Playtesting with a Purpose

Playtesting, or using play to guide game design, gives designers feedback about whether their game is meeting their goals and the player's expectations. We report a case study of designing, deploying, and iterating on a series of playtesting workshops for novice game designers. We identify common missteps made by novice designers and address these missteps through the concept of purposefulness, understanding why you are playtesting as well as how to playtest. We ground our workshops in the development of rich player experience goals, which inform playtest design, data collection and iteration. We show that by applying methods taught in our workshops, novice game designers leveraged playtest methods and tools, employed playtesting and data collection methods appropriate for their goals, and effectively applied playtest data in iterative design. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps in our research on playtesting.