droqen's forum-shaped notebook

Quote from: 7:32You need to remember that you are different. We [game designers] don't represent normal people at all. . . . We are just not normal people. And so what we value isn't the same as what normal people value. . . . What we are interested in is not the same, and our skill level is also very different from what I call "normal people".

Hmm. What is a normal people? Next McWilliams shows a slide of the top 25 TV listings. "Anytime you start to feel like you represent the mass market, look at that." She shows examples of popular media.

Quote from: 8:25And I think this . . . fact that we're not interested in the same stuff a lot of [the] time leads us to look down on the stuff that we're not interested in. . . . it's a dangerous line of thinking for us, since as developers, and as designers, and as creative people, our goal should be to put smiles on people's faces, to entertain them, to move them emotionally in some fashion, and we need to understand them in order to move them, especially if we're not part of the mass market.

McWilliams is drawing from modern popular culture as the bastion of goodness, which I'm absolutely not on-board with, but aside from that, I agree with the broad strokes, and based on the questions Momin asked, I think I will enjoy at least the strategies given by this talk.

I think it's still worth looking down on popular stuff when it is bad, and I believe my own interpretation of badness is far removed from "stuff that [I'm] not interested in."

Quote from: 9:14We just don't look like normal people. We don't act like 'em, we don't think like them

What a weird thing to repeatedly insist upon. Aren't we normal people? I think it's more important to understand the ways in which we are people, normal people, than to double down on this idea of alienating idiosyncrasy.

She shows a stock image of people standing around in office clothes...

Quote from: 11:10

How do you make a game when it's not for you?

How do you inspire yourself and your team to make something great?

Quote from: 13:33Get your head around what [your audience] is doing. You don't just wanna know what they're playing, you want to know what they're watching, what are they wearing, what are they listening to, what are they reading, what are they talking about, you want to understand these people. And you can treat it like a fun exercise, you can treat it like you're a scientist observing a tribe in the Amazon, but either way, understanding your audience is key.

Audience. There's something about the word audience that grosses me out. Part of it is McWilliams' repeated insistence that "we are not normal people"... Are you saying that these people you're observing are "normal people"? I can't get that taste of alienation out of my mouth :/

At 14:XX, there is a fun slide that says "Personify Your Audience" -- which is like, create a character who represents your audience? It actually sounds like a lot of fun. The bullet points on the slide read:

• Create representative players
• Give them names
• List their hobbies
• What do they want from your game?

Okay at 15:XX, we have a slide called "Eat Your Own Dogfood" which is... ugh... can we please think of a more appealing way to talk about the work we're doing? oh my god. Just have the same concepts, and don't present them in an intentionally corporate-yucky way!!

But the idea is cool. Get everyone on the team to spend a considerable amount of time with our competition. (3-5 hours.) This makes a lot of sense, though again I would prefer this to be more vibey. Spend time embodying our characters, soaking in the mood, etc. There are more fulfilling things to do than just align ourselves with media.

Still: "Meet The Competition (and show some respect)"

The negative language in this slide at 17:00 is so bad that I'm not even going to quote it! Let's keep it to "Meet the competition, and show some respect."
Or, as Donella Meadows says in Thinking in Systems,
"Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. . . . study its beat. . . . watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who've been around a long time to tell you what has happened. (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2111)"
". . . admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system. (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2116)"

Slide 18:XX

Talk As A Group
- What makes the game work?
- Why do players like it?
- What can we do as well as they do?
- What's feasible on our budget and in our timeframe?

I would say: If there are negative voices, e.g. "this other game sucks", keep the conversation focused on answers to these constructive and respectful questions. It sucks -- okay, but what works? What can we do as well as they can? (This is a clever one: not better, just as well as they can.) Why do people like it and play it? (Keeping it constructive, positive - don't accept answers that focus on unhelpful/disrespectful things.)

Focus tests! - Use them to understand how users people think.

Ask them more questions, and listen to them - not just about game design but also what do you think of our art style? (the story? the presentation? the controls? etc)

For usability testing: Take a video, watch it, you'll learn the things people do

Ask them to test OTHER games, your competitor's games :O
Ask them to compare your game (half-finished though it may be) to other games. Expect to be worse.

"If you do it right, everybody likes the same stuff in games." -28:00

I agree with this... but... not what she follows up with... Maybe I should pick it apart.

"They want an immersive experience that makes them feel like they did something special and they're unique and special and they develop skill while doing it."

