Capturing Player Experience with Post-Game Commentaries

1. Capturing Player Experience with Post-Game Commentaries Robin Baumgarten Joint work with Jeremy Gow (Imperial), Paul Cairns (University of York), Simon Colton (Imperial) & Paul Miller (Rebellion Developments)

2. Capturing Player Experience • Understanding player experience is central to game design • Informal playtesting is widely used by developers • Our motivation: studying adaptive experience management systems • We want to access experience as it changes during play • Our requirements for experience capture • Detailed and non-destructive record of normal gaming experiences • Relate change over time to activities and events in game • Unbiased as possible, as experiences are varied and poorly understood • No existing method ticked all the boxes, e.g. biofeedback, experience sampling, comparative judgements.

3. Post-Game Commentaries • Our solution: post-game player commentaries • Screen capture during normal play session • The player then controls a video replay of their screen capture • What do you remember feeling and doing? • Record them talkingas much as they can in response to the video • Neutral prompting by an observer reminds the player to talk • Detailed and contextualised experience reports • More explicit prompts (e.g. word lists) introduce bias, but give more data • Can be used to corroborate other methods, e.g. biofeedback • A form of Cued Retrospective Think-Aloud Protocol applied to games • Cued RTA is effective in other domains, e.g. problem-solving • Butpotential for experiences to be lost or reinterpreted in memory

4. Using Commentaries: Rogue Trooper • What can we learn from commentary data? • We used a case study to illustrate the technique • 1st level of 3rd person shooter Rogue Trooper (Rebellion, 2006) • 4 single players = 1.5 hrs commentary in total • Data analysis used open coding to construct a classification of reported experiences • Counted experiences on a scene by scene basis • One scene = a combat, a navigation phase, a mini-game or a cut scene

5. Case Study: Results • Experience classification for Rogue Trooper • Positive-negative classes: control-controlled, interested-bored, understand-confused, satisfied-dissatisfied, purposeful-aimless • Coping-struggling classes: hard-easy, confident-cautious • Player commentaries give multiple views of players’ experience • Dominant experiences for entire level • Feeling Confusion (21% reports) and mostly about Combat (34%) • Breakdown by scene • Clusters of negative experiences help identify areas for redesign • Individual player journeys • Helps us understand how different types of player can experience the game • Highlights role of negative experiences in both learning and dissatisfaction

6. Conclusions & Future Work • Post-game player commentaries can provide a detailed and contextualised reports of player experience • Case study demonstrated how commentaries can be used to • Develop classification of experiences for a game • Critique a level and understand individual player’s progress • Our research priorities • Use commentaries to study effects of experience management systems • Tool support to reduce burden of data analysis