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        <h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i><a href="../../index.html">loonygames</a><br>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>Vol. 
                2, Issue 3<br>
                November 24, 1999 </b>
             <br>
              
                <b><i>Beaker's 
                  Bent:</i></b></p>

                <b><i> 
                  On Vision</i></b></p>
                by 
                  Rich &quot;Beaker&quot; 
                  Wyckoff</p>
              
              

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               Over 
                the summer I finally started to read some nonfiction that was 
                related to my job. Frankly, I've had trouble finding any non-fiction 
                that could hold my interest for long enough to finish them, and 
                there just are no worthwhile serious books about the business 
                of game design and publishing. There are the industry histories 

                out there and there are some &quot;learn to make games books,&quot; 
                but compared to the work which has been written about the general 
                software industry, the games-specific books are lightweight.</p>
              </p>
              I finally 
                decided to sample the more general software books in the hopes 
                that I'd find information that would be relevant, and I'm glad 
                I did. As it happens there are eye-opening books about both design 
                and general business out there which are as fascinating as the 
                best novels. In my reading so far, I've had beliefs I've held 
                with little justification confirmed and I've been introduced to 
                ideas I previously had never considered &#150; pretty much the 
                point of reading, I guess. </p>
              </p>
              One of 
                these rather startling ideas is that there is such a thing as 
                a large, visionary company. As many of my personal bad experiences 
                in the industry have come directly from the management bungling 
                which seems endemic to any organization larger than a single team, 
                I had formed the opinion that big corporations are by their nature 
                bad. This was until I read <i>Built to Last: Successful Habits 
                of Visionary Companies</i> by James Collins and Jerry Porras.</p>
              </p>
              Honestly, 
                I didn't even want to read this book at first though it was given 
                to me by perhaps the best boss I've ever had. I was sure that 
                no company could actually be anything I would consider visionary, 
                and I thought that it was going to be some sort of &quot;how to&quot; 
                book founded on principles I wouldn't accept. Instead, <i>Built 
                to Last</i> is a scientific study of around twenty companies that 
                have lasted for over 100 years and are the most well regarded 
                and usually best performing in their fields. The point of the 
                study was to determine what elements were common in all these 
                companies: thus, what constitutes a visionary company. They make 
                an argument that is compelling enough and founded in enough evidence 
                to completely change my mind, at least.</p>
              </p>
              Each of 
                the visionary companies is paired with a comparison company which 
                has existed for a similar amount of time and is in as similar 
                a line of work to the visionary company as possible. As an example, 
                some of these pairs were Sony (visionary) and Zenith, Hewlett 
                Packard (visionary) and Texas Instruments, and Boeing (visionary) 
                and McDonnell-Douglas. Many of the visionary companies had wild 
                differences in their histories and organization, but despite these 
                differences, the authors make a convincing argument that there 
                is an underlying similarity between them all.</p>
              </p>
              This column 
                isn't intended to be a book review, but rather an explanation 
                of the applicability of this book to the computer game industry. 
                The book can be boiled down into an assertion that it is a myth 
                that great companies are distinguished by the specific individuals 
                who run them and are purely profit-driven. Instead, it turns out, 
                the companies which are widely regarded as visionary do not rely 
                on the presence of any specific CEOs nor do they focus on money-making 
                above all else. Yet despite this, these visionary companies in 
                the long term have often outperformed their comparison counterparts.</p>
              <br>
            Finally, 
              even games companies that have company-wide ideologies and the strong 
              indoctrination processes to create the cult-like atmosphere Collins 
              and Porras describe still need to set themselves big hairy audacious 
              goals. Audacious goals of visionary companies described in Built 
              to Last include Boeing's project to make a commercial jet even though 
              the airlines had gone so far as to say they wouldn't be interested. 
              Boeing did anyway at great financial risk, and within a few short 
              years all the airlines were phasing out their prop planes almost 
              entirely. </p>
            </p>
            It is possible 
              that id's decision to make Wolfenstein 3D when action games were 
              entirely 2D counts as a BHAG, and likewise the invention of deathmatch 
              for Doom, but it is unclear from an outsider's perspective whether 
              these were treated as BHAGs or just naturally evolved. In recent 
              years, id's decision to postpone the indoor/outdoor Trinity project 
              and make another indoor, deathmatch game could be seen as somewhat 
              less than visionary. Indoor/outdoor in itself may not actually be 
              that audacious of a goal anyway, as the 3D engines which were popularized 
              largely by Wolf 3D are slowly evolving into it as hardware and software 
              technology develops.</p>
            </p>
            The previous 
              examples of applying the ideas in Built to Last to the games industry 
              are largely conjecture on my part. The important point, as noted 
              by the authors themselves, is that this book pretty readily disproves 
              most conventional business thinking, and our developing industry 
              is in real need of thinking that goes far beyond the conventional. 
              It is unlikely that more than a handful of companies in our industry 
