Culture is hard

[Music] [Music] it's the middle of the night and I've just woken up um I'm screaming clutching clutching at the arrows that somebody is there somebody there I'm drenched in sweat I want to spend the next 15 20 minutes talking to you about why specifically this is our menu for today there are two things I need to talk about Roby I imagine this is a rewarded add it works best that way then I for more things of our ovo we're gonna have a discussion about felonious monk then we're gonna talk about the opposite of Marmite guns booze Japan and how I

failed each turn every one of your mother's it's exactly what you'd predict two things are OBO first is this I think this is a moment where I would just like to be a lot of Rovio for that is crazy that means that every single man woman and child on the whole planet has downloaded a Rovio game except for the ones that haven't if it's not only a month and to be prompt there's a hell of a lot of downloads I'm obviously we also account once we did delete them immediately secondly this I don't if any of you've seen but recently we did completely insane but rather brilliant piece of hookup marketing with I'm Aiden everyone had been waiting obviously for the Angry Birds iron maven mashup they were like come on and sit come in I was very successful and we now have the NFL

select to bother Super Bowl of Slee coming up this starts tomorrow in Angry Birds two neighborhoods evolution and there's a little tiny detail which I really appreciate about this which is this is Super Bowl fifty two Angry Birds was the 52nd game that Rovio made so I think there's a really beautiful little little little touch of history in there so a year ago I came here Eisley I was upstairs then it was more important as in room 1 but we won and I announced that we were we're gonna start a studio here in London and at the time I said that it was the culture of that studio is going to be an enormously important part of what we were doing it's a kind of weirdly artificial thing starting a new studio in an existing company it's not quite a start-up it's something a little bit different and you have to sort of inject this pre-existing culture into the into the environment which is kind of hard we wanted to bring the best of what I'd learned in Rovio

and those VP of products over there I went to bring the best of that Nordic working culture over which means respect for the individual it means respect for family life it means a commitment to diversity it means wearing slippers in the office it means being in perpetual darkness it means making every meal into a buffet these are the important things about Finnish culture certainly and we wanted to bring those over which meant that we've done crunch it means that we offer flexible working conditions and it means that we have a commitment to diversity now this is the state of Rovio this is the state this is the state of Rovio right now we have appointed people 300 of those works specifically engage 150 of them work directly in development the average age is 35 which i think is I'm quite impressed by how large that number is forgetting development we have 37 different nationalities which is in chi-su don't know there were 37 countries apparently there are phonies

even more and 28% of us are angry and 72% others are sassy those boys and girls types and it's not bad I don't think but obviously we can do much better and we want him now when we first died and why by we I mean me and we'll even sitting at the front we started talking about the kind of culture that we specifically wanted to create we wanted to make something that embraced diversity and it embrace diversity more than one set it embraced the kind of like identity diversity for sure the sort of sort of my clear manifestation of every conceivable kind of privilege it was a kind of like answer to that in some respects it was also about the kind of cognitive neurodiversity that I believe is the exactly the fanciest word you can use to describe what we're after and the thing about doing that is that what you're

expressly saying is that you want to find a group of people who don't agree with each other and then you want to get them to agree with each other and make a province and that is going to be difficult it's going to be hard it's going to be a more difficult job if all the people that you have in your studio are very similar to each other have very similar experiences issue similar backgrounds think in similar ways then your life is gonna be a hell of a lot easier but you're also gonna have a hell of a lot of smaller power with which to paint your masterpiece in the in the world now mobile games are free-to-play mobile games expressly which is what we make it's really hard to make a game that's going to break out it's really really difficult I think in the room there are actually some of the people who made the most reason when I can think of which is golf class and well done if you're here um it's really really difficult you're gonna have to make something different there's that

saying if you always do all you always deed you always get what you always had and that is very true the video game industry we're not very much about like let's bring in some people who haven't done walking into an interview having not made a game before means you're not going to get the job and it means that we end up with a lot of people who are very similar experience wise and passion wise and trying to break out of that is a brilliant way of getting some new ideas into the room but it's hard you have to embrace that complexity you have to accept it upfront you have to understand that it's gonna take up some of your time who's that it is plenteous monk it's specifically farness sphere monk the middle lane was sphere how did his parents know he was going to be a massively famous influential jazz musician when he just came out screaming um erroneous monk said one of the things I think that I absolutely love there's a quote from him which is the genius is the one who's

