Is it just me, or is calling this about “piracy” missing the point here? (and, in case this isn’t obvious enough: yes, this is a deliberately very flippant post, but the points are serious :) )
EDIT: just for the record, I actually bought and played the game, quite a lot. Although don’t expect a professional review there :).
(this is part 2 of Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus)
Last time I said that “good Developers are very similar to Valley Technology Startups”, which suggests one obvious way things could develop:
In this model, the Publishers spend their time “speculating” in Dev studios: instead of buying a studio in order to own the output of that studio, you buy it with the intent of later selling the studio itself at a profit.
This is a good model; as I first heard from Jack Lang, at one of the Cambridge Enterprise Conferences many years ago:
“The best way to get rich is by buying and selling things. Preferably companies”
IIRC it’s a quote that’s been around for a long time, but I can’t remember where the original quote came from, unfortunately.
(of course, this observation is why Publishers are box-shifters in the first place: simply buying and selling things is an easy, fast, stable, sustainable way of making a very large amount of money. It’s not particularly creative, perhaps, but it’s a very efficient way of generating profit, and lets you leverage your resources/cashflow way above the profit you would generate simply from manufacturing your own goods and selling them)
The real beauty of this is that – as Jack’s quote illustrates – a Publisher and a VC have very similar fundamental business models: they buy stuff that they have no intention of using themselves primarily to sell those things at a profit to other people. In both cases, the less time the company can hold onto the products, while getting the same price differential between purchase and sale, the better. What is a VC? A VC is just a higher-value version of a box-shifter. So, for a Publisher to diversify into being a VC may not be so difficult…
As someone who’s been through the mill of raising finance for startups before, I’d also like to add that “funding game development” is commonly thought of as having no equal in risk and unpredictability – save “providing venture capital for a new startup”. The hardest part of being a VC – the insanely high risks involved – is bread and butter for Publishers, who routinely spend tens of millions of dollars on stuff they don’t understand, cannot effectively control, and cannot reliably predict!
Studios would find that:
Publishers would find that:
I’m just pulling this out of thin air, trying to think of a studio that many years ago was worth something, got acquired, went internal, and now is probably worthless. When EA bought Westwood Studios, one of the things they paid for was the brand; how much value did they really extract from that brand? How much value does it have *today*? Today, it’s probably next to none – customers don’t care, and other games industry companies all know that the real meat of Westwood Studios (the staff, the equipment, the processes) was disbanded shortly after being bought by EA. Could they have made more money by promoting and protecting the WS as an owned-but-independent studio? If they’d taken that route, and even if they had made less money than they have with the route they chose, would it be more than made up for by the fact that they might be able to sell WS right now for, say, a couple of hundred million dollars – if only it still existed as more than a name?
But this isn’t the way Publishers work right now, so … where does this plan all go wrong? Why hasn’t it happened already? What might prevent people from trying this?
At the moment, the funding decisions that Publishers make are so distantly removed from the actual point of capitalizing on them that it’s quite easy for the people making the funding decisions to blame many other departments and personnel within their organization should the investment go poorly. Indeed, this plausibly deniability, this easy abrogation of responsibility by the decision makers – and the great distance between them and the people actually implementing the game – are root causes of a lot of the practical problems in the Publisher/Developer relationship whenever they do “external” publishing (i.e. publish a game made by an independent / external studio, as opposed to a wholly-owned internal studio).
A lot of the benefits for the New Way cited above stem from removing that indirection; that means a bunch of people making hundred-million-dollar decisions would be exposed to rather more scrutiny and responsibility than they hold right now. I’ve heard people (usually the ones who don’t really understand VC’s, have acted naively or foolishly with them, and come away poor and bitter) describe VC’s as “arrogant”, “bullies”, and “too demanding”; while I don’t agree with that, just think how you’d act if you were the named individual responsible for a handful of $10million investment decisions, and how that might come across sometimes. Could the individual people working for Publishers accomodate such a change? If they were content with that level of personal exposure to risk, would they be working in the games industry, or would they already be working in the higher-paid VC industry?
