Harley Baldwin is the vice president of design for Schell Games. Harley is responsible for mentoring, managing and cultivating the design culture, collaborating with clients and guiding the vision for exciting, pioneering experiences for players and guests.

How did you start your path to getting a job in the video game industry?

I went to University of New Mexico and when I was starting my senior year, I discovered that there were people making video games for a living. I decided that’s what I wanted to do. Keep in mind that this was over 25 years ago, and there was no such thing as a degree in video game design or anything like that, so I had to make it up as I went along.

You mentioned you had a couple of jobs before college and prior to your start in game design. What kind of jobs did you have?

One summer, I washed dogs for a living, so every day I would come home just soaked, and smelling of dogs.The job is more intense than you’d think. The washer has to find and pick the ticks off the dog, and…things like that. It gave me appreciation for people who take on the less pleasant parts of life.

While I was in college, I worked in the library as a shelver. When I was supposed to be shelving books, I’d find and read books that were interesting to me in a corner somewhere. It was very luxurious and naughty.

Very cool.

Yes! I also worked retail for a long time, mostly as a cashier. I was good at the money aspect of retail, not so much the stacking and the folding.

Out of those experiences, were there any takeaways or lessons learned that still affect you today?

Sure, I can immediately think of two. I am one of the few people I know who can properly bathe a cat. You’re laughing, but it is a lot harder than it sounds. I can do it in a way that both the cat and the person stay safe. But that’s not really what you asked…

No, but that’s hilarious.

You asked me what I learned about work, or about craft, from those experiences. I learned that we have a mental hierarchy in our society about what type of work we think is important. That mental hierarchy doesn’t value the effort people put forth in doing the work. That concept has very much stuck with me. I learned how fast our society would crumble if what we thought of as “service jobs” would stop. Our society would just stop working. I don’t think a lot of people are aware of that. Also, the amount of care that you bring to your work- no matter what it is that you’re doing- has an enormous effect on the outcome. It can be hard to care about something; not everything is fun. Not everything in game design is fun. If you can find a way to bring your best skill, mindset, and craft to the task, the outcome is going to improve. And it doesn’t matter if you’re designing systems, or folding towels.

From college, how did you get into the games industry?

At UNM I was a photography major, and I had all this expensive photography equipment. If I wasn’t playing games, I was spending the rest of my time walking around and taking pictures. The idea was for me to graduate and move to New York City to be a high-end photo printer for fashion photographers and others. I wanted to print advertising collateral. The summer before my senior year my apartment was broken into and they stole all my photography equipment. Even now, the amount of equipment they stole would be difficult to replace. But back then, as a college student on work-study and Pell grants, it was devastating.

Absolutely!

There was no way I could finish the senior thesis I had planned. So, I had to quickly scramble to see what exactly I was going to do. A friend of mine said that she was going to interview at this software development company with a guy who attended our high school. She heard my plight and told me to come along. I went, and it turns out the job was making video games. I got really excited. Then I got the idea that I was going to earn as much money as I could, so by the end of summer I would have the money to buy whatever equipment I needed for my senior thesis. But by the end of summer, I didn’t care about photography anymore. I was completely into game development. Thankfully the lessons I learned from photography were applicable to game design in some ways. I had trained my eye to see, if you will. I decided to stay with the company and build games.

Very nice.

The first game I worked on was called Mad Dog McCree. It was a western where the player had to only shoot the people in the black hats, not any bystanders, or people wearing white hats. I sat there watching each frame of the video and drew boxes around the people, indicating whether or not this was a person who should be shot. Throughout that time, I started asking questions like, ‘couldn’t we write a script for this to happen?’ ‘Could we make these tools easier to use?’ For the first couple of years I was a technical artist, asking a lot of the questions about improving the process of making the game. I liked the idea of rapid iteration of the content we were creating. Then I started asking questions like, ‘what should the player be doing?’ and ‘how does the player know what to do?’ and I found myself becoming a designer pretty quickly.

Cool. What do you like about Schell Games?

I’ve spent over twenty years on the west coast in the AAA console, shooter, sometimes adventure world. I think of it as a very heady time. We were working with big budgets, working on $20 million dollar games with a $20 million dollar marketing budget, and it was very exciting. The trade-off was that we were actually a lot more creatively-constrained.

How so?

There are a couple of reasons. With that kind of budget, it is important to ameliorate risk as much as possible. The number one way of ameliorating risk is to make sure that the game is something that people will like and buy. That means it is really hard to innovate. There are times that the AAAs would take one #1 hit, and try to mash it up with another #1 hit, in order to create something new. Other times, we had conversations ending with “we can’t do that because we don’t know if people will like it.” And that may sound surprising to some in the industry because they think the AAAs are pushing the envelope, but really that part of the industry is polishing what is already known to work.

