Bill Hader said, "When someone doesn't like your writing. They're often half right. You need to change what they don't like but do it YOUR way" Best creative advice.
"Valid - Having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent (clear, logical, and convincing)." Feelings are the exact polar opposite of "valid." This is one of these Post-Modernist "objective truth isn't real" philosophies that has been maliciously snuck into common parlance so people don't even realize what a backwards idea they're endorsing. When these philosophies say "your feelings are valid," they are literally and explicitly making the argument that "individual feelings are more important than logic." EDIT: They are explicitly saying, "having a feeling" is just as logical and rational as a statistical analysis or concrete evidence.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat It has nothing to do with Post-Modernist logical nonsense. It's a quote referring to, and responding to those who believe their feelings outweigh objective fact just because they disagree with it.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat ...Calling someone out for acting on their emotions, especially when those emotions are spawned from false information, is not "post-modernist". That's normal fucking behavior. It's called having integrity. It's called holding someone responsible for their irrational behavior. The entire concept behind post-modernism is the disagreement with major ideologies and common theory. Being a post-modernist doesn't make you delusional. It's completely unrelated. You're just using buzzwords to look intelligent.
I remember Bill Hader mentioning a similar thing ruclips.net/user/shortsNHHZSNw9J2o?si=PIHfj1IFLv8XJjtp [Edit: Link doesn't shortcut ;-;] "When people tell you something feels wrong, they're usually right. When they start telling you what you should've done, they're usually wrong", more or less.
@@Webberjosometimes not even that. I know a few developers who took "listen to the community" as "do everything the community wants" and removed features, only to then be begged to put them back in because it turned out that was what most people enjoyed about the game, they just got angry and thought the feature was the reason. The community is full of people who know what they want and don't want, but it's also full of people who don't know either, and it's up to the developer to actually understand and test feedback.
"They did this to bump up game time" It takes a very well adjusted person to look at that and interpret what is actually being said "This part is boring and a needless waste of time to the point that it made me feel like there must be another reason for it being there because it clearly isn't fun"
@@bencastor9207 The irony is that when you ask people to give "constructive" feedback and or "thought out" critique the result is that the most cooperative individuals will end up overthinking their problems and end up giving the wrong informatuon you need. Because they DON'T know what is wrong, as you said. But now they feel obligated to give a reason for why they feel bad about something, even if that reason is not what they actually feel. Whereas if you had just told people to share their first impressions, emotional response and overall feelings about something that's the purest and most honest response you're going to get. Of course, if some could actually put their frustrations into words you'd be missing out on that but the tradeoff is you'd be able to get a ton more data from a wider base. But yeah. 10 people saying "this part made me feel so bad that the dev must have nefarious purposes" is worth much more than 1 philosophical breakdown of how your approach fails to consider the emotional character development or something like that. Not that that isn't useful as well
@@bencastor9207i dont think devs have really put the responsibility on us. in my opinion i think thats just a common human thing we put on ourselves. if we dont have a reason for believing or feeling something then it must ne wrong. so we meed to grab at or find any reason to justify it. even if that feeling is well placed like the criticsm of the maze being boring. we still want to reach for a reason to say so without fulling knowing why. and i think thats just a issue we put on ourselves. not really being enforced by anyone else. since no one is stopping you from just leaving a review saying "thougjt the dark maze was boring" its kinda just a personal responsibility we feel to justify why to ourselves.
You know, reading this helped me finally put the finger on why I liked certain fetch quests over others. When, in the process of doing a fetch quest, I get to learn more about the game world, its mechanics, or discover entertaining side lore and characterization, I find it fun. In a very literal sense, the journey is the reward over the actual task to be completed. When this is _not_ present e.g. the reward is loot and not much else, fetch quests feel like padding and stuck in the game to artificially create 100% completion
@@BenRangelWell... yes and no. Critic can be referring to professional critics, but more often than not in the gaming industry, we're talking about people who are critical of the product with connotation that they're doing so unjustly or excessively.
thats kind of a different issue. writing a story is more like true art because its one of the types of art thats least rule-based. its more subjective than programming a game. this is just my opinion, anyway. am i right?
Yet when you make a change, they assume their reasoning was correct and still continue touting complete nonsense, using the fact that you made a change as proof they are correct. I wish people simply said “I don’t find this fun, but am not sure how to explain why I feel that way”, instead of making up outlandish nonsense.
@@joao34386 Who cares? Do you make changes to make the product better or are you deeply invested in making sure that one guy doesn't feel validated? This is a problem with media literacy broadly, not an issue with a few bitchy apples.
7 Days to Die wouldn't be the clusterfuck it is if the developers actually followed this logic. They have the worst player to developer communication I have ever seen. Yes, even worse than Blizzard. They openly and publicly shit on their own player base.
@@Mooshkajoe > They have the worst player to developer communication I have ever seen. Yeah? Go pay attention to DICE and the Battlefield franchise. Literally every time the fanbase says "this is too much like CoD, stop trying to turn BF into CoD; if we wanted CoD, we'd play CoD," the next game feels even less like retro Battlefield games and more like the last years' latest CoD game.
sure, but also: sometimes it's a vast minority. sometimes they're in a bad mood. sometimes they're just wrong. the customer was right about their experience, and that's about it. still is up to the dev to figure out whether they were right about the game enough that they speak for a lot more people than themselves. you aren't going to please everyone.
A film producer once told me that every time someone gives you a note, their solution to your script's problem is probably wrong. But, the fact that they got caught on something means you need to fix what it was that made them write the note.
As someone who may or may not have gotten lost in the dark maze somehow due to sheer stupidity whilst recording the entire showcase of my lack of IQ, I am relieved
I've got a degree in game design, and in school this is something they absolutely hammered into us. Playtest, get feedback, make adjustments, playtest again, and then playtest some more. If something isnt working for your players, change it. If something unexpected lets them do cool stuff that you hadnt intended for, figure out how to keep it from actually breaking the game, and embrace it. No plan survives first contact, if/when your original plan isnt working, keep the parts that do work, change the rest.
This is good advice for other creative disciplines as well. The idea of my book isn't the same book I ended up writing in the end, but I'm still stoked about the end result.
Mate. As someone who lives in Reality, The Universe, trust me: they are *NOT* teaching "playtest, get feedback, make adjustments, playtest again" in schools. I can't take five fucking steps without stepping in some AAA company's fuckup that could have been avoided by literally playing the game at all and discovering the problem. If they were teaching what you say they are teaching in schools, these problems would not exist.
@@GreyMariaStrange blanket statement to make. Have you not considered how superiors' control over project development (budgeting + deadlines) affects the amount of time and number of opportunities studios have to playtest? Just because you encounter some issues does not entail that they have not playtested and not resolved other issues.
While this is great advice, to be completely honest, I miss games from the time when there was not such a thing as a degree in video game design. Games feel like they're designed by a committee and follow a bunch of checklists with very little deviation. A lot of games out there feels very samey and soulless. If it wasn't for a few holdouts in the industry and the explosion of independent studios and creators, I'd probably abandon gaming as a hobby by now...
