Nate Bolt — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:54:57 GMT

Thanks Austin glad you liked it. We did have to get permission from both the individual gamers and the Spore team at EA. But the Spore folks were unbelievably cool about giving us permission to talk about the details, with two big caveats:

(1) It all had to be post-launch. While the game was still in development, when all the research took place, everything was super-duper top secret.
(2) We can not ever discuss the actual findings from the study, only the techniques.

The most difficult part was planning this before we even started testing by drafting really rigorous consent forms for participants and sending them info on how we would use their recordings. Some people opted-out, which of course was totally cool. Most were like “sure that’s hella funny lulz”

Nate Bolt — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:15:20 GMT

Trevor and Anuj – awesome questions. I *wish* we were allowed to talk about the findings of the study and how it related to game design decisions, but while EA has been absolutely amazing in letting us discuss the research, they have made it very clear we are not allowed to discuss any of the findings publicly. So I guess we can’t officially comment on what the game getting knocked says about the testing, other than that I would love to be able to talk about it someday.

For the remote viewing software, we went through all the same frustrations you listed Anuj, and our final solution was just to run 300ft of VGA cable around the testing area and mirror the gaming laptop output on six seperate LCD monitors (DVI+VGA) that matched each of the participant’s screen’s. Then for recording we used ZD Soft game recorder running on each gaming machine. Pretty duct-tape-ish solution, i know, but it worked for our setup. In the future, I want to look at software+hardware that sends VGA signals over ethernet, since as you’ve noticed the 3d acceleration on games makes the regular software totally FAIL.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Nate Bolt