CHI 2008: Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design

adam

ben

brad

This paper was basically about these guys who are trying to figure out general problems with usability in games and try and make this heuristics, or categories, of the problems that come up and how they can be found and resolved.

They looked at 108 PC game reviews for single player games in 6 major game genres from the Gamespot website. Once the read all the revies and listed the problems that came up the invented some categories for the basic problems as follows.

And then from this they defined some hueristics for how these problems could be avoided defines in this next table.

Once they had the heuristics they tested them with people to see how they would be used to identify problems and which heuristics would be used the most, and here were the results:

So they found that heuristic 9 was the most common problem, which is a lack of a tutorial or help. And overall the testers thought the heuristics were very useful for finding problems.

Overall I think this is a pretty useful system thet have come up with but right now it only extends to single player PC games. So they need to get console and multiplayer games taken care of as well.