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Welcome to Show Business...
raphaeldisanto
Member Posts: 402 Arc User
... and there really is no business like it.
You know what? This is how show business works.
Welcome to fame, guys. That's right. This is fame, in the classic showbiz sense of the world. Admittedly, it is a small and microcosmic version of such (and Irene Cara isn't running around in a leotard and leg warmers), but yes, this is what it looks like. Trust me, I've been there (in my own small and microcosmic way) and this is exactly what it looks like - with the highs and the lows and the confidence boosts and ego-crushing failures. It's not that I'm unsympathetic - No one likes to get 1-starred - but really, everyone's entitled to their opinion on a work of creativity and everyone's entitled to express it via the means available to them. And they do. Repeatedly.
"Justin Bieber sucks, I'm gonna go downvote all of his videos on youtube."
"No, he's the best singer in the world, your stupid Rage Against The Machine sucks, I'm gonna downvote their videos on youtube."
"You're both wrong, I'm gonna downvote them both and upvote all the Miley Cyrus videos I can find."
You know what? This is how show business works.
We all have opinions about various forms of artistic entertainment. Every single one of us. That's how we, as humans, are wired.
Does IMDB ask you to make a short fan movie before you're allowed to rate films on their website? Does rotten tomatoes? Many of us had never tried to make a quest before The Foundry, yet that didn't stop us from slamming video games on gaming websites. Many people have never stepped foot inside a music studio, yet they'll go to metacritic and downvote all the music artists they don't like. Many people have never written anything longer than a 1 page resume, but that doesn't stop them from going to the Barnes and Noble website, or Amazon and 1-starring all the books they didn't enjoy.
These people are everyone. They might be you or me or the guy in the car behind you at the lights. They might have no appreciation for the detail and work that goes into placing every note in a concerto; they just know they don't like Bach - And I'm not just talking about people who "don't like classical music". I'm talking about classical music afficionados here. People who are very familiar with the genre, know its proponents and practitioners in and out, but can't play a lick of music. They may like one violinist and hate a different one, despite not knowing which end of a violin goes under your chin. Just like gamers who can tell you all about the best games, the best dev houses, but couldn't write a 'Hello world' program if you paid them.
This is no different, except that now we are the BioWares, the Bethesdas, the Valves. We're getting the criticism from so-called "uninformed" gamers who don't appreciate our hard work, our effort, the time it takes to place all those details, and we're mad because quests that don't appear to have taken nearly as much work are more popular, rated higher, featured, whatever metric you want to use.
You know what? This is how show business works.
Apparently, Square spent 100 million dollars making the latest Tomb Raider. It shipped somewhere around 5 million copies.
I don't know how much money Notch spent making Minecraft, but it was a whole bucketload less than 100 million bucks. It's shipped 11 million copies. That's over twice as many.
Square put all that time and effort and money into graphics and cut scenes, dialogue and sound design, making the game look as beautiful as they could and they get outsold by some jumped-up indie upstart with 8-bit graphic that look like they could have been whipped up in an afternoon (and probably were).
Minecraft costs a lot less, yes. That makes it a lower barrier to entry for most people. Time is money, folks - And in the world of the Neverwinter Foundry, your barrier of entry is the complexity and length of your quests. If you make a Final Fantasy, it'll get lauded by the critics and then it'll promptly and instantly be outsold (have more plays) by a "Minecraft" quest that takes 15 minutes and has a story no more complex than "See dungeon. Kill everything in dungeon. Get loot."
Fun doesn't always care how hard you worked.
I'm writing this because I've been a professional musician, and anyone out there who, like me, has been in the "showbiz" world for any length of time knows that yes, it can suck. You're gonna get people who hate on your stuff for stupid reasons. And you're gonna get people who don't appreciate the work it takes. And you're gonna get people who simply don't like what you produce.
You know what? This is how show business works.
You put your stuff out there, and you see how the dice fall. You don't want criticism (any kind, not just the constructive kind)? Then make your stuff, lock it away in a room and never show it to anyone.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't put the work in. You absolutely should. You make the quest you want to make and if that quest involves hundreds of hours of asset placement, tens of thousands of dialogue lines, a hundred dummy NPCs that are needed for foundry-tricks and workarounds, then you absolutely should do it; and to paraphrase one of Lincoln's most oft-misquoted lines, people who like that sort of thing will find it just the sort of thing they like. But if the quest you want to make involves slapping together a couple of prebaked rooms and an NPC with ten lines of expositional info dump, then be my guest. Go nuts. Have a ball. The Foundry's there for both types of quest and everything in between.
No, success is not a measure of quality. Neither is it a measure of lack of quality. Bieber sells a lot of records, Meyer sells a lot of books and we like to rag on how they suck. But you know what, Jimi Hendrix sold a lot of records too, and we all know how popular Tolkien is. Success in this chaotic popularity contest that we call show business is determined by many things, many factors, most of which we can't control. The ivory tower won't save you here, so come on down from it, roll up your sleeves and get back in the Foundry.
You get back in the Foundry and you get back to work because this isn't about fame or fortune or popularity. It's about building something. It's about making something that's bigger than you are. It's about producing a product that no one else could have produced because it's yours. It came from your hands, your mind, your heart, your creativity. It has you stamped all over it - in the map design, the mob placement, the dialogue, the everything.
And it's about creating something that has never existed before in this form, and would never have existed had you not created it.
Take the feedback from people you trust. Ignore it from people you don't. Don't stress over stars and reviews; they're outside your control. Just make the quest you want to make and take pride in the fact that instead of consuming a piece of entertainment, you've created one. You've given back to the world, in some small way. You've added to society's collective cultural grab bag of entertainment options for others.
Don't sweat the small stuff.
Just create.
tl;dr: People are gonna hate your stuff and down vote it and they're entitled to do it, just like you're entitled to give an opinion on any piece of art that you have no idea how to create either. Ignore it and move on. You can't please everyone so just take pride in the fact that you've created something that wasn't there before.
You know what? This is how show business works.
Welcome to fame, guys. That's right. This is fame, in the classic showbiz sense of the world. Admittedly, it is a small and microcosmic version of such (and Irene Cara isn't running around in a leotard and leg warmers), but yes, this is what it looks like. Trust me, I've been there (in my own small and microcosmic way) and this is exactly what it looks like - with the highs and the lows and the confidence boosts and ego-crushing failures. It's not that I'm unsympathetic - No one likes to get 1-starred - but really, everyone's entitled to their opinion on a work of creativity and everyone's entitled to express it via the means available to them. And they do. Repeatedly.
"Justin Bieber sucks, I'm gonna go downvote all of his videos on youtube."
"No, he's the best singer in the world, your stupid Rage Against The Machine sucks, I'm gonna downvote their videos on youtube."
"You're both wrong, I'm gonna downvote them both and upvote all the Miley Cyrus videos I can find."
You know what? This is how show business works.
We all have opinions about various forms of artistic entertainment. Every single one of us. That's how we, as humans, are wired.
Does IMDB ask you to make a short fan movie before you're allowed to rate films on their website? Does rotten tomatoes? Many of us had never tried to make a quest before The Foundry, yet that didn't stop us from slamming video games on gaming websites. Many people have never stepped foot inside a music studio, yet they'll go to metacritic and downvote all the music artists they don't like. Many people have never written anything longer than a 1 page resume, but that doesn't stop them from going to the Barnes and Noble website, or Amazon and 1-starring all the books they didn't enjoy.
These people are everyone. They might be you or me or the guy in the car behind you at the lights. They might have no appreciation for the detail and work that goes into placing every note in a concerto; they just know they don't like Bach - And I'm not just talking about people who "don't like classical music". I'm talking about classical music afficionados here. People who are very familiar with the genre, know its proponents and practitioners in and out, but can't play a lick of music. They may like one violinist and hate a different one, despite not knowing which end of a violin goes under your chin. Just like gamers who can tell you all about the best games, the best dev houses, but couldn't write a 'Hello world' program if you paid them.
This is no different, except that now we are the BioWares, the Bethesdas, the Valves. We're getting the criticism from so-called "uninformed" gamers who don't appreciate our hard work, our effort, the time it takes to place all those details, and we're mad because quests that don't appear to have taken nearly as much work are more popular, rated higher, featured, whatever metric you want to use.
You know what? This is how show business works.
Apparently, Square spent 100 million dollars making the latest Tomb Raider. It shipped somewhere around 5 million copies.
I don't know how much money Notch spent making Minecraft, but it was a whole bucketload less than 100 million bucks. It's shipped 11 million copies. That's over twice as many.
Square put all that time and effort and money into graphics and cut scenes, dialogue and sound design, making the game look as beautiful as they could and they get outsold by some jumped-up indie upstart with 8-bit graphic that look like they could have been whipped up in an afternoon (and probably were).
Minecraft costs a lot less, yes. That makes it a lower barrier to entry for most people. Time is money, folks - And in the world of the Neverwinter Foundry, your barrier of entry is the complexity and length of your quests. If you make a Final Fantasy, it'll get lauded by the critics and then it'll promptly and instantly be outsold (have more plays) by a "Minecraft" quest that takes 15 minutes and has a story no more complex than "See dungeon. Kill everything in dungeon. Get loot."
Fun doesn't always care how hard you worked.
I'm writing this because I've been a professional musician, and anyone out there who, like me, has been in the "showbiz" world for any length of time knows that yes, it can suck. You're gonna get people who hate on your stuff for stupid reasons. And you're gonna get people who don't appreciate the work it takes. And you're gonna get people who simply don't like what you produce.
You know what? This is how show business works.
