MY NEW BEST FRIEND: mentoring in the games industry

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.

At the annual Develop Conference in Brighton’s lugubrious Hilton Metropole Hotel NESTA gave what could be called a half term report on how their Games Mentor scheme had been going- 6 months into a one year pilot.

As a pilot, the scheme seems to have been pretty flexible. The pairings met a couple of times a month. NESTA’s preliminary matchmaking role meant mentees were presented with a choice of two candidates for mentor, and interviewed both before making a decision.

Whilst it wasn’t clear what the criteria was for choosing the original seven mentees, they certainly weren’t washed-out companies in danger of going under- rather they seemed to be companies who were in some way successful yet flatlining to some degree. The glass ceiling was something they couldn’t negotiate on their own. (I hope that’s fair). The mentee companies worked across mobile, casual, online, advergames and console games.

At Brighton three of the companies who’d taken advantage of the scheme were there to recount their experiences. First we heard from Brian McNichol, MD of Dynamo Games about his experience as a mentee, and then his mentor David Wightman, ex-CEO of Creative Edge software gave his perspective on the process.

Brian mentioned how it had been hard to change the idiosyncratic mentality of the three original Dynamo co-directors as they had grown the company to ten people, and how David had highlighted this, and helped them look at project decisions and their relationship to their publisher. He also sharpened up their attention to hard statistics about the marketplace. “We’d been narrow-minded” Brian admitted. ”We’ve now grown to fifteen people and we needed to evolve a different culture; simple things like paying more attention to timekeeping”. Thanks to David, Dynamo also realised they had to re-set long term goals. “We’d had no time to stop and examine our goals since we started. It was often the simple things we needed to do, but it’s a lot easier making fundamental differences to your business when you have someone there who has been through the same thing.” These days it is possible to get a lot of statistical intelligence on the market, and this is essential, according to David Wightman. Stats can help you price your product, or help you choose the right publisher or host.

Next up was James Brooksby, Studio Head of Double Six. They’d created the successful “Burn Zombie Burn” game. In the Digital Distribution space, work for hire has small margins, and James needed help to escape that loop. Self publishing was obviously the answer. How can you bring in funds that aren’t from the publisher? That’s where Thomas Bidaux, CEO of ICO partners
was able to advise; he’d been working in online games for 10 years, and had set up the European subsidiary of the Online Game giant, NCsoft. “It was also a learning experience for me” admitted Thomas. This became a common theme across all mentors. Some other familiar themes began to emerge too- the importance of digging deep for the statistics that now exist about the market, the need to look long-term, and to simplify.
James coined the term Business Therapy, and Thomas continued the allusion to the mentor as business shrink stating gnomically – “James has the answers, he just doesn’t know it”.

The last pair, Paul Farley MD of TAG games, and mentor and industry legend Charles Cecil of Revolution, had clearly hit it off. One interesting fact is that Cecil is also a mentee in the scheme, pointing again to an interesting variant of the teacher/student role. Both parties are learners in this paradigm.

To Paul, the mentor gives you an overview. “You’re too close to the product. You’re first to get in the office, last to leave; you may have a plan but you feel you are going it alone. We worked out the mentor isn’t the messiah, but he DOES go on a journey with you. Charles opened up networks. The mentor doesn’t bring an agenda or try to sell things to you, unlike a coaching scheme I was part of before. His objective overview was invaluable.” Charles then summed up his role in one tidy sentence “It’s all about experience and looking for patterns”. 

The flexible nature of the scheme, so hard to programme or predict, clearly is playing dividends. Everyone is learning, and businesses are growing.

This was a half term report- and NESTA are going to evaluate and report again at the end of the programme. One thing occurred to me- couldn’t there evolve a kind of weird Stockholm syndrome, with a reliance on your new best buddy’s say-so? I asked the group about their exit strategy. David Wightman had a firm answer- “It’ll finish when my influence is no longer needed, when I’m having no impact”.

Being concerned with innovation, NESTA can only pilot this project, it can’t roll it out or repeat it. So what is the future of this initiative?  Maybe Skillset needs to start engaging more with epistemology- the skills agenda needs to become more of a knowledge agenda?

For more details about the scheme http://www.nesta.org.uk/games-mentoring/