作者：Sebastian Long

游戏测试是在玩家游戏的时候去分析他们的行为和情感的一种方式。通过在先行版本或游戏原型中观察玩家的游戏行动能够帮助你找到游戏中的缺陷并作出相应的改变，从而让游戏更接近你的设计需求。

但是要运行有效的游戏测试却非常困难，需要你做好万全的准备并掌握相关信息，而如果你能够做到这些便能够获得巨大利益。那些最畅销应用，广受好评的游戏以及取得巨大商业成功的游戏之所以能拥有这样的结果是因为，它们都进行了有效的游戏测试。

为了从所邀请的群众那获得无偏见且诚实的反馈，你需要仔细留意他们在进行游戏测试时的每一个眼神，所发出的任何声响以及呼吸。

所以优秀的游戏测试是怎样的？

游戏测试不应该让人感到恐惧

当你在运行游戏测试时你肯定总想挨着玩家坐，越过他们的肩膀看屏幕或在他们玩游戏时与之交谈，但这却会严重影响玩家的自信与注意力。如果你是从一般群众那挑选玩家，那么对于那些玩家来说有个完全陌生的人坐在旁边观察自己的一举一动真的会非常不舒服，特别是对于孩童来说。你不应该让玩家感受到恐惧，不管是对于玩家来说还是主持人。所以最佳方法便是避免和玩家待在同一个房间里。你可以使用屏幕镜像和摄像机或单向玻璃去观察他们，如此便能避免观察者和玩家的压力，留给他们一个更轻松的环境。游戏测试者通常都会感到紧张与害羞，所以你应该尽可能去缓解他们的这些情感。

游戏测试过程的问题

每一款游戏都有缺陷，如果你的玩家表示他们不理解或不能进行有效互动，或随着时间发展他们的排名未出现明显变化，那么你的问题可能便是来自游戏测试过程。你可能问的问题具有引导性或带有偏见，或者你所邀请的游戏测试者缺少多样技能或经验，再或者是游戏测试环境对玩家诚实表达自己的想法具有影响。

给予游戏测试者食物奖励

如果你们国家不允许你支付给游戏测试者现金，或你们的预算很紧张，你可以选择给予游戏测试者食物和饮料作为奖励。比起现金，提供食物会更简单一些。而运行真正有效的游戏测试的最大挑战之一便是获取游戏目标用户群体或带有经验的玩家，而为了鼓励公众（非游戏粉丝）参见游戏测试，你应该提供给他们能够弥补其时间投入的奖励。

给予游戏测试者的食物应该是新鲜，美味或低糖的

因为如果不断提供免费的披萨，苏打或高糖分甜品将导致孩子们只专注于食物而不是你的游戏。如果你需要为玩家提供食物，你最好提供那些简单没有刺激性的食物，并且最好事先咨询游戏测试者的饮食习惯。此外除了食物和饮料你还需要提供卫生间，即方便孩子们可以轻松上厕所。

避免玩家感到失望

玩家参与你的游戏测试的前提应该是相信你的专业性与合法性。因为玩家通常需要考虑请假或花费长时间的路程去你们公司。也许你认为一天的反复游戏测试只能探索游戏的一小部分内容，但玩家却会认为这是他们一生仅可能拥有的一次参与自己喜欢的游戏制作的机会。你可能会认为这种热情的差异性会导致一些严重的问题。所以你最好能够有效管理测试者在每个阶段的期待值，即从最初的互动中便真正重视这一点，从而避免他们感到失望。

不应该让游戏测试者听到开发者的讨论

专业的游戏测试房间应该具有较强的隔音效果。像交谈，笑声或大叫都可能导致玩家分心。你也可以提供给游戏测试者耳机去帮助他们阻隔外部的造影，开发团队也必须尽可能减少噪音。在与办公室不同层楼或在密室中进行游戏测试能够减少噪音对于测试者的影响。

不应该丢给游戏测试者一大堆问题

作为游戏测试的观察者你肯定有一大堆问题想在玩家游戏时问他们。所以避免坐在他们周围便是阻止你不断问他们问题的一种有效方法。因为如果不断问测试者问题你便有可能打断你们团队精心设计的游戏流并影响玩家关于节奏和理解性的反馈。除非你是个经验丰富的游戏测试协调者，否则你便应该记下提问内容并遵循这些内容，从而避免你提出一些带有偏见或引导性的问题。

