Games User Research

As an emerging field, the aims and characteristics of usability and player experience testing can often be unknown or unrecognised within game companies, outside of a few key industry leaders, such as Valve and Bungie. This can often lead to comparisons being made with QA testing, or confusing usability testing as an element of QA.…

In the words of the Fast Show, this week I’ve mostly been playing 100 Rogues. I’ve never previously been able to get into Rogue-likes, having only played games in this genre briefly, before being scared off by the dungeon crawler’s core mechanics of ‘odds stacked against you’, ‘if you die you lose’, and ‘you will…

Mobile geolocation games are a hot topic right now. The popularity of the iPhone, the potential for geolocation in HTML5, the geographic API integration with Twitter, and the rise of games like Gowalla and Foursquare all point to a significant shift in people’s perceptions of the potential of geolocation. I’ve recently been involved in the…

Last week Because of this, biometric readings have to be justified by another method, to give some understanding as to why the heart rate spikes at certain moments. Traditional UX methods, such as a post-test interview, are therefore needed in addition to biometric readings. However this reintroduces traditional UX problems. A player may not be…

Been playing iPhone games recently? Then you’ve probably been bothered by pop-ups asking you to sign in with OpenFeint, Plus+, Crystal, or one of the other many social gaming networks on the iPhone. When I started writing this post, I was going to cover the problems that having many rival social gaming networks causes, and…