Biometric storyboards: a games user research approach for improving qualitative evaluations of player experience

Developing video games is an iterative and demanding process. It is difficult to achieve the goal of most video games — to be enjoyable, engaging and to create revenue for game developers — because of many hard-to-evaluate factors, such as the different ways players can interact with the game. Understanding how players behave during gameplay is of vital importance to developers and can be uncovered in user tests as part of game development. This can help developers to identify and resolve any potential problem areas before release, leading to a better player experience and possibly higher game review scores and sales. However, traditional user testing methods were developed for function and efficiency oriented applications. Hence, many traditional user testing methods cannot be applied in the same way for video game evaluation. This thesis presents an investigation into the contributions of physiological measurements in user testing within games user research (GUR). GUR specifically studies the interaction between a game and users (players) with the aim to provide feedback for developers to help them to optimise the game design of their title. An evaluation technique called Biometric Storyboards is developed, which visualises the relationships between game events, player feedback and changes in a player’s physiological state. Biometric Storyboards contributes to the field of human-computer interaction and GUR in three important areas: (1) visualising mixedmeasures of player experience, (2) deconstructing game design by analysing game events and pace, (3) incremental improvement of classic user research techniques (such as interviews and physiological measurements). These contributions are described in practical case studies, interviews with game developers and laboratory experiments. The results show this evaluation approach can enable games user researchers to increase the plausibility and persuasiveness of their reports and facilitate developers to better deliver their design goals. Biometric Storyboards is not aimed at replacing existing methods, but to extend them with mixed methods visualisations, to provide powerful tools for games user researchers and developers to better understand and communicate player needs, interactions and experiences. The contributions of this thesis are directly applicable for user researchers and game developers, as well as for researchers in user experience evaluation in entertainment systems

Gamification of Older Adults’ Physical Activity: An Eight-Week Study

Designing fitness programs to combat a sedentary lifestyle and foster older adults’ motivation and goal-setting is not yet well-understood beyond point-based systems. To improve older adults’ (over 50 years) health and wellness, we studied a gamified physical activity intervention over eight weeks in an experiment (N=30) with three conditions (gamified, non-gamified, control). Our qualitative analysis showed the gamified group exhibited more engagement and interest in performing physical activity facilitated by technology. Results from our quantitative analysis indicated significance in the perceived competence dimension compared to the non-gamified and the control group. Perceived autonomy was significant for the non-gamified group against the control group. The findings from qualitative and quantitative analysis show motivation, enjoyment, and engagement were higher in the gam-ified group. This provides support for successfully facilitating older adults’ physical activity through gamified technology, which helped us create guide-lines for older adults’ adaptive engagement

Exploiting players? critical reflections on participation in game development

Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players’ and designers’ relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement

Biometric Storyboards: visualising meaningful gameplay events

Due to the specific characteristics of video games most of the established HCI methods of user research cannot be used the same way for video games. One of the challenges is to gain insight into how players feel and behave when playing a game. This paper explores a technique on using Biometrics measure and Storyboards where we graph the player's experience journey over a longer period. The graph could visualise a meaningful relationship between the changes in a player's biometric signal and game events. This would enable game developers to have a better understanding of players' gameplay behaviour and eventually help them optimise the experience of their game

Understanding the Contribution of Biometrics to Games User Research

Utilising biometric data has become an increasingly active area in the video games user research community, and a number of academic papers have been published introducing various biometric based analysis techniques in video games research. This paper aims to quantify the value of biometric methods as an addition to traditional observation-based user research methodologies, and their respective contributions to the production of formative feedback during the development of video games. Our results show that observation-based techniques can expose the majority of issues relating to usability, however the biometrics-based approach enabled researchers to discover latent issues in related to players' feelings, immersion and gameplay experience and, in certain categories of issue, reveal up to 63% more issues than observation alone

Biometrics to Improve Methodologies on Understanding Player's Gameplay Experience

Due to the specific characteristics of video games most of the established HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) methods of user research cannot be used the same way for video games. To address this, the research project presented here adapts methods suited for empirical research on video games. This will be based on utilising player's physiological measures in conjunction with other user research methodologies such as observation, interview, think-aloud, heuristics, behavioural coding and player emotion

Biometrics to Improve Methodologies on Understanding Player's Gameplay Experience

Due to the specific characteristics of video games most of the established HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) methods of user research cannot be used the same way for video games. To address this, the research project presented here adapts methods suited for empirical research on video games. This will be based on utilising player's physiological measures in conjunction with other user research methodologies such as observation, interview, think-aloud, heuristics, behavioural coding and player emotion

Biometric Storyboards: visualising meaningful gameplay events

Due to the specific characteristics of video games most of the established HCI methods of user research cannot be used the same way for video games. One of the challenges is to gain insight into how players feel and behave when playing a game. This paper explores a technique on using Biometrics measure and Storyboards where we graph the player's experience journey over a longer period. The graph could visualise a meaningful relationship between the changes in a player’s biometric signal and game events. This would enable game developers to have a better understanding of players’ gameplay behaviour and eventually help them optimise the experience of their game