Duration: 26:22

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Our subversive overall goal was to sensitize future leaders in the game industry the value of games user research. Knowing that most of our students would not be game user researchers, we wanted give the students the experience of working with game designers (which most would be themselves in the future), and to represent the players’ experience.

By this method, the students who are the game researchers will have to understand their assigned game designers’ goals, vision and conceptual design of the game, create a player test plan, carry out the research, analyze it, then communicate it to their assigned game designers.

Here is the set of subversive goals:
Create Empathy for Game Research and Researchers
Administrative Skills
Diplomacy Skills

We will cover challenges, what worked and did not, surprises, and implications for other programs.

Speaker: Heather Desurvire
Heather Desurvire of User Behavioristics, Inc. is one of the most experienced specialists of User and Player Experience whose published work on methodologies and guidelines has added to the body of knowledge in the field. As a veteran practitioner, Ms. Desurvire has worked with many Fortune 500/100 companies, the US Government and top publishers and studios, such King, LucasArts, Electronic Arts, Disney, Sega, Relic, Blizzard, and many more. Her early work pioneered research on methodologies for evaluating the usability for UX. A summary of her research work is published in “Usability Inspection Methods” (ed. J. Nielsen) for usability methods, and in “Evaluating User Experience for Games” (Springer, 2010 + 2015 second addition) for immersion and PX. She also has teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Players Experience.

Speaker: Dennis Wixon
Dennis Wixon of USC Schools of Cinematic Arts, has worked in user research since 1981. He was a usability manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such as Usability Engineering, Contextual Inquiry, and data logging were developed. He has also managed research teams at Microsoft, which developed RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) and TRUE (Tracking Real-Time User Experience) methods. He has co-authored over 50 articles, book chapters and talks on HCI, and coauthored of two books: Field Methods Casebook for Software Design and Brave NUI World. Dennis is an associate professor at USC in the Interactive Media and Games Division within the School for Cinematic Arts.