(no subject)

[benlehman]

Most painful thing I've had to write in a while

Why? Because I spend a lot of time and emotionally energy in said isolated circles.

Ahw, fuck it all.

Comments

[jhkimrpg.livejournal.com]

Er, hold on. You jumped from "listening to people" to "tell me how to do it".

You can listen to people without compromising your art or having them tell you how to do it. Particularly in game design, I think it's useful to have feedback, rather than creating your "art" in isolation and not caring how actual people play it. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's good to have a variety of feedback. You're not going to be able to please everyone with your design, but I still think it's useful to listen to different groups of people. For example, I think feedback from a variety of religious backgrounds was useful for the Dogs design (i.e. Mormon, non-Mormon, and atheist).

Half of Vincent Baker's original group of playtesters were women. I'm going to presume for a moment that he actually did listen to them and took their feedback into account for the game. Are you saying this was a bad thing? Do you think that he shouldn't have listened to those women and instead "stuck to his art" -- which meant ignoring people who read and played his game?

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

John -- you're doing a thing here which is a bad thing. You are taking my words in one post and twisting them into a deformed monstrosity by ignoring the context of the posts before it.

Stop.

yrs--
--Ben

[jhkimrpg.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll speak purely in my own words here.

I think that designing by mass commitee is bad. However, hearing a variety of voices in design is good. This means especially listening to people who aren't exactly like you. Game design is not like a painting or a novel. It has less personal expression of the author (though it is expression), and more a tool for others to use for their personal expression.

Demographically, the typical traditional role-player is a white male American who started playing RPGs in his teens but is now older. I think it's good to listen to people from other perspectives -- people who haven't been role-playing for years, people who aren't male, people who aren't American, and so forth. That doesn't mean asking them to tell you what your game should be. It means having them read and hopefully try out your ideas and listen to what they think.

It might make me uncomfortable at times to hear people's opinions, but I think that's a good thing.