Don't Talk to Me or My Baby Ever Again: Negotiating Challenging Collaboration

[Music] hello i'm kim belair and on stage around is uh david badard we're writers and narrative designers and we're also the founders of sweet baby inc uh sweet baby inc is a narrative development company with a physical space in montreal where i am right now and a distributed team working remotely and when we say that we're a narrative development company it's that it's a term that we use to encapsulate like a lot of the stuff that we do which ran i guess ranges from consults and script writing to narrative direction and cultural assessments it's kind of a full service thing where we work on games with like a lot of different clients in a lot of very very different ways and that means we've had to be very very flexible of course in the way that we work while also developing a very rigorous production and organizational structure

to keep us on track and working to like a dozen client schedules of time without breaking our own no matter what happens we as sweet baby need to be able to stay working about nine to five we need to be salaried and comfortable and we need to keep our own you know work life balance while also shifting to the demands of like a lot of different projects and that's been great but it's also meant that we have to be equally rigorous in our production pipelines as we are in managing just the way that we're treated and ensuring that any challenging collaboration gets handled as quickly as possible with as much empathy as firmness so today i think what we want to do is just kind of share some of the things that we've we've seen in terms of tough collaborations and a bit of what we think might hopefully you know have helped them go more smoothly or at least kind of share this is when we knew that it was time to say forget it and walk away so first off i think it's important to say that collaboration can be

challenging most collaborations are going to be challenging a little bit especially at the beginning because there's a rhythm to collaboration and a language to learn and even in best-case client scenarios we have to embed right and that naturally takes a bit of time so to start we kind of wanted to give a couple examples without you know naming names uh of things that have gone kind of poorly and that we'd like to kind of share so i'll start with project a um we joined a project that looked really really great the game was stunning it had a diverse cast and we were told of course that it needed our diverse voices and it also lined up with our gameplay sensibilities and when we got on board the team they promised us this thing was ready to write it's got everything it needs the blocks are all there we just need to put the words in we'll show you here and we'll build the final systems but what happened was uh it was not ready to write and the systems that were

promised were never built because as we went through this project the studio began shedding seniors and replacing them with juniors and suddenly the expectation became that the work we were promised would be done in the dark we ended up and i'm not proud of this but we basically writing an entire game without level design block out for a lot of the experience and on top of that like the marginalized perspectives that we were you know consistently reassured were behind our hiring ended up being fully lip service they wanted a diverse team but they didn't want to have to represent them or make any changes and we eventually of course just said there's not much more we can do here it's not coming together and we walked away so project b was another collaboration that was literally years in the making it had this lengthy runway of conversations and every time we met with them they stressed the importance of our team and its specific makeup being key to crafting the franchise narrative and offering our perspective on characters

and story we spent ages just months figuring it all out and at every gate reassurances were made that we're the right people we'll be able to shape this game we're going to be fully embedded and embraced and we were told specifically that our role as contractors in the studio would actually give us a lot of freedom and a lot of movement and allow us to do really specific work and so what happened of course because this is this talk um is that we joined with a ton of excitement but ultimately ended up shoved pretty hard into this this internal hierarchy of like this deeply hierarchical place like all of a sudden there were these soft rules about who can speak to who and when there are these unspoken grudges and politics and some very loudly spoken grudges and politics there was public disrespect that we were witnessing happening like in meetings just between developers and obviously we're contractors but we still brought this up to management and it got a shrug they said like no don't worry about it you're not part of this our job is to to fix

the studio we're going to handle this and just do your work as contractors and so you know with a certain amount of hope early on we did and still we checked what was needed and eventually we were asked to do this huge involved narrative document to solve this problem that the team had been having with the story and especially the the later parts of the story and so we submitted this document and we were expecting some kind of creative feedback because finally it got up to the creative director and after everything after working on this super hard after trying to navigate it and trying to give something of ourselves to the team that they had asked for we got this quote that we'll never forget from the creative director who had nothing to say about the narrative nothing to say about any of the creative it was just an email that says why are outsourcers writing our ending because that was all that mattered it didn't matter what we did it mattered who we were and so we left the project at that point within days so finally project c is a little

