Investigating the Applicability of Usability and Playability Heuristics for Evaluation of Pervasive Games

This paper investigates to what extent traditional methods for usability evaluation can reveal problems and issues in pervasive games. The questions of importance for the study could be summarized as: what kind of problems in pervasive games can usability evaluation methods reveal? Which of these problems are general/traditional usability problems, which problems can be related to general problems in computer games and most importantly: which problems are unique for the genre of pervasive games? In order to approach these questions, a pervasive game prototype called "SupaFly", have been evaluated with 58 participants and by use of three standard usability evaluation methods; qualitative questionnaires, system logs and focus group interviews. The problems identified in the evaluation are analyzed and compared to categories and heuristics of previously known usability problems and problems identified in computer games (playability problems) in order to outline the problems unique for pervasive games. Of a total number of 16 issues, six issues were at least partly not covered by traditional usability and playability. Of these six issues, three problematic issues were completely unique for pervasive games: the connection between the platforms of the game (unclear relation between game platforms), the role and meaning of player positioning (unclear role of player positioning (location)) and the level of social interaction (levels of interaction not aligned with social needs).