The Colour of Vomit: Diversity Within Creative Teams

As mentioned previously, I spent some years working at 5th Planet Games, where I helped create social / freemium games for Facebook, Kongregate, and other platforms. My official title there was "lead writer & creative director". That role involved co-managing a team of artists (alongside our art director).

Most of 5PG's employees operated out of the office in California, where they somehow survived the state's absurd heat and sunshine. But our creative team included members from all over the place -- different parts of the US, Canada, Brazil, France, South Korea etc. Lots of time zones, and a lot of cultural diversity.

The games we produced required hundreds and hundreds of assets -- characters, weapons, suits of armour, enemies to slaughter. Our business model revolved around throwing fresh content out there each week, to keep players engaged and, if possible, spending money. When you have to churn out so much material, it helps to have writers and artists who bring a wealth of varied ideas to the table.

If people grow up hearing different myths, watching different movies and TV shows, reading different books, playing with different toys, they may have different ideas of what a warrior or a monster looks like, for example. That opens many avenues.

Granted, we also experienced cross-cultural confusion at times. Apparently most nations don't have Christmas crackers, so if you ask a non-British artist to draw them, you end up with festive biscuits / cookies instead.

But my favourite example concerned vomit.

I came up with the idea of a "vomomancer" for one of the fantasy games -- a mage who crafts golems from vomit instead of clay or stone. If this disgusts you, rest assured that some of our players felt the same way. One of them entitled his forum thread on the subject "Discouraging Content".

Anyway, to accompany this vomomancer, I asked a South Korean artist to create a vomit golem. He went off and produced a sketch. The drawing looked great, so the art director and I approved it. He then painted it up and dropped the coloured image into our team's Skype message window.

The golem was red and purple. This confused me, since I knew I'd asked for it to be vomit-coloured. I mentioned this. The artist, equally puzzled, said it already was. Apparently the preponderance of red chillies in the South Korean diet influences the colour they puke. By contrast, here in England our binge-drinking usually results in an orange-brown mixture.

Sure, this may not stand as the most amazing or life-changing instance of cultural diversity in the workplace. But I loved it. The little things, the international or historical quirks, have always appealed to me.

My goal is to one day be part of a team which can, between its members, vomit all the colours of the rainbow on any given day.