The workshop is scheduled as a 2-day workshop held at Austin, Texas; co-located with ACM CHI May 5-6, 2012. The workshop is intended to be a gathering of current game user experience practitioners and researchers. The goal of the workshop is to expand our knowledge of the different methodologies currently in practice within the area of games user research as well as the utility and drawbacks of the different methodologies in evaluating game design issues or gaining insight about the players’ experience. The outcome of the workshop will be a collection of lessons from the trenches and commonly used techniques published in a wiki-style forum publicly available. This will extend the discussion of topics beyond the workshop, and serve as a platform for future use.

As we engage in user experience research, we make many experimental design decisions, lay out the conditions or issues we want to explore, select methods that can evaluate or measure the variables we identified and can generate useful data or insights – in the hope that such research can lead to a better understanding of player experience and uncover game design issues. In this workshop, we will attempt to share knowledge on all these steps or methods by bringing together the community and initiate the dialogue focused on these two problems of (a) better understanding of player experience and (b) uncovering game design issues.