different in that this is a project we worked on on an ongoing basis with a process that very early on was sold was easy and friendly and very much felt easy and friendly and it allowed us to meaningfully embed with a team to share values and build a narrative and tell the story that really did work for all of us it felt it felt perfect in a lot of ways that a lot of game dev collaborations don't but that looseness and and that that vibe meant that very few deadlines or refined narrative pipelines were built and often we found that our desire to be good teammates saw us taking on more than we should have to kind of fill in gaps while our status as contractors still kept us on the outside of very meaningful decisions so what happened was that that easily easy and friendly process was mentally and emotionally true which is wonderful but it fell apart very quickly when production hit snags and kind of as a result of the focus being on that easy relationship versus versus something more rigorous a lot of production nuance ended up left unspoken and that meant that when things change

on production or alterations were made to scope there was this assumed shared understanding based on a general sense of alignment but there were no actual processes to determine or ratify that alignment and so a lack of micromanagement which is nice easily became a lack of management at all and resulted in these assumptions being held as truths and they were held as truths that were inherent that we were assumed to inherit just because we vibed but that didn't really exist in a more meaningful way beyond that and it took a long time for us to fix and we did i think we're we're happy about that but so much of that time could have been spent on making the game better rather than resolving something that we should have done at the outset because just to say it i think you know we also make mistakes there are plenty of things internally that we are still building and we very much respect how challenging this stuff is right we're a kind of company that we're still kind of figuring out how we operate we're relatively new to the game but this talk i just want to make sure is not just for

venting it's mostly to share some realizations that we've had the first i think being that our issues with clients tend to fall into two distinct categories the first is a lack of clarity on how our work even functions how narrative works in our case but i think it goes across the board because a lot a lot of times we find that when we're hired there's a faulty perspective on what writers and their designers need to work and how they work there's this assumption that kind of you get a contractor fully formed but the second focus is a lack of focus on people and a perception of projects as being importantly work first game first and then humans second contractors third and i think looking at those regardless of what we do like if we weren't in narrative or writing i think we still have this problem as contractors we see that it's its core the core issue here is a way that teams and companies view contractors and outside help so the question becomes how our contractors seem

and i think from our perspective a fundamental issue is that contractors are often perceived as a tool they're like a hammer that you can grab to go out some nails and in a good scenario just be an easy solve and contractors are also seen as workers who can perform a task without like the pesky overhead of hr they're a quick fix little context is needed and contractors provide a way to weaponize talent without the company having to consider the human behind it we become this extension of the team itself but wielded by their hand and i think in a cohesive empathetic kind community community-focused organized well-produced and efficient game production process this relationship could be a beautiful symbiosis but that's just not how most games work there are no nails simple enough to just wheel the hammer against them and to me what contractors are an ideal scenario here is collaborators people you invite into your team because with blood you've hired people who are experts in their own field and

who are deeply knowledgeable with discipline and who have taken that knowledge and made a living not only from that knowledge but of grasping context very quickly producing that very efficiently and applying their knowledge to a project in an ongoing manner and while it's tempting i think to assume that this external role of a contractor or a craftsperson here creates distance between that person and the team i think that the reality that is that games require creative collaboration and shared vision and there's often actually more work to be done to bring contractors in to share that vision and to make them cohesively and in terms of their own perspective and knowledge part of that system so to that end we came up with some guidelines just some thoughts and stuff that david's going to take us through and that hopefully provide at least like the beginnings of of some structure just some ideas to think on about how we can kind of do this better right hi i'm david um

it's we've said it before already but every collaboration is challenging to some degree that's just what collaborations are but we found solutions to lean on when challenges do happen because they will we've worked through the challenges and we now know things that we wished we knew before we left some of these projects so first up we're going to talk about what to do before you're bringing in external collaborators the very first question you need to ask yourself is why do you want to bring on an instagram collaborator what is the problem that you're trying to fix and really the real question is are you ready to solve this problem or do you wish to be told that there is no problem if you're bringing in a producer are you ready to change the way you're doing things if you're bringing in a sound designer are you ready to invest in some tools so that they are able to do their work better if you're bringing in a sensitivity reader are you ready to examine your own biases because it's going to happen we can sense as collaborators when

the client is asking for safety versus asking for changes and the best collaborations are when people are willing to change next question is what are you paying for are you paying for an opinion that you are maybe or maybe not going to implement are you paying for a content producer with strict deadlines or are you paying for a co-creator with many responsibilities and many and lots of autonomy these are all very very different they're quoted differently the contract is different they're built differently and they need different levels of access and onboarding to your project you have to be ready for this and you have to adapt based on what you actually want and the other question you need to ask yourself because we always get asked this is is it really full time or are you just trying to lock them down there's no benefit in locking down a freelancer we're used to doing the work on time according to your schedule if they take the work it's because they know that they can do this in this amount of time no need for full time if the freelancer knows that they can do this work

