Kotaku: "Five Things I Didnt Get About Making Video Games (Until I Did It)"
polycounter lvl 18
Thought this was an interesting enough article to post here:
Kotaku: Five Things I didn't Get About Making Video Games (Until I Did It)
After so many years in the industry, I started staying away from certain forums. The frothing hatred and vitriol of some gamers just wasn't worth it.
Kotaku: Five Things I didn't Get About Making Video Games (Until I Did It)
After so many years in the industry, I started staying away from certain forums. The frothing hatred and vitriol of some gamers just wasn't worth it.
Replies
(also it's nice to read someone on Kotaku being critical of the way journalists act towards devs!)
Yesterday, I was reading a ''The Order'' bashing thread on a french site and alot of the xbox players stated that their engine sucked and that iwas just a Unreal ripoff..Basically, Unreal is the one that started PBR ( a term they don't even know)according to them.
Another stuff is when they start criticizing visuals of the game with no understanding of the tech involved in it.
You know, woudn't it be great if the game reviewers themselves knew what game developping implied before making reviews?
For example, instead of having stuff like:
Graphics: 6/10 '' Even though XY game plays well and is colorful, the overall is ugly.''
I'd prefer stuff like:
Graphics: Fair '' Visually, the game isn't stunning but the studios crafted an engine capable of rendering dynamic radiosity which gives the game nice variants of color and brightness through the areas.''
The general public would still be super ignorant about the process and language of development.
Its the same problem the VFX industry has, everyone thinks its all one button pushed and its done, so the work is undervalued
im not pointing any fingers but he wrote "...one meaty title..."
(sarcasm)
actually the less they know the better i would almost say. otherwise they wont be the fresh eyes that can point out overlooked flaws, or rise the expectations on the medium.
heres a shitty analogy. i go to a resturant, and get shitty food. i complain, and get to talk to a manager that tells me, the chefs tried really hard but due to circumstances, they got the wrong vegetalbes delivered, a chef had a bad day and forgot to wash hands, two courses got mixed up during stress, etc ie the hardships of running a resturant.
to me all of this are irrelevant. the only thing that concerns me, is that i expected a good meal but didnt get one. no mather how hard someone tried, i will still choose another resturant the next time.
its the same with anything that is meant to sell and entertain a audience. an artwork or movie or game or something else, doesnt deserve a explaination to why it doesnt meet the audience approval. therefore extended knowledge about how the media was created is useless.
with that said, the dude in the kotaku article seems to have been a really shitty journalist calling people idiots. but lack of understanding about game development isnt the flaw here, lack of common sense is.
but, in the end it shouldnt affect our judgement of the product. the question "is this good or bad?" is different from "do i have sympathy with the creator of this product's struggle?"
EDIT: slightly offtopic, but maybe not: peter molyneux comes to mind. he offers a lot of excuses for his projects nowdays, which i think is excessive, since hes projects continues to fault in the same ways. let the product do the talking.
and lets not forget, the journalists and audience also acts wrong in the same way in my opinion. they judge hes games based upon the way he hyped them up, which i dont think is a very good messure of a games quality. again, let the product do the talking.
Actually, the whole entertainments media is kinda saturated and it's always hard for the artists/devs to get success because the consumer has plenty of choices.
It's not just with games but with movies, tv series, comcis and novels,animes and let's not forget the music industry.
Sure it's saturated but compared to other indisutry, it's not that bad (yet).
And despite what you think, we are quite lucky since gamers have different taste. Because of that, indie game with unusual tone and gameplay get success (Limbo, Minecraft, Hotline Miami). Compare that to the music industry and you realize indie musicians don't get that much success/recognition from their work.
Same goes for movie. European movies are often overlookd and ignored in comparison to American productions. However, in games, you have companies like CDProjekt (Poland) that managed to get the whole gaming world eye's on them with their upcoming release.
Edit: By the way, sooner or later there will be eventually a crash in the industry just like it happenned before during the E.T period. However, after we'll probably be back on our feet again and start anew for a new generation.
Whenever your console overheats, just reset it...
Yes and no. When was the last time you saw a well known food critic write something like. "Bobby Flay's new restaurant is a total piece of shit. What sort of idiot would do anything like this?"
On the other hand, you'll see tripe written by video game "critics" like this written for the bigger sites regularly. There is very little professionalism or credibility when it comes to video game review sites, which is a stark contrast to most other industries. There is often a fine line between games "journalism" and youtube comments.
Negative reviews aren't a problem, nor does every reviewer need to be an expert game designer. However, some professionalism, tact, and perspective would go a long way.
I know one too - confirmation bias.
The stuff in the article is quite basic, the fact that a professional video game critic (my assumption) doesn't know it before criticizing a video game is odd to me. Game development is at the bleeding edge of software development and yet many "gamers" are quite vocal about how they would approach development when they have no idea what that means.
It depends on the type of critic. There is a big difference between "this is a fun game and here is why" to "this development team made a mistake and here is why".
I completely disagree with the claim that "the less they know the better". If you're going to criticize game development (I am not just talking about how fun a game is) then you should have a rudimentary understanding of what you're criticizing.
The complexities of restaurant food is incomparable to technological development.
In the analogy you used the solutions were quite evident therefore you were able to reasonably criticize and give potential solutions (this is not how it's done in game development criticism). It's just not the same in development. Granted, if you were able to give proper steps to resolve issues being critical of then the analogy would be much more effective.
We would like to put ourselves above other businesses, but we're still making products and we more often than not try to put our plates on peoples tables hoping they don't notice we burnt the food.
From my own experiences game development is like a messy kitchen, even down to the very "too many chefs" aspect of making games.
I do think both are worthy critics. Reviews don't have to try to be positive as much as they don't have to try to be negative. '5 Reasons why Elder Scroll Online would flop' is as legit as '4 Reasons why Guild Wars 2 is awesome.' And I believe both have their places on the internet. Remember, each reader is also the reviewer of the review. If the review is crap, then we as readers ignore it.
Yea, I can totally see how it would feel that way.
I don't think one is better than the other. What I was trying to point out was that game development has a lot of problems that we have yet to find final solutions for. Things like human level AI, game engines, immersion (think VR) etc... These are some fundamental problems that are often criticized, but the solutions are simply a work in progress. That's why I think the analogy doesn't take into account the fact that the problems in game development are hard, ongoing, and lack easy answers (if any at all).
I feel like I am being a bit nitpicky, my apologies. People have made some great points in here. I think I've ran into too many emotional gamers who criticize development studios as if the studio has stolen their lunch money. Often times forgetting that they (the studios) are real people with feelings.
You know I was really going to have at the OP for posting this until I saw his avatar...:shifty:
Because posting a relevant discussion point in General Discussion is...not a good thing?