Gamesbeat Summit 2017 Mike Gallagher & Ted Price Transcript

Good morning everyone! So it's a delight to be here. Ted, how you doing?

I'm great thank you. We'll be doing little tennis match over here.

So we're going to play a little tennis game up here and about talking
about leadership. I've got the first serve and it's really a pleasure to sit here with Ted because first of all all of you may know him from his games, of course those are legendary, whether it's Ratchet and Clank or Resistance or his new title that's being featured here, but what you may not know is that Ted's on the board of the Academy. We both serve on that together and the academies are very much focused on promoting the true art form of our industry and that also this is really key to the leadership discussion, Ted, is for 10 years in a row his company has been one of the top 25 small and medium-sized companies to work for in the United States. So when you talk about leadership as an output that we all enjoy, well it takes a team to make it and Ted's gonna walk us through that and Ted I thought it would be best to start if we turn the clock backwards and look back to 2005, the industry is on the ropes and being accused of all sorts of negative things about what's going on with our kids and the content & how its putting the marketplace and you volunteered to serve. You said "I'm here, I want to help us defeat those criticisms" which ultimately we did and I was just curious what was going through your mind at that time and what did you learn from it?

So as Mike said we were we were definitely under duress several states had passed bills that were trying to pass bills that would make selling video games to minors a crime and it was a situation where we were looking at the content we were creating and others around us for creating and going saying to ourselves "How could it be possible that you could walk into a store, sell a game to someone, and then the store owner could actually be put in jail for this?" and we were shocked at what was happening with our constitutional rights and so I had the opportunity to participate in some of the defense in these states and then eventually at the Supreme Court level in helping write some of the industry's defense and for me what was really gratifying about the process was it forced me to look at what we do, what all of us as creators do and reevaluate how important our craft is to the world. We are in one of the most as you know vibrant living evolving media ever invented and what was happening was people who didn't play games, in particular legislators, who didn't play games were looking at our stuff and saying "This is harmful! I don't know anything about it, but I know it's harmful" and there are people who are telling me that this hurts our kids so we needed to take a stand and say "You're wrong, this is a medium that is helping the world in many different ways and here's why..." and the last thing I'll say about this was one other reason was got in fighting for me and for the rest of the Insomniacs, it was the first time I personally got to stand up for what I believe America stands for and in particular it was defending our First Amendment rights which I think is absolutely crucial to who we are as Americans and why this country is amazing.

Well that's I think that's a great point that will connect up later in our discussion to those First Amendment rights being more and more important even today, but that I think that's a great great contribution you made back then.

Well it wasn't just me, it was a lot of people who actually did it and it was wonderful being in the Supreme Court actually I got to go thanks to the ESA and watched the arguments and if you ever have an opportunity to watch a Supreme Court case, it is one of the most entertaining and educational experiences you will ever have! It was it was incredible but I want to kind of build on that, I think that I hope that challenge has passed for us, but these challenges never stop coming our way within this industry so Mike back to you, what do you think is the next big leadership challenge we're going to face in this industry coming from Washington?

So what's fascinating is that those content issues is Ted references Supreme Court case in 2011. We won that case 7-2 and cemented the creative rights of the industry, so since then the content issues have moved to the side. They're not completely gone, but if you look at today's environment this is a digital connected online worldwide industry. It's a huge business, it's $100B dollars worldwide and growing much faster than film and music is shrinking, so you look at entertainment it's the most vibrant form. The areas where we're seeing we're most acutely we're paying close attention to...one is Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, these technologies are these extensions of the video game march of technology. If you look back at this industry 10 years ago, I was here and mentioned and since then repeated that this industry is changing the  interface between humans and machines, and what it's doing is it's not doing it in a university, it's not doing it in a government lab, it's doing it in the hands and in the homes of consumers all across the world and it's done that from, you look at mobile today and Virtual Reality and all those extensions, it goes back to motion based gameplay, it goes back to all the different aspects of changes in how you enjoy the medium that have gone back for 30 years. So when we see these new technologies begin to be adopted in greater numbers, today we're in a couple million units when you get to larger numbers, what we worry about is that the critics will come forward and say that somehow this is harming society much like Comic Books, Cable TV, or Video Games, went through that process we could see those types of challenges and we're ready for those, we're taking steps today to be ready, and then the second is taxation. We see digital taxation happening now and as state local governments look for new sources of revenue, as industries like Cable Television, Flatline, or start to decline on a revenue basis, they're looking for new sources of Taxation and they're looking at the video game industry and digital taxes in particular. Those would be the two worries I think we're the most concerned about Ted. So back to you looking back at leadership, you built a tremendously successful company. The games we've already talked about, how do you nurture that type of growth and success?

