

Passion vs. Professionalism - atomic_object
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_notebook_passion_.php?print=1

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katovatzschyn

        Feisal: Our own prisoners, Mr. Bentley, are taken care of, 'til the British can 
        relieve us of them, according to the Code. I should like you to notice that.
    
        Bentley: Yes, sir. Is that the influence of Major Lawrence?
    
        Feisal: Why should you suppose so?
    
        Bentley: Well, it's just that I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror 
        of bloodshed.
    
        Feisal: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it 
        is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.
    
             - Lawrence of Arabia
    

Good business is built on mutual trust, consistency, and reliability; art on
exceptionalness and originality. It should be no surprise that designers and
businessmen so often clash, one is playing for the middle of the normal
distribution, the other longs for the fringes.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Your indentation is breaking the line wrapping. Please edit this if you see it
in time; it's a nice comment that deserves proper typesetting.

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cantlin
A nitpick:

    
    
      Games aren't movies; we don't hand total creative authority to a single director
      and let his passion rule the project. Games are collaborative efforts, and that
      requires compromise and diplomacy.
    

Auteur filmmaking in commercial cinema is very much more the exception than
the rule. Even where the director has free reign, it is seldom at the expense
of a collaborative process except at a very high level. On the surface at
least the two industries seem to have many more parallels than contrasts.
Each, I'm sure, require both passion and professionalism in droves (though
like the author, I think I'd make the second my preference).

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jonnathanson
This is very true.

The production of big-budget, AAA games and the production of most Hollywood
movies share more in common than not. Especially these days, with AAA studios
spending more money on writers, directors, and in-game voice talent.

There are maybe 3 directors in Hollywood who can command anything remotely
approaching total creative control over a big studio picture. And even they
don't exercise the sort of control people think they do.

~~~
alexqgb
Indeed. After all, a "big studio picture" is a fairly well-defined genre. That
is to say, a tremendous number of choices have been made before any given
project even begins. Even a director given "full control" can be relied on not
to paint too far outside the lines. After all, how do you think he got full
control in the first place?

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CodeMage
Finally! This needed to be said a long time ago, especially in the game
development industry. I only wonder why Ernest waited so long to say it. He's
one of my favorite gamedev bloggers precisely because of his criticisms. They
should make his Twinkie Denial Condition list a game industry certification ;)

~~~
WeWin
Yes! I've always found it to be the case that employers that ask for 'passion'
are merely interested in turning enthusiasm into dollars. Run, run, run like
the plague.

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jes
This may often be the case, but it's not necessarily true. I've hired software
developers for many years. I believe that passion is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for being a highly effective developer.

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saraid216
Passion is certainly necessary, but when it's used as a smokescreen for how
poorly you're treating the developers, calling it a requirement is flat-out
wrong. I certainly see no problem with using it in recruitment spiels; it's
using it during the job offer that's a problem.

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barce
My take away since "art" does not scale: Work in smaller teams in order to
produce passionate art.

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goodweeds
This reminds me a lot of Erin Hoffman's infamous rant (<http://ea-
spouse.livejournal.com/274.html>) about EA's abusive working conditions which
resulted in three class-action lawsuits.

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michaelochurch
Lord Acton said to judge talent at its best and character at its worst. Large
human organizations tend to judge both at their worst, and to be negative on
unknown people for a longer time than any single rational actor would be,
which is why "dues paying" periods are so ridiculously long. What this means
is that the people who get ahead are people who can sustain a middling
performance over a long time without even a whiff of failure, and not the
creative, passionate people who take a lot of risks and can hit the high notes
but occasionally screw up.

There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people,
and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance)
between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7. If you're HV, it
means you learn quickly and can do great things but it's also a statistical
near-guarantee that you'll be fired at least once in your career (don't worry;
in the long term, it's not as big a deal as you think it is).

Game development on AAA titles is no different. Don't go into it thinking a
high level of creative talent will launch you into a position of major
influence. You may or may not have creative talent, but not only do you have
to prove it first, but you have to get into a position where you _can_ prove
it-- and the latter is much harder, because the only people who can get on
projects where creativity is visible are those who've already put a lot into
the political bank.

Passionate people look at the garbage games typical of the industry and think,
"I could do so much better!" And they're 100% correct. That also doesn't
matter.

