Click Nothing

Anti-Irreplaceable

Wow.

Over ten percent of all the traffic that has ever gone through this blog went through in the past week in response to my previous post about Chaos Theory.

Needless to say, that was totally unexpected. I realized sometime in the evening last Saturday that it was Chaos Theory's 10 year Anniversary and decided to quickly throw together a blog post. In fact, I had originally started writing with the intent of telling three little tales about the development of the game, but, as I am sure you are aware, I can be a bit wordy, and it was getting late, so I only shipped one of them.

I guess it just happened that the particular story I chose struck a chord. Obviously, quality of life issues in the game industry remain a big issue, and what happened to me (and many others) continues to happen today. It was decidedly not my intent last week to drop a bomb and then drop the mic. What to me is 'some crazy shit that happened to me a decade ago' is a big deal to a lot of people, it turns out. So perhaps I should speak that.

I think the most important thing that I feel about it, is that the problem of quality of life in the game industry is not a simple problem, and that having a simplistic stance on the issue is not helpful to the people who are suffering.

Many people seemed to be blaming the evil bosses of the evil corporations for the imposition of eighty hour weeks. While this happens, and it is shameful, I assure you, no one has ever imposed an eighty hour week on me, and I have never ordered a crunch on any one of my teams, ever. My eighty hour weeks were something I did to myself. They were not mandated by Ubisoft.

Other people pinned the long weeks to shitty production practices and bad planning. It's true that some of our planning was shoddy, but at the same time, I can say with certainty that even if we had had better practices and planning I would definitely not have gone home after 40 hours a week. I wanted to be there. It was the only thing I wanted.

Many pointed out that the science shows that prolonged crunch demonstrably leads to bad results. Sure - data shows that. But that does not mean there are not exceptions. Certainly there were bad results for me and my health (and for others as well). But there were no bad results for the game. I'm pretty sure that the game was not a 100 metacritic and all our crunching left us with a lousy 94. Those hours and all that stress mattered. To say that it did not, or that it was deleterious to the final game is simply false in this case.

Others seemed to want to rush forward and empathize and say 'hey, that sounds awful, but you should know it was worth it'. While I appreciate the sentiment and the empathy, what you mean by that is that you believe it was worth it because what you gained was valuable. That's great, I am flattered. But you actually don't, and can't know the cost. It's as if I bought a cookie from you for five dollars and ate it, and you are telling me it was worth it because you're happy with your five dollars. But you don't know what the cookie tasted like. The taste of the cookie is my experience. Not yours. So while I appreciate the empathy (I sincerely do), I still feel it's important not to jump to a simplified perspective on a complicated issue that has such potential to damage people. What we really need to do is try to understand these quality of life issues, and empower people to come up with ways that allow them to solve the problems that are specific to their own lives in the contexts in which they are dealing with them.

Probably every quality of life issue is different. Everyone gets sucked into different traps. Long hours can be the thing that causes the problem. They can be the thing that compounds it. They can be the thing that people use to conceal the problem. Believe it or not, they can also be the thing that helps. There is no single problem, and there is no magic bullet.

As I said, in my case on Chaos Theory, I was not being told to work three jobs and put in eighty hours a week. I chose to do it. I did it because in a very real way, doing it made me happy. I felt empowered, fulfilled, and appreciated. I did it because I believed it was possible to make a better game than the original Splinter Cell, and that the easiest path to get there was through a lot of hard work. The positive feedback I was getting in the short term sucked me into a destructive spiral over the long term. I was exhausted and stressed, but the best way to deal with that problem was to get a few important things done on the game and get the high from having moved the game forward.

Back in 2001, just before I left Vancouver to go to Ubisoft and start my career in games a friend of mine gave me a bit of advice. He told me (I'm paraphrasing), "If you want to be successful in a big company, the way to do that is to make yourself irreplaceable." That's what I did almost from the minute my feet hit the ground in Montreal. I just started working like a machine. I stuck my nose in everything and I tried to pick up every loose task I could. By the time the original Splinter Cell had shipped I had gone from being a rookie level designer who had never worked on a game before to being a level designer, game designer and scriptwriter on a 92 Metacritic blockbuster that sold over five million copies (that was a lot in 2002). My level had been the one to represent the game at E3. My other level was the one on the demo disk in Official XBox Magazine. My other level was the first one in the game. I was irreplaceable.

