Hyper-Intense Interaction Controls Heuristics (HIICH) in RPGs, FPS, TPS genre smartphone Games

Abstract

Hyper-Intense games are characterized by difficult gameplay and highly engaging interaction. These interaction-heavy games often pose extreme complexity for virtual input controls, hence, resulting in difficult interaction, especially in smartphones where the primary input medium is touchscreen. Touchscreen controls lack tactile feedback which hinders playability in genres like First/Third Person Shooter (F/TPS). The lack of context-specific heuristics to evaluate hyper-intense interaction yield usability issues in such games. Using a seven staged methodology, a heuristic set for evaluation of virtual controller is devised; evolved and validated over multiple iterations. The development of the proposed heuristics followed an iterative process, driven by designing a virtual controller within a smartphone game. This is followed by a qualitative analysis and a controlled experiment to compare the effectiveness of proposed heuristics with general heuristics. Findings of the validation stage indicate that the proposed heuristic set (HIICH) is capable to uncover more usability and interaction issues.