Team:Chris Demeniuk, Xiaomin Jiang, Cheng-Lun Li, Josh Morse, Satyendra Nainwal

Background:

In the project of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Class, we studied users of the popular portable gaming system, Nintendo DS (NDS). Besides, we focused on multi-player gaming and evaluated the gaming usability.

Evaluation Process:

1. Performed literature reviews and researched other gaming platforms. Conducted a comparative evaluation based on the findings

2. Conducted user interviews to understand the usage patterns of college students

3. Conducted a heuristic evaluation to four Nintendo DS games, based on Nokia's Mobile Game Playability Heuristics. Selected Super Mario Kart as the treatment of experiment

4. Ran an experiment to identify the cause-effect relationships among competitive level, distance, performance, and level of fun. Ran qualitative (grounded theory) analysis and quantitative (statistical) analysis to get in-depth understanding about user experience

Key Findings

a. While focusing on gaming, Nintendo DS were sold at least twice more than its major competitor, Sony PSP, which provides more features, 5x CPU, and weights only 70% of NDS

b. Players prefer playing with someone at the same level. While NDS doesn't support ranked matching, players prefer to play with someone they are familiar with.

c. Players experience the most fun while gaming co-located in cooperating mode.

d. Experts performed worse while playing with intermediate/ beginners, since they tend to "be nice". However, they experienced less fun under the circumstance.

e. Game logic, social interaction, and outcome of the game are most significant factors that affect players' experience of fun.

The Results:

Based on the findings, we provided design recommendation to the game console and mobile gaming design. Some of our recommendations are:

* Multiplayer games should provide skill level matching and support users to choose players. On the other hand, allow them to accept, or reject invitations from other players.

* We suggest these games provide additional metrics for performance, other than winning or losing. Since losing usually decreases the level of fun, players who lose should be able to seek for the sense of achievement from different perspectives. On the other hand, while advanced players play with less competitive opponents, they might gain more fun accomplishing other challenging tasks, such as breaking their personal best record.

* So far, games of Nintendo DS still don't support social interaction very well. We suggest the games and the game console to support more communication channels, such as audio, text, or emotional symbols, for players to share feeling or collaborate in games.

Responsibilities:

My responsibilities included designing the experiment, running qualitative and quantitative analysis for the data and writing up the testing report. I also participated in all the other evaluation tasks.