Facts about Players - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 79

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F acts about P l ayers
It would take years of reading psychological manuscripts, theses,
reports from governmental agencies, and literally sifting through
mountains of data to come to a holistic understanding of what makes
a player a player. While I can't claim to know everything about gam-
ers, from years of work in human computer interaction and psycho-
logical research intersecting game design and software engineering, I
have learned a lot. Again, some heavy psychology material here will
be gathered up into a cheat sheet at the end of the chapter.
Unfortunately, in good research anyway, it is hard to delineate or
list any clear facts about people as a whole. For this reason, this chap-
ter is going to abandon that approach. Instead of trying to tell you the
facts like “all gamers like tofu” or “gamers between the ages of 11 and
21 prefer cottage cheese rather than feta,” I'm going to tell you one
inalienable fact about gamers and people in general: factually, people
differ significantly, but there are a few key things that we can use to
bind them together and get a better understanding of our audience.
More appropriately, this chapter will make you aware of the things
that differentiate one player from another, and drive home exactly
how important it is to account for these differences. If, for example,
we performed our user testing without pretests, we would have no
idea if we had accidentally recruited a group full of pro-gamers or a
group full of people who had never touched a controller in their lives.
While many companies do feature an “entry interview” for their play
testing, I am going to demonstrate some of the more overlooked ele-
ments that contribute, psychologically, to our enjoyment or distaste
for games.
A few things differentiate players of games. The obvious ones are
researched to death—things like age, socioeconomic status, race, gen-
der, and predisposition to games. There are entire schools of thought
dedicated to researching stuff like this. It is important, necessary,
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