The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 28

Figure 2.3 Red Faction Armageddon pop-up screenshot. ( Red Faction Armageddon Screenshot
courtesy of Nordic Games.)
Sadly, this is easily the most common method of “teaching” play-
ers to interact with the game. Look at Red Faction: Armageddon in
Figure 2.3.
The Not at All
“Good tutorials are essential for new gamers,” * however, game devel-
opers have recently begun to leave tutorials out of many titles alto-
gether, like Bayonetta ™, where players are literally dropped into
combat when the game begins with little to no recognizable instruc-
tion. Part of the reason for this may stem from our extremely educated
and game-friendly audience leading developers to the assumption that
players have already played other games in the same genre. Gamers
are often assumed to have built experiences around particular genres;
often, it is enough to refer to “RPG,” “shooter,” and so on in order
to recall the relevant skills, expertise, and strategies long-term gam-
ers have built over years of experience. As I have already mentioned,
raw discovery learning has been illustrated to be problematic for nov-
ice learners, so what does that mean for players of the “Not at All”
type games? Well, often they will simply put the controller down in
* Hayes, E. (2005). Women, video games, and learning: Beyond stereotypes. Te chTre n d s ,
49(23-38), p. 27.