Office Space: The Dos and Don'ts of Game Development Workplace Design

[Music] uh hi everybody uh I'm Dimitri uh I've been in game development for about 15 years now and I've done stuff like design casual games produce casual games design mobile games uh start a game company that makes mobile games be the GM of a company that makes social games be the GM of Zinga New York and work on a giant console franchise which shall remain nameless before all of that stuff though uh I went to grad school and studied architectural history so that weird combination of backgrounds is why I wanted to talk about uh something we rarely talk about in this business which is not the games that we make but the places in which we make them uh so before we start looking at some of those um let's take a super brief look at some history uh the office you work in didn't spring fully formed out of Ralph Bayer's head or his garage um the like the games themselves uh commercial office forms have a long history which I'm going to go through in about three slides um the first serious influence on game development offices starts with the

modern Factory this is one of the first times that we see a need to put a lot of people in a limited space to perform repetitive tasks uh without moving very much pretty soon an industry Springs up around trying to make these movements even more efficient and between that the desire to have employees under something like a constant surveillance and uh the growing costs of commercial real estate uh you wind up with something like this just to get this out of the way this is an open Office uh every 20 years this gets reinvented and uh every 10 years as everybody decides that it's horrible and there's a bunch of push back against it and uh for the reasons that you see here surveillance paternalism and cost uh especially cost open offices are not going away sorry uh so instead of starting another debate about uh studies show off open offices suck uh let's take them as a given for just a few minutes and uh talk about how we can make this better rather than pretending we'll be

able to abolish it completely anytime soon um so besides factories turned into open offices another ancestor of the modern game development space is this the art studio these spaces started out as places that were just optimized for light great big giant windows and ease of access to supplies but starting about the mid 20th century the idea of the studio as a social space um and eventually as an art object itself starts to gather some steam so signifying that you're a creat through your workspace is an old idea but we also have Andy warhol's Factory to thank for a lot of what we expect for someplace that's called a studio today and the third major branch in the ancestry of game development spaces is the science lab these are utilitarian spaces that also have great big giant windows and are devoted to experimentation uh Laboratories are where computers first started to show up in the workplace and the Total Takeover of the desktop by computer equipment was

very much birthed in the lab this is what um yeah you see the like sort of timeline of what an engineering uh space looks like this is what an engineering space looks like right now and um this is also what every other space looks like right now so what you probably started to notice in these last three slides is that despite starting down three very different paths these workplace types wound up at a really familiar destination rows of desks so the key differentiator is not what the of desks are but what you surround them with and how you arrange them because the rows of desks themselves are really the nucleus of the commercial workspace so in an industry famously on The Cutting Edge of technology and culture what have we done with all those rows of desks uh unfortunately the first answer is a bunch of that nobody likes um last year this guy the amazing Kyle Drexel of War gaming helped me to run a survey about game industry workplaces and I guess this is already kind of spoiled by the um the factoid at

the top of the slide but one of the big takes takeaways from that survey is that most game developers don't really like their workspace uh here's why there's sort of a bunch of reasons uh reason number one which kind kind of surprised me was it's just too noisy it's too noisy uh about 30 odd perc of game developers thought their workspace was too noisy um and uh this you know obviously has to do with the fact that when Engineers want were to design a perfect workspace they're going to come up with some place place that allows them to to get into that uh Flow State that um that that everyone is after when designers design a perfect workspace they're going to design a space that allows them to collaborate and talk to each other and artists fall somewhere in between marketers fall somewhere on the phone uh this this obviously has a um a lot of different applications so personal space this is a little bit more out of folks control but it was the number two thing that people talked about we're we're on top of each other there's no privacy uh at all and that

doesn't necessarily have to mean you know our desks are packed in next to each other or you know we wish we were mad men and had giant offices and just going to drink booze all day long um but it does have something to do with how the space is laid out and how people perceive this space importantly because these are you know this is survey results here so whether or not you can do anything about it this is what people are thinking about the space that you've created for them to work in so even though everything is super tight and super crowded this is like dichotomy number one in this in this uh list um we're still never near the the people that we need to be near where you know we have to walk all the way across the office to get to HR we have to walk all the way across across the office to get from one part of the engineering department to another the bathrooms are at the far side of Mars um this is a a consistent problem and of course the the classic there's never a meeting room there's never many a meeting room when

