https://chuckroquemore.com/blog/ Notes on games, live ops and AI, from a producer's desk. en-us Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 https://chuckroquemore.com/blog/are-we-having-fun/ https://chuckroquemore.com/blog/are-we-having-fun/ Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The question I keep coming back to isn't a vibe check. It's a production discipline. <p>Some of my fondest memories are four-way ladder matches in <em>No Mercy</em> that went on for hours, and <em>GoldenEye</em> in the library: rockets, no shields. Nobody had to ask whether we were having fun. You just knew.</p> <p>Almost 20 years into making games, it's still the question I come back to: <strong>are we having fun?</strong> It sounds like a vibe check. I mean it as a production discipline.</p> <h2>Where I learned to take fun seriously</h2> <p>I played college football, then started making video games of my own while I studied game art and design. My first industry job was in QA at Activision, on Guitar Hero. That's where I started studying how mechanics shape emotion: why one system makes you feel unstoppable and another makes you feel cheated. It taught me to look past <em>whether</em> something is fun and ask <em>why</em>.</p> <p>Since then I've produced games at Netflix, Activision Blizzard, The Pokémon Company, Mythical Games and Marvel. The companies and the games changed. The question didn't.</p> <h2>Fun is three things holding each other up</h2> <p>When I ask "are we having fun?", I'm really asking about three things at once:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Player trust.</strong> Players can tell when a game respects their time and when it's working an angle. Fun is what trust feels like from the inside.</li> <li><strong>Team health.</strong> A team that's grinding itself down can't find the fun, and can't protect it when it shows up. Tired teams ship tired games.</li> <li><strong>Business outcomes.</strong> Fun that pays for itself is fun that gets to keep going. A live game that players love and the business can sustain gets another season.</li> </ul> <p>These aren't trade-offs. They reinforce each other. When one slips, the other two follow, usually faster than anyone expects.</p> <blockquote> <p>Fun isn't the opposite of discipline. It's what discipline looks like when it's working.</p> </blockquote> <h2>The job is discernment</h2> <p>What defines my work is discernment: knowing which ideas to protect, which systems to simplify, and when to push a team creatively versus operationally. "Are we having fun?" is how I figure out which of those the moment needs. If the honest answer is no, the next question is where it broke: the idea, the system, or the way we're working.</p> <h2>Same question, new tools</h2> <p>Today I run AI operations in creative ops, and I ask the same question of every AI tool we bring in. Does it give people more time for the part of the work they love, or does it hand them a new chore? Is the team having more fun because it exists?</p> <p>If the answer is no, it isn't done yet. That's true of a game, and it's true of a workflow.</p> <p>So: are we having fun? If we are, players can tell. If we aren't, they can tell that too.</p>