I'm hoping all of these question threads will bring the Adventure Paths to a standstill! :D
Anyway, you're rad, Jessica, and you need a thread :D
How did I delete that instead of editing it?
D:
Kinda of related to what you do...but what is a typical day like?
What are your interest other than gaming?
Favorite book(s)?
Favorite Movie(s)?
Favorite type of music? Favorite song?
I'm hoping all of these question threads will bring the Adventure Paths to a standstill! :D
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I'm hoping all of these question threads will bring the Adventure Paths to a standstill! :D
Anyway, you're rad, Jessica, and you need a thread :D
Thanks! :-)
...I think. :-P
Have you got a favourite among the iconic characters?
So I have a question for you:
What was your entrance into gaming?
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Yay! Another one :3
Hello Ms. Price, would you mind us asking what all it is you do?
Not at all. :-)
I'm the company's advocate for reality.
I manage the schedule, and try to ensure that what the management asks of the production team is reasonable, or at least possible, and then I try to make sure that the production team is working toward those goals as efficiently as possible.
Actually getting that done takes a lot of different forms: colorful schedule charts, kickoff meetings, making sure meetings stay structured and on-topic, getting coffee for people, mediating conflicts, taking people who don't remember to eat to get lunch so they don't pass out from hunger, load balancing (generally reassigning things to different people on the fly), tracking down where work is, modeling how long projects will take, figuring out where we need more formal process and where we need less, coming up with plans for how to get things done, calculating the opportunity cost of new projects, telling people to go home for the love of all that's holy, making recommendations about what to do when to the exec team, and helping members of the production team prioritize. I also help with some of the actual production tasks when there's overflow, such as writing back cover copy, editing, putting together art lists the art team uses to do art orders, etc.
People joke about me cracking the whip, but it's generally less about whip-cracking and more about understanding why things are taking longer than expected (when they do), and then helping to remove obstacles and distractions, get people whatever they need to finish things, and just making sure I understand how much longer it's likely to take so I can keep the management team up-to-date.
Mostly it's about being objective -- I have to do a lot of turning off the side of me that wants to please people and tell them what they want to hear (the side that wants to say, "Sure, we can do that by end of day tomorrow, whatever it takes!"), and wants to get everything done immediately, and turn on the side that just sees it as math.
For both Wes and me, there's a lot of being a communication channel between the management and the production team. There are a lot of very busy people in positions of importance here, and they don't sit in the developer pit, so I try to help them understand how stuff is going, make sure that they know when someone has hit it out of the park work-wise, make them aware of things that might slow down a product, and so on.
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So Ms price. Would you succumb to the dark and sweet side of >>Ask *someone from paizo* ALL your questions here!!<< threads??
Apparently, the answer is yes. :-)
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Kinda of related to what you do...but what is a typical day like?
All of my days are different combinations of the things I listed above, so I'm not sure there's such a thing as a "typical" day.
Today I came in, updated the production schedule, checked in with everyone on the editorial and dev teams to make sure there weren't any new problems with the stuff we're trying to ship by next Friday, talked to Wes about some plans for after we get this bunch of stuff out, updated the exec team on where we are schedule-wise, went grocery shopping with Liz to get supplies so she can make pancakes for the people who are coming in to work tomorrow, did an edit pass/sanity check on some stuff, made Jay do his intern blog entry, and am about to go round up a bunch of pieces of products to figure out what still needs to be done before we can ship them.
What are your interest other than gaming?
Good food, reading, folklore, linguistics, my new bike which I adore (I had forgotten how much biking feels like flying), good television, my cats, history (the Mongols are my current fascination), peoplewatching.
Favorite book(s)?
That's like asking what my favorite color is. :-) Today I like blue. And rose-gold. I also am really enjoying the book I'm reading about the evolution of feathers and their anthropological significance. Ooh, and The Prague Cemetery. I'm also craving spicy sesame sticks and Outrageous ginger ale. All of this is subject to change, possibly in the next few minutes, which is why I generally have large stacks of books in various places in my home, all of which I'm partway through.
Favorite Movie(s)?
Memento
Shakespeare in LovePi
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Pan's Labyrinth
Up
WALL-E
Vertigo
Much Ado About Nothing
Charade
The Devil's Advocate
In the Loop
Brave
The Princess Bride
The Secret Garden
A Few Good Men
E.T.
The Tree of Life
Let the Right One In
Hanna
Clue
Gosford Park
Strictly Ballroom
Searching for Sugar Man
Serenity
That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
Favorite type of music? Favorite song?
Hmm. I entered college as a violin performance major, so classical music (with a side of Celtic fiddle) is what feels like home to me. I didn't really listen to anything else until late in college. I still love classical, opera, and good movie soundtracks.
