As this is the last post I will really be making for this blog, I wanted to make a post about something that was really meaningful to me. In my endeavors over the years to understand good and bad game design I have started to realize there are a few really bad trends in the idea of instructing people how to play a game. For the purpose of discussion I am going to focus on two types of games, those that come out of Japan, and those that come out of the US. I break them into those two categories because in general games from those regions have very different, but I feel very flawed ways of teaching how to play. In most Japanese games for instance, when the player starts a game for the first time they are face with a twenty minute, and that is on the low end, tutorial that literally tells you way too much how to play. Then in games made in the US, players are either faced with games that tell you every little thing you need to do as you play or the player is faced with a game that is so simple it practically insults the player’s intelligence. I think it is a really bad way to design games. I don’t like being prompted with what I need to do to play, I want to be able to figure it out myself. The designers should make a game which teaches through play. Telling a person to play a game isn’t really playing. Giving a game a help menu makes it no longer a game to be played but a set of steps to be followed. Games need to get back to the idea of teaching through play. Only they can we have games that are actually interesting and a truly challenging.
I don’t want to make it sound like all recent games aren’t challenging because that isn’t true. It is just that too many games create an environment where hand-holding is the norm and that really needs to stop.
Tutorials have been a sticking point for a long time when it comes to game design, and I think it will continue to be a point of study for a long time. I think it comes down to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” tutorial type that can be applied to every game. A detail-intensive strategy or simulation game would likely require a thorough, perhaps task- or text-heavy, tutorial, while a fast-paced platformer may only require a more organic, integrated tutorial to explain the mechanics. Extra Credits (a series of short animated video game lectures on youtube) did a video trying to break apart tutorials and how they function, and you can find it here. They go into some examples of tutorials that they think “work” and “don’t work”. It’s an interesting watch, and I would highly recommend checking this out.
Whether or not there’s a cultural influence to how games include tutorials? That I don’t know off the top of my head. I’d have to go back and play games specifically looking for that to try and find a pattern.
This is an interesting topic, and maybe it’s too old for Max to get back to, but my main response would be that it’s tough to talk about, since we probably think about tutorials and hand holding different ways.
So, what would either of you suggest doing, then? Max seems like he wants as little instruction as possible, which is fair, but at what point does it become silly? In some sense, it almost feels like you two are on opposite sides of a spectrum, where Max prefers all instruction to be purely extradiegetic, since tutorials in games both break immersion and feel claustrophobic (for lack of a better word). Then, jpm5511 seems like he prefers instructions to be as diegetic as possible, since the methods employed by games like Shovel Knight really require no words: nothing but the game world and a control scheme. In that sense, do both of you completely disagree with each others opinions on what a tutorial is?
I’m not trying to call anyone out, but I’m just honestly curious about what each of you means when you say you dislike handholding. I mean, I’m compelled to agree with both of you, but I don’t really know how I’d even define the term, so I’ll hold off until I, or maybe WE, can decide what hand holding really is.
I completely agree with your opinion towards the ways a substantial amount of games teach players to play their games. These ineffective means of teaching players typically cause them to feel frustrated within the first few minutes of playing the game. The real problem lies in the fact that all the core experience of the game can not be expressed until the player submits to the initial learning process. This places a barrier between the player and the experience provided by the game right from the start. Many gamers will drop the game without grinding through the initial tutorial and will never actually get to the real experience. To overcome this problem I think it is vital to provide as much of the core experience as possible without any form of “forced” learning via tutorials or dialogues right from the start. One way to teach the game-play without tutorials and the like could be to provide a slow and steady stream of “lessons” taught with actual game-play and tested with challenges to answer questions like “Does the player understand the jumping mechanic?” Games like Shovel Knight and Braid execute this style of teaching well.