Gaming

Abstract

Playing is the first activity newborn humans immerse themselves in besides fulfilling basic needs. There is no ultimate goal to be achieved: Playing is a process that is only kept alive by the player’s experience of it. This chapter provides an overview over existing concepts and current research on the experience of playing video games. It does so by taking the perspective of a quality engineer, who identifies influencing factors, quantifies them in terms of performance metrics, and analyzes their impact on perceived quality features. To support the development of empirical test methods as well as instrumental prediction models for video gaming QoE, the concepts are grouped in a taxonomy. The chapter is concluded by a discussion of the empirical application of the framework in experiments, a brief look at an existing QoE prediction model, and an outlook at promising future research directions.