Now, I generally like female singer-songwriters (there aren't a whole lot of male voices that I like, although the occasional baroque pop song with a male singer will grab me, like Depeche Mode's "One Caress" or Coldplay's "Viva la Vida"). I like folksy people with instrumental skills and interesting lyrics (Ani DiFranco, Hem, Jane Siberry, Wailin' Jennys); I like glorious head cases like PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Bjork, Natalie Merchant, Neko Case and Kate Bush and sassy piano girls like Rachael Yamagata and Fiona Apple; and I'm a sucker for the sort of sirens who sound like they can flay you with their voices but have their moments of vulnerability (Carina Round, Florence & the Machine); torch singers (Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt); French whisper-singers (Carla Bruni, Keren Ann); the Carpenters and Carole King and the Beatles and Queen and Fleetwood Mac and Heart because duh; weird but awesome acts like Cibo Matto, Azam Ali and Jamiroquai; some jazz (Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Dave Brubeck, Julie London); and random pop that gets in my head (Metric, Broken Social Scene, Cults, the Dirty Projectors, Foster the People, Kimbra, Massive Attack, Neon Trees, Snow Patrol). And Nine Inch Nails.
I also have a category of songwriters where I dislike listening to them perform their own stuff, but love hearing it covered (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Vega, Bon Iver).
I don't have a favorite song for more than a few seconds at a time. Does anyone actually narrow that down to just one (or ten, for that matter)? :-P At this particular moment, it's Carina Round's "Set Fire."
Like everything else, it really depends on my mood.
what is the most fun thing you've done at paizo? at paizocon?
This year will be my first Paizocon, really. I stopped in for a bit last summer the weekend before I started my job here.
The most fun thing I've done at Paizo is the daily interactions I have with my coworkers, who are awesome human beings and frequently hilarious.
Have you got a favourite among the iconic characters?
Kyra.
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So I have a question for you:
What was your entrance into gaming?
I answered a ringing payphone.
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Thankies for answer :3
... So what you're saying is if we send you gifts we get Paizo stuff sooner?
Nah. Send the gifts to the art staff, editors, and developers. :-) I just help steer the boat. They're the ones rowing.
Natalie Merchant, Kate Bush, and Fiona Apple are incredibly under-appreciated artists.
I'm the company's advocate for reality.
So you're the designated driver of the paizo staff?
Also, which version of "Let the Right One In"?
I'm the company's advocate for reality.So you're the designated driver of the paizo staff?
Also, which version of "Let the Right One In"?
The only one.
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In the nearly one year that you've been on the Paizo staff, how many times have you managed to get your cat(s) illustrated?
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Just once.
SO FAR. :-D
Have you travelled outside the US?
If so where?
Where would you like to go?
What is your favourite city inside the US and outside the US?
Actually getting that done takes a lot of different forms: colorful schedule charts, kickoff meetings, making sure meetings stay structured and on-topic, getting coffee for people, mediating conflicts, taking people who don't remember to eat to get lunch so they don't pass out from hunger, load balancing (generally reassigning things to different people on the fly), tracking down where work is, modeling how long projects will take, figuring out where we need more formal process and where we need less, coming up with plans for how to get things done, calculating the opportunity cost of new projects, telling people to go home for the love of all that's holy, making recommendations about what to do when to the exec team, and helping members of the production team prioritize.
So, basically you're Paizo's mom?
(Please get the humor in which that was intended)
Do you like living in/near Seattle?
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ooh ooh can we see?
Sure, when the product with her in it comes out. ;-) Here's what she looks like. :-)
Have you travelled outside the US?
Yes. I spent a couple weeks in Spain, and a couple weeks in London, and a couple weeks in Ireland.
Oh, and Canada, which doesn't really count.
Where would you like to go?
Italy, definitely. Some areas of South America: Brazil, Belize, Ecuador. Thailand. New Zealand.
What is your favourite city inside the US and outside the US?
Well, I love Seattle something fierce. I love going to San Francisco, although I'm not sure I'd want to live there. I'm enough of a foodie to love LA and Vegas for their eats. I went to New Orleans for my birthday this year, and fell in love pretty hard, which was kind of surprising because I didn't think I'd like the South (but if you go in winter/spring, it's not that hot and humid!). Milwaukee will always feel like home. New Harbor, Maine, is where I spent a lot of summers and still love it. I love Boston (had family friends/relatives there, so we visited a lot when I was a kid).
But generally, every time I get off a plane in Seattle, I feel a sense of kinship with all the other people who have also had the good sense to live or visit here. ;-)
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If you're the manager to keep them on track I'm guessing that you're kind of the go-between between the "creative side" of the writers and designers of Pathfinder and the business side of Paizo where people have goals in order to keep the project profitable and sustainable. Am I correct in this assumption?
Obviously "Paizo is the most awesomest company that has ever existed", but really. How hard is it to balance that creative licence and time needed to develop material with the need for deadlines and profit margins?
