The Meeting List

Have you ever sat in a four hour meeting with 8 people and at the end of it were not sure what you accomplished? If you have, you wasted four days of individual work. Don't do it again!

Meetings are not some do or die silver bullet to your problems. It feels powerful to get everyone together to try and tackle a mammoth problem. It feels like being cave men and killing a mammoth. But that's how it feels, that's not what it is. 

Meetings are a performance sport like marching band, or rhythm gymnastics, or dance competitions, or cheer leading. There is no directly opposing team, it's about doing your best and it takes hard work and practice to get better. What matters in a meeting is what 'thing' you deliver and how long it takes you to deliver that 'thing'.

As a game designer, I have learned certain rules and patterns that help to create a more effective meeting. Here is a list of 6 things that make meetings more effective.

The Meeting List

1. Meetings solve specific issues.
Every meeting has a specific goal. The meeting is a reaction to a problem. This creates a lot of tension walking into a meeting, but your going to have an agenda that's going to be your process to fixing any problem you have.

2. Meetings deliver real things.
Meetings create plans to tackle problems or revisions to documents. These need to be actual things (such as an email or document). The person in charge of these plans (the manager/producer) is the Directly Responsible Individual for taking the results of the meeting and putting it into the document or task tracking software or email or presentation specification.

3. Meetings have an agenda.
Know your task and your time. Understand what/how you are going to discuss and how you are going to come to a solution. Also know how long you are going to spend on each task in a meeting. You may even go so-far as to elect someone whose sole job is to be a time-keeper for the meeting. It's gonna be hard the first couple of times and you may need to cut people off, but it will keep your meeting on time. Your manager/producers job is to run the meeting to the agenda.

This changes the dynamics of your meetings and can make them very intense. Every 25 minutes needs a 5 minute break.

4. Codes of conduct and rules
Meetings need to be respected, the agenda needs to be respected, above all team members need to be respected. Basic elementary school rules apply. Be compassionate. Remember you are in a meeting to solve a problem and a any solution is better than no solution. You win as a team and you lose as a team, and everyone is on the same team. If people are afraid to come to meetings, change how your meetings work.

5. Meetings are safe
Ideas are safe in meetings. People are safe in meetings.  Don't fire people in a meeting. Ideas are not stupid in meetings (this is the place for ideas!). If someone does have a stupid idea, ask them to explain more (stupid is a communication problem). The rules and conduct are important, but the people in the meeting are going to work much longer than the meeting will last. If you break a rule in a meeting that's OK (try to do better in your next meeting), if you break a relationship or confidence or trust that's not OK.

6. Meetings are fun
Don't fear the meeting. You'll get better at meetings, you'll be more efficient at meetings. Meetings aren't the moment when you take down the mammoth, they are actually the moment when you realize you can take down a leviathan!

P.S.
Meetings are not meant to inform (those are presentations).

Sources on this stuff
SPACER
(note: try to work in more 'expectations' into this list)
Toyota Method
(I want to work in more about 'going to the location' but controlling attention is hard enough)
Generic Business Website Interview With CEO
(notably Steve Jobs and others view on 'less people is more results')
My Own Meandering Experience
(a lot goes with meetings I've run (or I see being run) and conversations with my dad who was a manager and a mechanical engineer and work I had with several college professors)
Game Design
(Time limits and the act of timing things creates more engagement (and stress) the agenda also helps focus people and provide feedback as items are completed. The short time limit of meetings helps people resist burnout (and a meeting is an expensive way to spend a persons time)... Game Design is a thing, the game design of a meeting is kinda its own post!)

Guns n Stuff

I recently started working part-time teaching an after school program, so my blog hasn't gotten a lot of love lately. but on the bright side I will be shifting more time back here.

Now I got some time so I'm gonna write a post breaking down guns in first person shooters (mostly because I really have enjoyed action games over the years, and it's something I've been chatting about with my designer friends lately).

So to keep things simple, I've found that guns in a first person shooter essentially grind down to one core concept. 'This gun' is better/worse based on the 'relative terrain' the opponent is in. So what does that mean? Essentially each gun has a role or optimal relative terrain. For example in most first person shooters if you have a shotgun its going to be good if your opponent is close to you, and bad (less effective) if they are far away. That seems pretty obvious. It's easy to see how shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles all sort of fall on this line of distance vs effectiveness.  In a sense 'distance from the player' is the relative terrain (relative terrain is the answer to the question, 'where is the target in relation to the player?').

But you can take the idea farther than just distance, for instance take a throw-able grenade. Where does a grenade fall on the distance chart? It kinda doesn't, a grenade is best when your target is behind cover or you have a group of targets together. Or think about the Bioshock's Electro-Shock plasmid, it's great when your opponents are in standing water or you surprise a single opponent. Or think about the myriad of games that include a sort of 'area denial' or a trap weapon (like land mines or remote detonated bombs). Those weapons are great when you know your opponent has to move through a specific area.

You'll also notice that the roles guns have often overlap, or in some cases multiple guns will share the same role. This is about creating an interesting choice for the player in what weapon they want to use or feel is the most powerful (the Borderlands series is all about finding the overpowered gun). The guns should feel overpowered for their role. Players then have to evaluate the map and the objectives and their play-style to determine which guns they want to use.

A lot of flack gets thrown around about guns all being the same in first person shooters and how creativity is gone. In reality this isn't so much the case, it's just that the roles of guns are figured out and defined and new guns aren't needed. However by defining guns as having a 'role' based on 'relative terrain' I think we can open up a new perspective on guns in first person shooters. For instance focusing less on distance and more on other environmental factors would be an interesting way to change how the guns in shooters or create new weapons while still retaining the essence of what makes a shooter fun.

* Also I know that I make a lot of assumptions here. Mostly this is in regards to new first person shooter titles and not certain indie games. Lots of really good first person games like Thirty Flights of Loving, Kairo, Jazzpunk, Lovely Planet, and Receiver just plain don't follow this. Also older styles of games like Half-life and arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament are working on a different set of assumptions so these ideas don't transfer as perfectly