Learning to Play: How Players Recognize Implicit Guidance in Video Games

By design, an account of how a video game should or could be played is embedded within the game itself. Yet, prior research on learning in games has largely focused on tutorials, mental models, or abstract measures of difficulty, leaving unexplored how players learn to recognize implicit game design features as instructive during actual gameplay. Drawing on video recordings of streamers’ first playthroughs of Cuphead and an ethnomethodologically informed analysis, we show that the recognizability of game elements as instructive is shaped by the temporal demands of multitasking, ever-changing relations between environmental cues, and local histories of failure. Our findings demonstrate that learning game mechanics is intrinsically connected with players’ practical organization of seeing. Building on these insights, we propose four forms of ambiguity as design resources for supporting learnability in video games and other systems that rely on learning-by-doing.