Learning and building strategies with computer games

It has been frequently noted that people can intuitively learn to play computer games (or video games) with little or no instruction and that they quickly and easily develop skills for becoming better players. The same is rarely said of software for business applications. We were interested in learning why this is true. We have undertaken a study is to see what aspects of game interfaces contribute to learning and to building strategies. We are investigating this by first gathering a collection of background material on the topic. In addition to collecting background material, we are designing and carrying out a study of individuals playing computer games. From the reading that we have done and the preliminary design of our study, we have created four hypotheses to test. The background material for this study, the experimental design and our hypotheses are all discussed in this paper.