Topics in Usability
Games

Articles    Books

Articles

Allaeys, Sabinr. Mobile Phone Games Designed for Girls
Unlike many game developers, one company creates games primarily targeted at young women and girls. MiniFizz is certainly not just a traditional boys’ game painted pink. - User Interface October 2004

Federoff, Melissa  Heuristics and Usability Guidelines for the Creation and Evaluation of Fun in Video Games. 2000

Folmer, Eelke. Interaction patterns for games - Pattern library in process (2005)

Houser, Rob and Scott Deloach - Learning from Games: Seven Principles of Effective Design 
Why do players of computer games seem to approach those applications without fear, eagerly exploring and learning as they go, whereas users of business applications will go out of their way to keep from using the tools? - Journal of Technical Communication, 45, No. 3 (August 1998): 319-329.

Kieras, David.  User Interface Design for Games, University of Michigan, 2000). 

Laitenen, Sauli. Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing
Heuristics and usability guidelnes for games. The article describes the importance of usability for games and describes two testing methods. - CMP Game Group, June 23, 2005

Light, Ann.  It’s Official, Games can make you Smarter... - Usabilty News, 2003

Lucas, Shannon and Denise Fulton What We Learned Evaluating the Usability of a Game
How do you test a game? Rather than look at background issues like differences between games and applications, this article focuses on the methods employed for the usability testing of Ion Storm’s game Thief: Deadly Shadows. - User Interface October 2004

Malone, Thomas.  "What Makes Things Fun to Learn? A Study of Intrinsically Motivating Computer Games" (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 1980)

Noldus Information Technology. Case Study: eMotion Laboratory.
Description of a the eMotion Lab at Glasgow Caledonian University, whose projects include usability tests of games.

Peterson, Martin. Why Game Documentation is Essential to a Satisfying User Experience 
Documentation and information organization are an integral part of video game construction. - User Interface October 2004

Usability and Mobile Gaming: As Good as It Gets?
Developing gaming applications for phones can be fun and, fast, and can allow developers to work on the edge of relatively uncharted territory. 

Game Usability Study
On May 3, 2003, Nokia sponsored a presentation of the results of a game usability study, coordinated by Nokia and conducted by Idean Research Ltd.

Books

Malone, Thomas W.  "Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games." in Human Factors in Computing Systems (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1982).

Rouse, Richard. Game Design: Theory & Practice, (Plano, Texas: Wordware Publishing, Inc., 2001).

Randy J. Pagulayan et al., "User-centered design in games" in Handbook for Human-Computer Interaction in Interactive Systems (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2002), 883-906.