The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 22

are other examples of activities like this outside of games. There is a
difference between walking and fitness walking , between dancing at a
club and dancing in a ballroom , between lifting and proper lifting , and
so on. Similarly, you have to be thinking harder about the situation at
hand in World of Warcraft than you do in Pong . You don't necessarily
have to think faster, but your cognition is more occupied during raid-
ing, questing, and managing your characters. Modern games follow
a trend of increased element interactivity. Doom ™ is less complex,
mechanically, than, say, Team Fortress 2 ™. This is not a game value
judgment, just a testament to the number of things one must remem-
ber at any given moment to be successful in the games' objectives.
Increased element interactivity has lead to a steeper learning curve
for modern game players entering the hobby than individuals enter-
ing in the era of the Atari 2600 with its one button. For this reason,
we teach our players incrementally, which I will talk about more in
later chapters.
How Tutorials Teach
Whether they do so intentionally or otherwise, every tutorial of any
kind that appears on a screen is employing some sort of instructional
design strategy, which in turn is based on a learning theory. We will
talk a little more about learning theories in Chapter 3. For this chapter,
however, I am going to split tutorials along two teaching methods
that I see in literally hundreds of games: didactic and exploratory . here
are pros and cons to each of these methods, and they are discussed in
the following section.
Didactic
Various dictionary definitions exist for this word, but the predomi-
nant meaning in education is that didactic teaching methods are
designed as purely instructive, often excessively so, and in a way that is
oblique, clear, and rigorous. Didactic teaching methods include drill-
ing your times-tables, reading the instructions that come with your
power drill, following assembly guidelines, doing paint-by-numbers,
or following the instructions of a GPS. In a game, this includes fol-
lowing your objective marker on your minimap, responding to direct