User Experience Design for Inexperienced Gamers: GAP - Game Approachability Principles

Game Approachability Principles (GAP) is a set of useful guidelines for game designers to create better tutorials, and new player experiences—especially for the casual gamer. Developing better first learning levels can be a key step to ease the casual gamer into play and to do so proactively—at the conceptual design phase before it is too costly or cumbersome to restructure the tutorials as would be the case later in the development cycle. Thus, Game Approachability, in the context of game development, is defined as making games initially more friendly, fun, immersive, and accessible for those players who have the desire to play, yet do not always follow-through to actually playing the game. GAP has evolved through a series of stages assessing accessibility (NB Approachability and Accessibility are used interchangeably throughout this chapter) as a stand-alone, heuristic-based approach versus one-on-one User Testing. Outcomes suggest potential for GAP as an (1) effective Heuristic Evaluation, (2) adjunct to User Testing, and (3) as a proactive checklist of principles in to conceptually design the new player experience and/or tutorial to increase Game Approachability—for all levels of gamers.