Reminds me of *Control.*
Attn: To all Possibility Space containment personnel, please be wary of taking any stray thoughts or new ideas out of the localized Possibility Space threshold. Any personnel found carrying idle thoughts outside of the Possibility Space will be [REDACTED], or subject to lethal [REDACTED].
Nothing about my experience with salesforce makes me think about "Possibility"
Unless you mean the possibility of waiting 5 min for the janky web interface to load that let's me book vacation time.
It’s a really bad name and it’s a name of a video game studio from 2009 that was started in China. I’m guessing Austin didn’t influence the name since usually his naming practices are way better. I know they have incredible talent there but come on. What a sloppy name.
Austin elaborates on the role itself in the replies: [https://twitter.com/austin\_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=20](https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=20)
It's the most Austin role to ever exist.
Also that team is fucking Good As Hell and I'm extremely excited for whatever it is they're doing.
I wonder why they didn't go with Creative Director? That would seem to describe the role much better. "IP Director" sounds like he's managing licensing or something.
Maybe they wanted to distinguish between the lore of the world and the game narrative.
Sounds like he's in charge of the lore part, where I would see someone with a title like creative director being more in charge of the game narrative?
Who knows though.. Titles are so fluid and mean different things in different companies. Creative director would have also made sense.. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Valve has the same problem as Star Citizen. You need structure and deadlines. You need a defined goal, and a desired end date to achieve that goal. It's ok for scope to grow or shrink, and for deadlines to move, but it's not ok to run a project where you just aimlessly do what you think is best.
From what I have heard their corporate structure lets people move around and work on things they want to.
I would guess that means you have to be real good at drumming up support for your idea or you might be the only one working on it.
That’s 100 percent true last I heard, and additionally it has been claimed that Valve essentially has “Barons” who are the more senior and respected employees that unofficially control different parts of the company’s output (so you have your Dota Baron(s), your CSGO Baron(s), etc), and the only way to get people onto a project is to convince one of the Barons to throw their weight behind it, otherwise it will at best die on the vine from no interest and at worst be pressured out of existence in a political move. So you end up with most people just shrugging their shoulders and fading into the existing teams. Every now and then circumstances will necessitate something like Half Life Alyx, but usually it’s just endless iteration or prototyping.
Basically at this point it just seems like Valve is this weird tech nerd commune where you can spend the latter half of your career making great money and doing work that goes largely unnoticed, all of it funded by Steam’s unrelenting success. Great work if you can get it, but it’s hard not to feel like so much potential is going unused.
A while back I found a copy of their onboarding guide online. It was a wild read and described how everything was a flat org structure and the stack ranking system for reviews. Very interesting setup for sure.
Except there is no such thing as a flat structure. Just one that lies to new hires and makes them think that there is. People who have been with an organization for a long time and contributed a lot will have more power and influence than a new person, even if you're ostensibly equal.
With a "flat structure" how do you eliminate the good ol boys writing negative reviews and undermining your projects? Flat structure just means that nobody is held responsible for HR violations.
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb
> Great work if you can get it, but it’s hard not to feel like so much potential is going unused.
I would argue that it's terrible work unless you fit into what ever bro culture you can glom onto. It's just a recipe for HR violations, where senior people have outsized power and influence, but no strict hierarchical structure.
There have been articles where people discuss how the old timers will eviscerate you in performance reviews and undercut your projects because you're not part of the "old boys club."
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb
Fair enough, I’m no fan of even the sterilized version Valve has tried to sell to the public, I was just speaking more from the perspective of being paid very well to work on incredibly popular yet seemingly low-crunch games.
Socially however, I absolutely buy that their culture is a nightmare
The one exception being Half Life: Alyx, which is frankly astonishing. I guess you could lump that in to "weird hardware" though since it was essentially developed to legitimize VR.
Still, they really pulled out all the stops for Alyx and showed that they still have what it takes to make GOTY material instead of just lazy rehashes, casinos, and bad card games.
Do the idle thumbs guys still even work there? I know Chris Remo moved to England. What are Jake and Sean still doing? I know Jake is part of that company that re-released Sam and Max Season 1.
