You'll never know for sure. Over an impromptu dinner with some colleagues, one of them remarked how he needs to work extra-hard these days to watch his words, so as not to say the wrong thing, presumably for fear of being chastized or called out for dragging down morale. Another colleague, who isn't on the same team but used to be, noted how sad that seemed--that it used to be possible, and expected, for people to say exactly what they thought in no uncertain terms. I can see it both ways, though I said I think everybody needs a filter between what goes on in his brain and what comes out of his mouth. Neither Colleague #1 nor Colleague #2 seemed to like this, so I qualified it by saying that if I always said what was going on in my head, I'd be in prison. They laughed, fortunately.

People need to watch what they say around other people when those people stand to be offended by what they hear and are in a position to make important decisions. These types of situations are more common when you have a larger number of fewer like-minded people working together. If it's just me and you, we can say fuck fuck fuck and it's cool. If it's me, you, and Janey, that all of a sudden becomes pretty awkward because even though you know Janey and she's all right, I'm not so sure, and the whole vibe is different and bad. Multiply this out by different variations on Janey, add in a few situations where you get pulled aside for a gentle-but-firm talking-to because of your tone, and suddenly you're feeling repressed. Or if you're like me, you just learn to measure your words all the time as a matter of course, both in social and work situations (which are all the same to you), so even if you're being a dick and flying off the handle, you're doing it in a deliberate way to achieve a specific goal, even if it's--at the worst of times--a self-destructive goal.

Apart from reading the studies about this and hearing the platitudes about this, I learned firsthand from working as a writer and as a manager for a number of years that tone is an elusive and powerful thing that needs to be measured and managed just as carefully, if not more so, as the actual content of the message itself. This applies both to speech and the written word, and it runs deep through all personal interactions we have. One thing I didn't tell my colleagues tonight is that I can't be perfectly honest with anyone--not them, not my friends, not my wife. I pause and cut myself off in mid-sentence regularly, maybe to the bemusement of people who like me or the annoyance of people who don't, and this is a perfectly transparent byproduct of my tactic. This may reflect poorly on me in the end, and it really ought to reflect poorly on me as a former critic, but it's just the way I've become conditioned over time.

In the end, stark honesty has done nothing but get me in trouble from a very young age. It's caused people I thought were friends to sell me down the river, it's caused girls I liked to think I was a creep, it's caused higher-ups at work to think I wasn't "management material", and it's caused my audience to second-guess me, and all other sorts of badness. Tempered honesty, on the other hand, tends to work out pretty well for me. Tempered honesty is when I control my message to suit the ears of the listener, because what I perceive to be true isn't the same as what he perceives to be true, so I need to put a translation filter on what I say for his sake. To make sure he hears the message I have in my head. Tempered honesty takes more effort and at times makes me wish life had dialogue trees, but it's worth the hassle. Dishonesty, if it's even worth mentioning, belongs only in thrillers. If I've ever met a successful liar, he or she has my deepest respect. It's strange, but lies to me tend to be more transparent than the truth.

At my last job, I got pulled aside and got that talking-to on a number of occasions when those above me--or in some remarkable and important cases, those under me--perceived that what I was saying was overly negative or harmful to those around me. Sometimes they had good reason to do this, but it was always shitty being on the receiving end. I'm very sympathetic to people who have good reason to be disatisfied, feel as though they've exhausted all options of being patient and constructive about the reason for their disatisfaction, resorted to some good old fashioned cage-rattling to try and get something to happen, and then got shot down for trying. That's too bad, but at the same time, I'm unsympathetic to those who take this as a reason never to try again. Complaining is just venting, after all. It's never a truly effective means of getting things done properly, so that primal "this is shitty" feeling you get when you're bitching up a storm, that's your common sense dropping mad knowledge like it's wont to do.

What does any of this have to do with games? If you've worked on one, then you probably know. Or if you haven't, imagine your job and imagine the product of the work to be games rather than whatever it is you do, and you get the idea. Games are made by teams. "Team" is a euphemism for "group" that is often used to suggest effective teamwork where it doesn't necessarily exist. I'm not saying this is the case on my team. I'm just saying that working on a team, no matter where you work, brings with it a certain class of problems that all teams have in common, whether they're good or bad, or big or small, and no matter what they do. It just so happens that my team, which is deep into development, has a lot of stuff to do. In a sense this is the most predictable situation in the world.

I've gone from being a relatively high-ranking supervisor type at my previous job to just one of the guys again at my current job. So I'm able to have a certain type of conversation with my colleagues that went away for me after a while at my last job, which I grew to miss. It's not that I like to complain, because I hate it. It's just that I'd prefer to hear about people's struggles with tone and honesty firsthand than to experience the results of those struggles directly. I don't have a lot of friends and yet my work relationships, I think, have been very successful on the whole. I think it's because always being on guard lets those around me let theirs down a little.