Narrative review process: Getting useful feedback on your story

Abstract

Getting useful feedback on the narrative of a game can be notoriously difficult: by the time a playtester can experience the story in your game, it’s usually already too late to make any significant changes. With this in mind, we developed a method which allows Ubisoft to apply a simple research methodology on a game’s story, early enough for it to be valuable for the writers working on it. This paper defines common difficulties of properly testing narrative in games, and then explains the methodology developed and explains how it was successfully used on Ubisoft productions to generate actionable feedback.