As someone who works mostly in the cultural sector, for museums and the like, I’ve gotten used to talking about failing over the last few years. At various museum conferences and events there have been Epic Fail sessions filled with horror stories of million pound plus projects getting dumped after breaking so badly they only lasted a few days after launch, as well as more minor disasters with familiar lessons about marketing and targeting the right audience and so on. And there has been much discussion of “failing forward”, allowing yourself to fail and learning from it as an essential part of the process.
So when I was looking for a subject for an upcoming #LEGup (the London Educational Games meetup group) session, it seemed like a natural topic. What could we learn from failure in the business of games, and in game development? Is it possible to make it a useful and natural part of the process?
At first, I posted the session and put a call out through our Meetup page for speakers. Nothing. I began to wonder if putting the event together might be harder than I thought and if the games industry perhaps hadn’t yet gotten to grips with talking about things that go wrong. I began to wonder if our fail session might itself fail.
Approaching people directly was more successful, but hard to do.”Hi, I know you to be a failure, come tell everyone about it!” is not a great opener. But thankfully people got where I was coming from and didn’t apparently take it too personally, and I got three fantastic speakers.
I think all our LEGup speakers this year have been great, and if you don’t believe me, check out our YouTube channel. We’ve had invaluable advice on crowdfunding, Cat Spanish, a surprising academic defence of chocolate covered broccoli and more. But even in this great company, there is something really special about hearing honest, open accounts of things that have gone wrong and what people have learned from them. There is something painful, humorous and hugely informative, a sense of “wow, I’m glad that wasn’t me, and now I know how to avoid making the same mistake”. Or alternatively, “oh s&@!, that is me, I’m about to walk into exactly the same catastrophe, thank God I heard about this now before it was too late”.
And our three speakers more than delivered, as you can see from the videos embedded in this post. Alex Warren told us how he quit his boring job to pursue his side project, textadventures.co.uk, and see if he could make it profitable. To cut a long but entertaining story short, it didn’t work out. He tried all kinds of things, and here shares what he learnt from the whole experience.
Annette Mees is one of the co-directors of Coney, an agency which creates experiences that are somewhere between theatre and game design and that are highly participatory. To hone the production they go through a very iterative process, constantly putting things that they know may not work in front of an audience; a process that Annette said still made her feel a bit ill every time, but which is invaluable for creating a polished final experience.
Our last speaker was John Davison . I felt a bit bad when I asked John to speak. I knew his agency Kanoti, who had produced all kinds of beautiful animations and games, had suddenly closed down at the beginning of the year, but I didn’t know why. I suspected it might have been painful, but also that it would be an important story. John told us what had gone wrong, in a very open and honest way, with many lessons for anyone working in the creative industry and looking to set up a business.
We had great feedback from people at the event: one person said it was the best #LEGup yet. However, it was one of our least well attended events so far – no doubt partly because it was half term, but perhaps also because, as one person said in the pub afterwards, “when I saw the theme I thought it might just be a bunch of losers.”
Clearly, none of our speakers are “losers”. And I happen to know that lots of brilliant people at our meetups, and in the games industry, have at some point “failed”. They have failed to make money, failed to get critical acclaim, failed to get the audience numbers, failed to even get a project launched. I know I have, on some projects. So, why are we so uncomfortable talking about failure? Why aren’t we better at sharing the lessons we learn when something goes wrong?
I appreciate that people doing commercial work might feel they have to always give the impression that they are super successful to potential clients. But we’re amongst friends, right? Let’s talk more about the mistakes we’ve made or the pitfalls to watch out for, and help the whole industry avoid doing the same.
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