All creative projects start with a vision.
I’m spending the great games industry contraction working in operations, which is fun for me in its own way, but I miss production. Unfortunately it’s not really a thing one can practice on their own. This leaves me with a lot of time to think, which is generally bad for me.
Recently, I decided to take all my noisy thoughts and try to assemble them into something sense-like; a proclamation of how I think about production as an out-of-work practitioner. One of the scant nice things about times like this is that it gives a nuance hound like me an opportunity to reset and reconnect with my own romantic, lofty ideals. I think it’s important to have those, even when success in realizing them fully is asymptotic.
So, I would like to present my theory of the case: An argument for production as a storytelling craft, to be treated as any other creative field in the broader entertainment industry. This is functionally my manifesto.
The Language of Tools
At some point in the late 90s I was in my grandparents’ apartment in Moscow, watching TV while sprawled in the bed we shared. The cultural significance of watching dubbed American cartoons was lost on me and I couldn’t tell you how the translators decided to deal with “football head” in a country where a football is — you know, the round one — but I remember being entranced by a commercial break making-of featurette. It turned out that cartoons were a series of sequential drawings drawn frame, by frame, by frame, on clear cells. This was when I caught the Animator’s Madness. You know it if you’ve seen it.
As much as I love a beautiful Don Bluth feature or a lavish Disney renaissance film, I’ve always felt drawn to the way television animation solves problems. Even as a kid, I liked spotting places where animators held frames or found ways to use minimal motion for maximum impact. When I got introduced to anime, I immediately noticed those wobbling eye glints. A character’s face could be totally still, but if the drawing is convincing enough and if there is just a little motion in the eyes, the moment becomes compelling. When I got a lightbox as a gift, copying this two-drawing loop was the first little animation experiment I conducted.
I was a professional animator for all of two years before I realized that I loved the craft, but not the career path. My transition to video game production was an academic pursuit: I took online courses on all the common tools and methodologies, I read Richard Lemarchand’s “A Playful Production Process” to find out what games had in common with animation and what I needed to learn anew. I listened to talks, sought out mentorship programs, and took my first clumsy stabs at networking. I felt desperate to prove that I was good enough to be here. The first couple of years of my career were spent anxiously overcomplicating things.
Thankfully, I know I’m not alone in this. The various production mentees I’ve had in recent years,1 bright and eager as they all have been, all start out asking similar types of questions. By the time they come to me, they typically already absorbed a panoply of advice from other mentors, peers, and online sources, became overwhelmed by the vastness and subjectivity of information available to them, and fractured their focus. They are often more nervous about learning JQL than they are about being able to understand, break down, and solve problems. Or for that matter, tell a compelling story.
I think there are three main categories of productivity software in use at the time of writing: Jira-likes, Shotgrid-likes, and Notion-likes.
- Jira-likes are any systems that rely on assigning and categorizing tickets (Monday, etc.).
- Shotgrid-likes are any systems that rely on nested spreadsheets to organize work (MS Project, Salesforce, etc.).
- Notion-likes are any systems that are primarily Wikis with some productivity tooling built in (Confluence, etc.).
If you’ve used one, you’ve used them all. I think it’s less useful to be concerned about the tool itself, and more useful to think about why and how it’s being used.
| Why “Industry Standard” Matters I do think it’s important to briefly acknowledge that sometimes “Industry Standard” is a completely appropriate reason to use a tool. Bigger, long-running, established companies that may be running multiple projects at the same time, moving team members around, using central service teams like IT or QA, or giving vendors limited access to their tracking do need a commonly agreed-upon solution in order to do business effectively. The more interoperability your company requires, the more likely it is to opt for a standard tool. This, however, should not excuse the folks in charge of deploying these solutions from approaching them thoughtfully. Tracking is not immune to scope creep. |
No matter what you use, the important thing to remember is that a tool is simply the language by which you communicate whichever story you need to tell.
Production as a practice is particularly susceptible to two things: Anxious practitioners, and what I like to refer to as ‘productivity radiation.’ We as a people can easily trick ourselves into thinking that a tool, methodology, framework, chart, or ritual will fix the problem at-hand because we’ve seen it work before, and may deploy an ill-fitting solution just to feel like we’ve done something, especially in a time when we feel pressured towards action. We very rarely get the opportunity to step back and consider why any of these things are necessary in the first place.
- It is important for every person on the team to understand the goal, how much work has been done towards it, and what work remains.
