I agree with the majority of this except for one very important point - it's never about an arbitrary other person. It's always about a big group of people, otherwise known as a target audience or demographic, about whom we can have a priori statistical knowledge. That's the core principle of marketing. It's also not usually about making a product in the 20% of things people are surprised to like, it's about making a product that's in the 80% of things people almost always like because that's a much safer bet, and the people who like a product against type are less likely to buy sequels and tie-ins and all that than the people who are always looking for more of the same type of thing.

[quote name='chervenkoff' timestamp='1313616504' post='4850480']
[quote name='ApochPiQ' timestamp='1313615377' post='4850472']
That's the thing - we already have great ways of delivering software without killing creativity. Hundreds of games ship every year using those techniques.

Why are those sequences of procedure less valid than your concept of a "process"?

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1313625569' post='4850540']
I agree with the majority of this except for one very important point - it's never about an arbitrary other person. It's always about a big group of people, otherwise known as a target audience or demographic, about whom we can have a priori statistical knowledge. That's the core principle of marketing. It's also not usually about making a product in the 20% of things people are surprised to like, it's about making a product that's in the 80% of things people almost always like because that's a much safer bet, and the people who like a product against type are less likely to buy sequels and tie-ins and all that than the people who are always looking for more of the same type of thing.

At the moment of replying, emotion might have gotten the better of me, for which I apologize. I guess I was fighting with a one-man army here for too long.

My rhetorical question was aimed at pointing out that there is always need for improvement. Pointing at successful projects and saying everything is OK is easy, however the truth is that more often than it should, projects fail. My research does not aim to replace the processes and practices already in use, but to complement them, without introducing significant overhead.

A game design is more or less a piece of art, and as such it can only arise from the personal preferences of the game designer. My designs first and foremost exist to please me. But the designer is only one person, if they have a few preferences which are way out of line with the target demographic it's completely appropriate for these to get overridden during the development process even though that will probably annoy the designer. Being an artist is like that, trying to turn art into a commercial product always requires a bit of hack-work and pandering. If you're a professional you suck it up and move on, or if the proposed changes are too large you realize you are working with the wrong group and try to find people who have more tastes in common with you. As far as individual players go, no any one individual doesn't matter any more than one other individual; surveying them, especially a survey with one or more free-response boxes, is the best practical way to find out the opinions of a large number of individuals.

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1313794136' post='4851416']
A game design is more or less a piece of art, and as such it can only arise from the personal preferences of the game designer. My designs first and foremost exist to please me. But the designer is only one person, if they have a few preferences which are way out of line with the target demographic it's completely appropriate for these to get overridden during the development process even though that will probably annoy the designer. Being an artist is like that, trying to turn art into a commercial product always requires a bit of hack-work and pandering. If you're a professional you suck it up and move on, or if the proposed changes are too large you realize you are working with the wrong group and try to find people who have more tastes in common with you. As far as individual players go, no any one individual doesn't matter any more than one other individual; surveying them, especially a survey with one or more free-response boxes, is the best practical way to find out the opinions of a large number of individuals.

The fact that projects fail does not suggest in any way that the process for managing creatively rich software is at fault.

Are you actually interested in project failure, or are you fixated on the notion of trying to repair something which is not broken? In the former case, perhaps you should actually study why projects really fail instead of just assuming (very incorrectly) that the demands of managing creativity has much to do with it. In the latter case, you continue to display precisely the wrong attitude and ask precisely the wrong questions.

If I was doing your research, my first priority would be to actually learn something about how real game development works. You are operating with a minimum of such knowledge and this is killing your credibility and leading you to waste a painful amount of time on diversionary arguments which have nothing to do with what you are trying to find out. You need to do research from a point of humility - always assume that you know nothing before you assume that you know anything. Having talked to a few developers does not an expert make; the fact that you've received so much criticism for your incorrect assertions about developmental realities should be a strong indicator of this problem.

Once that is done, you can move on to the real question, which is "what needs to be improved?" You're walking into this discussion with a preconceived notion of what needs to be improved, and despite being told repeatedly by several people that your preconception is wrong, you cling to it. A much more appropriate response for a researcher is to discard your incorrect view entirely and embrace reality. Honest discovery in research is never accomplished by slavishly working towards wrong assumptions. The really interesting breakthroughs come from people who refine their views progressively over time as new information comes to light. Half the cool stuff that researchers discover has nothing to do with what they originally sought to research!

I guess, in a nutshell, you need to be willing to walk away from your misguided current tack of research, and explore something different which is actually a valid problem. Depending on your motivations for asking these questions to begin with, that could either be very easy (e.g. you genuinely want to see fewer game projects fail, for instance) or it could be very difficult (i.e. you had a pet project and you're committed to it even if it proves out to be a waste of time).