The gaming industry has been rife with layoffs and redundancy issues for many studios these past few years. While a studio might look to hire vast amounts of people for a project, the practice of redundancy layoffs is ultimately hurting the industry, says WB Games VP and general manager Laura Fryer.
Speaking at the Develop Conference, Fryer likened ongoing management practices to farming techniques. She then went on to offer various ways for studios to improve their internal culture. The former executive producer of Gears of War stated, “This is like ploughing a piece of land incessantly until, after three-or-so years, the plot of land becomes unusable. I believe this is an unsustainable model for the games industry."
Moving into the notion of sustaining a working environment, Fryer touched on the idea of installing a ‘permaculture’ for a gaming firm. This ‘permaculture’ is designed to develop a self-sustaining ecosystem, one that “you as a 'gardener' have very little to do. As such, [she believes] the key is to find a way to create a permaculture in game development, to foster creativity in such a way that it becomes entirely sustainable.”
"It's best to give people a toolbox full of tools with which to solve issues. That way, when the team next runs into a problem, they choose the right tool from the toolbox," she offered. "And if they don’t have the right tool to solve the issue? Then they make a new tool: which is how we gain new tools for the box."
"It’s very important that you do not become a slave to dogma. Sometimes the processes we have don’t make sense in terms of our ultimate goal, namely to ship a good game."
Fryer believes that developers need to do what works, rather than sustain practices that are simply ignored. "The question any creative on a game project needs to ask whenever they are asked to do something is ask: 'What problem are you trying to solve?'"
"Maintaining design documents are no good if nobody reads them. It becomes a solution that simply doesn't work."
What does work, is accepting the fact that studios are fluid things. There are ups and downs, and learning to address this and work with it, rather than against it, is going to help out in the long run.
"Inviting this structured feedback after each milestone can allow you to tweak and manage the process," she added. "This allows you to keep fostering creativity over the course of a project, rather than squashing it."
[Thanks Gamasutra]
