What if you could peek inside the minds of your players and understand the psychological needs that drive their gaming behavior? What if you could use this knowledge to create playtesting experiences that not only gather feedback but also uncover the hidden desires and motivations that drive retention and engagement?
Traditional playtesting methods often merely scratch the surface, focusing on metrics and opinions that don’t always tell the whole story. But by incorporating psychological insights into your playtesting process, you can unlock a new layer of understanding that goes beyond the superficial and taps into the core of what drives player behavior.
Previously, we’ve talked about the hidden costs of skipping player research in game development. In this article, we’ll explore four key ways that psychological insights can significantly improve the ROI of your playtesting efforts.
Gather Targeted Insights from Psychologically Aligned Playtesters
Effective playtesting hinges on gathering feedback from participants who accurately reflect your target audience. While traditional recruitment methods often rely on demographic factors like age, gender, or gaming frequency, psychological insights allow you to dive deeper and identify testers who embody the intrinsic motivations and preferences of your core players.
Example: Let’s say your players score highly on traits like fearlessness and goal setting. Armed with this insight, you can specifically recruit playtesters who share these psychological traits, by doing things like including screening questions about their preferred gaming experiences or their level of investment in storylines and character arcs.
By purposefully seeking out testers who align with the psychological makeup of your target audience, you ensure that the feedback you gather is coming from the players who matter most. This targeted recruitment approach leads to playtesting insights that are more relevant, actionable, and predictive of how your broader player base will respond to your game.
Uncover Actionable Insights with Psychology-Driven Playtesting Scenarios
Psychological insights can also guide the design of your playtesting scenarios, letting you create sessions that more deliberately probe the key drivers of player engagement and satisfaction. By tailoring your playtesting objectives to the specific intrinsic motivations and preferences of your target personas, you can gather more focused and actionable feedback.
Example: Suppose your psychological insights indicate that a significant portion of your player base is driven by competitiveness and status orientation. With this knowledge, you might design playtesting scenarios that specifically evaluate features like leaderboards, ranked modes, or prestige cosmetics. By putting these elements front and center in your playtests, you can observe how players who are motivated by social competition engage with them, and identify areas for optimization.
Interpret Player Feedback and Behavior
Playtesting generates a wealth of player feedback and behavioral data, but making sense of that information and translating it into actionable insights can be challenging. Psychological frameworks provide a valuable lens for interpreting player responses and identifying the underlying drivers of their reactions.
Example: Imagine that during a playtesting session, a participant expresses dissatisfaction with the pacing of your game’s progression system. On the surface, this might seem like a straightforward balancing issue. However, by viewing this feedback through the lens of psychological needs, you might uncover a deeper misalignment.
Maybe this player scores highly on the need for autonomy and self-control, and the linear, gated structure of your progression system feels overly restrictive to them. Or maybe they have a strong drive for mastery and eagerness to learn, and the current pacing doesn’t provide enough opportunities for skill expression and growth.
By interpreting playtesting feedback through a psychological framework, you can get to the root of player reactions and identify the core experiential needs that aren’t being met. This deeper understanding allows you to make more targeted adjustments to your design that address the underlying psychological drivers of player satisfaction.
Eliminate Friction Points with Persona-Specific Psychological Insights
Playtesting is an essential tool for identifying points of friction or confusion in your game experience, but understanding the psychological basis of these friction points is key to effectively resolving them. Different player personas may encounter different types of friction, based on their unique motivations, preferences, and psychological traits.
Example: Let’s say you observe that a significant number of participants are struggling with your game’s tutorial sequence. By cross-referencing this behavioral data with psychological insights, you might discover that the friction is particularly acute for players who score high on independence and low on mastery.
For these players, the current tutorial pacing may feel too slow and hand-holding, leading to disengagement and frustration. Armed with this psychological insight, you can iterate on the tutorial design to better accommodate the needs of this audience. For example, you could offer a “quick start” option that streamlines the onboarding process and gets them into the action faster.
By using psychological insights to diagnose the root causes of friction points for different player personas, you can design targeted solutions that address the specific needs and preferences of each segment. This nuanced, psychology-driven approach to resolving friction helps ensure that your game is providing a smooth, satisfying experience for all your key player types.
Supercharge Your Games User Research with Psychology-Driven Playtesting
Ultimately, incorporating psychological insights into these four key areas of your games user research and playtesting practice can significantly enhance the depth, relevance, and actionability of the insights you gather.
By using audience insights tools like Solsten to understand the intrinsic needs and motivations of your target audience, you can infuse every stage of your playtesting process with a deeper empathy for your potential players. From recruiting the right participants to designing targeted scenarios to interpreting feedback through a psychological lens, these insights help you make design decisions that are more closely aligned with the core drivers of player satisfaction and engagement.
