Evidence-Based Design

Gamasutra has a brief article on production-phase metrics for single-player games at Bioware. I don’t know how true this is of the rest of the industry, but it sounds like theirs is driven by QA, rather than design.

Ideally, QA should feel comfortable giving subjective design feedback to the team — walking across the office to tell the designer that the new minigame sucks. Unfortunately, designers aren’t always willing to listen. Walking across the office with a printout of this chart could be more successful.

That kind of stupid designer pride leads them to be unwilling to back metrics initiatives or to listen to community feedback. Grow up and take advantage of the tools available to you — they make your job easier.