Abstract
The purpose of video game tutorials is to help players easily understand new game mechanics and thereby facilitate chances of early engagement with the main contents of one’s game. The mobile game market (i.e., phones and tablets) faces important retention issues caused by a high number of players who abandon games permanently within 24 h of downloading them. A laboratory experiment with 40 players tested how tutorial presence and player expertise impact on users’ psychophysiological states and continuous-use intentions (CUIs). The results suggest that in a simple game context, tutorials have a positive impact on non-expert players’ perceived state of flow and have no effect on expert players’ perceived flow. The results also suggest that flow has a positive impact on CUIs for both experts and non-experts. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of these results are discussed.
Highlights
The mobile game industry is currently facing retention issues with 61% of customers deleting the game within 24 h of having downloaded it [1]
Their main finding is that tutorials drive engagement in more complex games as compared to games characterized by “mechanics that can be discovered through experimentation”, i.e., simple games [4]
These relatively high values were similar to those obtained by Kivikangas [26] who conducted an experiment using a video game as a stimuli
Summary
The mobile game industry is currently facing retention issues with 61% of customers deleting the game within 24 h of having downloaded it [1]. Only Andersen et al [4] have explored the need for tutorials in the gaming context. Their main finding is that tutorials drive engagement in more complex games as compared to games characterized by “mechanics that can be discovered through experimentation (experiential learning)”, i.e., simple games [4]. Playtime increased by 29% when a tutorial introduced the most complex game as compared to no tutorial Their results did not support any significant effect of tutorials for simple games.
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