An Empirical Model of Software Playability

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate through empirical research that ISO/IEC 25000 Series SQuaRE and other existing software quality models, particularly those related to usability, are not suitable for special software products such as game software. Through the survey of university students in China, it shows that attribute such as Joy, Stimulus, and Novelty, are not included in the existing usability or playability models. However, these attributes are the most vital attributes of playability. In this paper, the usability and playability of software products are defined respectively as ‘how good the software is for using or playing’, or ‘how good it is to be used or played'. Since playing is a special form of using, so, playability is considered as a special type of usability. Other examples of using include working and studying. The empirical evidence in this paper demonstrates the usability in ISO/IEC 25000 Series SQuaRE is specialized for measuring how good the business application software can be for performing specific predefined tasks and to what extent. That is, if this deduction is correct, the usability of ISO/IEC 25000 Series SQuaRE is specialized for working, a special type of using, which is equivalent to workability. These discussions suggest that it may be impossible to develop a scale to measure the usability of all software. This means that to develop a scale of usability or playability with sufficient validity and reliability for practitioners to use, the software must be well segregated enough, and a separate measure must be developed for each type in detail.