Fighting the Wrong Good Fight

I feel for Warren Spector when he says that reviewers are misunderstanding Epic Mickey; really I do. I feel for him the same way I felt for Tim Schafer when people misunderstood the RTS elements of Brutal Legend. And, when I say that I feel for them, I don’t mean that in the backhanded way that sets up the classic “but it’s all about the results” fatality move. I mean it in the “I’ve (kinda) been there and it sucks" kind of way.

There are few things as frustrating as working diligently on a project into which you have poured endless aspirations, heaping dollops of ego and unwavering, if unwarranted, confidence, only to discover that when you put it before the madding crowd they don’t get it. It’s almost impossible not to get mad at the consumer, whether that be a player of video games, a watcher of movies or a reader of your words, for looking at your work through the wrong lens, from the wrong angle and with all the wrong kinds of attention.

As a writer, it’s one thing to have people just not necessarily like what I say. That’s easy to deal with. But, when someone takes away the wrong point entirely, or spends their entire time hyper-analyzing a single sentence out of 1000 words that doesn’t even really impact the main point anyway, well that is almost physically painful. It can keep me up at nights, irrationally, illogically scowling away into the darkness. I can only imagine how that must feel magnified for a designer who has poured heart and soul into a project over a span of years, only to end up feeling like the keepers of the gate have missed the point entirely.

None of this is to say that my sympathy is moving the stone-hearted ways of my wallet, or that anyone is actually in the wrong for criticism delivered to Warren, Tim or anyone else who puts a product on the shelf. What I can’t criticize, however, is the desire, even need, to advocate for one's own work, hopeless though the effort may be.

Much as I think Warren Spector and countless others before him might want players to get on point and recognize the direction that they intended to go, the truth is that you have exactly one chance to impact a player’s perception and that’s when the game is on screen. Warren can tell us until he’s blue in the face that we are seeing things through distorted eyes, but he has no solution for correcting our vision. He might as well try to convince us the color red is a D Flat as played by an asthmatic on a Sousaphone.

The futility of the effort, however, is noble. I like a developer who stands up for his or her game. I like to see that kind of passion, misplaced though it may sometimes be, in the industry. In an age where things seem so packaged, prefabricated and product driven, there is something endearingly personal about such an emotional reaction. Speaking for myself, had I invested three years and millions of dollars into a single work, I would have to be physically restrained from not accosting anyone who even vaguely appeared to want to drag my work through the mud.

That Warren Spector doesn’t randomly lob bombs from a moving vehicle at those who dare besmirch his good name -- like, say, a David Jaffe might -- is a credit to his even temperament. Maybe it’s easier for me because I waited on Epic Mickey, and so I don’t have a $60 stake in Warren’s vision, but I do think it’s easy to lose sight as consumers to the fact that real lives are wrapped in the boxes and streams of data that make up games. I'm not saying that should be a factor in the buying decision, but it can be taken into account when we decided how to interpret the talking points that filter into the news.

In an industry that often seems perfectly content to take the safe route and distribute the intentionally mediocre, where the best path to profitability is to release games built by committee and formula, I ache for the team that strives to exceed and fails. Even as much as I condemned the catastrophe that was Elemental: War of Magic earlier in the year, I was torn by the certainty that people genuinely passionate about trying something different had fallen far short, even if it was clearly a failure of their own doing.

It’s easy to indict the highly visible for standing up for their work, for being completely biased against the litany of reasonable charges being brought against them. Frankly, I kinda like having those people around.

Comments

Nice read. Also, I thought I would be sad about the Sean/Shawn-less podcast but the discussion around Epic Mickey was really great.

I absolutely love Epic Mickey for what it is. Yes, the flaws that countless of reviews and podcasts have pointed out are very real and maybe I'm just really easy to please but those flaws don't bug me so much when I love this game as much as I do. I applaud Warren Spector and his team for putting everything they had into Epic Mickey.

Interesting. While I agree that I like the passion of developers standing up for their game, this always comes hand-in-hand with a criticism of game reviewers for "doing it wrong" or "not getting it". It's one thing to disagree with them, it's another to basically accuse them of doing a bad job for not agreeing with you.

Yeah, I feel for game makers when their work gets panned, from the figureheads to the coders and animators. People put years of their lives into their work only to have it slated.

But at some point someone needs to have a look and go, 'You know guys, this is cool and all, but this sh*t is broken.'

As a Software Test Analyst and sometimes tester I find it amazing how the designers and programmers sometimes take it so personally when I find a bug. They and the people behind Epic Mickey should be looking at the bright side. One, if someone is giving you feedback (good or bad) then they are at least interested enough to check out your work. Two, you get a chance to learn from the comments so that your next piece of work is better.

