Playtesting with a Purpose

Playtesting Workshops and Study

developed with Jessica Hammer, Jodi Forlizzi, Mike Christel, MacKenzie Bates and Rachel Moeller

Developed and taught a series of three workshops: Explore, Refine and Persuade. (All workshop materials can be found here.) We hope to give students a clear picture of what playtesting is and how it is used in each phase of the game design process. Through group activities, lectures and exercises, we will work to break down incorrect assumptions and replace them with a refined set of playtesting skills.

We ran these workshops in the context the Entertainment Technology Center, a graduate program focused on game design and development twice during the 2014–2015 academic year, evaluating the playtesting outcomes, interviewing faculty and student stakeholders, and debriefing within our group. In observing students’ progress with playtesting, we identified common missteps, such as trouble with applying data collected from a playtest to advance game design. The common theme of these missteps was a lack of purposefulness in playtesting.

Common missteps included:

1. Not setting specific player experience goals. Player experience goals provide a frame for designing good playtests and interpreting playtest data.
2. Difficulty choosing appropriate playtesting methods. Testing gameplay and game mechanics is hard. Some teams set player experience goals, but still failed to connect those goals to the design of their playtests. The resulting data that they collected was divorced from their core gameplay experience, so they struggled to use the data to inform the next iteration of their games.
3. Challenges applying data to the design of the game. Students struggled to interpret the data they collected to help them make important game design decisions. This was especially true for groups that used low-fidelity prototypes. They often dismissed failures in the game prototype as the limits of working non-digitally and not failures of the game. Students working on transformational or educational games tended to collect data in their playtests on learning gains and attitude changes rather than game play, therefore, it was difficult to make iterations of game play (whether of not they improve learning or attitude).

Therefore, we created a second iteration of the workshops, focusing on “playtesting with a purpose.”

We emphasized…

1. Setting player experience goals
2. Making and testing hypotheses about how design decisions support those goals
3. Using playtesting data in a persuasive way.

Overview of workshop methods: