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"Lessons I learned switching from games journalism to development"
- Thread starter OCD Guy
- Start date
Great thread. As an architect, I know what it is to work on something for years and how many times you're set back by any number of reasons and forced to go back to the drawing boards or make concessions you wished you hadn't to. Designing good stuff is hard and expensive.
This would apply a lot to locked animations or long ones that were clearly meant for accuracy. See every red dead redemption 2 thread
Yes. This just gives perspective and hopefully means we can be less angry about games not meeting our standards.
Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've said here which is why I specified "almost always." There's definitely a lot of people out there who don't know what really works in game design but a lot of indie devs I know who are serious about what they do are willing to keep trying and trying again through various playtests until they get something that works, even if it often means completely redoing their game to accomodate new features or design philosophies. I've played many early builds of some indie games made by acquaintances and I try to be as honest as possible about what does or doesn't work and their response usually shows how important their game is to them. It's hard to take criticism for some people but anyone who really wants their game to be a good example of quality usually goes and adapts things based on the feedback. Definitely not always though, many games still fall through the cracks due to burnout or other things. I agree with Pokemon Sword/Shield. Developers managed to make something good with the time they had but it was a case in which higher ups definitely got in their way and restricted them from making something that they really wanted to be much larger.
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Coming from software development... yeah, im ofthen bafled how bling coleagues or friends in their jobs are to stuff that is obvious for me (like, im more focused on UX stuff compared to 2 friends...that work on a small mobile game engine... and make mobile apps and some small games. When i question and say that an aspect is hard to understand, or see, or stuff...they try to find explanations why its okay that way, instead of understanding that an outsider does not see it the same way, and wont have the weeks of experience with the game so that its clear what interactions are possible (especially when they are never mentioned...).
Or menues tht do nothing, or popups of errors that when you say okay just pop up again, since the connection is still not established, and so forth...
Yeah, a lot of tech people are kinda in their own world when they develop.
On the other hand: having the ambition and knowledge to start developing a game is already a natural filter for people that have some kind of awareness what they are doing, or they would not have come that far.
And with pokemon: thats the reason why i dont want to remove the franchise from gamefreak... i see there is some passion there, but as long as the upper suits stay the same, and i have read enough interviews with masuda, the games wont show their true potential. He is rather conservative with the franchise, and the vision he has is... rather basic, so untill they have others up there, the franchise is done for me.
if anything it should make critics more comfortable saying "this sucks"
Reviewers need to remember that their responsibility lies with the consumer, not the developers. They should be honest and they shouldn't be assholes about it. They don't exist to help developers fix their games, they exist to help consumers make informed decisions (and usually, to entertain their readers). They should be considerate of the real talent that went into making a game, but that's it.
i agree. he tweets as if it is useless for journalism to exist. "The developers know this stuff, so why talk about it"
OK???? Game journalism isn't FOR developers, is it?
Killer analysis? Give me a break. It's not like they are stating on the box "These features suck, sorry folks." They're hoping people don't notice or care.
Tbh the twitter thread in the OP seems to conflate proper reviews with twitter dunks. And in his defense, journalists are way too up their own ass with the latter.
But more to the specific point, "this sucks" feedback also goes into a larger loop that extends beyond the specific developer or title that is the subject of the review.
I have no doubt that ill-received features have been cut from not-yet-released games based on poor reception of titles that are out in the wild.
WIthout criticism I would've bought a decent number of games I'd end up regretting. For real, I've saved money because the opinions of other human beings exist.
Hum you can see developers praising tools a lot on GDC talks. Generally the talks are about things they themselves developed, but shared praise is not uncommon.
"I don't care that it hurts people because I know I won't ever be on the receiving end" is a pretty shitty way to understand empathy.
It depends on the reviewer. Some write reviews of bad games to inform the consumer. Others write to dunk on the game.
That's the inner circle, the people in the know. Try saying it on twitter? On Game Award acceptance speech? Share some spotlight?
I agree with you on this. Like, I get it. Making games and putting out your stuff out there is tough. Once your baby is out there is it now subject to criticism and to be honest, the amount of effort, reasons and whatnot some decisions were made does not matter in the end. I get that as someone that has worked the other end he would appreciate somethings a lot more because you have been through the mud but that doesn't change the outcome of the product.
