Listen to the uninvested

Mark highlights an important and often overlooked detail about your audience. Playtesting is a key in developing any game or product. Your audience tells you straight away whether your product or game works as intended and is accepted as intended. Theory is important, but you can't foresee everything without testing it. Very much true. However, there is a hidden trap set up among the testers. The trap is that the more enfranchised they are, the more they know about you, your product and the more biased they are. This has the hidden danger of providing feedback that while not wrong in itself, skims over core issues that unbiased feedback would provide.

Mark tells us that a mechanic goes through many stages and the people who are behind such mechanic have a viewpoint of someone who knows how magic is produced. This means that people who didn't participate in creating that mechanic are going to have a different viewpoint. They are going to be less critical about it and this is much needed because they know that a big part of making magic successful is to bring in new players. The lesson here is that when you have a problem, bringing in people from the outside who didn't take part in that problem is going to provide you with valuable feedback. Mark cites that this is the idea of therapists and advice columnists, they aren't part of your life and can provide you with unbiased opinions.

What Mark said is very easy to apply to any aspect of life. When you are building something and seek out for opinions among friends, relatives and people who are close to you. Most of the time all those inputs are going to be biased. Precisely because those people have a close relationship with you. How many times did we hide our true opinion because we didn't want to hurt another's feelings? Now some people may be blunt, lack boundaries or are just not very much self aware. I've read about toxic relationships and bias is a huge factor. Suppose that you are in a relationship with a toxic person. Chances are that close friends and relatives to that person are going to have very biased opinions about that person, whereas people unrelated to that person are more likely to tell you the truth. There is also a huge factor called "gaslighting", but this is out of reach for this page.

Mark for instance. He loves his job and he loves magic. It'd very hard for him to criticize his own game or the company that makes the game that he loves. Not so much for people from outside the company. I could stretch this discussion beyond and talk about the Law system, politics, relationships and many more things but that's would be going too far for the purposes of this page. In addition, I'd certainly make mistakes by attempting to connect too many different topics together. Suppose that you were a catholic. You are less likely to believe that a catholic from the same group as you would lie than a person from a different religion or a catholic from a different group. That's the point that Mark tried to make about listening to the uninvested.

I can tell that this very much applies to level design and game design in general. Mark, as all other people that design and develop the cards, know the rules and are experts in the game. A card or a certain strategy may be mundane for them, while being a complex beast for the newcomer. I remember making a map for Unreal Tournament with some sections that offered challenges. For me it was easy. I was playtesting it offline and with the luxury of spawning at any point in the middle of the challenge level. I've seen players complaining that the level was hard for them. When I look back I surely missed the impact of high latency (I tested it offline, where latency is zero) and the impact of having to begin the challenge from the beginning for every misstep.

A powerful lesson from mental health is that we have to be conscious not only about ourselves, but about the perception of others as well. After all, healthy relationships are two sided. On the other hand, toxic relationships are one sided. Toxic people lack this ability to see the world through the other's eyes and I can't go in details because that's a very complex topic. I'd dare to say that when a company is making a game while not listening to the uninvested, they are pretty much adopting a toxic stance. If they are not listening to even the invested, then there is the recipe for their own demise.


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