Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience

by Katherine Isbister, Noah Schaffer

Computers used to be for geeks. And geeks were fine with dealing with a difficult and finicky interface--they liked this--it was even a sort of badge of honor (e.g. the Unix geeks). But making the interface really intuitive and useful--think about the first Macintosh computers--took computers far far beyond the geek crowd. The Mac made HCI (human computer interaction) and usability very popular topics in the productivity software industry. Suddenly a new kind of experience was crucial to the success of software - the user experience. Now, 20 years later, developers are applying and extending these ideas to games.

Game companies are now trying to take games beyond the 'hardcore' gamer market--the people who love challenge and are happy to master a complicated or highly genre-constrained interface. Right about now (with the growth of interest in casual games) game companies are truly realizing that usability matters, particularly to mainstream audiences. If it's not seamless and easy to use and engaging, players will just not stay to get to the 'good stuff'.

By definition, usability is the ease with which people can emplo a particular tool in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability refers to a computer program's efficiency or elegance. This book gives game designers a better understanding of how player characteristics impact usability strategy, and offers specific methods and measures to employ in game usability practice. The book also includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for usability and communicate results to higher-ups effectively.

Genres: Game Design, Usability, Nonfiction, Design, Gaming

398 pages, Paperback

First published August 12, 2008

About the author

Katherine Isbister is a game and human computer interaction researcher and designer, currently a professor in computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Isbister received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, with a focus on the design of interactive characters. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35. In 2011, she received a Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From 2014 to 2015, she held a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Reviews

[Emma]

This book gives an excellent list of methods to test your game's usability with and describes when and why each method is useful. Toward the end there's a recap chapter, which is a great way to quickly check which method to go for in a given situation.

However, this book is far from perfect. It is ten years old now, and it shows. The book puts a lot of effort into selling the importance and benefits of usability in game development (because the field was new), which gets a bit tedious after a while. Worse, it was such a new field back when the book was written, that it overcompensates by being very academic and thus difficult to read. Or maybe that was the writing style back then. Granted, each chapter is written by a different person/group, so it is more a compilation of articles/white papers, but it is very sad to read a book about usability, which uses language that makes the book nearly unusable (by modern standards at least.)

Another way in which the age shows, is the examples, which are dated, but like the methods listed there, have not become irrelevant.

All in all, I'll gladly recommend this book to anyone interested, though I do hope a more approachable book is or will be out there.

[Wilson prata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ótima referência para quem já possui conhecimento em uma das áreas (ou usabilidade ou jogos digitais) e quer saber como relacionar esse conhecimento com a outra área. Para os mais experiêntes, os capítulos são alternados entre "objetivos", em que se apresenta e demonstra um conjunto de técnicas de pesquisa, e "subjetivos", em que algum autor consagrado da área comenta sobre sua experiência ou os desafios profissionais que enfrenta.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm interested in the use of lessons learned by game developers to create workplace dashboards for monitoring multi-mission data that is dynamic, complex, and of varying interest depending upon the user. Many of the features of a user interface such as World of Warcraft, especially with add-on's, represent a very efficient way of filtering and delivering essential information as it is required.

This book is a good survey of various aspects of how these interfaces are designed and the thought process behind them. This is not a "how to" book; rather, it's a series of essays and interviews from professionals in the field with a variety of perspectives (albeit, a little unevenly). For example, one of the more interesting essays, for my purposes, was Nick Fortugno's "The Strange Case of the Casual Gamer." He discusses some essential differences between hard-core and casual gamers, and the implications for game design: e.g., skill sets, "conditioning to failure," and experimentation. His observations help to explain why workplace applications fail or succeed and underscore the need for good, adaptive human-computer interaction.

Overall, a quick but thought-provoking tour of the subject for the non-specialist.

[MoniGarr . · Rating 3 out of 5]

lots of useful information for anyone that needs to build games & gamified apps, experiences.