THQ's Bilson: Research and focus testing will 'usually destroy' creativity

Hey! HEY! He also looked at a lot of Warcraft art books. Don't besmirch the man's efforts!

But seriously, if they can keep putting out solid, entertaining games like Darksiders, I don't care how much inspiration they take from existing franchises. Everyone who creates is standing on the shoulders of those who came before them.

it's more like WoW took a look at Joe Madreuria's art books, as in, comic books from the 90s

Yeah, I've tried several different images, all at 64x64. Been at this for nearly four hours, 30 minutes with the last upload. It's nothing big, but I've yet to encounter someone else without a pic. That being said, I even went as far as saving someone else's pic and uploading it. No dice.

Try duplicating the image and renaming the second one. Then upload back and forth on two DIFFERENT browsers, that always works for me.

Frellwit, you're not alone. :(

I just tried uploading an image in Firefox, it seems to have worked. I'm just waiting for it to update the posts. *crosses fingers*

S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that's the way you spell success!

As someone who has done player research for the past 5 years on some successful titles, parent is dead on. Usability and player research will let you know where people are misunderstanding things that you thought would be clear. It will tell you where your level design is too difficult (or too easy). And it will bring out all of the ugly stuff in the closet that you should probably fix before shipping. If you don't do an appropriate amount of user research during production, you will wish you had once the reviews start rolling in.

What it *won't* do for you is give you creative ideas or solutions to problems. User research won't tell you if the hero should be an alcoholic father or a widowed boy of seventeen. It won't tell you how much content should be in a game, or even if people realistically are going to buy it (though they'll tell you if they really won't). And, frustratingly enough, it won't give you solutions to the problems that it uncovers.

People who rely upon user research to make creative decisions for games usually come from toothbrush and fizzy water sales, and don't understand what the tool is for. They, understandably, have the instinct to satisfy the wants of their customers. A creative professional, on the other hand, has to shock the customer into wanting something they didn't know existed. It's a form of magic. A magician can't ask the crowd what they want to see, then show it to them. He has to figure out something original that the crowd doesn't expect, and dazzle them with it.

that mantra, and this one:

"If you need to do that kind of research you must not be playing games yourself"

Some games feel like the people who made them don't actually play video games!

I don't get it