Introduction - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 11

The burgeoning field of Games User Research deals with the moti-
vations, habits, emotions, and psychologies of players. This is by no
means a new practice: companies have been applying “focus group”
type tests of products for decades. Games User Research sets itself
apart, however, in its interesting triangulation of data gathering and
analysis methods. This new field is slowly helping designers and devel-
opers everywhere get answers to the right questions about their audi-
ences, instead of the tired old methods and practices that ultimately
teach us very little about our players.
Tutorial Levels Suck!
Let me start this section by saying you are absolutely right. Tutorial
levels, as they currently exist, are forced exercises in futility. Like put-
ting your cat in a room with a Rubik's Cube ™ and shouting instruc-
tions at it, time is wasted, everyone is frustrated, and ultimately,
nobody learns anything. In fact, I will be so bold as to say that the
current incarnation of tutorials in video games is often worse than
nothing. This is certainly brash, but the fact remains that just like the
cat in the aforementioned scenario, the bitter taste in the mouth left
by the forced labor will stay with you much longer than any inciden-
tal learning that occurs as a result of the exercise. Hatred of tutorial
levels and instructions is oddly ingrained into the minds of gamers, as
though we hate to learn, when really, we learn new skills every time
we pick up the controller. Famously, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon ™ rather
recently lampooned tutorials generally: “ Press Enter to Demonstrate
your Ability to Read.”
Like the previous section, however, this is again an answer to the
wrong question. Over the course of decades of evolution in game
design, we have slowly started to include these abysmal, mandatory,
unskippable, hateful tutorial levels that feel like having our teeth
pulled by hot pokers. Consequently, we recoil from them and don't
include anything at all. This is nearly as big a mistake as the tuto-
rial level itself, and is a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the
other direction.
If you picked this topic up out of curiosity, wondering how anyone
could be stupid enough to defend the tutorial level, I'm here to tell