thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-23, Joel wrote:
David,
The basis of that feeling (that people would belittle me over lack of "full" playtesting) was instinctual; nobody was breathing down my neck about how "that thar game better be playtested, son...FULLY."
What I DID see was the occasional taking to task by some person against some person for rushing their game or not playtesting or charging too much money or what have you. I think at some point this became the "new new honesty...?"
I don't have links or examples, and I don't have experience of people subjecting ME to such scrutiny directly. I just remember seeing other shit go down and thinking, "man, I better watch my fucking back or that could be me!"
Hmm, actually I did have one experience that wasn't...overtly a call-out, but seemed to me to have a weird undertone. So I'd completed my first version of my game, and was all like "yay, my game!" on Story-games. Someone asked, "Hey, could you tell me about your game some?" And I was like "Sure! Be happy to! It's like this!"
And the person said "Oh wait, I get it now! This is actually [previous, rejected name of game]. Now I know why it seemed to come out of nowhere; it actually didn't."
I came away from that conversation thinking "hmmm...was that some sort of test? Was this person checking me for proper game development cred, to ascertain by the number of forum posts my game appears in whether I've been designing the game for sufficiently long? And I narrowly averted criticism by demonstrating that the game was previously in development [=talked about on forums] under a different name?"
I have no idea if that's what the poster was getting at. But that's what it felt like.
Peace,
-Joel
