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主流发行商谈游戏测试的价值及必要性

发布时间:2011-08-01 10:03:57 Tags:,,,

作者:Laura Parker

一座高楼矗立在西雅图的天空之下。在这座昏暗的大楼内部,一群游戏玩家正在耐心地等待被“捆绑”到电压电池上。细细的导线从他们的衣袖中探出头来,微小的触体被认真地放置到每个玩家的手臂上。沿着大厅的某地方,第一股电子脉冲在一个玩家的皮肤上起伏流淌,一台电脑就登记了这一股电子脉冲。无论他是谁,他的神经都会把他暴露。

在Valve的总部,有一间像科学实验室一样宽敞、一样杂乱的测试房。计算机显示器在墙上一字排开,图形、图像和表格的稳定流就从中喷涌而出。一些记录玩家的心率;另一些跟进玩家的眼球运动情况。大量废弃的电阻和电池组被堆砌在房间的一个角落;玩家的信息报告、录象、声音抄本、书面调查表和上千份来源于数个小时的直接观察的结果堆积在另一个角落。Valve非常重视游戏测试。

以玩电子游戏谋生听起来像是每个狂热玩家的梦想。对于测试游戏人员,这种测试所代表的绝不仅仅是游戏开发的另一个例行流程。发行前的游戏测试可以让游戏开发者深入到玩家体验、帮助他们确认游戏的质量和杜绝潜在问题。我们现在所看到的游戏不只是一个简单的成品——这是一种能以不同方式影响个人的主观体验。此因,电子游戏测试不仅要比其他行业的产品测试来得更加严格、更加普遍,而且要更加精确。感觉可以测量吗?为什么一个玩家喜欢这类游戏,另一个玩家不喜欢?用户反馈如何改良游戏?

发行商和开发商不断地寻找这些问题的答案,为此,他们尝试了各种各样的测试方法。GameSpot调查了Valve、Bungie和 Epic Games这三三个游戏工作室的游戏测试情况,找出像科学和心理学一样的工具,如何帮助游戏开发者更好地理解玩家行为的本性。

这是游戏测试房还是科学实验室?(from gamespot)

这是游戏测试房还是科学实验室?(from gamespot)

三年以前,Valve 聘请了实验心理学家Mike Ambinder 来领导游戏开发团队中的测试部门。作为一名耶鲁大学的计算机科学与心理学的学士、伊利诺伊大学的心理学博士,Ambinder当之无愧地成为领导Valve在用户研究,这个新方向的最佳人选。凭借视觉识别方面的深厚背景,Ambinder开始把Valve的游戏测试研究当成一系列测试不同游戏设计假说的科学实验。因为大部分心理学研究是围绕试图隔离行为机制(找出为什么人们会被激励去做某事)展开的,Ambinder 认为游戏测试应该努力做相同的事:利用可提取数据来创造一种整体上更好的用户体验。

Ambinder 表示:“对我而言,游戏测试是游戏开发过程中最重要的部分。这不是我们保留到开发末期才做的事,也不是作为质量评估(QA)或平衡工具。相反地,它是决定发行内容和时间的支配性因素。”

这对游戏产业而言,这还是一个新的研究视角。虽然游戏测试已经被当作游戏开发过程中极其重要的一部分,但在形成最终用户体验方面的作用从未像现在这样重要。一般来说,游戏测试方法强调电子游戏作为产品而不是能够以不同方式影响玩家的多样性体验。即使电子游戏变得更加复杂,且发行商开始雇用专业的QA团队(而在从前,往往是单纯地由开发团队自己测试),但用户反馈实践还是被限定在突出游戏设计的客观性问题,如编码错误和漏洞,在探索游戏中能实现的体验方面,并未多加涉及。因为发行商和开发商混搭不同的方法,以适应各个项目的需要,像功能测试(检索游戏整体设计的一般问题)、验证测试(检查游戏是否遵守发行商的技术和法律要件)、兼容性测试(在不同的配置、硬件和软件上测试)、定位测试、公开测试(由用户找出开发者未发现的错误)和回归测试(确保之前报告的错误已被清除)等,这些方法论已经成为行业惯例。

