open re: playtest! playtest! playtest!

Fellow list member Kamran Ayub (who maintains and works on Excalibur.js and runs Keep Track of My Games) shared an interesting thought about yesterday’s email:

One thing it seems like narrative games would benefit from playtesting is for inclusivity. Your game could be played from all types of people from different cultures different to yours, so you may unintentionally introduce language or elements that don’t land how you intended.

This.

So. Much. This.

Inclusion should be a priority for us.

It is practically impossible to have a complete view of where we are being non-inclusive.

At least not without many years of experience in the subject.

Clearly, playtesting is a good tool to identify inclusivity issues.

I’m not going to delve into the ramble of cultural Marxism, what matters to me is making the world accessible and inclusive, which is why I was excited about the response.

Although Kamran is focusing on content issues (e.g., whether a word or another might be offensive, etc.), I believe this is also true in matters of form.

For instance, a children’s book has less text than a book for adults.

This is true in video games as well, the length of the texts is greatly reduced, we will talk about this in an upcoming email.

And not to mention those of us with ADHD.

There are games I cannot play because of the amount of information that needs to be managed at the same time without getting distracted.

This speaks to the importance of playtesting with a variety of players.

It’s clear that this extends to all types of playtesting, not just narrative, but it’s good to emphasize it.

Thank you, Kamran, for your comment!

Question:

Do you know any games that would have benefited from having done narrative playtesting on something in particular? Why do you think that?