Leadership Ingame and IRL

It has been a while I didn't write anything on here.
I do have free time for now, so might as well.

I have been asked a lot during talk with different people of different positions in gaming companies: 'Are you more of a leader or team player or do you prefer to work alone? How do you describe yourself as a game designer?'

I have not yet to occupy a position that asked great leadership skills, sure I have often talk to leads of other department and try to bring ppl together so we have all the same vision of our  project and are all on the same page but I have never been in an official lead position.

That being said, to go back to ingame leadership, I was given the position of 'Guild master' in Tera Online because the GM was quitting the game and no one did step up to take the position. I did not want the guild to fall apart so I took place of the GM. Now you'll say, what does this have to do with work? Well it's a good practice at being a leader I'd say.

I remember one co-worker that said to me once: Sof, you can't make everyone happy. If you try to do that you will fail, stand up and make decisions for the best of the game'. And this applies also ingame... Of course everyone have opinion on things and someone somewhere has to make decisions.

As for an example, some of our players wanted to go PVP against another guild, some didn't want to because they were scared of getting 'camped' and 'ganked' which was understandable. So i made a poll and I went with the majority that we would flag our Guild as PVP enable for 1 round, then the next round we would take a break from PVP. That decisions seemed to have been approved from everyone and it went well.

Also, ingame and IRL, I'm all about transparency in leadership. I want my guild in game to know what I'm doing, where is the money going and how they can help the guild as individuals. Tera Online also implemented a 'politics system' called 'Vanarchy'. From running Vanarchy, we get taxes incomes and I did post all logs of outcomes/incomes on our Guild web site.

I have seen in the past some leaders at work hiding things to the team and if some of it was revealed, probably the end result of our project would have been better. Now, don't get me wrong, I know that not everything can be said to a team, one must use his/hers judgement. I'm totally aware of that but I still think that it's important that your team feels and knows you are on-board with them and that you are working together towards the same goal. I often saw and heard ppl at work feeling that their lead/producer was 'against' them. They did not feel part of the team and didn't like their opinions meant anything at all. And I'm not talking about ppl that just came out of the school but great ppl with great ideas. I just wish at the time I could have had their voice heard. Maybe I'll have the chance to do that someday :)


Cheers