The Practice Paradox: How Practice Negatively Impacts Players' Time-to-Quit and Frustration in Challenging Game Sections

Game designers scaffold player skill through practice opportunities such as tutorials and training levels, assuming that practice builds resilience against harder challenges. However, whether unstructured practice harms persistence more than no practice at all remains untested. We conducted a controlled between-subjects experiment (N=110) examining how dedicated practice time, play performance, and individual differences shape participants’ anger and quitting behaviours in a highly challenging 3D platformer level. Our results show that unstructured practice did not yield the anticipated benefits, like higher persistence, relative to no practice. Performance was the clearest predictor of quitting behaviour: poor performers were more than twice as likely to quit compared to good performers. Instead, players who practised but failed to see progress on the challenging level were more likely to quit than those who never practised. These results suggest that onboarding evaluation should shift from practice duration to practice effectiveness. We argue that designers should monitor player improvement rate and consider how they present practice opportunities relative to the game’s current challenge.