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October 20, 2005

Playtest Review - Life By The Fire / Chong Qing

Life by the fire

It was very exciting experience to watch my team's game played in a playtest room. It was more than just watching what we expected players to do when we were designing it. It was the moment that a game meeting players and being evolved by their creative input. I think the success of this type of game actually depends in large part on the team chemistry of the players. Designers are like preparing little clew or inspiration for them and rest of it is up to players. In terms of that, I think we had great players (Rick,Justin,Josh) for testing our game. It actually felt like having audition for actors.

The weekness of our game I noticed during playtest was that it felt a little bit too long for the player to prepare their turn. Though, the time gave players to think about right timing for up and down of their narration according to that of the selected music. But actually I want to see players starting narration right away after checking the written card and drawing. Players can improvise their narration when the music changes its tone. I think it can be a pleasant challenge for the players while speeding up the pace of the game. I think it's enough to listen for like 10 sec. to get the feeling of the ambience music and it will be better even share the first 10 sec. of the music together with co-players. I want to revise the rule to have music always going on(by making the i-pod play random track automatically) and when the music goes to next track, the next player immediately starts their story. To make it possible I think players need to have their cards already chosen and think about next story while listening to previous player's story. Unexpected music will make even more fun situation that the next player might need to change their ideas prepared during previous turn.

What I like most about our game is the music part. I think music is a really great inspiration for players. I often notice that same narration with different music will make a totally different experience.

Chong Qing

I think using movie footages for narration is a really great idea. Though, I couldn't really get how the the answers for the questions change the movie. I noticed that choosing between walk and ride actually changes the editing faster paced but not that obviously. I tried to use the words from questions(east/west, work/ridem, man/machine) to make a story. I felt like I would prefer to have more options(words) to come up with a story. I'm kind of confused because I thought it's trying to make a narration watching the film but it was not clear when we should start talking because the movie kept going on and I found players kept watching it rather than saying something about it. I think we were more like trying to understand how the answer s we chose affected the film and we mainly talked about that rather than trying to make a story out of that. The choice of footage was I think really ambient. It was more about the background than specific characters. So I assumed that this is kind of first person view of storytelling. It was interesting to find myself trying to use some visual elements like color, shape, movement used as cinematic language to come up with my own story out of them. It was totally opposite experience of having a story and trying to make a film from it.

I think this game has lots of potential to be a great interactive movie. I think if designers want players to make stories out of it, it needs to be clear when to let players have moment to say something or input their creativity. Also I thought showing the film is sometimes giving too much information that actually limits imagination from the players and let them a little bit passive. But I think footages chosen was kind of ambient with lots of backgrounds rather than specific with certain characters or subjects I guessed that's to give more space to players come up with their own ideas.

Playtest Room Experience
As a player knowing that designers are watching myself or even recording and also the fact that we don't have much time for playing, I found co-players to be more analytic in playing the game. Actually because the nature of this types of game is based on performance, I think having audience(especially creators) for the performance is great motivation for their envolvement in the game. AlsoI think having a room like that really helps to have more focus on the game itself than playing in a space where other games are played together.

Posted by doox at October 20, 2005 02:30 PM

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