Peter Lübeck

I got back from Malmö and the Øredev conference this Friday night, feeling quite tired after three days filled with lectures, of a varying levels of awesome. The conference focus was Efficiency, which of course fits very well with the stuff I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks. Now I have a lot more material to take into account when thinking of how to best implement Agile on an enterprise level.

I went to a lot of sessions focusing on different variations of Agile implementation, from small (5 people) to large (14.000 Nokia employees). I got some useful information on best practices and lessons learned, which will come in handy in my near future. This however, was still largely things I already have a fairly good theoretical knowledge of, so it was good to find some other session gems for me to attend.

For example I attended a session called the Pair Programming show, in which two coders aimed to present the benefits, and problems, associated with pair programming. The presentation was rocky at best, but the message was clear and strong and I found myself really thrilled about trying to incorporate pair programming into the every day culture of The Company. The benefits feel obvious, although I can see the difficulties in introducing a radically new way of working to a crowd of solo-oriented coders. A worthy challenge I guess, especially since I am not a coder mysel!

It is good that I had two coders with me during the whole conference so that they also got to experience all the interesting stuff, as well as me getting someone to discuss things that might be outside my “area of expertise” with.

Another concept that was frequently talked about during the conference was Time boxing, which isn’t a new concept but something that I feel that I should really look into more. So today I started using a variant of Time boxing called the Pomodoro Technique, in which you basically decide a task to work on, then set a timer for 25 minutes and only work on that task for the duration of the timer. After the 25 minutes are up you take a five minute break and then either continue with the task or select a new task. It feels awesome, since you focus intently on a single task for 25 minutes, and you hinder yourself from dragging stuff out, which I tend to do sometimes.

I am actually using this technique right now as I am writing this blog post. 25 minutes to write, read, correct and publish. Seems like a nice time box, and I won’t get to chance to start thinking too much about what I am doing. As soon as I am done writing this post I will select another task and do that for 25 minutes, and tomorrow I am going to try this at work. I am counting on it to allow me to perform wonders!

When working on my personal guide to running an Agile company, I have focused a lot on the company’s responsibilities towards its lifeblood: the individual developer. Yes, you know, that person who goes by many names, such as employee, worker, agent, cog, slave, or the one I dislike the most: asset. Calling someone an asset just makes me feel like your are planning to use the person as you would a tool, with no regard to who they are, what they think or what they want. This just seem wrong to me, so I prefer to use the term associate, which my integrated Leopard Dictionary defines as:

a partner or colleague in business or at work

That’s definitely how I want to look at the people working with and/or for me.

I have come to realize that while I have focused a lot on a company’s responsibility towards its associates, I have neglected to reflect over an associate’s responsibility towards the company. And by that I don’t mean the corporate company that’s only an abstract entity consisting of managers, blurry visions and broken promises. Resorting to my dictionary once more, I find three different definitions of the word company:

1. a commercial business
2. the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment
3. a number of individuals gathered together, especially for a particular purpose

While number one is of course a key aspect of any game studio, I myself personally lean more towards number three being the thing to focus on, and hope that number two will come naturally when you put awesome people together in the same room.

Anyhow, this week I have begun reflecting on all of the above and am now going to add a new section to the part of my “manifest” focusing on the individuals. For this section I will look at what I would expect of any reasonably awesome person come to work in my dream Agile environment. I already have a number of ideas that I want to delve into, if only I can maintain any sort of focus on this for the near future.

My focus has been steadily waning since the first week I allowed chance to set my focus, since I am now into my fourth week on what was supposed to be a weekly focus. I have not yet decided on how I am supposed to go about my other focus areas, perhaps I will shift to another area next week. Who knows!

My little focus experiment has turned out to be a lot more effective than I initially planned for. It has been so effective that I this week ended up ignoring my new focus area and continued with the one from last week. After being so involved with something for a whole week my mind just wouldn’t let go, and so I decided to just go with it.

I didn’t see the point of working against myself just to stick with an idea, and I am glad I came to that realization. Otherwise I wouldn’t have begun putting the things I worked with last week towards creating a draft of a kind of company wide, agile strategy with an almost flat hierarchy where the whole organization, including management, is using and following the same methods and principles.

