Leaving Microsoft to join DigiPen

I left Microsoft at the end of June, and started at DigiPen one month later. My last day at Microsoft was the same as Bill Gates' last day. Here is the goodbye message I sent, with updated email addresses at the end.

From: Rachel Rutherford [mailto:rachelr@microsoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:20 PM
To: Rachel Rutherford
Subject: Moving on

Hi all –

I am leaving Microsoft to join DigiPen Institute of Technology as a full-time professor in their Game Design & Production department. This Friday is my last day. Stop by Millennium E cafeteria this Friday at 4:00 for an informal send-off for me, Hakim, Shun, and Bill (couldn’t resist that last one). BYOWhatever. Also, please send me your contact information at: realrachel@aol.com.

This is my third time leaving Microsoft. I left once to direct theatre for four years. Once to direct theatre in Europe for a year. While living at the Odin theatre in Denmark, I went into town every Saturday to play games at the internet café. I was such a regular that one night when the café was locked, and dark, and full of gamers (for reasons I never knew, not speaking Danish), they wordlessly unlocked the door and waved me in to the cave.

This time I am leaving to join DigiPen, which is more like a small theatre company than one might think. I have taught there for over a year, and the caliber of their game developers must be experienced to be believed. DigiPen is the top game college in the world, and largely unaware of it. Dingy, hot, small, unprepossessing, crammed into half of a Nintendo warehouse, full of computers, haggard luminous programmers, glorious emergent games, a monastic single-mindedness, and a bone-deep fatigue. Over 6,000 apply, 200 get in, 60 graduate. It is a conservatory training, a special forces one – elite, grueling, punishing, virtuosic, and culminating in a graduate-level math/physics/computer science education with four year-long, 3-to-5-devs/team, completed games.

I believe that inside this training, inside game development itself, a new kind of artist is being born; a new kind of art. I am the kind of pan-craft artist/scientist/player I am educating and creating.

Games demand so much. Artistry – visuals, music, space, interaction. Thought – physics, math, code. Abstraction – the ability to build cathedral-engines of code. Engineering – the ability to build functional structures which ship on time. Goodness – spirit, feelings, delight, play. Teams – presence, integrity, conflict, passion, phase-shifts. Games – the angels-on-the-head-of-the-pin asymptote of fun and play, of laughter, of desire. “Games are software theatre,” says Benjamin Ellinger. “An architect looks at a system and thinks, “What can we remove?” says Chris Peters. “A team is not enough; you need a conscious team, one with the tools to bootstrap itself, which knows how to increase the rate of its own iteration and joy,” says Rachel Rutherford. “Your brain will unfold it all, just give it time to do its work,” says Jason Mai. “Videogame development is the most dense and diverse creation medium currently available and that's why I do it,” says Sean Gubelman.

If your idea is not recursive, you are not working at the level of maximum efficiency.

Back to how I joined Microsoft. I had worked at Xerox PARC, and at Apple; had played on a men’s ice hockey team for 8 years, had my own game company, and co-designed a high-end realtime video-editing system. In March 1994 we sold our house in the cinnamon sun-grass of California, and moved home to the rain. I had offers from Microsoft Research, Kids ITV, and Kids. I chose Kids, got given kids adventure games, and have been in games ever since.

I have worked on Kids Adventure Games prototypes, Goosebumps: HorrorLand, Goosebumps: Say Cheese And Die, Dreamworks Interactive, Mustang, Reach for the Stars II, NBA Inside Drive 2003, NHL Rivals 2004, Mythbots, You Know It! Trivia, Solitaire In Motion, More Solitaire, Hop It!, Firefly, and Fable 2 Pub Games. I am grateful to have known the people of Kids, Microsoft Australia/Games, Sports Games, Action, Arcade & Strategy Games, Casual Games, Carbonated Games, and all the artists – mmm, the artists – developers, testers, program managers, user researchers, managers, marketers, financiers, and hardworking good-hearted smart people of Microsoft.

I would like to thank Microsoft veterans and alumni Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy, for having led the turn-around of the Visual C++ group, which development environment makes these games possible; for founding McCarthy Technologies, the 10-year team lab in which the Core Protocols system for high-performant teams evolved; for training me to be an Associate Core Director of that system; for enabling me to give two Software Development Bootcamps at Microsoft, Team Zero and Quality Without A Name; and for showing what it means to walk the path of integrity and limitless thinking.

See you tomorrow in MillE caf at 4:00. Bring me flowers. Bring really loud music. If you can’t make it, send me a link to your favorite music and if possible, a YouTube video of it.

rachel

Rachel Rutherford
realrachel@gmail.com
rachelr@digipen.edu

It's my birthday!

I went to bed happy, and woke up happy.

today is DigiPen graduation, v1.2

Today, people who went to school here:








Are driving over here:




To graduate:




And to thank Christopher Erhardt & Michael Moore, among others:


For teaching that enabled wonderful creations like these to emerge:
Aether

Hollowpoint

Rex Texas

Behemoth



Synaesthete, IGF award-winner

... and many other beautiful games.

Congratulations, class of 2008.



