thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-21, Joel wrote:
David,
I'd say it was some pressure to make sure the game worked, sure. Mainly due to really shallow game design experience—I don't yet have very developed instincts for knowing if my surface assessment of "well, it SEEMS like it should work..." is accurate.
More than that though, it was pressure to have the game ACCEPTED as working. With my Game Chef design, I wasn't sure before playtesting that it would be playable or fun. But my latest, now completed design? Yeah, I was pretty secure in that knowledge. When I playtested, it was mainly (as I noted in my original comment) to know how the game would FEEL to play, and to get myself comfortable with the play of it. But I felt pressure that if it wasn't "sufficiently" playtested, I'd be judged as a fraud.
As for pressure of another kind, I'm not sure. I can't think of any other categories of pressure. I guess pressure to be a hip Story-Games-posting type person in general, one way of which was to have a game, and that game SURE AS FUCK BETTER BE THOROUGHLY PLAYTESTED AND "FULLY BAKED."
I do remember where it all started. It was a conversation on the Forge, where Ron said that Joshua's first edition of Shock was a fun game, but a mess of a game text. Soon thereafter there was a whole rash of talk on "half=baked" vs. "fully-baked" game design on blogs and forums, and the lesson that I absorbed was that I had better not go public with a game unless it had been tested to a degree that was A) beyond my means) and B) incommensurate with the needs of the game.
In retrospect "stay in playtesting indefinitely" does sound like a shrewd workaround. But in my simple and direct way, I assumed the only solution was to get the game DONE, and let on as little as possible about how much it had been "playtested."
I did include a list of playtesters in the text, though, partly in the interest of honesty and partly in the interest of gratitude. By the time I had typed them all out, I found I was pretty happy with the list. It didn't look scant or anything, rather just right for the game.
Peace,
-Joel
