In Fullerton’s chapter about playtesting, she discusses how playtesting is the single most important activity a designer can engage in. The purpose of playtesting is to ensure that the game is achieving your player experience goals. It’s important to, as discussed in class on Tuesday, ensure there is balance throughout the game and that there aren’t too many or too few components. For example, if you’re creating a 2 v 2 card game, you need to make sure both teams have the same advantage to win the game, or else it would be unfair. Additionally, if you have a card game like Uno, you’d need to make sure you have enough variety of cards to keep the game going. You also want to make sure the time played isn’t too long or too short (depending on what you’re going for). Initially, you should playtest your game yourself in the early stages and then recruit more people. This reminds me of our team’s process of creating our board game on Tabletop Simulator; we started by having all of us get into the game and test the components. After we realized one member was completely powerless and was at a disadvantage, we increased that characters’ abilities to make sure the game was more fair. Next, we will be recruiting groups to playtest our game, which is exactly what Fullerton suggests. In this environment, it is a lot harder to have our game be playtested by total strangers, which is also what Fullerton suggests so that you can gain a new perspective from people you don’t know who all have differing opinions. However, it would be interesting to do that someday with our game. It is important to recruit testers who are actually interested in your topic, however; you will get far more relevant feedback than someone who would not wish to even play your game. This reminded me of when we had a board game day in class and our group was playing The Fury of Dracula. I have never really been super interested in long games that require knowing a lot of rules, so my feedback that day was biased.
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.
I like that you brought up the balance necessary between recruiting strangers to play test in an unbiased way but also recruiting players that are actually interested in your game topic. It can sometimes be a hard balance to find, and is a common theme in surveys and test in all fields beyond game design.
LikeLike
Yeah I agree about the fact that playtesters can be biased depending on whether or not they like the game in the first place. If I had to do a survey on the Fury of Dracula I believe I would be biased because I personally do not like games that have a lot of rules too. So I think it’s important to ask question as specific as possible. For example if we ask a question “What do you think about the game?” and the answer is “it’s a bit boring”, I feel like “boring” is too abstract and we can’t do much on that.
LikeLike