Exploring playability of social network games

Abstract

Social network games in Facebook are played by millions of players on daily basis Due to their design characteristics, new challenges for game design and playability evaluations arise We present a study where 18 novice inspectors evaluated a social game using playability heuristics The objective is to explore possible domain-specific playability problems and to examine how the established heuristics suit for evaluating social games The results from this study show that some implementations of the social games design characteristics can cause playability problems and that the established heuristics are suitable for evaluating social games The study also revealed that inspectors had problems in interpreting cause and effect of the found problems © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.