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minimal. One could argue that this fosters the feeling of hopelessness
and loss that is common in the horror genre, but there are ways to do
this without crippling a novice player. The clear counter argument
is, “Why would I bother instructing a PC gamer that WASD moves
people?” There is an even clearer answer to this argument: if ALT-F4
doesn't close the game (it doesn't), why should I assume that WASD
makes me move? I will talk about some of these points later through-
out the topic, and culminate in examples in Chapter 8.
Finally, we create tutorials because the level of element interactiv-
ity (see Figure  2.1) of games has increased. We touched briefly on
element interactivity and provided a definition in Chapter 1. Element
interactivity is a concept that describes the number of simultaneous
mental tasks to which a player must attend in order to accomplish the
tasks in your game. In games like Pong ™, element interactivity is very
low—players must simply move up, move down, and block a ball with
the intent to score. You could consider that three things to remember.
In World of Warcraft , on the other hand, element interactivity is very
high. This is because you must not only move the character in 3D
space as opposed to 2D, you also have to think about levels, skills,
statistics, items, item level, your role in the party, exploration, quests,
chat, etc.
I would bet anything that no one has played Pong for more than
10,000 hours, but this does happen in games like World of Warcraft .
Not only is this indicative of the level of complexity, but also the depth
of the game, both of which require dedication and cognition. There
Casual lifting
Proper lifting
Low
High
Figure 2.1
Element interactivity diagram. (Figure courtesy of Peter Kalmar.)
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