Enhancing Game Design through Games User Research and Storyboarding
Game design is an art that blends creativity with a clear vision of the player’s experience. Yet, it can be challenging to evaluate if the final product aligns with the developer’s original intent. This is where Games User Research (GUR) steps in—a field focused on understanding how players interact with games to bring the final experience closer to what designers envisioned. GUR allows designers to observe player behavior, assess engagement, and adjust design elements to create a more immersive and enjoyable experience.
Understanding the Role of Games User Research
Games User Researchers (GURs) use various methods and tools to analyze player interactions, supporting developers in making informed design decisions. By observing user test (UT) sessions, GURs capture insights into player frustration points, engagement, and the ease with which players navigate game features. These insights are invaluable for aligning gameplay with design goals.
However, GUR’s effectiveness hinges on clear, convincing, and actionable reports. Reporting UT findings in ways that development teams can trust and utilize effectively is critical. This is where storytelling and storyboarding can transform complex data into accessible insights, making it easier for developers to identify problem areas and make targeted adjustments.
The Need for Improved GUR Reporting
To understand GUR’s impact on game development, we spoke with professionals from UK-based game studios who shared their experiences with UT reports. They emphasized four main areas of interest:
- Identifying player frustration and difficulty points.
- Assessing player engagement and enjoyment.
- Verifying if players are using game features as intended.
- Comparing player experiences to the designer’s original intent.
For example, in a racing game project, a developer used heatmaps to track crash locations across tracks. While helpful, the heatmaps alone couldn’t differentiate between crashes that led to frustration and those that created excitement. They noted that an ideal UT report should combine data visualization, like heatmaps, with player comments to provide a fuller picture.
What Makes an Effective UT Report?
Our interviews highlighted a few key characteristics of useful UT reports:
- Concise Summaries: Developers value reports that summarize key findings at a glance.
- Contextual Location Data: Knowing precisely where issues occur in each game level allows developers to prioritize fixes effectively.
- Trust and Credibility: Developers are more likely to trust UT findings when they witness player behavior directly, through either in-person observation or gameplay videos.
- Comparison to Intended Experience: Developers want reports that help them compare actual player experience with their design intentions, focusing on usability, player experience, and game pacing.
Storytelling: Transforming UT Data into Engaging Narratives
Storytelling is a powerful way to communicate player experiences and align development teams with user-centered design principles. In game design, storytelling helps developers visualize player journeys, understand design issues, and create a cohesive vision that bridges different perspectives within a team.
By using storyboards—a familiar tool for visualizing narrative elements in games—GUR teams can present UT findings in an intuitive, engaging format. Storyboards can serve various purposes, from illustrating gameplay issues to mapping user emotions, making them an ideal tool for GUR reporting.
Integrating Storyboards into GUR Reporting
Effective storytelling through storyboards can transform how UT findings are presented. Below, we discuss several advantages of storyboarding for GUR:
- Connecting User Research to Gameplay Events: Storyboards allow GURs to link different data types, such as qualitative user comments and quantitative gameplay metrics, into a unified narrative. For instance, they can combine a player’s actions with biometrics, like heart rate data, and gameplay events, providing insight into how gameplay moments impact player emotions.
- Comparing Player Experiences: Storyboarding enables researchers to create a visual record of different player journeys through the same game events. Comparing these journeys highlights gameplay trends, revealing patterns of behavior and preferences that inform design improvements.
- Whole Session Overviews: Visualizing a complete gameplay session gives developers a bird’s-eye view of player performance, emotional highs and lows, and areas needing refinement. Storyboards facilitate quick scanning of levels, events, and player emotions, enabling teams to identify potential problem areas faster.
- Verifying Design Intentions: Storyboarding helps verify whether the final design meets the intended player experience. Comparing storyboarded player feedback with the designer’s vision enables teams to judge if their designs are effective or need adjustment.
- Simplicity and Familiarity: Storyboards are easy to understand and interpret, offering a visual language familiar to most game developers. They reduce complexity by visually connecting data points, which encourages team buy-in and increases the likelihood of actionable insights.
- Supporting Collaboration: Storyboards facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, enabling GUR teams, developers, designers, and producers to interpret player data collectively. This shared understanding builds a foundation for collaborative decision-making, reinforcing user-centered design principles.
Introducing Biometric Storyboards
To take storytelling a step further, GURs have started using “Biometric Storyboards.” These storyboards combine player biometrics, such as heart rate and facial expressions, with gameplay events. By tracking how players feel during specific game moments, Biometric Storyboards provide an emotional layer to GUR findings, capturing fluctuations in player engagement.
Developing Biometric Storyboards
The process of creating Biometric Storyboards involved several iterations. Early versions attempted to divide gameplay by time, but this approach proved ineffective. Instead, researchers organized storyboards around “thematic beats” or gameplay events. This shift made the data more representative of the player’s journey, showing where gameplay was too challenging, too easy, or elicited strong emotional reactions.
From these storyboards, researchers learned to:
- Divide levels by thematic beats to focus on player experience at each significant game event.
- Use color-coded dots to indicate moments of high and low engagement.
- Overlay behavior descriptions with player emotions, using gradient lines to show emotional dips and peaks.
By pairing game actions with emotional responses, Biometric Storyboards offer a unique view of player experience, helping teams visualize where design intentions align with or diverge from actual player feedback.
Using Storyboards to Center Player Experience
As video games grow more complex, finding tools to simplify player data interpretation becomes increasingly important. Storyboarding offers a balanced approach to GUR reporting, combining player feedback with gameplay metrics into a visual narrative that’s easy for developers to digest. This method can be a game-changer for GUR, allowing teams to recognize player frustrations, engagement, and overall satisfaction more intuitively.
Key Benefits of Storyboarding for GUR:
- Enables Correlation of Complex Data: Storyboards provide a cohesive view that blends player actions, biometrics, and gameplay events.
- Facilitates Comparisons Across Players: Comparing multiple storyboards can highlight gameplay trends and player preferences.
- Provides a Visual Overview of Gameplay Sessions: Storyboarding lets developers scan entire sessions, helping them pinpoint design areas needing improvement.
- Verifies Design Intentions: Designers can see if actual gameplay aligns with the player experience they intended.
- Supports Collaboration: Storyboards encourage a collaborative review of player experiences, fostering a user-centered design approach.
Conclusion: Storyboarding as a Tool for Insightful Game Design
Storyboards are a powerful addition to Games User Research, bridging the gap between raw data and meaningful insights. By translating complex player data into visually accessible narratives, GUR teams can foster a shared understanding of the player experience across all departments. Storyboards not only highlight design flaws but also provide a structured way to brainstorm solutions, ensuring that game developers stay connected to player needs and design goals.
Biometric Storyboards add another layer of depth, allowing developers to track player emotions alongside gameplay events, enhancing their ability to craft engaging, user-centered games. In the future, we hope to see more GUR teams integrate storyboarding into their workflows, as it promises to enhance collaboration, streamline development, and bring games closer to the experiences their designers envisioned.