An Audience With…
Media Molecule’s studio director explains what it means to work at the coalface of Dreams
Media Molecule director Siobhan Reddy explains what it means to work at the coalface of Dreams
While it’s easy to admire the eccentric invention and imagination that forms the foundations of LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway and Dreams, none of these milestone games would exist if it wasn’t for Siobhan Reddy. One of Media Molecule’s five directors, she took the role of producer, marshalling wild thickets of ideas and technology into games which could actually be made, and then ensuring they actually were. And if that wasn’t enough, she also led the studio itself, building its corporate culture and team and steering its growth as not only one of the UK’s premier – and most distinctive – game developers, but also one of its most diverse. After 13 years, all five of its directors still work together, a testament to her ability to thread the needle of enabling sustainable and yet ambitious creation. Here, ahead of a keynote session at Develop: Brighton in July, she talks about how she’s helped to engineer a studio that’s been able to maintain that balance, how to herd cats, and why mucking in with everyone else is crucial to getting a game out of the door.
You both manage the studio and still actively produce games. Those are two very different roles, especially at a company as big as Media Molecule. Actually all five of us directors are still hands-on. That’s been something that we have all wanted to maintain, because as people we all move between the high level and the granular. At the moment, I am producing the Dreamiverse part of Dreams because I’m down a producer, so I’m actually doing more production right now than I have done in quite some time. And I just love it! I was just saying yesterday, like, I really don’t really want to give it up, but I know I have to. In a normal world, I manage the production team, and I’m very involved in ensuring that we have a plan and that I’m talking through it with each of the producers. Then I always pick up stuff when they need support. If we need bugs to be assigned, I’m really happy to jump in there.
To me, that’s a slightly selfish thing, because it allows me to get into the granularity of the project, and that’s the way that I truly understand the state of it. I try to find ways to do that while not getting in the other producers’ way. I’m sure I do get in their way sometimes, so looking after the Dreamiverse is brilliant. I’m enjoying it, and the timing of it is really good because we’re all working in this new way, where we’ve got Dreams’ early access launched and we’re working towards regular
“ONE OF THE BEST PIECES OF ADVICE I WAS GIVEN WHEN I JOINED THE INDUSTRY WAS TO ALWAYS STICK WITH THE TROOPS”
updates. I feel like I need to understand all this in order to be able to advocate it, and also so I can ask other people to do that job. I don’t like asking anyone to do something that I would not be willing to do, so part of me liking to muck in with the production team is because I don’t want ever to be too far away from them and understanding the reality of their jobs. And it also helps me understand the reality and the state of the project.
One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I joined the industry was to always stick with the troops in the trenches and not to become one of those managers who were off, far away, telling people what to do but not actually getting their hands dirty. I’ve probably taken that a bit too literally, but that’s very much a core part of who I am and how I work. To be fair, the other directors are actually very similar in that we’re all quite hands-on people.
Each of the other directors has a very individual personality. There’s Alex Evans the creative programmer, David Smith the programmer-designer, Mark Healey the designer and Kareem Ettouney the artist. Has managing that balance of creative talent partly shaped your role?
Oh, if you only knew! Yeah, I mean, we work together really brilliantly as a team, and my role… So, here’s the thing. I think that what all of us really love, and you need to love it if you’re going to work at Media Molecule, is the frenetic energy of creating stuff. We don’t quite know whether it’s going to work out, and you’re going to have to work hard to solve all the problems its design brings up. With that kind of ground-up approach – and I think most game companies are a little bit like this – you need to enjoy a little bit of chaos. My job, I think, is to make sure that we have just enough chaos to be able to stay in that place, but just enough structure that we
don’t go off the rails. I’ve often described it as herding cats. Sometimes I’m very much encouraging one of them to go off-piste, because something’s not working about what we’re doing or it’s become a bit stale, and sometimes I’m actively trying my very best to rein them in. Sometimes we’re all completely aligned; sometimes I need to pitch them on a way of working or a goal that we’ve got to hit; and sometimes it’s one of them pitching me something that needs to happen.
