Livestreaming for User Testing Context-Rich Observation of Game Player Behavior

Game developers need methods for judging the effectiveness of their game designs. Although traditional user testing methods have been employed by the video game industry, they fail to capture players in their natural settings, indicating a more ethnographic approach could generate new insights into their behaviors. With the recent rise in popularity of livestreaming, this paper proposes that employing a “think-aloud” testing method over a livestream can be a useful addition to the testing tools available to developers and provide valuable contextual insights that could help game designers discover radical new innovations. By observing the livestreams for seven games, including two games created by one of the researchers, we discover that livestreaming not only exposes many of the design and product quality issues revealed by more traditional user testing, but that it also exposes many contextual behaviors that would otherwise remain hidden in a laboratory setting. This has implications not just for user testing within the video game industry, but for user testing in other industries desiring more contextual information about their consumers.