Above: Amy Hennig, center, talking about creativity in game narratives at MIGS 15 (with Jason Della Rocca and Jade Raymond).
Della Rocca: I want to go back to something you said, Amy, about creating safe spaces and enabling developers to feel it’s okay to fail. I strongly believe in failure as part of an exploration process, as part of discovering what is successful, but not everyone takes that view. They’re paralyzed by a notion of failure. How do you create that space?
Hennig: You talk about it a lot. It needs caveating all the time. When we show each other our work and say, “This is the bad version.” It loosens you up to say, “But I’m going to show it to you and then we can all make it better together.” And often the bad version is actually the really good version.
The challenge in a larger company sometimes — a good development culture for a team, where you create that freedom to fail and embrace failure as a movement, because it’s learning and leading to success — when you’re part of a larger organization, that can be viewed as antithetical to creating a successful company. But those of us in management positions, we can keep applying pressure upward to say, “This has to be okay. We’re going to show you stuff that isn’t done yet.”
Raymond: I agree that it’s a matter of talking about it. If you always say things, “Look, we’re going to try these five things so we know at the end we’ll have at least two good ones,” if you always approach things like that, then people understand that it’s part of the culture. It’s what’s expected.
When people from outside the game industry talk to me about what it’s like, to me there are parallels with something like comedy. You don’t ever know a joke is going to be funny until you tell it to an audience. If you’re trying to create something new and different, you don’t know if it’s going to be fun. That’s where we get into trouble. If you’re not planning for any failures, you don’t make time for the possibility.
Hennig: Failure is such a loaded word. You don’t want to say, “We should absolutely fail before we succeed.” But we get to good by showing the not-good. Some things maybe just never jell and you have to be willing to make that call. But the point is, these things take iterations. It’s the nature of our work. It’s invention. It isn’t just execution.
Trying to balance out the needs of a large organization that requires some degree of knowability when what we do is by its nature unknowable — I always talk about how what we do is like charging into a void blindfolded on a tightrope. “Follow me!” It’s a big, sustained act of faith. It’s an internal act of faith and a shared act of faith with the team. You need philosophies within the company that share that faith and extend that faith.
Della Rocca: I’m guessing that working with Lucasfilm, they follow a similar philosophy. Dealing with a licensor like that, there must be immense pressure to never show them the not-good stuff.
Hennig: It just doesn’t work to hold it too close to your vest and say, “It’s not ready yet. It’s not ready yet.” People will revert to that, too, if they ever feel like their vulnerability led to a bad result. We have to make sure it’s always safe.
When I talk about a safe space, I don’t mean that we’re going to coddle everybody and handle them with kid gloves. But we have to feel like there aren’t repercussions to saying something stupid or showing something bad. It’s the way to doing something good.
Raymond: Because you’ve been there and collaborated with them from day one, there’s also this idea that they’ve been part of the creative process, and so they have ownership as well. It goes back to the topic of collaboration and ownership. They have ownership and buy-in and more passion and all that stuff. You have people on Lucasfilm’s team who are part of everything you’re doing.
Above: Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens on Dec. 18. EA is making films based on the movies.
Hennig: Exactly. It was very wise of them to set it up that way. That’s how they deal with people in their own company as well. They try to give them lots of space, even though that might involve change and unknowability too. It wasn’t what I would have expected, coming into a situation with a couple of big companies like EA and Lucasfilm and this giant IP that applies so much pressure. They’re absolutely collaborating with us.
One of the challenges — there’s this great opportunity in the fact that the galaxy is so much bigger than the films we’ve seen so far. They’ve worked very closely with their creatives to say, “Don’t just fall back on what we know. Our job, working together, is to explore and make more in the spirit of what’s dear to us. Show how much bigger the galaxy is with new characters and new stories.”
