Is finding great game designers another Quarterback Problem?
There’s an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker discussing what he calls the Quarterback Problem. In short, there are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about a candidate will accurately predict how they’ll do once they’re hired. That, combined with reading Joel Spolsky talking about hiring good coders, led me to give some thought to the issues in the games industry. Years of hiring game and level designers, and being involved with the hiring of programmers, artists and producers has me thinking that there are some definite parallels with finding good people in games – and while there’s a lot of ink spilt talking about hiring good coders or artists, there’s not many people talking about how to hire great designers.
One of the main points made in Gladwell’s article is that the same is true of teachers – and the impact that a good teacher can make on their students is exceptional. I won’t try and suggest that good designers are as important as teachers – but they can and will make a substantial impact on the quality of what can be a multimillion dollar project. It’s worth trying to find great ones.
Yet, having sat through a lot of interviews (on both sides of the table) I’ve been largely surprised at the lack of precision involved in hiring designers. In fact, the higher the position being hired for, the less substantial the process seems – ultimately boiling down to hiring creative directors without requiring a design test of any kind.
Even so, is the traditional design test a great tool for finding good designers? For people who haven’t had to do one, most companies ask prospective designers to fill out a design test. It’s basically a document that asks the candidate to write up a spec for an example level (usually a level in the game or sort of game they’ll be working on). At Pandemic, we used the first Destroy All Humans! as our example for the design test, and asked people to design a mechanic, ask how they would bind together the saucer and on foot mechanics, then ask them to develop a weapon and scenario for the game, along with asset lists.
Now, this is a good representation of one of the tasks a designer will regularly need to do – documentation and nice logical spec designs are crucially important to ensuring that tasks begin nicely. As I’ve worked in software development over the years however, it’s become clear that this is really only the beginning of the job of a designer – and in many ways, it’s the easiest part.
Where a great designer really shows their chops is in their ability to simplify and convey the goals of the game, to implement exciting play, to respond to user testing and build things better, and to work with everyone else needed to get those elements into the game. This ability to collaborate and respond to the experiences players have while engaging with the things you’ve built (and to put yourself into the players shoes in advance) are much harder elements to test.
So what’s the best response? One of the suggestions is to throw the gates wide open, and see who pans out. That seems like a good idea (and one I’m at least partially in favor of) but it can be very difficult to put into practice under the normal time pressure of game development. Generally speaking, you’ll need to find designers and ship a game with them over the course of two years – and it’s hard to simply hire 20 people with the intent of cutting them down to 5 after a few months. That approach may fly in financial services, but it’s not so easy in game development – especially as the cost (in terms of the resources of the rest of the team training up new staff) of each new hire is highest during those first few months.
My first suggestion is that it’s absolutely key to know what you’re looking for. This sounds simple, but my experiences tend to suggest it’s almost unheard of with designers. People are looking for someone who comes across well during the interview, or who can talk about games, or who has nice hair … it’s rare that a studio has a codified set of requirements that outline exactly what they’re looking for.
So first, determine what makes a good designer for your studio. Every studio works slightly (or extremely) differently, so the requirements you have will differ. At Pandemic, I was hiring designers on the following criteria :
1. Collaboration : We had an extremely high focus on working with the team to achieve goals, and our designers were the ones ultimately responsible for putting assets into the game. So a key part of their job would be working with the artists to make sure it looked right, and the programmers to make sure it worked right. For our team, collaboration was a must.
2. Responsibility : Related to the above, we needed to find people who would take responsibility for the things they were working on. On our team, designers were both the first port of call and the last responsible for anything in the game – and that meant making sure that we hired people who would take pride in what they implemented. In a lot of ways, this is equivalent to the “Get Things Done” requirement in Joel’s article on hiring.
3. Insight : Understanding how game mechanics work, and what changes have which impacts on the actual game. From insight comes craft – the ability to create elegant structures, to make changes which simplify and improve the game you’re working on.
Now, with those three criteria in hand (while I’m not proposing these as universals, they’re a good start) I set out to try my best to find ways to test for them. It’s not as easy as you might think, and I’m not suggesting there are any magic questions that will give you a positive test as to whether someone has the requirements.
Nonetheless, armed with explicit knowledge of what I was looking for, it became much easier to ask questions and have a conversation around those areas. I can ask which games the candidate has played, and then (providing it’s a game I’m familiar with) we can start to talk about the themes and mechanics. Not only is this one of the things I enjoy, it generally gives me a sense of the way the person thinks about mechanics. In terms of collaboration, I’d ask about past working experiences they’d enjoyed – both to get a sense of what they’d done in the past, and also to see if it involved other people. If so, I’d dig deeper and ask how they worked with those people.
So generally, setting criteria and conversing around them can give a pretty good impression as to whether the people you’re hiring have the basic chops or not. The key to building a system that works, however, is to add some feedback to it. As a result, I’d keep notes as we went through each hire, and then return to those six months or a year later and reflect on what had worked, and what hadn’t. Over time, this allows me to refine and reflect on how the criteria I’ve selected have turned out – and whether it needs any tweaking.
Even with all this in hand, hiring great designers remains somewhat hit and miss – I know some criteria that make it easier to work well in the studio setup we had, and have some ideas as to how to search for people who meet those criteria. Nonetheless, I was often surprised (and generally pleasantly!) by the new approaches and insight the designers I was fortunate enough to work for brought to the table. I’m interested in what sorts of approaches other people use – and how that’s working out for them!