My goal is to create a plan for my vision of the ultimate, team driven, agile game development company where the individual is never forgotten and where openness and honesty are the key virtues. Sound a bit too much kumbaya? Well the main challenge of course is to create this kind of open climate and still maintain a strong focus on profitability and effectiveness.

I am borrowing heavily from Agile, Scrum, Lean, XP etc, my focus not being to create THE best methodology but rather to nail down my dream way of working. This is based on my ideals and views on quality, creativity, communication, respect, honesty and focus, among other things.

One of the key goals of this vision is to create a working environment where an individual is never more than one step away from top-level management, in the natural order of communication. This means minimizing the need for dedicated managers and creating a more organic management structure. Managers, possessing one or more key competences, will mainly serve in a more supportive fashion, working alongside self-organizing teams. Instead of managing a single, specific team, managers instead make up their own agile team, each manager in turn serving a number of teams that have use of their particular competences.

In the spirit of a great manager, my aim in the long run is to build an organization where my position will practically be obsolete. Before this is realized though there is a lot that needs to be done. In particular this needs to be field tested in order to work out all the quirks, which hopefully is something I might get the chance to do in the near future.

I’ll just leave it at that for the time being. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing too much in the early stages. Instead I will put my time towards writing all my initial ideas down and start looking at the whole. I might report back with the progress in the future.

A week ago I decided to try out a new way of achieving focus by putting my trust to chance. By randomly selecting an area of focus from a number of different areas of my choosing, my aim was to commit myself to focus all of my spare time/attention to that particular area.

This week my area of focus has been Professional Development, and I must say that the results have been quite positive! I have not been nearly as distracted by my other projects as I usually am, and I have felt a strong urge to follow through on my commitment. I have still allowed myself to do things not connected to professional development, like trying to beat Baldur’s Gate 2 for instance, so my commitment luckily hasn’t been bordering on fanaticism.

So what have I been doing exactly?

Well, being fairly new to the games business I usually feel a strong need to seek knowledge that will help me improve my prowess as a games producer. This includes re-evaluating my behavior as a leader, organizer, designer and manager, as well as looking at how other people does things. I recently have been reading up on servant leadership, creativity and project methodologies of different shapes and sizes, and have started to incorporate this into my daily work.

In my current position as producer/consultant at Tarsier Studios I spend a lot of time looking at ways to improve the production process. In the spirit of my “assigned” focus of the week I have put a large part of my spare time towards researching different agile development methodologies and looking at how I can adapt and modify these to fit my way of being, working and managing.

Since I always listen to things through my iPhone when I am walking to work and the like, I thought it a good idea that what I listened to reflected my focus. I found the Agile Toolkit to be a great source of information on Agile software development, so I loaded up my iPhone with enough episodes to last me a week. I then looked through my Things database to see what other agile related things I have picked up and stored for future reference.

I found, and spent an hour watching, Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned at Google, where the father of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, did a walkthrough of the results of the Scrum implementation at the Google AdWords department. It is definitely a good watch for people interested in hearing more about Scrum, and from the mouth of the Creator no less. This served as a springboard for my research for the rest of the week, and also motivated me into realizing a planned project of mine.

For quite a while I have been taking notes of everything I see, read and experience with regards to leadership and management, especially lessons learned from project evaluations and post mortems. What I haven’t been doing is to make something interesting and concrete out of these notes. So in the spirit of this weeks focus I started working on a manifest of sorts where I am putting together all my thoughts, ideas and best practices on these areas into a cohesive document that will serve as the foundation for my continued implementation and study of agile work processes and leadership practices. It is only a rough draft, but I must say that I never expected to get as much done as I did this week, all thanks to achieving and committing to focus.

My only caveat with this method of achieving focus is that a week might be too short a time span for achieving something noteworthy. At the same time I think it is a good way to keep things fresh and interesting, and the limited time frame is an additional spur to achieving and keeping focus. If you were to do a two week run you might loose your focus before the time is up. I will probably continue with Focus of the Week for some time to come, but I am unsure of whether or not to continue choosing an area at random or instead make a concious decision. I guess it is time to make a decision since I need to determine my focus for the upcoming week.