游戏测试不应该在展会中进行

在一些展会中展示游戏是收集玩家反馈的一种有效方式，但在这种地方你却不能有效掌控玩家的行为。周围都是吵杂的音乐和热情的粉丝们，玩家将很难专注于游戏，你们要进行交流也很困难。除了噪音外，玩家可能在自己玩游戏之前已经看过其他玩家怎么玩了，或者他们会为了了解游戏而事先阅读游戏教程。所以你不应该基于这些玩家的反馈去改变游戏。更重要的是，如果你将游戏测试推迟到你们完成一个适合展会的稳定游戏架构，这时候再去等待玩家的反馈将太迟了。

不应该让游戏测试者感到不适

虚拟现实中的互动设计挑战让VR测试变得更加重要。但模拟器综合症是一个很麻烦的元素，这不仅是因为“暗示性”：即提醒游戏测试者可能感到不适会让他们更有可能觉得不适。所以你必须尽可能地让玩家觉得自在：不要使用带轮子的椅子，避免提供难吃的食物或饮料，并确保玩家不会口渴不适。为一些玩家可能会在测试中感到不适而提前做好预防；所以VR便是“不要在办公室中进行测试”规则的例外。

playtest(from gmw)

不应该让游戏测试者觉得被控制

游戏测试是让人紧张的。所以你应该避免传达给玩家这些压力与紧张。你可以在游戏测试的前天晚上进行演习并明确如何缓解测试者的紧张感。在游戏测试的那天你应该按照黑板上或墙上写着的时间安排进行并让测试者感到安心。在测试者身边尽量表现得足够自然，进行有效且合理的提问也是你必须不断练习的技能。

你必须让测试者感到被欢迎

游戏测试是关于将不同想法带进游戏开发中。通过招进拥有不同性别，种族，经验与能力的游戏测试者，游戏的用户和吸引力也会被相应地扩大化。开发者可以通过各种方法将游戏带向更多行动不便的人，例如你可以考虑让具有身体障碍的人参与游戏测试。邀请非目标用户玩家进行游戏测试能够发现那些目标玩家和资深玩家所忽略或未曾遇到的一些游戏问题，从而帮助你创造出一款更具包容性且更加成功的游戏。

游戏测试不应该是一场市场营销活动

想想你邀请游戏测试者前往的环境是怎样的，如果你的墙壁上挂满奖状或概念图，你便是在阻隔你与玩家间的诚实反馈。游戏测试的目的不应该是为了推销，实际上应该恰恰相反。你应该确保游戏测试环境足够简单平常，这才能有效避免测试者感到兴奋并让他们觉得自己有责任去回馈你的用心。为了鼓励测试者的诚实反馈你应该尝试着将自己带离测试内容：“我并未参与这款游戏的制作所以即使你不喜欢或不理解游戏也不会伤害到我。”

游戏测试不应该是一场骗局

在询问玩家关于游戏测试的意愿时，你总是很容易忽视玩家与你分享个人信息所承担的风险。玩家会觉得交换自己的名字，年龄，居住地址或其它信息去获取未发行游戏的试玩机会好到不真实。收集个人信息既会涉及到法律问题也会涉及道德问题，特别是你的游戏测试者是孩童时。所以你应该确保对所有玩家的信息进行最妥善的保密。

游戏测试主持人的第六感

创造一个让玩家觉得舒服并愿意提供诚实反馈的环境只是工作室从以玩家为中心的开发中获取真正利益的一部分。在询问玩家细节并保持安静，在推动开发团队创建游戏测试架构，在选择合适的游戏测试格式等等方面，研究人员的第六感真的非常重要的。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What Should a Playtest Smell Like?

by Sebastian Long

Playtesting. The science of analysing players’ behaviour and emotion during play. Observing real players’ actions during playthroughs of your pre-release or prototype game helps you find flaws in the experience and inform changes, thereby bringing the game closer to your design intent.

Running great playtesting sessions is notoriously difficult, requiring significant preparation and expertise, but they’re richly rewarding when run well. There is a reason all the top grossing apps, the critically well-reviewed games, and the commercial mega-blockbusters achieve such lofty heights: They’re being playtested properly.

