Avaliação da playability de jogos digitais com avaliadores não especialistas através de conjuntos heurísticos customizáveis

Abstract

Playability is defined as the degree by which a player is able to learn, control, and understand a game through all its interactions with the game. Playability assessments for digital games are essential in game development for creating games with better interactions, interfaces, and mechanics. Startups and small businesses that develop games need well-designed, flexible, and easy-to-apply evaluation methods. Also, nowadays, game development companies are looking for low-cost solutions with immediate results for the company. Besides, solutions defined in the literature do not consider the differences between types and genres of games and inspectors need more support to carry out the evaluation process. In this way, this work proposes, evaluate, and develops technologies that can supply the needs of the current game development companies. This work presents the proposal and evaluation of two assessment techniques for Playability in Digital Games. The first developed technique for the assessment of Playability was NExPlay and it aims to carry out evaluations through non-expert evaluators with the objective of reducing costs and time with expert evaluators. The second proposal is the CustomCheck4Play technique, whose primary objective is to be a customizable technique according to the types and genres of games being evaluated by it. Additionally, the PEACH Support Toll was proposed in order to facilitate the customization process of the heuristic set used by CustomCheck4Play, enabling the ability to perform assessments in an easier, faster and more organized way. NExPlay, through its evaluation, proved to be a viable solution for the evaluation of Playability in digital games, however, inspectors identified difficulties in the understanding of some heuristics, requested a more complete categorization, and identified the existence of several heuristics in only one, which made it difficult to understand which aspect of the heuristic should be evaluated or not. For these reasons, we proposed CustomCheck4Play. CustomCheck4Play greatly statistically proved to be more effective and efficient in detecting Playability problems than another heuristic set from literature when we evaluated the same game or different games that are from the same subset of types and genres proposed for the techniques.