Measuring Player Experience: A Paradox of Human-Computer Interaction

Digital games are an appealing pastime for more than 50% of people in the UK and Europe.

The real attraction of games seems to come from the experiences that they offer players. But what are these experiences and how do games provide them?

In much of my work I have tried to understand this by developing tools to measure experience. But there is a paradox in turning something so individual and subjective as experience into numbers that have some sort of concrete, objective meaning.

In this talk, I will explain how nonetheless it is possible to meaningfully measure player experience. In doing so I hope to show that, at least in part, these subjective experiences are common to all people. However, our understanding is far from complete because of the diversity of players, games and types of experience.

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