A Heuristic Framework for Evaluating User Experience in Games

This book chapter describes an approach of evaluating user experience in video games by using heuristics. We provide a short overview of video games and explain the concept of user-centred design for games. Furthermore we describe the history of heuristics for video games and the role of user experience of games in general. Based on our previous work and experience we propose a revised framework consisting of two sets of heuristics (game play/game story, virtual interface) to detect the most critical issues in games. To assess its applicability to measure user experience factors we compare the results of expert evaluations of six current games with the user experience-based ratings of various game reviews. Our findings indicate a correlation between the extent to which our framework is satisfied and the game’s average rating.