Biometric Storyboards to Improve Understanding of the Players’ Gameplay Experience

Due to the specific characteristics of video games most of the established user research methods cannot be used the same way for video games. One of the challenges is to gain insight into how players feel and behave when playing a game. Having a better understanding of players’ gameplay would help developers to optimise the experience of their game. In this paper we are reporting our current work on introducing a new technique called ‘Biometric Storyboards’. Narratives have always been part of the user experience process to communicate how and why a design would work. We are promoting a new methodology based on using stories (or rather storyboards), where we graph the player's gameplay experience over a longer period (e.g. a level of a game). Sometimes the limitations of stories are that they are a personal and subjective experience, from the perspective of the consumer. Thus, they become a fairly intangible experience to record. Using our proposed method of the biometric storyboard, the seemingly elusive narrative experience becomes a data-supported recorded asset. The graph itself is calculated based on (1) player’s biometric responses, (2) postsession interviews, (3) players’ self-drawn diagrams of their gameplay experience and (4) coding player gameplay behaviour. Our paper reports the three evaluation stages and iterations of this method on two commercial console games that were still under development, and we explain how these approaches helped the developer to have a better understanding of how players interact with their game, ultimately enhancing their ability to effectively optimise the experience of the final release.