Sweet, sweet failure

[SpacePirateCaine]

About a year ago, I had the distinctly interesting experience of working professionally in the gaming industry. I spent two and a half months as a "Quality Assurance Analyst" for Konami Digital Entertainment. That translates to "Game tester", essentially. I would spend eight hours every day sitting down at a desk with a TV, VCR, PS2, XBOX, Nintendo DS and PSP, and 'play' a game ad nauseum, walking against walls, trying to jump out of the level, and so on in order to make the game as bug free as possible. It was far from being a hugely important role -  I was hardly a key figure in the creation of this product, but I did my part. However, one thing that happens with being a tester in a big company is that you aren't always working on something good.

There have been many, many worse games in the world than Xiaolin Showdown, but there are just so many games that were better. For a number of reasons, some more overt than others, this game was slated by the media, recieving an average of 4.5 (bolstered only by the fact that for some reason, one site gave it a 7) and has made it onto the do-not-buy list of more than one game review page.

Now, is it necessarily wrong that I feel a strange sense of vindication from seeing a project I was intimately involved in completely lambasted? I was among the first to admit that the game was un-good - it was a featureless clone of better games, was blander than burnt toast, the ending is essentially non-existent and above all, you can't possibly lose. But despite all of these things, I am faced with a dilemma: My name - my real name - is in the credits. When people play and become very, very disappointed that they even possibly shelled out the paltry sum it costs to rent a video game in the western world, my name will show up - even if completely ignored. I am involved with something so very awful that I, one of the very few people who should be proud to have their hands in it, am oppositely satisfied with the fact that nearly everybody who's played it disliked it.

I think this stems partly from the fact that during the making of the game, I fought long and hard against the game's developers themselves to make the game something I actually wanted to see. The hard-headed game designers at Bottle Rocket entertainment refused to listen to the earnest cries of the testing team to fix the glaring issues with gameplay, fun factor, and everything else. And thusly, when the game was released in November, everyone else played it, and it was summarily torn apart like so many extras in zombie movies by (nearly) every reviewing site online.

So I pose my question: Has anyone else here been involved with something intimately, that they were glad to see fail? Any sort of project that they had only enough power to do what they could to make it that much less bad, and otherwise just watch the train plow into the side of the apartment building?

[Nikolas]

So I pose my question: Has anyone else here been involved with something intimately, that they were glad to see fail? Any sort of project that they had only enough power to do what they could to make it that much less bad, and otherwise just watch the train plow into the side of the apartment building?

First of all, very interesting thread! I've never seen a thread started by you, so I'm utterly happy for this

Onto the question.

No, this has not happened to me. Not in the extent that you imply. But in my cases, somehow, although I'm the composer, thus the last person anyone would care to have onboard, everybody seems to pay huge ammounts of attention to what I say! Which is hugely satisfying! Further more the games I work on, both freeware and commercial, do tend to change (to the extend of possible, right?) in order to satisfy MY needs! If these games come out and fail, then I will have a big part of that failure... *fingers crossed*

Now I did have a bad relationship with some game developers (no names of course), but the game probably died in oblivion more or less. I certainly know ways of bringing it back from the dead, and so on, but none of us are interested anymore to do so.

The part of your question "...glad to see it fail?..." is an interesting thought indeed. On the one hand this seems from an outer perspective to be merely mean, in the point, that "the bastards didn't listen and now look! The failed! hahaha! They should've listened to me! I told you so", kind of thing... On the other hand though, for me it just feels humaine, perfect, justfiable, honourable even to your peers (the rest of the beta testers), and so on...

What I see as bizzare in most companies is this:

Beta Testers: People who essentialy play games (yes, I know let's go into that really, but mainly it's what they do. No need for experience, or anything and it is the starting point of most people in the industry, right?)
Beta Testers vs Dev Team: Completely different. Racism in all it's glory! your a beta tester? sorry you can't come in! This is a dev party alone!
Need for Beta Testers: Enormously! Everybody knows it! Just that it seems that ego gets in between and instead of listening to what BT do best, they decided to ignore it!

In music terms, to which I'm best at: If the dev team are the composer, the beta testers are the performers. One cannot exist without the other. Now generally the performer won't touch the composition, but he will certainly give his own interpretation. Same with beta testers. While they shouldn't probably alter the whole story, but they are the only connection to the real world any company has!

(BTW, If someone on the beta team, tells me that my music does not work in some place, I've no idea how I would react! This has not happened yet, but I have switched places to music tracks, as suggested by the programmer and main creator of the game... I am always open to suggestions, at least I'd like to think so Up to the point that my professionalism is not touched!)

[Hudders]

My name - my real name - is in the credits. When people play and become very, very disappointed that they even possibly shelled out the paltry sum it costs to rent a video game in the western world, my name will show up - even if completely ignored.

