Game design - definitely a 21st century profession
by petermeEarlier this year I wrote a post titled, “21 Century Professions,” where I posited that experience design is a “miscellaneous” profession, because it’s so “synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain.”
Jesse recently pointed me to an article on Valve Software, the company behind the video game Half-Life (among others). Among heartening comments such as, “In the end we determined to stop thinking about it in terms of schedules and certification processes and start thinking from the point of view of a customer…” is rather lengthy explanation of Valve’s (lack of) organizational structure. An excerpt:
“We don’t really do job titles,” says Jeep Barnett, one of Valve’s more recent acquisitions, plucked from university along with the rest of the team behind Portal. Later, Episode Two’s Gautum Babbar dismisses the idea that there is any one person behind the direction of the series. It’s a recurring theme; responsibilities are shared and positions are rarely set in stone, employees expected to straddle roles and make themselves useful in any way they can.
“I think my personal view is that we’re in the business of inventing things that haven’t existed before,” says Newell. “A lot of times, solutions fall between the cracks of existing role definitions. Is this an art problem? Is this a tech problem? Is this a design problem? Often the answer is all of the above, and you need people who are really comfortable spanning multiple disciplines.”
This is exactly true about our work as experience designers. Organizations that don’t recognize this, and insist on placing people into narrow boxes, will never be able to fulfill their potential.
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on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Experience design, Management.
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December 4th, 2007 at 5:59 am
That’s interesting about Portal.
It’s an ironic twist that the first sentence of your following paragraph has you pigeon-holing yourself into the job title of “experience designer”
For me it comes down to simply recognising and using all the skills each individual brings to the table. This could be everything from cutting code, to bouncing ideas, to making pretty pictures, to knowing all the latest tricks, or to creating a positive vibe in the team.