Management is an inexact science. You have a team meeting to announce a change you think is good news, and end up doing a week of damage control. You think you give a team a strong talking to, and they are thrilled to be have “pressure put on them”. Employees, bosses, colleagues and clients state their needs and wants, then change their minds. It’s trial, error, retrial, success, returning to error and back to success. It’s not dull.

But today I learned a simple yet valuable management lesson. Buying ice cream for the whole team just when they’re getting the 4 PM munchies is a good idea. I never would have thought that was all it would take to make 35 adults shout with glee, but there you have it.

I’m in Chicago for a motion capture shoot. Despite a few heart attacks like the talent getting stuck at customs and two crewmembers missing their flight yesterday, we’re managing to have the time of our lives.

Chicago is a pretty city, especially if you’re looking in the right direction. I’ll have to be back for a closer look someday.

Me: I’m conservative about scope because I’m about making sure we deliver on time. Maybe if I was less anal about that, we’d crunch more but the game would have more features and more fun.

Him: Well, I’m not convinced that anal means no fun… oh wait, let me rephrase that.

I just found out what happens to casual Friday when you can wear jeans anytime you want.

My designer is sitting on the floor, having a conversation with someone. I enter the office, and have to go around him to get to my desk. It involves some contortion on my part.

“Sorry for having my ass in your face, there”, I say.
- Eh, it’s Friday, he replies.

I just had a Jack Bauer day. The kind of day where you see people leave for the day at two o’clock, then you realize it’s half past five.

A day where someone announces that your appointment is here, and you bitch that they weren’t due for another three minutes.

Where five minutes is an eternity in which a hundred conversations, events, changes and decisions occur, and yet a day which goes by in a flash.

A day I couldn’t handle more than once in a while, and yet, my favorite type of day.

I’ve been having all sorts of dreams, adventure dreams, romantic dreams, complete nonsense that makes complete sense in the dream dreams, et cetera, all with the basic principles of project management in the background.

I’ll be an Indiana Joan type heroine, torn between saving my one true love or fifteen native children from certain death, and I’ll start thinking about the duration of either task and the dependencies between them, and the impact on the end date of the expedition. I even visualize the Gantt chart in my mind.

I adore what I do, but sometimes I think there’s no way I can keep this up for many more years. Then again…

This year, to help with fundraising, it was decided that the director of each team would do something embarrassing to encourage their team to give to charity. What I did was hang this beauty in our work area for all to see. (My parents had it made of me when I was eleven years old. I’m sure that explains a lot).

My team came in second in the fundraising. The total end numbers were in the tens of thousands.

(Reporting live from the City of Angels…)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been here in my life, but I know it’s the third time this year. And I generally hate it.

My client treated me yesterday to a private in-depth tour of a major movie studio, complete with private guide. We then watched the movie our game is based on, though it is not scheduled to come out for a while, then listened to the soundtrack to select music for the game.

So just as I was whining about the woes of working with Hollywood a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood decides to go and redeem itself.

Back to reality tonight.

Not exactly working ungodly hours these days, all things considered, but still I feel like I’m working too much. Something about living alone with a Boston Terrier - whose conversational skills leave somewhat to be desired - means my mind doesn’t really get much diversion, so I keep working (in my head) until I get back into the studio the next day. That ain’t good. Last night I had a nightmare in which a monster from my game was chasing me. That wasn’t good either.

My guitar lessons are the perfect diversion. Doing something wholly unrelated to games that requires my undivided focus is the only way I’ve found of completely disconnecting. I’m always happy, at the end of a full day, to know have a lesson that night.

I’d enjoy this perfect job more if I got my mind off it more often. I have half a mind to make that a new year’s resolution, but I like to only make resolutions I can keep. Is that stacking the deck?

The hardest thing about my job, I would say, is dealing with the changing desires of clients who often do not really understand software development. The games I’ve made have always been based on existing properties, like TV shows, films or books. Clients are thus filmmakers or TV producers, and sometimes authors. They deal with linear narratives in which they control their audience perfectly. Games have to give players choices, which means a sometimes branching narrative, and in that way at least they’re a little more complex to build.

Whenever a focus test changes the client’s mind about what the audience will want next year, they casually ask for things like:

“The first level (which has been done for months and approved) needs to take place in space, not at sea” (I’m serious)
“We need the main character to not be human, but an alien” (I’m serious)
“Yes, I know we asked for a shooting game, and the game is now fully designed, but now the emphasis of the movie has moved onto the character’s deep seated love of singing, so we can’t have any shooting” (Yep)

I read an article in Game Developer yesterday about working with Hollywood and how wonderful the interaction would be for our industry, and what a great influx of experienced talent this would bring to games. A couple of weeks ago, Don Daglow (maker of the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game) extolled how wonderful it had been to work with the filmmakers, with Weta changing the movie’s production schedule to make art assets available to the game makers earlier. Uh, WOW.

Still, I can’t help but be a little skeptical. In my limited experience, Hollywood is the true creator, and I make swag (a game) aimed at marketing their product (a movie). Perhaps mutual respect will come the day when Hollywood makes as many movies about games, as there are games made about movies. Hopefully someday, our content will be rich enough to warrant this.