As someone who genuinely does not give 2 shits about 99% of reviews on anything out there I would not care about most people's views on a game other than myself. And with the ease of being able to try/see games in action before purchasing don't even see a need for them much less get why people search for them other than some validation of some sort after they have already made the decision to purchase anyway.
But that's just me and I guess some people like them for something and in turn they still hold some sort of meaning and some trust certain folks out there I get that. But that's a topic for another time. My point being that idk how much does a review have weight in the days of Fortnite, LoL and a bunch of indie darlings and games that get sold like gangbusters yet it's public never read a review or cared much about journalist criticisms for it. I just don't see most NBA2k players or Cyberpunk customers caring about any journalism related to the games before hitting the buy button for devs to really cry about criticism killing their game.
The problem (as far as criticism these days) games have are mostly related to the actual nature of today's gaming landscape with games being able to take care of a lot of things that were awful before. I'm playing No Man's Sky for the first time this year and I'm having a wonderful experience on a game that has been over the years carefully refined. When you fix what others gripe about on games like this one and Fallout 76 (I have not tried this one yet ) and people are still hating then yeah. You learn that some people just want to tear your creation down and that's pathetic to say the least.
As for reasons for including bad content there are so many to even name in all forms of media, from books to movies and music. Ever heard a awful track on an album? There is a reason for it, doesn't make things better in any way.
Social media has had an extremely deleterious effect on how people discuss any form of popular media, but particularly games because of how extremely online the audience can be. So when media is released the yawning void of low-vocabulary hot takes is out there like it's some kind of race or game to see who can coin the shortest, smarmiest shitpost first. Era is no exception here, especially now during top 10 listicle season and everyone under the sun having at least two opinions about what games outside their favorites deserve. It's extremely depressing to watch how folks only engage at a superficial 'shit/fave' binary level with something they'd otherwise claim they want covered as art. Gather enough of these shitty takes at velocities common on a 30k+ membership platform and yeah I see devs start to take it kind of personally and find sites like Era indistinguishable from 4chan/reddit.
The solution really is to just intelligently and empathically engage with the media you consume. Be critical of systems, decisions and other details that detract from the quality of your experience, but think before burping out an ill-thought out take like 'lazy devs' or 'no testing.' Sometimes extremely talented people work very hard for very long and still can't satisfy you. Bad games exist. But if you can't find your own unique perspective on it beyond predictable Semiliterate Crappy Online Anger then you're disappointing the very notion of global online discourse.
The solution really is to just intelligently and empathically engage with the media you consume. Be critical of systems, decisions and other details that detract from the quality of your experience, but think before burping out an ill-thought out take like 'lazy devs' or 'no testing.' Sometimes extremely talented people work very hard for very long and still can't satisfy you. Bad games exist. But if you can't find your own unique perspective on it beyond predictable Semiliterate Crappy Online Anger then you're disappointing the very notion of global online discourse.
Actually my job requires that I receive near constant critisms at time so I completely understand how crushing it can be but even having said that I completely understand that as much as it hurts and as much as I'm well aware of the issues within the games, when I say this product is ready to be consumed , I am inheritly opening up myself to criticism both internally and externally. And whilst it's always nice to have understanding from the end users/consumers , ultimately it's up to them to decide whether the product is worth their time.
Now natually this all depends whether the critism is valid and the tone people take. If someone's a dick, you have no obligation to listen to them. But the sicophantic nature of the game journalist/influencer culture we have to makes it very unlikely that games journalists will be harsh with their critisms. Which is why I would say fan feedback with said "killer analysis'" will always be a lot more useful.
It doesn't really make sense to talk about tooling in an environment that's not specialized in the first place. It's like that in every industry. Doesn't mean developers aren't candid about praise or other criticism in the correct context. And the reality of third party tools not working as intended or presenting their own limits to what you're making is no less true regardless of whether developers are open about it or not. As a software developer myself, third party tools are always a bit of a gamble and we're not always in a position to help in their development as much as we'd like.
But i guess if you're just trying to a reason to put the blame on whoever you want, the actual lived truth of development probably doesn't matter that much to you anyway, so.
It's all about how the criticism is conveyed to the consumer by the critic, honestly. It should be pretty obvious, right? There's a difference between saying "This shit sucks!" and "Here's the issues I have with point a, b, c, etc." You can be critical without being a complete asshole.
