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Practising Games User Research within a video game company possesses unique challenges, ranging from tight turnaround of findings to collaborating with the development team and incorporating the needs of the rest of company. This chapter describes processes and best practices for applying GUR in the industry while identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls.

This chapter provides an introduction to the field of Games User Research (GUR) and to the present book. GUR is an interdisciplinary field of practice and research concerned with ensuring the optimal quality of usability and user experience in digital games. GUR inevitably involves any aspect of a video game that players interface with, directly or indirectly. This book aims to provide the foundational, accessible, go-to resource for people interested in GUR. It is a community-driven effort—it is written by passionate professionals and researchers in the GUR community as a handbook and guide for everyone interested in user research and games. We aim to provide the most comprehensive overview from an applied perspective, for a person new to GUR, but which is also useful for experienced user researchers.

This chapter presents the physiological metrics used in Games User Research (GUR). Aimed at GUR professionals in the games industry, it explains what methods are available to researchers to measure biometric data while subjects are engaged in play. It sets out when it is appropriate to use biometric measures in GUR projects, the kind of data generated, and the differing ways it can be analysed. The chapter also discusses the trade-offs required when interpreting physiological data, and will help games researchers to make informed decisions about which research questions can benefit from biometric methodologies. As the equipment needed to collect biometric data becomes more sophisticated as well as cheaper, physiological testing of players during a game’s development will become more common. At the same time, Games User Researchers will become more discriminating in its use. Where in the past professionals in the games industry have used biometric testing to generate quick, actionable feedback about player responses to elements of a game, and have been less concerned with the scientific robustness of their methodology, as GUR develops a new breed of games industry professionals are attempting to deploy good academic practice in their researches.

As user experience (UX) research in game development becomes more established, many studios are now incorporating UX practices within their studio. However, the maturity level of UX within a studio can vary widely, from those who are hostile towards UX up to those who embrace UX at all levels in the organization. This chapter is for both game developers and Games User Researchers who are interested in assessing where they currently are on a UX maturity scale, and also keen to understand what more could be done to become more player-focused.

Towards informing the development of new playtesting labs, this chapter outlines the process we used at Player Research for setting up our labs. Setting up a functional lab environment requires a range of considerations—across floor plans, materials selection, technology choices, testing strategies, and more—and in this chapter we describe some of the key lessons we learned along the way.

This chapter provides an overview of challenges that emerge from the involvement of players with special needs in game development, focusing on user involvement in early design stages, and challenges that emerge during playtesting. Through three case studies focusing on young children, people with disabilities, and older adults, we offer insights into appropriate methodology for GUR with diverse audiences. Additionally, we discuss strategies to establish a respectful and empowering process for user involvement.

In this chapter we provide a pragmatic description of how GUR processes can be employable and impactful even with limited resources and prior user research experience. We also provide guidelines for how GUR processes can start small and be iteratively expanded upon to become an integral part of a developer’s working processes. Included are step-by-step guidelines for starting to work with GUR.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the author’s personal thoughts and experiences post-launch in Games User Research. Its subsequent sections explore data sources that should be leveraged on a live title, and the importance and limitations of benchmark studies. The chapter concludes with a methodological example that can be implemented to kick-start your own post-launch analysis.

This chapter covers the applied methods to uncover usability problems and the concrete guidelines on how to plan for capturing usability events. And overview of tools and processes that can help to document and analyse observations made by the researchers is also presented.

Game Analytics (GA) provides new ways to conduct user research, counteracting some of the weaknesses of traditional approaches while retaining essential compatibility with the methodologies of GUR. This chapter provides an overview of what GA is and how it fits within the daily operations of game development across studio sizes, with an emphasis on the intersection with GUR and the synergies that can be leveraged across analytics and user research.

This chapter is an introduction to social network analysis with a focus in the context of player and in-game data. An overview of the key elements for network analysis is presented along with a discussion of the possibilities that can be realized through the use of networks and advice on using networks for Games User Research to understand player behaviour in a social context.

The increased interest in virtual reality (VR) has yielded a lot of studies and development in both research and game design. Simulation sickness is an issue experienced by a significant subset of players in VR. This chapter focuses on the challenges this issue poses for user research, and suggests practical considerations for researchers to minimize legal and ethical risks.

Surveys are an essential method of data collection that can deliver generalizable and actionable insights about the player’s experience. In this chapter, we present practice-oriented guidance about when the method is appropriate, what constitutes a good questionnaire and how to alleviate possible biases and issues with data quality.

Games User Research (GUR) methods and principles are evolving rapidly in keeping pace with the innovation rates in games. Every day brings new insights and practices, and new technologies keep expanding the borders of GUR. In this conclusion, we briefly outline some of the areas where innovations are being made or the front lines expanding in GUR, from new contexts, technologies, measures, production concepts, platforms, on to special topics such as telemetry, virtual reality, and psycho-physiological measures.

In this chapter we describe the challenges and learnings in establishing processes for developing actionable biometric procedures for production teams. The chapter, divided in four main sections, describes the ongoing efforts of recent years to facilitate the incorporation of the science of biometrics into the culture of video game production, as illustrated through several case studies. The end goal is making biometric data an accessible option in the tool chest of user researchers and an ally in the team’s decision-making processes. Throughout the chapter, references to related work in games user research and academia are presented.

This chapter points out the key benefits of a well-designed process in Games User Research. For example, the creation of templates and question databases can ensure that information is collected in a comprehensive, shareable manner. Maintaining this documentation can facilitate future optimization for increased research efficiency.

This paper presents a set of heuristics (PLAY and GAP) for game design and discusses the history of heuristics for games, describes the use of these heuristics, summarizes research demonstrating their effectiveness, and describes a hypothetical model that reviewers use when evaluating a game. The usage by designers and evaluators when reviewing two released games is also compared. Overall, heuristics were found to be much more effective than informal reviews and their use led not only to problem identification, but to suggested fixes, possible enhancements, and effective aspects of the existing designs.

User testing games does not have to be expensive and time-consuming. In this chapter we focus on the specific situation where the resources, expertise, and time available for user testing is limited, as is usually the case for indie studios. This means adapting affordable and accessible user testing processes for indie studios. We emphasize the contribution of analytics techniques in this adaptation process, and describe different methods of how to incorporate analytics into other Games User Research methods.