Player Experience (PX) in video games is a multifaceted construct encompassing affective, perceived, and subjective dimensions. While extensively explored in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and games user research studies, the practical evaluation of PX, especially concerning audio elements, remains challenging. This paper presents a Literature Review (LR) (n=26), which addresses the gap in the literature related to audio in PX evaluation, unveiling trends and issues. We used Creswell's methodology for LR, exploring three major research questions that investigate the approaches, instruments, and methodologies used to evaluate audio in digital games, the constructs of player experience related to audio assessment, and the challenges faced by researchers in this context. Our findings underscores challenges in the generalization of study outcomes, audio personalization and variation and audio-games evaluation. This work strives to bridge the gap between research and practice, fostering a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between audio and PX in games.

Video games have become an important aspect of modern culture, especially with the widespread use of mobile devices. Thus, it is important that video games are accessible to all people, but colorblind players are still affected by the use of colors in game interfaces. Some challenges of developing chromatically accessible games are the limited availability of colorblind test subjects and the importance of identifying and considering accessibility threats even in the early stages of development. Thus, digital simulations emerge as possible tools to increase accessibility and awareness. In this paper, we conducted three empirical studies that seek to verify the relationship between the identification of color accessibility problems by people with typical color vision using simulations and people with color blindness, in the context of mobile games. Results indicate concrete uses in which color blindness simulations give advantages to developers with typical vision in identifying chromatic accessibility issues in their games. Additionally, we discuss different possibilities for incorporating simulation tools, accessibility guidelines, and colorblind user participation into a realistic game design life cycle. We also discuss how the incorporation of simulation tools could be beneficial to foment the discussion of accessibility in game design studios.

The Human-Computer Interaction community worked over the last years on scoping and defining User Experience (UX). As reported in the literature, UX’s understanding changes according to the socio-cultural context and between professional positions, making a global consensus unattainable. Nevertheless, tracking and investigating the most accepted UX definitions and statements may be advantageous for visualizing multiple contexts’ needs. Such an investigation is still scarce and even more significant in developing countries since there are structural differences from developed countries in the software development industry that directly impact user research practices. To fill in this gap, we replicated in Brazil a survey distributed before, mostly among professionals from developed countries. We compared 252 responses from academics and practitioners and identified differences and similarities among Brazilian and international communities. The definitions of UX chosen by the academic and industrial domains explain differences in UX design and evaluation. When comparing Brazilians’ responses with previous studies, Brazilians give greater importance to qualitative measures and to different UX time spans.

The User Engagement Scale (UES) is a self-reported attitude scale broadly used in user research to measure their engagement with interactive systems, such as digital games and applications. The present work presents a translation of UES to the Portuguese language and its cultural adaptation to the Brazilian context. We followed five steps for the cross-cultural adaptation process: Translation, Synthesis, Back translation, Expert committee review, and Pretesting. Seeking to assure that the translated version is equivalent to the original in terms of metrics and semantics, we run tests on two data sets collected from 432 users' past experiences. As expected, T-tests for independent samples demonstrated that UES-Br provides significantly higher engagement experiences than scores for non-engaging experiences. An exploratory factor analysis indicated that most items were strongly correlated to the main factor (Engagement), showing a single underlying factor for all items. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis suggests that the original four-factor model provided an adequate fit to the data collected with UES-Br. The translation also demonstrated evidence of validity and reliability. This paper contributes to the global player- and human-computer interaction knowledge by enabling the Portuguese-speaking community to use a validated tool already established for native English speakers.

Software engineers are traditionally concerned with performance and capabilities of mobile applications, while Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) approaches remain underused in many cases of industry everyday practice, especially in smaller companies, running on a tight schedule.