Game User Experience Evaluation

In order to design new methodologies for evaluating the user experience of video games, it is imperative to initially understand two core issues. Firstly, how are video games developed at present, including components such as processes, timescales and staff roles, and secondly, how do studios design and evaluate the user experience.

This chapter will discuss the video game development process and the practices that studios currently use to achieve the best possible user experience. It will present four case studies from game developers Disney Interactive (Black Rock Studio), Relentless, Zoe Mode, and HandCircus, each detailing their game development process and also how this integrates with the user experience evaluation. The case studies focus on different game genres, platforms, and target user groups, ensuring that this chapter represents a balanced view of current practices in evaluating user experience during the game development process.

This chapter presents the theory of the Core Elements of the Gaming Experience (CEGE). The CEGE are the necessary but not sufficient conditions to provide a positive experience while playing video-games. This theory, formulated using qualitative methods, is presented with the aim of studying the gaming experience objectively. The theory is abstracted using a model and implemented in questionnaire. This chapter discusses the formulation of the theory, introduces the model, and shows the use of the questionnaire in an experiment to differentiate between two different experiences.

This chapter introduces physiological measures for game evaluation in the context of games user research (GUR). GUR consists of more than playtesting game; it comprises a collection of methods that allow designers to bring their creations closer to the initial vision of the player experience. With the prices of physiological sensors falling, and the advancement of research in this area, physiological evaluation will soon become a standard tool in GUR and game evaluation. Since mixed-method approaches are of increasingly prominent value, this chapter describes core GUR methods with a special focus on physiological evaluation, keeping in mind both benefits and limitations of the approach in academic and industrial applications.

There is an ongoing debate on what kind of factors contribute to the general positive user experience (UX) while playing a game. The following chapter introduces an experimental setting to measure UX aroused by facial expression of embodied conversational agents (ECAs). The experimental setup enables to measure the implications of ECAs in three contextual settings called “still,” “animated,” and “interaction.” Within the experiment, artificially generated facial expressions are combined with emotion-eliciting situations and are presented via different presentation platforms. Stimuli (facial expressions/emotion-eliciting situations) are assembled in either consonant (for example, facial expression: “joy,” emotion-eliciting situation: “joy”) or dissonant (for example, facial expression: “joy,” emotion-eliciting situation: “anger”) constellations. The contextual setting called “interaction” is derived from the video games domain, granting an interactive experience of a given emotional situation. The aim of the study is to establish a comparative experimental framework to analyze subjects’ UX on emotional stimuli in different context dimensions. This comparative experimental framework utilizes theoretical models of emotion theory along with approaches from human–computer interaction to close a gap in the intersection of affective computing and research on facial expressions. Results showed that the interaction situation is rated as providing a better UX, independent of showing consonant or dissonant contextual descriptions. The “still” setting is given a higher UX rating than the “animated” setting.

Within the past few years the adoption of business analytics has provided powerful new tools to the interactive entertainment industry, giving rise to the field of game analytics. Where traditionally user testing was limited to samples, it is today possible to obtain behavioral telemetry data from entire populations of players, and to map second-by-second interactions in the user testing lab. In this chapter, the focus is on the behavioral side of user experience in games, rather than user experience itself. The chapter outlines what behavioral telemetry is and its role in game user research from an introductory, top-down perspective. The chapter also introduces data mining as a toolbox that is available for analyzing large or small telemetry datasets. Finally, several case studies are used to showcase examples of how behavioral telemetry data can be used to evaluate game design in order to optimize the user experience.

Game Approachability Principles (GAP) is a set of useful guidelines for game designers to create better tutorials, and new player experiences—especially for the casual gamer. Developing better first learning levels can be a key step to ease the casual gamer into play and to do so proactively—at the conceptual design phase before it is too costly or cumbersome to restructure the tutorials as would be the case later in the development cycle. Thus, Game Approachability, in the context of game development, is defined as making games initially more friendly, fun, immersive, and accessible for those players who have the desire to play, yet do not always follow-through to actually playing the game. GAP has evolved through a series of stages assessing accessibility (NB Approachability and Accessibility are used interchangeably throughout this chapter) as a stand-alone, heuristic-based approach versus one-on-one User Testing. Outcomes suggest potential for GAP as an (1) effective Heuristic Evaluation, (2) adjunct to User Testing, and (3) as a proactive checklist of principles in to conceptually design the new player experience and/or tutorial to increase Game Approachability—for all levels of gamers.

This book chapter describes an approach of evaluating user experience in video games by using heuristics. We provide a short overview of video games and explain the concept of user-centred design for games. Furthermore we describe the history of heuristics for video games and the role of user experience of games in general. Based on our previous work and experience we propose a revised framework consisting of two sets of heuristics (game play/game story, virtual interface) to detect the most critical issues in games. To assess its applicability to measure user experience factors we compare the results of expert evaluations of six current games with the user experience-based ratings of various game reviews. Our findings indicate a correlation between the extent to which our framework is satisfied and the game’s average rating.

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in social play in digital games. With this comes an urge to understand better how to design and evaluate for this new form of play. In this chapter, we encapsulate best practices for game design and evaluation, grounded in other game researchers’ work, as well as our own research and practice. We focus on a sub-area of social games that has experienced great growth and has attracted general interest in research and in practice. It is also the area that has driven our own research: co-located, physical, and social play that is technology supported. In this overview, we provide a sense of the challenges and opportunities involved when designing for this particular area, using good empirical grounding and presenting a framework in the form of lenses through which to think about the design of co-located physical social games.

Games that demand exertion of the players through bodily movements have experienced commercial success and have been attributed with many physical, mental and social benefits, thus changing the way we play computer games. However, there is a lack of understanding of how to evaluate such exertion games, mainly because although the games’ facilitated bodily movements are believed to be responsible for the generated user experiences, they are not considered in traditional evaluation methods that primarily assume keyboard and gamepad-style input devices. We do not believe there is a generic approach to evaluating exertion games, and therefore offer an overview of our mixed experiences in using various methods to guide the reader for future evaluations in this domain. We support the presented methods with data from case studies we undertook in order to illustrate their use and what kinds of results to expect. By identifying remaining issues in regards to evaluation methods for exertion games, we aim to provide an informed way forward for research in this area. With our work, we hope to contribute towards the advancement of such games, fostering their many benefits towards a more positive user experience.

In recent years there has been an increasing amount of computer game focused HCI research, but the impact of controller-related issues on user experience remains relatively unexplored. In this chapter we highlight the limitations of current practices with respect to designing support for both standard and innovative controllers in games. We proceed to explore the use of McNamara and Kirakowski’s (Interactions 13(6):26–28, 2006) theoretical framework of interaction in order to better design and evaluate controller usage in games. Finally, we will present the findings of a case study applying this model to the evaluation and comparison of three different game control techniques: gamepad, keyboard and force feedback steering wheel. This study highlights not only the need for greater understanding of user experience with game controllers, but also the need for parallel research of both functionality and usability in order to understand the interaction as a whole.