Ken S. McAllister, University of Arizona
Judd Ethan Ruggill, Arizona State University
Co-Directors, The Learning Games Initiative

I think a lot of ‘im. He thinks a lot of me. And..uh..there ain’t a thing that he wouldn’t do for me. There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for him. That’s the way we go through life, doing nothin’ for each other.

—Ralph Stanley, Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop

Photo courtesy of thegoldguys.blogspot.com

Game educators are an unruly (albeit fun and interesting) bunch. They hail from diverse disciplines, deploy disparate pedagogies, and prize different parts of the medium with which they work. Get a room full of them together and ask how and what they teach and you’ll be capsized by a wave of unique answers (a heterogeneity that mirrors the complexity and adaptability of the game medium itself).

The one thing game educators perennially seem to agree on, though, regardless of their individual ways of seeing and doing is the importance of collaboration to contemporary game development. Educators know well that the game auteur is today more myth than possibility, particularly in the commercial world where the scope of projects often exceeds what scores of talented, driven people working hand in glove, night and day, can produce over the course of a year. Even the simplest games are vastly complex artifacts, requiring the synergy of multiple and diverse skills, practices, people, and technologies to create. Game development demands excellent teamwork, and lots of it, something even the most iconoclastic of game educators will trumpet from the rooftops if given half the chance.

There is a distinct difference, however, between teamwork and collaboration, a difference game educators don’t always recognize and (much to the detriment of their medium and its field) don’t always teach. Teamwork involves the ability to work side by side in pursuit of a specific goal. It is the assemblage of often disparate talents and trajectories into an organized, well-oiled machine capable of grand things—winning a Superbowl, building a skyscraper, producing a good game, and so on. Collaboration, by contrast, is more complex and (unfortunately) elusive. It, too, is a kind of confluence—and in fact depends on teamwork—but it also involves sacrifice and mutation. Collaborators not only work together toward an end, but also give up something of themselves in the process. Rather than always teaching from the comfort of their expertise, collaborators routinely embrace the humilities of learning. Whereas teamwork is synergistic—the sum of the parts adds up to a well-integrated and seemingly greater whole—collaboration is synthetic. It is the melding of perspectives, expertise, respect, concession, and sense of self that generates something new, neither lesser nor greater than its constitutive elements but altogether different. As a result, while teamwork can produce something grand—a good game such as Punch-Out! (2009, Nintendo), for example—collaboration can produce a kind of magic that materializes surprising greatness, as in BioShock (2007, 2K Games).

Ken S. McAllister, University of Arizona

The real value of this magic, though, is not in its ability to conjure certain economic, artistic, or technological ends. Instead, the value is in the way collaboration transforms the means by which such ends are achieved. For instance, collaboration turns the abidance that so often characterizes team-based work (e.g., “Shelia and her crew did that part”; “We’re still waiting for AI to finish up so we can finalize our level designs and then consult Legal”) into holistic devotion, that is, into the understanding that one’s ownership extends to every part of a project, regardless of how much or little hands-on work was done personally. This in turn generates a tremendous amount of pride and sense of responsibility, which feed into the work itself. Moreover, because collaborators have a vested interest in the project as a whole, they tend to be more attuned to the vagaries of the various development processes and pipelines, which makes for a more flexible and multi-skilled partnership. Team members can competently shore up areas beyond their own should the need arise (which it always does in game development—deadlines wait for no one, particularly when publishers’ money is on the line), or at least have a reasonable understanding of the pressures in play for their colleagues. This goes a long way toward soothing the inevitable tensions that are part of any transdisciplinary endeavor, as well as optimizing workflow patterns that can then be leveraged in both contiguous and future projects.

