Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson on the perils and nd pitfalls of community management ent

So we have finalised our publisher, and therefore our budget and our rough release date, which means we are hiring a community manager – and I am conflicted about it. These days, having someone on board full-time who can communicate with players, bring news back from the battlefield of complaints and issues and bugs, or help your latest trailer find its audience, is crucial. More and more, however, I find the role and its impact on games troubling.

Interfacing too much with your audience during development can make the act of creation an attempt to satisfy a moving, poorly defined series of requests from a possible audience instead of a focused, planned execution of a (hopefully) fresh and coherent idea. Interacting too much with them after release has, we’ve seen elsewhere, created a hellstorm of entitlement that has lead directly to deeply unpleasant online forums and generally abusive behaviour between players and toward developers.

But it’s easy to see how we got here. At every stage of development, games are more deeply involved with their audience than any other medium – from focus-testing early builds to check whether the game is behaving the way you expected and that players are interacting with it in a positive way, through to the excitement of defeating a human opponent versus a virtual one. There is no movie that requires you to watch it in a group, but we have entire categories of games that are inherently linked to multiple players.

And the very act of being an interactive medium made it exciting and seemingly attractive to let players interact with it even more: to bring them closer to the process, to give them direct access to developers through streams, or AMAs and forums, to the point that sometimes it feels like the audience itself has become a kind of surrogate producer. On one hand this has kickstarted the creation of some amazing communities, but it has also damaged companies, ruined careers, and made some games worse.

What other medium would change the ending of a story after release because of a petition that amounted to less than onetenth of a per cent of its audience the way that Bioware did with Mass Effect 3? And what did this collapse under pressure actually achieve? Not much, apart from compromising the story as originally envisaged by its creators and then accelerating the retirement of some really great game developers – one of whom decided it would be more fun to go make boutique beer instead of deal with being abused daily by your supposedly biggest fans.

In a month where writers from ArenaNet have been dismissed because their employer was too scared of the foaming opinions of a tiny segment of their audience, and a designer at Riot left after venting (admittedly in poor taste) about a streamer who had already been banned over a dozen times, it’s worth considering whether there’s any value to be had from a developer interacting with the audience outside of the work itself. Players are free to hate the content, but they should not be free to change it.

This is not to say that it isn’t valuable when communities form, or build, their own content, or find their own ways of celebrating or engaging with the games – it’s about what role developers should have in that process. For me, developers and players should be the videogame equivalent of church and state. They both exist, they are both important, and by definition they overlap in certain ways, but there should be a careful and controlled separation between the two.

The act of game-making often requires a kind of willful ignorance, where you can’t stop to think about how big the project is, how far from finished you are, or how broken everything is at this exact moment. To keep working on it instead of turning off your computer and going to the pub, you need to focus on near-term goals and the hope that you can make continual progress until you can look up and find that it’s mostly working.

To protect this delicate balance, we need feedback and community interaction to be filtered and managed so that it’s effective and helpful, instead of enraging and depressing. This makes our Typhoon community manager a gatekeeper as well as a visible presence to the community; they will need to pick through requests and complaints, but also keep the really nasty stuff to themselves, so we can keep working and hopefully make our first game something that doesn’t earn us death threats.

One developer decided it would be more fun to go make boutique beer instead of deal with being abused daily