Well, the writer gives an example where he himself called the artist of a game "drunk and blind". This isn't about "this game is bad", this is about publicly humilliating the devs for laughs and edge when they most often have no say on the state a game is released in.
Yeah that line really rubbed me the wrong way.
Granted, I'm slightly biased because I was a critic for nearly a decade.
EDIT: That said, the additional context the poster provided helps.
At what point though, do we start taking ourselves so seriously that nothing is palatable? If I read an album review where someone claims the producer was tone-deaf, I don't come away with the idea that the producer was actually deaf, nor do I think the reviewer is trying to personally humiliate the producer either. My understanding from that review is that the album sucks so bad in the opinion of the reviewer, that any honest criticism would be such a boring read that it might as well not exist, so the reviewer has spiced up his language in order to salvage some entertainment out of the entire situation.
It sucks to be a developer working on a shitty game, but it's still the entertainment industry. Nobody at CAPCOM is curing cancer and we shouldn't treat their products with that amount of seriousness. There are obviously lines that shouldn't be crossed, just as in any situation involving real people, but it isn't like things are assumed to be personal in this context.
Interesting, did you, by any chance, read the OP? I, as a consumer, just want to blame the dev, who took my money. And exactly who, wanted to shift the blame to "whoever you want"?
Actually looking through his tweets he is listing the points he has learnt while going through the transition so good on him for learning some empathy . But you actually raise another interesting point there , how do you know the difference between a time constraint decision, a decision from upstairs and an actual artistic decision?
The lead up to any game release it's never communicated what's what cause any negative thing you say about the game can effect hype. This leads to scenarios where you have to assume that the glaringly obvious flaw is a deliberate design decision and you have to criticize based on that. Unfortunately short of developers being more open with flaws prior to release I don't see this changing.
I think a lot of people are getting hung on that quote and misinterpreting it. He's not saying reviewers or even players shouldn't say "this part sucks"; of course the customers need to know, and shit needs to be called out. He's saying 95% of the time, the developers are well aware that this part sucks, so calling the devs clueless about what parts of their own game are bad (and let's not act like that's not a thing that happens all the time) is not just petty, but factually wrong. You can criticise a product without insulting the people that made it. He's saying the answer to "how could the devs be so dumb as to miss this doesn't work?" is, more often than not, "they aren't, and they didn't".
Further, he explicitly says the thread in general is aimed at consumers, not reviewers:
Caveat: This is intended as a summary of my personal lessons, mostly for the benefit of consumers, rather than some obnoxious guide for game critics, so sorry if it came off that way to some. Professional critics are doing an excellent job (which is why I pay them regularly)
See above; inasmuch the thread applies to you as a reviewer (which is very little, as it's aimed at consumers), your job indeed shouldn't involve speculating about the reasons why something or other is bad, just telling consumers that it's bad. The point is precisely to stop assuming the blame always lies on incompetent or clueless devs. Which, again, is more of an issue with consumers, especially now that the age of edgy game journalism is mostly a thing of the past.
You? Instead of thinking "the blame might be shared" or "developers sometimes don't have a choice", you instead tried to justify blaming the people you want to blame. I think that counts as wanting to blame whoever you want and dismissing an alternative way of thinking.
The thing I learned from game development : That idea you have, that magnum opus that you want to work on? That amazing idea that has been brewing in your head for the past 5 years waiting for the chance to become something?
Yeah, here's a 3rd of the budget, half the time you need and upper management will randomly pop in and tell you to change something because their kid is offended by the colour blue. Also you have to stay back another 7 hours after your shift because the intern broke a character rig he wasn't meant to touch.
Yeah, here's a 3rd of the budget, half the time you need and upper management will randomly pop in and tell you to change something because their kid is offended by the colour blue. Also you have to stay back another 7 hours after your shift because the intern broke a character rig he wasn't meant to touch.
Yeah I noticed that after my last post.
Oh well. Maybe I'm just too accustomed to the gaming community and their "Critics ain't shit" mentality.
If you don't share the glory of triumph, you can't share the blame of failure.
Where do we draw the line between harmless ribbing and insulting, indeed? That's an ages-old question that everyone has to answer for themselves. Your line is certainly bound to be in a different place than mine, given your position that game development isn't "serious work" like "curing cancer", so devs are fair game for public mocking.
