thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-23, Chris Chinn wrote:
A few years ago, I started developing The Emperor's Heart and had to learn everything Ben is talking about, the hard way.
The signal to noise ratio was also made much worse, because of the status-culture he's talking about. I had people jumping into playtest, who had never even heard of wuxia, and complaining that the game didn't fully immerse them in the genre because they couldn't be bothered to watch a few movies. It was game tourism, looking for the new hotness.
I even tried to promote more playtesting in the hopes of better feedback for a bit.
Luckily in a bad way, I got hit with health issues and had to put everything down. It gave me the chance to step back and really look at what I was doing and what I was getting from my efforts.
The easy trap a lot of folks have fallen into, is exchanging the core values of playing games or making games to be played, with impressing other people about how you're involved with games.
It's a lot more socially rewarding than sitting at home, thinking really hard about a game that doesn't exist yet, and may not be fun, yet.
And it basically comes down to self promotion, though a lot of folks keep trying to slide it under "community participation", "enthusiasm" or even "theory" when it's usually either a lot of empty attention questions or name dropping for status.
For example, how many folks even bothered to think about how Emily's Story Capital or Mo's Push & Pull is all up on Apocalypse World's Moves and Reward systems? Vincent has more name dropping value than either Mo or Emily, and so, it's really interesting to look at how ideas 3-4 years past are magically erased, even as things are built upon them.
Crowd-following is great as a fan and a gamer, and terrible as a designer - it will never seek roots of anything you're looking at, and, if anything, obscure them as people are more focused in exciting/new things, rather than why/how anything works.
Obviously, the line is thin- "every gamer is a designer" is not far off, yet, at the same point, just because you can do both doesn't mean it works well when you do both at the same time, or mix up one for the other.