most like themselves and to me this is extremely important again if you're trying to make a game it's gonna be one if I mean how many games are other on the apps on at 1 million or 20 million or 500 billion games and you're like well we're gonna make one of the best 22:50 yeah that's what we're gonna do we're gonna do better and a hundred billion minus 20 to 50 people you have to make something that is very clearly itself and the point of this is when you're sitting there with this group of people who are different you've got different backgrounds different thoughts I'm thinking the same way there's a temptation at least to expect that what you'll get is I want white I want black let's do grey grey everyone's favorite color you'll get if only get to the top of the chart great no the solution is war what about if we do green how about blue turquoise II blue yellow yellow yellow director budding up so definitely yellow we're good with yellow this is the point one of the things that we studiously avoid in all of our

discussions in the studio is compromise is splitting the difference is saying like well we'll get more go okay with desire no when there's any kind of like insurance II keep looking keep searching keep finding it we thought the thing that you really need the thing that's different that everybody is happy with because unless you're willing to go that distance then what you're gonna end up with is a kind of mush rather than something that is unbelievably itself doesn't mean it will succeed of course but it raises the chances significantly and then in a situation where you have a bunch of people who often very differently or a very different backgrounds who will have this diversity of thought the other thing you gonna have to be as tolerant you have to be tolerant the difference you've got different people if you need to have a group of people who are I believe the word you gets it a long moment isn't emotionally intelligent not something that I was born with a lot of I've tried my best to learn it and this is about being kind it's about being kind when people have ideas you don't believe it it's about like trying to find those new ways of doing stuff and trying to be

kind to each other and possibly more importantly catch yourself it's very differently in this business to get angry with yourself as much as it is to going through with other people this is a very demanding environment that we're all in being kind to yourself as as important as being kind to other people junior group of people who are tolerant who accept that their life is going to be complicated where they have chosen a harder path and are understand that they're also not gonna be able to compromise that they're gonna have to find great solutions once you've got that I think you've got the start of a wonderful culture and this is also something that we discuss an awful lot in our studio is less more is more or less I addressed kind of a typically I think for this room I would say not entirely uniquely but kind of a typically nobody dresses like this and makes games this game development has not happened you know where the has ever developed game in a pinstripe suit

there's just literally never happened right and it's just this idea that in our culture at the time we spoke we go like we've got to make work fun because it's Millennials they won't come unless there's a pool table on the ceiling and everyone's got their own horse they just won't come I'm interested it's like unless work unless work is fun is that true they're awful lot of things that we do when we build our studios very exclusionary they're very thin like ah like you like us come you like us because look here are the things that will tell you this is something we discuss a lot in our office we have disagreements about this which are fine as I hopefully have already indicated to you a lot of fine disagreements happen never cutting my wife nanny my wife works in public policy consults the seat right she her job is divided metric opposites of mine laughter how many nerf

guns the were in office and I was astonished to discover it at home this is a point that when you walk into a video game studio it's like a bit like being in a toy shop in a lot of cases it's like super exciting there's lots of bright colors and there's guns and spikes on everything but at the same time I think it's sending out messages isn't it it's definitely there are some messages in them drinking beverages I'm very sorry by the way I didn't know you were gonna talk about beverages I'm not an app specifically attacking you here but and in fact this isn't necessarily none of this as a comment of what you should and shouldn't do they're just things to think about their fridges there's lots of if you've got a beer fridge in the office it's telling people things your sense of like hey what didn't stay a little longer and have a drink be nice why don't you Oh are you pregnant no you're not in the gang you can't be with us and oh do you have kids and have to go home do you live a long way away are you over the

age of twenty seven is this it we have a curb we talk a lot about like not crunching about trying to make the industry grow up a bit and I think a lot of that is actually it's not adding stuff it's actually taking things away the fewer things that you have to agree on as a group the easier it is to have a very diverse group of people because they don't all have to as well as coming to work in a videogame place also have exactly the same view on the last Jedi and also also like agreed yes definitely subtitle not dubbed so on and so forth these are not these extra things you're putting in the way make it harder hard if you have a truly different bunch of people making it truly different interesting new kind of experience interestingly in our studio there are two very strong views on whether or not we should have a beer fridge we currently don't but that's not to say well in the future the person who thinks that we should most strongly is teetotal and the person who thinks that we shouldn't most strongly is me I'm I'm

