Happy Thanksgiving!

This week has been very short, just two days in fact, but we did a rather large playtest so it is certainly worth talking about.

Basically, it was an A/B test featuring our Guide role, which cares about completing the experience, and our Teacher role, which cares about attending to the guest.  Originally, the second role in the test was the companion, but a small error in our editing tool that was built for the playtest, combined with various members of the team being sick on alternating days made this impossible.  We had eight testers total, seven who were EA employees, and one a friend of Carl, our advisor and client.  After they went through the experience, we administered a short survey, and we then asked some follow up questions based on that survey.

Here are a few key notes we observed:

• Mixy was generally seen as helpful.
• Mixy was generally seen to give good information.
• Guest’s didn’t feel very connected to Mixy.
• Mixy Didn’t seem to get in the way.
• Mixy came off as pushy, and not caring of the player.
• Teacher and Guide were hard to distinguish, possibly because users tend to view the panels in order anyway, and the teacher would revert to trying to get the user to go to the next panel too quickly.

That’s about all we could write up so far, since the playtest went all day, and everyone had preparations to make for the holiday.  Next week is Softs, so we are looking forward to reporting on that.

Adieu,

~mixAR