Iteration and Reiteration

I feel like digital media and the changes to how media is distributed and consumed has opened up an interesting angle, the ability to continue to patch, update, and refine long after the original version went live. It’s been an interesting thing to get my head around, and while it’s definitely been something I’ve noticed most with my game projects, my novels haven’t been left out.

That said, I do think the “ability to patch” can sometimes make for a bit of a lax quality control process. Let’s talk about that a bit today: patching, updating, and the like. It’s been on my mind because I’ve been updating my extant games with new content as my third game keeps rolling, so here we are.

As much as I’d love to catch everything with a game, let’s be clear: I have my own biases when I’m playing through games, and there are plenty of things I miss when I’m editing, cleaning up, and adjusting a game. When I released my first game, I needed to patch it pretty much every week for a bit to fix oversights, mistakes, and issues as people played through.

When it comes to games, you get way more data from way more people stress-testing games and playing them. Which is why the quality control departments of game publishers was such a big deal back in the 1990s and early 2000s: if your game gets out of the door with a game-breaking bug, there was no way to patch, adjust, or fix things on the copies out and in the wild. There are updated versions of some of these games (famously, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had a post-release print run that changed some of the art assets and music in certain areas that alluded too strongly to Islamic iconography), but the ones in the wild are in the wild.

The ability to patch and update is quite helpful to fix the issues, but I do notice that having that fallback means I’m a bit more willing to deem something “good enough” before launching it into the wild. There were plenty of oversights I missed in my first game that I’ve caught over the years, and while I was able to launch the second game in a more “stable” state, I definitely needed a bit of feedback to catch the things I missed before launch.

I think I recall the League of Legends developers saying that they get more data from a single day of a live patch than from the two weeks leading into the patch. Not to say that my case is analogous, but it’s a similar premise: people can catch what I miss, and they can help color how to balance and adjust things post-launch.

I think that there’s been a shift towards the “updating” of books more aggressively, to tweak and refine as time passes and tastes change. It’s something that we’ve seen with older authors (I recall some of Roald Dahl’s output being “scrubbed” a bit to match contemporary tastes, for one), and I know authors have gone back in to clean things up.

I’ve done that, admittedly. There are no major structural changes, nor will there be, but I’ve added a couple of paragraphs and gone back to clean up typos and issues with syntax here and there. I do plan to eventually do new covers when I’ve the resources to make them happen, but that’s still a bit off.

I do think it’s an interesting discussion, though. Should books be “patched” like video games are? I feel there’s little harm in it, so long as it’s something the author is assenting to, but there’s also plenty of questions about the validity of extant editions afterwards.

We live in a digital era, and what was needn’t be what is or what will be, so to speak.

I will say that I think my position isn’t the only valid one here, and if your perspective is that what’s written should stay there, that’s also reasonable. I do think that it’s on authors to decide the fates of their words and their works, and adjustments to make a product they’re happier with and more satisfied with is an admirable pursuit.

That said, if the people prefer the past iteration, that’s perfectly fine. Look at Star Wars (particularly the original trilogy).