The Testing Shift. Game testing as embedded empirical study of user response.

This paper is aimed to show that the empirical study of literature, text and media can make use of some findings from digital media studies, and in particular from game studies: indeed games are the most important digital mass media, first in chronology and by diffusion. Games are the result of a complete fusion of hot and cool media (McLuhan 1964) and their evolution (Bogost 2006) shows the same paths of contemporary literature (Nemesio 1990). The study of player response is currently made by game testing, a practice that is included in the very production of games (Meyer 2008). Game testing is the empirical study of a single ludic text (token) and a systematic study of the tester response could provide a platform for the empirical analysis of the game text in general (type). The different phases of game testing could be usefully implemented in the empirical study of literature texts.