Using Criticism as a Game Designer

in #gaming5 years ago

One of the things that I think is important for a game developer is to understand criticism. Especially in the tabletop roleplaying field, there are a lot of examples of well-known designers not taking criticism well.

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Image courtesy of Pixabay.

And I think some of this is not entirely their fault, since there are certainly people who don't do a good job giving criticism, and giving criticism is as much as skill as taking criticism. When people don't give good criticism, you wind up in a state where you are pushed to be defensive, or where you grow too proud of yourself.

I broadly sort criticism into three sorts, based on the raw value of an individual piece of criticism. As with anything, the more criticism you get the better idea you have of the whole picture of how people will react, but generally what I classify as unproductive criticism will take a lot of material to get good feedback from.

Unproductive Criticism

The first of my three categories is unproductive criticism. This is the sort of criticism that everyone has seen from people who can't articulate well or don't care to. At the first glance, it's not productive in the slightest.

Unproductive criticism itself can be divided into two forms.

Hostility

The first is hostility. This is when someone sees something that someone else created and just decides to take a giant steaming crap all over it. Fortunately, relatively few people tend to be this over and their criticism. Unfortunately, people who have this sort of criticism style also tend to be very vocal about it. Generally, I don't suggest doing anything in response to hostile feedback.

The reasons for this are twofold.

First, you're not likely to make someone who has a hostile reaction to you change their mind. Most people of this sort don't like things and get emotional about it, and something about games attracts a fair number of these folks.

Second, unless all the feedback you get is sharply negative, all that you're doing is taking from something that you've made that people have enjoyed and changing it because of the people who don't seem to like anything.

There is a very rare chance that you may have made something that's of no value whatsoever and you should scrap everything and start over. Fortunately, if this is actually the case, you will probably also have someone who can voice this in a productive fashion and say that it didn't work for a particular reason, not just destroy what you have created.

Babble

The second general type of unproductive criticism is babble. This can be negative or positive, and in some cases it's fine if you're getting it as a review, but it doesn't give you actionable goals.

I generally prefer that people can explain what they like about my games, but people aren't always so articulate and sometimes enjoyment comes from more than what one easily communicate. Settle for the praise if it's good.

If babbling is negative, it's still useful. This is frustrating and difficult to deal with, since the reasons why someone didn't like your stuff are not obvious.

However, there's still something to be said for babble. If people are experiencing your game, and then they say that it was awesome or that it was boring you still get a certain amount of insight from just that basic approval or disapproval. It doesn't give you a specific action plan, but it does let you know if on the balance things work well or not.

In case anyone is curious, the most common form of babbling feedback in the modern day is the five star rating. Not the text that may accompany the rating, but the actual one-to-five star rating. It's low resolution, but it's also really easy to look at.

To take as much advantage of this sort of feedback as possible, simply see how many pieces of it are positive and how many are negative. Don't worry too much about the actual statements, since they may or may not find up carrying any relevance. If you do see a particular trend, that might work, but you generally want to focus on the small group of people who give really good criticism and only look for very large trends in the babblers.

Note: There are people who write reviews without really having knowledge of their subject. Figure out who these people are, and you'll know how to tell convincing babblers (ignorant reviewers) from warranted praise and thoughtful suggetsions.

Warranted Praise

A moderate form of feedback and criticism would be what I refer to as warranted praise.

I don't consider this to be particularly productive feedback, since it doesn't always help with any future improvement, but it's also not unproductive. It lets you know what you've done right so you can do again. There are occasions where this feedback is really valuable because it touches on something you didn't initially see, which is nice too.

One great thing about this is that helps you know what's done if you're receiving it as part of a playtesting process. If you get a lot of merited praise about something, meaning typically that people are able to explain why they like it, you know that you should leave it alone, or at least be conservative as you go about making "improvements" to it.

The one difficulty with earned praise is knowing when it's actually merited. Sometimes people will blather on in praise and sound more coherent than they are. This is where you need a gut check. If you know that you put a lot of effort into something, and you can corroborate the positive feedback, you're probably correct and identifying it as well earned praise.

Thoughtful Suggestions

The best form of criticism is the thoughtful suggestion. Note that this is not "I would have done it this way" or similar control freak statements. Sometimes it can take that form, but the distinction is that the suggestion respect what you have done. If there is one reason, it's probably not good feedback. If there are five, you can probably trust it.

The suggestion can be framed either positively or negatively, but you can treat the suggestion the same either way. Be careful with taking suggestions, since the reasons for changing need to be better than the reasons to stay the same. Don't forget that many people may be no more than casual observers of your work they may not have appreciated some of the consequences that you have already seen of alternative courses of action.

Likewise, with games you do occasionally get bad feedback because people get emotional about their performance. I can come up with a great reasons why my favorite video game classes and characters should receive an increase to their power. After all, I lose with them far more often than I ought to. That doesn't mean a game designer in their right mind would take my casual advice about their game. Not every reason given is a hallmark for a thoughtful suggestion. Look at means as well as ends, in particular. Performance results are great at helping with balancing the interactions between elements in a game, but they don't work well after the game's already finished and you're thinking about tweaking core principles of the design. Your result when you're done changing some things is going to be radically different.

Wrapping up

If you're a game designer, it's important to know what the core of your game is. This will help you ask questions that lead to constructive criticism, and also helps you interpret that criticism and figure out how to improve.

Often, the criticism that you receive will be paradoxical. You're looking for the problem that leads to someone being disappointed. Many players do not have the ability to express this or will pull punches to save your feelings, wrongly believing that earnest criticism is rude.

The important thing is to take your vision and figure out how to improve it using the reflection other people have seen. Identifying whether or not criticism is useful, and figure out how it applies to your game, is a vital step in this. Asking people for ideas without asking them for criticism is a great recipe for a confused soup of a game (too many cooks spoil the broth, after all) but with criticism you can refine down to core elements.

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My gf is an artist who creates youtube videos where she shows what she did to create the artworks and there it's the same.
There are many hmmm lets call them amateur critics who don't really know how to give good criticism (or don't know how to interact with other people in a good way in general xD).
It's good to ignore the unproductive criticisms but sadly it's not always that easy

Posted using Partiko Android

One of the things that I find is a mark of a poor critic is that they don't know what they're doing.
If you don't appreciate the fact that others have skill and invest effort in their work, you can't be a good critic.

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