EA Mythic’s Paul Barnett gave two talks at Develop last week. I attended the first of these sessions in which he outlined a number of things he had learned from his time working on the new Warhammer MMO. The talk was excellent fun.

Paul is an entertaining and lively speaker and, even if you don’t wholly agree with what he’s saying, he always does so in an engaging way that’s interesting and easy to listen to.

Gamasutra posted up my notes on the session and, because of his strong opinions, attracted a long comments thread full of both subscribers to and detractors from his views.

Today, over at Quarter to Three, I find out he’s responded to the piece on his MySpace (!?) page. He writes:

So I gave a talk at Develop and someone decided to cull some hasty notes from the 60 mins and try to boil it all down.

I appear to have upset people on two points:

1) My view that playing WOW can influence your thinking and you need to be careful about that.

2) That a poor attitude is more dangerous on a team than almost anything else.

Of those two points a few views have arisen.

That I forbid people to play WOW (not true)
That I think playing WOW is bad (Also not true)
That I don’t play any mmos (not true)
That I am a fool for having my view (jury still out)

That I am claiming that I only want to hire mid talented people (not true)
That heretics are defined by people who have a different view to me (not true)

I used heretics because its a nice Warhammer word. If you wanna get business like it would be best fit. Someone with the right attitude and poor skills can be developed, but someone with the wrong attitude needs some serious time to turn them around.

If you have ability but an unsalvageable poor attitude (a bad fit for the company) then better to let them go, its better for the company, its better for the person and will be better for the team. The ‘black hate’ that malcontents can generate is damaging and dangerous, my advise is based from ten years working with all manner of brick and mortar companies and seems as relevant for the computer games business as well.

The core driver is to try to intervene and help the people with attitude and morale issues to see the light and join with us in making the game. Burn the heretics is as much about a statement of management intent as anything, we will not tolerate ‘black hate’ from the shadows. We will not sit by and allow people to just fester with caustic talk and cheap shots. We want your worries out in the open, your concerns known and addressed and communication root and branch with team members.

Of course you could just take the notes hastily pasted on a web site as the answer as well, appears quite a few already did. And they wonder why I don’t go to GDC.

It’s supremely annoying to have him intimate the write up is an innaccurate representation of what was said. I copied down the session pretty much verbatim and if the transcipt is in any way a poor representation of what he really meant, then it’s because of a failure to communicate nuance in the source rather than the coverage.

Now, in Paul’s defence I would say that he’d just landed in the UK and hadn’t realised that he was giving an extra talk at the event (so these points were, in his words, scrabbled together on the plane and at the hotel) but even so: when you get up in front of a roomful of journalists and developers you are on the record so you must expect your words will probably find a wider audience than in the room, especially if they are interesting or controversial.

I understand that it’s painful to feel as though you’ve been misrepresented but in no way do the notes do that (as evidenced by the fact he elaborates on them in the MySpace post, rather than changing them). I actually thought there was merit in all of his points and that the bombastic execution is something many of the other sessions would have benefitted from.

To be honest it’s the MySpace comments thread that’s most infuriating. That’s what he said! It’s literally what he said! No twisting of words!

Wait. This is about the whole marine thing, right?