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Survey questions for playtesting your 4X strategy game
Survey questions for playtesting your 4X strategy game

A selection of tried-and-tested survey questions to use and adapt for playtesting your 4X strategy games

Gareth Lloyd avatar
Written by Gareth Lloyd
Updated over a week ago

How to use these questions

Where possible, we try to provide survey response option scales that include:

  • Five or seven response points, in order to provide a reasonable trade off between granularity and ease of response,

  • A central neutral option,

  • Negative responses below the neutral response, and positive responses above it.

This structure allows us to assign positive, negative or neutral scores to responses (from -2 to +2, or -3 to +3) which can be helpful in visualising and communicating outcomes later on.

Some questions are scored in specific ways:

  • Where questions are reverse coded, this means that responses on the upper end of the scale are negative. If you want to compare these questions directly with other questions that are non reverse coded, you will need invert the scores.

  • Where questions are middle-optimal, this means that the most positive response is in the middle of the response scale. The lowest and highest scores here represent negative extremes: e.g. 'too hard' or 'too easy'.

These questions are not formally validated or part of a single tool or scale, so feel free to use individual items or modify questions for your current research goal. However, you might find more value in them by using them repeatedly, whether across multiple playtests, or in some cases, on multiple days on a longitudinal playtest. This way you can track changes to these responses over time, especially where you have enough players to aggregate responses.

I felt free to play the game as I wanted to

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

I felt as though the game was encouraging me to play a certain way

Multiple choice (single selection)

Reverse coded

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

The game offers features that are different to other strategy games

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

The game is very similar to other strategy games

Multiple choice (single selection)

Reverse coded

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

The game allows me to pursue a wide variety of goals

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

There is a lot in the game to keep me coming back

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

Overall, the game was..

Multiple choice (single selection)

Middle optimal

1 – Much too simple

2 – Somewhat too simple

3 – Slightly too simple

4 – About right in terms of complexity

5 – Slightly too complex

6 – Somewhat too complex

7 – Much too complex

How prepared or unprepared did you feel to play the game after the tutorial?

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Very unprepared

2 – Unprepared

3 – Slightly unprepared

4 – Neither prepared nor unprepared

5 – Slightly prepared

6 – Prepared

7 – Very prepared

New game features were introduced..

Multiple choice (single selection)

Middle optimal

1 – Much too slowly

2 – Somewhat too slowly

3 – Slightly too quickly

4 – At about the right pace

5 – Slightly too quickly

6 – Somewhat too quickly

7 – Much too quickly

The menus were easy to navigate

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

The in-game [HUD/user interface] was clear and easy to read

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

In the [levels/matches] that I played today, there was a clear sense of progression

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree

3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

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