After reviewing the areas in my IO Interactive Cap of Randomness, I have decided to continue to allow chance to do the selection for me. Here goes…

Still getting nervous over this!

The note says:

Experiences, which means I will spend this week looking at ways to improve how I experience things in my life, and at what things to experience. This includes planning trips and visits to friends and family, seeing what cultural events and music performances I might want to go to in the upcoming months as well as looking at what movies to see, what games to play and what books to read.

This might sound like a lame focus for a whole week since I perhaps should do these things anyway, but knowing how I work I need to dedicate myself to something in order to perform at my best! The Power of Focus! You should try it sometime.

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about focus lately; how you need to find focus in order to accomplish great things, or even anything at all. Focus is a great tool since it allows you to put all your energy toward a single task or project. There are a lot of difficulties surrounding focus though, e.g. all the constant distractions in your life, your (my) ambition to do everything at once and, as I have come to realize, actually deciding on what you want/need/can/should focus on.

I have a lot of different projects that I have some ambition of working on, probably too many, and I don’t feel like I am getting as much done as I could. So, after battling the focus issue for a while I’ve come up with the following idea:

Let chance decide what your area of focus for the upcoming week will be, and then don’t do anything but that for the whole week.

What I have done is to write down, on small pieces of paper, every possible area that I might want to focus on (twelve in total). I then fold the pieces and put them in a hat, which in this case is my IO Interactive cap that has been lying around in my closet for some years since my head is too big for it. I then shuffle the notes and simply pick one and see what I get.

The area that I end up picking will be the focus of my attention for an entire week, or until I cannot do anything more with it, in which case I will pick a new area. This weekly focus is of course something that affects my spare time, and not my work, even though you could apply it to your work as well.

Even though I haven’t given it a go yet, there’s one thing that I’ve prepared for, namely lack of motivation to work on a particular area. All of the areas of focus that I’ve put in the hat are things that I actually want to do. If you try to fool yourself by putting down a project that you rather avoided doing and end up getting that as your weekly focus you will most likely fail in doing something about it. So before putting the areas in the hat I looked at each of them and imagined how I would feel if I got that particular area. If I didn’t get a positive image in my head about a particular area, I didn’t put it in the hat (two areas got left out because they didn’t feel relevant at this point in time).

So now it’s time to put this to the test! Here goes…

Whoo, this is actually pretty scary for some reason. I guess it could be a sign that I am comitting to my experiment, which is great! The whole point of this is to make myself commit to being focused!

I have picked a piece of paper, and now for the unfolding…

And the note says:

Professional Development, which in my case means I will spend the coming week focusing on leadership, project management, methodologies etc.

Let’s see how it goes!

In his Business of Software speech from 2008 Seth Godin points out that advertising is a severely endangered creature and that people instead need to focus on creating high quality products.

A good product will sell itself, since a good product equals satisfied customers and satisfied customers are the best sales people in the world. A happy customer will of course share his joy over your great product with the people around him, and since people tend to listen more to people they know, these recommendations are a lot more worth than any TV ad. This is regardless of whether it cost millions of dollars to create or was aired during the Super Bowl, it will probably still be less effective than traditional word of mouth marketing of a high quality product.

To make you product or service even more appealing to its intended user base, you should also refrain from trying to create something that EVERYONE should want. The more you focus your product towards a specific user base, the more likely it is that those users will be satisfied with the product. As Seth Godin says, it is wrong to assume that niche products are less likely to be profitable, as a niche product is likely to be of more use to its intended users. If it is exactly what they want, and there is no better alternative on the market, their willingness to pay for the product will increase.

On a side note, this phenomena of trying to make your products appeal to more and more people has really gotten a hold of the games industry, to the dismay of many a niche audience, and myself. As budgets increase, publishers and developers are less likely to take risks, and so they streamline their games in order to not alienate any potential users. More and more genres and franchises are moving away from their original niches, creating more accessible experiences that lowers the bar for new users, but in turn leaves many of their original fans behind.

