Don Daglow's Blog

So What Matters Most to You?

So What Matters Most to You?

I've been hobbling on a sprained ankle this week, which forced me to sit still and think for the first couple of days until the pain subsided.  I started out thinking about an online casual game we're working on.  Three stream-of-consciousness links later I remembered a lunch I had with a friend of mine a few years ago.

 

A Case Study

Here's the problem he wanted to discuss, altered in a number of places so my friends won't recognize who was at that lunch!

My friend is a producer for a major publisher.  The project was a high-profile RTS for the PC.  The game had innovative game play, a decent budget, and as an internal project it was on track for a good marketing push when it shipped.  In short, the title would get a fair chance at being discovered and bought by gamers.  It could be a hit.

Not all projects are that lucky.  A lot of games compete just to get noticed, to rise above the noise level and even get considered by consumers.

The lead environment artist on the project was talented and understood games.  He worked well with the lead animator and the other artists, and was the de facto art director for the project since the other art leads looked up to him and there was no project AD. 

The levels had variety and the terrain looked natural.  But on one level there was a problem.  The colors of several primary units blended into the background and they were hard to see.  The manager had noticed it, but said nothing and let it go for a week to see what comments they got from the first in-house playtests.  "Units are hard to see on Level X" came up on the playtest feedback.

The manager asked the artist to change the colors of the level so the units would be displayed clearly against the background.  The artist refused -- to him the level looked perfectly fine.  They went back and forth, and the manager was unsure what to do.  This was their first project together and after several months it was the first time they'd ever hit an impasse.  He asked the environments lead to think about it but, given the defensive tone, did not give a direct order to make the changes.

 

The Manager's Dilemma

So we're sitting at lunch and the frustrated manager is running through his choices.  As usual, I had no magical answers, so I spent most of the time asking him questions. 

In the end, I suggested he sit down alone in a room and rank "the list of things you want to be true at the end of the project."  I think it works best when written on Yellow Stickies, so you can move them around easily.  Once you look at the final, ranked list it usually tells you what you need to do next. 

Postscript: A reader made a good comment that this implies the manager may choose to tell the artist to shut up and do what he's told.  How the final decision is crafted and shared is a topic for another day.  In this case the artist had a history of being reasonable and this felt like a strange exception.  IMHO a longer, thoughtful private discussion between the two should precede any final decision.  By the time this manager took me to lunch those long talks had already happened.

Here are some things that might have been on his list, in no particular order:

• The game will ship on schedule.
• The artist will do what he's asked whenever the manager asks him to do it.
• The artist will be happy and motivated and spread a positive mood in the office.
• The manager will be happy and motivated and not yell at the kids when he gets home.
• The game will be a hit and sell millions of copies.
• Players will be able to enjoy each level of the game and see all the units clearly on the terrain.
• The game will earn a 90+ on GameRankings.
• Team Members on this project may argue a point, but in the end will do the things the manager instructs them to do.
• The other artists won't get upset because a non-artist told the environments lead what to do.
• The lead environments artist will still be working for the company when the project ships.
• The lead environments artist will still be working for the company a year after the project ships.
• The team will display good morale, stay focused on the work at hand and not be distracted by personal issues.

 

 

How would you have ranked the list above if you were the Producer?

Are you struggling with a tough issue on your project?  What happens if you list all the things you want to be true at the end of the project and rank them based on their importance?

Often that ranked list suggests changes in how you're running a project.  What would you do differently next Monday morning if you were actually going to implement those priorities in all your actions and decisions?

If you're not willing to make those changes next Monday morning, why not?

 

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow.

What I Learned Sitting in the Airport

 

So I'm sitting here waiting for my flight, minding my own business.  Another of those "days where I could have caught an earlier flight if only..."  You know the sad story so well I don't even need to tell it.

I'm on my computer, working on a different blog post you'll see here soon.

A woman walks in, sits near me, takes out her cell phone and proceeds to talk with someone for about half an hour.  She does about 90% of the talking.  The other person occasionally says something.

A while later a man comes in and sits two tables away from me.  He takes out his cell phone and proceeds to talk.  Over the next twenty minutes I learn that someone named Frank just got fired, that no one has ever liked Al, that Ed just hired someone who lives in Kauai to serve accounts in Honolulu and when will Anna Luisa realize Ed is stupid, and on and on and on...

So what the heck do these two people have to do with game development?

