  We present a new concept called Game Mechanic Alignment theory as a way to
organize game mechanics through the lens of environmental rewards and intrinsic
player motivations. By disentangling player and environmental influences,
mechanics may be better identified for use in an automated tutorial generation
system, which could tailor tutorials for a particular playstyle or player.
Within, we apply this theory to several well-known games to demonstrate how
designers can benefit from it, we describe a methodology for how to estimate
mechanic alignment, and we apply this methodology on multiple games in the
GVGAI framework. We discuss how effectively this estimation captures
intrinsic/extrinsic rewards and how our theory could be used as an alternative
to critical mechanic discovery methods for tutorial generation.