I personally find it regrettable that many of the genres and franchises I have come to love are now turning into something I find less enjoyable, dumbed down versions of their former selves. There is much to say on the subject, but I’ll leave that for another time. Now back to the issue at hand.

So, instead of spending all that money on advertising, Godin means that you should put it towards increasing the quality of your product, thus also increasing your chances of satisfying your customers (sales people).

This seems to be a particularly wise assessment since people are getting more and more numb to traditional advertising. After being bombarded day in and day out, from multiple directions and through different types of media, it’s no wonder that we are starting to filter out all of this information. This is especially true since the majority of all those ads are not targeted at specific individuals, and so we constantly have to deal with boat loads of irrelevant information.

So what happens when people seize to take in any form of advertising, and ad related profits dwindle into nothingness? What will happen to all those ad funded products and services when advertising stops being a viable source of income?

I believe that this is already happening behind the scenes, but that it is not that apparent since the effects of advertising are difficult to turn into hard data. I think that there is a risk that we, within a couple of years, will see a collapse not unlike the IT bubble, where all ad funded businesses suddenly find themselves without income. As it is now we spend billions upon billions of dollars on advertising, and as Seth Godin have already pointed out, people are not responding as they used to.

Still, copious amounts of ad money are constantly being shifted around the world, supposedly without any real hope of actually turning into profit. Since we are used to this, and believe that this is the way things are supposed to work, I think that we might suddenly find ourselves in a situation where all the supposed value of advertising more or less turns out to be equal to dust. When that happens, I think we will see the downfall of hundreds of companies that can no longer sustain their businesses, which in turn will result in a major hit to the global economy.

There are of course alternative methods of marketing. Ad funded businesses could in theory find other ways to generate profit, but I believe that all this will happen too fast for people to adapt to the circumstances, resulting in a veritable domino effect of collapsing companies.

What will you do when that multi million dollar advertising deal of yours turns out to be castles in the air? Will you be able to handle the consequences?

Getting Things Done, abbreviated GTD, is “an action management method created by David Allen” (Wikipedia).

I happened to stumble across GTD when I was looking for useful and rewarding audio books to listen to while I was running, and while it hasn’t exactly changed my life it has definitely made it more easy to live in.

At the time (about a year ago), I was living and working in a very stressful environment. I had just started my first game studio (Black Drop Studios), together with three others, as well as begun the third and final year of my Bachelor’s program in game design. It is safe to say that I was in dire need of action management in order to maintain any semblance of sanity.

So what is this fabled action management you say? Well, what David Allen proposes is that you implement a system in which you place all of your projects, thoughts, actions, ideas etc. The main purpose is to get EVERYTHING out of your head and into a system that you can trust to keep track of all your data.

The definition of stress, at least for me, is lack of control. When I have an abundance of things floating around in my head that needs my immediate attention I tend to get stressed out and then my efficiency and focus levels drop accordingly. So with GTD, as soon as a thought pops into my head I write it down and get it into the system. This could be any thought at all, e.g. something to do, something to read, someone to see or somewhere to be. It doesn’t matter what it is, I just write it down and get it into the system. This is called Collecting, and is the first of the five different phases of the GTD workflow.

Once you have collected something you place it in your Inbox, which can be either a physical box or part of a digital action management application. Since I am quite tech oriented, I mainly use digital tools, but I have recently begun to use physical Inboxes both at home and at work. The collection process should be as quick and smooth as possible, so that when you remember that important, mission critical data, you can capture it instantly. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have no means of collecting the data, so always have pen, paper, or your digital organizer, close at hand.

When you collect data this way you don’t deal with things as soon as they appear. This might seem like a sure way to get stressed, but the thing is that as soon as I capture a thought and put it into my Inbox I can relax, because I know that the thought is now safe and that it will be dealt with. This part of GTD is definitely the one that I have managed to really incorporate in my everyday routines, which has resulted in heaps of data that needs processing.

This leads me to the next phase of GTD, namely Processing, but that is for a future entry.

UPDATE: My suggested communication system was picked as one of the top contributions for the challenge.