Another issue is that the success of selling a studio depends on, well … your ability to sell!
Publishers do not, generally, have any experience of selling companies. A publisher might spin-out or sell off one division every decade, at most – and many of those are instigated by the division itself (management buy-outs), or are fire-sales (find a buyer at any cost, no matter how low). They don’t have staff who are experience in doing this, they don’t have any contacts suitable for doing it, and they don’t (generally) maintain the level of immersion in the marketplace of studio buyers to be able to setup great deals when selling on a studio. Look at how much time the individual staff at VC’s spend purely “networking”, both looking for things to invest in (new purchases), but also looking for, befriending, understanding, and keeping up to date with the needs and desires of potential buyers (people who might acquire some of their portfolio).
Lastly, have a look at the typical VC organization – a handful of Partners (maybe half a dozen people who make investment decisions), a handful of Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR – maybe one or two domain-experts who make recommendations and help in due diligence). This is enough to manage billions of dollars of investments.
Now look at the typical Publisher organization – 50 people in each of marketing, customer service, and sales, perhaps 15 handling external develoment (finding and making development/publishing deals), and another 10-50 people in internal support roles. This is enough to own 1-3 development studios.
This isn’t to say that Publishers would need to downsize. Rather, it’s to point out that if the external development side started doing sales of studios for as much as $100million a time, their revenues and profits would suddenly massively eclipse (20 to 1, perhaps even 200 to 1) the whole of the rest of the organization, despite being outnumbered more than ten to one. Sooner or later, the “rest of the organization” would become politically weak and subservient to the massively profitable “trading in ownership of development studios part”.
The VPs of the current departments may well find that the total pie they’re sharing in becomes much bigger, and much more than makes-up-for the fact that their slice has got smaller, but will they accept their slice going from being a “Vice President” sized slice to a “Operations Manager” sized slice?
1. When I wrote Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus, I had *no idea* that NCsoft had just decided to shutdown its European development studio, and make a swathe of redundancies in European publishing. Sheer coincidence, and sad for a lot of people involved, but very interesting nonetheless.
NB: if you work for a publisher or developer and are interested in picking up any of the good NCsoft Europe staff, especially development, QA, localization, and customer support – and you have jobs in or within commuting distance of Brighton – let me know. Lots of people are suddenly looking for stuff to do next…
2. I said that “Developers exist to make a loss, every day”, and some people questioned that.
Yes, I really mean this: the more they spend, the greater the potential profit, and they should be maximizing their potential profit. Obviously, there is a point of diminishing returns, but generally speaking whenever you have an R&D lab, you want to pump as much money into it as you can possibly spare. Generally, R&D labs are rather good at soaking up almost infinite amounts of money.
Compare the revenues and the expenditures of, say, GTA IV with those of Bookworm Adventures. The latter may have been much much more profitable in percentage terms, but the former made a bigger amount of money overall. Often, the sheer amount of money you make is more important than your profit percentage.
3. I decided to write these blog posts after a comment I made to Steven Davis about the problems of publishers owning development studios, which he replied to with “Actually, the publishers should fund these things like a movie studio or VC. Let them be independent, get them off the books, and use your money to control distribution or via publishing rights.”
I’d been thinking along similar lines, but I also realised I saw some big problems with the approach, so I thought it would be interesting to explore in more detail. But if he hadn’t made the comment, I probably wouldn’t have got around to it :).
Over the last few years, there has been a big shift in power and success away from independent studios, and towards in-house, publisher-owned studios. This has been driven by several things, sound economic reasons, competitive reasons, and because the strong independent studios had done a good job at creating a slew of new IPs (which publishers were eager to snap up, as always).
In my experience relatively few people in the games industry realise this, but all these things are cyclical (it’s a lot more obvious in non-niche industries, like the IT industry, where you have many more companies, and the billion-dollar companies can’t be counted on one hand). So, what’s next? What’s going to happen over the next 3-5 years?
