If you don’t know who James Hewitt is, you need to move out from under that rock you’ve been using as a domicile for the past decade. Yep, that big round thing is called the sun. It’s warmer now, blame all the carbon emissio𝕴ns.
Okay, now that’s out of the way, read TheGamer’s 👍in✤terview with Hewitt from last week, where he detailed the design process for the classic games he’s created in his career, from the rebooted 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blood Bowl, to Adeptus Titanicus, to Fallout Factions: Nuka-World, which 🎃he’s curr🌞ently working on with Modiphius.
Now you’ve read that article and you’re ꧃up to date with everything else that’s happening in the world (Putin’s still in power, so are the Tories), it’s time for another round. I had such a great conversation wꦯith Hewitt that we covered too much ground for one feature, and our chat about his adult diagnosis of ADHD, and how open he is about it online, struck me as worthy of its own discussion. Hewitt was enthusiastic when I brought up the subject, and began by telling me about the moment he decided to look a little closer at how his brain works.
“I saw a tweet by Jamie McKelvie, who's an awesome comics artist – the current design of Captain Marvel is based off his comic,” Hewitt tells me over video call. “He's a friend of a friend, and I follow him on Twitter. I saw he got a diagnosis for ADHD, and I had always thought before then that I knew what ADHD was; it's annoying children in shops and all the cliches that you think. And then he was talking about his process, and I thought, oh, hang on.
“And there's that weird feeling of someone looking over your shoulder. Oh, this is the story of my life. I did a load more research and found some really good resources online.”
Hewitt dove headfirst into his online research, finding a fascinating resource in a YouTube channel called which offers advice on managing everyday life witꦬh ADHD, as well as deep dives, and interviews exploring the condition. Suddenly, a lot of scattered pieces of his life to date clicked into place. At this point, he’d dropped out of university three times, never held a job for more than about two years, and the whole time he’d thought it was a ‘him problem’.
“In tabletop games, you throw a stone and you hit a person with ADHD. And you probably didn't mean to throw the stone because you've got ADHD.” - James Hewitt
“Suddenly there was this whole community of people who had gone through exactly the same thing,” he explains. “Oh my God, it's not that I'm failing at life, it's that my brain works differently. It helped me realise, not to make excuses, but it gave me a reason for a lot of things that happened. But it also gave me some insight into why I'm good at some of the things I'm good at.”
Hewitt didn’t so much as adapt his approach to game design to fit in with his ADHD, but realised that his existing system had come about as a result of the disওorder and how it affects his thought processes.
“In tabletop games, you throw a stone and you hit a person with ADHD. And you probably didn't mean to throw the stone because you've got ADHD,” he jokes before explaining the more serious side of things. “It's a thing that has definitely helped me get to where I am because my brain can't help extrapolating. In game design, one of the big things is, you've come up with an idea and, if you're doing a game like 40K where there are so many different units, you have to think, ‘right, if I do this, how will that interact with these three dozen other things?’ And when your brain already works in that way, it really helps.”
There are downsides, too of course. Hewitt notes that he often overthinks and shuts down his own ideas before they’re fully formed or he’s had a proper chance to explore them. The downside of having a mind that loves tangents is that sometimes they get overwhelming and you have to reset. Still, understanding a bit more about how his own brain works and embracing that has “helped [him] hone it and work with it,” rather t🥀han fight against it.
ADHD has also affected Hewitt in the grey areas of game design. He says that it helps him to focus through late nights in the week before a deadline, “working all the hours under the sun, panicking frantically, but still turning out something which I'm actually pretty proud of.” It’s a commendable feat of brainpower and concentration, but that deadly crunch time can easily lead to burnout for designers. It’s undoubtedly positive that Hewitt can look at the work he’s done under those conditions and feel a sense of pride, but the fact that he has to cope with those harsh working hours is a stark reminder of the realities of the industry.
Despite these stories, Hewitt’s role at Modiphius,✨ where he currently works four days a week, has been flexible, and he has the freedom to apply himself in whatever way best befits his brain state each and every day. But first, as his mind is wanton to do, he paraphrases Stephen Fry.
titanicus
“There’s a thing that Stephen Fry said about depression,” Hewitt tells me. “It was like, ‘You can't change whether it rains, but you can take an umbrella.’ [...] If I'm having a day where my brain is not working in a particular way, I'm now much more able to recognise that and go, right, this is not a day for doing really in-depth spreadsheet [or] detailed work. I'm gonna go and make a prototype, or I'm gonna go and read some emails and feedback and you look at the 1,000 emails already in my inbox and go, ‘Oh, I'll dig through some of those,’ or whatever it might be.
“Knowing that it's a chemical imbalance in my brain, it's a thing that I cannot help, it gives me licence to not just go, ‘no, I need to do this thing today and push on through it and if I'm not, I'm failing.’ It's been so useful coming to terms with that.”
Hewitt describes his current design process as “🔴riding the wave” of his ADHD – riding the brainwaves, if you will. But, before his diagnosis, he found applying himself to work much more difficult.
“When I was working at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Games Workshop, I had no idea. All I knew was that some days it's really, really hard, and I would go home so frustrated, [thinking] I've done nothing useful today, and I'd lose sleep over it. It's this constant feeling of flipping. I think a lot of people with ADHD have gone through that, the feeling that you can never quite catch up, there's always too much stuff going on. And it never goes away, you just get used to carrying an umbrella.”
Hewitt is incredibly open about his experiences, both those positive and negative, but also praises Modiphius for allowing him the freedom to work in a way that helps him. There’s a reason for this, and he brings it back around to the tweet he saw years ago that opened his eyes to his own diagnosis. He wants to pay that forwardไ, to help other people who might be suffering under similar conditions, and to make it cle𝓡ar that you can succeed with ADHD. He’s a testament to that, if nothing else.
“I did a a while ago, [about] how I got diagnosed in the UK, and I still get people messaging me going, ‘Hey, I read that and I'm now on the thing, and I I've got this, thank you so much.’ And that's the best thing. The fact that I've helped someone figure out a little bit about themselves, that's better than any number of awesome game design things, whatever else I might have done, that's the winner.”
