New: Jotting Notes on DeeAnn Soles GC Summit 2009 Presentation: Being GC

[DeeAnn Sole of Team Snout spoke at the GC Summit 2009. You remember when I volunteered on the Hogwart's Game, I followed around this one lady who, operationally, had the whole game in her head? The lady who knew what was coming up, who had to start prepping what, who was out driving where? That was DeeAnn. When she gave this talk, I didn't take notes . I just now watched the video, and this time I took notes. I'm paraphrasing, except the stuff in [square brackets] which is my snide commentary.]

• Originally wanted to give this talk to let potential GCs know what it was like. But looking out at the audience--it's people who have already run games. Preaching to the choir.
• Forming a GC Team: People you can get along with. Not just folks from your team. We poach from Drunken Spider and elsewhere.
• Defining the target. Most important step! [If The Game were a software development project, this would be figuring out the Product Requirements] Figure out what you want. Part of this--make sure everyone on GC has a compelling reason to want to work on this. Think about game style, theme, size, budget, date. Priorities: MUST have, cool, WIBNI.
  • Question wha-you resolve this in one meeting? Answer Nah, it takes us two or three. [This surprises audience] Well, OK, we might be sending ideas around by email for a few months before the meetings. The meetings: getting everyone together in one room, make sure we really are talking about the same thing.
  • Question are these things resolved by the time you're at the "go/no go" decision? Answer More than resolved
• Next, set up meetings. Snout meets weekly. This keeps up momentum. Some folks are motivated by deadlines--so give them a regular deadline. As game approaches, meet more often. Twice a week. Twice a week plus weekends. In days leading up to game: If you can be here, be here! Please! We're not freaks: bowlers do this leading up to the end of league.
• Assign folks to each major area
  • Nagger (PM)
  • GameStart
  • Route
  • Puzzles & Activities
  • Theme/Story
  • EndGame
  • Gadget/Software
  • Commo
  • Applications & Pre-Game
  • Money & Logisitics
  One person might do a few things. But for each general area, there's someone responsible for it. [Surjective but not injective... uhm, depending on which way you're flipping the relation around]
• (Question about applications) I have to set up a system, a fair system, let teams know what the system is. You've been armed with all the information, go to town. I can't choose. It would have killed me to choose between 35 different teams. or 60 team. After our 16th slot in the Hogwarts Game filled up in 16 hours, I was crying trying to figure out how to fit in 4 or 8 more. Until Curtis said "snap out of it!"
• Go/No go decision: Do NOT announce until after this. Are we still having fun? Can we finish this beast?
  • Question Has there ever been a no-go that meant no announcement? [Yeah, is this question meant to be a question that people might say "no" to? Or does this just make folks commit to the group with witnesses?] I was no-go for Midnight Madness. We have always been positive. For Hogwarts we did have a little bit of a discussion--we were close: I think 5 people were "go" and 3 people were "no go". So we talked about why the "no gos". People were all "This role is too big for me" "I don't think we can get this done" So we reallocated. Sometimes you need to haul on the brakes. Sometimes people need to step out. [And better if they do that early on before you're relying on them for too much]
• Business-y stuff
  • Whether to get insurance: if something goes wrong, does anyone on GC have something that they can't afford to lose? If so, get insurance.
    • Yours could be the game where someone falls down a mineshaft.
    • In my first game, in Amnesia, one of the players scrambled out on slippery rocks by a crevasse. I'm looking down, there's surf crashing. I'm thinking: if he slides, it is over, we are never going to be able to rescue him. He will die.
    • In Justice Unlimited, I didn't once worry about someone falling down in the park while playing tag and breaking their leg. I worried about people climbing trees, the play equipment--but I didn't once worry about people running in the grass. But it happened.
    So we get event insurance. We get the sport one. In Midnight Madness, it was 25% of our budget--but it was worth it.
    • Remark from Linda Holman, Shinteki to get permission to use some places, you need insurance. Some of them might require that you have some amount of insurance.
    • Question from Burninator Corey does the insurance cost scale with the # of players? Answer the insurance we looked at for Midnight Madness, the cost was the same up to 1000 people. They covered seven days--we only used two. It was $540. Hogwarts was $500, with people going more places. Yeah, and there were sites that needed us to be covered.
    • Question from Burninator Corey You say Team Snout is insured. Is Team Snout a legal entity? Answer Yes. An unincorporated association recognized in California.
    If there's a particular person who's responsible for the game, you might instead go for Personal Umbrella Insurance.
  • Money: we spend it before we get it from teams. GC members end up loaning $ until after game. Submit receipts! If there's going to be something expensive, we put that off until after we get money from teams. But we've been building stuff for months before that.