@@Micromation Promise you that was not the aim our school went for. Truth be told, some parts of the whole thing felt a bit lacking in focus and 4 years is entirely too short to get a proper education in art, programming, programming but in an engine, 3D modeling, animation, story writing, level design, actual conceptual game design, sound design and whatever else I'm missing, but it was definitely not aimed at the whole "design by commitee" kinda stuff. Our teachers were very much pro weird unique stuff rather than just competently regurgitating whatever the current popular trends are. And being such an all round curriculum, it was also more directed towards indie stuff, cuz AAA studios would generally want someone who is specifically focused on just 1 part of the whole process.
That's why you listen to people. Even if you think they're wrong and stupid, there's still a reason WHY they're talking to you, and it may be valuable information.
@@cattysplat I head Gabe Newell talk about getting yelled at on the internet, and he said if you take out the anger, there's usually a genuine complaint in there. The volume is due to the fact that they don't think they're being heard. So if you respond to those comments genuinely, they'll usually immediately apologize and de-escalate now they you're listening to them.
@@Trev81 And to be fair, if the gaming industry has shown anything, it's that they legit do NOT listen and people NEED to be extremely loud and threaten to hit them where it hurts [the money] for them to finally bother to pay attention.
This is how I treat feedback for my writing. I ignore whatever advice they give on “here’s what you should do instead”, but I very much pay attention to what they didn’t like itself and think about how it could be better
@@staple_boiif you play the whole game and then ask for a refund that's essentially like eating like 90% of a streak then sending it back to the kitchen and saying it was too dry or not well done enough or some bullshit. You're just being a cheap bastard that wants free shit.
This is such good advice. Don't just build what players ask for, but try to figure out what problem they're trying to solve. Most gamers are very bad game designers (because it's actually hard), but there's usually some negative experience they're responding to - even bad suggestions are valuable feedback.
This is true of feedback in many fields. When you get opinions on your writing for example, readers may think they know why something isn’t working. Often they are wrong about the why. But they are almost never wrong about there being a problem.
A quote from Will Hindmarch I think about a lot is if somebody said there's something wrong with your game they're almost always right, but they're almost always wrong about what the problem or solution is.
Can be true but surely a quote from the creator's view. I'd argue that for bad parts of movies and games some reviewers can pinpoint exactly what the problem is. Especially in games it might be as obvious as "this level is too dark and repetitive" Allthough I agree they might not have any idea of the simplest possible fix. (Like what would be the easiest way to make it feel less repetitive)
probably because viewers/consumers most of the time dont have a skill in what theyre viewing. they only know the product from their viewing of it, not a skillset in it.
For any dev: if you intend to make a dark maze, please either tell the players to save beforehand or give them a way to reset back to the maze entrance. I had an issue with a dark maze in an other game. Normaly, you can use torches to light up the way, but I ran out by the end of the maze (you need to walk it back). The maze was 3 levels, filled with enemies and stalagmites that blocked the way and could get you stuck. Doing the maze with torches and excluding fights took about 20 to 30 minutes. I tried to do it in the dark for a good 2 hours before giving up. The issue is that the game only has manual saves and death only make you respawn in town. So there's no real reason to save unless you want to exit the game. I lost almost 5 hours (not counting the time spent trying to get out of the maze) of progression just because I ran out of torches. Also, the enemies didn't respawn and I beat all of them before running out of torches, so I couldn't wipe.
I sat here for 10 minutes trying to google what a "dark maze" or "shadow maze" was and was going crazy finding no results cause I thought it was some game dev philosophy term, kinda like "dark patterns" but then I read your comment and realized, no, it's just a maze in your game that is dark.
for any dev: if you intend to make a dark maze, don't. slam you hand in a car door a few times. that's what you're making your players feel. just don't.
@@theblasteffect4499that has more to do with how RUclips encourages videos above specific time threshold, etc. videos from people that do/try make living on YT are very different from people who don't give a damn about it as a revenue stream and instead are doing it for themselves. Same like when all of the sudden everyone was doing stupid polls for no reason other than gaming the algorithm.
Reminds me of the killer instinct situation. A character was getting a lot of flak, with people demanding a nerf to their ability to heal themselves, but the devs ignored that feedback and instead nerfed an entirely different move, which, as it turns out, had been so advantageous that the character had literally no bad matchups.
Man.... Thank you for all that you do. I am not a sw/game developer, but your vids helped me understand some customer relations / reactions better than all the vids I saw on YT with trainings and tips and tricks in customer relations. Thank you and keep up the good work
They asked themselves "Why is this even in the game it's not fun" but instead of coming to the conclusion "somebody thought it might be" they looked for the way someone was screwing them. At least in teh U.S. that's common because we get screwed a lot and 90% of the time it's intentional.
Things are always a question of "was this a mistake/incompetence or is it malicious?". In general life things will just be mistakes, but the larger the company you are dealing with it the more likely its intentional to screw you.
@@kempolar9768Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by incompetence I guess Incompetence is very harsh tho, honest mistakes do happen very often and we do make them even tho we don't like admitting it.
@@kempolar9768Even then, in larger companies there are lead devs that have more power than in a smaller cooperative dev team, and those lead devs and execs might make stupid calls that force everyone under them to go along with it. It's why the real sweet spot is in-between, where there's not so many voices that the execs start ignoring them all, but also enough voices that the broad range of perspectives flushes out these bad designs. I know Larian's horn gets tooted a lot but... that's part of their success. Supergiant Games too.
That person probably did spend half an hour in the dark maze. A section of a game that's trivial for most people can be nigh impossible for another. There's that famous tidbit that everyone agrees Myst has a mix of brilliant, intuitive puzzles and impossible ones, but no two players agree on which are which
A great example from personal experience is the Towers of Hanoi puzzle in Mass Effect 1. Towers of Hanoi is fundamentally a very basic puzzle. It's not meant to be difficult, it's literally for children. But at ~15 years old, the one in Mass Effect completely stumped me until I just used the Omni-Gel instant resolution button. Why? Because the VISUAL DESIGN of the puzzle was unclear, leaving me just clicking different elements of the UI that sometimes grow larger and sometimes don't, with no clear indication of what I was achieving or why. On subsequent playthroughs understanding what the mechanics actually are, it's a breeze - it's not meant to be hard, after all. But that first time with no context, and with the interface being what it was, it seemed like pure nonsense. It's a great example of how something can seem intuitive and simple to one person (the designer) but completely indecipherable to another (the player) if they aren't in some way familiar with it going in.
@@cattysplat You could have bought the official Myst Strategy Guide, which many did. This was an expected thing to do, back before the internet era of gaming. heck, it may have been why they started giving the game away with new computers. Betting on that sweet strategy guide money.
I love this point. We spend so much time finding whats wrong with what people say, when its more valuable for everyone to instead work to find the truth in what people say.
listen to the solutions, don't take them at face value is better, there's often people who have good solutions which may or may not work in this exact case but may work in another.
