Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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248 C. Koeffel et al. we have selected evaluators with different gaming habits and backgrounds. One evaluator can be considered as a so-called core-gamer who frequently plays games of different genres. The second evaluator was rather a representative of the casual gaming scene with experience in different genres (among them also core-games). For the evaluation, we decided to choose games from several different genres in order to avoid biasing towards one genre, as experienced in some of our analysed work (cf. Federoff 2002, Sweetser and Wyeth 2005). Furthermore, the chosen games had to be rather recent ones to exhaust all current technical possibilities. To allow for a reliable comparison of our testing results with a large number of reviews, we chose five popular games. Therefore, the following games have been selected: • Shooter: Team Fortress 2 12 (Valve Software) • Role playing game: Sacred 2 13 (Ascaron) • Adventure: Sam and Max, Season one, Ep. 5: Reality 2.0 14 (Telltale Games) • Racing: Racedriver GRID 15 (Codemasters) • Realtime Strategy: Die Siedler: Aufbruch der Kulturen 16 (Funatics) The five genres above mentioned were chosen due to their popularity in terms of video game units sold (ESA 2008). “Family Games”, although being among the top five genres, has been deliberately omitted, since games in this genre usually rely on a greater number of people playing at the same time (e.g., Wii party games), and our heuristics were primarily developed for traditional single-player video games. Nevertheless, we decided to include one multiplayer game (Team Fortress 2) to prove the applicability of our heuristics to this type of game too. Due to the lack of literature on the correct conduction of heuristic evaluations of video games, we defined our evaluation protocol according to available literature in heuristic evaluation (Nielsen and Mack 1994), with adaptations towards the affordances of video games. Each evaluator obtained a list with the according heuristics and an evaluation report for the found usability issues. Previous to the evaluation, the reviewers met and previewed the heuristics in order to get familiar with them and to avoid misapprehensions. Both reviewers evaluated each single game by playing single-player campaigns or Internet matches with Team Fortress 2. Issues found while playing were noted in the evaluation report. After playing the game, the experts again reviewed the game and their perceived experience according to the heuristics. For the assessment of the games, two different ratings were applied: a Nielsen severity scale and a point-scale ranking (to enable a better comparison to the game-review site). 12 http://www.teamfortress.com/ 13 http://www.sacred2.com/ 14 http://www.telltalegames.com/samandmax 15 http://www.racedrivergrid.com 16 http://siedler.de.ubi.com/
13 Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience 249 Table 13.2 The results of the evaluation ranked according to issues found, points obtained and compared to the results of Metacritic.com Rank Ranking according to found issues Ranking according to points Metacritic.com ranking 1 Team Fortress 2 (18) Team Fortress 2 (82.9%) Team Fortress 2 (92%) 2 Sam and Max, GRID (22) Die Siedler (79.65%) GRID (87%) 3 GRID (77.93%) Sam and Max (82%) 4 Die Siedler (26) Sam and Max (77.7%) Die Siedler (80.6%) 5 Sacred 2 (29) Sacred 2 (75.17%) Sacred 2 (78%) First, the researchers reviewed each game after playing it, using the heuristics to rank the found issues according to Nielsen and Mack’s severity scale (Nielsen and Mack 1994), which led to the number of total usability issues found per game as displayed in Table 13.2: 0. Not a usability problem at all. 1. Cosmetic problem only: It does not have a profound impact on the game. 2. Minor problem: It has a slight impact on the game and influences the experience a bit. 3. Major problem: This problem has a severe impact on the game and negatively influences the user experience. 4. Usability catastrophe: This problem has to be fixed in order to allow for a decent user experience. Second, the evaluators assigned a score from 1 to 5 (1 being worst, 5 being best) to every single heuristic to determine how well the game fulfilled each of them. For this rating, the severity ranking of the found issues was used as an indicator for the degree of fulfilment. In general, the problems and their severity, which were found during the rating according to the above-mentioned scale, helped to determine which heuristics were the least satisfied ones. After the ranking of the heuristics, the evaluators met again and discussed possible inconsistencies in their evaluation. These problems were resolved through discussions, and when necessary evaluation and/or ranking was adapted. The achieved overall score was obtained by the summation of the ratings by the single evaluators and the calculation of an average ranking. This score was then converted into a percentage scale indicating to which degree the game complied with the heuristics (100% would mean the achievement of maximum points). The resulting ranking is shown in Table 13.2. To compare the results of the expert-based heuristic evaluation, we chose to select at least 10 game reviews (on average 20) for each game to avoid biasing of the single reviewers and therefore guarantee a more objective rating. Metacritic.com 17 exactly fulfils these requirements by accumulating scores from different reviewing sites and 17 http://www.metacritic.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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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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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 17 for playe
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