I listened to some of Justin Gary's interview with Matt Fantastic on the "Think Like a Game Designer" podcast on my walk home from work today. The two were talking about how to interpret playtesting results, and Mr. Fantastic shared some advice he got from Mike Selinker. According to Fantastic, Selinker advises asking playtesters just one question, "What did you do?"
This question completely avoids problems of the designer asking leading questions. Instead, the designer gets to hear what the player experienced in their journey through the game. It's a lot simpler than some of the other formats I have used and encouraged my students to use, and it's certainly simpler than the formal playtesting process that my students are pulling from Lemarchand. It would be fascinating to run parallel tests with these different formats and see if there's something objective that can be learned from this, but who has time for yet another research project?
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