As a designer who was recently laid off, your content has been great to boost both my mood AND my knowledge of the industry. Keep up the great work brother
@@TheUhmmmmmmmm yeah, it's comments like these that makes said "snowflakes" not wanting criticism. Maybe if you were less disrespectful, they wouldn't feel attacked all the time.
@@Shikaschima It's the same with OSRS for me. If Jagex comes out with an update I think is stupid. I will let them know how dumb their idea is. It just happened with the Occult rebalance. The difference between the two, I wasn't disrespected from Jagex for years so I was a little more telling on what should be changed. Not just telling them they are dumb. Though I made sure to let them know that.
😅 this made me remember something an uncle would occasionally say. " More often than not it doesn't matter why someone did something just if it had good or bad results " ( he worked for the us government for a long time, and that is supposedly why he had this mindset )
Makes sense that people who aren't well versed in something can convey their frustration in the only way they know how. Something that should be well understood in a whole range if different industries.
This is why I respect you Thor, you don't dismiss someone just because they're wrong about one thing or emotional when expressing it, you parse the information and consider it all fairly. It's a depressingly rare skillset.
Seth Rogen of all people said something very similar to this, essentially "if people read your script and tell you something is wrong, they're probably right and you should listen. If people tell you WHY that thing is wrong/bad, throw the advice out the window"
that in itself is a bad advice, you still should listen to the why they think it's bad, even if they are mistaken, sometimes it is part of the puzzle, otherwise you run the risk of just ignoring everything because you think you know better. if the guy who's been datamining the game tells you this skill doesn't work as intended and is missing something, you should listen to them, and check if it's actually the case.
Exactly. People won't always know why they don't like something or give you realistic ways to fix it, but it's important to analyze their feedback and figure out what you can do.
Players and testers are ABSOLUTELY AWFUL communicators. I remember in the Borderlands or Borderlands 2 development all the testers were complaining about shotguns being ineffective and bad. The devs, instead of buffing shotguns' range, damage or spread or anything... just made the shotguns have a louder sound. Basically all (beta) tester complaints went away and they started getting compliments about the shotguns. Players have NO IDEA what they want.
Wow it's almost as if game design include things more than just numbers. Like if you include a mosin in your game and it doesn't ping on reload, it's broken, I don't care how well balanced it is, and if the shotgun sounds like a fart in the wind, same issue.
@@jonpaul6948 I feel like the point isn't "Player feedback should be ignored because they don't know what they're talking about" but instead "Players do not know what they want, and you should think more about what it is exactly they're complaining about and what needs to be changed" in this example it wasn't that the gun was weak, but that the gun didn't feel powerful, and they were right but didn't attribute this to any aesthetic features and instead thought it was the stats of the gun. I can't speak for whatever "shitty devs" use this example but I feel like this story is an interesting one you can learn from.
@@Boomerkbom57 This is a huge problem with developers in my experience, the attitude that "players don't know what they want". You have 1 single example of poor communication, then you have the very public example of Blizzard devs telling players they didn't actually want Classic WoW, which turned out to be a huge success. You can pick out the shitty devs because they all have this condescending approach and toss out the examples that suit their narrative while ignoring the others.
Just wanna say: sometimes, ~certain devs~ will try and bump up playtime so you can’t get a refund on your game, but normally it’s kinda easy to see that this is happening. The most recent BanBan game (I think 3 or 4?) has MANY segments that are specifically designed to just waste the player’s time. The game barely racks up two hours of playtime even with those segments added in, and people hate the games and their creators so much that theres history of “speedrunning” the games to get a refund while also completing them. First off, don’t do this. If you don’t like a game, just refund it instead of wasting your time completing it. But, if a creator is willing to waste every single players’ time, just because they don’t want you to be able to refund their game, that’s a horrible practice. It makes for bad design and punishes literally every player that chooses to give them the benefit of a doubt. The BanBan games have a tendency to be awful without this practice, and all it does is make actual fans more likely to stop playing (and give trolls more ammunition to fling at you). The trolls are awful and doing terrible things to the creators, but the creators certainly aren’t helping themselves in any way
I mean... they could just be really bad at mazes in general. I mean, an average run of Resident Evil 2 is only like 5 hours, but mine regularly went up to around 15. I'm dyslexic so reading was always a big time sink.
This is like in Killer Instinct when everyone thought Jago's healing was broken, and the devs saw that something was wrong and instead of nerfing the healing they left it as is but nerfed some of his mid-range abilities. People were mad at the patch notes but once they played the complaints went away. Turns out the healing wasn't broken, it was that he had no bad ranges. Jago was good no matter where he was on screen, and that was a real problem. The healing was just easier to point to.
This is the essence of every design-related field in existence. People do not know how to articulate what is actually wrong with something, but they know they don't like it - and UX is KING. Your job as a designer of [thing] is to understand what people want, which hides behind what they say, and to fulfill that want in your own way.
this is a valuable lesson that will hooefully stick with me. "the general argument of your criticism is wrong yet it has an aspect of truth and i will work to fix that." i need to remember that shit.
Yeah, this was something we learned early on in my game dev education: players (and testers) are really good at figuring out when something feels bad, but are often terrible at figuring out *why* it feels that way. When someone says "oh you should make this change" what you really need to listen for is "what problem did this person experience?"
Honestly, i think the best part of this, is that you are a person who was willing to admit, YOU MADE SOMETHING BAD. And moreso, after finding it, you fixed it, making the bad thing something much much better. I bring this up because more often then not, people make something, it gets shown to be not that great, and the person gets all defensive saying something like "no, you just dont know how to enjoy it" or "the design isnt bad, you are." You didnt do that. Even though the guy's reasoning was complete bogus, you used it to realize you made something that was absolute garbage, admited your mistake, and took the proper steps to correct it. THAT deserves respect.
I love how positive you can be with these types of criticism. My pretty big pride would't allow me to take a negative criticism expressed as "This sucks" wtih your attitude. I would probably have to distance myself and take some time to boil off before coming to the conclusion that "This person was rude but I should still look on how to improve what they said so that this doesn't happening again"
This is very good advice for any game developer. Players excel at identifying what sucks. They are absolutely horrible at identifying WHY it sucks. Listen to feedback, see what people don't like, completely ignore their suggestions on how to fix it, and fix it yourself :)
That's an important part of learning from other people, oftentimes people deliver a message very poorly, perhaps too aggressive perhaps not worded properly, but if we try we can still learn from them
Bill Hader said something about a note from someone along the lines of: if someone gives you a note where they say "I oh, instead of X, I would have done Y." Theyre usually wrong about what to do, but they're about that something needs to change, it just needs to be your change."
"Dark Maze" immediately brought me back to stumbling around caverns full of Zubats cause I was too stubborn as a child to waste any of my Pokemon's move slots for Flash.
Great approach to that kind of criticism. Often people can't actually explain why they dislike something and will attribute it to some dumb or weird stuff, but they can still be speaking from a genuine place and shouldn't just be thrown aside entirely.
Ive heard this same advice from multiple creators. The average consumer of media can tell when they don't like something, which is often indicative of an actual problem with the project. But they VERY rarely know how to fix it.