  • Banks won't take checks that aren't addressed to a real person. (nervous laughter--probably from the Ghost Patrol table). I thought it would be cool if we could take checks for Homicide, but I called up the bank and they said "That's money laundering!" and that was the end of that. You can set up a business entity for your team. Then teams can fill out checks to Team Snout. But it takes time to set up an entity--and effort, and maybe money.
    • Audience suggestion: set up a Paypal account for GC. Behind the scenes, it goes to a person. But to the players, it seems to be going to GC.
    • Chris Dunphy, Radiks question: If GC is trying to stay anonymous, then what? Answer: I've never tried to remain anonymous, I cannot answer this question. [Oh sure, that's what you say when you're on camera.] Answer from Alexandra: You can do a DBA [Doing Business As]. In San Francisco, it costs about $25, and you file a notice in the paper. You can take that DBA to a bank. So... some effort. And some paperwork. And you have to dissolve your DBA when you're done with it. [Hey, why is Chris Dunphy asking about how to anonymously run a game? Has anyone tried putting a tracking beacon on his trailer? How do we know that he's really traveling around the country? could he be faking footage of national landmarks, suspiciously using stills when Cherie appears "in frame", pretending to "travel" there while actually hiding out in a house in Palo Alto, planning a game?]
    • Sean Gugler points out: In Midnight Madness, wanted to remain anonymous for a while. Teams that were accepted didn't know who GC was--until the pre-game Captains meeting "bring your checkbook".
  • Nasty surprise: all that $ that teams pay you? The IRS says that's income. Now, you can also deduct your hobby expenses--but only the part that's over 2% of your adjusted gross income. So if your "real income" was $50K last year, you eat the first $1K of expenses. [Ouch.] IRS cares whether it's a business or a hobby-- Oh Curtis wants me to tell you the professional golfer story or about the writer who was researching prostitutes.
  • Anyhow Team Snout files its own taxes because it's a separate entity. And I think JPT does too. Team Snout is a non-profit. Its taxes are kind of a nightmare to deal with. But it exists separate from any of us. If you think you're gonna do a lot of games, you might want to do that. But it's a lot of effort. You might just want to say "You know what--I'll just pay the money for the hobby."
  • Keep records. So you know who to pay back.
• When you're feeling overwhelmed: Scale back. Look back at that Priority List. Are you freaking out over a WIBNI? Cut it out. Teams don't know about stuff that isn't there. No one shows up to a Game expecting Don Luskin. Ask for help Game community will help. People not in the game will help--because this stuff sounds like fun. Remember the fun.
• Quality Control
  • Get a fresh pair of eyes to look. Every single time we didn't do a Quality Control check--it got us.
  • "Only GC thinks that's funny" It always starts with someone saying "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if we made the teams do _____?" Everybody laughs. As soon as you hear everyone around the table laughing, you need the alarm bells to go off in your head. You need to step back and say "Would I want to run naked through a fountain if I was a player?" [No.] Would teams like it? Might someone get arrested? Remember the rules of Team Snout:
    • Nobody dies
    • Nobody goes to jail
    • Nobody bleeds
    ...and sometimes we don't make that, but those are our rules. There was a broken leg in one of the games. And Jeff did injure himself. But other than that...
• Question from Chris Dunphy any examples of "Only GC thinks that's funny?" Answer Yeah. We had a puzzle where we gave teams a CD and a phone book. In the phone book, we had Red, and in the CD we had Herring. We had people looking at red things for a long time. It was in our first game--we thought it was hilarious at the time--to tell you something was a red herring. But what we actually ended up doing was sending them through every red thing they could find. It took hours.
• Another disaster: we had someone on GC make a last-minute edit to a puzzle. They checked there own work. Of course there was a typo. So we had to call up every team, go out, fix up their puzzle for them.
• We had a math error in one of our formulas. That threw our timing off for hours and hours. We wanted every team to see our "showpiece" puzzle--and had to re-route teams on the fly to make that happen.
• Question from Burninator Corey How many people are on Team Snout for GC? Answer Different each time. Curtis and I. Sean's almost always on. I don't want to get by without seven people. But that's my personal approach--because there will be a lot of activities and I don't want to be responsible for everything. I've heard of teams that have done it successfully with two. I sure wouldn't want to be them, but I've heard of them. Thinking like a PM: If I have more people, we can do more in less time.
• Question from Burninator Corey You know all this business stuff--how did you happen to end up talking to accountants? Answer I researched on my own. For example, as a non-profit, exempt from California franchise tax. But the California franchise people don't all know this. I know that because I read through the paperwork. Got a frickin scary letter saying that we owed tax--called up tax people, finally got routed to the guy who deals with non-profits, pointed out what kind we were and he said--yeah you're right, they just did your paperwork wrong.
• Comment from Linda Holman, Shinteki If you're freaking out about insurance or business: you can always ask other GCs.

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