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Gamers are not a monolithic group; gaming preferences and motivations vary in important ways among gamers. An empirical, validated model of gaming motivations provides a crucial methodological bridge between player preferences and their in-game behaviours, and, more importantly, engagement and retention outcomes. Instead of simply seeing on a key performance indicator dashboard that a certain percentage of gamers are leaving, a motivation model allows us to pinpoint why those gamers are leaving.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 describes each of the eight methods for player research we have used, and covers why the method is used in the context of player research, how it is executed, the time taken, and what is delivered as a result. Each of the methods has been refined over the years to reflect the balance between time and budget required, and accurate and actionable results delivered. The strengths of each of the methods with respect to player appeal, understanding, usability, experience, and successful monetization are presented.

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.

Interviews provide direct insight into the player’s behaviours, motivations, and understanding of how the game works. This chapter explores the preparation of an interview, interviews during the session, final interviews, and interview tips. It concludes with a discussion of data capture and analysis, as well as thoughts on the future of the method.

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.

This chapter is about the think-aloud protocol and its application to player experience. It covers what the protocol is, when to apply it, how to conduct it, its pros and cons, and its variations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of think-aloud protocols with children and the considerations necessary when using child participants.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy and then definition of the RITE method. It then delves into the benefits of this method and provides practical notes on running RITE tests effectively. The chapter concludes with an overview of the original case study behind the 2002 article documenting this method.

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.

The fierce competition in the video games market and new revenue models such as free-to-play emphasize the importance of good playability for first-time user experience and retention. Cost-effective and flexible evaluation methods such as heuristic evaluation is suitable for identifying playability problems in different phases of the game development life cycle. In this chapter we introduce the heuristic evaluation method with updated playability heuristics, present example studies on identifying playability problems in social network games, and propose new heuristics for evaluating free-to-play games.

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.

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.