Archive for the ‘Game Usability’ Category
“Playing to win?” @ multi.player conference
This Friday, Pejman Mirza-Babaei and myself will be presenting “Playing to Win? : The correlation between biometric responses and social interaction in co-located social gaming” at the multi.player conference at the university of Hohenheim.
This paper has been a collaboration between ourselves, Graham McAllister of Vertical Slice and Jonathan Napier of Relentless Software. It shares insights gained from our recent studies combing coding social interaction, biometric readings and self-assessment to understand how player’s react to different social and in-game situations.
We’ve found some really interesting results, implying that player behaviour is divided by their inherent motivations. For each player type, it is possible to measure and evaluate the specific forms of social interaction they display, and react to.
This research aims to be useful not only academically, but also of use to commercial games development, by allowing greater insight into targetting development to specific player types, or into maximising the interaction generated by a multiplayer game.
I hope to share the presentation, and the paper, afher the conference. However, if anyone has questions in the meantime, how about contacting me?
(what a link-heavy update!)
edit: A review of the conference can be found here
Full information on the research method and findings will be up on Gamasutra soon – stay tuned!
Usability Fail – Worms (and Worms 2)
I’ve recently been getting back into both Worms and Worms 2 on the iPhone, largely due to the Bluetooth enabled multiplayer mode. Worms, for those who don’t remember was a hugely popular turn-based shooter in the nineties, and the 1995 original was the first game I bought on the PC!
Classic Worms
However the iOS port has made a huge usability sin with its misuse of icons. Today I’ll look at what the problem is, and how it could be resolved.
Erik Rothoff Andersson (Kick Ass) on testing with users & why you shouldn’t listen to what users say!
Erik Andersson is the creator of Kick Ass, the new iPhone game based on his hit web-app. Kick-Ass is an adaption of asteroids that allows you to attack your favourite (or least favourite) websites, destroying them with a selection of ships, while earning achievements.
The iOS game can be downloaded here, and the original bookmark-let is available to play for free
Kick Ass in action...
Today Erik tells us about his experiences with finding testers, getting user feedback, and why you should look at what people do, and not what they say!
Click to continue…
The 5 secrets to happy players with Agile Games Development
Agile software development offers a fantastic opportunity to integrate user insight into the game development process, leading to better games. In this post, I’ll cover the main methods that can be used to integrate user insight into agile games development, and why this is important.
Perfect Dark – Game Usability from the 90’s
Recently I’ve been enjoying playing the Xbox Live Arcade port of Perfect Dark – I played this extensively as a kid (especially the multiplayer with it’s groundbreaking inclusion of computer-controlled bots!). However without the rose-tinted glasses, a number of obvious usability issues come to light.
Today I’ll look at the major usability problem in this game, and how it would be fixed if Perfect Dark was made today!
