Jess Goes Interactive

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October 20, 2005

Life by the Fire Playtest Review

I enjoyed this playtest immensely. We wanted to create a game where the players had to make up their own stories based on a few pieces of inspiration, and that is somewhat of a risky proposition. If the players aren't into it, then the game is not going to work. Rick, Josh, and Justin did a fantastic job of creative storytelling and dealing with the cumbersome tech situation. It was so great when they kept up the tale-spinning between turns - that was something that we hoped would happen but didn't seem like something you could order your players to do when laying out the rules. Overall, I think the intended and emergent behavior during the game was incredibly successful.

I think the most interesting question that came up was how to handle story preparation. Josh asked for paper to jot down notes - I am torn on how to answer this request. To me, this game celebrates the tradition of oral storytelling and the passing on of tall tales and myth, and I am afraid that letting people write stuff down would lead to the reading of written stories, which is a different feeling entirely. Also, we structured the game so you could only tell one tiny story about your friend (the musical pieces were only 1.5 minutes long), and you had the sentence and picture to use as reference points. Also, I think in a setting where the players have the time to go around and around and tell lots of stories there wouldn't be as much pressure felt to make your story the best story possible - our playtesters may have felt that they would only have time to tell one story during the test and so been nervous about making sure that it was a quality one.

The question of how to handle the music previewing was interesting. All testers agreed that they didn't want to all preview at once because then they'd have to remember their stories and timing while the others went. But if each player is previewing for a couple minutes before their turn then there is the question of how to handle the dead time. Maybe this is something that having more players would solve - maybe with four or five players the continuation of the tale-spinning would be more engaging. Maybe real marshmallows would help too.

Posted by rosenblj at October 20, 2005 09:34 AM

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