Like stage or table magic, however, the art of collaboration requires time and training to perfect. Would-be collaborators must not only learn to see and work at both macro and micro levels simultaneously, but also become comfortable occupying multiple and changing roles within these levels and within the development team as a whole. After all, collaboration is an inherently dynamic process. This is especially true in the game industry, where the state of the art, the market, and technology can change overnight (think of how quickly the Sega Dreamcast’s copy protection codec was cracked). Developers who are unable or unwilling to adapt wind up in the uncomfortable position of releasing terrible games, watching their hard work dissolve into vaporware, or being forced from the industry altogether. Hence the need for game educators to take a more active role in teaching the art and science of collaboration: students simply do not have the luxury of on-the-job training. They must be practiced collaborators—not just experienced team members—before they enter the job market.

Judd Ethan Ruggill, Arizona State University

Fortunately, there are many different ways to teach the rudiments of collaboration, from well-worn corporate team-building and trust exercises to radical interpersonal and artistic experiments. Among the techniques we’ve found most useful in our work—in addition to teaching game studies classes, we co-direct the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary and international research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games—is the application of the principle of “sweat equity.” With sweat equity, effort—not a given deliverable—is the metric; that is, how people work is emphasized over the tangibles they produce. A pedagogy built around this principle would make it clear that team members are only as good as the ways they are able to relate to one another and to the project as a whole.

This is not how quality typically gets measured in the game industry—there, unit sales numbers and Metacritic scores reign supreme—but collaboration is the catalyst of the highest quality. Good collaboration means delivering a strong product on time and on budget, with a minimum of interpersonal strife, and thus minimal headaches for publishers whose purses are on the line and whose stomachs are busy ulcerating. The industry is full of would-be’s and could-be’s, yet it always pays top dollar for talent that works and plays well with others, i.e., collaborators. Unfortunately, not everyone is so talented.

Consider a project we completed recently with “Bill,” a colleague with whom we’d always wanted to work but never had. Bill has well-honed technical chops, is able to generate solid work rapidly and easily, is thoroughly easy-going, and is an all-around nice guy. He is, in many ways, a perfect partner. And yet, Bill’s ability to collaborate is not nearly so dreamy. Indeed, it is more in keeping with the relationship Ralph Stanley describes in the epigraph above, the whole idea of “doing nothin’ for each other.” Bill certainly contributed cheerfully and deftly whenever asked over the course of our project, but there was no personal investment from him in the development process beyond his slice of the pie, nor an assumption by him of any ownership of the project itself. He acted more like a hired hand than a collaborator, which ultimately diminished the transformative potential of our work together. It also caused a fair bit of strife at one point when the proverbial ship caught fire and he never made a move to help put out the flames (and through his inaction actually hastened the burning). Even though the project turned out well enough in the end, it was marked by the shadow of missed opportunity, as if something great had passed us by. This is never the case in a true collaboration, where the quintessential product is deep, multi-faceted, and coadjuvant teaching and learning. What we learned from Bill were not the secrets of his unusual and interesting way of problem-solving, something that would be incredibly useful to us in all the projects we do. Rather, we learned only that he does good work, which in the end was kind of disappointing (as strange as that sounds).

So how does one cultivate the commitment to sweat equity among future game developers, that is, a commitment to collaboration as well as teamwork? One way is to teach game development as the “art of the jam,” as if the process were akin to playing in a garage band where the musicians switch instruments after every song. While they may never become expert in every instrument, the musicians do come to know more intimately the dynamics of each and the band as a whole, in effect supplementing the compartmentalized knowledge of expertise with the overarching knowledge of broad experience. Game education classes can function similarly, with programmers trying their hand at creating art assets, artists learning the rhythm of project management, and managers getting some programming experience under their belts. These need not be deep engagements, just enough to impart the flavor of the different jobs (it’s not fair to ask everyone to know everything about everything, but it’s quite reasonable to insist that they know a bit more than a tiny bit about everything). A couple of rounds switching chairs is all it takes to get a functional sense of the different roles and the variety of ways they might fit together, a realization that changes not only how specific jobs are approached, but also (and more importantly) how the art of game development functions best when it’s characterized by flow.

