Ooh What's This Button Do?

Abstract

Video games as a system are composed of two component systems: the player and the game. The interaction between these two create specific gameplay experiences which can be described mechanically by player actions and gameplay challenges. We systematically look at potential player actions (as defined by basic cognitive and motor abilities) and gameplay challenges to understand how they relate to each other. We quantify these relationships by the importance of each action to the completion of a challenge. We summarize these relationships in several tables, separated by controller context. From these tables we draw conclusions about areas for novel gameplay, game analysis, and the impact of challenge design on people of differing abilities by examining trends in the data. We end by exploring ways to improve our methodology, refine our data, and other avenues to explore in the future.