Who cares about the player?

I have an unusual job. At parties, introductions might go something like this:

Anon: “Hi, what do you do?”

Me: “I work in videogames.”

Anon: “You get paid to play games all day?”

Me: “Not really, I only get paid to watch people play games.”

Anon: “Sounds great. I’d like a job like that.”

Firstly, they probably wouldn’t like my job. It doesn’t involve playing games that much. Secondly, if you play games for fun or relaxation it requires more mental effort to watch someone play a game and try to figure out what they’re doing than it does to actually play the game. Still, this is what I do for a living.

So who am I? I run a video game user research studio in Brighton, on the south coast of Britain, called Vertical Slice. User research is the commonly accepted name for this ‘watching’. You may also know it as usability or playtesting, but these names tend to suggest only specific parts of the overall field of user research. Despite being a relatively new field, the Game User Research Special Interest Group (GUR SIG) on LinkedIn currently has 281 members, many of whom are employed at major game studios worldwide. Developers and publishers take user research very seriously, considering it a way of adding enormous value to a game for relatively little cost. The games we’ve worked on range from triple A titles that reach the top of the charts through to digital downloads and mobile games. You’ve probably played them.

Why do I watch people play games? Game developers live with their game perhaps ten hours a day for cycles that typically last between six months and two years. All that time means that they get very good at their games; when they play they go through the same motions, the ones they know that will work.

In contrast, when I watch gamers who are completely new to the game I see how they often have no idea what they’re meant to be doing. The game rules that were so very obvious to the designer are completely foreign to a new player. Identifying and refining players’ assumptions and perceptions before release helps to improve the gaming experience immeasurably.

To be fair, calling it ‘watching’ is putting it rather mildly. The techniques that we use come from psychology, cognitive science, computer science and design, among others. Our work typically goes into very detailed analysis of players’ interaction with game worlds, constructing a profile of not only what they did, but also why they did it.

And it’s possible to go further. By attaching biometric sensors to a player we can also try to identify how they feel when playing a game through heart rate, arousal levels, skin temperature or breathing. Together they can be used to reveal insight into the player experience.

Fundamentally, we’re trying to understand why players aren’t behaving or feeling as game creators intend. If we know this, the creators can make changes to the game to improve player experience. Now wouldn’t that be worth pursuing, a game that we experience exactly as its designer intended?

It’s not surprising that there is an increasing focus on understanding the player. In the last five years we’ve seen game interaction methods significantly change with the introduction of gestural controllers (Wii, Kinect, Move), new sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes), and touchscreen devices. This new focus on natural user interfaces has led to games becoming more accessible to broader audiences, especially people who wouldn’t have considered themselves gamers in the past.

With a wider audience comes a wider range of abilities, expectations, previous experience and, perhaps most importantly, motivations. The traditional system of labelling players as core or casual is becoming increasingly meaningless, as it provides such coarse insight into their reasons for playing.
All this is making life more difficult for game designers who are trying to ensure that their game is experienced as they intend.

Player experience - isn’t that what gaming is all about? It doesn’t matter to the player how the game technically works under its digital skin, it’s what the game communicates and what they perceive that creates the experience.

It’s this thin layer that exists between experience and mechanics that this column will be exploring each fortnight. I’ll be focusing on players and their interactions with game worlds, deconstructing games and their interfaces in order to understand them better and give practical insights into improving gameplay.

Let’s make games better.

Graham McAllister is director of game usability lab Vertical Slice. Read and follow his other columns on his topic page.