In the midst of it all

Today was a crazy day. Our computer game development class had a beta test session today, where we had lots of people (mostly high schoolers) come to TWU to test our game out. From 18:00-18:30 was settling down and introductions. Since our professor didn't show up until a little later, I took charge of pairing up all of the people in our class (the observers) with the guests (the testers). There were more testers than observers, so some people had to double up.

The idea is that a tester would play the game while the observer wrote down the tester's experience (frustrations and insights etc. with the game). I set aside four students to test the game in multi player mode over the network, and had some of the more experienced developers be their observers. Since networking issues tend to be a lot harder to solve, the idea was that if the experienced developers were right there when it crashed, it would help with figuring out the problems as well as assisting the testers. It turned out that since I had the testers volunteer to test in multi player mode, we ended up with keener and more opinionated people testing in multi player mode, which was good.

At 18:20 the lab technician with the keys showed up. Thankfully my professor had arrived by then so after completing the pairing of observers with testers I passed things over to her, and she gave her little spiel of the background of the course. After that all of the testers and observers chowed down on pizza while they got to know each other a little bit (at least that's what I suggested they do). In the meantime I went downstairs with the technician and logged all of the computers in and made sure they were ready for the game to be run on.

Little did I know that the night before I had compiled the developer's version of the game instead of the tester's version of the game. It didn't cause too much trouble, since they are very similar. It just meant that there were a few things in there that we didn't want the testers to see which we were still working on.

At 19:00 the testers arrived downstairs, and there was a nice cacophony and confusion of sitting down, getting headphones and questionnaire forms, and the instructor shouting instructions over everything. Once everybody had settled down, we told them they could start the game. I proceeded to patrol the room and give tidbit instructions to each observer which had not been announced. I personally thought that we needed to have a training session for all of the observers before we did the session, but we didn't really have time for that so I kept it to myself. I need to speak up more now and then though.

So my patrols proved useful since now and then I noticed that very little communication was going on between certain observers and their tester, so I tried to encourage communication by asking a few simple questions or making comments on the tester's game play. It worked two thirds of the time, which was good. I had some observers madly scribbling notes trying to keep up with the words coming out of their testers mouths because of the questions I was asking them =). The age range of the testers there was from around 8 till 50 something, so it was quite wide. Like I said tough, most of them were in their teens, though more on the early teen side.

At 20:30 we told them to stop playing, and begin filling out their questionnaire and consent forms. This took a while and people started slowly turning in their forms. We were supposed to get out by 21:00, but we finally got the last people out of the room by 21:10.

All in all it was a very good day for me. It was quite busy running around and making sure everybody was OK, and contributing when I could. But I like that kind of work. Making sure things are running smoothly, things are going as they ought, and that people are happy is my kind of thing. So at the end of the day I felt very productive and useful.

In the midst of it all though...

I miss Tamara. I've never missed somebody like this before. It's been really obvious to me today. There's this longing, anxious, empty feeling inside of me that keeps stretching and gaping inside of me. I can't get away from it. I miss her a lot right now, and all day today. I just really want her to come back.

She'll be back the day after tomorrow though =). She's in a resort in Puerto Plata right now (in the northern Dominican Republic) doing a recap kind of thing. She gets back to Seattle on Saturday night, and I'm going down with her family to pick her up. Without thinking about the implications of being away from her for a whole month, I just want that moment to come as quickly as possible. Anyways this post is long enough.