This book is focused on providing the foundational, accessible, go-to resource for people interested in user experience (UX) and user research (UR) in games. It is a community-driven effort—it has been written by passionate professionals and researchers in the GUR community as a handbook and guide for everyone interested in user experience, user research, and games.
We aim to provide the most comprehensive overview from an applied perspective, for a person new to GUR, but which is equally useful for experienced user researchers. We stress the term overview — GUR is a deep, interdisciplinary field with thousands of professionals working within it worldwide; hundreds of scientific papers are produced on the topic every year.
It is not possible for one book to provide everything you need to know about GUR, but what a single book can do is provide the bird’s-eye view, introduce the contexts and methods, and provide a pathway for further self-illumination. That is not to say that this book is not practical, as the various chapters not only describe high-level concepts, but also how to work in practice with GUR methods. This book contains practical guidelines on how to conduct user research across topics such as planning, methods, lab design, mobile games, accessibility, budgeting user research, and more.
The book is grounded in the design and development process, and describes which methods we use at which stages, mimicking the glossaries used in the industry and academic research today, but putting everything into context. The connection between the wider context of GUR and the nitty-gritty details of work ‘in the trenches’ is perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book.
- Most robust and comprehensive overview of Games User Research (GUR) and Game User Experience (UX) best practices that exists, covering all aspects of user research and UX in games
- Written by experts across the games industry with advice that can be applied to any game production, across indie game development and AAA titles
- Practical advice from the experts who do UX research and user-centred testing of games every day
- Integrates the latest research and knowledge across industry and academia, distilling the wisdom of dozens of professionals with combined hundreds of years of experience
- Heavily illustrated with colour screenshots
The book is published by Oxford University Press, an can be ordered here.
For an overview of the contents and authors see here.
We want to take the opportunity to thank the GUR community for help and contributions to the book. More than 100 people were involved in the creation of this volume, from people who wrote chapters, reviewed chapters, provided feedback on what should be included in a core handbook on GUR, etc. We have now an awesome collection of chapters distilling hundreds of years of hard-earned wisdom into a 500-pages plus volume.
For following news about the book, follow us on twitter @GamesURbook
Edited by Anders Drachen, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, and Lennart Nacke