Gone Visiting With Valve 20
Valve's rekindling of the passions of PC gamers continues to get some attention today, as RPS writer John Walker sits down with Gabe Newell for a chat and Escapist author Yahtzee Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame) went a-visiting in their Bellvue offices. He has a travelogue from the trip up on the site, showing an interesting side of both the company and the commentator. "One of the things I've always wondered about in Valve games is the credits, in that very little seems to get credited, if you catch my drift. The names of all the people involved always simply roll past in alphabetical order with no job titles or details of any kind. The reason for this, as I'm learning, is that no one at Valve has any specific title. Part of that is because of something called the Cabal System. When a job needs done or a problem needs solving, or an issue has come up in one of the hundreds of play test sessions Valve games undergo, a group of bods with random assortments of skills from all over the spectrum of game design are brought together to bounce solutions off each other and argue their merit."
Jobs descriptions (Score:2, Insightful)
In one hand, not mentioning their respective jobs, makes the ones with more meaningless tasks feel more useful and important for being listed as equal as those that did the most. But that may end up making the ones that had to work harder feel that their work had less meaning.
On the other hand, mentioning the jobs, will make the ones that did the most important part feel their importance, but may at the same time make the ones that have less important tasks feel demoralized and loose productivity. And that may well revert in delaying all the work...
If I'm not mistaken, Unreal 2, at the end, lists people involved with their respective jobs. Don't know if this has any effect, though.
But that's a whole lot of different politics,a whole lot of different cheats and a whole lot of different game bugs.