Focus testing Gaia's 'zOMG'

   

      Posted by Daniel Terdiman Font size Print E-mail Share 4 commentsYahoo! Buzz Focus group testers play Gaia Online's forthcoming casual MMO, 'zOMG,' at the company's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. The new game, which is scheduled to go into public beta in a couple of months, is an adjunct to Gaia's existing casual virtual world, which has more than 7 million users.

 (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN JOSE, Calif.--How do you fine tune a game that has been long in the making and is just a couple of months from going public?  

That was the central question behind a focus group I sat in on Tuesday, as the developers behind the wildly popular casual virtual world Gaia Online invited seven devoted players to put zOMG, their new massively multiplayer online game, through its paces.  

During the session, which lasted about two hours, the seven players--five women and two men ranging in age from 19 to 25--were asked to pound away at zOMG in a bid to help the designers see just what was working at this point in the development process, what wasn't and to discover whether the players would recommend the game to friends. Already, the Web-based Gaia Online has more than 7 million unique monthly users, and an auction system with more than 100,000 transactions per day. Gaia is mainly a social environment without a deep goal-oriented gaming element, but now, with the planned launch of zOMG, the company is adding an MMO that will be a separate, but adjunct, gaming environment that will essentially have direct paths into the company's larger virtual world and which will be peppered with references to the original environment. The Tuesday focus group wasn't the first Gaia has held at its offices, and it won't be the last. But it was the first time the company had allowed a reporter in the room to witness the proceedings, a risky move if the testers said they didn't like the game.  

In the end, I'd say that the testers I watched were generally pleased with the game. They liked its mechanics and the way it tied into the larger Gaia Online world, but they did have some sobering comments for the producers about why they would recommend it to their friends. 

But more on that later. Gaia Online co-founder Derek Liu looks on as the focus group testers play the new MMO.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The session was hosted by Kate Pietrelli, an account manager at TriplePoint, Gaia's outside PR agency, and was attended by several members of the game's development team, as well as Gaia Online co-founder Derek Liu. Throughout the two hours, she directed the players through the game and peppered them with questions about what they were experiencing.  

She began the session by asking the testers how they felt about using the trackpads on the PC laptops they'd been given, rather than mice.  

One tester, 25-year-old Crysta Coburn, said she was happy with the trackpad, and that she tended to be using it when moving around from place to place in the game, but reverted to using keyboard commands when fighting.  

But four other testers said they wanted mice for a better experience, and the producers handed them over a minute later.