The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 24

they are not provided instruction. Interestingly, in education we often
think of exploratory education as less “harsh” or instructive, and yet
most of the more grueling games from the past used this method of
teaching, with guidance, to teach us how to play. In exploratory teach-
ing, learners are fully expected to experiment, fail, and learn from that
failure. Obviously, this is not practical in some situations (e.g., nuclear
engineering, airline piloting, surgery), but because the cost of failure
in video game playing is low, games are well suited to exploratory
teaching methods. Sometimes called “discovery learning,” this type
of education is as old as didactic methods, and is hotly debated in
education and psychology literature. * In games, this involves mechan-
ics like the “fog of war,” by which players have to look and explore to
learn, achievements that pop-up when you figure out controls yourself,
emergent mechanics like those in Scribblenauts ™ that prompt you to
discover new things, or games that give you very little or hazy instruc-
tion while prompting you to wander and play around, like Flower ™
or Journey ™. On the other hand, this also includes hard-as-nails older
games that were nonetheless successful despite their lack of (written)
instructions, such as Super Mario Bros. , Tetris ™, Pac- Man , Contra ,
and others. Players were expected to be motivated by the game's gru-
eling difficulty, and learn to play by failing repeatedly through a kind
of behavioristic learning that I will discuss more in Chapter 3.
In addition to deciding whether a didactic or exploratory teaching
style should be presented, tutorials also have to decide when and how
instructions are presented. In some games, like Contra , the answer is
“not at all.” Then again, in other games, instructions are constant and
ever-present. Most tutorials are presented in what is called a context-
relevant manner. Context-relevant refers to the context in the instruc-
tion. In the case of a teacher, I would discuss conjugating verbs in
Japanese the first time you encounter a verb conjugation with which
you are unfamiliar. In a video game, this might take the form of
showing you the pop-up for swimming when you first enter water, or
showing you the indicator that illustrates how many lives you have left
* Kirschner, P., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. (2006). Why minimal guidance during
instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery,
problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist ,
41(2).