No voting
As you all know I was not present at the last meeting when it was decided that a vote would pass over to pick a person for the art director position. When I found out, I had only expressed my irritation at the entire situation to a few people. Now I’m ready to say what needs to be said.
I understand the need for an artistic director, I understand the importance of the position to the project and to the group, and how it will give some much needed focus to the game and be key to the success there of. And I want to be clear to everyone else that this is no small deal; Whoever is the artistic director will be making go/no-go decisions in an autocratic manner for the rest of the project. Some of us only have enough time to focus on 1 project over the summer and it’s this one, and when I say that I am thinking specifically about everyone who is not doing this for credit, who have a lot less to gain from this even from a potentially successful standpoint. This is why it’s important that the artistic director be able to generate really exciting ideas, so exciting that the rest of the team is excited to follow through and pave the concepts laid out by the artistic director.
Now, the crux of this post is here, so let me be clear: If I was at that meeting, this vote would not have happened. There are some things we can vote on, and there are other things we don’t. Nobody, I say again, NOBODY, is actually qualified to take on a position such as this. There are many risks associated to this project, success isn’t easy and after a month, we don’t have much to show for it in terms of a game. This project is a huge risk that we all share together, and willingly so. For one, there was no real point for me to read the 3 CV/portfolios posted earlier, and if you think about it, it’s ridiculous to even imagine that there would be such a thing involved in the project considering, secondly, that this project was never founded on a qualification basis, simply on a willingness basis.
Time is valuable for all of us and I need someone to put a strong lens and focus the ideas that have been floating around for a month now. Because if you didn’t notice, we don’t even have a game on paper, we have game elements floating around. More than focusing the project even, I need someone to manage and take care of the creative group because I can’t do it alone, I need a focal point for whom I can build this game engine for, and I can’t look after 2 extremely opposite points of production at the same time.
My job, as I see it, it to see to it that this project is successful by creating a game close to CART values and allow everyone involved to learn a significant amount about game production, management (self and/or others), working in a team, etc on the simple basis of “I want to learn X”. Oh, and write a game and game engine for it. When I started this I had this idea of a flat hierarchy with this very simple pipeline of production. That idea got shat on and has quite evidently changed meeting after meeting as different people in the group stepped into different directions. Although these are idealistic construct for a production team, they don’t happen to be realistic ones. But i digress.
Voting on such an important issue based on things that have absolutely nothing to do with what the project is about is all around pointless. I am calling for a no vote, and I am putting my foot down on this. Art direction is too important and I will not allow it to be deliberated on at the expense of success, to vote on irrelevant data that bears no meaning to what this project tries to accomplish: It’s not happening.
I know everyone in CCGD is excited to make a full fledged game, and the prospect of success is an extremely tangible career boost. The value that our collective effort makes is great, and I’m happy for that, but we are all a team and this decision will affect a very core group, one I can’t afford to loose in terms of cohesion. teams like that work like alchemy, and I can’t have that rely on a vote based on irrelevant data that could create scenarios we are not ready to deal with.