FFWWDD Questionnaire

At the end of the day, it is players who determine the quality of a game. No matter how much we try tohedge our bets by using tools and techniques (like the ones in our lovely collection), it is players who will validate what works and what doesn’t.

When conducting playtests one of the most important decisions is what to ask the players. In large, well-funded projects you’ll be able to line up multiple sessions where you can dig deep into a specific aspect of the game. In these cases, the questionnaire would be tailor made for that aspect. However, in smaller teams, it is not uncommon that you only have limited time with your playtester and can realistically only run a few sessions.

In these cases you want to get the most bang for you buck and luckily the FFWWDD questionnaire is here to help (I pronounce it ‘forward’, but feel free to correct me 😀 ). These are 6 basic questions that you should ask any tester to get a good sense of their overall thoughts on the game:

• What was the most frustrating moment in what you experienced?
• What was your favorite moment?
• Was there anything you wanted to do, but the game didn’t let you?
• If you had a magic wand where you could change any part of the game, regardless of cost or complexity, what would you add/change/remove?
• What would you say you were doing in the game?
• How would you describe the game to friends and family?

If you’re curious how it got its name, it’s an acronym of the key words of each question:

• Frustrating
• Favorite
• Wanted
• Wand
• Doing
• Describe

All credit for this technique goes to Jesse Schell and his team. They’ve also released a handy checklist for preparing, running and analyzing your playtest.

Instead of our usual steps, as the tool is already a list, I’ll note some things to keep in mind.

• Might go without saying, but a playtest is only as good as the match between your tester and your target audience. Make sure to filter testers so they are similar to your players.
• Ideally you want to observe players live as they play the game before giving them the questionnaire
  • Second best however, having video capture of their footage as they voice out loud their thoughts (Streamers are experts at this).
  • Conventions, meetups and forums of similar games are great places to look for testers. Chris Zukowski has an excellent piece on this.
  • Vin St. John also has some good best practices on playtesting.
• The order of the questions is important, you want to make sure you capture negative feedback first.
• Although every playtest is valuable, I believe you should use at least 5 testers per test; that will help reduce variance from personal taste and help you draw better conclusions.
• Testers are great at showing problems, but not so much at proposing solutions. They just don’t have as full picture of the project as you do.
• If you have specific questions about part of the game, or you want to follow up on your observations, feel free to add questions to the questionnaire after the FFWWDD.

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