In design, very rarely does the consumer know what he actually does want, but if he's consistently having a bad experience, it's still your place to fix it. Excellent example.
I see the same in my field. People don't often leave bad feedback about things they enjoy even if those things were made with ill intent, so their feedback ends up being really valuable if it's actually listened to. There's something to be said for being constructive in your criticism, but just coming out and saying "fuck I hate this part" is the kind of impactful feedback I want to hear. I think a lot of people have reservations about giving direct "I don't like this" or "this is really bad" feedback because it's easily and often dismissed, but it's how we work as humans - I know when something I'm doing isn't fun, but I doubt I could pinpoint why. Trying to identify the root issue in a system you've only interacted with at surface level never works, just tell us what you don't like and we'll see what we can do about it.
A saying I heard somewhere and I have lived by as a designer is “Players are amazing at finding problems with games, but terrible at saying why or how it’s a problem” fortunately that’s what WE get paid to do.
I wrote a song recently and made someone read it without any music, so like a poem. They didn't like it very much, and said "I don't like poetry". It'd be easy to think "oh so they wouldn't have liked it either way" but this vid helped me a bit go past my slightly bruised ego, so great job youtube man!
It feels like listening to the internet talk about modern Hollywood "This show sucks." "Yes I agree, the writing was bad and the cgi felt rushed..." "And also the main character was a woman! And also, turns out one of the writers liked a tweet one time that said women should be paid as much as men." "...."
I try to catch myself and not take things so negatively ever since I heard the phrase: “nobody opens their mouth to criticize without the intention of wanting things to get better, otherwise they’d just keep their mouth shut.”
Listen to someone telling you something is wrong with what you're creating, just don't listen to their solutions. Remember that it's your product, and you're the creative mind behind it, and they think they know what they want to play, but in reality, they want to play stuff they don't know they will like. They're also playing your game to huuh.. play your game, not their game. ♥
Not only the shorts are always educational, the comment section is the same. Some people expanded his point in the short so I could understand it better (sometimes much much more than what the short provided).
Bill Hader once said something similar. I'm paraphrasing, but essentially he said people who tell you something you did sucks will also list why they didnt like it. Ignore the "why" part, but still fix the disliked thing. It's one of many very important lessons to learn as a creative. Feedback is important, but you also need to learn how to listen to it.
When I was trying to learn how make games, someone told me "Listen when someone tells you somwthing sucks, but stop listening when they try to tell you how to improve it"
Take my engagement ✌️ Been programming for a decade and been planning on making a game for years, I'm really loving the insight from your recent shorts
GMTK had a great episode about criticism. His takeaway basically amounted to: "Always listen when your players are saying that something feels off, because they're almost always right. Never listen to your players when they tell you how to fix it, because they're almost always wrong."
Dark Mazes can be a very satisfying challenge in a game. Frustrating while you are in it but a feeling of accomplishment when you are out. The key is to remember that there are 3 senses; sight, sound and hearing. As long as the game doesn’t take them all away, the user can still manage the challenge. Of course I still love the bard’s tale and death lord games and being teleported to different sections of the maze that look exactly the same.
It’s very often true that even if someone is complaining about something for a bad reason, they’re still complaining, so clearly something is wrong, they just have trouble articulating it properly, so it’s usually still valuable to look at those critiques to try and find those underlying reasons
Bill Hader said, "When someone doesn't like your writing. They're often half right. You need to change what they don't like but do it YOUR way" Best creative advice.
I love Bill Harder, his show Bardy is brilliant.
@@samwallace6509 Genuinely talented know how to work with feedback. People with no talent think their works are perfect on the first try
@@phantomkitten73 Too high concept for me, he was at his best back on Saturday Night Liver.
Bit aside, that's a dope ass quote.
@@samwallace6509Nah it's good advice. It's harder to tell the quality of something when you're the one making it.
To share my favorite quote:
"Your feelings are valid; your opinion is not."
That is perfect and I'm keeping it.
"Valid - Having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent (clear, logical, and convincing)."
Feelings are the exact polar opposite of "valid." This is one of these Post-Modernist "objective truth isn't real" philosophies that has been maliciously snuck into common parlance so people don't even realize what a backwards idea they're endorsing. When these philosophies say "your feelings are valid," they are literally and explicitly making the argument that "individual feelings are more important than logic."
EDIT: They are explicitly saying, "having a feeling" is just as logical and rational as a statistical analysis or concrete evidence.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat It has nothing to do with Post-Modernist logical nonsense.
It's a quote referring to, and responding to those who believe their feelings outweigh objective fact just because they disagree with it.
@@Tazytots you just disagreed with me then repeated what I said as a fact.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat ...Calling someone out for acting on their emotions, especially when those emotions are spawned from false information, is not "post-modernist". That's normal fucking behavior. It's called having integrity. It's called holding someone responsible for their irrational behavior.
The entire concept behind post-modernism is the disagreement with major ideologies and common theory. Being a post-modernist doesn't make you delusional. It's completely unrelated. You're just using buzzwords to look intelligent.
Players are very good in figuring out whats wrong in a Game
But very bad at saying why it feels wrong
Well put
We don't know what we want, but we know what we don't want.
I remember Bill Hader mentioning a similar thing ruclips.net/user/shortsNHHZSNw9J2o?si=PIHfj1IFLv8XJjtp
[Edit: Link doesn't shortcut ;-;]
"When people tell you something feels wrong, they're usually right. When they start telling you what you should've done, they're usually wrong", more or less.
@@Webberjosometimes not even that. I know a few developers who took "listen to the community" as "do everything the community wants" and removed features, only to then be begged to put them back in because it turned out that was what most people enjoyed about the game, they just got angry and thought the feature was the reason. The community is full of people who know what they want and don't want, but it's also full of people who don't know either, and it's up to the developer to actually understand and test feedback.
I did playtests today. And good god it took until the last test until someone could explain one of the major complaints.
"They did this to bump up game time"
It takes a very well adjusted person to look at that and interpret what is actually being said
"This part is boring and a needless waste of time to the point that it made me feel like there must be another reason for it being there because it clearly isn't fun"
@@bencastor9207 The irony is that when you ask people to give "constructive" feedback and or "thought out" critique the result is that the most cooperative individuals will end up overthinking their problems and end up giving the wrong informatuon you need. Because they DON'T know what is wrong, as you said. But now they feel obligated to give a reason for why they feel bad about something, even if that reason is not what they actually feel. Whereas if you had just told people to share their first impressions, emotional response and overall feelings about something that's the purest and most honest response you're going to get. Of course, if some could actually put their frustrations into words you'd be missing out on that but the tradeoff is you'd be able to get a ton more data from a wider base. But yeah. 10 people saying "this part made me feel so bad that the dev must have nefarious purposes" is worth much more than 1 philosophical breakdown of how your approach fails to consider the emotional character development or something like that. Not that that isn't useful as well
Smart man. "What brought them to this wild conclusion?" Not worrying about how correct it is
@@bencastor9207i dont think devs have really put the responsibility on us. in my opinion i think thats just a common human thing we put on ourselves. if we dont have a reason for believing or feeling something then it must ne wrong. so we meed to grab at or find any reason to justify it. even if that feeling is well placed like the criticsm of the maze being boring. we still want to reach for a reason to say so without fulling knowing why. and i think thats just a issue we put on ourselves. not really being enforced by anyone else. since no one is stopping you from just leaving a review saying "thougjt the dark maze was boring" its kinda just a personal responsibility we feel to justify why to ourselves.
