Does the producer actually have to be the conduit here to understand the different working styles?

Peter O'Brien: Producer as arbiter is one of the least respected roles. Often only seen as a facilitator, a producer's role can be critical when things are not going as expected. If it's not the producer, it's often a good designer or area team manager doing it. Equally, if they are doing well, it's your job to make sure people know it is.

Ben Gunstone: The bottom line is that, as the producer, it's your job to make sure that everything is in place to reduce any kind of art versus code issues. If the operational stuff is done and issues still arise, then it leaves personnel issues, and that's a whole different can of worms.

Your job as a producer is to make sure [communication] does happen. Regular team meetings and physical team layout is conducive to communications (but not idle chit-chat). It's identifying a unifying team member, and if one doesn't exist, stepping up to the plate yourself (or hiring one in!) Don't rely on email; get the team talking to each other.

Frank Rogan: As Ben states above, this line of questioning is indeed an age-old one. But it's also not at all unique to the games industry. I'm sure you could walk into any working situation and find that the guys in charge of sorting the widgets think the guys in charge of counting the widgets are a bunch of morons, and vice versa. I had a rather nomadic working career in college. In every restaurant I ever worked, the cooks hated the servers. At every newspaper I ever worked, the journalists despised the ad sales guys, and the editors thought all the writers were drunks. Heck, I even worked at Disneyland, and the guys from Adventureland knew, just knew, that all the guys from Tomorrowland were idiots.

What I listed before were tactics, not strategy, and it's important to understand the difference. Strategy involves identifying the breakdown at the source, and that's always going to be the nature of the people involved, and the nature of how their work is measured and rewarded.

• Build your team with chemistry in mind. Have cross-disciplinary interviews and annual reviews.
• Recognize good communication when it happens and reward the hell out of it.
• Recognize bad communication when it happens and confront the hell out of it. If a coder hates the artists and would rather go sit in a cave, make it clear to him that you'll be happy to find cave work for him, but that he will never, ever get to leave the cave. (Now, some people might be happy with that, but at least you'll know.)