My advice (which is so cliche): forget about games, except as a hobby and
possibly something to study. Play them and build independent games if you
wish, but consider "game design" a non-option without one hell of a lift.
Learn how to program. Programming opens up a lot of problems that are fun in
their own right even if you're _not_ working on games. A lot of programming
problems are _far_ more interesting than running 8-figure video games; trust
me on this. Become a really great programmer. That will pay off regardless of
whether one ever goes into the video game industry. And becoming a top-1%
programmer (takes 10+ years, start now) will make entry into the game industry
at a decent level (for a passionate person unwilling to pay dues for decades)
possible.

~~~
ekidd
_There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people,
and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance)
between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7._

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by this model. Truly great work is often a
result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity.

Consider jashkenas, for example: Over the last few years, he's written an
impressive number of solid, professional libraries and released them as open
source. So he was working from a high baseline, and he gave himself lots of
chances at success. Sooner or later, he was bound to write something 1 or 2
standard deviations better than his personal average.

I'd say that CoffeeScript is at least a 9, but it's an outlier from a pretty
large group of 7s.

~~~
_delirium
I do think that's somewhat true in software, but I think games are more of a
mix of art and software, and in art it's much less common to find consistent
winners outside of the mediocre category--- Thomas Kinkade makes consistent
nice-looking paintings, but Picasso produced a lot of crap amidst his
masterpieces. I'm not sure it's possible to take risks on game _design_ and
not end up with a reasonable number of duds, even if you're solid and
professional on implementation.

It is true that most game-industry positions aren't really for designers, but
these days a large number do involve _some_ amount of design, especially if
you want the game to be unique in some way. For example, AI programmers are in
an odd position of doing "just implementation", but implementing a system that
deeply impacts what kind of gameplay and design is possible (in some cases
they quite literally write the tools that the designers will use to do things
like write NPC behavior).

~~~
jamesaguilar
Is disproof by counter example allowed? Blizzard is one case of a company that
has consistently produced masterpiece games in all of their major ip's at
least since Diablo, Starcraft I, and Warcraft 3.

~~~
localtalent
Only because they scrap ones that don't work. There's a difference between
consistently producing incredible work and consistently releasing incredible
work. Curation is a big part of industry success.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_the_Clans)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost>

~~~
jamesaguilar
OK, great point.

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chief2108
Given two candidates with similar skills, but one with obvious passion and the
other not, I'd pick the passionate one every time.

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ditojim
You need both to truly succeed.

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ctdonath
The difference between passion and professionalism is doing those parts of a
project which nobody wants to but which must be done. There are some necessary
tasks which just plain nobody is passionate about.

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mcantor
Did anyone else find this rather rambling? I lost interest after a few
paragraphs because it basically read like a recapitulation of easpouse. I'm
not saying it was a bad article or anything; to be honest, I'm surprised that
it didn't hold my attention given the subject matter.

~~~
aaronf
He lost me shortly after the sweeping statement that "'Passion' is an excuse
used by employers to mistreat their employees." This simply isn't true in all
cases. If I'm hiring someone, I want them to be passionate about what they're
working on. Even if they work exactly 40 hours a week, it means they'll do
better work than someone who just wants a job.

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danso
I was in general agreeance with this article until the end:

>But Van Gogh was no naïve artist operating on raw talent and passion alone.
If you read his letters, you discover that he was a well-educated scholar of
art, much influenced by the ideas of others.

His passion kept him going when nobody would buy his works, but it was his
professionalism -- his endless desire to learn more and do better, that
exploited his talent to its fullest. Van Gogh's early works didn't amount to
much. It was his growth as a serious, thoughtful, professional artist that
turned him into what he became. _____

Hold on, how can the author draw a line between passion and being learned?
Isn't it possible to be learned because you are passionate, and yet still be
unprofessional? I define unprofessionalism as acting like Steve of Apple...and
by that I mean either of the Steves.

I think it's obvipus to a cliche how Jobs fits in to this debate. IMO, Woz
falls into the "passion" category. If, in a company, he was hired to build
boards so that the company could profit and grow, and instead, he gave away
his intellectual property and energy towards furthering what he saw as the
home brew culture, that is an act of passion over professionalism. But it has
little to do with whether he was learned in his area of expertise.

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CPlatypus
Passion means wanting to do something. Professionalism means doing stuff you
don't like because it's necessary. The acid test is often how the person
responds to their work being flamed.

* -passionate -professional: ignore it

* -passionate +professional: respond neutrally, "agree to disagree" if the flames continue

* +passionate -professional: flame back, send ASCII dongs

* +passionate +professional: stick with it, prove beyond reasonable doubt (often by demonstration) that the flamer is wrong

All my opinion, of course, but I find the distinction useful. A good
organization needs both passionate and professional people, though they need
not be the same people. The trick is to put people who have only one attribute
into roles where their strengths are maximized and their weaknesses minimized.
Don't put the passionate amateur in front of enterprise customers, and don't
put the boring pro in front of idealistic programmers.