You know, reading this helped me finally put the finger on why I liked certain fetch quests over others.
When, in the process of doing a fetch quest, I get to learn more about the game world, its mechanics, or discover entertaining side lore and characterization, I find it fun. In a very literal sense, the journey is the reward over the actual task to be completed. When this is _not_ present e.g. the reward is loot and not much else, fetch quests feel like padding and stuck in the game to artificially create 100% completion
Also I think we can apreciate the fact that game companies so sometimes put in stuff just to up game time, especially in open-world games
This is actually consistent with all story tellers. The critics don’t know why it’s a problem but dang are they good at finding the problems.
It's like if something is your job, you'll be looking for everything that's wrong, rather than enjoying what's right.
I'd argue many critics are fully aware of why there's a problem and can articulate it.
@@BenRangelWell... yes and no. Critic can be referring to professional critics, but more often than not in the gaming industry, we're talking about people who are critical of the product with connotation that they're doing so unjustly or excessively.
thats kind of a different issue. writing a story is more like true art because its one of the types of art thats least rule-based. its more subjective than programming a game. this is just my opinion, anyway. am i right?
I think often things "feel" wrong and most people can pick up on that, but they justify that feeling with the wrong reasons
God I wish all devs reasoned like this.
Sometimes gamers don't actually know why something sucks, they just know it sucks.
Yet when you make a change, they assume their reasoning was correct and still continue touting complete nonsense, using the fact that you made a change as proof they are correct.
I wish people simply said “I don’t find this fun, but am not sure how to explain why I feel that way”, instead of making up outlandish nonsense.
@@joao34386 Who cares? Do you make changes to make the product better or are you deeply invested in making sure that one guy doesn't feel validated?
This is a problem with media literacy broadly, not an issue with a few bitchy apples.
nice pfp boi
"Sometimes"? You mean all the time 😂.
@@FireheadLazzo This isn't a "few bitchy apples", it's a large minority of people.
This is how all criticism should be handled. “Assume their criticism is right, even if their rationale is wrong”
That doesn’t account for the fact that people can just be wrong or worse, stupid
7 Days to Die wouldn't be the clusterfuck it is if the developers actually followed this logic. They have the worst player to developer communication I have ever seen. Yes, even worse than Blizzard. They openly and publicly shit on their own player base.
I think it should be more like figure out where that critisism comes from instead of just assuming its right or wrong
@@Mooshkajoe > They have the worst player to developer communication I have ever seen.
Yeah? Go pay attention to DICE and the Battlefield franchise.
Literally every time the fanbase says "this is too much like CoD, stop trying to turn BF into CoD; if we wanted CoD, we'd play CoD," the next game feels even less like retro Battlefield games and more like the last years' latest CoD game.
sure, but also: sometimes it's a vast minority. sometimes they're in a bad mood. sometimes they're just wrong. the customer was right about their experience, and that's about it. still is up to the dev to figure out whether they were right about the game enough that they speak for a lot more people than themselves. you aren't going to please everyone.
A film producer once told me that every time someone gives you a note, their solution to your script's problem is probably wrong. But, the fact that they got caught on something means you need to fix what it was that made them write the note.
That is a great explanation of it.
As someone who may or may not have gotten lost in the dark maze somehow due to sheer stupidity whilst recording the entire showcase of my lack of IQ, I am relieved
We all potatoe sometimes
But also if the developer didn't like the maze its possible the dark maze was disorienting and maybe a little frustratingly hard.
What's the game?
@@ShamelessJamesHeartbound.
The moment Pirate said it take 2 minutes to finish the Dark Maze i felt so stupid. It took me so long...
I've got a degree in game design, and in school this is something they absolutely hammered into us.
Playtest, get feedback, make adjustments, playtest again, and then playtest some more.
If something isnt working for your players, change it.
If something unexpected lets them do cool stuff that you hadnt intended for, figure out how to keep it from actually breaking the game, and embrace it.
No plan survives first contact, if/when your original plan isnt working, keep the parts that do work, change the rest.
This is good advice for other creative disciplines as well. The idea of my book isn't the same book I ended up writing in the end, but I'm still stoked about the end result.
Mate. As someone who lives in Reality, The Universe, trust me: they are *NOT* teaching "playtest, get feedback, make adjustments, playtest again" in schools. I can't take five fucking steps without stepping in some AAA company's fuckup that could have been avoided by literally playing the game at all and discovering the problem. If they were teaching what you say they are teaching in schools, these problems would not exist.
@@GreyMariaStrange blanket statement to make. Have you not considered how superiors' control over project development (budgeting + deadlines) affects the amount of time and number of opportunities studios have to playtest? Just because you encounter some issues does not entail that they have not playtested and not resolved other issues.
While this is great advice, to be completely honest, I miss games from the time when there was not such a thing as a degree in video game design. Games feel like they're designed by a committee and follow a bunch of checklists with very little deviation. A lot of games out there feels very samey and soulless. If it wasn't for a few holdouts in the industry and the explosion of independent studios and creators, I'd probably abandon gaming as a hobby by now...
@@Micromation Promise you that was not the aim our school went for.
Truth be told, some parts of the whole thing felt a bit lacking in focus and 4 years is entirely too short to get a proper education in art, programming, programming but in an engine, 3D modeling, animation, story writing, level design, actual conceptual game design, sound design and whatever else I'm missing, but it was definitely not aimed at the whole "design by commitee" kinda stuff.
Our teachers were very much pro weird unique stuff rather than just competently regurgitating whatever the current popular trends are.
And being such an all round curriculum, it was also more directed towards indie stuff, cuz AAA studios would generally want someone who is specifically focused on just 1 part of the whole process.
That's why you listen to people. Even if you think they're wrong and stupid, there's still a reason WHY they're talking to you, and it may be valuable information.
Extract the data separate from the crazy rationalisation and conspiracy theory.
@@cattysplat I head Gabe Newell talk about getting yelled at on the internet, and he said if you take out the anger, there's usually a genuine complaint in there. The volume is due to the fact that they don't think they're being heard. So if you respond to those comments genuinely, they'll usually immediately apologize and de-escalate now they you're listening to them.
@@Trev81 And to be fair, if the gaming industry has shown anything, it's that they legit do NOT listen and people NEED to be extremely loud and threaten to hit them where it hurts [the money] for them to finally bother to pay attention.
@@AzureRoxe valid point
yes. and it can be very hard to hear. but yes.
This is how I treat feedback for my writing. I ignore whatever advice they give on “here’s what you should do instead”, but I very much pay attention to what they didn’t like itself and think about how it could be better
Sounds like something someone who uses dark mazes to bump up playtime WOULD say....
