Creating a PlayUR Experiment

Assumptions

This guide assumes you have registered a PlayUR account that has access to Manage Experiments page and have already followed the steps on the Getting Started page to create a game on PlayUR.

Create Experiment

  1. In the list of games, find your game and click on it.
  2. On the Experiments tab click Add Experiment. Give it a name. Experiments are made up of multiple Experiment Groups (for an experiment to be valid, it needs at least one group).
  3. Create a group on the Experiment Groups tab and Add Experiment Group. Give it a name. In order to vary parameters, most Experiments will have multiple experiment groups.

Advanced: Experiment Wizard

You can also generate a series of groups in common experimental patterns (e.g. Control vs Treatment), and generate sets of groups based upon a set of different values for a given paramater.

Game Elements and Game Parameters

Your games can detect at runtime if a particular element has been enabled (true/false), and read the value of any arbritrarily-named parameter (this may be a string, integer, float, or boolean). Games, Experiments, and Experiment Groups can be configured to use different elements and parameters. This works in a hierarchical fashion, where settings for an Experiment override any setting on a Game, and settings on an Experiment Group override any settings on a Experiment. Similarly, Experiments inherit any non-overridden Game settings, and Experiment Groups inherit any non-overridden Experiment values. Game -> Experiment -> Experiment Group You can set elements and parameters by using the Elements and Parameters tabs on any Game, Experiment, or Experiment Group (as long as you have enabled these features).

  1. Choose one of your newly created Experiment Groups and click on it
  2. On the Parameters tab, enter in a new parameter name (this is sometimes referred to as a key).

Advanced: Parameter Lists

You can add [] after the name of a game parameter name to turn it into a list.

Advanced: Parameter Metadata and JSON Objects as Parameter Values

To be further documented, however you can ensure that parameter values are always in a specified format (such as String, int, float), and even define a JSON Schema and store complex JSON objects in a parameter. If a JSON Schema is set, PlayUR will even give you a custom editor to modify your JSON object.

What's Next?

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to create an experiment set parameter values, you have everything you need to get started on your own project. If you would like to try out a practice example, read on to the A Simple Example page, where we will create an experiment where we vary the bounciness of a bouncy ball using a PlayUR Parameter.