Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

5 The Life and Tools of a Games Designer 83
the desired emotional impact. The more people they see experiencing the product,
the better understanding they have of the way their design impacts experience. The
power of user testing is in this key aspect. Seeing is believing, and allowing designers
and other team members to see players interacting with their product is extremely
powerful. They do not have to blindly trust the user evaluation experts, they can see
for themselves.
One of the issues that does arise when receiving results from user evaluations
is the fact that it is extremely rare for feedback to come in that the designers have
not anticipated themselves. This may in part be due to the broadness of the results
that are received from small-scale user evaluations. This does lead us to question
whether more detailed large-scale evaluations may be better able to find specific
usability flaws.
Microsoft has constructed a tool for user evaluation that combines the ideas of
user testing and automated data collection. Each event time stamped and wrapped
with data about what context the user was in. On top of this survey, data collected
at specified points allow the inclusion of the users’ rating of their experience.
Combined with a strong visualization tool that can represent the data real time on a
map of the game world (Kim et al. 2008), you have an extremely powerful tool.
The examples given when discussing the strengths of user evaluations and the
tools that Microsoft have developed are very specific. For example, Kim et al. (2008)
talk about the number of deaths for each level of a game and notice one level had
a particularly high number of deaths. When drilling into the data, they found where
in the level the majority of deaths were taking place. Drilling further, they could
find the way players were dying and the exact weapons and characters that did the
killing. Finally, this data is linked to in-game video footage of the player’s character
when they died. This is powerful information, allowing designers to pinpoint areas
of game play causing issues. However, these elements seem like tweaks perfecting
an already strong experience.
Difficulty testing is another distinct aspect of game development. The difficulty
is something that is carefully tweaked throughout the game. As the players become
more skilled, they require more challenge but not too much. The evaluation of the
difficulty gradient is something that QA does assess. However, their primary focus
is software bugs. Also, QA quickly become expert users. Therefore, the value of
watching new users experience the game for the first time is incredibly useful to the
evaluation of user experience.
5.3.4 Post Launch
After potential years of work, the game is finally released to the public. The press
has reviewed it and consumers are buying and playing it. This is the point where
designers learn whether the experience they have created gets players’ attention. It is
also one of the first moments that designers really have time to distance themselves
from work and evaluate what they have created.