Is This Constructive Feedback

General
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but I don’t think negative feedback is inherently destructive.

I agree that negative feedback isn’t inherently destructive – but I think that feedback given in a meanspirited way probably is, and that’s essentially what I’m getting at. I think we’re probably in agreement on this point, and just getting wires crossed haha! :blush:

I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand what is meant here. Would it be alright to ask for clarification?

Oh, of course. Really, my objection was just to the specific phrasing of “what you think needs to be changed” in the original comment. I just don’t think the reader is really in a position to say that something “ needs ” to change – just that they might enjoy a work more if it did. I hope that makes more sense! My next point (“As readers we can make suggestions, but I don’t think it’s our place to dictate the direction that a work “should” take, if that makes sense?”) was kind of a continuation of that, and again I think that we are ultimately in agreement. I think this kind of comes down to the presentation of feedback/opinion about a work as being objective fact or a universal opinion, which I’m not super into. Readers can only really comment on their own experience and thoughts.

There’s been a growing trend of writers being hostile to any feedback, even if it’s purely constructive, and I worry about that making the community more hostile.

I agree that this would definitely be a concern, but I guess I’ve not been around here for long enough to be able to comment on whether that’s the case as someone relatively new to the COG world. I do think, in general, that writers wanting to defend or explain their work doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t engaging with the feedback or that they’re intending to be hostile towards it. They might just be attempting to initiate a discussion about their work, which I think is perfectly valid and can often be the best way to really develop a work (to really dig down into that negative reaction and get a better handle on where they’re coming from).

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This might be relevant. These are the guidelines I prosed when I started my closed alpha testing forum, in order to help shape the feedback I wanted and didn’t want:

There will be spoilers in here, please be careful and don’t share them elsewhere. I want other people to have clean reactions to the story once we get around to to the proper open beta.

Please make sure to only report bugs you find in the bug report forum. It makes things easier for me to find. DO NOT BOTHER WITH LANGUAGE, RHYTHM, GRAMMAR OR THINGS LIKE THAT. I have not smoothed down my language, this is literally my first draft, no edits.

THE FEEDBACK I AM LOOKING FOR RIGHT NOW IS:

1: Pronoun errors (nb they are a mess, I know, I will fix them. Don’t mind them.)

2: Bugs

3: Places where the story doesn’t make sense and makes you go ‘huh I thought I was…’

4: Very long segments of text. It’s hard to see when moving across labels, so if you find them, let me know.

5: The auction. You know the drill. Do you end up getting what you went there for or did the story forget?

6: I wish I could… If you have a strong urge that you wish that you could have said/done something that wasn’t in the story. SMALL THINGS! I am not going to make major changes (but there are things to be added), but if it makes sense, I can add dialog options and the like.

Now, the number 6 ended up being a lie since there were some VERY good suggestions that deserved a lot of reworking, but I didn’t want to tie myself down to every little wish there was.

I can really reccommend authors to spend some time considering what kind of feedback you want from posting your WIP and make sure to point that out. If you don’t have a dedicated discord forum, take a moment to add a standard feedback info thing at the start and the end of the demo, just to remind people of where you are in the process. If there are any particular points you are worried about, make sure to point that out too. I have several things like this:

IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG WITH THE EPILOGUES. Please report and explain what path led here.

Just to point out places I know where things might be wonky.

Some other tips:

  • From what I have learned it is a lot easier to get feedback that you actually asked for than just asking for general opinions, most people are not professional testers, they need to know what you need.

  • You can post your WIP on Dashingdon, but just ask for direct feedback from friends, twitter, tumblr, whatever social media you use if you don’t think you’re ready for everyone to chime in.

  • If you are testing out a concept and wants to see if people like it, then say that at the start of the demo and in the WIP thread. There might be people who don’t give detailed feedback, but might still want to chime in with a “cool, would like more” if they knew you were trying to find out whether to continue with the story or not.