 

 

Question 1: 

If your manager were sitting in an airport and talking on the phone about things at work, what kinds of things would they say?  What names would be brought up?  What tone would he/she use?

Would he or she do 90% of the talking?  70%?  50%?  Would there be derisive comments about other people?

If you imitated your manager on that call, just joking around, how confident are you that you'd get at least the tone of your manager's conversation right?  After they've worked together for a while many people can imitate their managers well enough to crack up their co-workers.  Can you?

Question 2:

What if the people who report to you (or a key peer, or that animator without whom you'd be sunk, or...) were asked what you'd sound like when you're talking about work on the phone with a friend?  What if they imitated what you'd be like on that phone call, without any worries about it impacting their jobs?

What percentage of the time would they predict that you talked?  50%?  More?  Would there be demeaning comments about people? 

The person they imitate, does that feel like you?

If the person they imitate talking in the airport doesn't sound like you, what would you have to change about your work style in order to inspire the person imitating you to change their act? 

What would you have to do differently in order for the imitation of you to become something you'd like to hear?

If you know what changes you'd have to make, what keeps you from making them?

Maybe you think you'll like hearing your direct reports imitate you talking about work.  In the management training exercises I've been through, very few managers sound to others the way they think they sound to themselves.  When I was on the receiving end of "this is what we think you sound like" it was not a happy day in my management training life, even though I saw my peers having similar experiences with their own styles.

So let me put the question out there one more time, to mull over in your private heart of hearts:  What would you have to do differently in order for that team member's imitation of you to become something you'd like to hear?

 

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow

In Appreciation of Dave Arneson

In Appreciation of Dave Arneson

I just learned of the death of Dave Arneson.

Many gamers may not realize it, but Dave affected the lives and careers of almost everyone in our industry.  He represents one of a small group of people who turned games into Games in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  Partnered with Gary Gygax and others, much of what we now take for granted in RPG's was developed from his imagination and logic.

Gamasutra and other sites have covered the news of his death, but I wanted to add a personal note. 

I've worked on computer RPG's for 34 years, from mainframes and Intellivision all the way up to MMORPG's and modern consoles.  I could not have designed a single level of those games without knowing and playing the work of Dave Arneson. 

Unlike the lucky students who studied with him at Full Sail in recent years, I only had the privilege of a few conversations with Dave.  He was a modest and considerate guy. 

In 1975 one of my college friends introduced me to D&D, which at that time was contained in a handful of 5x8-inch home-brewed booklets authored by Arneson and Gygax.  In later years the flow of TSR's growth led to Gygax's name growing in prominence and Arneson's name dropping away, but that's how it goes once hobbies turn into businesses.  The true foundation work that evolved wargaming into role-playing involved him.

In 1975 Pong and its variants were the only video games.

In 1975 Chess and Checkers and Monopoly and Chutes & Ladders were what most people thought of as games.

The computers we wrote games on at the time filled an entire room and were connected to painfully slow terminals that only printed letters and numbers, no graphics.  People didn't own computers, universities did.  This is pre-Apple, pre-Commodore, pre-PC.  It was even pre-computer typesetting, which is why the original D&D books look so primitive when you see them today.

Dungeons and Dragons was like nothing we had ever seen before.  The game swept up our circle of friends and became an obsession.  Within a few months it had spread from college campuses to excite young people across the country.  And, like today's games, it inspired the wrath of politicians and the worry of non-gamers about exactly what we were all doing in those marathon coven-like meetings where we referred to strange creatures, magic, gods and guilds. 

And screamed occasionally when an undeserving Wandering Monster scored a critical hit and the DM chose not to re-roll.

One or two generations later, role-playing is accepted as just another form of gaming.  But before Dave Arneson and his friends started experimenting with new kinds of game designs, role-playing as we know it did not exist.

Thanks, Dave, from all of us.  We'll always be grateful for the Beginning you gave us and the inspiration to continue a story that will never end.

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow

The Four Stages of Wii

The Four Stages of Wii

Let's face it, the tremendous success of the Wii took place despite the skepticism of many in the game development community.

In doing research for this post, I was surprised to see how many old articles about the Wii being under-powered, over-hyped and totally-doomed no longer pop up in Google.  If you click on CNET's 2006 E3 coverage you are sent to a page about the 2009 CES!

They must have been moved to the same folder with the "Obama has no chance to be President" articles. 

Lest we forget, the early reactions to the Wii were skeptical.  I personally opted for a PS3 and a 360 before I bought a Wii.  There are some lessons for all of us in how this all unfolded.

