Duration: 46:59

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Playtesting is a difficult and time consuming endeavour, frequently confounded by external and lurking variables. As investigators, user researchers and data analysts take steps to mitigate the effects that these corrupting influences can have when making inferences about players and their behaviour. This problem is only further exacerbated when the testing explores a massive, open-world game with hundreds of possibilities for fun, murder, and mayhem. This talk will illustrate some of the techniques used at Deep-Silver Volition in an attempt to isolate player behaviours for study. The talk illustrates a few ‘best practices’ for dealing with chaos in games.

Matthew M. White, Ph.D.
Matthew M. White, Ph.D. is a Data Scientist at Deep-Silver Volition, conducting data mining, user insights, and A/B testing on a wide variety of AAA titles. Matthew is the author of the book “Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games”, and spends a lot of time thinking about how information gets into brains, and the people that house them. .

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