What Does Games User Research Look Like for a Fan Game?
This is the very question I found myself asking at the outset of my user experience capstone program. For those wondering, the UW–Madison User Experience Design (superbly nicknamed the Mad UX program) provides graduate-level user experience skills in planning, designing, and assessing innovative digital applications and media.
Promotional image for the University of Wisconsin User Experience Design Capstone
As a recent graduate, looking at returning for grad school, this program seemed the perfect way for me to diversify my digital media skills while simultaneously allowing me to get ahead by earning a few credits during my gap year. I had first heard of the term user experience from my mentors at Field Day Learning Games who had talked about their background with user experience as a crucial element of their philosophy as designers. The strength of the Mad UX program stems from its emphasizes on the practical application of research methods studied through projects directed by each individual student.
MAD–UX Meets MOTHER²
For my project, I hoped to tie together an on-going project of mine with my budding user research skills. Speaking to the head producer of MOTHER² I sought to broaden the scope of my contributions to the project from mere programming and development to more design and user experience aspects of the project. This request was met with cautious acceptance, as the producer seemed interested to see what insights the research might provide for development without any real direction for research studies that could benefit the project. This left me with a lot of creative freedom to shape the research to match the requirements of my program. At the same time, those freedoms came coupled with the burden of fledgling UX maturity from the other members of my team.
What could go wrong… 😁
🎮️ Games User Research
As I quickly found out upon entering the program, the requirements of digital games vary quite a bit from traditional digital mediums like apps or websites.
Listing every difference between traditional and games user research is beyond the scope of this case study, but for those curious check out this talk by Alistair Greo or this article by Jakob Nielsen.
Suffice it to say, I was gonna need to do some extra homework to help fill in the gaps in my GUR knowledge (a slightly less superb acronym for Games User Research).
Enter My Online Oasis
Screenshot from the articles page of gamesuserresearch.com
Written by Steve Bromley this online community contains a plethora of resources for newbie games user researchers, ranging from expert-written articles and case studies to full-blown UX courses! Thoughout the course, I frequently found myself asking question in the group’s Discord community where you can connect with other games user researchers and Steve himself! I cannot overstate how valuable a resource this community was as I was beginning to explore the world of game user research. I would highly recommend joining the discord community for anyone else looking to explore what GUR has to offer. Steve’s articles helped supplement my primary readings for that fall including: Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research Methods by Catherine Courage, Kathy Baxter, and Kelly Caine and Universal Methods of Design by Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington.
Who Plays a Fan Game?
Putting into practice the research methods studied in the early months of the Mad UX capstone, it was time to conduct some research of my own and get my feet wet. The first decision to be made was to pick an appropriate subject for the team’s first study. While there was some consensus amongst long-time team members on the direction of the MOTHER² project, the open-source nature of the project had led to a lot of turnover, even just from the time I had joined the team (about 3 years into development in 2021). It seemed to me that taking the time to better solidify who our players are would be most beneficial for us moving forward.
Once I had oriented myself towards a goal, it was time to select a research method. For the capstone program, my cohort and I were required to conduct a breath of practice studies as we learned a vast array of research methods. The downside of this approach being that not all of the methods practiced directly corrilated to answering our research questions. Towards the end of the program however, we were were given more freedom to expand upon methods most appropriate for out project.
Breaking Ground
This figure is taken from Bromley’s article Choose The Right Playtest Method.
For this reason, I chose to conduct two studies to capture a more detailed snapshot of our current users. In our first study we chose to conduct virtual interviews with some of our target audience members hoping to learn more about what who are players are and what feature they expect from modern RPG titles. In addition, at the request of the project lead, we conducted a demographic survey polling player interests and in-game rewards, distributed to the game’s current followers on Discord and Twitter (now X). The MOTHER² team has periodically invited playtesters to help QA test early alpha versions of the game, who turned out to be a wonderful candidate pool when selecting potential players for interviews.
Promotional art shared during recruiting for the MOTHER² project
From these studies, I was able to collect over 300 responses and conduct 7 sem-moderated interviews which generated a ton of raw data that I was then able to record and transform into deliverables for my team. These deliverables included a competitor set of similar EarthBound remake titles, a catalog of games our players were most familiar with, some demographic info for our target audience, and poll results for our followers’ favorite types of in-game rewards and bonus challenges.
This figure represents the deliverable of the indirect competitor catelog, illustrating our follower’s favorite RPG titles
Sharing the Results
In the end, this infromation was compiled into a report that was shared with the project leaders outlining what we had learned from our research. Sharing this information with my team, helped to provide clarity during our design discussions around our potential users and bought me a little more buy-in to continue my user research within the project.
And indeed, there was plenty more to be done. In preparation for our Beta launch, this research experiment helped reveal the potential for additional playtests and observational studies to be conducted to better understand what draws fans to, or repels players from our project.
This is not the end of my research with the MOTHER² project. If you would like to learn more about how UX principles informed the design of specific features added to the remake check out the following case study: Redesigning Randomness 🎲.