So what I like about Schell Games is that we have enormous creative freedom. Not just with our internal IP, but the type of clients we attract are looking for a studio that is not afraid to innovate, to look at things with a different lens, or try new technology to see what it can do.That is super valuable to me.

Also we put a high value on the quality of life of our people. Our people are our value. If they are grinding themselves into dust, we know that it doesn’t help them stay, do their best work, or cooperate in a team to solve the hard problems of innovation and new technologies. We spend a lot of time and energy making sure that their quality of life is good. I like that very much.

I also love the emphasis on continuous improvement we have in the studio. We take continuous looks at our processes, the way we do projects- just everything- and try to figure out ways to improve them. There is much less of the “that’s just the way we do it here” culture. That sense of looking to optimize everything is what drew me into the industry, whether it’s creativity, technology or whatever issue we’re trying to tackle.

Where do you see the video games industry in five years?

What the hardware manufacturers want to do is to find the ‘killer app’ for VR/AR/MR. Somebody is going to figure out a way for a player to stay in VR to a point that it feels totally worth the value of the hardware. Once that happens, everything will flow from there. From playing a lot of games and watching the industry, seeing how our teams are solving these problems, I am starting to see glimmers of that. I’m trying to figure it out myself.

It will change everything in the way free-to-play games changed mobile gaming. The industry is still trying to figure out what kind of VR experience consumers will want to spend money- and time- on.

True.

If you go on Reddit, you’ll see that people think that the VR industry right now is just a sea of demos. We know that isn’t really the case, but that’s what people think. VR content is super expensive to make, and publishers have to be convinced to throw money behind it. The “gadget” industry is getting saturated, so the VR/AR space is really exciting, because it is new and different.

What’s unique about being on a leadership team in a game studio?

Never in my career thus far, have I had more opportunity to affect how much risk we take on. There’s a fine line when it comes to risk. I believe that in order to be creative and innovative, there is some risk involved. But taking on too much risk has its own issues. In the place we’re at, we can have good conversations about the opportunities in front of us, and the risks associated. It’s something that we think about a lot.

The kind of relationships that you get to make with the amazing developers we have here, and some of the clients we have here, is really unique for me. Getting a chance to work with people from companies that I deeply admire and asking them about creative projects that they’d like to see happen is awesome and satisfying for me.

As vice president of design for Schell Games, you get very busy. How do you stay on top of your craft and discipline?

I try to do it in several ways. In the studio, I play every single game we’ve made on a regular cadence. I play the game with the project teams, and we discuss exactly what it is they are trying to do. In a lot of cases, I am an early playtester for the teams to see if they are succeeding or not in what they’re trying to do. I tell them what experiences I liked in the game, and what I thought was challenging. I try to use those opportunities to connect teams who have solved similar problems or challenges, and to make sure that whatever insight they need is what we talk about.

In terms of staying on top of ‘game design’ as a craft, the main thing is to try to play a variety of different games frequently. It isn’t possible anymore with the size of the industry and number of releases to play every big game that comes out. Right now, since we as a studio have been focusing on VR, I’ve been focusing on playing VR games. I write up a “5 minute critique” of each game I play as a way to keep my thoughts organized. I write down my overall thoughts about the game, how it addressed certain design aspects (i.e. in VR, embodiment and presence) and what we, as a design team, can learn from that experience.

How does that process translate to your leadership of the design team?

I get the chance to have conversations about what the team is interested in making, what games are out there that they think are interesting, and what ground-breaking concept they think we can tackle. Playing all these games and having these conversations gives me more context on what I’d like to explore.

With Schell Games having such a large design team, there must be quite a spectrum of what individual team members like or think is interesting.

Absolutely. We do say that ‘diversity makes us strong’ when it comes to hiring, to the clients we work with, and to the type of work we do, and it is also true when it comes to the interests that our teams have. When I’m looking at a potential new team member, I try to see if this person is bringing a new perspective, background, or skill, different from our other designers.

What advice would you give to a person trying to get into the game industry?

I think Schell Games is a little different than other full-service game studios because we prioritize the ability to collaborate and work well with others. Flexibility is also a huge factor. We do so many different projects that it is necessary for you to be flexible. We also like it if you have multiple areas of expertise, so you can serve your teams in multiple ways if the project demands it. But that’s particular to Schell Games. For design, having expertise in different backgrounds or coming from a different industry puts you in a position to inform. It places you at an advantage.

