Facilitating evaluation support for serious games

This paper describes the evaluation asset, which is a tool that supports the evaluation of applied games. The overall goal is to provide a modular approach to game evaluation that can easily be applied and integrated by game developers in their game projects. The idea of this asset is to utilise game-based user data and translate it into meaningful information about the quality of a game. This asset has added value for various stakeholders – developers, who get an instrument to easily evaluate their software, training providers, who get information about the pedagogical value of games, and the players, who are enabled to provide quick feedback without distraction. Relevant related work from the field of learning and game analytics is summarised. The technical implementation of the asset consists in a client-side and a server-side component for collecting and pre-processing interaction data from games. This data is then analysed in terms of meaningful evaluation variables on which automatic reports and visualisations can be retrieved. The evaluation asset comes with configurable evaluation metrics for translating the data into meaningful information about aspects on usability and game experience. In addition, the evaluation asset may be linked to other assets, to make use of their data for additional information on the quality of a game. The technical implementation of the asset is described, as well as its integration and application in the context of a game. The evaluation asset, as an evaluation instrument complementing more traditional techniques (e.g. questionnaires), will be incorporated in the applied games developed in RAGE and applied in the context of the pilot studies.