Research / Measuring player experience

Short paper · 2017

Measuring Uncertainty in Games: Design and Preliminary Validation

Power, C., Denisova, A., Papaioannou, T., & Cairns, P.

ConferenceExtended Abstracts of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA'17), 2017

Teaser figure: the four factors of the PUG questionnaire (disorientation, exploration, prospect and randomness) with item counts and reliability, and the development steps from a 146-item pool to a survey of 674 players.
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In short

Uncertainty is widely seen as a precondition for good player experience, but it could not be measured. We designed the Player Uncertainty in Games (PUG) questionnaire from games research and work on information search, refined it to 66 items through player interviews and expert review, and tested it with an online survey of players.

Key findings

  • Principal component analysis found four distinct but related factors: disorientation, exploration, prospect and randomness.
  • Prospect and disorientation were only slightly negatively correlated, so they are separate experiences rather than opposites.
  • This was the first step towards PUGS, the validated Player Uncertainty in Games Scale.

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Power, C., Denisova, A., Papaioannou, T., & Cairns, P. (2017). Measuring Uncertainty in Games: Design and Preliminary Validation. In Extended Abstracts of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA'17) (pp. 2839-2845).

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