At Your Beck And Call
Do we expect too much communication from developers today?
Back in the day if you had a question concerning a board game the best you could hope for was a yes or no answer (and you had to provide your own SASE to get even that!). During the early days of computer gaming it was no better; maybe you could find something out through a BBS or by picking up the phone and calling the publisher.
Today thanks to forums, blogs, email, and everything else, it’s fairly easy to connect with the folks behind the games you’re playing. From a gamer’s perspective this sense of community is great, but is it so great for the developers?
If a developer stops by a forum and responds to questions on a regular basis this can be seen as caring for the community, but if they halt the visits (or don’t visit to begin with), this can be construed as any number of negative things: they don’t care about the game’s fans, they don’t care about the game itself, they’re far too aloof, et cetera. While you’d hope people would assume they’re just busy making the game, hey, it’s the Internet and you know that always seems to bring out the worst in humanity.
So what say you? Does the ability to instantly communicate necessarily mean that folks should be expected to communicate? Do you get offended/concerned during the development of a game if there is very little discussion on it? Or do you take it in stride?
It doesn’t worry me if devs are quiet during the development phase. But once the game is out, I really hope to see them engaged with the customer clarifying (e.g. “on-call artillery will automatically bombard enemy units unless you do x, y, and z.”), actively listening (e.g. “good idea - we’ll see if we can include that in the next patch”), or defending (e.g. “6th FJ Rgt. was filled with fresh replacements and shouldn’t be capable of holding up XXX Corp for more than a couple of hours.)
This kind of interaction speaks volumes about the quality of the designer and, by extension, about the game.
If they can get out in the community and offer some of this ahead of publishing, so much the better. But it’s afterward that counts most in my book.
Comment by Dan — 12/28/2007 @ 11:34 pm