To get unbiased and honest feedback from invited members of the general public you’ll need to carefully their every sight, sound and smell during your playtests.

So what does a great playtest …

… smell like?

… taste like?

… sound like?

… feel like?

… look like?

… and is there a sixth sense?

What does a great playtest smell like?

A playtest shouldn’t SMELL LIKE FEAR

When running your own playtests there is a huge temptation to sit next to a player, look over their shoulder or to talk to the player while they’re playing your game, but consider the impact this is having on players’ confidence and attention. If you’re sourcing players from the general public (and you should be), having a complete stranger sit and observe your every move is more than uncomfortable – especially for children. Playtests shouldn’t smell like fear – either on the part of the player (“Why are they watching me? Am I playing the game right? Do I look stupid?”) or on the part of the moderator too (“Should we interrupt? What are they thinking? Should we explain this mechanic, or point out where the assets are missing?”). The best way to avoid situations is to not be in the room with the player. By using screen mirroring and a video camera, or one-way glass, you remove the pressure on both the observers and the player, allowing for a more relaxed atmosphere. Playtesters will be nervous, and potentially shy, so do all you can to mitigate uncertainty or fearfulness.

Playtests shouldn’t come up SMELLING OF ROSES

Every game has flaws. If your playtests aren’t finding things that players acknowledge they don’t understand, or have difficulty interacting with, or their ratings aren’t changing over time, then your problems are likely with the playtesting process itself. You’re perhaps asking leading or biased questions and undermining the feedback, you’re not inviting playtesters with enough diversity of skill or genre experience, or perhaps the playtest environment itself is affecting players’ willingness to be honest, meaning that your game is unduly ‘coming up smelling of roses’.

What does a great playtest taste like?

Playtesters shouldn’t be REWARDED WITH FOOD

If you’re in a country that makes paying your playtesters in cash legally difficult, or if budget is pretty tight, it can be tempting to reward playtesters with food and drink. Providing payment with banquet of tasty snacks rather than cash is legally and logistically simpler. One of the biggest challenges in running great playtests is in sourcing players of particular demographics or experience; in order to encourage the general public (non-fans) to attend your offices, players should be offered a fair reward for their time. Saving a small amount on player incentives risks biasing your playtester pool, and skewing your playtest data.

Playtest food shouldn’t be SICKLY, SMELLY OR SUGARY

An over-consumption of free pizza, soda or sugary sweets can easily turn well-mannered children into sticky-fingered monsters focused on gummy sweets and not the game. If you do need to feed players, it is generally better to stick to simple, non-pungent foodstuffs, not forgetting to explore the dietary requirements of your playtesters. Furthermore, the most important thing you should provide along with food and drink is the location of the toilets, ensuring children have the confidence to ask to go. Having a sense for when a child is distracted by their need to visit the little boy’s or girl’s room is just another of the unsung skills of a playtest moderator.

Playtests shouldn’t leave a BAD TASTE IN THE MOUTH

Asking players to attend your premises requires significant trust in your professionalism and legitimacy. Players might be considering taking a leave-day from work to attend, or travel a long way. What you see as a one-day iterative playtest to explore a small part of the game, players see as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of something they love. As you might imagine, this discrepancy in enthusiasm can cause very significant issues. It will be important to manage your playtesters’ expectations at every stage of the process, starting from their very first interaction with you, lest they leave with a bad taste in the mouth.

Playtesters shouldn’t OVERHEAR DEVELOPER DISCUSSIONS

Professional playtest labs are carefully built to be completely soundproof. Nothing will throw players off their stride more than overhearing talking, laughing or yelping. Give playtesters over-ear headphones to help block out any background noise, and ensure that the observing development team know to keep the noise down too. Streaming the playtest live to a different floor or a back-room can help lessen the impact of noisy observers.

Playtesters shouldn’t GET AN EARFUL OF QUESTIONS

As a playtest observer you’re going to be brimming with questions to ask the player as they play. Part of the reason you’re not sitting next to the player is to deny you the temptation to continually ask questions. In doing so you’re interrupting the flow that your team has so carefully designed, and invalidating players’ feedback on pacing and understandability. Unless you’re a seasoned playtest coordinator you should write down and stick to a watertight interview script, lest you blurt out a biased, mal-timed or leading question.

