Now this is a changing concept in the game industry, so much change that we had a discussion in class about this phenomenon. We see this trend that newer games are slowly getting rid of the instruction manuals. Now when you open your game case, if you even purchase physical copies anymore, you will most likely see a page of art and that’s it. This is much different than in the older generations.
Go all the way back to the times of SNES. Here we have games like Mega Man X where you are supplied with the instruction manual and the Game Pak. The first level beams X in and he’s off. There is no help. You need to know that the D-pad is for movement, B is to jump, and the Y is to shoot. However, that’s not everything, you can charge the X-buster by holding Y and you can dash with A, but that’s not all, you can only dash after you receive the Leg upgrade from Dr. Light at Chill Penguin’s stage. So now we have all these controls that we are already supposed to know before we start playing, but we don’t necessarily understand all of the game mechanics associated with these controls. This could pose a problem.
Now let’s advance into the future a little bit. Games such as Final Fantasy X and Star Wars Republic Commando introduced tutorials for the controls while still providing the instruction manual. Now developers don’t have to worry about the consumers reading such manuals to understand the game.
Final Fantasy X instruction manual
If I wanted I could sit down and read this manual to understand almost all of the game mechanics. It’s full of information and is very detailed. There is only one problem to this; I have to sit down and take the time to read this. I want something similar to this.
First level tutorial personal screen shot- Star Wars Republic Commando
I get to jump right into the action and start playing. This first level was planned out so that player takes damage and be advised to heal. It shows new players everything they need to know about the game. What I feel is nice about this is game is that one can skip it if he already knows what to do.
Let’s advance to present day now. Most games have limited or no instructions. I’m just going to jump right to the point and ask what happened to Halo 4’s instruction manual? Oh let me show you. Click here (343 Industries- interactive manual). While this may be cool we now have to consider the problem about those without internet connection. I know a lot of people have internet; I’m just pointing out the people who have no means to access this.
Anyway, post your thoughts about what makes a game controls and mechanics easy to understand. Personally, I like the physical manual for reference with in-game tutorials.
Queue Taco commercial girl: “Porque no los dos?”. I think the player should be given options as to how they would like to learn the game. Back when I was younger I would love instruction manuals because after my mom took me to gamestop the ride home was “quick read the manual so you can play as soon as you get home”. With more games being digital this can still be done while you wait for it to download. On the other hand some games are better learned by experiencing. Look at Dark Souls for example. While the controls are simple enough the things you learn for the game are how to progress through levels. Their tutorial level does a good job of this by throwing you into an area and you just progress. As you progress you get your weapons and the hints on the floor teach you to play. You learn to watch around corners and make slow progress because if you don’t you will die.
Another interesting way of learning a game is one commonly used by fighting games which is a Challenge Mode. In this mode you begin by learning special moves, air to ground, grab combos and eventually you will learn more difficult input. Metal Gear Revengence does this by having VR missions.
My thesis for Schreyer’s is on the subject of immersive tutorials in games – so I’m glad you made this post. Tutorials are really tough to implement in games, because on one hand – you want the player to understand everything they can do, but on the other – you don’t want to take them out of the game to explain something – which is what a lot of tutorials do. Bringing up a text box that explicitly states what the controls are just forces the player to read the manual in a sense. I feel that games that intuitively map the HUD to the controller layout are the most successful in being immersive while still teaching the player. Metroid Prime, for example, had a HUD that represented the player character’s visor in first person, but the icons on the HUD were all laid out like the gamecube controller. Different weapons were mapped to the C-stick on the bottom right of the controller, and were displayed on the bottom right of the screen, and visors were displayed on the D-pad on the lower left. While these systems aren’t perfect, as the Zelda series has a very intuitive HUD, but it is not super immersive (the buttons are just labelled at the top) – but I feel that they are less patronizing to players, and pretty easy to figure out.
The funny thing is that I just recently read an article about ken levine (designer in Irrational games). He just recently left Irrational with several other programmers to create a new company for smaller digitally-delivered games. Now the thing is in an interview he stated that gamers are creating such tight communities that he doesn’t believe in game manuals or even instructions in the game because someone will try the game and post about it and all gamers will learn together through these communities. This concept is incredible because its entirely true. Just think about all the game walkthroughs out now. there are dozens per game and even more on youtube. These communities are out there and they are an incredibly viable resource for newer gamers to access and understand how games work!
Personally, I prefer the tutorials that are embedded in the gameplay. I just never would really take the time to go read the instruction manual of a game I bought. I would always learn by playing, and if there was some special skill I was missing, then so be it. It must not have been that important if I could play without needing to use it. One of the best cases that I can think of where the tutorial is actually a part of the game is in Dark Souls. The way the tutorial worked was by having the first level be exceptionally simple, and to leave messages on the ground. These messages are usually left by other players, but in this case, left by the designers. The way they work is, when standing on them, a player can press a button to read the message, and it will have some sort of information. But in the tutorial level, they were messages like “Press X to attack” or “Press Square to block” or whatever each button did. But what this accomplished was allowing for the instructions and tutorials to be a seamless part of the game, and for those who have played before and don’t need the instructions, you can simply run right over the messages in the floor. And for a game as difficult as Dark Souls, this is a nice way to teach the game to the player without throwing them directly to the wolves. And I believe that this implementation of a tutorial was done extremely well.
The link you found for the Mega Man X instruction manual is awesome and definitely conveys that the manuals weren’t always solely for the purpose of teaching you how to play the game. That manual has some pretty cool lore – five full pages from Dr. Cain’s journal. It is ideas like these that make me wish the physical instruction manual was still around. Creative developers used the manual as an opportunity to include some authentic literature about the game’s plot, and sometimes manuals had pages and pages of concept art you wouldn’t find anywhere else. I think that last sentence kind of explains why these kinds of things have died away. Back before the internet was widely available, physical paper copies were the only thing that gamers could get there hands on; you couldn’t simply google “Mega Man X concept art” and find tons of hits for what you were looking for, but the manual was the only place that had some of that kind of “extra stuff.”
On the other side of the spectrum you also provided a link to Halo 4’s “virtual manual.” This is the kind of stuff gamers have access to today, so I guess developers don’t feel the need to include physical “extra stuff” when it is much easier/cheaper to make websites dedicated to lore and more.
Pretty interesting post.
-Neil
I find the changes in the way tutorials have been done to be very interesting. The most significant change in tutorials was definitely when they moved from being strictly in the manual to the game itself. I feel that this was done to better emulate how games people played physically with each other are taught. For instance the only way to learn a game like soccer, baseball or even poker was for someone to sit down and explain the rules to you. I feel that tutorials moving into the game play section of games is an emulation of that.