That will likely be more of a thing once we're caught up on all our product lines. Generally producers are the ones that try to negotiate between the business needs (which are generally along the lines of SHIP IT NOW) and the creative side (which is generally, BUT IF WE WORK ON IT FOREVER WE CAN MAKE IT PERFECT!). It's not a call I make myself -- my role is more to work with the creatives to understand, OK, what more do you want to do? What does that actually do for the product? And how long do you actually need to do it? What can you do in a shorter period of time than you're asking for?, and then take that information to the management team and make a recommendation (along the lines of, "if we take another two weeks on development for this project, we can fix this thing that doesn't work, which I think is something we should do").
But since a lot of what I've been doing since I got here is trying to get us caught up, we don't have a lot of luxury for taking another week to add something cool or make something perfect. It's a lot of "how long does it take to get this done and make it good?"
Actually getting that done takes a lot of different forms: colorful schedule charts, kickoff meetings, making sure meetings stay structured and on-topic, getting coffee for people, mediating conflicts, taking people who don't remember to eat to get lunch so they don't pass out from hunger, load balancing (generally reassigning things to different people on the fly), tracking down where work is, modeling how long projects will take, figuring out where we need more formal process and where we need less, coming up with plans for how to get things done, calculating the opportunity cost of new projects, telling people to go home for the love of all that's holy, making recommendations about what to do when to the exec team, and helping members of the production team prioritize.So, basically you're Paizo's mom?
(Please get the humor in which that was intended)
:-) If Paizo has a mom, it's Lisa.
In all seriousness, though, while I get the joke, I've never liked the parent-child mental model for manager-report relationships.
I don't have anyone reporting to me directly here (other than the interns), which I prefer, but given that there is still a vaguely managerial relationship, I think it's always a good rule of thumb to take your mental model for your relationship with people who you manage and mirror it with yourself and your manager. Then ask yourself if you're still comfortable with it.
There's nothing in the least parental about my working relationship with Wes (my manager). He's my teammate, my comrade-in-arms, my friend and my occasional partner-in-crime. Similarly, the people I work with are also my teammates and friends. They're not in any way my inferiors. We each have parts of the process that are ours, and they're the experts on their parts just as I'm the expert on mine. Sometimes my part involves telling them what they need to be working on at a given moment, or telling them that they can't have as much time as they might want on something, but I'm just telling them that because I have a wider viewpoint than they do.
TL;DR: I'm not a mom, I'm a navigator. :-)
Do you like living in/near Seattle?
Love it. :-)
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ooh ooh can we see?Sure, when the product with her in it comes out. ;-) Here's what she looks like. :-)
Dawww :3
Contributor
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ooh ooh can we see?Sure, when the product with her in it comes out. ;-) Here's what she looks like. :-)
Oh, a Ginger! Most of them are male, weirdly (85%). But my cat when I was a teenager was a Ginger... named Ginger (she was a girl too).
I believe that orange cats come from sailor cats from Syria, but I could be mistaken.
Any relation to Vincent?
Any relation to Vincent?
Nope.
How long before the subscription shipments, especially for us superscribers, reach a relatively balanced state?
Should be post-August. As I understand it (once a product goes to the printer, it enters Jeff's domain), we'll be doubling up on monthly products through August to catch up on stuff that was behind prior to the Gen Con crunch, but after that, barring some event that causes us to get behind again, it should be one monthly product per month.
We're still catching up on the modules, though (Wardens was the one casualty of the crunch, and is in development now), but since they're not monthly, there shouldn't be a double module month.
M. Jessica Price,
Who are you?
What do you want?
Why are you here?
Where are you going?
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I have always been here.
Do you hate Rick Springfield for the song "Jessie's Girl"?
I have never heard this song.
Apparently I'm showing my age.
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If the song is likely to make me hate the singer, it's not much of an incentive to listen. :-P
It's just a song about Rick Springfield trying to take Jessie's girl. ;-)
Hmm. As I don't have a "girl" I'm not sure that I'd find it annoying or personally relevant, but I'll give it a listen when I have time.
Have you ever thought of a neat ideal like a character, rule, or in setting concept that you convinced the creative people to put into a Paizo product?
It would be hard not to, given that we all talk to each other and I sometimes help out with editing. I've suggested names for a couple characters that made it in, and have talked with Wes or some of the developers about nuances to add or change about places or people in some of the products. I've also been in some brainstorming meetings and made some suggestions that got used. It's a collaborative environment, so it's not like anyone who works on a product does so in a vacuum.
I've worked in a lot of different areas of game production (this is the first non-creative position I've had), and it can be tempting to want to get your hands in things when it's not what you're there to do, but I try not to interfere unless there's an open call for ideas/names/etc. -- unless I'm invited, really. I do speak up when I feel like I have some expertise that's unique -- I was a geopolitical risk assessment lead at Microsoft, for example, so there are times when someone bases a name on a non-English word and I tell them, "I'm not sure if you're aware of how that word is actually used, but it has some connotations that we may not want attached to that creature," but for the most part, I focus on making sure stuff has enough time to get done, and gets done on time, instead of what's in it.