Game Education Summit Europe

Paper Abstract:

In this presentation, we will focus on a number of methods for playability evaluation of games that have recently been developed, and we will complement existing research with insights that were gained through our own experience, during the development of a number of educational microgames.

We will argue that, thus far, existing playability methods have focused, either on strictly formal aspects of game content, or on user-experience related aspects such as presence.
While the use of quantitative evaluation methods has been very well documented in the past years, the use of qualitative game evaluation methods has received significantly less attention.
Nevertheless, in user-centred and design-oriented research, qualitative methods are generally considered a useful,
and often necessary addition to the objective methods  derived from psychological or physiological research.
The main goal of this research is to fill this gap, and to formulate, based upon practical experience,
a number of   guidelines for observing and evaluating player-game interactions.

In this project we developed a number of educational microgames.  During the different phases of the development process we used collaborative design methods and qualitative user experience tests.
Because these methods were very specifically applied to the educational context of testing in a school environment,
and because the practical application of these methods depended strongly on particular properties of the games that were developed, a number of practical challenges were met that have not been documented in traditional textbooks on qualitative research, or on research-by-design.
We will give an overview of the most important of these challenges. Based upon a critical analysis of the practical solutions that were developed, we will formulate practical guidelines that can be used by researchers who intend to make use of similar methods in future research.