How to Get Paul Barnett's Job

Warhammer fans who were not playing the beta and even a bunch who were allegedly already in, filled a meeting room for one of the most animated presentations at this year's Comic-Con. Paul Barnett, EA Mythic's Creative Director on Warhammer Online, not only to the stage but delivered the entirety of his panel discussion from the tops of the tables. Everybody who attended not only learned the three secrets to being a creative director, but also had the opportunity to leave the session with a beta key to see all the exciting features currently being developed.

The secrets of hard work have been revealed by just about every single successful mentor. Paul shared his three secrets but punctuated them with the universal catalyst: hard work. The three core traits necessary for a person to be a successful creative director (according to Barnett) are: devotion, imagination, and perception.

To illustrate the role of Devotion, Paul told a story entitled "poultry in motion." His humorous recounting of how the soon-to-be notorious chicken polymorphing in Warhammer Online was concocted. This story demonstrated devotion to his idea that characters too powerful for the setting should be magically changed into a chicken. Not once, not twice, but more than a half-dozen iterations of the process were ordered. Each iteration mandated "needs more feathers," or "make the feathers bigger." The seemingly mundane and perpetual revisions Barnett ordered were attempts to make the process look interesting for a player. Despite man hours of alterations, a clear majority of players pushed back and asked developers to make the feathers bigger. Reflecting upon the feedback, Barnett observed, "When I think I have been as absurd as I can, the average person is about 10% more."

Barnett's parable of buying a spaceship was not only inspiring due to the reality of the tale, but also because of how well it communicated the importance of imagination. When he worked at Games Workshop, the employees redecorated their playroom to look like a giant castle. While it worked for Warhammer, the guys wanted to decorate a room that fit the Warhammer 40,000 brand better. Thus, Paul had to find a spaceship in America to have moved back to their home base. What he ended up finding was the actual set used to film the Millennium Falcon sequences in Star Wars. To Barnett, who grew up adoring the original trilogy, seeing the piece in its stripped-down, incomplete state was a wonder to behold. Not only did it put him in a place where he recalled fond memories of watching the movies, but also made him feel as though he were there, in the cockpit, piloting the modified YT-1300 through the far reaches of space. "Don't let the facts get in the way of truth," said Barnett. "The facts say it is a broken-down piece of film prop." What each would-be developer needs is a working imagination to see beyond what is fact.

Finally, the principle of perception was explained via a tale of devoted archaeologists. When Barnett's studio inherited the props from Wing Commander, he used one of the helmets in a video diary for Warhammer Online. One of the viewers saw it and contacted him to confirm its authenticity. What Barnett didn't expect was a full team of game archaeologists to take a week off of work to travel from far away and catalogue and archive every piece of Wing Commander detail they had. At one point the paradigm of the archivists was revealed when they discovered Technosaur. Like true artifact hunters, the language revealed their perception of what EA Mythic perceived to be but leftovers of past projects, "This is the first evidence we have come across that Technosaur even exists."

If would be developers have devotion, imagination, and perception, they can bring the three most important attributes to a game. They don't cost anything, but from Paul Barnett's perspective, they are priceless. For more information on how Warhammer Online is coming, continue to check GameSpot's dedicated coverage. For more tales of how to be a game developer, check out our other panel entries from Comic-Con 2008.