ABSTRACT
It is easy, when developing a game, to fantasize about the player experience and to imagine how great it will be. Playtesting is necessary to serve as a wakeup call and force you to solve the ugly problems you’ve been putting off. Before we get too deep into this discussion, I want to draw the distinction between four different types of testing (focus groups, QA testing, usability testing, and playtesting):
1. Focus groups: This is a term that often causes professional designers to wince. It refers to sessions where potential players are interviewed about their likes and dislikes, often in an attempt to determine whether they like a game idea that a company is considering. Focus groups can be quite useful in the right context (particularly when deciding the relative priority of well-dened features), but they have a bad name because they are so often poorly run and manipulated to kill ideas that management is afraid of.