"shit, they got to do it *before* me!"
@sofaking2846true
@sofaking2846bro what? If I want my money back I want my money back. Tf are u on.
@@staple_boiif you play the whole game and then ask for a refund that's essentially like eating like 90% of a streak then sending it back to the kitchen and saying it was too dry or not well done enough or some bullshit. You're just being a cheap bastard that wants free shit.
^ i spotted the petty scammer.
If the dark maze FELT long enough that he thought it was implemented just to elongate runtime, then it doesn't matter if it actually was
This is such good advice. Don't just build what players ask for, but try to figure out what problem they're trying to solve. Most gamers are very bad game designers (because it's actually hard), but there's usually some negative experience they're responding to - even bad suggestions are valuable feedback.
Yeah, the problem wasn't the inclusion of a dark maze. it's that the segment didn't contribute to the game and felt like unnecessary filler content.
This is true of feedback in many fields. When you get opinions on your writing for example, readers may think they know why something isn’t working. Often they are wrong about the why. But they are almost never wrong about there being a problem.
A quote from Will Hindmarch I think about a lot is if somebody said there's something wrong with your game they're almost always right, but they're almost always wrong about what the problem or solution is.
Can be true but surely a quote from the creator's view. I'd argue that for bad parts of movies and games some reviewers can pinpoint exactly what the problem is.
Especially in games it might be as obvious as "this level is too dark and repetitive"
Allthough I agree they might not have any idea of the simplest possible fix. (Like what would be the easiest way to make it feel less repetitive)
probably because viewers/consumers most of the time dont have a skill in what theyre viewing. they only know the product from their viewing of it, not a skillset in it.
I've been guilty of observing something wrong in a game and being completely wrong with why
For any dev: if you intend to make a dark maze, please either tell the players to save beforehand or give them a way to reset back to the maze entrance.
I had an issue with a dark maze in an other game.
Normaly, you can use torches to light up the way, but I ran out by the end of the maze (you need to walk it back). The maze was 3 levels, filled with enemies and stalagmites that blocked the way and could get you stuck. Doing the maze with torches and excluding fights took about 20 to 30 minutes. I tried to do it in the dark for a good 2 hours before giving up.
The issue is that the game only has manual saves and death only make you respawn in town. So there's no real reason to save unless you want to exit the game. I lost almost 5 hours (not counting the time spent trying to get out of the maze) of progression just because I ran out of torches.
Also, the enemies didn't respawn and I beat all of them before running out of torches, so I couldn't wipe.
Good advice
I sat here for 10 minutes trying to google what a "dark maze" or "shadow maze" was and was going crazy finding no results cause I thought it was some game dev philosophy term, kinda like "dark patterns" but then I read your comment and realized, no, it's just a maze in your game that is dark.
for any dev: if you intend to make a dark maze, don't. slam you hand in a car door a few times. that's what you're making your players feel. just don't.
The customer is always right about what is wrong - but almost never right about what is right
Or, they're right about what's wrong, but not about how to fix it or why it is wrong.
This comment is complete gibberish.
@@fourierbird maybe you can't read? it's pretty straightforward - if poetic
The customer is always right is far too black and white to have any truth to it.
Could also be said for some users having IT-problems
Perfect example of “eat the meat, spit out the bones”
People are often better at telling when things are wrong than knowing why they're wrong or how to fix it.
Case in point all the RUclips channels built on criticism of media.
i think this is true.
@@kotor610 it's funny too, because they're often long videos. All that time yet not a very good point? Wow. Time wasted, dear RUclipsrs?
@@theblasteffect4499that has more to do with how RUclips encourages videos above specific time threshold, etc. videos from people that do/try make living on YT are very different from people who don't give a damn about it as a revenue stream and instead are doing it for themselves. Same like when all of the sudden everyone was doing stupid polls for no reason other than gaming the algorithm.
I love the way this guy looks at things. Right or wrong, he keeps his perspective and thinks it through.
Reminds me of the killer instinct situation. A character was getting a lot of flak, with people demanding a nerf to their ability to heal themselves, but the devs ignored that feedback and instead nerfed an entirely different move, which, as it turns out, had been so advantageous that the character had literally no bad matchups.
tohsaka pfp :]
Man.... Thank you for all that you do. I am not a sw/game developer, but your vids helped me understand some customer relations / reactions better than all the vids I saw on YT with trainings and tips and tricks in customer relations.
Thank you and keep up the good work
Look at the way he responded to the situation. I really wish more people were like that.
They asked themselves "Why is this even in the game it's not fun" but instead of coming to the conclusion "somebody thought it might be" they looked for the way someone was screwing them.
At least in teh U.S. that's common because we get screwed a lot and 90% of the time it's intentional.
Things are always a question of "was this a mistake/incompetence or is it malicious?".
In general life things will just be mistakes, but the larger the company you are dealing with it the more likely its intentional to screw you.
@@kempolar9768Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by incompetence I guess
Incompetence is very harsh tho, honest mistakes do happen very often and we do make them even tho we don't like admitting it.
@@charnalk5572its nice to get angry at things sometimes
@@kempolar9768Even then, in larger companies there are lead devs that have more power than in a smaller cooperative dev team, and those lead devs and execs might make stupid calls that force everyone under them to go along with it.
It's why the real sweet spot is in-between, where there's not so many voices that the execs start ignoring them all, but also enough voices that the broad range of perspectives flushes out these bad designs. I know Larian's horn gets tooted a lot but... that's part of their success. Supergiant Games too.
U sir understand the superpower of overseeing duality and different perspectives and learning from all of them. Good for you !
That person probably did spend half an hour in the dark maze. A section of a game that's trivial for most people can be nigh impossible for another. There's that famous tidbit that everyone agrees Myst has a mix of brilliant, intuitive puzzles and impossible ones, but no two players agree on which are which
Myst is famous for spawning an entire genre of games only playable by a few dedicated players :D
A great example from personal experience is the Towers of Hanoi puzzle in Mass Effect 1.
Towers of Hanoi is fundamentally a very basic puzzle. It's not meant to be difficult, it's literally for children.
But at ~15 years old, the one in Mass Effect completely stumped me until I just used the Omni-Gel instant resolution button. Why?
Because the VISUAL DESIGN of the puzzle was unclear, leaving me just clicking different elements of the UI that sometimes grow larger and sometimes don't, with no clear indication of what I was achieving or why.
On subsequent playthroughs understanding what the mechanics actually are, it's a breeze - it's not meant to be hard, after all. But that first time with no context, and with the interface being what it was, it seemed like pure nonsense.
It's a great example of how something can seem intuitive and simple to one person (the designer) but completely indecipherable to another (the player) if they aren't in some way familiar with it going in.
Myst had millions of sales but hardly any of them finished the game, let alone even solved the first puzzle. I know because I was one of them...
@@cattysplat You could have bought the official Myst Strategy Guide, which many did. This was an expected thing to do, back before the internet era of gaming.
heck, it may have been why they started giving the game away with new computers. Betting on that sweet strategy guide money.
