A Study On User Experience Of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games

In recent years, the development of online games is in full swing. In game industry, the people have always been committed to develope better games, but these work are often caught in the wrong direction, the product is not designed on people, which makes a lot of negative impact on player experience. While with the development of HCI, people began to pay more attention to the study of interactive electronic entertainment products and try to use HCI theory and methods to improve the user experience and the competitiveness of their products in the market.In China, Most game companies focus on the market and technical inputs only and this has resulted in poor user experience on game products. With MMORPG as the research object, UCD theory and methods are adopted in this thesis. User experience issues in Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) are studied with game playability as the breakthrough point, and then user experience design guidelines are put forward according to the results. In the course of the study, while also exploring how to let general UCD theory and methods applied to game products evaluation well.During this research, we first used the Literature review and Interview methods to investigate the background information of MMORPG and its gamers, then select number of representative games to do heuristic evaluation and usability testing as laboratory studies. Heuristic evaluation focus on finding problems, in addition to usability testing found users experience problems, it can be user behavior data. Through the collation and analysis of the gained data (both qualitative and quantitative), we summed up MMORPG user experience status and the corresponding design guidelines. Among them, user experience status including the requirement analysis of user experience, the investigation of user behaviors and user experience problems existed in games. Guidelines including the detailed terms of game design that can be used to guide the design of user experience.This thesis made useful exploration for UCD theory and methods used in the development of game products, and also laid the groundwork of a more in-depth user...