If you saw the tweet or the post, you know I’m looking for CSRs and that remote is okay for those spots. But there’s one position my company is hiring for that is not remote – and that’s the CS Manager/Director (which it is depends on the candidate ). I need someone who:

- Will relocate to Chandler, Arizona. (This is a suburb of Phoenix, which is basically like a normal city but in a place where it’s always sunny.)

- Has management experience in customer service. That means you managed a team of customer service people. A shift, a whole pit, a special strike team, whatever, that’s fine, but you actually need to have been someone’s boss.

- Has experience doing customer service in an MMO.***

Ideally, the management experience was in the CS pit of an MMO, but as long as you can check off both boxes, we want to talk to you.

Bonus points for (in no particular order):

- Being able to relocate immediately

- Being able to write clearly

- Having done MMO customer service for a PVP title

- Not secretly hoping to be a developer/designer

- Being fun under pressure

- A history of managing down, not up

- Experience managing remote employees (there are some great resumes coming in, but those people won’t be in AZ)

If you meet the top three criteria (and there is no number of bonus points that can be combined to substitute for one of the top three), please email me right away at my work addy – sanya AT pitchblackgames DOT com.

*

Just a few side notes – some of the resumes I’m getting are breaking my heart, because the senders (and I know many of you) are brilliant, thoughtful, interesting, and I know you could learn this job. I KNOW you could. But this is a startup MMO team. The initial CS group (the one that gets paid out of financing, not income) is going to be small and lean. Even the front liners are going to be contributing to policy writing and standard setting. At the outset, we can only use people who have done this before.

*I* do not count as having done this before in a CS sense. (Okay, I did, but it was 1999.) I have said many times that I could not have been a good community weenie without top flight CS people as colleagues, and so yeah, I’ve worked closely with some of the best. As such, I can write policy and do planning, but I am still not qualified to lead the team.

Also, related customer service experience is only relevant to a point. If you managed a call center, or ran a team doing live product support, I’d be excited – but I’d still want to see some evidence that you understand and respect the needs of MMO customers.

These customers are my players. I feel a responsibility for them that you cannot understand unless you also do community. The person who gets this job is going to be my colleague and partner in doing right by people.

***Lots of people have been asking if volunteer CS counts. Since that is how I started… okay, seriously. If you took tickets, answered appeals, handled low level problems, escalated big problems without making them worse, then yeah, it counts. If you hung around in a chat channel answering newbie questions, no, it doesn’t. Those things are related but not the same.

If you are applying for the boss job, and your only MMO experience is as a volunteer, your other CS experience would have to be pretty amazing. But yes, it would get you in.

So, to answer the usual “what made you take this job” question, I thought I would post a paraphrased version of the phone call I got from Pitchblack:

Them: We were wondering if you’d be interested in working with us.

Me: Great! So what can I do for you?

Them: (request for information)

Me: (standard explanation of what I can do, what I love to do, what I want to do)

Them: (sales pitch about company, word “amazing” crops up more often than is really normal)

Me: (trying to repress cynicism after five years of hearing this kind of thing and failing)

Them: (sincere description of the team and the game they’re making)

Me: (getting flashbacks to another startup I loved) So… what’s the idea behind the game?

Them: A three faction PVP MMO. In space.

Me: (The flashbacks are getting stronger, plus bonus points for sci-fi) Really?

Them: Earth was invaded by an overwhelmingly strong alien race, the Rodon, and humanity only survived because the alien race that kind of sort of created the Rodon intervened. Those guys, the Salent, are playing a very deep game. Anyway, there’s one element in the whole galaxy required for technical advancement, inventions, good gear, defense, and other stuff that players invent and make, and it’s mostly found on one planet called Dominus. The faction that controls Dominus has a major advantage.

Me: (Whoa.) Anything else?

Them: (List of things on which a big budget project simply can’t take a chance.)

Me: (weakly trying to be cool) That’s all?

