21 - Game User Research: Making Games Better

by Lennart Nacke

Today, we have more of a slide col­lec­tion. But the main fea­tured pre­sen­ta­tion is the one from Graham McAllister, who is a researcher in video game usabil­ity at the University of Sussex in the UK and also runs the com­pany Vertical Slice that spe­cial­izes in User Experience (UX; human per­spec­tive, not qual­ity assur­ance) test­ing for games. Most of what I have been research­ing in the past 4 years is already start­ing to be employed in prac­tice by them (quite fas­ci­nat­ing, really).

First, he explains the dif­fer­ent mean­ings of UX jar­gon, such as usabil­ity (can I do it?), user expe­ri­ence (do I like it?), user inter­face (how does it look?), inter­ac­tion design (how is the inter­face used?). Then he men­tions that UX is a key fac­tor dri­ving review scores of games (not the tech­ni­cal func­tion­al­ity alone), which then drive the sales. He backs up his claims with sales data. However, some games with good reviews may still fail finan­cially. On the other hand, games with bad reviews are not very likely to sell well. He then dis­cusses two case stud­ies (Assassin’s creed and Bioshock) in terms of suc­cess­ful design intent or game­play flaws. The rise of episodic gam­ing demands a higher level of qual­ity even for ver­ti­cal slices of games. He goes on to ana­lyze UX flaws of games defaced by gam­ing mag­a­zine reviews.

Slide 89 gives an excel­lent overview of the profit dis­tri­b­u­tion of a reg­u­lar dig­i­tal game (slide 92 does the same for an iPhone app) and clearly states the ben­e­fi­cial return on invest­ment for iPhone devel­op­ers. He then describes a local case study of an iPhone game called “Launchball.” Interestingly, the test­ing is pre­sented with dif­fer­ent tar­get per­sonas that are likely to be inter­ested in such a game. A com­mon approach from reg­u­lar UX, which is start­ing to gain momen­tum in game user research. As a take­away, from his pre­sen­ta­tion (and the oth­ers that I will be list­ing below), game devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers should become more aware of human fac­tors in playtest­ing and how this will drive the iden­tity and sales of their gam­ing prod­uct. On to the slides...


Bonus Presentations

Usability Testing for Console Games is a short (but very styl­ish) pre­sen­ta­tion from Andy Budd, Director of User Experience at Clearleft.

Next Generation Testing: Biometric Analysis of Player Experience is a talk I gave at last year’s GDC Canada, where I am dis­cussing tra­di­tional and next-generation (i.e., bio­met­ric or psy­chophys­i­o­log­i­cal) test­ing meth­ods for games.

Playability and Player Experience Research was a panel that I chaired at this year’s DiGRA 2009 con­fer­ence in London. We had a num­ber of spe­cial­ists talk­ing about all kinds of playa­bil­ity assess­ment and player expe­ri­ence research.

More Links

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality

Vertical Slice

Gareth White’s Blog: Game Player Interaction

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