Facts about Players - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 85

person, and Piaget himself didn't truly understand exactly when each
stage started and ended down to the day. Consequently, these ele-
ments of human development serve as a blueprint for how humans
learn rather than hard instructions.
While the dates that Piaget specified have been studied rigorously
and often found to be more of a general indicator than an exact num-
ber, this should demonstrate a larger point: age is an important fac-
tor in testing users who play our games. If we don't account for that
individual difference, even down to a few years, there is a multitude of
reasons we could be getting ugly data. Not only do users of different
age groups have different experiences in growing up with (or without)
video games, but there is also an element of psychological develop-
ment that changes as our players age that may make certain things
palatable and others distasteful.
(Experience + Skill)/Challenge = Fun
I won't spend an enormous amount of time on this point, as it is
almost always included, in some incarnation, in the text of people's
entry interviews. Prior experience in game playership plays an enor-
mous role in future enjoyment of games. When completing my Ph.D.,
I made certain to seek out people who had never before played a game
so that I could be sure that their schemata for games were nonexistent.
For example, if we attempt to create three or four different tutorial
methods with the intention of testing them between players, experi-
ence is a necessary interrogation in any entry interview. Imagine, for
example, that one tutorial treatment, through random selection, was
assigned a group of people who had extensive history playing games.
It would appear in data as though this group was amazingly more suc-
cessful than the others were, and the logical assertion from that would
be that this tutorial was better than all the others were in some way.
Unfortunately, tainted data like this are worse than nothing. A good
principle to remember is poor data are worse than no data.
Again, since this is an area of game testing that is rather well
developed—companies tend to interrogate the previous play expe-
riences of their testers before recruiting them—I won't spend too
much space beating a dead horse. One thing I would like to elucidate,
though, is the importance of recognizing whether experiences with