Daily Blogging: Virtual Office vs. Real Office
Today’s work: A little more Digital Grimoire, and getting Dawn of the Artifacts: Dusk ready for Alicia, along with a screencast to explain to her some of the intricacies of Shadowrun layout.
Today’s blog topic: Virtual Office vs. Real Office
I’ve worked for a game company that had a centralized office, and I’ve worked—and freelanced— for many that didn’t. I used to be a strong proponent of having a centralized office, but now I’m pretty sure that it’s the wrong choice for many companies, and the wrong choice for myself, personally.
Let’s talk a few of the advantages of having a shared working space:
- Shared resources: computer equipment [scanners, printers, cameras, etc], gaming library, storage space.
- Immediate feedback on works in progress, people around for brainstorming, tomfoolery.
- Daily contact with co-workers over lunch, breaks, etc.
And a few common misconceptions:
- Sitting around and playing games all day! Yeah, right. Short games during lunch, maybe. Full-length board and roleplaying games are kept for the evenings and weekends.
- Game companies have huge multi-floor offices in giant glass towers. In my experiences, game companies have commercial office space near the industrial side of town; tiny rooms in crumbling low-rent towers, and the wacky-shaped offices of former internet companies gone bust, underneath an optician. The last one was the best, as it was only a half block away from the bus stop and a nice coffee place.
A few advantages of working from home:
- No commute time.
- Ability to have co-workers from around the world. I’m in Canada. Several of us are in Seattle. Rob is in Chicago. Peter is in Portugal. We would simply not all be working together if we all had to decide on one city—even one country—to live and work in.
- For the most part, setting your own hours and being able to take appointments without having to clear it with your boss—and without requiring multi-stage travel of home to work to appointment back to work and then home— is a clear benefit. Being able to organize your schedule around social events and your moods is a benefit [and you don't get "grumpy coworker syndrome" dragging everyone else down, generally.
- You get to use your own stuff, your own kitchen is only 30 seconds away, you can go hang out on the balcony or back porch to take a break.
- When you get frustrated with work, you can go sing in the shower.
- ... or you can just crank the music up, and nobody will complain about your choices.
Some disadvantages:
- No shared resources. This means that everyone needs to own their own, for example, printer—and although that means everyone is free to pick the one that suits their work best, it adds up, especially if the company is picking up the tab. [I have the HP Color Laserjet 2605dn and it serves me well.]
- Communications. Everyone simply needs to put forward more effort to make sure that everyone has all the info they need to do great work, and also to make them feel included in the company. I’ve seen situations where one employee who was working remotely wasn’t well-liked on a personal level, and as a result he was often kept in the dark on company matters that he probably could have contributed effectively to. Then again, I’ve wanted to throttle him as he sat across the office from me, too …
- It’s a little harder to create a culture of shared experiences, and to share things that we like. There are ways around this — at Catalyst, I often record video reviews of new gaming stuff I like, and upload them to our Basecamp for everyone to check out.
- It’s hard to maintain a work/life balance in the game industry to begin with, because most game companies simply wouldn’t be able to operate if everyone on the staff worked only 40 hrs/week, and it’s even more difficult when your office is the same as your living room.
- If you have housemates of some sort, you may well drive them crazy or be driven crazy.
I should point out that you can solve some of the disadvantages of working from home by renting some office space for yourself; of course, that adds expenses, a little bit of a commute, etc, but for some people that’s a more practical course of action. Many “shared offices” are springing up in major urban centers now, where you pay a monthly fee to use part of the office, sharing with other people, almost like a vacation timeshare.
Anyone have any questions? I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, here…
November 10th, 2008 at 07:16:41
I know the feeling….
As said before, I myself started designing board wargames(my other hobby) and all my work is virtual and contact with my publisher is all virtual, in fact the publisher does not have an office for his company, his office is in his computer….Also plyatesting is handled by the designer too…
I think the internet has given a full kick up to all the hobbies.
I also have a career which takes up most of my time and hopefully I can retire soon and devote my full attention to the hobby.
I think that the only company(maybe) that has a full office devoted to its games is Wizards of the Coast or maybe White Wolf.
