Never done any re-blogging before so lets try this out.
I don’t know if any of you are part of or subscribe to boardgamegeek.com, but it is a fantastic site full of anything remotely board game related. In the latest weekly email that went out, they highlighted a great article by Stuart Black on ‘How playtesting boardgames can make you a better person‘.
In it he goes through 5 very humorous but very important lessons that designers and developers need to learn when getting people to play test your games. Its all great advice and I’ve found everything he said to be true through my own very limited experience getting players play testing. I especially enjoyed lesson 5:
Lesson five: Be unreasonable. Playtest through uncertainty and doubt.
Be unreasonable about the time you will need to be ready for the next session. Halve it. Then halve it again. You will feel anxious and fearful of social embarrassment, sure! But you’ll be too busy on the task, too focused, to let it affect you. Just get the job done and don’t waste time blocking out the fear.
You will produce better work in four days than four weeks, be able to manage fear, anxiety, embarrassment, and thus get over perfectionism, which paralyses creativity.
As a bonus, of course, your game will get made four times faster! Huzzah!
So if you’re interested in learning some lessons for developing and playtesting or if you just want a funny article to read, then I recommend you have a look 🙂
Oh and here is his blog: http://www.pitchblackstudio.net/
Grimwolden Games 