thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-17, Lugh wrote:
Wow. As someone who has been a playtester for quite a few games, I can just say that clearly your problem is simply that you're doing it wrong. Or, at least, the "you" that the OP is addressing his rant towards is.
First, as a playtester, I don't *want* to receive a finished, polished, completely analyzed version of the game. I've gotten that a couple times, and then my comments were ignored because it was too late in the development cycle to change things. At that point, you don't want playtesting, you want approval.
If you're not getting proper playtest reports with notes written during the game, you need to train your playtesters better. The playtest process should never rely on comments written from memory after the game is done.
Playtest *is* important for textual errors and rules holes. Because every writer/designer will have blind spots. This is the same rule as never editing your own work. You won't see what you either forgot to mention the first time around, or that you assumed was obvious.
As for using your playtesters to revise your game, I *think* you have a point there. But, it's terribly muddled. It is a bit clearer in your "When to Playtest" section. Use playtesting to *REVEAL* problem areas. Then, as designer, fix those problem areas. You seem to have experience with designers, what, pasting notes from the playtest report directly into the text as new rules? I think that's pretty clearly "doing it wrong."
Your point seems to be that we poor design monkeys have put our eyes out with the drill far too often to be trusted with it anymore. Some of us still have a pretty good idea of how to use it, though.
