Feedback Would Rather Be Constructive

I can guarantee that every single one of you reading this has gotten feedback.

In any setting that involves your work being seen by other people, feedback is invariably going to be a part of that process. Even showing your best friend your most prized creation is fraught with that lingering potential for feedback - you’re watching their faces, you’re looking at their text pop up on a screen, you’re searching for something.

I don’t think we can help it. Humans are social creatures - when we bring something into existence, we begin to think about it in the context of other people.

Creating your work has this side effect. No matter what kind of work, we find that push and pull thinking of, “What do they think?”. That’s not just limited to the formal idea of creation. That’s a part of any interaction we can have or imagine. That context of thought, that itch at the back of your mind? It can plague you, it can eat away at you, it can watch everything over your shoulder and paralyze you. It’s not a fun prospect.

In this field of fear of failure (“achievement unlock! an assortment of alliteration”), we might come to the following conclusion: that feedback is inherently destructive.?

After all, we want to protect that which we love. We put our time, our sweat, our dedication, and our care into creating something. It’s already so hard to create, we want to be sure that it remains as it is - prized, perfect, and unblemished. It’s us white-knuckling to hold onto that joy we felt to make something out of seemingly nothing. It’s proof we know what we’re doing. And in these times, I think that assurance becomes something we actively seek.

I get it. Believe me, I get it.

But what if we consider that feedback isn’t destructive? In fact, what if it’s actually the best thing that can happen to what you’ve made? What if feedback is inherently CONSTRUCTIVE? (gasp!)

I’ll flip to a different facet of theatre this time - let’s talk about playwriting.

Playwriting can be a solitary endeavor. It can be you toiling away at the page, stacking up words and lines and motion within scenes until you create something that you consider to be a completed work or portion. But when you have that in your hands, what do you do with it?

Compared to other mediums of writing, plays are meant to be performed. They’re meant to be experienced as a physical embodiment. That means that for a play to develop, it needs to not only survive first contact with other perspectives, it needs to weather repeated exposure to those perspectives. Not just the perspective of the playwright, but that of a future director, a future theatre company, the actors that take on the roles, the designers that consider the physical representations of the world of the play, the audience, and on and on. There are people involved at the very end of this process, and it’s really for these other people that plays become reality.

As a medium, plays require other people. Because of that, feedback is perhaps the most constant part of the process - besides writing, of course. So, regardless of your own apprehensions, worries, and fears, you pursue feedback. Thankfully, in a setting so personal to you and your creation, you have the benefit of choosing who you get feedback from. You can outline what you’re looking for and foster a space, not just for yourself, but for others to receive their own feedback.

It becomes a practice, at the end of the day, especially when you have peers that follow and respect the potential that feedback holds. I could show you the very first draft of any scene I’ve written. I could then show you notes I’ve taken having presented pages to my writing group at the time (shout out to the Broken Couch Collective). And I could show you the current iteration of that scene. Wildly different, perhaps, but at its essence, it contains that same thought I began with. If anything, the presentation of that thought is cleaner, more polished. It’s the process of taking what I wrote, finding what worked, and chasing the thread further and further toward what continues to work, and what can be elevated to be even more effective.

The key to making that feedback effective was the embracing of a constructive mindset. That begins by recognizing what works for the writing. By taking that deliberate action to stop and consider what is already wonderful about what’s been made, you become a fan of what’s been created. Your reaction then becomes grounded in the celebration that someone made this. By recognizing that, you then consider what would be best for it in the context in which it’s presented.

How do we know what’s best? That expectation is set by the person who’s asking for feedback. They’ll ask questions about certain aspects of their work, like what everyone’s initial reaction to a particular moment was. They might ask what stood out amidst the entirety. They could even ask about something more abstract, like the spacing on the page, or a deliberate omission of punctuation and correct spelling - a fantastic and widely recognized example of this in modern American theatre is the collected works of Suzan-Lori Parks. You’ll thank me later.

Feedback can also take the form of clarifying questions. It can take the form of reexamining the text, looking at it from different perspectives or directions. Feedback can be fluid, which allows it to become what the writer and the play need it to be. It’s ever changing in the hands of the collective, and feedback then truly becomes a process. Feedback can be healing, it can be reaffirming, it can establish truth. (Truth is becoming a theme with these writings isn’t it)

Throughout this process, there’s an emphasis that begins to form, subtle though it may be. It’s the emphasis that ego needs to fall away (oh wow another theme), from both the deliverer and the recipient of feedback. It’s not about who’s saying what or how it’s being said. It comes down to the why. Why is this particular moment effective? Why does this moment not stand out or feel as impactful? Why did the writer emphasize something in these pages? Conversely, why did something else come to light?

In the end, the process of creation is determined by that core question of why, and that understanding of “why”, throughout the iterative process, becomes a much more fruitful place to ask for and accept feedback. There’s also that secret benefit of getting warm fuzzies watching something grow, change, evolve, and become what it is meant to be. I find it inspiring and humbling.

With that in mind, let’s return to our target space of game development. (“FINALLY!” I hear you scream.) Here, we can eliminate the more abstract musings of why, but not because it doesn’t matter! When a feature or game is considered, the “why” is a direct goal that the team draws their analysis from. It’s a target that already becomes a shared understanding by way of communicating what the objective of the work is beforehand. If something is being implemented, but the “why” of the work hasn’t been made clear, then the work will never be at its best.

As development continues and a feature reaches certain stages of its lifecycle, feedback and communication is critical to ensuring its healthiness. Without these moments of reflection, the risk of losing the “why” increases over time, not because something wrong is happening, but because in the flow of creating, it can become hard to remember the direction you were heading down without coming up for air.

There’s also the flip side of this, where the “why” a feature is being developed is not actually being answered through the process of creation. What I mean by that is, sometimes creating a feature to answer a problem or need doesn’t actually answer that need; sometimes, the feature makes it more complex or cumbersome, to the detriment of the player experience. In these moments, the work itself reflects the necessity to reevaluate the “why”, to bring about more communication, to arrive at a new core from which to work.

But without those clarifying moments of feedback, it can be hard to recognize either scenario. We rely on our peers and stakeholders to hold the work to its core, and we trust them to focus on only the work and what it needs, rather than pass judgment or shut down the creative spirit. The space held for feedback is an opportunity to make a good thing better, or to find a new solution to a problem that resonates in a more relevant way. In an ideal culture, this is what I would hope to see, and it’s what I try to elevate.

We all have horror stories of feedback gone awry. I feel that those horror stories are grounded not in the why of the feedback process, but in those mindsets based on ego and the harm it can create in a collaborative space. I’ve heard the term “seagull manager” in a 2018 GDC talk by Cyril Barrow, where in order to make progress with the team, his perspective was once that of “flying in”, making negative or pejorative comments on the work (what he actually said was that he was pooping all over it), and leaving.?

I hold this question as to the state of feedback in the gaming space: how does the work serve the goal well in its current state, and what else can be done to make what already works even more effective? In other words, how do we focus on the good of what something is in the moment rather than the bad, or the perceived bad?

The natural result is that what contradicts or detracts from the feature will naturally fall to the wayside out of necessity, not out of spite. That process of shedding and polishing comes from a unified perspective, one that I hope occurs more often than not. In a more regimented setting, we may not be able to choose who we work alongside and who offers feedback, but we can be more intentional in how we give feedback and how that can be of benefit to everyone in the room, particularly those that are hard at work on something they love.

That’s how I approach it: focusing on fostering what makes something a labor of love rather than a labor of necessity. Of course, we’ll still have those moments of necessity, but there’s no reason for that to be the mental space any work is done.

Anyway, see you next time.?