My best friend was visiting me for a few days last week and while he was here I did something that I haven’t done in a long time, and something that I’ve never really done right: I watched someone else play a video game.

He’s a big fan of first-person shooters and has played enough Halo with me to trust my judgment, so when he asked if I had any games that he might not have heard of, I immediately thought of Portal. While mechanically very similar to an FPS, anyone who’s actually played it knows that Portal is really a puzzle game, so I was interested to see how my friend would respond to it. I was happy when he dived in, flying through the initial puzzles without any trouble, chuckling at a few of the jokes, and being suitably impressed at the novelty of basic gameplay like a portal jump.

What was really interesting though were the ways in which his experience diverged from my own. I saw him solve puzzles in ways that had never occurred to me, such as putting a portal over the furnace on the final boss, and I was newly impressed by the versatility of the mechanics. More importantly, he didn’t dwell for a second on the writing scratched on the wall. When he came to the end of the Companion Cube stage he simply tossed it into the burner without a second thought. Finally, he turned the machine off before Jon Coulton’s Still Alive was through its first verse.

I’ve always wondered if one could enjoy Portal without giving a crap about all the things that everyone talks about on the internet. Unfortunately, because I enjoy those things about the game as well, I’ve never been able to confirm it. Watching my friend play through the game once taught me a lot about the design of the game itself, but also that it could be enjoyed as simply a game, and not subcultural phenomenon. All this made me wonder what I could learn about favorite games just by observing another gamer’s experience, rather than participating.

As game designers we all play games as often as we can, and talk at length about even the most minute details of our favorites, and sometimes we even play games with others, either in competition or handing the controller back-and-forth. However, talking will never give you a great picture of someone else’s experience, no matter how many times you’ve played the game yourself. Playing with people is a great way to reveal things about a game that you may not have noticed otherwise (see Gears of War for good example), but for the most part you’re always going to be worried about what you’re doing, or waiting for your chance to play.

What I’m suggesting is the basis of playtesting. It’s more useful to watch someone play your game than to talk to them about it or play it yourself. The iterative process of building and testing is how most of us learn game design, and as we become more acquainted with this process we start to ‘see’ things in the games we play. To some extent our familiarity with game design means that we get more out of the games we play. We can start to make intelligent guesses as to why a designer presented us with a given situation, such as dropping only blocks made of groups of five, rather than the myriad of other possible situations. However, I would like to suggest that the rules of playtesting still apply. It’s more useful to watch someone play someone else’s game than it is to talk to them about it or play it ourselves.

Some argue that you can’t really understand a game without experiencing it yourself, and I won’t argue with that. However, in the right environment you can still learn a lot from just watching. The trick is to treat it just like you would any other playtest.

To get the most out of watching someone play a game you probably need to have played the game yourself. This way you can match their experience to your own, and see if the things that you assumed about the game were actually designed in, or simply your own rationalization. It follows that you shouldn’t help the person playing, unless it reaches the point that watching them spin their wheels isn’t helping either of you. In other words, don’t exasperatedly jump in the second they can’t figure out a boss pattern, but after their tenth death it might be good keep things moving with a little hint.

Pick a person that will enjoy the game they’re playing, or will at least give it a good shot in the name of science. My friend already enjoyed FPSes, so he already spoke the language that Portal was speaking, even if he was unfamiliar with the accent. If I had recommended that he play Vagrant Story, one of my favorite obscure Japanese action-RPGs, he might have still gotten into it (not likely) but in the time it would have taken to click I would probably have been the one to lose interest. That said, if you find someone that will play through Fallout even though they hate RPGs, my guess is that you’re going to learn a lot about that game. Also, hold onto that person, because they love you very much.

Finally, talk to the person. Observing how a player tackles a problem is especially useful when you get a sense of how they’re approaching it. Sometimes a player will broadcast what they’re trying do to in how they move their avatar, what they look at, pick up, etc. There will be quite a few times though when they will simply sit there and think. Give them enough time, and if they figure it out, ask them what they were thinking. If they’re sitting there for a long time ask them what’s going through their head. After a while my friend simply kept a running monologue going of what he was thinking at any particular time, no matter how mundane.

Games are a strange form of ritualized conversation between people. Sometimes between two players, sometimes between the player and the designer. As game designers it’s our job to keep a conversation going with people that we’ll never meet. We learn this just like we learn anything else, by trying it ourselves, but also by watching other people do it. It’s ironic that watching a game might be as illuminating as playing one, but in the end they’re all just tools to help us understand what we’re looking at, even if it’s something we’ve made ourselves. So if you have some time this weekend, pick one of your favorite games, grab a friend that you think would enjoy it, and watch them play. I guarantee it will make you a better game designer.

If you don’t have any friends, then I recommend checking out some of the videos at the Speed Demos Archive. Speed running is a culture unto itself, but you can still get a lot out of watching people who are so good at a game that they nearly break it.