinking, because there’s a Smart Guy in charge.
Given both the insightful nature of game developers and the size of these things we’re making, leadership in game development is less about being that all-knowing rock of stability and more about being the person who’s making sure that the experts you work with are heard, thereby making sure the best decisions get made.
Confidence isn’t about needing to always be right. Any two year old can be blindly stubborn. It’s not difficult.
Confidence is about being secure enough to put something out there, then being adult enough to know there will be times when you should change that “something,” if faced with sufficient evidence that there’s a better idea. Even if the better plan it’s the complete opposite of what you initially thought.
Sometimes, the smart move is to scrap the “something” entirely, if it’s just a plain old bad idea.
Whatever gets you closer to the end goals. “Getting closer to the goal” can also mean “not do something blazingly stupid that actually sets you back.”
To mangle a Henry Ford quote: “I don’t have to know everything. I just have to know the person who does.”
Surround yourself with those people and pay attention to them. You’ll find that most of the time you can do your own job, and just stay the hell out of their way.
(Note: I suffer no such delusions that I’m anywhere near perfect in this regard. I still think it’s a good personal goal to aim for.)
- Scott
Nick McLaren said
September 15 2007 @ 1:50 pm
You’re right on the money! Everyone has ideas. You can even have them too, as long as you don’t assume they’re anything more than your ideas and opinions. Even more importantly, that you don’t PRESENT your ideas without any sort of authority that you don’t actually have.
Even if you’re the most well studied person in the world, that only means that your opinions, or rather your conclusions, have a little more weight, but does not mean you’re always right either, even in your area of expertise. You always have to be able to take in new information, process it, and adjust your course of action as needed. That’s just good management.
In regards to your Henry Ford quote.. good quote.. but Ford was a very bad autocrat and not a good example for being flexible like this. His quote is pretty close to right on, but if only he practiced what he preached.
I really hope you keep this up Scott! I like posts like this that are from your experience but wrap around or bring to light a fundamental concept that we can all benefit from remembering. =)
Oh, and just be true to these words. I should disclaim that even my thoughts that I’ve jotted down here are just my theories and opinions. Like every other piece of information you take in, could also be way off the mark. =)
Cheers,
Nick
Michael said
September 15 2007 @ 1:56 pm
This is wisdom for the ages, stuff I think can be applied to life in general. My attitude towards pretty much everything is that it’s *impossible* nowadays to be the alpha and omega of knowledge on a subject. You can be the ‘expert’ on a subject within your group of friends, of course, or within your family/office/etc. I’m partially convinced the reason my wife’s folks gave us their blessing is because they were getting free tech support for life from me.
But even then, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things the ‘non-experts’ can offer. I may know a lot about MMOGs compared to most of my friends, but some of them have played EVE roughly 1000x longer than I have. My opinions/views on the game are mostly not my own at this point; they’ve been heavily colored by the first-hand knowledge these other folks gained through actual play.
Mostly I kinda wish people would stop taking themselves so damn seriously.
Trevel said
September 15 2007 @ 4:17 pm
My own quote is “There’s a secret to always being right: When you’re wrong, change.”
Nice article.
The Hiram Key said
September 15 2007 @ 6:51 pm
Without knowing which specific feature you are referencing, it’s hard to address the good / bad aspects of it. It’s hard to know even if you are talking about features that were documented in the patch notes, or the ones that went in and were not actually documented. That’s a real shame.
On the rest of the article, you are spot on, however its always nice to have a someone, or several someones who you can run those ideas by, regardless of how you feel and see what that group thinks. Call it your control group, or your BS detector or whatever label you want to slap on it. I realize that group (as you mention) becomes conditioned over time to respond in a way you will view as favorable, and the soltion on that is to rotate it, or always be seeking fresh “controllees”.
“Hello, this is GM Blahblahblah, if you have a couple of minutes I would like to show you some new features from an upcoming patch, and get your feedback. If you have ventrillo and are ready, we can begin right away !” Pipe dream ? Maybe.
I can’t help but wonder if such a system was in place (truly in place, not theoritically or kind a) what the responses would have been on things like the casting timer addition for quest interaction, or the change to status turn ins relative to guild level.
It would probably help a whole lot on the consumer end if these changes were documented better, with some type of accompanying reasoning attached, for I know quite a few people are often left scratching their heads and trying to understand not only what you had in mind with the changes, but why you ended up choosing that particular route.
