Playability: analysing user experience in video games

Abstract

Currently, few studies focus on analysing the degree of the Player eXperience (PX) in video games. Video games have now become interactive entertainment systems with a high economic impact on society; these are interactive systems characterised by their subjectivity, which differ from other systems in that their main objective is to entertain and amuse the user (player). This work discusses the analysis and evaluation of the User eXperience (UX) in interactive entertainment systems, exploring how usability, given its definition, objectives and the fact it is one of the main dimensions of UX, is not sufficient to characterise the PX, giving rise to a new concept: Playability. In this paper, we present a framework for the analysis and evaluation of the UX in video games. The results show the need and importance of a framework to help us understand and measure the experience that players feel using these types of interactive systems, in order to improve the experience during play time. The proposed framework characterises the experience using attributes to identify and properties to measure UX. It thus provides a multifaceted analysis mechanism to assess the impact of the gaming experience and its relationship with the elements of a video game. We therefore present a system to represent UX based on this framework, with the aim of ensuring and measuring a satisfactory experience of the entertainment system. Finally, we discuss a practical experiment in which an evaluation of the playability of a commercial video game was carried out using the methods proposed in this work.

Keywords:

• playability
• user experience
• usability
• video games
• interactive systems

Acknowledgments

This study has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain, as part of the VIDECO Project (TIN2011-26928).

Notes

1. Some profiles for video game players:

	• Casual Gamer: a player whose time or interest in playing games is limited or do not spend much time playing more involved games.
	• Mid-core gamer: a player with a wide range of interests and enthusiast toward creative and diverse games, but without the amount of time spent and sense of competition of a hardcore gamer.
	• Hardcore gamers prefer to take significant time and practice on games, and tend to play more involved games that require larger amounts of time to complete or master.

2. Quick Time Events: In video games, a Quick Time Event (QTE) is a method of context-sensitive gameplay in which the player performs actions on the control device shortly after the appearance of an on-screen prompt. It allows for limited control of the game character during cut scenes or cinematic sequences in the game.

3. In this work, we emphasise the three basic levels of the conceptual model of video games:

	• The Game Mechanic is formed by the set of elements that characterise and differentiate one game from another: rules, challenges, rewards, goals, and so on.
	• The Game Engine refers to a series of software routines that allow the execution of all elements of the game.
	• The Game Interface is the set of elements that are responsible for the interaction between players and video game.

4. Intrinsic P. (I), Mechanical P. (M), Artistic P. (Λ), Personal P. (P), Social P (Θ) and Interactive P (Φ).

5. QA or Game testing, a subset of game development, is a software testing process for the quality control of video games and the experience.

6. It is not the main objective of this point to emphasise how to make this observation analysis with video games. The objective is to use the result as complementation information of the experience for the Playability Framework.