From the Back Cover:
GAME PROGRAMMING/COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Understand usability and user research in game design
Usability—the ease with which people can use a program to achieve their goals—is a topic of growing interest to game developers. Until now, no comprehensive survey of usability and user research issues and tactics specific to games has been available. This book includes introductions to basic and advanced methods, and advice for evangelizing usability within game studios and publishing houses.
· Hear from a range of experts, including great minds from large and small game companies as well as cutting edge researchers.
· Learn instantly applicable theory and tactics for designing game usability methods to improve and enhance games: pick methods to suit your needs.
· Read about cutting-edge techniques (such as measuring heart rate and tiny muscle movements) to measure and evaluate game play experience.
About the Author:
Associate Professor, Department of Language, Literature and Communication, RPI; Director of the Games Research Lab, RPI; Chair of the MS in HCI Program, RPI. Katherine is Director of the Games Research Lab at Rensselaer (RPI), where she has worked to build an undergraduate major in game design, as well as a robust program of games-related research. She is also the Chair of the MS in HCI at RPI, which she helped to redesign to address current challenges facing HCI practitioners, such as the design of games and other social and leisure applications. Katherine is a former MK Game author, having written: Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach, which was nominated for a Game Developer Magazine Front Line award in 2006. She has published work in a wide variety of venues, and has given invited talks at research and academic venues including Sony research labs in Japan, Banff Centre in Canada, IBM, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and others. The Games Research Lab at RPI has cutting-edge facilities for user studies, and Isbister has used the lab to research innovative methods in user testing (e.g. the Sensual Evaluation Instrument - a project nominated for Best Paper award at the CHI conference in 2006). Isbister has worked in both research and commercial settings on HCI and usability aspects of games and other products. This background, combined with strong connections to game industry practitioners, makes her well suited to put together an edited volume on games usability that is both rigorous and useful to developers in their everyday work.
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