Dysplastic wrote:

Interesting. While I agree that I like the passion of developers standing up for their game, this always comes hand-in-hand with a criticism of game reviewers for "doing it wrong" or "not getting it". It's one thing to disagree with them, it's another to basically accuse them of doing a bad job for not agreeing with you.

I don't think developers are always in the right when they say that reviewers are panning a game because they just don't get it, but I don't always dismiss that, either. Mainstream game reviewers are a remarkably homogenous group of people with fairly similar tastes, backgrounds, and expectations. When dealing with a title like Epic Mickey that's of a genre and style that isn't generally popular with that group (i.e., it's a family-friendly 3D platformer based on a licensed property), I take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt. Likewise, I trust critics less with games like Brütal Legend that buck convention so aggressively.

I should say that I haven't played Epic Mickey and so can't give my own opinion about the game, but I also will be buying a copy, and my enthusiasm for the title is undiminished.

When's the last time a highly-hyped new IP actually delivered? I always think of Fable, which was going to do everything. Then it didn't. Promises are easy to make, but developers at this point should be realistic enough to know that just because it's their baby doesn't mean there aren't going to be flaws. I guess the words "grow up" would spring to mind.

To compare the failings of Brutal Legend to Epic Mickey are unfair. Note, that I am speaking from the perspective of someone who passed on both games - but for different reasons.

The main complaint I heard leveled at Brutal Legend (and why I passed) was that the RTS elements felt curiously tacked on and didn't fit the overall game play mechanic that was established earlier on. I considered that a design choice - one that seemed like a lot of people didn't particularly like. I never heard though that it was broken. I likened it to someone buying Deus Ex thinking it was a pure FPS, instead of the FPS-RPG it truly was.

On the other hand, Epic Mickey seems to simply have a broken game play mechanic. It does not seem to be trying anything new that we are simply not liking (as stated by Sean above) but trying to do something very basic for a game of this type that, by this point in time, should simply work.

To try to defend it as "you're doing it wrong" I think is disingenuous.

If this game had been anything like the concept art was originally (remember those?) i.e., a fallout-esc distopian world, I might be interested. As it stands, it's a gimmicky 3D platformer made with the Disney license and a poor camera.

I guess it fits the Wii platform well.

One thing that interests me about the situation is that you now have some games that are static, what is on the disc is what you're always going to have, some games will get minor touch ups with patches, and some will get overhauls over an extended life to keep them going and you often can't judge the current game based on the initial release.

The_Judge wrote:

As a Software Test Analyst and sometimes tester I find it amazing how the designers and programmers sometimes take it so personally when I find a bug. They and the people behind Epic Mickey should be looking at the bright side. One, if someone is giving you feedback (good or bad) then they are at least interested enough to check out your work. Two, you get a chance to learn from the comments so that your next piece of work is better.

As a developer, I can tell you that it's a hard to take criticism gracefully (at times), you'd think we'd learn... especially when it's a feature that there isn't a lot of choice about because of time, resource restraints, etc.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I don't think developers are always in the right when they say that reviewers are panning a game because they just don't get it, but I don't always dismiss that, either. Mainstream game reviewers are a remarkably homogenous group of people with fairly similar tastes, backgrounds, and expectations. When dealing with a title like Epic Mickey that's of a genre and style that isn't generally popular with that group (i.e., it's a family-friendly 3D platformer based on a licensed property), I take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt.

I'd argue that the mainstream game reviewers are also writing for a fairly homogeneous audience. While you personally might take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt, if their experience is reflective of the experience the majority of their readers would have, how is it fair to say that they "just don't get it?"

What irked me about Spector's recent comments were not that he was defending his game, but that he seemed so detached from his sentiments that it was difficult to take seriously.

"Third person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development," he added. "Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it."

I personally think camera controls in most 3rd person games are by and large just fine. The statement that "everybody gets it wrong" sounds like excuse-making that is not grounded in the reality of modern-day game design.

There's other stuff he said, such as Mickey not being "a platformer" (thus excusing the camera not being tuned for platforming) that just make me scratch my head. You can call the game an adventure, and rpg, or whatever, but when platforming mechanics are a major part of game progression, then developing the correct tools to traverse the game world is paramount...whether or not you want to label your game a platformer.

In the end I sympathise with his reaction to the game's reception, but I personally feel that he handled it poorly, as though he had to resort to a sort of denial in defending himself and his team. That's what gets me. It feels like he's insulting my intelligence by refusing to even consider that some of those criticisms might have the least bit of truth in them.

Dysplastic wrote:

I'd argue that the mainstream game reviewers are also writing for a fairly homogeneous audience. While you personally might take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt, if their experience is reflective of the experience the majority of their readers would have, how is it fair to say that they "just don't get it?"

That's a fair point.

Aaron D. wrote:

"Third person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development," he added. "Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it."