If the credits are at the end, at least you can rest easy in the fact that only people who finished the game will see them. And if it really is as bad as you say it is, only a few will complete it.

[GarageGothic]

Well, I know how you feel. I was a localization tester on EA's Catwoman game, which is something I try to avoid mentioning on my CV (unfortunately it's still one of the games that I'm credited for on MobyGames). Hell, that game was so bad that they even gave us free copies afterwards, which I never received for any other project.

[SSH]

Only vaguely on topic, but...

There was a minor spelling mistake in a product that I was testing at my job and so I filed a defect report:

"ERROR: Failied to load config file"

And in the defect report I said "There's only one i in failed".... then I realised, that would make a great title for a self-help book!

[ManicMatt]

Hudders is right!

Recall a crap film you watched. You were stuck in the cinema and were forced to watch it all the way through. The credits roll. Do you?:

A) Sit through the credits in hope of seeing an extra clip of a bad film.
B) Get up and moan about the film as you leave the cinema.
C)Find out who was responsible for making the props in the film and take a great disliking to them.
D)Make a note of the main producer of the film and take a great disliking to them.

[LimpingFish]

I feel sympathy for people who test games for a living, at both ends of the quality spectrum (say, MGS 4 vs SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab). Regardless of the quality of the game you happen to be testing, it's a repetitive and monotonous job with little room for creative input.

The majority of licensed game tie-ins are creatively stunted in the first place, made by people (who I also have sympathy for; but it's tainted by a certain amount of dispathy too) who feel that these games are industry stepping stones to artistic integrity, and who would, on the whole, rather be doing something else.

The developers have little interest in what the are developing, the testers have to endure the developers creative dissatisfaction reflected in the product handed down to them, and the customer loses his/her x amount of dollars on purchasing a game that nobody really cared about in the first place.

There are no winners.

[djres]

You were only a cog in the machine my friend.  A little bit of joy in seeing the game fail is totally naturally and definitely does not make you a bad person.  Schadenfreude, I believe that is called.

[SpacePirateCaine]

This is why I never start topics. I just read other peoples' replies, and let the thread stagnate until it eventually scrolls off into the forum abyss. Allow me to continue:

I'm not particularly worried about whether it makes me a bad person or not that I have childish/selfish tendencies to feel a sense of personal satisfaction when something that I predicted would be 'bad' was. Despite not wanting to admit it, I imagine that most people have the urge to say "I told you so" now and then when they give advice that isn't followed. Justified or not, there are certain situations in which I think people have little choice, as it were, but to feel as such. In the case of the game I was testing, I suppose that the developers weren't specifically interested in what we had to say - being published by my company, they had little choice but to be filtered through our QA department. Nevertheless, I wonder at people that refuse to listen to advice, even when someone seems adamant about its urgency.

To a lesser extent, I think that this applies at times to the Critic's Lounge here in the AGS forums. I haven't seen it very much at all recently, as it seems that most people here take the advice that's given and are happy with the improvements, but it has happened in the past, where someone will submit a piece as a WIP, but feel some form of upset when their work is picked apart and never seems to be completely satisfactory.

But I digress. Apart from the aforementioned example of one's advice being ignored, has anyone else ever had a reason to hope that something they were involved in was either completely ignored, and ultimately forgotten - or, in a perfect world, was aborted before ever seeing the light of day like so many teenage pregnancies? A mercy killing, if you will?

[evenwolf]

I absolutely HATE being a spoke in worthless piece of shit wheel.   

This has applied to me with movies.   As an actor I have no control over the story.  I represent the character in the movie but sometimes have NO control but to say yes or no.    If i say yes and the filmmaker is an imbecile I'm helpless. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atGLjFYJl0U

This is a peice of shit I acted in.   I actually WROTE the best dialogue in the movie, which is the vampires discussing their motives at the very beginning.  The rest is FILLER.  Happens to me all the time.  And I argue with the filmmakers about their shitty opinions but ultimately you're not making the movie.  They are.    If it does porrly in a film festival (which it did)  it reflects very poorly on me.   So in this case there's little gratitude in seeing it fail.

Luckily as far as professional Hollywood movies, I fell in absolute LOVE with the movies I worked on.   25th Hour and Hustle and Flow.   Hustle and Flow is my first onscreen credit.    God bless those filmmakers.  They even won an oscar.

[Pumaman]

Over the years, I've been involved in various corporate IT projects. And what I've found is that if the project is well managed, fun to work on and a good experience then I'll be hoping for it to do well, as I'll be proud of the finished product.

But when you're working on a project that you can see is a load of rubbish, but being told to carry on regardless by those in charge, it's only natural to hope that it fails. After all, as a cog in the machine it's not your job on the line when it all falls apart -- in a way you're wanting the project to fail so that the people in charge get sacked and don't get the chance to screw up anything else.