Understanding and evaluating cooperative video games

Cooperative design has been an integral part of many digital and table top games since their inception. With the recent success of games like Resident Evil 5 and Left4dead , many video game designers and producers are currently exploring the addition of cooperative patterns within their games. In this thesis, I present two contributions. First, I present a set of cooperative design patterns. This framework can be used by game designers to add co-op content in their games. Second, I present a set of validated performance metrics that can be used to gauge the users' experience in a cooperative game. In this study, we developed the performance metrics. I then applied them to evaluate four commercial cooperative games. I further validated these metrics through a qualitative content analysis method where I investigated the relationship between the metrics derived by our study and the metrics derived by game reviewers.