I love this point. We spend so much time finding whats wrong with what people say, when its more valuable for everyone to instead work to find the truth in what people say.
Dude idk where you can from but you showed up on my RUclips feed being super freaking kind and caring. Teaching us. Thank you.
Always listen to their problems, never (rarely) listen to their solutions.
listen to the solutions, don't take them at face value is better, there's often people who have good solutions which may or may not work in this exact case but may work in another.
As a designer who was recently laid off, your content has been great to boost both my mood AND my knowledge of the industry. Keep up the great work brother
I guess as a Dev, figuring out the message behind reviews rather than reading them head on is a very important skill to have.
A skill slowly getting lost being filled with snowflakes that can't take criticism :S And only ever read it head on.
@@TheUhmmmmmmmm yeah, it's comments like these that makes said "snowflakes" not wanting criticism. Maybe if you were less disrespectful, they wouldn't feel attacked all the time.
@@Shikaschima blizz 100% earned the disrespect. You get what you give after all.
@@Shikaschima It's the same with OSRS for me. If Jagex comes out with an update I think is stupid. I will let them know how dumb their idea is. It just happened with the Occult rebalance.
The difference between the two, I wasn't disrespected from Jagex for years so I was a little more telling on what should be changed. Not just telling them they are dumb. Though I made sure to let them know that.
I once heard a phrase that went something along the lines of:
"Compliments to the heart and criticism to the brain."
As an aspiring game developer, this guy's content sometimes offer insane bursts of wisdom; feeling very fortunate with the algorithm atm. Great guy.
Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
😅 this made me remember something an uncle would occasionally say. " More often than not it doesn't matter why someone did something just if it had good or bad results " ( he worked for the us government for a long time, and that is supposedly why he had this mindset )
Makes sense that people who aren't well versed in something can convey their frustration in the only way they know how. Something that should be well understood in a whole range if different industries.
This is why I respect you Thor, you don't dismiss someone just because they're wrong about one thing or emotional when expressing it, you parse the information and consider it all fairly. It's a depressingly rare skillset.
Seth Rogen of all people said something very similar to this, essentially "if people read your script and tell you something is wrong, they're probably right and you should listen. If people tell you WHY that thing is wrong/bad, throw the advice out the window"
I think it was Bill Hader who said that unless Seth also said it
that in itself is a bad advice, you still should listen to the why they think it's bad, even if they are mistaken, sometimes it is part of the puzzle, otherwise you run the risk of just ignoring everything because you think you know better.
if the guy who's been datamining the game tells you this skill doesn't work as intended and is missing something, you should listen to them, and check if it's actually the case.
Exactly. People won't always know why they don't like something or give you realistic ways to fix it, but it's important to analyze their feedback and figure out what you can do.
Players and testers are ABSOLUTELY AWFUL communicators. I remember in the Borderlands or Borderlands 2 development all the testers were complaining about shotguns being ineffective and bad.
The devs, instead of buffing shotguns' range, damage or spread or anything... just made the shotguns have a louder sound.
Basically all (beta) tester complaints went away and they started getting compliments about the shotguns.
Players have NO IDEA what they want.
If I had a buck for every time I've heard some shitty dev recount this story I'd never need to worry about refunding a trash game again.
Wow it's almost as if game design include things more than just numbers. Like if you include a mosin in your game and it doesn't ping on reload, it's broken, I don't care how well balanced it is, and if the shotgun sounds like a fart in the wind, same issue.
Is there like a job title that basically translate tester feedback to developer and vice versa?
@@jonpaul6948 I feel like the point isn't "Player feedback should be ignored because they don't know what they're talking about" but instead "Players do not know what they want, and you should think more about what it is exactly they're complaining about and what needs to be changed" in this example it wasn't that the gun was weak, but that the gun didn't feel powerful, and they were right but didn't attribute this to any aesthetic features and instead thought it was the stats of the gun.
I can't speak for whatever "shitty devs" use this example but I feel like this story is an interesting one you can learn from.
@@Boomerkbom57 This is a huge problem with developers in my experience, the attitude that "players don't know what they want". You have 1 single example of poor communication, then you have the very public example of Blizzard devs telling players they didn't actually want Classic WoW, which turned out to be a huge success. You can pick out the shitty devs because they all have this condescending approach and toss out the examples that suit their narrative while ignoring the others.
And that's why I love listening to you Thor, you are all about growth and learning ❤
Just wanna say: sometimes, ~certain devs~ will try and bump up playtime so you can’t get a refund on your game, but normally it’s kinda easy to see that this is happening. The most recent BanBan game (I think 3 or 4?) has MANY segments that are specifically designed to just waste the player’s time. The game barely racks up two hours of playtime even with those segments added in, and people hate the games and their creators so much that theres history of “speedrunning” the games to get a refund while also completing them.
First off, don’t do this. If you don’t like a game, just refund it instead of wasting your time completing it. But, if a creator is willing to waste every single players’ time, just because they don’t want you to be able to refund their game, that’s a horrible practice. It makes for bad design and punishes literally every player that chooses to give them the benefit of a doubt. The BanBan games have a tendency to be awful without this practice, and all it does is make actual fans more likely to stop playing (and give trolls more ammunition to fling at you). The trolls are awful and doing terrible things to the creators, but the creators certainly aren’t helping themselves in any way
It's moments like this that remind me that the full quote is actually "The customer is always right.....in matters of taste".
DUDE every video is see of this guy makes me like him more
He said "and it made the game better" like this was the most profound, inspiring life-lesson twist ending.
Guys got the perfect radio voice.
This is the original meaning of the phrase "The customer is always right, in matters of taste"
I mean... they could just be really bad at mazes in general. I mean, an average run of Resident Evil 2 is only like 5 hours, but mine regularly went up to around 15. I'm dyslexic so reading was always a big time sink.
gives me hope that a generation of game devs are being inspired by this guy
In my opinion, i really liked the dark maze.
This is like in Killer Instinct when everyone thought Jago's healing was broken, and the devs saw that something was wrong and instead of nerfing the healing they left it as is but nerfed some of his mid-range abilities. People were mad at the patch notes but once they played the complaints went away.
Turns out the healing wasn't broken, it was that he had no bad ranges. Jago was good no matter where he was on screen, and that was a real problem. The healing was just easier to point to.
Lmao I like how he just randomly writes words he says for no reason
Helps tremendously with editing the video, like making these shorts.
This is the essence of every design-related field in existence. People do not know how to articulate what is actually wrong with something, but they know they don't like it - and UX is KING. Your job as a designer of [thing] is to understand what people want, which hides behind what they say, and to fulfill that want in your own way.
THIS IS THE BIRTH OF THE B R I G H T M A Z E
Devolopers who take blame, and then actually fix it, instead of just blaming the fans 😍 I love you
this is a valuable lesson that will hooefully stick with me. "the general argument of your criticism is wrong yet it has an aspect of truth and i will work to fix that." i need to remember that shit.
What game?
