A videogame is a product of combined expertise across dozens of disciplines. But in a recently-published Youtube video titled “Have an Idiot at the Table,” former BioWare producer Mark Darrah said it’s valuable during a game’s development to have someone with only a layman’s understanding present in discussions about design and direction—provided they understand when and where their feedback is useful.
Darrah, who worked as executive producer on the Dragon Age games and the ill-fated Anthem, said he’s spent more than half his career as just that kind of “professional non-expert.” During the projects he worked on, he said discussions about game design, art direction, and audio—disciplines he isn’t trained in—benefited from the presence of a layman’s perspective, because it helps ground the ambitions and impulses of the project’s experts.
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“It’s because disciplines can become quite inward looking,” Darrah said.
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According to Darrah, it’s common for a conversation between experts in a discipline “to start to eat its own tail” as those experts become fixated on the subtleties of their craft, whether it’s game design, art, or his own field of expertise as a programmer. Left to themselves, designers can produce systems of escalating arcane complexity; writers and worldbuilders can coax each other deep into the weeds of proper nouns and fabricated timelines; artists can become preoccupied with “discussions around minor bits of white space in ways that are obvious to them, but may not come across to the layman.”
“The very subtle things may not be coming across. And that can be okay,” Darrah said. “But if [your game is] trying to make your point entirely out of subtle things, that point may get lost.”
Having a layman in the room to raise their hand and say they’re not picking up on the nuances that might be plain to the experts is a helpful indicator that things have gone too sicko mode—not so those nuances can all be tossed out, but so the developers can ideally ensure they’re accessible for the game’s audience to appreciate.
For the non-expert’s input to be useful, however, Darrah says they need to be proficient in a critical skill: Knowing when to leave people to their work when you don’t have anything to say.
“If you’re this external voice, one thing to really guard against is to not fall into the trap of feeling that you need to provide as much feedback as the other people at the table,” Darrah said. “You aren’t equipped to do that.”
Otherwise, Darrah says the team “starts to dread your involvement,” because it means they’ll have to spend their discussions navigating the contributions of someone whose suggestions and opinions aren’t anchored by practical understanding.
“It’s good to have that external voice,” Darrah said, “but that external voice needs to know that they shouldn’t be doing most of the talking in the room.”
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