Yeah, yeah…  So I missed last week’s entry.  The Crunch Mode Monster caught me last week.  We had a focus group session over the weekend for our game, and one of the levels that we had the focus group play test was one of the levels that I’m responsible for.  So about that gives me a great topic to talk about!
Focus groups.  They are actually really fun to be a part of, either as a “Guinea pig” player of as a developer watching them play.  Even though I’ve been on both sides of the coin, I’ll talk about things from the Developer’s point of view here.  In a fun way, you fell like some type of scientist giving an experiment.  You know, like you’re behind a one-way mirror watching how monkeys react to items placed on a table.  :)  It is always very interesting to see how the focus group reacts to the content you’ve made.  Elements in the level that the development team assumes are obvious can get passed up by almost every focus test player.  Occasionally they will get in a situation you knew would be a problem, and it’s interesting to see how the game will handle it.  If it doesn’t handle it gracefully, or even worse, the player can’t continue playing and you have to reset him, then you know you’ve got work to do.  This will happen when the players do stuff you didn’t expect them to do, or they do stuff that you had a feeling would be a problem.  This is why you have the focus group in the first place.

So, after about an hour or so of playing most of a given level, we sit them down and ask them what their impressions were.  This is a fun part too, because most game players can’t verbalize why it that they think a game is “good” or “bad”.   They just know, but don’t know that, for example, the reason the targeting sucks is because the sticky reticule is “too sticky” and so they are fighting against something that is supposed to help them.  Most players don’t even know what a sticky reticule even is!  I’ll get into all of that in a later rant-I mean-blog.  These players can provide very valuable information, and hopefully they reinforce what you’ve been doing this whole time.

One last thing that always amuses me in the Q & A session of a focus group is that they will tend to all agree with each other on the general scale of a game.  This is kind of the ‘mob mentality’ playing out here.  They don’t want to be THE GUY who says the game blows, so they will agree with the crowd.  I mean, it’s a pretty sweet deal for these guys:
A) They get paid a decent amount of cash for their time (ranging from 25 to 50 bucks)
B) They get fed all members of the Gaming Food Groups = Soda, pizza, candy, etc.
C) They get to play a game that isn’t out yet before anyone else
D) They get to visit a video game company and see some “behind the scenes” action
Given this list, it’s pretty difficult for someone to be an ungrateful guest.  So players tend to rate game quite a bit higher than they ordinarily would.  You have to take that with a grain of salt.  A lot of what they say you do.  The challenge of a focus group is to gleam the relevant information they give you and know what issues aren’t as important.

When all is said and done, we’ll have tested every level at least once, so we should have a pretty good idea of where we stand.  One can only hope you made the right decisions, and that all the time & effort spent in organizing the focus test was all worth it.  It usually is, and as I said above it can be fun too!  Just don’t get caught up in making any hasty decisions, stick to your core, and make minor adjustments based on the feedback.

Til next time…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under The Viceroy, Shots in the Dark Cast, Video Games, Blogroll. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.