their time tracking down bugs in the code, but they also provide vital feedback about
how the game is playing, whether it is too easy or too difficult, if the controls are intu-
itive or obtuse, and so forth. On fully funded projects, these testers are typically paid
employees who spend a full workweek playtesting your game and providing bug
reports. Typically these testers love computer games and play a lot of them, both as
part of their job and in their off time. Therefore, their opinions of how the gameplay
needs to change are understandably skewed to the perspective of the hard-core gamer.
Also, since these testers work on the project for such a long time, they can become
used to certain inherent problems with the game, and may stop complaining about
those shortcomings.
The third class of playtesters are first-impression testers. Will Wright, in his inter-
view in Chapter 22, refers to these people as “kleenex testers” since at Maxis they are
used once and then never used again. Wright used them extensively to test the GUI for
The Sims. These are people who are neither on the development team nor testing the
game full time. Instead, these testers play the game for a short period of time and pro-
vide their gut reaction as to how well the game plays. This may be for a few hours or a
few days. These first-impression testers are useful because they see the game as
first-time players would. They can provide essential feedback about unintuitive con-
trols, unclear presentation of information, or unfairly difficult portions of the game. It is
essential when observing these first-impression testers that the developers say noth-
ing to coach them or influence how they play. Furthermore, the important point about
first-impression testers is that you must keep bringing in new ones, since a human can
only truly have a first impression of a game once; after that they are “tainted” by their
knowledge of how the game works. Especially toward the end of the project, when the
development team is extremely familiar with the game and the traditional playtesters
have played it for a thousand hours or more, first-impression testers can be essential to
making sure the game is not too hard to learn to play.
486 Chapter 25: Playtesting
Many first-impression
testers were used to
refine and perfect the
interface inThe Sims.