Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 135

stomach becomes full and you become progressively more nauseous.
Games allow rich and varied rewards every single time a player does
something, and this allows designers to make sure everything stays
awesome all the time. Since this opportunity is available, there is no
good reason not to do it. Make small actions have huge rewards all
the time, and make them get bigger and bigger as players achieve
more and more. World of Warcraft does this amazingly well. Another
game we have mentioned that was great at it was Mortal Kombat . Tell
me you didn't do uppercuts over and over again just to hear the guy
yell TOAST Y! Peppering amazing rewards throughout repeated tasks
is one of the wonderful features of video games, and one of the things
that makes them ideal for learning. Behaviorally, players can't get used
to rewards the way they can in traditional learning, and you should
use this to your advantage when designing the learning in your game.
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
This is something that teachers do instinctively or at least by training,
after years and years of teaching hundreds of students. When it is
apparent that a student is having trouble with a particular element of
a problem, a teacher will use cognitive apprenticeship to scaffold his
or her learning by offering advanced schemata to decode and chunk
the problem down into bits that are more manageable. As the student
develops his or her schema, the teacher will reduce the assistance until
the student is capable on his or her own. How do we do this age-old
teaching method in games? We detect player behaviors and respond
accordingly. In the Skull Island example, enemy AI prioritized target-
ing friendly AI players until the player had successfully killed some of
them. As the player became more and more proficient at slaughtering
the enemies, the enemies stopped their prioritizing behavior. If the
player suddenly and without warning starts doing horribly, the ene-
mies will go back to deprioritizing the player. This effect fades after
a certain number of enemies have been killed. I haven't conducted a
study (yet) to figure out exactly what this number ought to be, but
hopefully the point remains clear. We can scale our rewards through
programming hooks when we know the player needs a hand. We can
detect when players are dying in a certain area with something like a