Well thank you for saying that, we always feel like we are trying to catch up to everybody else. I think most developers probably feel that way. It's a challenging industry, but one of the things that has worked for us well within Insomniac is that we actually do a lot of different types of games from shooters to platformers, to serious games to humorous games, stylized games, grounded games, and we work on all platforms and you mentioned one of the games we have here which is a VR game unspoken, we've gotten into that recently and have learned a lot of new lessons about design, but because we work on a wide variety of games it actually helps keep the creative juices flowing because if any of you have worked on one franchise for a long period of time and I think our first talk mentioned sequelitis, it can be challenging to keep the enthusiasm going and when you have a team who's looking at each other going "Okay this is sequel #7, what are we going to do to make this one different?" It becomes tougher and tougher. So when we have different opportunities for people to jump into a diverse group of wide range of games, it really helps quite a bit. At the same time, it's challenging from a brand perspective. We have a lot of times, we wondered what did fans think of Insomniac? What does our brand stand for, and because we do a wide variety of games it's challenging for us to come up with one statement about what our games are. At the same time though, I feel like that diversity of games helps us attract a diverse group of people at Insomniac and I think that diverse group that male/female, people from all different cultures, people with different backgrounds, really helps keep the innovation flowing and continues to help us move in a lot of different directions to make different types of content.

So follow on to that, how do you create that diversity of your team? How do you go about doing that maintaining your eye on success because you're a business, you have to be successful, how do you build that and then how do you have it have a momentum of its own?

Well one thing we don't do is we we don't manufacture diversity. We don't have quotas, we don't say "We have to hire a certain percentage of males or females or people from different countries." We have to be colorblind, we have to be gender blind, we have to hire who the people we think are the most qualified for the position, but in doing that we've ended up actually with a fairly diverse culture, people from all different countries, all different religions, different backgrounds, and that has helped us foster a community within Insomniac that where everybody contributes and one of the things that we say is great ideas come from anywhere. Anybody at the company, regardless of what your position is or what or what your seniority is can come up with the next great solution to the problems that we have. However, doing that can often create chaos when you say to everybody "Please contribute" then you've got ideas coming in from everywhere and we have 250 people at Insomniac and we have large teams and when you are trying to keep everybody moving in the same direction, it can be challenging. So I recall having the opportunity to go to Pixar a while back and a friend of mine, I had a brother who worked there and I got it went on a tour and we ended up in this little theater and the person who was taking us on the tour said "This is where every single day we have artists, riggers, concept artists, the director, audio guys show up and discuss what's going on in the film" and they, as you've got guys had probably heard before, it's called Dailies and it's something that movie studios do. It was foreign to me and I thought about it & I thought "That'll never work for us" and then last year when we were in deep in production on one of our games things were pretty chaotic and we said "Let's do Dailies" so now we have groups of 5 people, sometimes 10, 15 people, getting together, once, twice, five times a week, and focusing on one particular feature or one particular mission, it could be a one story point and asking "Is this good, is it bad, what can we do to solve this problem" and what's important about that is it gets us away from this culture where you're looking at email all day long or you are using text to communicate, it forces people to get together face-to-face, people of very different backgrounds, people who are in different positions, and come to terms with what's good and bad and more importantly work together to come up with the solutions that plague us in production everything all the time, and what we found is not only does it provide better solutions, it also fosters that sense of community and it helps us bridge a lot of natural barriers that can occur when you have people coming from different countries working together or people who have a completely different interests.

So let me ask you this just as a process matter you see this idea at another company, you have 250 employees, how do you take this new idea and then get others to buy in and support this thing on a daily basis?

That's a great question. I think one thing we've learned is change is tough, people don't like change and you have to take a stand, be brave, and say "This is the way we're going to do it" but at the same time, you can't be a dictator about it, right? Nobody likes the top-down approach, so part of it is explaining, communicating, have it being transparent with the pros and the cons of any approach and hoping that people will buy in and then getting feedback on it and evolving it and we continue to evolve this process.

I want to jump to you so I think for all of us in the industry we often sort of look at what's going on in Washington and one name pops to the top in our news feed every single day and obviously its Trump. As we struggle with continuing to build our own cultures and look ahead to where the industry is going, I often wonder who are the real players, who are the people who are leading behind the scenes versus the one name we see all the time?

