Playability and Player Experience Research [Panel Abstracts]

---

Nacke Lennart E. Drachen Anders Kuikkaniemi Kai Niesenhaus Joerg Korhonen Hannu Hoogen Wouter M. van den Poels Karolien IJsselsteijn Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As the game industry matures and games become more and more complex, there is an increasing need to develop scientific methodologies for analyzing and measuring player experience, in order to develop a better understanding of the relationship and interactions between players and games. This panel gathers distinguished European playability and user experience experts to discuss current findings and methodological advancements within player experience and playability research.

 

World of Warcraft, the Aftermath How game elements transfer into real life perceptions and experiences [Abstract]

---

Poels Karolien
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Most research on player experience has focused on in-game experiences. The question remains whether game-related player experiences do only occur while gaming, and, consequently stop when the player turns off the gaming device. Or, do they linger and transfer into real life? This paper proposes and tackles long term post game experiences or experiences that arise after repeatedly and intensively playing a particular game or game genre. Examples are association of real life objects with game elements, sounds or songs heard in real life that trigger lively memories of a game world, or slang typical to the game world that shows up in everyday vocabulary. These long term post game experiences presumably originate from the way people perceive and process their environment. To explain this, we rely on basic human perception theory (Boring, 1930). When processing their environment, people use prior knowledge to recognize objects, words, or sounds. The prior knowledge that is used as a reference point can be shaped by any perceptual stimulation that is repeated frequently and over long periods of time. Consequently, this prior knowledge biases human perception by creating a mental predisposition to perceive a stimulus in a certain way (Boring, 1930; Bruner & Potter, 1964). If we apply this reasoning to digital gaming as one particular kind of perceptual stimulation, we could assume that for habitual players of digital games, real world perceptions, cognitions, and actions will be partly structured by their repeated exposure to the game environment. We expect that long term post game experiences can be established through this process. These post game experiences can relate to all kinds of game stimuli, such as environments, actors and objects as well as sounds and words. We expect the concrete manifestation of these long term post game experiences to depend on the type of game or game genre one is repeatedly engaged in. This means, frequent players of First Person Shooter games will probably experience different things, make other associations, and use other game related slang, compared to habitual players of MMORPGs. To the best of our knowledge, there is not yet any research available that investigates the existence and conditions of these specific kind of post game experiences.

 

Putting Brands into Play: How Player Experiences Influence the Effectiveness of In-Game Advertising

---

Herrewijn Laura Poels Karolien
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

This study investigates the relationship that exists between the effectiveness of in-game advertising (IGA) and one specific context characteristic: player experiences during gameplay. Gaming is an active experience where a person is drawn into a virtual world and confronted with numerous emotions and experiences. It is argued that these player experiences might have an impact on how a player processes the game environment, including in-game ads. An experimental design was employed in which participants had to play an online computer game that contained in-game ads. Results show that manipulating player experiences had an effect on IGA effectiveness in terms of brand recognition and brand likeability, supporting the notion that player experiences are important context characteristics that have to be taken into account while studying the effectiveness of in-game advertising.