GAID : a practical model of game approachability testing of computer games

Abstract: In this thesis an attempt is made to improve on the heuristic model presented by Desurvire and Wiberg from their paper published at the CHI 2008 conference (Desurvire & Wiberg, 2008).  The goal is to create a tool to help identify the types of problems that are found in the article on GAP (Desurvire & Wiberg, 2010).   The improvement that is presented in this work is a flowchart that uses material from GAP. This will simplify the identification of limitations in game designs, using the material collected by Desurvire and Wiberg (2010). The benefit that the implementation of a flowchart hopes to bring to the research and design society is to make the GAP tool more accessible to less informed users. The approach taken in this work, to strengthen the GAP tool was inspired by the solution presented by Barendregt, Bekker and Speerstra in Empirical evaluation of usability and fun in computer games for children (Barendregt, Bekker, & Speerstra, 2003), who made a flowchart to help identify the type of problem that could be found in connection to children playing computer games. The function of such a chart in comparison to a list is to make it more available to personal less experienced in game design and the rules of good game design (Malone, 1982). The flowchart was tested on an expert to verify the issues being used in it and on a usability test material. It was found that the Game Approachability Issue Definition (GAID) flowchart is able to identify, approachability issues, and thereby did improve on GAP as intended.