Games User Research
This post is about why you shouldn’t playtest your game. But it’s not about why your game shouldn’t be tested. It just shouldn’t be you, the developer, doing it. Playtesting during development is invaluable, and it’s great to see how enthusiastic many teams are about running their own tests. However there are a number of…
read moreHello fellow Games User Research enthusiast. A group of researchers (Mirweis Sangin, Seb Long, Steve Mathiesen and myself) are planning to run a Games User Research event in Europe next year. Before we decide the format, we’d like to get some insight from other researchers based in Europe about what they'd expect from an event,…
read moreIn our office, we often play multiplayer games during lunchtime. The excitebike-esque Trials HD was popular for a while (despite being an Xbox exclusive!), so we were all eagerly awaiting Trials Fusion coming to PS4. It’s a great game, and perfect for collocated competition. However, there are many annoying parts of setting up a multiplayer…
read moreThis year I was lucky enough to go to the Games Developer Conference for the first time. It was a great opportunity to meet in person with many of the researchers I’d only spoken to online, and I also was able to see some great talks while out there. In this post, I wanted to…
read moreAs games user researchers, we consider usability to be a major factor in the quality of games. However it is not the only aspect that makes games “good”. A game could have fantastic usability, and yet still be boring. In order to get a snapshot of the importance of usability for game quality, I have…
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