Three wise men: Thomas Bidaux, Charles Cecil and David Wightman
Mentoring is to my mind a quite quixotic way of imparting skills. In effect it’s actually about knowledge exchange rather than skills, and hence is a little bit off the Skillset radar. It’s also usually a one to one activity, and hence rather expensive to institute. In fact one-to-one is a little misleading. There are usually (to paraphrase Princess Di) at least three people in this marriage- mentor, mentee and matchmaker or fixer. That’s a hell of a bill to pay at the end of the day for often unpredictable outcomes. But when you apply that equation to the Games industry, it might just be worth the risk for two reasons.
Firstly ideas have to be a lot hardier these days to weather the economic realities outside of the concept art stage- the previous originality of British brands like Elite, Lemmings and Worms just wouldn’t survive today’s climate without serious economic, logistic and even legal planning and canniness before hitting the market.
Secondly, the rewards can be huge for UK PLC; it’s reckoned Jagex make 60 million dollars of annual sales from Runescape. Estimates suggest that the IP for GTA has generated 1.9 billion for Take 2 (Games Investor report).
For those two reasons, it’s surely worth taking a punt at mentoring.
Last night, key figures in the education, skills and business world of creative media gathered in a Soho basement to wish Mandy Berry well in whatever she does next.
