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Taking Feedback
August 8, 2007 9:46 am
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.
Rahul wrote:
You seem to be drawing a connection between metrics and quality of minigame (in this example), but isn’t it true that often it’s not necessarily the minigame that sucks but perhaps the implementation of it in the context of the game? From that Bioware chart, if optional minigames are getting 0.00% attention, then perhaps they aren’t in the game in a way that is accessible/visible to players or even appealing. I can’t imagine the same process taking place at EAD on a Zelda project: in those cases, surely they would re-tweak the minigame so as to be more viable or better visible. After all, Zelda is all about optional minigames. Bioware games don’t really have that reputation, though.
Posted on 08-Aug-07 at 2:14 pm | Permalink
Darius K. wrote:
Amen to that. Metrics help you win arguments.
Rahul: obviously, the only thing that the particular chart shows is that nobody’s playing the minigames. It’s up to the designers to figure out why–which may involve slapping more metrics into the system! It is indeed important to understand what your metrics are saying and to not ascribe things to a dataset that it doesn’t actually say anything about.
Posted on 08-Aug-07 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
isildur wrote:
From my perspective, the advantage of a tool like that is not that it gives QA the ammunition they need to convince me something’s a real problem, it’s that it convinces me that there’s something other than personal preferences of QA at work.
I get a lot of suggestions for design changes from the whole team. I can’t really seperate ‘I don’t like X’ from ‘X is a bad idea’; both are presented equally sincerely, beause the things we don’t like seem like bad ideas.
But metrics that add ‘… and 90% of our players agree with me!’ go a long way towards getting me interested in the problem. Because otherwise, I can debate the merits of PvP experience gain all day long.
Posted on 09-Aug-07 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
J. wrote:
I do wish more game designers would think about how players are likely to react and behave, rather than base their work on how they’d like players to behave.
Is arrogance an essential asset to being a content designer?
Posted on 12-Aug-07 at 3:29 pm | Permalink
Wolfe wrote:
While I fully agree with you, and already implement a system whereby we look at what players / need / as opposed to what they say they want, I think the table in that particular example is particularly misleading.
I think an earlier poster is correct in saying that the data, the table, and the information surrounding these minigames needs to be better presented before making a determination. For example, I remember “Gems” from EQ; yes, the minigame was complete and utter poop, but I constantly ran across players who had never heard of it nor did they know how to access it.
I think direct feedback is even more important in a case like this. I’ve seen companies like Turbine and Blizzard directly ask the player base to go test out a feature and return to fill out a questionnaire regarding the feature in question. I certainly think a table like the one above should immediately spawn - at the very least - a request for more feedback from the player base. I think it’s going too far to draw any conclusions, though, before knowing the whole of the situation.
Again, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I just think this particular example was slightly misleading.
Posted on 13-Aug-07 at 2:16 am | Permalink
NateE wrote:
I absolutely agree that the example table given in the article can be initially misleading, but that does not mean it is not useful; like was mentioned, it simply needs to be better presented.
But that is an aside to the main point that QA needs to be allowed to give subjective feedback to the design team, assuming it is of course constructive. I think many crappy games could have been saved if QA had this oppurtunity along with the data to support them.
Perhaps too many developers believe QA to be disposable or simply “too negative” (both of which I have heard personally). This perspective is only accentuated by companies where QA happens to really be disposable which only engenders testers to have no personal interest in the game they are testing.
Posted on 15-Aug-07 at 4:44 pm | Permalink
Moorgard wrote:
“Is arrogance an essential asset to being a content designer?”
Only for those of us who are always right.
Posted on 17-Aug-07 at 10:08 pm | Permalink
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