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Destructive criticism

I recently read this interesting article : Punchbag Artists (link).

It is a collection of short interviews about the impact of harsh criticism on game developers. And even if I haven’t been nearly as affected as much of the people quoted, I can deeply relate.

I wonder how people working in mass media in general perceive criticism, but every time I am reading some rude comments I can’t help but worry about the people who worked on the product being criticized. Be it a movie, a game or any kind of publication.

To speak about what I know, a video game is usually made by a team of a few dozens of people, programmers, artists, designers, managers. Some teams are much smaller, some much bigger, but the ones I worked with ranged from 5 to 30 people on a single game, with development cycles of a few months up to several years.

Working in video games is the dream of a lot of young people, I guess it’s one of these jobs, like cinema, music or journalism, where the end result is so appealing that everybody wants to be on the other side of the mirror. And the studios are usually full of 20-somethings, struggling with ambition and insecurity. Working nights and week-ends for no extra pay, putting up with peer pressure, just because they believe in what they do. A lot of them eventually leave when they realize they could go get twice the pay in any other software shop, and that making video games is not what they envisioned.

But when a game gets released, even if all the press releases from the developer and the publisher are bursting with self-confidence and auto-congratulation, you can be sure that the reality is just a bunch of guys and gals like you and me, doing a Google search on the name of the game every 5 minutes, reading every forum, blog and review they can find. Taking every single swipe on a personal level.

Because we don’t all work on Bioshock or Uncharted, we know our game is not the world-shaking achievement the press releases say it is, we know it has weaknesses, but we just hope people “will like it”. And as you all know, when you work really hard for a long stretch of time, when you are finally done you cannot immediately step back and take a cold look at what you have accomplished, that requires time. No, when you are just done, and the game is out of the door, you feel empty, you have no confidence whatsoever about what you just did, and you start worrying.

Back when I was just done working on one of the first games of my career, I remember checking the library every morning until the video games magazine I was reading at the time finally arrived. Then I flipped through the pages until I read stuff like “the worse crap that ever came our way” and “these guys should stop making games, or trying to” and some more of the same. And basically nothing about the game itself besides dismissing it as a whole. It was over six years ago (or seven maybe?) but I still clearly remember that day, sitting at the back of my father’s car with the magazine on my lap, reading the article over and over again.

The next issue of the magazine had a small block of text named “erratum”, where they said they based their review on a old and unstable preview build of our game and that the released version was still not great, but at least way better.

The more I work in this industry the better I understand why the games on the shelves are the way they are, with their strengths, weaknesses and incoherences. And I think that criticism is very important, it is a reality check we all need, but nobody should ever forget that the people who made those things deserve respect and constructive criticism. I haven’t ever met a single games developer who was not concerned about making the best game possible, but there are so many things in play and so many people with conflicting interests that even the largest amount of goodwill is sometimes not enough.

Feel free to share your stories in the comments.