Making Sense of a Game : A look into Tutorials and Character Mechanics

Abstract: This paper researches how information in game tutorials can be retained by the player. We use a teach-back framework to see what information the participants’ retained. The purpose of this study is to understand how a video game can communicate vital information about character mechanics and rules with the help of tutorials integrated through level design. This qualitative study was conducted with 15 participants, they played through a Third-Person Action Platformer game which the authors created for this study. The participants were all experienced in this game genre for the sake of the results’ consistency. The results showed that the most effective method is the one that presented most text and restricted player freedom, that being said it is not the preferred method by the participants. This resulted in suggestions that differed from what is presented to them, some of them including demonstrations in the game world and even some audio elements that could be implemented instead of having a text-based tutorial.