Testing Playability in games

I'm reading this 2002 study titled Playability in Action Videogames: A Qualitative Design Model by Fabricatore, Nussbaum and Rosas. They studied 53 male Chilieans and their video game design imperatives. I'm reading it for my qualititative research class.

What I like about the study:

• presented a good model for studying playability


• methods were clear, stayed faithful to the grounded theory approach


• allowed the user to determine relationships through their words


• used a variety of methods observation, focus groups, interviews, audio recordings

What I don't like about the study:

• all male, women have different preferences


• doesn't say when the study was conducted


• action games have many nuances how generalizable is this


• didn't publish the list of games so we could get a sense of how representative they were of the genre


• didn't provide much raw data, just the conclusions and their relationships


• didn't provide relationships between categories


• said the study complemented other research. It didn't identify differences or explain contradictions if any


• study said that Lepper and Malon was not relevant to entertainment games did they find anything surprisingly different


• they didn't state their own bias or opinion only at the end do you find out he was a professional game developer

I will link my paper here on Wednesay when it is done.