Response: Playtesting with Strangers
This article presents advice on different skills game designers should have. One of the key skills game designers ought to have is listening — to playtesters, the game, and one’s self. The author draws an analogy between game designers and street performers; street performers constantly adapt their performances to audience response. Street performers are excellent observers and know when audiences are having a good time; they do not have to ask. The same way, game designers ought to observe carefully. Importantly, game designers must observe by noticing the kinds of moves players make, whether they are obeying the correct rules, and how the players interact with each other. Designing prototypes that do not look as rough is important with non-designers. Additionally, when running a playtest it is important to not actually play the game, but rather, to write a set of rules and make it clear that you (the game designer) is an observer, not a resource. When players play “wrong” it is important to not stop them and to not intervene. Finally, finding non-designer playtesters is easier than finding designers. Friends, family, and colleagues can be great playtesters.
Reflecting on this article, I have found many of the points mentioned true in my personal experiences. For instance, with project three, when playtesting with a group, we were very glad that we had two group members there — one to interact with the playtesters, and the other to simply observe and take notes. Performing both functions at the same time would have been too difficult and not allowed us to capture as much data as possible. I was observing and taking notes, and noticed that non-verbal reactions actually gave much more insight into how people enjoyed the game than their immediate verbal reactions. For example, one playtester was on his phone for the first part of the game — indicating his boredom with the pace at which the game was progressing. This non-verbal cue, along with other feedback, informed our decision to add more inter-player interactions in our game. Being able to gather this kind of data and make such inferences is even more important when playtesting on people one is familiar with — as such people are less likely to give negative feedback.
Additionally, I think it is true that listening to yourself as a game designer is incredibly important. It can sometimes be overwhelming to gather too much data from playtests; the data may not inform the simplest ways to make a game better. However, thinking about those insights more deeply in context of one’s instincts can actually spur ideas for changes that add much more to the game at hand. For example, when crafting my interactive fiction, some playtesters mentioned that the story felt not complex enough or that the decisions they had to make seemed quite arbitrary. While this feedback in and of itself was rather general, reflecting on it further prompted me to add a timer to each screen to make the decisions harder to make — thus making them seem less arbitrary. I was also able to lengthen the story in connection with this theme of time pressure. Thus, listening to my instincts resulted in a much more engaging game; working analytically with playtesting results would have resulted in changes that would have been too broad to have been helpful.