- It is important for the people leading the team to communicate that progress to whoever holds the purse strings and/or makes the big decisions.
Both of these reasons require communicating information to different audiences, and therefore, are an opportunity to tell stories. In order to tell a compelling story, you need to understand your goals. Are you trying to get more resources? Resolve a conflict? Celebrate a win, or raise morale after a poorly-received milestone?
You also need to understand the audiences in question. Their incentives as functions of their roles, yes, but also their personalities and idiosyncrasies. Where do they naturally look for information? Which parts of their histories inform the way they work? How much context do they have on your area of the project? How much do they need? Do they trust you? Perhaps most importantly, can you understand what someone is actually asking for?
For example: If a stakeholder that is allergic to Jira asks me for a Jira dashboard, my first instinct is not to ask which widgets they’d prefer to see. I want to understand what they want visibility on, or what they feel like they’re missing. If this stakeholder and I have a standing 1:1, it may be easier to dedicate some time to going through reporting. If they’re responsive to e-mails, perhaps I can cc them into a digest. If they’re Slack hounds like me, I can show them where to look for relevant signals.
The craftsmanship in this approach lies largely in using the power of storytelling as curation (not obfuscation!), and in being informative without being paternalistic. Data doesn’t lie, but unfiltered data in wide distribution can become a stochastic bomb.
I’m allergic to outsourcing seemingly-rote tasks like notetaking to a machine for similar reasons. My style of production — my ability to tell a story — is dependent on my ability to collect, retain, and continually rearrange a wide berth of contextual information. Formatting notes for distribution helps me retain what happened in a meeting, but it also gives me an opportunity to capture a mood, and grants me the power to keep the attendees’ attention on the important outcomes.
If anything, I’m heartened by the fact that the specific brand of Animator’s Madness that I picked up from television still informs the way I work. I love a grind, but I’m always looking for the eye glints.
The Syntax of Process
If tools are the language of production, then process is the syntax by which it is arranged. Now, when Producers talk about process, a chill washes over the room and the eyes of all those in attendance roll back into their sockets, tormented with visions of documentation purgatory and rigid rules around engagement. I think a really great process accomplishes three things: It offers a natural-feeling scaffold for completing tasks, supports open communication, and provides opportunities for play and discovery.
Let’s stick with the syntax metaphor for a minute. Imagine you need to find a public bathroom. There are multiple ways to ask after one. Consider this non-exhaustive list:
- “Excuse me, do you know where the restroom is?”
- “Where’s your bathroom?”
- “Bathroom?”
The first option is technical, exacting, and polite. Perfectly appropriate for approaching a service worker that may be able to help you, but a friend that knows you well might find the formality strange and cumbersome.
The second is casual. It assumes the assured existence of a bathroom, and that whoever you’re speaking to has some power over access to it. Completely functional at a mall, but may rub someone the wrong way in a formal setting, or be ineffective if you’re traveling abroad.
The third is blunt and effective in a pinch, but could be considered rude or leave room for error. Properly interpreting, “Bathroom?” requires that the person you’re speaking to can use contextual information to conclude that you’re looking for a public bathroom. Also, humans tend to reciprocate a vibe, so their directions may be equally vague. Any time saved by cutting out supporting context will be lost again when you only have, “Over there,” and maybe a point to guide you.
Similarly, process must be built on context, and considerations must be made for the people it is being built for. A team that has been together for a long time probably doesn’t need every single step of putting together a character model broken out — unless there is risk of turnover or ambition toward expansion. An outsource team working out of East Asia will be hampered by vague instructions, and certainly won’t be helped by text-heavy documentation meant to be distributed to team members who may not speak English. And no amount of process will fix a team that has underlying trust issues or unresolved cultural problems.
Time to torture the metaphor some more. Given that games is an industry in perpetual motion, there are no definite, permanent, infinitely replicable, one-size-fits-all solutions that can be applied without adjustment across different contexts. The foundational principles can be carried over, but the nuances must be constantly rediscovered.
By this logic, there is ample opportunity for a “Do you know where the restroom is?” team to become a, “Where’s your bathroom?” team, at which point they can build the trust, knowledge, and muscle memory necessary to just ask “Bathroom?” in a time of crisis and be able to habitually execute on the rest without error or offense.