-an immersive experience
-do something special
-feel that you're unique and special
-you develop skill while doing it

HMMM. I need to think about this. McWilliams really casually is like "yep this is what everyone likes about games!"
I thought about it. ~ SYNAPSE I don't make art to make people happy, I make it to provoke epiphanies. (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2151)

"We're actually enjoying the process of making the game. It has nothing to do with the game we're making, it has to do with the fact that we love being game developers, and we love making games." - 31:56

"Get a hobby" hahaha yeah. Let go. Let go. Making a big commercial game is not the place for getting super attached to owning your piece of the work. And yet you can still be proud of it! This is pretty good advice.

Quote from: 36:xxThe more surround yourself by people who are super excited just to get to make games at all, the more you'll remind yourself it's kinda cool that I get to make games at all, instead of being an accountant, or a software developer, you know, at an insurance company.

One step forward, two steps back. McWilliams advocates for... inoculating yourself to the things you're unhappy about, here? I don't know. The first thing she starts this longer section with is that "You're making games because you love games! Pay attention to other games more," and I don't know, it just sounds like... submitting to the cult, lol. I like "get a hobby" more than "get a hobby that involves playing more games, making more games, and teaching other people who want to make games how to make games so that you can feel better about not enjoying making this game"...

There's something in there, but I really don't like the specific culture she's coming from or speaking to.

Ah, wow. The next section is literally McWilliams reading negative internet comments and responding to them. It's so, uh, internet cringe.

39:35- "I'm creatively fulfilled by whatever I'm working on, because I'm making games. The problem we have is that we have an industry that grew up with personal creative fulfilment being very closely linked to people's jobs . . . but that doesn't work if your personal creative fulfilment is only about making a game that you would play. And it's why the Zyngas of the world are killing, in terms of the number of people playing. They're killing it. And they're killing it because they're getting past themselves, and they're making games for the rest of the world. And it's cool if you don't want to do that, that's fine, you know, you're, make the games for people you want to make the games for. But let's stop crapping on the people who are making the games for the rest of the world."

I think it was in particular this last sentence that riled me up, that made me want to consider this quote more carefully. "Let's stop crapping on the people who are making the games for the rest of the world." This is... how do I describe it? I want to say it's reactionary, defensive. "I'm creatively fulfilled doing what I'm advocating for!" "Let's stop crapping on people for doing what I'm advocating for." It's... narrow... and though I wouldn't go so far as to say these people are strawmen, wwhhoo cares? Who cares? "Let's," McWilliams says.

I once used language like this. This is a talk from 2012, over a decade ago, keep in mind. Part of my cringe is mere cringing at my past self, my past aspirations and hopes for the scene, the industry, the world. Hmm.

The last slide (with content) is a comment which 'gets it,' and yeah, I agree with this. Maybe I'm just enjoying my little isolated island a bit too much, I don't need to be exposed to all this internet vitriol and discourse. Ugh. Here's something I can agree with. McWilliams does too. (Or rather, this comment agrees with her!)

"You can either make games with yourself as the target audience (and then hope that others like them too) or you can try to make games that you enjoy *making* even if they aren't ones you would necessarily enjoy playing. Even if you aren't in the target audience for your own creative work, you can still get satisfaction from it, and still get motivated to do it." (slide at 42:xx)

I would say that the negative is not so important for me anymore. 'Even if they aren't ones you would necessarily enjoy playing.' I mean, yeah, okay, but the important part is everything else, not the negation, the rejection... this is non-timeless stuff. The timeless stuff. Let me extract it.

Extracted from the overview:

I'll end by saying I watched this talk because it was linked to me by Momin Khan (https://twitter.com/foolmoron/status/1624868050708070401) -- not via Twitter, but I've linked his enthusiastic retweet here since the original recommendation was done in a private work Slack, and this one is more enthusiastic and has more commentary about how he feels about it :)

I love that his takeaway is that it's about loving the craft of gamedev. Maybe the tone wasn't for me, I didn't need McWilliams to counter all these awful internet and workplace arguments I never wanted unearthed in the first place, but I expect somewhat that the talk is for an audience other than me. That is, it's a talk written for someone else, and for these people, the talk correctly addresses many familiar prejudices and frustrations.

I'm not at an objective place when it comes to designing or giving talks, but I like to think I'm getting there with game design.

Even still, I think the more important thing is the common feeling. Not marketing, not audiences... I don't know, I can't get over the feeling, not the one she's talking about, but a different feeling. I suppose the feeling could merely be a more deeply crenellated version of the position she's attacking; I think it is more worthwhile to develop one's sense of the universal craft of games, rather than to practice a divided craft, for limited audiences. But in many ways this 'universal' sense is simply aligned with what I want to... play, or see, in the world.

Is this something I will ever get over? I guess time will tell.

But I'll remind myself, here at the end, that the first splinter in my brain was McWilliams' insistence that we are not normal people. I hate that idea, the idea of identifying myself as separate.

There are no normal people.

There are only people.

And we are of them.