with each slide covering a main story beat. Step through it with the player, and after each slide ask questions such as: • What is happening currently? • Why is this happening? • What do you expect to happen next? This will allow you to identify whether players understand the story, and the characters motivations, and highlight where players get confused - identifying areas where further narrative support is needed when implementing the story. Mystery is a core component of many stories, and by
asking open ended questions (rather than just ‘is this clear?’) will give you a more nuanced understanding of whether the narrative intent is being realised - and allow you to ask clarifying questions to avoid high level or ambiguous responses. By doing early narrative testing, we can highlight issues
while it’s still easy to make changes - and verify it when greybox animations are in, to avoid expensive changes later in production.
NARRATIVE APPEAL TESTS Appeal tests are always more nuanced - games are a creative medium and we don’t want to defer artistic decisions to players. Asking players for story ideas, or if they like the story, is a recipe for generic low-impact storytelling. But we do usually want to see if players are engaged and interested in knowing what happens next. As part of longer gameplay playtests, regularly ask people
‘how interested are you in what happens next’ questions, and look for the drop-off over time, to find out where players are losing interest. Because this is best handled as a quantitative question, I usually run these when we’re doing multi-seat lab based studies with many players playing at once, so that we can get a reliable measure of where players interest is dropping, while still covering longer stretches of gameplay, and use survey questions to capture ratings for interest in continuing the story. If you have defined the emotional responses, you are
expecting at each story beat you can also capture this in narrative testing - asking people to pick from a word list how the story makes them feel and then checking that against your design intent. Testing narrative appeal requires a careful balance of
when in production to run these studies - when we have representations of the story beats in the game (often in a grey box format), but while we still have time to make any changes - especially if level design is impacted by story changes.
TRAPS TO WATCH OUT FOR Players can only really experience a story as intended the
first time they see it - otherwise they will be taking in prior knowledge that other players won’t have. This means we can’t re-use playtesters when testing story in games, and everyone only gets one shot at it. Make sure you’re screening for this when recruiting playtesters to avoid people coming back and biasing their responses. Many games use existing IP, which brings with it prior
knowledge and expectations. When recruiting players, capture their existing familiarity with the franchise, and be intentional about the level of familiarity you are expecting players to have about your IP to get feedback from the right kind of players. In real life players frequently take breaks and have to
come back to a game after spending many days (or weeks) away from it. This can be difficult to simulate in a playtest environment and can give a misleading impression about how memorable the story is. Keep this in mind when analysing results (or consider creative playtesting methods, such as checking in with players a few weeks later to see what they remember).
TESTING THE NARRATIVE OF YOUR GAME Playtesting narrative isn’t just checking whether players
like your story - as covered, we also want to discover what they have understood, where they get confused, and if they care about the narrative they have encountered. Playtesting early (including from storyboards) will help reveal issues while there is still time to address it and ensure that players experience the story as intended.
Steve Bromley is an experienced games user researcher who works with studios and publishers to run impactful playtests throughout development. Get his free book ‘Playtest Plus’ at
gamesuserresearch.com
July/August 2026 MCV/DEVELOP | 45
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