Psychologist

We believe that the more we know about human behavior, about how and why people do what they do, the better our products will be. All game designers are, in a sense, experimental psychologists. That's why we're looking for a experimental psychologist to apply knowledge and methodologies from psychology to game design and all aspects of Valve's operations. We want to exploit your experience with experimental design, research methods, statistics, and human behavior to help craft even more compelling gameplay experiences for future Valve titles. We'd also expect you to research and weigh in on any and all topics that are relevant to improving the experiences of our customers, partners, and employees.

Duties:

• Provide relevant insight into human behavior in order to shape gameplay and customer experience.
• Perform statistical analyses on all aspects of Valve's operations: gameplay, financial, and company data.
• Research compelling new hardware technologies.
• Design experiments to evaluate various gameplay hypotheses and design choices.
• Improve existing playtesting methodologies while incorporating novel techniques to improve best practices.
• Develop innovative ways of acquiring relevant data to answer open questions about all aspects of Valve's products and business practices.

Requirements:

• Graduate degree in Psychology (or equivalent) field
• Advanced knowledge of statistics
• Familiarity with one or more of the following pieces of data analysis software: SPSS, Systat, Matlab, R, (or equivalent)
• Four years experience with:

1. Experimental design/research methods
2. Relevant research in cognitive, social, human factors, and related disciplines in psychology

Recommended:

• Proficiency in one or more of the following programming languages: C++, SQL, PHP, (or equivalent)