The Games Industry Blob: part one
Re-reading my essay I can see why I got some of the reactions I did, since it does sound a bit more strident than what I usually write. I'm not going to clarify myself in detail; while the tone's buried in there somewhere, I think if the latter, more contentious part of what I wrote is informed in part by what I wrote earlier in the piece, it's fairly straightforward: criticism is OK as long as...
Re-reading my essay I can see why I got some of the reactions I did, since it does sound a bit more strident than what I usually write. I'm not going to clarify myself in detail; while the tone's buried in there somewhere, I think if the latter, more contentious part of what I wrote is informed in part by what I wrote earlier in the piece, it's fairly straightforward: criticism is OK as long as it's sensibly written, but at some point as a creator you have to actually focus on what you're creating, whether or not you are properly informed by others' input.
What I'm writing about now, though, is in response to the responses, since I think I was reminded of a lot of the forces that are at work in this whole games industry blob we all stick our hands in.
In a sense we have various factions that are trying to get what they want out of this blob, and this competitive, volatile environment winds up creating weird sorts of feedback loops that make what should be a simple interchange terribly complicated, often stressful, and a lot stranger than what one might imagine for what is, on the surface, just there to entertain. Feel free to help me fill in the blanks.
The Attention-Paying Array
On one extreme you have people who may not listen at all to what is said, or may not even hear from anyone even if they want input. They want to create a thing, for various reasons, and they do. You see this a lot, actually, in the independent designers, and they get away with it because, by and large, no one expects a whole lot from most of them. They could be a single person, perhaps writing Interactive Fiction for a contest, and have little to no fans to worry about displeasing.
The more popular a person or company gets, the more they will have input, either from opportunists wanting to get in on the action, or consumers who want to state their support, or make their demands. This leads into the huge developers, who often find themselves buried in input. These are the ones that tend not to have email addresses. If they have forums at all, they're usually crawling with mods and regulated. There is some self-policing, but as with forums in general it's down a lot to how the community comes together and the strength of individual personalities that dictate how open the forums are to criticisms and complaints.
Just about every company, from a garage-designer up to a corporation, is likely to be connected in some way to what's going on in the world, and no creator can say with a straight face that they don't build, at least in part, on what came before. Whether it's with software, hardware, or high-level concepts, game design is an ongoing conversation, both between the past and its failures and successes, and between the people who interact with the ongoing process in realtime.
How Input Might Influence Design
The more a company pays attention to what is said in general, some will argue, the better a game is likely to be. I'd say it depends too much on the quality of the criticism for that to be true, as well as the quality of the company's understanding of the valid of those observations.
I'm pretty sure no one is arguing that every criticism has to be taken with equal weight, and that sentiment was sort of implied in what I wrote: that not all thoughts are equal, and some are more reasonable than others. Some complaints, just because the project isn't expected to take literally forever, must be ignored for the game to be completed (lest they continually revise it until the end of time without ever testing and releasing it), others may not be giving the system as presented a fair shake (Denis Dyack aside, there are times when players do not take into consideration the full scope of a game system, you will see the endless debate about which class in an MMO is better, with each person absolutely convinced that their observation is correct).
Having seen the early 3D revolution that exploded after games like Doom, I watched perfectly good games suddenly become very ugly because game designers, convinced that 3D was necessary to catch user attention, moved away from what I considered to be one of the better gaming eras in favor of motion captured models, and often these (often clay) models wound up working their way into the other fad, full-motion video. Initially I loved the idea for a lot of games having this, but then I realized that as the market shrunk, this was pretty much what everyone was going to concentrate on. Game designs with 2D engines, no matter how good, were being ignored in favor of something supposedly 3D, even if it all it had was essentially 2D gameplay with a camera floating behind you that could get stuck in walls.
So not all consumer desires are right for a game, I'd say, because while they may be valid in themselves, being honest reactions to things they liked or disliked in other games, they don't necessarily fit for every game, or even the specific game that's being discussed. One could just as easily argue that it is a specific company's fault for paying too much attention to the trends of the current market: in my example above, maybe some of those game producers should have been a bit braver and just gone with their original 2D designs, rather than trying to retrofit 3D and full-motion video into a game that didn't need it. They were trying to up their target audience, to add to the list of features on the back of the game's box, but may have muddled what they were creating as a result. Users who gave honest input, many of whom wanted to see more 3D games, actually saw a version of what they wanted reflected in the final product, but that didn't mean that the game producers translated it into something that was actually much good.
And even making a decision to follow certain advice will alienate others; a games producer is unlikely to do two things at once as well as they could a single thing. You hear when certain big producers are selling their game, how you can program what each individual member of your party does and have an in-depth experience, or you can play it just as an action game. But when you think about it, doing less with the game and still getting a satisfactory result, why bother putting in a lot of specific commands to party members when it all sort of works out anyway? What extra things can you get out of doing it one way as opposed to another? Sure, both modes are functional, but it seems that the game really has one playing style, arguably somewhere in the middle, but they're trying to appeal, through marketing, to a wide variety of consumers who might hate the idea of one mode or the other.
