"The Hitchhiker's Guide to Critique" by akreon

"I agree... but" is where bad things start again

This is dumb.

Bakscratch said:

This is dumb.

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Care to explain why you disagree instead of just dismissing it in three words?

Bakscratch said:

This is dumb.

Click to expand...

this criticism isnt very constructive

If someone has critique they are normally correct, as an viewer of the creation they are the ones who the art is for, not matter what people say no one makes art for them selfs, they make it for other people to admire.
Any type of criticism is feedback, if you make something that isn't good to other then it probably isn't good, People don't need to explain them self's if someone doesn't like something there is probably something wrong with the art.
This guide doesn't even explain things proper as well, If the artist wants the best they would listen to the bad criticism and improve. Just by acknowledging the criticism doesn't mean you listened to it or understand what they said.
You can only improve by acting on it.
This guide doesn't do anything for telling you have to give helpful criticism, it just states that don't be an arse which doesn't do anything. Where is the explanation of what is helpful to people and whats not E.G. "It doesn't look like a carrot, maybe use a reference next time"

I agree that the guide is... oversimplistic, but I think that the artist needs to judge carefully the critique they recieve, rather than dropping everything for what the audience says. The guide identifies why this might not be (the audience might be biased, or malevolent, or uninformed), but what would be more useful would be identifying when these are happening. Of course, you also need to be able to acknowledge when you, the creator, are biased.

I think this guide is more of an outline of how to have a productive discussion about a piece of art in a critic/artist context. The middle section shines a light on particular archetypes that inexperienced critics/artists tend to default to, and also explains why they can be problematic. The last section shows that it's entirely up to the artist how much they take away from a critique, and that it has to be their decision to act on criticism.

Acting on criticism doesn't inherently improve your work. Artists want to get a particular message out into the world, and they need feedback to understand how their message is being interpreted. Often times, what gets made doesn't achieve what the artist intends. A (good) critic's aim is not only to provide an outside perspective on how the artist's work makes them feel, but also to understand what the intended feeling is, and identify what parts of the work aren't helping in achieving the artist's goal.

The critic can often have a false idea of what the artist's goal is. They aim to provide feedback that would bring the work further towards what they think the work is supposed to be. However, if the critic's idea and the artist's idea are disparate enough, their feedback can be effectively useless.

If the artist chooses to make changes to their work based on this "bad" feedback, it can bring their work further away from its intended purpose. This "bad" feedback can also change the artist's mind on what their intended goal should be, in which case the feedback can become useful again. The artist needs to try and understand the critic's goal in the same way that the critic tries to understand the artist's goal.

The idea of "you can't please everyone" says that you can choose not to act on feedback. This is often taken to mean that you can choose not to think about feedback, but thinking and acting are not the same.

Way to hit us with the dissertation ido.

I like the cute bunnies!

In my opinion, you need to be respectful when you are giving a critique. Tell them what doesn't fit. If you can offer ways to fix it. All the attitude, offensive comments, and personal feelings over whether the person should know what you are about have no place in a critique. You don't know the level in which someone is operating under. Anyways, that's just my 2 cents.

This pic gave me cancer.
Also the game.

And then there's the creator who doesn't respond in any way, and puts out the next version of their map with all the same things you pointed out, and you have no way of knowing if they even read your comments or not, let alone what they thought of them.