The learnability of video game tutorials: Heuristic evaluation of God of War and Little Big Planet 3
Rinne, Niko (2026)
2026
Monikielisen viestinnän ja käännöstieteen maisteriohjelma - Master's Programme in Multilingual Communication and Translation Studies
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2026-05-04
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202604304766
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202604304766
Tiivistelmä
The aim of this thesis was to study the tutorials of two video games, God of War and Little Big Planet 3, to find if they contained learnability issues and if so, what kinds of issues they were. Additionally, this thesis aimed to draw conclusions from the results about whether the intended target audience of the game affected the learnability issues found.
The two video games studied have different intended target audiences, with God of War intended for adults over 18 years of age, while Little Big Planet 3 is aimed at children over 7 years old. The tutorial levels of each game were played on a PlayStation 5 console, and every instructional message shown in them was collected to a separate spreadsheet.
The main theories used in the thesis are connected to learning in video games (Gee, 2005; Prensky, 2007), usability (Nielsen, 1993), and multimedia learning (Mayer, 2021). The method chosen for the thesis was a heuristic evaluation. The heuristics list was based on the theoretical background and prior heuristics lists by Nielsen (1993), van der Meij and Carroll (1995), and Desurvire and Wiberg (2009). The learnability heuristics list used consists of 9 learnability heuristics.
The number of learnability issues found was similar in both games. The nature of the issues was also
similar, but the most frequent issue was different in both games, which is something that could be deduced to be a result of the target audiences’ influence. In God of War, the most frequent issues are connected to the screen layout burdening the player’s cognition, while in Little Big Planet 3, the most frequent issues result from the playful tone and environment of the game. A heuristic evaluation proved to be a suitable method to find learnability issues from the games, but attention needs to be paid to the selection of the heuristics in the list in future studies, so that they study the intended phenomenon as precisely as possible.
The two video games studied have different intended target audiences, with God of War intended for adults over 18 years of age, while Little Big Planet 3 is aimed at children over 7 years old. The tutorial levels of each game were played on a PlayStation 5 console, and every instructional message shown in them was collected to a separate spreadsheet.
The main theories used in the thesis are connected to learning in video games (Gee, 2005; Prensky, 2007), usability (Nielsen, 1993), and multimedia learning (Mayer, 2021). The method chosen for the thesis was a heuristic evaluation. The heuristics list was based on the theoretical background and prior heuristics lists by Nielsen (1993), van der Meij and Carroll (1995), and Desurvire and Wiberg (2009). The learnability heuristics list used consists of 9 learnability heuristics.
The number of learnability issues found was similar in both games. The nature of the issues was also
similar, but the most frequent issue was different in both games, which is something that could be deduced to be a result of the target audiences’ influence. In God of War, the most frequent issues are connected to the screen layout burdening the player’s cognition, while in Little Big Planet 3, the most frequent issues result from the playful tone and environment of the game. A heuristic evaluation proved to be a suitable method to find learnability issues from the games, but attention needs to be paid to the selection of the heuristics in the list in future studies, so that they study the intended phenomenon as precisely as possible.