Librería Portfolio

´Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field.´

-Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword

Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes.

The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human-computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming.

Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human-computer interaction between the player and the game.



Table of Contents

Practical and Ethical Concerns in Usability Testing with Children

Gavin Sim, Janet C. Read, and Matthew Horton

You Are Not the Player: Teaching Games User Research to Undergraduate Students

Cynthia Putnam, José P. Zagal, and Jinghui Cheng

User Testing in the Learning Games Lab: Getting Valuable Feedback through Frequent Formative Evaluation

Barbara Chamberlin, Jesús H. Trespalacios, Amy Smith Muise, and Michelle Coles Garza

Usability Testing of a Three-Dimensional Library Orientation Game

Fatih Özdinç, Hakan Tüzün, Esin Ergün, Fatma Bayrak, and Ayse Kula

In-Game Intoxication: Demonstrating the Evaluation of the Audio Experience of Games with a Focus on Altered States of Consciousness

Stuart Cunningham, Jonathan Weinel, and Richard Picking

Tangible and Graphical Game Interfaces: An Experimental Comparison

Zeno Menestrina, Andrea Conci, Adriano Siesser, Raul Masu, Michele Bianchi, and Antonella De Angeli

Usability Testing of Video Game Controllers: A Case Study

G. W. Young, A. Kehoe, and D. Murphy

Business Models within Mobile Gaming Experience

Claudia Lucinda Hernandez Luna and David Golightly

NerdHerder: Designing Colocated Physical-Digital Games with Sociological Theories

Yan Xu and Blair MacIntyre

Testing the Usability, Usefulness, and User Experience of TableTalk Poker, a Social Game for Seniors

Karyn Moffatt, Nicholas Shim, Jeremy Birnholtz, and Ronald M. Baecker

Usability Testing of Serious Games: The Experience of the IHCLab

Pedro C. Santana-Mancilla, Laura S. Gaytán-Lugo, and Miguel A. Rodríguez-Ortiz