remember freelancers get better because they do more projects at the same time they accumulate more experience over time over a shorter amount of time because they touch many different projects and locking them down prevents that before you sign the contract you're going to want to talk about deliverables the first question is do you know the deliverables ahead of time as the client you might not and that's okay but that means you're not asking for a content producer you're asking for somebody to fill a full role within your team and then when that happens you have to ask yourself who's going to determine the deliverables more often than you think we as contractors are asked to onboard to a project and then we're asked okay what should we do first so we have to determine the steps between nothing and something when that happens we become a team member whether we're contractors or not and we're hired for our expertise not just our time and so you as a client end up bringing someone who will need to be very embedded in the team it's important to have that conversation before the contract to

determine the place that your contractor is going to have within your team ahead of time and to make that space in your team within your project we're always asked in the first opening calls when's the right moment to bring us on and we don't really know what the right time is it depends for every project we do know one thing though there is such a thing as too late uh and when there isn't time to do meaningful work when you're up uh against the wall and you're like we're going to bring in somebody because we're out of time chances are this collaborator will also not have enough time to do the through their work and it might not be a good idea to bring someone else to the mix uh who will who will also get crunch and turn in subpar work due to circumstances and there are there is also no such thing as too early uh oftentimes clients will wait to be ready to bring somebody on to have enough documentation to have enough you know for the vision to stabilize um and the best way we found to work honestly is as early as possible so that we can follow the project along it's not

about influencing the project it's about knowing and being there and avoiding pitfalls before they happen so we like to onboard very early on and do regular check-ins monthly or quarterly through before production before prediction starts that way we have time to build project knowledge we can add our opinions and influences to the project when it's needed in order to be ready to hit the ground running when the production starts this avoids things like calling into question major game pillars halfway through production because we weren't there before we actually had to encounter them this prep time is not time consuming this can happen as a couple times a month which means it's a couple of hours for us and it's not super expensive and it really helps collaboration be easier in the long run so please consider bringing any external collaborators you would want early on even just to see what the project is like and to have a long rampway uh towards your successful collaboration now you've decided to work with a collaborator and you've signed a

contract we have some guidelines for that too you have to remember that they're game developers the way contracting works oftentimes is that we will have one point of contact with your team somebody who's responsible for talking to us and it's also the responsibility because we're game developers to give us as much information as possible on the game and that's on top of their regular responsibilities on your team this means that despite their best efforts they're only human and we can't get a full vision of what's happening on your entire team and we're kept in the dark and we can't do our best work without the context of your wider game just like your regular employees so don't tweak don't treat your contractors like a service house external developers do their best work when they are part of the team invite them to sinks and end of sprint reviews and have them meet the whole team even if it's just like an hour long of fun facts and don't just have a private channel where you talk to the contractors in one person that's never useful bring them into the full slack channel have them

embed in the team have been participating activities more collaboration and more connections more access means better work at the end of the day the other thing is time in case you don't know freelancers plan their own work according to time they have a week and they're slotting all these different projects in that week to be able to get to meet their deadlines and they need their own calendars for that they can't really have waiting waiting periods to start or complete a deliverable a waiting freelancer is a freelancer whose personal calendar is getting really messed up and that leads to worse work at the end of the day that's why you're having all these conversations before you start remember to give feedback in a timely manner it sucks to send something and hear nothing back it always sucks but also if you hear feedback two weeks on you have to reacclimate and context switch back onto this project every single time so keep that in mind the same thing applies if you require more time from your freelancers always remember that if you're crunching your collaborators are crunching too there's no such thing

as one without the other you have to acknowledge this you can't just like bury your head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine they're they're freelancers they're used to it you have to have a conversation about this and don't take it for granted and the last thing is if your deadline deadlines change with food production it's because your team can't meet a deadline they can't produce the work in the time you've allotted ahead of time so why wouldn't the calendar of the contractor change as well we know that there's a date on the contract we know that there's a deliverable but if the whole project changes then that contract doesn't fit what you're making anyway so have the conversation to you know open up the contract again see how we can collaborate better and see how we can get to the finish line together better a topic that's very near and dear to my heart not garfield iteration um this is this is video games nothing's ever right on the first try i don't think i'm saying anything new here at gdc uh nothing ever fits on first delivery has to be tested balanced edited review

