Project Terminus: A study into the effect of branching storylines on replayability
Summary
A comparative study was conducted to determine whether in a narrative-driven game
created for educational purposes the existence of branching story lines has an influence on
its replayability. To this end, three versions of an existing game, Terminus, have been
created. To two of these versions changes to the degree of branching of the story have
been applied. One version was left untouched to make a fair comparison to the base game.
After providing demographic information, the users were each assigned a version of the
game to which they reported their experiences regarding the story line and the number of
times they played each section of the game. The findings suggest that the meaningfulness
of the choices and the branching story lines themselves have no significant effect on the
replayability but the enjoyment of the player, but which chapter was played and the
difficulty level of the chapter did have a positive effect. Further research is warranted to
determine if this is the case for students of the police academy using mobile devices as
well.