About Leadership Letters
In 2019, a group of game designers at Project Horseshoe formed a workgroup to discuss a topic called "Game Design Leadership".
Led by Chris Proctor (343 Industries) and Nick Laing (Amazon), the wide-ranging discussion went deep into the night,
eventually resulting in a stack of questions and trade-offs that virtually every new lead or director would face.
When over 100 index cards had been piled up, it dawned on the group that, yes, they had possibly over-designed their
solution to this problem, and delivered a framework that was way out of scope for the project.
To be fair, this was a room full of experienced designers. No one was really surprised!
The group was quick to rally. One person asked, "What's the one thing you would want to tell a new lead?"
Another followed up with, "What if we wrote letters to ourselves in the past and answered that question?"
It was quiet as more than a century of collective experience analyzed that solution from multiple angles,
and ultimately decided that, yes, this was probably the best path forward.
After ten minutes of work, the results were read aloud, one by one.
It was an emotional moment in time; laughter often shook misty tears from peoples' eyes.
When it was over, a sense of the profound held the room in silence.
Something special had happened. But what were the next steps?
We created this website to gather letters from lead designers and directors from around the world.
Our hope is that we -- as an industry -- can take note of the common threads that weave through
anecdotes shared by a diverse collection of voices. And that we, as designers, can be comforted
by sharing our struggles and challenges, and realize we are not alone.
In time, we may partner with academia to properly analyze this information to find commonalities and conclusions
that can inform future leads and directors, as well as the people they work with.
Should this study move forward, we will ask writers to opt in, instead of making them opt out.
