Brainstorming

tim-cain brainstorming collaboration team-dynamics game-development meetings

Abstract

Problem: How should brainstorming sessions be run in game development, and why do they often go wrong?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on decades of experience across Interplay, Troika, Carbine, and Obsidian to categorize the failure modes he's observed in collaborative design sessions.

Findings: Effective brainstorming requires participants who are positive, willing to listen, and open to having their ideas challenged or replaced. Three recurring personality types derail sessions: the unconstructive critic, the entrenched advocate, and the silent non-participant. The best sessions happen when the team shares a unity of vision and genuine passion.

Key insight: You must be willing to admit you're wrong or that someone else's idea is better — and the scariest people in game development are those who believe they're always right.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lYuzefVvMA

What Brainstorming Means

For Tim, brainstorming is a specific kind of meeting: a group session explicitly framed as collaborative idea exploration. He tells participants ahead of time that they'll be chewing on ideas together, examining pros and cons. The goal is to pull ideas apart, see how they interact with other game systems, and reassemble them — sometimes in a slightly different and better form.

Three Types Who Derail Sessions

Tim has categorized people who are bad at collaborative design into three types:

The Unconstructive Critic

These people dismiss every idea (except possibly their own) as "dumb" or "stupid." Tim's response: unconstructive criticism is literally unactionable, so why are you even talking? The better approach is to say "I think this idea would lead to this problem — do we want that in the game, and if not, how do we fix it?" Some people course-correct when told this. Others don't.

The Entrenched Advocate

These people arrive with a single idea and defend it against all feedback. They won't acknowledge flaws, won't listen to alternatives, and wonder why everyone didn't recognize their idea's "obvious greatness." Tim's point: if you don't want to brainstorm, why come to a brainstorming session? He illustrates flexibility with a personal example — he was going to call the Fallout character system "SLIPS" until Jason Suinn suggested "SPECIAL," and he was glad he listened.

The Silent Non-Participant

People who show up with no ideas and offer no comments. Tim doesn't mind quiet powerhouses in general, but questions why they attend brainstorming specifically. The common excuse — "I would have said something but everyone else talked a lot" — doesn't hold up. There are always lulls in conversation. You have to meet the facilitator halfway.

Brainstorming Across Studios

Interplay (Fallout)

The gold standard. The team was passionate, willing to listen, all headed in the same direction. Tim credits unity of vision as the key ingredient. He didn't fully understand why it worked so well until years later.

Troika

Mostly good brainstorming, though not as successful as Fallout. Tim notes there were surprising issues at Troika that didn't occur at Interplay — a topic he plans to explore in a future video.

Carbine

Where things "went south." People showed up entrenched in their own ideas or showed up with nothing and got angry about the meeting's length. Some would leave and tell coworkers that Tim didn't want them there — a misrepresentation of his frustration with non-participation.

Obsidian

Tim was there from 2011–2020. Early projects (South Park, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny) had good brainstorming. But when he became game director, some colleagues couldn't bring themselves to challenge his ideas. One person told him directly: "You're the game director now — I just want to implement what you say." Leonard Boyarsky and Charlie Staples were exceptions who would still push back.

The Fergusson Problem (Type Four)

Tim identifies a special fourth type: the person who, when their idea doesn't "win" the brainstorming session, quietly implements it anyway. He attributes this to Fergusson (Chris Avellone's handle was not mentioned — this refers to a specific colleague), citing the turbo plasma rifle in Fallout and several features in The Outer Worlds that broke the next day's build.

Passionate Debate vs. Arguing

Tim and Leonard Boyarsky would sometimes get very loud hashing out ideas on The Outer Worlds. Programmer Anthony Davis once walked in and said it was making people tense — "like Mom and Dad are arguing." Tim's realization: many people had never seen two designers passionately debate ideas without being angry at each other. He wonders whether people had never witnessed genuine passion for game design, or whether they assumed intensity was inherently hostile.

Why Letting Go of Your Ideas Matters

Tim loves it when someone else comes up with a better idea, for two reasons:

  1. The game gets a better feature. That's the whole point.
  2. The person who suggested it gets ownership. They spec it out, become the point person for questions, and feel genuine investment in the game. People whose ideas get implemented are far more engaged with the project.

Hindsight and Humility

Tim admits he's never shipped a game and thought "we did everything right." Sometimes you realize too late that a different decision would have been better, but too much work has been done to change course. That's fine — that's how you learn and improve.

The people to worry about are the ones who think they're always right, who can't identify a single thing they'd do differently. Those, Tim says, are the scary people.

References