“These are things you can do to augment your success” – Rodney says you have to have a well running studio first. And I know he does have one – as an aside I’m always curious about how Rodney finds the time to involve himself in everything he does.
On Why – Amaze wants to create a unique environment in which his employees can be creative. He also wants to give back to the community – after all he gets paid to make games.
Rodney observes that doing works in the community (like his annual Big Brothers / Big Sisters Bowling Fundraiser) – his company gets greater visibility, improved recruiting, better QoL, create leadership opportunities to represent the company in classrooms, or in industry events like GDC, the development community itself is strengthened.
He showed a funny slide with the old Wonder Twins – and he talked about how these efforts can create interesting and unforeseen relationships with other organizations and individuals.
Rodney then went into some things are going on in Austin, Texas – where Fizz Factor is located. Fizz was started in Rodney’s living room with four people. They were founded at the same time as Digital Anvil, Edge of Reality, Inevitable, and other companies that were the insane AAA sexy titles, and were recruiting aggressively. Rodney’s company was doing a cute little horsey title – it was a little hard to compete.
So they did what anyone would do in that circumstance – they dressed up in Elvis costumes and went bowling – specifically for Big Brothers / Big Sisters of Central Texas. This grew and grew over the years, and employees would come to Amaze specifically because of their community works.
Rodney was contacted by a group who wanted to create the Digital Media Council, who was interested in doing workforce development for digital media industries – and they specifically wanted involvement from the games industry. This grew into teaching teachers – who could then pass this knowledge onto 100’s or 1000’s of students per year. Teachers had no idea how to address student’s questions about what skills they needed to get into the games industry.
This community work, Rodney found, had a positive effect on his employees morale – when they talked to students, they would come back feeling like rock stars! They got asked for autographs, and truly felt like the special people they always were – but sometimes hard to see after a few hard months of crunch.
Another program, Velocity Prep – tries to find ways to get high school students involved in professional workspaces. They started with chip manufacturers like AMD, and then got interested in the gaming industry. They did this in an interesting way – groups of these students were placed in a professional environment, office space and everything – and were asked to solve a real world problem. They were under the same kind of management supervision anyone would be under. One project was to create a marketing program for the Austin City Limits Music festival. When they are done they present their work to a group of industry professionals who judge their progress and give feedback. In one case – the kids came up with exactly the same conclusions as highly paid industry consultants!
A survey was done to find the economic impact of digital media – which found over 19,000 jobs and what their salaries were and even what their environmental and cultural impact of digital media in the central Texas area. It was much larger than anyone expected.
Rodney says game companies usually don’t want to involve themselves in this kind of activity – for many reasons – Austin was lucky to have a Chamber of Commerce that “got” the games industry, and helped energize relationships between local government and games industry professionals.
In one case – the Capital Area Workforce Solution organized SCRUM classes for local Austin game studios, which cost $30,000 for a two day class for 30 people, but this government program covered the complete costs of the program.
On the education side – once the economic impact study was distributed, local universities like UT, Texas State University in San Marcos, and St. Ed’s University became much more interested in creating programs that directly benefited game industry early professional development.
Rodney mentioned all the things that came from the State of Texas – both good and bad. He talked about Rick Perry, famed for the “Adios Mofo” comment while a mic was still on – and also the guy that did an E3 keynote about bringing game industry jobs to Texas. This was mostly due to the efforts of the Texas Motion Picture Alliance – who is also interested in games as well as film. Now, game companies can get back 5% of their development budget from any production dollars spent in Texas. Most states in the US have similar programs for film, and many have it for games.
Rodney – “Films are easy – since they are in trucks and can drive wherever the money is – with games it is a little trickier….but the wind is at our backs.”
Barack Obama is going to have a national CTO – who said that “Technology is usually a spoke in the wheel – now it is the hub.” Even Sandra Day O’Connor, just retired from the US Supreme Court, is making a video game. Math and science scores are way down – but kids are really interested in video games – Rodney observes they are a great carrot to motivate kids to study these subjects.
Rodney opened up the floor to questions and comments – and there were a few people around the country, Boston, for example, that have community outreach programs. In one case, all the game companies got together and created little booths to display what they were working on, and invited government officials over to show them what was happening. They were surprised to see the impact, and got an advocate to push for legislation to benefit the games industry.
