“Playing the game” is out

I have mentioned here a couple of times that last year I was involved in an Initiative from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) related to mentorship in the UK game industry.

Halfway through the experiment, I think all the participants were actually very pleased with the outcome. When we met in September, questions arose about the legacy of the project. Because of its mandate (push for innovations and new things), the NESTA wasn’t going to sponsor this initiative for another year. Then someone (I can’t remember who, it might well haven been Jackie who was in charge of the whole experiment) came up with the idea to actually write a book about it. Putting a book together takes a lot of work and energy, and I can only salute the excellent jobs done by Charles Cecil and Chris Wright as editors of this project. My contribution (the 2 sections under my name and 5-6 sections here and there in the “Game Plan”) is by no way comparable to theirs, but I am nonetheless very proud to have participated in making this book.

You can download the book here: http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/playing_the_game.pdf

We knew from the beginning that due to the nature of the topic, the book will eventually become dated. I think that’s fine, and hopefully some of the content (especially the material concerning the mentoring experience) will remain useful for years to come.

I encourage you to download the whole document and give it a read. Here’s my section about the mentoring experience, from the 12 months spent working with James Brooksby, the head of the Double Six studio:

I am in my 11th year in the games industry. Well, that’s not totally accurate. I should say in the online games industry. While it might seem a small distinction, it is important when you consider my role as a mentor and my lack of direct experience with many aspects of the traditional games business. However, when James chose me for the mentoring programme, he did so knowing this very well.

James and I have known each other for five years, give or take a few months, and while we had never worked together before, we had a pretty good understanding of each other’s backgrounds. James’s experience of the games industry is actually longer than mine, but geared more towards the “traditional” part of it. His needs were a lot more oriented to what I knew: games as a service, self-publishing, digital distribution and the online world in general. But honestly, the whole mentoring experience was not that much about sharing experience; it was much more about business therapy.

The first cornerstone of our mentor/mentee relationship was trust. As I said, James and I already knew each other. It saved us a lot of time. I didn’t have to explain all about my background, and I didn’t have much to catch up on with regard to his achievements.

More importantly, we already had a feel for each other’s styles and a certain level of trust. The first two meetings, before mentors were chosen, were a check (on his part mainly) that his previous impression was accurate. Once trust was achieved, the biggest challenge of the mentoring experience had been overcome.

The second most important step was understanding each other’s expectations. I was not going to wave a magic wand to solve every problem we discussed; James was not going to ask me only about what I had done before. That was understood from the beginning, mostly because we talked about it early on (in the pre-meeting) and had a similar vision for the experience then.

There you have it, the two success factors for a healthy mentoring experience. Now, how is that a therapy?

Back in July, James came up with the term “business therapy” to describe the mentoring and since then, that terminology has stuck as a good analogy, especially when talking about it outside of our experimental group. Let me provide some more background to reinforce the notion.

James’s studio is part of the Kuju Entertainment group, a company of significant size, with studios all over the world. He has a board of directors he answers to, but which helps him whenever he faces any new challenge. He has had a working relationship with some of them for many years and there is definitely trust on both sides.

Similarly, James has been active in the development community for years and he is well known. His network probably gives him access to a significant wealth of experience and expertise. So why would he need to be mentored? It looks as if he has all the potential mentors he could ask for.

I found that a designated mentor makes a world of difference. I am not working for Kuju; I am totally unbiased when it comes to weighing James’s interests against anything else. I am not working for James, so when it comes to speaking my mind, I have no reason to censor any of my thoughts. Moreover, as I am neither employer nor employee, we can cover any topic. No idea is taboo because it would cause distress in the team or in the management. Sure, the stupid ideas don’t stick, but no judgment is passed on them, there are no lasting consequences for having uttered them. This is no detriment to the doublesix team (which is quite brilliant), or the Kuju management (which I found quite visionary to push James in his current direction), but rather the simple truth that one sometimes needs a neutral, unbiased party to confide in and debate new ideas in a free environment.

That’s the business therapy.

At the outset, I explained how my professional experience was actually very specific in the games industry. But to be truthful, it appeared somewhat irrelevant in many of our discussions. What was relevant was the process: James coming up with an issue, a challenge or a question, the two of us discussing it, me asking further questions and coming up with a more refined impression of what was the right path to follow.

I have a specific meeting in mind which defined for me the mentoring experience. That day, James and I had debated a couple of questions, looked at various documents and refined some of James’s plans when he started another discussion. He had received a business offer for one of his projects and he wanted to see what I thought about it. He went into the terms of the deal and the background, and when he was done, I had a very simple comment to make: “OK. Beyond the specific terms, there is something that is obvious to me. The way you talk about it, you don’t want to make that deal.” He paused, thought for a while and said: “Well, yeah, actually you are right. I don’t want to make that deal. I didn’t realise how much I don’t like it.” I had done nothing but be there, listen to him and mirror his thoughts.

There were a lot of good reasons why he came to that conclusion and we talked about it after that, but that moment when he came up with his own answer to his own question: that is what the process is about; that is the value of having this external and neutral point of view on your problems. It’s business therapy.

Good. Now, I need to pack for GDC 2010.

Tags: Business Therapy, Double Six, Mentor, NESTA, Playing the Game

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