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A few weeks ago, everyone was talking about Valve's new-hire employee handbook , the little Utopian guide to working at one of the mostextraordinary companies in the world. In the days following its leak, I called up some older hands in game development to ask for their reactions to the book. It's interesting that every single person who I called had read the booklet. And yes, they all had opinions. Most said that the faults within Valve's approach - its reliance ontalent, difficulties in tracking failures quickly enough and itsunsuitability for certain types of personalities - were worth thetrouble. Indeed, pretty much anything is worth the trouble if itgets us away from production-line mentalities, micro-managementtorture and group-think sensibilities. One person who offered an inherently valuable viewpoint is MikeCapps, president of Epic Games. Back in 2008, Capps made some comments about the long hours workedby game developers, saying that it came with the career. He wasslammed by developer Greg Costikyan and accused of "exploitativepractices". Capps was forced to face down a forum-storm , explaining that he had merely meant to say that game developerswho wish to work a rigid 9-5 week are less useful than those whoare flexible. He pointed out that this was no different than alawyer, a journalist or a doctor and did not mean the same thing asdemanding that they work longer hours. At DICE earlier this year I remember being deeply impressed byCapps' performance in a panel with Ted Price and Frank Pierce on how best to treat people. It was self-evident to these guysthat their staff would work way longer hours than their contractdemanded, and their challenge was to make sure their people didn'tscrew their lives up by working too hard. Of course, this suggests rules and management, things that theValve doctrine, in many ways, rejects. So, according to Capps, partof the employer's responsibility is to manage the talent'spredisposition to working crazy hours because, sooner or later,crunch will come and it will be necessary, as part of a creativeteam, to work silly hours. We all have to do it from time to time,unless we are working in some dismal job that involves clocking inand out. While acknowledging the advantages of Valve's system, and thatcompany's record for excellence, Capps says that hierarchies canand do offer benefits to employees, and shouldn't be seen as merelythrow-backs to the paternalistic systems of yesteryear. He says, "The bigger we get as a company, the harder it is foreveryone here to feel comfy just walking into my office and tellingme what I'm doing wrong. There's a lot of guys here who would dothat in a heartbeat because they've been in the trenches with mebut there's folks here who only know me as the president of amultinational. "An engine programmer on the editor team, if he's not happy withthe tasks he's doing, can talk to the editor lead or if he's nothappy with the editor lead he can talk to our director ofengineering or he can talk with me. But there's a lot of differentfolks you can chat with about your assignments and what you'redoing and whether you're happy about the people you're workingwith. "If there's no hierarchy and you're just two hundred peoplestanding in a building, who do you talk to about what's making youuncomfortable who can help you to fix it? You need to know who tocall on and where the specializations are internally." He says Epic aims for as much creative liberty as possible."There's a lot to be said for freeing people's creative impulses.We try to do that as much as we can because that's where most ofour cool ideas come from." But he says there is a balance between full creative freedom andthe inevitable pressures that come from deadlines and fromcustomers. "I don't think we're quite so laissez-faire about it [as Valve].What we tell people when we hire them is 'you need to tell us whatyou want to do and what you're good at and then we'll make clearwhat needs to be done'." He adds, "If somebody really wants to be a painter but they don'thave any painting talent and they're a great programmer, I can'tafford to let them paint all day long so they're going to have toprogram. But that doesn't mean we won't help them learn how topaint and give them the resources to learn. Maybe someday they'llbe a great painter too. And then if we don't need programming butwe need painting, well, now you're a painter because that's what weneed to do to get this game shipped." He stresses that the 'factory' system of placing people injob-title-specific roles is destructive. "We're certainly closer toValve's self-organizing process but I think we tend to try forefficiency as well as creativity and that means you balance betweenthe two." In a company of Epic's size, different departments tend toself-organize around their particular roles and the personalitiesthat have the most influence. Clearly, the guys who trouble-shootUnreal Engine technical inquiries are going to behave differentlythan the art department. He says, "We do company meetings almost every week and we try toremind people what the high level goals of the company are. But Ithink each team handles it very differently. Some game teams willorganize around a very rapid 'scrum' style approach where they'redoing sprints and everybody is working together on combat thismonth and everybody is working together on experience systems thenext month. And then we have teams like the Engine team who mixtheir time between adding new features and fixing bugs oroptimizing for games that are shipping soon." Ultimately, he says the rules are there to protect employees and tomake sure the business hits its targets. "Day to day, theindividuals are figuring out what they need to do to besuccessful." Colin Campbell has been writing about the games industry for 25years. He currently works for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @colincampbellx. Related news: Silicon Knights only entitled to $1 in damages in suit against EpicGames Bungie co-founder's mobile studio signs Unreal Engine multi-titledeal How Epic Games' week-long game jam gave birth to Infinity Blade: Dungeons. I am an expert from dimmable-led-lightbulb.com, while we provides the quality product, such as T5 LED Tubes , LED Flat Panel Lights Manufacturer, E27 LED Bulbs,and more.
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