Them: Well, there are jetpacks.

I was going through my media list, and realized practically everyone in it except Ravious has either gone insane, gone pro, or gone to the dark side as a developer. I swear, a gaming media list goes out of date faster than unrefrigerated milk.

I’m exaggerating but not by much.

If you want to be on my list o’ victims, gimme a holler at the email address attached to this site – sanya AT brokentoys DOT org.

This, by the way, is why some engineers hate talking to those of us who majored in the fuzzier subjects. We’re slippery. We can change an entire conversation with a single adjective. A noun is a noun until we use it as a verb. A word can mean its definition or its exact opposite. We can take something that should be binary, either on or off, something or nothing, and warp it with sarcasm and context and inflection and holy crap, how can we talk to you when we don’t even know what you’re saying!?

If it’s any comfort, engineers, we drive you crazy but you frighten us. People are all about optimism and false predictions and rationalizing. The human brain may be a computer, but it’s stewing in a bath of hormones and performs differently depending on the last substance consumed. Using that squishy system to interface with machine logic defies reason, and makes me suspect some kind of cyborg implant is involved. An implant you only get in engineering school.

This is why engineers who write novels will eventually rule the world.

Anyway, trying to discuss indie game development always seems to end up at an impasse because we can’t communicate what it means. The problem is the word “indie,” short for “independent,” meaning “stands alone without support.” That definition has few of the connotations of “indie” development, even though they’re the same word.

This is where I start sympathizing with engineers.

When I say indie, *I* mean:

• No parent studio – that means no game resources except what is within the company itself.
• No big budget – lots of money means you can hire outsourcers, consultants, temps, and PR to simulate the resources of a big company. You can also have endless amounts of time to tinker and polish. A real indie doesn’t have that kind of cash.
• Small – A hundred people is not indie. When you’re at a point where you need a full time HR manager, welcome to the establishment, man.
• No hyperspecialization – if you have someone on staff who can spend their days monitoring third party websites and nothing else, you are not indie.

Notice I said nothing about quality. Being indie is not a free pass to suck. But an indie project does need help from the community, if not in money (a la Kickstarter) then in time.

If you can fog a mirror, you’ve figured out that this is a communication challenge I’m facing right now. I’ve faced it before, but ten years ago, no one expected much from an MMO that had a budget, let alone an MMO from a company no one had heard of. I’ve got some ideas, but I could use more. If you’ve worked on a true indie, or if you have something to add/subtract from my definitions, please toss something into the comments.

It wasn’t as much fun as I had thought it would be. And it… ended.

The last couple years have been quite a ride. I enjoy consulting, and setting up communities, and I even like writing white papers. But thanks to the economy going tits up, the consulting pickings have grown slim, unless you’re willing to gladhand and live on the road in order to get those pickings.

That was even less fun than I thought it would be, and I already had that pegged as “less fun than sporking out my own eyes.”

Fortunately, I’ve really been having fun at Metaverse, which has given me a variety of things to do. But the absolute most fun I’ve had in… oh, more than five years, at least… has been a plain old forum gig.

I had one of those falling off the toilet moments, and realized I need the equivalent of plutonium in order to function. I need a few hundred crazed MMO fans to interact with, inform, organize, and mock with lolcats. I have always known that I recharge my energy for this job by attending cons, player gatherings, and tradeshows. I just didn’t know how miserable I really was without that player interaction.

I also realized that I want to stay with MMOs. Real ones. I’ve got a couple of “social media” games under my belt, and I did the sports thing for awhile, but while those players are great, there’s just nothing like an old school MMO for attracting, well, my kind of nerd. I make D&D jokes…from experience. I have Magic cards. I can quote ad nauseum from Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Spaceballs, and Princess Bride. There are more than two thousand books in my house, and I’ve worn out more library cards than I have credit cards. I have six alts in LOTRO, five of which were created so I wouldn’t have to “waste” craft materials and recipes. I wept over Challenger and Columbia. That’s who *I* am, and for better and usually for worse, I’m probably not capable of changing.

