Carbine Studios Staff Spotlight Q&A: Jeremy Gaffney

As Carbine continues to work on the unannounced and unnamed MMO, the official website is kicking off a series profiling their staff, starting with executive producer Jeremy Gaffney.

When managing your team at Carbine Studios, do you like to have a very structured environment with the staff, with tighter guidelines, or do you more or less just stand back and let the team go crazy with their creativity, with loose guidelines?

Personally, I like a mix there are over 100 of us here working away, and with no structure we’d go crazy. However, the best ideas generally come from letting loose the hounds of creativity, so we try for a mix.

We do a lot of rules by department programmers have a different set of (core hours) where everyone should be here as opposed to art or design, for instance. In my experience it’s very difficult to maintain a company culture as you get bigger and bigger there’s a tendency to get more and more restrictive. My answer to that is to have very few rules at the (big company) level and let smaller units form their own subcultures: different departments set their own core hours or rules for crunching or not rather than having it be a big studio-wide dictate from the company that might or might not really be (one size fits all.) This sometimes causes friction maybe a programmer is annoyed that he has to crunch while the artists don’t, or something similar but it does let us have some flexibility as well.

So, we aim for a kind of barely-controlled chaos. Sometimes it might get a bit too controlled or a bit too chaotic, but we have the right goals in mind.