Hi there, I'm Olive. I worked in Games User Research for ~6 years. Not a tremendously long career in absolute time, but it was mostly agency work, which tracks like dog years.
I don't have the energy to start a newsletter or whatever, but I would be overjoyed to answer any questions you might have. I'd love for my experience to benefit others, especially folks who don't typically have access to this kind of expertise.
Some examples of things I can help with
- how to properly gather feedback on social media
- common pitfalls to watch out for when playtesting
- how to get the most out of the feedback you collect
- writing good survey questions and avoiding response bias
- when is research useful, what kind of testing to do based on what problem you're facing
- probably a million other things I'm not thinking of
Disclaimers
This is not an advertisement for a paid service. I work in software now, and I'm a hobbyist gamedev myself. I'm extremely not-interested in squeezing broke indies for a few bucks.
My only caveat is that I'd prefer to answer questions publicly so they can help others.
If you truly believe you need a private answer, please mention it in your ask along with a way to contact you, and we can discuss it. I won't answer publicly without your permission, but I also reserve the right to not answer a private request at all.
My experience
Like I said, I mainly worked at agencies running many, many projects for big corpo clients like EA, Sony, Microsoft, Blizzard, Riot, 2K, etc. I also spent almost a year at [big mobile game company] before I got fired cuz I couldn't bring myself to care about their evil little skinner boxes.
I ran playtests, concept tests, usability tests, and I'm happy to explain the different methodologies behind those things. I did plenty of quantitative analysis (ie, spreadsheet magic with 1000s of survey responses), but my speciality was qualitative work (ie, talking to people face-to-face, asking the fun "why" questions)