You grab your popcorn and drinks and, with your friends in tow, sit down for a relaxing two hours immersing yourself in the sights and sounds of the latest blockbuster movie.

Through the movie’s website you are familiar with the characters and their role in the film, but you’re unprepared for the events that unfold. Different intertwining plots result in many loose ends that you expect to be resolved by the end, but your thirst remains unquenched as only a few plots find their end. The remaining plots hint at a sequel, but there are too many questions that remain unanswered and you wonder if you missed some of the endings. You search online on forums and blogs, only to find that you’re not alone in being left dumbfounded, and many start coming up with their own suggestions as to their conclusion.

A fortnight later, a game is available on your digital game shop, featuring the main characters involved in some of the secondary plots left pending. The thirsty fans of the film fully engage with the game and find their own ending to the unresolved issues, playing as sidekicks to the film characters, or maybe as their rivals in a totally different angle to the story.

Yet the events of the film dictate the context within which this new story unravels, using motifs, symbols and language that are consistent with those of the movie. This is transmedia storytelling, where digital games have a special role to play due to their unique interactive nature: the audience is not just passively watching but actively participating in the outcome. Beyond film merchandise and toys, engaging games require an effort to play and set challenges to be overcome.

In transmedia storytelling, the story is told in separate independent parts which are however consistent with each other: you do not need to read all the parts to understand each one, but each one enriches the others with further detail and explanations. So, just like a sequel to a film, the game has to be consistent in terms of visuals, actions and plot with the main experience within which the audience is first exposed to the story.

To achieve such a level of coherency, a game designer is given constraints that indirectly impact the expected gameplay. Unlike a sequel to a film, the game is developed in parallel with the film, thus providing little tangible reference material and making interpretation of the set constraints very difficult. With no direct measurement of game design available, it is more difficult to gauge the quality of a game, most often resorting to the measurement of the user experience facilitated by the game, itself subject to the player’s experience with previous games and stories.

Meanwhile, digital games, which are individualistic in nature, are still being challenged by the socially engaging traditional board games. The latter have undergone a rebirth since the onset of digital games, with heavy boxes full of tokens and cards to reinforce the imagined game world. Thus game designers cannot shrug off as irrelevant any suggestions of using a board game to fulfil the transmedial requirements of a game. They need to be able to compare digital games with board games to justify the former’s better suitability to the needs of the story.

Surprisingly, this comparison was not possible since research of user experience in games flourished in 2004, bypassing board games entirely. Thus there was no way you could measure board game design, let alone compare it to digital games. It is like being able to assess the aesthetics of a photograph but not of an oil painting.

Thus, in order to justify the choice of digital games for a transmedial role, I decided to dedicate my studies to finding a standard instrument that can measure user experience in both digital games and board games, and allow an evaluative comparison between them. Being easier to deploy and gather results, questionnaires are favoured as UX instruments, but finding the right one was not easy: most questionnaires include aspects of a digital interface, such as mouse response and animation effects, as its criteria, which are totally irrelevant to board games.

I chose to address this gap in user experience research for my Masters degree in game design with University of Central Lancashire (UK), which was carried out following the award of an MGSS scholarship in 2012. For my Master’s dissertation a questionnaire that based itself totally on user experience was found and tested. The testing was done on one on one and two on two board game plays to measure user experience due to both game mechanics and social presence. This questionnaire, which had been distilled from the research on digital games user experience, plus consultations with expert digital game designers and focus groups involving digital game players, was found to be a reliable and valid measurement of user experience for board game playing. This questionnaire, namely the games experience questionnaire by Ijsselsteijn et al, can be used to measure and compare user experience of both digital games and board games, and thus be able to justify or not why a digital game can better serve a transmedial role than a board game. Part of this work has already been published in the International Journal of Gaming and Computer Mediated Simulations Vol 6, No 1 in March 2014.

Thus, a game designer can now assess whether a game that is to participate in a transmedial narrative can be best made as a digital game or as a board game, by implementing prototypes of both formats, have participants play them and rate them on the GEQ, and be able to compare the resulting user experience. Moreover, this can allow the target audience, especially fans of the story, to give feedback at an early design stage and thus enhance the quality of the end product, whatever the format.

Jonathan Barbara has an MA in games design and lectures at Saint Martin's Institute of Higher Education.

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