Understanding players’ understanding is the core challenge of game design. Every playtest is an opportunity to see your creation through fresh eyes, and throughout this quarter, I’ve deepened my understanding and perspective on just how crucial this is. It’s about creating enough complexity that they don’t feel bored, but not enough that they feel overwhelmed. It’s about making sure they have enough choice to feel like they have agency, but not so much that they have no idea what to do. Every project helped reinforce these lessons, especially my parser fiction ESCAPE.
Initially, I was working on a branching narrative about escaping a simulation, complete with robots and complex puzzles about controlling mechanical bodies. But when I switched to creating a parser fiction, I was forced to really examine what mattered to my core themes about identity and sense of reality. The freedom that parser fiction gave players, and the complexity of creating the parser fiction that comes with that freedom, meant I had to distill everything down to its essence. I realized I was hanging onto plot points and mechanics that weren’t serving the message. They were adding perhaps interesting elements to the world and story, but as a game, it was just making it too complicated. Instead of elaborate puzzles about controlling robots, the game became about finding a personal, sentimental object that could trigger memories and help players find their way back to reality. I believe that this simpler approach actually created more meaningful player experiences than the grander, more sci-fi adventure, letting them explore and discover at their own pace.
I saw something similar happen with Sunnyvale CA, but in the opposite direction. Our tiny playable prototype was typically rough – just notecards and a grid with some whiteboard marker lines. But the playtest went phenomenally. Players really got into their roles as NIMBYs, saying things like “You’re doing the community a great service” when forcing others to deal with affordable housing projects. They engaged with the game’s themes through fun, natural roleplay. Seeing that we had the fellowship and core mechanics nailed down, we sought to make the game model the real world system better, which involved introducing a bigger board, more complex mechanics, and polished components. We lost the fellowship from the initial playtest. The increased complexity seemed to get in the way of the social interactions that made the game special. Players stopped roleplaying and started quietly focusing more on strategy, which wasn’t what made the game engaging in the first place.
Right now, as I finish up working on, Enshittification, and I’m facing similar challenges about understanding what players need versus what I think would be cool to add. I’ve been really excited about adding a social feed so players can see the direct effects of their actions on users. But what many playtesters are actually struggling with is understanding their progression and goals. It’s reminiscent to a challenge I faced last quarter, where I was really attached to certain mechanics that consistently confused our playtesters. For the longest time, I tried to deny there was an issue, instead attempting to fix things through better rules explanations. It wasn’t until I finally accepted that some features weren’t crucial that we could move forward.
This connects to one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned: the importance of keeping things low-fidelity longer to test assumptions. When you start with rough prototypes, you have the freedom to make bigger changes and find the best possible direction. Once you move to higher-fidelity prototypes, you can get stuck optimizing within a limited space instead of being able to make fundamental improvements. It’s like the difference between exploring a whole mountain range to find the highest peak versus just trying to climb higher on whatever mountain you happen to be on.
Sometimes this means letting go of features you’re personally excited about, which is always hard. With Enshittification, I keep having to remind myself that while the social feed is more fun to implement and might make the game more interesting for players who already understand it, it won’t help new players grasp the core mechanics. And ultimately, that initial understanding is more important than adding cool features that only benefit players who already get it.
The biggest challenge in game design, and really design in general, is that it’s really hard to see through players’/users’ eyes, especially when you’re deep in a project. People have been complimenting the interface of Enshittification which I have worried looks a little lazy or boring, just because I’ve been staring at it for so long. I hope I’m myself slowly getting better at understanding players’ understanding – at recognizing when something needs more complexity or less complexity, when something needs more clarity or more room for discovery. Each playtest teaches me something new about how players interpret and interact with game systems.
Looking forward, I want to keep practicing this skill of seeing through others’ eyes. It’s not just about making games that are fun or engaging – it’s about truly understanding how players understand and experience the systems we create. This means staying flexible with early prototypes, being willing to let go of features that aren’t serving the core experience, and always staying focused on how players actually interact with the game rather than how I imagine they will. These lessons, taught through both lectures and my own experiences, about understanding players’ understanding have been the most valuable part of this class, and they’re something I’ll carry forward in all my future design work.
