There is a some good in the idea - it’s not far off from what we do at Undead labs. That said, it’s not going to scale well.
Development is enormously complex and it’s driven by a lot of different needs, internal and external. This sort of idea crops up now and then because a lot of passionate people share a desire for personal empowerment, a dislike of the stuffy life of the business suits, and irritation at corner office myopia. If only everyone could just forget about all the bullshit meetings and clueless directives from On High and get things done!
The problem with that is that consensus about what people are actually supposed to be doing is much harder to achieve than you think. It’s hard with 20 or 30 people, and with 100 it’s purely notional.
In creative work like games it’s even harder - I’ve been on teams where the artists were split into warring tribes with different goals and tastes, and it’s extremely hard to get people to create a satisfying artistic whole – the goal of political consensus gradually replaces the goal of making great art, and the game does things that weaken it creatively just to keep different factions satisfied. I don’t like the top-down, everything-flows-from-the-art-director style of management you see in, for example. feature films. However I know what drives it. I once did a stage interview with the art director of Final Fantasy XIII; I asked him what Square looks for in art directors. He thought about it for a minute and said “Must be very tough guy!” “Tough?” “I work with 800 artists. All I do is fighting!”
In a company of 30 or 40 people, there is always a too much to do. In that kind of environment there is a a lot to be said for letting people pick their own battles and make their own decisions – whatever inefficiencies are created by pushing control down to the individuals are balanced out by the productivity gains you get from more passionate and better informed individual people. Most big systems in a company that size have only a couple of contributors so it’s not too hard for people to work our problems face to face; and, most of the time, there is so much to do that nobody lacks for interesting work or a place to make a satisfying contribution.
Beyond about 50 things change a lot – you have to worry about things like duplicated effort, incompatible design decisions, and creative drift.
It takes a lot of work to keep up with the many different things which are going on at any given moment - if everybody on the production floor is their own manager, they must all spend a huge amount of time and energy finding out what everybody else is doing just to know how to proceed. You can make things better with work blogs, twitter streams, or whatnot but in the end it’s just a much larger volume of information and keeping up with it requires more work: in fact, it becomes quite literally a full time job.
It’s a noble goal to try to keep the whole team closer to the decision making and big picture of any project. Despite what this post might seem to imply, I loathe top-down, command-and-control management of the Hollywood type (there’s a reason my current company is 1/15th the size of my last one!) It’s also a noble goal to use the smarts and drive of everybody on the team, instead of treating most of them like interchangeable widgets. Lots of smart people looking at a problem is always better than one person, and anything which harnesses the smarts of the whole group is a Good Thing ™. I’m just very dubious that you can run a big project with lots of part-time, amateur managers rather than a few professional ones. There are lots of bad managers out there – but there are also lots of people who have no desire to self manage and would rather put on their headphones and perfect a very narrow craft.