  • If you know that you are in a vulnerable place at the moment and only want to hear nice things in order to get the project going, please say so. A small “please, be gentle” or “I know there are issues, I just want to know if this sounds interesting” might give you more of the kind of feedback you are ready for. Then, once you’ve got used to people reading your stuff, you can ask for more.

  • Writing a game/story is a marathon, and not a sprint. You might want different feedback at the start compared to at the end, the important thing is to be clear what you want.

And finally: It is the responsibility of the AUTHOR to set the limits of what type of feedback they want. A tester/reader can’t read your mind, BE CLEAR. Most people don’t want to be assholes, lack of communication is often to blame.

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Good point.

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Sure will, my testers came up with a tagging system for bugs to make it easier to tag bugs too, they have been amazing in organizing themselves and figure out how to make communication happen.

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The whole sentence was:

Which I think holds true. The fact that you took a portion of my sentence to make me say something I didn’t is very disappointing. If this is how even mods behave, I feel even less comfortable discussing anything on these forums now.

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https://forum.choiceofgames.com/faq

I recommend people read the rules

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But when you start out and post a wip here, you don’t. You’re alone.

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Yes and no. You are alone with your idea and how to write it, but you are not alone and without support.

There are a lot of rules on this forum to help steer the discussion, there are protections from many things authors faces on more open social media. Yes, you don’t have someone handling things for you, but you are working in an environment with clear rules to limit bad behaviour and people who should at least theoretically know what they are talking about more than the average joe. As someone who has also posted elsewhere, the difference about what can be said is HUGE.

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This is something I agree that I can do better about. I agree with you that it is not always the best thing to do just hide stuff. Sometimes it very much is, like when someone is just trying to troll or stir the pot to get a rise out of people. But your words make me realize that it would sometimes also be a good job to have a moderation post in addition explaining what is not ok, when messages disappear. That would probably save trouble down the line.

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I can agree with @OscarArcane - there are very different circumstances for a person who writes for fun and for someone who writes for money. And feedback and overall relationship of reader and author can be- and, I think, should be - very different.
But when you are intend of selling a product you should be prepared that people on steam and google play will be absolutely harsh. So it is much better to listen to detailed criticism here - a really nice place for authors from what I get- and know your weak points and be prepared for hellhole of comments from more general and less gentle public.

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I understand what you mean, but as clear as the rules are, we still are debating what makes acceptable feedback and what isn’t. There’s still a gray area there that people can use to justify not thinking twice before giving ‘harsh’ feedback (what is considered harsh still being up for debate). This kind of feedback, in the mean time, affect the author which may not be a professional, prepared to distinguish ‘useful’ from ‘not useful’ feedback. And even if they were, when the ‘harsh’ criticism piles on, it can affect their confidence, ‘thick skin’ or not.

Always giving the responsibility to the author to handle things is a lot imo, and not very fair. it’s their responsibility to write the story, to specify the feedback they want, to read and react to all the feedback, to flag and wait for a mod when they are being attacked or made uncomfortable. I think that’s a lot on top of writing a whole story and all of that, for most of them, on their free time.

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That is exactly what I was getting at! Thank you for understanding, I wasn’t sure if that was clear.
I think a show of support would go a long way.

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I think here is where we differ. Because if you want to be published, that is indeed what an author needs to be able to deal with. It will only get more intense once it is out, and handing a WIP thread on the forums is a good way to learn. But I have come to realize that maybe the discussion here are about two categories of WIPs, and that’s why it is becoming muddled and people are talking past each other.

Maybe it would be clearer to have two different WIP sections…

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I think I separated the diverging discussions from each other – If I missed any post that does not belong in this discussion, please let me know.

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What’s constructive or not could also have to do with what kinds of suggestions are coming through. Focussed requests from authors about what kind of feedback they want could be very helpful with this, like @malinryden suggested above.

When I started writing CS games, my struggle with feedback was less tone (I’m from a musician background, so we’ve heard it all, heh) and more how to understand what feedback would be helpful for improving my story and what would not. An article I found very insightful was this Mythcreants piece on what beta reading is and is not, written by a developmental editor. The article addresses conventional fiction, so not all the points are applicable, but it has a general discussion of beta reading and its functions.