              could ever become true visionaries &#150; one piece of information 
              the book does not provide is how many other companies they would 
              consider visionary beyond the 18 they studied. My guess is there 
              would not be very many, and this book sampled from many industries. 
              However, even if no games companies managed a full transition to 
              visionary status, the very attempt to analyze their internal practices 
              could be helpful.</p>
            </p>
            The games 
              company is not going to go away at this point, and companies which 
              hope to last need to do more than just follow trends and acquire 
              licenses in an attempt to maximize profits. The fact that the book's 
              title is Built to Last is not coincidence: these are companies that 
              have found formulas that enable them to survive and in the long 
              run to prosper. Game developers come and go so quickly that some 
              don't even publish a game before their principals find themselves 
              looking for a new job. Any ideas to reverse this trend should be 
              studied closely.<br>
              <br>
              </p>
            <i>- Richard 
              &#147;Beaker&#148; Wyckoff is a game designer, not a level designer, 
              damnit!</i></p>
            </p>
              <i><br> 
              &nbsp;
              The common 
                feature of visionary companies is actually a strong, company-wide 
                commitment to a core ideology. And these ideologies are never 
                &quot;to make money,&quot; or even as simple as just &quot;to 
                dominate our market.&quot; No matter how a visionary company comes 
                about or what it makes, they all have an ideology that is more 
                than just a meaningless mission statement pasted to a wall and 
                then forgotten. Collins and Porras document instances where visionary 
                companies have lost focus on their core ideology, and those companies 
                faltered until they renewed their commitment. The visionary companies 
                rarely faltered just because of a change in management, whereas 
                the comparisons tended to live or die on the strength of a CEO. 
                The ideology of the visionary companies is held by the institution, 
                not any individual.</p>
              </p>
              Because 
                these ideologies are more than just meaningless words and are 
                a strong part of the structure of the entire institution, they 
                have a noticeable affect on the character of the company. Most 
                noticeably, visionary companies are very careful when they hire 
                people. The authors use words like &quot;indoctrination&quot; 
                and &quot;cult-like&quot; with full knowledge of how loaded the 
                terms are, because they accurately describe what goes on at these 
                companies. Visionary companies have comprehensive training and 
                orientation programs that go beyond the 20 minute PowerPoint benefits 
                explanation or mandatory and boring sexual harrasment meetings 
                that are the norm in other corporations.</p>
              </p>
              Also linked 
                to the core ideology is the idea of the &quot;Big Hairy Audacious 
                Goal&quot; as Collins and Porras put it. Visionary companies continually 
                set goals that would seem too risky to attempt to other companies. 
                BHAGs don't always work out, but when they do, they result in 
                phenomenal progress into areas that competing companies didn't 
                even see as possibilities.</p>
              </p>
              There's 
                a lot more to <i>Built to Last,</i> but these three concepts are 
                perhaps the most important, and what interested me about them 
                was how directly they can be applied to game companies. First 
                and foremost, it is clear that very few companies in the industry 
                have a core ideology or have one that they actually stick to, 
                from the CEO down to the playtesters. The few large companies 
                in the industry are the results of so many mergers that it is 
                unlikely they are thinking much beyond trying to make their next 
                run of titles sell more than any of their competitors, and the 
                many startups are formed by developers looking for freedom but 
                with little experience in the realm of management. A good sign 
                of a lack of core ideologies would be a company suddenly expanding 
                into types of games it has no experience or internal desire to 
                produce just because the management decided that it wanted to 
                capture that market. This kind of unfocused thinking has been 
                the end of many developers.</p>
              </p>
              If a company 
                is to have a strong ideology, it is also clear that industry-hiring 
                practices have to change. Over the years I've talked to or even 
                interviewed at a lot of different developers, and in very few 
                cases have I heard anyone try to evaluate me in terms of their 
                ideology. Interview questions for designers focus on your skills 
                and your ideas, but rarely do people describe their culture or 
                attempt to see if you will fit into that culture. For my first 
                job at Looking Glass, I had two different day-long interviews, 
                by the end of which I felt that I knew almost everyone at the 
                company, so that when I finally did walk in I felt like I was 
                already a part of the crowd. Since then, however, it is rare that 
                I have even talked to more than one or two members of a team I 
                would be working with. Looking Glass's intensive interview process 
                was definitely an unofficial indoctrination when I started there, 
                and the general atmosphere of the company acted as a continuing 
                indoctrination. However, the company had no clearly stated ideology 
                that would act to make this indoctrination more official, and 
                during the time I was there new hires were being screened less 
                and less thoroughly, leading to a definite change in the overall 
                character of the company.</p>
              </p>
              <br><p>&nbsp;</p> 
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Print CGI is 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.square8.com">Square Eight</a>. Used with permission. 
  Article is &copy; 2000 its original author. All other content is &copy; 2000 
  loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. You got that??</font></i></p>
 