For the games industry in general, for many years we have said that it is important for you to make games and to show that you have made games. So we encouraged people to go to game jams, and learn game engines, and things like that. And it is still important. But I do not think it is the single point of breaking into the industry anymore. I think games are an increasingly sophisticated medium. As the games industry matures, we need people who can evaluate content and the experiences provided in the medium, and speak clearly and succinctly about what they can improve, and how they would do that. Developing a standard or a habit for critique is very valuable. Games are not created in a vacuum- games have budgets, timelines, teams- so having a strategy or process is important.

Interesting.

Also, learn to code. An understanding of what computers are good at and what they are not will make working with you much more attractive.

Where do you see Schell Games in five years?

I think we will have shifted more of our work to our internal IP (original games). By then, we will have launched a very successful game, and I think that we will be working on the second phase of it, whatever that may look like. We will have grown, not extensively, but bigger than we are now. I do see us being a major player and influencer at the intersection of VR and learning, along with new technology.

(Internal IP: I Expect You To Die, Happy Atoms, and SuperChem VR)

What is one thing about leadership that you have learned on the job?

The hardest and most important one was learning to trust my team. When I was first promoted to a design lead, I was leading ten designers. I was conducting a brainstorm session, but trying to control the brainstorm to lead them to conclusions that I thought we should make. I was afraid that the team wouldn’t get to the right answers unless I led them. During one of the days of the brainstorm, I got so sick - to the point that I shouldn’t have gone to work - and I asked someone else to lead the brainstorm. I sat in the back room and watched my team. For the first 45 minutes, I was terrified. But they ended up designing something really cool, and came up with really good questions to continue answering. I knew and trusted them as good designers, but I had to learn to put my money where my mouth was, and trust them more with some of the high-level design questions. I needed to have them steer me, not me steering them. When I follow that lesson, I see my teams create and represent ideas and concepts on a much bigger scale than what I can do on my own. The best ideas come from teams that were given the opportunity and responsibility to build them from the start.

What’s your favorite video game?

Oh, how funny you ask. When I’m interviewing a candidate, and after I ask all the hard and scary questions and the candidate is about to walk out the door, I ask them what they think the best game of all time is.

Really?

Yes! And you would not believe how many people choke on that question. They think there is a right or wrong answer, or that the game they think is the best will be deemed a bad game by other people. When I ask that question, I’m not looking for a particular game, I want to see how the candidate reasons why they think it’s the best game of all time. Is there an emotional connection? Did the game make you feel smart? What did the experience do for you that made it the best game?

For me right now, my favorite game is Portal 2, specifically with the co-op mode. I love how important communication is in the game, and how smart the game is. Before Portal 2 I liked Portal, and before that I really enjoyed Quake II.

What in your opinion, makes the leadership team at Schell Games click?

We work together often, and we trust each other to do what we all do well. It is something that Jesse [Schell] has consciously built into the team and the studio. He is always looking for ways for us to communicate better; whether it is among us, or across disciplines, or studio-wide. He actively encourages us to communicate forthrightly and sensitively. There’s really no politics in the leadership team. We try to be accountable to one another.

Given unlimited resources, no timeline, and an unlimited budget, what type of experience would you like to see Schell Games create?

Two things I’ve always had a soft spot for are imaginary worlds and emergent systems. With those kinds of resources, I’d want to make a fantastical imaginary VR world - - like those gorgeous science fiction / fantasy book covers – with lots of emergent systems – and of course, complex social interactions as well. Imagine if the kinds of emergent systems that illuminate Skyrim and Breath of the Wild worked in social interactions with real players. And or course, I also would want to slay - or ride - or breed - dragons.

But also! After thinking about this question for much longer than I should have, I want to say that I think it’s an unfair question. First, designers never work with unlimited anything, and even if they did, we’d have limited player attention to vie for. Secondly, if this thing really existed, the game would never be made - because there’s always more polish you can add, more features, a better on-ramping experience, a new take of a voice-over, an obscure bug that makes you re-think your assumptions… it’s a recipe for an endless ouroboros of game development. People would get disheartened and leave, new ones would take their place, re-think core game concepts, and off they’d go, tilting at another impossibly perfect windmill. Real game design isn’t the process of adding cool things until the game is this behemoth experience. It’s the process of testing and refining your assumptions, of cutting and then polishing until what you have is nigh perfect, and that’s not possible without limits to push against. I don’t want to claim that it’s a capital “A” Art (some of it is) but we can learn from the greats – when someone asked Michelangelo how to sculpt a horse he said “Take away everything that isn’t a horse.” That’s a contemporary lesson for Game Design.