Facts about Players - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 84

Age and the Education Gap
his is probably one of the most important parts of this topic. he
average game player has aged significantly in the last few years, and is
now well over 30 years old. Because of this, it is a logical next step that
individuals who are gaming now grew up with games. I went over
this a bit in the introduction. As games increase in complexity, and
more particularly as game consoles increase in complexity from the
one-button interface of the Atari 2600 to the modern console, educa-
tion needs to ramp up accordingly. However, many of those individu-
als who are making games grew up alongside them, and are familiar
and learned in the natural progression to which they were personally
privy. Unfortunately, that is something that can't be replicated. An
individual now attempting to play a game who has no prior experience
must start with complicated equipment in the vast majority of cases.
New gamers who are being born and growing up to play games are
starting with a higher learning curve than we ever did.
On the other end of the age discussion, getting older people
involved in technology is a huge concern with a large body of research
surrounding it; however, little research has been done on attempting
to approach geriatrics to get them to play Call of Duty and scream
obscenities into microphones. That said, it is clear that there is an age
differential in what constitutes game playership. This age differential
extends in both directions, as new gamers are often getting their start
on touch-capacitive devices as opposed to traditional controllers like
those that you might see on the Xbox ™. Maybe this is a pathway to
simpler controls that will allow the next generation to get used to lower
element interactivity before advancing to traditional games? In any
case, there is no excuse not to refine our teaching.
Both Piaget and Vygotsky teach us that there are discrete, differ-
ent stages to the development of the mind. * This is relevant to game
design: depending on the audience for whom we are designing our
games, our tutorial interventions have to change accordingly. In the
Piagetian tradition, people move from a very basic level of mental
operations in childhood to a more concrete and realistic method of
thinking in adulthood. The level of cognition varies from person to
* Piaget, J. (1951). The psychology of intelligence . London: Routledge Publishers.