Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 129

means that much of the research done on all these other forms of media
has an application here as well. Future research needs to demonstrate
exactly how the cognitive principles affect game design, which is what
I am currently heavily invested in doing—job security and the like. If
anything, we should note that the cognitive space required for games
is in fact greater than it is for films and other forms of audiovisual
media. This is because the learners have to actively solve puzzles or
overcome obstacles of some kind in order to advance. Because of this,
the amount of cognitive load left over to parse through instructions
is very limited. To that end, we owe it to our players to mitigate cog-
nitive load to the greatest extent possible. The easiest way to imple-
ment this without years of education in cognitive psychology, in my
opinion, is to implement Mayer's Cognitive Principles into our game
design mechanics as much as possible. Surely, they have to be adapted
to game-like displays—some of the things that Mayer wrote don't
give themselves easily to games. On the other hand, elements like the
contiguity principle make perfect sense to interface and game design.
We talked about this in Chapter 6, so feel free to go back there for
more explanation, or check out the further reading in the Appendix.
Let Skilled Players Be Skillful as Fast as Possible
There is definitely a demographic of your audience that is not going
to appreciate being taught how to walk over and over again. It is
extremely important that you let them get to being amazing as quick
as possible. So to that end, it is very important that you detect skilled
play as fast as possible. In Chapter 7, we talked about a way to teach
the players to use the keys (WASD) to walk around. This was simple;
you just took any input as wobbly walking, corrected them with audio
cues until they put their hands on WASD, and then continued. The
logical counter to detecting unskilled play is detecting when play-
ers do things right and making sure to scaffold back your teaching
appropriately. How do we do that? Well, in our Skull Island exam-
ple, we could detect whether the players needed to be corrected in
how to walk, or if they naturally put their hands on WASD. People
aren't intrinsically aware that WASD makes characters move—they
had to learn it somewhere. In this sense, using WASD indicates a
level of skill. A typist lays his or her hands on the home row keys