Category: Milestones

Develop’s 30 Under 30 highlights up-and-coming development talent from across with world. I was included in 2013, in the sixth edition of the awards, nearly two years after the foundation of Player Research.

Approaching his two-year anniversary as a user researcher at Player Research, Sebastian Long, 27, has positively impacted more than 50 titles across all platforms. And his peers say he is a talented and professional researcher. Long evaluates behaviour and emotion via playtesting, user research and player interviews.

Develop 30 Under 30

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts support the professionals working within the film, games and television industries. I’ve been a BAFTA member since 2017.

Our curated academy of members sits at the heart of everything we do, from supporting our charitable aims, acting as mentors to emerging young talent, lending their knowledge and experience to our BAFTA Guru programmes, to forming our board and committees, and participating in voting for our Awards

BAFTA

I chaired the fourth gamesUR conference, hosting talks from researchers and data analysts from across Europe.

In 2017 I project managed the establishment of Player Research’s second branch. Montreal is host to hundreds of game development studios, and a community of talented games user researchers.

Sporting a new venue and new visual identity, I chaired the gamesUR conference again in 2017. The Cavendish Conference Centre provided exceptional hospitality for a series of wonderful talks.

My talk on designing a playtest lab had a certain Jakob Nielsen in the audience. It was subsequently featured in the NNGroup article explaining the myriad differences between mainstream user research and games user research.

Sebastian Long from Player Research in the UK described his company’s playtesting lab: The observation room included a big projection display with reduced versions of 12 users’ screens, as well as a pushbutton switch for observers to select one of the 12 screens to be magnified. […] This need to alternate between surveying many peoples’ broad behavior and detailed attention to a single person’s specific interactions is rare outside games research.

Jakob Nielsen, NNGroup

After the success of the 2015 event I chaired a second in 2016. Watch the session videos here.

The Develop Awards spotlight the best of video game development across the world, highlighting studios, service providers, games and their developers. Player Research won the ‘Services’ award in 2016.

• Audiomotion Studios
• Flipbook
• Formosa Interactive
• GameDev Network Limited
• d3t
• Player Research
• Red Kite Games

In 2015 I co-chaired the first games user research conference in Europe. The American edition had been running annually since 2009, bringing hundreds of Researchers to San Fran. The first event was a collaboration between the volunteer community and the IGDA.