The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 27

he Flashcard
Maybe more offensive than the tutorial, the flashcard is an absolute
failure of good teaching that is unfortunately present in many games.
Trying to teach someone how to play a game with a flashcard is like try-
ing to teach a doctor to perform brain surgery from a manual beside
the patient's open skull. In education, we know that many things do
not translate well to what is often called “skill and drill.” In some
cases, straight memory is all that is required to learn something. This
works great with things like multiplication tables, chemical formulae,
grammar rules, and the like. However, it does not work for topics that
are more complex, such as language nuance, interpretation of medical
symptoms, engineering for bridges, and so on. Unfortunately, games
often use flashcards that pop up on the screen to teach players complex
information. Realistically, the only thing that should ever appear on
a flashcard in a game is the control scheme. The instructional strategy
is didactic in that it spits information at the player with the hope that
he or she will absorb it, but does not verify that any learning has taken
place. If the player fails and dies, loses the race, gets lost, whatever the
case may be, up comes the flashcard again, equally ineffective, and
now even more frustrating. Older games used positive outcomes with
clever psychological reinforcers, such as flashing lights and sounds,
to clever ends. We will talk about this more in Chapter 3, which is
entirely devoted to how people absorb information.
“Flashcards are often used to study memory-intensive subjects
within a defined curriculum such as languages, math, science, medi-
cine, law, and so on.” * In some cases, a pair of students will write the
answer on one side of a flashcard and the problem on the other. I
employed these when studying the Japanese language to help me “skill
and drill” the characters and syllabary into my mind. Unfortunately
for game players, manipulating the controller is a skill that requires
more than rote memory. The exact mechanics of using a controller are
a complex interplay of schema and memory that we will talk about in
Chapter 3. For now, a pop-up just doesn't cut it (see Figure 2.3).
* White, M. (2012). Designing tutorial modalities and strategies for digital games:
Lessons from education. International Journal of Game Based Learning , 2(2), 13-14.