Editorial: The Madness of Crowds

By Jeffrey Philipp | July 12, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Editorial, Editorials, Game Design

Ahoy there everyone, just wanted to take some time to talk about something that I’m sure a good number of people are going to disagree with. Namely, that the people who make the games we all play and hopefully enjoy are, in fact, professionals.

Now, if you happen to spend any time at all inside the communities and forums for any game that has anything that even resembles a fanbase, then you’ve almost certainly had to come across someone making a post insisting that the developers implement some asinine suggestion or another and claim that the only reason that they haven’t or wouldn’t was because they are lazy, and have no idea how a game should be designed.

You might have even been the person making that suggestion. If that happens to be the case I’d like you to steel yourself for a moment, because I’m about to say something that you probably don’t want to hear: You’re wrong. At least, in the general case.

Like any other situation there are some ideas that are in fact truly good and actually are worth implementing, in that they are well thought out and take the entirety of a game into consideration, but the average player suggestion is almost certainly best ignored.

It seems that somewhere along the line people forgot that the creators of these games do this for a living, and presumably only still have jobs because they’ve proved that they posses at least some rudimentary skill in the general skillset required.

I don’t want to make any claim that sounds like developers are omniscient super-intellects that can do no wrong, as in fact there have been a huge number of provable mistakes and poor decisions, but in the long run the fact that these games exist at all is proof that they have managed to do at least something right.

Even these mistakes are something worth taking into consideration as game makers are in the position to learn something from these mistakes, while in general the majority of players have absolutely no experience with developing software (even the ones who claim they do), or balancing complex systems.

I don’t mean to sound excessively hostile toward players, but I have been reading a lot of posts that claim “lazy design” recently, and that doesn’t sit particularly well with me, because I have nothing but respect for the difficult job that game makers have these days.

It’s no surprise that players have been demanding more and more as years pass from their games, and I think that they have absolutely every right to want improvement in the state of the art of their hobby; however the problem that I see is that they are not correcting their expectations for the geometric increase in complexity that comes with creating a next generation, or even current generation piece of software.

I honestly think that since the players have so little concept of the interconnectedness of these games, if even a tenth of the ideas suggested by players were implemented it would very quickly turn into inmates having the run of the asylum.

Another cause of this perceived issue is the simple fact that we, as players, are not playing a game of our own making, in our own image. It does become easy to forget that when so much time is spent invested in a character that we are enjoying a shared fantasy provided by a creator other than ourselves.

I think that some of these claims of lazy or inept design are merely statements of preference, without the people making these statements realizing it. It’s not a bad thing, we all have different preferences, and not every game can be perfect for us, so perhaps before we start denigrating the hard work of others we should perhaps step away from the keyboard and take an honest examination of our own expectations, it could be surprising what conclusions you come to.

I was listening to an interview with Paul Barnett once, and he suggested two very good thought experiments that I think might help showcase the difficulty of game design.

The first was a question: If you could change any rule in the game Tetris, what would it be, why would you choose that rule, and how would that improve the game?

The second experiment was to demonstrate the complexity of a simple game, and that was to write the design document for chess, just plain old chess. I’ve tried both of these, and even though I think with enough time I managed to get some satisfactory answers, let me tell you it was a great deal more difficult than I first anticipated, and those are simple game design questions.

That experience caused me to take a step back from my personal desires to see my characters lay waste to huge armies of mobs and realize that even the smallest change to the game can have some very far reaching, and almost always unintended consequences.

Having said all that, there is one area that I think developers should pay very close attention to when it comes to the suggestions of their customers and players: Quality of life.

We all play too much, or at least we did at one point, and it’s that exceptional amount of playtime that does give us the edge on the developers in this area.

User experience seems to have been given short shrift when it comes to software development in general, for almost as long as there has been software. It has improved greatly recently, with Apple coming up with good ideas for all the other software vendors to steal, but it hasn’t been enough. User interfaces and game interaction are still catching up.

There are games out there that have absolutely ludicrously bad user interfaces…. EVE comes to mind. The system throws reams of data at a new user immediately after logging in, and most of it isn’t even particularly pertinent.

This is the one place that I feel developers absolutely must listen to their players if they hope to have any sort of playable product at the end of the day, because we simply play their game more than they do. They may have the experience of working within the system, and they have a finer grasp of the balance of things (and they do), but we all know when you work that closely with something you see it a different way than anyone outside does, and it’s absolutely necessary that these problems are fixed in order to have something enjoyable come out in the end.

I do hope that there can be some discussion on this matter, because I know that I’m quite forgiving of designers, perhaps even when I shouldn’t be, and I love to have a good debate, so let’s hear what you guys think, and perhaps we can even try this whole crowdsourcing thing out with video game design.

Until next time!