5.6.24

Can facilitating or managing creative work be an act of creation?

 A few years ago a friend and mentor, Aaron Loeb, described his role at Scopely to me as that of a Creative Executive or words very close to that effect. He described this as a role that “helps creators go achieve their vision.” And at the time the description stuck in my mind (and made me raise an eyebrow.) Yes, we all want to imagine that by helping facilitate the acts of creation that others can undertake that we are – in some small way – creating something.

But are we?

This topic is (like most of this sequence) obviously somewhat on my mind because I am clearly working through my recent roles in the games business, as a creative, and contemplating how I want to spend the remaining time I have on this earth. So let’s sketch out the journey from creator to “Creative Executive” whose primary job is to build environments in which other people get to create.

I started as a creator; an artist and an animator, a game designer, a storyteller. My official job titles involved these kinds of things for the first few years. But quickly it because clear that I could accomplish a lot more by helping get other people excited about the mission, the game usually. “Lead Designer” was probably the first role I had where I officially should have spent more time helping other creators build things than building them myself. I think many of the worst outcomes that I experienced during this time was as a result of trying to continue to also work as an individual contributor to games and not just leading and managing others.

When you make games for a living, if you’re like most of the people I know in the business, you end up working on far more games that never go to market than games that do. While getting games killed and killing games is always a slightly bitter pill, the guidance to “murder your darlings” is good. It’s good in creative efforts and it is particularly valuable in commercial creative efforts. It’s easy to come up with an idea, and it is painfully easy to fall in love with an idea. You can devote (that word again) lots of time to building the wrong thing; this is time wasted. And so getting good at killing games and reevaluating what a team is working on is critical. It’s not actually a bad thing that many games get killed early in their creative lifecycle; this is the basis of a functional gate-system, which any developer or publisher needs.

And in time, what becomes clear as a game designer, as a creator, is that most of the reasons games get killed often have little to do with the merit of, say, the design or the art style. Market dynamics, lifetime P&L, cost-of-capital, ROIC, and many far less sexy elements of the business side of creating consumer products (which is exactly what commercial game development is) end up deciding which games should live and which should have a small funeral before too much time or money gets devoted (!) to them.

This leads many creators, as they gain experience and lose a lot of games, to increasingly shift their focus to the business side of things. You end up moving from creator to Creative Executive because the B2B deals, securing financing, making sure teams have the right people, and the dull mechanics of accounting end up being many of the biggest risks to ever getting the games you want to make made.

If I were to describe the job of a Creative Executive, or a CEO, or other leaders of game development studios and publishers, it would be this: Your role is to ensure a healthy ecosystem which increases the likelihood that your teams are able to create the most beloved and commercially successful games possible. You’re a farmer whose job is to think more about water, sunlight, the Ph balance of the soil, and the talents of the other gardeners who will work the land than it is to lovingly dig each hole by hand, or even always select which seedlings should get planted.

This kind of role is inherently the job of the Creative Executive. It’s harder than actually throwing yourself into creating something. It’s less rewarding in most ways. But there are some advantages. Let’s think about them for a moment:

-          There’s great joy in getting to mentor and experience vicarious pride from the successful creative efforts of others. Watching a studio GM ship something amazing and their team get rewarded by fans, media, and financially can be quite satisfying. You know you helped and played a big role in that success and it feels good.

-          There’s less obligation to be slavishly devoted (!) to a single project or game. While each of the games you’re trying to help succeed are important, they often benefit from a more measured level of involvement. When the team knows what they are doing, has what they need, and the organization is ready to help them bring it to market effectively, you can limit the amount of time you spend on that project. Don’t throw people off balance when they’re in a groove.

-          Many games don’t work. When a game doesn’t work, the team who is focused on the game often get laid off. Helping lead a portfolio of projects acts as a hedge against a single failed projects. This is true for an individual as it is for a company.

-          Because the dollar values you’re responsible for are (much) higher typically, the compensation is often better at a leadership level than it is for individual contributors. This may rankle, but it is the case for most businesses.

So is facilitating or managing creative work an act of creation?

Yes. What you are creating is something different. You are building teams, companies, projects. But when it works, you definitely HAVE created something that did not exist before. Indeed, the act of “value creation” is likely the primary job of both the entrepreneur and leaders at publicly traded companies.

And it can be a very satisfying act of creation indeed.