Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 125

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b ulle t P oInt
l e arnIng d esIgn
If you really wanted to, you could tear out this portion of the topic and
staple it to your oice wall. his portion of the topic is usable, popular,
and referential. I recognize that game developers have a lot of creativ-
ity and drive, but very little time to sit down and read a topic cover to
cover. Driving home the read-and-use approach taken by this topic,
this chapter is a blow-by-blow list of bullet points about designing
learning for games that has been wrought through years of research
and game design. Designers can take these and put them directly into
game projects to improve the engagement, retention, and enjoyment
experienced by their players. Hopefully, this chapter can take your
knowledge from this topic with you to your next game project.
There Are Really Three Things
You have probably noticed that I have abandoned the word tutorial as
part of the title of this chapter, and there is a reason for that. I hope
that throughout the topic you have realized that you are building more
than just tutorials, but rather, you are building learning mechanics
that teach people to play. While this is by no means an authoritative
statement, I'd like to call that learning design. I have borrowed a lot
from multimedia learning theories and research in my own work, and
throughout the topic I have used a lot of the evidence from those
studies to justify my design principles. There are really three concrete
categories into which all of these design principles and rules fall. I
hope throughout the topic you have disabused yourself of the myth
that all tutorials are mandatory, unskippable, torturous exercises in
misery. The research I have been conducting over the last few years
suggests that three mechanics-based approaches work particularly
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