Anyways, I’m really happy that Catalyst is running supplement PDFs for Shadowrun…great idea!!!!
November 10th, 2008 at 07:19:11
I’ve been curious about this for awhile. I’ve done both options over the years and I’m currently in a standard office environment. As the IT department for a non-profit organization we have to make what we have go a long way and we’ve toyed with the idea of home offices. At one point we had to sell our administration offices and crammed in with one of our programs. Having the CEO sitting in the call center cubes right in front of me and the HR person in the supply closet was funny, but quite tragic at the same time. I set awhile doing phone support from my basement for a printer company while they were weighting their options and planning a cross country move. In the end they decided to stay with a traditional office setting and so on the other side of the country. I stayed where I am and have yet to regret it.
I worked well from home in a reactionary sense, handling phone calls. I could see working on Shadowrun as a good motivator to keep on task with. It’s gotta be frustrating though, you guys must be driven pretty hard to make a situation like that work as well as you do. Your dedication and professionalism shows in your product though. Keep up the good work, it seems like your have the best job in the world.
November 10th, 2008 at 07:26:52
Forgot to add:
Good thing I don’t have any housemates(my pet cat keeps me company and relieves stress) to make me go crazy.
My only enemy is writers block and commitment to real life and my career.
But anyways besides wargames, I also love RPGs and CCGs.
I play the following:
Shadowrun
Earthdawn
New World of Darkness
Call of Cthulhu(Delta Green in particular)
GURPS(alternate earths)
The new Runequest from Mongoose
Conan
Godlike
Wild Talents
D&D 4th ed.
Personally I think Catalyst has done a great job with Shadowrun…in fact, far better than what FASA did. Keep up the good work and keep writing….
Maybe after I get bored designing wargames I’ll get into RPG writing.
November 10th, 2008 at 07:33:19
Oh, a question while I’m at it. How do you guys handle data? Does Basecamp have some way of securing it in a central location or do you each roll your own backups? What’s your disaster recovery plan?
November 10th, 2008 at 08:44:25
Personally, I think I prefer the office at home set up.
Less stress, work at my leisure type of thing…
If I need to chill or do time out, I just close the computer and read a book, spend time with my cat or sleep which is just in the next room. And also while working on the computer, I like to play my favorite music or watch my favorite movie or TV show(currently watching Wizards by Ralph Bakshi while I’m typing this). All this helps the creative juices flowing.
I personally think that most of the hobby is now home office based especially with the advent of the internet has made communications between publisher and designer faster and more convenient.(supplemented of course by some meetings face to face and the occasional phone call).
November 10th, 2008 at 09:57:42
Chris hit it on the head as to why more companies aren’t doing this sort of structure. They simply can’t trust their employees to work from home… a sad state of affairs but it can cause issues. In one of my previous jobs, because my bosses couldn’t trust all my department I wasn’t allowed to work from home even though I had demonstrated I could be trusted.
It all comes down to the people involved, some work better under home working while others need to be ridden by supervisors etc in order to work well. CGL seems to all be people who can handle home working, more power to you! However, a single office type environment will continue to exist for a LONG time…
Until telecommuting is more viable, which would be awesome! :o)
November 11th, 2008 at 08:29:18
Chris,
Good question regarding backups. Everyone is responsible for their own local backup plan, tailored to their needs.
For example, I use my laptop for all “communications” — email, IM, etc — and for writing, web stuff, etc, and my desktop for most actual production. It gets backed hourly with Time Machine. On the desktop, I manually back up projects that I’m working on daily, or at convenient other points [IE, if I finish working on a book for the day, I back it up then.] I have an Apple Time Capsule for backups, and another external LaCie drive as well. I’m about to convert the backups on the desktop to an automated system, probably using SuperDuper! — I don’t run Leopard on it, so I don’t have Time Machine.
Plus, when projects are complete, they get archived multiple times — to DVD, and to a consolidated offsite backup, which, in turn, gets backed up. And a bunch of material [drafts, artwork] does end up on Basecamp as well, so it would be recoverable.
Staffers who doesn’t have to deal with as many huge files can get away with a smaller backup infrastructure. We’ve started working on some books using Google Docs, as well, so some manuscripts are “in the cloud” for their entire existence.