It's been a while since we ran a 'What I Do' feature, so let's rectify that!
This week's instalment is a very fun one. The main reason I started the column was to help shed a light on every corner of games development, from the most obvious job descriptions to the most obscure. And I don't think there are many more obscure than 'Operations Manager'.
Do you know what an Operations Manager does? Aside from...managing operations? Probably not! But it's an incredibly important job, often serving as the glue that can help hold an entire project--and studio--together. To help me (and you!) better understand the role and what it involves, I spoke with Michael Ailshie about operational health, keeping the lights on and...being a voice actor for Hades.
Luke Plunkett: Hello, Michael! Tell us a little about yourself!
Michael Ailshie: Hello! I’m a California native who grew up about 15 minutes from Disneyland - where I also landed my first job as a canoe guide! After high school, I escaped the tropical Mediterranean climate of Orange County for the colder Mediterranean climate of the San Francisco Bay Area, where I studied English Literature at U.C. Berkeley. I graduated from college in the fortuitous year of 2008 (with an English degree, no less), and ended up managing front-of-house operations at Whole Foods in Oakland before responding to a Craigslist post from an anonymous San Francisco video game developer in 2011. That anonymous developer turned out to be Supergiant Games, with whom I would end up working for nearly a decade. I currently live in Hollywood with my wife, a voice actor and improviser who’s been involved with UCB, Second City, and the Groundlings (our pup, Chili Cheese, and our elderly cat, Craig).
LP: Can you tell us a little about your career in the video game industry? What's your current role, and what are some of your other recent positions?
MA: I’m currently the General Manager at Null Games, a new indie games publisher founded on the notion that developers don’t need to sign away their life’s work and their ability to earn a living to acquire funding and support for their games. We offer generous, equitable terms that enable our developers to focus on making great games. As with most of my jobs in the industry, I wear a lot of hats in this role: finance manager, HR administrator, legalese analyst, strategist, business developer, and guy who worries a lot. Prior to this role, I was the Senior Operations Manager at Night School Studio, Lead External Development Manager at Epic Games, and Operations Manager at Supergiant Games. Prior to the pandemic, I also moonlit as the head of merchandise operations for The Last Podcast on the Left.
LP: That's...a lot of hats. So to stick to your most-worn hat, what does a job managing people and systems actually look like? Like, what does an average day or week entail?
MA: Operations is sort of an invisible discipline in games. If you’re doing the job of an Operations Manager well, your day-to-day is relatively incognito. Sometimes, though, things will go wrong and you’ll become acutely aware of what Operations teams are responsible for. If you’ve ever had an issue with onboarding, payroll, benefits, contracts, government agencies, payments, software licenses, hardware, or just having a functional, organized place to work and the means to do that work effectively, it’s likely something was rotten in the state of Operations. As my old colleague Greg Kasavin used to say, “Michael keeps the lights on around here.” While that might sound a bit reductive, I always wore that as a badge of honor because, frankly, it takes a lot of work to keep the lights on for a successful video game studio.
As the Operations Manager for Supergiant Games, there often wasn’t an “average” day-to-day since there was always some new and exciting challenge on the horizon, but on a given day, you could expect to find me vetting and negotiating contracts, maintaining the company’s financial records, filing taxes, literally paying the bills, building workstations, administering the studio’s benefits offerings, running the studio’s official merchandise store, planning the studio’s live event activations, and managing partnerships with any number of external mercenaries adjacent to those projects. During my time there, I built dozens of highly-themed event booths, packaged and shipped thousands of vinyl records, pestered people for countless receipts, scouted voice acting talent, and even navigated the treacherous waters of San Francisco commercial real estate.
While at Night School (which was acquired by Netflix), a fair amount of the Operations work mentioned above fell to dedicated teams like Finance, Facilities, HR, and so on. Some of the benefits of working with a large company! With much of that tactical work handled by better, faster, stronger colleagues, my day-to-day was more focused on the long-term operational health of the studio. When not moonlighting as a game producer, I wrote the studio’s employee handbook, built budget and team growth projections, managed new team member onboarding, organized and moderated the studio’s regular all-hands meetings, organized team-building events, constructed a centralized database that allowed our production and development teams to track all of our projects, negotiated contracts with external parties, and ran budgeting and forecasting exercises that tried to peer into the distant future.
LP: What is it about the job that you love? What keeps you coming into work every day, and doing what you do?
MA: It might sound strange, but I love it when my work removes worry and occupational stress from the equation for creative game developers. I hear so many horror stories from small development teams about losing creative development time to competing (and critically important) priorities like recruiting, negotiating, taxes, accounting, payroll, benefits, contracts, and generally “keeping the lights on,” and I love getting the chance to tank those problems. I firmly believe that when creative, passionate game developers are shielded from the anxieties that come with running and maintaining a business by someone with the aptitude to manage that work, they tend to make really good video games. Beyond that, I love figuring out how to solve problems that have no template to follow. For example, I had no playbook when it came to organizing an orchestra concert, but it was a blast to figure out and pull off.
LP: Putting everything you love and work hard on aside, is there anything you don't enjoy about the job? And is there anything the wider games industry could do to make it better or easier for anyone doing a role like yours?
MA: I’ll never forget an interaction I had with a PAX attendee a few years into my tenure at Supergiant. When this person asked what I did at the studio, I let them know I was the Operations Manager and told them a bit about that role. Their response? “Ok. Can I talk to somebody relevant to the game?” Ouch! While I take it in stride and feel confident in my contributions today, I do think that many people both in and out of the industry consider folks who aren’t actively making video game assets as tangential at best and superfluous at worst, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll always appreciate Supergiant co-founder Amir Rao for insisting that everyone on the team, regardless of their title, was a “developer.” Just like any narrative designer, artist, or engineer, I got into this business to make incredible video games and am happy I get to do that in an unconventional way.
LP: Before we go, I saw a Hades voice actor credit on your bio and it would be remiss if I didn't also ask how the hell that came to be and what it was like.
MA: I worked with Greg and Darren to track down some vocal talent for both Pyre and Hades via the SF Bay Area and LA improv communities (including my wife, Courtney Vineys, who voiced Ti’Zo in Pyre, and both Aphrodite and Dusa in Hades). I really enjoyed the casting process and loved finding uniquely talented actors that could bring their characters to life. Like a number of Supergiant’s core creative team members (including composer Darren Korb and voice actor Logan Cunningham), I was a high school theater kid and have never lost my passion for the DRAMATIC ARTS (aka playing make-em-ups and doing funny voices). At the tail end of casting for Hades, Greg and Darren actually asked me if I wanted to audition for the role of Orpheus. Of course, I said yes. Luckily, it wasn’t a stretch for me to pull off the disaffected, malaise-stricken vocal stylings of Hades’ resident bard, and I got the part. However, I left the singing work to Darren (trust me, you don’t want to hear my version of “Lament of Orpheus”).
