Introduction - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 7

Figure 1.3 Multiple skill set diagram. (Figure courtesy of Peter Kalmar.)

and so on. We'll talk more about this later in Chapter 5. Let's think
back once again to the early days of video games.
When the Atari 2600 was the dominant console, numerous genres
of video games were generally not available. People didn't have
lengthy discussions about microtransactions, ARPGs vs. JRPGs,
third- vs. irst-person cameras, whether Mass Effect 2 ™ or 3 ™ was
truer to the fiction, or anything else so complex. It was enough that
many bright lights flashed on a screen, there was a goal, an obstacle,
and some way—with skill—players could achieve it. Even in those
limited days of 4 KB memory stores and one-button controls, many
different games with very different kinds of challenges emerged. This
should lead a logical person to reject another assumption I often run
into when teaching game design: games have gotten so much more
complicated that they are harder to learn. I assure you that this is
not the case. While it may seem like World of Warcraft ™ would be
harder to pick up than Pac- Man due to the sheer amount of content,
I can tell you that teaching and motivation management are more
important than anything in getting people to absorb the subject mat-
ter required to play your game. In fact, I am so sure of this that in
my Ph.D. research I managed to get a whole host of people who had
never before played a video game of any kind actively playing World
of Warcraft , and playing it well! One of the major problems that leads
to this conception is something called element interactivity , which