Paul Barnett Speaks, Part One: His Griefer Son, the Meaning of Creativity, and Dating Games Workshop’s Daughter

By Steven Crews | May 23, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: Paul Barnett, warhammer online

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The MMO Gamer: So what’s his review of WAR?

Paul Barnett: It’s awesome, my dad is in it!

The MMO Gamer: You are? Do you make a cameo appearance?

Paul Barnett: I believe there was a full model of me in the first release that rolled out. It was actually the placeholder model that they used to use for testing all the death animations, so I’ve died billions of times in the game.

It was very weird, you could go to villages and every NPC would be me, and when they had a new monster model and they haven’t got it ready there, it would be me.

The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be quite frightening.

Paul Barnett: They put a video clip together of me dying in like every way they found possible. In the original shipment it was still there, they just hadn’t ripped it out yet, it’s since been removed.

It was interesting, it was partly done because we needed an obvious “it’s not in the game” model, it was also done as a present for me by some of the model builders because I was going so see my boy and my girl and they wanted to give me a model in the game.

It was weird the first time I saw the model, animated and breathing and blinking, I was gripped by a deep desire to destroy it I can’t really explain.

The MMO Gamer: I think in Buddhism they call that “vibhava-trishna.”

Paul Barnett: Whatever it was, it worked on me and I looked at it very unhappily. But I’m no longer a model in the game, sadly.

The MMO Gamer: That’s a shame. They could revive it and bring it back as like the Empire fortress boss, or something.

Paul Barnett: I don’t think it’ll ever be in. It sort of crosses that boundary of IP-friendly. I don’t know, maybe put it for an April Fool for awhile, they might do that I suppose. I don’t know, I’d have to wait and see.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on to what I believe is the second biggest questions on everyone’s mind at this point: Did the entire development team play Bright Wizards in beta?

Paul Barnett: [laughs] Are we going to get into a balancing issue conversation?

The MMO Gamer: I’m just curious. It seemed a little heavy-handed, let’s say.

Paul Barnett: Getting careers right is impossible. Getting the balance right is impossible. And no matter how much you try to design, no design survives real players.

And so as much we adore our internal testing and QA people and our signed up open testers, those players turn out to be trickier and cleverer and more interested in how to abuse our systems than we ever could be.

That however, does not excuse certain careers being overbalanced. This sort of thing Mark takes really seriously, and the careers team takes very seriously, and when you’re trying to put them right it’s very, very hard.

I don’t begrudge anyone whose job it is to balance careers. When to make the change, when to pull the levers, when to roll it into the build, it’s “you’re dammed no matter what you do.”

The people who are playing a career that is considered overly powerful, or has an ability that stacking incorrectly, or having a combinational system that is making them disproportional powerful… On the whole, most of them have no idea that that’s wrong or bad.

Quite a lot of people just assume that they figured out a good tactic and are pleased with the way they’re playing it. And suddenly, they log in and find out that the way they’re playing has been taken away from them, and now because they’re robbed of the tactic they’ve been using, they’re now in much deeper hole and trying to get themselves out of it and learn how to plan their career properly.

Whereas other people are playing the game, and believe they’re playing it well and they just getting absolutely cream-crackered. And these people end up going “Well it’s completely unreasonable, it’s unfair!” and they end up playing their career badly or just play with the strings they have.

It really is incredibly difficult and I’m glad I don’t do it. Always play Order, that would be my bet.

The MMO Gamer: I was expecting you to wink and say conspiratorially, “Yeah, we did!”

Paul Barnett: [laughing] I’m blaming someone who isn’t me.

The MMO Gamer: So what do you do, then? In a nutshell, what is the role of the creative director on the Warhammer project?

Paul Barnett: I direct the creativity!

The MMO Gamer: That is a very small nutshell.

Paul Barnett: That’s the grounds you gave me.

The MMO Gamer: Alright then, what is creativity in the project to you?

Paul Barnett: Creativity happens everywhere in the project, I’ll give an example: Travel policy.

If you’re not careful, large corporations turn around and say things like, “Everyone has to travel economy.” That’s not actually what they’re saying, what they’re really saying is everyone has to save money when they travel. That’s what they’re really saying.

And the way they do it is they put a policy out that everyone has to travel coach, no matter what you do. But that’s not true. That’s just applying a sledge hammer to a perceived money leakage issue.

The creative director is the sort of person who is able to figure out how we can travel cheaper, but still allow ourselves to travel in reasonable comfort-of not being treated worse than if we were a pig being transported across America.

There’s more room given to a pig being transported than to people in coach in some of these airlines. And that’s a piece of creativity.

It’s not a necessarily a piece of creativity for the game, but its creativity. Creativity in figuring out how we infuse people who’re going to be working on live game and need to be able to give things back in long terms, like four or five years.

Creativity is ensuring that people think wider and broader, when they are being forced to follow procedures, and deadlines, and production systems.

Because of the nature of the game we make, because of the time we have to hit things you end up thinking, “God! I’ll never be able to do that on time, so I’ll limit my thinking to ensure that I can fit it in my perceived delivery systems.”

Creativity in explaining a way why people are working what appears to be disparate parts of a project, but actually knit together, preventing alienation. Karl Marx was right on the alienation stuff, you’ve got to make people realize that they’re part of the greater whole.

And, creativity in figuring out in how we defend our game and show people that we care, creativity in finding solutions in where we messed up, bravery in understanding that some of our ideas don’t work in the actual field.

Understanding that as long as what we trying to do is a game that we believe in, that we’re trying to make it better for the people who already care, that we’re trying to open the door for people who’ve never tried it, and we are genuinely trying to give people who have played it every excuse to be come back and sated.

It takes creativity every single day.

What it isn’t, is telling people what to do. It’s allowing a talented team to show you how good they can be, and giving them gentle direction, sparks of illumination here and there. It’s setting up the strategy, but allowing them to come up with the policy and implementation.

The MMO Gamer: Sounds like an interesting job.

Paul Barnett: It’s not a bad job. How was that answer?

The MMO Gamer: Not what I was expecting. I was expecting you to say something like, “I know all the Warhammer lore by heart, and I go through and make sure nobody puts Skavens in the wrong area!”

Paul Barnett: Well, that’s a different thing. You’re talking about IP protection. What you’ve got to do there is realize we don’t own the intellectual property, it’s owned by Games Workshop.

It’s very precious to them because it’s theirs, they’ve birth it. It’s one of the things that builds the engine of commerce that allows them to make Warhammer more wonderful.

The MMO Gamer: You used to work for Games Workshop, didn’t you?

Paul Barnett: I was a consultant for them. I never worked directly for Games Workshop. I always took their money as an independent, and they were always very gracious about paying me on time.

My job there is to remind people that our relationship with Games Workshop’s Warhammer  world is as if we are dating Games Workshop’s daughter.

We have to treat her well, and be nice, show her we’ve got opportunities, and that we have a future, be respectful, behave, it’s that. We can’t trample all over it.

There is a reason why we can’t do some things in our game, and a reason why some of our decisions can appear a little peculiar. When we were first dealing with it, there was a lot hand-wringing over we weren’t going to allow female Chosen warriors.

And why would we make that decision? We made that decision because we believe that Games Workshop we probably right, that they don’t generally have them.

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