Improving Engagement Assessment in Gameplay Testing Sessions using IoT Sensors

Abstract

The video game industry is a multimillionaire market, which makes solo indie developers millionaire in one day. However, success in the game industry is not a coincidence. Video game development is an unusual kind of software that mix multidisciplinary teams: software engineers, designers, and artists. Also, for a video game to become popular, it must be fun and polished: exhaustively well tested. Testing in video game development encompasses different types of tests at different moments of the development process. In particular, assessing the players' gameplay in a test session can drive the development drastically. The designers analyze the players' actions and behaviour in the game. They can then decide if a feature/level requires rework. They often spend many man/work hours reworking a feature just because it is not engaging. As the designers (usually) assess the gameplay session by hand, they cannot be sure that a specific feature is engaging enough. They would benefit from meaningful data that would help them better assess the gameplay and take the decision to keep, rework, or remove a feature. Consequently, we describe the need for an IoT framework to assess players' gameplay using IoT sensors together with game devices which will produce a rich output for the game designers.