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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9463708" data-attributes="member: 71699">I'm drawing a distinction between the qualities of a mechanism as a mechanism, and its qualities in performing a job users care about. The former includes explaining itself well to players, easy to implement at the table, consistency of effect, well balanced; and yet even with all those qualities in place, it might still be rejected because it's not giving rise to the kind of conversation the designers intend. Designers ordinarily design more than they release, and some of what stays on the cutting room floor are perfectly good mechanics... just not for this game.It seems you're thinking of editing as largely a matter of arrangement, while I have in mind artistic choices made to achieve a creative intent. The best way to judge the aesthetic impact a recipe has is by testing (tasting) it, and after doing so one might decide to leave it out of the book. Not because it fails as a recipe, but because the chef has a creative intent for this book and it doesn't fit their present intent. (The distinction here is just the same that I drew for mechanisms above.) Creative work for publication is typically over-productive, and it is that power over what stays in and what us cut that seems to me editorial.There is justice in your point about clarity of terms. One way I am looking at playtesting is in relation to the question - what is it like to conceive a rule. How does that happen? A notion I've considered is something that could be labelled "prospective play", where the designer has not seen their rule elsewhere nor yet played it, but they're able to imagine how it would be played. They turn it over in their mind and think about how it could go.Playtesting then forms an extension of prospective play. The aim is to see what effect the rules will most likely have on conversations. Taking rehearsal as an activity done to secure that a performance goes as planned, I had in mind a notion of rehearsing on behalf of. One might discover that the wording of a prompt tended to produce conversation Q when one wanted more to see R. There's a strong connection between playtesting and a game text's performance at tables, which led me to contemplate it as a "prospective rehearsal". Ultimately here I agree with you that "rehearsing" isn't ideal due to its strong meaning of a performer practicing to themselves deliver a prescribed performance. The important point is to understand playtesting as a bridge between designer and players, that enables designer to procure (but not guarantee!) that players perform along lines they intend, where rehearsals by said players are going to be ruled out.I don't see this as an exercise of editorial power. One result of playtesting is that a rule is serving designer's creative intent, but with glitches of some sort. One fixes that rule, but retains it. I am saying that noticing a rule (or any game element for that matter) fails to meet one's creative intent and cutting it is editorial. In this example, had Baker noticed that filling in dots distracted players from the play he desired and cut the rule altogether, that would exercise his editorial power. One could just call that designing, but then I think one could use that term at a high level to capture a range of disparate activities, some of which are editorial.That doesn't seem right. Theme and rising action are built into (part of the intent of) the rules of some games, and communicated by them. Maybe not everyone notices that, but it's there to see. This comes back to prospective play. When I read a game text, I imagine the play - that gives me a taste of the experience it will offer at the table. I think such qualities are in some sense a property of the cues, else how does one explain one set of cues more likely having those consequences than another.</blockquote>

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