COMPARING BREAK TYPES FOR SPACED PRACTICE IN A PLATFORMER GAME

Abstract

The progressive development of in-game skills is important to both game players and designers. Players want to get better at games, while designers want to understand and support player progress. These goals align as skill development leads to heightened player performance, which is associated with positive player experiences. When players gain skill at a consistent pace, they tend to enjoy the game more. One promising area of research relates to the spaced practice effect (i.e., taking intentional breaks between periods of doing an activity). Spaced practice has been shown to improve skills in domains unrelated to digital games, such as athletics, and learning. Spaced practice refers to taking consistent breaks between periods of doing an activity. While there is some research into the area of spaced practice in games, it is unclear if the benefits of spaced practice apply in complex games that combine several skills and elements. If the goal of players and designers is to increase the overall quality of the player experience, there are also several issues with forcing the player to take breaks. For example, most players do not like gameplay sessions being interrupted. Taking breaks serves as an interruption to gameplay, and could potentially hinder the player experience. However, games often contain some natural rest periods—if breaks were implemented into the gameplay itself, players may be able to benefit from the spaced practice effect and not have their game interrupted. Some ecologically valid break-like activities are already present in games that could allow for spaced practice (e.g., cutscenes, mini-games, leaderboards, loading screens). Before designers can implement activities as breaks for spaced practice, we first need to know whether engaging with these activities as breaks reduces the benefits of spaced practice. We built a custom 2D platform game in which a player controlled avatar can wall-jump, swing, via a grapple hook and double-jump through an obstacle course. This game was used as the core gameplay activity in two experiments—one to test if spaced practice improves performance in a complex game, and another to determine how spaced practice is affected by the choice of in-game break activity. Through these experiments, we evidence that spaced practice significantly improves skill development in a complex platformer game; that spaced practice is effective across several types of ecologically-valid break activities; and that the use of short breaks does not subvert flow states during play. This supports that the use of spaced practice in games is beneficial. We further contribute some design guidelines for how to implement break activities.