When Will Wright and EA dropped Spore, their newest and most ambitious video game to date, they contacted B|P to study players’ experience and see if they were having fun. So we came up with SNERD, a game research methodology that simulates a native gaming environment, uses touch screens to gather input, broadcasts 18 live video streams, and took the power down for our entire block. On the reals, we researched 59 individual gamers playing 393 hours over 13 months to help the Spore team hone the player experience. That’s a whole lot of players swearing, and it’s all in the outtakes video.
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