Fresh Blood, Fresh Thinking

By Sanya Weathers

Community management is a pretty small specialty. Most of us know each other, and actively share advice/experience/horror stories. When you cross that small specialty with the small game industry world, things get a little insular.

Inbred is another term.

If you remember your high school biology class, you’ll remember that things that are too inbred might look good, but they’re prone to all kinds of problems that either can’t be fixed cheaply or can’t be fixed at all. Think about purebred dogs. You can get a good one if the breeder was responsible and cautious, but all too often you’ll find joint problems, digestive problems, and insanity.

If you find yourself talking to the same ten people, telling the same three stories, you need to break out of your circle and expose yourself to new ideas.

Check out associations for other industries. I get some of my best promotional ideas from other fields of entertainment. Book publishing has a lot in common with game publishing – and books have been around a heck of a lot longer than video games. Talk about time tested and proven. Hey, and speaking of time tested:

Talk to someone whose strategic thinking solidified pre-Web 2.0. Things move fast now. Agile development, strategic trending, and the always-on media culture have given us the collective attention spans of caffeinated hamsters. It’s good to be agile and responsive to customers. It’s bad to change your long term plan every five minutes.  Having an older mentor for whom long term planning is second nature is a heck of a lot easier than trying to cram two different styles into one brain.

Seek viewpoints and tools that are off-trend. The next big thing isn’t going to be a copy of what came before. If you and all your friends are all using the same business model, and using the same tools to achieve your goals, the “winner” is going to be only incrementally better than the rest of the pack. To achieve that marginal victory, the winner is going to have to be tops in every category (and spend accordingly).

Instead of killing yourself for an extra 1% improvement, go in a totally different direction. Find a niche no one is serving. Use a social channel no one else is using. And when everyone else starts copying you, you’ll have a head start.

Look for people who don’t look like you. There are lots of studies proving that you’re predisposed to liking and promoting people who look like you – your gender, your race, your socioeconomic background, your educational level. You can argue and scream about this until the cows come home, or you can stop fighting human nature and think your way to a different path. Look around your studio. The management team is pretty stunningly homogenous, isn’t it? There may be some diversity in the pits, but somehow, the top rank is similar to the point that they even dress the same way.

The odds of this happening randomly are nil.

This is also the eventual kiss of death for the creative soul of your company. Nothing original comes from people marching in lockstep. You need people from different backgrounds with different experiences than yours, and you need them at the design and decision making levels, not in your cubicles. Just by having “different” people around, you can broaden the appeal and accessibility of your products, and infuse your company’s body with fresh blood.