Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes

1.

Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.

2.

Iteration is the key. Everything is about iteration. How many times can I use iteration in this talk? Iteration, iteration, iteration. This is how you make good games: by iterating.

The more you iterate, it doesn’t matter what direction you’re going in or what you actually do, as long as you get the number of iterations up. This process (iteration) is what turns all the bad stuff into the good stuff. Here’s a graph showing game quality and number of iterations approaching infinity together. This graph proves my point.

3.

For our last project we used Scrum, and boy, are we glad we did. There is no way anything we did would have been possible without it. What is Scrum, you ask? It’s a set of new terminology for things that already happen when groups of people work together. For example, instead of a “meeting,” you have a “Scrum,” and so on.

You should use Scrum too, since it will solve all your problems. If I’ve piqued your interest, sign-up sheets for my specially discounted seminars on Scrum can be found clipped to the bottom of your conference program.

4.

The game we made was great – because we’re great. We are just a group of awesome people. We never crunch, and we go to the beach every other Friday to play volleyball. Even those times when we did crunch, we had delicious catered meals. And there was one time we got a masseuse in the office. Awesome. Yes, our studio’s amazing array of perks and benefits keep us happy and doing our best work all the time.

We have a ton of open positions we need to fill very quickly so please send us your resume as soon as you can.

5.

The game industry is in trouble. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing before. We need to do this other thing, which is the thing that I’m doing. I said this last year but none of you came with me. Well, this time I really mean it.

Comments

[Andy]

A team in my company has been using Scrum for the past several months. From the outside looking in, it looks ridiculous. Those I've talked to on that team think it's ridiculous. I'm not sure how it has as much support as it does, it really is a pretty poor match for software development, largely because it completely ignores how software actually, you know, is developed.

[Jeff]

Guess this means I can skip GDC and DICE this year! Thanks!

[JC Barnett]

Hehe, you should do a keynote about keynotes at the next GDC. Then someone can do a keynote about that keynote later on.

[Scott Hartsman]

You just saved me so much in travel expenses.

I feel like I should write you a check now.



(Fantastic post. :)

- Scott

[Andrew Mayer]

Great post. Sadly it's all too familiar...

While Scrum, in particular, is a real, useful tool, I've also seen it used as shorthand for "We're doing the meeting my way, but here's a fancy new term for it."

[D]

Funny you should mention this

We were using morning scrums for a bit over at [CENSORED GAME COMPANY NAME], but basically after a while realized that it wasn't tracking anything new that we weren't already informally tracking amongst ourselves.

Our producers actually had the good sense to axe it about a month in, just as we all really realized we didn't really want it.

The funny side effect though, everyone, including me, took up their own bastardized version of scrum with their own post-it notes in their office just for themselves.

I've found it to be useful for just myself tracking tasks before a milestone, but morning meetings at 10am are such a drag to get to on time.

[breath]

I swear to God that every Raph Koster talk I've ever seen is an agglomeration of all five, with a heapin' helpin' of "I'm da prophet" thrown on top.

[Jeff Freeman]

You were missing the chart for #2, so I made it.

http://mythicalblog.com/index.php/gaming/relationship-between-iterations-and-game-quality-chart/

Feel free to grab it for your summary.

[Matthew]

Thanks for the diagram, Jeff. Looks like it does indeed prove the point!

[Leona]

I understand that it's also popular to monetize the long tail while seeking the tipping point. I'm launching a wiki for it.

[Bill]

Ha! This was very funny. And I should know -- I'm a Professional Comedian! (really!)

[Chris Remo]

This is a wonderful post.

[Mike Cohn]

First, I'm an agile/Scrum guy so let me be clear about that. I want to clarify one thing about Scrum and it's one of my favorite things about Scrum. You will never hear anyone who is knowledgeable about Scrum claim that it will solve any problems. Scrum is not a silver bullet. When various tools or technologies or objects were introduced, their proponents have often labeled them as silver bullets. One of the few consistent points that I hear Scrum trainers make is that "Scrum is not a silver bullet; in fact adopting Scrum will make your life worse."

