泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
Golden boy and availability bias
March. 29. 2018.
As I mentioned many times, I meet various chief executive officers because of my job. Leadership positions must weigh heavily on everybody. A boss of a firm needs to set a direction for the future of the corporation, make decisions, and pay employees' salaries every month. Envying the head's authority, staff members don't consider the leader's authority. Compare to the power which is easily seen, workers cannot feel responsible for something until they experience it. Even if there are no big consequences, I cannot help respecting countless representatives who have run a business for several years. Because I went out of business long ago.
On the other hand, a great number of leaders tend to make the wrong decision. It's a natural behavior of risk avoidance because they don't want to take upon themselves for anything. The availability bias is a miscalculation that the chief executive officers often make in such a situation. The availability heuristic occurs when evaluating a specific topic or conclusion relying on not inaccurate data but immediate examples that come to a given person's mind. Media outlets seem to reinforce this tendency. The mass media, by the nature of the people they serve, is apt to write an article about something unusual. For instance, a newspaper doesn't print the story of a person who loses millions of won or tens of millions of won on the stock market on contrary to a man who made tens of billions of won. While repeatedly reading biased articles, people are apt to mistake talent for luck thinking that anyone can easily make tens of billions of won if they want to. Numerous mothers are reluctant to speak ill of their sons and daughters although they devote so much time to brag about their children. A legend about a golden boy—it's called "Eom-chin-a (literally mother's friends' son or daughter)" in South Korea—is credited like this.
Recently, I spoke with the head of video game development. The CEO, a former talented programmer, was very proud of a self-made game that he had developed in person for several years. I thought that the game was technically mature. However, despite the high-quality work, unfortunately, programming perfection doesn't guarantee fun of the game. The company had to terminate its service due to a high-maintenance fee long after its launch. I cannot say for certain, but I believe that there are problems with game design. But the leader put the project failure down to lack of marketing budget for an hour in the meeting.
Many game developers talk about how much they spent a promotional budget for profit. And they want to suppose that a specific sum of money would ensure some level of expected return. Without leaders' objective perspective on things, the matters would not be solved based on what they want to believe. If mothers don't stop nagging mentioning a golden boy, it would just make their children feel annoyed or less confident. I sincerely expect game developers not to make a wrong decision under the delusion about Eomchina.
※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
(http://www.khgames.co.kr)
Translation by Kim Ki-hui