 

2004 - 2006: Denial

When the Wii first was announced in May, 2004 under the code name "Nintendo Revolution," the development community assumed that Nintendo was going to field the third similar horse in a three-horse race. 

This was, of course, all wrong.  In the fall of 2005 the motion-sensing remote was unveiled, along with Nintendo's strategy of making completely different kinds of games.  They were not competing head-to-head with Sony and Microsoft.

Many people had a first reaction of "Huh?"  

When the name "Wii" was first announced in April, 2006 it was easy to anticipate gamers' comments in the online forums.  Reading the same joke 72 times got old very fast.

2007: Anger

In May of 2007 Microsoft's Robbie Bach ripped the 6-month-old Wii as "underpowered" and un-interesting. 

He wasn't just launching another "my box is better than your box" salvo.  He was appealing to emerging Developer and hard-core player anger because the Wii did not play by the rules.

Over and over again at conferences that year, game creators told me, "I'm not interested in the Wii.  It's a novelty item.  It doesn't have the power to do anything fun."

These comments were often delivered with anger and resentment, because the success of the Wii was slowing the acceptance curve for the Xbox360 and PS3.  They were messing up the script we had to follow in order to get to next-generation fun.

The question that this raises, of course, is "next-generation fun for whom?"

I still remember how that Spring I kept hearing people say, "The Wii is like chewing gum.  It's fun for a little while and then you lose interest.  It's not gonna last."

 

2008:  Grief

By the end of 2007 it was becoming clear that the success of the Wii was gaining momentum, not losing it, despite the shortage of Wii consoles.  Ubisoft, EA and other top publishers revamped their product mixes to pursue the big, unplanned Wii audience.  The industry is growing! 

So why did grief set in for game developers? 

Because the perception of the PS3-360-Wii years as a repeat of the boom years of last gen "with better graphics, more creativity and greater personal fulfillment" never came true. 

The hard-core audience has not regained its former buying power, and the publishers have not retained their old-style ivory towers.

Instead new customers have come forward, making the overall game industry pie bigger.  The casual online players.  The Wii Fit users.  The huddled masses of WOW, yearning to be leveled up.  Together with our traditional gamer audience, their combined buying power has helped the games business prosper during the deepest recession in any of our lifetimes.

 

2009:  Acceptance

Although skeptics remained both inside and outside the industry, 2009 has marked the year when more developers have decided to move on with their lives. 

Where once I heard complaints about the Wii, I now hear pitches for new titles that people are trying to place.

Sony's studios are having a fabulous creative year, Microsoft has made XBLA a successful new business model, and Steam has been helping re-invent PC gaming for the better.  The success of the Wii has not precluded any of this Good News.

So what can we learn from all this?

You probably recognized that this article discusses the four stages of mourning: Denial, Anger, Grief and Acceptance.

When my father died, i had to go through that cycle.  You can't call up God and say, "Hey, I read all the articles.  I'll just skip ahead to the Acceptance part and leave out all the pain.  Thanks!"

But do we need to do this in our creative lives?  Do we have to take a long time to react to surprises in the marketplace?  Is there a reason we can't immediately target a new audience?

In hindsight, I wish I had focused resources on the Wii at least a full year before we did so.

What new opportunities to entertain people with great games are out there right now? 

What other audiences that weren't available two years ago are now ready to play your games?

Is there any reason you can't work on a game for this new audience?

Can I please have a copy when you ship it?

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow

What I Learned About Used Games by Buying Birthday Presents

In my first post in this two-part article, I discussed What I Learned About Used Games from A Misguided Pizza Guy who is fighting the changes brought on by online tools like Yelp.  As comments noted, maybe the Pizza Guy wasn't so misguided because his pizza place got a lot of PR out of the stunt. 

But there's a difference between stunts that work once and strategies that work all the time.

So What About the Losses from Used Games?

In recent weeks the used-game business grew from its base on ebay and GameStop and spread to most of the major retailers.  Whatever illusions anyone may have harbored about creating an ASCAP-like world where game creators got a return on the $2 billion-plus used games market have been dispelled.

No publishers, public opinion or principles are going to change the strategic plans of an unapologetic GameStop or its competitors.  I hear a lot of people at conferences talk about somehow organizing our industry to strike back at the practice.  Print T-shirts like the Pizza Guy and wear them everywhere we go. 

I disagree.

