Playtesting is a game designer’s primary tool to assess the quality of a game and understand players’ experiences. There are multiple ways to collect playtesting data, including gameplay/think-aloud videos, observations, interviews, questionnaires, telemetry, and physiological responses.

Many questions are still open, such as:

  • Are physiological signals worth the effort? And which ones?
  • Which (combination of) data is better for different genres?
  • How to effectively combine different concoctions of data?

The goal of this research is to evaluate current approaches, establish effective combinations, and propose supplementary methods using non-intrusive automated techniques. Potential research directions include generating tools for combining different modes of data and using novel data like facial expressions, voice, and body language recognition.

This includes tools built to combine multimodal data such as physiological signals, telemetry, and observational video — helping researchers and designers better analyze and interpret player experience.

Optimizing Playtesting

🔬 Project Members

  • Chek Tien Tan
  • Songjia Shen
  • Tuck Wah Leong
  • Daniel Rosser
  • Yusuf Pisan
  • Sander Bakkes
  • Pejman Mirza-Babaei
  • Veronica Zammitto
  • Alessandro Canossa

🏆 Outputs

  • Tan, C. T., Shen, S., Leong, T. W., Rosser, D., Pisan, Y., Bakkes, S., Mirza-Babaei, P., Zammitto, V., & Canossa, A. (2015). Tool Design Jam: Designing tools for Games User Research. In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ‘15). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2810263

  • Shen, S., & Tan, C. T. (2014). Combining think-aloud and physiological data to understand video game experiences. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘14). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557326

  • Tan, C. T., Shen, S., Leong, T. W., Rosser, D., Pisan, Y., Bakkes, S., Mirza-Babaei, P., Zammitto, V., & Canossa, A. (2015). Exploring Gameplay Experiences on the Oculus Rift. In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ‘15). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2793117 (HONORABLE MENTION AWARD)

💡 Keywords

Playtesting, Player Experience, Game Design, User Research, Telemetry, Data Analysis