------------------------------------
[Later that day]

Here are some pix from today's graduation.

hey, look, our Firefly game is in a video

Last year, I made -- well, no, I got us the chance to make, and Joshua blessed, and Jason laughed and exec-produced, and Peter liaisoned, and John gave us a game idea so we had something to build, and Dex did all the heavy lifting and got the bugs and game up and running, and Shun had the firefly idea, and Rick and Stephen and Justin and Shun and Steve made it BEAUTIFUL, and then we were out of time so there's no audio but there you go -- (and there was that one magical CarbAll meeting where we turned out the lights and in the blackness, the quiet breathing silence like we were suddenly on some camping trip, there were eighty fingers delicately touching, touching, touching, to try to guide the shy fireflies into their jars) -- well, as I was saying, we made a demo called "Firefly" for the playtable.

So my group made the demo, and the playtable group upstairs loved it, and installed it on a bunch of machines, and then in a feverish joy of amateur marketing, decided to make some videos about it.

This was a one-take video, upstairs, in the hall. "C'mon," I said, grabbing all the artists. "They want us to show our game on a video, let's go."

I thought it was going to be put on YouTube, but it actually made it onto our official Microsoft Surface website, which you can check out here.

Ours is this one.

i am a wikipedia author, programming with butterflies, xkcd, Nureyev, mom, DigiPen

We were having our last CarbAll meeting. Carbonated Games had disbanded the previous day. "So what should we do for closure?" I asked. "Update the Wikipedia page." said Chris Peters.

I thought that was a great idea. So I did.

Listen, if you are not a programmer by nature, messing around with some system where a) it's all in public, all the time, publicly rollbackable to every single time you have ever saved, b) you can't delete anything, and c) you're pretty much always live -- is a little scary. Like having the keys to drive the North American continent, when you really haven't mastered the Volvo yet.

("What happened to our servers?" "She took them down." "All of them? I thought we had three-country backup." "She got typing wild. We don't even know what she put in there. One minute she's adding the Firefly demo, the next minute all hell has broken loose, and it's like the goddamn Titanic in here." "What are we gonna do for an encyclopedia now?" "Google probably has something." "Or China. They're big. They've probably got some filtered SETI overlord thing where every search entry returns, "Have a green tea bun, dear. I SAID, have a green tea BUN." "I'm outa here." "Or maybe Google China, they're probably ahead of the curve." "Did you even READ "Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia?" They're like the database of all databases. Give 'em a week, it will be reconstructed." (A silence.) "Hey, you know... with that kind of server solidity and a little avatar work, Wikipedia could be a great casual MMO." "Yeah, but they'd have to rebalance it.")

So anyway, I updated the Carbonated Games page.

Then I noticed, reading the "History" tab, that you could see everyone else who had ever updated that page. I clicked on one, and up came a bio page with little boxes like this:


I was hooked. One all-nighter later, I knew what userboxes were, and had made my own page. Second Life does it for some people. For me, it's having a lemonade stand in the wikiscape.



Have you read the rules of Wikipedia? I used to wonder how Richard Stallman did it. How do you wade in and tackle all of humanity's fear, shortsightedness, and greed, and still stay true to your principles? Sturgeon had it right, in Baby Is Three -- when we grow up, we need to join and help. It's Gandalf and the Balrog, and no way around it -- you gotta grapple with your Shadow, to get whole.

Wikipedia is humanity's bitch -- or monk, same thing -- and they serve with grace, integrity, good humor, fair play, steadily evolving rules. I am going to donate. Now I am a wikipedia patron, not just an author.

Which reminds me.

This was one of the big things I learned, living at the Odin Teatret. To have your theatre flourish, you must give it away. So every person who walks in goes, "This is MY theatre." You are their monk, their mule, their sun-blessed servant, and all of you turn your blind faces to the light. When I first went to the Odin for the Odin Week workshop, they assigned each of us a piece of the theatre to clean. I had the blonde stairs at the far end of the foyer. Once I owned those stairs, I owned the theatre. I was the theatre. If you touched the theatre, you were touching me. Everything changed. Because of this one ethic in my head, I made whole rafts of decisions differently. This is the most efficient upstream act I have encountered.

Leonid Anisimov said, "Affect the space first."

Eugenio Barba says, "Everyone in the theatre, cleans the theatre." This MAKES you affect the space. And, as soon as you do that, your perception of the space changes.

While I am on this long and random walkabout, check this out: xkcd.com. I just discovered this webcomic -- "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" -- and am addicted. Click the comic below to enlarge.



This strip reminded me of me -- half assembly coder, half so-abstracted-to-infinity-that-when-you-think-it-it-exists. I am a naturally upstream, chaos-dancer kind of creator. In theatre. In software. In companies. In relationships. It's all Indra's Net, all the time. We're all waves and particles, so go splash in the paradox and don't forget to pay your electric bill.

It is just like the Odin. Water the plant over here. Walk onto the plain blond expanse of floor over there. Lie down. Tell the truth. Move the truth. You are the truth. You are a piece of harmony in a small chaotic system, in a large chaotic system, and you are a chaotic system. Rest. Do your work.

