GUR is a young field, and our practioners have wide a variety of experience and education–some come from psychology, HCI, QA, production, market research, etc.  While this diversity spurs a variety of approaches, it also means the field doesn’t have an accepted framework for how all this variety fits together.  This lack of a common framework often manifests itself in arguments about methods (survey vs. focus group vs. usability!) or measurement (self-report vs. metrics vs. biometrics!).

This presentation offers a framework for how to fit all these different aspects of GUR into a single coherent whole, so it is easy to see the relationships between the various concepts, methods and measurements.  And since the framework is a graphical one, I mean to ‘see’ the relationships literally.  The framework comes from fundamentals of psychological science, the field with the longest and most rigorous tradition of getting accurate information about how to think about and measure human experiences.

Bill Fulton started Microsoft Games’ User-Research group in 1997 and led it for 7 years, during which the group grew from 1 to 35 researchers.  Bill then spent 3 years as a game designer at FASA Studios, before founding Ronin User Experience, a game design and user-research consultancy.  Before all that, Bill lost out on four years of the Golden Age of Gaming while in the Psychology PhD program at the University of Washington’s, where he studied, researched, and taught psychological research methods, and social & cognitive psychology.  But he’s not bitter about that.

The workshop will be opened by a keynote panel with Mike Ambinder from Valve Corporation and Janus Rau Sørensen from Crystal Dynamics & IO Interactive (Square Enix).

In user research, there are a variety of methodologies that experimenters use—direct observation, think-aloud, Q&A, metrics, eye-tracking, and so forth.  Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages, and skilled user researchers spend time matching up methodology to research question.

The panel will review different methods and tools in place at Valve and Square Enix, keeping in mind the epistemological differences between practices in use at the two studios.

Mike Ambinder has a PhD in Experimental Psychology (with a focus on visual cognition) from the University of Illinois and a B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale University. He is an author or co-author of 12 scientific articles/book chapters and has studied visual memory, the capture of attention, 4D reasoning, and the human factors of display/interface design among other research interests. At Valve since 2008, he works on the application of knowledge and methodologies from psychology to game design and has contributed to such titles as Alien Swarm, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, and Team Fortress 2.

Janus Rau Sørensen has a MA in Information Sciences from Aarhus University and since 2004 he has worked as User Research Manager at IO Interactive. In 2010 he moved to San Francisco and became User Research Manager also for Crystal Dynamics. His angle  is definitely qualitative, having wide experiences with usability testing, games user research, user testing, participatory design research, user experience research, moderation, leadership, strategic planning and implementing user involvement methodologies. He has worked on titles such as: Kane & Lynch, Kane & Lynch 2, Mini Ninjas, Hitman Absolution, Tomb Raider: Underworld, and the new Tomb Raider.