Beta-Testers I Have Loved

"I found a bug in your game," goes the kind of e-mail I've been getting lately. "I get a TADS error message whenever I try to take more than 201 napkins from the napkin dispenser."

Messages like these pour into my mailbox with alarming frequency. But I don't mind -- I don't tell their authors to quit nitpicking and get a life. Because these are my beta-testers. I count on them to be insane.

Yes, insane. C.E. Forman has laid out quite a nice list of guidelines for play-testing in his article ("Oh No! Beta!"), but he fails to mention the most important requisite for a successful beta-tester: you must be absolutely, stark raving mad.

Look at it this way: Say you're an interactive-fiction author. (I say it all the time, it shouldn't be too difficult for you.) As soon as your game is ready for debugging, you painstakingly walk it through all its paces, taking every logical step and ensuring that it works properly. Once you're done, you release the game to your battalion of beta-testers, secure in the knowledge that you've accounted for all but a few sensible actions.

What a fool you are! (This, too, I say to myself all the time.) You may have accounted for every sensible action, sure, but those who play your game are likely to be anything but sensible -- they may try odd things because they're stuck, because they're contrary, or just because they're plain lame-brained, but there's no way they're going to behave as expected. Which is why the best beta-testers are those who can routinely do the unexpected. Which is where the insanity comes in.

Take, for example, one of my favorite beta-testers. He has an odd compulsion, when he plays IF games, to close doors behind him. It's a bizarre fastidiousness, not even remotely useful for an IF player, but I love him for it, because he has uncovered bugs in this way that I never would have found by my own, door-opening self.

And then there's my napkin-thieving friend (whose initials, incidentally, are CEF). It's a wonder he can ever finish a game, he's so busy scouting out blind alleys and trying to interact with the scenery. Without his help, I never would have known how my game responded if you tried to push on an NPC, or talk to a brick.

But that's what good beta-testers do: they command NPCs to walk through walls, flip coins that they aren't holding, pour pepper on goats. Give them a fork in the road, and they will likely take neither path, but attempt to EAT SPAGHETTI WITH FORK.

I've tried to learn from my beta-testers. When I play-test my own games now, I flip, prod and manipulate every existing object (and even some that aren't there) in an attempt to find illogical behavior -- which is never a good thing in an IF game, even in response to an illogical action. There may be no good reason for a player to type GIVE PIANO TO ORANGUTAN, but if the game replies "The orangutan tosses the piano about in its hands for a bit, then gives it back to you," it tends to break the spell of realism.

But I know I'm doomed to failure in my attempts. I'm simply too close to my game to see all the possible actions, and I'm naturally more inclined to look for things that do work than those that don't. And so I happily put up with bizarre midnight messages about napkins and one-way doors, give my beta-testers nice big thanks in the game credits -- and all the while hope and pray that nothing ever happens to make them accidentally go sane.

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