Introduction
What's your job? Seriously - what do you tell people when they ask?
If you tell them "Coder", "Artist", "Producer", “Designer” or whatever else happens to be on your business card I’d like you to have another think, because recent events have convinced me that's almost certainly not what your job really is.
It’s become apparent that many people never consider the connection between the job they do and the value it creates. It seems to be a side-effect of working in organisations; especially big organisations, but it affects small ones too.
It's easier to spot the value in certain professions, of course; if you're a doctor and you cure a patient of an ailment then the real, tangible value of your work is pretty obvious. You're a healer – you’re improving people's lives by healing them; a noble calling for sure.
But jobs like that are becoming rarer as our society becomes more complex and collaboration becomes essential to delivering many of today's demands.
As a result, I doubt many game developers ever have cause to think of themselves as entertainers, but I'd argue that's precisely what we are if we're working in the games industry.
Not artists; or scientists; or technologists or any other "-ist". Not engineers; or managers; or administrators. We might draw on these skills while doing our job, but they are not the actual purpose in-and-of themselves.
We are entertainers - more like a busker on a street corner than a scientist in a lab. But unlike buskers (and just like many scientists) game developers rarely meet their audience face-to-face, and that can have all sorts of unexpected and unhelpful consequences.
The Busking Business Model: Turning Scowls In To Smiles
When I'm not writing blogs I run a games studio in Scotland called Denki – I say “games studio” so people will know what I mean, but we prefer to think of Denki as a digital toy factory, for reasons I'll go in to another time. Regardless of semantics though, it would be easy for me to think it's enough that our teams have paying work to keep them gainfully employed, and that our costs don't get out of control. That's what a typical “studio manager” does after all, right? Well, that might be true on the surface, but it’s not how I see it.
I recognise the important differences between the mechanical process of managing a games studio and the very real value it must deliver if I'm still going to have a studio to manage tomorrow. My day-to-day decisions must ultimately result in smiles on the faces of the people who play Denki's games, or the rest of it doesn't matter. When it comes right down to it I don't get paid for controlling studio costs, I get paid for turning scowls in to smiles. Setting strategy and managing the studio is just one small part of how I help Denki achieve that aim.
I suspect you get paid for turning scowls in to smiles too; regardless of your specific role in getting a game in to someone's hands. Your job is to entertain your audience which, in this case, happens to be the person playing your game. And, just like the busker strumming their guitar on the street, when your audience appreciates your efforts, you're more likely (though still not guaranteed) to make money.
As a result, the business model for a busker is closer to the business model of an indie game developer than you might first realise. Here's some of the similarities for starters, and I'm sure you'll think of plenty others once you get the idea:
(Go with me on this one…)
- We both tend to work on our acts behind closed doors until we have enough confidence in our creation to believe an audience will appreciate it. Or we run out of money – whichever happens first.
- When we finally reveal our acts to the world we both have only a fleeting moment to catch people's attention before they decide to give us their time or walk on by.
- We both perform to an audience with many other distractions competing for their attention - we have to convince them to give their time to something they didn't plan to.
- We both have to make sure we structure our acts so they are constantly engaging – the moment the engagement dips they're off, dragged away by all the other pressing things they planned to do that day; which means we’re less likely to get paid.
- Finally, regardless of the objective quality, there will always be those who don't like our act. And despite our best efforts there will also be those who enjoy our acts, but still aren't prepared to pay for them, for whatever reason.
The Power Of The Audience
These similarities were all brought home to me in glorious detail last month when we took Denki’s latest game busking.
We’d decided to set up for three days at the world's biggest performance festival: the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. We wanted to encourage passers-by to play it and provide feedback so we could understand how they perceive our game, and how we could make it more engaging for them. I wanted to count the scowls we made in to smiles myself, and learn what it would take to make more.
As a game developer more used to interfacing with computers than other people it was a daunting experience: to have that fundamental connection between the job I do each day and its ultimate purpose laid bare in the most vivid way imaginable.
I was prepared for the worst; however, having been through the trauma and lived to tell the tale I once again appreciate just how vital this connection between developer and audience is and why we can get things so wrong when we ignore it.
The game we've been working on is called Quarrel. It fits neatly in to the “strategy word game” genre – you know, the one where players compete for territories by trying to "out-word" one another? Yup, thought so. Anyway, it's been in development at Denki for a while now and recently reached an important milestone where it's “showable without shame”; so we thought we'd use the opportunity to take it busking in Edinburgh. Earlier this month, a whole gang of Denkians arrived at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre intent on finding out what the general public would make of Quarrel.
We were piggybacking the University of Abertay's most-excellent Dare To Be Digital competition. Seriously, if you haven't heard about Dare To Be Digital yet you really need to check it out because it's redefining the way people learn to make games. And while you're at it, take a look at Abertay's new MProf Games Development course starting this year - if there's a more exciting course for would-be game developers out there at the moment I'm not aware of it.
