GamesUR Speaker Summit 2025

Sebastian Long discusses important updates about the Games User Research Salary Survey.

Please take the time to help us gather data by completing the salary survey: http://gamesursalarysurvey.com/

Essential Tips for Going Freelance

Sebastian Long

Premiers: Monday, Dec. 1st at 6:00 PM CET (9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET).

Talk outline:

Being a ‘freelance’ player researcher is one of the many ways of forging a career path in this sought-after discipline. It makes it possible to work with individual game studios for a few weeks at a time — in fact it’s advice commonly repeated to career-starters: find small teams to work with, and build out your portfolio for a full-time role.

Freelance work feels increasingly important for people at all skill and experience levels, whilst the games industry job market remains frustratingly tough. Working as a ‘lone wolf’ lets you partner with teams of all shapes and sizes: studios, publishers, and research agencies like Player Research.

This talk provides some essential advice to individuals considering freelance work: how to prepare for positions, what to look for, things to ask, and things to expect. As an agency Director, experienced research project lead, hiring manager for FTE and FTC roles, I’ll go through the top tips that’ll help you land and succeed in freelance research gigs.

Remote Accessibility Playtesting with People with Disabilities

Jozef Kulik

Premiers: Monday, Dec. 1st at 7:00 PM CET (10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET).

Talk Outline:

The talk highlights some of the common barriers and challenges associated with playtesting with people with disabilities and emphasizes how people with disabilities are often inherently excluded from traditional user research processes. The talk emphasizes this as a problem for our discipline that aims to serve as the voice of the player in the development process,and then provides various suggestions to improve user research processes towards making them more accessible (both in towards improving physical, in lab playtesting methods). The talk then move into discussing remote playtesting as a best-practice example of how a team might conduct accessibility focused user testing and illustrates how an accessibility playtest might be ran from hypothesis and research questions, through to research dissemination with teams. The presentation includes examples from a live playtest, using real player data to highlighting the value illustrates the type of research questions that accessibility testing can help your teams address, throughout discovery, testing and validation research phases.

Game Development for new Games User Researchers

Steve Bromley

Premiers: Tuesday, Dec. 2nd at 6:00 PM CET (9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET)

Talk Outline:

Games User Research does not happen in isolation. To have real impact, researchers must work collaboratively with other disciplines across the game development process. Game development has a bespoke development process, different to many other forms of tech. I’ve seen from years of mentoring that this can be a barrier for people coming from other industries, or is often opaque to new games user researchers, making it hard to cut through. This talk will explore how games are made and who makes them, critical for being an effective researcher.

We will cover the stages of game development and the roles involved – highlighting how each discipline brings its own objectives, pressures, and timelines. Recognizing these helps researchers identify how to position their studies for impact. This will also point to further resources and references for attendees who want to deepen their understanding of development practices. By the end of the talk, attendees will have a clearer picture of how games get made, how to collaborate with different disciplines, and how to position user research for maximum influence.

Case Study: A Systems Approach to Framing Better Games User Research Questions

Nandhini Giri

Premiers: Tuesday, Dec. 2nd at 7:00 PM CET (10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET).

Talk Outline:

This case study provides insights on how a systems analysis of a complex interactive product experience like video games can empower UX teams to prepare more precise evaluation questions to study the impact of the product on the desired user group. The 25 min talk provides a detailed account of applying a systems approach to analyzing games to frame better research questions for testing and improving video game player experiences. This is based on project data collected from a course titled ‘player-centered approaches to designing games’ conducted in a higher education institution over two semesters. The course introduced games user research methods to students specializing in game design, development, and user experience majors at both undergraduate and graduate levels. A comparative observation between the first user research project that involved traditional approaches versus the second iteration of the same project with a systems approach showed that student game developers and designers could better understand their game as a system and henceforth design and develop better user studies to test and evaluate video game player experiences.