I’m a process and pipeline specialist so maybe I’m biased, but I do think that building good team foundations and continually practicing the process until it becomes second-nature to its practitioners is one of the best ways to bend towards efficiency. And, as we work through an era obsessed with output and acceleration, I keep wondering: How does one make a results-driven industry fall in love with process again?
Once again, we must consider the points of craftsmanship in production. How do you toe the line between stability and stagnancy? When do you choose the points at which to deviate from the process versus adjust it permanently? How do you communicate changes and deviations to your team? How do you make them feel purposeful and necessary?
Results are important, of course. We are making a product, the product must cover its expenses and make a profit, or else the business fails. This makes the business types (justifiably!) focused on deliverables and wary of exploration or, ironically, play. However, play is integral to discovery, and discovery is what keeps the business innovative and competitive in an increasingly crowded market.
My favorite recent example of playful innovation born out of process efficiency comes from Resident Evil 9. I spent the first chunk of the game bewitched by reflective surfaces. The choice to make Grace’s reflection an impressionistic blur on top of a black void felt like a very intentional answer to the question, “What is the impact of a reflection in this setting?” Well, there is no gameplay impact, but a player would be more likely to notice a lack of mirrored motion in a reflective surface than a lack of fidelity in the reflection. It would be a clunky and unintentional distraction in a genre that benefits from a player’s attention being expertly directed.
However, Leon’s introduction scene features multiple moody close-ups of his frowning, haggard face in the rear and side-view mirrors of his sports car. These solutions are nothing but — excuse the pun — smoke and mirrors. Even the alleyway set where he makes his entrance is cleverly cordoned off, not a single extraneous thing was built or used. A less mercenary team would be more likely to struggle with creating reflection tech to be used across the game, which would likely have knock-on effects on things like performance, shot composition in cinematics, level design, lighting, and the volume of bugs.
This kind of thinking reminds me of — stick with me here — the stage adaptation of Disney’s ‘Frozen,’ a thing I am only mentioning because I am determined to convince as many game developers as possible that our true sister medium is theater. In the source material, Elsa’s iconic transformation from put-upon young monarch into ice baddie is accomplished with a flurry of effects and beautifully-shimmering particles.
Considering the financial success and cultural prevalence of the IP, as well as the depth of Disney’s coffers and talent pool, one could reasonably expect that the transformation on stage would also be the pinnacle of costuming technology. However, most productions rely on a stagehand to yank the top layer of a dress rigged with fishing wire off manually.4 Occasionally a second stagehand is present to manually deploy a confetti cannon.
Someone had to consciously evaluate the impact of this moment. On stage, it’s not about a high-tech transformation or an LED-rigged gown, it’s about hitting the right timing to emphasize the actor’s emotional performance and stage presence. The risk involved in pulling off a complex transformation is just not worth breaking the illusion in the eyes of a child, especially not when their bar for suspending disbelief is generally so much lower than an adult’s.
Both instances feature the exact same kind of problem solving, and I would gladly bet money on the fact that the solutions came about from a mix of expertise, rapid prototyping, and high-trust teams.
Producers as Creative Partners
Allow me to posit something scandalous: The tension between fine art and commercial viability is fundamentally flirtatious.
One of my favorite art history anecdotes is that the ultramarine pigment often used during the Renaissance to paint the Virgin Mary’s robes was made from lapis lazuli, which had to be sourced from mines in modern-day Afghanistan (hence the name ultramarine, from ultramarinus, meaning ‘beyond the sea’).2 In order to turn the lapis into pigment, the mineral had to undergo laborious processing. This is why many paintings of Mary went unfinished at the time, at least until the invention of synthetic (French) ultramarine in 1824.3
I have some strange witch’s curse cast on my eyes that forces me to see everything in systems (it’s that and the double astigmatism that grants me streaky prophetic visions in every oncoming headlight). If I spend just a minute too long on this anecdote, I start to think about all the many potential points of failure. In order for a painting of the Virgin Mary to be completed the artist must estimate and place an order for the correct amount of paint, the lapis mine must be operational, the ship carrying the order must make it from Afghanistan to Italy safely, the pigment extraction process must be successful, and each handoff between these steps must be executed without error or delay.
So, this is where a version of me that exists in 19th century Italy starts to ask questions: Do we need to use the natural pigment? The synthetic one is a very close reproduction, save for the way in which it reflects light2. Will the finished painting be mounted in a place where it catches enough light to make a difference? Will enough people see it during that specific time of day in order to justify the expense? Do some members of our intended audience have the eye to make the distinction between organic and synthetic lapis used in the production of the pigment? Are they in a position to influence public opinion, or to fund future projects?