It was specifically the ProtoPlay part of Dare To Be Digital we were involved with; the part where all fourteen teams put their games on show for the general public to play. Previously the Dare To Be Digital teams had only shown their games to industry experts, but a few years ago they took a bold decision to host a public show as part of the Edinburgh Festival, where members of the public as well as the industry judges would be invited to evaluate the results.
It's no exaggeration to say that the quality of the games almost doubled overnight. Having been involved in judging the Dare To Be Digital games since its inception back in 1999 I could honestly say that none of the refinements they had made to the process made anything like the difference that asking the teams to demo their games to the general public made. And that got me thinking: why did that one change make such a difference? After much consideration my conclusion is that it reinforced the link between the teams and their audience. Further still, it completely negates any sort of rational excuses for weaknesses in the final product.
Industry judges have been there on the front lines – they'll usually understand the feeling of pulling an all-nighter to get something delivered against the odds, and will therefore tend to listen sympathetically to stories of misfortune and good intent from the teams and temper their criticisms accordingly.
The general public however, and especially children, care not for any heroic development efforts, whether successful or not. Unlike industry judges the public evaluate the Dare To Be Digital games purely on what is right there in front of them; just as they would be in their own home or local game store. And, as I discussed in my last blog they're only looking for one thing – fun. They don't care whether the teams almost killed themselves in the process or completed the project in their first week and spent the other nine weeks of the competition racking up impressive Donkey Kong scores.
The Way; The End: The Answer?
This is something Denki’s own Gary Penn recognised a long time ago as part of The Denki Difference. He maintains that there are two important yet distinct parts to the creative process which he refers to as “The Way” and “The End”. The End is the most important part, because it's the part everybody notices when they first come in to contact with a Denki Game. Very few, especially outside of our industry, have any appreciation for The Way, which is the process we use to get to The End.
That might sound complicated, but you’ll almost certainly be familiar with the underlying principle already. I always turn to The Beatles whenever I need to illustrate it: there have been more detailed books written about the songwriting and recording processes used by The Beatles than any other band in history. The reason is not that they did anything particularly pioneering that hadn’t already been tried elsewhere before, but because so many people loved the results - their songs. Their songs are “The End” and their songwriting and recording processes are “The Way”. If The End hadn't been so impressive far fewer people would ever have stopped to consider The Way. Yet, surprisingly, I still meet many game developers more obsessed with The Way than The End.
The same applies to Denki Games: if Quarrel doesn't make people smile when they play it then no one will care that we climbed a figurative mountain to create it. And that's what standing in front of your audience tells you without any sort of ambiguity – whether it makes them smile or not.
Much to our relief taking Quarrel busking proved to us that it connects with audiences just as we hoped it would. Passers-by were prepared to stop, have a go, and spend time chatting about it to learn more; all good signs that they’re engaging with the game.
We had almost 200 people play Quarrel over the three days. The majority of them played for over 30 minutes. Many of them came back more than once for another go, and many of them brought friends or family to play it with them when they did.
That's the best kind of feedback: it's all very well asking people “Do you like this game?”, but actions speak way louder than words as everyone knows. Someone going out of their way to come back with their wife and kids for a multiplayer game of Quarrel is worth ten filled in questionnaires saying “we think your game is great”. Although fortunately, for all you fact fans out there, we walked away with over 150 of those too!
Lessons
Having found the process so successful in highlighting areas where Quarrel needs further refinement we fully intend to make “busking” Denki's games a staple part of our development process in future.
By considering ourselves entertainers rather than engineers or artists, it suggests other ways we can improve ourselves and our games too. Suddenly it becomes clear that creating an impressive piece of art or code is not enough in-and-of itself. Our work can't just be "good" when judged by the standards of ourselves or our peers; it has to be "good" when judged by the expectations of our audience, and they're rarely looking for the same things as friends or colleagues working in the industry. Our peers might appreciate technique, or flair, or some other subtle technical aspect of our work, but the chances are our audience isn't going to care - at least initially. "Having a laugh" is probably far more important to them than appreciating our subtle, technical mastery.
Of course, once they are having fun and being entertained then it's possible that they'll start to appreciate the subtleties that have been added by our considerable skills and effort as well. But going back to the busker example, unless we've earned our audience's attention in the first place, they're never going to appreciate how cleverly we chose to substitute that G7(9) chord for the BbMaj7 just before going in to the last chorus – the songwriter’s equivalent of using clever shading to hide a character’s low poly count. (Honest!)
