Playtest Analysis

---
name: playtest-analysis
description: Analyze game playtests using observed decisions, failures, strategies, pacing, comprehension, engagement, and cohort context to turn sessions into design evidence.
---
# Playtest Analysis

Use when playtest sessions need to inform game-system or mechanic decisions beyond individual comments.

## Procedure
1. Define the design questions, build revision, participant profile, and test conditions so observations can be interpreted in context.
2. Capture behavior such as choices, routes, retries, failures, mastery, confusion, unused mechanics, dominant strategies, completion time, and help requests before relying on post-session opinions.
3. Record critical incidents with the game state and preceding events that produced them.
4. Separate comprehension problems, execution difficulty, balance issues, motivation problems, content gaps, and technical defects.
5. Compare patterns across players and cohorts while preserving meaningful outliers that reveal exploits or severe barriers.
6. Triangulate subjective feedback with observed behavior and telemetry where available.
7. Prioritize findings by impact on the intended player experience, recurrence, severity, and confidence.
8. Form specific design hypotheses and define the next change or experiment that could confirm them.

## Decision rules
- What players do and what they say can both matter, but they answer different questions.
- One frustrated player does not prove the difficulty curve is wrong; one reproducible softlock does prove a defect exists.
- Keep build and cohort context attached to findings.
- Analysis should produce design decisions or experiments, not a scrapbook of quotes.

## Quality gate
The analysis is ready when observations trace to exact sessions and build state, recurring patterns and critical outliers are distinguished, root-cause categories are plausible, priorities reflect the intended experience, and each material finding has a design decision, hypothesis, or follow-up test.