Eyes and Ears - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 102

either narrate them or write them, but not both. Consider the follow-
ing example from a generic sandbox action game:

VIOLATES THE REDUNDANCY PRINCIPLE ADOPTS THE REDUNDANCY PRINCIPLE

Press the R2 or L2 button to switch weapons.
Be careful, Bill will not automatically reload
when switching weapons!

Press the R2 or L2 button to switch weapons.
Be careful, Bill will not automatically reload
when switching weapons!

Action: Ongoing Action: Ongoing

Pop-up: Text with narration Pop-up: None, just narration.

Contiguity Principle

The last of the principles, the contiguity principle, tells us that learners
best absorb information when things are proximal to one another. For
example, if I were to label my programming code with //see comment 6 ,
then endnote comment, this is less efficient than just putting the com-
ment inline. In game design, this means keeping relevant information
close to the information upon which it depends. If that is confusing,
this means keeping text or audio about what things do either proxi-
mally or temporally close to the object in question. This should make
sense; it is harder to remember something when you have to look it
up, than when the information is right there. Consider the following
example from a generic first-person shooter:

VIOLATES THE CONTIGUITY PRINCIPLE ADOPTS THE CONTIGUITY PRINCIPLE

Weapon info on left side of screen (type of gun).
Ammo on right side of screen (bullets in clip).

Both pieces of info proximal on the right side of
the screen.

Summary

After reading all of this, I hope you have some idea of how it works.
It is important to understand the differences between how the brain
handles sound and how it handles imagery. Because cognitive load
is additive, it is important to always keep load from each sense as
low as possible. Unfortunately, there have been no studies (of which I
am aware) that have asked whether adding vibration or physical stuff
increases load. In either case, we can make best use of our psychologi-
cal understanding of how audio and video are processed by making
sure to obey Mayer's principles as they apply to game design. Following
this is a cheat sheet of everything we have covered in this chapter.