The semester has started and this week we were off to a good start. In order to have enough time to have multiple iterations, the team decided to do as many playtest, as early as possible.
Since this is a student pitch project, we already made several design decisions before the semester started. We based our design on Geoff Kaufman’s research on perspective taking. in his research he suggests that if a user reads a first person account of events, they would then adopt that person’s approach to life for a short time. For example, if they are reading about an introvert person and then are asked about how they would act in a social situation they will answer similarly to what that person would answer.
The research also suggests that after learning about the character, the user is more open to new information that on a regular basis they might not agree with.
The basic structure of our experience is being present in a room with multiple personal objects. When a player picks up one of them, they hear a first person recollection of a past event in this person’s life. At some point the person would mention she had an abortion and hopefully by this point the playtester has learned enough about her to not be biased (or be less biased) against her.
We conducted a non digital playtest. We placed objects on the table and when playtester touched one I read a short segment. Our main focus was to see if the playtesters were confused and how much information they managed to retain.
Based on a post playtest survey, we learned that even though the players could choose the order of the texts they were listening to, they didn’t find the story confusing. With five objects, they had no problem retaining information. In addition, we noticed that even though the players were offered “new” objects during the playtest they still preferred to go over all the objects before exploring the new ones.
For our next playtest we will try and see what is the most amount of objects a player can deal with. They will be able to choose a name at the beginning and the name on the letter that is part of the objects will correspond with their chosen name. We assume this might help them connect with the character.