Evaluating player experience for children's outdoor pervasive games

There is a growing body of research in pervasive outdoor gaming, mainly focused on adult players playing games on smart phones. Published evaluations of the player experience in such games are largely based on anecdotal descriptions and post-play surveys. The latter approach is especially challenging to apply when the play test participants are children. Observations of game play so far have been ad hoc relying on unstructured observation, which makes it difficult to extract reliable conclusions from observations and to draw comparisons between different games. In this paper we present two methods developed specifically for evaluating the player experience in children’s outdoor games: the Outdoor Play Observation Scheme (OPOS) and GroupSorter. We discuss their application in three different case studies and conclude that OPOS is useful in quantifying the different types of play behavior in outdoor games; GroupSorter adds qualitative data on the play experience. Moreover, the application of GroupSorter is not limited to game development but can be used for obtaining user input in other context as well.