Putting it in Perspective

I just finished my final "Game Design" class tonight, and our instructor fielded questions from the class. By and large, he impressed upon the class that if you want to get into the industry, you have to "do the work". Make stuff.

I told him that I want to be a Producer, and asked what kind of "work" I would do. There wasn't a real answer for that apart from what I've been doing, except to develop the mentality to be the "undeniable force" to the team, keeping the train on the track.

He then told us a story about the end of a game project where because of what he considered to be failures on the production side, the Crunch Mode that all projects go through took a very serious toll on the team. One person felt as if he were physically dying. "I'm not going to make it", but he wasn't talking about finishing the project, he was talking about surviving it. Another team member could be heard tucking his daughter in at night over the phone, night after night, because he couldn't be home with his family. Physical pain endured by the staff. Emotional strain. All of which could have been mitigated (or even avoided) if the producers would have forced the issue early in the process to keep the project on the rails. It had our instructor literally choked up when he thought about the toll this project took on his team ... his friends.

That really hit home with me, and while I'd thought before that I had an idea of what a Producer does, I've got a whole new perspective on what my chosen job function is going to entail. And now I want it more than ever. I don't want people on my team to ever have to suffer this badly for what they love, because it's entirely possible to keep it from ever getting that bad. There's always a crunch mode when shipping software (or any product, for that matter), but it doesn't have to be like that.

It's not going to happen to my teams. Not on my watch. This is why I want to be a Producer.