Playtesting Beyond Bugs:
Testing the Intended Experience

By Nemah Irshad · Development Reflections

I’ve been working on a personal game project with a partner who doesn’t come from a game development background, but is extremely analytical and constantly brings ideas for mechanics, systems, and different ways the game could work.

One challenge this brought up was explaining why certain game development processes, especially playtesting, are necessary before we can really judge whether an idea works.

Explaining the reasoning behind the process

I can share what I’ve learned from game development verbally, but experience alone isn’t always enough to explain why a particular process matters or why it fits the problem we’re trying to solve.

I didn’t want our design decisions to come down to one person saying, “This is how it’s usually done.” I wanted us both to understand the reasoning. So I decided to refresh my knowledge and find research that could give us a more objective foundation for those discussions.

That led me to A Survey Method for Assessing Perceptions of a Game: The Consumer Playtest in Game Design, by John P. Davis, Keith Steury, and Randy Pagulayan.

A working mechanic isn’t the whole picture

My biggest takeaway was that testing can go beyond finding bugs or checking whether someone understands the controls. It can help us ask whether the game creates the experience we intended.

A mechanic can function correctly. A player can understand what to do. They can even succeed, and the design can still be missing its goal.

The Halo example

The paper describes a usability test from Halo: Combat Evolved. Novice players successfully fought from a distance, while the designers intended closer combat. Changes to targeting feedback and enemy behaviour encouraged players to move closer; follow-up testing checked the effect.

The distinction matters: this example concerns usability testing, while the paper’s consumer playtest method combines gameplay with surveys to understand players’ perceptions. Both helped me think more carefully about what a test is trying to reveal.

What stayed with me was the difference between being able to play and having the intended experience. A successful action doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we need to know about a design.

Moving the discussion from opinions to evidence

That gave me a better way to approach discussions within our own project. Instead of trying to prove whether one person’s idea is right or wrong, I can ask:

How can we build the smallest version of this and test what players actually do?

For me, the useful questions are:

• What does the player actually do when we give this to them?
• How do they respond to the systems we’ve created?
• Is their experience the experience we intended to design?

Playtesting gives us something more useful than opinion alone: evidence we can discuss together. It changes the conversation from defending an idea to finding out what happens when someone plays it.

Revisiting the fundamentals

Sometimes refreshing the fundamentals is just as valuable for the person with experience as it is for the person learning them for the first time.

This reading helped me explain my thinking more clearly, and reminded me that understanding why we use a process matters as much as knowing that it is common practice.