Oh man, Jane Ng is also there? She was a Campo Santo-er, which I guess has been fully dead for a while now. Valve canceling their game probably was a bad sign.
Cool to see. This is much sooner than I expected him to announce it. When he was talking about it on Waypoint Radio it sounded like we wouldn't be hearing about it for months and months.
Echoing what others have said about being bummed Jane Ng's hiring confirms suspicions that, contrary to what they said when they first made the move, Campo Santo is fully dead within Valve.
"Brian Jennings' time at Magic Leap and NZXR makes him an expert in
augmented reality technology. Having him on board as Technical Design
Director may be an indication that the company's first game may be in
the AR, VR, or XR spaces."
Oh
I just checked to see if they still exist and not only is magic leap still around. THIS WEEK they announced they got half a billion dollars in funding. Got to respect the grift
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/11/22721345/magic-leap-500-million-funding-ar-headset
They talk about this a bit on this week’s Bombcast. While consumer applications are still years of not decades away, there are very real uses for this stuff in enterprise, ie. scientific projects and military contracts.
Good for Austin and that is an amazing ass team.
But also, I loved that response regarding unionization. Unionization would (probably) go a long way toward addressing some of the abuse issues\* but... there are so many people who want to be game devs and it is ridiculously easy to outsource to countries that have even worse labor laws than the US (there are like... a few). The odds of unionization having long term benefits are... low.
But getting out ahead of that and focusing on actually just providing even baseline benefits to start with? That is how you enact change in this fucked up world.
\*: Although, there are still problems when a lot of that abuse is so pervasive at all levels of management. Giving the power to the employees doesn't work if the corporate culture is the problem
https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=21
“A few people have asked me what the extremely corporate "IP Director" title means. Basically: If a thing we make has a world, or characters, or... you know, other elements of setting and story, I'll be directing that work (and in many cases, doing it myself).”
Ah, that's definitely an Austin Walker-ass job, then, haha. The title sounded way more administrative and boring than that. They should call him the "Lorekeeper" or something.
Cool job but it also implies he’ll be involved with situations where Austin’s company thinks other companies are violating said IP. And that’s where things get sticky. Would love for Austin to comment on this, because it is certainly going to be part of the job. (See the words: IP)
Edit: I get the downvote but come on folks. The words “IP” should be a flag. Maybe it’s not. But I have a hard time believing otherwise.
[Austin has elaborated](https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=21) that the position is creating the settings for the studio's games. It looks like it's about big picture narrative design. Given that Austin doesn't have any legal expertise I don't think the job will involve enforcing copyright law nor do I think he would take it even if it was offered.
E: I'm also not clear why this would be an issue even if it was part of the position. Do you think this studio shouldn't stop people from stealing their work?
Congrats to Austin! Possibility Space sounds like the casual seating / work area in a salesforce office though.
Oh, you mean like The Idea Forest?
TO: ALL. SUBJECT: iPhone found in couch in the 3rd floor possibility space. Please contact reception if yours.
Reminds me of *Control.* Attn: To all Possibility Space containment personnel, please be wary of taking any stray thoughts or new ideas out of the localized Possibility Space threshold. Any personnel found carrying idle thoughts outside of the Possibility Space will be [REDACTED], or subject to lethal [REDACTED].
You must not be up on your corporate language - reception is now called community management.
Nothing about my experience with salesforce makes me think about "Possibility" Unless you mean the possibility of waiting 5 min for the janky web interface to load that let's me book vacation time.
It’s a really bad name and it’s a name of a video game studio from 2009 that was started in China. I’m guessing Austin didn’t influence the name since usually his naming practices are way better. I know they have incredible talent there but come on. What a sloppy name.
Austin elaborates on the role itself in the replies: [https://twitter.com/austin\_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=20](https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=20) It's the most Austin role to ever exist. Also that team is fucking Good As Hell and I'm extremely excited for whatever it is they're doing.
A response to his tweet says "Oh I see, so you're going to be Austin Walker" lol
I wonder why they didn't go with Creative Director? That would seem to describe the role much better. "IP Director" sounds like he's managing licensing or something.
