PDA

View Full Version : Soul Bubbles: Expertise Bias (great article)



Cleric
14-10-2008, 08:55 AM
I'm not sure how many of the dev guys read Lost Garden on a regular basis, but I was just pointed to this great article

The Expertise Bias
This phenomenon is well understood in the game development community. Game developers also suffer from being experts. Not only do they have encyclopedic knowledge of exist game mechanics, they also have an intimate understanding of how their game is supposed to operate. Surely with such vast expertise, they would be the ideal critics.

Yet, because games are a learning activity, expert game developers often have surprising difficulty understanding how new users will react to their creation. Things they feel are incredibly important end up not mattering. Elements they dismiss as trivial annoyances end up stopping players dead in their tracks. The very fact that designer knows their game intimately makes them a poor critic.

More in linky: http://lostgarden.com/2008/07/soul-bubbles-classic-game-ill-treated.html

dislekcia
14-10-2008, 11:48 AM
If a reviewer is unaware of their own preferences and biases when reviewing a game and is unable to step past those and view the game from the perspective of a new player when required to, I'd say they're a crap reviewer.

We have a glut of incredibly poor game reviewers out there, mainly because all you need to do to be one is have a website and rant a lot.

In game design you're aware of this issue, even in a small community like ours, and you do tons of user testing to get around the problem of you making your own game too hard because you know exactly how to play it.