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Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Most video games require constant interaction, so game designers must pay careful attention to usability issues. However, there are few formal methods for evaluating the usability of game interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a new set of heuristics that can be used to carry out usability inspections of video games. The heuristics were developed to help identify usability problems in both early and functional game prototypes. We developed the heuristics by analyzing PC game reviews from a popular gaming website, and the review set covered 108 different games and included 18 from each of 6 major game genres. We analyzed the reviews and identified twelve common classes of usability problems seen in games. We developed ten usability heuristics based on the problem categories, and they describe how common game usability problems can be avoided. A preliminary evaluation of the heuristics suggests that they help identify game-specific usability problems that can easily be overlooked otherwise.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2008
    1870 pages
    ISBN:9781605580111
    DOI:10.1145/1357054
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 06 April 2008

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    1. heuristic evaluation
    2. usability evaluation
    3. video games

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