Research on Experimentation in Game Development: Want to contribute?

Are you experienced with experimenting, prototyping, and evaulating ideas and features in various parts of game development? Want to contribute to research and learn more at the same time? Please read on!

As part of WASP-funded research project, we are investigating how game companies experiment with and evaluate new ideas, features, and changes throughout the development process. The goal is to be able to reject or accept any assumption about an idea as early as possible based on the experiment, for example, based on the technical and commercial viability among (potential) users. Earlier feedback and better decisions lead to more efficient development, faster release cycles, and hopefully better reception among players.

Prototyping, Play-testing and A/B tests are common methods and can fall under labels such as Game User Research, Data Science, or Continuous Experimentation. We have examined experimentation under the latter concept in several other domains and now want to investigate how it is applied in game development, what challenges exist, and how these can be managed.

We therefore looking to interview individuals working with “experimentation” or evaluation of assumptions and ideas in their development processes. We’d be happy to also have a more open dialogue over a brown-bag lunch or workshop where we present how experimentation is carried out in other domains, what we have seen so far in the gaming industry, and from there discuss challenges and opportunities within your company’s development processes.

Should you be interested, either in an interview, worshop, or hearing more about the project and experimentation in general, drop a mail to Johan.Linaker@RI.SE or Elizabeth.Bjarnason@cs.lth.se.

Examples of previous research

• Ros, R., Runeson, P., & Bjarnason, E. (2024). Evidence-Based Guidelines for Advancing Continuous Experimentation. IT Professional: technology solutions for the enterprise.
• Ros, R., Bjarnason, E., & Runeson, P. (2024). A theory of factors affecting continuous experimentation (FACE). Empirical Software Engineering, 29(1), 21.
• Ros, R., & Bjarnason, E. (2018, August). Continuous experimentation scenarios: A case study in e-commerce. In 2018 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) (pp. 353-356). IEEE.
• Bjarnason, E., Lang, F., & Mjöberg, A. (2023). An empirically based model of software prototyping: a mapping study and a multi-case study. Empirical Software Engineering, 28(5), 115.