Metrics for Assessing Gamers’ Satisfaction: Exploring the Graphics Factor

Requirements’ engineering (elicitation and documentation) is considered to be one of the most crucial phases of the software development process. More specifically, many products fail to reach the market or to capture a respectable share of it, due to problems derived during requirements engineering. In any game the main requirement is expected to be entertainment: i.e., guaranteeing that the user has fun while playing the game. The experience of the user, while playing any game, is highly correlated to non-functional requirements, such as game speed, game graphics and scenario. However, in the majority of the cases such non-functional requirements are vague, since there are no success indicators (metrics) or target values that can (to some extent) guarantee user satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a process that can be used for enhancing game requirements’ engineering, by specifying nonfunctional requirements along with metrics, based on user satisfaction factors. The employed user satisfaction factors, are reused from previous work (i.e., a survey with regular gamers), whereas in this work we identify game characteristics that are relevant to a specific user satisfaction factor (namely: graphics) and we propose and validate metrics for their automated quantification from game artifacts.