Professional Skills for the Digital Age The Ultimate Guide to Success in the Game Industry & Life

Harvey Smith - Arkane Studios Co-Creative Director and One of the minds behind Deus Ex and Dishonored chimes in on Social Media and how to grab his attention.

 

Networking Nerds: You’re a guy that’s very active in the social media world. Tell me your thoughts on social media, what do you use it for and why?

 

Harvey Smith: It’s interesting because it seemed like social media just exploded and then everybody was like ‘Oh this is exploding and it’s huge’. For me, my love of social media started a long time ago - in the late 80s - when I was in the military.

 

We had these satellite communications bands that we worked in. My friends and I went to school and then we all scattered out. Some friends were in England and some were in Spain, I was in Germany, and some people were back in the States. So we were on this ring, and if you knew where your friend was you could teletype at night. You’d type your message on this big metal typewriter that used a long yellow spool of paper. It was really loud. You would type on it and it would rattle and spit out what you typed and spit out what they typed. Very crude. So at the end of your shift you’d tear it off and roll up these big yellow spools of paper and put them in a safe. They actually stored the conversations for a year or longer. Most of them were work related, but once in a while we’d get snapped at for using it for personal reasons.

 

You could get away once with asking your friend ‘How you’ve been?’ or whatever and it was kind of magical. Telephones weren’t the shit back then. Living in Germany and being in a different time zone and trying to call your family or friends, it all sucked. The connection was terrible, there were echoes, and sometimes the calls would get dropped, and it was expensive as hell. So this teletype felt like a magical device.

 

Later, when I started at Origin in ’93 we all used IRC. And that was pretty cool because you could be working in your office and chatting with four people in their offices privately, and then you could privately message one of them. And then we started using ICQ, created by the Israel-based company called Mirabilis. IRC and ICQ were basically the forerunners to the social media we know today.

 

Later, I started using MySpace, Orkut, Friendster to meet people. And so when Facebook came out I had an account fairly early, even though I heard it was Harvard kids. I don’t know why but for me, but it makes me feel really good to have like a Yellow Pages of all my friends that I can ping them at any point and ask them what’s going on, or see photos of them, their dogs, their kids, their food. It doesn’t matter to me, I love it all.

 

Twitter has been one of my favorites. It’s just super powerful. I read the Dishonored hash tag, and that probably gives me a skewed view because it seems like there’s always activity there. I spent the first couple of months of our launch directly thanking people for playing the game, or fixing their customer service problems, or answering their questions. And that’s not new to me, I was always a forum guy, and during Deus Ex times I always read the forums.

 

So I use it professionally, personally and romantically and for family. This group that I feel akin to, it’s just people that are very comfortable with social media.

 

NN: As long as the people are being constructive, I’m guessing that you appreciate the feedback that these guys are offering? That’s going to help you develop and grow more as a designer and creative head?

 

HS: Yeah, it’s funny, we had this feature in the game (Dishonored) called ‘the heart,’ and at one point it was a supernatural device for finding your targets, and at then some point we found the need from play tests just to put markers on screen all the time directing the player towards the target. What that meant was the heart had no purpose and we almost cut it. So we then were like ‘What if it helped you find these very hard to find runes and bone charms that help you level up your character?’ And then we had this idea like ‘What if you point it at people and squeeze it and whispers a secret about them?’

 

So long story short, the art is cool, its beats in your hand, it’s kind of creepy, it helps you find runs and bone charms – so it’s mechanically very useful to you. But since you’ve got it out anyway, you might as well point it at some person and squeeze it and see what it says about them. And then we learned through Twitter and such that people really loved the heart. They talked about it nonstop. They sometimes let it guide them and based whether they killed people or not on what the heart told them.

 

People have written entire articles about the heart now, and it’s the kind of thing that we would not have known resonated with players had we not been paying attention to social media.

 

NN- There’s probably a lot of up and coming developers that are looking to get their break. What kind of things really get your attention in a positive way? What’s pulling you in, what makes you notice an up and coming guy as someone you want to network with and keep an eye on?

 

HS: I can tell right away who is fun to converse with, and that differs from person to person. But I can tell who I have chemistry with, who I connect with. And there’s nothing anyone can do about that. You can’t fake chemistry really, not for very long anyway.

 

But the real thing is looking at the work they’re doing at the time. Like you can chat with someone and they can say ‘Hey here’s my project,’ and you go look at it. I’ve been talking to Mike Bethel, he did Thomas Was Alone, and it’s got this cool narrative wrapper with a voiceover and great music and this very simple – you’re a rectangle hopping around in a rectangle maze. And it’s the kind of game that one guy could really put his heart into and put his mark on it instead of working with 100 person team.

 

I guess what I’m saying is a large part of how I see people is by what they’re working on and what their output is, and where they’re interests go. I’m friends with people in town, like the guys from White Whale Games who made God of Blades, which is really cool. I’ve spent a lot of time with them. It’s Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock influenced fiction in a side-scrolling fighting game. And you unlock new swords if you go to public libraries which is the coolest feature ever, right?

 

And people like Adam Saltzman who just made Hundreds, it’s really, really good on the iPhone.

 

So you can talk to those people, and they are still people trying to make their name in some way or another even though they’ve had some success so far. They’re on a good trend, but no one feels settled or done. Everybody who’s working in games is like ‘I need to do the next thing. What am I going to do next? How am I going to take this in a more interesting direction?’.

 

More from Harvey will be featured in Networking Nerds, The Ultimate Guide to Success in the Game Industry & Life due October, 2014 from Needle Rat Press.