Difficulty spikes, unreliable checkpoints, context-sensitive buttons that might open a door, but might bounce a grenade into your lap instead: these things matter. “Every moment in a game, you’re bleeding players,” says John Hopson, Bungie’s user research lead. “Hopefully, you’re bleeding them as slowly as possible. The most powerful thing I ever did on Halo was make a graph showing how many players we lost each mission. We had these people: they bought the game, they wanted to play, and we failed them.”
Usability testing didn’t start with videogames. It started with product development of a more domestic stripe: with teapots, toasters and car dashboards. Although designers have always spared a thought for their audiences since the days of Jet Set Willy – it’s hard to make even the simplest videogame without thinking of what the player’s going to do or see from one second to the next – it’s only become a serious issue in the games industry relatively recently. Yet with no bespoke track at GDC, no standardised terminology, and no agreed best practices, usability may be gaining respectability, but it’s still one of the least understood aspects of design. That poses some interesting questions. How does the industry approach user research today, and why has something so fundamental waited so long to be taken seriously?
Usability is made up of two elements: user testing, which investigates whether people can understand how to play a game properly, and playtesting, which then looks at whether they’re actually enjoying themselves. Playtesting has been taking place on an unofficial basis since Spacewar. User testing, however, has been far less common.
“The problem is that user testing is complex,” says Chris Viggers, the development director at Blitz Games Studios. “It’s about the psychology of how people interact with a computer and with different control systems. It’s about what they’re expecting out of a game and how they think it should react. You’re working out how to factor it into the game, and making sure that testing sessions are as objective as possible when it comes to what kind of questions you ask. You can quite easily skew your own results by approaching your testers incorrectly.”
That said, certain developers began thinking about usability a lot earlier than others. “Because Microsoft was a conventional software company, they were used to doing usability for Word and Office already,” says Hopson, who worked for the platform holder prior to joining Bungie. “They just transferred that philosophy across. We had to bend the process around quite a bit, though. When you’re testing whether a spellchecker works, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s fun.”
Speaking of processes, while there are currently as many approaches to usability as there are developers, there’s one golden rule everyone can agree on. “Start early,” laughs Dr Graham McAllister, the director of Vertical Slice, the UK’s first game usability studio. “Come to us earlier and we solve more problems. We almost always have fundamental changes to make and, at the moment, most companies come to us at the end. When they get our report and we say: ‘Here are the five things that are absolutely critical and must be changed or there’ll be an impact on the review score,’ it may be too late.”
“Now we do usability as soon as we can get something for people to play,” says Jason Avent, a game director at Black Rock Studios, the creator of Pure. “That can sometimes mean it’s not even first playable for the game: it’s a prototype in XNA or Unity. That gives you enough data to make more committed choices. With Pure, we started user testing early. We had a fairly early version of a track with a couple of massive jumps in it, and just one guy on the track. We had some art, but it didn’t look great. The most important thing was that we had the handling, the collision response, and the rider response. Those were the aspects we were testing. At that stage, you can change stuff, but as you go further and further it gets harder.”