You put your stuff out there, and you see how the dice fall. You don't want criticism (any kind, not just the constructive kind)? Then make your stuff, lock it away in a room and never show it to anyone.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't put the work in. You absolutely should. You make the quest you want to make and if that quest involves hundreds of hours of asset placement, tens of thousands of dialogue lines, a hundred dummy NPCs that are needed for foundry-tricks and workarounds, then you absolutely should do it; and to paraphrase one of Lincoln's most oft-misquoted lines, people who like that sort of thing will find it just the sort of thing they like. But if the quest you want to make involves slapping together a couple of prebaked rooms and an NPC with ten lines of expositional info dump, then be my guest. Go nuts. Have a ball. The Foundry's there for both types of quest and everything in between.
No, success is not a measure of quality. Neither is it a measure of lack of quality. Bieber sells a lot of records, Meyer sells a lot of books and we like to rag on how they suck. But you know what, Jimi Hendrix sold a lot of records too, and we all know how popular Tolkien is. Success in this chaotic popularity contest that we call show business is determined by many things, many factors, most of which we can't control. The ivory tower won't save you here, so come on down from it, roll up your sleeves and get back in the Foundry.
You get back in the Foundry and you get back to work because this isn't about fame or fortune or popularity. It's about building something. It's about making something that's bigger than you are. It's about producing a product that no one else could have produced because it's yours. It came from your hands, your mind, your heart, your creativity. It has you stamped all over it - in the map design, the mob placement, the dialogue, the everything.
And it's about creating something that has never existed before in this form, and would never have existed had you not created it.
Take the feedback from people you trust. Ignore it from people you don't. Don't stress over stars and reviews; they're outside your control. Just make the quest you want to make and take pride in the fact that instead of consuming a piece of entertainment, you've created one. You've given back to the world, in some small way. You've added to society's collective cultural grab bag of entertainment options for others.
Don't sweat the small stuff.
Just create.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by raphaeldisanto on
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Comments
Pretty much one and the same.
"An Occurrence at Faolon's Field" (daily eligible)
Shortcode: NW-DGPROFMWU
"A Lunacy in Havenlock" (needs reviews!)
Shortcode: NW-DUY2JXAQQ
Most reviews are only opinions.
When you get a bad review, sit down and ask yourself honestly, "Is it warranted from a technical aspect?" Did you really leave some rocks floating in midair when it doesn't look right? Does the player really respawn in a wall when they die? Fine, then the criticism is genuinely warranted. Take it as a learning experience. Thank the writer of the criticism, no matter how rudely delivered. Why? Because they helped you!
But what if it's opinion, not technical delivery? "Ur quest stunk cuz I dun like reading" isn't really a valid technical issue, now is it? So why bother to take it personally that someone's too gosh-darned lazy to read? What validity does it have in your world?
Great, so you're lazy and you want to blame that on me... well, I don't have to accept that.
The best thing for you to do (and I tell new authors this), is to take care of the valid complaints long before your book (or foundry) reaches the shelf (so to speak in this digital age). Make it technically accurate. Focus on your job, which is to deliver your story (or hurry-through-it quest) with technical details correct. Double check your spelling, your mechanics, and etc. When that's done and you put out your product, then there's one thing left to do...
Ignore opinions that come from people whose opinions you don't care about to begin with. Heck, I'm kind of looking forward to a few negative opinions. You see, the LAST group of people I want to please completely are the "[forget] the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" crew. Do you really think that I'm putting in tens of hours on the FIRST map of my quest series for that type of person? No.
But I'm not going to alienate them 100%, because they're a large enough demographic that, in the most technical sense, I'll cater to them. First line of each quest NPC: "Just give me the quest, because I am a simpleton." Fine, if you want to be a jerk and ignore the hours I've spent creating an immersive world, you can. But I don't have to be any nicer about it, than you are being to me by being so careless of my work. On the other hand, you're a big enough group that I'll give you the option... not sweetly, but I'll do it.
So keep your demographic in mind. Who do you want to please? If you get negative opinions from other people, remember that it's like the guy who loves rap music saying that the classical music is horrible. Well, of course it's horrible to him--he likes rap! Of course my "too much story" dungeon is horrible to the "push-through-it-fast-as-fast-can-be" guy... he just wants to "git 'er done". He's not my target demographic.
Basically... it's all about being certain whether a bad review is earned by your own shortcoming (ie, bad technical delivery), or is simply a matter of (wrong) opinion.
Pick your side, take a stand, save--or kill--your former allies.
Part 1: Remembrance : NW-DDTLPFIKS (need 7 more plays)
Part 2: Treasured Sin: Not yet published
The other important question I ask myself when recieving feedback is:
"Will this feedback make my quest better, or simply make it more to this reviewer's taste?"
It's an important difference, I think.
Agreed!
I think that the problem is that not enough people are told about this from this viewpoint. They get bad reviews and people scoff, "well, that's nonsense" but they don't help the creative person work though the criticism in a way that makes sense to that hurt feeling that comes up.
Pick your side, take a stand, save--or kill--your former allies.
You can learn to deal with criticism. It's a skill, a learned ability and you can practise it and get better at it. For me, dealing with criticism in a healthy manner involves both confidence -and- humility. The humility to recognize when the critic has a point, and confidence to stick to my guns when I know he doesn't.