Not about WoW, but rather about Games

My inspiration for posts often comes from a news article I read. Today’s comes from a member blog post on Gamasutra. It is a QA Tester who believes every company should have a mandatory play hour every day. To play their game. I laughed a bit, started to navigate away and decided to take a moment to read the comments. Imagine my surprise that people were arguing against his point.

I’m sorry… but WHAT?

Were there seriously *game developers* saying we *shouldn’t* be playing our own game? Excuse me while I boggle at that absurdity. If someone had come in and said, I do play our game, more than an hour each day, because I am testing things I am putting in, there might have been a valid point. But these people seemed to have missed the guy’s point. Let me see if I can nail it down a bit better.

When designing, arting, programming a game, the designer, artist, programmer is the FIRST person to see it. I build a level, I put it in. I should immediately be applying values to the level. Is it fun? Does it hold to the spirit of the design? Is it fun? Does it fit in the framework of levels? Is it fun? Does it fit in the game? Is it fun? Is this a treasure area or a combat area? Is it fun? An artist or programmer will likely ask their own barrage of questions (Is it pretty? Does it fit with the theme? Is it optimal? Does it work as intended? Does it work as a system?) but they are the first people to experience the game.

It doesn’t exist unless it is on screen. I first heard this at GDC, and I cannot express how much I love that sentiment. It doesn’t exist unless it is IN THE GAME. Once you can play your game, your daily focus, beyond tasks, is finding the worst thing in your game and fixing it. How do you find the things that are bad and need to be fixed? By playing your game. How will you know what systems are currently in place to use for the best effect? By playing your game. How will you know when the exact piece of art you need already exists, it just isn’t in your level? By playing your game. How do you know it is fun and you are on the right track? By playing your game.

Play it early, play it often, and play it as oddly as you can. Once you feel you have exhausted *every* possible bit of creativity you have, get someone else to play it and watch them. Don’t help them, but watch them. Play it when you are tired. Play it when you are inebriated. Play it when you are caffeinated. Try to play an entire level without killing anything. Try to run past enemies. Try to only use alt fire attacks. So on and so forth.

I love the idea of sitting down and playing something from the game every day. Gather up the design team, sit them down in the conference room and play the level we haven’t seen in the longest. Or the level with the most changes. Talk about it. Just talk out loud. Make different people play it. Attempt to identify where it went right and where it is going wrong. (Here’s the trick, don’t come up with solutions, let the designer think about that later and talk about it later. You’ll get bogged down in problem solving then.) Now, to be fair, no, I don’t think you should base all your opinions on your game off your own design team, but they are the first line of defense against a bad game.

Not playing your own game is almost as absurd as being a game developer and not playing games. As a designer, I try to play new games or significant games every so often. (Or at the very least watch other people play games I am terrible at.) I was once told about a lead, who was interviewing a design candidate. They asked him what he was playing. He responded that he hadn’t been playing games recently but rather had been focused on getting a job. (He, not too shockingly, didn’t get that job either.) When designing games is your career, playing games is the equivalent of taking a refresher class. Taking a certification course. Attending a seminar. More importantly, you have to do it with games you would never play in the first place.

This is why I am so thankful to have family members who play games. I can watch them play, and excel, at games I am abysmal at. I can watch them and determine why they are fun (despite not being fun to me) and then apply that later.

As I boggled over the seemingly absurd responses, I did note one thing. Several people assumed because he was QA that a. he was talking about focus testing or b. his point was invalidated because he was QA. If there ever was a time i wanted to reach through the internet and slap someone, it would be now. Never discredit an idea because it comes from an unexpected source. A shocking number of design ideas I have had come when doing something completely absurd, or talking about something not even remotely close to the issue I solve. If an artist comes up with a great gameplay idea, I am not going to discount it because it’s his job to make the level pretty. If it makes the game better, use it.

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