In Honor of Labor Day

By Sanya Weathers

Don’t forget that a community person’s job is not just keeping up morale in the player base. The development team is part of the community. We need to keep ’em happy.

That should not be confused with keeping management happy. That especially should not be confused with “telling managers what they want to hear.”

The vast majority of game company employees are just like the game’s customers, with the same passions and interests. (A fair number of the employees were probably posting regularly on the forums of the games that they played, before they became game developers and stopped posting on any forums but their own because that would be a conflict of interest, now, wouldn’t it. Ahem.)

So use the same techniques that you use to manage your customers. Respect their time, be concise, be funny. Be considerate. Put yourself in the shoes of the person you want to talk with.

But more important than technique is the content. Your devs often only hear bad news from you. Something that is broken or a balance decision that is enraging your forums or a website error that has dropped your signup rates to zero. YOU may be the only person on the entire dev team who sees the other side – the relationships formed, the friendships made, the exciting battles and fabulous stories. No one emails the front line content dev to let him know that two people who met in your game got married. No one sends pictures of the baby named after an NPC to the quest developer.

It’s up to us community types to communicate the joyful side of things, and the real impact our products have on the lives of the people who play them. Every job on the development team plays a role in making the magic happen, so don’t just tell the management team. Tell the labor force. Happy Labor Day.