Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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240 C. Koeffel et al. are characteristics of situations themselves, which include natural events, human affairs, feelings, etc.” as early as 1934 (Dewey 1934). Nevertheless, a clear definition and grounded understanding of this term is still missing (Law et al. 2008). According to Law et al., the main problem is that user experience treats non-utilitarian aspects of interactions between humans and machines. This means that user experience mainly focuses on affect and sensation– two very subjective impressions. It encompasses areas from traditional usability to beauty, hedonic, affective or experimental aspects of technology use (Forlizzi and Battarbee 2004). Hassenzahl and Law, leading researchers in the field of user experience, define it as “a momentary, primarily evaluative feeling (goodbad) while interacting with a product or service” (Hassenzahl 2008). Therefore, user experience is designing for joy and fun instead of designing for the absence of pain (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006). Thus, the community has recently undertaken measures to better understand the meaning of user experience and to find a unified definition through different conferences, workshops (Law et al. 2008, Roto and Kaasinen 2008), forums and the like. Especially, the MAUSE COST Action 294 10 has aimed for finding a definition and measurement of user experience. According to literature, user experience in games can be measured using the following qualitative and quantitative methods (Federoff 2002, Desurvire et al. 2004, Sweetser and Wyeth 2005, Hazlett 2006, Koivisto and Korhonen 2006, Mandryk and Atkins 2007): physiological measurements; expert evaluation (heuristics, etc.); subjective, self-reported measures; and usability tests. Integral factors of user experience are the state of flow and immersion defining the level of enjoyment and fun (IJsselsteijn et al. 2007). The measurement of the state of flow through different methods is one of the major topics of user experience in games and by many seen as the optimal experience when playing games (cf. Sweetser and Wyeth 2005). According to Hassenzahl, the concept of flow is very close to the idea of user experience and he describes flow as “a positive experience caused by an optimal balance of challenges and skills in a goal-oriented environment” (Hassenzahl 2008). The concept of flow was first introduced in Csikszentmihalyi (1975) and further refined to fit to video games and player enjoyment in Cowley et al. (2008), Sweetser and Wyeth (2005). Whereas Cowley et al. introduce a framework to map flow of the game play, Sweetser and Wyeth try to integrate heuristics into a model to help design and evaluate enjoyment in games. They found out that there is a certain overlap of the heuristics investigated and the concept of flow. Based on this, Jegers introduced the pervasive game flow model that enhances the game flow idea from Sweetser and Wyeth, with aspects that are particular to pervasive games (Jegers 2007). Another concept that is tightly linked to user experience is immersion. One definition of immersion and its stages has been proposed in Brown and Cairns (2004). Through a semi-structured interview with seven gamers, they were able to 10 http://www.cost294.org/
13 Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience 241 distinguish immersion into three phases: engagement, engrossment and total immersion. Engagement is the first stage of immersion. According to Brown and Cairns, the players have to be interested in the game to reach this state. When the user continues to play a game after the stage of engagement, she will reach engrossment. When engrossed in a game, the player’s emotions are directly affected by the game. Total immersion is the most immersed a user can get. She will be completely involved in the game and will experience absolute presence, where only the game and the emotions produced by the game matter. In a follow-up work, Cheng and Cairns have further investigated the different stages of immersion (Cheng and Cairns 2005). They tested a game with changing graphics and behaviour on 14 different users. Through this experiment, Cheng and Cairns found out that when a user is immersed in a game, she would oversee usability issues and even not notice changes in the game’s behaviour. Our work is influenced by the first approach described in Sweetser and Wyeth (2005) to integrate heuristics into the game design process and especially to use it for the evaluation of user experience. Sweetser and Wyeth accomplished this by integrating common known heuristics into the eight steps of flow as proposed by Csikszentmihalyi. Nevertheless, we will not try to measure the user experience through the factor flow, especially since the GameFlow approach has been criticised by Cowley et al. (2008) stating that through the employed mapping important, if not elementary issues got lost and also question the necessity of social interaction as a central point. Instead, we will provide a set of heuristics that are independent of the flow approach and will target usability and user experience of the evaluated games. A comprehensive overview of this process will be given in Section 13.6. 13.6 Overview and Review of Existing Video Game Heuristics and Their Impact on User Experience As introduced in Section 13.3 and further discussed in Section 13.4, heuristics can be a valuable method in video game design. In this section, we want to present a modular framework which is based on previous literature and was introduced in Koeffel (2007). The framework consists of the sections game play/game story, virtual interface, and device- and application-specific heuristics. The review of existing literature as introduced in Section 13.4 has indicated that separating the heuristics into different categories appears to be most effective. Especially, since a categorisation allows for a better readability by experts and therefore for more clarity during the review. The section game play/game story contains heuristics regarding these very topics. In the section about the virtual interface, heuristics concerning the displayed virtual and not physical interface that the player interacts with are presented. The deviceand application-specific heuristics are supposed to symbolise an exchangeable part that can be substituted with heuristics that are specific for a special area, such as
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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 17 for playe
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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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3 Presence, Involvement, and Flow i
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Chapter 6 Investigating Experiences
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Chapter 8 User Experience Design fo
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Chapter 10 Evaluating User Experien
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Chapter 11 Evaluating Exertion Game
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