Adaptive Tutorials for ESports Games
Lead Research Organisation:
University of York
Department Name: Computer Science
Abstract
Within the past few years, eSports-organized competitive video gaming has grown rapidly as cultural phenomenon and industry. ESports titles like League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2 or Hearthstone are the most viewed games on Twitch, with a combined total of 194.8 million hours watched in July 2016.
Due to this wide exposure, eSports games attract many new players everyday, and the industry is actively concerned with broadening its player base. However, a majority of eSports tutorials are quite rudimentary, only teaching the basic controls and the rules of different game modes. Due to the complexity of eSports games (both mechanically and strategically), such basic tutorials may leave new players frustrated and under-prepared to enjoy play.
Beyond eSports, tutorials are an essential design aspect of all games, helping players to understand and thus, enjoy the game. Despite their importance, there are few established best practices for tutorial design, particular when it comes to teaching more complex game skills that relate to open, emergent not pre-scripted gameplay.
One promising approach to teaching complex skills for emergent gameplay are adaptive tutorials as they don't rely on pre-scripting. Whilst, in educational software, adaptive tutors and tutorials has seen considerable advances, they have not yet reached the games industry. Research on adaptive tutorials gaming has chiefly focused on difficulty balancing. Rather than making a smarter tutorial that helps novices improve their performance, such systems level the game to the player's skill, in effect hindering not helping them improve their game performance.
This project explores how to design enjoyable and effective adaptive tutorials for complex game skills. It focuses on eSports in particular since they cover a broad range of player skills and game mechanics and provide vast amounts of ready metrics and data from which to analyse player interest and skill. The resulting adaptive tutorial systems and design guidelines would be of great value not just for eSports, entertainment games, and games for education: outside of the games industry, tutorials are used in educational, productivity, and creativity support software which would all benefit from improved tutorials.
Due to this wide exposure, eSports games attract many new players everyday, and the industry is actively concerned with broadening its player base. However, a majority of eSports tutorials are quite rudimentary, only teaching the basic controls and the rules of different game modes. Due to the complexity of eSports games (both mechanically and strategically), such basic tutorials may leave new players frustrated and under-prepared to enjoy play.
Beyond eSports, tutorials are an essential design aspect of all games, helping players to understand and thus, enjoy the game. Despite their importance, there are few established best practices for tutorial design, particular when it comes to teaching more complex game skills that relate to open, emergent not pre-scripted gameplay.
One promising approach to teaching complex skills for emergent gameplay are adaptive tutorials as they don't rely on pre-scripting. Whilst, in educational software, adaptive tutors and tutorials has seen considerable advances, they have not yet reached the games industry. Research on adaptive tutorials gaming has chiefly focused on difficulty balancing. Rather than making a smarter tutorial that helps novices improve their performance, such systems level the game to the player's skill, in effect hindering not helping them improve their game performance.
This project explores how to design enjoyable and effective adaptive tutorials for complex game skills. It focuses on eSports in particular since they cover a broad range of player skills and game mechanics and provide vast amounts of ready metrics and data from which to analyse player interest and skill. The resulting adaptive tutorial systems and design guidelines would be of great value not just for eSports, entertainment games, and games for education: outside of the games industry, tutorials are used in educational, productivity, and creativity support software which would all benefit from improved tutorials.
Planned Impact
The IGGI Centre for Doctoral Training will impact upon:
The Digital Games Industry: IGGI will inject a substantial cohort of 55+ PhD graduates and a wide range of academic research leaders with direct experience of research collaboration with the UK digital games industry. Although large, the UK games industry is fragmented and geographically dispersed, consisting primarily of SMEs. Increasing skill levels and injecting research advances in such a community is best achieved through employment of and engagement with creative and entrepreneurial PhD graduates with good communication skills, and through stable long-term government-funded collaborative projects which offer the opportunity for research engagement at a time to suit the business cycles of games industry partners. IGGI offers the opportunity for a step change, yielding increased profits through an internationally distinctive UK games industry which is technologically advanced and research-aware. The financial barriers to starting a company in this area are low and many IGGI graduates will start their own games businesses, mentored by experienced investors and entrepreneurs, significantly increasing their chances of creating a successful games enterprise. Data mining tools developed during IGGI will allow increased understanding of game players, which can increase profitability of mainstream games.
