Diary Methods in AAA Games User Research.

In this paper we present lessons learned from a diary study completed for Electronic Arts' AAA video game NHL16 in August 2015. Key findings suggest that while there is high risk to use the method, there is also great benefit in terms of impact via actionable data and ability to collect rich artifacts to tell the users' stories. To reduce the risk, this work presents a series of suggested guidelines for conducting a diary study in games user research, which has not been investigated in past work. We lay a foundation for diary methods in GUR and how to further improve the method by providing examples and real results through an AAA game example.