He's talking about his own indie game Heartbound
@skateloser4088 Thanks. I already figured it out from watching a few of his streams, but regardless, thank you. 👍🙂
Yeah, this was something we learned early on in my game dev education: players (and testers) are really good at figuring out when something feels bad, but are often terrible at figuring out *why* it feels that way. When someone says "oh you should make this change" what you really need to listen for is "what problem did this person experience?"
If you're gonna refund the game, taht suggests you don't like it.
You do not need to complete a 2.5 hour game to figure out if you like it.
Something every artist learns. People can't tell you why something sucks but they still can tell you it does.
Honestly, i think the best part of this, is that you are a person who was willing to admit, YOU MADE SOMETHING BAD. And moreso, after finding it, you fixed it, making the bad thing something much much better.
I bring this up because more often then not, people make something, it gets shown to be not that great, and the person gets all defensive saying something like "no, you just dont know how to enjoy it" or "the design isnt bad, you are." You didnt do that. Even though the guy's reasoning was complete bogus, you used it to realize you made something that was absolute garbage, admited your mistake, and took the proper steps to correct it. THAT deserves respect.
Finally someone puts it into words. Sometimes shitty advice or feedback can make you rethink.
as someone with no capacity to see in the dark, including dark game environments, that's the exact kind of thing that would frustrate me to tears.
I love how positive you can be with these types of criticism. My pretty big pride would't allow me to take a negative criticism expressed as "This sucks" wtih your attitude. I would probably have to distance myself and take some time to boil off before coming to the conclusion that "This person was rude but I should still look on how to improve what they said so that this doesn't happening again"
This is very good advice for any game developer.
Players excel at identifying what sucks.
They are absolutely horrible at identifying WHY it sucks.
Listen to feedback, see what people don't like, completely ignore their suggestions on how to fix it, and fix it yourself :)
That's an important part of learning from other people, oftentimes people deliver a message very poorly, perhaps too aggressive perhaps not worded properly, but if we try we can still learn from them
Bill Hader said something about a note from someone along the lines of: if someone gives you a note where they say "I oh, instead of X, I would have done Y." Theyre usually wrong about what to do, but they're about that something needs to change, it just needs to be your change."
The more I listen to his shorts the more I just like him as a human ❤
"Dark Maze" immediately brought me back to stumbling around caverns full of Zubats cause I was too stubborn as a child to waste any of my Pokemon's move slots for Flash.
Part of what makes you great is being able to expand the view of situations like this and exptarpolating information from things that may not be based
Great approach to that kind of criticism. Often people can't actually explain why they dislike something and will attribute it to some dumb or weird stuff, but they can still be speaking from a genuine place and shouldn't just be thrown aside entirely.
Ive heard this same advice from multiple creators. The average consumer of media can tell when they don't like something, which is often indicative of an actual problem with the project. But they VERY rarely know how to fix it.
In design, very rarely does the consumer know what he actually does want, but if he's consistently having a bad experience, it's still your place to fix it. Excellent example.
I'm glad you could find the good in something that most would allow their emotions to blind them to.
I see the same in my field. People don't often leave bad feedback about things they enjoy even if those things were made with ill intent, so their feedback ends up being really valuable if it's actually listened to. There's something to be said for being constructive in your criticism, but just coming out and saying "fuck I hate this part" is the kind of impactful feedback I want to hear.
I think a lot of people have reservations about giving direct "I don't like this" or "this is really bad" feedback because it's easily and often dismissed, but it's how we work as humans - I know when something I'm doing isn't fun, but I doubt I could pinpoint why. Trying to identify the root issue in a system you've only interacted with at surface level never works, just tell us what you don't like and we'll see what we can do about it.
It sounds like a huge balance of:
- What you want your game to be.
- Whats fun for the player.
- If it still runs correctly after the previous two.
That’s a really mature and pragmatic way to analyze the situation. 👏🏼
that could be a valid point If you add up all things together
One of those "right answer, wrong logic" moments.
A saying I heard somewhere and I have lived by as a designer is “Players are amazing at finding problems with games, but terrible at saying why or how it’s a problem” fortunately that’s what WE get paid to do.
I wrote a song recently and made someone read it without any music, so like a poem. They didn't like it very much, and said "I don't like poetry". It'd be easy to think "oh so they wouldn't have liked it either way" but this vid helped me a bit go past my slightly bruised ego, so great job youtube man!
It feels like listening to the internet talk about modern Hollywood
"This show sucks."
"Yes I agree, the writing was bad and the cgi felt rushed..."
"And also the main character was a woman! And also, turns out one of the writers liked a tweet one time that said women should be paid as much as men."
"...."
I try to catch myself and not take things so negatively ever since I heard the phrase: “nobody opens their mouth to criticize without the intention of wanting things to get better, otherwise they’d just keep their mouth shut.”
Listen to someone telling you something is wrong with what you're creating, just don't listen to their solutions. Remember that it's your product, and you're the creative mind behind it, and they think they know what they want to play, but in reality, they want to play stuff they don't know they will like. They're also playing your game to huuh.. play your game, not their game. ♥
I never know what this guy is talking about. But I love his voice so much I watch every video I come across
Even if someone gives criticism for the wrong reason doesn't mean they are wrong. They frequently are but not always
Not only the shorts are always educational, the comment section is the same. Some people expanded his point in the short so I could understand it better (sometimes much much more than what the short provided).
Those kinds of people piss me off. You handled it much better than I would’ve, and for that I commend you
Bill Hader once said something similar. I'm paraphrasing, but essentially he said people who tell you something you did sucks will also list why they didnt like it. Ignore the "why" part, but still fix the disliked thing.
It's one of many very important lessons to learn as a creative. Feedback is important, but you also need to learn how to listen to it.
When I was trying to learn how make games, someone told me "Listen when someone tells you somwthing sucks, but stop listening when they try to tell you how to improve it"
A key skill: Always listen to the cause of someone’s complaint, but take their proposed solution as a very light suggestion.
we had an MMO in the late 90's, early 2000's that had an invisible maze too, with traps you could not see either. fun times
Take my engagement ✌️
Been programming for a decade and been planning on making a game for years, I'm really loving the insight from your recent shorts
I’m impressed with the mental control to listen to feedback from a person who’s actively straw-manning you.
GMTK had a great episode about criticism. His takeaway basically amounted to: "Always listen when your players are saying that something feels off, because they're almost always right. Never listen to your players when they tell you how to fix it, because they're almost always wrong."
Love your work Thor. Thanks for being so uplifting
Dark Mazes can be a very satisfying challenge in a game. Frustrating while you are in it but a feeling of accomplishment when you are out. The key is to remember that there are 3 senses; sight, sound and hearing. As long as the game doesn’t take them all away, the user can still manage the challenge. Of course I still love the bard’s tale and death lord games and being teleported to different sections of the maze that look exactly the same.
It’s very often true that even if someone is complaining about something for a bad reason, they’re still complaining, so clearly something is wrong, they just have trouble articulating it properly, so it’s usually still valuable to look at those critiques to try and find those underlying reasons