Game User Research

Module 1: Pscyhology of Play

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Rigby and Ryan. (2007). The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS). White Paper.
Anders Heidenberg. (2005). The Psychology Behind Games. Gamasutra.
Nicole Lazzaro. (2004). Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion without Story. White Paper.
Torben Grodal. (2000). Video Games and The Pleasure of Control. Media Entertainment: The Psychology of Its Appeal. Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer. (shared in Forum).
Halko, S., & Kientz, J. A. (2010). Personality and Persausive Technology: An Exploratory Study on Health-Promoting Mobile Applications. Persuasive Technology. (T. Ploug, P. Hasle, & H. Oinas-Kukkonen, Eds.), Vol. 6137, pp. 150–161.
Bart Stewart. (2012). Personality and Playstyles: A Unified Model. Gamasutra.
O’Brien, H.L. and Toms, E.G. What is user engagement? A conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, 6 (2008), 938–955.
Schoenau-Fog, H. (2011). The Player Engagement Process – An Exploration of Continuation Desire in Digital Games. DiGRA 2011.
Boyle, E. a., Connolly, T.M., Hainey, T., and Boyle, J.M. (2012). Engagement in digital entertainment games: A systematic review. Computers in Human Behavior 28, 3, 771–780. (shared on the Forum)

Module 2: Research Design

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings: IRB and working with Subjects

What is Research

Creswell, J. W. (2012). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantiative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 2nd Edition. [ chapter 1 ]
Leedy, P. D. and Ormrod, J. E. (2005) Practical Research: Planning and Design, 8.
Bordens & Abbott, Research Design and Methods, 8th ed, 2011, McGraw Hill. [Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Reporting

Module 3: Review of Quantiative Data Analysis

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Bordens & Abbott, Research Design and Methods,i 8th ed, 2011, McGraw Hill. [Chapters: 10, 13, 14, 16]
Field, Andy. (2013). Discovering Statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics. 4th edition. Sage Publishers. [Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7]

Module 4: Qualitative Data Analysis

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Hsieh, H.-F. and Shannon, S.E. (2005) Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative health research 15, 9, 1277–88.
Recommended: Bazeley, P. (2013). Qualitative data analysis: Practical strategies. Sage.

Module 5: Game Usability Evaluation

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Isbister, K. and Schaffer, N. (2009). Game Usability. Morgan Kaufman. [Chapters: 7, 11, 17]
Chapter 6: Usability Testing from Nielson, Usability Engineering (on Forum)
Michael C. Medlock et al. (2005). The Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation Method (RITE): Better Products in Less Time. Cost-Justifying Usability, Second Edition: An Update for the Internet Age, Second Edition (Interactive Technologies) Randolph G. Bias (Editor), Deborah J. Mayhew (Editor), pp 489-518.
Amaya, G., Davis, J. P., Gunn, D. V., Harrison, C., Pagulayan, R. J., Phlips, B., and Wixon, D. (2008). Games User Research (GUR): Our Expeirence with and Evolution of Four Methods. In Katherine Isbister and Noah Schaffer, Game Usability.

Module 6: Game Heuristics Evaluation

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Module 7: Playtesting and Interaction Analysis

Lecture Notes [pdf] [ppt]

Readings:

Collins, J. (1997). Conducting In-House Play testing. Gamasutra.
John. Vin St. (2013). Best Practices: Five Tips for Better Playtesting. Gamasutra.
Valve's approach to playtesting: The application of empiricism
Korhonen, H. (2010, September). Comparison of playtesting and expert review methods in mobile game evaluation. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Fun and Games (pp. 18-27). ACM.
GUR Methods
Jordan, B., Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. The Journal of the learning sciences, 4(1), 39-103.
Heather Desurvire and Magy Seif El-Nasr. (2013). Methods for Game User Research: Studying Player Behavior to Enhance Game Design. Graphics and Applications, Vol. 33, No. 4. (on the Forum)
Kurniawan, S., Mahmud, M., & Nugroho, Y. (2006, April). A study of the use of mobile phones by older persons. In CHI'06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 989-994). ACM.
Mackay, W. E. (2004, August). The interactive thread: exploring methods for multi-disciplinary design. In Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 103-112). ACM.