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Poor communication is holding back industry, says
GameCity organiser - The inability of publishers and platform holders
to communicate with companies outside of the games industry
is holding back the entire market, according to GameCity's
Iain Simons. [GamesIndustry.biz news]

Speaking of poor communication, from the title of the article link, I was expecting a sane conversation about how communication on large teams is always a problem that retards innovation, kills creativity and prevents decent quality control. Unfortunately, as the rest of the text of the teaser implies, that couldn't be further from the truth...

…Which is a real shame. Communication is a HUGE issue in the industry (this is likely true in every creative industry, but I only know games). Here's a primary example:

I was working on this game, in the past, where there were 3 versions of the player tutorial. Each version was supposed to cover the exact same things, but do so with a slightly different story bent. My team and I took one of these tutorials and 2 other teams each took one of the remaining tutorials to produce.

My team and I sat down; we talked about how to pull it off. I brought in preliminary map sketches I'd considered and explained what the requirements we had to teach were. We then got to work turning those into real designs we could make together. This is good, the preliminary map sorta looked like kool-aid man, Oh yeah! (which is bad, in case you didn't get that).

So here's the deal, remember how I mentioned that I explained which requirements we had to teach the player to my team? Yeah, well, apparently the other two teams didn't get that far in their own pre-production meetings on their maps. As a result my team implemented a teaching tool that the other two teams did not.

That's poor Communication on their part, but it affects everyone, even my team - which did the job right. You see, it was an important lesson we had to teach players - that the world could kill you if you weren't careful. We set up the tutorial for it, and then we rewarded players at the end of it, so the heart ache of dying, or almost dying at the hands of the world would at least be paid off with sweet, sweet loot at the end of the ordeal. Players would wander off thinking, "damn, I'll watch myself out there, but at the same time, sometimes I might need to get through dangerous terrain to get to the good stuff, I'll keep that in mind." Well ok, they probably don't think in Beaver Cleaver's voice, but you get my point - they learned the lesson and learned that sometimes it's worth the risk, all in the same process.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, mine was the only team to do so. So, flash forward a few months and we've shown the game to some players and they bitch that my version of the tutorial is "broken" because there's this part where the environment is dangerous, and the other tutorials don't have this part. These poor players are suffering from the same miscommuniction as the devs that screwed up the other two tutorials in the first place. but it gets worse. People who had since forgotten they gave me the order to teach this lesson in the tutorial, then decided the players were right, my tutorial was "broke."

Flash forward a few more months and one member of my team quietly informs me, "Hey you know that tutorial bit with the dangerous environment? Well, I know you can't go back to the tutorial now, but I wanted to let you know the project director made me cut it." So now, the game ends up not teaching this vital lesson in any of the tutorials. I guess it's easier to break a single tutorial than to fix 2 broken ones... Worse, the one tutorial that wasn't broken is now singled out as the "broken" one.

The sad thing all of this could have been avoided had the teams involved just communicated properly, the way mine did. (not that I'm tooting my own horn, I blame my team for being so on the ball, not me). Still, these other teams did not... Poor leadership, probably. Whatever their reasons, they don't change that the game in question ended up with inadequate tutorials, which in turn means players are going to be increasingly frustrated later on down the line when these mechanics are used to leverage gameplay and they have no clue how they're supposed to respond...

You see the poor communication on the dev side translated to the game itself communicating poorly with the player. But hey, that's the industry, I guess.

What's the motto again? "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission"

- Snipehunter