但时代变了。随着游戏人群的成长,推动更加多样化的游戏体验已经促使发行商反思传统的测试方法的局限性。根据Ambinder,游戏行业的发展方向是:利用更加创新的方法来收集数据、乐意在积累数据上花更多时间、精力和资源。

Ambinder 称:“我认为越来越多的公司开始看到一种价值所在,即雇用具有心理学背景或针对提取有效测试数据的技能的人群。对我们来说,游戏测试是关键,因为这是确认产品的最有效、最诚实的方式。如果我们几乎没做什么测试就发行游戏,那我们就太愚蠢了——因为我们对游戏的质量没有任何信心、没有对它进行严格的检验。为此,只要我们在游戏中加入什么有趣的东西,我们就进行测试。因为我们在发行后要不断地更新产品,所以基本上我们从来没有停止过游戏测试。”

大概10年以前,当开发商第一次对用户研究产生兴趣,标准惯例并没有在上面浪费太多的时间,因此,只有游戏的第一个小时会经历外部测试。这些年来,游戏测试态度相对严肃了。大多数发行商都认为没有经过上百小时、涉及游戏方方面面的严格测试,就发行游戏,是一种疯狂的行为。十年知识的价值换来了一个真理:观点。

具有数年游戏测试经验的Epic Games高级游戏测试经理Prince Arrington从他身边的工作中看到了观点的价值所在。

“当我把收到的反馈拿给开发商,然后盼着我的建议在游戏中复活,我总是很愉快的。但难过的是,我的工作价值往往被很轻易地贬低了。作为开发者,我们离项目太近了,所我们就非常容易落入这样的陷阱:没有意识到我们的宝贝游戏并不完美。结果就是,差劲的设计一直很差劲。掌握外界反馈的价值在于,如果你能敞开心胸接受有益的批评,然后在整个开发循环中检查,这样你可以确认你做了些了不起的事,或者痛苦地意识到你没做出什么出彩的事,有这种觉悟总是不错的吧。”

Bungie让一些甚至从来没见过射击游戏的人来测试它的《光晕》(from gamespot)

Bungie让一些甚至从来没见过射击游戏的人来测试它的《光晕》(from gamespot)

正如Ambinder, Arrington的生涯根植于心理学。他在卡罗莱纳州立大学获得心理学学位后,离开学术界转而成为一名合约测试员。也就是在这个时候,他的父亲告诉他,玩了这么多游戏,他就应该开始制作游戏了。在他作为Epic的QA经理的三年期间,Arrington渐渐地把游戏测试当作保证开发无误的有利工具。

“游戏测试对于开发周期,就相当于设计讨论或编码复核。虽然执行方式不同,但应该成为每天的必修课。我们要让不同人用各种技术进行测试;我们乐于接受建设性批评;我们的唯一目的就是把我们的游戏做得尽可能完美。

“开发者在一个项目上工作了这么久,总是难免会对什么有效、什么无效迷失观点。如果没有真正的反馈形式,开发者就有可能会喝下苦艾饮料(游戏邦注:指的是一种可以为了某个信仰或理念而壮烈牺牲的精神或行为),习惯于项目的无效和缺陷。这会导致在开发出更理想的路径方面停滞不前。”

这种观点经常是由那些从来没有玩过电子游戏的人提供的。当决定采用哪类人群作测试时,Valve 和Epic 的人群定位都非常广,从资深玩家到从来没有玩过射击游戏的玩家,甚至是非游戏玩家。随着游戏人群日益增多,开发商已经渐渐意识到,触及所有游戏技术级别的人群,和保留现有玩家的同时开发新玩家的重要性。

Bungie的用户研究设计领导,John Hopson(游戏邦注:他也持有心理学学位)称:“在Bungie,我们有一个游戏测试者的登记页面,我们吸纳各类人群:专家级玩家、休闲玩家及所有人。在《光晕》的测试中,我们甚至吸收了以前从来没有射击游戏经验的人。真是痛苦的观察经历,因为他们遇到的麻烦太多了,特别是那些我们想都不用想的东西,如组合使用两个游戏控制手柄或铵键的位置。但《光晕》应该是一款老少皆宜、雅俗共赏的游戏,所以看看从来没有玩过射击游戏的人对《光晕》作何反应,是非常必要的。”

