Player experience in FPS games

Abstract

Player Experience in the field of games is crucial to the design of contemporary games. Gaining insight into how different players from different backgrounds react to challenges and level design can save valuable time and effort during the creation process of a game. With the tools available today, we can employ a variety of data mining techniques which assists in achieving a number of different goals. In this thesis, player experience is studied with respect to games of the First-Person Shooter genre. By means of the open source game Cube 2, levels were created with the purpose of gathering feedback from participants. Using a combination of a comparative rank feedback systems and gameplay-logging techniques, data was analyzed by utilizing three different analytical methods. This analysis provided information regarding the validity of using the techniques deployed in this thesis in order to understand player experience.