A Preliminary Study on Heuristics for Mobile Games

Playtesting and expert evaluation methods are common these days to evaluate games. In order to find out playability problems in mobile games, an evaluation method is needed to evaluate mobile games with a set of playability heuristics. Heuristics evaluation method is good for identifying playability problems deeply but a set of playability heuristics is needed to apply this method. This research is conducted to identify and explore more playability problems in mobile games. It has been reviewed that some of the problems were still unidentified by evaluators when they evaluated the games with present playability heuristics set. In this research some problems were identified from literature analysis and survey results. This research has been conducted by using survey methodology tools (interviews & questionnaire), the questionnaire is divided into 3 sections and it contains 20 questions. 100 questionnaires were distributed among university students and all were returned with positive feedback. The outcome of this research proposed some new playability heuristics for mobile games, in order to identify playability problems. Consequently, these heuristics may help game designers and developers while considering these heuristics during development of mobile games.