SUBOTRON pro games: Know your Player – Optimizing the player experience

Location: Raum D / Q21
Admission free

<link http: jpirker.com>Johanna Pirker, MSc, BSc
Graz University of Technology

QA / Testing / UX Strategies + Basic Player Data Analysis

Ever wondered why nobody buys your game even though all your friends had so much fun while playtesting? Creating an interesting user experience makes the difference between successful games and failed projects. To provide meaningful game experiences, it is important to focus on interesting and engaging design aspects. Games User Research is an emerging field to understand the interaction between your game and the players. Knowing your players opens up the possibility to optimize the players’ experience as they engage with your games.

The first part of the talk focuses on one of the most critical but also most painful components of game development: testing the game, evaluating the user experience, and getting honest feedback. Johanna will introduce foundations of games user research, different testing methods, and how to design studies. In the second part she will introduce player-profiling strategies based on game-play data, and how you can design a game, which is made for the player, and not only for you, your family, or your very close friends.

Short biography:
Johanna Pirker (MSc, BSc in Software Engineering and Economics from Graz University of Technology) is university assistant, software engineer, and researcher at the Institute of Information Systems and Computer Media at Graz University of Technology (TUG). She finished her Master’s Thesis during a research visit at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working on the integration of simulations and animations of electromagnetic fields into collaborative virtual world environments. She is currently finishing her doctoral dissertation in computer science on motivational environments under the supervision of Christian Gütl (TUG) and John Belcher (MIT). She specialized in games and environments that engage users to learn, train, and work together through motivating tasks. She has long-lasting experience in game design and development, as well as virtual world development and has worked in the video game industry at Electronic Arts. Her research interests include immersive environments, game research, gamification strategies, human computer interaction, e-learning, computer science education, and information retrieval. She has authored and presented numerous publications in her field.

Supported by <link http: www.creativespace.at>www.creativespace.at – Die Kreativplattform der Wirtschaftskammer Wien

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