it whatever whatever the hell it is sorry for swearing in french there will be many passes this is the normal process so don't build your calendars expecting collaborators who have less visibility on your project to get it right the first time it's not because they're bad at their jobs it's because they need iteration just like everybody else on your team this is the process of making games and to that effect integrate we need to see our first passes in the game to know if it's good we need to see it in action in order to improve it and make it better this applies to everybody your wider team has a better perspective on the project and everything going on in the game and getting your collaborators work in the game will allow your team to react to this content and help improve it for future passes to make it simple integrate the content into the game to compensate for the fact that your collaborators are not fully integrated into your team it's honestly you'd be surprised at how much

times we've sent scripts and we don't see them in game ever and we get lots of notes on them but we can't help them making make them better until they're in game and we can also add our perspective to this we've said this a couple times before but contractors are honing one specific skill across multiple different productions at once generally speaking you are an expert in your game you've spent thousands of hours and years learning and figuring out and knowing how to make the specific game but think of the fact that the freelancers that you're hiring go the same thing goes for them and their field of expertise across many different games they spend their time being the best at doing what they do across multiple different productions on multiple different scales multiple different scopes in our case from aaa to a very small nd so we know how to do narrative on any type of product production so oftentimes the problem isn't about your project it's about making our expertise fit with the project at hand so listen to your collaborators they're

experts and remember don't hire people to tell you things that you think you know better than them that's not going to lead to successful collaboration you hired them for a reason work requires vulnerability experience energy and thus it requires humanity a task can have taken 15 minutes to perform but it requires thousands of hours honing a craft to do in this amount of time you're paying to access a human being with life experience who knows how to do their job so please respect that and finally here's something everybody knows games change scope during development it's just what games do and that's why we like doing this sometimes that happens while your contractors are working on the project the thing you have to remember is yes we will sense it as it's happening we'll see that like what we're trying to do doesn't quite fit with what you're doing uh but you they should also be told about it you can't just assume that they'll find out from somebody else there needs to be a conversation about

the game scope changing because change in scope means change in expectations employees can weather a change in scope because they can wait around for a little bit you're paying them full time to weather this change but contractors are deliverable based and they have other things going on they need to have the relationship reevaluated and re-examined when these changes occur is it the right time to put an end to a relationship does it have to change does the contract need to change does more people need to be brought on all these questions need to happen when you're changing changing the scope of your game now we've given lots of advice for clients but we also wanted to touch base on a couple points in case you're the collaborator first be honest with what is and what isn't your responsibility with yourself and with the client be clear about what they are getting out of what they are getting and what you are willing to give and that line will always move throughout the contract so it's a conversation that needs to happen often get everything laid out first before you start on any work we talked about deliverables before this applies to contractors too

and advocate for yourself as best as you can especially when change challenges arise this can lead to conflict but conflict is not bad all of the guidelines we've mentioned can and should be brought up when challenges are happening it's not easy but it's necessary it's what you need to make it through those challenges to to do a successful delivery of a successful project always make sure to build a good relationship with your clients in order to be able to have those conversations we've told a lot to clients today to try to build relationships with you but it's also the contractor's responsibility to build these uh these relationships to be able to have challenging conversations your client your good clients will listen and make changes and how do you keep going when a project keeps falling short well you need to have honest conversations with the client you need to reevaluate both your intentions and your roles and deciding whether to push through and continue depends on their understanding of your points as a contractor uh it's perfectly okay to keep going in a challenging situation as long as all

parties understand that it is a challenging situation but if not nothing not credits not cash not connections is worth suffering so always consider if you can leave a difficult situation remember that as a freelancer you also have leverage and that's going to help you enter these challenging conversations and oftentimes find a solution towards those challenges so kim's going to kim is going to give you the takeaways yeah so just to kind of wrap it up with some final takeaways from this um and kind of simplify things that we've talked about and give things to think on the first is decide what you're paying for if you're hiring someone are you paying for their expertise are you paying for their hours are you paying for their time are you paying for their work are you paying for their muscle because whatever you're really really and truly paying for beyond their knowledge is going to determine your ask and that's what the contractor is going to use to set up their own workloads and also their own lives for the foreseeable so that's something that's super important at the