Della Rocca: The notion of perfectionism — as you say, some people keep their work close to the chest. They have ideas, but they may not want to show them yet. I tend to see that as a signal of fear. It’s not that they’re actually a perfectionist. They just don’t want to show their work because they don’t have that confidence. They don’t feel that it’s safe enough to reveal what they’re working on.
Hennig: Right. And they’ve probably suffered consequences for doing that in the past. That’s why we have to protect folks from that. But again, with Lucasfilm, because they’re creatives — because they’re filmmakers and writers themselves — they’ve embraced us in the story group. We’re developing the story with them, bringing in raw ideas and saying, “What about this? What about that?” And they say, “Well, not that, but…” We bounce off each other.
Working with Doug Chiang as our art director has been amazing. It’s not just, “We did some art. Can we get a rubber stamp?” We just bring all the raw artwork to him, lay it on the table, get out a Sharpie and say, “What’s working for you? What’s landing? What isn’t?” To be able to do stuff within the Star Wars canon and have it not only blessed by them but have them as collaborators — it’s honestly kind of mind-blowing.
Della Rocca: I liked your comedy analogy. It makes me think of playtesting, taking our games and putting them in front of real players and seeing if the joke works, if the gameplay is fun. Ubisoft in particular, with the Assassin’s Creed franchise — that was heavily developed through the playtesting process, leveraging user input for a big part of that. I’m curious to know to what extent you’re taking that into current projects and leveraging playtest methodologies and user research.
Raymond: It’s key. One thing that’s interesting as you go through testing at the end of a game: No matter what game you’re working on, there’s a very strong correlation between getting the difficulty level right and fun.
The challenge is, as games become more and more mass-market and the audiences become more broad—Especially with a Star Wars game, where you’re going to bring in everything from core fans to someone who doesn’t necessarily play games often, how to you get difficulty right so that everyone is having fun? That’s the kind of thing that can playtesting can help highlight.
Above: EA is making games based on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and other Star Wars stories.
Hennig: We were big believers at Naughty Dog too, and also at EA. We bring in people on a frequent basis. You might bring in 10 or 12 people. You should make sure it’s on site. Make sure you can watch them. Make sure you see what they do. Also, make sure you’re getting metrics out. That was the most useful thing. We could collate all this stuff and look at where we had difficulty spikes, where people were stuck for too long.
You could see it in people’s body language, too. If they’re into it and leaning forward, and then they pull back, take a note. Some of this stuff is almost anthropological observation when you’re sitting in the room with them. When we got things right, on the Uncharted games and on The Last of Us, it was because we went through such rigorous testing to make sure pacing wasn’t getting sacrificed.
Della Rocca: This is one of the major challenges for indies. They tend to use themselves or other developers as testers. Often when we play indie games for the first time, they’re super hard. I’m not a pro gamer, but I’m still a gamer, and I just die.
Hennig: Some designers pride themselves on punishing the player.
Della Rocca: But I think in most cases they just don’t realize, because they’ve played and tested it themselves for so long. At Execution Labs we instill a rigor around testing on a regular basis. We video people. We have surveys. It’s a core part of the process, even for small indie teams.
It’s a humbling process, when you take a game that you think is so amazing and you put it in front of players. They’re frustrated. They don’t know where to go or what to do. We see it all the time.
Raymond: They almost always don’t play it the way you thought they would.
Hennig: Sometimes they seem like they’re getting stuck, but in reality they’re just enjoying being lost. If you ask them, they say, “Oh, no, I was having fun.” In the metrics it shows up as they were in the level way too long, but they were just dicking around and enjoying it. “Were you having a hard time?” “No. Just looking at the bricks.”
We talk about a lot of high-level philosophies up here, but that’s kind of what it comes down to. It’s not just a matter of, “Here’s a bunch of tips and tricks and things you can do.” It really is the attitude. One thing I’ve talked about before in terms of making that analogy to how I work with actors. People have tried to emulate our process, but they didn’t emulate the why of what we’ve done, only the how. Then they don’t get our results and they don’t understand why. It’s because they weren’t carrying the philosophy with them.