Nine times out of ten, I am not asking these questions to talk the artist out of the thing they want to do; I am asking because I need help understanding our goals. Tell me what your vision is, and I can tell you what resources we have available. I want to make good art, and you want the means to make it happen. It’s all a give-and-take, a push-and-pull.
I was scrolling LinkedIn recently and I saw someone say that a creative’s job was to spend as much money as possible, and a producer’s job was to stop them. Early in my career, I wholeheartedly agreed. Looking back, I think my biggest problem with this mindset is that it aligns me as a producer solely with a project’s financial interests instead of both the financial and creative. This creates an environment for unnecessary friction, instead of allowing me to be a collaborator, helper, and most importantly, an enabler.
I consider asking, “What are you trying to achieve with this idea, and how can we accomplish your goal with the resources available to us?” whenever possible is more productive than saying ‘no’ (in most cases, see below). In his book “To Sell is Human,” Daniel Pink cites a study conducted at the university of Illinois in 2010 that showed interrogative self-talk to lead to notably productive outcomes, and also notes that this is the secret to Bob the Builder’s efficacy.5 I believe it. Can he build it? Yes he can.
Asking questions is fun, anyway. Interrogation is an invitation to solve the Jaws problem, to create something like Titanfall 2’s skyboxes, the way the original Crash Bandicoot fussed with PlayStation software, or the Elsa quickchange. If you frame the problem right, fighting against these constraints can become part of the fun of our silly, impossible jobs. My goal for all my teams is for us to tell a collaborative story about ourselves that makes us all feel more clever, more capable, and more enthused about the work we do.
| The Necessity of ‘No’ It’s really hard to write this because a manifesto is a declaration by definition, and declarations are — well, definitive. The joke among producers is that you can answer every question with, “It depends,” and we as a people are prone to endless nuance. So, I find it necessary to pull aside here and say that sometimes, something is truly just impossible to do with the time and resources that a team has. I do find that saying ‘no’ is a lot easier when I have done the work to establish myself as a trustworthy collaborator who will do her best to enable her team at all other possible junctions. Possible junctions also exclude bad ideas. Sometimes wonderful creatives pitch something that just won’t work in-context, and the best thing for the health of the project is to say ‘no.’ The way in which this happens depends on the structure of the team. Sometimes a creative lead is functioning in the role of a producer and can say ‘no’ outright; sometimes it is up to a producer to interrogate the creatives until they either make a compelling enough argument to get a ‘yes’ or talk themselves out of whatever they’d pitched on their own. No matter how the specific situation unfolds, a solution will be harder to find without trust and good faith. |
In Conclusion
A Producer is responsible for communicating up to leadership as well as to their team. We collect loads of data — some definitively trackable via Jira, some anecdotal — and then have to use that information for the benefit of our team and the project at large. Obviously it’s the most fun to come to a meeting with a triumphant story in one’s pocket, but sometimes one must create a sense of urgency, or find a way to describe a failure in terms of unintended gains or forward-looking learnings.
I think it’s a shame that production gets a bad rap. It is a necessarily collaborative and joyful craft, at its best more akin to being a Dungeon Master than a traffic cop. The best producers I’ve ever worked with have balanced curiosity, compassion, and mercenary decisionmaking with a dancer’s precision and grace. The hardest part about it is that practicing it requires a team. Unemployment is, in most cases, a forced stoppage. For that reason, writing this has been both cathartic and bittersweet.
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1 I’ve slowed my efforts a lot nowadays but am always happy to take one-off calls. I do try to volunteer with the Game Production Guild at least once a year.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine
3 I learned about this in an art history class I took in college. Here is a relevant video, before I engage in some bad footnote etiquette: https://youtu.be/nBjgngg6_bE?si=AqIytJoMLydI9Fi1
That same art history class involved learning about a man named Alan Pascuzzi, who is a Rochester, New York-born fresco artist living and working in Florence, Italy. And I just think that a guy from Upstate New York maintaining a classical art form in Florence is really neat.
4 Elsa quickchange: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VLEDuwCbXmQ
5 Daniel Pink, “To Sell is Human,” ch.5 — though admittedly this is my least favorite of the three Pink books I’ve read. If you’re gonna read one, read “Drive.”