Sometimes it can be hard enough to convince a team to test their game once. Testing a game once is great at identifying problems and issues with a game. However after the team have addressed these issues, researchers have a new challenge \u2013 convincing the team to test again.<\/p>\n
Without retesting, it is difficult to tell if the team\u2019s fixes have been effective, and the usability issues that were identified could still be occurring. Additionally the issues from the first round may have obscured secondary issues which weren\u2019t picked up the first time. Today I\u2019ll be looking at some examples of why retesting is important.<\/p>\n
Testing difficulty<\/b>
\nHave you ever played a game where the difficulty was\u2026wrong? Either the game is much too easy and offers no challenge, or the difficulty is much too hard (and , unlike Dark Souls, it\u2019s not a game type which is meant to be this hard). The problem with these games could well have been not retesting them.<\/p>\n
With a single test, the team would have got a finding such as \u201cplayers believed the game was much too hard\u201d. If the test was done well, the finding may even be quantifiable: \u201cOn average, players died 13 times on level 3, however the design goal was that players would only die 3 times\u201d. \u00a0The team would have then gone away and altered the game by making it easier. However they now do not know how much easier they have made the game \u2013 perhaps their changes were not enough, and the game is still too hard. Or worse, the changes may have been too extensive, and now players complete every challenge with their first attempt.<\/p>\n
The only solution to this is retesting after the team makes changes, in order to verify if the changes worked.<\/p>\n
Testing fixes<\/b>
\nIt\u2019s not just with difficulty that retesting is important; it can also help judge which solutions are appropriate. We have tested games before where players haven\u2019t understood a key part of the game. We discovered this in the first test, and reported it to the team. The team\u2019s response was to create tutorials explaining how this bit of the game worked. We then retested \u2013 but the issues still occurred. The team redesigned the mechanic entirely.<\/p>\n
For this example, it took two tests for the team to find the right solution, and a third test for us to verify that the solution worked, and everyone now understood the mechanic.<\/p>\n
Finding more issues…<\/b>
\nRetesting is also important when big issues prevent researchers from seeing smaller ones. For example, if a player doesn\u2019t learn how to open the map, we would then have missed any secondary issues about whether they can understand the map. Retesting after the \u201ccan\u2019t find the map\u201d issue has been resolved is the only way to uncover these secondary issues with the map itself.<\/p>\n
Testing a game through multiple rounds is the best solution to help evaluate the team\u2019s fixes. However it\u2019s not always possible, and so sometimes researchers will be required to rely on their knowledge of best practices, and what they observed in the first test, to help teams find effective solutions to usability problems. But, when in doubt \u2013 test, and test again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes it can be hard enough to convince a team to test their game once. Testing a game once is great at identifying problems and issues with a game. However after the team have addressed these issues, researchers have a new challenge \u2013 convincing the team to test again. Without retesting, it is difficult to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games-user-research","grve-entry-item","grve-blog-item"],"yoast_head":"\n