 

 

 

It is seldom useful to fanatically defend the status quo against changes in technology or culture.  Both the fun and the money lie in doing something new to take advantage of those changes.

Gabe Newell role-modeled this attitude in his DICE keynote (see Chris Remo's excellent Gamasutra article here).  He said the best response to piracy was for game developers to stop building big canned experiences that people go to the store and buy for $60.  We should instead start providing the "service" of entertainment.  We sell a downloadable game at a fair price, listen to user feedback and then steadily enhance the title over time to provide continuing value and earn an ongoing revenue stream. 

I'd take that concept one step farther.  How would you pick an ideal birthday present for a friend of a friend of a friend? 

You can't, because you don't have a real relationship.

We've lived in a world in which retailers had relationships with consumers, publishers had relationships with retailers and developers had relationships with publishers.  This served the retailers and publishers well, since they needed each other.  But it has never served developers, since we have been walled away from building relationships with the very people whom we want to serve.

The ultimate goal of the downloadable world Gabe describes – and which Valve’s Steam service pioneered – is a more direct relationship between creators and audience.  The best developers must also be relationship builders.  Alex and Mark of Media Molecule come to mind, people who are out to involve players rather than merely serve them.

Creating downloadable games does not automatically create a relationship with our players.

In fact, the walls between developers and players are being re-erected as we speak.  We’ve already seen a long list of these problems in the mobile and casual games spaces.  But we’re going to get a lot farther pursuing these player relationships than we are by printing T—shirts and complaining. 

I think we’ll actually produce better games.

 

What kind of game would you build if you had these requirements:

  a)  Version 1.0 has to be out in six months

  b)  It’s a game you’d love to build and play

  c)  Version 1.1 ships 30 days after 1.0 and has to be worth a small additional charge – it’s not just a patch.

  d)  Version 1.2 ships 30 days after that and has to be worth…  [REPEAT}

Copyright © 2009, Don Daglow

What I Learned About Used Games from the Misguided Pizza Guy

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This is Part 1 of my comment on the major retail chains all adopting used game sales.  How do I get from a Misguided Pizza Guy to used game sales and business models?  Read on, dear gamer, read on...

I heard on the radio the other day about a local pizza place owner who has gotten very upset about the ways that the restaurant business is changing.  Just as it drives us nuts when our games are reviewed unfairly, he is furious about anonymous Yelp members who display both the eloquence and the sharpness of their tongues in sarcastic 1-star reviews.   

Despite the fact that he has a Metacritic score over 80 -- I mean a Yelp score of 4 stars -- he wants to strike back against the system.

His response to the changes in the business of running a restaurant: take the most hurtful and derisive Yelp quotes, print them on T-Shirts and have his servers wear them.  One server, by way of example, is walking around the restaurant wearing a shirt that reads, "The Pizza was so greasy that...."

He's gotten the radio piece I heard on KCBS and an article about his wife (co-owner of the shop) and the shirts in the New York Times.  He sounded defensive and his wife's interview sounded proud and confident, so maybe he should leave the PR to her.

And, I have to admit, as a PR stunt this appears to be working.

But I think there's another way to look at it, leaving out gimmicks that only work once.  What can you do over and over again to prosper in a world of harsh criticism and ruthless competition?

Question 1:  If you're running a 4-star pizzeria, what's a better use of your time:

     a)  Draw attention to Yelp's anonymous, sarcastic, seemingly-random negative reviews and the unfairness of the system.

     b)  Try experiments in service, menu, (and yes, T-shirts) to see what will make your 4-star place a 4.1-star pizzeria.  Then going for 4.2, and so on.

 

Question 2:  If you chose "b" above, then what is the best source of ideas on how to go for those 4.1 stars?

     a)  Thinking really hard until it feels like you're in a Troma movie and your brain is gonna burst and mess up the carpet.

     b)  Gathering the best ideas from all of your team members in an open environment that encourages honest and frank discussion.

     c)  Reading all the less-than-four-star reviews on Yelp and thinking about how to correct anything that somehow contributed to the negative comments, however random and unfair they may seem to be.

     d)  All of the above.

 

Question 3:  You don't run a pizzeria, you make games.  You don't face a world of random 1-star reviews in Yelp, you face a world in which traditional packaged goods have lost a significant slice of their revenue potential.

How could you prepare your games and your team for this new model?

How could you make the disadvantage we now face into an advantage?

 

Next Post:  How can we respond to used game sales?

