The Dev's Creed: Being Wrong is Essential
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
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It's ok to be wrong but everyone needs to learn how to fail faster because no idea is made fully formed. Your ideas can't be precious and your ego can't need protecting. Every failure is a chance to GET IT RIGHT! If everyone can be willing to commit the team will succeed.
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#ExtraCredits #Gaming #GameDesign - Ігри
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Bruh
They also give you a free book.
This video's title is confusing. The title is "...and how to fix them!" instead of the much clearer "Game Dev Mistakes and how to fix them!". Putting the title of the video on the title card (Game Dev Mistakes) isn't good enough. Not everyone looks at those and if we save a bunch of videos to a queue or playlist all at once we might not see it at all or remember it if we did. Please do this better moving forward.
The thing I always like to say is “if you always want to be right, you have to admit when you’re wrong”
Even a working clock can lose a few minutes.
Technically a working clock is right less often than a stopped one.
Reminds me of a boss I had, who said "If I cut off hands every time someone came to me because of a mistake they'd made, I would have a big pile of hands and no one doing any work."
Slightly gruesome, but accurate. People would either be too afraid to do their jobs out of fear of messing up, or hide mistakes until they're irrecoverable, and that'd be a ship that sinks itself.
If I was to pluck a hair for every mistake I've ever made in my life then I'd be bald.
Sadly I’ve seen examples of bosses fine with the pile of hands and letting positions below them be a revolving door of people working the position ~6 months before letting them go for not meeting expectations.
@@michaelconnell1010 I can't imagine that operation being effective or profitable in the long run. Onboarding costs are hideous these days.
I'm dealing with this at my job right now. No one wants to admit they made a mistake. They either blame someone under them who wasn't involved in any way or just pretend their mistake is somehow a good thing. It's that meme of standing in a burning building smiling and saying how everything is fine. It's extremely frustrating to deal with.
I like this idea of disussing how we reached a wrong conclusion. That way we can trace a problem or even find new ways to solve a problem.
The problem usually stems from a lack of originality. Even a bad game can be good if it's unique in a fun way. I don't pick on Cute Witch Runner even though it's "bad" because the style is nice and I'm sure a lot of kids enjoyed it back when it was available. It was like a basic flash game that you could take with you on the go.
a problem is only a problem until it is made into a feature... it happens all the time in games... and in open source development as well.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Hardest thing at my job is teaching people its okay to be wrong or have a plan turn out bad.
2nd hardest thing is teaching them that situations change and are dynamic. That we need to be ready to drop plan A and move into plan B, or C, or plan screw it all and go home because no amount of overtime is going to fix this
Prototypes are important, but I usually skip that key phase of development to get to the fun of the core project.
Thanks for this video. I'm going to use it in my team's culture moment. I corrected my kid this morning, and he was like, "I screwed up didn't I?" "No, you just weren't aware that this thing was possible."
The people who don't admit they are wrong are the people who are wrong the most often, because being wrong is how you learn to get better, if you don't admit it then you don't get better and will be perpetually wrong.
In the safety industry there is a term for a culture that doesn't punish honest mistakes. We call it a "just culture". When we admit mistakes we attempt to find why those mistakes happen and find a way to prevent them from happening again. Admitting small errors sets up a positive culture that allows for admitting big errors that have the potential to kill people.
The fail faster video is by far my favorite extra credits video.
Thanks!
Thanks for actually addressing this from a manager's perspective. It's easy to see us as an obstacle, but we mostly want to do our jobs well, and we mostly know we need employees who feel safe and comfortable to do it.
Unfortunately most people have previous experiences with unqualified managers or situation of direct manager without any decision making power.
It was only two workplaces out of 10 where it was not the case for me. And in one of this workplaces higher-ups decided to close the project and dissolve the team right after first public release, where it would start making money.
I blame the litigation culture and the people who get rich from it. If you admit you're wrong, you end up opening yourself to lawsuits. Even just when interacting with customers, every time I'm told to never admit if we can't do something and try to spin things positively, and the customers are always going "you aren't helping me" and spinning everything negatively.
