考研阅读精选：商学院调查-游戏改变者

『如果没有游戏制片人以及他们的智慧和努力，得有多少邪恶的外星人未被消灭，多少公主未被拯救？』

Business-school research: Game changers

商学院调查：游戏改变者

Jul 4, 2011 | From The Economist

“DUKE Nukem Forever” is an uninspiring video game in which a wisecracking hero blasts aliens into smithereens. Its only truly remarkable feature is that it exists at all. The game is the sequel to the wildly popular “Duke Nukem 3D”, which was released in 1996. It has been 12 years (and multiple lawsuits) in the making—an epic disaster in an industry in which sequels are generally expected within one or two years.

In 2009 Wired magazine described the failures of the game’s original developers, suggesting that one of their problems was trying to produce it themselves. Although the term “producer” is borrowed from Hollywood, video-game producers are less glamorous than their Tinseltown counterparts. They are akin to project managers in traditional software firms and are often resented by creative directors for the amount of control they exert. But without a producer to exert discipline, the Duke Nukem team were free to fiddle for as long as they wished.

This story came as no surprise to Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Mr Mollick has written a working paper examining the contributions of individual workers to the success of published video games, as measured by both revenue and critical reception, between 1994 and 2006. Mr Mollick used a model originally developed by educational-policy researchers to tease out the effects of individual teachers on their students’ performance. He drew from a sample of more than 800 games with combined revenues of $4 billion and controlled for such factors as the year the game was released, the number of people assigned to the project, the publisher and the genre, since different types of games have different built-in audiences. Then he looked at the results of that work: both a game’s eventual reported revenue and its critical reception (the two were only modestly correlated).

Mr Mollick found that some 30% of differences in revenue between games could be attributed to the producer and the designer alone; and that the lion’s share of this variation was due to the producer. The boring project manager, in other words, meant more to the success or failure of the project than did the flashy designer. Moreover, the effect seemed to persist even as the individuals moved on to other projects, so more than one game could benefit from the same competent producer.

The fast-moving nature of the video-game industry does present some problems for Mr Mollick’s research. He couldn’t include online games, for example, since measuring their revenue is still a tricky issue. He also couldn’t measure marketing budgets, leaving little room to distinguish between genuine hits and overhyped games whose reputation has waned over time. Finally, he was unable to measure delays before release. In the software industry, a delay is a sure sign of inadequate project management (the Duke Nukem case being an extreme example). “The nature of the business model of games has changed fairly radically since 2006,” Mr Mollick concedes, “but that doesn’t mean the nature of making a good product has changed.”

That means having a thoughtful producer on board, able to curb (or indulge) the designer’s wilder impulses and make sure that deadlines are met. Rather than being interchangeable, suggests the research, managers, and their talents, matter a great deal to the success or failure of their projects. Mr Mollick’s current investigations focus on whether similar effects can be seen in fast-growing technology firms. In the meantime, video-game producers can take new pride. How many evil aliens would remain unslaughtered and princesses unrescued without their efforts?