An Approach to Assess the Impact of Tutorials in Video Games

Abstract

Video games are an established medium that provides interactive entertainment beyond pure enjoyment in many contexts. Game designers create dedicated tutorials to teach players the game mechanisms and rules, such as the conventions for interaction, control schemes, core game mechanics, etc. While effective tutorial design is considered a crucial aspect to support this learning process, the existing literature approaches focus on designing ad hoc tutorials for specific game genres rather than investigating the impact of different tutorial styles on game learnability and player engagement. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by presenting a general-purpose approach aimed at supporting game designers in the identification of the most suitable tutorial style for a specific genre of video games. The approach is evaluated in the context of a simple first-person shooter (FPS) mainstream video game built by the authors through a controlled comparative user experiment involving 46 players.