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they do, and their designs often reflect their best and most passionately held ideas about how games should work. In many cases they’ve put in extra nights and weekends of work to create particular features, fought for those features in meetings, and spent internal political capital to make sure the features made it into the game. They have a strong and completely understandable bias toward rejecting research results that require them to change their designs, no matter how true or important those results are. It falls to me and my team to act as advocates for the data, to present the results in the way most likely to get past that bias and jumpstart a serious collaboration about how to address the HCI problems revealed by the data. We’re certainly not always successful, but I have seen several consistent themes in which presentations have struck home.

The first theme is that successful presentations tend to establish the audience’s motivation before moving into the detailed analysis. The client’s first unspoken question is always, “Why do I care about this?” Answering that question early on increases the odds that the audience will stay with you until the end of the article, meeting, or presentation. Even if the audience is ostensibly listening, if the answer to that question is not clear in their mind then the presentation is wasted. In many cases, this is about establishing the users’ pain, the cost of an HCI failure. During the production of Halo 3, I got in the habit of playing a video of a sample user from the study we were discussing in