This is absolutely a major contributing factor. It's the same kind of deal as having to never admit any fault in a wreck. Both drivers are typically partially to blame in accidents, but if you admit to even the slightest mistake (even if the other person involved made a worse mistake), you can be stuck with the entire bill for fixing both vehicles. It's a culture of always wanting to place all the blame on someone else while ignoring your own contributions to the problem.
Personally my thoughts on mistakes boils down to: "did somebody die or get hurt? No? Then it's not that bad and you can most likely fix it."
I think a lot of the fear of failure comes from school. In school, failure is permanent and you can't go back and fix it. Due to this, we're trained to avoid it at all cost and neglect how to fix failures. I'm very thankful to teachers who would offer ways to make up for failed tests and projects. It helped me foster a mindset where failure isn't the end.
Something I've heard someone else say their boss told them is, "there is no screw up so bad that, if you tell me about it, we can't fix it". This sort of mentality, where fixing the problem is more important than assigning blame, is very valuable for any kind of work.
While a nice sentiment, the reason the idea of never being wrong is powerful is the result of the "Value added" metric driven model. Corporations are incredibly impersonal, and what is measurable is what impacts the algorithm of who is replaceable. While being easier to work with (because you have integrity in admitting when you screw up) may be a great asset to your immediate co-workers, 9/10 times the person choosing who stays and who goes is some higher up manager who only knows what's recorded in the computer.
This is why you talk to your immediate manager and develop a relationship with them. If your manager values you then it is less likely that the higher up will let you go. Unless the company is a dumpster fire, but then getting let go is a blessing.
This is why big corporations in general are a cancer on society. I'm not convinced it's absolutely inherent to running a large company, but fucked if it isn't a nearly universal reality with large companies. This is the result of decades of the "greed is good" mental illness being normalized instead of stamped out with extreme prejudice.
I watched this last night on Nebula, and the second it hit youtube I was linking it to my studio. This video sums up everything I've learned about building a healthy organization in my 18 years of game dev. Thank you Extra Credits, this is how you build culture.
I have this problem uncomfortably often at work.
Sometimes I'm brooding over something for days, because I don't want to ask my boss for help, knowing we could solve it in minutes together.
I blame it on how school taught me to not talk with others at work and the mentality that if I have a problem, it's a problem I have to deal with on my own.
That's a very unhealthy mentality, you should try to work on it!
When I was new at a warehouse job, I had a person helping show me my job (informal training), who happened to be our safety team leader. While he was trying to show me something, someone else came by and called him out for doing something unsafe, pointing out he is supposed to be the safety team lead. The tone of the accusation was a bit disrespectful, which caused the person training me to lash back, cussing at them and sending them away.
When I got to be the safety lead some years later, I never forgot that interaction. When inevitably people on my team tested me by calling me out for doing something unsafe, I gave them a safety token so they could get some candy from the store and thanked them for Actively Caring. I genuinely appreciated the reminder to use correct lifting techniques and the opportunity to encourage my team to speak up to each other when they see something wrong.
"Maxim 70. Failure is not an option - it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."
Used to be a lead on a couple of projects, and yeah, signalling problems and delays ahead of time is very useful. It's the entire purpose of doing daily standups/check-ins, though people are generally slow to understand that. A problem that's communicated can be solved, keeping it under wraps until it makes itself known is generally more hassle in the end.
The best approach is to be on the constant lookout for things and probe where you might be wrong. Way easier to deal with it if you figure it out yourself rather than have someone else point it out to you.
We all try to make the best of the information that is available to us and well, if we're wrong that just means that there's been some crucial piece of information we've been missing or not accounted for.
Style plays a big part in a game's success. It just also has to have a level of quality that fits with it and be unique enough. Anyone remember "Mighty Milky Way" by Wayforward? It is a really good game with simple mechanics and a unique style.
