Survey questions for running concept tests

In your concept test, you might want to find out whether your players perceive your concepts to have the attributes you designed them around. For example, you have one concept that you designed to be dark, gritty and futuristic. Do your players actually associate those attributes with the concept as you have designed it? You can do this using paired opposites.

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.

[Upload image for Concept 1]

Please rate the above image (concept 1) on the following attribute:

Rating scale

1 [Light] to 10 [Dark]

Please rate the above image (concept 1) on the following attribute:

Rating scale

1 [Happy] to 10 [Sad]

Please rate the above image (concept 1) on the following attribute:

Rating scale

1 [Intense] to 10 [Relaxing]

Which of the following concepts is your favourite as a first preference?

Multiple choice (single selection)