The usability of games

Abstract

Games have become one of the biggest forms of entertainment and nowadays many people play different kinds of games. However, there are things that might affect people’s interest to play certain games. One of them is the game’s usability. The usability of games differs from the usability of productivity software because some of the games primary goals are them being fun and offering challenges to the player. Due to this the goal of this study was to find out what makes a good game usability. This study was done as a narrative literature review focusing on studies about game usability testing and various heuristics for games. As a result, it was found out what different ways there are to test game usability and what kind of heuristics there are regarding the usability of games. Usability testing has a lot of different methods on how to do it and developers need to find one that suits their game. Heuristic evaluation is one of the methods and it gives good guidelines on how to improve game’s usability. Heuristics focused on various things about games’ usability and some of the important heuristics for all kinds of games were about learning to play the game, challenge, various settings, controls, interface, and feedback to the player. At the same time there are heuristics that are not relevant for all the games but are very important for smaller set of games.