 The Way is the means by which The End was achieved. Audiences rarely have any interest in The Way, unless The End captures them first and draws them into the subtleties. Yet during a game’s creation, as developers, we often become obsessed by The Way – ignoring our audience in favour of satisfying ourselves or our peers.
What busking with Quarrel confirmed for me is that anyone working in an entertainment industry needs to consider their audience first - always. And what industry is more explicit in its role as an entertainment industry than "the games industry"? The clue's in the title, surely?
If a Denki Game is engaging, exciting and rewarding for our audience, then we’re doing our job: we're entertaining people. If no one's stopping to play, then regardless of how well we might have performed our individual roles along the way, we've failed as entertainers in the end.
Or someone’s playing the bagpipes close by – always a potential hazard in Edinburgh at this time of year!
In summary then: focus on delivering The End. Document The Way. If your audience appreciates The End, your peers will appreciate The Way.
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I was one of those Dare to be Digital students who brought their prototype game down to the EIEF that first year (2005); and it never occured to me until now what a significant step that was. Rather it never occured to me that, had I taken part in the competition the previous year, I wouldn't have been forced to spend all those torturous, draining, nerve-wracking hours preparing a game to be demo'd to the public. It never occured to me how important that experience was, and how it shaped my ideas about the concept of "The End" and "The Way" before I ever entered the industry proper.
And thinking about it now, having some idea of how to get something fun out the door... that's the most important cross-disciplinery skill in this industry, isn't it?
Losing track of the audience is definitely a hazard when we group in teams of hundreds, lock ourselves up in a studio with a guard posted out front for three years or more and emerge later with great expectations of wowing the world with our collective brilliance. The moment your work is speaking for itself and performed (by/for/with) your audience is the Moment Of Truth, soundly destroying any previous assurances of how great the experience is. Any notion about the value of the experience before that point is an educated guess at best and should be considered as such and no more.
I'm also impressed by the bold simplicity of just asking people on the street to experience the work, right alongside the chainsaw juggler and the sidewalk magician. As someone who constantly looks for parallels with other forms of entertainment, this is right up my alley. You've got me thinking about organizing a field trip to our local busking site, the Venice Beach Boardwalk. For me, this highlights the idea that our industry is largely sitting in an ivory tower, and we could benefit from getting out and about, figuratively and literally as you've shown here.
Finally, as this article appears on a site that serves as an industry discussion hub, I sincerely hope that the focus you've placed on "The End" here can help us recognize inefficiencies in "The Way"; wasted efforts that aren't directly targeted at the end result: that Moment Of Truth. A brief tour of the postmortems we get usually include one or two instances where this recognition would have saved time, money and maybe even saved a game or a studio. Cheers, Colin!
If I may pose another analogy, in the Karate-Do, the Do part means "The Way" and it is just as if not more than important with how hard you throw a punch. The Way is the technique that got you to where you are.
@Andrew: Glad I was able to put some perspective on your pain for you! Your observation about the value of "getting something fun out the door" is as astute as it is true. Many creative companies, and especially game developers, struggle to get *anything* out the door - whether good or bad. People with the ability to ship something are rarer than I'd like in our industry; but those with the ability to ship something fun are like hen's teeth... It reminds me of something I noticed many years ago, which is this - no one deliberately sets out to make a bad game in our industry, because it's just as difficult to make a bad game as a good one. :-)
@Glenn: I really like your comment about opinions before "The Moment of Truth" being educated guesses at best. So true. The one thing you know if you've worked in creative media for any length of time is that it's almost impossible to second guess what an audience will like. That's why Denki's focused on making games we want to play - that way, at least if no one else likes it we will. Doing it any other way means worst case is that *no one* likes it! I would heartily encourage you to organise a game busking session on the Venice Beach Boardwalk - like you say, it's a really honest way of gathering feedback from regular people. A day doing that will give you more information about how you could improve your game prototypes than a whole month of design meetings - guaranteed! Your point about effort that doesn't improve "The End" being wasted is an important one - I look forward to a day when everyone in our industry works with that thought foremost in their mind.
@Rob: You're absolutely right - "The Way" is crucially important; the danger is that it's also easily misinterpreted as a substitute for "The End". Your Karate-Do analogy is a good one - delivering a powerful punch is what's important, and everyone has the potential to do that occasionally. But it's the "Do" part that enables experts do deliver powerful punches *consistently*. Same with games - we all get lucky sometimes and deliver a fun game; but following "The Way" is what makes the difference between being able to deliver it sometimes, and being able to deliver it every time.
Cheers,
Colin.