outset um you also have to decide what you're not paying for and you have to communicate that very clearly to ensure that expectations are met and that that contractor's work and time and knowledge are never wasted they're they're never things are never done without compensation on either side and things are not done with an expectation of of pleasing a client that the client doesn't even need and third even if a contractor is one person versus something like us which is you know company these relationships are still the joining of two ecosystems and as in ecosystems an imbalance in one area can affect another and it can spread between the two so always make sure that you know that balance is maintained and speaking of ecosystems if you are crunched for time assume that that rolls onto your collaborators as well you need to be aware and be honest about the way that the project is going the way that the studio is feeling the way that individuals are feeling and you define solutions early whenever you can and finally to you know really reiterate this good collaboration requires

understanding of the work and empathy for those who do it and anything you know anything less than that anything that doesn't feel as good as that is truly genuinely not worth the pain so thank you and good luck good luck i think we might i think we can do questions i think we have five minutes right yeah about five minutes uh if you want to go up to the microphone i think it's so that kim can hear it and if we don't have time for all questions we have a breakout room after testing okay all right hi yeah i've got maybe an odd question um other than being like a world of warcraft uh guild leader uh do you know of of any software that teaches good team and task collaboration skills uh video game software specifically

i think nothing that necessarily teaches that that i can think of off the top of my head but i think that the for me the thing that's been most valuable in terms of how to manage client collaborations has been to use genuinely like happiness and well-being as a metric and to to realize that like that is fundamental to the work i think a lot of the time especially in contract situations early on there's this temptation to say okay well this is frustrating i'm i'm hurting but i'm a contractor i have to keep this work i do this thing and to say well i'm just dealing with this stress i'm just dealing with this bad feeling and that spreads to a team that spreads very easily to a team and the biggest yeah the biggest help has been just examining how are people feeling in this space and how can i address that because the second that you start paying attention to i think the flow of of those emotions the flow of that power and the way that people are feeling and the way that people are being handled you can start to i think get a better picture of what needs to be done because ultimately even as a contractor the way that i think about deliverables sometimes is not what is this deliverable when is it do why am i

going to panic about it it's what value does this have to the person or team i'm giving it to and how do they feel about it the urgency is often determined by the energy and i think that that's that's kind of something so i i would even generally like start looking just towards community building and the ways that communities work and then start applying that to them to the models of collaboration so just just quickly then happiness of for the contractors and the team would probably equate to quality of the work absolutely absolutely because i think you can get work of a certain quality no matter what right you can beat work or or out of people that's happened into awful right i think the games industry is very very happy to do that a lot of the time but i think fundamentally when it comes to building a team that lasts to building a team that you want to stay with and to keeping a bunch of people especially as contractors for me that's very important right to have those relationships that kindness is necessary to any development at all and you know if you reach a point with someone who really does have that knowledge who has enough experience

that that line that they can draw that boundary they can put down is very firm you know and i think that it's it's it's it's all it all comes down to are we having a good time is there joy being created here is it worth it and it has to be um okay thank you um we're gonna go there first i think he was there first oh thank you um i'm just have a short remark because my company is actually built exclusively on collaborators and i wanted to share my experiences with that first of thank you for the talk because i can really agree with everything that you said and my experience was at the beginning very scary because i was i had the intentions to include my collaborators and i wasn't sure whether they actually want to be included or whether i just want to make money and then just go and we had in the beginning these discussions with the meetings like they were like let's not do too many meetings i was like oh let's see whether that works out and i just want to share it actually worked out great and my collaborators actually love working and being included everywhere and i can only encourage everyone here try to hire

collaborators and integrate them as well as possible into your team absolutely thanks for sharing yes next question hi thanks for the talk i was wondering if you have tips on how to decide beforehand what is going to be a good collaborative relationship if you have a way of like tips of how to assess whether a company is going to be a good fit um yeah i mean you speak to that um for me it's it's a like one anything can change right like leadership can change and there's no way there's no surefire way to say it but i think that at the outset it's been very very important for for me and for us to establish our values very clearly and to say that like this is something that's going to have to happen and to to be very outright about the way that i don't just perceive this work but that i perceive the work of games that i perceive this industry for me at this point if i can't be honest when i'm meeting a sweet baby client for our team