Playtests shouldn’t ever be held on a NOISY EXPO FLOOR

Showing games at expos is a seemingly great opportunity to gather player feedback, but they often lack the controlled environment needed to contextualise players’ behaviour. Surrounded by booming music and noisily eager fans, players will have difficulty in concentrating on audio prompts, and conversation will be difficult. More than just the noise, players may also have opportunities to watch other players play before playing themselves, or skip tutorials in favor of ‘getting to the game’. These aren’t normal behaviours, so it is unwise to change your game based upon them. Perhaps most importantly, by delaying playtesting until a stable expo-ready build, you’ve likely waited far too late into development for players’ feedback to be meaningfully implemented: too little, too loud, too late.

Playtesters shouldn’t FEEL SICK

The challenges of interaction design in virtual reality makes VR playtesting doubly important. Simulator sickness is a uniquely troublesome factor, not least because of the ‘suggestibility’ of the condition: warning playtesters about potentially feeling ill can make them more likely to feel ill. Ensure you’re doing all that is necessary to keep players comfortable: don’t use wheely chairs with seated VR; avoid sickly food or drink and keep playtesters hydrated. Be prepared for some number of players to feel unwell and halt the playtest; for this reason, VR is the exception to the ‘don’t be in the room’ rule.

Playtests should feel IN CONTROL

Playtests are stressful. Builds break down, players don’t show, and sessions overrun. Not communicating these pressures and stresses to the playtester is important. Having a dry-run session the evening before a playtest can be great to soothe nerves and work out any kinks in the schedule. For all-day playtests, consider pinning up the day’s time schedule on a board or wall to help players feel reassured. Ultimately though, acting naturally around your playtesters while being secretly terrified about build stability or accidentally asking leading questions is a skill that takes a lot of practice. As you might have gathered by now, there is a great deal of preparation and expertise that goes into running great playtests – and here we’ve only really considered the playtesters’ experience, not the science of observation or analysis of player’s feedback.

Playtesters should FEEL WELCOME

Playtesting is all about introducing diverse voices into game development. By recruiting playtesters of all genders, races, experience-levels and capabilities, a game’s audience and appeal is broadened accordingly. There are very many easily-implemented ways in which games can be made more accessible to persons with disabilities, for example, and you should consider including playtesters with impairments. Inviting playtesters that are outside your pre-conceived audience for the game can help expose flaws that genre-fans and experienced players can overlook or won’t encounter, all toward more inclusive and more successful games.

Playtesting shouldn’t look like a MARKETING EXERCISE

Consider the environment you’re inviting playtesters to; if your walls are covered in award cabinets or concept art, you’re putting up barriers between yourselves and the players’ honest feedback. The objective of playtesting sessions should never include trying to make a sale; in fact, the opposite should be true. Making the playtest environment as dull and uninteresting as possible helps to reduce biasing playtesters through excitement, or making players themselves feel as if they have a duty to be polite in return for your niceties. It can be valuable to try and distance yourself from the product being playtested in order to encourage honesty: “I wasn’t involved in the making of this game, so it won’t hurt my feelings if you find things you don’t like or feel you don’t understand”.

Playtesting sessions shouldn’t look LIKE A SCAM

In asking prospective players to sign up to a playtest, it is easy to overlook the risks you’re asking players to take in sharing their personal details with you. Asking for players’ names, ages, addresses or other details in exchange for the chance to play unreleased videogames can look too good to be true. There are also both legal and moral implications in collecting personal information – doubly so if you’re wanting to invite children to playtest. Ensure wherever possible that all players’ touch-points are suitably branded, sent from official email addresses, and feature a comprehensive privacy policy.

On the ‘sixth sense’ of a playtest moderator

Crafting an environment within which players can feel comfortable and willing to give honest feedback – soundproofing, sick-bags and all – is just part of the answer for studios to truly benefit from player-centric development. Reseachers’ sixth sense of when to ask players for detail and when to keep quiet; when to press development teams for playtest builds; when to apply one playtest format over another, and so many other situations, is critically important. Groups of Researchers have been perfecting this science of player research to aid their development teams in iterating towards a great experience for their players; starting from concept-stages, through design and production.

Those studios adopting a more player-centric development process have seen, felt and maybe even smelled the difference that well-run playtesting can make.

Have these tips helped you come to your senses?

What might your next playtesting session smell like?（source：gamasutra）