My last job was working for a large publisher (NCsoft – http://ncsoft.com) where we were setting up a new internal development studio from scratch. When I arrived I there was only one other person (plus my manager). We were doing a lot of other things at the same time – external development, pitching new internal projects, etc – but over the course of the first year I spent a lot of time looking at what we had to do to get a studio up and running, starting from scratch.
Interesting and fun. But also … surprisingly difficult. I’ve been one of the first employees at a couple of startups, and founded some, so I’m accustomed to starting up teams and departments, and a lot of the problems we encountered with this studio were just variations on familiar themes. But then there were also some new ones, side-effects of being inside a huge, well-established, publisher – one whose head-office was on the other side of the world, where the vast majority of the staff didn’t share any languages with the vast majority of the publishing office in our country, and our staff.
To summarize: the things that should have been completed fast were incredibly slow, and the things that should have been easy often turned out to be extremely hard. My definition of “should have” here is based on “whatever plays to the strengths of large corporates”.
As that became clear, one option would have been to throw up our hands and say: “this company is crap! No other similar company works this way!”. Instead, I dug deeper, and tried to understand how it was that we seemed to be seeing a lot of the opposite of what I expected. Sure, a lot of it could be explained by some over the top internal politics, and some by issues with individuals, but … this is a billion-dollar public company, and it’s foolish to think that management could be so weak and disorganized that a few internal battles and a few individuals could cause major aims of the organization to fail. No, there were underlying problems that were natural side-effects of the way the company worked. IMHO, these same issues are almost certainly causing problems for other internal development studios already, and will probably be major contributory causes of the move away from internal studios (when that day comes).
Publishers exist to make profit, every day; Developers exist to make a loss, every day
I could stop there. In that one sentence is encapsulated a problem so powerful and subtle that it’s more than capable of causing all the secondary problems – the ones people actually notice – that lead to publisher/developer acrimony when the two are together in the same company.
A traditional publisher is a box-shifter that pays a hefty license fee for exclusive rights to import a popular, trendy product from a foreign country. The things they need to be good at are:
Why did I mark the SECOND point as the point for profit? Because profit is extracted through the differential between the costs generated in that bullet point, and the price point that the publisher – arbitrarily – places on the product as sold to retailers (who then, typically in retail (forget the games industry – this is normal for all industries!) double the price again before selling to consumers).
The price point can be … anything you want. The volume you sell comes from the third bullet – but you have NO control over how much you sell. You *try* to sell as much as you can, but you cannot wake up tomorrow and *decide* to double sales. However … in contrast, you can wake up tomorrow and *decide* to halve costs. Or double them. So you focus on that middle bullet point: Efficiency (while making sure you assign a healthy slab of money to a sales + marketing department, and set them “targets” to try and meet).
A traditional developer is an R&D (research and development) laboratory. They try to be as scientific as possible, whilst spending every day working with masses of unknowns (and several unknowables – what is “fun” anyway?). After working for an indefinite period of time (no way of telling how long it will take) they’re trying to create (or discover) something that has never been created before, and which satisfies various criteria – many of which cannot be measured until after the project is complete.
They absorb money like a dry sponge in a puddle, with very little to show for it. The things they need to be good at are:
Why do they have to secure a large pile of resources?
Because their success is limited only by two things: their resource, and their skill. That translates into three concrete things:
Those three things are, in turn, only limited by “money” and “the quality of the people they hire”.
Publishers hate this. No, that’s not strong enough; Publishers REVILE, DESPISE, RESENT and LOATHE Developers for always, ever, and only going after those two things. And … they don’t understand it.
Frankly, as a box-shifter, with “efficiency” your only concern, WHO GIVES A F*** HOW “GOOD” YOUR PEOPLE ARE?
But that’s not the worst. No, the worst is this: as a box-shifter, the only thing you can directly control is your costs. Everything in your business, from the structure, to the choice of staff, to the processes, is designed to reduce costs. And what does every R&D laboratory obsessively try to do? Yep – raise costs!
If you ask a Publisher to create, fund, nurture, and partner with a Developer, you are asking the staff to encourage, to aid and abet, the one thing that you are already telling them every day to hunt down and destroy. Capiche? Does anyone see a problem here?
