Quality
For some obscure reason, a conversation I had with Sumit and Nikhil a long time back came back to me just now. The meat of the talk was revolved around Sumit saying that games did not have to be picture perfect (pun not intended) and Nikhil and I saying that he was wrong. Sumit's contention was that games are made for a breed that are adamant on playing the bloody thing so gamers would go to any length to make the game work. Nikhil and I were saying that there was a certain level of quality that is required of any product, and that games in general had one of the lowest levels of quality in commercial products that we'd ever seen. It was actually Sumit's heartfelt belief that in the case of games, some kinds of quality are superior to others and that games that look better, and play better, and feel better, and provide more fun, were more important than games that can be played easily (you know the way I mean that). He knew of so many consumers working their asses off to get to play a game on their chosen hardware platform, for example, that it blinded him into believing that all games have the same kind of cult following that Half-life, or Doom have.
Long story short, the conversation died out somewhere in the middle of one rum and another half beer.
I will not pretend to know about quality control in games. I do however know a little bit about kind of people that are involved in persuing that elusive goal of making the quality of their product a matter of their personal prestige. It is this knowledge that has provoked me to write this particular post.
What is quality? It is the description given to that facet of a product, the facet that is shown to everyone, that when seen by whoever is using the product, causes them to judge the product. That's quality, the description. How it is judged decides whether the quality is good or not. Good quality is like good ethics. Both are so predominantly required that the opposites don't make sense.
Given that particular lecture, here are 5 things that I need for great quality of the products that I design and build:
1. A great quality control guy. He should be shameless, nitpicking, and not afraid to be unpopular (in that order).
2. A great management. To say no to releasing a product that doesn't meet the mark.
3. A great team. That thinks, like the great quality control guy, that an incident is a mark of every time that their mother slept with a bug.
4. Great tools. To help me to find and diagnose problems.
5. Great consumers. To point out to me my deficiencies.
Aatish, Manish, Darshana, Parvinder and Khushboo, I salute you.
1 comment:
Let me elaborate to the readers that Quality of games in question here is not the "quality" of its play or its aesthetics but the quality of the software engineering part of games (the non-gamy part for the gamers)
The fundamental difference between any software and computer game is the motive to use it. In later case the desire is purely emotional; hence consumers go a long way in making sure they get their dose of zoning-out (other term for losing sense of time and space for time t)
What is Quality? I would say, for any consumable in this world the consumer will always have expectation level. (It’s the ‘X’ that he gets/feels/sees/hears/senses/smells on consuming it). Quality comes when you don't match the expectation but exceed it.
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