There are ways to speculate on why something is bad without doing a bad job speculating though. A smart, experienced journalist could look at the amount of development time & money spent on a project, compare it to similar projects, and make inferences about why something didn't work out. Or they could look at a design choice, and make some assumptions as to what led to that choice, and then argue their opinion on why a different choice would have been better in the end. Even if the journalist isn't privy to the several hours of meetings, prototypes, etc., that led to that choice, if the final product leaves the reviewer scratching their head about a design decision, the feeling will likely also be shared by some portion of the general audience and thus is worth discussing.
Game development is hard work, yes, but it's not so impenetrable that journalists can never hope to understand it at a very high level an incorporate that into their writing and reviews. I think the take-away is to approach these kinds of questions/speculation thoughtfully and in a way that makes the player think about the game in a different way than they might if they had just come away with a frustrating experience.
Why are you writing that like I don't know that's your argument. Maybe you're the one who's not reading.
Nah you're twisting it. I didn't say video game development isn't serious work, I said we shouldn't take it so seriously that we forget that it's entertainment.
And what does "not forgetting that it's entertainment" entail, exactly? If you've made any other argument for how it's relevant other than "it's fine to insult entertainment professionals for humor", I must have missed it.
Consumers should never assume that Devs are clueless but here you are asking that they make the opposite assumption that they are aware of the issueand there is a good decision why it was ignored. Granted the benefit of the doubt is always a good place to be but remember that has to be more often than not earned.
I agree with the larger sentiment of dont always assume malice or incompetence and don't insult for the sake of it. But if a developer makes a decision that I can only perceive as incredibly dumb, I have no compunction saying that the choice was incredibly dumb until they clarify on why the decision was made( which again they won't most likely ever explain until a leak happens).
That's not how tools work. If I buy an oven, I expect it to work. I'm not going to defer to it the praise I get for my cooking, but I'm not going to take the blame if it blows up while I'm making dinner, either.
I'm confused about your logic here. You also said in another post that developers "can't share the blame of failure." The guy on Twitter has the answer in the tweet you quoted: they don't blame anyone publicly. Sometimes they can't even say anything due to NDAs.
And I mean, nothing is stopping you for blaming devs for 3rd party stuff. But just know you're likely pointing your finger towards the wrong person or company in these cases.
I'm saying that entertainment is subject to all sorts of discussion, from high level analysis to outright mockery. And, as long as it's not coming from a place of obvious intent to harm, it's fine.
Rottentomatoes probably contains a lot of discussion about Speilberg which is unfair to him and doesn't acknowledge the challenges he was up against when he made Jaws, but I also don't want to live in a world where people are so polite that they won't say something like "Well that movie sucked and the guy who made it doesn't know the first thing about sharks. The actors are all boring and the sound guy was asleep."
The effort we put into our personal criticisms of something often reflects the amount of time we spent thinking about the thing in the first place. When the "thing" is entertainment, it's just a reality that a lot of people are going to have short, mostly uninformed, shallow opinions, and sometimes that comes in the form of mockery. To me, that's fine.
edit: Just making it clear this is just a random example. I love Jaws!
I'm not asking anything of anyone; I'm just explaining what the twitter thread is about (as opposed to people's interpretation that it's directed towards reviewers). You are free to assume a development decision was the result of incompetence or whatever else you want; the thread just highlights, from the point of someone actually involved in game development, how this assumption will be false most of the time. What you do with this knowledge is up to you.
This will always be a problem in an environment where:
1) the pricing model is largely more expensive and enthusiast-driven than other media, so you're self-selecting a market of customers who rightly or wrongly have increased expectations in many instances
2) the current form of social media has made all participants in it a brand unto themselves, creating a market incentive for self-righteous attacks on "worthy" targets in the take economy
3) Users are sourcing "critique" from amateurs on Twitter/YouTube, not professional critics, and these models do not incentivise measured analysis
4) the games industry itself constantly panders to design by checklists and the novelty of increased realism/spectacle, and therefore trains consumer expectations accordingly
You can see elements of this emerging in other mass media like film, where the industry is shifting towards pandering to enthusiasts to drive engagement on social platforms, while also spinning various plates to avoid any kind of social media backlash against the cast or crew ahead of release.
