Warning: It is after midnight and I don't feel like proofreading.
Reading internet forums is, as most of us know, a special form of torture that should be reserved for those with a preexisting, one-way ticket to the netherworld. That isn't to say that the fans as a whole aren't awesome, or that there aren't interesting topics or well formed posts. I don't mean to be ungrateful, I really don't. I appreciate that, good or bad, people care about our industry's products so much that they spend their time discussing it with others. It is simply that the anonymous nature of the internet guarantees that a certain percentage of the populous is going to be...challenging.
For some reason all of us, even though we know that we will fixate on the inevitable negative posts, eventually seem to find ourselves reading the forums for our respective games. Kevin Smith has written far more extensively (and with much less fear) on the nature of the internet, so I'm going to focus this on some of the special hells we get to deal with in the world of video games.
1. The good-intended fans who don't have to deal with the realities of game development.
It is tough to understand what goes into making a video game until you've done it. There are business, technical, artistic, legal, and creative limitations to every decision we make. Even though some ideas sound awesome, it can be incredibly frustrating to read entire threads devoted to demanding features or changes that are simply impossible. Some generic examples:
"Why don't these lasy developers simply hire a dozen animators and do (insert feature here)? They have millions of dollars!"
A few notes, if I may:
- First of all, you can expect that whatever feature you want can't be done by a single discipline in the modern era, even if it _seems_ like it would be the case. Concept artists need to draw the first vision (which will require iterations), artists then make content (which will require iterations), designers need to create the gameplay (which will require iterations), programmers need to code the logic (which will have bugs that need to be fixed), and QA needs to test everything. This doesn't even include the overhead of producers getting in the way with the pesky "budget" and "schedule" or leads ensuring the feature is polished. NOTHING is as simple as it seems.
- Second of all, talent is very, very hard to find. It is also very, very expensive. No matter how nice it would be, it is simply unfeasible to grab a large number of people out of school and expect them to hit your quality bar. It takes MONTHS to train even the most experienced people on the very specific tools that each team has and get them accustomed to the way each team works. Finding the _right_ person for a team is also an art that often takes months of hard work. Even if you could find the people, you'd be amazed at how fast games can eat through their budget.
- Finally, you should read the seminal classic "Mythical Man Month." The fact is, and this is pre-101 producer stuff, adding 2 people to a six month task does not make it a three month task anymore than putting nine women on a pregnancy makes a baby pop out in a month.
"Game X is so lame...they only have like a dozen characters on the screen...they should have 50 and make epic battles! And the battles should all be procedurally generated so they are unique every time. And they should support 16 player co-op, with fully recorded fights you can play back on your iPhone. They should also make it so every object in the world can be broken in a totally unique way. Also, 30fps is so choppy, it should run at 120fps at 1080p."
So, this example might be a slight exaggeration, but you get the point, and to be honest, it isn't _that_ far off from some of the comments I read. Even with the most talented tech team in the industry (and I'm proud to work with them), the fact of the matter is that the hardware can only do so much. There are a lot of technical considerations that most people never even realize that every game team has to live with. I could go off for HOURS on the difficulties, but let's focus on the easiest one, shall we?
- For all the arguments on the internet about how we have BluRay now and we have all the gigabytes of storage in the world for art assets, everyone seems to forget the simple fact that memory on consoles is limited. Very limited. All the fancy HD textures, meshes, high quality audio, and game code you see on your screen (and beyond) need to fit into 512K of memory (I'm simplifying the problem here.) That doesn't even account for the overhead of the operating system and game engine which steals our precious space. It doesn't do us a LICK of good to have all those gigs of space on a BluRay disk if, when we need to show you the cool stuff on screen, it doesn't fit in 512 megs. Sure, we are constantly moving things in and out of memory, but that takes time (quite a bit of time), and if it isn't there when you need it, your game will suddenly run at 0FPS instead of 30 or 60 while it gets there. When you understand how large HD assets are and how complicated game code is, you'll realize the miracle of what you see on the screen.
2. The incorrect fans we simply can't correct.
This one is extremely frustrating. I've seen thread after thread of people TEARING into games for things (in development) that are simply incorrect. I'll "genericize" one example I saw to make a point:
"OMG that move is WAY too easy to pull of and never runs out of power!!! THIS WILL RUIN THE GAME. They need to change this or I will not buy it. How can they be so dumb."
Of course, as is often the case, maybe the meter is just full so we can easily demonstrate it? Or maybe the button combo is super-easy so our poor production team can actually pull off the move while doing an interview with a microphone stuck in their face?
What makes this torture, of course, is that maybe the WAY the meter gets full or the ACTUAL button commands to make a move work are still secret and we can't talk about it? Which leads to 3...
3. FOR THE MOST PART WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THE GAME, AND WHEN WE CAN, WE ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT SPECIFIC THINGS!
You can't fathom how excited developers tend to be about the games they are working on. And you similarly can't imagine what it is like not being able to share that enthusiasm with the public. Can you imagine working for years on a project and not being able to say anything? How about creating a piece of art that is the single greatest thing you have ever done and not being able to show your friends? It is, in a word, nightmarish. You, dear internet forum member, may post a totally reasonable question on the internet, and a million fans might be confused as to why the development team can't take a simple second to answer it. The reason? Because if we DO answer the question, no matter how "simple" it might seem, PR will sneak into our homes at night and kill us and our families in our sleep. And if that happens, the game never gets finished. You don't want that, do you?
4. The mean-spirited interview nit picking.
A shout-out to one of my fellow producers, who posted what I consider to be one of the best interviews I have ever seen. I was, frankly, jealous of his performance. And yet, one of the comments was "I would never let someone like that represent my product." I know the internet is anonymous, and I know we will never fix "mean people", but next time someone asks me why I don't often frequent forums, I will cite this example. In summation, dear internet, please be nice to each other.
