Neuroticism in Indie Gamedev

[a327ex]

This small blogpost by the creator of Cube World is a great example of a high neuroticism post.

Every big five personality trait has its advantages and disadvantages, but until I read this post I generally thought that high neuroticism was mostly a negative. People with high neuroticism experience anxiety and depression more easily, which means that in the context of indie game development they'll more easily slide into a negative state of mind based on interactions with other people, and this is especially hard on these people with the Internet. Often times you'll see indie developers and artists complaining that all it takes is one negative random comment to make them feel bad for the day.

As someone with fairly low neuroticism I never related to these complaints as it's very very hard for any comment online to make me feel bad. But it's reasonable to assume that all of the people constantly complaining about this genuinely experience this enough that it is a problem. For indie developers being high in neuroticism will be a disadvantage in the sense that a lot of your job is interacting with random people online, and if all it takes is one of those people to be a bit rude for you to feel bad then interacting with customers can become a really negative experience.

This is reflected in the Cube World post, as Wollay apparently got anxiety and depression from something as simple as getting DDoSed. While it can be pretty devastating to have people attack you like this, any person who's average in neuroticism wouldn't be too shaken up about it and would just move on.

Another aspect of high neuroticism is the fact that you'll always second guess yourself and what you're doing. This can be both a positive and negative, and in the post this is shown by Wollay saying he's a bit perfectionist (he's actually likely a big perfectionist, given the quality of his game) and the fact that he scrapped the game multiple times before finally releasing it after so many years. The negative aspect of this perfectionism is that it will make you take longer to do whatever it is that you want to do, but the positive is that whatever it is you produce will likely have a really high quality.

This positive aspect is something that I never thought about before but it seems to make sense. In my previous post #52 I mentioned how I have some trouble telling if what I'm doing is of high enough quality or not, and it makes sense that this lack of ability might be directly related to my low neuroticism. Because I'm more stress tolerant I'm more willing to release something in a poorer state as the negative feedback (be it actual negative feedback or the game just being ignored) won't really hit me that hard and I'll just move on the next thing. There are advantages and disadvantages to being like this, just like there are for being high in neuroticism.

Maybe if you have high neuroticism it makes sense for you to sink 4-5 years into one project and really have a go at it because it's likely that you'll be able to produce something of high quality, while if you have low neuroticism it might make more sense to go for projects that take 1-2 years or lower and slowly work your way up and iterate on things given that it will always be harder for you to accurately judge the quality of your games. I don't know if these are reasonable things to do but it seems reasonable to me that there would be some differences between the approaches that work best for high vs. low neuroticism indie developers.

If there's any advice that I can give: if you're really high in neuroticism and dealing with randoms online really makes you depressed you won't really be able to get over that that much. Before, I used to think that people could just grow a thicker skin (as that's apparently how I handled things) but these differences in personality are very deep within people and they can only be changed in very small amounts and with a lot of effort. The best thing someone high in neuroticism can do is get someone else lower in neuroticism to handle customer interactions for them, and if you can't do that then you need to develop your games in a way that diminishes your interactions with customers as much as possible.

If you're really low in neuroticism you probably want to find someone you trust and who is honest to give you feedback on what you're doing, because you can't necessarily trust your quality meter. If you can't do that then you need to develop your games in a way that diminishes the iteration between production and consumption, since if you can't use a single individual you trust, the next best thing is using the market itself, so making games faster and iterating on them quickly is probably your best bet.

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As a 22 days later update to this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128000/Cube_World/

It seems that Cube World was received very poorly by people because Wollay made some questionable decisions regarding the high-level/meta design of the game. I haven't played the game but the complaints seem pretty standard by almost everyone who plays it.

I went on about the positive aspects of high neuroticism but it turns out that this time its negative aspects won. Apparently Wollay would have been better off by not scrapping the game multiple times and it seems that his quality meter deteriorated over time and made him unable to judge how people would perceive the game accurately.

Even though in this example things didn't turn out quite so well I think the positive aspects of high neuroticism likely lay themselves out how I explained in the article. But maybe the part about high neuroticism people being better at judging the quality of something they made is not quite correct? Maybe they're just more sensitive to potential flaws but are no better at fixing them, and like everyone else, they're also subject to "dev blindness" (inability to accurately judge the quality of what you're working on) which sets in the longer you stay with a project without external feedback.

I don't know the answers entirely but if anything this just makes me think then that people shouldn't spend too long on their projects because the longer you do the less you're able to judge it accurately. At the same time you don't want to spend too little time in it otherwise every game you make has no meat to it and that's also not good.

In any case, it also seems like Wollay deleted his blog so the post linked at the top isn't linking anywhere anymore so I've added a picture version of it.

[D0NM]

Wow! I'm rethinking many things now.