Traditional approaches, characterized by linear and reductionist approaches, focus on isolated components of a problem. There is an emphasis on cause-and-effect relationships between components, which helps solve simple problems. Game systems, on the other hand, have intricate, complex, and interconnected layers that demand a holistic perspective. Student game designers and developers often focus on individual components of the game and fail to look at the interconnected nature of the game system. They are often driven by ideas that excite their development teams or by prior knowledge of playing existing games. This preconception prevents them from exploring new design patterns and gameplay approaches. Further, game development is an iterative process that requires playtesting and user feedback. Students receive peer feedback on their games, but this happens through ad-hoc playtesting sessions. There is a need for a structured approach to developing user research sessions to (1) identify parts of the game system that can be refined through user feedback (2) collect appropriate user data that can improve the game system and player experience (3) Translate data into design guidelines (4) communicate these guidelines to the development team.

Classrooms are sandboxes for testing and studying various game design practices and research methodologies. Introducing games user research methods to student development teams has proven to be a great tool for tackling these challenges. It could serve as a tool for onboarding junior UX researchers and integrating members from cross-functional teams to (1) develop a good understanding of the product and (2) identify areas that require further research and user input (3) Frame research questions for better impact. Gamified applications and interactive software products that employ game-based strategies can also benefit by utilizing this systems approach in evaluating products with interconnected components and dynamic user interactions.

Synthetic Doesn’t Mean Soulless: Ethics and Empathy in AI-Driven Research

Maria Amirkhanyan

Premiers: Wednesday, Dec. 3rd at 6:00 PM CET (9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET).

Talk Outline:

AI is rapidly transforming how researchers understand players. Originally developed and validated in sectors like marketing, healthcare, and social research, synthetic respondents (AI-generated models that mimic human behavior) are now entering the games user research space. They promise scalability, speed, and lower costs that traditional methods can’t match.

Yet this new wave also challenges one of research’s most fundamental principles: empathy.
When your “participants” are artificial, how do you ensure the insights are still real?

This talk explores the intersection of innovation, ethics, and human understanding in modern game research. Drawing on case studies from Duamentes Gaming’s collaborations with studios and publishers, we’ll examine how synthetic respondents can support (and not replace) human-centered research when applied transparently and responsibly.

AI Augmentation in Games User Research: How to Maintain Research Quality Using AI

Lennart Nacke

Premiers: Wednesday, Dec. 3rd at 7:00 PM CET (10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET).

Talk Outline: Games user researchers increasingly use AI tools to analyze player feedback, generate survey questions, and process qualitative data. I draw from recent academic research on AI use for user experience research to examine when AI enhances GUR versus when it compromises research quality and validity in this talk.

My framework addresses three critical decision points: when to use AI for data processing, how to validate AI-generated research instruments, and where human judgment remains essential. Based on recent studies that support that researchers cannot reliably detect AI-generated text but can still assess underlying research quality, the talk presents criteria for evaluating whether AI assistance maintains or diminishes methodological rigour.

You’ll learn a decision matrix for assessing AI tool appropriateness across different GUR contexts (from survey design to player interview analysis). My framework includes transparency steps for documenting AI use in research (based on our recent research on deceptive design), validation requirements before deploying AI-assisted methods, and quality control checks that catch when automation misses important player insights. Special attention goes to preserving the human touch in our player research, a deeper understanding, contextual interpretation, and creative insight that AI cannot replicate but that defines excellent games user research.

Gendered Toxicity in Competitive Gaming: Women’s Perception and Responses

Elena Koung

Premiers: December 3rd at 8:00 PM CET (11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET).

Talk outline: My submission is to present our recently published and award winning research on Gendered Toxicity in competitive gaming. Women’s participation in competitive gaming continues to grow. Despite growing attention to women’ s presence and challenges in gaming, research has largely overlooked their unique experiences with toxicity in competitive environments. Our study addresses this gap by examining the perspectives of 28 women who play competitive games at varying levels. Through reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, we discovered how women are being harmed by gendered toxicity and desire for justice. We present two key findings: 1) the forms of gendered toxicity women perceive in competitive gaming and 2) how women respond to their experiences with gendered toxicity. Using women-centered perspectives, our research deepens the understanding of how gendered toxicity marginalizes women and highlights confrontational strategies that seek justice and drive change. We demonstrate that gendered toxicity sustains a sexist meritocracy and exposes the limitations of existing interventions and mitigation strategies. Our findings encourage game developers and industry practitioners to design more inclusive moderation systems and competitive gaming events.