作为游戏设计师，你可能会在测试中投入更多时间。但一直玩游戏究竟有什么趣味呢？

虽然测试游戏可能很好玩（如果你不喜欢玩游戏，为什么要当设计师？），但也不要忘了你这是在工作，所以要谨慎对靠谱，确保自己有效测试游戏。现在我将讨论一些有助于游戏测试的建议。

测试理论

在进入正题之前，我想先分享一些自己的游戏设计理念。

作为设计师，你应该是游戏空间的探索家。你希望探索一些很棒的东西，但如果你没有先四处查看一番，是很难获得什么成果的。你可能是一个系统大师，但你无法在没有实验证据的前提下，真正了解自己的游戏有多好。为什么？因为游戏更关注的是人（以及心理）而非系统，虽然系统通常都很清晰明了，但人的心思却总是难以捉摸。

测试是让你了解自己游戏本质的主要工具，它相当于天文学家的望远镜或生物学家的显微镜。你得通过测试才能找到当前设计的弱点，并根据这一信息进行迭代和优化游戏。

microscope(from nothingscaredgames)

这实际上意味着什么？你应该将每次测试视为获得宝贵数据的机会。正如科学家做实验一样，你在测试时要有一个目标和假设。这并不需要特别明确，但你至少得有一个关于自己想探索游戏哪个区域的大致想法，至少要大概清楚游戏的运行表现。有时候，游戏测试会得到一些你从未预料到的结果，但只要你没有在测试上浪费时间，总会通过自己的目标获得一些经验。

测试阶段

在游戏开发过程中，你将经历多个测试阶段。你早期的测试通常可以得出一些将大幅更改游戏的数据。你应该有所准备，预留一些大型、结构性的更改空间，但随着时间的发展，你的目标将更为集中于调整特定的元素。以下是你在测试过程中将经历的几个阶段，以及你在这些步骤中应该追求的目标。

早期探索——在你早期测试中，你应该具有一个极为粗糙的原型，你的目标也很简单：这款游戏是否值得你投入时间？理想情况下，你将把游戏展示给那些心胸宽广的玩家，他们可以看到游戏过去的丑陋原型，以及同游戏核心理念完全不相称的元素。如果你的测试者在探索游戏理念的过程中充满乐趣，并且乐于提供关于如何玩核心机制的建议，那就是一个好兆头，说明游戏值得深入探索。

结构上的不确定性——当你决定专注投入制作一款游戏时，就该开始想想游戏的基本结构。你将有一些关于游戏如何运行，一些机制如何组成游戏核心的概念，但其他元素仍然有待讨论（要经过测试才能敲定）。

你的游戏应该使用卡片还是骰子？玩家是否应该在几个轮回之间进行切换？游戏结束的触发器是什么？在这个阶段，你要制定这些根本性的决策。用你的测试反馈来回答这些问题，保持游戏通俗、直观、节奏合理 ，当然这一切都要围绕游戏核心而运转。

易用性和规则——让我们面对现实吧：多数人都是在首次接触时会频频光顾游戏，第二、第三或之后几次就未必如此了。虽然我们很有必要隐藏一些让玩家探索的元素来维持游戏寿命，但更重要的是要让玩家在首次玩游戏时就易于理解和上手。如果玩家第一次就不明所以，他们就永远不会有兴趣深入探索游戏了。

在你整个测试过程中，要与此前从未玩过该游戏的新玩家进行测试，确保他们可以快速上手。另外还要写下规则，让玩家在无需你指导的情况下自己通过手写的规则了解游戏。不过你也可以适当解释规则，以便玩家快速了解游戏趣味，但多数时间你一定要坐在后面，观看他们如何以你的规则玩游戏，因为这正是多数人的游戏体验。迭代优化可以确保游戏体验顺畅。

平衡——另一方面，要找到一两个测试游戏的核心团队，让他们多次试玩游戏以确保游戏的平衡性经得起时间考验。至少，你得确保真的有人想玩游戏。如果你找不到愿意深入探索游戏策略的测试者，那么这款游戏可能就没有生存的空间了。

总结

测试是游戏设计的基本环节，所以我才不惜大费篇幅阐述其重要性。我将在下一篇文章中讨论你应该找谁测试游戏，搜集哪些数据，如何从测试者获取反馈。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Board Game Design Basics: Playtest! Part I

As a game designer, you’ll probably spend more of your time playtesting than doing anything else. Awesome! What’s more fun than playing games all the time?

