Macguffin Games

IGDA Elections – Charles Schultz

If you’re coming to this post without having seen the lead-in, you can find that post here.  It links to all the other assessments I’ve posted.  You can also find my disclaimer there – I’m on the Boston IGDA chapter’s board and support the candidacy of Darius Kazemi.

Charles Schultz

UPDATE – Mr. Schultz’s answers below.

Mr. Schultz comes from a long background of mobile development, management, and Quality Assurance.  He has worked, amongst other places, for Motorola and RiM.  He’s also taught, wrote books, and he notes a couple times that he holds 16 patents (most look to be related to music and/or mobile devices).

His stated goals are to Engage, Encourage, and Envision – engage more small studios and individials in the mobile and social media areas, to encourage “responsible gaming across all genres and platforms” for both game players and designers, and envision the ways the industry will develop in order to help prepare educators to teach for it.

Mr. Schultz doesn’t say how much time he’d commit to the board, but notes that he has had a long history of non-job activities – most of which he lists in other parts of the profile – and says he would make the IGDA his top priority amongst them.

Questions for Mr. Schultz:

Why run now?

My unique set of experiences and skills – development, testing, music, communication, education and innovation – seem relevant to the current period we are in with the emerging prominence of mobile and social games and being in an in-between period with respect to game console and technology cycles. I have served at the local level for a number of years and would like to contribute to the industry as a whole.

You note that you would like to have the IGDA identify more with “responsible” gaming.  The IGDA’s description of its charter value of Expression notes, “We oppose any effort that would treat games differently from other forms of art and creative expression.”  Historically, calls in other media to behave responsibly have been associated with censorship, such as with the Production Code and the Comic Code Authority.  Can you explain further what you mean by more responsible gaming?

I am not calling for censorship here. What I do expect, as we do from other artistic bodies such as the movie and music industries, is that the IGDA can do its part to encourage and enable the creation of games that have positive benefits to communities, society and individuals. The Games for Health movement is a good example of this.

Additionally, the IGDA should promote responsibility on the part of the individual gamer. In-game cheating and stealing, hacking games and crashing servers, excessive and obsessive game playing to the detriment of work and family can all be explicitly discouraged. This message can be peer-driven at the chapter level and promoted at national and local events like GDC and the LA Games Conference.

Also, game developers should be more responsible to provide games that are not prone to hacks, cheats, etc. which become detrimental to other player and ultimately spoil the reputation (and income) of the game, studio and publisher. This is bad for the industry as a whole. Better SV&V and software development techniques can be introduced to reduce these occurrences, and we can utilize subject matter experts to provide information and training for game development professionals by sponsoring conference tracks, webinars, etc.

You note in your statement that you are, “a proven innovator with 16 US patents, able to work with the board to anticipate possible futures and how we will get there,” and that you would use this to help the IGDA prepare educators and companies for the future of gaming.  This seems like an extremely ambitious project; can you explain how you would want to tackle such a thing with the limited time and money of the IGDA?

To me this is not ambitious – it requires the application of a few proven techniques that I have used in the past, along with the participation of subject matter experts. My role would be to gather information from the right experts, include them in the process of generating results from the tools and methods at my disposal, rank the results and then provide the findings and directions to the industry at large. The Board and the IGDA in general would certainly be instrumental in contributing the right expertise to arrive at the best conclusions and courses of actions to take, including educating artists, developers, technology and tool providers, and educators as a whole through vehicles such as webinars, instructional videos, courseware and white papers – all of which I have developed in the past.

What do you think the IGDA’s role in the industry-wide Quality of Life discussions should be?

My initial instinct is that each individual decides for themselves what conditions and hours they are willing to accept in return for the salary and benefits they receive. Still, this must be done within the framework of labor laws. Having said that, there do seem to be extreme forms of dedication that are implicitly required for workers to participate and remain employed in some game shops. Once the expectations have been set for a game, it does become a matter of survival for a studio to deliver the goods on time and budget in order to remain in business – leaving the dilemma of working more and continuing to have a job in the industry versus being out of work for a period and possibly ending up back in the same situation with your next employer. In order to break the inertia, perhaps some studios could promote and brand themselves as “fair work” shops – kind of like the “fair trade” coffee brands. This could become a recruiting tool to attract top talent which would force other companies to follow suit or risk having a depleted pool of talent left for their projects. Some consumers may also support those shops in the same way, by favoring or paying a little more for games produced by those shops.

Do you think the IGDA’s dependence on studio sponsorships for money is a bad thing?  If yes, what will you do to begin changing this?  If no, why not?

I have not studied this matter to decide for myself whether the present situation is bad or good. Simply depending on studios or any other entity for funding can be benign if the sponsor is not using it as a lever to gain an advantage in the industry or cause the watchdogs to look the other way. Those would be the kinds of problems I would want the board to address rather than “who” is funding things.

Tags: igda