Evaluating User Experience in Games

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxviii

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2. Introduction to Evaluation of UX

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. User Experience Evaluation in Entertainment

      • Regina Bernhaupt

      Pages 3-7

3. Frameworks and Methods

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 9-9

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   2. Enabling Social Play: A Framework for Design and Evaluation

      • Katherine Isbister

      Pages 11-22

   3. Presence, Involvement, and Flow in Digital Games

      • Jari Takatalo, Jukka Häkkinen, Jyrki Kaistinen, Göte Nyman

      Pages 23-46

   4. Assessing the Core Elements of the Gaming Experience

      • Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez, Paul Cairns, Anna L. Cox

      Pages 47-71

   5. The Life and Tools of a Games Designer

      • Emily Brown

      Pages 73-87

   6. Investigating Experiences and Attitudes Toward Videogames Using a Semantic Differential Methodology

      • Philippe Lemay, Martin Maheux-Lessard

      Pages 89-105

   7. Video Game Development and User Experience

      • Graham McAllister, Gareth R. White

      Pages 107-128

4. User Experience – Decomposed

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 129-129

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   2. User Experience Design for Inexperienced Gamers: GAP – Game Approachability Principles

      • Heather Desurvire, Charlotte Wiberg

      Pages 131-147

   3. Digital Games, the Aftermath: Qualitative Insights into Postgame Experiences

      • Karolien Poels, Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Yvonne de Kort, Bart Van Iersel

      Pages 149-163

   4. Evaluating User Experience Factors Using Experiments: Expressive Artificial Faces Embedded in Contexts

      • Michael Lankes, Regina Bernhaupt, Manfred Tscheligi

      Pages 165-183

5. User Experience – Evaluating Special Aspects of Games

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 185-185

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   2. Evaluating Exertion Games

      • Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze

      Pages 187-207

   3. Beyond the Gamepad: HCI and Game Controller Design and Evaluation

      • Michael Brown, Aidan Kehoe, Jurek Kirakowski, Ian Pitt

      Pages 209-219

   4. Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience of Video Games and Advanced Interaction Games

      • Christina Koeffel, Wolfgang Hochleitner, Jakob Leitner, Michael Haller, Arjan Geven, Manfred Tscheligi

      Pages 233-256

6. Back Matter

   Pages 257-258

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It was a pleasure to provide an introduction to a new volume on user experience evaluation in games. The scope, depth, and diversity of the work here is amazing. It attests to the growing popularity of games and the increasing importance developing a range of theories, methods, and scales to evaluate them. This evolution is driven by the cost and complexity of games being developed today. It is also driven by the need to broaden the appeal of games. Many of the approaches described here are enabled by new tools and techniques. This book (along with a few others) represents a watershed in game evaluation and understanding. The eld of game evaluation has truly “come of age”. The broader eld of HCI can begin to look toward game evaluation for fresh, critical, and sophisticated thi- ing about design evaluation and product development. They can also look to games for groundbreaking case studies of evaluation of products. I’ll brie y summarize each chapter below and provide some commentary. In conclusion, I will mention a few common themes and offer some challenges. Discussion In Chapter 1, User Experience Evaluation in Entertainment, Bernhaupt gives an overview and presents a general framework on methods currently used for user experience evaluation. The methods presented in the following chapters are s- marized and thus allow the reader to quickly assess the right set of methods that will help to evaluate the game under development.

• Design
• Interaction
• human-computer interaction (HCI)
• usability
• user experience
• user experience (UX)

From the reviews:

“The book promises to address the evaluation of user experience, it provides little in terms of actual analysis and more in terms of anecdotes of data collection efforts for various specific games. … provides a broad overview of the practice of gathering user experience data for computer-based games. … The current volume is appropriate for a course that introduces the concepts of collecting user feedback in a traditional HCI and game development setting.” (Thom McLean, ACM Computing Reviews, December, 2010)

• Institut de Recherches en, Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Université Toulouse III, Toulouse CX 4, France

  Regina Bernhaupt

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