How to do User Experience Research in Games

The role of Games User Researchers or User Experience Researchers in games is to help teams design and build a game with the best possible user experience given the resources available. Games user experience research provides a conduit between the creative imaginations of game designers and the final product on the shelf that fits the needs of everyday players, coming from a wide range of skills and knowledge and increasingly diverse populations. In this masterclass, we will discuss how people create games and how user experience research fits into this game development landscape. We will practically introduce how research methods and practices from UX research are applied in games and how we plan and run user research studies in games. We will conclude by learning how games user research studies are analyzed and how stakeholders are debriefed.