Until Dawn and its User Learnability

When I was in elementary school, the kids in my class were always after the same books to check out from the library each week. These weren’t just ordinary books to us. We were able to control what happened next in the story. These “Choose Your Own Adventure Books,” published by Bantam Books, was a great way to get kids excited to read, knowing that we were the ones choosing what happened next.

Recently, a group of friends and I discovered how we could choose our own adventure in a more thrilling and interactive way. Until Dawn, a PlayStation 4 video game released on August 25th, 2015, is described as an interactive movie/survival horror videogame. Each decision you make in the game has a butterfly effect and determines what situations the different characters get into and which characters survive until dawn. The game is actually designed as a single player game, but my friends and I all chose different characters within the game that we would control, and handed the controller around when each new character was on the screen.

 

A couple weeks after staying up all night to finish the game, we talked about user learnability in class and how it is important for game designers to think of ways to make new games easy for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time that they encounter the game design. This instantly made me think back to Until Dawn. In the beginning of the game, the game would tell the users how to go about performing tasks. This includes things like giving specific directions on whether they should be pressing X or Y on the controller in order to climb a fence, or instructing the users to not move the controller at all in order to keep their character from drawing attention when they’re supposed to be hiding from someone—it is like the tutorial is built into the first few minutes of the game.

In addition, in the beginning of the game, users are given more time to make their decisions. As the game goes on, the helpful directions are taken away and the time given to make decisions on what the user wants their character to do or say decreases, since by then the user understands how the game works.

 

If you are interested in “choose your own adventure” types of books and games, I definitely recommend checking this game out. I think it is a great game to help us see how game designers attempt to enhance user learnability. I included the trailer link below:

And for those of you who may have also already played it, I’d love to hear what your thoughts on this type of gaming are!

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventurehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_Dawn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventurehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_Dawn