I personally think camera controls in most 3rd person games are by and large just fine. The statement that "everybody gets it wrong" sounds like excuse-making that is not grounded in the reality of modern-day game design.

I don't think you're taking the platform into consideration here. Third person camera controls are fairly standardized on platforms with dual analog controls and to a certain extent on the PC, but they're a tougher nut to crack on the Wii. All of the third person games I've played on the Wii that had successful cameras also had fixed or mostly fixed cameras. The problem of non-stationary cameras for third person games is still largely unsolved.

Hmm...I hadn't considered that.

In that context it makes a lot more sense.

Mr. Specter isn't the first person to do this. Read Molyneaux's comments to the media when Fable II came out, or Will Wright discussing the response to Spore. And, his backpedaling aside, the camera definitely has some interesting quirks that affect gameplay.

Thing is, both sides are sort of right.

I've waxed rhapsodic myself about the miss-match between many games and the reviewers. And yeah, Epic Mickey seems to fall into that valley for me. Unless you think Ratchett and Clank is the epitome of game design, you're at a disadvantage. Very few reviewers are in that space.

But this is part of a developer's job. Whether or not the type of gamers most reviewers are fit the bill for the type of game he made, they are a market he has to address and he can't blame them for the fact that their perceptions of his baby are not to his liking.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

I'd argue that the mainstream game reviewers are also writing for a fairly homogeneous audience. While you personally might take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt, if their experience is reflective of the experience the majority of their readers would have, how is it fair to say that they "just don't get it?"

That's a fair point.

Conversely, that fairly homogenous audience is, by and large, not the audience at which any game named Epic Mickey is targeted.

I understand Warren Spector's frustration, but I have to think that he knew going into this project that he wasn't making a game for the game reviewers. At least he's still getting a few overwhelmingly positive reviews like Adam Sessler's, I suppose.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

I'd argue that the mainstream game reviewers are also writing for a fairly homogeneous audience. While you personally might take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt, if their experience is reflective of the experience the majority of their readers would have, how is it fair to say that they "just don't get it?"

That's a fair point.

Aaron D. wrote:

"Third person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development," he added. "Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it."

I personally think camera controls in most 3rd person games are by and large just fine. The statement that "everybody gets it wrong" sounds like excuse-making that is not grounded in the reality of modern-day game design.

I don't think you're taking the platform into consideration here. Third person camera controls are fairly standardized on platforms with dual analog controls and to a certain extent on the PC, but they're a tougher nut to crack on the Wii. All of the third person games I've played on the Wii that had successful cameras also had fixed or mostly fixed cameras. The problem of non-stationary cameras for third person games is still largely unsolved.

I disagree, Wii flaws or not, crazy camera is a dead issue, something that was figured out a long time ago (hint, it has little to do with the camera and a lot to do with the level design). 2010 is not a time where you should be fighting a camera.

Minarchist wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

I'd argue that the mainstream game reviewers are also writing for a fairly homogeneous audience. While you personally might take a lot of critical opinions with a grain of salt, if their experience is reflective of the experience the majority of their readers would have, how is it fair to say that they "just don't get it?"

That's a fair point.

Conversely, that fairly homogenous audience is, by and large, not the audience at which any game named Epic Mickey is targeted.

I understand Warren Spector's frustration, but I have to think that he knew going into this project that he wasn't making a game for the game reviewers. At least he's still getting a few overwhelmingly positive reviews like Adam Sessler's, I suppose.

It's not? I would think any Disney themed game would be targeted at the masses, otherwise, why pay a license and use a worldwide recognizable character? Warren Specter may think different, but I doubt it, he was hoping for mass appeal, because that = $$.

Shoal07 wrote:

I would think any Disney themed game would be targeted at the masses, otherwise, why pay a license and use a worldwide recognizable character? Warren Specter may think different, but I doubt it, he was hoping for mass appeal, because that = $$.

Yes, exactly. Mass video game market != game reviewer audience. Soccer Mom # 6,447 doesn't even know that IGN exists, much less that they review games or even understand the difference between a good 3D camera and a bad one. The only review most potential purchasers of Epic Mickey are likely to read is the one at Common Sense Media, and even that's pretty unlikely.

I think maybe you mis-read? The "fairly homogenous audience" to which I referred was Dysplastic's game reviewer audience.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I don't think you're taking the platform into consideration here. Third person camera controls are fairly standardized on platforms with dual analog controls and to a certain extent on the PC, but they're a tougher nut to crack on the Wii. All of the third person games I've played on the Wii that had successful cameras also had fixed or mostly fixed cameras. The problem of non-stationary cameras for third person games is still largely unsolved.