What? If Scrum makes your life worse why do I advocate Scrum?

In any event, funny post. And Scrum and iterative development do get overhyped. Don't believe any thing solves our problems other than us. Still, I think iterations and Scrum are great ways to help.

Scrum makes your life worse by exposing problems in your organization. The problems were always there but perhaps not visible. Or perhaps visible to a few who weren't politically powerful enough to do anything to fix them. Scrum puts the problems right in people's faces. This happens because of the short, timeboxed iterations (first use of that word here!). When a team has to have a playable game every 2-4 weeks it forces a lot of issues to the surface. You can't hide from those issues any more and must address them. So, Scrum itself will make your life worse. *But* if you gradually resolve those issues then life gets good.

[Jeff Freeman]

MS Outlook defaults meetings to 1 hour durations. It doesn't display meetings of less that 30 minute durations as anything but 30 minute meetings.

I read somewhere, "How much more productive would everyone be if outlook had defaulted to 5-minute meetings?"

SCRUM institutes a policy of overriding MS-Outlook's default 1-hour meeting length with a default 5-minute meeting length (or at least, in my very brief experience with it, it did).

I *loved* that about it.

[jconstantine]

omg you said "silver bullet".

[Max]

Man, am I ever tardy to the party on this one, but it seemed worthwhile to thank you here, given that this entry first drew my attention to your blog. The first two of these are especially relevant to me, both as one of those kids who grew up with his brain melting into the internet and as someone who comes from a school where iteration (well, playtesting, really) is stressed as high (if not the highest) priority in development.

All of these lazy speeches stem from a general lack of rigor in the industry, so thanks for calling bullshit on them. No seriously, it's a breath of fresh air to have someone call the emperor out on just how naked he actually is. The first few conferences I've attended have all been marked by a great disappointment at just how little is actually being done (I'm unconsciously using the passive there: perhaps I should blame myself or point a finger at someone) to seriously address the topics each of these "keynotes" glosses over.

1) Perhaps those of us who grew up on computers are different. That may be so, but social networking, music, what not, are all things that have been around in one form or another, offline, since we were scarcely different from chimps. The tech makes it easier, but it also makes it easier for lazy marketeers to reach into a big grab bag of demographics and fake an answer. Oh no, my kids use the google, they may have scary brains.

2) Iteration is great, when it's coupled with playtests. It forces a little rigor into the development process. I can't really complain about that sort of iteration. But ungrounded iteration tends to spiral into perfectionism. Likewise, there is never a blanket time on when to start iterating: yes, the sooner the better, but time is money. How does iteration hold up against polish in the grand scheme of things? That may be a poor case, but at some point, hard choices have to be made an opportunity cost incurred.

3) Scrum may or may not be hype, but it definitely isn't panacea. It is, however, a good litmus test for how up to date the higher ups are on different schools of development. I suppose something else will adopt this function in time.

4) Pure blather. Infomercials are the biggest waste of everyone's time. No one seems to talk about doing something interesting with their work.

5) Doomsaying will never grow old. It's good for people to have a fire under their asses, but lazy prognostications (The PC is dead! No wait, it's still dying! It will never die! It's dead again!) are irksome whether they are pessimistic or optimistic. Why is it so hard to concentrate on the now or the immediate future? Why does no one bother to put their ass on the line by saying "this is the next big problem we're facing, and this is how we're starting to deal with it." I've seen people talk again and again about how F2P/P4S or Microtransactions will kill retail, but no hard thinking on how hurry up and do it. Meanwhile, it's already here, and there's no active design around the economic model-- the same two or three economies happen recur again and again because no one is willing to gamble and build something new.

Anyways, there's a useless fluff comment, but thanks again for calling out these smug regurgitations.