When the core Splinter Team left Ubi to go found EA Montreal, it was obvious that I would take the Lead Level Design job and write the script. Who else would you ask to do that? I became the Creative Director not long after that, and yeah - no question I was irreplaceable again. 

You know the rest of the story from the previous post. But here's the part I didn't talk about:

After Chaos Theory, I was pretty seriously burned out. I said at the time that I never wanted to make another Splinter Cell again - because frankly, I'm pretty sure I can't do it better, so what would be the point? So I decided to go and work on Far Cry 2. And at the same time as I made that decision, I also  considered that advice my friend had given me about making myself irreplaceable. I realized that while it had technically 'worked', it was totally unsustainable and would not end well. I decided I needed a new strategy, and what seemed a straightfoward alternate strategy at the time was to just 'do the opposite'.

I decided to go into Far Cry 2 with the explicit goal of 'replacing myself'. What that meant, concretely, was finding a better Lead Level Designer than me, and finding a better writer than me so that I would only have one job, and then - perhaps even more important - working to build as many of the creative leaders as I could so that maybe one day, I could have no jobs. Presumably this would lead to me being at the top of some kind of pyramid scheme where I got to sit on a beach and drink mojitos and play videogames for the rest of my life - but I didn't really think it through that far.

Anyway - that's exactly what I set out to do. I brought in a Lead Level Designer who unquestionably was better at it than I was. I evolved the role of 'writing' into the role of Narrative Design, and brought in a Narrative Designer who was better than I was, and then I spent the next three years having them tell me how stupid I was and it was great. 

Far Cry 2 was hard as hell. In a lot of ways, it was harder than Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. There are things that that game changed in me that will never go back to the way they were before. Maybe I'll write about those when Far Cry 2 turns ten. But all that said, for the most part, I worked 40-50 hour weeks for almost the entire development of Far Cry 2. I didn't suffer real damage in the way I did on Chaos Theory. Yes, there were people who worked a lot longer and harder hours that. On several occasions I tried to order people to leave the building, and I remember asking the Producer how we could force people to go home. Some of the reasons those people were working so hard had to do with bad planning and management. Some of it had to do with scope creep. Some of it was because they were super engaged. I'm sure their reasons are as complex as mine were, and I won't try to diminish them through simplificiation. It's complicated. It's hard.

Today, the Lead Level Designer, the Narrative Designer and the Art Director from Far Cry 2 are all Creative Directors on different projects. Far Cry 2, in my opinion, is a better and more important game that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I won't try to take too much credit for that, but I do suspect that if I had continued to position myself as irreplacable, I would not have made it through at all. The project would have crashed and burned, the game would have been taken over by another creative lead and likely rebooteed. Likely many of the people who developed themselves through the course of that production would have been derailed and might not be doing as well professionally as they are today.

So there you have it - those are my thoughts on the complexities of quality of life in the game industry and that's my one and only strategy for not getting snuffed out: replace yourself. It's not a magic bullet, but that's all I've got. 

(It just so happens I feel the same approach applies to designer authorship - but that's another topic.)

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part I

So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give:

The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm

The games of today unsurprisingly strive to mimic the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media largely because gamers and game developers have grown up in a world where those media are culturally dominant. That is changing. As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old. Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion.

This talk examines the potential long-term future of gaming by looking at the accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media from the internet, games, music and narrative media to augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices.

Sorry that the summary sounds so brainy and cerebral - I promise it will be a talk about games and that it will be as chaotically poetic and filled with increasingly obsolete jokes about the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons as the rest of my recent talks.

But more than just announcing that I'm speaking at GIS, I wanted to announce that I am expanding the trip to do the talk in several other cities. I don't want to announce any places or dates yet, because I'm still putting it together, so I'll let those interested speculate away. I will admit that a part of planning this as a 'tour' was because I am a couple of trips 'in debt' following cancellations resulting from my injury - so if you had been hoping to see me talk a few months ago and were disappointed by a cancellation, odds are good you'll be getting a second chance.

