Joining the Conversation -- NHL 13 and Community Interaction - Wiggy's Blog

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Joining the Conversation -- NHL 13 and Community Interaction Stuck

Posted on February 11, 2013 at 05:39 PM.

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I noticed on the EA Sports NHL twitter that EA is hiring a "conversation specialist" to help with the marketing and social media liaising, and it got me thinking about the dynamic that exists between consumers of sports games and the companies that make them.

A lot of companies hire these types of people in order to provide an access point for the consumer into a large organization. The idea is to give them some place to provide feedback and to feel that it is actually being received.

A lot of former game journalists have gone into this field, including Luke Smith, who went from 1UP to Bungie, and Alex Navarro, who went from Gamespot to Harmonix (but he's now at Giant Bomb).

I think a lot of people that take a position like this feel that they're going to bridge some sort of perceived gap -- that they can create a connection that goes beyond PR spin and marketing speak. The problem is that these positions are created to pump up a product, regardless of its quality.

Even looking at this new position for the NHL conversation specialist, one can see that the listing is to: "...liaise with the development and franchise communications/product marketing teams to ensure positive ongoing dialogue between our studio and our consumers."

When it's your job to ensure a positive message to and from the consumers, you'll likely stick to that path in order to keep getting paid. It's interesting that EA also has the "GameChangers" program, and this conversation specialist is actually meant to liaise with them in order to "manage" their content. The GameChangers are key community members that help "develop and support" products by being key pillars of the community.

Of course, this is totally a company's prerogative to set up their community hierarchy the way the wish, but when you've got someone whose job is to produce positive spin and that is managing key community members for a product, I think there's a bit of a disconnect.

Now, of course there have to be filters for community input. We all know that there can be small but vocal sections of the community that drown out the majority opinion by hogging the discussion space. At the same time, if someone is making a valid point and backing it up with facts, should they not be able to get that message to the right people?

I know EA reads the forums and checks Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, but when we see the same types of issues creeping into games year after year, plus the ever-increasing presence of DLC and microtransactions, it makes you wonder how much of the community feedback is actually being processed, let alone heard at all.

Again, companies can't just say: "Tell us what you want fixed, and we'll do it tomorrow." There are limits on resources, most of all time, when creating an annual sports franchise. On the other hand, when the optics are that a company is co-opting members of the community to carry a non-stop positive spin to the masses, it asks the question of whether there could be a better way of making the community a bigger part of the feedback process while also being transparent with what actions will or won't be taken on said feedback.

I applaud EA for doing "community days" and the like, but why isn't there more room for collaboration and feedback in that sort of process? I think all users should be able to see the full extent of events like that, and they should feel that there is some accountability with the developers for features and changes that weren't made in previous years. Many users' concerns and complaints seem to get sloughed off in brief passing mentions, and I think there needs to be more of a process showing why certain features are being added or why others are too hard to change in a given yearly release.

I honestly think there is a better way to have a conversation about the realities of game development with the intelligent and passionate members of a game's fanbase. If developers want to ask for more and more of a user's time and money as we go forward, I think it's only fair that we ask them to critically look at how they receive and synthesize feedback from those very same people.

What do you feel, OS? Do you think the feedback you have on a game franchise, particularly NHL in this case, gets heard? Is there a better, fairer way for feedback to be delivered while still allowing companies the latitude to promote their products?

Comments

# 1 Simple Mathematics @ Feb 11

Hire me EA. I'll do rosters and give you some BaGM advice

# 2 Rufio2031 @ Feb 12

There is no way that the feedback from OS goes unnoticed. But EA simply does not care because they own the market and they don't have to put the resources into making a great game. Either way we'll be coming back to purchase next years game in hopes that they fix penalties (among hundreds of other issues). In reality, they haven't tried, because 5 or more years of the same issues existing simply does not make sense.