The Curse of the Fanboy!

On Rock Scissors Blog, White Wolf writer and now Gamma World developer Bruce Baugh talks about playtesting.

Likewise, if the design goals include doing something new, then you have to be prepared to tell some existing customers that they won't necessarily be interested in this new thing. This is a very tricky matter in gaming, where a small fraction of the audience is very loud, and of that fraction a significant number of people are willing to carry on with obsessions that border on (if they do not cross into) the realm of the genuinely clinically disfunctional as well as socially disruptive. When you put out a new game and run into someone who lies about its contents in an effort to strike back at the company for something done fifteen years ago by someone who isn't at the company and may not be in the field at all anymore, you are not dealing with an essentially healthy audience. And I know that every developer and most authors reading this are nodding along, thinking of multiple examples of the sort of person I just described.

If you the reader have never encountered that sort of obsession, count yourself lucky. It is in any event part of the social context of presenting new games. A vocal portion of our audience wants nothing but more of the same, whether their preferred "same" is 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS as of 1990, White Wolf as of 1994, or whatever. And if they are allowed significant input input into the playtest process, they will bully down anyone who wants anything else, and if they don't get what they want, they will go off and malign the developer and publisher. It is better to act as gatekeeper and deny them entrance at the beginning, and let the preferences of existing customers be represented by people who are prepared to be more temperate about it.

You may think Bruce is being harsh, but I have to agree with him. I'm not a game developer or writer, but I can name some of the people he's referring to. I suspect one of those individuals is a former denizen of the Pyramid Online message boards, who eventually become one of only three people to be banned from that venue. Of course they're a minority, but they're a loud and annoying minority. I find people who's entire meaning for existence is defined by a roleplaying game line, comic book series, movie franchise or even a rock band to be profoundly scary people.

Of course, there are some egotistic and socially dysfunctional prima donnas amongs game writers as well, including another of the three people to be banned from Pyramid. Not that I'm going to name any names. And I have to say the all game writers I've actually met have been perfectly charming people.