Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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236 C. Koeffel et al. of a higher quality. To test the applicability of our heuristics to user experience ratings, we conduct heuristic evaluations on several games and compare the resulting data to user experience-based game reviews. Finally, we critically assess our method and offer improvements and future perspectives. This discussion of current advanced interaction games leads to the introduction of a set of specific evaluation heuristics applicable to the user experience of these games. Together with the aforementioned general game heuristics (which focus on game play/game story and the virtual interface), we deliver a complete framework usable for evaluating the user experience of games either generally or specifically for advanced interaction games. 13.2 Video Game Definition and Genres Before discussing heuristics for video games, we want to get a clear understanding of the terminology “video game”. Esposito provides an interesting definition for a video game: A video game is a game which we play thanks to an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story (Esposito 2005). Esposito’s definition contains four important elements that classify a video game: game, play, audiovisual apparatus and story. These elements are derived from literature such as Huizinga (1950), Callois (1961) and Zimmerman (2004). We second this definition in most of its statements but want to add that the mentioned audiovisual apparatus is not necessarily limited to two senses. Touch-based input and haptic feedback mechanisms allow a broader range of video game devices. We also want to point out the need to clearly distinguish games from productivity applications as done in Pagulayan et al. (2003). Finally, to avoid misunderstandings about the term itself, we consider video games as an umbrella term for all electronic games, independent of their platform (computer, console, arcade, etc.). Still there is need to put games into certain categories to be able to unite titles of similar type. There are many different distinctions available, some more common than others. Wolf defined a set of 41 genres in Wolf (2001), being sometimes too specific (e.g. when defining Diagnostic Cartridges as a genre). Ye proposes to adapt the genre term and certain genre conventions from movies to games, but does not give a clear genre definition himself (Ye 2004). A common and well-established genre definition has been created by the NPD group and is mentioned amongst others in Pagulayan et al. (2003) and used by ESA (2008) for their market statistics. This classification contains eleven well-known and established (super-) genres such as role-playing game (RPG), action or shooters, and abstains from introducing fine-grained subcategories. We propose the use of theses genres in order to be able to classify games in accordance with the market/industry for our test in Section 13.6.2.
13 Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience 237 13.3 User-Centred Design in Games User-centred design is a design philosophy which describes a prototype-driven software development process, where the user is integrated during the design and development process. The approach consists of several stages which are iteratively executed: requirements analysis, user analysis, prototyping and evaluation. Usercentred design is specified in EN ISO 13407–Human Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems (ISO 13407:1999). This approach is also used for game design as described in Fullerton et al. (2004) and a central topic at Microsoft Game Studios 8 . It contains three distinct development phases: conceptualisation, prototyping and playtesting. The first phase typically involves the complete planning such as identification of goals, challenges, rules, controls, mechanics, skill levels, rewards and story (Pagulayan et al. 2003). These specifications are done by game designers and are put on record in game design documents. The second phase–prototyping–is used to quickly generate playable content, which can be efficiently used to do playtesting and measure attributes such as user experience, the overall quality (commonly denoted as fun), the ease of use or the balancing of challenge and pace (Pagulayan et al. 2003). To gather results for these variables, a range of usability methods such as structured usability tests (Dumas and Redish 1999) and rapid iterative testing and evaluation (RITE, Medlock et al. 2002) can be applied. Pagulayan et al. propose additional evaluation methods such as prototyping, empirical guideline documents or heuristics (Pagulayan et al. 2003). We believe that especially heuristics can be a fast and cost efficient but still effective and accurate evaluation method for user experience in games. Therefore, we will present our own set of heuristics in Sections 13.5 and 13.7 and verify them by conducting an expert evaluation. Before that we will give a short introduction to heuristic evaluation as an expert-based usability approach. Heuristic evaluation is one of the so-called expert-based usability inspection methods (Nielsen and Mack 1994). It is an efficient analytical and low-cost usability method to be applied repeatedly during a development process, starting at the very beginning of a project design circle (Nielsen and Mack 1994). In general, heuristics can be considered as rules of thumb that describe the affordances of the users to a particular system. The formulation of heuristics is more universal than the one of usability guidelines (Koeffel 2007). The heuristics should provide enough information to enable the evaluator to judge all possible problems of a system (Sarodnick and Brau 2006). During a traditional user-interface evaluation, three to five experts (in the field of the application, usability or both) inspect a system according to recognised and established usability principles (i.e. the heuristics). Heuristics allow for an evaluation of systems in a very early stage of the design process (e.g. paper mockups). Although numerous heuristics are available for the evaluation of video games 8 http://mgsuserresearch.com/
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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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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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Chapter 1 User Experience Evaluatio
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Chapter 2 Enabling Social Play: A F
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