The Relationships between Aspects of Playability and Learning Content in Educational Games

The use of games as educational tools is becoming prevalent in and out of classrooms. Among the success factors of educational games is playability, which has been studied but only in general and high-level manners. This study tries to delve deeper into educational game playability by investigating its relationships with aspects of learning content. We experimented with an educational game whose learning content consisted of lessons belonging to three topics. The topics were related to informatics and differed in familiarity, comprehensibility, and memorability aspects. The game's playability consisted of five aspects: learnability, user interfaces, in-game goals, information presentation, and control scheme. The game was playtested by first-year informatics students, who afterward reported their playing and learning experiences through a questionnaire. We then conducted correlation tests and analysis on the questionnaire responses, which resulted in several interesting findings. Among the findings are (1) optimum playability is achieved when the three learning content aspects are satisfied, and (2) assuring the learnability aspect is crucial to the player's learning process. Lastly, we combine the findings from the correlation analysis and the players' critiques and suggestions to propose general principles for optimum playability in educational games.