Introduction - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 2

Like the dog trainer analogy, we often make a critical mistake when
making games or activities for our players; namely, players don't come
with predestined knowledge of how to play your game, nor do pup-
pies come housebroken . In the current games industry, we have been
spoiled. We have a large demographic of players who have knowledge
of something called genre . This might be your first time reading some-
thing based in cognitive psychology, or you might read on the topic
all the time. In either case, we as humans have a habit of categorizing
things through something called a schema . We sort things so that our
minds can easily manage them. A sparrow is a sort of bird, which
is a sort of animal, which is a sort of living thing, and so on. With
these schema distinctions, we associate rules . Birds can be fed, for
example. The bottom line that we tend to miss is that we had to learn
these schemas at some point. Just like game players know that shoot-
ers often have a reload button, we know that birds will often fly away
when approached. The important distinction we often miss, however,
is that both gamers and children had to learn these from someone, or
something, at some point in their lives. The sort of organization the
mind undertakes can be seen in Figure 1.1.
In the childhood of individuals who grew up alongside the games
industry, like me and many other people born between 1965 and 1990,
games taught us by starting with simple controls. We cut our teeth on
the Atari 2600™ with its one button before gradually moving on to
the NES with two, the SNES with six, and so on. We learned simple
controls like moving objects on the screen in games like Pac- Man ™,

Colors

Wings

Ca rdinal

Life

Beak Blue Jay

Animal

Crow

Flies

e mind
stores
data in an
organized
way.

Food

Wild/Pet

Figure 1.1 Schema diagram. (Figure courtesy of Peter Kalmar.)