TESTING STORY IN GAMES
By Steve Bromley N
arrative is a core component for many games - whether as a core component of the experience or just a sprinkling of expanded universe lore,
and when interviewing players story often comes up as a primary motivation for why players stick with the games they love. Playtesting and user research give us the opportunity
to check that the story is landing with players, being understood and creating the emotional reaction we hoped for. There are two common topics teams need to know when playtesting narrative in games. The first is ‘comprehension’ - do players understand the story. The other is ‘appeal’ - is it gripping players, and are they interested in following what’s happening.
For both of these types of playtests, there are some traps
to watch out for when running narrative playtests - in this article we’ll cover how to safely approach testing both comprehension and appeal for the story of your game.
FINDING THE RIGHT PLAYERS For both of these types of playtests, finding the right kind of players is incredibly important, and can quickly derail any playtest with irrelevant opinions if done poorly. Recruit players from your competitor set of games,
with a particular eye on ‘do they play the right kind of narrative games’. When running these studies, I’d often distinguish between linear narrative games (such as The Last of Us), branching/choice-based games (such as Detroit or the Telltale games) or even emergent storytelling (such as Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress) to ensure that we’re hearing from our genuine potential players. When recruiting the players, validate their experience
and interest in narrative - not just asking them if they pay attention to the story, but also requiring them to demonstrate it as part of recruitment for the playtest - such as asking them to describe story beats that stuck with them from the competitor games.
NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION TESTS Seeing if people understand your story can be done very early in development - often starting with the storyboard outline, before anything has been implemented in code. This works great as a one-to-one study, where you are
sat with one player at a time and walking through the story. Create a powerpoint prototype of the narrative,
44 | MCV/DEVELOP July/August 2026
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