Narrative is an essential pillar for many games – whether as a core component of the experience or just a sprinkling of expanded universe lore, and when we’re interviewing players story often comes up as a primary motivation for why players stick with the games they love.
Playtesting and user research give us the opportunity to check that the story is landing with players, being understood and creating the emotional reaction we hoped for. There are two common topics teams need to know when playtesting narrative in games. The first is ‘comprehension’ – do players understand the story. The other is ‘appeal’ – is it gripping players, and are they interested in following what’s happening.
For both of these types of playtests, there are some traps to watch out for when running narrative playtests – in this article we’ll cover how to safely approach testing both comprehension and appeal for the story of your game.
Finding the right players
For understanding both the appeal and the comprehension of story finding the right kind of players is incredibly important, and can quickly derail any playtest with irrelevant opinions if done poorly.
Recruit players from your competitor set of games, with a particular eye on ‘do they play the right kind of narrative games’. When running these studies, I’d often distinguish between linear narrative games (such as The Last Of Us), branching/choice based games (such as Detroit or the Telltale games) or even emergent storytelling (such as Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress) to ensure that we’re hearing from our genuine potential players.
“I have played a game” is a very broad definition, and covers a wide range of potential behaviours – from giving it 5 minutes on gamepass, to putting in 100+ hours. We need to be specific about who the game is being targeted at, by making an intentional decision about the appropriate amount of playtime.
When recruiting your playtesters, validate their experience and interest in narrative – not just asking them if they pay attention to the story, but also requiring them to demonstrate it as part of recruitment for the playtest. A typical way of doing this is asking them to verbally describe story beats that stuck with them from the competitor games – to help validate their experience, and that they are paying attention to other games.
Narrative comprehension tests
Seeing if people understand your story can be done very early in development – often starting with the storyboard outline, before anything has been implemented in code.
This works great as a one-to-one moderated study, where you are sat with one player at a time and walking through the story. Create a powerpoint prototype of the narrative, with each slide covering a main story beat. Step through it with the player, and after each slide ask questions such as:
- What is happening currently?
- Why is this happening?
- What do you expect to happen next?
This will allow you to identify whether players understand the story, and the characters motivations, and highlight where players get confused – identifying areas where further narrative support is needed when implementing the story.
Mystery is a core component of many stories, and by asking these open ended questions (rather than just ‘is this clear?’) will give you a more nuanced understanding of whether the narrative intent is being realised – and allow you to ask clarifying questions to avoid high level or ambiguous responses.
By doing early narrative testing, we can highlight issues while it’s still easy to make changes – and verify fixes as early animations are in, to avoid expensive changes later in production.
Comprehension will be impacted by the format in which the player is experiencing it – storyboards will get different results to greybox cutscenes, which will again get a different result to the final implementation. Checking players comprehension at key milestones throughout development will help surface problems as early as possible, and reduce last minute re-work or crunch.
Running this as a moderated playtest (where you are sat with the player while going through it) also allows you to ask questions about players current playing behaviour, what’s hooked them in other game stories, and to recount specific times that story has resonated with them or inspired purchase decisions. This contextual data is incredibly valuable for surfacing unexpected insights, and is one of the reasons why qualitative research can be much more impactful than even the largest survey.
Narrative Appeal tests
Appeal tests are always more nuanced – games are a creative medium and we don’t want to defer artistic decisions to players. Asking players for story ideas, or if they like the story, is a recipe for generic low-impact storytelling. But we do usually want to see if players are engaged and interested in knowing what happens next.
As part of longer gameplay playtests, regularly ask people ‘how interested are you in what happens next’ questions, and look for the drop-off over time, to find out where players are losing interest. Because this is best handled as a quantitative question, I usually run these when we’re doing multi-seat lab based studies with many players playing at once, so that we can get a reliable quantitative measure of where players interest is dropping, while still covering longer stretches of gameplay, and use survey questions to capture ratings for interest in continuing the story. Running this in a secure playtest lab will help ensure that plot points, or gameplay footage don’t leak – essential for narrative heavy games where spoilers are a risk.
If you have defined the emotional responses you are expecting at each story beat you can also capture this in narrative testing – for example asking people to pick from a word list how the story makes them feel, and then checking that against your design intent.
Testing narrative appeal requires a careful balance of when in production to run these studies – when we have representations of the story beats in the game (often late in pre-production, or early in production), but while we still have time to make any changes – especially if level design is impacted by story changes.
Traps to watch out for
Players can only really experience a story as intended the first time they see it – otherwise they will be taking in prior knowledge that other players won’t have. This means we can’t re-use playtesters when testing story in games, and everyone only gets one shot at it. Make sure you’re screening for this when recruiting playtesters to avoid people coming back and biasing their responses. And as always, screen out people who don’t or can’t represent your real target audience – such as people who already work in the games industry, or your friends and family.
Many games use existing IP, which brings with it prior knowledge and expectations. When recruiting players, capture their existing familiarity with the franchise, and be intentional about the level of familiarity you are expecting players to have about your IP to get feedback from the right kind of players.
In real life players frequently take breaks, and have to come back to a game after spending many days (or weeks) away from it. This can be difficult to simulate in a playtest environment, and can give a misleading impression about how memorable the story is. Keep this in mind when analysing results (or consider creative playtesting methods, such as checking in with players a few weeks later to see what they remember).
Testing the narrative of your game
Playtesting narrative isn’t just checking whether players like your story – as covered, we also want to discover what they have understood, where they get confused, and if they care about the narrative they have encountered. Playtesting early (including from storyboards) will help reveal issues while there is still time to address it, and ensure that players experience the story as intended.
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