I'm Jason Bowey.

Assessing and inducing player experience (pX) in games user research (GUR) is complicated because of the tradeoff between maintaining rigour through experimental control and having participants feel like they are engaged in play. To establish and evaluate an embedded method for inducing a sense of success or failure in participants during gameplay (e.g., to study how different players exhibit resilience to in-game failure), we manipulated leaderboard position in an experiment in which 155 participants played a Bejeweled clone. We show that manipulating success perception through leaderboards increases the player's perception of competence, autonomy, presence, enjoyment, and positive affect over manipulated failure. In addition, displaying the score enhances the effect on positive affect, autonomy and enjoyment, while not increasing detectability.

Research on sexism in digital games has suggested that women self-select out of playing sexist games; however, assuming a homogenous gender-based response does not account for the diversity of identities within a gender group. Gender-incongruent responses to recent events like #gamergate implies that the gender of the participant is not paramount to experience, but that their beliefs about gender roles are. To explore the role of sexist beliefs on experience in sexist games, we created three versions of a game that were identical except for the presence of sexist imagery and/or dialogue. We show that enjoyment of sexist games is not predicted by player gender, but by the player's pre-existing beliefs about gender. Furthermore, avatar identification is the pathway through which enjoyment is facilitated. Finally, sexist dialogue does not improve the play experience for anyone - rather it harms experience for players of all genders who do not hold sexist beliefs.

In game design, evaluation is important to do early and often; however, evaluating game narratives early in development is an open problem. We don’t know how the evaluation of a game narrative will be affected when it is experienced outside of the context of the game’s mechanics and graphics. In this paper, we test the plausibility of using a text-based narrative prototype, by evaluating player experience and narrative experience in two studies using different game genres. In both studies, we compare the narrative evaluation of low- and high-fidelity graphics, but in study 1 (N=78), we kept interaction mechanics intact, and in study 2 (N=124), we removed game interaction in the text prototype. We observed no significant differences in experiential measures or narrative engagement in either study, indicating that text-based narrative prototypes could be an effective playtesting tool for game studios to integrate into their development cycle early.