The development and validation of the game user experience satisfaction scale (GUESS)

Abstract

Since the 1970's, video games have grown to become a ubiquitous form of digital entertainment. As the demand for video games continue to increase, video game developers and designers are facing the difficult task of creating games that are not only enjoyable to play, but marketable in a highly competitive industry. In order to improve the success of commercial video games, some game companies have turned to using a variety of game evaluation methodologies to improve their game's design. The most common form of game evaluation in the video game industry is called playtesting, which involves the players providing feedback about a game after they have played it for a period of time. However, meaningful results are difficult to obtain from a playtesting session without a properly constructed gaming questionnaire or scale. Thus, there is a need for a psychometrically validated, comprehensive, gaming scale that is appropriate for playtesting and game evaluation purposes. Following the current best practices of scale development and validation, this research employed a mixed-methods design that consisted of a five-step plan to develop and validate a new satisfaction scale for gaming. Ass a result, a new instrument measuing video game satisfaction called the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale (GUESS) with nine subscales emerged. In general, the GUESS was demonstrated to have good content validity and internal consistency, as well as satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, the GUESS was developed and validated based on the assessments of over 450 unique video game titles across a number of popular genres (e.g., Role-Playing, Action Adventure). Thus, it can be applied across many types of video games in the industry.