Warhammer - A story entitled "poultry in motion."
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

To illustrate the role of Devotion, Paul told a story entitled "poultry in motion." His humorous recounting of how the soon-to-be notorious chicken polymorphing in Warhammer Online was concocted demonstratednot only devotion to his idea that characters too powerful for the setting the enter should be magically changed to a chicken. Not once, not twice, but more than a half-dozen iterations of the process were orded. Each iteration mandated "make the feathers bigger." The seemingly mundane and perpetual revisions Barnett ordered were attempts to make the process look interesting for a player. Despite man hours of alterations, a clear majority of players pushed back and asked developers to make the feathers bigger. Reflecting upon the feedback, Barnett observed, "When I think I have been as absurd as I can, the average person is about 10% more."

Barnett's parable of buying a spaceship was not only inspiring due to the reality of the tale, but also because of how well it communicated the importance of imagination. When he worked at Games Workshop, the employees redecorated their playroom to look like a giant castle. While it worked for Warhammer, the guys wanted to decorate a room that fit the Warhammer 40,000 brand better. Thus, Paul had to find a spaceship in America to have moved back to their home base. What he ended up finding was the actual set used to film the Millennium Falcon sequences in Star Wars. To Barnett, who grew up adoring the original trilogy, seeing the piece in its stripped-down, incomplete state was a wonder to behold. Not only did it put him in a place where he recalled fond memories of watching the movies, but also made him feel as though he were there, in the cockpit, piloting the modified YT-1300 through the far reaches of space. Don't let the facts get in the way of truth, "said Barnett. "The facts say it is a broken-down piece of film prop." What each would-be developer needs is a working imagination to see beyond what is fact.