Eyes and Ears - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 98

of good information on where you can find heavy psychological stuff to
pore over. There are more than eight widely accepted principles, but I
think these eight best relate to game design. Feel free to check out the
further reading to research the other ones, too.

Multimedia Principle

First of Mayer's principles, the multimedia principle demonstrates
that a combination of words through either writing or audio, along
with images and graphics, is intrinsically better at teaching than either
of those things is alone. This means that a picture with accompany-
ing text, like the popular Internet infographic, is going to be easier
to remember than just the picture itself, or just the text itself. From a
commonsense standpoint, this is understandable. When, in infancy,
we first begin to learn things, we are presented with both the subject,
such as opening a bottle, and expert instruction in the form of words
and images from our parent or caretaker. In games, this means that
a combination effect is necessary to effectively teach players to play
the game. Both the mechanics and the tips should line up to teach a
consistent message. Here is an example for a generic FPS game; pay
close attention to the tense shift in the language:

VIOLATES THE MULTIMEDIA PRINCIPLE ADOPTS THE MULTIMEDIA PRINCIPLE

“Enemies will shoot at you! If you're hit, make sure
to take cover while your health regenerates.”

“You are being shot! Notice your health is
depleting ! Take cover to let it regenerate!”

Action: Paused Action: Ongoing

Pop- up: Visual Pop- up: Auditory

By allowing the action to take place as the tutorials are happen-
ing, we accept the multimedia principle that text indicating some-
thing ( damage ) is happening while an image ( actually seeing the damage
happen, red jelly on the screen ) accompanies it.

Modality Principle

The modality principle is probably the easiest of all to implement into
game projects. Modality tells us that learners are better at remember-
ing and understanding instructions when they are presented as speech