作者：Brice Morrison

我在《粘粘世界》达到最低程度可玩性时就开始进行游戏测试，旨在获悉某些内容的呈现方式是否具有可行性。《粘粘世界》能够达到今天这种程度要归功于我们所进行的游戏测试。

world of goo pipe from thegameprodigy.com

静静坐下观看他人体验游戏意义很大。用户通过肢体语言传递的信息远超过言语。我从中获悉用户直觉在游戏机制中的运作情况，调整游戏，让游戏内容更好地配合用户潜在操作习惯。作为工程师，我习惯通过推理和直觉，而非自己的观察解决问题，所以这对我来说是个新收获。

我试着将自己积累的经验归纳成若干小点，供其他开发者参考：

1. 瞄准不同用户——基于两类不同用户进行两次测试相比瞄准同个用户进行两次测试能够让你获得更多信息。

2. 亲自参与——许多有用信息来自于观察用户。我们很难通过口头直接反馈获得有用信息，所以若你没有亲自参与，那么测试就失去价值。坐在能够看到用户、看到他们手和屏幕的位置，然后静静观察。这里有很多值得观察的东西。

3. 回避干扰话语——我的游戏测试开场白是：“就是这款游戏。你们想体验多久就体验多久。我不在这里。”坦白讲，用户首次体验游戏时，你不应该在那里，所以最好选择撤离。不要说什么不恰当的话。作为开发者，你希望大家从游戏中获得乐趣，你希望他们能够理解游戏，但若他们无法达到这些目标，你会感到非常沮丧。也许你会很冲动地想告诉他们：“不，要这样做”或“试试那个”或“忽略这部分”，但你需要忍住这些冲动，看看哪些障碍是优秀挑战，哪些源自糟糕设计。重点是你是你是研究人员，若你干扰玩家，所获数据就会失真。

4. 提问问题——我违反原则3通常是因为我看到某些玩家试图进行某些我无法理解的操作。不要指导他们，探究他们想要做什么，因为这时他们遵循的是自己的直觉，获悉玩家直觉背后的含义是游戏测试的目的之一。

5. 做笔记——没有将内容写下，你就很容易忘记。你需要逐行罗列。当你看到某糟糕内容，心想：“我希望他们没有看到”，就要将此记下。当玩家出现疑惑时，将此记下。若他们试验某些你没有想到的内容，将此记下。你在观察过程中出现某些想法，将此记下。这不会过于琐碎，稍后你可以进一步过滤这些内容。

6. 坚持到底——在单个测试过程中，我通常会记录2页的笔记。在一个回合结束后，我会基于所收集的笔记集中思考可以进行的调整和补充。最终结果是形成一份任务清单。

然后反复进行测试和调整，直到游戏变得尽善尽美。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

2D Boy’s Ron Carmel’s Keys for Playtesting

by Brice Morrison

In this guest post by Ron Carmel of World of Goo developer 2D Boy, he discusses many of the keys to effective playtesting, which in turn is one of the keys to building effectively designed games.

I started out playtesting world of goo as soon as we had something that was minimally playable, just to see if certain ways of displaying information made sense to people. It turned out that much of what World of Goo is now we owe to playtesting.

Just sitting quietly and watching people play the game was invaluable. People tell you more with body language than they ever would with words. I saw how people’s intuition around the game mechanic worked and adjusted the game to be more in line with what I saw people trying to do. As an engineer (and I know i’m not alone in this) I’m used to solving problems more by reasoning and my own intuition than by observation, so this was a new experience for me.

I tried to distill my approach down to a few guidelines that might help other developers improve their games:

1. Use only virgins – Two playtesting sessions with two different people (one session each) will give you a lot more information than two playtesting sessions with the same person.

2. Do it in person – The vast majority of useful stuff came by observing the players. Hardly anything came out of direct verbal feedback, so if you’re not there in person, the playtest is basically worthless. Sit where you can see the player, their hands, and the screen and just watch. There’s a lot to see.

3. Shut the hell up – I start a playtest session by saying “OK, this is the game. Play for as long or as little as you want. I’m not here.” Let’s be honest, you’re not going to be there when people play your game for the first time, so back off. Not saying anything is harder than it sounds. As the developer, you want people to enjoy the game, you want them to get it, you might feel frustrated when they don’t. You might feel the urge to say “no, just do this” or “try that” or “ignore this part”, but by suffering through these urges you get to see which obstacles are good challenges and which are products of bad design (you also reach a higher level of enlightenment, but that’s another subject entirely). The point is that you, the play tester, are a scientist and if you’re interacting with the player you risk contaminating your data.

4. Ask questions – The only time I regularly break rule #3 is when I see a player trying to do something I don’t understand. Without guiding them, find out what they’re trying to do, because at that moment they are following their intuition and an understanding of intuition is the game design gold you mine out of playtesting.

5. Take notes – What you don’t write down, you’ll forget. This should be a list of one liners. When you see something ugly in the game and think to yourself “Ick, I hope they didn’t notice that”, write it down. When the player seems confused, write it down (what might they be confused about?). If they’re trying to do something you hadn’t thought of, write it down. Any thought you have as you’re observing, write it down, nothing is too trivial, you’ll filter these notes later.

6. Follow through – For a single playtest session (for World of Goo it usually lasts between 30 and 90 minutes) I get up to two pages of notes. After a session kyle and I brainstorm possible changes and additions based on the notes we have. The end result is a todo list which I usually plow through pretty quickly (or at least file in our bug DB so that we don’t lose things).

Lather, rinse, repeat until your game is perfect.（Source：thegameprodigy）