Arrington表示,某类玩家可能占据了这款游戏用户基础的一大部分,如果开发商太过依赖某个方向,而这个方向并没有把这类人的信息纳入考虑范围,可能会有扭曲测试结果的风险。

“如果你的游戏不为新玩家着想,或游戏的上手门槛设得太高,那类人往往不会再玩或者干脆避开你的游戏。所以保证游戏对休闲玩家容易上手、对资深玩家和硬核玩家有足够的挑战性,这是非常重要的。”(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

The Science of Playtesting

By Laura Parker

We go behind the scenes at Valve, Bungie, and Epic Games to see how user feedback helps shape the game development process.

Inside a dark building high above the Seattle landscape, a group of gamers wait patiently to be strapped to a voltage battery. Thin wires peek out from under their sleeves as tiny round contacts are stuck carefully to each of their hands. Somewhere down the hall, a PC registers the first electrical pulse, rippling across the skin of one of the candidates. Whoever he is, his nerves have just given him away.

The playtesting rooms inside Valve’s headquarters resemble a large, untidy science lab. PC monitors line the wall, spewing out steady streams of graphs, patterns, and charts. Some keep track of candidates’ heart rates; others record their eye movements. A pile of resistors and voltage batteries lie discarded in one corner of the room; candidate information reports, video recordings, audio transcripts, written questionnaires, and the results of thousands of hours of direct observation lie in the other. Valve takes its playtesting seriously.

While playing video games for a living may sound like the dream ticket for any avid gamer, for those involved in the process, it represents much more than just another routine part of game development. Testing games before they are released gives game developers a rare insight into the end user experience, helping them validate the quality of the game and isolate potential problems. We now see games as much more than simple products; we see subjective experiences that affect individuals in different ways. For this reason, video game testing not only has to be more rigorous and pervasive than product testing in other industries, but also more precise. Can feelings be measured? Why does one player enjoy a particular game, while another does not? How can user feedback be used to make games better?

Publishers and developers are constantly seeking answers to these questions, trialing a variety of playtesting methods to get the best results. In this feature, GameSpot will go behind the scenes of three major studios–Valve, Bungie, and Epic Games–to find out how tools like science and psychology are helping game developers better understand the nature of player behavior.

Playtesting room or science lab?

A Healthy Dose of Perspective

Three years ago, Valve hired experimental psychologist Mike Ambinder to head up the playtesting department of its development arm. With a B.A. in computer science and psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois, Ambinder was the perfect man to lead Valve in a new direction in the field of user research. Using his background in visual recognition, Ambinder began treating Valve’s playtesting sessions as a series of scientific experiments designed to test various game design hypotheses. Since most psychological research revolves around trying to isolate mechanisms of behavior to find out why people are motivated to do the things they do, Ambinder thought game playtesting should strive to do much the same thing: use extractable data to make an altogether better user experience.

“For us, playtesting is the most important part of the game development process,” Ambinder says. “It’s not something we save for the end of the development, or use as a quality assessment (QA) or balancing tool. Instead, it is the dominant factor that shapes our decisions about what to release and when to release it.”

This is a relatively new attitude for the games industry. While playtesting has always been a vital part of the game development process, the role it plays in shaping the final user experience has never been as important as it is now. Traditionally, playtesting methodologies focused on video games as products rather than as variable experiences that can affect players in different ways. Even as video games became more complex and publishers began to employ dedicated quality assessment teams rather than simply having the development teams playtest their own games, user feedback practices remained fixed on highlighting problems surrounding the more objective aspects of game design–coding errors and bugs–rather than exploring the experience of what it’s like to actually play the game. Methodologies like functionality testing (looking for general problems in the game’s overall design), compliance testing (checking that the game complies to publishers’ technical and legal requirements), compatibility testing (testing the game on various configurations of hardware and software), localization testing, public beta testing (which lets users pick up any errors the developers may have missed), and regression testing (testing to make sure previously reported bugs have been eliminated) have become industry standards, with publishers and developers mixing and matching various methods to suit individual project needs.

