Touch and play? Investigating the value of touchscreens for gamer experience

Touchscreens - mobile phones, tablets, phablets, laptops - are now omnipresent. They are increasingly used as a gaming platform: puzzle games, role play games and first-person shooters are just some of the genres to have appeared on this platform. Despite this, there is only limited research on the particular value of touchscreens for gamer experience. This paper discusses a raft of experiments designed to explore this issue. We compared games played on touchscreen, with the same games played on two other platforms: console and PC. We measured three dependent variables related to gamer experience: ease of controls, ease of task completion, and satisfaction. We found that the value of touchscreens for gamer experience depends on the interaction of three factors: characteristics of players (their gaming background and preferences); types of games (their genre and design); and platform (their controls and affordances). We discuss how these interactions can be further understood and explored, and lay out a set of sensitivities and hazards to inform the future design of touchscreen games.