 

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow

What I Learned from A Cooking Contest

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Lessons about game development are all around us.

One of my favorite shows for late-night DVR diversion is the new Food Network "Iron Chef sequel #7" program called "Chopped."

Four restaurant chefs (not yet ready for Iron Chef America) compete to impress a panel of three restauranteur judges.  As designers we recognize the game's "skill-based musical chairs" structure: 

--  There are three rounds: appetizer, entree and dessert.

--  The contestants get 20-30 minutes for each round, based on type of food.

--  The basket of surprise ingredients is opened at the start of each round.  It always includes at least one bizarre item, and they have to use at least some of every food in the basket in their dish.  Got a recipe for cantaloupe, watermelon and sardines, anyone?

--  After each round, one participant is "Chopped" by the judges for doing the least interesting and delicious dish.  Whoever is left standing after the three eliminations is the winner, and picks up $10,000.

So what's the big lesson I've taken from watching the show?  Most weeks the chefs get in trouble the same ways that ambitious game design teams get in trouble.  Here's my take:

1.  The most creative person usually fails first.  It happens over and over again.  In the first twenty-minute segment a really creative chef starts a complex, unique appetizer... one they can't possibly complete in 20 minutes.  As the last 2 minutes roll by they desperately try to salvage what they can, and sometimes they don't even get everything onto the plate.  The judges say how original and exciting their ideas were and how it's such a shame they didn't finish and how they have such great potential... and then they Chop the most creative person.

How many games have started with a brilliant set of ideas that wouldn't fit the schedule and budget?  The last two months of crunch time can't salvage something really fun out of the dashed hopes and good intentions, and the team ends up getting Chopped.

2.  There's Always Something You Don't Know How to Do.  One show had tamarind paste as an ingredient.  I thought, "That's why they have people who are head chefs on this show, because I have no idea how to use tamarind paste."  Then I saw the eyes of one of the contestants.  Sheer terror.

30 minutes later a judge was uttering the dreaded words, "This is inedible."  You didn't have to wait through the commercial break to know he was the one being Chopped.

What "tamarind paste" have I seen sabotage game teams over the years?  Pathfinding.  Animations that skate.  Online games choking on geometric growth in packet volume.  Multithreading. 

Teams assume that they've conquered the unknown before and they can do it again.  A pathfinding system that is almost playable is as useless as a pathfinding system that doesn't work at all.  Either the team has to bring in an expert who can rescue the project, or the game gets Chopped.

3.  Once the most creative person is gone, the least creative person is usually next.  After the first round the surviving chefs sometimes say to themselves, "Wow, I'm glad I wasn't creative like her!  That's the secret to this game -- play it safe!"

Thirty minutes later they're serving something you can get at Outback and six commercials after that they're on their way home.

Game designers face the same gotcha.  Get too ambitious for your budget and schedule, you fail.  Outstretch the capabilities of your team and engine, you fail.  Play it safe, you fail.


4. Fast deadlines, surprise requirements, and 2 zillion people watching your every move seldom produce great work.  This show is about not committing suicide and not being boring.  Of the nine dishes they eat, the judges seldom describe more than a couple as memorable.

This is where game development is different than the cooking show.  We (usually) have fast deadlines, we (often) have surprise requirements, and some days it feels like 2 zillion people are looking over our shoulders.  And we still have to produce something striking and memorable, because we don't have 3 opponents spread across a kitchen.

We have thousands of competitors spread across a planet.

 

So what can we do as team leaders when we face these problems?  These questions go out to all the Producers and Publishers in the audience.

In the next week, what could you do on just one project to make a deadline (big or small) better suit the true requirements of the assignment? 

Would it help if you took one hour in the next week and made up a list of ALL the requirements the milestone (or level, or module, or tool, etc.) has to meet in order to be considered complete and "110% totally done."  Did that list already exist somewhere, or is it out of date or spread across a series of notebooks, emails and wiki pages?

On the next project you start, how could you structure the planning and preproduction phases to avoid the "short deadlines and guaranteed surprises mean the most creative teams fail first" catch-22?

Despite all these issues, great games get built every year.  Thinking about these questions and then doing something about them -- even small improvements -- can help you protect your team from being Chopped.

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow.

Perspectives on Game Industry Layoffs

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 Photo: Library of Congress

I have a slip of paper that I found among my grandparents' things.  As I read about the travails of the economy and the latest waves of game industry layoffs, I think about what the paper says.

