Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 5

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Towards Democratisation of Games User Research: Exploring Playtesting Challenges of Indie Video Game Developers

Denisova, Alena, Bromley, Steve, Mirza-Babaei, Pejman, Mekler, Elisa D.·2024·Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
DOI 10.1145/3677108
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Playtesting is a games user research (GUR) method used to evaluate design decisions based on feedback gathered from players with the goal to improve player experience. HCI games research has been actively working on and promoting best practices in GUR. However, these practices often require resources, knowledge and expertise, which are not readily available for indie video games developers. Thus, to better understand how GUR can support these developers, we conducted an interview study with 13 indie games professionals to learn about their practices and the challenges they face when doing playtesting. We report on the key findings from this study, including challenges with finding appropriate participants and handling the data from playtests. We provide a discussion of how existing GUR practices can be adapted and what HCI games research can do to help mitigate these challenges to make playtesting more accessible and impactful to indie video games developers.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3677108

Cites

7 of 7 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 7 references

Research works printed but not linked: 45

  1. 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.102370 · DOI · Paper page
  2. 10.1007/978--3--319--94277--3_40 · doi:10.1007/978--3--319--94277--3_40
  3. 10.1007/978--1--84882--963--3 · doi:10.1007/978--1--84882--963--3
  4. 10.1080/13645579.2016.1195588 · DOI · Paper page
  5. 10.1080/2159676X.2019.1628806 · DOI · Paper page
  6. Steve Bromley. 2021. How to be a games user researcher. Amazon, UK.
  7. 10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0020 · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0020
  8. 10.1145/2967934.2968103 · DOI
  9. 10.1145/2793107.2793147 · DOI
  10. 10.1145/3411764.3445286 · DOI
  11. 10.1145/2793107.2793141 · DOI
  12. 10.1145/2702123.2702256 · DOI · Paper page
  13. 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.102383 · DOI
  14. 10.1145/3311350.3347173 · DOI
  15. Anders Drachen, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, and Lennart Nacke. 2018. Games User Research. Oxford University Press, Inc., USA.
  16. 10.1145/3102071.3102089 · doi:10.1145/3102071.3102089
  17. Henrik Engström. 2020. Game Development Research 1 ed.). University of Skövde, Sweden. 230 pages.
  18. 10.14236/ewic/HCI2010.26 · DOI
  19. 10.1145/3392864 · DOI
  20. 10.1145/3375184 · DOI
  21. 10.1145/2793107.2793130 · DOI
  22. Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman. 2004. Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games. CMP Books, USA.
  23. 10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0024 · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0024
  24. Katherine Isbister and Noah Schaffer. 2008. Game usability: Advancing the player experience. CRC press, USA.
  25. Brendan Keogh. 2023. The videogame industry does not exist: Why we should think beyond commercial game production. The MIT Press.
  26. 10.1145/3313831.3376401 · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376401
  27. 10.1145/2793107.2793131 · DOI
  28. Nadav Lipkin. 2013. Examining Indie's Independence: The meaning of" Indie" Games, the politics of production, and mainstream cooptation. Loading..., Vol. 7, 11 (2013).
  29. 10.1145/3647646 · doi:10.1145/3647646
  30. 10.1109/ACII.2019.8925434 · DOI
  31. Pejman Mirza-Babaei and Thomas Galati. 2018. Affordable and data-driven user research for indie studios. Oxford University Press, 381--392.
  32. 10.1145/2994310.2994364 · DOI
  33. 10.1145/3313831.3376831 · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376831
  34. 10.1145/2851581.2892408 · doi:10.1145/2851581.2892408
  35. 10.1145/3170427.3185360 · DOI
  36. 10.1145/2851581.2856504 · doi:10.1145/2851581.2856504
  37. 10.1145/3544548.3581232 · DOI
  38. 10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106688 · DOI
  39. Jesse Schell. 2008. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA.
  40. Bart Simon. 2013. Indie Eh? Some Kind of Game Studies. Loading... Vol. 7 11 (2013).
  41. Alexander Styhre and Alexander Styhre. 2020. Who Is an Indie Developer? Sorting Out the Categories. Indie Video Game Development Work: Innovation in the Creative Economy (2020), 107--128.
  42. 10.1145/3341215.3354644 · DOI
  43. 10.1145/2336727.2336732 · DOI
  44. 10.1145/3290605.3300593 · DOI
  45. 10.1177/1367549418810082 · DOI

Metadata

Authors
Denisova, A., Bromley, S., Mirza-Babaei, P., & Mekler, E. D.
Venue
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published
2024-10-14
Volume
8
Issue
CHI PLAY
Pages
1-25
ISSN
2573-0142
DOI
10.1145/3677108
Cited by
5
References
7
Language
en
Licence
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Towards Democratisation of Games User Research: Exploring Playtesting Challenges of Indie Video Game Developers. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/3677108
The paper
Denisova, A., Bromley, S., Mirza-Babaei, P., & Mekler, E. D. (2024). Towards Democratisation of Games User Research: Exploring Playtesting Challenges of Indie Video Game Developers. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677108

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.