Transposer les grammaires vidéoludiques : une étude rhétorique et quantitative des tutoriels en réalité virtuelle

Abstract

This paper proposes to study the specificities of virtual reality games’ tutorials, considered here as revealing the grammars specific to these titles. To do so, we have built a database listing a corpus of 58 VR games and coding their formal properties according to nine criteria: scope, support, temporality, diegetization, variability, interactivity, avoidability, contents, and dominant rhetorical strategy. The data were then represented in the form of a graph using a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The analysis of the graph allowed us to conceptualize four categories of tutorials: interfacial tutorials, tutorial levels, contextual tutorials and personified tutorials. Such a typology has the advantage of providing a framework for comparison that makes it possible to measure how virtual reality, as a new medium, inherits existing videogame languages while transforming them and proposing new grammars for play. The examination of the corpus allows, in particular, to question the “naturalness” or “intuitiveness” that is often attributed to gestures or interactions with games in VR. Finally, to go beyond the typological division, two transversal motifs (appearing in the four categories of tutorials) are presented and analyzed: the hub and the tutorial voices.

Keywords

• tutorial
• virtual reality
• database
• multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)
• rhetoric