A reseachers' guide to teaching players (without more tutorials) | Sebastian Long
Channel: GRUX SIG
Date: 2021-05-25

This is a foundations talk aimed at early-career games user researchers. Players have to learn our game’s rules. It’s one of the few things that all our players have in common: they’re all going to play our game for the first time, and learn how to play. Sometimes this goes well. Sometimes not. As a games user researcher, you’re going to be tasked with making sense of players’ behaviour and cognition as it pertains to making your game learnable. You’re going to be the voice of players’ frustrations and misunderstandings, and thereby central in your team’s strategy on teaching and tutorialisation. Tutorials are powerful and reliable tools for helping players learn, but they have their limits. In this talk, we are going to be thinking about the various ways players can be taught how to play. I’ll outline a very simple ‘mental model’ describing how players learn. I’ll explain how using this simple model as a ‘first principle’ will help you broaden your thinking on teaching players, improve your 'fixes'/suggestions, consider the limitations of research methods, and recognise the far-reaching implications of suggesting “we should just add this to the tutorial.

Speaker
Sebastian Long is the Managing Director of Player Research. Seb splits his time between running Player Research's playtest labs in the UK & Canada, and consulting with gamedev clients of all shapes and sizes. He has run research studies for 200+ commercial titles, and designed research, training, workshops, and data strategies for a few hundred more.

About #gamesUR​ Conference
Games User Research focuses on players’ psychology and their behavior via techniques such as playtesting, analytics, expert analysis, and others. Game User Researchers aim to help game developers deliver players the best gaming experience possible.

The #gamesUR​ Conference is a biannual gathering of the world's top professionals in games user research. For more information visit www.gamesurconf.com.