In Part One of this essay, Gamelab co-founders Peter Lee and Eric Zimmerman discuss the development of Gamelab's company culture.

Many of the chapters in this book discuss the tangible, concrete problems of starting and running a game development studio. In addition to the thorny questions of legal company structures and managing finances, there are equally important but less tangible issues that game development entrepreneurs must face. How do you keep your employees creatively engaged with their work? What kind of company culture results in successful games? How do you interface with the outside world? These hard-to-define but essential-for-success intangibles often make the difference between a company that merely limps along and one that thrives and shines, both inside and out.

In the essay that follows, we will try to make these intangible issues as tangible as possible by referencing our own experience with Gamelab, a successful 7-year-old independent game development company. Our approach to running Gamelab is based on the four following intangible principles:

• Make everyone an author
• Design a company culture of research and play
• Be process focused, not solution focused
• And be an honest hustler to the outside world

These issues are all intangible because each one involves all of a company's departments and functions, and also because each one touches the daily experience of everyone on staff. They are part of the internal processes of how a company runs itself on a daily basis, as well as the way that a company relates to the outside world. In our experience, the truly successful companies, the ones where we all wish we were working, are the companies that get these intangibles right.

Although we have identified four separate intangibles, the truth is that they all overlap and work together. A company culture of research encourages people to have discussions across departmental divides, which in turn engenders a focus on process. Involving staff in hustling the company makes them feel like an author of the organization's public image - and gives them a feeling of authorship over their day to day work as well. It is a tough problem to get these intangibles in place, but because they catalyze and strengthen each other, working on one part of the larger problem helps with other parts, too.

Before we dive in, one caveat: do not be fooled by the simplicity of the advice we offer. As with many aspects of starting and running a business, these complex questions have many correct answers and our solutions may not be right for you. We are not advocating that every company should be managed the way we run Gamelab. But we hope there is something you can glean from our approach that can be useful for your own endeavors.

First Things First: Make everyone an author

If there is one overriding directive that infuses everything we do at Gamelab, it is the idea that everyone who works at the company is an author - that our staff should feel as if they are the ones contributing ideas, working through problems, and creating great games. It is crucial that every individual at your company feels a sense of responsibility and authorship over what they do. If you can instill this key sensibility into your team, many of your other problems will begin to be solved as you find that your staff will solve them for you.

What exactly do we mean by a sense of authorship? Consider its opposite. If people do not have this feeling about their work, they will feel like a wage slave (even if they are well paid), clocking in at the start of each workday to tick off to-do boxes and complete tasks for someone else. Virtually every negative work situation seems to stem from the fact that people feel like they are doing someone else's work, and so it does not matter to them how polished a game is or even whether it gets finished. These projects usually go over-schedule and end up with lackluster results, or at their worst crash and burn.

On the other hand, when staff have a genuine feeling of authorship over what they do, then they are not merely workers anymore: they become collaborators. They take the extra time to diagnose obstacles with the overall development process. They will listen to critical feedback on their own work, and offer thoughtful comments to others. They will care very much about the quality of the final product and about the company as a whole.

Productivity will increase if employees are creatively engaged. It is easy enough for you - the owners and founders of a company - to be passionately engaged in what you do on a day to day basis. But how do you get your staff to care? Creative staff need to be personally invested in what they are doing. They require more than financial incentive; they need to be authors.

But what about financial incentives? Some companies use reward systems like bonuses or stock options in order to create a sense of ownership (or even genuine legal ownership) among its employees. These approaches can work to a certain extent, but for us purely financial incentives can only go so far. Money without any genuine authorship becomes an empty gesture, a lure to keep talent from running off to another company. Make no mistake: financial incentives are important, but they are not enough. From our experience, the intangible benefits of an authorship-focused company generally outweigh any possible tangible financial gains. This may not be true in every industry, but it certainly is true of a creative field like game development.

So how do you impart authorship to your staff? The secret is that authority and responsibility cannot be faked. You cannot pretend to offer authorship, while still actually structuring your company as if most of the staff are minions that can't be trusted without extensive oversight and approvals. In order for them to feel authority and responsibility, they actually have to be given real authority and responsibility over what they do.

What does this mean in practice? At Gamelab, we do not have a single individual that plays the role of "creative director" or "vision leader" on any given project. If you are assigned to do character design on a game, then you are the one doing the character design. General decisions are made through team consensus, but there is no manager reviewing each of your designs, telling you that they do or do not measure up. You are given ultimate authority on the tasks assigned to you to solve.

In the real world, it is tricky to pull this off. In an environment without trust and communication among project team members, the danger is that staff become territorial and hoard their own authority while scoffing at others' attempts to tell them what to do. On the other hand, if you can keep trust and communication healthy, then the opposite happens: team members become desperate for feedback from everyone else, and there is idea exchange and feedback across all members and disciplines.

Giving authority to your staff does not mean that you cannot have internal hierarchies and structures. At Gamelab, the art director still supervises and directs the visual designers on a project, conceptually directing each individual designer through research and initial design explorations. But every visual designer is ultimately given the autonomy to solve the problems that he or she is assigned. And they are in large part responsible for making sure that their individual work is fitting into the team's larger evolving vision for the game as a whole.

One result of this approach is that staff are always challenged to solve tasks in new ways. The experience of constant challenge is a key part of feeling like an author. If your team starts solving design and development problems in the same ways over and over, the spark will go out of their work. They will feel like zombies on an assembly line showing up each day to do someone else's drudgery. People feel like authors when they are given the creative freedom to solve problems in new ways - whether they are full-time employees or project-based freelancers. And a company full of motivated innovators will produce much better work than a company full of zombified assistants.

Creating challenges for your staff takes some strategizing, as well as a company that is interested in exploring new creative territory. For example, at Gamelab our goal is to always try and come with new kinds of audio and visual aesthetics, new sorts of gameplay, and new directions for content on every project. For example, every downloadable game has certain interface elements in common like an options screen, a main menu, etc. On any given title, we try and express the game's narrative on these screens, finding different approaches each time. While at many game companies these common parts of games are all implemented in the same cookie-cutter style, our visual staff like the challenge of having to actually design the interface themselves. That is why we hired them, right? It can be quite challenging to do this on every project, but it definitely motivates our talent. And it gives our games variety as well.

Relative to a more traditional, authoritarian approach, giving your staff a genuine sense of authorship by giving them real responsibility can feel scary. You and your senior staff probably know better how to solve many of the problems that come up and, in the short term, it is easier simply to tell people what to do. But if you proceed by treating the rank and file as extensions of the experienced staff, everyone will end up unhappy. Your supervisors will be overworked as they micromanage everything that happens under them, without the time to address their own tasks. The rest of your company will lose interest in the big picture as they simply do what they think their manager wishes without considering the larger game or the company as a whole.

Democratizing authorship has to come from the top down. Are you setting a good example for your staff? Do your processes instill the trust and communication that team authorship requires? Are the people at your company given the freedom to solve tasks in the ways they see fit? To make everyone an author requires constant vigilance against the natural tendency to control everything that happens at your company. But making sure it happens is absolutely essential to success.

Look for Part 2 of this essay next Wednesday, 7/25/2007

This essay originally appeared in "Business and Legal Primer for Game Development," edited by S. Gregory Boyd. Buy Business & Legal Primer for Game Development from Amazon.com.

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