But we’re all very aligned on what the project basically is at any one time. And we’re very aligned on Media Molecule’s goals and where we’re going. But I sometimes think the day-to-day of that is a bit like choreography, because I come in and I’m like, ‘Okay, what’s the flow today?’ Alex might come in with a really brilliant idea that he really wants to try out, and sometimes you have to capture that essence in the raw moment, rather than saying to him, “No, you’re scheduled to do something else, so you need to hold that thought and then have the same energy in six weeks’ time.” Sometimes that’s just not the best way to work. So yes, it’s a constantly evolving relationship, and my job is to sometimes hold the line, and sometimes break it.
How has Media Molecule managed to retain such a consistent group of lead creatives for so long?
We always put fit as a very high priority when we hire people. That’s the main way we’ve achieved it. Culture is built, you know, by people. Right at the beginning, we set goals like making creative games and the games we wanted to, and for Media Molecule to be a familyfriendly studio. And in those first few years, we cemented a vibe that was very much created by the people that were there. Most of those people are still here, and when I look at Media Molecule now, I really think that everybody still holds those same principles. I appreciate that if you join Media Molecule and you’re not into it, you’re seriously not going to be into it. But for some game companies, if you don’t fit then you’re considered rubbish. Here, it’s not that, it’s just that sometimes you don’t need a death-metal drummer in a jazz band.
So we need people who are creatively simpatico and also want to go on a certain creative journey, because we’re quite niche. Making creative games and tools is very different from other types of games that a lot of developers really want to make, but that also means that a lot of people who apply to us are already attracted to the culture. And we’ve always looked at different types of people, as well, such as people who don’t have traditional games experience. Having a diverse team has always been really important. We’ve been very open to finding interesting, creative people who may not have the traditional experience to join us, because the kinds of games we’re making are not traditional experiences.
Media Molecule’s team is roughly one-third female. Are you still part of upholding that principle and pushing it forward?
Yeah, I’m very much part of that. I’m not the only the only person who cares about it, obviously, but I think the thing that I’ve learned is that everything takes work. You can’t just have an idea, and it doesn’t matter how simple the idea is, every single thing takes work. There was definitely a point where I felt like we were not seeing CVs coming through from women, and so we started to
try a bunch of different things. We’ve looked at the language of our job adverts, we have looked at where we hire from, and I guess I was able to make some big decisions. In 2013 I was put on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List, and following that I had a lot of people talking to me about joining various boards and getting involved in high-level initiatives to bring more women into the industry. All of them were really brilliant, but I realised that the one area where I was actually able to have an idea and then implement that idea quickly was here at Media Molecule. So we started trying lots of things, like saying yes to internships. We hadn’t done any before, and then we got a brilliant showreel through from an artist called Emilie Stabell, and she became a catalyst, because then I was able to say, “Look at this brilliant young artist, she’s a great candidate for us to start our internship program.”
We started to say yes to work experience, especially from girls’ schools, and it’s been wonderful to see a talk that I did at a school resulting in someone getting work experience here, which then resulted in an internship, and which will now hopefully turn into something much longer. Seeing the road that young programmer has taken, it’s all been led by her, with us just saying yes to things.
After the Radio 4 thing, lots of school groups got in touch with us and asked if they could bring classes here, and while we couldn’t say yes to everybody, we said it as much as we could. Lucy Black, who was running that program at the time, had a rule that if it was a co-ed school, the party had to be 50-50 malefemale. And that was a really interesting rule, because what it meant that young girls and boys from different disciplines could be exposed to each other, and all the different disciplines that come into making games. We think it’s so obvious that there are composers that work in videogames, but if you’re a young person you may not have figured that out yet. And if you’re really good at maths, you’re usually encouraged to do accountancy, whereas you could be a graphics programmer, be a rock star. And we’ve very much encouraged people within the studio, both men and women, to speak at conferences about what they feel passionate about.
It’s about putting in the effort to make sure that we weren’t just expecting the funnel to change. Obviously, in our games, we very much make an effort to ensure creativity is for everybody. It’s not gendered and we want to bring everybody, young and old and all genders, to it, so another reason why all this is important to us is that our audience is everybody, so as a studio we should reflect that.
