The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 18

often referred to as the serious games or “Digital Games for Learning
and Training” community. If you are interested, a quick Googling
will reveal a dearth of literature on both.
his topic, however, is not concerned with the litany of scholarship
on serious and educational games. Rather, this topic attempts to give
you an overview of how people learn things, how you can teach people
things, and why this matters to game design. To that end, the tuto-
rial and teaching mechanics will be addressed throughout this topic,
but not in the exact way you think. First, we are going to get you to
remove everything in your brain that even remotely sounds like the
word “tutorial.”
So, with that said, the following definition is the one with which
we will work throughout this entire topic:
A tutorial is any component of a digital game that is intended to teach
someone how to play.
Whether that includes introductory levels, actual traditional
“tutorials,” on-screen instructions, narrations, mandatory levels,
or something completely different is irrelevant to the definition. Even
something as seemingly innocuous as incremental difficulty teaches
players to play the game. Whenever we desire the player to learn a
skill that is mandatory for overcoming the obstacles in our game, we
are engaging in game tutorial design, or what I call learning design .
I'm here to propose that game tutorial design is an intrinsic and inex-
tricable portion of game design generally, and in my classes, I teach
the two side-by-side. Expecting players to continue to play something
about which they know nothing is hopeful, to say the least.
Why Tutorials Are Necessary
This is a very important topic. Many of my students react negatively
when I tell them that they have to have some kind of tutorial in their
games. This is largely because they are operating with the definition
of a tutorial with which most people are familiar: an unskippable hor-
rific experience through which we are forced before we are actually
allowed to play. Consistent with education scholarship on playful
learning, this doesn't have to be the case, which is what I hope to