Human Factors Professor Helps Define What Makes a Great Video Game

Until now, it’s been hard to define what makes a game so good that it captures the market, but that is just what Embry-Riddle Human Factors Professor Dr. Joseph Keebler and research colleagues, Mikki H. Phan and Dr. Barbara S. Chaparro at Wichita State University, have done. Magazines like Wired and online news sites like Science Daily are letting the world know about their research.

Human Factors is the study and practice of designing products, systems, or processes with a view to how humans actually interact with them. Human factors professors and students apply the science of psychology to make these interactions easier, more comfortable, less frustrating, and, when necessary, safer.

The insights and understanding of these interactions are critical to improving life-saving products, such as medical equipment and airline computer systems. These insights can also, in Keebler’s and his colleagues’ case, involve creating a scientifically validated means of gauging a video game user’s satisfaction, the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale, or GUESS.

The researchers, whose paper will appear in Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, are also making GUESS available on a Creative Commons license. This means the GUESS survey can be freely copied and redistributed, even commercially, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole with appropriate credit given.

Embry-Riddle students are some of the first beneficiaries of GUESS. The Human Factors & Systems Department in the College of Arts & Sciences in Daytona Beach is the home of the Game-Based Education and Advanced Research Studies (GEARS) Lab, where research focuses on exploring how games and simulation can enhance education and training. Students are now conducting studies to understand how personality correlates with the GUESS, as well as the effects of various virtual reality systems on GUESS responses.

“Measuring reactions to games has been a complicated endeavor for scientists and video game developers,” said Keebler, an assistant professor of Human Factors. “There are a ton of tools available that look at an individual's response to games and how enjoyable or engaging a particular gaming environment is to a player. This makes it hard to decide what metrics to use, and for the sake of time, usually one study cannot implement them all. We now have a validated scale that is freely available, relatively short (55 items), and allows developers, researchers, and our students working in GEARS a quick and valid way to understand how good a particular game is in the eyes of their users.”

The GEARS Lab, in Embry-Riddle’s Department of Human Factors & Systems in the College of Arts & Sciences in Daytona Beach, focuses research efforts on using games and simulations to study areas related to education, training, and cognition. Recent efforts address ethics in gaming, training military communication and leadership, developing mathematical models of utility and choice in games, and how tablet-based games (for example, Minecraft) can be used in middle-school education.