Drinking the Kool-Aid

Part 2 of the Massive Gamer interview with me is up. I wanted to expand a little bit on one of the bits in it. actually.

Massive Gamer: What do you think is most important when it comes to doing good community?

Preacher: Honesty - not just in the sense of conveying true information to and from the players and the devs, although that is very important, but also not getting so caught up in the emotions of the moment - whether it's the players upset about a change or the devs excited about a patch - that you lose sight of the facts and misrepresent the situation

I talk about "drinking the kool-aid" a lot in community - internally, that is. What I mean by this is when you've bought in to a project, a feature, or the overall company line to the extent that you no longer have any perspective on it. A large part of a CM's value to their team is their ability to provide an outside perspective - not just a customer's perspective but a synthesis of all possible customer perspectives. How will the players react to this change? What should our highest bug fix priority be? Is this ad campaign going to have an effect on our existing playerbase? These are all questions a CM should be able to offer an answer to.

A problem arises when you, as a CM, have adopted the official line to the point where you begin to believe it. This patch will be great - look at all those bullet points! These bug fixes will be perfect because we say so, despite having our most junior programmer tackle the five easiest fixes regardless of severity! This ad campaign will bring in people by the thousands, and no matter that it promises things we've been promising since beta and can't deliver on!

The marketing team can say these things, because it's their job to be perky. CMs - good ones - are not perky. As a matter of fact, they tend to be the most cynical and jaded - and usually drunk - folk I've ever encountered. It's our job to see the downside as well as the upside. It's our job to anticipate criticism and plan how to react to it. Yes, we have to be upbeat and optimistic in public - hence the drinking. But to our teams, we should always be trying to make sure people see both sides and plan for them.

And in order to see both sides, we have to seek out both sides. We have to look for criticism, find the pockets of negativity, and welcome the flames. We have to get our hands on them in order to weigh them, judge them, then translate them into fluffy bunny terms for the delicate artistic temperaments on the dev team, so that next time the public has to find something different to bitch about. If your game just biffed a publish, you better know how, and why, and how many people noticed. Likewise, if your company has an image problem overall, you better have a report on who is bitching, what obscene nicknames it's been given, and how exactly the corporate logo has been photoshopped.

This is totally why we all drink so much, and why we burn out so fast. But it's still the job. And it does make it easier to live with when the company fucks up in exactly the way you predicted it would, and pisses off precisely the set of people you forecasted, and lays you off. Satisfaction in a job well done is almost as good as health insurance.