Gaming Industry Veteran Andrew Chambers Talks Social Gaming and the Importance of Collaboration (EXCLUSIVE)

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Gaming Industry Veteran Andrew Chambers Talks Social Gaming and the Importance of Collaboration (EXCLUSIVE)

Andrew Chambers has worked with massive studios like Activision Blizzard and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Games. However, recently he left that career behind in order to embark on a new adventure as Director of Games at Genies. For those out of the loop, Genies is a leading avatar technology company with a mission to power an interoperable identity layer across the internet.

It uses something called the Genies’ Tool Kit, which enables developers, artists, creators, companies, and platforms to build gamified avatar experiences and universes – all connected through the Genies’ interoperable layer. We got to sit down with Andrew and discuss his work with the company.

[Some of the answers have been edited for length and clarity]

Andrew Chambers Tell Us More about Genies’ Goals as a Company

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

You’ll likely be seeing this logo a lot more in the coming months. Image credit: Genies

FandomWire: First off, can you please tell us a bit about Genies as a company and your role within it?

Andrew Chambers: At Genies, we’re looking to power an interoperable identity layer for the internet’s future. There is even a strong belief that these avatars will eventually become a real way for folks to socially communicate with each other. We are a social avatar platform first and foremost and when you think about social avatars, you think about games, right?

When we look back at some of the other sort of big social platforms that emerged over the past decades, like

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, originally it was just a way to share status updates or photos. And then Zynga happened. Then Farmville happened. And then people started actually like, playing and interacting together and spending time on those platforms together.

That’s where we see potential for games hitting here, especially with that social component and that avatar interaction component. Now what are we building? Well, in a lot of ways, you look at the relationship that recently emerged between Disney and Epic. You see this growing over time to be something where everyone might want something like this.

Somewhere where everyone has the ability to have this toolset and can use it in order to ramp up their own IP into this social platform that not only allows people to have an avatar that can communicate and interact with others, but also these game experiences that people can use to actually actively spend time together. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s what we’re building.

---

The Disney and Epic stuff… we’re doing it better.

---

We’re basically saying; if you’re an IP holder and you’re interested in having this platform where your users can have an avatar, can spend time together, and can play games together, then this is for you. And then also there’s the UGC component, where your creators can actually add and contribute content.

Speaking more to the gaming side of things, I came here because it’s an incredible challenge and is a really interesting opportunity. The interesting thing here, everyone spins around the word interoperability, and what that ends up meaning is just visuals. Like, they have a visual component that’s interoperable.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Andrew Chambers doing what he does best at a Genies event. Image credit: Genies

The thing that I find really makes us unique is we don’t just have the visual interoperability, we have behavioural interoperability. So this basically means the player’s actions can then be read in all these different environments so that we can understand better what their desires and needs are. And then that can then be used to shape other games.

I’m here because of that really compelling challenge. I see it as just this really interesting opportunity to try and solve for this really interesting problem. We’ve made pretty amazing progress on it already by bringing in really talented game developers that are attacking the problem on a daily basis.

FW: So more than anything else, you felt that there was already a need for this sort of thing, a gap in the market that needed filled?

Andrew Chambers: This isn’t something where we’re like, pivoting into or anything like that. It is something we’ve been working towards for quite a long time now. Stuff like this does take a while to build, so it’s not like we’ve like, seen the opportunity and we’re pivoting into it. It’s more like; this is where things are happening and this is just the proof in the pudding.

The Disney and Epic stuff just puts it more front and center for people to gravitate and understand, which does in turn help us a lot in terms of understanding that demand because of that announcement itself. But, we’re doing it better because we have the behavioral interoperability as well.

FW: You mentioned getting game developers on board to help you with certain things. What has that been like, how have those relationships developed?

Andrew Chambers: So the game studio is internal. They’re not external developers that we’ve brought into help solve the problem. They’re all internal developers that we’re using, that we’ve hired, and that they are full time employees. So we have a few small teams building game experiences internally.

FW: I see. Just in terms of clarifying the timeline, how far along was Genies in terms of pursuing that goal when you joined?

Andrew Chambers: I joined around October, November of last year, to offer support with things like the next year’s roadmapping. Then in January, I joined full time, though I’ve been chatting with Genies since about July last year. So that was when I first got introduced to the company through a mutual friend.

From there, those conversations of what the team was working towards really started to pique my interest. Also, seeing just how open and honest they were about understanding the challenge of building games was also refreshing.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Just some of the cool avatars that you can create with Genies. Image credit: Genies

Now we’ve got a team of 15 people in the game studio and at the beginning of the year, we only had one. So we’ve ramped up pretty aggressively. Not as aggressive as some people do, because we are ensuring that we’re staying right sized against the problem set. But we have committed some decent resources towards this problem, because we do see that this as a really hard challenge.

FW: Making that decision to step away from more traditional game development into something that’s based more in avatar creation, was that something that you decided because you wanted to get away from just developing games, or was it more just an opportunity to continue to grow as a creative?

