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When I first started working at Massively-that-was, I got a bit of a wake-up call pretty early on when I made a joke about EverQuest II. It wasn’t a good joke, actually a mean one, but since it was in work chat, you won’t be able to find it even if you go looking. But it was very much predicated on the idea of pointing at this game and just kind of being dismissive about the whole thing, sort of kicking at the idea that it wasn’t good and that clearly the people who were working on it didn’t care about creating something new or engaging.
To my surprise, I was immediately informed that I was making the joke to more than a couple people who really liked the game. I had to eat some crow that day, which was a helpful lesson to learn for the future. But my opinion of the game itself hasn’t improved a whole lot; rather, what changed is my understanding that there are people who care about the things you don’t care about. And that works out on the development end, too. Bad MMOs aren’t just a product of people who don’t care.
Let’s be clear here: There are a lot of MMOs that are just fine. Does anyone here remember Astellia? You shouldn’t, but my first impressions of that game were that it was… fine. It wasn’t a good game, but it succeeded at its basic requirements. It was fine. And there are a lot of those games. A lot of reports from others who have played Tarisland, for example, are that the game is… fine. It’s fine.
The easy thing to point to in these cases is to say that the game was the product of people who didn’t really care, and I am as guilty of this assumption as anyone else. It makes a lot of sense to look at a final product that seems almost tailor-made to be “good enough, I guess” and conclude that the people involved did not really care. But that also assumes a certain degree of intentional effort, as if you can just decide whether you make something good or bad.
Spoiler: You can’t!
I have sat down in front of a blank draft for a column with something that I considered an absolutely solid premise and a plan for how I was going to write the column, and I really did my absolute best to turn in a piece of brilliance and it just… didn’t come together. I’m not going to go back and say which columns fall into that category, but the fact is that I have been doing this for more than a decade. I have a lot of experience with how to write a column and how to turn my thoughts into a column.
But that doesn’t mean I always do a good job. In fact, sometimes it means I do a bad job. An idea doesn’t work. An introduction isn’t as funny as I thought it was. That’s not even counting the times when I have a thought, go to look up the data to support it, and find out that the data don’t support my theory, or worse, completely contradict it. Sometimes I can salvage that, but not always.
We’ve all heard the joke that you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but that cuts a lot further than almost anyone wants to admit. You should never attribute to a lack of care what can adequately be explained by trying to do a good job and just not managing to pull it off for any number of valid reasons.
Now, I want to cut a fine line here. It would be fair to say that with many projects, the people who are working on them may be more concerned with cashing a paycheck than with trying to build a passion project. That doesn’t mean that people are necessarily trying to do a bad job, but it does mean that it’s less likely for, say, someone working on Tarisland to stay late in the hopes of translating a text with perfect fidelity.
But that extends to successful projects, too. I don’t think anyone who works on Fortnite is losing sleep over doing the best job possible. By contrast, I would absolutely believe that the teams working on World of Warcraft during Shadowlands were pulling long hours, spending extra time, and doing everything possible to build the best possible expansion for every player to enjoy. Heck, I find that more plausible than believing that the people working on that expansion just didn’t care and were phoning it in.
None of that means that the expansion was good, though. It was terrible. It is very possible for humans to care about something, put their full effort behind it, and wind up doing a terrible job. Sometimes it’s because of pre-existing assumptions that are incorrect, sometimes it’s because of mistakes, sometimes it’s because of the fact that in any creative venture you are putting a bunch of pieces together and hoping for the best – and there are times when that does not work.
And yes, sometimes something bad comes out because nobody involves actually cares. I don’t want to paint a world where every bad MMORPG patch or feature or expansion or whatever is perceived as the work of an uwu smol bean just doing his best when sometimes you’ll get people who should know better doing something boneheaded. My point here isn’t that this never happens but that it can happen, it is plausible, and it is in fact normal for someone to try really hard and just… not nail it.
Even more importantly, this can happen at all levels. You’ll note that my earlier paragraphs applied a standard saying that I genuinely believe the people working on WoW wanted to make the best expansion possible while working on one of the worst, and Activision-Blizzard has never been a scrappy underdog. (No, really, it never was the case.) It’s easy to sort things into categories that convince you whenever a big studio fails it’s because people didn’t care, but a small studio tried hard and just couldn’t quite make it.
But that’s also not true. Big studios and big operations have people who really care and try really hard and sometimes screw up. I’ve met the teams working on huge games who clearly care about the product and two-person dev teams who are equally enthusiastic. I’ve met huge teams who are clearly reading off a press release and small indie teams that seem wholly unengaged with the end product. And just because you care doesn’t mean you made something good or something that anyone wants to actually play.
Perspective is important from all ends of the spectrum. It’s possible to do a bad job or do a good job on something that doesn’t work. And while it is eminently possible that something that seems like a bad job is a matter of people who were working on development and just did not care, it’s also possible that the people who worked on it cared a bunch. Caring about something doesn’t make you good at it.
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