Playing Aloud: Leveraging Game Commentary Culture for Playtesting

Introduction

The goal of a game designer is to structure mechanics, narratives, and aesthetics in a way that not only is pleasurable, but also challenging and engaging to the player (Schell, 2015). One key tool in a designer’s toolbelt is the think-aloud approach (Boren & Ramey, 2000; Denning, 1990). In think-alouds, users talk through their interaction with a technical system aided by the prompting of an expert facilitator (Nielsen, 1992). The facilitator attends to both verbal and non-verbal (e.g., behaviors, body language) responses to the system to gain insight into the user experience. While think-alouds can provide invaluable insight, the methodology is not without its challenges, including being cognitively taxing, requiring the user to be skilled at verbalizing their thoughts, and the potential for bias introduced by the setting or the presence of the facilitator. These challenges are all felt more acutely when attempting to get feedback on newly designed video games for learning where immersivity and presence within the game are an important aspect of the designed experience.

One central practice for feedback in game development is the use of playtesting as a means to gather data on player experience. Playtesting think-alouds are a widely-used playtesting approach for gaining insight into the players’ experience. While the same challenges exist for think-alouds in the context of game design, there are additional challenges a game designer faces in trying to get meaningful insight into the player experience. For example, a common goal of video games is to design for immersion, where the player feels “present” in the game (Dede, 2009). However, asking a player to think-aloud while playing pulls them out of the game, lowering presence. Additionally, gameplay is an increasingly social activity, either in the form of players playing synchronously with others or by connecting via social media while they play. Thus, isolating a player for the purposes of data collection and playtest is inauthentic relative to the actual experience of gameplay. In response to these methodological challenges, this paper introduces a methodological variation on the think-aloud protocol that draws on contemporary youth gaming practices that we call the Play-Aloud methodology. In this paper, we first review literature related to the potential utility of leveraging game commentary culture for playtesting. We then describe our implementation of game commentary culture through the Play-Aloud methodology. Next, we present a short example study using this methodology to gain insight on the design of an in-development game, and then present findings on what this method revealed about our game design. We conclude by drawing conclusions from our implementation and findings, pointing towards how this method might be used by other game designers and researchers, and future work to refine the method.