Life In Wartime

@Muckbeast

I had exactly the same thoughts when reading the article. The closest you get to an insightful commentary is the segment quoted in this blog entry.

I suspect two things:

The first, that the NDA which Electronic Arts has in place is so exhaustive that the guy couldn’t comment on the weather without an attorney showing up on his doorstep.

The second, that he was just a lowly peon, so expecting him to have anything insightful to say about Warhammer Online is like expecting a Private in Iraq to comment on the entire theatre of operations. And what can he safely say, except “it’s great” or “it sucks”? He probably couldn’t get clearance to say either anyway. And that’s the problem; we read this for the “screw you, sir” moments, always few and far between.

So you get exactly what that italicized paragraph at the beginning describes: Press-release material and lots of I-thinks. Not worth four pages, let alone one.

Still, we have a few interesting points to discuss. The first seems to be this belief that a CSR job is the gateway to game designing, even though I’m pretty sure that people who design games are directly hired from technical schools and universities which teach appropriate courses (especially, I surmise, programming).

That reminds me of a retail place where I worked, where they’d hire people with sales experience, didn’t matter whether it was in shoes or real estate, or any unrelated product, as long as they had experience with sales with commission pay. I, on the other hand, worked in the storeroom, knew every last thing about a large part of the goods in our regular inventory, and had to make sure everything was tidy in the showroom; when the sales personnel were too clueless to figure out what they were selling, they often sought me out, not just on S&H matters (also part of my duties), but on the product itself.

Yet when I asked, not particularly seriously, whether I could transfer to sales, the predictable response was, sorry, but you don’t have sales experience. They’d sooner get a door-to-door cosmetics peddler who knew nothing about our line of products than someone like me, who was knowledgeable about what the company was selling. But hey, at least I was spared having to lie about the genuine quality of what we offered, even though my pay was shit as a result of being overhead.

So yeah, if Monken had continued working at EA (or, I suspect, any other place in the games industry), he would just have earned points as a CSR — meaningless in the larger scheme of things. Maybe they’d have given him a nice little promotion, but I suspect it would have been like the Army; even if he had had job security and spent twenty years there, he’d have ended up as Sergeant Major, perhaps an object of respect among lowly CSR’s, but with every immature loudmouth right out of West Point barking orders at him nonetheless. Experience means nothing, for they always know better.

As for WOTLK and its impact on WAR’s subscription figures, I really can’t say. I played WoW for the first time a few months after WAR, and the games were too identical to make a difference — in which case, the incumbent wins. Still, I remember that when I saw WAR being discussed in the months leading up to its release, those who were most interested in it were people who despised WoW and all that it stood for, and who definitely wouldn’t be standing in line to get a copy of Lich King; so I would think that, at the exact opposite of Monken, WAR’s problem was not a case of losing players who returned to WoW with WOTLK, it was a case of losing players who wanted something else than WoW (perhaps a 2008 version of DAoC, which I never played), and, finding a clone with perhaps somewhat better PvP, said, “no, thank you”.

@Angelworks

Perhaps this is because the industry is too young. Film school, for instance, really took off when? The seventies maybe? If I recall, it is now the third stage of the industry, right after the pioneers (who just preferred to tinker with stuff), and the guys who started out in the mailroom. So far, the games parallel is remarkably similar, and what we are discussing is whether Phase 3, the professionals trained through proper channels, has already kicked in.

And even then, those making films don’t run the studios; if they’re successful, they sometimes own production houses but they still need the studios’ money. The suits running the industry are just your usual MBA types.

But I suspect there is a difference between tech support and typical CSR work. I have always understood tech support to be guys who were knowledgeable about coding yet socially functioning (enough, at least, to be able to handle irate customers). CSR work just gets you a list of glitches, which you pass on to the highers-up, and customer service representatives are the your-call-is-important-to-us guys, more in the PR line than technical workers.

If anything, Monken’s profile ( linkedin.com/pub/jeremy-monken/7/486/941 ) indicates some credentials in graphic design, so I have no idea what he majored in; J-school perhaps? But I see nothing in the way of a programming background.

@geldonyetich

I think I may have read that article before. I certainly agree with most of it. I remember the case of someone I knew who once took a technical course that was so tailored to the needs of one employer (who actually paid for it) that it was thoroughly useless for even their competitors. And right after he finished, the company started laying off people; they eventually rehired, but I can’t recall whether the guy ever ended up working at the place in question. So I would never go for a narrow course of study that ends up restricting me.

But the opposite — too vague — isn’t better. I’m all for a liberal education, except that it doesn’t seem to be valued in and of itself these days. Either it’s a springboard to an MBA or law school, or it’s a long, windy (and long-winded) road to the academic stratosphere.

And I can certainly see the author’s point: Even if you do get hired, you’ll just be another guy on the assembly line, and it won’t ever get you into the manager’s armchair upstairs. The lesson I get from this article is not even that, to enter the games industry, I should take my time, study broadly and start small, but that I should never even bother entering it. I remember a previous discussion we had, where I compared an early Garriott selling his games out of Ziploc bags, and Yahtzee’s independent games. Garriott was one those pioneers I mentioned above; he was there first, and he helped form the industry (and I’m a bit sad for him that it had to end like it did). A guy like Yahtzee is twenty years too late to hope for this sort of career. He doesn’t seem to be much of an industry insider (besides, he’s in Australia), and if he tried to enter it, he’d probably be kept down because of his lack of experience — not of game design, but of the industry itself.

