Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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246 C. Koeffel et al. their selection process based on game design reviews, they have eliminated all aspects related to fun, enjoyment and technical issues. Since it is our goal to evaluate user experience as well as the usability of a game, we decided not only to base our heuristics on the aforementioned literature, but also to include the usability issues distinguished by Pinelle et al. We therefore want to create a more holistic set of heuristics that do not solely concentrate on either user experience or usability. Moreover, we want to focus on all aspects offered by video games, especially as occurring problems have an impact on the user experience, and the quality of a game can hardly be determined by usability only. In their conclusion, Pinelle et al. even recommend the inclusion of user experience-based heuristics. Furthermore, they base their heuristics only on reviews of the website GameSpot.com. We believe that although GameSpot is one of the largest and most comprehensive video game review sites, it is not recommendable to rely solely on its reviews. The site has been under heavy criticism in November 2007 for allegedly firing a reviewer due to negative reviews of a game published by a financial sponsor of GameSpot. 11 Relying on multiple sources can help to attenuate possibly biased reviews. Table 13.1 contains the final heuristics concerning game play/game story and the virtual interface. These heuristics have been chosen based on a qualitative review of the sources mentioned in Section 13.4. As mentioned before, the 29 heuristics introduced in Table 13.1 are the result of an extensive literature review of several different existing sets of heuristics in the field of video games. Furthermore, the authors’ experience in the area of video games has influenced the selection of the heuristics. For reasons of redundancy and simplicity, the literature-based heuristics have been narrowed down to the 29 statements as shown in Table 13.1. Moreover, the most important aspects of video games are reflected in these heuristics. Especially, through the literature review it has become clear that certain aspects such as learning phase, mental load or a reasonable artificial intelligence have been addressed by several sources. Thus, they have been summarised into one heuristic and have been given the according level of importance. Additionally, we tried to keep the number of heuristics short, to allow for a more efficient review of the games. From the first draft to their current status, the heuristics have been continuously expanded to cover all necessary areas, resulting in our final set of 29 heuristics. We assume that it is necessary to investigate the usability as well as the user experience of a video game to detect its overall quality. As mentioned before, heuristics have already been employed in Sweetser and Wyeth (2005) to detect the flow potential of games. But on the contrary to our approach presented here, they base their results on the concept of flow. They have taken the eight elements of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1975) and mapped them onto computer games (Sweetser and Wyeth 2005), creating the GameFlow approach to flow. As described in Section 13.5, this method has been criticised amongst others 11 http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50134
13 Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience 247 by Cowley et al. (2008). Using the approach described in this chapter, we are able to overcome the described weaknesses such as the possibility to lose elementary issues. First, we do not use any kind of mapping to the flow concept. The 29 heuristics as introduced in Table 13.1 represent a summary of existing heuristics, without any direct connection or modification towards the flow theory. Second, the above-mentioned ambiguities of social interaction are not treated in the heuristics. Moreover, they are part of the device- and application-specific part of the framework introduced above. Especially, since games on different devices offer different kinds of social experiences, this particular area has been relocated to this separate part of our framework as shown in Section 13.7. The work introduced in this section leads us to the conclusion that it is possible to detect a computer game’s user experience through heuristic evaluation. Our assumption is that a game that is enjoyable to play has to a large extent be free of usability issues that keep the user from enjoying a game. Especially, the heuristics targeting game play/game story deem appropriate not only for classical usability issues (missing feedback, etc.), but also to issues connected to enjoyment and fun of a game (challenge, fairness, etc.). In order to be able to estimate the user experience through heuristics, we have set up a methodology to prove this concept (see following section). Our approach states that the overall user experience of video games can be determined by conducting an expert-based evaluation of the game in question, using the heuristics shown above. The more heuristics are met, the higher the overall user experience is, the more heuristics point to flaws in the game, the worse the user experience is. 13.6.2 Heuristic Approach to User Experience To prove our assumption that an expert-based heuristic usability evaluation of a game can be used to determine its user experience, we have chosen to conduct an evaluation. Larsen states in his work that common game reviews are to a major part based on the subjective evaluation of a game’s user experience from the game reviewer’s point of view (Larsen 2008). Game reviewers have been unwittingly evaluating user experience of games for nearly two decades. Following this idea, we chose to evaluate a number of computer games using our 29 heuristics and compare the results to common game reviews. Therefore, we were able to compare the heuristics–primarily designed to detect usability issues– with the user experience-oriented game reviews. In order to be able to make a quantitative statement, we tried to establish a connection between the number of problems found through the heuristic evaluation and the numerical rating obtained from several different game reviews. The process of our evaluation was designed as a heuristic evaluation for video games. To obtain meaningful results, two evaluators conducted the study. Both of them were experienced in the area of computer games and usability, with one being a usability expert with gaming experience and the other vice versa. To avoid gender-specific ambiguities, a female and a male researcher were selected. Since gaming habits and preferences could influence the outcome,
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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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2 Enabling Social Play 15 observati
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2 Enabling Social Play 17 for playe
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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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Chapter 6 Investigating Experiences
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Chapter 10 Evaluating User Experien
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