If it sounds like we’re advocating for dilettantism, that’s because we are, at least in part. Game developers today need a wide range of skills to be successful in the market, a market that’s bursting at the seams with talented, motivated job-seekers who are increasingly being asked to be even more talented and multi-faceted (such is the nature of a buyer’s market). By the same token, specific expertise is still the coin of the realm throughout the game industry, and rightfully so—to make the best, one needs to be the best. But expertise is made all the more productive when it is contextualized within the larger process of development. That’s when nuance, synthesis, profound understanding, and hard work converge.

To state the obvious, this kind of convergence doesn’t happen quickly, nor is it permanent. As is the case with most activities forged on interpersonal communication, developing effective collaborative skills takes regular practice, reflection, and adaptation. For one thing, collaboration is unnatural (except in exceedingly rare cases): it requires participants to keep their egos in check and occasionally sacrifice their ideas or practices for someone else’s. Sure, such sacrifices are often just good for group coherence—everyone gets a chance to contribute something—but more importantly, they’re good for enhancing the end product. The fact is that sometimes other people’s work is simply better. The ability to recognize this and to say “yeah, forget what I said—your idea is the way to go” is vital for successful collaboration. This ability has obvious consequences for the rank-and-file, but it also has implications for the suits. It shouldn’t fall to the project manager alone, for example, to assess each fork in a project’s road; in a collaboration, everyone exercises that judgement, even when it means their own work gets tossed in the circular file.

Another reason why collaborative skills must be regularly honed is because there’s a kind of sixth sense that people develop when they collaborate often. In the pre-collaboration stage—when a project is in the offing and everyone is trying to figure out whether or not they should put water in the camel and join the caravan—one’s skills at reading people must be excellent. Is the somewhat ornery old-timer likely to be a gruff but invaluable font of wisdom or an aggravating albatross? Will the sarcastic AI genius get along with the cowboy sound engineer? And how about you? Will you really be able to pull off this project with these particular people and objectives? Answers to such questions will ultimately come down to a best guess, of course, but the more diverse experiences and regular practice one has, the more accurate the guess will be.

“Diverse” experience is key here for developing collaborative skills over the long term. Collaborating well with one group for eighteen months is excellent practice, but it’s not particularly diverse; even semi-broken teams can get their collective mojo working in short bursts. It’s working with many different types of people in many different contexts and under many different sorts of pressure that creates an excellent collaborator. Such a person will know quickly how best to work with people in order to yield a robust final result while also experiencing—and helping to generate for others—considerable job satisfaction. Learning this skill is never completed, but teaching students its rudiments will help them to practice it early, effectively, and often, thereby giving them a considerable edge as job seekers and doers.

Finally, it’s worth noting that—as with our friend “Bill”—there are some people who just don’t take to collaboration. For whatever reasons—some more forgivable than others—they can’t deal with the negotiations necessary for collaborating a project into being. That’s okay. If non-collaborative folks have important contributions to the project, let them be consultants. And if they aren’t necessary, avoid them. These skills, too, are important to teach burgeoning collaborators: not only must one be good at initiating and maintaining collaborative partnerships, but one must also know how to protect those partnerships from outside forces that might prove destructive. Collaborations—inchoate ones especially—are often very delicately balanced and can be upended easily. For students who, after considerable and earnest practice, discern that they themselves are not cut out for collaborative work, don’t force the issue further. Having learned (if not internalized) the value of collaboration, help them exercise the art of expert external support of collaborative teams. Here again, practice and diversity offer both resilience to disruption and aptitude for sussing out moments when avoidance is the wisest course of action.

To paraphrase Ralph Stanley II, then, the good doctor’s good-natured son, collaboration is a lot like applause: “you just can’t hardly overdo it” (ibid.).

Works Cited

Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. Dcn Records, 2002. CD.