The future of management

You know what the main problem with the game development industry is these days? The BIG G does! It’s management. There isn’t enough of it. We are going about this all wrong. Some games have over a hundred employees, and I’m betting most of those aren’t managers. That’s COMPLETELY the wrong approach. We need projects with MORE management. We’ll create a really sophisticated structure with levels and levels of management and clear responsibilities. At the top will be the visionary. He’ll come up with the high-level concept like “clone Halo”. He’ll give useful feedback like “make it more fun” and “this isn’t cool enough”. Below him, we have the chairmen of the right and left sides of the screen. Each one is responsible for all the bugs, gameplay and art that fall on their half of the screen. They both are responsible for the board of directors (which of course has a chairman) that includes director of fun, director of ripping other games off, director of doing nothing, director of time wasting, and director of scheduling. Below these directors, we have the subdirectors. The subdirectors are below the board of directors, but are in charge of the individual departments. So, there’s a subdirector of art, animation, production, management (an integral department to making a game), programming and design. Below, them are the leads. The leads are broken up into many important categories. Each department will have a lead for each character or enemy, a lead for each type of object, and a lead for each level. Below that, there are several sub leads. The subleads work on specifying EXACTLY what they want in the game. They lead the subsubleads who write exact specifications for not only what is wanted, but how to do it. Then, all the work can be done by one completely unskilled person. This person doesn’t need to know how to use Maya at all. They can just follow the step by step instructions provided by the art subsublead assigned to that particular object. No programming experience? No problem! The document will tell them exactly what they need to type!

Why will this work? So much time in game development is wasted on reimplementing features because inexperienced people are making incorrect decisions. With so many great directors, they’ll know exactly what is necessary first, so they’ll be able to boil the problem of making a good game down to its simple elements. It’ll be so simple and easy that one unskilled person will be able to make the entire game when oversaw by 50 directors.