playtest! playtest! playtest!

Game designers have been banging their heads against the wall for years with closed-door creation.

In fact, this happens to a greater or lesser extent in all creative disciplines, but in video games the consequences are brutal.

What do I mean by creating behind closed doors? This:

I have an idea for a game. I think it’s excellent, so I start creating it.
I spend 3 years creating the game I want, it’s perfect.
I launch it on Steam and it receives bad reviews, so bad that my game is categorized as “Mixed” and therefore Steam stops showing it to new players.

What happened? We designed behind closed doors. We never showed our game to anyone during the development process.

The process of testing our games with real players is called playtesting (emphasis on real).

The central idea of playtesting is to help develop our games iteratively and incrementally. The loop would go something like this:

I design and implement a part of the game.
I ask myself specific and general questions about this part of the game.
I do playtesting of this game segment with other people.
I allow players to give a general opinion and then ask them the specific questions I want to answer.
I collect the data, analyze it, and make decisions: is the game okay or does something need to change?

This may be an oversimplification of the process, but it more or less goes like that.

I want to propose here that narrative games are no different from other games, although they pose their own problems. I’ll leave you some questions here, if there’s one that catches your attention and you have opinions about it, please respond to this email and tell me!

What things are important to playtest when we talk about narrative games?
If narrative is about creating a mental model in the player’s brain, how can we test that? Are we generating the mental model we want in the player’s mind?
If we have branching or probabilistic narrative elements, how do we test that all paths/possibilities are interesting?
What do we do if a player tells us: “here you forced me to do this, but I wanted to do something else”?
How do I test part of my game if the stories need to be complete to see if they work?

I will be addressing some of these issues in future emails because they seem crucial: there’s a chance that one might write a book and people like it so much that it doesn’t need to be modified, but, in my experience, this doesn’t happen with video games.