Have you ever talked in-depth/in public about your time with Ensemble? It took me almost a decade to connect the Greg Street tips from the old strategy guides to the WoW guy, and I was wondering what that whole journey involved for you; where you started, jobs held, major decisions/designs made, etc.

Whoa. This could be a really big topic.

I started out as an associate designer, working on the scenarios in the campaign for Rise of Rome, and graduated to being a lead designer on Age of Empires 3. That journey took almost 10 years.

Rather than write a novel here, I’ll call out a few episodes that are still fresh in my mind, and particularly some of the folks who I learned a lot from. (And if any of my old friends are reading this, and I didn’t mention you by name, well know that I learned a lot from you too.)

Early on, I threw a fit because I didn’t want to do William Wallace for the Age of Kings campaign. I thought (and still sort of think) it felt like pandering to players because Braveheart had recently come out. But I handled it in a really stupid way. I threatened to quit. That was really the only weapon in my arsenal as the most junior person on the team. Fortunately, one of the lead designers, Mark Terrano, handled it with the perfect response. He sort of chuckled and said “Bold words!” Because he handled it with humor, it defused the situation, but he was also letting me know that my response was way out of line given the situation. Years later I started calling this phenomenon “Your hill to die on.” I always ask my team “Is this it? Is this your hill to die on?” It may very well be. Your team or company may be making a mistake so dire, or compromising your values so severely, that you have no choice but to walk away. But you generally only get a few of these a career. Use them wisely.

Sandy Petersen was one of my very early mentors at Ensemble. I learned so much from him about prototyping, playing other games (especially board games and paper RPGs) for ideas and inspiration, how to handle playtest feedback, and how to love my career. Sandy loved EVERYTHING: nature, history, horror, dinosaurs, other cultures, weapons, warfare, literature. You could kill hours talking with him about virtually anything and come away knowing literally ten times about a topic than you did before. I thought I knew games pretty well, but I played dozens of obscure wargames with their chits and hex maps with Sandy over the years.

Ian Fischer was one of my first bosses and best friends at Ensemble. He understood the difference between design-by-committee and talking about a problem until we came to some kind of resolution. By that I mean that he wouldn’t compromise on a design just to make people happy. But he would also be disappointed if you got frustrated and wanted to end a conversation. We would sometimes have 1 hour meetings go on for 4-5 hours because we were so close to a breakthrough. He also taught me a lot about how to communicate with engineers and artists. Ensemble ran a studio-wide playtest every day at 4 PM. Everyone had to play the game and give feedback in an open meeting. We eventually grew too large to all fit in one room and then we’d divide the sessions up. I learned how to take feedback from players from Ian. You can’t argue. You can’t defend your ideas. You aren’t going into the box (what’s a box?) with the game to help provide context for players. Some testers want more explanation than others, and you need to learn to read people to know how much. You also have to follow-up on the feedback. People stop giving it if they think it is falling into a black hole.

Dave Pottinger was a lead engineer who later became a designer and has stayed a close friend. When he was an engineer and I was a designer we learned that if the two of us could come to alignment that we could generally get everyone else on board. When we hit a tough design problem, we’d just sit down in my office or his and bang it out, even if it took hours. The lesson here is about how you start small with an idea and slowly build on it. You don’t walk into a meeting, especially a big meeting, with an untested idea and try to get everyone to buy in. Instead you shop it around to a few people you trust at first and build the idea with them. Then when you go into the larger discussion, you already have a few advocates.

Rob Fermier was also an engineer but he could have been a designer as well. I used to think of engineers more as implementers. As the designer, I’d flesh out the idea and then hand if off to an engineer to build. With Rob, the relationship was different. I had to get him to understand WHY we were building something, what the goals were, and what the acceptable trade-offs would be. I learned to use engineers (and by proxy artists, sound designers, producers, QA, etc.) to help me make my ideas better. Designers are not the ones who make the game fun. Everyone makes the game fun. It’s easy to forget that.

Harter Ryan was one of our early producers. He has probably softened in his old age, but at the time he was the definition of hard but fair. I had a natural inclination to be a bit of a softy, especially as a manager, but he showed me the value of holding people accountable for their commitments and the quality of their work. Newbie leaders often assume that their team will only respect someone who acts like their best friend, but I learned from Harter that teams will also trust a leader who holds them to a high bar and gets results.

Chris Rippy wore many hats at Ensemble and I worked with him closely on story development, voice actors and so on. Chris was great at staying humble and not taking things too seriously. You could suffer a big setback and he’d acknowledge it as a setback, but then laugh it off. When things seemed really stressful, he’d get us to unwind.

Chris’ brother David was the lead producer on Age of Empires 3, and he was often the bearer of bad news when things weren’t going well. When the team or his boss had concerns, he would make sure we heard the feedback rather than shielding it from us. As a leader, you do need to tank a lot of shit to make sure your team can take care of actually making the game, but you also need to make sure that the feedback, especially the tough feedback, is getting to them, or you aren’t doing them any favors.

Vance Hampton was one of my first reports. I inherited some designers when I rose to a lead position, and I viewed them mostly as a distraction who were always asking me for things when I was trying to get work done. Fortunately we did employee opinion surveys, and Vance (and a bunch of other designers) shared how their inept manager never game them much constructive feedback on how to improve as designers. “Keep doing what you’re doing” was the extent of my feedback, which is extremely demotivating. I realized I was failing them. The studio had entrusted me with the mentorship of these designers and I was blowing them off. I vowed at that moment to take managing people seriously, and I have spent a lot of effort on it ever sense. Riot has a lot of really talented designers, many of them much smarter than me. But I got this job in part because I had experience running a large organization.

Lastly, I have to mention Tony Goodman, who was the head of the studio. From the beginning, Tony didn’t want to just make great games, but he wanted to make a great place to work. He wanted to craft a studio that we wanted to spend time in and would be proud of. He cared a lot about the quality of the games, but he cared more about the health of the team. He ran Ensemble much more like a business than a garage startup and that inspired a bunch of twenty year olds with little experience to become professionals. Tony helped me understand how important trust is in a leader. Anyone at that studio would have taken a bullet for him (and for each other I imagine). When I first became a lead, I whined to him a lot when things weren’t going my way. But the message I was sending to him was that I wasn’t really ready to lead. He got me to understand that I had to spend much more effort than I was doing to get the team to trust me. Trust isn’t assigned when you get a title. It’s something you have to build, and that takes time and sweat.

Interestingly, I didn’t have any great examples in how to talk to players. I sort of picked that up on my own. I like to think it’s because I had been a scientist, and when you aren’t sure how something works as a scientist, you sample. So when I wasn’t sure if our designs were landing, I just asked players. I still don’t know any other way to do it. :)

Again, there are at least 20 other people (Bill, Graeme, Crow, Helwood, Patrick, Karen, Jerome, etc. etc.) I’d need to thank here. I’ll do a part two sometime.