Towards Custom Quest Tutorials: Identifying and Addressing Players' Cognitive and Performative Struggles in Games

Challenge is fundamental to creating enjoyable games and maintaining player engagement.However, excessive difficulty can frustrate players and hinder their experience.Therefore, understanding and addressing why players struggle-whether cognitively (understanding objectives) or performatively (executing actions)-can improve player engagement and enhance game design.This research is a work in progress aimed at analyzing gameplay data and player feedback from quests designed to test movement, combat, and crafting mechanics, with the goal of constructing a dataset to provide insights into players' struggles.Using machine learning, we aim to develop a model that detects player struggles in real-time, identifying key factors contributing to these challenges.This model will enable custom quest tutorial interventions triggered when a player experiences difficulties, offering tailored support for gameplay.By providing an approach to identify player struggles, this work can help game designers and developers create personalized experiences.This paper outlines the current state of our research and invites feedback from the community.