Well, this is clearly insane – how could a Developer ever make a profit? The answer can be found most easily by looking to the one place in the world where R&D laboratories make more money than anywhere else: Silicon Valley.
In the Valley, the Technology guys have become Entrepreneurs (or found an Entrepreneur to work with), and they’ve gone out there and applied their intelligence to a new problem: “Given this thing I’ve created, which is novel and cool and awesome, how could I use it to drive a product that people would pay for, and which (because of my NEW tech) I can sell cheaper than what is available, or (because of my NEW tech) does something people have been trying to pay for but been unable to find a working solution for?”
Despite appearances otherwise, good Developers are very similar to Valley Technology Startups: it’s all about the monetization, the capitalization – what bridge are you going to build between “what you’ve created” and “someone who has money and a problem”, and HOW are you going to build that bridge?
“Sell the exclusive publishing rights” is one bridge. It can be built many ways.
“Create an infrastructure that lets us deliver this product to the public, and take money from them” is another bridge, with just as many potential schematics.
But then there are others too, many others. Just because those two are the ones that the game-playing public tends to talk about (and are the two that Publishers are most familiar with) doesn’t – by any stretch of the imagination – mean those are the only ones that exist. Ask Blitz (an independent developer) about their Advergames for Burger King (definitely not-a-game-publisher). But, in general, just like in the Valley, the “other” bridges are tricky to invent, and tend to make someone rich just once or twice once invented and done for the first time. There are always new bridges to invent, and if the Technology person’s main role is to invent new tech, the Entrepreneur’s main role is to invent new bridges. So don’t be surprised if you find it hard to think of some.
What happens when a Publisher catches a Developer, puts it in a cage, and ships it back home? Or, more specifically, what do they do to the people that are thinking up innovative new bridges for monetizing the Developer’s assets, and trying to implement them? I’ll give you a clue: if everyone you know believes the world is flat, and has never walked more than a few hundred miles, and one day you meet a person who claims to have walked around the circumference of the planet, would do you do?
Yep. These people tend to be first in the firing line when nerves start to fray and the tensions between Developer and Publisher flare up. They’re an easy target – they make no sense to the Publisher, and their very existence is an affront to their core business model, to their box-shifter mentality (it suggests that the box-shifter is doing a simpler business, something run by simpler, less imaginative, more stupid, people).
UPDATE: I’ve just written a followup looking at one of the possible future directions coming out of this
Don’t get excited :). The title refers to experimentation with stuff you’re allowed to use, rather than cracking (deliberately breaking in to stuff). Unless you submitted proposals this year, you won’t be able to do anything.
Pointed out by Sulka, this essay: http://virtual-economy.org/files/Lehdonvirta-VWDE.pdf
I suggest that researchers ask themselves the following questions to ensure their work is relevant to their aims:
1) Out of all social world sites and technologies, why am I focusing on MMOs?
2) Out of all possible interaction modalities, am I justified in limiting my
observations to the MMO server?
3) Do my results concern MMOs in general, a specific MMO, or some completely
different category?There are plenty of good answers to all three questions, but “MMOs are like virtual
versions of the real world” is not among them.
A 20-page essay explaining why thinking of “Virtual Worlds” as opposed to “the real World” causes problems from a design and analysis perspective. Instead, it suggests, we should think of them as Anselm Strauss’s social worlds (Strauss, 1978). IMHO, this fits closely with the good parts of mainstream thinking on non-online games, e.g. James Gee’s view of individual games as being or being comprised of Semiotic Domains.
I’m running out of RSS readers, in my quest to find something that Just Works, and Doesn’t Do Anything Stupid. I got close to giving up that such a thing exists, although I’ve finally found one that’s been working fine for a couple of weeks, so I think I may be OK. I was surprised quite how low the standard is.
Which means you’ll now have up to a 30 minute delay seeing feed updates.
My last post (where a conference organizer had explained that they wanted me to speak not because of my speaking ability but because of the name of the company I worked for) has drawn some really interesting feedback both from conference organizers and from conference speakers. Some of it’s been in email conversations, but you can see some good stuff in the comments to the blog post.
