Should You Play Your Own Game?

howyadoin

Should game runners have active pcs of their own on their own games?

Kestrel

Yes because:

This isn’t a paid job, you deserve to have fun on the labour of love you built.
It’s very easy for game admins to grow out of touch with what the actual day-to-day experience of the game is like. This especially matters on crunchy games. You need to have the experience of someone stomping you into the dirt in the least fun way possible, in order to appreciate just how unfun it is for everyone else (and realise it needs fixing).

It’s good to have some boundaries and separation between staff and players, but this isn’t one IMO.

L. B. Heuschkel

Yes, because we made the game we wanted to play. If it had already existed, we’d be playing over there. But it didn’t, and now it does, so why should we be punished for making it happen?

Also Kestrel’s reasons above.

Muscle Car

As long as staff characters are marked as such, absolutely they deserve to play!

Third Eye

Sure.

I can’t imagine having the motivation to staff if I didn’t like playing what I was running, but also I think not playing your own game as a PC doesn’t really accomplish anything and is performance/optics rather than an indication of anything. I’ve seen staffers who technically don’t play do far more abusive things on NPCs than they could’ve done on PCs.

Meg

So, what do you guys think about staff not playing the game? Would that raise any red flags? I know the immediate thought is from people saying ‘oh, staff shouldn’t play’! But if staff legitimately did not want to play any characters, would you find that a warning sign or anything?

dvoraen

@Meg Not necessarily. I mean, it entirely depends on the staffer. I feel like my best example of this would be the people who have done MU* coding over the years but didn’t engage other than with the codebase.

I know there’ve been both good and bad apples there, so…

Wizz

I’ve seen plenty examples of both extreme ends of the scale – where staff doesn’t play and stays uninvolved but winds up treating PCs as dolls they mess around with like…I dunno, Sid from Toy Story, and on the other end staff who center the entire plot around their personal characters and expect everyone to constantly gas them up and give them the spotlight.

I think choosing to play or not choosing to play are just different ways to engage with a game you make, each with their own unique challenges and pitfalls, and aren’t inherently problematic or better on their own.

Kestrel

@Meg said:

So, what do you guys think about staff not playing the game? Would that raise any red flags? I know the immediate thought is from people saying ‘oh, staff shouldn’t play’! But if staff legitimately did not want to play any characters, would you find that a warning sign or anything?

It’s not a red flag for me in the sense that I’d be reluctant to play a game where this were the case, but it is a nuisance on the level that I’d tolerate from a friend whilst bitching about it to my other friends.