Subotron pro games: Know your Player ? Optimizing the player experience

Johanna Pirker, MSc, BSc
Graz University of Technology

QA / Testing / UX Strategies + Basic Player Data Analysis

Ever wondered why nobody buys your game even though all your friends had so much fun while playtesting? Creating an interesting user experience makes the difference between successful games and failed projects. To provide meaningful game experiences, it is important to focus on interesting and engaging design aspects. Games User Research is an emerging field to understand the interaction between your game and the players. Knowing your players opens up the possibility to optimize the players? experience as they engage with your games.
The first part of the talk focuses on one of the most critical but also most painful components of game development: testing the game, evaluating the user experience, and getting honest feedback. Johanna will introduce foundations of games user research, different testing methods, and how to design studies. In the second part she will introduce player-profiling strategies based on game-play data, and how you can design a game, which is made for the player, and not only for you, your family, or your very close friends.

Kurzbiographie
Johanna Pirker is game researcher, software engineer, and educator at Graz University of Technology. She holds an MSc in computer science from TU Graz. In 2011/12 she was researching and developing virtual world environments for physics education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She believes in games and virtual realities as tools to support learning, collaboration, and solve real problems. Johanna has long-lasting experience in evaluating, designing, and developing game environments and virtual realities. She has started in the industry as QA tester at EA and still consults studios. At the moment she teaches game design and development at TU Graz. Her research interests include HCI, AI, games UX, and VR technologies and she has authored and presented numerous publications in her field. She is also an active member of the local developer community and organizes different events and workshops in this field.

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