If you’ve ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you. Each Monday, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it’s really like. Today we speak to Alistair McFarlane, chief operating officer of game design company Facepunch Studios and the executive producer of survival game Rust…
We let staff work whatever hours and days suit them… as long as the work gets done. If you want to mow your grass at 2pm, go for it. Facepunch definitely isn’t typical for the industry. For the most part, it’s a normal job, around 35 hours a week.
I get relatives thinking I just play games all day a lot… but I don’t. A lot of my job is strategy, people management, planning, product decisions and making sure teams have what they need to actually build great things. There are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, problem-solving and a lot of unglamorous stuff behind the scenes. Playing the game is usually a small part of it.
The long-running argument that video games encourage violence is… one I have never bought into. Decades of peer-reviewed research have failed to find any causal link between video games and real-world violence. It’s an easy headline, but it doesn’t hold up. In reality, games are a massive outlet for social connection and stress relief. We see them used in therapy, education and even pain management. And it’s honestly a shame the press so often blame such a creative industry when there’s no correlation. Like any form of media, context matters, but blaming games for violence oversimplifies a much bigger, more complex set of issues.
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The biggest advice I can give is… make stuff. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity, just start building things, mods, prototypes, little games, tools, whatever. You learn far more by doing than by watching. Now with AI, learning and experimenting is easier than ever.
I genuinely believe AI…
