thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-18, Ben Lehman wrote:
Hi Bret!
I figured out how to talk about the endless playtest for social cred cycle. Yay.
(As a warning to folks, I'm going to do a thing here where I talk about social interactions and social groups in rationalist terms: reward systems, strategies, and the like. Some people get very upset when I do this. Are you one of those people? I'm going to rely on your maturity and tell you to stop reading now: what I'm going to write next is just going to make you feel uncomfortable.)
So I think we can all agree that in the story-games.com extended social circle (although this dates back to the Forge and extends out to RPGnet) there's a fairly large amount of social cred and power attributed to people who are game designers. Essentially, there's a large social reward for "being a game designer" particularly an experienced one and also particularly one who hasn't become a local "bad guy" the way that Joshua became re: Shock:. Because of this there are a lot of people who want to be game designers because they lust after the status that it will provide them.
There are two problems with this. First, finishing a game, particularly finishing your first game, is really fucking hard. Like, way harder than most people will do strictly or even mostly for social status. Secondly, someone might say mean things about your game, and if a dogpile starts you go from high-status to pariah almost instantly.
There is a strategy which overcomes both these problems: putatively developing game(s), but keeping them infinitely in playtest. (This is far from the only viable strategy in this environment—I can talk about some of the others but they're really beyond the bounds of this post.) Give your game some cool evocative bits, some weird-ass system bits, and a nice title (the title is key). Talk it up, a lot, about how long you're playtesting it for. Make sure people post their playtest reports publicly. Attempt to use playtesting to substitute for any of the really important elements above (including marketing, creative and technical inspiration, and game development.)
This neatly solves the two issues with being a game designer, socially. First of all, you never have to go through the actual, grinding work of finishing a game. Yes, your game will never have an audience larger than 50, but as long as it's the right 50 forum-goers, you don't care. Secondly, as long as your game is "in playtest" no one can say anything bad about it: all they can do is give feedback, which must be phrased constructively. "Well, it's still in playtest" is an iron shield against the critique and dogpiling which could cost you status.
All you have to do is change games from time to time or make sure to migrate your game to the newest system trend (it's narrativist! now it's d20! now it's jeepform!) so you're never yesterday's news.
And so we have games in continuous playtest for years and years and years, and also a socially toxic environment where new, actually inspired designers are looking up to and taking advice from ignoramuses.
