Fallout dev Tim Cain says we should pay more attention to bad games: ‘[Publishers] often don’t learn from failure because they only look at the games that sold well’

“Jesus Christ, I could write this shit:” The great Alan Moore once said that the sort of negative inspiration you get from reading drivel is even more fruitful for aspiring authors than the kind you get from reading the classics. Fallout co-creator and prolific video blogger Tim Cain took it a step further in a video he published Wednesday, saying everyone from bigwig publishers to the casual gamer could learn a thing or two from bad games.

Granted, he’s not talking about irredeemable refuse like Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, but rather the “many” cases where “one game came out, it wasn’t very good, and it was forgotten … you could learn a lot from games like that.” You know, stuff like Viking: Battle for Asgard.

“For a publisher, their success is game sales. Because of that, they often don’t learn from failure because they only look at the games that sold well,” he said in the video. “Gamers will frequently point to popular games and say, ‘we want more of that,’ without necessarily knowing exactly what part of those games made them so good. If they do point to bad games, they tend to point to well-known bad games.”

He likened the industry’s tunnel vision on critical darlings, sales behemoths, and only the most prominent flops to survivorship bias. “In addition to looking for common features among games that sell well, you should look for common features among games that are considered unsuccessful.”

If you can’t tell the good from the bad in a good game, Cain reckoned “you will possibly miss out on why they are successful. This happens all the time in videogames, and everybody does it.” While it’s all subjective, Cain’s point is ultimately that not every aspect of a good game is an equal part of why it’s good—plenty of great games have “a low framerate, atrocious user interfaces, and crash bugs,” he noted—and a reliable way to understand games more deeply is to sit with an unsuccessful one, curious about what went wrong.