1) the pricing model is largely more expensive and enthusiast-driven than other media, so you're self-selecting a market of customers who rightly or wrongly have increased expectations in many instances
2) the current form of social media has made all participants in it a brand unto themselves, creating a market incentive for self-righteous attacks on "worthy" targets in the take economy
3) Users are sourcing "critique" from amateurs on Twitter/YouTube, not professional critics, and these models do not incentivise measured analysis
4) the games industry itself constantly panders to design by checklists and the novelty of increased realism/spectacle, and therefore trains consumer expectations accordingly
You can see elements of this emerging in other mass media like film, where the industry is shifting towards pandering to enthusiasts to drive engagement on social platforms, while also spinning various plates to avoid any kind of social media backlash against the cast or crew ahead of release.
As someone who has worked at quite a few different levels of Game Dev, thought I'd throw in some thoughts:
Disagree with this. Some devs (note: not all) are so knee-deep in their project that they refuse to accept any criticism of it, literally (sometimes) throwing player feedback out the window and/or playing down problems in their game. This extends to QA too, where game-breaking issues are marked as "QA bugs" where the greater public finds it and it was not fixed until the devs are tarred and feathered on social media for releasing a game with such a broken bug in it.
So yea, don't agree. The amount of feedback you get about features, through both reviews and messages, is also invaluable when planning for the future.
Absolutely FUCK blaming middleware & partners for your game's problems. If you are the lead studio on a game, its your job to lead the project and make sure it is done properly. Blaming externals partners just leads to moments where teams do not take ownership of their mistakes and, even worse, blame their outsourcing partners who have employees that make a whole $9 an hour for shit that they had no control over. I actually find that entire line of thinking quite gross to be honest.
Not entirely wrong about boxed copies of games being done in advance, but how far in advance is up in the air. Sometimes its months before, sometimes its weeks before.
The first part of this is true: Planned DLC and features are cancelled all the time due to cost or difficulty getting them to work. It's a natural part of game development. Proper QA work (and cert testing, among other things) is expensive! Budgets need to be carefully planned and sometimes you really have to stretch your dollars to get things out the door.
Nobody sets out to make a bad game, that is true. There are some (rare) games that are just contractual obligations but even then, devs (in general) would love to make a great thing if they could. Budgetary restrictions, publisher restrictions, and a whole bunch of other things are real issues that need to be carefully managed because they both, directly and indirectly, hurt product quality.
Constructive feedback is always better than rage. That doesn't mean that rage has no value, its just that rage is a lot harder to qualify and quantify than actual written feedback done in a proper manner.
Disagree with this. Some devs (note: not all) are so knee-deep in their project that they refuse to accept any criticism of it, literally (sometimes) throwing player feedback out the window and/or playing down problems in their game. This extends to QA too, where game-breaking issues are marked as "QA bugs" where the greater public finds it and it was not fixed until the devs are tarred and feathered on social media for releasing a game with such a broken bug in it.
So yea, don't agree. The amount of feedback you get about features, through both reviews and messages, is also invaluable when planning for the future.
Absolutely FUCK blaming middleware & partners for your game's problems. If you are the lead studio on a game, its your job to lead the project and make sure it is done properly. Blaming externals partners just leads to moments where teams do not take ownership of their mistakes and, even worse, blame their outsourcing partners who have employees that make a whole $9 an hour for shit that they had no control over. I actually find that entire line of thinking quite gross to be honest.
Not entirely wrong about boxed copies of games being done in advance, but how far in advance is up in the air. Sometimes its months before, sometimes its weeks before.
The first part of this is true: Planned DLC and features are cancelled all the time due to cost or difficulty getting them to work. It's a natural part of game development. Proper QA work (and cert testing, among other things) is expensive! Budgets need to be carefully planned and sometimes you really have to stretch your dollars to get things out the door.
Nobody sets out to make a bad game, that is true. There are some (rare) games that are just contractual obligations but even then, devs (in general) would love to make a great thing if they could. Budgetary restrictions, publisher restrictions, and a whole bunch of other things are real issues that need to be carefully managed because they both, directly and indirectly, hurt product quality.
Constructive feedback is always better than rage. That doesn't mean that rage has no value, its just that rage is a lot harder to qualify and quantify than actual written feedback done in a proper manner.