UBISOFT
So part
of this week’s lecture, we had a guest speaker from Ubisoft Toronto, his name
was Daniel Natapov and he was part of the companies game user research area.
Upon entering the class I had a terrible seat, I believe this was due to people
telling their friends about the guest speaker and them coming to see. Mr.
Natapov informed us that he was a part of Ubisoft’s upcoming title Splinter
Cell: Black List. It is a well-known franchise that a lot of gamers are really
excited for. I personally do not really prefer the first person shooter genre
of games myself. I believe a lot of those games have too much similarity and
not enough unique features that appeal to me. Having this guest speaker can
really motivate us and provide us with information and tips that we would need
ourselves when we want to go into the industry.
Group Communication
He also informed us that he had
previously worked with Microsoft. During his time at Microsoft, he claimed that
he preferred to work in and with larger groups of individuals rather than a
small group. This is quite interesting since a lot of people I know personally
in our program feel that working with a smaller group allows people to be much
more organized and function better. Progress is generally easier to track and
maintain as we are currently doing with a lot of our current final projects. In
the gaming industry, we know it is going to be quite different. From simply
viewing the credits of some of our favourite games we see a massive amount of
staff working in groups on different areas of the game. This is something I am
actually quite excited to do one day because I personally also prefer working
with larger groups. I do not really see myself as a leader, but i do get along
well and possess strong social communication skills when working with other
individuals. Mr. Natapov informed us that when working with these focus groups,
no matter what size or what amount of diversity is present, you must have
strong social skills. One typical stereotype that we as game development
students all have I believe, is the fear of presentation and speaking out loud
in a formal manner. It’s going to be interesting to see how this improves with
people I keep in touch with in the future. I noticed a lot throughout the past
four years of my time here that during our GDW presentations of the past,
though people had amazing looking games to present, they just had trouble
communicating the themes, story and overall just explaining what it was. Of
course, I am not one to exclude myself from this.
Conducting
Experiments
During the lecture as people
continued to ask questions, he informed us that he used a few of the game user
research methods that we learned in class. From what I heard he conducted and organized
a lot of focus groups with gamers so that they could provide helpful feedback and
find errors. One thing he had the moderators do was make the players in the
focus group feel comfortable. They are generally instructed to simply play the
game normally without any consideration towards the experiment being conducted.
One issue that he came across during his focus group experiments was that
sometimes the developers would give him unplayable or extremely bugged versions
of the game that prevented the users from even playing the game. Putting myself
in that situation, I would probably not know what actions to take, since the
process of gathering individuals for the experiment is difficult as it is on
its own. He did make a point to inform us that there were multiple moderators
so it does take off a great deal of pressure from just one individual. In
addition to the focus group research method, Mr. Natapov also claimed that he
used the think out loud method. If I remember correctly, this was when
participants would say what they are doing and thinking in the game without any
real regard to the experiment. From this, the moderators would have to process
and collect the important data that they overhear from the person. If any of us
do plan on becoming a game user research analyst, it is probably important that
we’re able to understand what people are saying and learn to filter out the
things are non-applicable to our scenario. Mr. Natapov stated that during this
process it is quite common for people to pick on things like graphics and other
art assets that are usually not finalized or being thought about at the current
time. This is natural because as gamers, the first thing we usually look at
when playing a new game is the graphics and how smooth and realistic they are.
It is up to the moderators to either inform the users what they are looking
for, or to simply just focus on the other things they are saying about the
game. This seems like it can be very annoying and tedious, but it is evident
that it is an important step in gathering information.
Miscellaneous
One
thing that made me laugh quite a bit about the presentation was when one of my
fellow students asked Mr. Natapov about the 10 gaming evaluation heuristics
that we have learned in not only this class, but our Social Network Games class
as well. He claimed to have never used or looked at them during his time there.
It is quite understandable since it is not necessarily in his job description.
Most of our lecture theory may not be used in the future anyway, especially
when it comes to learning about the human eye like we have done in more than
one class. I sometimes wonder if what we learn theoretically in our program
will ever apply to us in our future jobs.
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