You mentioned diversity, you mentioned complexity, those elements are very much present in how we represent this industry every day not just in Washington, but in all the state capitals as well. So from our perspective at ESA, if you look back in the history of our industry and where the challenges came from, they weren't necessarily a direct assault from the president of the United States, in fact that wasn't happening, it started in the States so we've changed our strategy starting 10 years ago with a much heavier emphasis on engaging early in building champions and doing it on a nationwide basis and so who these players are, they're attorney's general, they're governors, they're state legislators, and yes there are members of Congress, and their senators, and leaders within the White House, and you have to have an approach that's truthful and authentic to all of them, but where you're hitting targets that are very specific and what in this champion building exercise, I mean I'll give you an example is that the Attorney General from the state of Utah is an avid gamer, he's a total believer in this industry, he has a very open door to bringing the industry into the state of Utah and he comes to E3 every year and what's really great is he comes and he spends time at the show, you know last two years he's Ubered from San Diego to come up to LA to go to the show and then Ubered back and that's a degree of intense interest that he has in a industry. He goes as himself, he goes as a fan, he goes as someone who loves the medium, and then has a very important job to do. On other side of the political spectrum is congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We recently had the board of the directors of ESA back in Washington, we were doing outreach on The Hill, she came by to visit us and I really loved introducing her, many of you are probably familiar with her because she was on cable television every day as the head of the DNC. I introduced her not with all the complexity of Washington, but the way she approaches our industry is as a mom, it's that simple. That's where it starts that's what she grounds herself in and that's the prison through which she views how this industry engages with society and she's again a big supporter, she has high standards for us to hit, we continue to exceed them for some time, but it's those types of leaders that are throughout government that we cultivate relationships with and one thing that we did 4-5 years ago was we launched basically the video game caucus in partnership with Capitol Hill and these are leaders in government in the House of Representatives bipartisan who say "We believe in the industry, we want more of it, we want it to grow, we want to tell the story, and when people have misperceptions, we'd like to be a placew here we can correct those" it's a much much better conversation when you have a group of legislators, but it took time for us to get there and to build those champions and so it's not just one voice in the White House, it's a complexity of voices in the agencies and throughout the states and it's our job as ESA to have that conversation on a daily basis 24/7 and make sure that they're as excited about what you're doing as you are. So that that's it in a nutshell on how that works.

That's great.

So back to you Ted, when we look at these issues of diversity and inclusion, you know we're certainly at ESA we're focused on those very intensely, we work with Higher Education Video Game Alliance, some of you in the room may be familiar with them, we work with them to make sure we're understanding where are we now when it comes to diversity, but where we're going when you look at this, you've talked about it inside your company, do you see an outside responsibility, something that's bigger than just your company?

Well I think the obvious answer is yes. I mean all of us who are in this at this conference and people who go when we go to IGDA talks, etc. we're interested in helping the industry grow and become more diverse and more inclusive but it's practically it's difficult. For those of us who are making games, we tend to get very heads down and focused on production and we have the best of intentions but we don't always have the time or even the ability to make a difference outside and so for us at Insomniac we've done a couple things, we've we focused on a couple of causes that we think are really important: One is women in games, we believe that there is definitely a gender disparity in games and we need to do whatever we can to encourage more women and girls to get into games and so we have sponsored when we've supported the Women in Gaming International website for a year, we've had girls make games come and do make games at Insomniac, we're on IGDA diversity panels, we work with the Academy to mentor STEM girls who want to get into STEM sciences and so that's for us one way that we can make a difference, but the other way and I think all companies can do this is we will speak out on things that we think are important and we recently released a video when the immigration ban was announced by the executive branch where we said "We don't believe this is right we believe in inclusion, inclusion for us is about accepting people of different cultural backgrounds, gender identities, different races and providing a space where one can safely create" we don't want to do what we believe Washington often does which it which is exclude and in our we we had all Insomniacs who believed in this standing together and making a statement and I it was interesting because we got a wide variety of responses from people, in particular I got surprised at the amount of negative responses like I'll got a lot of people who were tweeting me or posting and saying "Stay out of politics and just make games" & I found that was pretty ironic because games are all about self-expression, what we do is we put ourselves out there with the stories that we tell the themes that we have and we are ultimately expressing ourselves, so why shouldn't we not express what we feel is go right and wrong politically, but for me personally this is really important because I love America, I love what we stand for in terms of freedom and opportunity, at the same time I and a lot of Insomniacs believe that we need to keep America safe, but I think we can absolutely do that without devolve into a racist xenophobic and culturally culturally biased society.

How about a round of applause for Ted in that video and we couldn't be more appreciative Ted of your leadership on the industry level because when your voice is so clear and when you bring the faces and voices of your team members which show your commitment to exactly what you're speaking about you elevate the craft of the industry, you elevate the meaning behind the words that we speak as the leaders in Washington and it has an impact and you've seen that impact and over time when we engage with more and more leaders, we end up in the right place and what I would close with is we started with Ted sharing his thoughts and his passion around the First Amendment right of freedom, freedom of speech, free expression, the power of this industry that fundamentally that's what drives it and to start there into 2005 and to end with your team approach to that same concept now 250 strong, we couldn't be more appreciative at ESA and everybody in this room should be appreciative of Ted price, Ted thank you.

Wow, thank you for all you do very good!

And I believe our time is up.

Yeah.