The quest for usable usability heuristics for game developers

Abstract Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research has provided many processes and methods for ensuring good usability during software development. The importance of usability in games has been acknowledged. However, there is a lack of research examining usability activities during actual game development and the suitability of different usability methods for different phases of game development. Game development industry, although growing fast and already including certain large and successful companies, consists of a huge number of small-to-medium-sized enterprises and start-ups. For these companies, practical, developer-oriented tools for ensuring game usability are needed, as these companies do not have resources for hiring usability specialists for taking care of usability. This paper reviews the concept of game usability and existing research on usability methods for game development. In addition, the paper proposes a set of usable usability heuristics as a practical, developer-oriented tool to be used during the game development process as well as reports on a small-scale survey study on game usability, heuristic evaluation and usability of usability heuristics in game development

Self-Determination Theory in HCI Games Research: Current Uses and Open Questions

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a major psychological theory of human motivation, has become increasingly popular in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on games and play. However, it remains unclear how SDT has advanced HCI games research, or how HCI games scholars engage with the theory. We reviewed 110 CHI and CHI PLAY papers that cited SDT to gain a better understanding of the ways the theory has contributed to HCI games research. We find that SDT, and in particular, the concepts of need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation, have been widely applied to analyse the player experience and inform game design. Despite the popularity of SDT-based measures, however, prominent core concepts and mini-theories are rarely considered explicitly, and few papers engage with SDT beyond descriptive accounts. We highlight conceptual gaps at the intersection of SDT and HCI games research, and identify opportunities for SDT propositions, concepts, and measures to more productively inform future work.Peer reviewe