103 years ago, my grandfather got up early one spring morning, stretched, and looked out the window of their apartment in San Francisco.   He was just two blocks away from where we now celebrate GDC at Moscone Center.

As he looked outside, the brick wall of the building across the street collapsed onto the pavement.  Their apartment started to shake violently.

When the shaking stopped my grandparents breathed a deep sigh of relief, because they were all right and their building was intact.  But soon columns of smoke were seen across the city, as ruptured gas lines caught fire.  Most of San Francisco had been built hurriedly of wood fifty years before, during and after the Gold Rush.  The blazes soon raged in an uncontrollable firestorm that devoured block after block.

My grandmother was four months pregnant.  As the fires came closer they packed what they could carry and fled to Golden Gate Park.  Most of the city burned to the ground in The Great Fire of 1906.

The army brought in tents for them to live in.   My father was born five months later, no worse for all they'd gone through.  Like hundreds of thousands of other people they eventually rebuilt their lives, and in the process rebuilt San Francisco.

That piece of paper.  I found it in an old wallet of my grandfather's that I came across while helping my parents clear some storage boxes twenty years ago.  It was a tiny yellowed newspaper clipping from late 1906, the year of the Fire.  It read simply:

"Although our city lies in ruins, no one should doubt that we will rebuild San Francisco into something even greater than what was here before."

Of course, we now know that this newspaper editor spoke the truth.  San Francisco did rebuild an even better city, and only nine years after the Fire held a World's Fair to prove that the comeback was complete.

Why do I think about this now?  Because the economic firestorm that has damaged our country so badly -- and chain-reacted into so many game industry layoffs -- is something from which we will recover with a better economic system.

In 1906 hard-working people in San Francisco made that editor's optimistic predictions come true.

In 2009, people who are committed and passionate about games and game development will make my optimistic predictions come true, too. 

If you're reading this article, I bet you're one of them. 

Global Game Jam Starts January 30

The Global Game Jam

The Global Game Jam is now less than two weeks away!  Sponsored by the IGDA Education SIG, the concept is simple:

A Game Jam is a weekend (usually) in which groups of people come together to create a game together in just that two day (and sometimes three night!) period.  Whoever signs up participates.  Whatever gets built belongs to the group who built it. 

The results tend to be focused on fun and gameplay, since there's no time to get distracted trying to wow people with production values.  They also tend to be innovative, since nobody wants to lose that much sleep to build a me-too game.

The Global Game Jam takes the concept one step farther: there are groups in every populated time zone in the world, sometimes more than one in the same city.  The organizers announce the constraints or guidelines for each time zone at the opening of the event (hence no secret 30 day running starts!)  Since the kickoff is a rolling process by time zone, the teams all over the world are all jamming simultaneously for the middle 24 of the same 48 hours.

For procedures to sign up and take part, see the Global Game Jam website.

What I Learned from My Friend's Garage

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I dropped over to see a friend recently and did a double take when I saw his garage full of furniture, tools, garden equipment, old posters and stacks of cardboard boxes.

"You're not moving, are you?" I asked him.

"No," he answered.  "I needed to take out the Christmas stuff, so I had to make a choice.  I decided to take the whole day, empty out the storage shed and put everything back so I can find stuff when I need it."

I looked around.  "What was your other choice?"

He laughed.  "Take half a day to get the Christmas stuff out, and then spend another half day the next time I needed something from the back of the shed.  And another two hours here and another three hours there.  I decided to just Pay the Man Once."

It got me to thinking, "When am I doing things on my projects where I'm paying over and over again instead of just practicing Pay the Man Once?

The games business traditionally shuts down for close to two weeks this time of year.  After the crunch to ship games for the holidays, the time with our families is more than welcome. 

But how much better could 2009 be -- and how much more family time might I be able to free up -- if I followed my friend's example?

What if I took just one day of that break to save several days of my time in 2009?  What would I do?

 

 

Is there any way you could spend one day over the end-of-year break that you know would save you at least 2 days in 2009?

What would you like to do with your family or friends on those extra days you'll save next year?  If you schedule the time off right after you "Pay the Man Once" you'll be a lot more likely to actually use the vacation.

And when you go on that vacation you'll remember how you got that time in the first place.

I'm going to make a list so I can make a good choice for myself.  As soon as I find my notebook.  It's around here somewhere.  Oh, yeah... it's under that big stack of stuff I brought back from conferences this year.  Or maybe it's...

 

Copyright (c) 2008, Don Daglow