Measurement Techniques for Game Designers

An interesting article over at Gamasutra talks about Measurement Techniques for Game Designers. In it, the author makes the case for gathering empirical data on successful games for comparison to your own games under development, and suggests some ways to make it meaningful and not too onerous.

For instance, he suggests measuring the amount of screen real estate your avatar uses in a game. Rather than measuring and computing area and screen percentage, he just plays a series of games, and draws on the monitor with a Chinagraph pencil to record the onscreen extents of the avatar. Then, playing the in-development game on the same monitor provides instant feedback on the relative sizes of the on-screen avatars. A clever, quick, and compelling experiment!