you need one there's never one when you don't need one um there are too many for people that always get all the meeting rooms they want um this I have some more slides about this later on in the deck but just know that um meeting space and collaboration space in general even if it's not a private meeting room uh is very important to folks this you know this list is is seven or eight items but this is you know these are the tops out of 200 different things that people wh about in the survey where I asked them to whine uh visual privacy is surprisingly important to folks this isn't just hey I don't want to feel like my boss is looking at my monitor all the time but also just the capacity to be looking out at your monitor and at your workspace and not seeing chaos uh right behind it so everyone can see everything sure but also the fact that you can see everything is really distracting so a lot of different uh a lot of different approaches in the case studies that I

take a look at to um to kind of try and figure out that problem um this one actually came up more often than I thought uh it would and I guess that's down to game developers being game developers but um yeah a lot of people don't just think their offices just are shitty um they're ugly they're boring they don't have any games in them um that that was a stunningly High uh uh frequency complaint there's no place for us to actually play games um that there's a there's a fine line which you'll see a little bit later on um between there's no place and you're trying to turn this place into some kind of weird fun prison um but uh but that came up a lot um and then the the you know the light level issue um this is is is very simple very basic but um programmers need different amount of light than artists than designers than you know people who have to look at Giant lists of stuff uh all day long the people that are testing your game uh etc etc um so one crucial factor in uh

workplace satisfaction they came up again and again and again in the survey my individual interviews um was the organizing principle behind how these rows of deaths are laid out there are two main schools of thought about how this ought to be done and most respondence offices use either one or the other in almost exactly equal proportions in a game team layout everyone working on a specific project is clustered together regardless of what they do on that project in the departmental layout artists sit with artists producers sit with the producers design sits over there Engineers sit over there even if there are two or three different games that they're working on it's pretty clear what the advantages and issues with these approaches are if everyone working on a game is sitting together you don't have to go too far to find and collaborate with the other devs who are working on the same problems as you are as we know from those Factory studies a 100 years ago the less you have to physically move to get your job done the more efficient you're going to be at doing it of course the main drawback here is the very reason why the departmental seating model exists it's very easy for people

to get siloed when they're only thinking about their own problems you quickly lose the advantage of having 30 Engineers who are these Top Class you know guys and gals working together uh if only 10 of them ever talk to each other and another 10 are like sequestered over someplace out they never talk to each other and it's that's you know the the knowledge sharing Gap becomes very very huge so as a result of that uh you get this this kind of third approach some workplaces is uh but usually but not only those with large or flexible physical spaces to work with have adopted a hybrid model um in which the groups most likely to work across all games sit with one another in as Central a location as possible and the devs working on a single game primarily or only uh sit together on the periphery now typically these Central Services departments include groups like marketing uh most business functions some artists some QA uh and very often a tools or um a game

engine group now to be clear none of these approaches are the right way to lay out an office space and I'm not trying to claim that um first you have to actually fit your staff into the physical space that you've got so some of these approaches might not be appropriate um and none of these appr uh might might be appropriate for your uh office in theory you could design some kind of crazy four-dimensional model where everything perfectly overlaps at acute angle but it's very rare that you can actually Implement something like that in the space you've got although I will mention one uh at the end of this talk that um that a giant company that everybody loves uh to be named never um has worked out and and a lot of people actually like it so that's in the tweetable takeaways portion um so let's uh let's take things out of the realm of theory uh for a minute and then look at a few examples of how some game companies of varying sizes and with varying giant Scrooge MC duck piles of cash deal with these issues uh the first

one is everybody's favorite company Zinga um these guys had a building that they uh that existed already that they needed to work with but it was basically a giant open shell the key word is gigantic uh Zinga was only a bit more than half of this office but we're talking about 12 NFL regulation football fields uh or nine World Cup football pitches for you people that like the right kind of football uh each employee has a lot of space in uh in a workspace this size um so I don't you know none of you might know what you know square foot perr um kind of feels like but trust me 140 is is you know in New York you're like forget it you want to that's Heaven um uh Heaven good um sorry uh so the model that Zinga tried to follow with this was a version of the of the hybrid plan where the game teams sit together uh and the central teams sit together and each of them had an open seating area that that surrounded Ed a small

core of uh collaboration spaces of various sizes um the problem uh that Zinga tried to address in the most obvious way was that ugly or boring issue that we talked about so like a lot of Silicon Valley startups made good uh these guys bought into the office as playground model um that has come to prominence in the last 20 years um seriously Zinga went absolutely goddamn bananas uh making their office into a 12-year-old boy's dream uh and we'll come back uh in a few minutes um to what influence that had on on their employees and their and their Outlook so once you left the common areas of Zinga um the offices don't look that much different from any other corporate workspace they have more knickknacks both employee and Company supplied but other than that it looks kind of familiar to anyone who's built software um here's how they tried to deal with the key issues that we identified a few slides ago so noise they had it a little bit easy they just had lot of square feet so they could