The thing is, it's not like this was a multiplatform game that didn't translate well from dual-analog systems to the Wii. It was Wii exclusive from Day One. It's a designer's job to make a game that works well on the system they're designing for. Assuming for the sake of argument that it's inherently difficult to implement a non-stationary camera on the Wii, the obvious solution is to design your game such that the camera never needs to move (or else design it to be used with the Classic Controller and/or Gamecube controller, both of which have dual analog sticks).

I absolutely agree with the article that an artist has every right to stick up for their work, but in this particular case, the way Mr. Spector is going about it seems disingenuous. Maybe he's just expressing himself poorly, but when I read his statements they come off as making excuses. It's one thing to listen to criticism and say, "Okay, I hear you but I disagree" and impugning the integrity of the critic, which is what he's doing when he implies that they are intentionally "breaking" the camera just to have something to complain about.

When I hear Tim Shafer talk about Brutal Legend, it seems like he approaches the whole thing much more honestly. He's able to take a step back and say, "Well, here's what we were trying to do, here's where we failed, here's where we succeeded. Here's what reviewers and players were expecting, and here's what they got, and obviously there was a disconnect there." Maybe with a little more time to gain perspective Mr. Spector will be able to do the same, but right now he seems to be just issuing knee-jerk reactions rather than putting any real thought into it.

I hadn't actually heard of Warren Spector's comments until I read this. Not having a Wii made experiencing it a moot point, but the concept art at least piqued my interest. I guess I'm going to have to read up on what the game actually turned out to be. Anybody have any suggestions for a review that will give a good overview of that?

Gremlin wrote:

I hadn't actually heard of Warren Spector's comments until I read this. Not having a Wii made experiencing it a moot point, but the concept art at least piqued my interest. I guess I'm going to have to read up on what the game actually turned out to be.

I think that also has a lot to do with the disconnect between players' expectations versus what Spector and his team actually delivered. Concept art:

IMAGE(http://www.slashgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/EpicMickey10.jpg)

Final game:

IMAGE(http://www.twingalaxies.com/images/generalinfo/epic.mickey.jpg)

Whoa. I mean, granted, it's (probably) not the dev team's fault the concept art leaked and colored people's expectations, but my interest in the game dropped precipitously between seeing the concept art and seeing actual in-game screenshots.

Reminds me a lot of Too Human and the dev response to poor reviews and player criticism.

Maybe
IMAGE(http://worldofweirdthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/don_quixote_440.jpg)
should accompany this post. It even kinda looks like him!

I wanted to love Epic Mickey, but I played a bit of it in Best Buy because they had the game in their display. I loved the game and forgave the camera until I couldn't actually target anything accurately because the camera kept moving trying to "follow" the Wiimote pointer. I couldn't even finish the tutorial. I'm going to have to keep playing Mario Galaxy because it has the same spin attacks and a whole lot better camera controls. And never forget, the mouse is just a devil with flattened, round horns.

Minarchist wrote:

I think maybe you mis-read? The "fairly homogenous audience" to which I referred was Dysplastic's game reviewer audience.

Right. This is a Wii game and a Disney game first, and a Warren Spector game second. The mass gamer market that this seems to be targeted for isn't the kind to read the critical reviews, so why does Warren Spector even need to address them? Why doesn't he just shrug, acknowledge that this game was not meant for them, and move on?

I guess the unfortunate thing for him is that while the mass market might not read reviews, they DO check Metacritic, where these reviewers scores are aggregated for an audience that they weren't necessarily meant for. Whose fault that is, I have no idea.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with what's happening with Epic Mickey, but there are several occasions where reviewer opinion just isn't worth the 2 seconds your machine takes to bring it up on your screen, let alone any time you might spend reading or listening to it.

Getting a "mainstream" reviewer who majors in RPGs to review Street Fighter IV just isn't right.

Scratched wrote:

One thing that interests me about the situation is that you now have some games that are static, what is on the disc is what you're always going to have, some games will get minor touch ups with patches, and some will get overhauls over an extended life to keep them going and you often can't judge the current game based on the initial release.

No patches on the Wii. It is what it is.

Standing up for their projects is fine, but a little humble pie might result in better games next time around. The idea of, "people just don't get it," leads to the thought that you are somehow this great auteur that the public is not ready for. You should never discount the opinions of your audience. When you start believing the fanboy rantings of your greatness, you stop caring if the game is fun for people or not.

Expectation is a tricky thing. It can ruin games, marriages, friendships, jobs... you name it. But, even if I don't get what I expected, if what I do get is great, like Mass Effect 2 or KOTOR, then I am all in.

I think where a game like Brutal Legend is that it was misrepresented. Even the demo only showed us the hack and slash, plus some driving. There was no indication of an RTS element, and frankly I don't want to play an RTS on a console. Had the game been just like the demo from start to finish, I'd have bought it. But the way I hear it, it was not.