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Everybody knows bugs. There are funny ones and stupid ones. There are annoying ones and actually-damaging ones. But however they manifest themselves, bugs sit right between a game's maker and its player, a sudden manifestation of mistakes that have been made, a crack in the simulation, a bump right back down to Earth. The player side of the experience of bugs is straightforward. They raise amusement, irritation and sometimes spluttering anger, and they should all be fixed. But players don't really know so much about the developer experience. That's despite the relationship between players and developers growing closer than ever over the past 10 or so years. In the era of internet-delivered patches, Early Access and the rise of indie development, players are caught in the swirl of the development process as they pore over changelogs and offer feedback.
"It's a mixed blessing, isn't it, the fact that you can release your game and people can tell you that it's broken and you can talk to them about it and then fix it," says Ricky Haggett, developer of Hohokum, Frobisher Says, and most recently of delightful space Rogue-like Loot Rascals. "That's amazing, and it's also incredibly stressful. You also feel very exposed."
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