In offering his take on the current, more-often-than-not-negative state of video game discourse, original Fallout creator Tim Cain has found himself questioning whether most players truly know what they want from their experiences, particularly as recent years have seen a rise in overtly negative browbeating over constructive criticism.
An industry veteran who, in addition to his work on the fan-favorite post-apocalyptic RPG, has also notably served as a designer on the first Pillars of Eternity and as the director for The Outer Worlds, Cain spoke to his thoughts on this particular topic on January 8th via a pre-recorded video uploaded to his personal YouTube channel.
“Hi everyone, it’s me, Tim,” he opened his video. “Today, I want to talk about the question ‘Do game players even know what they like?'”
From there, Cain explained that he was inspired to make this video after both hearing a comedian (whose name was not shared by the video game dev) discuss how “it’s hard to get feedback from an audience” because their laughs or boos do not specifically communicate what they liked or disliked about a given joke and reading a past quote from Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin wherein the author opined, “social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped”.
These reflections, he said, led him to realize that he has been seeing “a rise over the decades of my career in how games are discussed in person and online, which is a prioritization of the bad features over the good” – or, in other words, “people love to talk about what they hate and some of them almost never even mention what it is they like what
would they prefer instead.”
“And I get it,” Cain asserted, “with the rise of monetized channels I totally understand that rage bait gets more clicks so if you go on and have a channel and you go ‘I hate this, and these people are dumb, and bleh’, you get more clicks, because that’s what people respond to. But it doesn’t really explain forums or comments sections, where the people who are leaving the comments have no stake in how many people read their comment. You still find that complaints about features are on the rise and constructive feedback, saying ‘I wish they had done this instead of I like this in my games’ is on the decline. At the very minimum, at least the ratio has been increasing from bad to good.”
“The weird thing about this is I see people complaining about features that they can 100% absolutely ignore,” he then noted, proceeding to raise the phenomena of how players will still regularly engage with mechanics they claim to hate. “[These features make] the game a lesser experience for them, but they can’t seem to bring themselves not to use it, and then that’s when they turn around and say ‘Well it’s the designer’s fault, he never should have put that in in the first place ‘. Which is, again, a whole other discussion of how much handholding do you want and handholding in this case is how much should the designer not let you pick and choose how you want to play the game. Should he force you to play it the way that you want to play it and the way you’ll enjoy it and ignore millions of other players? A lot of you give feedback as if you’re the only person on the planet, but you assume your views represent everyone else.”
Continuing in his thoughts, Cain affirmed, “I’ve said before in many videos, if players would only talk more about what they want instead of what they don’t want, this would be so much better, and so much clearer, and so much cleaner. It would give developers a much better idea of how many people want those certain features.”
“The problem is is when people just tell you what they don’t want, it’s hard to get an idea of what the percentage is of people who want an alternative,” he told his viewers. “It’s like, ‘Okay I know you don’t want fast travel, but what do you
want? Do you want more Random Encounters? Do you want a paid fast travel? Things like that.”
Following this lengthy clarification of his opinion on the entire affair, Cain turned to offer advice on how frustrated players could improve their chances of being heard en masse, starting with the recommendation that “When you’re talking to game developers, say what it is you liked, especially why you liked [engaging with] that feature.”
“It’s called being constructive,” said the iconic video game dev. “It’s way easier to respond to constructive feedback than non-constructive feedback, so what I don’t understand is if you really want to get what you want, say what it is you want.”
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“If you just go, ‘Enemies are dumb, stop giving us dumb enemies,’ you just gave negative feedback but you gave absolutely no context,” he further explained. “It’s not like [dev teams] can go in and go ‘Hey programmer, can you click the check box for ‘Smart Enemies’?’ It may be that what you meant was these enemies never take cover, but there’s cover all over the place that you use but the never take it. You want enemies to take cover more frequently? Okay, that’s constructive! I can work on that.”
Putting a stamp on this part of his talk, Cain then summarized, “This is why it’s so hard for developers to deal with your negative feedback. You’re not telling them what you want, just telling a developer what you don’t want. Guess what? The space of what you could want is huge, and you’re not helping. In fact you’re in in many ways you’re hurting, because you’re jamming up the channel of communication with noise, with unactionable feedback.”
After this, with his video’s run time coming to an end, the Fallout creator returned to his initial question of “Do gamers even know what it is they like?’ and revealed that this question was sparked by his own observation that “people will say they want certain features, almost that they demand certain features, and that they hate other ones, but then the sale figures do not bear that out. They buy games that don’t have the features they claim they demand and they buy games with features they claim they hate.”
“I get that because games are an amalgamation of different features it may have had some things you want and some things you don’t, which is why it could really help when you leave feedback on that game,” Cain added. “You say ‘I bought it because of the features but I wished you would had these instead’.”
Moving to expound on his weighty assertion, he then told his followers that this discrepancy between negative opinions and sales numbers is likely caused by one of two reasons
The first such reason, said Cain, is that “what it is you said you wanted may be a minority opinion. You may really want a certain feature, but most people don’t or they don’t care about it.”
As for “the flip side of why sales figures may not bear out your opinion,” he bluntly asserted that some players among his audience “may not guide your spending based on your beliefs.”
“And this can be knowingly or unknowingly,” he admitted, rather than attempting paint every critic with the same brush. “You may buy a game not knowing [what’s in it]. You didn’t check the reviews and you didn’t realize it did this thing you don’t like. That would be unknowingly. The knowingly part is when you say you don’t want something but you buy games that have it anyway because they’re popular, because your friends are playing it, because it had a couple extra things you did like.”
Moving to draw his thoughts to a close, Cain then revealed that thanks to the aforementioned gray area regarding customer spending habits, “the devs can’t figure out what what’s going on because people said they didn’t want this but the game sold well.
“One issue is that none of those groups people who are minority opinion, or people whose spending doesn’t align
with their beliefs whether knowingly or not,” he posited. “None of those groups are ever going to be well served by Big Business by AAA games and it’s because they literally have to go after majority opinion to try to sell better. Occasionally there’s breakthrough where a game that no one expected or ever asked for busts through and everybody loves it, but that’s rare.”
“I’ve talked about with big budgets come less risk if you have a minority opinion or you’re somebody who doesn’t spend like you talk,” Cain continued. “Take a look at indie games. There’s a ton of them. I’m sure there’s one for you. In fact, there are so many games out there more games than you could ever play. There’s more games out there that align exactly with how you want to play games then then you could ever possibly purchase or play and they already exist.”
Putting the metaphorical ball back in the public’s court, he once again questioned, “So that leads me to the question of why is everybody going online to complain? Because there are a ton of games that you would love and the only conclusion I have is that you just like doing it you just like complaining. “
“And if that’s you that’s fine, I get it,” he concluded. “Just bear in mind it’s not helping you get better games that you want. It would be far better if you said exactly what it is you want instead of just saying what it is you don’t want. And then you have to sit and have that conversation with yourself do you even know what it is you want do you know what you like.”