Video Game Tutorials: How Do They Teach?

The subject of my study was looking into learning in games, specifically the ability of a game to teach the necessary information about itself and to keep players engaged to continue with interest. I initially investigated the task of a designer, the issues with players and design of tutorials which led to George Fan’s GDC 2012 talk about his game, Plants vs Zombies.

Fan provided a great insight to the development of his game, focusing on his aims of making it accessible to play for all people, ‘casual’ audiences and notably his own mother. Fan’s presentation brought up 10 key points he suggested which could help improve game tutorials, but they lacked a psychological perspective, the behaviour and response of learners.

Querying Fan’s presentation, the master’s focus was refined, the project was set to research player experiences, investigate and identify the issues behind negative thoughts about game tutorials and early game levels and in comparison to identify why ‘good’ tutorials are successful.
By gathering data from a number of participants their answers can help identify reasons behind positive and negative experiences by looking through a psychological lens, uncovering how they are affected when being taught new information in a game.

The master’s project conducted a qualitative semi-structured interview process to help elicit the information required whilst taking steps to eliminate bias. The benefit of doing an interview was the ability to record the audio of the interviews, with the task of transcribing quotes and notes for the purpose of analyzing later on.

The following is the later part of the master’s in a condensed form, analysing the data received from the interviews.

Analysing the data

10 participants named ‘Participant A-J’ were successfully recorded in interviews answering 10 questions that would require them to provide games with early game levels/tutorials that they approved of and disapproved of, then to specify why.

Other questions were open ‘point of interest’ questions to help identify the participant’s personal preferences when learning in games; how much guidance, what causes disruption, how much to read...
With the data prepared, the analysis was started.

Following a 6 phase plan devised by Braun and Clarke, the method of thematic analysis was used to identify detailed descriptions with the data, which would then be used to help provide a clearer understanding for why people view certain tutorials positively and negatively.

“Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data. It minimally organises and describes your data set in (rich) detail.

…Thematic analysis differs from other analytic methods that seek to describe patterns across qualitative data – such as „thematic‟ discourse analysis, thematic decomposition analysis, IPA and grounded theory.”  (Braun & Clarke, Using thematic analysis in psychology., 2006)

The process led to finding 26 initial codes in the participant response data, to start with they were seperated into 3 groups;

Positive Patterns

Negative Patterns

These following patterns appeared in only the ‘point of interest questions’ data (Questions which were not specifically about positive and negative experiences).