An Armageddon tradition for the last six or seven years has been a yearly "management retreat." The staff members who can attend split the cost of renting a beach house on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The week is one of debauched geekery: An Xbox is usually going non-stop, the table is spread with board games, and people sit around hashing out and writing up lists of ideas for the game. One year, we took the server apart and reassembled it on the dining room table while people sat around it, fixing problems and checking off printouts. At the same time, others were planning the rise of the in-game city-state, Tuluk, which had recently been taken over by its southern rival, Allanak.
One important difference between management in Armageddon and in the real world is the volunteer nature of the former. Tiernan, the in-game equivalent of a middle-manager, said it's important to ask junior staff the questions that make them go 'hmmm" and to give them the advice that helps them find out where they want to go, rather than just assigning them tasks.
In Armageddon, like at work, he sees the most important job as helping other people flesh out what they need to do for the task at hand. "I get them to really think in earnest about the project. That moves things along easier if they do that, 'cause it gives us a sense of size/scope. It also helps foster a sense of ownership with the project ... [and] helps me see how committed they are. If they haven't bought into it fully, then it's another conversation that kind of drifts away."
Admittedly, the implementation of some corporate strategies and approaches has exacted its price: Armageddon is much more bureaucratic than it used to be. While the days are gone when a maverick programmer could rewrite a major section of code and watch the sever crash for a month before another exasperated coder yanked it out, even small projects take longer to implement. Ideas are posted on the staff discussion board and thrashed out by committee, taking at least a week to resolve. But the size of the staff (as well as the player base) is substantially larger than it was 10 years ago. Formality and processes have been introduced with the intention of making things fairer to both players and staff.
Whether the game has had the same effect on the corporate world remains to be seen. Many on the staff intend to keep their ties to the game secret. One said, "If someone came to me with a resume saying they ran a MUD as a hobby, I would have to talk to them at length about the job before hiring them. It's a time-sink and it has emergencies that can intrude on your day job."
Cat Rambo is a science fiction writer and one of the implementors of Armageddon MUD. She can be found on the web at kittywumpus.net.