It’s touched on several things that I’d really like to see improved about games-industry conferences. Here’s my personal list of high-level changes I’d like to see, with a detailed explanation of each:
A conference organizer for Virtual Worlds Forum Europe approached me a few months ago asking if I’d speak at their conference this autumn, saying they’d specifically been recommended me as a speaker. I was a little cautious because the recommendations they described seemed to be for things I haven’t spoken about in a long time, but they had suggested some interesting topics and the conference was close by so I thought it would be fun and interesting to do (and not too disruptive). So I said yes.
I recently needed a reference-list of world-wide MMO publishers … and I couldn’t find anyone who was maintaining a list of them. So here’s one I put together, and hopefully next time someone needs a list they have a chance of finding one. I’ll also include approx how many MMO games they’ve published, which country they’re based in, and … whether they publish 3rd-party games (i.e. if you’re a developer, is it worth talking to them about a publishing contract?)
So, spurred by the recent updates to Moshi Monsters (http://moshimonsters.com), I though I’d take a look at the product overall.
Moshi Monsters has launched two major updates recently, one cosmetic (allowing your monster to buy “clothes”), and one functional (changes to the Daily Puzzles computer game, which is the core of the MM product for now, since it’s practically the only way to gain money to spend, and is required to level-up and purchase a wider range of items and clothing.
I used to work at Mind Candy a few years ago, and was one of a couple of people who worked on an experimental casual game that bore a huge similarity to the Daily Puzzle section of Moshi Monster (even had the same name :)). My interest to see how MindCandy would develop that idea over time, and where it might end up, was one of my initial drivers to keep playing Moshi Monsters in the early days. With the recent updates, I thought it would be interesting to do a quick review of how it works now, and to offer my own guesses at some of the motivations based on the first (unsuccessful!) attempt at Daily Puzzles.
PlayGen has just launched an interesting new game – FloodSim – which is quick to try and quite fun, but that’s not what this post is about.
This post is about detailed metrics on who’s playing, what they’re doing in game, and *what they think about it*.
Believers are wonderful people. I hire less talented believers over talented heretics every time. Three-star ability with five-star drive is how you want it. The other way around leads you to hell.
I missed the talk, but Sulka told me about it afterwards. I’ve just seen that Scott’s commented on this too, and a lot of people are complaining that this is a Bad Thing. The thing is, how many people have actually tried it?
Piece of advice for people who don’t understand search engines: if you’re going to make a mass-market product (like a Wiki), then do NOT make the standard setup – for every customer! – automatically include a link on *every page* that goes back to the front page of the installed software, but which has the same link name as the name of your product.
Try it out: search for anything non-trivial about “twiki” on google: unfortunately, most searches fail, because of this shortsighted idea – note how *any twiki anywhere on the internet* appears to search engines to be about Twiki-the-platform, even though most of them are not. Doh.
Sigh. Basic failure to understand how search engines will (have to) view your content? Decision to do something that, really, doesn’t make sense in the first place and is confusing even to humans? It’s a bit touch and go, but I reckon this is another example of Web 0.1.
(and because it’s not going to happen with FF, it’s something that Web 2.0 devs have to consider providing themselves)
“Show CPU usage and memory usage for each open window / tab”
Question someone asked on LinkedIn recently. I thought it was an interesting question, so cross-posting my answer here.
My Answer:
The first thing to do is to look through their portfolio of past work.
The second thing to do is ask them to explain it.
The good ones will be able to at least say something interesting about each project.
The great ones will be able to explain precisely why they chose the particular style that was used in each case, and what that style bought them in terms of fitting the project, or emphasizing the core content, or appealing to the target market, etc.
Generally, you also look for their knowledge of best practices in key areas. For instance, do they know the standard info about dramatic tension and story arcs from hollywood and TV dramas? Do they know about art pipelines and production methodologies – can they work with modern methods like Scrum?
But, at the end of the day, the biggest single question is: how many games have you played, and what did you like?
