Sharing Pain and Pleasure by Shivener and Oliveira Da Silva

This section covers our methods for collecting and analyzing post-mortem articles written by game developers and published on the website Game Developer.

3.1 Collecting Post-mortems

In spring 2020, we collected 102 post-mortem articles from 2015 (where Washburn et al. stopped) to January 2020 on Game Developer. Most articles were easy to locate on the site because they were labeled or tagged as post-mortems (e.g., Watson, 2016, "Postmortem: Stoic Studio's The Banner Saga 2"). In our first pass we coded approximately 1,235 passages among the 102 articles, averaging 11 passages per article. However, we eliminated 40 articles based on two criteria:

• the article had to be published on Gamasutra for the first time between 2015 and 2020, meaning it couldn’t be a repost of a post-mortem published in Game Developer magazine, which folded in 2013;
• the article had to contain the sections “what went right” and “what went wrong,” or some binary variations such as “well” and “poorly.” (More on that binary shortly.)

Often called “classic post-mortems,” a number of republished post-mortem articles were composed by developers of major, AAA studio games, such as the sci-fi game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the horror game Silent Hill 4: The Room. Discussing those republished articles would cover similar ground by Michael Washburn. et al. (2016) and Cristiano Politowski et al. (2018), and it would obscure the visibility of game developers who have been published more recently. This methodological approach to collection helped us focus on recent developers’ practices and feelings about games, especially games created by solo developers and small and independent teams.

3.2 Affective Lenses for Analysis

After eliminating a number of post-mortem articles based on our criteria, we analyzed 62 articles through the lenses of rhetorical and affect theories, paying close attention to passages labeled under “right” and “wrong” in order to understand feelings associated with development practices. This rhetorical-affective framework was based on the aforementioned affect theories regarding the transient nature of felt sensations between bodies and materials (see our literature review), and it was adapted from previous studies of professional writers and emotion-laden work in writing contexts (Kurtyka, 2017; Micciche, 2017; Shivener, 2020). Put differently, Holmes and Shultz Colby’s (2020) call for this special issue aligned with our project’s scope and theoretical framework, for studies of feeling are concerned with sensations that circulate and form between bodies and materials in composition environments. As Jenny Rice (2005) puts it, “Because the body-of-sensation is always stubbornly present in scenes of writing, there can be no affectless compositions” (p. 133). Felt sensations and emotional expressions (e.g., anger, worry and happiness) imbue scenes of game development––which are, at their core, scenes of practices narrated in post-mortems.

Working from theories of feeling, then, we associated “wrong” with painful and “right” with pleasurable because their connections surfaced in a number of post-mortem articles. Moreover, this binary is encompassed by Gregory Ulmer’s definition of electracy and built on extensively by Jan Rune Holmevik (2012) in Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy. Holmevik translates his understanding of Ulmer’s electracy transversal this way: “In very simple terms, play is understood as an activity in which the human agent seeks to experience pain or pleasure” (p. 13). In the case of post-mortems, many contributors recollect their experiences with pain and pleasure under “wrong” and “right” passages. A few passages for consideration:

On top of that, Square Enix offered high-quality QA which got us through the pains of consoles....(Diaconescu, 2017, “Postmortem: The totalitarian puzzle- platformer Black The Fall”)

We were soon looking forward with pleasure to every drop of new content, and more than once laughed out loud as we discovered the surprises she had laid in store (Ingold & Humfrey, 2015, “Postmortem: Inkle's 80 Days”)

From this theoretical view of painful and pleasurable feelings, we could see how developers were affectively oriented toward and away from practices, assuming that each practice includes felt experiences. In addition, our decision to focus on recent articles with the sections “what went right” and “what went wrong” gave us some boundaries for analyzing passages in the post-mortem articles. These sections often summarize an entire development process and are ripe with feelings. For example, the “What Went Right” category generated 295 passages among the 62 articles, with an average of four passages per article. Our next steps was to label passages with keywords that summarized the practices discussed. In some cases, keywords were obvious because they were part of a subheading, the first sentence of the passage, etc. As part of the process, we reviewed and re-reviewed the passage together to reach an agreement about keywords in question. (Learn more about this in the “Our Post-Mortem” section of the webtext.) We later looked for words to combine. For example, words such as “team” and “collaboration” were combined for efficiency, the latter being preferred because it spoke to internal and external collaborators. Management was a combination of “time management,” “task management,” and “personnel management.” The following word cloud (figure 1) shows the keywords compiled in the early stages of the project:

