A quick one

Scroller thoughts

Forgive the lack of Substack updates; I’ve been a bit in the weeds lately. But something’s on my mind, so let’s have a quick one.

I was in some corner of the internet or another, scrolling through anecdotes about the lack of positive feedback in corporate game development culture, and it got me reflecting on the importance of giving people their flowers while they’re here.

Assuming critical feedback is in service of the best possible player experience (in the allocated time to develop said experience and with the available resources), critical feedback is of paramount importance. Critical feedback identifies tasks that need to be accomplished in order to make the game better: “X isn’t working the way it should”, “Y needs clarity”, “Z isn’t aligned with the vision”. Critical feedback is necessary for the game’s (hopefully successful) development.

But where critical feedback builds the game, it can break morale.

If the only feedback a team ever hears is “Fix this, do that, this is broken, that’s bad”, day in and day out, while more than likely crunching to meet demands, trading personal and family time for Asana tickets — no matter how valid the critical feedback, it becomes demoralizing.

There has to be positive feedback to balance things out. There has to be an acknowledgement and appreciation of the work going into things — even things that are broken, even things that aren’t yet meeting expectations. It took work to get from nothing to broken, and will take yet more work to get from broken to fun, but there can’t be zero positive feedback along that road from nothing to fun.

9,000 people lost their jobs last week, through no fault of their own, in one fell swoop of a (profitable) megaconglomerate’s indifferent sword. I wonder how many of those 9,000 received their flowers while they were there. I wonder how often they heard “I appreciate your work”, “Good job getting things to this point”, “I see you put a lot into this”.

No gold medals or cookies required for doing the job — just a little human empathy. The games industry is hard enough these days. *Life* is hard enough these days. Have you looked outside? Seems reasonable enough to make people feel seen and appreciated such that they’re motivated to continue addressing the miles of to-dos in the ultramarathon of game development. Red Bull for the soul.

Happy chickens lay more eggs, y’know?

Just some thoughts that surfaced in my meat-noggin as I scrolled through the tales of tired game developers.

Hope y’all are finding ways to cope in these depress-cedented times. (That’s my new word for the depressing way history repeats itself.) I’ll be back soon with a more substantive article.