Unless you’re performing Shakespeare, you have one huge advantage as an actor over the audience: none of them know the script. Most of them have never read it, and the few that have don’t remember the details. So messing up a single word? No one will know. Flub a whole line? Cover for it quickly enough and only a few people will notice.
This is also a huge advantage of game design, although it is often balanced with early hands-on previews and marketing; the players haven’t read the design documents. They don’t know what’s been cut from the game.
It’s an important piece of information to keep in mind when making the tough decisions on what needs to be cut or deferred. Our job is to make the best game we can ship, not an ideal and perfect piece of software that comes out “sometime.”
We also have the advantage of more time. While an actor must react within the split second when he or a fellow actor forgets a word or line, a game team usually has time to discuss and investigate an issue before deciding what should be done.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our decisions must, in the end, be in service of the players. Our decisions need to be based on both the original intentions set out by our design docs and the compromises we can make that still reveal the best experience to the player. In many cases, it is better to cut a large system wholesale than to release something that may only fulfill half the design doc.
It all circles back to the fact that the player won’t know if a huge system is entirely cut, and that time can be spent making other features better. On the other hand, releasing a half-done system usually reveals the scope of the design doc and the fact that the implementation fell short.
What other similarities are there?
- Previews and Focus Tests are invaluable.
- It takes a lot of different people with a lot of different skills to get one show or product done.
- No matter how hard everyone works, the only thing that matters is the reaction when the curtain goes up.
- Most of your fans are really nice. Some of them are insane and scary.
