thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-02-28, Vincent wrote:
Joel: Functional, non-terrible social reward structures exist. That's what this is about. They exist, but they require discipline, clarity of purpose, and a perfect willingness to exclude people who aren't genuinely participating. Of course they do! You can't design a game for people who don't want to play it.
If you're in a forum without those things, you have to bring them with you and hold them for yourself. When you go about in public, you can't ban people, right, so you have to have the discipline and clarity to exclude them from your consideration. If their ideas and opinions aren't useful to you, no matter how socially rewarding, you have to be able to just disregard them. You can't expect any open, public forum to do it for you.