about the fact that this industry is broken then i don't think that's going to be a positive relationship but it took me several years of being in the position of relative you know comfort in this industry to even be able to bring that up because i think that if right now we don't see the problems if they don't see like the systemic issues that are going to be holding us back then i don't know that there's a collaboration that can even happen in an equitable way so it's it's about you know value matching and making sure that that perspective is the same beyond even the work and and technical matching i think thanks thank you uh hello hi uh thank you for the talk really appreciate it i wanted to dig a little bit into in you were talking about integrate yes um so you know just having experiences with you know where narrative is trying to be structured into the game it's like hey you're making this narrative let's play test it you know and sometimes contractors are working a bit earlier it really depends when that's available do you have any thoughts about what kind of structures are useful for integrating narrative in a way that's successful

i think the the most important thing is to as contractors it's really hard to learn every specific engine and project and how integration happens so having somebody on your end as a client who is able to integrate the work is always very very helpful sometimes it's impossible and that's okay but to be upfront about it and say okay well we don't have the resources to integrate right now so the calendar will match when we can integrate knowing that your second pass will happen yeah and you can integrate that recording will happen after you've done a second pass yeah making sure that this the calendar reflects the actual capabilities of the project to integrate the work inside the engine yeah and i should add also that like design documents and stuff can be immensely helpful in that in that way i think that the the aim is is mostly to ensure that the contractor has the same perspective on the integrated gameplay as you do so if you don't have integrated gameplay that's okay because that means that we're still aligned it's more that a lot of the time because the the team is is working together very intimately and very connected they have kind of an invisible knowledge that the contractor doesn't and so being able to

kind of package up and provide that knowledge in a build and a design breakout something like that means that your contractor gets armed the same way as your team cool thank you appreciate it thank you oh hi javier hi um thank you so much first of all for having this talk i feel like especially at gdc it's so easy for the industry to get caught up in this cycle of like backpadding about here's this game that was so successful and here are our staff designers that are talking about it and then the all of the like hundreds of people that have been collaborators on it aren't credited and in like any meaningful way and um i noticed that like like especially impacting like creators of color creators of marginalized genders um do you have any um like impactful strategies or or or frameworks that you can advise people to engage with the subject of labor accreditation um in any meaningful

way yeah i think for for accreditation it's an uphill battle right now i think the industry-wide is it's a huge push but for me the only thing i can do is advocate for for it and on any on any team even before the question is asked i often try to soft discuss it the same way that i would talk about what i want to know genuinely like a lot of time what the team's perspective is on the industry what a team's perspective is on the same on the issues that we suffer i want to know what they feel about accreditation at the outset i think that's something important to to really discuss and also to make sure that is in the contract in areas especially where you don't trust that no matter no matter the team no matter how kind no matter what anything having that on paper is super important and means that you know you will be guaranteed a place on this but i think largely yeah largely for me the the biggest fight to have the biggest way to advocate is to do it at the outset before any work even begins is is to treat it the same way that you would treat any kind of relationship

where at the beginning right there's for me that rule of dating that i've that i've always heard but hated is like well you don't discuss this you know it's just politics don't discuss this it's just that for me it's like no any kind of relationship going to enter into is going to be really really you know colored by that person's perception because i'm not just coming in as a writer i am coming in as kimball lair a black writer who is from this background who has this company who has this team and i don't that not all that enters into the world for me so i have i have to make those safeguards before i can even consider anything else so i think always having that finding advocates like finding people i'm ha i'm always happy to to have those talks folks like myself in the industry people who are there i'm i'm happy to to have that but advocacy and community are the most important parts fundamentally and then just bringing that up to any client i think matters awesome thank you so very much thank you can we keep going

yeah all right cool uh so one quick question uh when it comes to collaboration as you mentioned scope changes a lot throughout the process and there are times where because of scope being limited we have to cut out some things in terms of cutting content that has been worked on by a collaborator when do we really communicate that and how like what is the best way to approach that communication um i think with kind of this this just happened to us with understanding that despite their role outside being external to the team the work was valuable and the work was was what meant something to them and i think you know the reality yeah the reality of the scope is that sometimes things don't make it in but i think the importance of any situation like that is to realize who's losing something and that it's not just you know it's easy to say like we had to make that on our side it was a production decision but it was a creative decision to that person and i think just approaching with that

knowledge and say hey look you did work you're still valued and we're gonna credit you for it it got cut for scope reasons and we understand how painful it is but you know we want you to be prepared for that and i think that that that for me is is the only thing we can do because they're all realities you know that we can't change and i think we just have to talk around them i also want to add um if you can involve your collaborators in those decisions and what needs to be cut if if the scope concern is we to cut x number of minutes from this game as narrative collaborators we can help you find the best minutes that won't completely uh undermine a lot of the structural work that we've done for the narrative of your game i know it from from the you know project perspective it might be easy to go well these other easy yes ones to cut for us but then it might make your narrative way worse so always try to involve your collaborators in those discussions and be upfront about like this is why we need to cut this content and any information you have for us is appreciated okay thank you very much thank you

