Week 1.08: Reflection — Research and Ethics

Week 8 caught me by surprise. I originally thought research would cover the technology behind game development such as AI, procedural generation or perhaps AR/VR. I was wrong. Instead, this particular section of the module would focus on something far more important: User research and the ethics associated with soliciting feedback from others.

With hindsight, this should have been obvious. User Research is a key activity in product development. It’s easy to make a better product. It’s also easy to also make a product better. Unfortunately both these approaches almost always involve the developer looking at the product from what they perceive to be the User’s perspective: mostly just a best guess! “You cannot presume to know what your Users need: you need to really get to know them, how they think and behave” .

Creating a product that better suits the User’s needs can only be done by talking to the User or, more specifically, representatives selected from the product’s target audience. Although a different discipline entirely there is some degree of overlap here with market research: the who, what, when, where, why and how, or as Kipling so aptly wrote:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

One of my biggest failings over the years has been to follow the masses into the trap of ‘knowing’ what the User wants without actually asking them. It can be no surprise I’ve had a lot of first-hand experience at making a brilliant product nobody wanted!

My attitude changed significantly in 2010 when I left the safety net of corporate software development to start and run my own business. Not having the luxury of a bottomless bank account it suddenly became very important to tune my service offering to the needs of my clients and to actually start listening to them for once. The best part is… it worked and I’ve carried this forwards with me ever since.

The timing of this segment of the course was very fortuitous. It coincided with a massive inflow of work in my day job as, after 2.5 years of lobbying the Board I’ve finally managed to secure £750k of InnovateUK funding for a greenfield project to rewrite the software for our flagship product. I appreciate this is completely outside the scope of the Indie Game Development course but is the perfect project to apply many of the techniques we have covered in our studies. I have a very strong vision for the overall ‘look and feel’ of the application. Rather than rely on my own gut feel and instinct, or that of my colleagues, my goal is to drive the development based on solid research from real customers. Sauro and Lewis discuss several analytical methods that I plan to use to persuade my learned colleagues that this is not only something we should do but will also provide meaningful statistical data as well .

In the contect of game development I have some decisions to make…

When I enrolled on the course I was set on the idea of making free-to-play games that offered in-game purchases to allow the player to advance more quickly. This is a common pattern with on-line multiplayer games such as World of Tanks, Clash of Clans, EVEOnline and a myriad of others. However, listening to perspective of my peers in our Canvas discussion fora it’s clear that this model is not loved amongst many players, hence my dilema:

To run a successful studio will require a strong revenue stream. That revenue stream will only come from one source: the player community. The ‘buy once, play forever’ model will require a substantial install base and continuous growth to realise and sustain the level of income I will need. That’s going to be hard. The free-to-play (aka pay-to-win) model, on paper at least, appears better geared to generating a sustainable income. This is something I’m planning to research further as the course unfolds and will no doubt blog about in the future. My feeling at the moment is to follow the wisdom of the late, great Gary Halbert: “I concentrated on selling [to] the foxes and did not worry about offending the dogs!“

Ethics, the other portion of this week’s study was a big eye-opener and not something I’d ever really thought about before. Most likely because of my early experiences and the nature of my work has never given cause to ever consider it other than to avoid causing or doing harm to others.

Thankfully, the type and extent of User Research I am likely to conduct through game development is likely to fall into the low or medium risk categories . I had hoped everything would be low risk but as alpha- and beta- testing will, by definition, involve others my understanding from the guidance is this will default to a medium risk.

Conclusion

One of the more intersting challenges will be to dovetail User Research with the output of the Creativity and Ideation phase of game development. I also see this as a highly iterative process, tuning, revisiting and fleshing out details on each pass until the game concept crystalises to the point further progress can be made.

Having reviewed the material on ethics several times over the last few weeks it’s clear I need to create a pro-forma disclosure and consent form in anticipation of group related play testing or player surveys/feedback that I may undertake. The marketer in me sees this as a great opportunity to start building a MailChimp list of prospects for future games provided all the necessary disclosure, consent and GDPR regulations are followed and there are no objections from the University.

References

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