Foreign Affairs

Noah Falstein is a long-time member of the games industry, having been a programmer, project leader, producer, executive producer and creative director for companies such as Lucasfilm Games, the 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive. He formed his own game design consulting firm, The Inspiracy, in 1996.

He is also a long-time contributor to Game Developer Magazine and a frequent GDC speaker. This December he will be making an appearance at the first GDC Lyon. GamesIndustry.biz had a chance to speak with him about the topic of his upcoming lecture and his thoughts on industry events in general.

Falstein: I've been a game player and fervent game enthusiast ever since I can remember, certainly as a young kid. Along with a lot of my fellow game designers, I made paper games with cardboard and marbles and things when I was a kid. It never occurred to me that it could be a profession--it was just a fun thing to do.

When I was in college, it was just as computer games were starting up. Even then, it didn't occur to me that it was a job possibility, but I had already learned to program and found that I could certainly make some money doing that. I figured I could show off how much I had learned about programming, and also the physics and astronomy I had studied, by making a computer game on the mainframe computer that we had in college.

I went to a place called Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. In those days, it was still the mainframe era, and there was a big computer at U Mass that we hooked up to through modems and programmed that.

So, I was really unusual in that in the 70's I was actually doing computer games as part of my education, and when I graduated there was an opening at Milton Bradley just down the road from where I went to college. This was before they became part of Hasbro and were still an independent company.

They were doing all sorts of new electronic stuff. They had that Simon game with the four colors...I think they're still releasing that in various versions almost 30 years later. That had been such a big hit for them they were looking at games for computers and the early videogame systems. I actually did some programming for some VCS [Atari 2600] games that were never released, but Milton Bradley had reverse-engineered their system.

I just stuck with game development ever since then. I started as a programmer, but quickly moved on to design and product management. I got in as one of the first ten employees at LucasArts, then the 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive, and went through the whole start-up phase with those guys.

For the last eleven, almost twelve years now, I've been a freelance designer and producer working on a whole range of stuff for people in the US, Europe, Asia...all sorts of places.

Right, Inspiracy is the name of my freelance company. It's primarily consulting. It's a little bit different than purely independent consulting in that I have quite a few friends and colleagues who either have their own company or other connections.

So I'll do, for example, design consulting with a client, and when they want to actually build the game, I'll connect them with a developer and go ahead with that.

Just as an example, Larry Holland who is one of my old LucasArts friends, who did the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games there, and we worked on the World War II flight sim games at LucasArts together, he has a company called Totally Games that is just about a 15 minute drive from where I live. I started work with Cisco on one of my serious game projects about a year ago, and when we got to the point to start building the game that I had been working on the design for, I called up Larry and got him involved, and I'm working with him on that project.

I'll work as an independent, but I'll often spiral that out into full development jobs with colleagues that way.

I had originally heard about the Serious Games Summit Europe that was happening in Lyon and talked to the fellow who is organising that, and he invited me to come out for that. When I found out that GDC was doing a GDC Lyon that overlapped, I offered to speak at that at well.

Given the kind of work I do, I'm sort of stuck in between the two realms of that. I don't represent any kind of publishers and I don't have funding for games, but at the same time I tend not to come up with concepts and shop them around. I usually work with companies that have gone beyond that stage and either need help putting something together or have some sort of independent funding so that they are not going to a group like Game Connection to connect up with someone.

No, I've spoken at the San Jose/San Francisco GDC...Every one since, I think, 1993. In fact, I've been attending the San Jose ones...Not the very first one that was in Chris Crawford's living room, but every subsequent one.

There are only two people I know of who have been to every single one, and I am jealously guarding my tie for third place with a handful of other people. [Laughs]

Sure. The title is about ways to fail with a foreign designer, and I'm really sincere about that. The bulk of the talk will be about possible mistakes to avoid.

The reality is, even though I've done a lot of work for companies overseas, I almost always have found that their best bet is to exhaust every possibility of having somebody in-house, local, who is a native developer essentially, rather than going to the US to find somebody to do their design work.

There are certain exceptions, but I guess what it comes down to, even though this is working against my own self-interest to a degree, I would much rather discourage people from making mistakes that may involve me or other designers that they hire from abroad than to encourage them to try it and then fail and be part of the failure.

Most of what the talk will be about is, over the years as I've worked with groups, primarily in Europe, I've found that there are a lot of potential problems when they try to do a design with someone outside of their own country. I'll basically be talking about what those problems are, how to avoid them, and if, despite all that, you do want to hire somebody who is from another country, what you should do to minimize the chance of failure.

Well, it is fairly complicated.

I think the reason companies in Europe, in particular, tend to turn to US or Canadian designers at time is that there is kind of a flow... Stuff that is invented in Japan seems to be often popular everywhere in the world. Stuff that is invented in the US will do well in all the world except, usually, Japan. Then, a step down from there, things that are created in Europe every once in a while will break out to the US or, even more rarely, to Japan, but for the most part tend to stick closer to their local territories.

I've done a lot of work for German and Austrian publishers that manage to make hit after hit for the German-speaking territories, but are not able to sell anything even to England, much less the US. Some times they turn to designers to try and fix that.

As to why, certainly cultural differences and sensibilities are part of that. It is a little bit like the movie industry in that...It's been established for a hundred years, and there are movie production industries all around the world, but if you look at where the stuff spreads out, Hollywood has just a huge share, and Bollywood captures India and has its own cult following, and beyond that it just gets really difficult. If you are in France or Germany and want to make a movie that's going to be seen around the world, you've got a huge deficit if you don't go to Hollywood and do it their way.

