Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

9 Digital Games, the Aftermath 155
9.3.1.1 Participants and Procedure
We organized six focus groups with gamers. The composition of the focus groups
differed according to several variables such as game frequency, age, and occupational
status. Two focus groups (FG1 and FG2) included infrequent gamers
(i.e., people who game at least once a month), two focus groups (FG3 and FG4) consisted
of frequent gamers (i.e., people who game at least once a week), and two focus
groups (FG5 and FG6) were a mix of frequent and infrequent gamers. Participants’
ages ranged from 19 to 37 years. In FG1, participants were five undergraduate students
of which two were female. FG2 consisted of three male participants, also
undergraduates. FG3 had four male participants and was a mix of undergraduate
and graduate students. FG4 had four participants; these were people over 30 years
of age, all with a full-time job. Participants from FG5 were four working people
in their late twenties/early thirties, two of them were female. All three participants
from FG6 were female undergraduate students. The focus groups were led by a
moderator and an assistant moderator.
Each focus group began with an introductory round in which the moderator and
the assistant moderator presented themselves and gave a brief description of the
main goal of the focus group. More concretely, they explained that the focus group
was about digital games and player experience. Participants were further told that
they could freely talk about how they experience digital gaming. Then, participants
presented themselves, giving their name, game frequency, and the type of games
they usually played. The actual focus group discussion was clustered around three
core questions by means of a semi-structured questionnaire. The three core questions
were fixed but additional questions could be posed, probing for clarification
or more in-depth insights. The three core questions were (1) On what occasions do
you typically start gaming? (probing both motivations and opportunities for game
play), (2) what do you experience or feel while gaming? (i.e., in-game experiences),
and (3) what do you experience or how do you feel after gaming? (i.e., postgame
experiences). In this chapter, we only discuss the third question about postgame
experiences. For a detailed description of the remainder of this focus group study,
we refer to Poels et al. (2007).
Each focus group took about 90 min in total and approximately one-third of
the discussion time was devoted to the question concerning postgame experiences.
Participants were rewarded 10 C for their participation. All focus group interviews
were recorded and transcribed. Citations we report in the results section are all
translated from Dutch.
9.3.1.2 Results
Given the exploratory nature of this focus group study and the newness of the topic,
we did not employ a formal coding scheme to analyze our results. This result section
is structured according to the different experiences that we proposed in the
theoretical part of this chapter.