Help You, Help Me

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 5:57 PM

Help Yourself
I have an interesting story to tell you, something that really surprised me. Last night I was at the grocery store, and, being in my usual I-have-three-kids-and-I-am-tired-and-in-a-hurry state of mind, I rammed my cart into a display of plastic juice bottles. For a moment I thought I was fine, then at the opposite end of the display 2 cartons, about 30 bottles, rolled off onto the floor. My first thought, being a parent, was "Oh man, now I have to pick this up." But then I thought, "Wait, when you spill things at a store or restaurant, someone who works there will come around and pick it up." As I glanced around quickly to see if someone was going to do that very thing, I realized that was just irresponsible, the bottles did not break or anything, so I just started to pick them up. Then a most unexpected thing happened, though. About ten other people bent over and picked them up with me, finishing off the task in about a minute. I imagine that if I just stood there looking helpless or tried to ignore it that the most I would have gotten would have been a few nasty stares. Instead I got a real world example of something I see time and time again on game development message boards. People are much more willing to help people who take the effort to help themselves first.

How many times have you seen it over at gamedev or garagegames? Someone new to the community plainly says "I want to make the next great MMORPG, I don't know what to do, help me!" The charitable responses are usually of the following types: "Read the stickies"; "Search the forum/web/google"; "Can you be more specific?". more commonly, these messages are ignored. At the worst, it turns into a festival of flaming -- no need to describe this in detail, you've all seen it. Now, think about a new person who says "I read this, I searched there, I get it mostly, but I am missing one important thing". That person will get a good response. Sometimes four or five people will post immediate and useful information. Approaching a call for help from a position that one is competent, resourceful and thoughtful yields far more help than someone who appears needy, lazy and careless.

This is a great reminder to something we all may already know, an extension to the golden rule. Help yourself first and others will be more likely to help you.

Helping Others Helps You
It is quite simple to look at the work we do here in the coop, the work of giving art away, as an act of altruism. That the very act of making our art free is the same as making it worth nothing. I feel strongly in the contrary. Yes, offering help to others, in our case by offering game art to indie developers, does give me that warm fuzzy glow that comes from receiving admiration and respect from those I respect and admire. But, it's more than that. I do receive personal gain from what I do here. By fostering the community that I believe in passionately I am making that community a little bit stronger with each little bit I put into it. My hope is that this indie game dev community can grow large enough and strong enough that it can support a bunch of little indie game artists like me and my friends. Basically I am helping make an industry that can hopefully one day contain my dream job.

Here, I have a story for you that may illustrate this. About six years ago, I started up a site to sell self-published comics, similar to the kind that my friends and I used to publish back in the early nineties. After about six months, it was doing reasonably well with great potential for growth. Eventually I shut it down due to demands from having a second, and then later, a third, child. At the same time, a friend I met through this community, Rick Bradford, was turning his comics news and reviews blog into a store as well. At the time, there was not a huge market or customer base for selling these types of hand made books on an ecommerce site. But now he is doing well enough, between his store and a number of similar endeavors, to be working on comics full time. This is fantastic. 15 years ago, when we both started loving these types of comics, there was only a small, or at best, decentralized market for the work and selling something on a computer was barley even thought of. Many years of a handful of people like this nurturing the community out of sheer love of the medium has brought us to a time when those who love something the most can work on it as much as they want.

In short, reminder number two is this. Helping others helps you, too.

Help Us
Before I finish I do want to say that, yes, there is a goal to this post. I am here to ask something I don't often ask, and something I have not asked for in any kind of a concerted fashion before. In short, I am asking you to help us. Come join the coop. We learn, we share, we create together and, more than most virtual teams, we get stuff done. I have been extremely lucky to work with the great artists who have stopped in and contributed and I would like to share that with any of you who want to join in. Now is a great time to jump in. We're ramping up after a hiatus. We're building new teams. We've been working on new stuff and we're ready to have new artists join in. If you would like to know more, then check out our new Beginner's Guide to Joining, join the forums and do some work.

And, if you don't want to join a group like ours, that's fine, go ahead and give it a try on your own. Do something to contribute to the community -- it will help all of us and it will help you.

Stay free
~shs~