There’s that saying, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There was a discussion at work today that basically centered around the fact that a good portion of the team isn’t involved in the design process, and is, as a result, feeling left out. I had sort of an epiphany – when I first started designing stuff, I went to everyone I could get my hands on, for input, for feedback, just for perspective. I would bounce ideas off of everyone, because people simply have different skills and ways of looking at things, and it’s good to get as many people involved in the process as possible.

So, it was weird to sit there and think that basically, I’ve stopped doing that. In part, because last year, I did a huge portion of the design and implementation of a system in almost complete isolation, I got used to having to rely on figuring out how to do things on my own. I still tap the resources I have – I’ve been talking to one of my friends, who’s got an incredible amount of experience, and always has good ideas about how to implement pretty ludicrously complicated designs. So it’s not like I’ve been ignoring the resources at hand.

But I definitely haven’t been reaching out beyond the people I feel like I know really well, and part of that is simply training – you learn that everyone else is busy, and so I figured that I had my work to do, and everyone else had a similar amount. But this year, one of the things that’s really fucked is that we had essentially no production staff – no one to run the schedules, to set people in motion, and to make sure that people had interesting work to keep them occupied.

So, part of that fell to us, and we failed to do it right. It’s strange, though, how quickly it becomes easy to isolate oneself – part of what it takes to be a designer in this industry is to be fearless, and have no ego. I’m not good at either of the two, but I’m learning.

You have to be fearless, because you’re putting your ideas on the line. You send them out into the world, formed from your head, and they come back to you changed, crippled, mangled, and sometimes, much, much better. But your flaws are in those ideas – the things you overlooked, the things you didn’t take into consideration when you should have, and more. Every mistake burns – it makes you feel stupid, and inadequate. every time someone comes to you with a question – “why didn’t you do this,” you’re forced to wonder if you made the right decision, and if not, why.

One of the most important things I learned from my dad at my last job was that it’s often not that you need to make the *right* decision – it’s that you need to make the *best* decision. You need to take your information, and you sometimes need to move forward, even if you have no assurances that you’re right. School teaches you to be right – to make sure that you have the correct answer. The real world teaches you that quite often, you will be, and you’ll need to be wrong, and that waiting for the right answer will mean waiting forever, when there’s so much to be learned by simply moving forward, making the mistake, and learning not to do the same thing next time.

Which, of course, ties to the lack of ego. You have to be able to distance yourself from your work – you have to understand that sometimes, it won’t be the way you want it to be, or that you’ve made a terrible mistake, or things need to get cut simply because we don’t have the time to implement it in the way that you want. And through all of that, you need to not take it personally, and continue to strive to make the best thing you can.

The last thing, I suppose, is that design is really a service. In part, what you do is that you create, but the other part is that you take other people’s ideas, and incorporate them into the whole. It’s not like painting, where you take your vision, and make it reality. Maybe one day, games will be like that again – but until then, designing games is part facilitating collaboration, and part visionary creative genius. Ha.

It’s been strange – the last few weeks have been patently awful, at work. The situation with a number of the perosnalities on the team has been really grating, and I found myself perusing Gamasutra’s job listings today. But we met tonight to discuss a number of these very same issues, and discussing them opened my eyes, in one respect, to the fact that I’ve been using only a hammer, and in art it let me vent some of my frustration at how badly this team’s been run so far. It seems like we’re moving toward the right track. We’re not there yet, but we’re walking in the general direction.