Hi! I really like your game and reading your asks on tumblr :) I was wondering how you deal with players who try to high-jack your story (if that's ever happened to you)? Players who give feedback that basically says "I want to play a game that you aren't writing and have no intention of writing"? Or "in order to play the way I want, you need to completely re-conceptualize your game"? Hope you have a nice day!
Hi there! Thank you so much for reading and enjoying and commenting! :) 💖And great question! I truly feel that this is probably the one downside of posting a WIP for open and public consumption: I’ve seen a lot of comments on other games where enthusiastic readers (who perhaps would like to be writers themselves) try to mold a story to their personal ideas and preferences rather than concentrating on the more doable ways the base product could be improved. “this is cool and all, but what if you made the ghosts into elves instead?” “i don’t like playing games where there’s killing, why can’t we just give up the quest to avenge our father and become farmers instead?” “why can’t we play as someone completely evil and murder all of the ROs, I wish there were more games where I could play as a villain”Sometimes these suggestions are just downright impossible to even consider and diverge wildly from the intended story of the game. I’ve been fortunate enough to not receive very many, but when I do get them, I just say, “Thanks for the suggestion or idea, it’s interesting, but that’s not in the cards for this game at the moment!” I’ve never gotten any arguments from that. I think the key to being a writer who has a public WIP is holding firm to your conceptual vision and not letting too many requests or outside influences pull your story in different directions. There’s a balance to strike between being open to feedback and shutting down suggestions that completely go against your idea of the game. I don’t think the latter is trying to hijack the story necessarily, but it can definitely be pretty frustrating to say over and over, “because that’s not the story I want to tell!”
Another solution (and probably one which I’ll use) is creating a closed/private alpha-testing group for the game. This way you can somewhat pick and choose readers you trust to respect your vision of the game and give helpful feedback–helping you refine it and improve it–and then post the polished content later in the demo for public consumption. Then it’s easy to let “hijacking” comments roll off your back; the material has already been reviewed and tested, so you don’t need to rely on public feedback as much.(*)Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!
(*) Though public feedback is still important!
