Investigating the Effect of Scaffolding in Modern Game Design

Nowadays, game developers are much more focused on providing players with short-term rewards for overcoming challenges than they have been previously. This has resulted in a lot of games having more scaffolding to teach the players what to do, so they don’t quit the games in frustration of not knowing what to do.

This paper investigates the effects that scaffolding in games has on players’ experience of a game. To this end, a custom game was designed and implemented that contained a number of different scenarios with different types of scaffolding. This was used to conduct an experiment on 18 participants, measuring their experience with the scenarios they were tasked with completing. It turned out that participants overall found the scenarios with subtler scaffolding more interesting than the ones with text based scaffolding or no scaffolding at all. Additionally, they felt better about completing the scenarios that did not make use of scaffolding.