If you haven’t played major examples of each of the 10 most popular/valuable game genres, or aren’t able to EXTREMELY coherently explain what was good and what was bad about each and every one, then you’re probably not much good, and a long way short of being great.
To put this into perspective, I’m a CTO / Dev Director / Tech Director, and I’ve personally played in the region of several thousand computer games, and for every one of them I could tell you what was good and what was bad and make recommendations for improvements, or tell you what I’d love to plagiarise for other games. I know I’m a bit strange (in many ways), and it helps that I have a near photographic memory, but I expect a good Design Director / Creative Officer to have a similar level of experience as that. If I can do it, and also found the time to learn and become reasonably good at programming, then why didn’t they manage it too?
a.k.a. What is a game designer anyway? And how do I become one?
This has sat in my drafts folder for more than 6 months, so I’m going to just post it now, despite its incompleteness (sheesh. The whole point of starting a blog was so that I could post half-written articles and not sit on them for months at a time. Doh).
(also, I’d actually forgotten this wasn’t published yet. I only realised when reading Scott’s first “How to break into the games industry” hack)
Designer -> Lead Designer -> Creative Director -> Development Director
[it almost never ever works out that way. Unless you’re more interested in management than game design, in which case I’d question your suitability to become a game designer. Don’t worry, courtesy of the wonderful people over at TCE, I’ve got a much more accurate and informative explanation of this coming. In another post. When I get A Round Tuit]
Designer
You design things. See below for elaboration on the various kinds in e.g. MMO game development…
Typically you only design one small area of the game – a sub-system, a particular level, etc.
Senior Designer
[Don’t ask me. I was going to fill this bit in later with something you DON’T know, something new and interesting, when I’d got a coherent explanation from some better people than me.]
Basically … you take responsibility for a general area that includes various subsystems, or you take responsibility for all levels, etc. You typically are responsible for ensuring some consistency of style and balance across those areas (some of which you’ve probably farmed out to other designers).
Lead Designer
[Don’t ask me. I was going to fill this bit in later with something you DON’T know, something new and interesting, when I’d got a coherent explanation from some better people than me.]
Um. Makes the Lead Programmer’s life miserable? :) Pretend I didn’t say that. IMHO and IME, the Lead Artist/Programmer/Designer are probably more similar to each other than to any other role – they take overall responsibility for their teams, they catch things that fall through the cracks, they are the main communicator with each others’ teams (to prevent and resolve misunderstandings), etc. Just IMHO though.
A lot of them do mostly management and politics and “keeping the game good and liable to ever get finished”. But a lot of them mostly do art/code/design instead, and their management is light.
Creative Director
The person who controls the creative vision for the game, making sure everyone else knows what it is, and also making sure it’s consistent, going in the right direction, etc. For overall game design, the buck stops here.
See also this post on what I look for when hiring a Creative Director.
Game Director
Sometimes a synonym for Exec Producer (for studios where game projects are mostly run by good organizational people). Otherwise, (where projects are mostly run by good designers), this is probably the closest equivalent to a movie Director – someone who runs the overall game, not in terms of Project Management, but in terms of controlling the complete, final, product.
Design Director
…seems to be a fairly uncommon synonym for “Creative Director” – I’d guess there’s some differentiation, but I haven’t heard of enough places that have both to know what the standard differences are. The only studios I can specifically remember that have this are parts of Disney – although I have a vague memory that EA might have (had?) them.
Designer vs Producer
[ooh. This bit was going to be exciting. I was going to say some choice comments about “Producers who are frustrated Game Designers, but secretly want to be Executive Producers so that they can *order* the Lead Game Designer to make the game the way they want, instead of having to argue with them all the time. Lead Programmers who are frustrated Game Designers are pretty bad too, but aren’t usually so good at the “escalate myself via promotion until I can FORCE you to do it my way”, so not quite so dangerous]
(courtesy of Steve Wartofsky)
This is someone who lives “primarily in the spreadsheets,” and is very focused on the numeric systems underlying things like spawn rate, density of mobs in a zone, attack, defense, detect ranges and strengths, etc. etc. – back in the old days of turn-based historical wargaming design, for instance, this would be the primary design focus. Craig Taylor, Sr., is an example of someone whose specialty is in this area. He’s currently at Breakaway Games in MD, but his knowledge goes all the way back to the days of designing a number of board and card games for Avalon Hill.
