Gameplay Metrics in Game User Research: Examples from the Trenches

Games User Research (GUR) has gained a lot of ground recently in game development. It has become apparent just how beneficial knowing your target audience really is. More and more, studios and publishers integrate user-oriented methods in their development process and report direct benefits from this practice, above and beyond simple focus group feedback. This because GUR is a field that is all about the user: their experience, their game, their feeling of fun, etc. As users are also customers, it has become a widely accepted notion that GUR helps to improve games and thereby sales, so the investment and growth in this area is currently considerable (Pagulayan et al. 2003; Pagulayan and Keeker 2007; Isbister and Schaffer 2008; Kim et al. 2008; Drachen and Canossa 2009a, b; Lewis-Ewans 2012).

[1]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Arrrgghh!!!: blending quantitative and qualitative methods to detect player frustration , 2011, FDG.

[2]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Analyzing spatial user behavior in computer games using geographic information systems , 2009, MindTrek '09.

[3]  Carlo Vercellis,et al.  Business Intelligence: Data Mining and Optimization for Decision Making , 2009 .

[4]  Katherine Isbister,et al.  Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience , 2008 .

[5]  Jim Sterne.  Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success , 2002 .

[6]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Player modeling using self-organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld , 2009, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[7]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Towards gameplay analysis via gameplay metrics , 2009, MindTrek '09.

[8]  Jiawei Han,et al.  Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques , 2000 .

[9]  Mike Kuniavsky,et al.  Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) , 2003 .

[10]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Predicting player behavior in Tomb Raider: Underworld , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[11]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Patterns of Play: Play-Personas in User-Centred Game Development , 2009, DiGRA Conference.

[12]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Evaluating motion: spatial user behaviour in virtual environments , 2011, Int. J. Arts Technol..

[13]  D. Silverman.  Interpreting Qualitative Data , 1993 .

[14]  Magy Seif El-Nasr,et al.  User studies: a strategy towards a successful industry-academic relationship , 2010, Future Play.

[15]  Randy J. Pagulayan,et al.  User-centered design in games , 2012 .

[16]  M. Goodchild,et al.  Geographic Information Systems and Science (second edition) , 2001 .

[17]  Bruce Phillips,et al.  Tracking real-time user experience (TRUE): a comprehensive instrumentation solution for complex systems , 2008, CHI.