“THERE’S NO PROBLEM THAT’S SO BIG THAT YOU CAN’T SOLVE IT BY GETTING AROUND A TABLE AND CHATTING ABOUT IT”
We remember that when we visited the old studio, above the tile shop, you had a big wooden kitchen table at the top of the stairs and that there were team members’ kids running around it. It was a reflection of the family-friendly principle you mentioned, but do the same techniques and measures still work today?
We probably still have that table! But now we’ve levelled up and we now have three tables, and we have two chefs to cook us lunch every day. Right from the very beginning, I was very big on the fact that we needed a way to be able to talk to each other, that idea of getting around the table, because there’s no problem that’s so big that you can’t solve it by getting around a table and chatting about it. I still have that philosophy and I wish email would disappear. But know that that ship has probably sailed a little bit.
Slack hasn’t solved it, either.
Yeah, Slack has made production’s life even worse, because it’s just basically deconstructed email, and it’s now in 50 different channels. But anyway, we’re 13 years old now and we have become a truly multi-generational workforce. We now have people ranging from 18 to close to 60 here. If there’s one thing I’ve learned by making games, it’s that as we all age, our priorities change. I have always wanted to have a studio where our best people didn’t get to the point where they had to leave because they weren’t able to spend enough time with their families, or they weren’t getting enough time to go to the museum to get inspired, or they weren’t getting enough time to go to the gym to be healthy. That to me is just counterproductive.
I really love the current trend, where we can talk about all this being a professional career. We’ve had HR right from the very beginning because it’s always been really important to me to have an impartial person for the team to talk to, and also to keep us in check a bit.
Our current HR manager, Gráinne, comes from outside of games, and it’s been really brilliant to have someone with a fresh perspective, to highlight some of the stuff that we do really well and also to bring in some of the things which happen in the world outside. I like the industry getting older, and I like that as the industry matures, we look for work practices that are kind to our teams – and are also kind to our creativity, because being creative is hard. It takes effort and we have to not burn people out. If I think about big differences between then and now, it would be that we are even more family-friendly and that we have very flexible ways of working. People have to deliver their work, but I’m very open to suggestions of different ways of doing it if it helps them deliver their best work and also achieve a happy life.
But interestingly, there was a point where we were ageing up, and one of the things that was really brilliant about two interns we hired, I’ve mentioned Emilie, and the second intern we hired was Maja-Lisa Kehlet Hansen, an artist, and the same time we hired instrumental young programmers Bogdan Vera and Liam de Valmency. Those four were all in their early 20s and they came in and just gave us a breath of fresh air. And we were suddenly like, “Oh my god, we need this. We need young people, because they’ve got very different ideas to us.” We had got to the point where maybe the average age was in the 30s, and it was really good to make it a goal to look at the diversity within the generations, because you get some really interesting conversations and differences.
Media Molecule’s directors are all very highly respected, creative people. How do you ensure the voices of these young new recruits manage to be heard above theirs and percolate throughout the studio? Do you have to organise meetings to make it happen, or does it happen organically?
It’s mostly organic, and I think it comes from hiring people that we feel would naturally jive with the culture. When I look at the younger generation, like Rosabelle Armstead, who’s a programmer and our newest ex-intern, and the influence that Bogdan, Liam, Maja and Emilie had, they’ve all been the most junior people in the company, but their influence on the games was on par with Alex, Dave, Kareem’s and Mark’s. We always wanted to have a system here where it doesn’t matter what level you are within the company, you can influence the projects you’re working on. But we still have work to do on that. I don’t come into Media Molecule every day and think, “Oh, everything’s done. It’s all great. The culture’s working, the game’s great, the people are great.” It’s a constant work in progress, and as you asked that, I was thinking, yeah, I know that there still things that we need to address, and there are people who have concerns about different aspects. We might not have achieved everything yet, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t intend at some point to make sure that people are heard. I do surveys every couple of years and they are a good way to gather information and get a temperature check on where everybody’s at, what the major issues are that we need to resolve, and the best things that we should amplify. But other than that we do it through talking. So
there’s nothing structural, but was I talking to Ru [Weerasuriya, CEO] at Ready At Dawn yesterday and he was talking about these culture meetings they have, and I was like, “Oh, that sounds interesting,” but we’ve not ever tried to do something that structured. Maybe it’s a good time for us to start.