This is someone who may be the same as 1., or may instead work more in the area of scripted AI, control design (for combat and character manipulation), may be part of a team that works on interface and UI design more generally, may be responsible in an MMO (Scott Jennings being an example) of understanding how AI and pathfinding issues are not only designed on the client side but how those issues are abstracted, simplified and represented on the server side, and have nothing to do with balance whatsoever, except insofar as they will have to coordinate with the balance designer to make sure that whatever systems they are responsible have the necessary elements for tuning and balance that the balance designer needs to work with.
Yes, in our world, I would at this point break this out for MMOs at least as a full-time specialty; in companies like Bioware, this is probably a full-time specialty even in a single-player game, or single-player game with peer-to-peer multiplayer capability. The quest designer is responsible for understanding how to populate the quest system with the kind of content needed, at the right delivery rate (size, rhetorical style, voice and pace – all skills more related to training in theatrical or writing disciplines than the above two specialties), at the right level and style of language for the target audience. Someone doing quest design for a Splinter Cell or Killzone or Call of Duty game would want to be pretty well boned up on the style of communications, say, in a military or espionage framework, given a particular historical or imaginary scenario, and would need to be able to deliver a series of quests (informed by the context designed by the content designer, coming up next!) that both make sense in that context, and ring true to the kinds of conventions people would expect in this kind of game from having seen action movies and the dialogue style that exists in such movies. Companies like Bioware might assign as many as six or more quest designers to a single-player game project, where quest design is a central part of the content design (Knights of the Old Republic, for instance).
This category could be broken up into a number of specialties, depending on the project, but at the fundamental level, the content designer works closely with the Creative Director for the project to develop backstory, mythology, character concept design, situation and environment concept design (in the form of documents; this person will ideally work closely with a team of visual concept designers, iteratively, to flesh out a style for the concept for a game that is both consistent and plausible at the IP level, and supported by a visual style that provides trademark-able quality for same). The content designer informs the whole project with the overall scope necessary to contain and execute a vision that is competitive in the current market with other games in the same genre, and will have expertise that is focused in a particular genre, ideally; at this point, it is getting harder and harder to simply “morph” a content designer from one genre into one for another, you really need someone with competence in the genre to execute successfully in this area these days, to provide a competitive product.
The environment designer echoes and works closely with the content designer to develop the environmental style and structure for the gameplay. The world builder/environment designer also has to work closely with the balance and systems designers, to understand the scale of a zone/area in a game sufficiently to create an environment that feels right for the type of game being developed. The world builder/environment designer has to be able to work with the technological aspects of things like tuning grids, environmental grid overlays for AI, AI pathing and pathfinding (whether scripted or generated, depending on the type of game), so that s/he can operate competently in the development of environments for a game.
There are others, but those are the key disciplines. On a typical full-scale team for a full-scale project, there are multiples of all of the above, in the case of WoW, for instance, many many multiples. And the above categories may be organized into different groups working on different areas or themes for the game. You may also get breakouts of character designers, VO designers (who should, ideally, be working with professional VO directors), audio designers, music designers, all as specialties that drive the production teams working in these areas with specific ideas, integrated with and iterated against the above design categories, who are representatives on the design team for all the different areas of content development for a game.
As Steve put it: “a little five-minute précis on the way games in North America are developed these days. ;)”
Some alternative viewpoints…
Creative Directors considerd harmful
Brian Green (Psychochild) ponders What is a Game Designer? – (“The primary job of a designer is communication … Not Really the Idea Person”)
This is a really simple thing, and you only do it once per site, but it’s really easy to do when you know how, and a pain in the ass when you don’t, if you end up being fooled into using modRewrite or similar. A couple of people I spoke to recently hadn’t been doing it this way (which I think is the recommended way?)