Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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252 C. Koeffel et al. Our approach of using usability-based heuristics to determine the user experience of video games can also be adapted to tabletop games. As introduced above, the heuristics concerning the tabletop-specific aspects of games focus on particular attributes and circumstances that can be offered by tabletop games. Especially, social aspects and issues connected to the physical setup such as comfort are factors that are deeply influencing the user experience when playing tabletop games. We therefore deem the 10 heuristics as introduced above together with the rest of the framework (see Section 13.6) to be appropriate to evaluate the overall user experience of modern tabletop games. In order to establish an optimum combination between the three areas of the framework, further studies have to be designed. The coverage of all possible issues by the heuristics has to be assured. Since there are no possible mechanisms for comparing the results to established reviews, such as game reviews, the reference values have to be obtained by already investigated means to distinguish a game’s user experience, such as physiological measurements. 13.8 Summary and Future Challenges This chapter introduces a possibility to evaluate the overall user experience of traditional video games and advanced interaction games using heuristic evaluation. The term user experience has significantly gained in importance in the HCI community and although a standardised definition is missing, research strives to employ it in the evaluation of modern interfaces. The experience a user perceives when playing a computer game has been one of the central issues of many recent publications. Although being a subjective impression, researchers seek to objectively evaluate and properly describe it (Phillips 2006). The current possibilities include mostly subjective measures but also objective means such as physiological measurements are applied. An area increasing in importance, not only in the field of video games, but also in the field of advanced interfaces, is the evaluation based on heuristics. Therefore, we analysed and reviewed the most common heuristics for video games and advanced interaction games and built a framework upon our findings. This framework consists of the following three parts: game play/game story, virtual interface and device- and application-specific properties of a system. We demonstrated the application of the device- and application-specific heuristics with a set of heuristics developed for the application of tabletop games. We used the video game-related part of our framework to conduct an expertbased heuristic evaluation of five different video games to determine weaknesses and problems. We then tried to prove that heuristics can be used to measure the level of user experience by comparing the results of our study with accumulated reviews from several different gaming sites. Since these reviews focus on explaining how the user experience of a game was perceived by the respective author, we see it as a legitimate description of a game’s user experience. We do however acknowledge that we use a quantitative score from the reviews and not the qualitative data represented by the actual content of the review. Such a
13 Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience 253 score cannot represent the written review in its entirety and is therefore less accurate. Still, using the review score allows us to draw the conclusion that the user experience of a game is worse the less it adheres to the heuristics. To further prove this statement, we suggest more extensive empirical evaluations involving more games that belong to several different genres other than the five tested so far. Also, games with a greater variety of review ratings (e.g. extremely low-rated games) should be included. Additionally, testing games still under development could further prove the concept of applying heuristics during all stages of the development process. The ideal outcome of such tests could then be a definitive number of heuristics which have to be fulfilled in order to grant an optimised user experience. Further studies are also suggested to investigate the best possible combination of the three areas covered by our framework and to advance the heuristics for tabletop games which offer a new possibility to evaluate advanced interaction games. Additionally, an evaluation of the tabletop-specific heuristics according to a similar collection of reviews such as Metacritic.com would allow for a more reliable rating of our heuristics. For a broader applicability of the entire framework, application- and device-specific heuristics for advanced interaction games other than tabletop games could be developed. Therefore, the overall usefulness of the framework for different kinds of games can be evaluated. For the heuristics in particular, experience has shown that an additional category concerning the graphics quality and connected issues could be needed for an extensive evaluation of a game. Furthermore, differentiation regarding the various aspects of the virtual interface (e.g. main menu or in-game menu) is needed. To allow for a better comprehension of the single heuristics, the inclusion of exemplary graphics is recommended. References Amaya G, Davis JP (2008) Games user research (GUR): Our experience with and evolution of four methods. In: Isbister K, Schaffer N (eds) Game Usability. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA. Barakonyi I, Weilguny M, Psik T, Schmalstieg D (2005) MonkeyBridge: Autonomous agents in augmented reality games. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (Valencia, Spain, 15–17 June 2005). ACE ’05, Vol. 265, ACM, New York, pp. 172–175. Bernhaupt R, Eckschlager M, Tscheligi M (2007) Methods for evaluating games – How to measure usability and user experience in games? In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (Salzburg, Austria, 13–15 June 2007). ACE ’07, Vol. 203, ACM, New York, pp. 309–310. Bernhaupt R, Ijsselsteijn W, Mueller F, Tscheligi M, Wixon D (2008) Evaluating user experiences in games. In: CHI ’08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, 5–10 April 2008). CHI ’08, ACM, New York, pp. 3905–3908. Brown E, Cairns P (2004) A grounded investigation of game immersion. In: CHI ’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, 24–29 April 2004). CHI ’04, ACM, New York, pp. 1297–1300. Buisine S, Besacier G, Najm N, Aoussat A, Vernier F (2007) Computer-supported creativity: Evaluation of a tabletop mind-map application. Harris D (ed) Engineering Psychology and
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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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Chapter 1 User Experience Evaluatio
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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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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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Chapter 6 Investigating Experiences
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