Essential Games User Research Books – Games UX reading list

The Games User Research book draws together insight from top researchers across the insight to deep dive into many contemporary topics that are important for games user researchers and UX designers.

It’ll give you great insight into the range of approaches and challenges that exist in the industry, and will help you understand how to integrate games user research throughout the development process, and deep dive into skills such as moderating, biometrics and analytics. 

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The book How To Be A Games User Researcher was written based on five years of running the mentoring programme for the Games Research & UX community. We placed over 150 students with mentors at top companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, and helped many people get their first job in games.

The book covers the core lessons that people wanting to join the games industry needed to know. The first part covers How do games get made, and where does UX research fit in. The book then dives into How to plan and run usability studies in games. The final section is career guidance – what skills do you need to demonstrate in an interview, and how to get the experience needed to get your first games job. The book will save you a lot of time by avoiding common mistakes, and helps you ace your games interview. 

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In games UX and user research, we’re often asked to compare things – player’s opinions about different levels, builds, or the perceived difficulty of each level. This requires drawing robust conclusions, often from a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. 

If you haven’t done a course in statistics, this book is an essential reference for how to select and perform the right statistical test for your research objective – I personally find it helps give me confidence that I am being accurate and truthful when reporting quantitative data.

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Games UX and user researchers are often required to write surveys to help quantify player sentiment. This is a skill that takes practice to avoid bias, leading questions, or restricting players from expressing their true thoughts.

This book, surveys that work, is a great resource for designing and running reliable surveys, that doesn’t start from the assumption that a survey is always the right thing to do. I found it helpful for improving my own skills at survey design, and increasing my confidence in assessing player opinions reliably.

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The Gamers Brain

Understanding player behaviour is easier when we have a good understanding of what players are thinking, and why. This allows us to properly explain why players act in the way they do (“why didn’t they see that prompt on the HUD”), and improves our odds of making the right change to fix the problem.

The Gamer’s Brain gives a comprehensive overview of how the brain works, and how this applies to game design – including looking at concepts such as attention, memory, motivation and emotion. The context allows us to understand and explain both usability issues, and what might make a game engaging or dull. 

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One of the biggest challenges for user researchers as their skills develop is identifying where they can have impact. Relying on teams to ask for help missing many opportunities when we can be testing our hypotheses about player behaviour, and helping our teams. I strongly believe that it’s really important for user researchers and UX designers to understand how games get made, and what other disciplines are doing, so that we can intercept decisions at the right time.

A playful production process describes ‘how games get made’ from game designer Richard Lemarchand, who worked on the Uncharted series of games at Naughty Dog. The book explains a complete production process for making games, and allows us to identify where user research and UX design can fit in.

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Game design is a complex art-form that has a huge crossover with the skills required for UX Design. When testing hypotheses or suggesting changes, it’s really important to understand the design intent – what was the designer trying to do. 

This book covers almost 100 different perspectives that designers think about when making games, and different . Understanding how game designers make decisions, and growing your own skills at appreciating the different angles that each game design decision has to consider, will help you make more impactful decisions, and avoid making naive mistakes.

Learn more about The Art Of Game Design