Constructing and Managing the Teams

Henry Jenkins III

Pre-Workshop

Prior to the workshop, each student is asked to complete the following form and send it back to the event organizer:

1. If you're a student, when will you graduate?
2. What is your major?
3. What is your minor or concentration?
4. If you are not a student, when did you graduate?
5. From where and what did you study?
6. What skills could you bring to a group project?
7. What is your favorite story genre (i.e., science fiction, comedy, satire, drama, etc.)?
8. How many hours a week do you play computer or video games?
9. How many hours a week do you surf the web?
10. How many films have you experienced on DVD or Laserdisc?

The questions are designed to give us a sense
of each student's interests, expectations, and skills, so that we can
construct balanced teams. Teachers who work regularly with a group of
students may know them well enough to put together coherent groups
without using such forms, but you should ask yourself whether you have
a sufficient knowledge of the full range of the student's skills and
experiences and whether you know enough about their tastes outside the
classroom setting. Falling back on the usual ways you organize groups
for class projects may short-change students who have real potential
for this project that often does not surface or get effectively
harnessed through other class activities.

When we receive the forms, the first stab at organizing teams is by genre preferences. We have found that students who have similar tastes and interests will be able to reach a consensus about what kind of game they want to pitch faster and will be able to work together more effectively throughout the process. We have also found that structuring groups around genre preferences will enable a more diverse range of projects to emerge, including some which would not fit comfortably within the genre categories shaping the current games industry.

A second criterion we use in constructing teams concerns the skills students bring into the class. In the MIT context, the ideal team would consist of at least one or more member who has strong programming skills, one student who has strong background in visual design or graphic arts, one student who has a solid interest in storytelling and media, and one student who has spent some time thinking about how business decisions get made. One of the distinctive aspects of this program is that it gets students from different parts of the MIT Campus working together, each doing what they do best, and each learning from the others.

A third criterion to consider in setting up teams is the student's previous exposure to games. In the ideal team, there are at least some participants who play games regularly and have a real passion for that medium. In the case of an after school program, it may be the case that all of your participants fall into that category. But, in our case, we find a surprisingly large number of students come to the class with limited background in games, seeking to learn more about what their friends are doing when they play games, trying to develop a larger understanding of the contemporary media landscape, or seeking to work on other kinds of skills - such as leadership, presentation/communication, or problem solving skills. This project is a chance for hardcore gamers, many of who may not be academic leaders in the class, to show what they know and to feel empowered by their knowledge to push themselves into other areas of experience. You want to seed them across groups so they can help provide a background and context for other participants who may not know the game realm well. There is some danger in creating a team which consists of nothing but hardcore gamers; such a team may be less open to new approaches which break with the existing framework of genres and game play mechanics which have emerged within the games industry. Similarly, there is a danger in having a group which has no experienced game players, since they may end up re-inventing the wheel (developing something that has already been made by another company) and since they may not have a realistic sense of what can be achieved given the current state of the technology.

Finally, we see a value in constructing groups that include both male and female participants. At the present time, games are played by 90 percent of American boys and about 40 percent of American girls. There are real gender gaps amongst game players and even greater ones in terms of the number of women employed within the games industries. Those companies – (Maxis - the Sims) stands out - which have hired a significant number of women have been more successful in creating games with a crossover appeal - that is, games which interest both men and women. At the present time, game design remains a largely intuitive process with most people designing games they think will be fun and with what they think is fun being defined by their own childhood play experiences. Including women in the workforce creates a counterforce, which allows other kinds of innovations to occur as these women add their own play experience to the discussion. The same thing happens when male and female participants have to interact in the teams here. We have tried having all female and all male teams as experiments, but over the past five years, the teams that have done best have consistently been mixed gender groups.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the five years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the dozens of teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We select primarily graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times. At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. (See project review). We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.