These past few weeks we have been challenged with creating a game in assigned groups and limited to virtual interactions and meetings because of the given situation. This inconvenient situation may have been particularly educational for us given that many real world game designers are working with each other from different parts of the world and face several hardships in the game designing process as a team including but not limited to: coordination issues, language barriers, time zone conflict, travel conflict, technical difficulties in virtual interactions, and many other things that come with working with people that are not in your physical space. We got a small taste of facing such issues during game design with our group projects. One part of this process that was particularly inconvenient given the online only conditions we are forced to abide by was playtesting. 

During playtesting, we split into different Discord groups and played each other’s games. An issue we faced was that there were not enough players present to play our game to its full extent, limiting the “roleplay” effect and feel of our game (on top of the limitations of the virtual interaction which also greatly limited roleplaying abilities). In her section on playtesting, Fullerton wrote “Your role at this point is not that of the game designer but that of an investigator and observer who must give these playtesters access to the game, lead them through a useful playtest, record what they say and do, and, later, analyze their responses  Rather than telling players what to think about your game or explaining how it works, let them play it with no or minimal explanation” (pg 281). In our case, all of the game designers had to be a player in their own game because for our game, we did not have enough players, and for the other team’s game, we did not possess the program (Tabletop Simulator) needed to run their game, so they had to play the game for us on a livestream. While there was a lot of useful feedback from the playtesting session, it would have been much more effective if a) it was not virtual and b) there were more players so the game designers did not have to play their own games. However, given our circumstances, these factors were unavoidable. At least now we are more familiar with the process for future use. 

Works Cited:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.