Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Overall User Experience of Video Games and Advanced Interaction Games

This book chapter describes an approach of evaluating user experience in video games and advanced interaction games (tabletop games) by using heuristics. We provide a short overview of computer games with a focus on advanced interaction games and explain the concept of user-centred design for games. Furthermore we describe the history of heuristics for video games and the role of user experience of games in general. We propose a framework consisting of three sets of heuristics (game play/game story, virtual interface and tabletop specific) to detect the most critical issues in video games as well as advanced interaction games. To assess its applicability we compare the results of expert evaluations of five current games with the user experience-based ratings of various game review sites. In the conclusion we provide an outlook on possible extensions of our approach.