All seven of you, and the three lurkers, nodded in recognition at nearly every point. Maybe you don’t match me exactly, but I’ll bet you’ve still got painted miniatures in your closet and the lyrics to Code Monkey memorized.

Finally, I have come to realize that while my PVP skills get worse every year as my reflexes dull to the point that I can’t fend off attacks from elderly beagles, my favorite kind of communities are around games with a PVP element. I don’t know what it is, and it’s definitely not the calm reason and dulcet tones with which you people conduct your arguments, but I love the energy and passion and fun.

So, that’s the what. The where is more complicated, but all things being equal, I’m happier at a startup. I love the can-do spirit, the energy, the risk taking, and the excitement. I’m not a microspecialist, mainly, though goodness knows there are other issues. One of them, oddly, is that I’m not very good at coming up with ideas when I have a big budget. I’m actually more creative when I’ve got to make something work with nothing but rubber bands and Excel.

That’s where I want to be, and I think that’s where I’m going. I’m gonna have some news in a couple days. Knock wood for me.

I’ve been… busy. Busy writing for Metaverse about community, busy helping people launch communities, busy indulging my love of communities by hanging out at them.

Not so much with blogging about community.

I’m about to get a hell of a lot busier.

Stay tuned.

Or maybe [this game] should go after its own customers. Going after the “WoW market” or the “EVE market” or anyone else’s “market” is self-limiting and the cause of a whole lot of derivative garbage.

What the hell does “the XYZ market” even mean in this context? If you think everyone playing an MMO… a virtual freaking WORLD… is there for the same reasons, or even the same reasons every day, you are either ignorant or… no, you’re just ignorant. Because assuming any market is  homogeneous is ignorant, and flat out dangerous for those of us who are trying to create worlds.

We’re not going to get “X market” anyway. That group is happy playing X. We should be looking for people who want something different from X, or tired of X, or never really liked X in the first place but their guild leader did, because they are the only ones likely to come over to us and stay there. (If you’re here because you’re so happy playing X, well, you sure bitch a lot about it.) I can see including [design element], but only because there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, not because X has the final word on what makes a great game.

To your other suggestion, “X Game in Y setting” is stupid. People playing X like that particular setting. Just because the underlying code mechanics of a video game laser are similar to a video game crossbow doesn’t mean that you’re going to convince all the Renn Faire people that they’ve secretly been longing to fly spaceships. Go ahead. Come to the Maryland RennFest with me next weekend and ask the guy in the period-perfect Tudor outfit how he feels about the jackass in the Star Wars costume and Slave Leia companion.

You seven see why I deleted it, and moved it here. Someone asked me recently what I’ve learned in the last decade. Well, here it is. I’ve mainly learned that I can’t post the right thing in the wrong place.

If you’re looking for a diatribe about Sarah Palin, you aren’t going to get it.  If you’re looking for me to admire her community management, you sure as hell aren’t going to get it.

But brand management is a different animal. I respect the hell out of whoever she’s got doing brand management, and I stand in awe of what they’ve accomplished on behalf of their client. The client is doing her own part, though. If someone came up with a natty armband and some good slogans for her, she’d be unstoppable.

As for the ancient fish: I did my Metaverse Mod Squad post yesterday and I was maybe a little punchy. The seven of you who have been reading my stuff for… a decade… know that I sometimes torture analogies until they scream and break loose their chains to flee into the night. (See what I did there?) At any rate, I compared developers who post on message boards to coelacanths.

But I couldn’t not snicker about it. The four of you who have been reading my ramblings for ten years (HOLY CRAP, TEN YEARS) will join me in a hearty laugh at this one particular bit:

Forum posters aren’t just telling you what you need to know. They’re also performing for an audience and getting feedback of their own. You don’t have time to filter out the nugget of truth in both the rant and the feedback letter.

Oh, the irony. It burns.