Following on from last month’s successful feature in Develop magazine, Graham has published the second part of his usability/development analysis is in the April edition of the prestigious publication.
The article, titled ‘Experience Points’ (again) is on page 40-41 and outlines the best strategy for focus testing games in the build up to release.
Develop magazine can be found in print or at develop-online.net.
This issue can be downloaded for free here
Our very own Pejman Mirza-Babei is to lend his infinite expertise to the Games Research Seminar next week when he presents his paper at the conference, which is to be held in Tampere, Finland on 8-9 April.
Pejman has been working with Graham McAllister on “Using physiological measures in conjunction with other usability approaches for better understanding of the player’s gameplay experiences” which tracks the biometric responses between players of the games Haze and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Here is the abstract of the paper/talk: “In this study we capture player’s physiological measures during a gameplay session, to indicate micro-events that have caused changes in their body signals. At the post-gameplay interviews we ask participants to comment and describe their feelings on the selected events. The aim of this study is not to over-interpret physiological measures, but on using blips in measures to help identify key points in a game, which we then use to investigate further with the participant.This approach provides a method that can identify not only the negative user experience and usability issues but also the events which have a positive impact on player’s experience.”
It features a detailed break-down of the importance of usability testing, among other interesting insights into the development/usability process
This issue can be downloaded, for free here
Hey Vertical Slicers,
This is Joel, the new Community Manager at Vertical Slice. I’m here to organise all of our playtesting sessions, spearhead publicity and all sorts of other activities. Anyone looking to contact us about PR, advertising, media collaborations, our work, game trials or anything at all please don’t hesitate to contact me at joel@verticalslice.co.uk
It’s a good time to introduce you to the team too:
Joel, Pejman, Gareth & Graham
Graham McAllister – Director
Gareth White – Playability Researcher
Pejman Mirza-Babaei - Biometrics Researcher
Joel Windels – Community Manager
Vertical Slice gave a presentation at UX Brighton last night, entitled “User Research and the Future of Gameplay Experience Design.” We had a great audience of UX and games industry professionals. It was fantastic to meet you all and chat after the talks.
Topics included:
Vertical Slice’s director of games research, Gareth R. White, gave a presentation at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2009 conference “Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory“, held at Brunel University in London.
DiGRA is the top games research conference in the humanities and attracts world leading researchers with keynotes from industry and academic luminaries such as Media Molecule (Little Big Planet), Richard Bartle (MUD, precursor to modern MMOs like World of Warcraft) and Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games).
Gareth’s presentation was called “Wii Gaming for Older Players: From Motivation to Appropriation, and Usability to User Experience.”
Topics covered include,
Many thanks to the audience who provided lots of great discussion during the Q&A session.
Vertical Slice are pleased to announce that we are working with Relentless Software on their upcoming murder mystery game Blue Toad Murder Files. We are conducting the usability playtests for this episodic game available exclusively on the PlayStation Network in December.
Twitter: follow Vertical Slice (vsgr) and Blue Toad Murder Files (Blue_Toad).
Vertical Slice will be speaking at Develop in Brighton on Wednesday 15 July at 1:30pm (Production Track). We’ll be presenting alongside Jason Avent of Black Rock Studio on video games usability and user experience.