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@Luis: You're right - the next logical step from here is to literally run it as a money generating exercise, just as other street performers do. That's certainly a possibility, but definitely not something I was trying to suggest in this piece. I'm also keen to distance the approach I'm advocating from any sort of "market research" or "focus testing". I appreciate the similarities that can be drawn from a quick assessment of what I've said, but I consider it to be fundamentally different, both in its intention and implementation. Focus testing is most often a process imposed externally upon an existing creative process. At Denki our intention is to consider The End at all times throughout the creative process, thereby making our audience's reaction to our game an intrinsic part of The Way. I see that as entirely separate from market research and focus testing, though I appreciate why other may find it difficult to differentiate them, because the important differences are somewhat hidden beneath the surface. What I'm suggesting is that game developers set "Turn Scowls In To Smiles" as a guiding light for each game they make from the outset; consider their audience's likely reaction throughout the creation process each time a design choice is made; and then stress test their decisions at key points in development under the toughtest conditions - the gaze of the general public. No "target audience" or "invited guests" or any of that other focus testing nonsense - just raw street performance. "Quarrel: Live - without a net!" :-)
My experience as a student is that getting a start seems to largely be about your worth on paper. Sure, I'm happy to get my hands dirty and work hard, and there are a number of jobs I feel I would do well at. But the response I've had time and again is that wanting to be involved in the process in any way that I can make a valuable contribution to an entertaining end product isn't enough. Creative and innovative skills mean nothing if you don't have an exact job target in mind.
It seems to me that drive and passion aren't as important as prior training for specific roles. So how do we turn the desire to turn frowns into smiles into an entry level job?
I completely recognise the situation you're describing. I'm definitely noticing a chasm opening up between the large developers who require a lot of highly specialised technical staff, and smaller "indie" studios such as ourselves, where specialist technical knowledge is secondary to a proven ability to deliver results.
In some ways it's becoming analogous to the choice made by young amateur musicians - go to music school and specialise in performance, composition, arrangement, orchestration, etc. or join a band. They're both valid career paths, but with quite different barriers to entry, and by choosing one you almost certainly preclude yourself from the other.
I realise that doesn't directly address your question - so here's how I would approach it if I was trying to take all this "well meaning philosophy" and turn it in to an actual job that pays the bills:
Everything in this industry ultimately comes down to proof. Whatever it is you want to do as a job within game development, create the most compelling evidence you can of your ability to do it - by whatever means necessary. And be your own harshest critic too - imagine yourself on the other side of the table, actively trying not to give you a job, and try to pick holes in you. Then take steps to address those holes by targeting your learning accordingly.
Great quality demos are the hardest thing to create, which is why they are also the most valuable investment you can make in your career. Think of it this way - if you're hiring a magician for a party which would you choose: the one with the great resume, or the one with the YouTube video of them performing their tricks live to camera? It's pretty obvious, right? Why? Because one has proof and the other has potential. People buy proof and leave others to invest in potential.
The same thing applies to games companies today - if you were hiring a coder for your team which would you choose: the one with the promising resume, or the one with a playable game on their website that's making you smile?
Proof is an key part of getting a job in any sort of craft based industry - film, TV, books, games - you name it. Isn't that what a degree, or any other qualification is after all? Proof from a trusted source that this person has completed a course teaching certain skills and demonstrated their ability to an examiner. In many ways it's a substitute for a skills demo - of which playable demos are the best of them all.
That's why I pulled out the University of Abertay in this piece as a great example of pioneering teaching in the area of games development. Their Dare to be Digital competition has already shown them how important proof is to graduates looking for jobs, and so they're now rolling what they've learned from it in to their MProf Games Development course. I'm sure this will make their already impressive student employment rate jump even further.
But meantime, for everyone else, demos are the way to go. That's how I got started - by creating a demo of my skills. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be joining the industry at a time when there were far fewer people creating demos, so standards were low enough that I got in. But if I had to do it all again I'd choose the same route, because I realise and accept that it's entirely up to me to create a compelling case that any potential employer can judge me by.
In my experience, nothing happens before proof; everything happens after it. If luck = opportunity x preparation, then proof is definitely the catalyst.
Good luck, whichever route you take - and if you happen to have the kind of proof I've outlined here be sure to check out www.denkiornot.com - I know at least one company who values attitude and approach as much as skills :-)
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I suppose that we can compare the way vs the end to applications and resumes too. A demo reel that makes the recruiter smile is going to do a lot more than telling them how you achieved it. There are a few projects I have on the way as my own proof, and once they're done I might just drop them past your corner of the world :)
I have checked out the Abertay and Dare to be Digital stuff before, love the look of it, but I'm in Australia at the least until I've finished studying. This adds to the frustration because so much is in Europe and America. I think half of Australia's problem with not producing international quality games is that we don't have international quality resources over here across the board. Hopefully that will change one day, and hopefully I can do my bit to contribute to that.
BTW - Denki's workforce is currently 20% Australian, so I'm sure you'd feel right at home here if you happen to drop by :-)
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