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A New Way To Think About Tutorials

A New Way To Think About Tutorials

Think about games you have played that came with a “tutorial” mode. How many of you actually ended up completing it? If you are a completionist you might have, but many gamers simply look over tutorial modes and try to learn by doing. This doesn’t always work out, however, as many games, like fighting games or shooters, require a lot of skill and knowledge for competency. Anyone who has asked, “How do I block?” or “How do I throw grenades?” hasn’t played the tutorial mode. Shame on them!

If simply including a tutorial mode isn’t enough to get people to play the tutorial mode, how do you get people to play it? Well, some games include tutorials as “must play” sections in their single-player modes, which is one way to go about it. However, people have complained that these sections are boring, uninteresting, and needlessly break the fourth wall. Some of these tutorials can take up to a half hour or more of gameplay, basically acting as a slow barrier that impedes your progress toward actually playing the game. Egoraptor more than emphatically details the annoyance of such tutorials in his Mega Man vs Mega Man X episode of Sequelitis.

Another thing he details is the importance of the ability to teach players through game design. Instead of having a tutorial tell you to jump over a pit, developers should situate the stage so that the player naturally understands how to jump over the pit just by experimenting with controls.

For example, look at the first stage in Super Mario Bros. Right away there is a Goomba in your path, but you only have two buttons. You have more than enough time to realize that one of these buttons jumps before the Goomba gets close enough to kill you. It might kill you if you don’t understand that it is an enemy, but you’ll quickly understand after dying once that you have to jump over it. After that you encounter a pipe you have to jump, and then pits, and you know how to jump over these obstacles without a single tutorial message. For more commentary on this, check out the Super Mario Bros 1-1 episode of Design Club .

A New Way To Think About Tutorials

While these tutorials work quite well for single-player experiences, multiplayer experiences tend to suffer when similar “learn by doing” systems are used. There have been several fighting game systems that have had their A.I. programmed with purposeful critical flaws. Some will always throw out heavy attacks. Some are easily blocked and punished. Some can always be reversaled when you are knocked down. Some don’t block high/low mix-ups. But since these skills aren’t simple button presses, many players never get to the point of trying out these skills on their opponents because they don’t know they exist.

I recommend a fusion of these two systems, both a learn by playing tutorial, and a guide you through the basics type tutorial. The trick is this: don’t frontload your tutorial, backload it. You see guided tutorials get boring because they teach players skills they already know. This fusion system will skip tutorials for things you already know by examining what you do and recommending tutorials from there.

It would work like this: say you are in a match in a fighting game and you never block. After a couple matches like this, the game would say “your opponent is hitting you because you aren’t blocking his attacks. Would you like to learn how to block more effectively?” It can then run the player through a quick tutorial on how blocking works. Heck, if it is a system with replays, then it could even use the match that the player was just in as an example!

The A.I. would once again be built with critical flaws and the game would point this out when you lose. “Your opponent can’t block high/low mix-ups. Would you like to know how to perform them?”

This way the player can learn by doing until they hit a wall, and the game can act as a teacher to help them get over that hump. It’s a targeted form of learning that will go a long way toward introducing new gamers to high level skills.

What do you think? Would you like to see this kind of tutorial in games? Let us know in the comments.

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