Ryan: To that end, you appear to build towards the point that many, in the end, accept their role as a mostly passive consumer – while this is correct, would you not say that this ‘vocal minority’ (and for FO3, an especially visible one) will eventually have an impact? I think even Gatt’s spectacularly disastrous example of Galaxies, not to mention Asheron’s Call, says something about how developers and fans see themselves and each other. Your concluding remarks about ‘co-labourers’ – it is utopian, of course, to suggest a perfect harmony, but I think we are building towards it in some levels, and communities like NMA or DaC are providing a space that is very much necessary for this progression.

I personally feel that the game industry needs to adopt a targeted development/budgeting buisness model much like Hollywood does. One where they budget the game and develop it from the standpoint of realistic possibility of penetration, rather than “We want a blockbuster!”.

I mean, if I’m developing an RPG, I’ll get sales figures on RPG’s, and expect to sell the median figure. Sure, sometimes it’ll sell higher, sometimes lower, but I’ll budget for that median number.

Too much focus is on every game to sell like gangbusters.

On the direct topic, Fan/Developer interaction, I’d like to throw out two counter-examples. One on how a game can benefit significantly, and one on how it can be crushed.

Asheron’s Call: Very significant Fan/Developer interaction to the point where some fans have become AC developers at Turbine.

Over the years a number of issues have reared their heads. One of the largest being an imbalance between melee characters, and ranged/magic characters. At one point the imbalance was so severe that a melee character was actually shunned from participating. The fans pleaded with the Dev’s and they ultimately created a very effective plan on action that rebalanced the game in short order, while adding a highly interesting crafting system.

This interaction has lead to many other events, like an extremely pervasive and ellusive bug being tracked down that never would have been found. Or the dramatic changing of policies. I’ll be happy to elaborate if anyone considers it worthy of discussion.

Star Wars Galaxies: The Dev’s set-up a chain of fan feedback collection. One fan was chosen as a representative for each “Class” of characters, through which those characters funneled their feedback.

It was a catastrophy of unprecedented proportions.

The fan reps were given exclusive access to the Dev’s, who did not read the actual boards. In doing so, they set up the ability for the development of the game to be manipulated.

Some classes had skills considered too “Powerfull” removed, then the same things given to other classes. Other’s were outright ignored as the Fan Reps weren’t as persistant as others.

It all came to a raging head that melted down when some Fan Reps became fed up with a specific other fan rep.

It seems the “Bounty Hunter” fan rep had been manipulating information trying to get the other combat classes reduced in power and his increased. He would tell the Dev’s, and provide numbers, that he claimed demonstrated the other classes were too powerfull in relation to his. He left out the parts that the numbers he provided required the same commitment as the “Bounty Hunter” class did, as well as other pertinent data.

It became a firestorm as it became public and objective data was made available. But it was too late, the Dev’s had already made numerous changes based on faulty data from one Fan Rep, and large numbers of alienated Players quit en masse.

At the same time, it became apparent another Fan Rep was filtering info to the Dev’s based upon that Fan Rep’s personal vision of the game, and ignored mass opinions. Which just accelerated the feelings of alienation and exodus.

In my opinion, the Asheron’s Call model is best. Dedicated fans can know what’s best for a game, but they have to be considered as a group, not through a single person who can filter and manipulate information. It’s also my opinion that one should never abandon a fan base in favor of hoping to attract a new one. An event that occured to disasterous results with both Asheron’s Call 2 and Star Wars Galaxies, both of which suffered terrible losses.

I guess part of this is the high-risk factor of gaming, and the fact that gaming has no back-up currency to fall back on (film has theatres, music has shows). That means if you experiment with the internet and it goes wrong, you’re out a couple of million.

Bethesda – for example – can’t really have Fallout 3 fail. They’d survive, but they’re a one-project development house that spends 3-4 years and 25 million USD or more on such projects. Not exactly an investment taken lightly.

First of all, Jason, I’d agree that the game-development industry is built on blockbusters. It takes years and millions to produce a successful title. But I do think cooperation with fans is still possible. The easiest way is just to be open to fan activity and listen to their input. It’s everywhere. Also, accepting productivity (i.e., mods) can empower as well. Maybe an industry that encourages such behavior will help usher in that era of indie gaming.

Sun-ha, like you, I was surprised at the tendency on the forum to accept that Fallout’s destiny was not the domain of fans. Whether fans felt that Fallout was hijacked from them, or from Black Isle Studios (the games’ original developer), or never theirs in the first place (I saw all three), they felt it was out of their hands. It was not theirs to own. They did their best to work around this realization.

And Brother None, I know that the Bethsoft forums were extremely volatile. In my opinion, this made the research all the more valuable. In the face of such intense confrontation (and the occasional Bethesda fan), posters were compelled to address the issues more clearly; to make explicit the ideas that they had believed implicitly.

Anyway, I’d love to hear more. Feel free to email Nancy on this blog, and she’ll forward it to me. We can discuss away. I hope to have more soon.

I’d personally find the BGSF a troubled subject to study, to be honest. One factor in that is that it is very hard to find relevant producer-fan interaction between an aggressive fanbase as is present there and an insular producer – which is what Bethesda is to exceedingly high levels (not exceeding Nintendo or EA, though).

Another is that the thing has gone up and down from the moment it started. Unlike NMA, which is old and settled, BGSF still suffers under influxes of new users which tip the social balance one way or the other. It has gone from some developer interaction to scaring them off again, it has gone from traditional fan dominance at the start to the dominance of new fans that I think is visible now. And it’s always been a flame-fest amongst users, moreso than NMA.

I made some more comments on NMA, but obviously I should hold off any substantial judgement since you only give a glance at the material.

Jason T: I find your post interesting. Especially since the gaming industry lags not just in terms of open interaction on new media, but also in the way they cling to traditional publishing models when compared to the more open experimentation that music/film has done.

Sun-ha Hong: I find ownership a troubled concept in this context, as you might well imagine. I certainly don’t feel any ownership myself, but on the other hand I do feel ownership “should” lie with the 6 original developers, moreso than with Bethesda.

Also, I find it amusing how much NMA tends to get singled out in this process when DaC and the GameFAQs Fallout 3 forum are much more poignant examples.

Hope you’ll show more of your work Ryan, and I’m interested in hearing more about Sun-Ha’s “investigation”.

Here’s my blogpost about this:
http://fallout3.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/outsiders-and-insiders/

Your comments about the ‘ownership’ of the text is particularly interesting – because to an almost unprecedented degree in video game culture, Fallout fans possess a strong sense of ownership over the text, and are willing to be vocal about it: the news media point to NMA as the mischievous ‘culprit’, but the fact is such fans make up a big part of the official Bethesda forums, too. The number of years since the original games seems to have only served to brew up a massive and strongly focused metatext of ‘Fallout’. Certainly, you are right that many fans are willing to eventually accept their role as a spectator and consumer, with discourses such as ‘don’t like it, don’t buy it’, but with Fallout, I would suggest that some fans have succeeded in negotiating, or at least challenging, Bethesda’s PR discourse and their definitions of what Fallout is about. Certainly, they’ve made the video-game news media take notice of them. Though it’s impossible to tell at this stage, the Fallout 3 saga might just be part of a general development towards fans with more ways to make themselves heard.