18.7.4 Richard Bartle, author of 'Designing Virtual Worlds,' says that most players are not good designers. If designers can't be players in the same way the "rest of us" are, what does that say about game design?

With all due respect to Bartle, I very much disagree.

In fact, I think one sign of a great game is when one or more of the game's creators can sit down and play and enjoy it. If anything's magic, that is.

The other good news is that as games get more complex and teams get larger, the less a single developer can be aware of all of the mechanics, or most of the content. The sum can definitely be greater than all of the parts.

Now, does a designer have a different perspective than a 'regular' player? Absolutely. She is aware of more of the internal workings, might be aware of where the best loot is, or how to do a quest. She is also (or at least should be) focused not only on the game from her own perspective, but thinking about the game as a whole and interpreting her game experience accordingly (especially important when playing the game to tune or test).

Bartle's quote really surprises me, as I know many early MUD developers who played, and had a great time. And that's on their own MUD/MMOG. Certainly MMOG developers can play other MMOGs and have a great time too. Sure, they might be more aware or focused on the inner-workings of the game, but so are 'power gamers' who reverse engineer how the game works often better than the programmers who wrote the formulae in the first place.

This is almost akin to saying that a musician can't truly enjoy music (either his own or somebody else's) because they are 'forced' to analyze the key, tempo, and chord progressions.

As for the 'magic', I think any experience with enough variables that it's hard or impossible for a person to keep track of them all will often seem more immersive and magical. But I also think this can be experienced by a developer.

I know personally that I kept away from many of the minute details in EverQuest so I could eventually play it and get even more out of it, focusing instead on the '1,000 foot view'. For example, I purposely didn't look up every quest or item drop, and while I'd been to all of the zones, I did so by porting around such that when I played the game I'd recognize areas, but still had to learn my way around.

But then I also know content designers who played a lot more than me and had a total blast. Perhaps they didn't enjoy the zones they actually worked on (they could tell you better than me), but I know they had a lot fun in general.

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