Every few weeks, the guys over at GameCareerGuide presents a game design challenge to their readers. The latest challenge is to “Design a social interaction system for a massively multiplayer game featuring friendly characters who can’t understand each other”. I have never felt that I have had the time to participate in these events before, but this time I thought I should give it a try.

The communication system I am proposing sacrifices precision and versatility in favor of speed, accessibility, ease-of-use and interaction feedback. By using a library of universal symbols, accessible through an intuitive graphical user interface, players will be able to convey messages quickly and smoothly.

By pressing and holding a hot-key, a spiral of icons is invoked on the screen. When you rotate the analogue stick the symbols light up and scale up as you pass them. The spiral is repeating, so when you get to the end, the symbol that was first in line will seamlessly follow the last symbol. This makes it quick and easy to browse all of the symbols and there is no limit as to how many symbols you can put into it.

To choose a symbol, just press the action button. After pressing the action button the symbol is displayed in a specific area of the screen, and you can continue browsing. You can sequence symbols in order to create more complex messages. Because of the intuitive interface, players will be able to put together complex sequences of symbols in a matter of seconds.

The symbols consists of traditional and game related symbols. For example, each area in the game can have its own symbol. These could also have contextual meta actions/features attached to them, like co-ordinates or a marker for that area.

When you have chosen a symbol you can add a modifier to it in order to make your message more clear. A modifier can for example be positive or negative, and when chosen the color of the symbol changes to represent your choice. Instead of color modifiers could also be illustrated with prefix icons, like a thumbs up or happy smiley for positive. You can also add modifiers to an entire sequence, e.g. make it a question.

Depending on the number of available modifiers they can either have their own hot-keys, or you could access them through a similar, but smaller, interface as the one used to select symbols.

When you have put together a finished sequence of symbols with modifiers, you press a button and the sequence is displayed over the head of your avatar or in a specific chat window. Depending on the nature of the game, you could also have a realtime system where symbols are displayed after one another as you select them.

Using stimulating sounds and visual indicators, the interaction feedback of the interface can be made satisfying and rewarding. You will be able to motivate players to use the system by simply applying traditional interaction design methodologies to the user interface.

Even though the above description is for console, the system is basically platform and genre independent, and can be modified to work with almost any game.

I attended the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö on the 19th and 20th of May. Although the conference didn’t quite live up to my expectations, it still managed to infuse me with some interesting thoughts and ideas. One of these ideas is something I have been thinking of on and off for the past few years. It is about the long term user investment/involvement in video games of different types, genres and scope.

I guess it would be wrong to say that it is new, but at least it resurfaced now when I had to sit through a couple of less than great lectures. In an attempt to turn my idea into something more concrete I came up with some definitions that might allow me to make my point.

High vs. Low Investment: Basically what this means is how much the game demands from the player, in terms of problem solving, lateral thinking, social interaction as well as skill-based aspects like timing and precision.

Long vs. Short Term: The scope and scale of the game. This is not just a measure of total time spent with the game, but more of a general indication of play time, average session time, scenario scope etc.

So now that I have these things defined, what do I make of them? Well, I put together this neat little chart in which I tried to place a number of different games according to these criteria.

The games I have used as references are Boingo, Peggle, Tetris, N+, World of Goo, Braid, Team Fortress 2, Diablo 2, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Utopia, World of Warcraft and EVE Online. The observant reader might also have noticed that Facebook is in the mix as well. While it is not a game per say, the user interaction makes it a valid example for my little study.

Basically what I am trying to point out is the current lack of games that are long term high investments, and I am also wondering if there is a market for such games. I will not go into detail of each and every game on the chart, but by describing the extremes I hope to be able to make it clear enough for my point to be made.

To get a feel for the chart and it’s contents I will start off on the opposite side of the long term high investment games, namely the short term low investment games, as illustrated in the bottom left part of the chart. Games like Peggle, Tetris, and of course my own contribution Boingo, does not demand a lot of time or other kinds of investment from the player. Although I do not like to use the term, these games are probably best known as casual games.

While one might argue that World of Warcraft is very much a long term high investment game, it is my opinion that it is not. Although players at this point have spent several years developing characters and getting better equipment, the mission/quest structure is short term, and in my opinion also quite shallow. Sure, there have been larger scale scenarios where people have worked together in order to overcome some grand obstacle. But the core of the game, the thing that player spend 90% of their time with, is a short term, shallow, arcade-like gaming experience.