I think for me, theatre is the metaphor I needed to understand life. Not acting, not playwriting, but the whole dense complicated art-plus-business-existing-in-the-real-world gestalt of it. That gave me the three levels of meta I needed to understand my life: The gestalt of me. The gestalt of theatre. The gestalt of life. That's why I am a director -- the director gets to sit right in the middle of the entire gestalt, and go everywhere, and talk to everyone. It's like a license to learn. License to play. Same thing. (My and Joshua's shared vision is: Play. Polish. Perform. Repeat.)



I set up my mom's Mac. I'm at home, she's at her house, we're both in front of our computers. I am talking her through how to get to YouTube. "Type this. Now, in the little white box, type, "Nureyev." Now, click the second one down, his young Russian years."

Silence.

My mom took me and my brother to the ballet when I was young. Not all the time. Just when Nureyev was in town, or the Joffrey. It was such a strange, urgent, exotic powerful escape from our barely-out-of-lower-class life. We were pilgrims there together, open-mouthed at the beauty and music and male sexuality, the carnality of it. Ballet was our bacchanal, our Mardi Gras. Half my boyfriends have looked like Nureyev. The other half look like my brother or my dad.

"Oh, he's so young," she said. "And that's..." "... Les Sylphides." "No." "Le Corsaire." "Yes."

Watching the young dead man dance... whom we had both seen when we were young and he was not dead, and he was the most powerful man we had ever seen live... my mom is 74 and still correcting me on details... this is a good moment.

"I grew up in the wrong generation," she said, reveling in YouTube. "I would have loved this." "Yeah, but your generation has pensions. Retirement. You're living on the water, I'm going to be doing software till I'm 90." "But you can turn into millionaires. That never happened in social work." "Good point. Okay, I'll take my field."



And Nureyev leaps, and falls, and raises his head, and sits staring at the camera, troubled, imperious, unsmiling. No wonder I like introverts. And gay men. And SPs. And Russians.









So here's the thing. Or part of the thing.

Teaching at DigiPen is awakening and alivening me to games in a way I did not knew was possible. The last time I felt like this was in my early 20's, when I lived in a group house in California with 13 people, where everyone was a programmer before the PC or Mac even existed. I worked at Xerox PARC. Ken worked at SRI. The other Ken worked at Stanford AI Labs, or at least hung out there a lot, as did Julius, who spent all his time writing fast fourier transforms on the board, cooking eggs, and playing classical guitar. Warren was writing the first graphical adventure game at Atari, incensed that the creators got no royalties, and bringing the machines home, trailing wires, so we could play them in the living room. Elaine was riding her horse and going to Stanford Business School, and Richard Stallman came to visit, and Danny Hillis came for chinese food, and the guy from Lawrene Livermore brought the video of his robot with knees that could walk on water, and I had an account at MIT-MC and was playing piano at ballet studios at night -- and it was okay --

it was okay

to be smart.

I mean, really, no holds barred, as fast as you wanna be, with no apologies, smart. Scorching trails, blackwater connections, calculus problems that solve themselves while you sleep, choreography ideas that make me cry, smart.

Being with Teresa, Terrence, Lyon, and Ben felt like that again. Just one big ahhhhhhh.

I didn't realized I had retreated back into hiding, until I started immersing in DigiPen. The programmers, the people, the facebook pages, the conversations, the living density of ideation and demanding practice. (Oh. Duh. It's just like a theatre: train AND make a performance. The Odin actors do physical & vocal training half the day, then rehearse. The DigiPen programmers do math and physics half the day, then work on their game. No wonder the results are good.)

I get so warmed up, in this surrounding, that I can parse densities of information, translate from the codetalk, see the drifting icebergs and fiery winds in the mental structure, see its weak points, its lattices, I can see the unseen so clearly that I can start to make my own maps and inferences from it, gaining insights from territory whose roots I can't even grasp.

Being with me, Ben, and Chris is like being in one big brain. We are kind of slow, still, not optimized yet, but comfortable. When you add me, Ben, and Chris to DigiPen, you get catalytic combustion. The environment strips us. We spark and transform the environment. It starts to be like we are all one BIG brain. A nearly completely unoptimized one. Connected, but unoptimized. Alert, but unawake. What do you call something of nearly infinite potential power? As if tectonic plates could suddenly slip with such friction that they sparked into a volcano, and the whole earth rearranged, dancily.



And that's just going there a couple nights a week. Like some community college gig, except now I have my own badge and login and everything. And, just like the community college -- and the Wikipedia, and Nureyev, and 1700 and PARC -- I am falling in love.

So fun, to be this young. To be this old. This wild. To be alive at this time, in this river of high stakes and creation.

Teresa and Terrence were bemused that I kept going back to work. They would always find me and Ben at work. "We are not used to people who are so passionate about their work."

For passion, I need whiteboards, webcomics, a sparkling array of brains, and no leash.

Well, that's ONE thing I need.

****************************************************************8
[A couple hours later.]

This post is the first picture of the integrated me. Where games and dance and comics and family and DigiPen and Microsoft and theatre are all mixed up together in one Jumbalaya Rachel, and liking the flavor.

I am finally becoming the person I always hoped I'd be.