The explanatory power of playability heuristics

Research of playability heuristics to be used with usability inspection methods in videogame evaluations has been active in recent years, and there are multiple playability heuristic sets available. However, they differ quite a lot from each other, and it is still unknown how well they support inspectors and help to describe the identified playability problems in a game. In this paper, we present a study in which 36 novice inspectors were divided into two identical groups, and they evaluated a mobile game using one of the two playability heuristic sets. In the second task, the inspectors analyzed playability problems that were collected from the game, and assigned heuristics to describe the problems. The results show that a playability heuristic set needs to cover the main aspects of playability in order to be effectively used during the evaluation. The results of this work will help in developing a playability heuristic set that makes expert review an effective method for evaluating videogames.