One section starts, ’ Beta readers report their experiences. The task of beta readers is to help predict how the story’s real audience would respond to it.’

For me, the distinction between reporting what isn’t working versus suggestions on how to fix it helped me focus my approach to feedback. Often understanding what doesn’t work for a beta reader and why (‘this whole section is very confusing because I still don’t understand what the magic harp is supposed to do’) is very useful because it lets me know where I’ve lost the player.

On the other hand, following specific suggestions on what should be done instead can make the issue worse if the suggestion turns out not to fix the underlying problem. Maybe the beta tester says, ‘The whole section with that harp was really boring. You should just take it out.’ but really all that’s needed is actually a sentence or two clarifying the problem, or a choice illustrating the harp’s purpose, a couple of pages back.

The instructions and examples on official CoG beta tests may also be good to give a look (although notably HG authors have some different needs, including potentially wanting assistance with grammar). There are also some older threads on beta testing here on the forums with discussions that might be helpful.

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Yeah, you’re right–that’s what I had meant, but I used stronger language than needed. I edited it to make it more clear. I think saying “should” is fine since that’s more suggestive than the mandatory “need”.

I agree with you. Writers should and are able to defend or explain their writing against destructive feedback, and can choose not to take a constructive feedback. My biggest concern though is when a writer mistakes constructive feedback as destructive and reacts accordingly.

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Too true. As has been noted a few times on the thread, no one’s going to pull their punches on the Play Store – or in reviews in mainstream media, should your work end up there.

I’ve written before about my experience with reviews of my CoG game on the app stores, but the brutal review that stung the most was for an earlier dead-tree writing project. A decade and a half ago, I threw my heart and soul into writing a narrative nonfiction book about the most vivid and traumatic experience I’d had in my life to date – the murder of my colleagues while working in Afghanistan. There were reviews that said “sobering" and "wrenching.” And there was the one that said “long-winded and superfluously stuffed,” which smarts to this day.

But the thing is, they weren’t wrong. I missed a couple of deadlines, got the draft book in just before the publication wire, and so it didn’t get the editorial attention it would have benefited from. If I ever get the chance at a re-issue, I’ll tighten some things up.

It would have been great if I’d been writing that book in a community of regular readers so that I could have had that feedback – however punchily expressed! – in time to make changes then, before I got it in the immortal form of a Kirkus review. :slight_smile:

An author needs to be able to bear that in mind no matter how their critics are presenting their comments. But I certainly agree that a good critic will also bear it in mind.

It’s also not within our power, unless (as I wrote on another thread a couple of years ago) you’re the author’s “publisher, their patron, the government, or a crazy Misery-style fan who has them chained up in a cabin.” My fundamental perspective remains the same as it was then: “Telling the author how they should have done things is the reviewers’ prerogative…as readers, as customers, as human beings with opinions about how things oughtta be. That doesn’t force me to agree with them. It remains my prerogative to disagree and/or ignore them and follow my own tastes.”

Malin’s guidance on how to get the feedback you need is brilliant and should be turned into a standard resource for CS authors.

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I think the key to “constructive criticism” is in the term, “constructive.”

If you’re saying “This sucks, but I don’t know why,” that is unhelpful and probably unwelcome anywhere you go.

If you say, “I would like this more if I could play as a ninja instead of a debutante or a diplomat.” Okay! It may or may not be useful to the author, but at least you’ve pinpointed what you WOULD like to see instead of just what you don’t like. Constructive: building something new, helping to create. It’s not about positivity, necessarily, but active participation and being clear and helpful.

Alternatively, someone just gushing, “OMG, so cool, what? awesome! Yeah! Dreamy! Wow” might help the author’s ego a little, but probably doesn’t help the actual beta process of “what is this game missing? Are there strange moments that don’t make sense that might be bugs? What would improve this game?”

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Agree, this is also an important point.

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