So I’m always open to ideas, and I want to make sure everybody’s heard. My schtick as the studio director is that I love it when I feel like everybody feels like they’re contributing. If you’ve been to a party where everybody brings something, I think the act of that, whether it’s a plate of food or drink or whatever, it makes people feel like they can rummage around your kitchen. I love that feeling. I’m happiest when people just feel like they can open the cupboard in my house and do whatever they want. I feel like that about here. I want people to feel like it’s not just our company, or our studio, it’s all of our studio. Of course there’s structure, and of course all that stuff exists, but it should exist only to help us move forward, not to hold us back.
“MY SCHTICK AS THE STUDIO DIRECTOR IS THAT I LOVE IT WHEN I FEEL LIKE EVERYBODY FEELS THEY’RE CONTRIBUTING”
As Media Molecule’s first live game, designed to run as a service, how has Dreams changed your role, given that you’re on the front line of developing it?
I think I’ve learned more in making Dreams than I have doing anything else. One way of looking at Dreams is that it’s a vast Photoshop, and I’ve needed to understand the project to be able to ship it. There was a point a couple of years ago, when we at production and QA were getting our heads around the scope of it and figuring out what it would take to ship it. We needed to name everything and have it in a spreadsheet, so that we could understand it, because up until that point, we’d danced around that task a little bit because we knew that it was going to be a really big thing to do. But then, you know, the joy is diving into it. It took a few weeks, but then we were able to show the team and say, ‘This is the thing that we’re making’. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is massive.’
In the same way that I have to produce to understand the game we’re making, I also have to use the game, or play the game we’re making, to understand how to ship it. In LittleBigPlanet, I’d never really needed to get into the detail of all of the Poppit menus, because they were only a couple of layers deep. But in Dreams, the most interesting stuff is when you go deep, so we had to go deeper and deeper, and I ended up learning a lot more about the creative tools and using them a lot more than I did on LittleBigPlanet. It sounds mad, but doing the spreadsheet was really pleasurable, but then also learning the tools was really pleasurable alongside that, just understanding how everything worked. So yeah, that was the point where I realised the scope of it, and that to understand it is to be a part of it, and I couldn’t be on the outskirts. So I became a lot more involved in the day-to-day production.
On the other side of that we have things like outreach. We were getting interest from game developers and from different partners, and we were starting up that branch of the team while working towards this idea of a live service. Each of these areas, as they mushroomed up, I had to get involved for a time to understand them, until they were rolling. It’s not that my job is really different now; it’s still about people, product and process. But the product has more pillars than anything we’ve made before. We have a plan for Dreams which includes many things that aren’t on the traditional game path, and that means zooming right out much further than before, while also zooming in to understand what it will take to ship it all, right down to each tool.
There’s a point in a project when you finally see on the screen the thing you’ve been talking about. But with Dreams, with that idea of running a live service, we know what it is today, but where we’ll be next year will probably be very different. That means we have to be very fluid with what we do each day, and I think my role will never be one where I’m like, “I’m coming in and I’m going to be the studio director, only going to worry about studio director things.” There will be the days where I come in and be the Dreamiverse producer, and also studio director, and move them both on at the same time. I really, really love my job. I love that I am doing all these different things, and if I could have dreamed up a dream group of people to work with it would be them, and a dream project would be Dreams. I feel like we are getting to try out this thing that we’ve always wanted to do, which is to really bring creativity to people and making games; all the things that I loved as a teenager, just, like, weird theatre, mad music, all the things around on the fringes and a bit strange. I just love that I see them in the game we’re making. So I guess there’s a willingness from me for my job to be whatever Dreams needs it to be.