drunk all the time tweeting now so I think there's two pieces of Japanese philosophy which I'm sure all that we've heard before I apologize about hops right this is I'm just no it's going to be trite but I think they're really really really valuable things that I have learned to a deity and they can sue you which some of you would definitely have heard of you smashed pottery and then you fix it with gold and that is very much what building studio is about right building a culture it's the fact that it's not about whether or not you make mistakes break things and people are like I'm trying and running around and everything's on fire what's important is the fix what's important is what happens next it's not a lot of building great culture building team bringing people together is about like everything going wrong and then you fixing those things and pulling people together so always valuing the fix over being paranoid about making mistakes it's very

much the way to think about these things and the second of these is what be sabi a tiger micro not a micro not this is like the finished audience this is great everyone people here don't look at me yeah could be sabi wabi-sabi is actually an aesthetic and it's this idea that nothing is is finished nothing is complete nothing is perfect everything is process it gets used a lot to talk about agile production techniques which is pretty obvious right but I think also and I think I'm reflecting directly what I remember saying earlier the most important things about culture is this is approach the culture is alive it's not you don't choose that it's just the way it is constantly every new person coming in everything that happens will constantly change your culture so you need to be aware of that which means you need to firstly keep a very close eye on what it is secondly it's always important it's always worth giving your attention in

your time to a third which is even if things aren't going so well now you can't fix it and then kind of lastly this is where I am I think it's important to to admit your failures and here's here's my failure mum jammed everybody who heard about mum jump you did there are people who are so good right kinda so we jump one of the things that I'm very passionate about is the fact that is gender diversity in the industry I just am I'm sorry to be a white middle class usually privileged man saying that but it's true and the industry as a whole has a this tendency to always address the issue gender from primarily by saying it's education right it's education it's like we've got to go and talk to young women I'm gonna make sure that they're taking stem subjects and that they're aware the video gaming is that they can do and that is true but it's also a little bit kicking the can down the road maybe slightly if you're

talking to a fourteen year old and I need not director I don't if I need a director she's that I don't and they're gonna be I can't oh significantly older than 14 then it's gonna take a really long time for that to happen well not only 20 years I want to do something now and now a lot of there are surely women who's left the video game industry to have kids and not come back there's definitely a thing that has happened and it's certainly not something that we make easy childcare provision in the video game industry is not fantastic support for family life in the video game is she's not fantastic so something that we really really wanted to do is point that this not least because if you are a fourteen-year-old young woman right now looking at the video game industry to somewhere to join and you like they work what they give I can't how much the idea that there's some support for you throughout your career and that you're going to be looked after is important and we're not

very good at this so we decided that the thing we were going to do to try and draw attention to this was the mum jam mum jam was a game jam with free childcare so it's like come along we look after your kids for nothing and you can do game jam and we announced it and everybody loved it there's article in games industry dog biz by the wonderful James Bachelor Twitter - it was like this is the best thing that's literally ever happened and we got all kinds of props for it it was great I walked around like the glowing for a few days for people signed up for people signed up vii about five days left there were four people had signed up so we were like we're gonna delay this slightly so we did that and it feels really bad but we

got all this wonderful PR up didn't do it we just didn't do it never happened it's never happened we think there's two reasons for this first which is that it was called mum jam one really been called family jam anyone could come enough to be a mum you could be wrong puffs are first firstly a dad that was kind of fine and security got bit obsessed I think tunnel vision might have come in and we just happened to everybody plus if you are the the parent of a young in a young family want to go to a game jam even if there is free child care just and it also had the really unpleasant side effect that we didn't realize at the time of basically going oh child care that's what women do couldn't have been more further away from the truth now the end of this story I'm kind of pleased about not least because I've literally just run out of time so it's important that I finish it is that we don't know what to do next in this true

spirit of wabi-sabi but not in the spirit to concede you do we want to do something with this yes are we going to hold some kind of event to bring more attention to this yes what is that going to be I don't know and I think it's important again this period of good culture to know that what you care about the direction you're heading is important you will fixed it in the end so yeah that's what we've learned Rovio is really great fun to know that right embrace complexity embrace it enjoy it it's good you're gonna have it avoid compromise because that's part it's hot be kind think about doing less with your studio think about maybe having a great pension scheme a good dental care the idea value the fix and them I am very sorry all mums and all that and that is the end [Applause] [Music]

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