Measure
Playtest observation
You might say: evidence from play
An observation measure records a player behaviour, outcome, delay, error, explanation or feeling against a test question so results can be compared across sessions.
- What it does
- Turns a playtest into evidence for a specific change.
- Ask
- What observation would support or falsify the design hypothesis?
Sources
- Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance
when players are playing your game, make note of whether certain strategies seem to be used more often than others, and which ones seem to win.
- Tracy Fullerton, Playcentric Design (ACM interactions, 2008), Playcentric Design, pp. 42–47: test scenarios, observation and feedback
Called ‘playcentric’ design, it involves setting interesting player-experience goals, building a rough paper or digital prototype that attempts to achieve those goals, testing the prototype with players, evaluating the results and integrating feedback, and then doing it again.
- Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance, playtesting, balance signals and spreadsheet measurement
when players are playing your game, make note of whether certain strategies seem to be used more often than others, and which ones seem to win.
- Anders Drachen, Pejman Mirza-Babaei and Lennart E. Nacke, Games User Research, ch. 2 pp. 17, 24–29; ch. 1 pp. 6–8
it contains a high-level analysis such as tracked key performance indicators (KPIs) and main qualitative trends or observations.
- Celia Hodent, How We Introduced UX to Epic Games’ Production Pipeline (GDC16), Prod31–40 process
When UX-lab enters JIRAs, we enter detailed info: description of what we observed in the test and/or description of a violated usability heuristic.
- Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance, Balance in Single-Player Games; Balance between Strategies; More Game Balance Techniques: statistics and spreadsheets
when players are playing your game, make note of whether certain strategies seem to be used more often than others, and which ones seem to win.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Playtest observation" (observation-measure) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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