When such amazing things are released like the dressing room, alternate appearences, the revamp on icons for harvest items etc, we all cheer as we sit in our chairs and experience them in game. What a great team. How thoughtful ! How clever ! These guys rock so hard I can’t believe it.
And then the Edsel changes come out and crash into the gamescape like a lead ballon on fire, and we have to wonder what is going on. Truly.
Jeff Freeman said
September 16 2007 @ 12:52 am
There’s this outdated vision of one brilliant guy in charge who’s always right
The benefit of that model is in having one guy who is in charge.
It ought to be so beneficial that it’s worth the trade-off of him being wrong from time-to-time, even if he also professes to be brilliant and claims that he is always right.
It’s just that most likely anyone who actually believes the “brilliant” and “always right” thing about themselves is probably wrong a whole lot, about a lot of things.
Then it’s no longer worth the trade off.
And that’s before you even get to how much working for someone like that sucks. I mean… it’s pretty irritating to worth with someone like that.
When they’re in charge, there’s also the issue of how strongly it repels competency, and how improbable it is his delusional leadership of an incompetent team will realize success.
Best you could hope for would be a failure that you can be proud of. One of those “The market just isn’t ready for it” flops.
So that’s all a horror.
Accumulating competency and utilizing it is way more important than whether any individual decision is right or wrong.
So I’ll wave the “brilliant” flag and raise my big “infallible!” foam finger in support of the head dude’s decisions to help him be in charge, if him being in charge builds competency and utilizes it.
That is, only for so long as his infallible decisions come after, “What do you think?” and “Let’s ask so-n-so for her opinion,” and so on.
Plus from time to time, “I disagree with all of you, but ok… We’ll do that.”
‘Cause then if it turns out the team was right, then you were right to go with their opinion. But if the team was wrong, then - hey, everybody! remember? - you were the only one who was right. They can hardly fault you for having trusted their opinion.
It’d be ideal if all your decisions could be rigged like that. So that no matter what, you were always right… but you’d have to be brilliant to manage that.
Hey!
Are you sure this is an outdated vision? It sounds great!
Moorgard said
September 16 2007 @ 12:25 pm
I’ve been the recipient of Scott’s “Tell me if I’m being an idiot here” emails on more than one occasion.
To his credit, he bats about .600 on them, which is a really good average. But OMG, you should see some of the other 40%. *shudder*
Jeremy said
September 17 2007 @ 1:55 am
nice article. to me, the most useful insight in here is the approach of phrasing your own ideas (or even rebuttals to some extent) with a very humble framework. if you can disclaim up front your position, and your uncertainty, it will automatically remove the flame potential from the response and as you said, get people talking about what the right solution is. all of us in this industry want to claim that our development processes and feature sets are driven by customer desire, and most of us really want it to be that way, but we often have a problem of taking that communication style (humility, uncertainty, desire to find the agreed best solution) to a large set of a stakeholders, like an entire customer base.
- jeremy
David said
September 17 2007 @ 9:35 am
In my experience having a guy who knows he is always right at the helm is a good way of ensuring that you do not retain people who have their own ideas. Therefore, over time, the person who is always right ceases to hear alternatives, which undoubtedly reinforces their misplaced confidence.
I am intrigued to know which EQ2 change you felt was wrong.
Jeff Freeman said
September 17 2007 @ 7:28 pm
Yeh, but in that case, he’s really better off not listening to his people, anyway. No matter how bad he is, they’re sure to be worse.
Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is just sounding less and less an impossibility.
Here it is again, another reliable method - ensuring your prophecies always come to pass - of achieving the ability to be “always right”.
Example, or so I’ve heard: Marketing wonks. They cannot predict success, but they can predict failure with 100% accuracy.
Granted, all this also seems more and more divorced from success; but maybe that’s not your goal.
I mean, you could be a corporate saboteur whose real mission is to produce spectacular failures while appearing to be some sort of genius-variation of an idiot-savant. Thereby moving yourself up the corporate ladder, one flop and a time, to within striking-distance of the head.
In such a case, what good is Scott’s advice to you here?
Ha! No good at all!
An Important Note About Game Design (and pretty much anything else) » Grimwell Online said
September 17 2007 @ 7:46 pm
[…] Read more at his blog. « Four | […]
Greenion said
October 27 2007 @ 8:35 pm
“The more times you do it, the worse it gets, as you train people in not bothering to argue with you.”
- i relate.
good article, good advice.