Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience (Paperback)

~ (Author), Noah Schaffer (Author)
Key Phrases: hard fun, arcade mode, playtest labs, Serious Fun, People Fun, Easy Fun (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Isbister's Better Game Characters by Design MK book was mentioned in a New York Times article, July 2007, called "Hey Man, Let's Play Video Game Dress Up".

Book Description

Game Usability was the cover story in Wired 9/07 - this book offers practical usability design techniques by key game greats from Microsoft, Maxis, Sega, Ubisoft, Sony Online, Nintendo.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0123744474
• ISBN-13: 978-0123744470
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #857,348 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for a survey of topics, but lacks applicable content, August 8, 2009

By	Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

This book is a collection of chapters written by different authors. This style is commonly used in research communities as a way to pull together a set of influential members of a field to comment either deeply on individual topics or broadly on the effectiveness of trends. These sorts of books are handed to new graduate students or used in survey courses.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from the same problem as all of these types of books: if you actually want to learn about the topic, there's little meat. It's not going to teach you how to do game usability experiments - it provides opinions on which of the different methods worked better or worse in individual projects. This book is not going to provide detailed steps or guidance on any usability efforts you'd like to roll out in your company - it'll just talk about who's doing it already.

However, if you're just looking for a survey of the field or are willing to chase down the references in each chapter to find materials you could put to work to do your own usability studies or interpret their usability results, this book is fine. There are also some excellent later materials talking about some of the interesting tricks that have been used in specific games (i.e. heat maps showing where people tend to play and tend to avoid going on levels).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Usability assessment methodology, August 3, 2009

By	Trevor Burnham (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

This book's subject matter is much, much narrower than its title suggests. If you're interested in design patterns for game usability, or you're a game programmer or artist, there isn't much for you here. If, on the other hand, you're an academic in the area of human-computer interaction, or in charge of usability testing for a professional development team, then this collection of rigorous essays may be useful to you.

This is a book that has more in common with an academic text like Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches than something fun and general like Game Design Workshop. The authors grapple with questions like, Which demographics should I recruit playtesters from? How do I collect meaningful data from playtesting sessions? How often should I playtest? To me, these are distant concerns, and I was disappointed by the lack of specific case studies. (One notable example is Chapter 4, Games User Research, which talks about the playtesting methods used by Microsoft Game Studios, which have been refined thoroughly over the course of several years.) Some of the essays are fairly interesting, including two on physiological metrics, but I'm skeptical that these novel techniques will achieve mainstream adoption any time soon. (Is it better to watch a playtester's pulse race, or to hear them say "This is awesome!"? A heightened pulse can mean many things.)

The best chapter is 17, a rumination on game feel and playtesting by Steve Swink. This is a more inquisitive, less scientific chapter than the others. It also overlaps a great deal with Swink's concurrently released book, Game Feel, which I recommend highly.

The editors made a valient attempt to rescue a dry set of academic essays with intermittent interviews with developers. Unfortunately, these are largely more of the same, with developers talking on an abstract, conceptual level about their usability testing process. I'm not interested in process. I'm interested in usability. This isn't the book I was hoping for.

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read, but scattered focus, October 5, 2009

By	Charles D. Angel "americanpride" (South Carolina) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

This is a book of articles written by industry professionals. I'm not a fan of books that are a collection of articles because chapters feel disjointed and the focus is lost leaving myself, as the reader, not satisfied by the continuity of the content. There are a few interesting chapters that leave you wanting more information from that particular writer, but of course the next chapter is written by someone else. I think the information is interesting and useful as a general or introduction to usability issues in gaming read. If you are looking for something with more meat and instruction, then you should look elsewhere.