Journal Week 6 – Player-centred design
August 28th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I think that game designers do have a duty to entertain and empathise with the player but at the same time they also have a right to exercise their better judgement as “designers” if they feel it is appropriate.
The statement “if some aspect of your vision is incompatible with entertaining the player, you should modify or eliminate it.” seems questionable. This is mainly because it is quite difficult to know for sure if an aspect of your vision is incompatible with entertaining the player.
Simply asking a player for feedback and taking on their every suggestion word for word will not necessarily give you the best result. I think ultimately the designer must sift through the play test results and/or feedback and from that decide what and how problems should be solved. This is to help the game maintain its focus and integrity as a whole rather than becoming a mish-mash of suggestions pieced together to please the player.
