This is something that, shockingly, only occurred to me in recent weeks. And it was only after visiting Mental Concept Productions that I realised how important this issue is.
Your average joe, run o the mill, has never touched a proper computer (Or program, for that matter) will never completely understand what you, or I, or any game developer in general, do. And we miss the mark every single time.
Lemme break it down to ya,
I recently created a demo version of an online RPG in Flash. To me, it was 6 weeks of blood sweat and tears, from miniscule syntax errors that took me 3 hours to find, to drawing and re-drawing just the **** guides for the perspective drawing. When it came to the last night before the big presentation (For my class, family friends and EEK industry reps) I took one last look at the final product, and I was mortified.
To our average joe (As described above) I’d spent 6 weeks making a walk through with only 5 places to go. To our user, you could choose between 3 different hand (cursor) colours. You could open and close a window with stuff in it. You could look at a pretty scroll-like map which showed an icon. If the user goes to a new room, the icon slides to the next one. Pretty. A little clock at the bottom has a little lady bird go round. A leaf has it’s colour change. Birdies twitch.
AHH! To me, it’s a whole different story. From externally loading .swfs combined into one preloader, 4 different arrays for each part of the inventory, scripts for counters and clocks and map placement recognition, the database, all that PHP and MySQL…
And that’s just the back back end.
I was lucky, I worked with tutors who understood this issue, and they geared my presentation up for both industry and parental units. (Like explaining the more technical terms in simple English without being patronising, and how to make the whole thing seem impressive and difficult without talking about the code, which to most people is dull! Stupid people…)
/endRant
I guess what I’m trying to say is what we produce and what they see needs to be weighed up evenly. The average joe won’t care if you can do a fantastic, 16 page long code to make a 3D particle effect, if all he sees is a bunch of dots on the screen. If you try and explain the code to him, 9 times out of 10 he’ll close the site window and go somewhere else.
I’m not saying scrap the experiments, or that “style of substance” (gag) is the way to go; but I do think there is a time and a place. If you dum something down for the average user, they’ll know it. They don’t want to be patronised, just like n00bs. (C’mon, we were all one once) They just want to know what it does, and maybe why. How isn’t up there.
Not for Mr. Joe Average.
