More thoughts on playtesting.

More thoughts on playtesting.

Originally shared by Rob Donoghue

Ok, so on Twitter I made an observation:

Playtesting teaches that people are:
- great at spotting problems & feeling pain
- poor at explaining why
- terrible at proposing solutions

I stand by it, but it is also far from the whole picture.

So, first, a little unpacking: This was mostly thrown up as an extension on the truism that when you are taking feedback from playtesters, listen very closely to what problems they encountered, but don't worry so much about the solutions they suggest. Not that all the suggestions will be bad, but many of them will be. Even if your playtesters are smart and capable, they lack context. Or, if they have context, their value as playtesters may be dubious.

But this assumes a few defaults about how playtesting is handled, notably that it is distributed broadly and lacks the resources to really support it deeply or well. Those are important qualifiers because playtesting is not that much different than other forms of feedback gathering, and there is a lot of really useful knowledge, lore, practice and experience that feedback can learn from.

A knowledgeable facilitator[1] can get a lot more out of a playtest than someone with an impromptu questionnaire. Well chosen playtesters can alter the results of the test (for good or ill). There are ways to do playtests better.

but

This is gaming, and we can barely pay our artists and editors. We are lucky to be playtesting at all, and if we manage to get a playtest by someone who is not the game's designer, we are over the moon. It is hard to talk about refining something that is barely there.

but

We should. There's a lot of knowledge and experience out there. Some of it translates. Some of it doesn't. It's almost certainly worth talking about.

pinging Kira Magrann and Stras Acimovic  because reasons.

1- And even that word is chosen carefully. The discipline of facilitating meetings - rather than leading them - is one that is super interesting and useful to playtesting and, frankly, play in general.