Andrew Chambers: Probably more to grow as a creative and it was something that was an interesting alternative to what I’d been doing for a long time. I was pretty tired of the traditional model for making games. I mean honestly, I think that the way that most AAA games are built is broken. So here it was a really cool opportunity to do things in a way that I think is more appropriate.

What we do is have a few small teams build out rapid prototypes. By rapid I mean like one a week to try and find a fun idea. One of the teams has built out six different prototypes thus far and they’ve all been *******. And by prototypes I mean actual prototypes, not vertical slices or anything like that. The question is can we find the fun here really quickly?

---

I was frustrated with how the industry at large has been pursuing game development.

---

And then based on the success or ******** of those, (because there are always failures in prototyping,) we then decide to pick one of these and we’ll escalate that into a full production. We just promoted one idea like one game into production recently. And then we’ll spend a short amount of time building that out until we have it to a point where it’s presentable to audience.

This method is proving to work really well so far too. The team is loving it because they’re actually getting to build something, which is what game developers want to do, and then we end up getting to produce some really fun games in the process.

FW: On your

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

channel, you often offer your thoughts on the current state of the industry, which lead me to wonder whether those opinions influence the way you operate in your role at Genies?

Andrew Chambers: Yeah, in some ways for sure. I was frustrated with how the industry at large has been pursuing game development. I think that traditional developers have been focused on the wrong things. This mentality of; can we put a slide deck together in order to get $75 million or $100 million in order to fund this large game over a ******* of three to four years? I am not a fan of that.

Sure, that is one way to go about things, but it’s a safe way. It’s a way where you end up with lots of safe bets that are very repetitive. It’s not how you end up creating an opportunity to solve really interesting, compelling problems, which is what we have here at genies.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Disney CEO Bob Iger has backed Genies. Image credit: Genies

The problem we tackle here at genies is not just can we make a fun game? It is can we make a fun, interoperable game? And we’ve made awesome progress towards that. In order to properly ******* that problem, you can’t just put a slide deck together and say; here’s the answer. You have to get extraordinarily talented people building rapidly against it and then coming up with interesting solutions to that problem.

Like, how do we make it such that power on an item doesn’t translate into individualistic power? Not only have we got to ensure that it doesn’t result in broken gameplay, but that it also creates a landscape where everyone who joins the game is excited by what everyone else is bringing into the game because they’re all getting a benefit from it.

---

It’s not just about the end result, but it also becomes about the process too.

---

It is a total mental mind shift against the problem space, because we’re not just in a situation of; there’s a slide deck and we’ve committed to this, there’s like six months worth of development or a year worth of development, and then we’re going to release it. Instead it’s based in thesis. We want to try this, and then we try to rapidly build against it.

FW: I guess that if you spend two days on a prototype and it doesn’t work out, at least those two days weren’t wasted, because the time spent did provide you with an answer. At least that gets the creative juices floating, as opposed to the more traditional way of doing things.

Andrew Chambers: Yeah, and we do make sure to maintain a certain level of constraint when it comes to that. The reason being, without these sort of time constraints or resource constraints, we end up in a situation where the project has ballooned costs and then we paint ourselves into a corner creatively.

Just to bring this back to Genies specifically, one of the great things is we’re not just building games to release on a platform. We’re also building games to show potential partners and creators what sort of games we can build. So it’s not just about the end result, but it also becomes about the process too.

FW: My next question though is working with companies like Relic and like Blizzard over the years, I presume there’s been things that you’ve seen done by management you’ve then learned from and brought to this role. You know, is there anything specific that you would, can I do or not do based on things that you experienced in the past?

Andrew Chambers: I think that it comes down to empowering creatives to do the best work of their lives. I try and bring the best question to the room for these folks as opposed to the best answer. The reality is I’m not actually building games right now on a day to day basis, and I probably won’t be for a long time, and that’s okay. My role is not to do that. My role is to ensure that the outcome is very clear, that we’re aligned around what that outcome can look like.

Once we are there, I then do everything I can to empower them to do the best work of their lives as opposed to getting in their way. A lot of it is about trusting folks to do their job and deliver. That is something that I learned a lot about the early days of Blizzard. It was much more about; if we can come up with a cool idea, then everything else will fall into place.

But yeah, that’s not always how it works out. It’s more about transparency and candor and visibility so that the people who are actually making the decisions and building those games on a day to day basis are able to do the best work and are able to make the right decisions based on as much context as we can provide to them.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Andrew’s

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

channel is well worth checking out if you haven’t done so already. Image credit: Genies

Being the fountain of knowledge that Andrew Chambers is, combined with the fact that he was very generous with his time, means that this interview is going to be split into two parts. Please stay tuned for part 2 as soon as it is live and in the meantime, go check out Andrew’s brilliant

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

channel and check out Genies.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Gaming #Industry #Veteran #Andrew #Chambers #Talks #Social #Gaming #Importance #Collaboration #EXCLUSIVE

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up