Finding your way: an analysis of the challenge of navigating in games through the lens of Metroid titles

Finding Your Way: An Analysis of the Challenge of Navigation in Games Through the Lens of Metroid Titles discusses how navigation works in video games with a particular focus on how it is challenging to players. The work begins by exploring the studies of challenge in games and follows this by determining how exactly navigation fits into that discussion. By breaking the challenge of navigation into the three related sub-challenges of destination, routing and execution, each aspect of navigation in games is examined thoroughly. This culminates in an analysis of how these three sub-challenges are demonstrated in several games from the Metroid series, with a particular focus on the aspects of game design utilized to modulate the difficulty of each challenge as it appears in game.