For the subject of the talk - it spawns out of a lot of the thinking I have been doing recently. Needless to say once you come off a project and get some rest, your narrow, single-minded focus on closing and delivery opens up and you get to look at the big picture again... so that psychological shifting of gears definitely has inspired the core of the talk. Also, recent conversations online - particularly the discussion that evolved out of my debate with Manveer, and even yesterday's discussion on the nature and future of the expressive potential of games between David Jaffe and Anthony Burch (and others) (extended) are all topics that have been close to my heart lately and will be elementary to the talk. I'm hoping to be able to synthesize some of these ideas with my own recent talks about Immersion and Generational Shift. If you really want to get the most of the upcoming 'CN Tour 09' talk, you might want to refresh yourself on those two previous talks...but...

As an added bonus (and you get all this for free!) - I am also looking toward launching a few other special projects to 'celebrate' the tour that will hopefully increase the utility of Click Nothing as a whole and make the idea of reviewing those old talks a little easier.

So - to use the most ironic metaphor I can muster - stay tuned - if I can keep a modicum of focus, it's going to be an exciting post-midsummer.

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

Sports Injuries - Elbows and Egos

A couple little news items that made me laugh and cry this week.

First is the Wall Street Journal covering so-called 'Wii-elbow'. No other way to decribe it than a kind of culture shock arising from the collision between a bunch of fat, lazy pre-diabetics suddenly finding their sedentary life-styles in conflict with their insatiable thirst for entertainment with the arrival of the Wii.

A twelve year old girl says "it's harder than playing basketball"... which is such an absurdly false statement than I was almost blinded when I read it. Have you ever even played basketball? I've played a lot of Wii now, and one thing I can say for sure is that - while better than nothing - it's a far cry from playing a 'real' competitive sport. The only way I could reconcile that statement with reality was to assume she meant "it's harder than playing basketball". Gimme a break.

Next is the guy who complains of aching shoulders and arms and profuse sweating after playing Wii boxing for and hour and a half. An hour and a half. Of shadow boxing!! That's like 20 rounds of shadow boxing including all the breaks. Twenty, three-minute high intensity anaerobic sprints. The guy is threshold training with his Wii and fucking himself up. Does anyone in the world think it would be a good idea spend 90 minutes doing threshold training at the gym the very first time they go?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for using Wii Sports daily to get some exercise, especially if you currently get none, but ease yourself into it. Soon enough you will find that the exercise itself is as fun as the gameplay, and the gameplay will start to get tired once you've exhausted the depth of the system-space. Then - god forbid - when your brain is bored of the systems, but your body is craving the movement - maybe you'll actually want to do some real exercise for its own sake.

I wonder if we'll make it through the holiday without someone's Uncle Jack from Winnipeg having a coronary from playing 45 minutes of Wii Tennis with little Billy after gorging himself on Christmas Ham and Turkey? I wonder if Nintendo will face class-action lawsuits from a North American population so addicted to laziness and broadcast media pablum that a few corpses will actually be more shocking than an entire population of pale-skinned, carpal-crippled, diabetics with soaring blood-pressure and cheetos-orange stained fingers?

Part two of this sports-in-games weekend-write-up is an article from UrbanGrounds that went around the office last week. Now, I don't know much about football, but this is fuckin' hilarious. Ethan Albright is what I gues you call a 'special teams lineman' playing with the Washington Redskins in the NFL. He's had a 12 year career (which I take it is exceptional for a lineman) because he's good at doing a long snap to a punter, thereby buying the kicker enough space to get the ball away before being pummeled into the earth.

Unfortunately for Ethan Albright, someone has to be the lowest rated overall player in Madden Football, and this year, it's him. He writes a foul-mouthed rant to Madden and EA that's a good read provided you're not trying to drink a can of Coke while you read it.

Anyway, to bring a point to it rather than just point to it, question: does there even need to be an overall player ranking in such a game? Does someone have to be the 'worst' player in the NFL? It certainly seems like a problem to provide overall rankings - especially in a game like football - which has so many orthogonal units in play. You can do it more easily in boxing or tennis where everyone is being compared in the same way, but in more complex team sports with a variety fo player (unit) roles - of which football may be the most complex - is such a ranking even meaningful?

Regardless, Albright probably didn't complain when he got the royalty check from EA or via the player's association, and probably he wouldn't opt out of receiving such a cheque next season either, so maybe he should just deal with it. It's still a funny letter.