On Criticism and Soup

I don't know if you've heard about it, but there's these people who respond to negative (never positive!) criticism on something with "Do it better!" or "You've never created a [thing], how would you know anything?"

Judging the Soup

These statements imply that, in order to be able to criticize things, you need to have done/created them. I call bull on that, and will now bring the eponymous soup into play. I'm not a cook. I know how to cook noodles and make generic Asia style food. And I can put things on toast. But does this stop me from judging the food I get at a restaurant? No. I can tell if the soup tastes like hot water, and I can damn well tell if my Schnitzel is raw on the inside. I may not be able to tell you how much of what spice is missing, or how long it should have been cooked, but I know damn well that there's something not working with my food. I may not be a cook, but I'm an eater. I've had my fair share of food and I can tell if something tastes good. For things I've had more often, I can even tell what's wrong with it. In a nutshell, yes, I can judge the soup.

I want to see you do it better!

I'm very compelled to reply to that statement with STFU. It's closely related to an eater's ability to judge the soup, but there's more to it. Let's say you are a cook. You can tell what the soup lacks, and how long you have to cook things until they're al dente. Still, there's that other thing that will be thrown at you: You've never gone public/aren't a professional. I'll drop the allegory here and return to the thing that inspired me to write this post: "You don't know how much work it is to make a game. I want to see you make a better one." Aside from the fact that you don't need to be a game designer to see a game's faults... You guys, who write stuff like that under Youtube videos, do you have any idea how much time goes into making a good game? Do you know how much experience one has to gather before being able to make games as good as you want them to be? Alot. (Sorry, there was no good picture of an alot in a TARDIS.) Going back to the cooking analogy: Just because you can't cook a fancy meal, that doesn't stop you from using your knowledge to give a detailed critique of it.

The Pointless Point

Well, I'm pretty sure I won't stop these people from demanding you write a book before you call one crap, or make a game, despite all the experience needed to make a good one. But that doesn't mean that people who don't have these "qualifications" should listen to them. After all, if consumers couldn't criticize things, where would we be?

I will now step down from my soapbox. Thank you very much.

Idea Guys

My trains of thoughts are weird. They started at door frames and somehow ended up at Idea Guys and how I hate them.

Now, what's an idea guy?

While I picked up that term in the context of game development, it extends to all kinds of creative media. An Idea Guy (gender neutral) is someone who has that super special awesome idea... and then nothing. That idea is all they have, and then they expect it to turn into something whole.

But EF, you ask, didn't XYZ do the same thing with character ZYX? Nope, probably not. What XYZ had was a concept. Big difference there.

"So there's this guy, and he dresses up as a bat, and he fights crime!" That's an idea. Some things that sound pretty nifty to you, as the idea-haver. But how do you turn an idea into a concept? That's more or less simple: You give it some thought. You think things through, expand on it, expand on the implications...

"So there's this guy. He's stinking rich, but his parents were killed. So he becomes a vigilante. He mainly wants to scare criminals, so he dresses up as a creature of the night, a bat. He doesn't have super powers, but he has money to buy cool gadgets. And he fights crime!" That's a concept. See the details? The thoughts behind things, the motivation of that character?
 

The problem with Idea Guys

The Idea Guy wishes for their idea to be turned into something complete. In terms of game development, I've often seen people who look for a spriter, a scripter, someone who designs the levels and, in some cases, a writer. The stock question at these people: "Then what are you going to do?" Answer: "The story. I already posted it, duh." No. Just no. Some vague synopsis is not the story. It's more like the idea for a story.

Most often, these Idea Guys won't find the support they need and wonder why the heck not, since they have this brilliant idea. Now let me make that clear: Everybody has ideas. Place me in front of a conveyor belt and let me do the same thing for ten hours almost straight and I'll have tons of them. Or I'll mentally write cracky fanfic, but that's not the point.

The point is that ideas are worth nothing if you don't expand on them. Hell, if you have a concept, if you put thought in things, maybe throw out some kind of demonstration of your concept in action, you're much more likely to get your support.

If you ask for such a demonstration, you'll often get something like "but I can't do anything, that's why I'm asking for help in the first place." Uhm... I doubt that. Everybody can make rough sketches, even if they're stick figures. And if you say that you can't draw or compose anything visual at all, give us some textual stuff. A script, a screenplay, some description of how you imagine things to play out. Otherwise you'll just be someone who stepped up and shouted "I have an idea!" while proudly holding up a lightbulb.

Bottom line: If you really think you can't be anything else, at least try to be a Concept Guy.