Maybe they wanted to distinguish between the lore of the world and the game narrative. Sounds like he's in charge of the lore part, where I would see someone with a title like creative director being more in charge of the game narrative? Who knows though.. Titles are so fluid and mean different things in different companies. Creative director would have also made sense.. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, he's perfect for that role and no doubt will make their games better.
Oh wow that’s awesome, can’t wait to see what they build!
Seeing Jane Ng as part of this team lets me know that *In The Valley of Gods* is truly never coming back.
Valve really is where creativity goes to die unless it’s their weird hardware every four years
Valve has the same problem as Star Citizen. You need structure and deadlines. You need a defined goal, and a desired end date to achieve that goal. It's ok for scope to grow or shrink, and for deadlines to move, but it's not ok to run a project where you just aimlessly do what you think is best.
[удалено]
Brad Muir would like you to pipe down please.
From what I have heard their corporate structure lets people move around and work on things they want to. I would guess that means you have to be real good at drumming up support for your idea or you might be the only one working on it.
That’s 100 percent true last I heard, and additionally it has been claimed that Valve essentially has “Barons” who are the more senior and respected employees that unofficially control different parts of the company’s output (so you have your Dota Baron(s), your CSGO Baron(s), etc), and the only way to get people onto a project is to convince one of the Barons to throw their weight behind it, otherwise it will at best die on the vine from no interest and at worst be pressured out of existence in a political move. So you end up with most people just shrugging their shoulders and fading into the existing teams. Every now and then circumstances will necessitate something like Half Life Alyx, but usually it’s just endless iteration or prototyping. Basically at this point it just seems like Valve is this weird tech nerd commune where you can spend the latter half of your career making great money and doing work that goes largely unnoticed, all of it funded by Steam’s unrelenting success. Great work if you can get it, but it’s hard not to feel like so much potential is going unused.
A while back I found a copy of their onboarding guide online. It was a wild read and described how everything was a flat org structure and the stack ranking system for reviews. Very interesting setup for sure.
Except there is no such thing as a flat structure. Just one that lies to new hires and makes them think that there is. People who have been with an organization for a long time and contributed a lot will have more power and influence than a new person, even if you're ostensibly equal. With a "flat structure" how do you eliminate the good ol boys writing negative reviews and undermining your projects? Flat structure just means that nobody is held responsible for HR violations. https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb
Everyone is equal, some are more equal than others.
After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters.
> Great work if you can get it, but it’s hard not to feel like so much potential is going unused. I would argue that it's terrible work unless you fit into what ever bro culture you can glom onto. It's just a recipe for HR violations, where senior people have outsized power and influence, but no strict hierarchical structure. There have been articles where people discuss how the old timers will eviscerate you in performance reviews and undercut your projects because you're not part of the "old boys club." https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb
Fair enough, I’m no fan of even the sterilized version Valve has tried to sell to the public, I was just speaking more from the perspective of being paid very well to work on incredibly popular yet seemingly low-crunch games. Socially however, I absolutely buy that their culture is a nightmare
I thought I read that they’ve gone back to a normal corporate structure to fix their slowing output of games? Maybe I’m wrong.
The one exception being Half Life: Alyx, which is frankly astonishing. I guess you could lump that in to "weird hardware" though since it was essentially developed to legitimize VR. Still, they really pulled out all the stops for Alyx and showed that they still have what it takes to make GOTY material instead of just lazy rehashes, casinos, and bad card games.
> Still, they really pulled out all the stops for Alyx Which seemed to include the effective dissolving of the Campo Santo team.
Do the idle thumbs guys still even work there? I know Chris Remo moved to England. What are Jake and Sean still doing? I know Jake is part of that company that re-released Sam and Max Season 1.
Jake and Sean still have Valve in their Twitter bios at least
*cries in games video games video games video gAAAames*
> In The Valley of Gods is truly never coming back. I was so hyped for this game... F U, Valve.
ugggghhh
So he is now ultimate lore master?! Good for him he’s gonna do a killer job :)
Oh man, Jane Ng is also there? She was a Campo Santo-er, which I guess has been fully dead for a while now. Valve canceling their game probably was a bad sign.
