Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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84 E. Brown At this point, there is very little that can be done to alter the experience in a significant way. Patches and updates can be released to fix flaws or periodically enhance or extend the experience, but an overhaul would take a significant amount of time. Depending on the product, any evaluations that take place at this point can have differing impact. An example is with Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games (MMORPG). With these games, the core experience takes place online where players explore a virtual world with others. With these games, once they are released the product becomes a service and developers must begin a dialogue with their customer. Whenever developers want to release an update, for example, this has to be communicated. When will it happen, how will it affect game play, will players lose anything, and what do they gain? This is a distinctly different prospect to releasing an offline puzzle game where players buy the game, install it, and would expect nothing from developers except possibly to release a sequel. This means that the impact of any evaluation that takes place at this stage ranges from directly influencing the game while people are still playing to affecting future games the team make. Sales figures, reviews, and consumer reaction are the main resources available for understanding the impact the game has made. Sales figures are the most powerful; however, they provide little detail on why the game is popular. Are the people who buy the game actually playing it or does it sit on a shelf as a talking point for parties? The two key resources at this stage are reviews and forums. The use of these will be expanded upon here. 5.3.4.1 Reviews Reviews are a key measure of quality. They are expert evaluations of the experience. Sites, like metacritic.com, that aggregate review scores can be used as independent measures of quality. Aggregate scores can be used at a corporate level to evaluate the quality of the products being produced by a studio. At a team level, almost every review of their game, especially from respected sites and magazines, is read. Designers can take stock of the decisions they made throughout development and look at how they influenced the experience of their expert reviewers. They can look at themes and key areas that produced positive and negative experiences. It is difficult to take reviews and use them to influence redesign directly. They don’t contain enough detail, or the numbers to back up the commentary. However, they do provide insight into some key points and an overall opinion of the game. 5.3.4.2 Online Forums Forums are the meeting place for your users. They may be created by the development team or evolve informally around a product. At the very least, they allow players to share their experiences and help each other when needed. At their best, they become a powerful communication tool between a developer and their community.
5 The Life and Tools of a Games Designer 85 What they can provide depends on whether they are managed by developers or unconnected community sites. Both of these do provide a good idea of the mood of the community playing the game. Volunteered information is often very extreme reactions to the product. This information can often be used as a signpost directing more detailed user tests exploring the issues raised. When the developers participate in the community, a dialogue can begin where more specific questions can be posed to players. Results of these questionnaires are aggregated and fed back to development. Players speak their minds, developers listen, and players see change. When there are issues such as bugs that cause the players to have negative experiences, developers can communicate and show that they are working on solving problems. This dialogue is invaluable when it comes to supporting online products. Unfortunately, few formal systems of analysis are used for forum data, especially for the volunteered information. It is just as important to get designers and other team members reading the forums and seeing the impact they have on players as it is to gather quantitative and qualitative data from them. Players can be passionate about the games they play, and seeing this can motivate a team to do more to support them. 5.4 The Future This chapter has provided a snapshot of the industry, its people, and the process used in the evaluation of user experience. We have talked about paper prototypes, tech demos, informal heuristics, personas, user evaluations, forums, and reviews. However, there are many tools that have not been discussed. For example, physiological measures, eye tracking, formal heuristics, and ethnographic methods and patterns have not been mentioned as tools currently in use. If we take a couple of these, we can start to explore the way in which they could be utilized in the process described in this chapter. Formal heuristics are rarely, if ever, discussed in game development. But designers are using informal heuristics all the time. There have been several approaches made at compiling heuristics for games. Nokia focused specifically on mobile phone games (Nokia 2006), while others have encompassed all genres and platforms (Desurvire et al. 2004). However, it would be fair to say these works are not common knowledge in the games industry. One way that these could be reconciled is by developing heuristics for a game as it is being developed. This could then become the rule set by which it is evaluated. Exploring how this could be done and the kinds of tools needed to do this could prove interesting. Patterns are not currently extensively used, despite extremely comprehensive game patterns existing. Again, if we look at the processes that are taking place, where will these most effectively be used? It may be that at the concept stage they could be integrated with the brainstorming, allowing designers to challenge their ideas with historical rules.
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Human-Computer Interaction Series E
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Regina Bernhaupt Editor Evaluating
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For Philippe
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viii Foreword Chapter 3, Presence I
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x Foreword personality which evolve
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Contents Part I Introduction to Eva
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Contributors Regina Bernhaupt IRIT,
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Contributors xvii Manfred Tscheligi
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xx About the Authors Emily Brown is
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xxii About the Authors a post-docto
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xxiv About the Authors Christina Ko
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xxvi About the Authors MIT Media La
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xxviii About the Authors Theft Auto
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Chapter 1 User Experience Evaluatio
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1 User Experience Evaluation in Ent
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1 User Experience Evaluation in Ent
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Chapter 2 Enabling Social Play: A F
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2 Enabling Social Play 13 It is als
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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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3 Presence, Involvement, and Flow i
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Index A Advanced interaction games,
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