The Bored Game Designer Look
I debated whether to put this here or in the gaming blog, and since it's not expressly about gaming, it's more personal, I figured here is better.
Anyway, I'm watching an interview with Rob Pardo, one of the developers of WoW, and he has a look that I've seen many, many times. It is a look of exhaustion combined with boredom combined with that intense focus through adversity that only comes otherwise when you're drunk and just telling yourself "maintain."
I've sat in on quite a few developer conferences such as these, many of them hosted by people I know very well, so I knew exactly what they were thinking or feeling at that time. It's difficult for a game designer to be in these situations, and while I understand the marketing aspect of putting your developers out there, these are not the people you want front-running any kind of discussion with the populace.
And here's why...
When a developer is giving these interviews, he's talking about stuff that he's done with, it's in his past. Sure, designers all operate on older material, for balance issues and whatnought, but all the effort they've had has gone into that, and now it's done. When Mr. Pardo left the office on Friday to come to BlizzCon, knowing he'd have to do this interview, he was sitting working on content that hasn't been announced, and coming up with ideas that probably never will be announced, and suddenly he has to rein that in, and talk about current stuff. It is a shockingly weird combination of boredom (dealing with stuff you've spent countless hours hashing over, answering questions you answered months ago in development) and stress (in keeping your big trap shut.)
That look of concentration that designers get isn't the look of a man who's intent on hearing everything about your question, in the back of his mind, as he hears what the question is, he's putting together things he can't say, filing away information that flowed quickly from his mouth talking to other developers earlier, but that he can't talk about right now.
Now, that seems simple, just don't say what you can't say, but it's shockingly easy to blurt something out that you shouldn't. Working behind the scenes like this for a few years there, I had to monitor message boards, hold chats, and whatnought, primarily as a fill-in for some random person who was in a meeting or whatever, and because of that I spent a lot of time re-reading our own press releases, just to find out what I could say. People would ask pretty inane questions, questions which they knew the answer to already, if they'd just read the press releases, or they would try to trick you into giving something away, showing favoritism or whatnought, or just randomly blurting something out.
The latter was my big fear, the former, there, I didn't care about. It never mattered to me if the fans knew I was a big Aragorn/Eowyn fan, or that I hated Dwarves. But a lot of the time, you try to tow that line of neutrality. Another common question is along the lines of "why is this overpowered?" to which the answer you will *always* receive is "we're looking at that very closely, but we haven't decided, either way, about it yet."
Of course, I was a bigger fan of dad's stand pat answer of "I don't answer why questions."
Anyway, I'm watching an interview with Rob Pardo, one of the developers of WoW, and he has a look that I've seen many, many times. It is a look of exhaustion combined with boredom combined with that intense focus through adversity that only comes otherwise when you're drunk and just telling yourself "maintain."
I've sat in on quite a few developer conferences such as these, many of them hosted by people I know very well, so I knew exactly what they were thinking or feeling at that time. It's difficult for a game designer to be in these situations, and while I understand the marketing aspect of putting your developers out there, these are not the people you want front-running any kind of discussion with the populace.
And here's why...
When a developer is giving these interviews, he's talking about stuff that he's done with, it's in his past. Sure, designers all operate on older material, for balance issues and whatnought, but all the effort they've had has gone into that, and now it's done. When Mr. Pardo left the office on Friday to come to BlizzCon, knowing he'd have to do this interview, he was sitting working on content that hasn't been announced, and coming up with ideas that probably never will be announced, and suddenly he has to rein that in, and talk about current stuff. It is a shockingly weird combination of boredom (dealing with stuff you've spent countless hours hashing over, answering questions you answered months ago in development) and stress (in keeping your big trap shut.)
That look of concentration that designers get isn't the look of a man who's intent on hearing everything about your question, in the back of his mind, as he hears what the question is, he's putting together things he can't say, filing away information that flowed quickly from his mouth talking to other developers earlier, but that he can't talk about right now.
Now, that seems simple, just don't say what you can't say, but it's shockingly easy to blurt something out that you shouldn't. Working behind the scenes like this for a few years there, I had to monitor message boards, hold chats, and whatnought, primarily as a fill-in for some random person who was in a meeting or whatever, and because of that I spent a lot of time re-reading our own press releases, just to find out what I could say. People would ask pretty inane questions, questions which they knew the answer to already, if they'd just read the press releases, or they would try to trick you into giving something away, showing favoritism or whatnought, or just randomly blurting something out.
The latter was my big fear, the former, there, I didn't care about. It never mattered to me if the fans knew I was a big Aragorn/Eowyn fan, or that I hated Dwarves. But a lot of the time, you try to tow that line of neutrality. Another common question is along the lines of "why is this overpowered?" to which the answer you will *always* receive is "we're looking at that very closely, but we haven't decided, either way, about it yet."
Of course, I was a bigger fan of dad's stand pat answer of "I don't answer why questions."
posted by Kindralas at 4:55 AM
2 Comments:
Unfortunately, you can't tell that to the consumer asking you a question. In fact, I told that to a guy once who asked me a lot of "Why?" questions, and he just recast them to say things like, "Can you tell me the reason for..." So you can't win. :)
Yeah, that guy was hacking.
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