One of the questions they asked me in my interview for the current job was what I do when I make mistakes. And my answer to that was I basically go back and analyze where I or the process went wrong so I can fix that problem moving forward. I've become known for finding needles in haystacks because I will become a bit obsessive in backtracking to find the source of the errors in our interwoven worksheets when I notice them.
One time I was working in the live code base and I overwrote a major knowledge arrived. I had to go to my director who was very cool about it. She looped in a senior agent who rolled back my mistake in just a few minutes. The "everyone makes a mistake in live" attitude was very helpful.
If someone admits that they were wrong and tries to fix it, that actually makes me trust them more. It honestly takes a lot of maturity to be able to do it.
Also, I had a lot of good teachers growing up, particularly in math. They were open to being corrected by students, so long as the student was respectful about it. A couple of times, during my first year of Calc, students would raise their hand to correct the teacher, and then she'd turn around, look over the problem, and then go and fix it while thanking the student. It took a few extra seconds of the lesson, but that was better than someone being confused, and it honestly made me more willing to go to her when I had questions. This is opposed to the one English teacher who pretty much told a student that she didn't see his interpretation of a reading we had to do and shut down any discussion we could have had related to it.
This, this, all of this! As a project manager and functional manager, this entire episode is key and every employee should watch this multiple times over. On my dev teams I have 3 principles that we attempt to adhere to: 1) Have open, honest, and clearer communication (speak up, speak out, and speak honestly), 2) Lose your ego (it isn't about _who_ made a mistake or _whose_ code it is, but that we all work to fix it), 3) Assume positive intent (You may not like their opinion, but people aren't out to 'screw you').
This also 100%. I've been in thr Army for 18 years now, and when I had leaders that would make me afraid to mess up, I messed up more and we would just snowball. But now I manage my own teams, I've worked hard to let my people approach me and I love teaching them. And in return I have a huge team of highly motivated and competent junior leaders who can take things off me. And I also have the honor of my former juniors still confiding in me their issues, which demonstrates trust and respect I am proud to have.
when you decide to ask for help when you have a problem, is that you will start to think how to explain / frame said problem, changing your perspective on the problem and sometimes that is what you need to find the one that you missed, thuse helping you fix the problem. You can apply the rubber duck debbuging for similar effect.
The "You can never make a mistake or you're evil/bad/wrong!" attitude is precisely why I don't engage on Discord servers with a whole lot of rules. It just intimidates me way too much, and I feel like people are going to be watching me like a hawk to ~ambiguously punish me~ the moment I do one tiny thing out of line.
I wonder how much imposter syndrome is due to the perception that people expect us to be perfect at all times or we ourselves are failures?
When I started my job, I told everyone on the first day that I ask a million questions. And I made sure to check in with coworkers at least 1 or 3 times a day. So now that I'm here for several years, I'm so used to asking questions and checking in that I feel much less awkward going over and asking to bounce ideas off someone for a bit, even if I feel shouldn't need to. That, and, whenever I don't know how to do something, I ask someone to "walk me through this the way we do it here, because I can think of at least 3 ways to do it, and I'm sure I haven't thought of a bunch of important factors that come into play further in the process." And, "please explain again why we do it this way, because I want to make sure I can do it more independently next time." Works like a charm.
I needed to hear this after starting a new job
OMG, this applies to more than just games for sure! Admitting your wrong and working together to fix problems goes sooooo far with a team, and people are willing to try new things so much more, and you can build from there!
Especially when you're in a managerial position, fostering a culture of honesty and accountibility, where there is space to learn from mistakes begins with yourself.
Absolutely great pointers. Being wrong helps you learn. And you can't learn without being wrong. I can't count the amount of times I was never told I was wrong. Nor can I count the number of times I didn't have someone to turn to when I was wrong.
