But I don't want to give anyone the impression that we've abandoned human play testing. The automatic testing gives us a security blanket but we still want to watch people and make sure that the things that we create quantitative metrics for actually have real world applicability. We're theorizing about a lot of this stuff - we want to actually watch players and find out how they're reacting. We have to test each play theory and make sure it's actually true. Exposing the theoretical model with actual players was a super important part of testing the game.

We want to take that even further in the future. One of the areas that we're really interested in is testing biometrics on player state. Right now we have to filter our observations of players by simply by watching them and then we have to guess as to how certain things are affecting the player. But there are new technologies where we can wire players up with EEGs and actually have direct exposure to their physical reactions to the games.

We can know for sure of something is actually frightening the player - their heart rate is going up, their respiration stats are peaking, appropriate parts of their brains are being activated. Direct measurement of players' arousal states and responses to the things we're doing is super exciting. It just will allow us to be much more analytical about the decisions that we're making and the roller coaster ride we're trying to create for the player.