Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 128

level, the likelihood of you continuing to play is going to suffer if
you're an average player. On the other hand, if you are one of the play-
ers in the “club,” hey, your day is going to be great. League does a great
job of mitigating this eventuality with multiplayer games by offering
different game modes, different levels of play, numerous champions,
and more. The principle that ought to be avoided remains the same—
being excluded feels bad, and will discourage new players from enter-
ing the experience. How you will implement this will differ from
project to project, but a good indicator is this: if you see a club forming
and, more importantly, if you see a group of excluded people forming,
something is going wrong.
Offer Learning Support
his might as well be the title of the topic. If learners can't igure out
how to engage with your game before they reach their frustration or
boredom threshold, they're not going to play. Learning support comes
in all forms, and in my opinion based on research and game design
experience, I'd say that cognitive apprenticeship offers the best struc-
ture and set of instructional design strategies for learning in games.
I talk about that throughout the topic. You should always ofer some
kind of expert behavior for the players to model. The easiest way to
get this in without it feeling artificial is through an NPC. You should
always offer optional help if the player needs to look it up. Where
possible, mandatory help should be done with sound rather than text.
Through proper learning support, we attempt to minimize cognitive
load so that learners can emphasize learning to play over having to
parse redundant information. If you really are keen on offering amaz-
ing learning support to your players, please read the Appendix for
information on further reading that will make you a better teacher
and, I hope, a happier game designer.
Follow the Cognitive Principles
As much as we like to deny it sometimes, there is a huge amount in
common between movies, short films, training videos, and games.
They all share one particular thing: they simultaneously present infor-
mation via audio and video to a user—often a single user. This similarity