i don't know who was first i'm gonna bounce around yeah okay hi hi um first off thank you very much kim david um i had no offense to any other presenters this week but for me personally this may have been the most beneficial and valuable seminar i've attended thank you and speaking from a contractor outside of the game development industry um my question for you guys is do you think that the end goal or this the real solution for a lot of the problems that you're talking about and near you're having occur within the industry would be more control or rather more implied control and a seat at the table of product product and project management and development down the road yes i think 100 so their second part to that i'm sorry but

would be wouldn't the representation of the contractors within the industry in and of itself be the key point and solution to that end goal yeah yeah i think so i think that that's you know that kind of advocacy and representation is super important and i think that hopefully within years our industry will would be better at that i think that's like reform on a very very large level and i think until until then that for that is why for me like a lot of these these channels are like having communities of contractors having these open discussions having you know for for us we made a company that is essentially a contract a contractor filled with full-time folks and that has allowed us to have a certain measure of like you know freedom of movement because of that size but i think that all that says to me is that that's what we need on a huge macro level and is something that yeah i i think i could talk about this for a very long

time but i i do think it's the only moving towards a world in which there is more and i think there's more room for representation you mentioned control and i think that that might be one of the issues is it's not so much about control it's about influence it's about being able to have the conversation at the moment where it needs to happen as opposed to then having to assert some sort of control to be able to rectify the situation it's about you know not being afraid to let those people in the room who you need to let in early on well right the key to that honestly leverage yes and speaking from a categorical industry where our contractor base does have that leverage that's going to be a key point yeah so thank you all very much thank you thank you sounds good okay thank you um i come from a country where game development is still like advancing so i i feel like i shouldn't give me the luxury of rejecting jobs just because

they are not healthy and i am lucky enough to be in a position where i can like teach them and healthy relationships with game developers because they are not used to it they are like you guys are like like the hammer analogy you said so my question is how how to tackle tackle this with my clients how can i like teach them these healthy relationships so i think it's it's going to be a it's always a battle right because i think that fundamentally i believe in what you're doing and i and i will do it as well right i think that it's always worth going to the table my rule is that i will always show up at the table for that discussion if someone is is is being especially someone who's holding power is is being challenging is is having an issue and i have the strength advocacy and safety to be able to say okay i'm going to sit in this room and have that conversation i'm always going to do it i think

it's important to challenge that power it's important to ask them the very tough questions you know for for me in narrative a lot of the time that question is just like okay you've asked me here to write a black character and the question i can ask that's very challenging for a lot of people to answer is why did you make them black just that and that question is going to give me the information that i need so i think it's it's about not necessarily teaching them but interrogating them and having them explain to you the framework by which they are currently working the framework by which they are currently behaving badly and then it falls back to you i think to decide is this a person who can be taught is this a person who is whose framework allows for a change of opinion or a change in in behavior or is this a person who cannot be changed because i think that's the line right it's there's a there's a line that we don't especially you know coming from the background that i do there's a lot of stuff that i've had to just deal with i've had to just eat this a lot of stuff and go okay that has to happen but

what i have never benefited from was a situation that was purely detrimental at a certain point i have to be able to know that i can create shields guards and structures that will keep me safe despite how bad things are on that other side so i think it's yeah always go to the table always ask them questions about their perspective and let their answers determine whether that fight is even worth having and then when you are having that fight i think it's just important to just always remember that like this is about people this is about bringing people into a situation and this is about if you want to have access to humans you have to be human yeah and i think that's like the the core factor because eventually there is there will always be a point that you should leave in and that it is unhealthy on a way that cannot be mitigated and i think that the the challenge is is finding where that level sits for you specifically i i think a good metric to use and you know being

able to walk away is is a privilege but at the same time if it's if as a contractor you're juggling multiple contracts and one of them is hurting your other contracts this is a good sign to start having those conversations and start making those decisions because if your whole stock as a creator is is falling because and your energy levels are falling because of one specific challenge then that affects you more than it affects them okay okay thank you very much thank you thanks everybody i don't know if it's needed i'm gonna be in like the breakout room for like i don't know 30 minutes or something [Applause] [Music] you