While making the keyword set was interesting, we admit that it’s not generalizable because it’s a mix of developer keywords and those we interpreted and later combined. Eventually, we made a broader move in our coding to address this issue. For a more global view of these post-mortems, and to manage variations in words such as “graphics” and “art,” we finally labeled the practices under three broad categories, or stages, familiar to the game industry: “pre-production,” “production,” “post-production.” Much like the classical rhetorical canons, these terms encompass game development from its conception to its final delivery and circulation. Pre-production includes practices such as prototyping ideas and assembling a team before a game’s production begins. Production includes level design, story writing, and quality assurance (QA) testing before a game’s launch. It’s indeed the most encompassing of practices. Finally, post-production includes the publishing and the general public work of game development—launching on a distribution platform (e.g., Steam), attending festivals for talks and playthroughs, and tracking sales, reviews and bugs reported by players.

Across these categories of game development, many of these practices are highly collaborative and emotionally intense, an observation stressed by Casey O'Donnell (2014) in his book-length investigation Developer’s Dilemma. In his words, “interdisciplinary work takes time and the emotional maturity to accept that the ideas brought by each area of expertise are worth considering. If any one component of the collaborative team is unwilling to recognize this, the system breaks down” (p. 69). As a final check, then, we re-examined the passages in which game developers described specific feelings and gestured toward them in some explicit way (e.g. “strenuous,” “fleshed out”) to signal intensities. Operating only on the assumption that all practices are imbued with feelings, we might have found ourselves writing that all 62 post-mortem contributors found some sort of pleasure in design, for example. This final check for explicit references was a kind of emotional filter, a way of rendering our findings in the subsequent results sections.

The following table contains a example of our coding passages like those referenced above:

3.3 Limitations

We have a few words on the limitations of our methods, and we want to start by acknowledging something.

Feelings are hard to study, let alone pin down definitively.

We’re going to have critics, whether about our terms or what we found to be felt, affective, emotional. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (2010) acknowledge in their introduction to The Affect Theory, “If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds” (pp. 3-4).

Because developers write post-mortems retrospectively, we relied on their words and didn’t conduct follow-up interviews to confirm their practices or ask about more specific feelings. (This follow-up is something Shivener [2020] did with a smaller group of scholarly webtext authors to address differing views about feelings.) The latter would have been a massive effort. Nevertheless, because the post-mortem article is highly popular in the game development industry, we viewed Game Developer’s post-mortem series as an archive of interesting and reliable information. Whether totally factual or fabricated, post-mortem articles contain stories of practices and feelings that developers want to share, and their peers have had an appetite for such stories for more than 20 years.

Another limitation was our decision to interpret passages as painful or pleasurable, opting not to include a “mixed” category that would indicate mixed feelings about a practice. Affect theories have maintained that positive and negative feelings swirl among, collide with each other, and pulse through materially rich practices that are interacting during a game’s development cycle. Practices and feelings are interactive, always in motion and mixing. This view is supported by Laura R. Micciche's (2017) study of writers and their acknowledgments, which revealed "animals, feelings, technologies, matter, time, and materials interacting in both harmonious and antagonistic ways with writing" (p. 25; emphasis ours). It’s also substantiated by Hannah J. Rule's (2018) insights "that writing activity is never not emplaced: composing processes only happen through things, spaces, time, action, and bodily movement" (p. 404). While these studies focused on the dynamic surround of writing in general, and not specifically on digital composing, they call attention to the movement of materialities and feelings. Game developers who author post-mortem articles shed light of these scholarly conversations. Whether lamenting about a game’s dialogue, its marketing materials, or its players, they demonstrate that digital composing encompasses interacting materials and sensing bodies. These interactions might manifest over the course of several years during a game’s development cycle, perhaps resulting in a post-mortem about a game that “left me empty and completely out of energy, both physically and emotionally” (Brush, 2017). Our study aims to make sense of those interactions as explained by dozens of game developers.