One of the key challenges of video game design is teaching new players how to play. Although game developers frequently use tutorials to teach game mechanics, little is known about how tutorials affect game learnability and player engagement. Seeking to estimate this value, we implemented eight tutorial designs in three video games of varying complexity and evaluated their effects on player engagement and retention. The results of our multivariate study of over 45,000 players show that the usefulness of tutorials depends greatly on game complexity. Although tutorials increased play time by as much as 29% in the most complex game, they did not significantly improve player engagement in the two simpler games. Our results suggest that investment in tutorials may not be justified for games with mechanics that can be discovered through experimentation.

Game designers frequently invest in aesthetic improvements such as music, sound effects, and animations. However, their exact value for attracting and retaining players remains unclear. Seeking to estimate this value in two popular Flash games, we conducted a series of large-scale A/B tests in which we selectively removed aesthetic improvements and examined the effect of each component on play time, progress, and return rate. We found that music and sound effects had little or no effect on player retention in either game, while animations caused users to play more. We also found, counterintuitively, that optional rewards caused players to play less in both games. In one game, this gameplay modification affected play time three times as much as the largest aesthetic variation. Our methodology provides a way to determine where resources may be best spent during the game design and development process.

Analysis of gameplay data is crucial for evaluating design decisions and refining a game experience. However, identifying player strategies and finding areas of confusion is difficult because a designer may not know what queries to ask or what patterns to look for in the data. To make this task easier, we present Playtracer, a method for visually analyzing play traces that is independent of a specific game's structure. Playtracer applies multidimensional scaling to cluster players and game states, providing a detailed visual representation of the paths the players take through a game. We evaluate our method by analyzing an educational puzzle game and highlighting common hypotheses, pitfalls, confusing elements, and anomalies. Our results suggest that Playtracer can be an effective tool for game analysis and improvement.

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Creating game content requires balancing design considerations at multiple scales: each level requires effort and iteration to produce, and broad-scale constraints such as the order in which game concepts are introduced must be respected. Game designers currently create informal plans for how the game's levels will fit together, but they rarely keep these plans up-to-date when levels change during iteration and testing. This leads to violations of constraints and makes changing the high-level plans expensive. To address these problems, we explore the creation of mixed-initiative game progression authoring tools which explicitly model broad-scale design considerations. These tools let the designer specify constraints on progressions, and keep the plan synchronized when levels are edited. This enables the designer to move between broad and narrow-scale editing and allows for automatic detection of problems caused by edits to levels. We further leverage advances in procedural content generation to help the designer rapidly explore and test game progressions. We present a prototype implementation of such a tool for our activelydeveloped educational game, Refraction. We also describe how this system could be extended for use in other games and domains, specifically for the domains of math problem sets and interactive programming tutorials.