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Experience-First Approach: As a Playtester

Well, I let Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday go by without writing a blog post, and I have very dire doubts about my ability to get any writing done tomorrow.  Now, yes, I did knock out three posts last week, but I still don’t want to let a whole new week go by without keeping this up.  So let’s see if I can knock a meaningful post in less than an hour, and while typing on my phone.

Today I want to talk a little bit more about something that I’ve touched on before re:gaming and which I’ve adapted to be a big part of my philosophy on writing (specifically playwriting and how I teach it): the Experience-first approach.  I increasingly believe that talking about mechanics or theme (or characters or plot points) is a flawed lens through which to view the subject, as those are parts of a piece of a composition, not a view of the whole piece of art or its impact.  It seems trite but: talk about the feelings or journey or atmosphere that you wish to evoke for your audience, and then let every question of its component parts be: How does that serve the experience I’m trying to give the player/audience/actor/listener/viewer? Now, elements can indirectly serve the experience, this isn’t a reason to dumb down or flatten your design.  But for the creation of art and particularly especially for artists working with collaborators, an agreed-upon intended experience is an easier and fairer arbiter of what works and doesn’t work for a project.

So this week I tried the Experience-first approach from a new direction: I gave my playtest results in the form of Experience-first feedback.  It freed me immediately from the usual pitfall of “Well I would do it this way”, and was the playtester’s equivalent of when a couples counselor (in movies anyway) tells everyone to stick to I statements.  It also steered me towards what I suspect were much more useful, higher-level aspects of the playtest: the pace of the game, and overall strategy, and of the challenges and successes unique to different stages of the play.  It also helped to identify where I had either misinterpreted the rules, correctly read incorrect rules, and where there was room to talk bluntly about challenges and therefore freely about what led to them.

Long story short: I think I provided really good, productive feedback! And I truly believe that what helped me focus my feedback, and a useful path for me to return to whenever I/we meandered, was framing what I said as the experience I had.  I’m going to keep trying and refining this approach, both as a creator and as a consumer, and I’ll certainly write more about this.  I mean, if the world doesn’t end.  Who knows.  See you next week!

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