But things are changing. The growth of gaming audiences and the subsequent push towards more diverse gaming experiences has led some publishers to rethink traditional playtesting methods in favor of something a little more relevant. According to Ambinder, the games industry is starting to move towards more innovative ways of gathering data, willing to spend more time, energy, and resources on its accumulation.

“I think more and more companies are starting to see the value in hiring folks with backgrounds in psychology or related fields that provide skilled training in extracting meaningful data from playtesters,” Ambinder says. “For us, playtesting is crucial, as it is the most effective and honest means of validating our products. We would be foolish to release a game that went through minimal playtesting, as we could have little confidence in its quality had it not gone through rigorous testing. To that end, we start playtesting as soon as we have something playable, and we basically never stop as we are constantly updating our products after shipping.”

When developers first became interested in user research some 10 or so years ago, the standard practice was not to waste too much time on it; therefore, only the first hour of the game would undergo outside playtesting. Things are a little more serious these days. Most publishers would consider it madness to release a game that hasn’t been subjected to hundreds of hours of rigorous playtesting, combing over every single part of the game right up to its release. A decade’s worth of knowledge has come down to one thing: perspective.

After spending years as a playtester himself, Epic Games senior game test manager Prince Arrington saw the value of perspective in the work of those around him.

“I always got a kick out of giving feedback to developers and then seeing my suggestions come to life in-game. But sadly, it has the tendency to be one of those things that can easily be undervalued. It’s very easy for us, as developers, to get too close to our projects and fall into the trap of not realizing that our baby isn’t perfect. This often leads to poor design remaining poor. The value in having outside feedback is that it’s always nice, if you’re open to constructive criticism, to get those checks throughout the development cycle so that you can get the confirmation that you’re making something kick-ass…or otherwise, the painful realization that you’re not.”

Bungie playtested its Halo games with people who had never even seen a shooter.

Just like Ambinder, Arrington’s professional career is rooted in psychology. Earning his psychology degree from North Carolina State University, Arrington left academia to become a contract tester when his father told him that he played games so much that he should probably start making them. During his three years as Epic’s QA manager, Arrington has come to see playtesting as a valuable tool in keeping developers in check.

“Playtests are as much a part of the development cycle as design meetings or code reviews,” Arrington says. “While different in execution, it’s something that should be done daily, with different combinations of participants with varying skill sets willing to give constructive criticism, with the sole purpose of making the game as good as humanly possible.

“Developers work on a project for so long, there’s always the potential to lose perspective on what’s working and what’s not working. Without this form of genuine feedback, developers have a tendency to drink the Kool-Aid and become accustomed to the inefficiencies and flaws of a project, which leads to a failure to explore more suitable paths.”

This perspective is often offered by people who have never played video games before. Both Valve and Epic aim for a wide demographic when deciding whom to bring in, from seasoned gamers, to people who have never played a shooter before, right down to non-gamers. With the gaming audience growing every day, developers have come to understand the value of reaching out to all skill levels, fighting to keep existing audiences while trying to snare new ones.

“We have a sign-up page for playtesters on Bungie, and we bring in a whole range of people: people who are experts, people who play casually, everyone,” says John Hopson, the user research design lead at Bungie. (He too has a psychology degree). “For Halo testing we even bring in people who have never played a shooter before. It’s painful to watch because they have a lot of trouble, especially with things that we don’t even think about anymore, like coordinating the use of two thumbsticks or knowing where the buttons are. But Halo is supposed to be a game that is fun for everyone, so it’s necessary to see how people who have never played a shooter before react to it.”

Arrington says if developers lean too far in one direction they risk skewed playtesting results, ones that don’t take into account information from players who have the potential to account for a large portion of the game’s user base.

“If you fail to account for players new to your game or genre, it’s typically those players that will stop playing, or avoid your game, if the barrier to entry is too high. So this is very important for making the game easily accessible to the casual gamer as well as challenging enough for the veteran, hardcore gamer.” (source:gamespot


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