User:Thijshijsijsjss/Human Parser/About Playtesting

Playtesting as an Artistic Practise

And yes, from here on out I’ll be talking about videogames as an art form. What I mean by this is that games, digital and otherwise, transmit ideas and culture. (Anna Anthropy, 2012)

I like this statement from Anna Anthropy's book The Rise of Videogame Zinesters for its simplistic power. Games are (or can be) many things, that ultimately all fall under the transmission of experiences. Like with any other art form, this invites games to be the subject conversation and mutual reflection. While the position of games as an art is increasingly explored and accepted, it is unfortunate that many aspects of their creation are seldom considered as artistic practise. Unfortunate, not because these activities would need artistic justification, but unfortunate, because we might limit ourselves in a contrained way of thinking about these practises. By considering them artistic, and by taking inspiration from other fields of art, we might learn valuable insights to open up our design process.

One such aspect of creation is playtesting. Though often lauded as the backbone of game creation, I've seen it rarely be considered artistic -- as a practise of transmitting ideas and culture. It is often data-driven and rigid. My own experiences with playtesting (both as host and as participant) are just that: either playing by yourself, filling out forms and writing down bugs, or a vague self-indulgent activity so say 'yes, this game has been playtested'. In either case, these tests felt like a skewed dynamic between creator-observer and empty-shell-participant. Not much interpersonal transmission was happening here.

And while such tests can definitely have their merit, I wonder if this does not provide opportunity for something different. Something more personal. Something that is more promising of what games can be as a medium. Can playtests not be a moment of transmission?

Text-Adventures as a Lens for Life (and Vice Versa)

My mind constantly folds in on itself -- I feel like I'm thinking the same 10 thoughts over an over again, and living the same cycle of revelation > living > decline > stagnation every two weeks or so. Much like a text-adventure, life present a player with constant options. But unlike a text-adventure, where these options are orderly laid out in front of you and tailored to create an enjoyable experience, I have difficulty managing the overhead of constant optionality. At least, by myself. It is often only through contact with others that I can navigate (or even detect and acknowledge) the options in front of me. From my peers, I hear about similar difficulty. It seems as if these moments of contact are increasingly hard to find.

This is what I hope this project's playtesting sessions can be: (text-adventure) games and life as lenses for each other, navigating them through conversation. Now this is an ambitious hope. Yet, it is akin to much of my experiences in XPUB so far. Participating in sessions varried in methods and outcome has been very valuable, and it's something I'm keen on continuing.

Lessons from a Feminist Server Manifesto

I have named these playtesting sessions 'Forked Dialogues', alluding to the branching nature of non-linear experiences (both in games, and in life). It must be clear by now, that I use the term 'playtesting' loosely. I see these sessions as an opportunity for many things. A short list of examples include:

• have thematic conversations, and have the game be a tool in such conversations
• discuss and expose hidden labour behind video game creation
• break hierarchical standards of creator / player dynamics
• allow for more freeform activities to inform the design process

Hopefully, this all lead to more inclusive design and a more worthwile process.

I want to emphasize that these ideas are hardly original. In many other fields, they are widely applied. In particular, I'm reminded of Constant's Feminist Server Manifesto (Constant, 2013), detailing the practise surrounding a potential feminist community server.

A feminist server...

• Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices
• Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist
• Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns
• Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
• Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps
• Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies
• Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity

These are half of the points from the manifesto. Considering my own plans for Forked Dialogues, I'm left to wonder: what if we replace 'A feminist server' by 'A feminist playtesting session'?

References

• Anthropy, A (2012), Rise of Videogame Zinesters. New York, NY, USA: Seven Stories Press
• Constant (2013), A Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01. Available at https://areyoubeingserved.constantvzw.org/Summit_afterlife.xhtml (Accessed 13 December 2024).