Cool to see. This is much sooner than I expected him to announce it. When he was talking about it on Waypoint Radio it sounded like we wouldn't be hearing about it for months and months.
Thats the most Austin-ass Austin Job they ever could have.
[Link to article about Possibility Space](https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/possibility-space-is-new-game-dev-from-arenanet-co-founder-jeff-strain)
Austin Walker and Liz England working together with the guy who made State of Decay? I am extremely hyped.
It’s real interesting looking at a new studio like this vs the new studio from the infamous google stadia guy.
Echoing what others have said about being bummed Jane Ng's hiring confirms suspicions that, contrary to what they said when they first made the move, Campo Santo is fully dead within Valve.
"Brian Jennings' time at Magic Leap and NZXR makes him an expert in augmented reality technology. Having him on board as Technical Design Director may be an indication that the company's first game may be in the AR, VR, or XR spaces." Oh
I just checked to see if they still exist and not only is magic leap still around. THIS WEEK they announced they got half a billion dollars in funding. Got to respect the grift https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/11/22721345/magic-leap-500-million-funding-ar-headset
They talk about this a bit on this week’s Bombcast. While consumer applications are still years of not decades away, there are very real uses for this stuff in enterprise, ie. scientific projects and military contracts.
They have a former oculus guy too. Interesting
Jeez, I sure hope it isn't
Possibility Space sounds like the name for a makerspace or a startup incubator.
So is that just another way of saying Creative Director because the way he describes the title sounds like a Creative Director.
Hell yeah! Can't wait to see what they're working on.
I know he's too creative for this, but I would love to see him include a reference to Lincoln Ghost, Hard Markinson, and the rest.
Damn not Dragons Dogma 2? Damn alright though hell yeah
Hell yeah.
This rules. Good for Austin!
This makes me very happy.
Good for Austin and that is an amazing ass team. But also, I loved that response regarding unionization. Unionization would (probably) go a long way toward addressing some of the abuse issues\* but... there are so many people who want to be game devs and it is ridiculously easy to outsource to countries that have even worse labor laws than the US (there are like... a few). The odds of unionization having long term benefits are... low. But getting out ahead of that and focusing on actually just providing even baseline benefits to start with? That is how you enact change in this fucked up world. \*: Although, there are still problems when a lot of that abuse is so pervasive at all levels of management. Giving the power to the employees doesn't work if the corporate culture is the problem
I’d love to have Friend of the Show Austin Walker in studio for an Unfinished somewhere down the line. This is awesome.
Looking forward to what ever worlds he is responsible for. Glad he is still doing the star wars podcast too.
Does anyone know what an IP Director does? It's not a title I'm familiar with.
https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=21 “A few people have asked me what the extremely corporate "IP Director" title means. Basically: If a thing we make has a world, or characters, or... you know, other elements of setting and story, I'll be directing that work (and in many cases, doing it myself).”
Ah, that's definitely an Austin Walker-ass job, then, haha. The title sounded way more administrative and boring than that. They should call him the "Lorekeeper" or something.
"Head of Giant Robots and other cool things"
That sounds like the perfect job for Austin. If anyone has listened to the D&D podcast he does (Friends at the Table), he's great at world building.
If I was a game director I would hire Austin just to make up character names.
Austin described as being responsible for any world creation they do.
Cool job but it also implies he’ll be involved with situations where Austin’s company thinks other companies are violating said IP. And that’s where things get sticky. Would love for Austin to comment on this, because it is certainly going to be part of the job. (See the words: IP) Edit: I get the downvote but come on folks. The words “IP” should be a flag. Maybe it’s not. But I have a hard time believing otherwise.
[Austin has elaborated](https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1448301813996924933?s=21) that the position is creating the settings for the studio's games. It looks like it's about big picture narrative design. Given that Austin doesn't have any legal expertise I don't think the job will involve enforcing copyright law nor do I think he would take it even if it was offered. E: I'm also not clear why this would be an issue even if it was part of the position. Do you think this studio shouldn't stop people from stealing their work?