Introduction - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 13

Traverse level

Encounter enemy

Failure

Success

Punishment Reward

Loss of life
black screen
game over

Progression
score
power-ups

Figure 1.5 Old school game learning.

shooting a bad guy or clearing an obstacle, we reward them. This is
the reason I brought up the dog training analogy earlier—old games
taught in a way that wasn't really that different.
I hope that this will get you thinking about tutorials in a new way.
Simply put, anything that teaches the player how to play the game in
any way, shape, or form is a tutorial. Cast out your ideas of what a tuto-
rial is now: an unskippable, sadistic exercise in torture that maniacally
reads you the controls inch-by-inch, all the while hatefully aware that
you are twisting and wringing your controller in agony, yearning only
to blow the heads off some robot zombie pirates before dinner. I'd like
you to realize that this is simply a very bad example of what a tutorial
is. Making a player sit through an unskippable exercise like this is
kind of like inserting a blank screen with narration at the beginning
of a movie that says “YOU WILL GROW AS A PERSON AND
BE EMOTIONALLY MOVED BY THIS FILM” and expecting it
to work. The filmgoer is not engaged, not expecting to be spoon-fed,
and not coming to this emotional realization willingly, and most of
all, it is totally absurd to think this will teach the watcher anything!
Beyond that, some games try to hide this blatant tutorial in a “starter
mission,” where for some reason, the badass super soldier you are
controlling suddenly forgot how to aim his gun and walk. Barring a
major traumatic brain injury, this is a dual sin of breaking engagement
in the game while simultaneously failing to teach the player anything.