EVE Online on the other hand is definitely long term, and it is not just because of the time-based skill progression system. EVE Online has a completely different core than World of Warcraft, and it encourages long term investments in the world and its events. Just look at this news report from when the first Titan Class vessels was constructed within EVE, during the course of eight months. It is just mind boggling that something like that has happened inside the confines of a digital world, and it is one of the best examples in existence of long term high investment gameplay.

That said, EVE is overall not as high of an investment as World of Warcraft, it even allows players to continue leveling up their characters with a minimum amount of interaction. You can basically play the game passively, and still be an important part of the world. I guess that is one of the reasons the game appeals to an older demographic than many other games.

So what of the long term high investment games? Perhaps I should give an example of what I mean to further illustrate my point. Using the above described definitions and criteria I could argue that Left 4 Dead is kind of high investment. The game requires players to have a high level of mechanical skill, as well as an understanding of social interaction, communication and co-operation. Imagine that you take Left 4 Dead and push it up to the right on the chart. To make a co-operative zombie game that is more long term and high investment, you need to establish a long term co-operative relationship with your allies, and with the game world.

So, if you mix Left 4 Dead with Dead Rising, and push the boundaries of the scope of the scenario, what do you get? I am thinking a living online world that is active around the clock. Players play in groups of 4-6 people that are taking shelter in a big mall, and you need to work together in order to survive the zombie hordes. For you to survive in the long run you need to find a safe room and establish a perimeter. You also need to gather necessary resources and equipment in order to survive sickness, hunger and other challenges. This is a long term scenario, challenging players to survive, not for ten minutes but for several months.

During this time, players are encouraged to find their own creative solutions to their problems, and thus creating their own missions/quests. You might want to get a refrigerator in order to be able to store food more effectively, so you set out into the zombie infested mall with your team. Two people carry the refrigerator while the other team members protect them from zombies. The bigger the refrigerator, the more food can be stored, but the more difficult it becomes to get it to the safe room.

After a period of time you might want to relocate the safe room to another place of the mall in order to get closer access to necessary resources. In doing so you might encounter another player group, and depending on their good nature they might either welcome your party, or they might try to drive you away in order to maintain their current rule of the area. This can be the source of long term player vs. player conflicts that are spawned out of necessity, people fighting each other for access to resources.

This might not be a perfect example of a long term high investment game, since it is based on existing games, but I believe that I explained my definitions at least. So, is there room for long term investment games in the current game climate, or is this something that might appear later on, when the games industry has become more established and accepted as culture?

I personally really would like to play games of this type. I do not fancy the shallow arcade-like experiences offered by game like World of Warcraft, and I am looking for something that actually involves me on a long term emotional basis. Sadly, I am afraid that the current climate, and the ever adolescent games industry, won’t allow for these type of games to be enjoyed, let alone developed.

What do you readers think? Am I totally lost in my reasoning? Are there already games like this out there?

Drop me a comment if you have something to say about this subject!

As of today I am reopening my blog in an attempt to make something useful out of it. My plan is to use it as a way to gather up my thoughts, texts and more. I am going to divide it into different categories that are easy accessible through the grey horizontal bar below the header. Here you will be able to find texts and articles as well as updates on what is currently happening in my life.

I will also present some of my projects and work experience, allowing this site to double as a kind of portfolio. Before I do that though I need to get a routine for posting stuff, and I think that I am going to spend some time posting creative writing samples as a start. I recently ordered two books on creative writing, since I felt that I wanted to find my way back to this big interest of mine. The books are:

Portable MFA in Creative Writing and The Write-Brain Workbook

I am waiting for them to arrive so that I can start doing some exercises and getting some inspiration. After that we’ll just see what happens! First up is a text I wrote recently, after finishing the Watchmen graphic novel, which is about a hypothetical future scenario. You can find it here.

And oh, I am turning 25 today by the way. Perhaps all this is a sign of the beginning of a possible mid-midlife crisis? Who knows!

Bye for now,

Peter