give each employee a lot of square feet and that you know dramatically re reduces the noise because of physics visual privacy you see a lot of the time they tried to um they didn't use a uh a particularly intense methodology for this but but did what a lot of companies that have um prefab office furniture do which is to get these angled desk pods that uh that you can see here this is uh not a perfect solution as you can see because where from where the photographer is standing you can see everybody's Monitor and it also looks like pure chaos in the background but it is a lot better than the triangle sh shirt waist Factory stuff that you see a lot of other people do where it's just a sweat shop row and rows and rows of monitors um collaboration space they had a they had a ton of space so they could have a lot of collaboration space and here uh again they tried this hybrid layout where each game team has a physically distinct area uh as do the Central Services folks and uh but crucially within that area the arrangement was non-standardized and was

driven by the folks at the top the get the general managers of those games um that make sure that you note that was driven by leaderships because that that will come back in a minute so what was the overall approach uh basically Zing is trying very very hard to make everything fun and playful uh the idea of course is that the if the employees are having fun it'll be easier for them to make more fun games for the customers and sometimes this worked and sometimes it resulted in cognitive dissonance and forced fun and um lots of hate so this can be actual uh absolute cultural poison but it wasn't the only challenge that Zinga faced with the approach that they chose um it's it's really expensive to do things like this and when you know and when revenues turn down you know the ball pit starts to look goofy um scalability uh you know that there's only a certain number of people that can fit on the water slide and when you get more people but you can't make the water slide any bigger and um importantly as

we were saying before about about management being able to call the shots on how things moved around this um interferes with humans nesting impulse people want to have some degree of agency over their space we see this over and over again and this is actually pretty common um commonly mentioned issue in in white papers and studies uh people want to have some control over their space when you take that away from them it um it just sort of increases their Ree of nervousness so a lot of uh a lot of the sort of hips are ad agencies where it's like well you don't even have a computer you just you know take a notepad and draw on it and sit in the corner and lie on the fake grass or whatever it is that we've got um that uh doesn't often work out um if you're particularly interested there's a white paper by um a guys called Fleming and sturdy uh which is called being yourself in the electronic sweat shop new forms of normative control that's in human relations which is a which is a academic

Journal I'll I'll give you more information on that if you want it at some point um but uh so let's take a look at a at a second space um space number two is a three rings uh if you've never been to a meeting or a party there uh this place is really unique uh the studio is owned by Sega now but when they uh when they opened this office it was in Indie and they started to take a really dramatic approach to one of these classic small developer problems of how to build out a white box um they had a they had a giant clasy Loft really common uh you probably have one if you have worked at a at a small developers it's just an empty white box it was about um I guess one tenth of a football pitch um so not huge and uh key to this is that the the what you're about to see here this this steampunk submarine thing is the is half of their office the the the back half uh which was completely redesigned the front half um stayed very uh similar to its

original build um this is intentionally cozy so they actually had quite a bit more space than they wound up uh slicing up and giving to the employees on purpose trying to um sort of increase the the effort for collaboration by packing everybody into smaller spaces so that's quite intentional and they divided their space up into these small group work rooms little pods with four or five folks in them that would be a department working on a game um but not giant uh one giant team of of 35 people so even small companies especially in San Francisco wound up in this perk arms race according to three rings however it was practically impossible to hire engineers at this point and the office actually was a key marketing tool for them so despite superficial s similarities this is really a very different use of architectural playfulness than what we saw with Singa it's also important to note that though the steampunk aesthetic was completely pervasive in the front half of the

office this was definitely the party in the back portion of the three rings office mullet um there's uh a much more straightforward space on the other side of of uh of a wall that you can't see here and that has largely become home to the business type functions uh versus the design and the artwork um which are going on in the submarine and that's maybe the most literal uh case of architectural determinism that I have ever seen and it does affect the employees and and we'll see how uh in a slide or two so here's how three rings approach those big game development workspace issues very different to what Zinga did um and they did a couple of things that a giant Corporation really can't do well for example they knew that they weren't going to have a huge noise problem because they had a relatively good siiz space and very few employees um that's one way to solve that problem but it's not a call you can necessarily make for visual privacy they actually partitioned up their workspace and faced the desks towards walls and partitions in in order to avoid the problem of having you looking out at you know a sea

