Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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18 K. Isbister signals of emotion, and then self-labeling about feeling. So if the player feels her body acting as if it were happy and high energy (jumping around excitedly), she will conclude that she must be in a positive mood and will end up feeling more upbeat. With the emergence of physical controller-based games like those for the Nintendo Wii, it’s possible to use this physical feedback loop to help induce player emotions that can then spread through the group through emotional contagion. 2.1.5 Evaluation Tactics Given the many factors and nuances involved in the social play experience, evaluation of effectiveness of design choices toward a strong end user experience must vary accordingly, and a full discussion of the permutations involved is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, there are some general recommendations that can be made about evaluating the success of a given social play experience, which build upon the various aspects discussed in the prior sections. The first recommendation is a strong focus on ecological validity in testing. The design team must be clear about the expected parameters of use – setting, relational groups and their qualities, known social phenomena (such as emotional contagion or social learning) that should be supported – and should craft a test plan that allows a fair examination of these groups engaging in these activities in these settings. For example, it is helpful to test out mobile or handheld platforms in a setting in which players might engage in game play embedded in their daily lives, rather than in a laboratory setting. It is crucial to test a game directed at preschoolers and their parents with members of the appropriate demographic groups (e.g., Druin et al. 2008). When one is testing a social/party game, it is best to bring in a cohort of players who already are familiar with one another, perhaps recruited through one core player who meets all the target requirements (e.g., Amaya et al. 2008). This can sometimes make testing more costly and complex but may save a development team from essential errors in design that do not take these important environmental and contextual variables into account. Of course these recommendations are easier to follow when a prototype is fairly mature, but even early stage prototyping may benefit from in situ testing, to capture requirements that are otherwise invisible to developers in supporting engaging social play. In some cases, a company may be able to generate early insights into social play without relying on external testers, by conducting internal tests that mimic the end social experience. For example, Harmonix, when developing Rock Band, had every employee join a “band,” play weekly builds of the game, and provide feedback to the design team (Kohler 2007). Designers may also want to do some exploratory studies of play patterns with other similar games for the target platform, like those conducted in the Nintendo DS project (Szentgyorgyi et al. 2008), to help generate design specifications for social play before a project even begins. Another general recommendation is to craft questions that are asked to players with the target social experience in mind. That is to say, if the design team hopes
2 Enabling Social Play 19 to provide a great over-the-shoulder viewing experience, opportunities for creating emotional contagion, encouragement of performance, and the like, it is important to actually ask testers whether these effects were achieved. There are not yet standard questionnaires about these issues available to user experience evaluators, and this is an important area for further research and refinement and for the pooling of resources among both commercial developers and user experience researchers. In addition to attitudinal measures such as questionnaires, it’s ideal to look for behavioral evidence of effects as well, and recording tactics should support this process. For example, if a user researcher is conducting test sessions that include a larger play group, and is video recording game play, it is vital to include those who are watching as well as those who are playing in the recording. It’s not too difficult to rig multiple camera composited video records of play (see for example Fig. 2.1), and these will vastly improve analysis of the social effects of the game after the sessions are over. In terms of general procedure for studies with groups of gamers, the Microsoft group reports that groups of people who already know each other tend to talk about the experience much more readily as they play than solo players, giving high-quality comments about the design, thus making think-aloud much more viable and straightforward (Amaya et al. 2008). They also report that one should rethink task lists for a group study – instead of highly specific task lists, a general list that emphasizes certain game elements that the experimenters want the group to cover seems much more effective. The group also mentions that they hold off on asking specific questions of play groups until the end, in order to allow playful banter and discussion to develop that they feel gives them valuable information about the game design issues Fig. 2.1 Video recording with multiple cameras and screen capture allows for rich analysis of play
Page 2 and 3: Human-Computer Interaction Series E
Page 4 and 5: Regina Bernhaupt Editor Evaluating
Page 6: For Philippe
Page 9 and 10: viii Foreword Chapter 3, Presence I
Page 11 and 12: x Foreword personality which evolve
Page 14 and 15: Contents Part I Introduction to Eva
Page 16 and 17: Contributors Regina Bernhaupt IRIT,
Page 18: Contributors xvii Manfred Tscheligi
Page 21 and 22: xx About the Authors Emily Brown is
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Page 25 and 26: xxiv About the Authors Christina Ko
Page 27 and 28: xxvi About the Authors MIT Media La
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Chapter 6 Investigating Experiences
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Index A Advanced interaction games,
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