Capturing Player Experience with Post-Game Commentaries

Player experience is at the heart of good game design, but designers typically have limited experience data to work with. Detailed and fine-grained accounts of gaming experience would be of great value to designers and researchers alike, but recording such data is a significant challenge. We describe an approach based on post-game player commentaries, retrospective verbal reports cued by video of the gaming session and a word list. A pilot study was carried out to capture player experience of a tutorial level for a third person shooter game. We show how the technique can be used to provide useful game design feedback.