of monitors with visual chaos behind them their collaboration spaces actually as you can see on their on their layout here practically all of the office space in this area is designed as a sort of small informal collaborative space and then they also have a a secret Library room that you enter through a bookcase um that was a a conference and really this office space is tremendous so you know pardon me if I'm just like goofy about it um the light level was um was very clever here they have they have these big curtains that you can see over their um over their large Loft windows and they have custommade uh light fixture covers that mute the fluorescent lights so you can kind of adjust the lights in a in um a much more granular way than you saw in a space like Zinger in a lot of clasby office space and um here they have their teams in separate spaces but uh they kind of have a sort of mini version of the hybrid with with

individual groups inside teams parked together um to encourage collaboration with them um Unfortunately they actually only had one private uh uh collaborative space uh but a lot of this space was um was uh available for public collaboration so the the tldr is that through salesmanship and smart design and luck three rings was able to give themselves a completely unique environment um that functioned as a calling card that explained how the company works and how they think of themselves as you walk through it as a visitor or an employee the major issues that arose though are something you probably have already guessed once you have a steampunk submarine in your office your company is kind of like about having a steam steampunk submarine in your office um and that in introduces a bunch of risks around changing tastes for example not you know you're maybe not always going to want a steampunk submarine um packing all of these people into tight spaces on purpose can obviously um introduce some issues as

well uh and the fact that you're sort of basically stuck with what you've got um Tom scoffield who um is one of the principles at three rings told me um the way we thought of it was anything Works in here as long as it fits in a steampunk submarine um so it's a little bit deterministic but obviously um there there are some big upside so the final case study that I'm going to uh take a look at um looks at a totally different type of space is a very different space a very different budget and a totally different set of requirements this is New York's waka waka which is a uh game development co-working space and incubator in the trendy lower e side located in a former storefront tattoo parlor um this space was inherited and tweaked but in a lot of ways it's the same type of space that it was when it was an art gallery a few tenants ago it's a small open room and it's long and narrow which rules out a lot of the desk layouts that we talked about before

though without any real permanent walls it's quite flexible and it has a second story and a tiny little yard that can be configured in a few different ways so check this out even a 2,000 square foot office makes an amenity play um in its own way so that maybe tells us something uh people like to say that they don't care about perks that much like this cool little backyard but again we see a significant effort to maximize the available resources wakawaka doesn't have much Furniture in it at all but what is there is high quality and extremely stylish uh flexibility and minimalist Chic are just overflowing here and um this sort of underscores the aspirational aspect of workspace design um we yeah is it is it showing two different things or something ah all right cool um so we don't actually really design a workspace around our employees um so much as we create a space that looks like it's already home to the type of people that we want

working in it and whether that's um you know whether that's a a feature or a bug we kind of it's up to us to figure out so how did waka waka address the big issues um it's harder for them than for three rings or Zinga because they couldn't really choose much about uh how their space is laid out about what materials it's made out of it's really noisy um if there are a lot of people in there the whole the whole thing is made out of polished concrete now they've done what they can about that as you can see even the de is made out of noise baffling material um and they've got a bunch of noise baffles hanging on the wall so they are smart about it um as far as visual privacy goes there's really only two options you could have everybody facing directly into a white wall not great or you could have everyone sort of looking at at at a maximum of one other person uh and that's what they did um for collaboration space this is kind of tricky um the studio amenities and infrastructure are shared uh between every one that's in there it's kind of a

big open space they have a little area in the back that you can sort of see there that that has a couch and um their their backyard is also sort of an ad hoc collaboration space as is they downstairs but ultimately there aren't very many walls um so there's a limit to what you can do um now the layout uh of course can change other than getting new giant desks uh they can switch things up but at the end of the day there's there's not much Solitude that's POS possible so what uh the core of of Waka waka's workspace approach is about allowing small independent teams to work in close proximity to each other and share facilities that they could otherwise never afford uh this office signifies to potential co-workers and to those visiting that the people who work here understand the indie game aesthetic through and through it's sparse but precise and above all else it's elegant in both functional and visual design so this works to attract like-minded collaborators and immediately tells a compelling story to for example visiting

