“I didn’t know you could do that” The inexperienced player and tutorials in video games.

Abstract

Games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) like to vaguely explain certain pieces of information to its players, as the players are expected to know them or pick them up organically. Game studies research follows somewhat the same course, as academic studies often expects the reader to be at least somewhat familiar with games and gaming literacy. As a result, the perspective of the inexperienced player is often left behind, even though they could give researchers new insights into games, its mechanics and how games teach its players. This paper presents a textual analysis of the tutorial of (BOTW), to see if there are barriers to entry embedded within the game design for less-experienced players. This analysis is supported with focus group discussions, wherein unexperienced participants played the first hour of BOTW and discussed their difficulties with the game’s way of teaching the player. The analysis showed that although there are no strict barriers to entry embedded within the game mechanics, there are however a lot of moments within this tutorial where the players felt overwhelmed with information and/or confused with what the objective of the game was. Some of the explanations of game mechanics were told at rather irrelevant moments within the game and explanations of rather important mechanics were taken for granted. Finally, even though strictly the analysis of this research is somewhat limited to this (type of) game, the method used in this paper shows a way for analysing a game by both textually analysing the game and the experience of the player.