The resistance we saw before in #20 (Why Don’t Studios Do Usability Playtesting) can hopefully be addressed with some education, such as the primer sections at the start of the book.

However, once education has been removed, new forms of resistance may surface.

Forms of Resistance

There are a host of reasons why someone on the team might want to resist doing playtesting, even if they are aware of how it helps. Here are some of the more common forms of resistance and responses which may help you:

Resistance: “It’s too early to playtest.”

Response: Explore if there is something specific on their mind, why is it too early exactly? For example, you won’t need final art or high production values to test many usability issues.

Resistance: “The game isn’t ready, we’ll do playtesting closer to release.”

Response: If we wait until it’s closer to release then we may not have time to address any issues we find. In addition, incorrect design choices may be so embedded into the game that they’ll be very difficult, or impossible, to remove. We should be aiming to test early and often.

Resistance: “We don’t have time to do playtesting.”

Response: Playtesting helps the team to make best use of the time available by addressing what matters most for the player. Playtesting helps your prioritise and make best use of available time.

Resistance: “We don’t have budget for playtesting.”

Response: We can do this ourselves for almost no cost. The only cost we will have is paying players for their time. This could be one of the best investments we make into our game.

Resistance: “We tried playtesting before and it didn’t work.”

Response: How exactly was it done before? Who were the players? Often when I’ve encountered this form of resistance it turns out that the ‘playtesting’ was not done to a suitable standard. In other words, the playtesting was not effective in the past because it was biased or/and badly executed.

Resistance: “I don’t think we need it, our game’s usability is fine.”

Response: How do you know? Do a usability post-mortem on your previous games. Has the studio made previous games which contained usability issues? Going through professional and user reviews for signs of usability issues should help raise awareness in the team that this has happened before, and without doing usability playtesting it’s likely to happen again.

Understanding Resistance

It’s possible that these forms of resistance are not genuine, but rather they are defense mechanisms, masking deeper underlying issues with the individual or studio’s culture. This is beyond the scope of this book, but it is useful to be able to identify defense mechanisms at work.

Reframing and Mindset

I was once talking to a game team who were considering doing a usability study. They asked if I could guarantee that the results of the usability study would improve their game. My reply was that there are no guarantees, some factors are outside of my control, such as how many issues they will address and how successful each attempted fix will be.

They never did overcome the mindset that they could do a usability test and their game might be ‘no better off’.

This team had the wrong mindset, they were so focussed on the worst possible outcome (they would waste time and money), that they didn’t fully engage with the more likely scenario that this would have been hugely beneficial for them.

To help shift a team’s mindset, here are some questions to ask,

• How many other studios do you know of who do playtesting?
  

• Why do they think other studios do usability testing?
  

• Do our previous games have usability issues?
  

• What are the risks we are inviting in if don’t do usability playtesting?
  

• Would playtesting be considered good practice or bad practice among game developers?
  
  

This last question is perhaps a bit leading, but what it should do is activate their game developer identities, i.e. we’re good game developers so clearly we should be doing this.

Key Takeaway

Even if people are well-informed on usability and playtesting (educated), new forms of resistance can emerge. Some of these reasons might be valid, but others might be defense mechanisms - explanations that at first appear rational but could be masking underlying sources of anxiety or threat.

Next: 64. Playtest Frequency