Obviously, you can't please everyone.
If you compare this process to, say, film, you will find that film is a lot more secretive, and many people might actually like it that way. I actively avoid previews, of finished films even, if I'm pretty much determined to see it, but the basic filmmaking process is often by invitation only. The only filmmaking process that I know of that heavily involved fan input was The Lord of the Rings series, and I even indirectly knew (by many Kevin Bacon-like degrees) a person who was hired as a consultant on that film. But much more often there will be a bit of a black hole, with the odd promotional snippets and plugs, and then bam, there are previews and then reviews.
The games industry is often more open about the creation process, and as such there will likely be more people who have a venue for input much earlier on, often on the same website as the company currently making the thing. The cultures are very different, and computing has a long history of passing things on to the next qualified individual without worrying much about intellectual property (good examples are in this fun book), although that attitude is more embedded and obscure now than it used to be.
I think this partly feeds into the difference in fan reaction to a game in progress as opposed to a film, which helps make general comparisons people sometimes make between film and games industries to feel a bit suspect. Input is often expected, and sometime even encouraged, but there's no general consensus just how this is supposed to work, what should be paid attention to, what really matters for a given game, or what good, in the end, it might do. The examples are all over the map, but at some point, I still believe, a game maker has to make final decisions, charge ahead, and finish the fucking thing.
The End Result, Assuming There Is an End
Eventually the game has to be made, and when I say made I don't just mean on paper, or even fully written in code. One of the things that bugs me most about the malleability of game design in the internet age is how easy it is for a company to put out an incomplete product, even on consoles now. I call such software the beta you pay for the privilege of testing.
Having experienced both PC and console games for a large part of my life, the contrast was initially pretty clear. PC games became the first to be relatively easily patched, because you could download a patch from a website to fix bugs, assuming the company had the resources to continue working on a game once it was released (not all did, even well-meaning ones). This isn't to say that console games didn't have bugs; apart from some famous problems, a good number of games, even the very old 2600 games, had their share of quirks, if not outright bugs.
No matter what a creator puts into a game, if the game doesn't even function right they've breached, what I think at least to be, a pretty basic covenant between buyer and producer: if you pay money for something, it should fucking function as intended, whether or not I happen to be pleased by the game's aesthetics. Thus you get my rants about Elder Scrolls games breaking me down a bit, because despite all the nice content, I was often punished for wanting to see it because the game engine decided to throw up on its shoes.
Input at this point is crucial, and arguably the most important since it has to do with a product that is supposedly fully realized, but it's also, in a sense, too late. People have already bought the thing, a thing they expected to work, and now they are unwittingly involved in trying to fix it. With PC games, where the platform is often very different from machine to machine, some of this is pretty much going to happen, especially the more complicated a game is, but even with PCs there is often a basic level of compatibility which is expected.
Multi-player Online games seem to be some of the bigger offenders in this, especially those with ongoing subscriptions, as many producers have seen fit to release products that weren't really complete experiences-- one is often expected to wait a while before things get good. I'm tempted to not even talk about them, since to me they exist in a parallel universe where nothing is ever complete until enough people give up on it, and patches are pretty much expected, as are server updates and other events that prevent you actually playing the game you're paying for. Yet the investment in these things is pretty huge when you look at it in the broadview, so it's hard to ignore.
Aside from those users who have basic game functionality problems, players who complain because of specific design elements, many of whom I referred to obliquely in the previous essay, fall into several categories I may talk about later, and these include people who, beyond having a right to vent, are not only unlikely to influence future design, but sometimes come across as some of the epithets I used before.
The Cycle Folds back in on Itself
Can such input affect patches, or future games in a given series? Maybe.
Sometimes a fix that seems logical and simple to us on the outside can be uncompromisingly complicated given the structure of the software as it already exists. This is largely down to the integrity of the code itself, how flexible it is, and how it interacts with the given hardware, be it console or personal computing platform. I'm willing to bet some coders actually write themselves into corners, where something they thought wouldn't be a big deal suddenly becomes one, many months of work later, and the pressure by users, producers, and promoters will often complicate this: should I just put out something that works, barely, like we said it was going to, or should we announce a major change or delay?
Not everyone is a fan of delays, and they can certainly be disappointing when you were looking forward to a specific release, but I tend to think of it as good news when a delay is announced. That doesn't mean it is being done for reasons that will result in better code, since it could be done purely for market strategy, or could be a sign that the game company is going to collapse or the project is in trouble. Demands for a game to come out now, rather than later, tend to be ones I don't have much sympathy for, though, since more time invested sometimes (though clearly not always) makes for a better game.
Sometimes user ideas for a sequel, beyond it being a bit dangerous to repeat exactly for fear of being sued for stealing intellectual property, will not take the game in a direction that the company wants to go, whether their reasons are purely commercial or at least have some semblance of aesthetics or interest in new structures. Ultimately, again, the game makers have to decide what stays and what goes, since games are, hopefully, more than just a list of features.
If I continue this feature, I hope to go into more potential complications in how I perceive this tangled mess that is the games industry. Until then, have a better one :)