Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 131

will not be targeted for lack of knowledge, and will still be able to
make the mistake of dying (via his or her AI partner). The training
wheels come off once the player has demonstrated mastery by kill-
ing a monster. There are subtle ways to reward correctively in most
any game.
No Small Punishments
Death should mean something. I played a student game recently where
all of the tutorials, hints, controls—everything—were shown after
you died. Not only is this completely backward in terms of learning,
game design, whatever, it also makes death completely meaningless.
If you are actually meta-gaming to die intentionally so that you get
your hands on the tips, it means first that there is not enough infor-
mation being presented to you, and second that death is meaningless.
Once players have learned a topic, they reify their knowledge through
skill and drill, which is a facet of behaviorism that we talked about in
Chapter 3 and elsewhere. Once a student has something down, he or
she repeats it. As long as the results continue to be good, the behavior
becomes automatized, at which point the cognitive load required to
do it significantly decreases. If you have ever wondered why people
who play competitive games are able to track hundreds of interactions
per minute, or why healers in MMORPGS can focus on parties of
dozens of people simultaneously, this is the answer.
What is happening in the brains of players when punishments are
small or trivial is likely the opposite of what the developers wanted.
If death means nothing, players are likely either automatizing it as a
means to an end and will intentionally die, as in the student exam-
ple, or it is just irritating them. If you are irritating the player as a
punishment, you had better be sure that the punishment is short and
immediate. If the punishment doesn't affect the player's ability to win
the game, but rather just wastes his or her time, the player is going
to resent the game for that. Again, players are coming to a game in
search of a leisurely, enjoyable experience. If you betray that desire
with constant arbitrary punishment, they will just put the game down.
For this reason, your consequences must be harsh. Want to drop play-
ers to the last checkpoint when they die? How about dropping all of
their items, too? There is no such thing as being too harsh once you