Avoiding the “What if?” Rabbit Hole

When it comes to playtesting feedback, my two least favorite words are, “what” and “if.”  They are usually grouped together and come out sounding something like: 

“What if you could respond to someone’s action?”

“What if you could draw two cards a turn and discard one?”

“What if instead of wizards, the players were more like miniature dinosaurs who specialized in complex dance movements?”

What if you put a giant spoon in the middle of the city?

While it can occasionally be acceptable to offer your ideas to another designer, I’ve seen a few groups where the primary mode of giving feedback is just offering a laundry list of suggestions. I’m here to tell you that this is objectively bad feedback, and here’s why:

You Are Not the Author

I often compare game design groups to writing groups.

Imagine you’re in a writing workshop. You’ve just shared a short story you’re really excited about with a group of your peers. The first thing someone does when you ask for feedback is take the story out of your hands, cross out a few paragraphs, rewrite them, and hand the pages back to you in triumph.

Tell ‘em, Stephanie.

Offering unsolicited advice on how to “fix” someone’s game is downright insulting. It communicates to the designer that their work isn’t important, and it makes the playtest session about you and your brilliance, not about the project in front of you. It doesn’t take into account the person’s design goals, their unique personality, or the subjective process of creation.

Give designers room to breathe, create their own works, play in their own worlds, and put their own fingerprints on their games.

You Aren’t Giving Feedback On the Game You Played

Feedback is communicating how you experienced the game you just played.  What were your highs and lows, where did you have fun, where were you frustrated, etc. It’s about how you interacted with the game in front of you. Lots of times, designers even have specific questions they want answered.

Unfortunately, when you start off your feedback with suggestions or fixes, the discussion around the table inevitably becomes about your suggestion, and not about the game everyone just experienced. Once someone dives down the “what if” rabbit hole, everyone else at the table tends to give their feedback through the lens of how they think that suggestion would work, without ever having actually experienced it. The discussion derails, and the designer leaves with plenty of notes about this new idea, but not much on the game they actually brought to the design meeting.  This is robbing the designer of their playtesting time and is unacceptable.

Suggestions Often Fail to Communicate the Issues

There are no answers this way - only more questions.

Consider the suggestions made above - what statements about the game are they making?

”What if you could respond to someone’s action,” could mean that the playtester thought there was too much downtime on other people’s turns, it could mean they didn’t feel like there was enough agency in the game, it could mean they wanted the opportunity to feel clever by luring someone into an off-turn trap, it could mean they didn’t see enough interaction in the game, etc.

What if we could draw two cards and discard one, could mean they didn’t feel like they had enough choices in the game, it could mean they just like drawing cards (me too!), it could mean they didn’t think there was enough card variety, or that some cards were way more powerful than others, etc.

What if instead of wizards, the players were more like miniature dinosaurs who specialized in complex dance movements, could mean they thought your theme was basic, or that they’re hungry for something that seems different, or that they didn’t understand how the theme and mechanics meshed, etc.

In other words, when someone gives a suggestion, it can be very difficult to pinpoint the issue they’re even trying to address.

As a playtester, it’s far more valuable to give your feedback in terms of the specific issues you had with the game you played, rather than leaving a designer to guess. Sometimes I’ve even directly asked other playtesters, “what problem with the game are you looking to address with this suggestion,” and just as often as not they won’t really know.

So the next time you have a “fix” for someone’s game, perhaps ask yourself why you think that fix is necessary, and then report on those feelings during your feedback. This would leave the designer with room to address your concerns, but also fix those issues with their own solutions.

Exceptions

Look, there’s nothing wrong with offering a suggestion if the designer is cool with it. Some designers welcome suggestions and will even solicit brainstorming sessions. If that’s the vibe for the group, then by all means go with it. What I’m getting at here is 1) make sure a designer is cool with suggestions before you just start throwing them out, and 2) even if they are, it’s still going to be better to talk about the experience of the game first, and then at the end of feedback, check in to see if suggestions are on the table.