Publishers who are attending meetings with the developers that are based here this approach definitely comes with some real challenges however the space is small and uh it's there's there's no real layout choices uh so the various privacy concerns are magnified tremendously there's also the question of scale if you succeed here you you kind of have to leave uh so this randomizes the balance of the people in the space and that can be a huge issue in a workspace that's only got about a dozen other folks in there um the materials we talked about it's you know it's all polished concrete so they they couldn't really do too much with that um but they kind of ran with it rather than trying to fight against it um it's TVD how how well that works out uh and then on top of the challenge of people scaling out of the office you really have to trust the the curation instincts of um of the people that run this space now this particular workspace is run by game business veterans but if that's not

always the case then you know you you could wind up in here with whoever they were able to get to fill the seats in order to to pay the rent so at last here are the tweetable takeaways um I'm going to put them up there one by one so maybe wait till the end if you uh want to take a a picture and I'll also make this whole deck available digitally uh if you want it as well so let's try to distill some of the most significant findings from my research and the survey and the interviews and and these case studies so we'll continue this conversation with each other and the rest of our discipline and and maybe for some of you with the people you work with as you contemplate the design or redesign of your own development space uh first disciplines differ now this is huge Engineers do not have the same requirements as designers or arcst uh or artists or marketers if you have one type of space for all of these different types of folks you're setting yourself up for a big challenge even in a small Studio you have to do what you can to make sure that there's quiet space and collaboration space available and that

they're as distinct and distant physically from each other as possible um privacy too much noise uh as I as I mentioned was the number one thing that people mentioned in the in the survey but close behind it were um a few different types of issues around privacy physical privacy and visual privacy are separate and they're both very important game developers like everybody else don't want to feel like they're being monitored in a time and motion study by their bosses all day long so if we're already going out of our way to provide Jelly Bean foot baths delivered fresh daily by Uber it's irresponsible uh not to contemplate providing phone booths or arranging your monitors so that people can read Kotaku when they're burned out for a few minutes without worrying that they're going to get fired um there are better ways to find out if your employees are shering their responsibilities than by facing all their screens towards the boss um collaboration uh is an important and enormous part of what we do about a third of the folks we spoke to said that

their offices needed more meeting rooms when we changed the phrasing to talk about General collaborative space that number shot through the roof so people are are empathetic they don't want to disturb their colleagues a lot of times folks just flat out won't talk to people that they would benefit by talking to uh because there's nowhere to do it without disturbing somebody else there are a lot of innovative ideas about how to make this work even in a really low square footage space like the the backyard at waka waka or some others so if you're interested in going into greater depth on this uh particular issue drop me a line I'll I'll give you my contact information or you can come up to me afterwards and and I can offer some concepts for you um as I was researching this topic and uh speaking with uh interior designers and Architects I kept hearing over and over again how important it is to consult with the people that are going to use the office during your design process the impact of coming in on a Monday morning and having everything be in a totally different spot or of seeing people roam around with measuring tapes and lasers taking

measurements and jotting things down without knowing why they're there uh or what's going to happen to your workplace is huge that's that nesting Instinct that we talked about before and we know this you know this is Community Management this is usability testing and we do this in our games uh if you're designing a space take some time and talk to the people that are going to be using it uh although a game can sometimes be a passion project in a work of you know one um genius's singular vision uh it would be pretty unique uh to imagine an office space uh that way um so don't do it uh personal space uh We've mentioned this a lot and this is something that um you probably have less control over in your space uh just down to Raw square footage concerns but even in uh really small areas remember to do what you can um to you know just alter the layout make it possible for people to feel like there's a little bit of personal space even if that just means in couple of places I've seen literal actual phone booths um put up in the

corner so that people don't have to you know hover over by the kitchen to make a phone call um this this helps people feel like they have some control um so about that uh that super scheme uh that I mentioned before um there so a hybrid layout so this is you know one of these very popular uh companies that everybody loves designed this uh this system where there are pods of about four to six people with desks each one of those pods is self- assembled but it's always from the same game team and sometimes within the same discipline each pod has a separate meeting room and a small separate private collaboration area as well as being located around a central space that everyone can just kind of rotate their desks into in case you happen to have a jillion dollars and can build out a space that works like this the people that worked in that space gave tremendously good reviews um so that's something to think about and then lastly

uh perks I have a lot of data from the survey about this but here's the bottom line you have to have something uh the lack of space to play games in I mentioned before was mentioned about a fifth of our respondents people notice when the office is super square but there is definitely definitely such a thing is too much of a good thing uh about 33% of our survey respondents said that the reason they think their companies provide them with these fund perks was to keep them at their do at their desks for longer hours um so even if this is not true in your office you have to take into account that some people are going to think that it's true so remember that um before the guys show up delivering your three-story water slide um so uh we probably don't have any time for any questions at all but um this is my contact information if you can't see it just walk up I'll give you a business card and um there's also a room uh that I can go to or I'll just stand outside and talk to you um it's uh what did you say is three 200 2002 so

maybe I'll go there um hey uh give me a good rating the people will email you stuff and it'll say give me a good rating so give me a good rating uh thanks everybody [Applause]