The games industry is not quite as stratified as that, but there definitely is a pecking order that way. Certainly I've been at many conferences in the US where we tried to figure out how to crack into the Japanese market, and hiring a Japanese designer, as far as I know, hasn't been an effective strategy.

I think that trick of figuring out how to increase your sales in foreign markets is just a really complex and multifaceted challenge to businesses.

Yeah, the lines are blurring in terms of where a game is actually being built because of outsourcing. Also, the games industry, in contrast with the film industry for example, is by nature technology friendly and willing to try Skype conferences and work with wikis and all sorts of online tools.

Because of that, I've seen a lot more readiness to experiment and try collaborations that cross national boundaries and time lines and things.

And yet, despite that, there are some really interesting, subtle problems. Things like... There are times when I've designed a game with what I think is an American sensibility, but then a European company has done, say, the voice acting with some local talent that purports to be native English speakers but when you hear the voice acting, it sounds like they are Germans doing their best to do an American accent. That just falls flat on American ears and a lot of those games don't do very well.

It is a real subtle problem where you have to get it right at every step of the production, and not just the design or product management, but all the way through to voice acting and even play testing. I think the testers have to have the right sensibilities for the target market area.

It's a complex problem, and I don't know that anyone's found a reliable, consistent way to solve it. There certainly are a number of projects that have strong international components that were developed across time zones as you say.

Ubisoft....Actually, a lot of the French companies with groups in Montreal and off in other spots across the world have managed to do that. I've been to Singapore a couple of times, and as a government they are so aggressively promoting game development that many of the big publishers and animation houses have a branch office there. Particularly if you are working from the US with Singapore and with Europe, then, as you say, you end up covering the whole world and there is always someone awake working on it.

But for all the positive effects of that, it means coordinating...Trying to get everyone for a meeting at the same actual time, by definition at least one of those time zones is not going to be during regular working hours. And often, unless you are careful, it will only be regular working hours for one of the three time zones. It really is pretty challenging that way.

Well, as a freelancer obviously I'm all for it. Wherever the money will come from is a good thing.

Ironically, it is actually happening even here in the US. As probably the rest of the world would expect, the Department of Defense is funding more of it than anyone else. I think the success of America's Army got them aware of the potential for game development as sort of a training tool. On the serious games side, there's actually quite a bit going on even from US government grants.

When you talk about entertainment, pretty much everywhere except the US is fairly aggressively promoting it. A few spots...Singapore being a notable one, and some of the Scandinavian countries, and a few spots around Europe I think where there is a lot of government money available...People are really trying to push it and build it up.

Personally I think it is a great thing. Even, depending to some extent on the cache of American expertise, I still would rather see a world that's a little bit more of a level playing field, where it is more of a meritocracy and people succeed based upon their own individual talent and not some kind of perceived national talent.

The way things are going with the dollar versus the Euro, the US may be a source of cheap labor soon...

I've been involved with the GDC for a long time. I was also the chairman of the CGDA, which was the precursor group to the IDGA, right about the time that Miller Freeman then, and now CMP started taking over some of that stuff and forming the IGDA...So, I've been an avid follower and a friend of a lot of the people that run the GDC in the US and kept track of things.

One of the reasons I was excited to hear about GDC Lyon is that I am a firm believer in the GDC formula and it is nice to see it spreading around the world. France is a particularly fun place to visit as well, so on a purely personal level it is great opportunity and I wish them every success and hope that it really works out well.

The GDC San Francisco is so much bigger than anything else that is out there, I think that it would have to be five or ten years before it loses its supremacy as the one place to go, that everybody has to go to.

In the meantime, particularly for Europe and Korea and China, where they're opening things up, I think it is very difficult for a lot of developers in those places to come out to San Francisco, so it is a convenient thing.

It may be a little bit more of a self-defeating thing with their Austin conference, given that a lot of those people would normally travel to GDC San Francisco as well. Overall...I do a lot of work around the world and it just amazes me at how many game development companies are springing up everywhere and how growth seems to be very strong and promising for at least the next decade or so.

So my sense is that, if anything, this will fuel people's interest in coming to the main GDC as well. You know, go to their regional one plus the annual gathering where they get a chance to meet people from all over the world.

When I started doing public speaking on games, there would be GDC and there would be a few slots at E3, and then there would be just one or two other very small, minor things that you could do. Now it has gotten to the point where, particularly if you have a particular interest like serious games, or casual games, or mobile games, there is a conference pretty much...Every week, it seems like, certainly several conferences a month that are pretty significant all around the world.

That's really made things awkward on the one hand, but has opened up a lot of possibilities as well. I mean, I love the chaos of it all. I love the free market system and the fact that someone may try to be the big regional conference, but if they can't attract the people, it just won't happen.

The main GDC has always succeeded in part by having a grass roots feel. It's always been the place where we developers go to talk to each other and not just promote the industry or talk to consumers.

There are advantages to being big and to being small. I went to GCDC in Leipzig for the first time this year, and had a wonderful time, but the game developer conference part of it had around, I think, 900 people show up, and a lot of people were complaining about how it was losing its sense of intimacy and how they liked it better when it was smaller.

And I just thought that was pretty ironic, given that they are trying to grow, and also having been at the regular GDC since it was less than 200 people and seeing it grow up to 15,000.

It's just part of the normal course of those things. As once becomes known for being a big regional one, it fuels the interest in their being smaller, local ones so that you can actually take advantage of the intimacy of only, you know, 100 people that all actually get to know each other and not, you know, several thousand people that don't get a chance to all meet.