While playtesting your game should be fun (why would you want to be a designer if you didn’t enjoy playing games?), you can’t forget that you’re working, so it’s important to take it seriously and make sure you’re doing it efficiently. Today I want to discuss some ideas that will help you do just that.

A Shot of Theory!

Before I get to the nitty-gritty, I want to share some of my philosophy on game design.

As a designer, you are an explorer of game space. You hope to discover something awesome, but it’s very unlikely you’ll just discover something awesome immediately without looking around a little first. You may be a master of systems, but you can never really know how good your game is without empirical evidence. Why? Because games are more about people (and psychology) than systems, and while systems are often clean and understandable, people never are.

Just like a microscope lets a biologist see life in a fundamentally different way, playtesting lets a game designer see his or her game in a fundamentally different way. Image from Minnesota Public Radio.

Playtesting is your main tool to get an understanding of the true nature of your game, similar to an astronomer’s telescope or biologist’s microscope. You will playtest to identify weaknesses in your current design and will use that information to iteratively improve your game, making it as good as it can be.

What does this mean practically? You should treat every playtest as an opportunity to acquire precious data. And just like a scientist performing an experiment, you should always have a goal and a hypothesis going into a playtest. It doesn’t have to be completely explicit, but you should at least have a vague idea of which part of your game you want to explore, and should have at least a rough idea of how the game will perform. Sometimes, playtests will offer unexpected results about parts of your game you didn’t see coming, but if you didn’t waste your time with a playtest, you will learn something about your goal.

Stages for the Ages!

As your game develops over time, you’ll go through several stages of playtesting. Your early playtests will often offer data that suggest sweeping changes. You should always be open to making big, structural changes, but as time goes on your goals should become more focused as you fine tune specific components. Below are some of the stages you’ll find yourself in and the goals you should be shooting for when you’re in those stages.

Early Exploration – In your very earliest playtests, you should have a very rough prototype, and your goal should be simple: is this game worth spending your precious time working on? Ideally, you will present your game to open minded gamers who can see past the ugly physical prototype and the completely unbalanced components to the core idea you have in mind. If your playtesters have fun exploring the concept and are excited to offer suggestions about how to play with the core mechanic, it’s a good sign that the game is worth further exploration.

Structural Uncertainty – Once you’ve decided to focus your attention on a game, it’s time to figure out the game’s basic structure. You’ll have some concept of how the game will work, and some mechanic will form the game’s core, but everything else should be up for debate (to be settled by data from playtesting). Should your game use cards or dice? Should players switch who plays first between rounds? What should trigger the game’s ending? During this stage, you’ll be making these fundamental decisions. Use your playtesting feedback to answer these questions, keeping the game accessible, intuitive, moving at a good pace, and of course centered on the game’s core.

Accessibility and Rules – Let’s face it: games get played way more for the first time than for the second, third, or any other time. While it’s very important to make your game have longevity with strategies that evolve and hidden synergies for players to explore, it’s much more important that you make it easy to learn and understand for the first play. If players can’t figure it out the first time, they’ll never discover all of the awesome depth you put into it!

Throughout your playtesting, make sure you test with new players who haven’t played the game before to make sure they can pick it up quickly and easily. It’s also vital to write the rules and to get players to learn the game with the written rules without your help. There are times when it’s appropriate for you to explain the rules so players can immediately have fun, but you absolutely must sit back and watch people struggle through your rules because this is how most people will experience the game. You need to make sure that experience is as smooth as possible, and iterative improvements are necessary to achieve that.

Balance – On the other hand, it’s important to find a core group or two of playtesters to play the game multiple times to make sure the game is well balanced and that it stands the test of time. And at the very least, you need to make sure that someone actually wants to play the game a bunch. If you can’t find playtesters that will delve into the depths of your game’s strategies, it might not have the legs it needs to survive.

Just the Beginning

Playtesting is fundamental to game design, so it’s no surprise I have a lot more to say about it. Next time I’ll discuss who you should playtest with, what kind of data you should be collecting, and how you should take feedback from playtesters.

But that will have to wait for now. In the mean time, get out there and playtest your game! Just make sure you have a set goal in mind before you do.（source：nothingsacredgames）