Thanks for the core memory unlock in the beginning with the 2 stupid dogs reference
I've been leading/managing for years and I really echo the message in this video. I've had both kinds of developers and I can confidently say that the ones that were quick to recognize and admit when they need help, and then LEARN from it, were my favorites. I once mentored this dev who did sweep issues under the rug and thought that admitting they were lost was going to reflect poorly (guess what, its the lying that does that). However, once they learned it was ok to speak up, they were able to switch to a different project where their skills matched better and they became one of my favorite people to work with. They still weren't the best dev on the team, but I knew they understood how to be honest and learn from their mistakes, so I could trust them.
I love the little motion tweened bits in this!
I deal with this sort of thing all the time at work. It is so easy to make a mistake so I have been way more comfortable now in dealing with mistakes.
6:34 This is true enough I do get a lot of interesting ideas that I write down and look at it again after a few days to see if I'm still turn on to the idea or are turn off
Thanks for the video :)
This is, one of the best videos I have ever seen, everyone should see this
I'm very glad this was made! Thank you!
This is something I try to live by, spurred I assume in some part by my brain's tendency to go into full problem solving mode when it runs into issues.
It can be gruelling, it's not a perfect method, and it will most definitely strain your relationship to other humans (at the very least initially); but if you do manage to get to the root of a problem and fix it, the whole structure (whether it be a relationship, a project, a work situation, etc.) will end up stronger for it, and many times more able to weather future problems.
A way I find mistakes i make I wouldn’t notice at face value is to contrast what can guarantee to be true with I think it true, it works surprisingly well
fail faster is still one of the best videos I have ever seen glad this video is following in its legacy because this is the way it should be everywhere not just in making games
Great video!
My current boss is agood example of this. He came from a different field of work and therefore doesn't have much of a technical understanding of what we do. But he's always taking the time to learn some things and when you have a problem he will ask you to explain it to him and then he tries to come up with ideas on how to fix it. He always tries to find out what the team as whole but also the individual members need.
All of this really helps building a healthy work environment
This reminds me of Arlo's video on Paper Mario Origami King, its one of my favorite videos on the internet.
"It is better to be wrong and know why, than be right and stay ignorant"
So... who messed up and inspired a whole youtube video
😂😂😂 Since we are such a close group and everyone's work relies on another person, this kind of thinking comes into use often.
@@extracredits ya lol, following the theme of the video "all of us at one point or another"
"There is no shame in being wrong. The shame is in staying wrong."
Making mistakes is common thing for game dev like me, be it critical mistake or design mistake. So I'm facing them every day. I even used my failed games as base to try or create new stuffs.
One story I’ve seen crop up in places is the new hire screwing up some mission critical piece of infrastructure worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and when they ask their boss if they’ll be fired he says “After I just spent all that money teaching you not to make the same mistake again?”
Let me tell you, admitting you made a mistake is not going to make everybody around you lose all respect for you. The majority of the time, the rest of us already know you messed up and just haven't said anything to your face, so hearing you speak up about it actually increases our respect.
Training new people the correct way with realistic expectations makes you a student again it's so refreshing
Never be afraid to be wrong. Fear being wrong and failing to seek the right answer.
"Practice makes progress." _ Nella the Princess Knight
I just started playing disco Elysium this week and got a good laugh at seeing them pop up.
NO SPOILERS!
DE is one of those games where its totally worth rolling with mistakes.
One word: Karoke.
Relevant
During the It's Okay to be Wrong Prologue, the Earth was spinning backwards. XD
I can already see new merch products from this video upgrading the "Fail Faster" motto with "Fail Safer" and "Be wrong, but don't stay wrong" 😋
Merch Idea, that 2+2=5 shirt I would defiantly buy that!
There's nothing wrong with BEING wrong.
The problems begin when people insist on STAYING wrong!
I recently came back to a company I had worked for previously, and the backend IT infrastructure for one of the programs is still recognizable as what I built when I was a business analyst with no IT experience. I have joked with my coworkers that they’re allowed to throw me under the bus for problems that I had a hand in almost 5 years ago because they’re still valid problems.
