Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.
> All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that include every feature under the sun.
Lots of book authors and other artists who have to "promote" themselves on social media run into similar issues.
“Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,”
Let’s both appreciate the moment.
Everyone I knew who got into the industry did it to share the joy that gaming brought them to other people. It's an explicitly social industry in that respect.
Also, I don't know of a single place that can afford to run interference for every single dev. Even on the large AAA stuff I worked on we were lucky to have 1 or 2 marketing people who were even aware the dev team existed.
And when I say “run interference,” I mean “handle all public interactions for the product, which your devs shouldn’t be involved in at all, because they’re devs, not marketers.”
This is a problem -without- requiring it to be acceptable behavior.
It's a serious problem with online interactions, especially in the gaming field where people get unreasonably passionate and there's a lot of sexually frustrated young men needing to vent their anger.
Hell, I've been an asshole here on HN, I know I have been, it's so much easier to be without seeing someone's face.
It doesn't make it ok or acceptable though, and unfortunately I feel I have to downvote and speak against you because what you're doing is defending hate and evil. It shouldn't have to be a cost of business, it's not business, it's an unfortunate side effect of the free and open and anonymous internet. It doesn't mean we should accept it though.
When you’re on a platform serving an arbitrarily large number of people, even a vanishingly small percentage of them amount to more toxicity than a single recipient can handle. That’s the asymmetry of celebrity, and has nothing at all to do with whether the toxic behavior is acceptable or not. It’s a large numbers issue.
Dealing with toxic people is a guaranteed consequence of opening yourself up to communication with millions. Yes, it -is- the cost of celebrity, and always has been. It’s just the weird nature of the internet that the nature of “celebrity” has changed.
edit: And there's also the matter of games with live service components, where you're in a state of constantly tweaking the game based on feedback, potentially for years.
Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two.
Unless you -have- to be the public face of a product, your professional media interactions shouldn’t be accessible to the masses. Your private definitely shouldn’t be. They need to be heavily firewalled. If I can trivially message the lead dev of my favorite game, he’s done something wrong. If I can reach him on a private account he can’t just burn or ignore, he’s done a lot wrong.
The internet hosts the majority of people on earth: it’s a very, very long tail of crazy, poorly socialized, immature, etc. There is no changing that if you are accessible to seven billion people, some tiny percent of that will amount to an overwhelming amount of shit.
The answer is jealously guarding your privacy and communications channels, which isn’t something I’ve seen in these discussions.
Im not trying to victim blame here. I just don’t see as fruitful lamenting something that boils down to “dealing with the public en masse sucks.” It does, and it will:
But then, I’m pseudonymous or anonymous everywhere, and do my level best to keep my pseudonyms unrelated to one another across multiple platforms.
As opposed to letting my patients trivially connect my real name to my various social media channels.
Then maybe it's time to put down the keyboard and listen to the experiences of the people who have found some level of success.
When you've shipped a title that's moderately successful you're more then welcome to come back here and tell us how were doing it all wrong. Until then I find it hard to listen to the advice of someone who can't empathize with what is happening here.
Not to and with patients, but certainly to and with other docs and healthcare executives. The age of “I open a private practice and work there until I die” came to an end about a decade ago. Never mind requiring a constant stream of referrals. I have to network pretty constantly.
like movies, games have credits. entertainment products (movies, games, music, books, etc.) have traditionally been about following talent around to find more work by them. we're all basically entertainers.
that, and angry gamers can chase down people to yell at. especially the higher you are in the responsibility chain, the easier you are to find. linkedin makes sure of that. resumes and all that. because, you know, game devs want jobs, too.
this often means game developers don't have the choice to not be derided in public. not unless step one to joining a game team is the switch your entire life to "private". delist your home address. everything. and, i know plenty of devs who've had to. we all shrug and say, "man, that sucks."
because the difference between making games and making boring, insurance middleware? nobody really cares about enterprise middleware as craft. nobody wants to do it, much less thinks they can do it better.
EVERYONE passionately thinks/hopes/wishes/wants to make better games than you.
(. . . well, maybe not everyone, but certainly a whole lotta folks)