Project Terminus: A study into the effect of branching storylines on replayability

Abstract

A comparative study was conducted to determine whether in a narrative-driven game created for educational purposes the existence of branching story lines has an influence on its replayability. To this end, three versions of an existing game, Terminus, have been created. To two of these versions changes to the degree of branching of the story have been applied. One version was left untouched to make a fair comparison to the base game. After providing demographic information, the users were each assigned a version of the game to which they reported their experiences regarding the story line and the number of times they played each section of the game. The findings suggest that the meaningfulness of the choices and the branching story lines themselves have no significant effect on the replayability but the enjoyment of the player, but which chapter was played and the difficulty level of the chapter did have a positive effect. Further research is warranted to determine if this is the case for students of the police academy using mobile devices as well.