Morale Improvement

tim-cain team-morale leadership game-development team-building management

Abstract

Problem: How can a project lead or director keep team morale up during stressful game development, without resorting to forced "team building exercises"?

Approach: Tim Cain reflects on morale-boosting activities he used across five companies (Interplay, Troika, Carbine, Obsidian), noting which were intentional and which emerged organically.

Findings: The most effective morale boosters were casual, optional, low-stakes social rituals — bringing food, playing the game you're making, having a dog in the office, and creating excuses for cross-discipline conversation. The key is creating opportunities for people to interact without pressure.

Key insight: The best morale builders don't feel like morale builders. They feel like normal human things — sharing food, petting a dog, playing games together — that happen to make people feel connected and part of a team.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP3j2irlHJM

1. The Philosophy

Tim emphasizes that none of his morale-building activities were forced "team building exercises" where you "will attend and you will make something out of popsicle sticks." Nearly all were optional, casual, and genuinely fun. Many started organically — he only realized they were morale boosters in retrospect, which led him to do them more deliberately at later companies.

2. Interplay: Thursday Nights and Cinnamon Bread

2.1. Thursday Night Thing

At Interplay, the team would gather on Thursday evenings — grab food from different places, meet in the main conference room, and watch movies, play multiplayer Super Nintendo or Atari Lynx games, or run GURPS/D&D sessions. Tim became the main organizer, sending out emails to keep it going. It only stopped when Fallout development got too intense and they moved to offices without a good gathering space.

2.2. GURPS Sessions for Fallout

Tim ran GURPS sessions initially just for fun, but when they picked up the GURPS license for Fallout, the sessions became both educational and team-bonding. Players saw firsthand how the same puzzle could be solved multiple ways by different groups — which directly informed Fallout's philosophy of multiple quest solutions.

2.3. Cinnamon Bread

Tim baked cinnamon bread at home and brought fresh loaves to the office three mornings a week. He'd arrive early (7-8 AM), slice it up, eat a piece or two, and leave the rest. People started arriving earlier to get some, and those early-morning bread conversations turned into organic discussions about cool new features and animations. "I had no idea morale building was happening."

3. Troika: Deliberate Team Building

Troika was where Tim realized he needed to do this stuff deliberately. Key activities:

3.1. D&D for Temple of Elemental Evil

The team played D&D one afternoon a week (Wednesdays, ~1.5-2 hours). This served double duty: learning the rules of the game they were building, and team bonding. The impact extended beyond designers — artists who played saw that they needed fall-down/stand-up animations for grease spells, trip attacks, and sleep effects. "You didn't have to explain to the animators what it would be used for. We played D&D — they saw it."

3.2. Regular Lunches

Despite being an introvert who usually needed quiet lunch breaks to recharge, Tim deliberately started taking the team to lunch. They had a beloved mom-and-pop pizza place with a patio, and a Halal Chinese restaurant less than a block away ("the best kung pao chicken I've ever had in my life"). These lunches mixed game talk with casual conversation — "very calming and a nice break in the middle of the day."

3.3. The Dog

Tim's rescue dog was arguably the greatest morale booster across his career. People would take breaks to pet the dog in his office, and while there, they'd talk about what they were stuck on. Tim served as a sounding board while the dog lowered their blood pressure. "The dog was kind of a social morale booster just by being a dog — doesn't say anything, very calm, very just happy to be there." People would converge around the dog and start talking to each other organically.

3.4. Chinese Soap Opera

Occasionally in the afternoon, the team would stop and watch a Chinese soap opera that nobody understood, trying to guess the plot and characters. Unintentional team building that really worked.

4. Carbine: Chocolate vs. the Fun Police

At Carbine, there was a hostile environment — a "fun police" culture where cross-department interaction was discouraged. Tim's countermeasures:

4.1. Chocolate Eating Meetings

Almost daily around 3 PM, Tim would announce he was eating a chocolate bar and invite people to come try a piece. People from all departments — art, programming, design, audio — would stop by for 10 minutes. The magic: a programmer might tell an artist about a new feature, the artist would say "I didn't know about that," and the programmer would say "come by my office, I'll show you." "That was worth the price of a chocolate bar."

4.2. After-Hours D&D and MST3K

Tim played D&D and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 / RiffTrax after hours, mostly with artists he "wasn't supposed to be talking to." This let people see him outside the distorted picture painted by hostile management, which was "a bit eye-opening for some of them."

5. Obsidian: Baked Goods and Outer Worlds

At Obsidian, Tim brought in baked goods (often made by his partner Robert) — blueberry muffins, chocolate cookies, cinnamon bread — and left them in the South Park lounge area. This helped him meet the two-thirds of the company he didn't already know. Later, running The Outer Worlds, he consciously started chocolate eating meetings again and watched the same cross-pollination happen: narrative designers and animators who normally never spoke would discover each other's work and connect.

6. Rankings

Tim's personal ranking of morale boosters:

  1. The dog — "Number one. The dog was very good at getting people to feel quickly like they were part of the team — or from the dog's view, part of the pack."
  2. Chocolate eating meetings — "Very close number two." The most reliable way to get different disciplines talking to each other in a casual, unforced way.

7. Lessons

Tim identifies a key principle from his experience making Temple of Elemental Evil: if your team is making a licensed game, they should experience the source material. Star Wars game? Watch the movies. Tabletop RPG adaptation? Play the tabletop game. This serves both practical education and team cohesion.

The broader lesson: morale improvement works best when it doesn't look like morale improvement. Create low-pressure social spaces, bring food, be present, and let human connection happen naturally.

8. References