User Experience Evaluation Methods for Games in Serious Contexts

EasyChair Preprint 8899

Abstract

The most important factor that leads a digital game to be successful is the quality of users’ experience while they interact with serious digital games. A digital game should be “fun” and “exciting” in order to provide the best gaming experience and make the players happy (Author, 2016; Author, 2017). This need is even greater when we talk about digital games for learning purposes. As there are many different types and kinds of digital games, users’ experience needs to be examined in more detail by research studies. User experience is a multifactorial concept that is difficult to be measured. Users experience can be affected by many factors such as, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005), immersion (Brown, & Cairns, 2004; Ermi & Mayra, 2005), frustration or tension (Gilleade & Dix, 2004), psychological absorption (Funk et al, 2003), social gaming contexts (Bracken, Lange & Denny, 2005). Τhis chapter aims to present a variety of methods, quantitative and qualitative/objective and subjective/empirical and non empirical, that can be used to evaluate user experience in serious games, not only during game-play but also before and after the game play, as well as, to provide insights on when to apply the various user experience evaluation methods in the development cycle (Bernhaupt, 2020).

Keyphrases: Qualitative, digital games, evaluation, experience, quantitative

@booklet{EasyChair:8899,
  author    = {Sotiris Kirginas},
  title     = {User Experience Evaluation Methods for Games in Serious Contexts},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8899},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}