Evaluating Interactive Entertainment using Breakdown: Understanding Embodied Learning in Video Games

Abstract

This paper describes evaluating interactive entertainment by understanding embodied learning in games, which is a perspective that situates the learning that a player must go through to play a game in a skill-based environment.Our goal was to arrive at a tool for designers to improve learnability from this perspective.To study embodied learning, we use the concept of breakdown, which happens when our experience fails to aid our everyday actions and decision-making.We conducted a study to investigate learning in games from which we constructed a framework of 17 patterns of breakdown and a set of guidelines to aid heuristic evaluation of video games and to help designers support breakdown in interactions, which support players' learning, so that they do not become breakdowns in illusion, which break players' immersion [19].