Projects
These following are projects where I directly provided Games User Research testing (Playtests, Posttest Survey Analysis, etc.), as well as research projects I've conducted through my academic and professional career. Click on the images to see the work I contributed.
Black Games Archive
Freelance Archival Researcher
Project Description:
The Black GamesArchive is a joint research project between USC and Purdue University. It is a multimedia, public-facing database of games, digital resources, accessible scholarship, and designer interviews that are relevant to the intersections between Black culture, games, and play.
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My Role:
I looked up games that featured black characters, had prominent/notable black devs, or borrowd from black culture throughout gaming history (1970s - present). I used Wikipedia, various games articles, MobyGames, and more to find games, then added their name, release date, and other demographic info to a spreadsheet for review by my professors. Once approved, I created an article for on the Black Games Archive website.
I created over a hundred of these articles in just over 5 weeks, greatly expediting a project that would have taken multiple months otherwise.
Glowing Garden
UX Research Lead
Project Description:
Glowing Garden was my Capstone Project in the University of California - Santa Cruz's (UCSC) Games and Playable Media MS program. I served as the UX research Lead and was responsible for recruiting playtest participants, recording and analyzing playtest data, briefing and debriefing participants, and creating posttest surveys to assess the quality of new features we added to our builds.
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My Role:
I ran weekly playtests over the final quarter of our program (10 weeks total) and presented the previous week's findings to my team at our weekly stand-up. My findings influenced our game's design through the entire production phase, informed our team's game design decisions, and helped our Engineers prioritize tasks that maximized user enjoyment.
“Because I'm Bad at the Game!” A Microanalytic Study of Self Regulated Learning in League of Legends
Research Assistant
Project Description:
This is a study I co-authored alongside PhD candidate Erica Kleinman and my first published research paper. The goal of the study was to see if a framework for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) in physical sports translated to E-sports, specifically by exploring how League of Legends players of varying skill levels learn and improve at the game.
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My Role:
I converted participant responses into code for statistical analysis and provided additional research on external stat tracking websites for LoL (Mobalytics, Blitz, etc.).
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This was my first taste of doctoral research and gave me additional experience in analyzing participant testimonials, which I applied to my Capstone Projects the following two quarters.
Miacademy K-12 Online Learning Program
Product Researcher
Project Description:
This was a research project conducted for the Miacademy K-12 Online learning program with the goal of classifying and improving the reward systems present in Miacademy's learning programs to improve and gamify the student learning experience. ​
My Role:
My job involved explroing the features of Miacademy's waebsite including their educational games, non graded learning games, and social features, which I did by playing through all of them as a new user. I also did additional research into GDC talks about gamification in education and a close analysis of the engagement features in Duolingo and reported my findings to one of the company founders.
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What I learned:
This project gave me new insights into gamification, allowed me to polish my solo research methods, and the chance to apply the research skills I learned during the Museum of Mechanics Lockpicking study that I completed in the prior schoold quarter.
Museum of Mechanics - Fishing
Student Researcher
Project Description:
This was a campus wide independent study inspired by the Museum of Mechanics - Lockpicking by Johnnemann Nordhagen and aimed to make a digital museum where players could explore and interact with various types of fishing mechanics across games history.
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My Role:
I served on the project's research team and worked alongside 4 other student researchers. I helped catalog the fishing systems and mechanics in Nintendo Wii, PC, and multiple VR systems and recorded my findings on an Excel sheet. I also led a mechanics study on The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time with the research team, where we explored the game's fishing mechanics over zoom and recorded our findings in real time.
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What I learned:
This project heightened my research collaboration skills and helped me improve my methods for conducting smaller studies. I directly applied these skills to my Capstone projects in the following two quarters.
Art by Songyue Qi
The End of the Line - New Age (Dropbears Games)
Games Product Researcher
Project Description:
This is an indie gacha game version of The End of the Line, a student game I worked on in undergrad at the University of Southern California (USC, seen below), under the company Dropbears Games
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My Role:
I served as a games product researcher and researched the systems, mechanics, and common huristics of popular gacha games played on android and apple phones during the pre production phase of End of the Line- New Age.
I conducted a feature study on several mobile gacha games, focusing on core game loops, time gates (energy/stamina systems), unit summon currency, drop rates, and monetization. I recorded all my findings on a doc that I condensed and presented to my team over several scheduled Discord meetings. I also created and distributed a survey to the users of /r/gachagaming to directly ask our game's target demographic what they wanted in a new gacha game.
A few of the studies I conducted are included on the google docs link to the right.
Logo by Alejandra Flores Banuelos
The End of the Line
Student Useability Lead
Project Description:
The End of the Line (EotL) was a visual novel student Advanced Games Project project started in Fall 2018 at USC.
My Role:
As the team's UX Lead I was responsible for gathering participants, scheduling and executing playtests, designing posttest surveys, and presenting my findings to my team. I ran near weekly playtests of EotL for 2 semesters (about 8 months) and focused on participant responses to new features, story beats, and accessibility features. My findings informed the design of our game's features and stories over the course of the project.
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What I learned:
This is an incredibly personal project to me since it was my first real exposure to games UX as a field of study and my first taste of the games industry. It was my first time applying my psychology skills to games and I made a few mistakes (mainly being too verbose with my findings and missing conflicting variables in participants responses) but I learned and adapted over the course of the program. The skills I learned here allowed me to apply to UCSC, where I further honed my research skills through my masters program.
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