How not to hire artists.

NOTE: This entry contains a certain amount of strong language. Reader discretion is advised.

Christopher Gregorio (aka Kaitol) has stirred up something of a fuss on Twitter thanks to this article on his blog, in which he gave a bunch of do-and-don't advice on how to find and hire artists for your flash game projects.

Some of this advice was, shall we say, ill-considered and possibly somewhat unethical. He has earned a massive firestorm of opprobrium as a result.

I don't know him personally. He might be a nice guy, but from that blog entry his attitude towards the people he works with really stinks. In short, he advocates the following measures:

• Cruise deviantArt for technically-proficient amateur artists, as they're likely to be ignorant of industry rates and will thus accept lower pay than professsionals.
• Get them to name their price, as their inexperience usually means they'll underestimate how much their skills are worth.
• Don't look for professional or experienced games industry artists - they know how much their skills are worth and how much flash games can earn, so they'll want a bigger cut of the profit. That's your profit.
• Refuse to pay them until they've delivered the work, to standard and by the deadline, otherwise their crappy amateur work-ethic means they might work slowly or even flake out on you entirely.
• Don't tell them how much their artwork will increase the value of the game, otherwise they'll want correspondingly more pay.
• Set strict deadlines, and hold your underpaid amateur artist to stringent professional standards. Dock their (already below-market-rate) pay if they don't meet these standards.

This is all brutally pragmatic advice, and unfortunately quite likely to work. Creative workers are a notoriously insecure breed and creativity in general is horribly undervalued, to the point where creatives will habitually undersell their skills for fear of an ego-crushing "Pff, it's not worth that much! I'll give you half." response. So if you're a businessman who has no compunction about callously taking advantage of others to line your own pockets, this advice might well get you results.

It's the kind of ruthless outlook that makes some people rich, allowing them to crush their competitors, see the markets driven before them and hear the jubilation of their accountants. It works in TV, Hollywood, the music industry, the comic industry, and pretty much anywhere else Creative Types produce work for Corporate Suits, accepting their mediocre paycheck and lack of recognition with piteous gratitude. After all, it's not like creative work is actually worth much, right? They can just pull that stuff out of thin air.

Sorry, that's a rant for another day.

Anyway, I think Gregorio's fatal mistake was in trying to apply this ruthless dog-eat-dog Golden Rule big-corporation exploit-the-little-guy dickery to the independent games industry.

Prominent games developers (like the people who make Gears of War or Prince of Persia or HALO or any of the other blockbuster console titles) are serious business, and their games are played by thousands, millions of people around the world. Creative types queue up to work for them because there's a hell of a lot of prestige associated with helping to produce an AAA-grade game. These companies have a lot of leverage when choosing who they employ, and can dictate the terms under which their employees are hired and fired.

This can, however, lead to badness; however many of their creative workers become overworked or burned out there'll always be more lining up to take their place. The creatives become like any other resource to be acquired, used and discarded. This is vile and reprehensible, yes, but also an unfortunate reality of the job marketplace for creative types. Or in fact anyone, really. The bigger the company, the more likely it is to foster a dehumanising environment with policies that prioritise the bottom line over the welfare of employees. You've read Dilbert cartoons, you know the score.

From that point of view Gregorio's article, while full of douchebaggery, also has some pretty effective advice. By preying on the inexperienced artists who haven't yet developed the self-confidence required to say "Actually I am worth more than that!" you can get more bang for your buck, lining your pockets with the toil of creatives who don't realise they're being underpaid. So his article tells developers how to find cheap, reliable, easily-exploitable creatives who'll make your game look good for minimal outlay on your part, thus maximising your profits and confirming your position as a soulless jerk. It might as well be titled "How to make inexperienced artists' insecurities work for YOU!", because that's really what it boils down to.

Is this just Capitalism In Action, an inescapable trait of supply-demand market functions as Gregorio claims in his defence? Maybe. But it's the Unethical Fuckery variety of capitalism as taught at the Sleazebag School of Douche Economics. It's the kind of brokenness that arises in a near-monopoly market in which a few big companies call most of the shots. It is not a particularly desirable way for a market to operate, particularly if you are an employee rather than an employer or shareholder.

The situation advocated by Gregorio uses information inequality (the employer knowing how much a creative's work is worth, whereas the creative does not) to shift funds from the Payment pot to the Profit pot, under-rewarding the creative in order to over-reward the employer. It's generally how companies tend to operate once they reach a certain scale and can get away with that kind of shit. It's why unions and regulatory bodies exist. It's also part of the reason I am not personally very keen on working for such companies.

When Gregorio tries to apply this approach to the independent games industry, however, it blows up in his face. This is because he has totally failed to realise that indie game development is fundamentally different from the big-corporation model.

Basically, thanks to the magic of THE INTERNET and the vastly increased mobiity of information and labour it provides, the relationship is no longer a hierarchical ME AM WAGE-PAYER, YOU AM PEON boss/employee situation. There are a lot of indie developers out there looking for artists to bring their vision to life, and it's much easier for creatives to find them. This seriously undercuts the developer's leverage when dealing with the artists, and turns the relationship into more of a collaboration between equals. This requires a much more equitable distribution of the rewards - you can't go around endlessly exploiting the trust of inexperienced creatives because they'll (a) go find someone else who's more reasonable, and (b) warn their peers about you. Word will get around and you'll find it increasingly hard to get people to work with you in future - particularly the people with the level of skill you're looking for.

It also means that if you brag about it on your professional blog a lot of people will get to hear about it, who will then tell you exactly how much of a slimebag you are.