An Argument for Usability in Games

In 2007, I went to the Game Developer Conference and spoke to people at the booths. I asked “what are you doing for usability?”

They smiled and said “what’s usability?”

I was actually happy to hear that response. Usability has to mature in an industry, and at that moment I was two years away from finishing my graduate work.

So two years later, I was finishing my doctorate and thinking that I’d like to join the game industry. I went to the 2009 Game Developer Conference and again asked “what are you doing for usability?”

And this time, they said… “what’s usability?” How disappointing! I also tried asking about what kinds of testing they did, andgenerally the answer was “playtesting.” Which means having extremely expert gamers test the game, mostly trying to cause glitches or find exploits in the game mechanics. Sometimes playtesters move outside of quality assurance and bug testing, but even then they don’t have the expertise in usability to do proper expert evaluation.

So there’s some need to argue for usability in games. In this post, I’m going to talk about some research that speaks to the importance of usability in games.

Do Usability Problems Exist in Games?

Say you work on games. Someone walks into your office and says “I want to help you design games to be user-centered!” You’re bound to think that such a practice is needless, because you’re already designing a user
experience at every step of the way. Surely, usability problems don’t exist in games! Right?

Well, there’s an excellent paper (Pinelle et al, 2008) that describes a process for coming up with usability heuristics for games. While the heuristics themselves are excellent, I want to focus on some of the information that came out of the methods they used for coming up with the heuristics. This group aggregated game reviews, looking at the various criticisms that were given for games. When the study looked at game ratings of 8/10 or lower, they found that all of the 108 reviews they looked at had at least one usability problem. On average, these games had 2.64 usability problems per game. So this paper suggests that usability problems are definitely present in games.

I mentioned that the Pinelle study deliberately looked at games with an 8/10 rating. The study didn’t look at games with a rating higher than 8 because the preliminary research found that games with very high ratings
generally didn’t have usability problems. This suggests that there may be some correlation between games with fewer usability problems and high ratings. This wasn’t the point of the paper, but it’s another hint about the value of usability to games.

Do Usability Problems Impact Game Buying Behavior?

Sardonic game marketers say things like “I could sell an empty game box.” They say that all they need is some good screenshots and the rest of what matters to buying behavior is all marketing and presentation. Try to return a game at your local retailer and you’ll find that they’ll typically have a policy of no returns on games that have been opened. It’s a bleak outlook for your friendly neighborhood professional in game usability. Fortunately, there’s a study that looks at game purchasing behavior.

Mikko Rajanen and Dorina Marghescu (2006) surveyed 123 students about game purchasing behavior. They found that the top thing that affects people’s decision to buy games is their own experience trying the game
or the game’s demo. That was rated as the most important factor for 44% of respondents. They also asked about the most important factors when testing the games and found that the top issue was “user interface and playability of the game” as the most important for 52% of respondents. When asked about what things most disturb them while playing, the top answer was “bad user interface and playability” for 47% of respondents. So what all this means is that the top reason people buy games is because of their experience trying the games, and the most important thing when they try games is usability issues. So usability makes you money if you’re in the business of selling games.

That same study by Rajanen and Marghescu (2006) found that the second most important factor was reviews by other game players, rated as the most important by 35% of respondents. The feedback about what’s most
important in game reviews was somewhat less clearly in favor of usability issues. 40% said the top thing is the overall rating of the game, 30% said the top thing is the plot of the game, and 21% said the top thing is the rating of the user interface and the playability of the game. So the most important thing in reviews is either the plot or usability, depending on how much the reviewer factors usability into the overall rating of the game. This all means that reviews are also important, and the two most important things players look for in reviews are plot and usability. So again, usability makes you money if you’re in the business of selling games. But also, make sure to hire some good writers.

How do Usability Problems Impact the Game Experience?

While I’m talking about research supporting usability in games, I have to give a quick nod to my own dissertation research (Schaffer, 2009). Testing 8 games with 160 participants, my research found that usability has a major impact on game enjoyment. My research also modeled the function of usability. You might expect that usability just directly increases game enjoyment. That’s not exactly true. Instead, it acts as a modifier. Think of usability problems as obstacles that keep a user from getting to your game’s enjoyment. You can have a game with amazing potential for enjoyment, but if the usability is bad then the player never gets there. Why does that matter? Your game has to be fun in the first place. Some games aren’t. But if you have a game that’s got serious potential for enjoyment, then the game will only be seen as enjoyable if you do serious usability work on it.

Game Over

So now you have some research that helps make the argument for usability in games. To learn more about what’s involved, check out the Game Usability book. Also, stay tuned tothis blog. I’m hoping to demonstrate how HFI can do work on games in a future post.

Another quick tip before I sign off. Say you’re in a game company and you want to get some usability work going. A useful way to help get management on your side is to speak their language. Remember, usability problems keep people from enjoying your game, and that’s a serious risk. For management, usability is about
risk management. Risk management is serious money for them. Speak their language, and let them know about the value of usability. You can also stress how games are hitting wider audiences, so the target audiences are becoming less and less like the game designers themselves. This is important because
usability helps tune the design to target the intended user.

References

Pinelle, D., Wong, N., and Stach, T. 2008. Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1453-1462. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357282

Rajanen, M. & Marghescu, D. 2006. The impact of game usability to player attitude. Proceedings of 29th Information Systems Research Seminar In Scandinavia, Helsingoer, Denmark, 1--17.

Schaffer, N. Verifying an Integrated Model of Usability in Games. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2009.