Practical Game Design

Individual sessions

As the heading suggests, each player is being exposed to the game separately, with their play session closely monitored and often recorded.

Individual sessions allow you to pinpoint highly specific usability issues, interview the players and confront their opinions with observed behaviors. They are also good at minimizing peer-based bias as players cannot help out or influence the opinions of fellow test subjects.

Frequency is more important than scale. It’s better to run the tests every two weeks on just three users than to do it once a month on a group of ten. Big usability issues are easy to find, and if they’re repeated by more than one player, you have an obvious problem to address.

Individual sessions tend to be ...