I'm working on a plan to deal with all the feedback on my Philip K. Dick game (Left Coast)

One of the things I only recently realised about creative projects is how much crap builds up around me while I'm writing them: it's like I excrete pages of notes and scraps of paper filled with random ideas and shower-inspired insights.

My first great leap forward in writing organisation was to put all of these into a folder marked "Next Draft". My second great leap forward was to actually look at them.

It's that process of looking at the notes that helps me make decisions about what's in and what's out: what insights have stuck and still ring true, and which insights have helped me move on to a deeper understanding of the project but are no longer relevant.

As I mentioned in my previous post (How would you process feedback on something you've written), I'm working out how to apply all the feedback I've received for Left Coast, my game about science fiction authors. I put all of these notes onto a one-page mind-map, so that I can get a sense of how much there is to do, and what themes have emerged from the feedback. The mind-maps for Left Coast is filled with people's observations from playing and reading the game, and it's also got a section called 'Big Questions' - which is about challenging myself to go deeper into the feedback and test my assumptions.

The other thing I'm doing (and have been doing for a while now, to great effect) is I write a 'Future Vision' of what I want this stage of the project to end up like. This gives me a concrete end-point, which in turn forces me to stop and publish it rather than constantly rework it. The Future Vision for Left Coast looks like this:

I’ve published a massively simplified version of Left Coast that contains radically culled procedures for play and which clearly explains who does what (and when). This version is designed and written to inspire people to play, so it contains plenty of example NPCs, story seeds (and anything else I think is necessary for this ‘half-done’ draft). 

The game is laid out cleanly (with my Times New Roman layout). It’s divided into five sections: i) brief intro to game and some playtesting advice, ii) an ‘inspirational’ essay, iii) how to create PCs and setting, iv) how to play, and v) an afterword.

What I do this is write out where I am right now, and (vitally) I keep adjusting this 'Present Reality' every time I make changes. The Present reality for Left Coast, as at 10 October 2011, looks like this:

I’ve decided to write this draft for ‘my’ group initially, rather than for wider publication: my suspicion is I’ll get more done this way. 

Having added all the feedback to my mind-map, I now need to think about what needs to be done and prioritise it. Now that I’ve saved the rules summary onto my desktop, I suspect the simplest way forward is to run through my Rules Summary two or three times, adjusting it based on the mind-map of feedback, my marked up rules summary, and my marked up rules - and then review where I am. 

So, I need to start that process by putting the mind-map right in front of me and tackling point after point. 

… Then I can comb through the expanded rules for material for the ‘essay’ (which may be unnecessary for this ‘me’ draft). 

I should probably organize a one-afternoon long playtest with Simon, hopefully Mike, and Sophie for November. 

I need to ID all the ‘vibey’ stuff in the main rules, strip it out of the procedures and put it into an ‘essay’ about how you play Left Coast and why you’d want to play it. I’ll put the rules summary stuff after that. I also think that having four sample characters, each with four or five hooky options for NPCs in their ratings will be a good thing to do. 

It needs a table of contents, and I need to look at the Guide to Writing Free RPGs for some advice.

(This process of having a Future Vision and adjusting your Present Reality comes from a fascinating book called How to Make Your Dreams Come True by Mark Foster. It's a free download, and worth a read.)

How would you process feedback on something you've written?

I'm writing a game called Left Coast, where you play science-fiction authors teetering on the brink of sanity. In July, I pulled together my notes and created a draft that I thought would be fine for others to play. Since then, I've received feedback from:

- Wayne, who's read it
- Simon, who's read it
- various commentators on Story Games
- Mike, who I playtested it with
- various commentators on the Forge
- Malcolm, Gregor and Per, who have playtested it without me

That's a lot of feedback (which has all been stored in my 'Left Coast - Next Draft' folder). Now I have to pull it all together and make some decisions about what it all means.

First, I'm reading through it all and looking for any feedback that almost everyone seems to be giving me. Usually I get overwhelmed by the thought of doing that, so I'm converting the feedback into a mind-map, so I can group similar comments and observations together.

It's already obvious, just from working through feedback from the first five people, that the game is still too complicated: I've layered on so many procedures, and 'mandatory elements' and 'things to keep in mind', that people are having to spend all their time trying to figure out how to make the game work (rather than finding out whether the game actually does work).

So I have two next steps: simplify as much of the procedures as I can, while digging deeper to see if there's anything fundamental that's lying underneath the feedback: stuff that's non-obvious but is actually the 'real' work that needs to be done.

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What about you? How do you process all the information when you get lots of feedback about one of your projects?

The deep dive

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving Jenni some feedback on her most recent novel. Towards the end of our session, I tried a technique that I'd heard about in a governance seminar last month; it's called a 'deep dive', and all it involves is taking the time to dig into one particular issue, asking questions about and exploring its various facets (without having a particular agenda or wanting a particular outcome), and seeing what emerges.

For Jenni's novel, I asked her about the various ways she - as the author - had used 'anger' in her novel. It's a bit of a recurring motif, and it's something I have a particular interest in; The Limit is all about anger, and in fact writing The Limit taught me a lot about dealing with anger in my own life. That one question revealed a lot of things to me that weren't clear from my reading: in particular, the use of anger as one of the stages of grieving, and the repressed anger of the novel's love interest.

Pretty much all of the stuff that came out of our wandering conversation during this deep dive, I was able to think of ways to apply to the rewrite of the novel, hopefully strengthening the elements that Jenni already has in there.

It's not a technique that I'd do very often; maybe once every couple of script meetings; but I think the deep dive has a real place at the writers' table.

RPG: Playtesting so I want to keep writing

Hey, it's 10/10/10 today. That's worth commenting on!

Over the last couple of months, during spare-time, I've been writing little bits of Left Coast (my game about slightly crazy science fiction authors in 1960s California). The writing's been going fine, but I've also been thinking about what the next stage of playtesting will be.

Playtesting, for those who don't know it, is like redrafting a script or an essay but for games. You write a draft of a game, play it with some friends, and then figure out whether the game created the sort of fun you wanted it to create. If not, change some rules, change your approach, strip the game back and start again until you get it delivering the consistent fun you want.

It's a process I enjoy but something's been bugging me about it recently; this quote from Ron Edwards helped me articulate what I think the first step in my playtesting process needs to be:

My current thinking is that in earliest playtesting, people should be participating "for love," with less emphasis on breaking or even evaluating mechanics. I find feedback of this kind to be disruptive and demoralizing, including oh-so-helpful advice about how to write anything.

My concern at this stage is best served by addressing Color, i.e. the sort of imagery and flashy-stuff that characterizes the game (which may or may not include a specific setting and/or fixed characters); and Reward, i.e., whatever it is that I as the designer want to be the point and most fun about the system.

I've found out the hard way that including people not committed to these things, at this stage, can stop a project in its tracks.

So, less emphasis on mechanics and getting the rules 'right'; more emphasis on fun, being inspired to continue writing, brainstorming what the game could be.

This ties into my previous post, On Giving Feedback; again it's a quote from the Forge, which I'm finding to be a valuable resource for thinking about how to lead a productive creative life:

What I need is feedback that puts energy into my efforts. What I need is feedback that helps me see the full elephant, to understand the meaning of the whole beast that has yet only a crude shape under my mortal hands.

I am already scrutinous and critical enough of my creative efforts. What I need is feedback that strips away the bullshit that's holding me back, empowers and armors me against the certain doubts and contrary notions of others, and gives me energy and momentum.