Max Nichols

I do think I did you a disservice quoting your thread then doing mine here.

I was imagining all the cases I’ve seen of leadership listening to — frankly influencers, not even players per se, and doing a bad job of filtering & interpretation.

But of course most advice is assuming functional orgs

That is a good point! I will watch your video

I do suspect that we're talking at kinda cross-purposes here a little bit, maybe thinking about different kinds of decisions at different scopes or points in time. When we get down to brass tacks and specific examples we seem to agree.

I don't think it's just that. I am saying that I want more creative leaders who make strong decisions without any input _at all_ from users.

I want to play, and work on, games that are catering to an individual vision holder's tastes and artistic goals above and beyond whatever users are saying.

Right!

What I'm trying to say is that, if we're making a work of art, it doesn't always matter if some users are complaining. In fact, I doubt it's possible to make something really compelling that doesn't turn off some users.

Making "users stop complaining" is often not an important goal

That I definitely agree with!

Even that usual framing—that users can explain their feelings, not solutions—can mislead teams into treating all negative feelings as important, actionable problems.

I would never suggest that users should be ignored outright!

But I don’t think it’s correct to say that they should always be heeded (I don’t think you said that), or even even that their inarticulate feelings are always useful to act upon

I think our industry has a terrible dearth of authorial intent in projects above indie scope, and many leaders that are willing to listen to influencers or streamers or loud reddit threads over their own devs. That’s why I push back

Honestly, I’m even a little skeptical about that common wisdom. One player’s “wrong” can easily be another player’s “right”, and we can’t please everyone, right?

Maybe it’s ok if our game just isn’t to their taste.

I think scale can be a huge factor, yeah.

The old chestnut “listen to their problems, not their solutions” is a good starting point. But frankly not every player represents every other player, or your own artistic vision.

Sometimes it’s ok for someone to have a problem that we never plan to solve

bsky.app/profile/mark...

Very true! Utterly dissimilar examples.

It takes a lot of discipline and very clear vision to be exposed to all that and still hold your course against ALL the feedback you perceive.

For 100% of the feedback you hear to be "this thing is frustrating" and say "no, I am the designer, the artist, I know that this thing is important."

And... listening to vocal minorities is effortless. Unavoidable, even. And you have this insidious thing that happens where ALL the feedback you're getting is from this narrow cross-section. It is your entire window into the player experience. You're blind to problems that this subset doesn't see.

Like

I think as game devs we often exist in this vacuum where we don't get to really see information, especially in short feedback loops, about how our work is landing. We're desperate for evidence of how our work is landing and how it's being taken and experienced.

Aonuma: With fan sites and Miiverse, its almost as though we’re sitting in the same room [as the fans], because there’s no go-between; it’s direct. But with regard to how fan voices or fan opinion affects my daily work and my creative process, I certainly have the fans in mind when I’m creating something, and I want to create something that will make them happy, but it’s my creative responsibility to also give them something they didn’t know they wanted. An element of surprise always has to be there, because I’m a creative person; it’s my job. … I like to leave a little bit of distance between myself and my fans, because it’s that distance that allows me the space that I need.

I think it can be important to listen to feedback from communities or players in very controlled ways, but taking their opinions as truth and their problems as your problems is a huge danger that must be carefully managed.

I identify much more with what Aonuma says here:

I guess my experience in games has been one of slavish devotion to the words of every streamer or redditor or esports player with a platform.

Where exactly are these teams that are NOT listening to their players to the degree that it's causing them problems? I want to work there instead, hahah

I've worked as a designer on a MOBA team where I had to take direction from a "Balance QA team", comprised mostly of esports players we hired from MOBA communities, even if I disagreed with them. I, the character designer, basically just became the implementer of these folks' feedback.

But I've seen large GAAS teams that practically listen to their games' reddit as a creative director. I've never seen a game that ignores their reddit.

I've seen CEOs that follow twitter influencers for the game, and take their feedback as gospel.

The reality of course is that this is nuanced and can't be summarized as "we should listen to players" or "we shouldn't", since at SOME level you have to just do basic, like, playability testing and balancing, which inevitably requires at least observing players.

I don't fully disagree with Robin-Yann here, but I think I've seen FAR more problems caused by listening to players, than solved.

Listening overmuch biases towards vocal minorities and shortteam bandaids, and diffuses the vision/focus.

I've seen more games ruined by this than vice versa.

Not to put Luis on the spot here, but this seems like a pretty clearcut illustration of a source of FOMO that only affects games:
bsky.app/profile/beet...

I will abstain from trying to define what's normal here, hahah

My impression is that fewer people feel that way about other mediums, but who knows what kind of distortions I'm looking at it all with

I know for myself a lot of this feeling stems from being a game designer, who:
1) Wants to stay abreast of trends and boundaries being pushed.
2) Am surrounded by interesting discussion of many games. A zeitgeist.

But I see players who are not devs or professionals with the same feelings

I am not sure! I've spent my whole life in those kind of enthusiast/dev circles, so my perspective is super warped.

You hear people say stuff like “there are too many games on Steam”. That’s a widespread belief!

But nobody ever said “blockbuster has too many movies” or “spotify has too many songs” (other than as a criticism of the business stranglehold).

It’s obviously a very goofy thing to think or feel but it’s very widespread.

I don’t even listen to 0.1% of all the music that comes out and nobody would ever feel like anyone should, or feel buried by it.

I wonder why, culturally, game-enjoyers seem way more likely to feel like they “can’t keep up” or are “overwhelmed” by the number of games coming out.

In what other art form would we ever feel bad for not experiencing all of it? Why do so many of us have these feelings for games, and games alone?

It's funny because back in like, the late 90s and very early 00s that kind of thing WOULD happen. People like Miyamoto or Capcom's Yoshiki Okamoto would just casually mention stuff that they were thinking about or were in development.

But uh

That was more than 20 years ago

I can still hear his voice