Imagine that you are a developer of high-end video games, known as AAA. Surely you think that life is beautiful: you work in what you love, you make a good number of people happy, and you also have job security (well, nowadays you never know) for years. Well, think again. Social networks have given a voice to people who perhaps should not have it, and the result has been that people like Ramone Russell end up exploding.
We are feelings and we have human beings
Russell, who works for Sony in the hugely popular baseball game ‘MLB The Show’, couldn’t take it anymore and spoke at length about what he has to endure in the newsletter Game File. “Everything is difficult. And if we haven’t done something, it’s because we haven’t found the right way to do it“. And something as simple as that results in the anger of the fans.
Logically, when you start programming video games, you think, like in the first paragraph, in a naive way. Everything is going to go well, you are going to make many people happy. And yet… “We want to give fans everything, but we can’t. We have a release date. We have a limited amount of resources. So if we don’t make it, it’s never due to lack of effort”.
And in the end, Russell ends up begging fans to behave better. Seeing the responses that are usually given on Twitter to mundane problems in the industry, sadly, it seems more and more like a utopia. “We are human beings just like anyone else. And sometimes we do things right and sometimes wrong. But when we do it wrong, it’s never because we haven’t tried hard enough”. And now, how about we behave like human beings instead of psychopaths? It’s not that difficult, really.
