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We're Not Listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers
 Rule #5: Prove It
When I first told people I was going into the games industry, every single person I told had an idea for a game I should make. Every player of every game has recommendations for what needs to be changed to make the game better. Developers are buried in suggestions, anecdotes, and feedback, and almost all of it is shortsighted and badly thought-out.
The way to ensure your ideas stand out from the cacophony is to support them with a level of proof and certainty that the average wannabe off the street can’t match. The best way to do this is to provide an active, working example of your recommendations, with numbers to back it up. Pick a currently popular game and put your idea to work. If your theory makes predictions about FPS level design, grab an existing game level off of the Internet and modify it to fit your recommendations. A side by side comparison with statistics to demonstrate the impact of your changes is the most powerful tool you can have to convince an industry audience.
Now, this example of modifying an FPS level requires a certain degree of technical skill, and that’s important. People with technical skills get more respect in the games industry. Beyond that, it puts your recommendations above the level of the average raving fanboy who buttonholes a game designer and rants about why his favorite weapon/class/vehicle/strategy needs to be buffed. It shows them that this idea matters to you, and proves that you understand what it will take to implement the idea in a real game. One working model of your idea is worth a thousand eloquent, logical research articles.
Obviously, there are some topics that are very large and difficult to model, but almost all of those ideas are also too large for developers to really change mid-project. If your idea is too complex for you to test on any scale, it’s probably too complex (and therefore risky) for anyone to actually implement in his game.
Rule #6: The Customer is Always Right
A lot of research being done on games simply isn’t relevant to the day to day work of the industry. It’s not bad research; it’s just focused on things that the industry doesn’t particularly care about. Fortunately, there’s a really straightforward technique for ensuring that your work is relevant to industry game developers: Ask them.
Ask them before you do the work. If you’re doing a giant longitudinal survey of players in a particular MMO, contact someone at the company ahead of time and talk to him or her about your study. Start by contacting the game’s community rep and explaining your project, they should be able to forward you to the right person within the company. They may be able to provide you with internal data or to suggest lines of inquiry which might not have occurred to you.
Game designers don’t release their games and move on to the next project; they watch their players and player communities with all the apprehension and passion of parents at a grade-school play. Having good research done about their game is beneficial for both the studio and the game, and most developers are happy to work with researchers when they can.
Be warned, however, that there are some potential costs to industry partnerships. You will almost certainly have to sign an NDA which will give them some say over what you can release and when you can release it. Furthermore, just as most researchers don’t understand industry concerns, most of the people you’ll be talking to in the industry won’t intuitively understand what’s involved in doing good research.
For example, they might try to draw conclusions from your data that you feel aren’t scientifically valid. There are also potential ethical concerns unique to research collaborations with industry. If your MMO survey includes questions about practices banned by the game’s terms of service such as item duping or gold buying, the question of whether or not to release those results to your industry partner becomes more than merely academic.
Fair’s Fair
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, let me back off a little on two points. First, what I’ve said here isn’t necessarily news to everyone. There are academics who have forged close ties to industry, working directly with developers to produce work that is equally successful as both pure and applied research. Others have found ways to present their information in snappy, bite-sized chunks for easy assimilation. One example of an approach that’s on the right track is the “Game Studies Download” presentation from GDC 2006 (http://www.avantgame.com/top10.htm), in which scholars used short presentations of each piece of research and presented very clear implications from their studies.
Secondly, now that I’ve spent the majority of my time ranting at my academic brethren, I’d like to take a brief moment to turn my criticism on my industry coworkers. Start listening. Sure, academics sometimes appear to be ivory tower dreamers, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily wrong. In the day to day bustle and pressure of the industry, we simply can’t try all the interesting ideas out there. The less focused atmosphere of academia can lead to some genuinely new ideas, things we might miss because we’re too far down in the trenches.
Furthermore, academic games research is free. It’s a rare game developer that can afford to pay for blue sky research, but these folks are happily doing this work for us. Even better than that, academic research is public. One of the few downsides of my job is that some of my work is (appropriately) considered to be trade secrets by Microsoft and the games studios. There are a number of companies out there doing really interesting applied research, but very little of that research will ever be available to benefit your game.
Remember Joy’s Law: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Tapping into the work being done by academic researchers is a cheap way to put more smart people to work on your game.
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