Knowledge and Experience in Video Game Play: Understanding Individual Differences and Mental Model Transfer Across Game Genres

Abstract

Research suggests that a variety of factors can alter video game play-from usability to aesthetics to expertise. An important developing area for human factors research is understanding how individual differences may influence interactions with video games, but the field lacks adequate methods for evaluating and classifying differences. This paper provides a notional framework for characterizing one critical individual difference in video game play, that of knowledge differences arising from player experience. This framework attends to common video game genres and mechanics and is illustrated using two distinct video games: Minecraft and Ark. The purpose is to highlight the sorts of knowledge making up player mental models and show how to identify the form of transferable individual differences that can be measured and improve research on video game development and use.