5 Rules For Dealing With Brutally Honest Criticism

How any detective can learn to handle the harshest truths

Happy Mystery Monday!

With the Mystery Game Jam now over, I’ve been going through the games and discussing each one in our Discord server. (By the way, don’t forget to fill out our feedback survey if you participated).

A discussion regarding constructive criticism naturally arose, and I realized now would be a good time to write this article. I had wanted to write this article for a few months anyway, but this seemed like the right time to publish it. Enjoy!

All game developers must confront harsh criticism

In the course of detective work, whether as a professional or amateur sleuth, you will inevitably be forced to uncover and face any number of harsh truths:

• Your spouse cheated on you.

• Your family members murdered each other.

• The people you trusted the most lied to you.

And for game developers, our harsh truths come in the form of critical reviews.

This is a topic I've been thinking about for years — certainly well over a decade, and I really could write so much more than just this article on it. My mystery game Detective Butler has always been about the relationship between truth and happiness (inspired by similar themes in Umineko) and so I've given this subject a tremendous amount of thought and I have pretty strong opinions about it.

I've also experienced my fair share of criticism, so I've had to learn how to deal with brutally honest feedback the hard way. There was once a time my game (which currently has an 80%+ positive rating after 250+ ratings on Steam) received a 3/10 from a relatively big visual novel journalist. It really crushed me, and it greatly discouraged me from wanting to keep making games and participating in the visual novel community. But I kept going anyway. (Their website is now defunct.)

So I know exactly how negative feedback can affect someone. You end up wondering how much of that negativity is true, how much of your game (if any) you should change, and whether the people giving you positive feedback are just lying to you just to make you happy. I still get people voting 3’s on VNDB, but I also get much higher numbers, and I’ve even had people tell me it’s their favorite mystery game. Some people might genuinely not like your game, and that’s okay, but it’s not the end of the world.

When someone criticizes your work, how seriously should you believe them? Should you change everything in response to what others say? How can you decide what should be taken seriously, and how do you know what to do about it?

There is a fine line to balance here. Criticism that’s too harsh is discouraging, whether or not it’s actually true. But you need to be able to handle it, because criticism that’s too soft can just as easily set you up for failure.

The problem with sugarcoating the truth

I've always been a seeker of truth. I’ve never liked it when people lie to me. And I never like it when I have to lie to other people.

And many of the people who I admire most are the kinds of people who tell you what they really think, even if it hurts your feelings. My game’s character Detective Butler is exactly that kind of person — though it’s also kind of hard to imagine a detective who isn’t.

When you lie, you need to keep coming up with more lies in order to maintain a logically consistent story. But when you tell the truth, you just need to tell the truth — because the truth is inherently logically consistent. Fans of the Ace Attorney games should be well aware of this fact.

The problem with lying about criticism (or anything, really) is that you've made the person happy in the short-term at their expense in the long-term.

By lying, you've given them a false sense of reality, and a false sense of security. When the harshness of reality inevitably comes crashing down upon them, they won't be able to deal with it. And it will happen eventually. And it will not be pretty.

In the video game industry, this happens when a developer is so sheltered from negative feedback, they believe their game is inherently deserving of praise. Then they go to release the game, and it only receives negative reviews. They are completely confused, because all of the feedback they received from their developer friends suggested they had made a great game, but all of their gamer customers are saying it's not fun. "Surely it's the gamers who are wrong!" the dev says, completely unwilling to acknowledge the harsh reality that the past several years were spent in vain.

I won't be naming names, but I have seen this happen many times, even to developers with very large followings. I can't comprehend how these devs can lack such self-awareness that they blame (and shame) their target audience for not enjoying their product. That is not how reality works. Nobody has to buy your stuff, and everyone is entitled to their own opinions.

(Side note: This is the opposite of what happened to me, where journalists tell you your game is great but the players don’t like it. In my case, the journalist hated it, but the players had fun.)

But the much more common situation is arguably even worse: the fledgling indie developer releases their game, only to be met with total silence. Their game is so dull and uninspiring that nobody even wants to give it a try. Yet their developer friends had told them it was a fun and interesting game. So where are all the people?

Your dev friends are exactly that — your friends. They already know, like, and trust you. And most likely, you gave them a testing copy for free. Now imagine trying to get a total stranger (a person who has zero reason to like or trust you) to pay you money for an experience that is significantly worse than you’ve been led to believe it is. It's a completely different dynamic. No wonder it doesn’t work out.

Your friends don't want to hurt your feelings. But a total stranger who feels like their time and money was wasted will be angry enough to say whatever they need to say to make themselves feel better.

Some people are able to tolerate the worst criticism, while others can't handle much at all. I'd like to think that a person's tolerance for criticism can be improved over time, since it is such a vital skill to have, especially when working in a creative field. It's not that it never hurts, but that you realize the pain doesn't really matter. If anything, you start to consider the pain of embracing the harsh truth a good thing — because the pain of running away from it is a thousand times worse.

In today’s article, I’m going to give you 5 tips that I use to embrace the harsh truth.