A metric suite for evaluating interactive scenarios in video games: an empirical validation.

Game development is one of the fastest growing industries. Since games' success is mostly related to users' enjoyment, one of the cornerstones of their quality assessment is the evaluation from the user perspective. According to literature, game scenario constitutes a key-factor that leads to users' enjoyment. Despite their importance, scenarios are currently evaluated through heuristics in a subjective way. The aim of this paper is to develop an objective model (i.e., a set of quality attributes and metrics) for evaluating game scenarios with respect to users' satisfaction. The proposed model can be applied to flow charts and character models (i.e., common game scenario representation mechanisms). To achieve this goal, we: (a) gathered game scenario characteristics that are related to users' satisfaction, (b) proposed several metrics for quantifying these characteristics, and (c) performed a case study on three interactive scenarios to evaluate the model. As a result, we developed a three-level model: the first level includes high-level characteristics (e.g., interestingness), which are specified in the second level; the third level maps graph-based metrics to the attributes of the second level. The results of the empirical validation suggest that in the majority of the cases, the proposed metrics were strongly correlated with the perceived opinion of evaluators. The results can be useful to both researchers and practitioners, in the form of early quality assessment instruments (regarding practitioners) and future research directions (regarding researchers).