Love video games? Start your career making them better. Games user researchers run playtests to ensure games are understandable and enjoyable, and are a key part of making games that people love. The video games industry is full of passionate people who care about making fun experiences. If you love games, and want to make them better, consider a career in games user research. Drawing upon ten years of experience working on top games and helping people start their career in games How To Be A Games User Researcher is the essential guide on how to run professional quality playtest studies and get a job in the games industry. What's in the book? Discover How games development works and where research fits in How to plan, run, analyse and debrief professional quality playtests The importance of building relationships with game teams How to start a career in user research The skills required to excel at job interviews Who is this book for? This book is for: Students considering a career in games user research UX researchers looking to transition into games New games user researchers Academics studying games design, development, or HCI Game designers and developers looking to improve the quality of their playtests About the author Steve Bromley led research studies for many of PlayStation's top European games including Horizon: Zero Dawn, SingStar and the PlayStation VR launch lineup. He continues to work with games and VR studios to improve the player experience of their games. For the last five years, Steve Bromley has run a games user research mentoring scheme, which has partnered over one hundred students with more than fifty industry professionals from top companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, and helped many people get their first job in games. This book covers many of the topics that mentees have asked as they start their games user research career.

Games live and die commercially on the player experience. Games User Research is collectively the way we optimise the quality of the user experience (UX) in games, working with all aspects of a game from the mechanics and interface, visuals and art, interaction and progression, making sure every element works in concert and supports the game UX. This means that Games User Research is essential and integral to the production of games and to shape the experience of players. Today, Games User Research stands as the primary pathway to understanding players and how to design, build, and launch games that provide the right game UX. Until now, the knowledge in Games User Research and Game UX has been fragmented and there were no comprehensive, authoritative resources available. This book bridges the current gap of knowledge in Games User Research, building the go-to resource for everyone working with players and games or other interactive entertainment products. It is accessible to those new to Games User Research, while being deeply comprehensive and insightful for even hardened veterans of the game industry. In this book, dozens of veterans share their wisdom and best practices on how to plan user research, obtain the actionable insights from users, conduct user-centred testing, which methods to use when, how platforms influence user research practices, and much, much more.

Successful products require good decisions. Reliable information about what users are trying to achieve, their context and whether they can and will use your product is essential to making good product decisions. User researchers run robust and repeatable studies to find that information, but they need some tools and support to get started. Building User Research Teams is a practical guide on how to build a research team of any size, starting from convincing colleagues why they need a user research team, through the development and implementation of the tools and processes needed, to running high quality studies and mapping the future development of a growing research team. Learn how to: Advocate for user research inside your organisation Budget for and equip a research team Create the templates and tools needed to run research Run studies that are impactful and accurate Optimise your research team's workflow Grow a research team long-term This book is useful for: Companies looking to hire their first researcher New research leaders establishing a team Independent researchers in companies looking to maximise their impact Designers, product managers and UX professionals wanting to incorporate research best practice into their work

Games live and die commercially on the player experience. Games User Research is collectively the way we optimise the quality of the user experience (UX) in games, working with all aspects of a game from the mechanics and interface, visuals and art, interaction and progression, making sure every element works in concert and supports the game UX. This means that Games User Research is essential and integral to the production of games and to shape the experience of players. Today, Games User Research stands as the primary pathway to understanding players and how to design, build, and launch games that provide the right game UX. Until now, the knowledge in Games User Research and Game UX has been fragmented and there were no comprehensive, authoritative resources available. This book bridges the current gap of knowledge in Games User Research, building the go-to resource for everyone working with players and games or other interactive entertainment products. It is accessible to those new to Games User Research, while being deeply comprehensive and insightful for even hardened veterans of the game industry. In this book, dozens of veterans share their wisdom and best practices on how to plan user research, obtain the actionable insights from users, conduct user-centred testing, which methods to use when, how platforms influence user research practices, and much, much more.

"Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field." —Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes. The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human–computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming. Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human–computer interaction between the player and the game.

This Element takes the initiative to highlight the nascent state of audiovisual translation research centring on users of video games. It proposes ways of advancing the research by integrating numerous related perspectives from relevant fields to guide studies in translated game reception into further fruition. The Element offers an accessible overview of possible relationships between translation and its experiencers, showcasing ways to design game reception studies. Examples, methods, tools, and practical concerns are discussed to ultimately develop a blueprint for game translation user research which aims to consolidate scientific user-centric inquiry into video game translation. To that end, the blueprint captures the three-pronged interplay between the parameters of localisation-reception research in facets of user experience, facets of translated games, and facets of game users.

In der Vergangenheit war die Mensch-Computer-Interaktion (Human-Computer Interaction) das Privileg einiger weniger. Heute ist Computertechnologie weit verbreitet, allgegenwärtig und global. Arbeiten und Lernen erfolgen über den Computer. Private und kommerzielle Systeme arbeiten computergestützt. Das Gesundheitswesen wird neu erfunden. Navigation erfolgt interaktiv. Unterhaltung kommt aus dem Computer. Als Antwort auf immer leistungsfähigere Systeme sind im Bereich der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion immer ausgeklügeltere Theorien und Methodiken entstanden. The Wiley Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction bietet einen Überblick über all diese Entwicklungen und untersucht die vielen verschiedenen Aspekte der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion und hat den Wert menschlicher Erfahrungen, die über Technologie stehen, ganzheitlich im Blick.