The thing is, I’m fully comfortable with saying I made these mistakes because what was the alternative? Someone else would make them instead? The entire body of work that still made things better or move forward wouldn’t have been done? There may be lines that you can’t cross, but if the big problem is that I made a mistake, then the root issue is that I was ever in a position to *make* that mistake. Those can turn into good discussions on how to prevent others from making those same mistakes in the future, or how to change workflows so some tasks are no longer needed. The automations I did, as flawed as they were in accounting for future design changes, were part of removing myself as a variable of potential error from day-to-day processes, and the mistakes do not overshadow the good that came from that.
I love the theme of this episode.
Being wrong is a good thing. Being wrong means we are trying, that we are learning.
Healthy adults allow their opinions and methods to change with new information and ideas.
The best way to be right all the time is to admit that you're wrong and change. Strong opinions, loosely held.
I'm going to have to get workmates to watch this lol. So frustrating working in an environment where people are so afraid of being wrong, that walkthroughs and PIRs turn into blame sessions rather than trying to pinpoint what went wrong, upskilling and documenting so it doesn't repeat
tl;dr - Transparency.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
As a Fallout fan, I think the entire Fallout community needs this lesson.
PANR has tuned in.
Was there a part 1 to this with the rest of the title?
You know: All these tips are very much important to anyone in any profession.
However: What if the one that is wrong is the supervisor? Or the manager? Or the executive board of a dev studio? Or the publisher that agreed to publish your game?
What can you do to make clear to them that what they want is wrong or that they are wrong? And persuade them into changing coarse into a better path? 🤔
“If I had a dime everytime I was wrong and no one called me on it, I wouldn’t need to work. Likewise, if I had a dime everytime I was wrong and someone DID call me on it, I ALSO wouldn’t need to work, but for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT reason.”
This is important to get through, *especially* to game-devs. Anyone who've watched any kind of videos about game development knows that complaining about 'lazy devs' is ridiculous - if anything, they often work *way too hard* - but that means that when you encounter something in a game that is just WRONG... just, objectively, unquestionably makes the experience worse... there's only one thing you can ask: "What were they *thinking?!"* Someone, somewhere in the process must have somehow arrived at the conclusion that this was A Good Idea, and then all the other people who SHOULD have told them "No, it isn't" just... didn't.
Basically, if developers can't admit to or alert each other to mistakes, believe me - the *players* will very much do it for you, and they won't be polite about it!
Needed to hear that today. Feel Hugged from me
That 2 Stupid Dogs reference tho.
I was wondering if anyone else would catch that
then there is me... i iterate to much... the whole "so busy making a plan.. i never use it" problem.
I don't recall the particular notable -- pretty sure he was a major scientist -- but when he was a little kid, he tried to pour himself some milk, and wound up spilling it all over the floor. And his mom came in and was like "Wow. Never in my life have I seen such a tremendous pool of milk. Well, since it's down there anyway, wanna play in it?" And a while later, "Well, at some point we've got to clean this up; how would you like to do that?" And after that, "What we have here is a failed experiment in how to carry a large jug of milk with such small hands. Let's go in the backyard and see if we can figure out a better way." And she filled the jug with water and he experimented until he was able to pour it effectively.
And that's the point at which he realized that he didn't need to be afraid of failure. That mom's reaction, that day, laid a steel foundation for everything he would go on to accomplish in his life.
Imagine how many mothers fail to lay such a foundation, purely by coming unglued over mistakes that are, in the long term, not such a big deal after all.
Fail Faster!
How do i @ everyone in corporate management so we all warch this vide9
0:09 2 Stoopid Dogs reference!
Not nearly enough use of that meme.
„if they are a good boss…“ there lies the problem. most aren‘t.
Good luck trying to turn around the "Infallibility Fallacy".
I always say I'm never wrong, I just make a lot of mistakes that I learn from. Being wrong implies you thought you'd be correct from the start, I basically always frame it as that I know nothing and I'm always learning and experimenting. It is a odd thing but has done some wonders in terms of overall mentality.