Parents, Game Players and Wider Society: Large and growing numbers of people are playing digital games with unprecedented enthusiasm. In a recent Forbes magazine article it was suggested that, by the age of 21, the typical child has played an average of 10,000 hours of digital games. Creating games which engage a wider range of players and which increase the social and scientific value obtained through playing games can have massive benefits: both economic ones and ones which harness the massive "cognitive surplus" implied by game players who are clocking up thousands of game hours. The potential benefits here are cultural (e.g. to raise awareness in important areas such as environmental change), scientific (e.g. to conduct experiments which use artificial economies to test economic theory), social (e.g. to educate children about science) and therapeutic (e.g. to use games to increase mobility in the elderly).
Scientists: Gameplay data can provide information about human behaviour and preference on a massive scale - this provides a major new experimental tool for researchers in Economics, Ecology/Biology, Computer Science, Psychology, Mathematics, Media and others. The very recent announcement (20th June) of a proposed call in the EU Horizon 2020 research funding programme on "Advanced digital gaming/gamification technologies" underlines how much the EU values this area and the opportunities for pan-European research in games and sustainability for IGGI.
IGGI Graduates and Supervisors: Digital games are already a major attractor to computer science and digital media courses. IGGI will provide a beacon for innovation in digital games, with heavy competition for PhD places allowing recruitment of top students. For each IGGI graduate, learning and conducting research alongside a strong cohort of students with related but different interests and expertise, with extensive interaction with industry, will give rise to a highly rounded and employable PhD graduate, who will be highly sought by both UK games industry and the growing games research community. Supervisors will gain knowledge at the cutting edge of games and gamification research.
Through the CDT, IGGI investigators, supervisors and students will become well versed in the issues and techniques of the digital games industry, developing a long-term understanding which will, we believe, result in a stronger digital games industry, a wealth of fascinating new research questions, and real benefits for wider society through the now-ubiquitous medium of digital games.
The Digital Games Industry: IGGI will inject a substantial cohort of 55+ PhD graduates and a wide range of academic research leaders with direct experience of research collaboration with the UK digital games industry. Although large, the UK games industry is fragmented and geographically dispersed, consisting primarily of SMEs. Increasing skill levels and injecting research advances in such a community is best achieved through employment of and engagement with creative and entrepreneurial PhD graduates with good communication skills, and through stable long-term government-funded collaborative projects which offer the opportunity for research engagement at a time to suit the business cycles of games industry partners. IGGI offers the opportunity for a step change, yielding increased profits through an internationally distinctive UK games industry which is technologically advanced and research-aware. The financial barriers to starting a company in this area are low and many IGGI graduates will start their own games businesses, mentored by experienced investors and entrepreneurs, significantly increasing their chances of creating a successful games enterprise. Data mining tools developed during IGGI will allow increased understanding of game players, which can increase profitability of mainstream games.
Parents, Game Players and Wider Society: Large and growing numbers of people are playing digital games with unprecedented enthusiasm. In a recent Forbes magazine article it was suggested that, by the age of 21, the typical child has played an average of 10,000 hours of digital games. Creating games which engage a wider range of players and which increase the social and scientific value obtained through playing games can have massive benefits: both economic ones and ones which harness the massive "cognitive surplus" implied by game players who are clocking up thousands of game hours. The potential benefits here are cultural (e.g. to raise awareness in important areas such as environmental change), scientific (e.g. to conduct experiments which use artificial economies to test economic theory), social (e.g. to educate children about science) and therapeutic (e.g. to use games to increase mobility in the elderly).
Scientists: Gameplay data can provide information about human behaviour and preference on a massive scale - this provides a major new experimental tool for researchers in Economics, Ecology/Biology, Computer Science, Psychology, Mathematics, Media and others. The very recent announcement (20th June) of a proposed call in the EU Horizon 2020 research funding programme on "Advanced digital gaming/gamification technologies" underlines how much the EU values this area and the opportunities for pan-European research in games and sustainability for IGGI.
IGGI Graduates and Supervisors: Digital games are already a major attractor to computer science and digital media courses. IGGI will provide a beacon for innovation in digital games, with heavy competition for PhD places allowing recruitment of top students. For each IGGI graduate, learning and conducting research alongside a strong cohort of students with related but different interests and expertise, with extensive interaction with industry, will give rise to a highly rounded and employable PhD graduate, who will be highly sought by both UK games industry and the growing games research community. Supervisors will gain knowledge at the cutting edge of games and gamification research.
Through the CDT, IGGI investigators, supervisors and students will become well versed in the issues and techniques of the digital games industry, developing a long-term understanding which will, we believe, result in a stronger digital games industry, a wealth of fascinating new research questions, and real benefits for wider society through the now-ubiquitous medium of digital games.
