A bit more about my new book - Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online
TL;DR: my book about playtesting has been published and is now available! Thanks to Geoffrey Engelstein for his work in giving me the opportunity and to all the folks I've playtested with (and for) along the way.
OK, so it's not like my magnum opus or anything - I've written dozens of books, thousands of blog posts, and who-knows-how-many social media posts over the years...but this one's earned a special place in my heart. It's been published by Taylor & Francis, and should be available in bookstores and Amazon storefronts around the world.
After Sarah Shipp wrote the first book on Thematic Integration in the CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design series, I began to wonder what sort of book I could write. I figured I had a lot of experience on playtesting, especially in the online space, so that wouId be a place to start. had the chance to reach out to Geoffrey Engelstein to ask about what they were looking for in future volumes of the series. As the series editor, he responded positively, offering some guidance on my initial outline. I took a lot of time to work on this next, refined version - by this point, I was mentally gearing up to write a book, whether it was signed by the publisher or not.
Playtesting Best Practices, the official synopsis:
Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online covers the complete journey of playtesting – the iterative journey to shape and refine tabletop games from raw ideas to balanced and fun games. This step-by-step guide embraces the process and celebrates the purpose of every step, from early self-playtesting to late-stage unguided playtesting, and offers the specific questions and practices the author has refined to perfect his own games.
This book is split up into four main sections, each with a distinct focus:
Getting ready to playtest: Establishing goalposts, brainstorming, self-playtesting, getting organized, how to design a prototype, and writing rules. The focus here is starting good habits and establishing best practices, whether this is your first game or your hundredth.
Playtesting in the real world: How to find playtesters, how to teach your game, what to do during the playtest, how to take notes and collect feedback, and being a great playtester yourself.
Playtesting online: How to adapt to digital platforms, the best practices for playtesting online, how to use these opportunities well, and cautions about playtesting online.
What to do next: How to iterate, additional ways to playtest your game, knowing when you’re done with playtesting, and choosing how to get your game out there.
Let's talk about that outline
For anyone intrigued at the process at writing a book, a quick word about outlines. As the main part of a book proposal, it's going to form a big part of the impression people get from this as-yet-unwritten project. If you have a track record, past writing projects, or other written words out there already, those can help with credibility, but your outline is basically 'here's how I'll address this topic as completely and authoritatively as possible, based on my experience, education, and understanding of the topic'. Your outline should be far more than just the highlights - mine ended up being about 13 pages long...! It probably could have been more detailed, too.
That outline is far more important than just 'a thing to help sell your book to a publisher' - it's a very specific goal / guide to the book you want to write. Just like a business plan, a design document, or a rulebook, it boils down to a statement of intent - a way of describing something you want to make or play. The outline can (and did!) change significantly - some chapters got merged, some sections got merged, some areas got fleshed out at Geoffrey's encouragement, and so on.
What was it like working with the publisher?
As expected, they were supportive and had a system for seemingly everything. One of the expectations they had was to write it as part of their predefined style guide, which was both helpful, freeing, and slightly terrifying all at the same time. It was helpful because, even though I have written a lot of books, the style will admittedly be all over the place. There were a few different forms near the beginning - one focused on ensuring we had permission to use any images used in the book (I ended up creating all of them myself, so this was more or less irrelevant in my case), some related to formatting and organization, and so on.
I knew that a professional editor would be coming along to help standardize and change things as needed, and naturally, all errors or departures from that style guide on my own. It might sound like a terrifying thing to be locked into some unnatural way of speaking, but I looked at it as standard English, still within my own voice. I wrote a bit more formally, but one does that when writing a nonfiction book anyway. Blog posts are written differently from social media posts, and so on.
You don’t see much of a publisher begin to kick in their work Intel after you’ve produced your manuscript. That’s when I got introduced to my professional editor, who asked me to fill out a set of multiple-choice questions regarding my personal styles.
This took longer than I thought it would, but in a publishers standardized methodology, it allows the editor to edit the book using the author’s particular style as guided by a form the author themselves filled out. Whenever I saw another step of this process, I immediately wondered about its purpose, and ultimately saw the logic of it as I was working with it and afterwards.
Overall, they were solid to work with, gave clear expectations and deadlines, and made it easy to help them do their jobs well. Head down the rabbit hole a bit if you'd like to learn more: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publish-your-book/writing-editing-services/publishing-guidelines/
What's your next book going to be about?
It'll be about game design, I'm aiming to self-publish it in October, and... that's all I want to say about it now =)
Where can I get Playtesting Best Practices?
It's slightly cheaper at the publisher's website: https://www.routledge.com/Playtesting-Best-Practices-Real-World-and-Online/Backe/p/book/9781032813486, and it's also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Playtesting-Best-Practices-Online-Tabletop-ebook/dp/B0DWMQYY1K