Absolutely agree with the video. It just didn't touch one tiny eetsy peetsy detail.
Some people just don't care.
Some employees simply do not care about what they work on, be it out of disinterest, malignancy, or flat-out apathy. This ends up upsetting practically everyone, and by the time this person has been unmasked, it'll likely have chunked your project. And if you don't have a good manager or leader in general that can notice this (or maybe they're the one who doesn't care) this can mess with morale so much the project becomes doomed to fail, and it happens all the time.
It's also a much bigger problem than people not sharing their problems, as this gets taught in any healthy work environment.
Fail faster.
It's definitely a difficult thing to do with programmers. There is an external culture of seeing us in binary. We are either the impossible genius, or the cause of all problems. And the moment problems like the user not wanting to do vital data entry and then not having the data they didn't enter quickly toggle that bit. It's really hard to avoid the appeal of desperately clinging to the genius image out of fear of being someone's scapegoat. (And, no, writing a logging system that clearly shows their boss what they didn't do is not a fix, that just makes you scary to everyone - do that logging for debugging, but don't use it against anyone.)
I have had to clean up after several people who had hidden messes, including myself. It's never a good experience for anyone. The hardest job is sometimes just getting people to ask for help.
Hardest part of all this is that initial set of someone admitting and owning a mistake. People nowadays seem to be allergic to accountability and will insist that everyone else is wrong or they are misunderstood instead of just owning up to a simple human mistake. I blame social media, it tends to amplify everything 100x.
um why are videos missing, i wanted to go back and watch the fail faster vid and found that for some reason you only have 12 videos none older then 4 months, what the hell happened?
how to fix what
There is a imposter among us…
I have only seen the thumbnail and the message I am taking from this is that Extra Credits say we should kill game devs who make mistakes.
Mhmm...
And I assume that goes multiple ways?
Such as, I dunno...
Very controversial videos that are heavily criticized for not only not getting their messages across but also perhaps giving the 100% wrong message?
I can think of two...
There are no bugs, only Features.
But the performance and the frame rate are in the toilet....
THOSE ARE FEATURES! THERE ARE NO BUGS!
Snek mic at 3:00
that is not our spy!
It’s a feature.
Behold, what could have averted every single government cover-up in science-fiction and 90% of government cover-ups in real life.
Not to fault the Extra Credits crew for taking a sponsorship, get that money, but 80,000 Hours is an explicitly longtermist organization. There are lots of reasons that longtermism is an ethical problem, but it comes down to this: longtermism's stated goal is to draw philanthropic time, attention and money away from the needs and concerns of people who are alive now and focuses those resources on people who do not exist. Everyone has a price, so I ask: Extra Credits, are they paying you enough money that you're ok platforming this?
No. In this sick world we live in it is often better to "fake it till you make it" rather than admitt a failure, because everyone is expendable and no second chances are given.
Gonna throw this out.
Ever tried, ever failed, no matter.
Try again, fail again, fail better.
The worst a game can be is forgettable. Does anyone remember "Wanderjahr Chronicle"? Nope. That's because it was bad, buggy, and bland. There wasn't anything that stood out about it. Meanwhile, ask the internet about Denpamen or Chibi Robo and they'll probably know about those games due to their unusual style and fun gameplay (mostly).
A game I know that you may not know is "Groove Heaven" which is a really cute and short game about a demon on a mission to deliver a message to heaven. It's a 2.5D rhythm-based platforming game with catchy music! I'm not sure it's on Steam or not but it was on the Nintendo 3DS and it's really good.
If you want the opinion who fought the wars of history several times over, this is a text book example of tactics that haven't been written about how to put together a good fire team.
A great fireteam requires tallent but a good fire team leader can put together a group of about 5guys according to DHS standards. let me show you how design features learned in the military were actually applicable to the games and games development industry as far back as WW1 and thus ties back into. wait for it. tolken. I'm kidding, it's wargaming.