What is Player Research Assistant?

The Player Research Assistant is Lysto's in-dashboard AI feature that lets you ask natural-language questions about your playtests and get instant, evidence-backed answers, without having to manually review hours of footage or sift through pages of feedback.

It turns your playtest data (transcripts, survey responses, setup context, and player profiles) into decision-ready insights, on demand.

Think of it as having an on-demand research analyst embedded directly into every project. Instead of waiting on analysis turnaround, you simply ask a question and get a structured answer grounded in your own study data.

How It Works

Once your playtest is complete, the Player Research Assistant indexes all of the data generated during the study:

• Gameplay transcripts
• Post-test survey responses
• Playtest setup and objectives
• Player profile attributes

You can then query/prompt this data in plain language, just as you would ask a colleague, and receive structured answers with clear findings and supporting evidence, including direct quotes, observed patterns, and statistical breakdowns.

There's no need to switch between dashboards, scrub through recordings, or manually cross-reference survey results. The Player Research Assistant synthesises signals from across your study and surfaces what matters most.

What You Can Ask

The Player Research Assistant is designed to answer the kinds of questions that typically take researchers hours to address. Some examples include:

• Where are players getting confused or stuck?
• What are the biggest friction points in this session?
• What patterns show up consistently across player feedback?
• How do different player segments behave or respond?
• Can you run a thematic analysis on this playtest?

Each answer comes with supporting evidence, so you can trace every finding back to the source data and share insights with confidence.

Why It Matters

Game teams often run playtests but struggle to act on the results quickly. The bottlenecks are familiar:

• Too many gameplay recordings to review in full
• Large volumes of transcript and survey text to synthesis
• Signals spread across multiple views and dashboards
• Slow turnaround from data collection to actionable decisions
• PMs and producers depending heavily on researcher availability

The Player Research Assistant addresses these directly. It accelerates the analysis process so teams can move from playtest to iteration faster without sacrificing the rigor that good research requires.

What It Is Not

The Player Research Assistant is not a generic AI chatbot. It only answers questions based on your actual playtest data, and every response is anchored to real evidence from your study. It will not speculate beyond what the data supports.

It's also not a replacement for researchers. Instead, it increases researcher leverage by handling synthesis and pattern recognition at scale — freeing up your team to focus on interpretation, strategy, and recommendations. It also gives PMs and producers faster self-serve access to insights, reducing dependency on researcher bandwidth for routine queries.

Getting Started

The Player Research Assistant is available directly within your playtest dashboard once a study has concluded. To get started:

1. Open any playtest in your Lysto dashboard
2. Navigate to the Player Research Assistant icon
3. Type your question in simple, natural language
4. Review the structured response, including findings, supporting quotes, and observed patterns

For more information or to explore how the Player Research Assistant can support your team's research workflow, reach out to your Games Partnership Manager or contact us at contact@lysto.io.