Fredrik Ahlström

At least in game development, what really matters is whether everyone in the organization—from the owners and top management all the way down to the people actually making the games—can share and genuinely relate to a love for games and a desire to create something. As obvious as that may sound, the reality is that there are workplaces where you can go day after day without feeling even the slightest trace of either. Especially when executives and leaders genuinely love games and are players themselves, conflicts within the organization tend to become meaningful conflicts over creation—arguments that may be intense, but are still moving along the same vector. And that is often where something new is born. When the opposite is true, however, those conflicts become nothing more than a battle against irrationality. And if, by bad luck, that continues for a long time, even a strong team can eventually be destroyed. There are several important factors when game developers work as an organization under executives and leaders, but most important are: (1) whether those leaders can earn respect or (2) whether they have a vision that people can believe in. The first is relatively easy to imagine. If executives or leaders have an outstanding track record in the field, respect tends to come naturally. This may sound obvious, but there have in fact been cases where leaders had not merely achieved nothing in game development, but had virtually no understanding of development or games in the first place. Worse still, there have been organizations in such a terminal state that people known primarily for sexual harassment or abusive management ended up in leadership positions through favoritism and connections among senior management. Many people have probably seen or heard of organizations like this. Respect from developers does not simply emerge from an organizational title or rank. And yet there are still quite a few people who seem to misunderstand this, believing that hierarchy and job titles alone somehow create a leader. That said, even someone without a track record can be a strong leader if they have a vision that people can genuinely believe in. For example, even if someone comes from another industry and has no experience developing games, an organization can still function extremely well if that person has a powerful vision that gets to the heart of the matter—something people can understand, share, and rally around. The opposite is when an employee asks, “Why did you introduce this system? What exactly are you trying to achieve with it?” and the answer is something like, “Because as the head of this organization, I want to do the right thing!” If nobody can define what “the right thing” actually means, there is no clear objective and no identifiable vision. The organization then wastes enormous amounts of time playing a guessing game, trying to infer what that person is thinking and somehow arrive at the answer they have in their head. Organizations like that gradually begin to fall apart. So if you ask me what makes a good environment for developers, one answer would be this: There needs to be either a certain degree of genuine respect for the people leading the organization, or a strong vision that people can believe in. Only when one of those things exists does real challenge become possible—and with it, the possibility of creating something genuinely new. When neither exists, an organization either descends into chaos, or people simply begin treating their work as “just a job,” carrying out tasks every day that have little or nothing to do with creativity. That difference is enormous.