Sure, you’ll get the occasional indie hotshots who, like for films, will manage to make it to the majors based on projects with z-grade budgets (Robert Rodriguez), even if just to fizzle later on (the Blair Witch guys), and everyone will talk about them for a while, because you need the occasional Horatio Alger story to maintain the status quo. Maybe Yahtzee could end up as an example of that for the games industry. But as much as these people might be the exception that confirms the rule that no-one and nothing can come from outside the industry and immediately make it to the top, they have the unfortunate tendency to inspire thousands of would-be screenwriters or video game designers. Regardless of talent, I certainly hope that those who seek to emulate such successes realize that what they are doing is going for the most part to be a complete waste of time.

(And I’ve never understood people who wrote screenplays instead of stage plays or a novel; likewise those who dream of designing a video game but wouldn’t even give a moment’s thought to trying to put together a board game. One seems a much more realistic objective than the other.)

“Its hard feeling bad for a guy with desilusions.”

Not really, if this is, as I suspect, a modern-day case of Plato’s cave, usually meaning you are not aware of anything beyond your cubicle. You made that Titanic analogy in a previous post, and I can’t avoid remembering those pumping the water in the sixth compartment, where the gash ended, who thought they were succeeding because the water was receding — until it flowed over from the previous compartment.

So Monken’s reality of Warhammer is what he, as a CSR, could see and what he had to deal with; hence, gold farmers and cheaters. The guys who made his job miserable were to be blamed for the failure of the entire game, and it’s certainly better-looking on your resume that you should blame them instead of the suits upstairs. It’s a cockamamie reasoning, yeah, but it’s the only one he could make on which he could pretend to have knowledge — that and blaming WoW. If he had gone on and pinned it on the developers’ decision to not include a human tank class for Order, we would have seen it as the empty theorycraft it would have been.

What particularly annoys me about this article is that it is being sold as an insider’s look — yes, the author was a journalist, and he has writing credentials, but you don’t read this piece because he was a games reviewer; you read this for no other reason than because he was working for EA Mythic when Warhammer went live. If a former White House butler wrote a book called “Twenty Years of Serving Presidents”, and assuming that somehow it didn’t get vetted to death, would you read it to pick up tips on how to polish silverware?

Sure, I’m sick of “belligerent investigative Watergate reporting with a touch of tabloid gossip”, but when you see an article touted as being written by an insider, you expect something in the way of, well, inside information.

Yet here is the breakdown, page by page, of the Escapist article:

Page 1) Author’s background, with so many details that he should have produced an article thrice as long to match it. He mentions in passing that this job would whet his journalistic curiosity; fair enough.

Page 2) How great he feels being a CSR, what an eclectic bunch they are, and the promotional material looks great. WoW, however, shows up at the bottom of the page to sow the seeds of destruction in paradise.

Page 3) The downturn. And at the bottom of the page, we get that anecdote with the catered meals. It’s the best part of the story. Why? Because it’s the only one, outside of the layoffs themselves, which involves the company in anything other than a public (PR, financial statement, etc.) setting. If the CSR’s had ordered pizza and paid for it themselves, it might have given some flavour as to their work environment, but it would have said nothing about working for EA.

But even that moment with the corn is so superficial, so fleeting, that it leaves the weakest of imprints, and all I’m thinking is that I might as well have been reading Douglas Coupland; wasn’t jPod‘s company based on EA Vancouver? And didn’t Coupland expose the excesses of the “everybody’s-an-aspie-and-it-feels-great” mentality which Monken unintentionally brings up when he mentions “breaks playing Rock Band in the console-filled breakrooms”, “some Simpsons quote” or “a bizarre internet meme” thrown around among people who “all shared the same interests”? Perhaps Monken enjoyed it, but I felt queasy just reading that, and I can picture myself going mad in such a work environment. I’ve never been a snob, but being immersed in such mind-numbing superficiality might well have tipped me over the line.

Page 4) The Protracted Goodbye.

It’s all about how the author feels, in between segments culled from press announcements. Compare the segment Mr. Jennings quoted with the rest of the article; completely different.

Mind you, I’m not blaming Monken for his lackluster article; I’m blaming Electronic Arts for making him unable to discuss any aspect of working at EA, including “internal conversations”. But he could have tried to weave in certain anecdotes about his workplace that tell you something of the company.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean. Remember that retail place I worked for that I mentioned above? Okay, I’ll tell you this much: We were selling home appliances, and the store where I worked was the Siberia of the chain, as we were specializing in discontinued floor models from other stores, items damaged in shipping, and repaired defective stuff (which the client, needless to say, did not know about). So we were selling unpacked appliances, all exhibited as floor models and sold on a case-by-case basis; and as soon as one sold, it had to be replaced by another item from our extensive backstore. One day, the guy in charge of purchasing for the entire chain showed up (remember, we were in Siberia, so we rarely saw him), and started demanding that all refrigerators on the sales floor be arranged according to height. And when one of them sold, and that the replacement was of a different height, we had to move all the others to make sure the height order was respected. In a good evening, we could sell five or six such refrigerators, and our skeleton staff in the back had to take care of all other departments as well. But what did the purchasing guy know, he never came around, and even the store manager told us to disregard his request the moment he walked out of the door.

This, I like to think, is a revealing anecdote. Monken’s article has nothing of the sort. But then, he’s a freelancer, and they’re Electronic Arts.

World of Warcraft taught one lesson. Polish your damn game.

The problem starts when polishing your damn game to meet the Warcraft-set expectations requires a Warcraft budget and, for that, a Warcraft-sized prospective player base — the lowest common denominator. No thanks.

Yeah, by all means polish it, iron out the bugs, get rid of the game crashes (which were my main reason for leaving WAR, by the way) and definitely finish your game by release, but don’t go for those graphical excesses (Conan was a prime example).