The Normative Bias in Game Development

As a game designer, it is critical to understand your audience’s frameworks for making sense of the world.?After all, the virtual world experience you are presenting them with will participate in the same structures, habits, and assumptions – while the game exists in code and assets, the gameplay actually happens in the player’s head.?However, epistemology – the study of how people know things – is an abstruse philosophical branch, and frankly, not a lot of help in the day to day.?

What’s come more into vogue is cognitive biases – those faults in our wiring that can be relied on almost universally.?Folks like Dan Ariely with Predictably Irrational have built an awareness, certainly among monetization designers, of how certain structures in human value understandings can be used to maximize revenue.?More progressive folks have brought an understanding of cognitive bias into the hiring process – how people unconsciously make assumptions and decisions about people.?I want to talk about a bias in game development – the normative bias.

Now, you’re going to have to go with me on this journey, because I don’t have scientific studies to back this up – I haven’t field tested this like a behavioral economist might.?But, after a couple of decades in the game industry, I’ve got more than a few experiences to draw from.?The plural of anecdote is not data, but it may be wisdom, if approached the right way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people tend to assume that what is normal for them is also normal for other people.?One of the primal moments of growing up is going into your friends’ houses and realizing that there are other ways of living – different family dynamics, different approaches, different norms.?The shift from “everyone is like me” to “I must be the weirdest person in the world” is something that a lot of game developers experienced, and it’s a crucial moment, because our tendency to put our own experience front and center as universal truth is never-ending.

Video game development is hard.?It takes a tremendous amount of work to take even the simplest full game loop from conception to execution much less polish.?We have developed incredible libraries of tools, and yet, it’s still one of the most difficult creative endeavors.?It’s not that hard to write crappy prose; my kid can make awful drawings; even stupid songs aren’t that tough to come up with.?Making even a terrible video game is a mountain of work.

As a result, it takes a long time for people to get to the point where they’ve seen multiple cycles of development – things going from conception to execution to shipping and audience reaction.?It’s hard to compare development cycles when you’ve only got one experience to draw from – distinguishing between success and failure when you only have one success case is going to produce blind spots.?Much like families, people tend to assume that the way that they’ve done it is the way that everyone does it.

This could not be farther from the truth.?One of the best professional experiences that I’ve ever had was the four years that I spent working at THQ in developer management.?Over that time, I got the chance to take pitches from independent developers across the entire spectrum of the industry; I did something like twenty due diligence visits – you know, when you shake a studio down from top to bottom, look at all of their tools, technology, process, and personnel.?We looked primarily at US and Canadian studios, but also a few in Europe.?And it was eye-opening.

The range of approaches for everything from design to toolchains to asset integration was all over the map.?It became very clear to me in that process that there are many paths to success.?These were all functioning companies – most of them already doing AAA work on consoles – and the commonalities in how they functioned mostly came down to things like disaster recovery – having the right kinds of backups and contingency plans.?Other than that, everything was up for grabs and shifted from developer to developer.

What design meant, what production owned, how programmers interfaced with other departments, how people used concept art, how assets were integrated into source control, how builds were managed – before you even get to anything project-specific that is tied to gameplay or IP or audience, just at a structural level – there were no standards.?Everyone made it up, doing what worked for them, in their experience.

And they all thought what they were doing was THE way games were made.?I walked into studio after studio after studio where people proudly declared that they were doing things the way that everyone understood they should be done, and every single one of them was different.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone.?Nature loves variety.??It’s in the physics of the universe – check out entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.?Of course, if you set hundreds of creative individuals the challenge of coming up with ways of making complex things, they’re going to come up with all kinds of different ways.?Of course, they will.?Just as games are diverse and polymorphous, so are the development processes that go with them.?And yet, everyone who goes through one of those diverse processes the first time will think that every other development process is similar, regardless of reality.

The problem is that while the world is complex and varied and nuanced, leadership is not.?Let me qualify that; it’s too broad of a statement.?There’s a brand of Western corporate leadership that is very identity and authority driven.?These are people who have been successful, who believe with every fiber of their being that they understand what created that success, and it is their mission to impose this structure on every project they work with going forward.?This kind of leadership requires clarity; clarity requires simplicity.

This is not a good fit for game development.?Game development is messy.?It’s not formulaic.?There isn’t a recipe for success.?There isn’t a standard for how things are done.?The normative bias that leads people to think that what has worked for them in the past is going to work for other people in the future has led to collapse after collapse in the game industry.?I’m not going to name names here, but you can go searching for high-profile developers who proudly proclaimed their vision after a successful title and ran their companies into the ground, and you’ll find more than one or two.

There was a time when you could make video games for people who wanted to be video game developers – the market was that small; the costs were that low.?In the early days of the industry, it was a maxim – make the games you want to play.?There was no other guidepost; there was no way to understand what else could be possible.?The only testing you could do was against the team.?Every project was groundbreaking because there were no landmarks.

To do this today is suicide.?Hundreds of indie developers are doing it – chasing their dreams, making the games they want to play, pouring their hearts and souls and savings and blood and sweat and tears into making games that are going to appeal to a few thousand people.?It’s heartbreaking.?95%+ of indie developers will never get back what they’ve invested, monetarily.?People who do it for fun, or art, or personal motivation, that’s different; that’s fine; if that’s how you want to make games, you do you.?But if you want to make a business, you better look at product-market fit.?And if you think that your market is you, you’re wrong.

The game industry today is not the same as it was when I started over two decades ago.?CD’s and DVD’s changed everything; then, the internet changed everything; then mobile changed everything; then, free to play and live services changed it all again.?The industry has grown at a phenomenal rate – in size, in reach, in monetary impact.?It’s not the hobbyist sport that it used to be.?As recent court filings show, it takes 9 figures these days to build and market blockbuster games.

And so, it astonishes me, in this day and age, to have pundits stand forward and proclaim loudly that they have the truth of game development.?Maybe this is my normative bias showing – because I have seen team after team after team that has approached the same problems and solved them differently and found success.?The truth is that there is no singular truth.?There is no one path.?There is no one – myself included – who has the magical keys to the kingdom.

While we all tend to believe that what is true for us is also true for other people, that’s bias, not truth.?The assumption that other people inhabit the same world we do, much less in the same way we do, is just not borne out by reality.?Game developers, more than most, should understand this – our audiences are as perversely polymorphic as our processes are.

So, when you see someone standing on a soapbox pretending to have the capital “t” Truth about games and game development, ask yourself, are there experiences out there that are different from that??Is this just normative bias at work??Does this person really have the right range of experiences to make that claim??Most of the time, I think you’ll find, there’s something familiar at play.